Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
#8 Peter Botting: political campaigning, storytelling, career building - from Malawi to Westminster
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Peter Botting has been an indispensable ally of politicians, c-suite executives, and founders over many years. As the CEO of a FTSE 250 company put it "When it's a big gig. When it really matters, you call for Peter." It was great that he answered my call to come on the podcast as I learned a lot from a career that informed a fascinating discussion on how to make change in the world possible. Whether it's for your next job interview, a fundraising campaign for your charity, for a speech to Parliament, or to win colleagues around to a new initiative, I hope this conversation proves a useful starting point. You can find out more on Peter here: https://peterbotting.co.uk/. Please enjoy the episode.
Politics and Purpose in Conversations
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, amol Pandu. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with adventurous, rebellious and sometimes courteous free spirits. Peter, thank you for joining us. Thanks for making the time Great to have you. The last time we met it's been a long time was over 10 years ago and you probably won't remember this the context, but you were giving a speech to a large room full of aspiring politicians.
Speaker 2Oh no.
Speaker 1Young politicians, of whom, at the time, or young people aspiring to be politicians, to be precise, in my words, of whom I was one, I confess, and that aspiration, has long, long died. Well, yeah, that that ship is kind of exactly yeah oh, what's that all about? But no you. You. Someone asked a question. You know what advice would you give. You know, beyond what you've given in your talk? And you said, uh, give a shit, um what?
Speaker 2do you? Sounds like me sounds like you.
Speaker 1But what? What did you mean by that? What? Who doesn't what? Why? Why was that the thing that kind of came to your mind because it would seem obvious. But things that are simple, I guess, not always easy politics is derided and has been derided for years, centuries.
Speaker 2Everybody's been slagging off politicians forever, literally centuries. Now it's just louder because everybody's got a voice through social media. But policy and politics are important because politics and policies affect everybody. Whether you're at school, whether you're running a business, whether you're working for a business, whether you're on pension, whether you're sick, whether you're rich or poor, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2Politics affects you and you can be a spectator and you can be somebody who is a victim of it and just accepts it or moans about it, and there's enough people in every pub in the country who moan about politics. There's very few who, as Theodore Roosevelt said, get in the ring and get dusty and dirty and bloodied and get involved, and you can't be involved in politics and I have views on charities as well you can't get involved in politics if you don't want to have a result. At the end, I gave a keynote speech probably 2013 or 2014, and I said that every speech should be a campaign, because every speech should be trying to get something done. It should be a trigger to action. It should be trying to get something done. It should be a trigger to action, it should be trying to achieve things, and if you're in politics and you're not trying to achieve something, then you're doing it as a job.
Speaker 1Correct.
Speaker 2And charities. I have a similar problem because they should be trying to make themselves obsolete. Trying to make themselves obsolete, but far too many charities, particularly ones in Africa, are almost wanting to self-sustain because keep the gig going, mission creep.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Or just keep the gig going because it's a good job and you live in five-star hotels and drive fancy cars and you should be trying to make yourself redundant.
Speaker 1And did you see that growing up I mean people listening will hear a twang in the accent?
Speaker 2A twang.
Speaker 1Yeah, something that has a Southern African aspect to it.
Speaker 2Well, first of, all congratulations on calling it Southern African rather than South African.
Speaker 2Because, Southern Africa is a massive place and I was born and raised in Southern Africa and I have to say thank you to Madonna, because I used to have to explain where I was born and raised in my first six years. I was born and raised in Malawi and I used to have to say Malawi, comma Central Africa, until Madonna made the supposedly small country on the map, which isn't that small, and that's just the thing that you see in Africa. You see politicians and you see it here as well politicians just wanting a gig rather than wanting to get.
Speaker 1It's a career.
Speaker 1Annoyingly so, wanting a gig rather than wanting to get it's a career, um, and is how much of that is actually a function of the system? So I'm sure a lot of those aspiring people in that room that I talked about wanted to make a difference or had a desire to make an impact, but the system kind of chipped away at them. I'll just have this concession and then you'll get to do your mission, just do that compromise and then you know, let me become an MP. I'll do all the hoops I need to jump through to become an MP. Then I'll, at every step you're just giving up a bit of your integrity, a bit of your purpose to get to the starting line, and then you've lost who you are and you've become a part of the. It becomes a self-sustaining job and winning is more important. Winning arguments is more important than solving problems. To steal a phrase from a guy called Rory Sutherland, who you've probably come across.
Speaker 2A lot of people go into politics with ideological reasons, and particularly on the conservative side, because if you look at the CIA's MICE four types of criteria nobody, or very few people on the conservative side, go into politics because of money. Money is the first M of MICE.
Speaker 1Yeah, what are the other three?
Speaker 2Very few people on the conservative side go into politics because of money. Money is the first M of MICE. What are the other three? Ideology is the second one, ego is the third. Compulsion is the third. Now, most conservative candidates give up a significant amount of their earnings when they become members of parliament. Got it? Most Labour members of parliament not all, but some, the majority increase their salary. So most conservatives go in at least partially ideologically. But then the system comes and the system is the party does everything to stay in power. There's very few ideologically pure parties who do. The signpost of this is who I am. This is what I believe in. Vote for me if you want, but I'm not going to move yeah.
Speaker 1But is that a bug or a feature? Because maybe there has to be an attrition to stop I that I dominating too much. Right to stop someone coming in and overturning century-long traditions that maybe get in the way of some fix that they want to do. So it's not always a bad thing necessarily.
Speaker 2It's a great question, but do you go into a restaurant and they say what would you like to eat, or do you look at the menu, right, it depends, and the worst type of restaurant is one that offers you three cuisines.
Speaker 1I'm guessing four cuisines. It depends it depends.
Speaker 2If you are a weird person, then you get confused by choice or too many choices. I've just come back from the States and we have a very finite choice here in terms of peanut butter. You go to the States you will have not one shelf full of peanut butter. You will have one, two, three, four, five, six shelves of peanut butter Too many choices. Yeah, and people get confused by choice. Yeah, there's a great scene.
Speaker 1Have you seen the film? Not Zero Dark Thirty, the other one about defusing bombs, by the same director.
Speaker 1No, and there's oh God, the name of the film is escaping me. Anyone rescue me here? No, um, hurt knocker. Thank you, declan. Declan to the rescue. As usual, he's the brain. He's the brain, as you've already said. So in the hurt knocker he kind of noticed. Hopefully no spoiler alerts here. But the guy who's a, the obsessive bomb diffuser who lives for it, comes back. He's served all his tours and he's the one that the other bomb diffusers in afghanistan think is the weird one. He's the uncommon amongst uncommon people, to use david goggins's phrase. Um, and he's back. He's in a supermarket in america and he sees this giant wall-to-wall choice of cereals. Yeah, and then the next scene is him just volunteering to go back into the helmet because he just can't go. This is that choice paradox. But just to sorry, go back to the Stay on track. Well, the beauty of this podcast is there's no track. So if we want to talk about peanut butters for the next 90 minutes, sorry guys, you're going to have to listen.
Speaker 2Hey, you should try cashew peanut butter.
Speaker 1Okay, oh, cashew butter. It's not good, it doesn't spread, it's weak it spreads.
Speaker 2Okay, but it's… there's no flavor, is it?
Speaker 1It's got no oomph in it, as my mother would say Well, anyway. So the restaurant analogy, and why I think it maybe fits with the politics, is that you know if you go to a restaurant and they're doing fish and chips and they're doing pizza, the likelihood is they're neither. You're never going to get the best fish and chips in your life, nor are you going to get the best.
Speaker 2Be a specialist.
Speaker 1Be a specialist and chips in your life, nor you're going to get the best. Be especially. And the challenge with politics is, as far as I see it, or a challenge is that a party has to be a broad church to get the numbers, and you'll never get two people to agree on the same thing, so you will have, you know, the corbinistas and the splat rights.
Speaker 1We will have the thatcherites and the centrist, whatever you want to call it, the one nation, whatever, and winning. Therefore, is it a problem that winning becomes paramount? Because that's the way you can unite all those ideologies to kind of not destroy the system but kind of keep it plodding along whilst the rest of us, you know, get on with our lives along whilst the rest of us get on with our lives.
