Most people don't know about bottlenecks.
They do know about queues though.
You see a queue of people lined up at a cinema waiting to get
their popcorn. You know that there's something
slowing it down. If the queue is growing, you
know it's costing you money. If you're not cognizant of
bottlenecks, there is an unbelievable amount of wasted
effort, in some cases actually not even pushing the needle
ineffectually, but pushing it in completely the wrong direction.
We talked about the the bottleneck theory.
We're just talking about contrarian thinking unlocking
like unlocking complicated problems have been in a very
simply. And then he mentioned your
theory or your, your, your book and the conversations you've
been having around the bottleneck theory.
And we're like, actually, we should make other people Privy
to this conversation even more. So we should make sure that we
get clock involved in one of these conversations as well.
And then that got really, really exciting.
And then so that's why this is a monumental moment and milestone
for the Bottleneck podcast. But before we go and dive into
the conversation, for those that are not familiar with your work,
it'll be great for you, for you to give us a bit of a an insight
into Clark, but then also Bottleneck from your
perspective. Absolutely.
I'm, I'm you've actually written the book called The Bottleneck
Detective and it's subtitled by the way, the fast, no fluff turn
around guide for struggling small businesses and a lot of
your works obviously influenced by Eli Goldratt and the theory
of constraints. When I first met Alfred, it was
in the context of, I think you had on your, on your lanyard,
the butterfly effects. And those, those are two things
that absolutely fascinate me. And of course they're often one
and the same thing. A butterfly effect is actually
achieved because there's a bottle back.
So in other words, this is where a tiny intervention, sometimes
psychological, sometimes mechanical, sometimes
organizational, can just have absolutely disproportionate
effects because you're actually kind of surgically, it's kind of
the sort of, I guess, the corporate equivalent of keyhole
surgery. You're absolutely surgically
intervening in the place where change really matters rather
than in the 50 other seemingly attractive and sensible places
where change doesn't actually make any difference because the
bottleneck's somewhere else. But by the way, one other thing
I need to tee up is you've also written a book about Winston
Churchill's ingenious problem solving skills, because that's
something that's always occurred to me.
There are quite a few occasions where clearly in the same way
that Warren Buffett and for example, well, I mean Elon, but
also emphatically Jeff Bezos, part of the reason for their
success is a really unusual approach to decision making.
I think that's also massively true of Churchill, by the way.
By the way, sometimes it was a bit silly.
I mean, I'm doubtedly the people around Churchill had to spend
quite a lot of time reining him in.
But nonetheless, if he hadn't been there, things might have
been very different. Yeah, fire away on the
bottlenecks because we love this, right?
OK, so I'm going to do a Rory and I'm going to start talking
and you guys stop me. Stop me when you want to have a
little interruption. OK, So, hey, look, it is
absolutely delightful to be talking to both of you.
I, I must admit, I, even though you're world famous on LinkedIn
elf, I, I, I only came across you just just in the last couple
of weeks, obviously, but I, I've just done your course, the one
unteachable, the public. What is it?
Branding, personal branding and, and, and it's lovely, lovely,
really, really cool. I, I feel like I actually got a
sense of who you are now. So yeah, that that was really
neat. And, and if it, and now I'm
just, I'm not going to get to the real bottlenecks, but one of
the bottlenecks in my life is always been that I've had an
engineer's brain. And it's not until I got into
my, I guess, late 40s that I understood finally the need to,
to think about brand and perception and all that kind of
stuff. And a lot of that's do to do
with to do with Rory's influence.
So I actually, I have two heroes in, in the world, in the
professional world. And one of them is Ellie
Goldratt. And he was the creator of the
theory of constraints, which has got this like the most boring,
boring, boring name on Earth. It's like theory and of and
constraints. It doesn't tell you what it is.
But if if you just look where it came from, it started with him
studying physics years ago. The the flow of fluid from a
physics point of view. He he got the idea of
bottlenecks. And then he went off and visited
his uncle who ran AI think it was a fun and they made poultry
cages or something like that. And he looked there and he
realised that the that the place was not performing so well.
