A Chicken Can Only Lay One Egg At a Time - Geoffrey Moore, Tech Industry Legend

Season 3 kicks off with Geoffrey Moore, Tech Industry Legend (we can say that!)   

As you will hear Vic is even more excited than usual. Not only because let’s face it - this is Geoffrey Moore we have as a guest, but also because through our Tech Industry Leaders Survey, we appear to have identified the Tech Industry’s Biggest challenge:
Competing Priorities - where 75% of Leaders agreed or strongly agreed they had competing priorities and this is also a topic Geoff is very passionate about.

The title comes from a previous talk Geoff made where he says it is only natural that Tech organisations do not want to put all their eggs in one basket, but they need to remember a Chicken only lays one egg at a time.  Hence we dig into this some more and also learn about Geoffrey’s new book, The Infinite Staircase.

We had great fun recording this as our Christmas Special and hope you enjoy listening

Here is a link to the video Vic refers to. 

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn!

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:09

Welcome to Get Amplified, the podcast for tech industry leaders who want to build unstoppable teams to help their organizations execute faster. And we're back with series three or season three in the modern parlance. We're going to keep them a little bit more succinct this time. And by and large, we're going for 30-minute episodes. However, on this occasion, it being a Christmas special, and I am wearing my Santa Claus jumper, uh, not that you wonderful listeners can see, uh, we have a very special guest for you as a little early Christmas present. So, Vic, you'd better start by telling us who we got.

Vic 0:44

I'd be delighted to do that. Thanks, Dan. So today we have with us, and the only way I can describe and do the intro here is gosh, just a tech legend, um, Jeffrey Moore. So, Jeff, it is such a privilege to have you on the podcast today. And when we first uh heard from the Chasm group that you were happy to join us on the podcast, we talked about focusing on your new book, The Infinite Staircase, which I'm very, very keen that we get into. But when we were on our prep call um last week, I shared with you a little bit about our tech industry leader survey. And actually, the biggest finding that came out of that was that 75% of the leaders that we heard from are struggling around the problem and the challenge of prioritization. Um, and you shared with us the framework that you have around zones to win, and clearly from this very, very recent survey of a you know, a global survey of tech industry leaders, this is clearly a topic that still needs addressing. So I'm I'm gonna start with a bit of a lighthearted thing. In preparation for this, I was watching an amazing talk that you did um that's now on YouTube, and I'm sure we can we can uh share it with our listeners afterwards. But you talked about prioritization and the fact that a chicken can only lay one egg at a time, and hence, um, if it is okay with you, I would love that to be the title of our Christmas podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

It sounds good to me. It would be if it would have been Dickens, it would have been a Christmas goose, but I think a chicken is close enough. It's close enough.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

As long as we haven't come up with a turkey, that's the only thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

There you go, there you go.