Speaker 2What's interesting is the Conservative Party normally has those divisions hidden within the single big church. Yeah, the Labour Party has those divisions externally.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2So we have internal squabbles, like I always call Conservative Party conference a bit of a dysfunctional annual family gathering.
Speaker 1Yeah, like Christmas conference, a bit of a dysfunctional annual family gathering.
Speaker 2yeah, like mad uncle and the you know the, the various defective, dysfunctional people and the conservatives generally, generally present as a as a unified voice yeah, generally, generally, and there's and.
Speaker 1Is that a good thing, or is that the wrong question?
Speaker 2It reduces. Elections are almost always of more of the same or change. Those are the two choices you can boil everything down to. We can tolerate this one a bit further for another five years or four years or whatever, or we want change. So it's pretty binary under our electoral system. It's more of the same or change, and you need to have an understanding of what each choice signifies or promises. Let's not go into whether they deliver what they promise. That's a separate podcast.
Speaker 1It's probably unfair to. I think we maybe unfairly hold people to their election pledges too much, because sometimes facts do change. There's no point rigidly sticking to something. But generally the issues on the other side, where pledges are not worth the paper they're written on, and and um. But how do we therefore go full circle to giving a bleep um where? How does that fit into that change versus more of the same as advice on the to a person rather than the system?
Speaker 2Giving a shit means that you want. By definition, you're dissatisfied. Politicians should be permanently dissatisfied. A good politician should be a speck of sand in an oyster shell.
Speaker 2It should be like a shoe a piece of stone in your shoe, it should be bloody annoying. A good politician should be very annoying. I worked for a politician who annoyed his party all the time because he kept on bouncing up in the house of commons. No matter what the debate was about, he didn't care. He just kept on putting his hand up, pointing at the speaker, waving at the speaker, asking to speak, and his colleagues some of whom should be shot kept on saying shut up, sit down, that's not relevant, and he just kept on putting his hand up, being bloody annoying.
Embracing Serendipity and Curiosity for Success
Speaker 2And he was a member of parliament for over 30 years. But he brought in a piece of legislation, a private member's bill. Private member's bills never become law as a rule. It's so seldom that it's effectively a law or it's a thing. It's so seldom that it's effectively a law or it's a thing. But he brought in a private member's bill that made anti-slavery day a thing. It also meant that every police force in the UK had a dedicated full-time equivalent police officer working on anti-slavery. It also meant that anti-slavery day was not just a thing on the 18th of October. It was also a theme for schools and it was also on every website that you see, and he brought that in in the final six weeks of his 30 plus years and that was because for the last five or six years of his time in parliament he gave a shit and he just focused doggedly, insanely, and just annoyed everybody. He was like a stone in your shoe when you're on a long hike and he eventually got stuff done.
Speaker 1Is that a lesson for broader life then? Got stuff done. Is that a lesson for broader life then? Because it's something I've been grappling with is you can't choose when inspiration strikes. You can't choose when your moment happens. It might be early, if you're you know. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, it happens when you're 18 in a dorm room. If you're this politician, it happens in the final he was a, it was AG2.
Speaker 1Yeah, but the point is to increase your surface area exposure to luck Not luck, but to creative forces. So that moment happens and if you don't stick with it, you're never going to get that. And if you're looking for a reward every time you put effort in, that means that you're you're permanently going to be dissatisfied, versus giving a shit and therefore turning up even when people are.
Speaker 2You're not getting that recognition in the market I think a side observation from what you're saying serendipity plays a role, whether you want it to or not, and and if everything you're doing has to have a short-term ROI, you'll just be zigzagging all over and not have anything, or might have something that it'll be not because of you. Sometimes the weirdest setbacks, the weirdest obstacles, the weirdest chance meetings, the weirdest all sorts of things suddenly result in something that wasn't on the agenda, wasn't on the horizon, wasn't on the forget the medium term, it wasn't on the long term, maybe, and it just happens. And the openness to embrace new stuff and the openness to acknowledge that you know precious little about anything, yeah, um, and a curiosity about life, and a curiosity about people, and a curiosity about everything, particularly now with ai and everything happening so fast, so quickly, um, exciting times we live in.
Speaker 1Well, you're saying lots of things here that I want to tap into, but let's please don't make a note. Um, you know, just on that serendipity point, there's a a guy, nassim taleb, I don't know if you're familiar with his work but, like you know, he talks about anti-fragility, which I've brought people about, this podcast and others, uh, but you know, one example he gives is going to networking events which you wouldn't think from a millionaire trader. But he gives in his book an example where you know what are the downsides.
Speaker 1You lose an evening, right and you go home and you probably get it Nineteen eight percent of the time going to an event that you don't know anyone and meeting people you don't know um will probably be a complete waste of time, but the up and the downside can be measured as pretty small. You lose an evening. The upside is is asymmetric, because you could meet a spouse or, in 10 years time, a business partner or a client, and you've got to expose yourself to your point. And on the final point you made about curiosity, this is the one thing that I think the world is severely lacking. The foundational kind of quality in a person. Curiosity and generosity is the other one, that together. But do you think curiosity is innate or do you think that can be taught? I know you've said happiness is a skill before. I've picked up on that and that is a skill or a muscle that you can train. Is it the same? For for curiosity do you think? Or people?
Speaker 2can you hold all of those thoughts while I just talk about networking?
The Power of Authentic Networking
Speaker 2okay, yeah, all right, so talk about this networking okay so networking and opening yourself up to lots of opportunities I agree with. I also agree with extreme focus and saying no to a lot of stuff which is confusing. But that's me. I went to a networking event about 12 years ago and it was at a big law firm and I couldn't be asked on the day. I didn't want to, I'd registered for it, I'd paid, it was a thing. I wasn't flush at the time and I went out of duty to myself, but my heart wasn't in it, my mood wasn't in it and instead everybody else was bubbly and effervescent and happy and enthusiastic.
Speaker 1They have the avatar and I was the exact opposite of all of those adjectives.
Speaker 2I was the exact opposite and I went and sulked by. The beer got a bottle of beer and this other guy got a bottle of beer and he had as much enthusiasm as.
Speaker 2I did for this thing and we basically spurned the rest and talked for two hours without him being there. I'd have gone in 15 minutes, because then I could have justified to myself that I'd been and it wasn't for me and I'd at least made the effort not much effort, but I'd made an effort and I spoke to him for a couple of hours. During those two hours we didn't talk about work, we didn't ask what each other did, we talked about random stuff, we mocked the people who were networking. We didn't even ask each other's names. Anyway, two hours later, this guy and I, it's time to go. We're both called Peter and off we go. We're both called Peter and off we go.
Speaker 2We connect on LinkedIn A month later, If I'd been working for somebody the next morning, my boss would have said how many people did you meet last night? How many business cards did you get? How many this and that did you get? Was it a waste of my time? I'm not paying that expenses to get you there to meet one person. So I'd have failed in the productivity test.
Speaker 1But it was a quality connection.
Speaker 2I thought, anyway, we connected on LinkedIn, didn't meet up. Two years later I don't think we even did the sort of fake happy birthday thing that LinkedIn tells you to tell. We didn't even do that. Two years later, his PA sends me a message saying Peter's going overseas to the Middle East. I go okay, well, we had a good two hours. Two years later he says I'm in London, do you want to grab a beer? We haven't had a beer for four years, six years or whatever it was. Grab a beer. He's got a friend, a colleague, with him and I end up being part of a major football deal. I was a tiny player but I helped keep this deal on the tracks and I made some money and it was a connection, and I'm still in contact with him 15 years later. Whereas if you go to a network thing and you come back with a collection of cards which is hi, I mean they're just pitching or selling olive oil or doing a short term hustle. So serendipity and being real, yes.
Speaker 2Being real is a. If I could open an authenticity shop, I'd have thousands of aspiring politicians as customers, all looking to be authentic.
Speaker 1Looking to coach themselves to look authentic, or needing you to slap them in the face and be authentic?
Speaker 2Well, there's a big interesting conversation that we've had recently. It's an ongoing conversation about the difference between millennials and above, and Gen Zs, what's happened during COVID, and sort of Instagram versus TikTok, the curated versus the long form.
