Zoe Scaman on The Unseen Source of Value Destruction

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That's fetchpet.com/save. Well, I was with a financial organization a couple of weeks ago doing a keynote. And before I went on stage, the CEO said, we have to talk about AI publicly. And if we don't talk about our AI agenda publicly, shareholders will get nervous. So they're just doing it for the sake of doing it. And yet they don't necessarily spend as much time or anytime at all really talking about what do we hold onto? What do we protect, even if it doesn't logically make business sense in the next two quarters? And I wish that we were having more of those discussions because the value destruction, I think, is much more real right now than any level of value creation. (upbeat music) This episode of Creator Destroy starts with a French sociologist and intellectual named Pierre Bordeaux, whose work on how meaning accretes around objects, brands, and symbols should be foundational to every enterprise that cares about value creation. But it's not. I'd never heard of Bordeaux until just a few months ago. My next guest, Strategist, Consultants, and Big Thinkers, Zoe, Skame, and introduced me to his thinking and her musings of a wandering mind newsletter. So he's one of a small number of people I know who's willing to say out loud with a lot of people feel but won't admit, which is that much of what passes for marketing strategy has been reduced to a process producing decks and frameworks and post-it notes that make everyone feel like something happened without actually creating value for anyone. She's the founder of Bordeaux, a strategy studio, and has spent two decades working inside and alongside companies like Droga 5, Lego, Netflix, L'Oreal, Tesco, and with Mark Cuban and Lucodontic. What makes this episode what it is is that Zoe's not here to share what's working but what's broken. Why most of the people running enterprises can't see it and what the costs have not seen it are. We get into a competency should actually look like when the old playbook was written for a world that no longer exists and where playbooks don't work anymore and the paradox of how you intentionally construct meaning when meaning only works if it doesn't feel intentional. So Zoe, a few months ago, I read something you'd written where you mentioned Pierre Bordeaux and I'd never heard of him and I'd never heard of or and wasn't familiar with, his thinking on how meaning accretes. And I wound up going down a bit of a small rabbit hole as a consequence. And I wanna start our conversation here. If meaning is the mechanism by which value actually accrues to an object to brand a human, an organization, a company, I'm wondering from your perspective, what the absence of understanding of how meaning is actually built, nurtured and sustained cost of business. - It's a nice small question to start with. So thank you for that. I think, yeah, yeah, yeah. - What? - We'll warm me up with the big ones. - That's fine, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I came across Pierre Bordeaux's work probably about 10 years ago and I was obviously massively late to the party even then, but what I found really interesting about-- - Not as late as me as it turns out. - Not quite, not quite, but we're there, we're there, we're good. So he wrote a book, well, well before I was even born called Distinction and what he was suggesting in distinction was there is three levels of capital that can accrue. There is economic capital, which is what is a product or a service worth in terms of its straight economic value, but that there are two others. One is cultural capital, which is this idea of a product or a service will accrue a certain amount of meaning based on what it means to people from, the way that they want to position themselves, the values that they might attach to it, all of the other cultural aspects around it. And then there's another one called symbolic capital, which is this idea of basically how is something seen as prestigious, what kind of attributes are tied to it in some way. And so when I started reading this, I thought, well, this is interesting because this is a way of me understanding what the value of a brand is, but then as you went deeper down the rabbit hole, so did I at the time. And where I kind of got to was this understanding that hang on a minute, meaning is not something that we can manufacture, per se. It's not necessarily something that we can build in a kind of paint by numbers process. It's something that almost kind of gets built by accident and he called this space where meaning gets built the field. And he said that all meaning is relational. So a lot of the time we like to think that meaning is individuals. It's something means something to me because of a reference that I have or a personal experience that I've had. But he basically said that's mostly bollocks. And actually, it's all kind of relational. So something will mean something to me because I know that it means something to you and I'm therefore symbolically giving that meaning because I think it says something about me to you. And so the more I started thinking about that, the more I started thinking about the fact that actually hang on a minute in advertising and brand, we like to think that we are the authors of meaning, but we're not if this is true. And actually the process that we go through, which is we create this idea of kind of synthetic meaning that we want to attach to a brand or a business. We vomit it out into the world and we assume that everyone kind of jumps on the meaning train is massively misunderstood in terms of actually the process that we are actually going through and what we are actually creating. And so I started kind of thinking, well, actually there is a very different way of understanding both our role, but also what is a brand out there, when it actually starts to create all of that sort of meaning aspect around it. And the question that you ask, which is, what happens when a business or a brand doesn't really understand this? I think it's kind of three issues really. The first one is if we continue to build meaning as if we are the sole authors of it, what we actually end up manufacturing is something that is very hollow, which is a kind of cause play version, I suppose, of meaning because we've written a positioning statement to the