Coburn Ventures Podcast

Sometimes our most valuable work is done when we review that which we think we know for sure. So to start off this new year, we have a short but potentially really important conversation on one of the most fundamental concepts in our work: risk. What is it, fundamentally, and what are we doing to incorporate risk that is worthwhile, and what are we doing that may be wasteful?  Let’s jump in. This is part of a series called The Dark Side of the Moon: the elements of process we don’t always like to spend time on but have a huge cost if we avoid them. We’ll cover risk, selling disciplines, and red flagging, all along with our friends. I hope you find it a useful trip... See you on the other side.

As we close out 2021, we wanted to offer a topic that is both interesting and supportive of year-end introspection and is also thought-provoking beyond investing as many of us step away from work over the holiday.  We’re talking about the difference between scarcity and abundance.  To help us explore the concept, our conversation today includes Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist. I think you see how this clearly compliments the discussion. If you haven’t read Amber’s piece on scarcity and abundance, please reach out and we’ll get it to you. I hope you enjoy it.

In the last in our series on Leadership, Pip and I apply the concept of collective consciousness to leadership and especially, our new workplaces and habits of work. The upshot? The more collectiveness consciousness an organization has, the more options the organization has.  As workplaces are now “blended” between offices and home and other spaces, it might be helpful to step back and consider the level of collective consciousness on your team, as much as you can assess it from the inside. We explain this much more in the conversation, which I hope you'll find useful.  Though it wasn’t planned this way, this concept really ties together so much of what we learned in this series by talking to Lisa Baird about adaptability, Matthias Hollwich about the future of workplaces and Jennifer Salopek about leadership and value creation. This will be a wrap on this particular series on leadership. I hope you enjoy it. 

How is it that value is actually added to a company? We sometimes assume we have the playbook to answer a question like that, and, well, for many of us this is the goal of our jobs as investors or leaders. But of course, like everything, it's quite dynamic.  In this deep dive on leadership with Jennifer Salopek, we explore “value” much more...what might be next beyond the pyramid structure of business organizations, what the new career goals may be, and how they would be facilitated and managed to create lasting value.  We also reveal a new format in which we gave Jen a sneak peek at the other leadership podcasts in this series, so we’re all able to riff off of those contributions and spend a little more time with the important ideas from Lisa Baird and Matthias Hollwich. I hope you enjoy it.

Matthias Hollwich, founder of the architecture firm HWKN, is back with us today to offer another perspective in this series in our podcast on leadership. Now, Matthias lives at the intersection of the future of work and leadership and he does this with his toolset of architecture and design. So his perspective lives a few years ahead of us, because by nature, he is designing buildings and spaces that take time to come to fruition and must serve future needs and future generations. Let’s hear more of what the future may hold.

It's Thanksgiving today in the United States, so this is a special edition of our Coburn Ventures Podcast, which will also be an inaugural edition of a new monthly series over at the Change Makers podcast coming in 2022. That podcast is for the Coburn Ventures Community for Change and the over 300 members who contribute to that community.  In this special edition, we knew we wanted to present some kind of take on gratitude. And we noticed that conversations about gratitude today circle around habits and practices...cute little books and journals to remind oneself to be grateful… and that seems wonderful but somehow not critical, and it seems to be missing what we were suspecting may be a really crucial element of gratitude in making not only our lives but our work, better. So we held discussions over the course of the last month with a broader group and called in "Gratitude meets process"  and here, I would say process is the scaffolding for doing great work, however you want to define that.  Well, we often look to linear methods of doing and creating our work, a lot of the structures and tools we use: calendaring by the hour, thinking in units of dollars, or pages written, these are linear constructs. But we understand that insight generation is not a linear phenomenon. What could gratitude, which is also nonlinear, its transcendent, what can gratitude teach us about how we are living and working? You'll get a special surprise after a brief introduction, so please, join us in a special deep dive on gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving, in the very broadest sense, to all.  Thank you.... for listening.

As a midpoint in our series on leadership, we are dropping in a short but simple concept that I think could be valuable just because it's a valid candidate for a real blind spot for us, the lens we see through as investors and business leaders, and for the management teams we interface with and depend on to have a strategy that syncs up with reality. So, this podcast is about growing our awareness and being able to see things we may have been missing, by learning about this concept of being mis-aged. Let's jump in.

Today we kickoff a series on leadership, and what better way to do that than to visit with Lisa Baird, our friend and leader of Heidrick & Struggles Global Human Resources Practice. We dive right in, and start with hiring: What are corporations looking for in their leadership and more importantly, why? What attributes are required to meet the moment?  We end with Lisa's own questions for management that she uses for assessments and interviews, so stay tuned for that. Let’s jump in.

What does it take to identify a company that is a true guardian of an increasingly valuable, durable brand? Now that we have learned more about brand character with Veta, we will focus on assessing if the company is actually acting consistently with brand character as one of the key ways to preserve and build brand value.  If we, as investors, are going to purport that a company has “a great brand” or a brand that translates to an intangible asset, I think we will benefit from understanding how Veta builds brand character as a key to generate durability and long term success. Let's jump in.

Today we get to dive in on the topic of brand with a day-to-day practitioner, advisor, and creator of brand value, Veta Bates.  Veta gives real-life examples of products and then helpfully pairs them with analysis behind what each company is doing with their brand development that is or isn’t adding value.  As we start,  Veta is recounting a conversation she and Gavin Ivester had about a very specific yet-to-be-named product. We start there because it takes us right to the heart of how product design and brand character can come together for powerful effect. Let’s jump in.