Speaker 1This is who I am.
Speaker 2Take it or leave it and that is the same whether you're on a dating app or in a business pitch. When I was living in Africa there was a company there called Transglobal Trading and kind of. The rule was back in the day when you were still in junior school, was the grander the name of the rule was back in the day when you were still in junior school, was the grander the name of the company, the more likely it was to be a fax machine and a proxy office above a shop.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's the quiet people in the room.
Speaker 2It's going to be something else.
Speaker 1And is social. I mean people like to blame social media, but is is social media just a reflection of us human nature? It's not the the tools problem, it's it's us.
Speaker 2Yeah, we were in the getty museum and the gold earrings that are there now are are the same as people. We're now pretty much. They're a bit grander, they're more, but people are motivated by to an extent yeah the same gold drinking, the need to be loved, yeah, sex. We haven't changed a lot in 2 000 years, 10 000 years but type of gold.
Speaker 1But companies and politicians and whoever, media, whatever, have learned to hack into those. You know that are evolutionary endowment, haven't they? They learn how to tap our reward systems, our dopamine, to, you know. You walk past a vape shop now and I've got nothing against vaping, but it's just the colors, right?
Speaker 2and I'm like.
Speaker 1These colors don't exist in nature, but they are designed to like and actually my three, my three-year-old daughter. I was walking with her and she walked past you and oh, I want to go in there. You must have been horrified, you know at some point she's's going to try a cigarette or a Vecchio. That's for many years in the future for me to think about. But maybe the technology is encouraging that fakeness that's always in there in us and we have to kind of learn to circumvent that with authenticity. So we need more, peter Bottings.
Speaker 2Well, we need more authenticity, and one of me is probably enough, I'd say Authenticity. One of me is probably enough. I'd say the rise of TikTok has to be put down to the growth of this generation, which has an impact on politics. It has an impact on businesses over the next 15, 20 years. But it's that disdain for curated the disbelief in the curated the craft, the long skill, the slow.
Speaker 2Yeah, I was with a friend and we were walking along Venice Beach, which is where our stay went on in the States, and I didn't notice people's cosmetic surgery where he did. He was like, yeah, that's fake, that's fake, that's fake. And I think my generation don't notice it as much because we're just not locked in. So not, we're not as in tune to the fakeness of it. We can smell fakeness one-to-one, but the the physical changes yeah we, I get suckered by them but it's incentives.
Speaker 1People will sacrifice looking silly on one-to-one in front of people for the sake of looking better in front of a thousand people on an Instagram account, right. So, there's that sort of the system is making gaming your behavior to work better in the digital world, to be more successful in the digital world, to be more successful in the digital world at the expense of authentic one-to-one connections.
Speaker 2I've heard about people that have their whole their family and friends know a totally different identity to the person's public character, the public persona there, and that's the same for politicians as well, and when the politicians actually say I don't know the answer to that, or yeah, I thought that before, but now the facts have changed and now I think this yeah that's refreshing, because it's it's real yeah, but that can again, can be.
Speaker 1So giving a shit can be coached right, and I've noticed this with startups. For example, the advice for getting funding for a startup was to have a mission. You know, think about solving a problem and then work backwards, and you know, let's take the best examples of this, and you know whether it's steve jobs wanting to make computing access accessible to all or it's elon or whatever, and so now every startup has a mission.
Speaker 1It's all kind of, and everyone's been coached to look authentic, to get the funding and to varying levels of effectiveness yeah because it then you have to then work even harder to figure out how authentic this person is.
Speaker 1Are they willing to sleep on the factory floor to get the car off the assembly line? Are they willing to do the shift at the expense of, rightly or wrongly, at the expense of their children's mental health? Because the mission of this corporate vehicle they set up is more important than the collateral damage around them, rightly or wrongly?
Speaker 2I met a CEO from a startup recently and he was kind of pitching to me and I was listening and talking about it and the question came up whether he had direct experience of the problem, the pain problem, that his startup purported to solve.
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 2And he said no, and that was an unguarded moment, but it was revealing that he'd not experienced this. You know, zuckerberg wanted to know who was Single, who was single, who was available or whatever. At Harvard. He was driven by it. He understood the problem because he'd come up against it. He was fixing a problem for himself and those people are the most driven, the most focused, because they get the problem and they get the solution. And authenticity shop's not right for startups.
Speaker 1Yeah Well, it's not a theoretical abstraction. Here is a kind of funding gap, or here is a market that you know it has to kind of it has to resonate, and then that you know it has to kind of it has to, it has to resonate, and then that way you're willing to work the weekends or whatever the the trite.
Speaker 2Yes, because any investor will invest in the person as much as the concept. Yeah, and if the and if the, the, the ceos are nine to five, a good timer, um, why would you invest? You'd invest in somebody who's put their house on the line, everything on the line.
Speaker 1Yeah. A challenge to you, peter, though. Is authenticity a luxury belief for those of us who are in a position to worry about whether we're authentic or not, and have a mission or not, or have a passion about changing the world or launching a startup, versus the large majority of people in this country who are just trying trying to get by, or is it something that would help them as well?
Speaker 2whether you're looking to get a, to get funding for a startup, or trying to get a new job, or trying to get elected, you have to fit in before you can stand out, what I call fiso. You have to fit in first to stand out. Okay, you have to get your hand on the tiller, your hands on the levers before you can steer, use the tiller or pull the levers. You have to do that, but you should be doing it for a reason, and sometimes that reason isn't a tangible, tactical, very specific thing, but it should be a direction. It should be a direction.
Speaker 1Particularly in politics.
Speaker 2It's, you know, your political sat-nav. Is this something that you're unhappy with? What do you want this country, or whichever country you're looking to represent, what do you want it to look like? You should have a direction and the stepping stones, the tactical pieces of legislation or barriers that need to be got rid of, or safety things that need to be brought in, or whatever they become part of the you need to think goal strategy tactics. It's not novel.
Speaker 1It's.
Speaker 2Sun Tzu's been around. His teachings have been around for a while, yeah, and people don't necessarily always get to the tactical without understanding the strategy. Interesting or confusing.
Speaker 1Well. Do they therefore need some help? Is it helpful to have some sort of external force to guide or to bounce ideas off and the you know? The example I'd give is you know, I work in the investment industry primarily and there's a new, burgeoning movement. You know, an investment manager or portfolio manager is a professional, a decision maker. If you're a professional sportsman, sportswoman um, you would have a coach because you're a professional. If you want to be a professional, you need someone to coach you. To keep you honest, they don't tell you what to do, but they is. Is coaching something that everyone should do, or is it something that for some people, it's not suitable? Do they need to have a mission first before they get the coach?
Speaker 2Don't ask me, ask Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt of Google said, I think verbatim everybody needs a coach. Bill Gates. Microsoft said everybody needs a coach. Bill Gates Microsoft said everybody needs a coach. Warren Buffett everybody needs a coach. So anybody who says that they don't need a coach, that's fine, as long as you're more successful than any one of those three. And everybody needs a coach Not necessarily for coaching, not for what the people think about coaching. Sometimes it's also for helping you look in the mirror.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2We too easily go into silos or echo chambers, where our beliefs are never challenged, our thoughts are never challenged. We're never asked to explain why, because we only hang around with people who think the same as us or say yes to us or say yes to us absolutely, and you should never hire somebody who says yes to you.
Speaker 2You should. You know, the best people on boards are people who challenge and support Both of those words. Challenge and support. But most bosses want support only because challenges become known as difficult people, tricky people, troublesome, and so the trick to being a good board member is to do both. Coaches keep you on track. Coaches keep you consistent and keep your nose to the grindstone, kind of thing. But they also and whether I'm working with a startup CEO or an aspiring politician it's why do you believe that? Why and I help them think about some people say what's the right answer to this? I say no, what's your answer? I help them think about these questions and then answer the second question, the third question, sometimes the fourth question.
Speaker 2And sometimes they move positions because they've never thought that deeply. If you hang around with people who all think the same as you, you go into a oh, that's sound or that's, and they assume the labels, often without thinking.
Speaker 1So you're addressing the tribalism bias in some respects.