nth degree, we've wordsmithy ads, we've done the colour palette, we've got the right celebrity attached to it, we shove it out into the world and we assume that we have built some level of meaning, but actually we haven't. And there's something kind of missing there. I think we also don't understand that meaning has to be nurtured over a long period of time. And what we're doing at the moment which everyone is kind of aware of is we're basically resetting brand to pretty much zero, every two and a half to three years when we have a kind of new CMO coming in, we're very short-termist with how we look at brand and business now and that's accelerating and getting faster and faster. So we're actually breaking any ability that we have to kind of build meaning because we're not allowing it to kind of compound. And then I think from a kind of sustainable aspect of it and sustainable meaning, how do we maintain any level of meaning that we may have accrued for a business in a brand, I don't think we quite realise that meaning is a currency of sorts. And we've earned it over a period of time. And if we fuck up which a lot of brands and businesses do now on a regular basis from a PR perspective, we spend it and it doesn't necessarily come back. And so we basically start to kind of chip away at that meaning, you know, and a plus example of that is obviously what's happened to Nike over the last couple of years and the fact that they were kind of riding the co-tales of all of this meaning that they'd accrued over decades and hadn't quite realised that they've been spending down the balance of that, you know, over the last kind of, you know, 10 to 15 years without necessarily building it back in. And so I think it's kind of this threefold issue, which is we're building something really hollow because we don't understand actually what it is, you know, where we're not nurturing it properly, so we're not letting it compound, we're just cutting it and starting from zero over and over again every two and a half to three years. And then we're not realising that this is something that we have earned as a currency. And if we screw things up and spend it too quickly, we've lost all of that meaning. It's very difficult to kind of build it back in again. So I think that's the kind of cost to business of not really understanding this work and what this means for the job that we do. - I'm struck by one of the first things you said, which is that, you know, we as, and tell me if I'm interpreting it or playing it back wrong, which is that marketing marketers can't create meaning. But of course, isn't that the job of marketing and marketers, which is to create meaning? Now I get that meaning, doesn't exist in our positioning statement, our work, our outputs. It exists in the minds of the audience, right? And if it doesn't exist there, it doesn't exist. But help me resolve that tension. And then I got to follow up tension for you. Yes. So I think the way that I see it is that we are not the authors of the meaning per se, you know, the audiences, the culture is the sort of, the people that we're going out there to are the authors. And what we do is we create the conditions for that meaning to either occur or not to occur. So I think it's a very small tweak on the significance of the role that we play. Yeah, but it's an important one. I get it. Yeah, I hope so. And I think that that's the difference, which is when we wordsmith everything to the nth degree, when we build our brand love keys or brand houses or whatever that may be, we think that we are essentially capturing meaning. And then we have the ability to communicate and supplant that onto the culture that we would hope to move in the right kind of direction. But I think what we're missing is actually we need to be creating the conditions for that meaning to then become emergent in some way. And that does change, I think, the role and the approach, you know, that we should be playing. And I think for me, the thing that creates those conditions is how a brand or a business behaves, as opposed to what they say. And that is a really, really big shift as well. Because if you then start thinking about how a brand and a business behaves, suddenly the job of marketing is not just the marketing assets, because how a business behaves can come from any part of the business, which can then hit the public sphere, which then has a knock on effect to the emergence of whatever that meaning tends to be. And so I think it's really helping us to kind of step back and see the whole picture, as opposed to just the kind of advertising stuff that we tend to focus all about time and energy on. Support for the show comes from Odio. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other, introducing Odio. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part, Odio replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. So why not you? Try Odio for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. And Donald Trump find a way out of the war in Iran. The Iran war has been by a long margin. Trump's biggest policy failure. Part of the reason that he has been unable to end the war is because he can't accept the loss that it would imply from his war goals. I'm Pete Barara. And this week Ian Bremer, the founder and president of the leading global risk firm Eurasia Group, joins me to break down the latest in the war in Iran. The episode is out now. Search and follow stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. The difference between how a brand of business a company behaves and what it says is oftentimes enormous. And the easier examples to cite are when there are contradictions between what you say and how you behave in the United States over the last few years starting I think three years ago, maybe four target has suffered from that contradiction, right, which is for 20 years, 25 years, they were talking about inclusion and values of belonging and what has suddenly become a bad three letter word, which is DEI, right, with a real commitment to it, not just words. And then they capitulated to some angry folks and their business for other reasons as well has suffered significantly as a consequence. What's your advice as both a strategist, but also as a consultant and advisor to your clients on how to what systems they might put in place to ensure that there's alignment between what we say and what we do that