SPEAKER_03 2:47

Fantastic. Thanks, Vic. Much appreciated. Um, so Jeff, perhaps you'd be so kind as to give us something of an intro. I mean, we've had kind of the your your other half on the podcast previously, as it were. Um, but perhaps you could tell us your journey to where we are today, if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Sure. So my journey actually started as an English professor. I did a doctorate in in medieval and renaissance literature. I taught English for four years at a place called Olivet College in Michigan. But we wanted to move back to California in the 70s, and there was no jobs in academics. So that's when I got involved with the software industry. And I spent 10 years in the software industry, starting in the in the HR uh kind of roles, but got into sales and then eventually into marketing. And then I had a really very fortunate career experience. Uh, I joined a company called Regis McKenna, which was the premier high-tech marketing agency at the time. This was in 1986, and it had all the great tech clients of that era. And that was where I was able to see the patterns, let me write my first book, which was called Crossing the Chasm. And Crossing the Chasm was all about well, how would you introduce a disruptive technology into a mainstream marketplace? And that went viral. It sold over a million copies, it's been translated into 12 or 16 languages, it's been through three editions, it's still very actively used 30 years later. So that was kind of my claim to fame, if you will. But let me start the chasm group. And the chasm group that was was the group that uh took these ideas, and then we had additional books as they came along. And and the way that works, by the way, is you write a book like Crossing the Chasm. Somebody says, Well, you should give a speech about that. So you go in and you give a speech, and at the end of your speech, somebody comes up to you and says, You know, you should come into our company and talk about this because this our company has this problem. So you go and you talk to the company, and they say, Well, you know, we think you should stick it around and help us work through this problem together. And so you say, Okay, I'll do that. And as you do that, you realize, well, actually, the problem they have isn't exactly the one that I described. So you start adding little extra pages to the book or extra slide. At the time, we we we didn't even have PowerPoint, we had we had these sort of things called transparencies, but you'd add a few extra transparencies to your deck and you you'd move on. Well, sooner or later you get a you get all these additions to the point there with so many additions, you thought, I have to write another book. So the second book was called Inside the Tornado, and then that led to the third book called The Gorilla Game. And I just went on. And so there'd been seven books. But but uh to Vicki's point, the first and the last ones are the ones that matter. So so crossing the chasm still is very active in the venture community. Zone to win, which is the one that Vicky was referring to at the end, it's the same problem of introducing, catching the next wave, bringing the next wave of technology to market, but it's doing it inside an established enterprise, like Vicky worked at VMware. So, like a VMware bringing it to market as opposed to a startup like Airbnb. It's a different problem, and it creates what we ended up calling a crisis of prioritization, which is what Vicky was referring to just just a minute ago. And so, how do you solve that crisis of prioritization where you still want to pursue your existing business very powerfully, but you also want to catch the next wave, and there's just not quite enough time or talent or or or capital to go around. So, how do you play that game? And that's what the book was about.

Vic 6:01

As I as I said as we were starting this call, watching that video last night, it just everything just made sense to me. I honestly I watched it and it was like my 22 years in tech was explained.

SPEAKER_03 6:15

Yeah, yeah.

Vic 6:16

It was so clever. I've been in in three of the different zones that you talked about, but I didn't know the the right and the wrong, and I can't express enough just how much it just clicked into place in the name.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

Okay, you're having a little bit of a fangirl moment here.

Vic 6:36

Oh, I really am. I really am thank you, Sash.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

Jeffrey, you can you cannot believe how entertained I am to see Vicky lost for words.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Well, maybe I should say a few words about these zones because we were talking about it. Let me let me just say a couple of words about it so we put them on the table. So the the crisis prioritization comes from the fact that there are genuinely conflicting interests inside a global enterprise at this time. So, and and what people were doing is that we're trying to manage all the interests in one pot. And they were trying to use kind of one system for managing them all together. And the the inside of the book is that won't work. So, what you have to do is kind of create different pots to put these things in. And so the four zones, three of the zones exist permanently, and one zone is temporary. But the zones that we all know, you know, the performance zone is the one where you run your current business, you make your products, you sell your products, it's how you deliver value to the customers in the world this year, it's how your it's what your investors look at, it's what your performance compensation is based on. It's it's it's all the yeah, it's all the stuff you would talk about in a public uh earnings report if you were a publicly held stock. That's the performance zone. The productivity zone is all the cost center functions you have to run behind the scenes if you're going to have a performance zone that works. So it's all of HR, it's all of finance, it's all of IT, security, facilities, marketing, customer success, anything you don't charge the customer for directly, it's being run out of the productivity zone. So if there was no disruptive innovations, you'd be done. You'd you I have a two-zone company, we're done. But of course, digital transformation, all the stuff that's happening, every industry is now being disrupted, not just tech. And so that means more and more industries are saying, we need an incubation zone. So the incubation zone is where you you test out whether or not this next big thing that's coming down the pike is something you should participate in or not. And if so, on what basis? So, should I try to be a first mover? Should I be the disruptor? Or is this am I more likely to be the disrupt T and I have to sort of get on this wave before it gets on me, as it were? And the incubation zone is a place where you do fast failure and you do this learn as fast, it's the all it's the agile, it's all the stuff that the Silicon Valley folks out here like to talk about. But but it's just for that zone, and that management model is for that zone. If you try to do fast failure in the performance zone, you're gonna miss quota, you're gonna get fired. If you do fast failure in the productivity zone, you might have to go to jail. I mean, you you're gonna break. I mean, so in other words, the point is there are these three zones, and the productivity zone is very process-oriented, it's very rules-oriented, it's very steady as you go. The performance zone is like, hey, close the quarter, dude. If you have to do a cut a corner here or there, come on, let's let's go, let's go, let's go. So we have these three zones. One, the performance zone is very sort of action-oriented, think fast, you know, make it happen, be intuitive, do the right thing. And then the and if you do make a mistake, recover quickly. Um, the productivity zone is more about no, no, no, set it, follow the process, this will work, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it. So that would, there's a guy named Daniel Conman who wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And that's exactly the difference between those two zones. And then there's the incubation zone, which feels much more like startup land. And there's a whole model, the book talks about how the venture capitalists manage incubation zones and how and how an enterprise can use it. So those three zones are there. And as Vicky already pointed out, you would play the game very differently depending on which zone you're in.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