Speaker 2The tribalism, but also not just the tribalism, it's the tribal thinking, it's the lack of thinking, the copy and paste label without understanding what that label actually means, without understanding what that signifies and what the direction means, and thinking it through.
Speaker 1What would you say then and this is something that I've told myself I'll get a coach when I can, when I can afford, when the business is doing well enough. Is it a false economy to think like that?
Speaker 2Every step you make, every investment you make, every step you make, every investment you make, every decision you make. I make better decisions when I have somebody who I can bounce those decisions off, whether they're in a formal coaching position or they're friends who, friends who actually care, have your best interests and the difference, the value that a coach brings is that most friends and family don't want to hurt your feelings.
Speaker 2They say what they think you want to hear, and the best people for me to coach are professional sports people or professional musicians or people who have been either of those things, because they first of all, understand the role of a coach.
Speaker 2You can't outsource the work to the coach. The second thing is that they don't want validation. They're looking for that lonely voice that says you're doing this bit wrong or half wrong or, in a slightly less efficient way, do it differently. And I heard a great speech by a very good speaker who was a silver medalist for the uk in diving and he thought a very funny line. Very funny line. He gave a speech standing on a chair in front of a senior leadership team of a FTSE 100 company that I was working for, the CFO at this event and he said I used to be famous until bloody Tom Daley came along because he had a silver medal in diving.
Speaker 2But he's also Tom Daley's mentor and when he met Tom Daley Tom Daley was seven or eight or whatever all of the other kids in this diving school or diving club or whatever they wanted this guy's signature. There was no selfies at that time. They all wanted a signature Sign the T-shirt, sign this, sign the book. Tom Daley didn't care about signature. He grabbed this guy by his hand and said come watch me dive. And he got up on the board dived, came up to this guy and said what did I do wrong? Now Tom Daley's got a couple of goals and this guy puts it down to his not inclination thirst. He was thirsty for useful, deployable advice.
Speaker 2And he got it and this guy's been his buddy and mentor ever since. And you just think, if those people that level of success in sport or in business, why invest? I'm assuming your resources are finite. I'm assuming your time is finite. Correct. Why screw around doing stuff? That?
Speaker 1you could be learning from other people. I'll give you one answer, and it's not a good one, because it is actually when you read something like Eric Schmidt's, what was his big thing.
Speaker 2Not.
Speaker 1KPIs Big Hairy Audacious. What's his book about?
Speaker 2Big, hairy, audacious Goals.
Speaker 1Was that it? No, he talks about it in this book. There's this way of measuring oh God, declan, anything. No, he talks about it in this book. There's this way of measuring oh God, declan, anything. No. Okay, it will come to me, but okay, you read a self-help book, or you read a book by a recognized coach, or you start a little coach and you go hang on, amal, like I should be doing this myself. You're so pathetic. Why do you need? You know you need to like find some inner resolve here and be able to do this. You don't need someone else to like keep you honest.
Speaker 1And I know I do because I'm my own worst enemy. We all are, I guess, but I think it's a bit of ego that stops people getting a coach, particularly non-sporting professionals, finance professionals, whatever you want to call it, because it it's a bit of is whether it's ego on the like on the like I don't, I'm so good, I don't need help or it's ego that I I should be able to do this myself.
Speaker 1I shouldn't need someone else to help me, because I'm I'm. I'm surely better than that. Not better than that, but I'm surely where were you born and raised? I was born in the UK, london.
Speaker 2It's a UK problem and so there's a big difference between Germany and the work that I've done in Germany, the UK and America. When I was working in Germany, one guy came up to me at the end of a training session for one of the big PLCs that I worked for there and said I'm being made redundant. And I said how do you know that If you were being made redundant, you wouldn't be on this training course? And he said yes, but I haven't been booked for the next one. And in Germany, being booked in for training is a positive thing. The company is confirming their belief in you and they're investing in you. Brits believe in James Bond too much. Yes, the effortless amateur Brits believe in James Bond too much.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 2The effortless amateur. They believe in the effortless amateur, which means that they don't want to be a peer to be coached. So speechwriters in the States can earn $100,000 if they're good Right. Speechwriters in this country can't earn anything because they've got a 21-year-old out of Oxford who's a PPE, got a 2.1 or something. He can write the speech and he's on 25K a year working in Parliament. Because speeches in this country aren't seen as significant or important. They're devalued, they're not a significant thing. In America you have have therapists everybody's got a therapist.
Speaker 2In america, it seems everybody's got a personal trainer, everybody they believe in investing in themselves yeah the brits have bought into james bond and james bond, you don't get those abs, you don't get that fitness, you don't get that level of stuff without training.
Speaker 1Ask the, the marines yeah, they train, it's not effortless I read a bit of background on ian fleming and he was a very strange fellow and he kind of was very jealous of his brother. He was that. But very I think james bond was kind of based on his brother but that effortless thing is a really British thing Apparently effortless.
Speaker 2Well, they aspire to that, so they don't put the effort in and then they don't perform. And if you look at the productivity of managers in Germany, or their effectiveness versus here, it's getting better. But 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, the amateur manager was British, almost by definition. The Americans are getting better at it and on an individual level they hire speech writers. Nobody here wants to hire a speech writer, because the magic of the speaker shouldn't be undermined by having the magic manufactured. They don't want manufactured magic, they want natural magic. And natural magic doesn't work.
Speaker 2Ask Winston Churchill. He would spend days preparing speeches. And any great speaker, gandhi, martin Luther King spent days torturing himself over his speeches. And, by the way, when he gave that big speech, the 16-minute speech that he changed direction in six minutes before the end, that was a culmination of a thousand sermons he'd given. Yeah, practice was there? Ceos in this country book in the speech. They've got to give, but they don't book in time for rehearsals. Martin Luther King did thousands plural of sermons. Those lines were repeated, he had them all in his head and then he gave that speech. That speech didn't, that magic didn't just happen and he got a coaching during the speech.
Speaker 2The woman that was his great confidant shouted out to him six minutes before the end tell him that, tell them that bit. And then he swiveled, changed. The first part of the speech is pretty dull. Then he changed and then the speech happened. That was what electrified the people. If martin luther king can take advice in the middle of a speech, maybe people should take it at the beginning of their career. Yeah, okay, I've been better. I've made mistakes. Every time I've not asked people for advice. I've made millions of mistakes, literally Every time. You might get told by somebody who's honest with you. That's correct, that's fine.
Speaker 1You might get told maybe not how do you pick a coach? When should you sack a coach? How do you know you've got a dud? Because there's a common thread that they are as eloquent as you are being right now, and there must be. You must see a lot of shysters out there, particularly on LinkedIn, or maybe not. Maybe they are genuinely an underappreciated breed.
Speaker 2Most of the shysters that I meet on LinkedIn are the ones who want to help coaches with their social funnels you have to click CEOs and people who want to be CEOs.
Speaker 2That's what I call CEO people. They have often said to me I can tell you stuff I can't tell my spouse, because your spouse normally doesn't want to hear about the office they want to hear about. Can we have some our time? Put your phone down, what about us? You need to be able to tell a coach anything, slash everything. So you need to be. It needs to be a team thing. So the work that I've done with TedMed I was surprised when I first started working at ted med how much I could change somebody's delivery in a very short period of time just sorry, just to put ted med is ted for doctors, is that right?
Speaker 2it's the medical it's basically ted but for geeks medical health geeks right, okay? Um, so speakers there range from the US Army Surgeon General or the US Surgeon General, or scientists discovering amazing things or leaders of hospitals anybody in the health geek sector and I was amazed at how much impact I could have in a very short period of time on people's delivery pretty much like a film director. But when you're talking about what people say as opposed to how they say it, that needs time to reflect. You need to understand them. You need to understand their real motivations. You need to understand what their organization is aiming for, what they're aiming for, what their organisation is aiming for, what they're aiming for, what their audience is like and that needs some pretty naked discussions.
Speaker 2And people are correct to be sceptical and distrusting of people in this world of gangsters and shysters and all the rest. I'm not sure how you'd find the right person, but you need to get to the place where you feel comfortable, so where you know that you're not going to end up in somebody's after-dinner speech where they're talking indiscreetly about you. You know where they have some level of experience in your sector. You know that they have your best interests at heart. You know that they are in we mode with you, so they shouldn't be competing with you. They should be in your gang.