they're talking the talk and walk in the walk. Are the frameworks that you use? No, not really. I think that for me, the biggest issue in pretty much every single business that I walk into that causes this misalignment between words and actions is incentives. And that is always the problem. What are you saying? The internal cultural one. Yeah, what are you paying lip service towards versus what do you actually reward internally in terms of the incentives that you have? So I was I was working for a company many moons ago, large sportswear company, which I'm sure many people will know. And they were undergoing. Does it rhyme with fakie? Maybe, maybe not. They were going through a large transformation project that we've got a couple of years and the whole point of that collaboration of that kind of project was collaboration, which was, how do we work better together? How do we kind of connect ourselves across seemingly disparate work streams, departments, that kind of stuff to kind of create, you know, one brand, one business. So the motivation was very, very clear in terms of actually what they wanted to try to achieve. And we went through in those workshops as you do. But there was one particular workshop that we were in. So I'm sorry. Can I interrupt the story for a second to ask you a question, which is presumably what they wanted to achieve was greater efficiency in the name of greater effectiveness. Was was a more holistic, organized, integrated approach to business. And I'm kind of like we talk about this a lot on the show that or design, you know, is one of the greatest impediments to growth. Like, why the fuck do you think so many large enterprises do not understand that multiple PNLs is not the path to prosperity? I think they do understand that multiple PNLs are not the path to prosperity. I think the challenge is probably twofold. One, which is organizations are made up of humans and humans are inherently irrational beings who like to hold on to their own thief dims, who like to hold on to their own success, who want to judge themselves by factors such as their job title, how many people they manage, you know, their specific PNL. You know what they're earning in terms of their bonus and if you try and take that stuff away from people, they often dig their heels in and they become personally, you know, the biggest impediment to change. So it's a very light balance between organizational transformation and people just being dickheads about it and kind of getting in the way of it. I think is a real challenge. And I think the other thing is when you get to organizations of that size, the organization becomes a kind of Frankenstein's monster. You know bits of it have kind of grown and evolved and morphed in different ways over time and then they've added another bit over here and then they've added an extra, you know, box over on the right hand side and it just becomes this kind of monstrosity that still somehow manages to kind of function. But I think the inefficiency in them is everywhere and you know it's a symptom of just having a gigantic organization, which is why I also think the traditional approach to organizational design is is completely inappropriate because and I've seen this a million times and I've been part of these as well. We plan it almost like this perfect chess board and we like to move people and departments around like they're kind of pawns on a chess board and we come up with this kind of perfect encapsulation, which is very neat and very logical of what an organization should be we start on a PowerPoint slide and you know McKinsey etc charge you know 250 million quid for this kind of stuff and then they impose it. On top of an organization which is as I said inherently a monstrosity and run by a rational humans and that's why breaks every two years and McKinsey get to renew their contract for another 250 million quid it just doesn't work. And so I think this is the problem so I think there is an inherent understanding that yes competing incentives and PNLs are a mess and are the cause of a lot of the pain. But then how do you get past that how do you get over it you know when you're dealing with these organizations that are emergent in their nature. I want to ask you to follow up on that which is how do you get past it that I interrupted your story so go on with the story and then I'll bring it back. Okay so I finished the story first and see as a workshop all about collaboration how do we start doing more stuff together in this particular workshop was about retail. And we had three teams in the room one was wholesale so they were selling to big department stores one was e-commerce they were managing the website kind of e-commerce sales and the other one was in store so basically managing their own stores and their capabilities there as well. Well you know how do we get more fluidity amongst this how do we start sharing ownership how do we kind of funnel people into different. experiences, different touch points, et cetera. And one particular story came up from the store guys, which said, well, we're pissed off with E-Com guys because they never put the address of the stores on the website. So that's a bit weird. Why wouldn't you do that? And they said, well, we don't want people to go to the stores because we're E-Com. And we want to sell via E-Com because that's our PNL. If they go to the store, we lose that sale and doesn't shop on our PNL. So we're not going to do that. And then suddenly, all of these red flags and alarm bells started ringing in my head, they were, we've got completely misaligned incentives here. If you are deliberately not putting the location of the stores on the website, the cut their nose off, then what else would we misaligned on here? And we've really gone into a big deep discussion about the way that different teams were rewarded, about what success metrics were looking like and how they were set at the beginning of each year. And we realized that there were these huge walls between each of these different teams and their ability to actually have any level of collaboration and fluidity, it did not exist. Because if they did start to collaborate, they would be chipping away at their own PNL, chipping away at their own kind of incentive structure and the rewards that each of them got individually and as a team at the end of the year. So it just didn't work. And the more