But as long as there's no transfer, the fourth zone is called the transformation zone. And that's when you go all in on the new thing. And that's what creates the crisis of prioritization. Because at that point, the new thing is very demanding of resources, but it's not yet efficient and it's not yet really effective. So basically, you have to take resources out of your core business, which is very effective and very efficient, and pour them into a business that is ineffective and inefficient, and it drives everybody crazy. And by the way, your investors think you're nuts, you're you're the employee, everybody's arguing with each other. It's extremely challenging. And so the one rule of the trans, the two rules of the transformation zone, what three. One is if you start one, you must finish it because you you've now put your company through hell. There's no point going halfway. It's not like Dante got to the fifth level of hell and said, Virgil, let's go back, right? It's like, no, you got to go all the way through inferno to get to purgatory. Because that's problem number one. Problem number two, therefore, is you have to you can't you have to be relentlessly focused on getting this thing through, which is where the one the chicken can only lay one egg at a time. There is zero chance you could possibly do two transformations at the same time successfully. And it, I mean, it's just it's just impossible. One doing one successfully is incredibly difficult, but two is out of the question. And then the third thing is every day in the transformation zone is a bad day. So the faster you get through that thing, the better. And and and while you're in it, you're gonna get the everybody's gonna second guess you and doubt you and and and think you're an idiot. But as soon as you get through it, well, you're you're a hero. I mean, you you're like the most you're you're brilliant. You're you're Steve Jobs. Who knew that Apple was supposed to be in the music business? Who knew that Amazon was supposed to be in cloud computing business? What idiot thought that Netflix, with its incredible DVD business, should cannibalize it with streaming. I mean, so but then when it works, it works.

SPEAKER_03 12:09

So there were those are the it'll it'll never catch on.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

It is never that's that's right, that's right. It'll never catch on. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 12:15

That's really that's really interesting. That you know, the the first bit of that, you know, the productivity and then the incubation zone bit, you know, that reminds me so much of of my time at SoftCat. You know, I never had those terminals that terminology for it, but I was the guy responsible for the incubation zone. If I'd have been in productivity, I'd have hated it. It would have bored me to tears, which I guess leads me to the question do you think different sort of personality types, if that's the right phrase, are suited for operating in different zones?

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Very much so, very much so. And the thing each zone has to do, the thing I that I one of the things I have to install pretty early is you have to honor the other zones, even though you like, for example, people in the in the uh uh incubation zone are pretty sure they have between 10 and 20 IQ points advantage over people in the productivity zone. But you know, they're obviously kind of dull, and we're the smart ones, and they're the kind of dull ones. And then the performance zone people.