Speaker 1Okay, and when should you? I guess the second question, when should you fire a coach? Is when you find you're not, when those things have been.
Speaker 2Betrayal if they're being indiscreet about you and when they're not adding value, when they're not pushing you. But a relationship, any relationship, has ebbs and flows.
Speaker 2So you could have a week or a month with a coach, say you're on a weekly tack where this week's a bit they're distracted, you're distracted you have a bit low energy and it's not working, but then it might be that next month and you need somebody who can slot into your life, who's familiar with your life and your challenges and doesn't need translation of who who is and who what is and what the challenge is. You can just come in and go. Okay, I got your back and and that's a very personal thing it's also who can you swear in front of, who can you tell your fears to, who can you be? That's a privileged place that I've often been in and respecting that privilege and being discreet about it and thinking about my clients' issues thoughtfully, not just glancingly, because you're the conciliary, you're their guy, you're their sat-nav to an extent, not necessarily their sat-nav in terms of taking over or a puppet master, but just a sounding board.
Speaker 1Can we take a step back and the decision, or weighing up the decision to get a coach, I guess, is getting to step one or getting to step zero, in that you've already automatically demonstrated, even by deciding whether you want one or not, some level of ambition, some level of confidence in yourself that you've got a way of having an impact on the world. Many people, before they even get to that choice, have us, you know, to increase your target audience. All the people who don't have confidence in themselves, don't think that they, they're worth anything, or don't think that people value them or appreciate them. They don't give them a chance and therefore they're not going to even bother getting to the starting line. What, what, what would you help to?
Speaker 2that say to that person who's stuck in a rut and I've, I've read an article you wrote a while back about you know, yeah, you know, you're in a job and you're stalled.
Speaker 1Your career's a bit stalled, you know, and you're in a job and you're stalled, your career's a bit stalled and you're feeling same old, same old, but I'm a bit stuck and nothing's worth it. How do you get them? What would you say to them to get them from there to step zero, where maybe where someone like me is is to question whether they should get a coach or not?
Speaker 2somebody once said that I build people, and I don't think that's maybe where someone like me is to question whether they should get a coach or not. Somebody once said that I build people, and I don't think that's right. I think I help people believe in themselves more. Everybody is a type of car. Some people are Ferraris, some people are Fiat 500s. What I think most people have in common is that they're stuck in second gear or third gear, and some people need a kick up the behind and a redirection.
Speaker 2Some people are just simply in the wrong jobs and they're not suited to. They're either creative and they work in sprints, and they're in a job that requires daily grind, require the daily consistent nine-to-five, and that doesn't mean that you're wrong. You're just in the wrong job and having an understanding about what you want and what you like, that. That sounds like the sort of thing that you should have been advised to about a career counselor or whatever, but I'm not sure they always get it right. And if you're not excited about what you're doing every morning, if you're not, if it's not fun.
Speaker 2if life's not fun, then you need maybe a kick to just go well, what is fun for you? Because fun for one person is different to somebody else. I see an awful lot of people and you see an awful lot of people, although you're probably too posh to go on the tube. It's a facade, Don't pry into it.
Speaker 1I go on the tube. It's a facade, don't pry into it.
Speaker 2I see an awful lot of people, often men in their 40s or 50s, and they're on the tube and they're wearing an anorak over their suit and you can see their demeanor, just shouts it wasn't supposed to be like this. And we all, when we're 15, 16, 17, 18, we're all going to change the world. We're all going to. When I was 16, I had a ridiculous ambition I was going to be a lawyer and I was going to be a criminal lawyer, obviously because I'd watched all of these crimes Perry, perry, mason and all that. Yes, come on, date me, thanks and I watched all those and I.
Speaker 2I told my parents with a straight face and how they didn't laugh at me, I don't know and that I was only going to defend innocent people and I'll get a reputation for defending innocent people and then I'll become incredibly successful, which is like cutely naive for a 16 year old idiotically naive Everybody is. And who knew then that I would end up doing what I've done all my life, which is coaching? Knew then that I would end up doing what I've done all my life, which is coaching? Most people are in second gear or third gear, and I know people, when they're doing stuff that they're not interested in, they're bored, they're distracted.
Speaker 2When they're doing stuff that they're interested in, a bomb could go off next to them because they're so focused, they're so intent on it that nothing can move them, and that's the sort of thing that you want to be, but you're not saying do what you love you're not saying do what you love though, because that's for many people you know, when you're 22, you need to do a bit of shit.
Speaker 1right, you need to shovel a bit of shit. That's for many people. You know, when you're 22, you need to do a bit of shit, right, you need to shovel a bit of shit. Yeah, totally. So how do you marry that with the need to kind of follow your passion and give a crap? But you've also got to do the grind and learn the skills and have a craft and put the hours in, do the 10,000 hours Whatever, five times or whatever.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah, you're right, but it should be something that I've done so many jobs which bored the brains out of me, but they were educational because I understood what I, you know, didn't like. But I'm still learning now what I like, and, yeah, and, and, and what's a good thing and what's not.
Speaker 1but that takes me to my curiosity question, which you didn't evade but you postponed earlier. Can curiosity be taught or is it innate? You may not have an answer to that, nor should you. Maybe you haven't thought about it, but it strikes me, particularly as a guy with a sales background who spends most of my days, how many people are just fundamentally incurious or lack curiosity Because they're comfortable.
Speaker 2They're comfortable having the level of knowledge they have about their surroundings and their job and their activities, and they've settled, they've compromised with it. Compromise isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they've said, okay, this is okay, I'm okay with this. The Germans have a great saying which basically says as soon as you become a master at something, you should become an apprentice at something else.
Speaker 1Yeah, that beginner's mindset, yeah that beginner's mindset.
Speaker 2And I'm curious and I like exposing myself to this. Let me rephrase that I like having people around me who teach me stuff, who I can learn from, who broaden my binoculars and turn it into a widescreen, and that's important.
Speaker 1Have you heard about the explore exploit, not trade-off, but manifestation in bees. Have you heard about this? So again, I've been listening and reading way too much Rory Sutherland. So, rory, this is a hat tip to use, but 20% of the bees don't obey the waggle dance. So the waggle dance is where the bees point to each other, where the nectar is, where the flowers are. So this is the way this waggle dance is the way. But 20% of them don't. They just go off and they come back.
Speaker 1Go off, come back and every now, and then those 20% find a new source of nectar, and so they're the explore bees and then the majority of the exploit. Now, the scientific rational thing to do is, when you have a resource, you maximize your roi and you exploit the shit out of it. But the problem with that is that you deplete it and you have nothing left. And no one's gone out. And maybe I need to make peace with the fact that there's a lack. There's a lack of curiosity in the world, because we're not all meant to be curious and some of us are, and if you're not, that's cool, you're the exploit camp but, you get that few, who are, whether we call them adhd's or autistic, or we're on the spectrum.
Speaker 1is the thing that people like chucking out, or they're just fundamentally just that? They want to go out and just explore, not exploit. Is that so? Maybe it can't be taught? What do you? What would you say?
Speaker 2This is such an interesting question because I've recently discovered that I'm ADD. I don't have the age, but unless I'm ADD, I don't have the age unless I'm late. But ADD is people, I think, have a challenge because we are explorers, but we have to sometimes stop exploring and just get down and do stuff. And when you're a single person and you're as opposed to being part of a community where you have to do both, where you have to explore and deliver output, that's a challenge. Because unless you've got the luxury of a team, a significant team of nine-to-fivers who just carry out stuff, you've got to do both.
Speaker 2And I think what's kind of fun is screwing with the algorithm and doing it on purpose, because if you're on TikTok or Instagram or any of the social media things, they can very quickly put you in a tribe and then they feed you what that particular algorithm and then you become yeah you get audience capture and then you're not exposed to new stuff, but screwing with the algorithm, where you purposefully search out stuff that is not what you're normally looking at and the algorithm goes that's interesting, I didn't realize, and then it starts showing you different stuff and I think passive scrolling is detrimental.