I started kind of delving into this, the more I then have started seeing it in pretty much every organization that I work with, the number one barrier to any level of success is misaligned incentives. And nobody really wants to dig enough into it. Because it's messy and it's combative and it's really difficult and tangled and it's a mess to try and fix it. So they just leave it alone. - It isn't that the fundamental job of the chief executive, which is, you may not wanna dive into it, but if you wanna increase the, if you wanna create sustained value, you better fucking dig into it because your punching growth in the face, right? Which then brings me back to what I said, I wanted you to help us understand, which is how do you advise companies to get past it? How do you advise companies to ensure kind of the cultural incentive and financial, economic incentive alignment, excuse me. - So there's a thing called, and it sounds very fancy, but it's not. There's a thing called dialogic systems change, which I've been very interested in for a long time. So about 10 years ago, I was living in New York and I was working for a company called Undercurrent, which at the time was this kind of bleeding edge. - A new Josh and Aaron back in the day. I was inclined to vundercurrent. - Right you, well there you go. - Yeah, when I was at Live Nation. - Yeah, amazing. So when I went over there because they were the bleeding edge of organizational design at that point in time, and I wanted to understand how they were doing things differently and at that, in that era, hologratic organizations were all the rage. This idea of no structure, slam teams, so basically autonomous, lean multidisciplinary teams. And it sounded logical and it allowed you to move fast, break things again, the same kind of era that that stuff was happening. And it essentially created a bunch of renegades within a hierarchical structure. But one thing I started to notice very quickly is that it didn't matter which organization we went into, whether it was American Express, whether it was climate reality project, whether it was PepsiCo, whether it was Live Nation, we kept picking up and supplanting the same strategy over and over again. So we were almost becoming a McKinsey. And we would go in with the same recommendation, you need slam teams, you need to pull some staff out, turn them into these renegades and these people who are doing pilots, and that's how you smash through your hierarchy. And there was no real understanding of the organizational issues that that business had, no real empathy for what they were going through, no real understanding of the specificity of the challenges that they were facing. And it got my back up and I just thought, we're just doing what McKinsey does, but in a slightly more fashionable trend forward way. And I don't think it's working. And so I started exploring this thing called dialogic system stage, which is actually about 30 or 40 years old. So it's not new. And it was this idea of, well, actually, organizations are emergent, how they start to build and evolve their practices and their operating methodologies is fed by every single person that walks through that organization and deposits something. And every single person that leaves absorbs something. And it creates this kind of concept, which I've labeled previously as this idea of something called the heartwood, which is this kind of dense inner working of what an organization is. And I just thought, well, how does that get created over time? And so dialogic system has changed, suggests that actually it gets created through a number of different pillars. One being this idea of you set a vision for where you want the company to go, which people kind of know the vision, but you then allow people to find their own way to it. And you never ever do it as a top-down mandate. You never take the vision, shove it into a bunch of posters, plaster them up inside all of the toilet doors and call that organizational transformation and culture change and job done. And instead, you allow people to have a certain level of autonomy and subjectivity over that meaning and to kind of create it for themselves. And there's a number of different practices that sit underneath that. And I think for me, that's the stuff that kind of really, really works. And it shows up in very different ways in different organizations. So Snapchat being one of them. So Snapchat, how they practice called Council. And I've done it a few times. One of the most powerful things that I've done in terms of, you know, organizational communication. And it came from Evan Speagle, who's the founder of Snapchat. He actually used to do it in middle school. And they come together before really important decisions. And they sit literally in a cycle of chairs. And they talk to one another. And they share how they're feeling. They share what they need in that moment. And the idea of Council is to be heard and to feel a sense of recognition. And then also to hear others. And it really helps them to kind of shift and change how they approach different subjects. And one example of what they did recently was when they were going into the one of the court cases that was brought against them and the other social media platforms is Evan Speagle and his legal team. And some of the others actually sat in Council before they then walked into the courtroom. And really kind of sat and talked through the nitty gritty of how they were feeling in that moment, how they wanted to approach things. And it was at that particular court case when Evan stood up and round and actually addressed the parents, you know, the children who had died. And no other social media founder did that. But the Council gave him the ability to feel like he could. And then there are other practices as well. So for example, in Nvidia, with Jensen Huang, the Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia, never ever does one-to-one meetings. He will actually go out onto the floor of Nvidia and just start talking. You know, people kind of gather around him and he finds that as a much more effective way of disseminating information and also disseminating decisions. By the way, I do that all the time and nobody listens. I just, it's like. Maybe you need to have the statue of Jensen. I don't know. I need that. Interesting. It's an interesting methodology for kind of this idea of dialogic