Vic 13:15

You said it on the talk yesterday, and it had me laugh out loud. I've sat in the incubation zone. I sat there for two years at Citrix when we we were looking at whether we moved into the SMB space and I led that project, and that's exactly how we felt. And I was like, oh my goodness, it's like you were inside my head.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

So so we have to honor each zone, the productivity zone. You have to honor the fact that it is it is setting up a stable foundation for everybody, and we need these processes if we're going to scale in any in any meaningful way. And God bless the performance zone, they're paying for everything. I mean, so so so everybody's got a role in this model. And and but but to Sam's point, there's also everybody has, I think, a sweet spot zone. Yes, and then there's also another zone that they're thinking I better not ever be put in that zone because that's just not me. And that's fun, but what's not good, I don't I don't like it when I see people being snarky across zones. I think everybody's gonna honor the other zones.

Vic 14:12

And that's the respect across the zones, isn't it? Now, where where we started with our conversation last week, and and why this is so fascinating for me is because so we've we changed the way that we work with our clients last last year, and we started by doing something. Um, we started by saying we're helping tech organizations execute faster, and and it came from actually a conversation that we'd had with um Paul Weefels about the fact that the tech industry, the tech is so similar now, it's about how organizations align their troops, and that's what the key differentiator is, and that's really what drives us at the Amplified Group. So we're about helping tech organizers execute faster through team experience and how people align together. And from that, we started doing something really simple called a speed check, and in our speed check, it measures four things, which are purpose, trust, clarity, and simplicity. And because simplicity is one of our core pillars, we keep it really simple. It's not a 50-page report, you get a two-page report out of it. But what we found was that the lowest rated question across the industry when we do it, whether we're doing it in a large organization or a very young organization, is competing priorities was the lowest score, and it was the biggest challenge. So when we came to put our IT leader survey together this year, we decided to include that question. So in our questions for the IT leader survey, we had we again we keep it pretty simple, but it was um I'm inspired to go the extra mile because I have purpose. Failure and mistakes are treated as lessons. I clearly understand how my team contributes towards our goals. There's trust and belief that the best idea wins, and we don't have a lot of competing priorities. Now, um, I'm inspired to go the extra mile because we have purpose came in at 82%. It came in really high. Simon Sinek has been getting his message out. Yeah, where to go, Simon.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Start with why. Start with why.

Vic 16:29

And that had gone up 10 points in two years. Yeah, but the one we don't have lots of competing priorities. 75% of our audience came back saying we have competing priorities. And that for me, yeah, was a big red light that said we need to look into this some more, because there's clearly a big challenge here.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

So there's a couple of things that are so so the the ways you can tactically improve that answer to that question, in my view, is first, you when you you want to sort the priorities into these buckets. So, in other words, I want are you still gonna have to prioritize things inside the incubation zone relative to each other? Because you don't have an infinite amount of money to invest. And by the way, the same thing inside the productivity zone. You're gonna have to to uh prioritize which initiatives are we gonna put in place and invest in this year, which were we not? And in the performance zone, which products are we gonna put the extra weight behind? What regions, what what sales launches, what whatever it is. But what you don't want to do is to try to prioritize a sales launch against a putting in an ERP system against an RD project. So the first thing you need to do is zone your business and sort them out. The second thing then, and this is what I learned from Mark Benioff at says at Salesforce, who's just the best in the world at this, is you stack rank everything inside of Zone.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

And and it's really interesting to watch this happen because often the first two items that they get stacked ranked, they get a fair amount of you know, support. This is usually one or two outliers, but but then you get to three, four, five, and six, and it gets muddier and muddier and muddier. And so what I see happening in boardroom after boardroom and executive leadership team after executive leadership team is people not prior, not doing that stack ranking. And what they do instead is they they just shove it down to the middle organization. And now you wonder why your organization isn't executing right now. Absolutely. Well, duh, they have to negotiate everything every morning.

Vic 18:26

Everything, absolutely everything. And so the one of the slides that you had in your talk had the egg timer in it. Yeah, and we had put a slide out three weeks ago on LinkedIn with an egg timer, and you had Horizon 2. Yeah, we're saying that needs to be a filter of, and so when you were sharing with us about the importance of stack ranking, I'm like, hallelujah! This is the problem.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Yeah, and the the truth is it's a very uncomfortable conversation to it can be an uncomfortable conversation to have, but if you don't have it, all you're doing is just is you you're essentially imposing it on the people that report to you. Yeah, and and and by the way, your execution in the world will go down and you'll lose and you'll be cranky and you'll start blaming each other. And the answer is you could have solved that, you could have solved that at the beginning if you'd had the tough conversations, yeah.