Speaker 2I think if you're actively screwing with the algorithm on a regular basis so that you're exposed to new stuff and I like going into museums with people who know what they're talking about because I'm being exposed to different stuff, different ideas, different concepts, different stories but I have to get my butt out of my armchair and go and do it, and online you have to do it as well, so that you're not oh, this person is in this tribe or in this, whatever, I'm just going to feed them that and almost everybody I would say a lot of people, I think don't do that.
Speaker 2And they just passively consume what the algorithm presents. And screwing with the algorithm I think is fun and it exposes you to different stuff, interesting stuff, stuff that you never knew interested you or Is one antidote to, by the way genius comes not from genius. Geniuses comes from when you mix two disciplines.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2When you're good at this thing and that thing and you bring them together that's where suddenly breakthroughs happen.
Speaker 1Yeah, because if you're the engineer that's worked on that piece of coating your whole life, you will say it can't be done, and someone else, an external, it can't be done.
Speaker 2Yeah, it can't be done. It can't be done in your experience.
Speaker 1Yeah, I've got a friend who listens to the podcast. He's like, please, can you not talk about steve jobs every podcast? And it's very hard. But the other one is double click. I've found myself saying double, can we double click on that? And uh, I have to pay a 10 pound.
Speaker 2Fine, every time I say, uh, let's double click on, say, I think all the money that you could invest in a fortune, yeah well, um, where was I going with that?
Speaker 1yes, is one antidote to helping you not be a slave to the algorithm, or being a slave to the status quo or your sofa or your job. Um, being aware of the power of storytelling. Because, if you are aware of the power and the power of storytelling, because if you are aware of the power and the importance of storytelling, you therefore seek out stories. And by seeking out stories, you're going to find things that you don't know.
Speaker 2You'll think that my answer would be yes to that, but it's not. It's no, because you're answering. You're asking slightly the wrong question. Okay, first of all, we all do this routine stuff. When we walk to work, we use the same path, we go the same way. When we go for a run, we do the same route. When we drive from A to B on a regular basis, we use the same route. We do it all the time, regular basis. We use the same route, we do it all the time and taking different routes going. That was one of the great things about being owned by Jack Russell for 17 years was he was like let's go different way okay and and sometimes I would just go, you take.
Speaker 2You take the lead, which is probably not what you're supposed to do with the dog, but I explored whole parts of Southwark because the night before there was an interesting smell going that way and we went on exploration together. And storytelling is good, but you should be listening to other people's stories, not your stories, not the stories of people like you, not the stories from your background or your socioeconomic background, your race or your whatever the people from different, different, different perspectives. So storytelling yes, but if you just listen to your own stories, you just go down the same algorithm.
Speaker 1But don't story. I thought stories transcended backgrounds as a power as a device.
Speaker 2A device, yes, but there are different stories. You know any. Any war has propaganda on both sides. They are both stories from different perspectives, you know. But then the story by definition is powerful. But it's what story you're listening to, what definition you're're listening to? Are you a terrorist or a freedom fighter? Are you a good guy or the bad guy? The meme about the I don't know who the British actor was, it's a famous meme where he says are we the bad guys?
Speaker 1Oh yeah, the Michelin web.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's looking at the other perspectives, looking at other newspapers, not just having one primary source of information and using trusted information from various perspectives and not, I think, we've all. Because we're lazy, we delegate to commentators a lot and their version of the story and they're master storytellers and they tell us what we need to hear, and because we're so time deprived, we we outsource what we should think we outsource what we should think.
Speaker 1What we're allowed to think.
Speaker 2Who's the goodies, who's the baddies?
Speaker 1What does Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson tell me? I should think, and I'm going to go and we just delegate it to them.
Speaker 2and they have enormous power which they don't always wield correctly, because they have a job which is selling inches or clicks, so they're not however much they a job which is selling inches or clicks, so they're not. However much they claim to be independent tellers of the truth, they're not. They're commercial entities and they're selling inches and they're selling clicks, and people will only publish them if there's enough clicks. If they don't get clicks on their articles, nobody's going to go and click on a moderately articulated headline that's balanced and looks at both sides. Who's going to read that?
The Power of Storytelling in Leadership
Speaker 1No one. Yeah, one of the things I'm, you know, the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea, which basically means that our entire political discourse is set up for failure because we're looking to battle each other. Win arguments. Okrs, by the way OKRs Does that ring a bell Objectives and Key Results. That was the Eric Schmidt book.
Speaker 2That came almost instantly to you.
Speaker 1It was a nice lag there, but we've got time. Yeah, sorry, just checking, we're not going to overrun our….
Speaker 2Are you getting?
Speaker 1bored already. No, I'm not. There is a… we need to be out of the room at some point, but we've got, we've got plenty of time. So um, um, yes, objectives and key results. That was um, based on the founder of intel, and now his name's gone from my head and he'll come half an hour later, but it was huge.
Speaker 2He was, yeah his influence on only the paranoia people like Andresen Horowitz, all of those people who are now players massively influenced by him. I can't remember his name either, but his impact, his ripple, his ripple was.
Speaker 1I've read his book Only the Paranoid Survive and it's brilliant. Can someone look it up? Thanks, yeah, yeah, Okay, can you just spend 90 seconds or? As long as you need articulating why an executive or anyone should understand the power of stories, or be aware of it and appreciate it.
Speaker 2Jack Welch, who was the CEO of General Electric pretty much transformed General Electric, I think During his tenure, x grew I'm not sure that's the right verb, but you know what I mean. He said that the whole job of a leader was brand. Nothing's more important than brand, and storytelling is everything that comes out of a business, whether it's a startup with two people or a large organization or a political party. Everything is about brand. It's about what people talk about when you're not in the room, and everything is about your story. Every word you say, every nuance, you make every pause, you make every story, you tell every thing you don't say.
Speaker 2All of those things matter and you are the chief storyteller, whatever your actual title is. You might be a managing director, a CEO, a CSO, a CMOmo, I don't care if you're leading anybody, anything, including your own life. You're the chief storyteller for yourself and your organization and you need to get it right. And you get a coach for anything else. You should surely get a coach for your life and I'm not talking about life coaches, by the way, but just getting a storytelling coach who helps you understand what the hell your story is and then tell it to everybody, whether it's investors or potential talent that you're trying to onboard, or customers or banks or media analysts, or media analysts or financial analysts, or anybody.
Speaker 2The storytellers are the. They own it.
Speaker 1Yeah, it reminds me of what you just said. It reminds me of Yuval Harari's In Sapiens. He talks about why Homo sapiens triumphed over the other hominids, other competitors, is that we were able to get more people to fight for us because we could tell each other stories and then therefore unite around a certain cause, in a way that the Neanderthal or whoever else we were up against Homo floriensis or whatever it might be and that's our storytelling is at the root of our success as a species. And the problem is today that we live in a world of scientism where the spreadsheet and the bar chart and the you know we over. We've we've had a misunderstanding of science and physics and we think everything is about rationality and everything is about projections and backward looking data. Um is, if it's not in the data, if there's not a market for it, we're not going to do it. And every successful business that's gone on to disrupt has had a really, really shit set of backward-looking data to support it or justify it.
Speaker 1But through will and through a good narrative they've been able to transcend that.
Speaker 2Well, we could talk a lot about management consultants and the management consultancy approach to politics which has come in, but that's an interesting perspective about storytelling, getting people to follow you or to believe in you. There was when I first went to ukraine in the 90s. In 95 or 96 there was, I heard, a I would follow that person over the barriers or over the wires, and the ability to persuade people to follow you or the ability to persuade people to join your startup for where they're buying a portion of tomorrow versus crappy salary today. That needs huge storytelling because the most important thing you can do as a leader is hire talent, talent who can do um.
Speaker 2But storytelling is not just about getting people to follow you. It's also about passing on mistakes and storytelling from you know whether it's from the campfire that we were huddled around at night thousands and thousands of years ago to the stories that are told today on TikTok that passing on of wisdom, that passing on of don't, do that you're going to hurt yourself. Don't do that, that's not smart.