So he went in and he'd found the bottleneck, which in this place
had been running for a long time.
He found this little bottleneck and he went in and he hired, he
convinced his uncle to hire someone to put it in the
bottleneck spot. And suddenly production just
zoomed through the roof. Unfortunately, they actually
made far more than they could sell.
They used all of their cash, and within a few months, his uncle
was bankrupt. But Ellie never told that story.
In a sense, what he'd done is he discovered a new bottle back
now, which was sales. With sales, sales.
Exactly. So the bottle back was actually
downstream of production, not upstream production.
Fantastic. Yeah.
And, and, and that's actually when he turned his mind to
looking at bigger things. Well, he obviously went and came
up with some fancy algorithm that he sold to all of the 1970s
eighties manufacturers that was based on the idea of
bottlenecks. But he also added a lot of work
around accounting and accounting for for making money, not
accounting for counting up stuff and paying you tax.
And there's an enormous difference.
So he, he, he, I, I discovered his book, The Goal in 1996, I
think it was. And then just Fast forward to,
to now. And that's what I've been
basically doing since then. Is it I, I do it quite different
to what Ellie did. Ellie worked with factories.
I work with knowledge workers and I, I, I work with managers
nowadays, but I used to work with software development teams
and now I work with the, the, the, the leaders and the
managers of those teams. And it's, it's almost exactly
the same and totally different when you're working with people,
machines don't have opinions, machines don't play politics,
people do. Machines don't have trust issues
and, and confidence issues and, and so on and so on.
So it's a really, really interesting world.
We, I'll, I'll, I'll give you a lovely example of this, which is
both psychological and by the way, people in marketing could
benefit an awful lot from talking to people in, you know,
experts in manufacturing or supply chain or whatever it may
be and vice versa. Because we probably don't
consider the systemic elements of a problem enough and they
don't consider the psychological elements.
I'll give you a lovely example, by the way.
London City Airport, which any Londoner will know, is just a
freakishly efficient airport given its small size.
They they're run by a company called Global Infrastructure
Partners and they brought in people not with airport
expertise, they brought in people with kind of production
line expertise. Right.
But it could also be psychological, of course,
because the way to relieve a bottleneck may rely rely in how
people think. I'll, I'll give you, I'll give
you an interesting idea of one that is a bit of both, which
only occurred to me the other day.
We have a problem with the NHS, which is too many people
requesting GPS appointments, the things that don't really require
a General practitioner, or at least don't require a General
practitioner yet. And it suddenly occurred to me
that, OK, there's a, a, a, a systemic component to that,
which is if you could get people to go to the pharmacist before
they went to the doctor, the pharmacist could head off quite
a lot of the past. And the pharmacist, of course,
has an interest in doing this because you might buy some
toothpaste, a packet of aspirin at the same time, OK.
Also, pharmacists are vastly better trained than people
think, I think. I think people generally think
it's a shopkeeper in a white coat, whereas in fact, they're
extremely highly trained. And then it suddenly occurred to
me there's another psychological solution to this, which is,
which is both psychological and systemic, which is if you made
it widely understood that pharmacists could get you
priority GP appointments if necessary, people who are
desperate to see the GP would go to the pharmacist and 50% of the
time the pharmacist would say I can prescribe antibiotics, which
they now can in the UK. Previously they couldn't, OK,
because pharmacists couldn't prescribe antibiotics, only
doctors could. Now they can for a certain
number of conditions. OK, that's actually quite clever
because people would automatically go to the doctor
because they go. There's no point in going to the
pharmacist because if it requires antibiotics, I'll just
need to go to the bloody doctor, OK?
So it's a waste of time. So I'll go straight to the
doctor. And here we have this very all
credit to the government person who thought of that, which is
once you, once consumers know that a pharmacist can give you
antibiotics, even if the pharmacist says I can give you
antibiotics but you don't need them, OK.