systems changing emergence as well. You know, Netflix have got this kind of first captain mentality. So regardless of your seniority in the organization, you basically have an idea. You take it as a project and you run with it and you just get on with it. And you kind of see where it goes. And so I think there's a kind of multi-shoot of lots of different practices that are pointing towards this idea of kind of dialogic systems change. And then I start to basically adopt that and the way that I do with my clients, which is I'm not going to give you an org chart. I'm not going to give you a set of values and pillars and principles and practices because all that's doing is me taking this idea of the chess board and trying to impose it on your organization, which is messy and gnarly and filled with lots of different, as I said, a rational people with very different viewpoints. And instead, how do we open up spaces for these different types of practices which give you the ability to open up communication, give people autonomy, help people be heard. You know, a perfect example of that is AI rollouts. You know, right now, everyone is saying how many co-pilot licenses could we possibly release in the organization? Let's get some AI training programs in place and Bob's your uncle, you know, we've done it and we're suddenly aware AI-centric. And for various reasons that is going to fail, you know, top-down licenses, first of all, are kind of coming with no context. People are just like, what is this? I only figured out Excel macros last week. I'm not trying to, you know, play around with co-pilot, fuck that. And then other people are seeing the headlines, you know, out in the wild, AI is coming for your job. AI is eating the energy grid. AI is water hungry, you know, and we're all going to be, you know, basically starving for any kind of natural resource if we allow these data centers to be built. And suddenly, they're seeing these co-pilot licenses come down and there's a bit of a mismatch there in terms of what they're seeing in the outside world and what they're being mandated internally. Understandably, people are digging their heels in. And then you've got management and exactly to the teams wondering why these AI programs are not taking off. It's because you're not allowing people to be heard. You're not explaining the context. You know, you're not giving them any kind of autonomy over this as a process. And those are the things that are kind of getting in the way. So it's really an interesting one because you've got this kind of newest emerging technology which is itself emergent. It's not a piece of software. They've created the training data in the parameters but the actual technology itself emerges. And we need to marry it with, you know, the oldest way of managing human relationships. Which is this idea of dialogue and dialogue existence change. And so I think those two things together are kind of really interesting, you know, combinatorial forces. And that's something that I'm trying to explore in my work more and more. You know, it's interesting with Snap's counsel in mind. If we rewind about 20 minutes, one of the questions I asked is, you know, workets in the way. How do the businesses not realize, you know, that they're not aligned? and then. And your response was they do realize it is just alignment requires the alignment of individuals and humans are humans. And yet with with Snap as an example, I shouldn't go and have won on this, but it seems that at least they have approached solving the problem of human idiosyncrasy by allowing people to be more human. They've leaned into the human as a way of addressing it, right? Because Maslow's hierarchy is still in full effect. The architecture of our brains is unchanged despite everything else that has changed over thousands of years. And we all it's like an opera commercial. We all just want to be seen, be heard, be understood, and be valued. And it's it's something that makes me wonder, right? Thinking about the chief executive, the CFO, as the humans they are, the board members, as the humans they are, what do you think they don't see or don't activate perhaps? Perhaps they do see it. They just haven't got worked their way around it about how decisions either create or destroy value within their enterprises, right? Which is where does their humanity, right? Their fundamental Maslow's hierarchy humanity get in the way of value creation and facilitate value destruction. So I think when it comes to value creation, I think the vast majority of executive leadership teams, CFOs, CMOs, etc., are very good at seeing what could potentially create value. You know, they've got it already mapped out on balance sheets. I need to do more of that. Let's throw some money in that direction. I think what concerns me more is they don't see or really want to understand value destruction. And that's the stuff that happens really, really quickly. And it goes back to this idea of, you know, the heartwood aspect that I've been researching and kind of working on recently, which is, you know, you've got this kind of dense inner working of what an organization is and what it holds. And it's almost weirdly like a kind of ambience, which sounds really naff. But it is a very specific way of how this organization does things, how it thinks, you know, how it reacted to the last, you know, financial crisis and how it kind of rode that out. And it becomes almost these sort of known behaviors or known ways of thinking or operating that people can't really articulate why that's just just how it's done. And what I get concerned about, especially with this kind of race towards embracing things like artificial intelligence, and I'm not anti-AI in any way, but the way that it is being rolled out is with a complete disregard to the damage that it can do to the heartwood of an organization. Because if you are turning everything into, you know, an efficiency play or a productivity play or just a way to do the same stuff we've always done but faster, you're then turning a lot of decision making into essentially a protocol or you're feeding it into, you know, some sort of agenteic solution, which are, you know, so nascent as to, I think, you know, it's madness to kind of trust most of them at the moment. But you're kind of feeding all of that in. At the same time as you're kind of weeding out some of the more