Speaker 2Do it this way, Do it this way and whichever religious belief you have, all of the stories that are in those beliefs. They are all about don't do that. That's not going to be good, that's not good for the community, that's not good for you. They all stories, and storytelling has helped us survive in that way as well yeah, there's an interesting um.
Speaker 1Someone pointed me to a book about, about storytelling. They talked about nuclear waste. Have you heard of this where there's a place where they're storing nuclear waste? They were asked to themselves how do we, how do we make sure no one open like goes. And um, they were like, well, we could do it in english, we could put 100 languages in, but um, um, we don't know what language people are going to speak in 50,000 years, 100,000 years. So the way they resolved that was to create kind of story, image, storyboards of a person going into a cave that they shouldn't have gone into, because that was the only way we could transcend humans. Today to humans, the language of story is better than the language of words in that sense.
Speaker 2Funny. You should say that I've recently learned a lot about storyboarding Right, and that was effectively storyboarding in its earliest form.
Speaker 2There's an interesting thing that you talked about earlier, the whole personal development and the books you read and I read this book and that book. Personal development and the books you read and I read this book and that book. And there comes a time when you should stop reading and get on with doing, because it's the same with getting input and coaching. Coaching shouldn't be on a daily basis. Reading books is interesting on maybe a thought process, but any decent book, even if you read it on Blinkist and you get the 10 nuggets that there actually is within a book, as opposed to the 80 pages of blah blah blah.
Speaker 2Nice ideas, but don't get distracted by them. We get distracted far too much. We should be focusing on doing and getting the right coach reading three or four or five books or whatever. And then, ok, now I need to do. And the people who win are the people who do, who just deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver. I've seen in politics and in business people who are not necessarily the smartest, but they just put in the hours, yeah, consistently, and they just put output, output, output. And guess what? The output gets better, the stories get better, the product gets better, the services get better, and then they're an overnight miracle.
Speaker 110 years later, yeah, what was the moment? There was no moment. There was no moment. Yeah, it's cumulative. Yeah, no, there was some sort of experiment I heard about where there were two groups of equal ability asked to make pots pottery and one group said you're going to be measured on quality.
Speaker 1You need to make a small number of just the best pots you can have you heard of this and then the other group was told you're going to be measured on volume and output, just make as many pots, pots you can, perfect pots. Have you heard of this? And then the other group was told you're going to be measuring volume and output, just make as many pots you can. And at the end of it it transpired that the group that was measured on quantity produced far better pots than the one that was over rationalizing and trying to over engineer and think about well, no, let's do a well, no, let's do it a bit like this. No, let's do it a bit like that, let's not do that. The quality came in the quantity and turning up and putting the hours in.
Speaker 2Well, it's the 10,000 hours that Gladwell speaks about. Quentin Tarantino speaks about the first film that he made that he said should never be viewed, seen or exist anymore. But he said it was my film school. I learned more about what was, about how not to do it, doing that film, and he's been kind of successful.
Speaker 1Yeah. So what advice would you give to someone who's full of good ideas, full of lots of new initiatives, always starting something, always talking themselves into something and then talking themselves out of something to start the next new thing?
Speaker 2You mean everybody in a pub in England? Well, asking for a friend? Focus, focus, choose, commit.
Multitasking Myth and Filtered Out
Speaker 1Focus, focus, choose, commit, focus. Too many things.
Speaker 2There's very few people who can do well multitasking is a myth but very few people who can focus enough energy and commitment and resources onto multiple things, unless you're incredibly good at hiring people, telling stories to get amazing people onto your teams. But you have to do that one at a time. Get them on, get them up and running, then get the next team. But if you're trying to do it solo, do one thing and become the world expert at it. You need depth of knowledge, depth of understanding, general, centimeter thick knowledge. We can. Can you answer the second question? Can you answer the third question? Can you answer the second question? Can you answer the third question? Can you answer the fourth question? Can you stand up to scrutiny? Most can't, because they try to do everything.
Speaker 1Generalists are fine, but I want to give you a chance to talk about filtered out, because I think people should be aware of it. Can you tell us what filtered out is and you know why you did it, why you put it together?
Speaker 2Filtered Out was a well, there's two books. They're both interview books. One is a series of articles that I wrote for City AM and that we tidied up, added 3,000 words to about the more modern interview life, or brutality of modern interview life.
Speaker 1Is this job interviews? Job interviews.
Speaker 2Yeah, all about job interviews. So Filtered Out. The first book is about that. Filtered Out. The workbook was basically spawned from an Excel sheet that, over the 20, 30 years or whatever 25 years that I've been coaching people, preparing them for interviews, they kept on saying what are the questions, what are the questions that I'm going to get? What are the questions I'm going to get? And a lot of. If you look on interview questions on the internet, you'll often find the hardest interview questions or the cruelest interview questions or the weirdest.
Speaker 2And I, because of the work that I was doing, was actually focused on helping people get a job. I was focusing on the questions that they were going to get why this company, why this industry? Tell us about yourself, all of these things. And so I developed a very crappy Excel sheet with a list of questions, and every time I heard new questions because my clients would come back to me and say I've got this question, I'd add it into the mix. I'd add it into the mix and then I kind of weighted them, which was the questions that came up the most. And then they would say okay, that's great, the training's been great, I've gone and done my homework.
Speaker 2Now the second phase of the homework from the coaching session is now. We're going to do the questions. Send me the list and I was sending over this scraggly ancient 2003 Excel table that made people's laptops crash and all the rest and I took the 45 most frequently asked questions. I turned it into a workbook. So on each page, on the first page, there's the question. Then I explain my understanding of what they're really asking, because not all questions are asking what they appear to be asking. And then on the other side and then I'll give some advice on how I think there are ways to answer this question and then on the other side, there is literally a blank page with lines.
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 2And you take a pen or a pencil and you write it in. It becomes your career workbook, it becomes your interview prep book, and I took the 45 questions that I have seen over my career as the questions. You're not going to get all of them, but if you're getting 15 questions, 10 of them will be from here, definitely. So if you prep that, you'll have 10 at least of the questions sorted. Plus, I took two of Elon Musk's favorite questions and added that. So there's 47 questions. If you do one of those a day in a month and a half you will be in a totally different place in terms of preparation for an interview and you'll also have looked in the mirror a bit.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2And sometimes people read the book and say to me I've decided to change careers. Or change industry, because you made me think which is a?
Speaker 1result on its own. What are Elon Musk's questions. You have to buy the book. Okay, good, good.
Speaker 2It's very affordable. Yeah, it's a very good investment, filted out available on Amazon.
Speaker 1It is what's your definition of populism? Do you have one? I detest the word populism because it's by definition of populism. Do you have?
Speaker 2one. I detest the word populism because it's by definition a negative word, and we've had discussions about this, about democracy. Surely should be Popular, popular. So what is? Is a populist?
Speaker 2somebody who's bad by definition, so it's become a negative or maybe it was always a negative somebody who panders to the populist, to the population, and so there's a back and fro about that, and what I do say, though, is that politics, by definition, is about words and numbers.
Speaker 2There's two things it's about what you say and what numbers of support you can get based on your story. There's an awful lot of people, politicians particularly, who love to focus group everything they say and do. The focus group, the focus group everything they say and do. The focus group, the focus group politician, and I've used focus groups before. Well, I've been a part of a national referendum where we used focus groups, and they were useful in weighting one thing versus another as being relevant to somebody, but it wasn't a directional thing, it was a particular item, right, and we thought this wasn't a particularly compelling argument, but the focus group responses said that it was when you're using focus groups to define what you believe and what you say, and you're just a, I'll be whatever you want me to be, just vote for me.
Speaker 1That, I think, is dangerous that's winning at the cost of giving a crap.
Speaker 2Yes, that's not giving a crap, that's just giving a crap about power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think.
Speaker 1I think populism is but yeah it's, it's a crap. That's just giving a crap about power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think populism is yeah, it's a term used by people when the other side wins.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1There must be a definition of it. That is useful where someone has hacked the system a bit and is able to work the algorithm, or whatever the algorithm is, to their favor, not in technology sense, but in terms of an electoral sense. But I don't think we're discerning enough to to have a proper definition. Where that is is is a thing, and maybe the whole point of winning elections is different to having sound governance, and so that's voting is one part of the story, but the other part is institutions that are restraining of that. So that's where the restraints on being excessively popular will come in, from having an independent judiciary and an independent central bank and anyway.
