Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

If you have a fear of pricing, or if you’re worried that if you put your prices up you’ll lose customers, then you need to listen to the Pricing Man, Hermann Simon, author of over 35 books on the subjects of profit and pricing. “Pricing is about value, or more precisely, the value perceived by the customers. If the customer perceives a high value, he or she is willing to pay a high price. If the perceived value is lower, you have to offer the product at a lower price.”Hermann Simon has lived two lives: in the first he was a boy on a farm in the Eifel region of Germany. In the second he is the Founder and Honorary Chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global consultancy with over 1500 employees. He’s an expert in strategy, marketing and pricing and he’s the only German in the “Thinkers50 Hall of Fame” of the most important management thinkers in the world.“No company has ever failed from making a profit. Most companies are revenue driven, market share driven, sales driven and only about one quarter are truly profit-oriented.”This is an incredibly insightful podcast about the importance of pricing and the need to understand the complexity of price, as well as looking at new pricing techniques. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:How people should think about pricing now with CoronavirusPricing is not primarily about pricePricing is about the value perceived by the customersHow to establish the value of PorscheThe power of branding when pricingHow Evian beats the local waterThe power of multidirectional pricingNo company has ever failed from making a profitLinks:Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects EverythingPrice Management: Strategy, Analysis, Decision, Implementation

If you’ve ever sat in the pub and dreamed of quitting your job to go in search of a better life, then this week’s guest, one half of Corporate Rebels, Pim de Morree, is a guy you need to listen to. Because Pim and co-founder Joost Minnaar didn’t just write down their plan on the back of a beer mat, they executed it too. “We worked in outdated workplaces characterised by inertia, bureaucracy and a lack of motivation. We simply couldn’t accept that the world of work, for far too many, is a place full of misery and despair”. And so they simultaneously quit their jobs in January 2016 in order to research progressive workplaces. Their aim? To travel the world and visit 70 inspiring workplaces to see how work could be more fun. They created a bucket list of some of the world’s most inspiring workplaces and set about visiting each and everyone to learn what it takes to be considered ‘progressive’. So far they’ve visited over 150 workplaces, worldwide, combining their practical insights with academic findings from their PhD research, sharing everything they’ve learned along the way on their blog, on their podcast and in their book. In this episode, Pim chats about some of the trends they have found from visiting progressive workplaces all over the world. The place of values instead of profit, the place of network teams instead of hierarchical pyramids, and the search for talent and mastery over job descriptions. He even reveals which businesses were disappointing, not living up to their progressive hype. This is a great conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:The genesis of Corporate RebelsThe benefit of no business modelTheir bucket list of organisationsHow to measure the success of progressive workplacesWhy self-managing won’t work for every workplaceThe 8 trends that they’ve seenThe problem with copying

Innovation, according to entrepreneur, author and co-founder of Strategyzer.com, Alex Osterwalder, is what your business needs for longevity and success. Alex believes that successful companies are those that compete at the level of business model, not just at the level of product, or service, or price. “Innovation is not a talent or idea problem. It's a process and culture problem. Companies are not putting in place the right systems for the great innovators and great ideas to emerge. People on the ground know very well what could work, but we don't give them the space to explore. And if that doesn't change, a lot of companies are actually going to pay the price and go out of business.”Alex knows what the challenges are in driving innovation. He knows what needs to be done in terms of structure, power and resources. And he knows how company culture fits into a business model. And in this incredibly insightful episode, he shares his thoughts and actionable processes with listeners. “An invincible company has three characteristics - they always reinvent themselves, they compete not just on products, technology, price and service, they compete on superior business models. And they understand transcending industry boundaries. People who see themselves in one industry, usually that's not going to play out well in the long term.”It’s a slightly longer episode, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably, and don’t forget to bring a pen and paper, you’ll want to take notes. On today’s podcast:Creating an innovation culture in a companyRethinking business models and business R&DTranscending industry boundariesEntrepreneurial CEOs don’t have to be foundersInnovation needs money and power to succeedThe monetary value of experienceLinks:Book - The Invincible CompanyBook - Business Model Generation

