Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

Do you recruit for ‘culture fit’? If you do, then you’re wasting your time, says Bretton Putter,  author and CEO of CultureGene, a culture development, consultancy and software business.“My vision is to help millions of people lead better work lives by changing culture globally. And my mission is to help change culture development into a critical business function in the way that sales and marketing are.”Brett is a self-declared reformed recruiter, who saw the light when he was doing executive search for some CEOs who really got culture in their businesses. They made him hire based on behaviours, and while it wasn’t something he was initially keen to do, he saw how effective it was - hiring great employees into a business that was clear on its culture, and has since built a business based on the idea that as a CEO, your company’s culture is your only source of sustainable competitive advantage. On today’s podcast:How to nail down a company’s valuesCulture Decks Decoded came out of failureThe company culture decks he admiresHow to hire for values Why culture fit is his bugbearHow to embed culture into your businessHow COVID-19 has shown holes in company cultureLinks:Culture driven leader - Forbes article

How is your company culture looking? Worried that it’s taken a hit during the ongoing pandemic? What can you do to stop your best employees leaving? Who better to provide the answers to these questions than the doyenne of culture herself, Melissa Daimler. Melissa cut her teeth at Adobe, Twitter and latterly, WeWork, leading their learning and development efforts globally. Today she helps organisations, predominantly tech firms in Silicon Valley, operationalise their culture.“There's just a lot of companies who are now realising having seen the downfall of WeWork and other companies that if you don't pay attention to that [company culture], you know, things fall apart on the business side.”In today’s episode, Melissa shares her thoughts on company culture and her model for how to make culture real in an organisation and how you take a value statement, and how you then turn that value statement into a set of behaviours that you overlay with performance expectations. “Make sure that if you have values, that they're not just values on a wall, that they're actually behaviours that you can see and experience in the daily workings of the company. And if that's not true don't even have them. Don't bother.”We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.  On today’s podcast:Operationalising your cultureWhy culture isn’t ‘the fuzzy stuff’The impact of culture on employee churnThe theme of bad meetingsEmbracing remote workingHow to maintain company culture in this new normalLinks:Why Leadership Development Has to Happen on the Job

In an otherwise bleak world, today’s guest is a success story who just keeps going from strength to strength. Martin Bysh is CEO of Huboo Technologies Ltd, a fulfilment company that takes stock, stores it, picks, packs and delivers it on behalf of e-commerce sellers, automatically.But Martin hasn’t always been in this industry. In fact, this is his first company that has physical things, like people and space. He’s always had companies with no people in them. This 180 degree business model is completely down to Paul Dodd, his business partner. “[We figured] we’d do something together in e-commerce. We ran a few shops online to get a sense of where the pain points might be, and immediately stumbled on fulfilment. It's a massive problem for lots of e commerce companies. And so we started to explore it and just gradually found ourselves in this business, which I love, but it is very much a people business. I think we've got about 70 staff now. And it's all about the people, but it's a lot of fun as a consequence.”But scaling a business that consists of so many people with so many moving parts is a challenge. How do you scale small without breaking small? “This isn't about massive sheds and treating people as robots. This is about building a distribution system for e-commerce businesses, based on human beings. How do we take the best of human beings and build a business on that, which drives high margin rather than trying to treat human beings like robots to drive margin into the business.”This is a fascinating conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The little known world of fulfilmentBuilding the companyThe micro-warehouse/hub fulfilment modelStaying open during the pandemicHis plan to turn the business into a billion dollar companyIntegrating last mile as a way to save costs