Vic 19:16

And it's having that, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 19:17

You just have to, you have to.

Vic 19:19

We we had um Scott Heron, um CFO system.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Oh, who was like the best, right? So Scott was at Autodesk. Yeah, he did this. Yes, they did this, yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that was that was just amazing listening to that.

Vic 19:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But um, he was talking about the importance of the decision-making process. So I've got a follow-up with um the lady at Autodesk that drove that, so that we can so we can find out some more to share that with our listeners because it's making those difficult decisions, isn't it? Yeah, and having the guts to do that.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Yeah, yeah.

Vic 19:58

But having everybody with you. So, one of your other key messages about this was about making sure that you've got alignment of your leadership team and everybody is on the bus together because you've got one outline, you've got somebody causing doubt in there, that just comes down through the organization. So perhaps you could just talk about that for a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Well, it's important, but I mean, basically, and and of course, I've been working in the last decade or two with relatively large public organizations. When these organizations go through a transformation successfully, in almost every case, one or more very, very senior executives has to be fired because they just simply cannot align with the thing. And they're not bad people. In fact, they got you there, but they just can't let go of whatever it was that's there, or they feel entitled to be able to have a different point of view. And if you're not in the transformation zone, you can you can you can work with that. But when you're under a transformation, everybody has to row in the same direction. And and so you you and so this is what we call this is why we call it a command culture in that quadrant, because we're saying this is when the CEO actually more than earns their comp if they actually get it. If you create if you lead your company through a successful transformation, I don't care how much they're paying you, you you could have you could have earned more. But if you if you get paid a CEO thing and you do not lead them through a transformation, or you you you're you preside over a failed transformation, and there are many visible CEOs that have been doing that in the last uh you know the decade or so, yeah, that's just a crime. Because you're now you're wildly overpaid.

Vic 21:31

Yes. But it's it takes it's it's tough, isn't it? Because you you people want harmony naturally.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

So so so you it's it's gotta be authority. Yeah, it's like the harmony under under uh of North Korea, or the harmony. I mean, basically, because it's gotta be very authoritarian and it's gotta be done with humility. I mean, I think Satya is was a is a great example of this at Microsoft. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

Yeah, yeah. I think

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Benevolent dictatorship, you could call it.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Well, and and and and by the way, temporary dictatorship, right? Yeah, yeah. In other words, I'm I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a wartime of Churchill, I'm gonna be a wartime prime minister, but not a peacetime prime minister.

SPEAKER_03 22:13

A benevolent dictatorship with a statute of limitations.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Yes, there you go. Nicely done. Good.

SPEAKER_03 22:19

Yeah.

Vic 22:21

Um, so uh the other piece that that springs to mind from this is, you know, I think I mentioned to you that we use Patrick Lencioni's methodology. And so he talks about so you have to have the trust there to start with. So then you can have productive conflict. And in that productive conflict, you know, we talk about, I think it was Intel that started this, disagree but commit. So make sure that everybody's heard, but you need to commit and you need that leader to make that decision.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yes, yes. So, first of all, so the you you debate, you can disagree, but the commit, and when the commit happens, it's not so much that the leader doesn't make the decision, it's that somebody feels they don't that they can opt out. So, so an opt-out culture by uh again, in a world where you're not transforming, you can live with a certain amount of opt-out. In fact, it's it might even be healthy, but in a transformational world, there could be no opting out, period. Just no opting out.

Vic 23:16

You're making me smile there, because I used to describe VMware's culture as a consensus culture. And when I'm when I'm working with leadership teams, I say, what's the difference between commitment and consensus? Because in my experience, it's at least six months.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Because if you're trying to get everybody to people feel entitled to opt out, and so you you want to be really clear. If there is an entitlement to opt out, then let's make it explicit. But if there isn't, then let's make opt-out a criminal offense because because it just it it just it just takes the air out of the balloon.