Speaker 2So that that I think I'm poetry versus prose and and some of the people who are the best campaigners are crap at governing, and some of the people who are great at governing are crap at campaigning.
Speaker 1We can edit this out, but where would Boris Johnson sit for you in that?
Speaker 2Easily one of the best campaigners, easily one of the best delegators, easily one of the worst choosers of people.
Speaker 1So he's good at delegating tasks, but bad at delegating to the right person.
Speaker 2You only delegate to people who are in sync and have the same goals. Yeah, and I think he was also really good at being loyal beyond when he should have been Okay Interesting Does that make should have been Okay Interesting. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. But as a campaigner the reach, the recognizability, the brand, the understanding of having a brand. We were discussing recently, various people and their political leaders and their brands, and he's easily one of the top one of the criticisms.
Future Predictions
Speaker 1One of the criticisms his enemies give him is that he doesn't. I guess, boiling it down to the context of this conversation, that he never gave a shit. It was just about, you know, winning. Would you think that's fair? Don't know? I mean, I don't know that. Okay, I have a closing question. I feel like we've only scratched the surface, but time is against us, unfortunately. So let's, definitely, let's do this again. But I'd love to wrap up with my traditional closing question, which I call the long bet, and in the long bet, you have a 10-year horizon to make a prediction of something that you would like to happen, or something that you think will happen, and over time. I think it'll be a fun way of adding these together and seeing who thought what, and it's a kind of good way of chronicling the state of the day. Um, so uh, you can ask me why 10 years? I can give an answer, but it's just, it's arbitrary. So, yeah, what? What would you say is?
Speaker 2I'm gonna choose two things, because I'm greedy, yeah, uh, I was born and raised in africa. Africa, my job is unleashing potential and I want to talk about two things. One, I want to talk about Africa, and the second one I want to talk about is Gen Z, and both of them are hugely important. As a coach, you're often in a sort of a parental role where you are disappointed or heartened by the work of your child, the people that you coach, your child. And whenever I go to America, I'm fascinated by the experience and I'm disappointed, not by America, but I'm disappointed by Africa. Africa is four times the size of America and has 12% of the GDP. You could fit China, I think, europe and something. The scale of Africa is enormous, but it's got 12% of the GDP of a country that is a third of its size. Its GDP is 3 billion. Japan's is 4. Sorry, I don't understand. I come from a tiny country called Malawi. Malawi's got a calendar lake. On a map it looks tiny. It's 365 miles long.
Speaker 2It's nearly from here to Edinburgh and it's 52 miles wide and on the map it looks tiny. Africa is doing so many good things, but it could do so much more. I'm disappointed by the performance of Africa and what it could be, and it's largely through bad governance over the last hundred years not picking sides on everybody's behalf that I would love to see Africa standing up and becoming better governed and not wasting resources in corruption and all sorts of mismanagement and being much more interested in trade rather than aid. There's portions of Africa or parcels of Africa that are growing at 6%, 7%, 8%, 10% from a bad base, but they could do so much better and I would love to see Africa doing what it could Getting out of second gear and getting into third just getting into third would lift millions and millions of people.
Speaker 1The second one is Gen Z.
Speaker 2Gen Z are going to be 30, 35% of our workforce within the next 10 years. Can they translate that idealism, that rebellion, that awareness into whatever the future of work looks like over the next 10 years? Because the future of work is going to be dramatically changed. We were at a trade fair at the Excel the other day and we met a company that showed how interviews can be done simultaneously with a thousand people just wiping out HR departments.
Speaker 2No bad thing, perhaps Perhaps yeah, but that whole thing and maybe enhancing the experience of the people being subjected to the interview. But life's going to change. Life's going to change and it's already changing. Deepfakes yes, deepfake Live I shared on LinkedIn today. That is terrifying or a huge opportunity, or both. So when, if Gen Z, that generation that's about to come up, that's already edging into the work pattern, whether they can turn that idealism and that self-awareness and that informedness taken off their keyboards and actually turn it into action in whatever the world looks like in 10 years' time?
Speaker 2Yeah, it's tempting to beat up on gen z, for sure I find, you know, I heard this term, I heard this term, that gen z.
Speaker 1Yeah, there's a bit of that, you know. Is this just normal? You know, young, but on steroids because of tiktok and perhaps you know, I had a term time blindness, which I'd never heard before. We heard of this. So time blindness is a Gen Z term, basically making it a disability to keep time. I can't keep time and timekeeping is something that I can't do. It's a disability of mine.
Speaker 1So, will you be tolerant of me in the workplace Because I've got time blindness. I'm going to turn up late quite a lot, and it's sort of like that's the classic. You know I'm allergic to the phrase I can't without yeah or without adding the word yet you're pathologizing, uh, jens, maybe gen z has a habit of pathologizing uh important life skills that they don't want to cultivate, and maybe that will change when they collide with reality.
Speaker 2You and me and every normal person most normal people were rebels at 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
Speaker 2The youth of today is not a new concept and we just can moan about it now louder because we've got social media to bitch about them using their social media. I don't think there's a big change actually, but they're going to be a significant, articulate, intelligent, informed, depending on how much their sources of information are, and that's what they do with it, because they are entering the most hectic, fast changing. To be honest, when we, when I was a kid, if we didn't do too much, not a lot of stuff happened because the pace of change was so slow. Then the pace of change is so slow now that if people aren't getting involved in changing things and they're just observers, it's not going to be well, it's not going to be good what worries me is and they'll leave the power in the hands of old men, and that often leads to war well, stepping back from war helicopter parenting is the kind of thing that worries me.
Speaker 1I, I, I over coaching your children. As a parent, you know to win a. If you do a, you'll get b. There was a speech written given by the ceo of nvidia recently to a bunch of stanford students. It's very interesting. He said I've got very my special power is I've got very low expectations. So when I'm hit with adversity, doesn't you know, I can overcome it in a way, whereas a lot of you in the I'm paraphrasing for him but a lot of you in the room you know, you've been told from a very young age if I do a, if I pass this exam, I will get b. If I get into this university, I will get this job. And then the moment you start a business or the moment you make a decision in the marketplace, a if you do a, that equals b doesn't happen. Reality is much more complex than that and we're over coaching our children.
Speaker 1We're over not coaching sorry, we're over kind of parenting. Or we're over coaching our children, not coaching sorry, we're over kind of parenting. Or we're over promising to our next generation that these stepstones that you take through formal education with a capital E, there's not enough real-life education. It's all about passing exams and gaming the interviews, you know. Is that something?
Speaker 2And those parents. They're doing what they think is best because those things would have worked well for them in their day.
Speaker 1But the rules are changing.
Speaker 2And the rules that exist today are not going to be the same that they are in two years' time. Part of my job as an interview coach is helping people prepare for what it is now, not what it was like 10 years ago or 15 years ago or 20 years ago. I had the great benefit of having an Irish mother. You had an Indian mother, correct? I think we were both lucky because neither you nor I nor our fathers had much vote in what happened in our families. Our mothers didn't believe in democracy, did they? They pretended, but it was fake democracy. They told us what was going to happen, but even those mothers are working on what they see as effective and working and getting people involved. If you're going to do helicopter parenting, you need to do it with the people who are aware of how life is now, because it's changing, and it's changing fast, and that's what gives me hope for the kids in.
Speaker 1Africa.
Speaker 2when they collide with the West, they'll trounce them because they've been in touch with reality in a way that the overcoached middle class Western they also have a work I don't even call it a work ethic, I don't even call it a work ethic but they understand that you have to work just to maintain where you are today. Sometimes you have to work two days today just to maintain where you were last Friday. Work two days this week just to maintain where you were Friday yeah, because things conspire against you in Africa. And work, consistent work in whatever thing you do wins.
Speaker 1Let's call it a day on that, I think, peter. Thank you so much. Where can people find you, peterbottingcouk Twitter.
Speaker 2Twitter Peterbotting.
Speaker 1Thank you, Peter. I really appreciate you sparing the time and let's have you again soon.
Speaker 2It was fun.