expensive talent potentially, you know, in your organization, because you think that, you know, AI or agenteic needs to have more resources and more cash. And when you're doing that, you are accelerating towards this very homogenous place essentially. And you're really chipping away at that heartwood, which is now impossible to kind of regrow over any decent timescale. And I just think the short termism and the short sightedness is really scary. And it is something that I'm kind of seeing more and more, which is, you know, we have to talk, I was with a financial organization a couple of weeks ago doing a keynote. And before I went on stage, their CEO said, we have to talk about AI publicly. And yet they don't necessarily spend as much time or anytime, it's all really talking about what do we hold on to? And I wish that we were having more of those discussions, because the value destruction, I think, is much more real right now than any level of value creation. You know, it's interesting. It seems to me that it goes back to what you said about Bordeaux in the beginning, which is, you know, and the role of organizations marketing and enterprise-wide and creating meaning, which is they set the conditions for the creation of meeting. Here we are setting many of us the conditions for value destruction without being mindful and aware of it. Speaking of AI, I know that you just, I think it was just, I'm not sure when this episode will drop, but last week based on our recording, you just launched something called the Wetsstone, which has been a project of yours for a little bit. Will you tell the audience about it? Yeah, so I suppose that the Wetsstone is almost the individual version of protecting the heartwood. So actually, you know, how do we do it with our own brains and our own minds? And a couple of years ago, just after I had my son actually, I was, I basically didn't take any maternity leave and I was exhausted and I felt like I needed to kind of keep working. And, you know, this was when, you know, Chatchy PT and Claude had kind of first come out and I just thought, well, I'm going to lean on them, you know, to sort of help me through this period. So I can keep working even though I'm fucking exhausted and my brain isn't really functioning. And I did a project where I heavily leaned on AI and I got the workout and it was good and it was fine and the client was all happy. But then about a week or two later, I could not remember for the life of me what I had actually written. And what I actually recommended and it was almost like I'd been, you know, a sleep at the wheel. And I had no recollection of it. And it really disturbed me because for me, building muscle memory across lots of different varieties of projects is what keeps me sharp and what keeps me cross-pollinating. And so if I had kind of handed away my cognitive capacity for that project and yet I produced something that was good, that was a really scary moment of realization for me. So I just thought, I can't do this. This is bad. But I don't want to stop using artificial intelligence because I think it's an incredibly powerful tool. I want to use it with much more intention as a kind of cognitive extension of my own brain, not necessarily this kind of measmer of trivial knowledge that I can occasionally drop into and pull something out of. And so I built basically an interrogation for myself within Claude. And it took a while to get it right. And I just thought, how do I take my own practice out of my own head and encode it into Claude so that I can actually build Claude as a true extension of me and as a sparring partner for me and a way to almost kind of mine my own memory. And so I started off by asking Claude just to ask me about my practice and that went really badly. And it was like, you know, but why do you do this? And I was like, I don't fucking know. I just do. It just happens. And it wasn't working. And so instead I kind of built more of an interrogation. Wasn't a non-reasonable question, but it's just that the answer was implicit and probably required too much effort to make explicit. Exactly. Exactly. Well, it's this thing called tacit knowledge, which there's a kind of philosophy called Michael Palani. He came up with it a couple of decades ago. And he essentially said, the more muscle memory you have, the more expertise you have, the more it is so contained almost in your kind of body. And in the way that you approach things that you are unable to articulate why you're doing what you're doing. And he said, you know, we know more than we can tell. And so I started kind of looking at this. And I think, can I turn that into an interrogation practice? And so rather than asking me the question, instead Claude would throw a couple of things at me and I would just react. And it was a way of drawing out what that practice was and what I believed and how I was doing it. So we went through this process, me and Claude, for a good couple of months until I refined it. And then I was able to kind of encode my initial practice into Claude and first of all, it looked like 27 different skills that I have within Claude. You know, one of them is this idea of kind of parallel transplants, which is I'll go into a completely different category, like evolutionary biology, pick up something that I think could be applicable to a particular organizational problem that I'm facing, not as a metaphor, because I don't want any of that stuff, but as a mechanism that can unlock a different way of looking at it. And another one, an agrono session with sci-fi. So I asked you like, hey, Laguin, Philip Pullman, you know, all of those amazing authors. And I thought, you know, could I build sci-fi scenarios where I could stress test, you know, different ideas to help me pull them apart in a different way. So ultimately, I had 27 of those. I'm now on version 120 something for all of them. So I'm constantly iterating and updating them and tightening them when new information comes. And I've essentially built me, but inside an AI. And I wrote about it a couple of months ago and lots of people got in touch and said, how did you do it? You know, could I do something like this? And you know, how do I get my own implicit knowledge out? And I tried to explain it. I even tried to kind of create some sort of PDF instructions, which were dreadful. And I just thought, I can't explain it. I've got to