Vic 23:52

Yes, I I felt that for seven years.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

And and the uh the other Sam, I think I think Vicky needs a little extra therapy, Sam. And I and I'm thinking maybe a Christmas gift that has alcohol in it might also help. So I just wanted to work with it, okay?

Vic 24:08

Do you know what? I I had my Christmas gift actually early this week because I had all my amplifiers together um for a team meeting, and it was oh that's it was just wonderful. Now we had we had an external facilitator in, so we were practicing what we were preaching. We we made magic on that call for Jeffrey. It was just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

It was good fun.

Vic 24:31

So yeah, it was, it really was. Anyway, we're digressing. I'm sorry. One of your rules of you can only go through one J Cove at a time. And the fact that we, you know, I personally experienced VMware trying to go through four.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah.

Vic 24:46

And just how painful and how hard.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

It'd be like saying, I'm gonna have open heart surgery, but why don't we do a tummy tuck at the time and and maybe a little plastic surgery around the eyes? It's like, no, no, no. One no, don't when you're on the operating table, get off the operating table.

Vic 25:06

But from a field perspective and from those teams that were in or that are in the um the performance zone, saying to them, you know, where are you going to invest your time? Because you've got all of these different business units going, I'm the best, I'm and they're all competing for airtime with the sales organization. And that's what I feel I'm seeing now in the clients that we're working with.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Well, so so in that world, I mean, if you're if you're if you have a portfolio of products, again, if you're not in the transformation zone, there is a competition for field, uh field time, and it it tends to be won by the comp the products that are selling the best. And this is sort of a Darwinian sort of natural selection going on, which is which is fine as long as you're playing with a population in a relatively stable category. But if you have to catch the next wave, the problem is the the new the new offering is not as popular as the offerings in the pop in the in the performance zone, but you have to prioritize it anyway. And and that that and in fact you have to make it the number one priority no matter what, because you have to get that offer to scale. Because if you get halfway through and start to drift, you've you've just set everybody back, you know, two or three paces. And at the end, you have nothing to show for it except kind of a tarnished reputation. So so so if you're going to do a transformation, you must, you must prioritize it to the point and get it to scale. By the way, once you get it to scale, I mean, then then you're you're a hero. But but until you're at scale, you're a chump.

Vic 26:38

Yeah, and it and it's getting to that 10%.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Yeah, and and and and the la and it's it's like bicycling up a hill. The last 100 yards is the hardest 100 yards, right? And and so people quit. And it's like, no, please don't quit.

SPEAKER_03 26:52

So Christmas is coming up, right? So it just so happens you have the perfect stocking film available.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

It's a stocking stuffer, absolutely true. Well, let me tell you a little bit about it, because I do care a ton about it. So when I write books, I try to staple myself to a really tough problem, like that. I don't know the answer to. And then I try to say, okay, let's how how how would you get there? How would you be able to do that? And so I'm 75 years old. I've been on the planet for you know three quarters of a century. I'm thinking, well, you know, Jeff, what about like like the big problem? Like, like, what the hell's going on around here? Like, how did we get here? What what how does this all this which is a very tough problem, right? So, so it's sort of like could you explain the question was could you explain all this? I mean, if you had like a I've got two grandchildren. So the problem I gave myself is could you explain to Noah and Elena like how this whole thing works?