That's fundamentally changed things.
And it's a classic case, I think, which is a mix of systems
thinking in an engineering sense, in a sense of, you know,
order of events and psychology. US totally, totally.
And and that's the that that that in my formula, the focus
formula I have for managing bottlenecks is curation.
That so that that's curating. It's looking at the stuff that's
coming in and going, hey, how can we send stuff even if it's
less efficient? How can we send it away from
this really, really scarce bottlenecked resource?
By by the way, my bottleneck book is actually has made it's
way into the the civil servant part of Downing Street, but I
don't know how far it's gone, but so I'll, I'll claim that one
as my, my, my victory jokingly. Yeah.
OK, so, so that's, that's good. I like that now, now I told you
there were two people, right? And the other one is the is is,
is one of the handsome men on the phone on the on the Zoom
call here. So I've got 2 great influences
in my life and Rory, genuinely your way of thinking has just
messed with my engineering brain so much.
It's just wonderful. And I and I, I, I'm sure that
everyone that that listened to this has probably read your
book, but if they haven't, they should go out.
And it's fascinating, one of one of the best reviews I got.
Well, I haven't done any shit reviews.
I don't want a bit. But one of the most flattering
reviews to me personally was one in the Wall Street Journal by
actually a software engineer. Yeah.
And his conclusion was I suddenly realized I have a
second string to my bow. Yes, totally.
Which I which I thought was actually the perfect way of
putting it. I don't claim, by the way.
And I have huge, huge reverence for actually physicists,
engineers and everybody else because they can often see
things that we don't completely. And actually, you know, let's be
honest, you know, the success rate of engineering has been
pretty good. You know, we.
But at the same time, what I, what I, what I am always
cognizant of is there's the second string to the bone.
I'll tell you a lovely story about that, which was I met,
this is about 10 years ago. I'm at an Oxford high table
sitting next to a guy who's an absolute expert in green energy.
OK, have I started talking about?
Are there things we can do behaviourally which help solve
the problem? EG if you put your washing
machine or tumble dryer on at 10:00 at night in the UK, it's
probably sort of nuclear powered or powered by clean energy.
Or at least the odds are fairly high.
If you put it on at let's say 5:30 in the afternoon someone
might need to fire up a coal-fired power station.
OK, so simply getting people to time shift would would
effectively help relieve an energy bottleneck, which is a
chronological bottleneck in this case.
Anyway. The guy who was a brilliant
engineer looked to me as if I was nuts, OK.
And more or less sort of turned and talked to the person next
door. And I literally for five years I
thought, OK, I'm clearly wrong about this.
I'm clearly talking bollocks. Don't say it again.
Shut up because you're making yourself look stupid.
And then of course, in the UK, we now have octopus energy.
Greg Jackson absolutely understands that a very
significant part of actually of, of the green transition isn't
necessarily producing or distributing energy in different
ways. It's getting a, not necessarily
everybody, but a significant number of people at a bottleneck
moment in energy demand to shift their behaviour a bit.
And I I I finally felt a bit vindicated because I literally
spent after this guy was so weird, you know, treating me as
if I was basically deranged. I basically didn't mention this
point for about another 5 or 6 years for fear of looking
stupid. It is funny a bit fresh eyes
that that that's the whole thing in in my bottleneck detective
book. That's one of the recurring
things, a little character. And you know, it's it's it's a
very, very short book, but it's got a little character teenager
who can see bottlenecks. We can see cues and and just
constantly this thing. It's just like fresh eyes,
people who are inside a situation just just can't see
their own situation. I, I know it's true for me.
I know it's true for everyone that, that, that I know.
And you get stuck just thinking that the status quo is what
you've got. There's a, there's a lovely,
the, the, the expression that you have that you mentioned as
one of the physicists mentioned about the opposite of a, a, a, a
good idea can actually be a good idea.
And it's like, that's not intuitive.