build it. And so I built it. And I've built it as a process that you go through, which takes about six hours. And it's the entire interrogation, which basically it's built on Claude Opus 4.8, which obviously, you know, is now the most advanced frontier model out there. Our fable was, but I only you lasted about three days until it was pulled by the - You have to be government. - We're back on Opus 4.8, which is fine. And it takes you through this process. It is a bit uncomfortable. Some people have apparently cried while they've been doing it. Some people said it feels like therapy in a good way. And it gives you an initial kind of mind print, which is an articulation of how your brain works and kind of all the different practices that you have. You then pop that into your own AI that you use on a daily basis. It helps to enrich it and kind of build it out. And then you pull it back into the wet stone and it shapes those into five initial skill files that you can then leverage every single day, and how you kind of interact with your system. And for me, the most important thing is we kind of navigate this next era is how do we avoid becoming generic and homogeneous, but also accidentally chipping away at our own muscle memory and our own cognitive ability. And I'm definitely seeing that in a lot of people all seeing it. If you're on LinkedIn, if you're in your emails, people are writing stuff based on not actually having read anything that you put out there in the first instance, which I think is really depressing. So I just want AI to be more me. And that's what I want other people to try and experience as well. And I think where I want to then take it next is there an ability to turn the wet stone into an organizational way of thinking? How do you kind of really hold on to that uniqueness that is the core of the heart would have been organization? So I haven't figured out what that looks like yet. But the individual focus is the sort of first baby step in that direction. Is it relevant as a product that's ultimately a service for mostly for strategists and mostly for the intellectually oriented, or is it kind of for anyone who's deploying using AI, LLMs in particular, to facilitate output? I think the latter. I don't think it's just relevant for strategists. It doesn't talk about your strategy practice. It talks about you as a human. It asks you about your upbringing. It asks you about your beliefs and your fears and your desires and all of that kind of stuff as well. And then really starts sort of pulling that in different directions. So I think it's applicable to everyone. Some people have asked me, can I buy it for my team? And my pushback is, no, I don't think you can, because this is deeply, deeply personal work. And it's something that each individual needs to go through on their own. So I'm not going to do it as a kind of team license. I also firmly believe that once you have your mind print, which is the articulation of how your brain works, I think you should keep it to yourself. I don't think you should care. I know I would. Yeah, I don't think you should care. Nobody needs to know how this thing works. Yeah. Well, exactly. I think it's really personal to you. And one of the things that I say in the instructions at the end when you've got your skill files is do not upload your mind print as an instruction file into your AI. That's not what it's built for. It's built for you and your own personal understanding. So you can kind of add to it over time. The skill files are the ultimate output of that, which are usable and that you can kind of use every single day. But the mind print should be yours. And I think that that's really, really important. And again, as we start to move into these new value exchange conversations with organizations, the other question is, well, if I'm feeding my working practices and my brain into, I don't know, McKinsey's AI, because I happen to be an associate there, what's mine? And what do I retain versus what is the company own? And that becomes a very sensitive conversation. So that's, as I said, another thing that I've kind of put in the wetstone is, this is for you. This is not for your organization. I wouldn't personally upload it into your company's co-pilot unless you have a way of keeping that private. I would use it for your own personal AI. But that's the way that I personally would approach it. I mean, I wrote about this, not the wetstone, obviously. Kind of the challenge that we all have with LLM still three and a half years ago, about six months after chat, GPT kind of changed everything, which was my worry that human beings would default to the outputs offered by LLM's, which, and we're seeing that, you spoke to it, which would just further the commoditization of, well, fucking well, everything, from thought to output, which then makes outcomes less than. And I think that solving for that is an organizational and individual imperative if we don't. It's the machines doing the work, as you said. So we're about at time. And I want to ask you the question that I ask everyone is as we come to the end of our conversation, which is, if you had all the power in the world. And for this moment, I granted to you all the power in the world. And you could create anything tomorrow. And you could destroy anything tomorrow. You don't have to answer through any particular lens. You can answer through any lens. What would you create tomorrow? And what would you destroy? I would destroy the word consumer. I think consumer and the language and belief system that we have constructed around it, points to our base selves, points to us as basically these hungry extraction monsters who just want more, more, more. And we build towards that. And this goes back to the point that I was talking about with misaligned incentives. If we think that that is who we are building for, this kind of faceless consumption engine that is humanity, we are just going to continue to run in one very negative direction. And I think it's such an easy fix from a language perspective. But if we just shifted the language, I don't even know what the answer to that would be. It may be different based on different moments, different moves, different categories. But if we just shifted the language, I think it could really change how we do business. And what it is that we create, and what it is that we place value on and where we put