Are you bored of hearing about the negatives of a recession? Well, if you listened to last week’s episode with Jack Stack, you’ll have heard him share how he’s on his fifth Black Swan and how after each one his business doubled. Why are we mentioning this again? Because a recession doesn’t necessarily always spell doom and gloom. In fact, today’s guest, Dr Kaihan Krippendorff, strategy, growth and transformation expert, keynote speaker, author and consultant is using the time to pivot his business. Kaihan hosted a conference last week with guest speakers including Rita McGrath and Amy Webb, and he’s holding another one on 6th May, with guest speakers including Amy Edmondson and Scott Anthony. (Link below). These conferences have given him the seeds of a new business model. They’ve allowed him and his team to focus on something else right now, they’ve created new relationships, and they’ve allowed him to build their audience as well as their brand.So if you’re wondering what you can do to fill your days, why not use this time wisely to think about your business strategy, and perhaps take advantage of coronavirus accelerating trends that were already in place?In today’s podcast, Kaihan and Dom discuss the tools Kaihan uses with his (mainly) Fortune 500 business clients, and how these tools could also be used by mid-market firms. He also discusses the online conference he ran last week and his top takeaways from it.On today’s podcast:How clients find KaihanThe outthinker processWhy it’s so hard for humans to be strategicExamples of innovations his clients have been able to driveThe importance of employee self-realisationHow to create a 2x2 matrix for scenario planningLinks:Outthinker 2020Outthink the CompetitionDriving Innovation From Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs

If you’re struggling to see how your business is going to survive the current Black Swan, then you should listen to Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings Corp, the oldest employee-owned remanufacturer to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in North America, to learn why The Great Game of Business could help you. Jack is currently in his 5th Black Swan event. That’s right. His 5th. And each one he’s been through has been a significant catalyst for further growth for the company. In fact, after each recession, the business has doubled in the next five years.“When we do our business plans, we say, okay, we know there's something out there we can't even figure out, so let's set money aside for the most catastrophic event you can imagine. So in ‘09, we actually put together a long term plan to raise $100 million in cash for the next Black Swan.”In today’s conversation, Dom and Jack discuss how the open-book management approach is a way of running your business by making your financial instruments personal, giving people a stake in your business and getting people to own elements of the income statement and the P&L. They also discuss how, if you're an organisation, you might follow in Jack's footsteps and run your employee bonus programmes based on the weaknesses of your financial statements, rather than a profit share or based on revenue goals. For our lucky listeners, Jack is offering a preview of both his new books along with a resource kit. See the links below for more information.On today’s podcast:What Jack is famous forThe advantage of financial literacyWriting The Great Game of Business bookHow Jack saved International HarvesterSurviving his fifth Black SwanStarting an open-book journeyLinks:https://www.greatgame.com/jack

Are you an entrepreneur looking to scale up your business? Or perhaps you’re still figuring out your company’s purpose. Then you need to listen to Daniel Priestley, showman, visionary, speaker, and author. Daniel’s willed a number of multi-million-pound businesses into existence from nothing, written four best-selling business books and is the co-founder of Dent Global, an incubator for startups run by people with business experience under their belts. “The one thing that stood out to me is that very few of them [entrepreneurs] are 22-year-olds. Most entrepreneurs have been in their industry as an employee for 15 years before they then get the confidence and the skills and the connections to start a company. Most entrepreneurs are around 40 when they start, and most people who achieve an exit are typically in their early 50s.”So if you’re someone who has an idea, knowledge and network to create a business and want to create a better life for yourself, Daniel is the guy you want to go and see. In this podcast, Dominic and Daniel discuss the inspiration for Dent Global, the type of people who might want to join the entrepreneur accelerator programme, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and an easy hack for finding a purpose for your business. On today’s podcast:The Silicon Valley inspiration behind his entrepreneur accelerator programmeThe CHAOS methodologyWhy most entrepreneurs don’t want a big exitWhy you need a value proposition creationThe dichotomy of being an entrepreneurHow to create purpose in your businessLinks:OversubscribedKey Person of Influence24 AssetsEntrepreneur RevolutionDarren ShirlawShoe Dog - Phil Knight

How should you as a business leader, respond to disruptive change in a decisive way? As the current global crisis gathers momentum, ensuring your organisation is able to respond to disruption is vital for survival. But it isn’t just coronavirus that is out to disrupt you, there are thousands of things that could potentially derail your business, not least the economy, access to talent, access to capital, access to markets to name but a few. Today’s guest is an authority on the subject of change, in fact, Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School not only teaches it, but he’s authored several books on the topic too. So if you’re an entrepreneur wondering what frameworks your business should be putting in place to support growth and create a valuable business, or how to look at strategy and how to get your business fit for the future, then this is one conversation you don’t want to miss.On today’s podcast:How big businesses handle disruptionHow to do face to face work remotelyWhy managers need to adaptThe ABC methodWhat makes a great coachHis prefered models for entrepreneurshipLinks:Becoming a Better Boss - Julian BirkinshawFast / Forward - Julian Birkinshaw and Jonas Ridderstråle Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow - Larry E. Greiner