SPEAKER_03 27:46

How it's why we're all here.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

Well, exactly, and how we got here, and what are we supposed to do now that we're here? Whoa. So, anyway, um, so it's sort of like a theory of everything. I mean, like, okay, what's your theory of everything? So it turns out a ton of people have been writing on bits and pieces of this really well. And so, and I've been reading in it uh kind of sort of recreationally for decades. So I thought, well, now wait a minute, maybe we can stitch this together. And so the the the first two-thirds of the infinite staircase says, okay, if you start with the Big Bang, how do you get from the Big Bang to Vicky and Sam on this podcast, right? With with with no miracles intervening. And so the idea behind that is it's it starts with physics, right? I mean, the big bang is all physics, right? But then somewhere along the line, chemistry sort of emerges out of physics. And chemistry isn't, I mean, you can you can kind of see the physics inside of chemistry, but chemistry's got a set of rules that you can't derive directly from physics. It's a new set of rules that sort of overlays on top of physics. And then you get to Earth about 4.6 billion years ago, and within a billion years, you get life on Earth, and you realize, well, biology is chemistry. I mean, it's all chemistry, but it's got another set of rules that you put on top of that. So then you said, well, wait a minute, maybe there's this sort of complexity emergence model, and that's where the staircase came from. And so the then question was well, how many stairs would you need to explain this? And by the way, you know, the time is short, so you don't get like 5,000. I ended up with 11. And I don't know that they're the right 11, but they're each stair builds on the previous stair. And the bottom stairs are based on the natural sciences, and that kind of gets you to bacteria, sort of like from Big Bang to bacteria. And the middle stairs are based on Darwinism. Like, how do you get from bacteria to chimpanzees? And and Darwin's got a pretty good way of explaining that. It brings in consciousness and it brings in, and then it brings in mammals, and when it brings in mammals, mammals have values and mammals have cultures even before human beings. So the, you know, the nurturing values of mammals and the and the disciplinary values of mammals, they're really our core religious values, they're actually mammalian. I mean, they're actually just a kind of an extension of our mammalian value system. So anyway, Darwinism kind of gets you to chimpanzees. And then the top of the staircase is much more around well, what sets human beings so remarkably apart from everybody else? And that is language. And and then and all the things that build on language, and the the three I talked about were language after language, I said, well, let's talk about narratives, stories, because that's how we understand the world. Narrative, I think, is our superpower. I think that's the human being superpowers is storytelling. But then analytics, which sort of crap detect the narratives, because some of the there may be fake news in this world, right? So so is it is it fake or is it real, or how do we do that? And mathematics is a different kind of analytics, which crap detects a different set of stories in science, but they're both really interesting. And then that can can create theory. So anyway, I have these 11, it's it's it's about 130 pages, and it starts goes from Big Bang to you know to this podcast. How does that work? Then the last third was well, okay, that's a coherent story. I mean, it may not be true, but at least it's coherent. Um, what does that say about what we're supposed to do? I mean, how are we supposed to act? I mean, uh I was sort of raised to do good. Well, so what is goodness and where does it come from? And what authorized if there's no divine creator, if you're not obeying the will of God, well, then what are you doing? And why is goodness still matter? And so that was a big deal for me to try to explain that and then to talk about the challenges of doing by the way, when I did got to doing good, I kind of used the zones again because I said there are zones of doing good. I mean, I uh once you I get a hammer, it's gonna be a nail. I'm gonna hammer it one way or another. So I used the zone idea there with the doing good, and then the last chapter was called being mortal, because I think immortality creates one context for doing good. Well, mortality creates it's it has the same function, it's just a different context. So, how would you be mortal? So anyway, it was my attempt to sort of say, okay, this is my best, my best shot at sort of explaining everything and sort of how that tees up a moral life in in the current uh world. And since we're having our our politicians aren't exactly helping us with our moral life right now, I was sort of thought maybe this might be a good Christmas gift. So yeah, I'm with Sam. If you put it in your stocking, I think it'll be it'll be really good.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

Happy days. I'll get I'll get a copy for my daughter. She'll really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