resources and what we're protecting versus what we're kind of breaking down bit by bit. So I think that's always been a bug bear of mine. I hate that term. I think it's dangerous, honestly. And I think it's-- Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I talk about it a lot, which is words like consumer, customer agency, client, vendor. They dehumanize, right? And humanity's been cross-current, individual, and shared humanity of this conversation, which is if we see people only as-- actually, we stop seeing people. We just see an aggregation of data points that may or may not by our particular brand of widget, because perhaps we did or didn't set the conditions for meaning. And it's so self-defeating. Yeah. Yeah. So I think-- I mean, yeah. Hands down. That's what I would destroy. And I think in terms of what I would create, one of my biggest fears right now, which I'm sure is a big fear for you as well, given the age of your kids, is what the fuck are they supposed to do? When it comes to not even career, but how are they supposed to survive? When it comes to the economy and capital assistance that we've built and how fast we are shutting them out of all of it and any opportunity. Yeah. And we are seeing one of the fastest decreases in young people's employment in history right now. Nobody seems to have a plan for what to do about that. We're just kind of abandoning them and feeding our own gravy train instead of seeing where it's going to take us. But I think it's really scary. And I think it's-- again, it's very, very short-sighted. I'm seeing a lot of agencies at the moment and their proposition is we're going to partner agents with someone with a decade or two decades of experience and you're going to get the best possible quality out of us in terms of your kind of agency client experience, which works for maybe 10 years until that person fucks off. And then what? We haven't actually created the next generation of brilliant thinkers and brilliant leaders. So I just feel like we're abandoning them. So I think what I would create is how do we start really thinking about bringing apprenticeships back for knowledge work, which are not training schemes or grad plans or anything like that. But the stuff that I benefited from when I was coming up in the industry, which was just time and absorption and exposure and conversations with brilliant people, two decades, my senior, who I could just sit with, and kind of learn from. And we have decreased that to the point of it basically being non-existent because we see it as a sunk cost. And we don't see it as something that we want to invest time and energy in anymore. And it's such a loss for the advertiser industry before any industry, to be honest. And I just feel like we owe the next generation more than abandoning them at the very start of their adult lives. And so that's, I think, what I would want to create, which is more cognizance of this. And we owe them better. We owe them more. And I really would want to bring back a real enrichment when it comes to how we prepare them for what's next. From your mouth to our children's lives. So I scheme, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you having me. [MUSIC PLAYING] To wrap up this week's episode, consider this. It's 1975, and an ad copyrighter by the name of Gary Doll is sitting in a California bar listening to his friends complain about their pets, the feeding, the walking, the mess, the bills. But in their complaints, Gary Doll So a tongue-in-cheek opportunity to address their problems, what did he do? He created the pet rock and for those in the audience who have no idea what I'm talking about, Dal collected smooth rocks on Mexican beaches and parks and anthropomorphized them. He used stickers to give them googly eyes and he put them on a small straw bed in a pet rock branded cardboard carrier with air holes, creating the so-called perfect pet, one that never needed feeding, walking, cleaning, or veterinary care. He priced it just under $4, which in 20, 26 is about $25 in real terms and the pet rock became a cultural phenomenon. Dal sold millions of them and became a millionaire in 1975 dollars, no less. But the true genius of his idea wasn't the googly eyes or the carrier, even the product idea itself. It was a 16-page owner's manual titled the care and feeding of your pet rock, which included instructions on how to train your rock to sit and stay, how to teach it to roll over, and how to teach it to play dead, for which the rock was a natural. In the end, the manual was the product and it was the reason why people engaged with the idea. Of course, the easy takeaway is that this was a novelty of fat, a gag gift that caught lightning in a bottle during a weird cultural moment between Watergate and Disco. And that's not entirely wrong. But what Dal did actually merits continued consideration because he took a commodity, arguably the most commodified object on Earth. A literal rock was something with no inherent value, no emotional value, no meaningful differentiating characteristics, and he created value where none existed, not by changing the product which he couldn't, except for the googly eyes, because well a rock is a rock. But with tongue-planted firmly in cheek, he constructed meaning around it with the manual, the packaging, but also importantly, by understanding that people weren't buying a rock. They were buying into a joke that let them participate in something that made them smile. The rock didn't change. The context around the rock changed, and that context, which is to say the meaning he constructed around a product through deliberate decisions about positioning, packaging, tone, and cultural timing is where and how value was created. It definitely wasn't in the thing. But in what the thing meant. And if an ad copywriter in 1975 could create a million dollars of value around a stone with no utility, no differentiation, and no reason to exist, consider how much value your company may be leaving on the table, or quietly destroying by not understanding the construction of meaning. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Jim McEl Manolo-Marano, Brandon McFarland and Ashley Fuderman from the Fox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdoms Company. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder, with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? That's odo.com.