But then if you talk to a scientific or mathematic person,
you ask them what sqrt 49 is and then they go 7 and then they go,
oh, no, no, no, it's also a -7. So the opposite of the right
answer is actually also the right answer.
I, I, I only, I honestly think that there's all these things
that are as clever people learn, but there's nothing like getting
someone with fresh ice to come and just look, aim, just, I
don't know what. WTF.
Yeah, yeah. Going back to both of your
points, I often talk about the art and science of things,
right? A lot of the times, especially
in modern day society, people see those as like not enemies or
two different spectrums. But really, when you fuse the
two, you realize that you're more alike than you think.
And if you actually almost like act more like a Venn diagram and
solve problems together, obviously blue sky thinking out
the box, thinking with data and also almost like a logic to back
that up. That's usually the winning
combination. That's the reason why often than
not, winning start-ups or or founding duos often more
successful than those that are only a singular right.
Yeah, it's 1 + 1 = 3, isn't it so often?
Yeah. I want to ask you a question
because I think, you know, I've had the same experience.
You, you I if I read correctly, you did your your dissertation.
Yeah. And that changed your life
because you went on and made it real.
Yeah. And yet, am I right that when
you did your dissertation, you were almost laughed at?
Oh, yeah. So, so just a bit of background.
So I was obviously born in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
moved to the UK when I was 14, my dad growing up as a doctor.
And that was my life's ambition. If anything, when you grow up
being African, that's almost like the only answer.
You're either a doctor, engineer or a lawyer, right?
And I had a doctor in my family. So it was almost like written in
stone. And then I realized that I was
shit at science, right? So I had to figure something
else out. And I never use a computer,
never used. Actually, the iPhone was
launching and Steve Jobs was doing the iPhone keynote.
And that made me fall in love with storytelling.
And then obviously I've never seen a business person like that
before. I've never seen a business
person not wearing a suit speaking in very like simple
languages, explaining and talking about technology and and
intelligence that my simple brain couldn't comprehend.
But then he was able to do it in through storytelling.
So marketing got me to fall in love with this space by Steve
Jobs. Then Mark Zuckerberg's saying no
to a billion dollars from Yahoo and building a tool that me and
my friends were utilizing back home coming to fall in love with
the social media marketing thing.
But I decided to write about it because I felt that actually, if
you think about marketing and and what we were learning at the
time was all about product place, price promotion.
So the four PS right. But when you realize that place
doesn't necessarily need to be a physical space, it's where
attention, where your mind is as well, it is just perfectly
logical to me that actually place could be where we live
online, right? And if anybody can capitalize on
that very underpriced resource, right, of attention, if it just
made a lot of sense to me. And I just felt that small to
medium sized businesses were going to move faster, innovate
quicker, and we're actually going to dethrone the larger
competitors. And my lecturer basically marked
me down for being in cuckoo land and the fact there was a lack of
Harvard reference. So then I decided to become that
reference, right? So might not.
Make it real, yeah. Exactly, exactly.
Why not? Why not make it real?
But going back to the whole concept of bottlenecking and,
and I think that Rory touched on, on Elon, for example,
basically all it is. I've got to go back on that a
bit. You're literally marked down.
Were you? Because effectively what you've
done is you've come to something with a new angle and therefore
it was treated as illegitimate. 100%.
I mean, this is exactly. The same, I'd exactly the same.
I'm sorry, I'd have to talk to you, but with my dissertation, I
did it for a large life company in Scotland that no longer
exists. I came and did my dissertation,
went through it was a theory of constraints, analysis of big
software projects. I came up with what eventually
became my book that my business novel Rolling Rocks downhill and
when I showed it to the internal people did this was my naivety.
I think you you've had exactly the same thing.
The people that I worked with, the senior manager who I was my
sponsor for this said picked it up when I after she'd read it
and she said, don't worry Clark, I won't tell anyone who was just
like and you know, went on and I, I swear I've sold 20,000
copies of that book. It's been read and it's spread
all around, but at the idea new new ideas.