If you’re looking for a new way to innovate your business, don’t miss this latest episode of The Melting Pot with Dennis Hahn, Chief Strategy Officer at Liquid Agency. A few months ago we had Marty Neumeier on the podcast (you can find the link to his episode in the links section). Dennis and Marty work at the same firm. You may wonder what Dennis can share with you that you wouldn’t get from Marty’s episode. The short answer is, a lot; the longer answer lies in the podcast. Dennis leads teams of strategists across Liquid’s offices, providing expertise, mentoring and consulting on a wide range of significant strategic branding initiatives for clients that include GE, John Deere, Microsoft, Nasdaq, Nordstrom, PayPal, Silicon Valley Bank and Walmart.Dennis’ particular expertise lies in what they call ‘The Swarm Method’. Swarming is a way of helping businesses pull from the very essence of their being, the solution to a problem that they’re struggling with. Swarming involves not just sitting down with the executive team and hashing out details, but rather running a workshop with as many stakeholders as possible, across your whole organisation, to pool resources and conduct an incredibly diverse brainstorming session.“We're solving brand problems, we're designing brand strategies, we're designing culture for workplace culture, we're doing customer experience mapping and all kinds of things through the swarming method.”If you haven’t tried swarming, we hope this episode gives you the impetus to go away and try this method of innovating in your own business. There’s collaborating, and then there’s swarming.On today’s podcast:What swarming is and how it’s used to engage leadership teamsThe evolution of swarmingThe benefit of using the Swarm methodWhy innovation happens in a down cycleThe tools Liquid usesThe power trio in an organisationLinks:https://about.me/dennisfhahnhttps://www.dominicmonkhouse.com/the-melting-pot-with-dominic-monkhouse/how-to-sell-more-things-at-a-higher-profit-with-marty-neumeier/

What do you do when you’re an entrepreneur and your first two businesses go swimmingly well, so much so, you start a third and end up bankrupt?Do you admit defeat and go and get a ‘real job’? Or do you shake yourself off and decide you’re going to dedicate the rest of your working life to the commitment to eradicate entrepreneurship poverty?If you’re Mike Michalowicz you do the latter. Mike is an entrepreneur and author. He built two incredibly successful tech businesses and exited them for a lot of money. But his third venture as an angel investor, didn’t go so well. However, it was off the back of this failure that he found his subsequent life’s mission, as an author. “I was making it [entrepreneurship] more complex than necessary and I was confused about what worked or not, so I endeavoured that day, that the rest of my life I’d devote to studying entrepreneurship and simplifying it.”Mike’s latest book, Profit First, is what he talks about in this episode (although of course, he touches on his journey to get to this point). Because profit in a post-COVID world is something that businesses and entrepreneurs are really going to need to focus on to survive. Rather than putting profit last or talking about ‘the bottom line’, we have to put profit first. We have to extract value from our businesses and reinvest it in a really deliberate way. This is a really interesting conversation about a topic close to all entrepreneurs’ hearts. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Why Mike wrote Profit FirstThe advice Tim Ferriss gave himHow Profit First can help small businessesThe fascinating thing about consumer behaviourThe business hierarchy of needsPeople speak the truth through their wallets

These are uncertain times, and now more than ever, the success of your organisation can literally come down to its culture. But what if you don’t have a company culture (that you know of) or maybe you’re wondering how to implement your ideal company culture, wonder no more. Today’s guest, Gustavo Razzetti is not only a culture practitioner, but he’s spent the last 20 years helping teams work smarter and faster, together, partnering with clients to design fearless workplace cultures, unlocking the whole team’s potential and giving that organisation a competitive advantage. Gustavo has amalgamated all of his company culture knowledge and distilled it down into creating an easy to use and easy to implement culture tool, the Culture Canvas, an open framework that makes culture actionable.If you have any questions about it, or if you’re curious how to put the Culture Canvas into practice, what elements of it need to be contiguous with those you already have in place, how to surface the Canvas, how to share it and make it easy to live every day, as well as how to ensure that your hard work implementing your ideal company culture isn’t lost, this is one episode you don’t want to miss. “Culture is something fluid, now, it's not one thing. It's not something that you do once and that's it.”On today’s podcast:What Culture Canvas isHow to implement the different elements of itHiring for culture fitAligning sub-team culture and company cultureSurfacing norms and rulesCreating psychological safety Links:https://liberationist.org/culture-design-canvas/Stretch for ChangeStretch Your MindStretch Your Team

While you will have heard of the Ritz Carlton hotel group, you may not necessarily know who founded it - meet Horst Schulze, the man, the myth, the legend. Horst is legendary for creating the infamous operating and service standards for which the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company are renowned. “I talked to an institution recently and I said, ‘Don't you want to be the very best in the country?’ He said, ‘well that would be arrogant’. In other words, you don't intend for your investors, for your employees to be the very best?”Horst has been in the hotel business since he was 14 years old, cutting his teeth as a server’s assistant in a German resort town. He ‘worked to work’ before realising one day that he’d been approaching work wrong. An inspirational maître d'hôtel had taught him early on to ‘work to create excellence’, and he hadn’t been doing that. “I didn't go to work to create excellence, which you taught me. I apologise, it will never happen again. And what a silly thing to waste your time to just fulfil a function, like a chair.”That was the turning point for him. From there his career accelerated and exploded.After leaving The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, Horst went on to found Capella Hotel Group. Again, you may not know who they are, but you’ll remember when President Donald Trump met with North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un - that meeting took place in the Capella Hotel in Singapore. “Excellence is never an accident. It's always the result of high intentions. Vision and high intention and hard work. Yeah, that is culture. High intention, hard work.”This is a truly insightful and entertaining conversation, we hope you enjoy it. On today’s podcast:Building a culture of excellenceTipping in hotelsThe difference between a manager and a leaderHow to build the best organisationRepeat teaching valuesThe three types of customersEmpowering employeesLinks:Horst Schulze - Excellence WinsThe Ritz CarltonCapella Hotels and Resorts