You may not have heard of Patty McCord directly, but if you’re in HR or recruitment, you’ll have likely heard of her work. Patty was Chief Talent Officer at Netflix for 14 years and co-author (alongside Netflix CEO Reed Hastings) of the infamous Netflix culture deck. This document was one of the first slides on Slideshare and is probably one of the most viewed documents up there too. Patty has worked in many different tech companies in and around Silicon Valley, and today she  is often in the media with interviews and articles, as well as speaking at CEO forums and business schools. But it is her work that she did during her time at Netflix that she is most well known for. While at Netflix she abolished performance reviews as well as challenged the need for policies. Patty firmly believes people come to work as fully formed adults with a desire to make an impact and be proud of what they do. “It starts with the idea that people are adults and that they're smart, right. And so what I mean by that is, people who have demonstrated the ability to make a commitment and follow through, I mean, that's sort of baseline 101 for adult behaviour.”In her chat with Dom, they cover some of the elements of the culture deck, A-players and how to hire them, how to hire and build teams, what the main job of a team leader or manager is, and how to exit staff from an organisation with dignity and fairness.On today’s podcast:How the Netflix culture deck ended up on SlideshareThe difference between hiring adults and hiring childrenWhy she hates the term ‘empowerment’Why you should build a team for the future, not the nowAbolish the annual performance reviewLearn how to let people goLinks:https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

How is your branding? Do you have a branding strategy in place? Who is in charge of your branding, or have you passed it to the marketing department to deal with?Marty Neumeier is in a league of his own when it comes to branding. With over 24 million views on his slide deck about branding, he is an authority on the subject.Marty is an author and a brand consultant in the area of brand design and innovation. He’s written quite a few books on branding, and in addition to his work at Liquid Agency where he does CEO branding, he also has a company called Level C, which trains people up, around the world through five levels of brand strategy. In this podcast, Marty talks about what is brand, the history of marketing, what it might mean for a CEO of a business thinking about their brand and how branding isn't marketing. How branding overlaps with customer experience, and what some stepping stones might be to create a customer tribe. As well as how to get your customers to feel something about your business, and how to use your brand to shorten your sales cycle in order to sell more things at a higher profit. “Branding is about getting more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price. The secret to profitability. It's a long term investment in your company… If you want your company to last, you need customer loyalty. And the really good thing about branding is that brands last longer than customers.”On today’s podcast:Why people get brand and branding so wrongHow small businesses can think about brandingB2C branding and B2B brandingWhy branding is customer experienceThe importance of naming and logosFrom customer experience to customer identity

With more people opting to work remotely, particularly in light of the current health issues surrounding Coronavirus, today’s guest couldn’t be better timed. Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a partner marketing agency that helps brands with a form of marketing also known as affiliate marketing. What sets his marketing agency apart from the competition? He built his business to be remote from day one - all 175 members of his team are based around city hubs, but all work entirely remotely.Which has led him down many interesting different avenues, not least writing a book, starting a podcast and authoring a truly fantastic and #1 newsletter on LinkedIn. “I am obsessed with people sort of living up to their ability both inside and outside of work that's become a universal thing. For me, I think one of the biggest shame is not living up to your own potential or capacity.”This is a really wide ranging conversation, covering how to work remotely (including the cultural implications), the genesis of Acceleration Partners, how (and why) he started his newsletter and what has driven his personal high performance as a business leader and entrepreneur. On today’s podcast:Acceleration Partners and affiliate marketingHow his team of 175 people work remotelyHow to recruit for remote workingThe core values that drive himThe newsletter that started as an emailWhy meetings should be held in the afternoon, not the morningLinks:The elevate podcastFriday Forward (newsletter)