I have one last thing because I because Richard isn't on this call, but Jonathan, I our social media guy. So then I started playing with positioning statements for the book from Crossing the Chasm. So in Crossing the Chasm, there's this little template for telling positioning statements. And uh just read two of them. I put I have seven of them, but I'm just I just was playing a game with it. We're publishing them one one what's we'll give you the first one and the last one because I think they're kind of fun. The first one was very serious. I mean, uh, this was my real attempt to say, okay, who should read this book? So I wrote down for intellectually curious readers who wonder how we ever got from the Big Bang to LinkedIn, because that's it's in a LinkedIn blog. The Infinite Staircase is a book that provides an end-to-end explanation of the ideas, well, an end-to-end explanation based on the ideas of complexity and emergence. Unlike books about astrophysics, molecular biology, evolution, and the like, this book snitts all these topics together into one coherent narrative. So that was sort of okay, I wasn't terribly inspired, but I thought that's sort of accurate. My favorite one was for super smart readers who love the challenge of debunking books that claim to present a theory of everything, the infinite staircase presents a perfect target. Unlike books that seek to protect themselves from overreaching, this book puts it all out there and says, Come and get me.

SPEAKER_03 33:29

Love that. That's brilliant. That's a great that's the one to that's the one to go to market with.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Yeah, yeah.

Vic 33:36

It really is. So we'll use that when we share it, actually. And I I've been following your um what you've just been talking about there. That you've been doing hashtag and you've been sending it out, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02 33:46

I saw that. Yeah, yeah.

Vic 33:48

But for that last one there, because the the thing that that has struck me most about the book, and I think it's what hopefully you were looking for, is gosh, how thought-provoking.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Yeah, that's just what yeah. I mean, look, look, a secular understanding of the world is there's a lot to cover. I mean, and and and and the stuff that's out there is amazing, but it goes, it's pretty narrow, it's pretty siloed. So the astrophysicists don't really talk to the biologists who don't really talk to the anthropologists, who don't really talk to the you know, English makers. So, yeah, I would I think I'm hoping that by pulling it together horizontally, it it'll help. Yeah.

Vic 34:25

So what that's just made me think of. You know, you're talking about the different zones and them having respect for each other. It's the same there, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I I I I do think we don't we don't make a lot of progress by demonizing anybody. I think we we need, but I don't think we need to give each other happy talk. I just think we ought to we ought to honor honor each name. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 34:46

Makes sense. Makes sense. So you've taken 132 pages to do to deliver what Douglas Adams summed up as 42.

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Exactly. I mean, basically it was a rather long, long-winded way of saying 42.

SPEAKER_03 35:00

Fantastic. It's absolutely brilliant. My my one question, of course, is now now that you've given us a unified theory of everything, what do you do next?

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Well, I think you still have to live. I mean, this is what the being actually the being mortal one was was the last chapter is kind of almost it almost can stand alone because what it just says is okay, we're here for a while. There was, by the way, this thing's been going on a long time before we got here, and it presumably is gonna be going on a long time after we leave. So, how do we fit in? And and I was using the idea that that ourselves, uh our personalities, our characters in narrative. So narrative for me became the the key stair that and that there's narratives that we participate in, and and and legacy and impact are all about choosing the narratives you wish to be part of, and then acting out those narratives in ways that that have impact on others and that would carry the story forward. And keeping the play going and keeping the story forward is sort of the theme that that kind of unites the human race. It's a little bit like a like a like a relay race. You know, you you get the baton from your parents and your grandparents, and you run with it for a while, you pass it on to your kids and your grandparents, and and you also pass it on to your colleagues. And if you write stuff, you're passing it on to people who read it, et cetera, et cetera. But it's to me, that's what it's about, is participating in that in that sort of almost like a bucket brigade of culture being sort of developed and passed down the line. And as the world changes, the stuff in the buckets has to change. So you're always innovating. Fantastic.

Vic 36:27

Thank you so much for making time for us. I'm grinning from ear to ear, aren't I? I mean, we've just covered so much.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Well, good. Well, I'm getting amped myself. Obviously, you got me in, so thank you very much.

Vic 36:42

Absolutely wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 36:43

Wow, what a Christmas special! Thanks, Jeffrey. That was absolutely blooming magnificent. I think you've you've made Vicky's year in the closing minutes of it. Um, so all it remains is for me to say thank you for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. As always, your comments, I'm sure there will be many comments on this one, and your subscriptions are most gratefully received. And we wish you a very happy Christmas and a magnificent new year.