You’ve probably shifted your thinking from ‘how to survive the pandemic’ to ‘how to survive the upcoming recession’. In which case, you don’t want to miss this episode with Shannon Byrne Susko, CEO of Metronome United, serial entrepreneur, author and speaker. You may be familiar with Shannon as this isn’t her first time on The Melting Pot; we’ve had her on the podcast before (you can find a link to her previous episode in the links section). We’ve invited Shannon back to discuss what she’s learned over the last few months, to share with our audience what she thinks the future looks like and to find out what she is seeing with the businesses she is currently working with in the US and Canada. And what in particular they’re doing to ensure they’re not just surviving, but thriving.“So the number one thing I learned is that a repeatable growth system works in good times and bad times. The same fundamentals, the same things that we want to put in place to grow a company also works when there's a huge crisis in the market.” And that’s what Dom and Shannon discuss today. The topic of conversation has quickly moved beyond ‘how to run a business during lockdown’ to thinking longer-term, to making it through the upcoming recession. Because running a business in a recession is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before unless of course, you’ve run a business in a recession. This is a really great conversation with lots of actionable insight, we hope you enjoy as much as we did. On today’s podcast:Adaptability of people’s mindsRepeatable growth systemThe changing needs of your core customerMetronomicsThe coach cascade systemThe importance of language in an organisationMetronome growth system softwareLinks:https://www.dominicmonkhouse.com/the-melting-pot-with-dominic-monkhouse/rebroadcast-shannon-byrne-susko-the-accidental-ceo-turned-reluctant-bestselling-novelist/

Are you wondering how your business is going to survive not just the remainder of the pandemic, but the looming recession too? Perhaps you’ve realised you need to rewrite your business strategy but you aren’t sure what you need to focus on? Then you’ve come to the right place. Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker, and a longtime professor at Columbia Business School. She’s one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth and is one of the most regularly published authors in the Harvard Business Review and a frequent speaker on business strategy. She’s the perfect guest to discuss how leaders can navigate these imminently choppy waters. In this episode of The Melting Pot, Rita, whose expertise lies at the intersection of strategy and innovation, discusses her incredibly useful model for rapid portfolio review and what she calls ‘discovery-driven growth’. I.e. how do you find things that you can drive revenue from, not just now, but in the future too.We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.On today’s podcast:What got Rita into the uncertainty spaceThe entrepreneurial mindsetWhat can people do in a crisisRapid portfolio reviewExamples of companies pivoting during COVID-19Links:https://thinkers50.com/The Best Service is No Service - Bill Price & David JaffeSeeing Around Corners - Rita McGrathRita’s YouTube Channel

Do you drain your team or engage them? Are you wondering how to make your leadership team even greater? You need to listen to Liz Wiseman, author of New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.  Liz is a researcher, executive advisor and author, writing Multipliers over 10 years ago. She’s recently updated it, although its core ideas still very much apply today. In it, she identifies two types of leaders - multipliers and diminishers. The multipliers get twice the output from their teams than the diminishers do. So you might be thinking, then why don’t we all strive to be multipliers? Because, Liz says, most of the behaviours exhibited by diminishers are completely accidental - only 20% of diminisher behaviours are deliberate.“About two thirds of diminishing behaviour that we see is what we would call accidental diminisher behaviour, meaning it's done with the best of intentions.”In this episode Dom chats to Liz about what these diminisher behaviours are - maybe you’ll recognise yourself in some of her descriptions. So if you think you could be holding your team back accidentally, preventing productivity and the only thing standing between your team and greatness is an awareness and desire to do things differently, then this fantastic conversation is not to be missed. On today’s podcast:How teaching programming led her to becoming a researcherNot every smart person creates a smart teamThe limitations of diminisher leadershipThe behaviours of a diminisherWhy perfectionists are the bottlenecksLinks:Henry Stewart - The Happy ManifestoLiz Wiseman - Multipliers