New ideas are easy to have, but good new ideas are hard to to
actually bring to life. Like like your five year gap
there with the the the coal powered stations.
Rory. But then what you were just
saying there, Clark about like even like rolling rocks down a
hill that feels it's almost like almost like like a relief,
because that's what everybody wants, right?
You don't want ideas or concepts to be to be held back.
You want it to be in free flow, right.
And actually the the transition from stagnation to flywheel is
effectively what butterfly effect and bottlenecking is all
about, right? It's it's how do you make those
unlocks that get you into flywheel?
And often the knob people try to treat the almost like the
outputs of an of of a of a of, of something that's almost like
pausing momentum as opposed to actually getting into the weeds
of what's the actual inputs. That that I find this question
so important because so often. Are you familiar with Daniella
Meadows? But I.
Know. That the famous one is 12 points
to intervene in the system. And it's a kind of, you know,
it's occasionally treated as kind of, you know, the 10
commandments of complexity thinking.
And what's interesting is her top points are psychological.
The biggest one is reframing what people think the system is
for totally. So so and actually, sorry,
actually if there's one big more than that, it's transcending
paradigms. And then number one is the power
to transcend paradigms, right? And the example would be if you
think of a lake as merely a source of water for a factory,
you will behave very differently to if you think of a lake as a
local amenity and haven for wildlife.
For example, Very interestingly in business, what I only
realized recently in business was that if you go back to
people like Herbert Simon, the shareholder value, profit
obsessed motive is completely alien to Herbert Simon, who's
one of the best business thinkers of the last century.
His view by the way, was that profit was merely A constraint,
which is that a business needed to make a profit in order to
survive and gain investment and justify its existence.
But the purpose of a business was to explore adjacent
opportunities. So his purpose of a business,
what the business was actually for, was effectively it was a
discovery mechanism for new sources of value, and profit was
merely one of the constraints on its ability to do so.
He acknowledged that businesses needed to make a profit, but the
idea that profit should be the primary target was completely
alien to him. And the shareholder value
movement is unfortunately, I think in business, fundamentally
a massive mental constraint. And it's because it's it's such
a dominant paradigm that it leaves people incapable of
actually looking at things differently.
And and it just, it turns a lot of people's stomachs.
They're actually working the organizations and, you know, the
discretionary effort is often, you know, not there.
They find disgust if it's gone to extreme.
But it's an interesting thing about it, which is you can bonus
the people at the very top enough money so they
fundamentally buy into shareholder value maximization
or profit maximization. Yes.
But the majority of the workforce, unless you're so
successful a business that you can actually offer, you know,
massive options to everybody. What it creates is a massive
misalignment between senior management to a focus on one
thing. Most people who work in an
advertising agency do not or a hospital or anywhere else do not
get up in the morning going, how can I actually, you know, how
can I actually maximize? I mean, I don't know who WPP
shell designed something that you know, the state of Wisconsin
DMV pension fund. Well, you know, I'm they're
animus towards those people, but I can't really say that their
retirement well-being is what makes me get up in the morning.
And so you create this fundamental disconnect between
people that I would argue if you're a customer focused
organization that can pretty much align everybody, you know,
there is a fundamental human urge to do well by your fellow
man. OK, There is not a fundamental
here. There is a fundamental human
urge to make money. I'm not disputing that.
There isn't really a fundamental human urge to enrich other
people. That's ridiculous.
OK, You know, I want to make rich people I've never met and
who will never thank me. No, I don't think so.
If. You think about the the money
side of things for, for for me when I was growing up, it was
money was not a necessarily a good thing.
Not having it was something we were actually quite proud of.
But so I've I've had to wrestle a lot because the the bottleneck
stuff when you look at it. Is that particularly a sort of
New Zealand troll? Poppyish thing, I think it is,
yeah, yeah, it, it's definitely that, you know, it's, it's very,
very, very common. I think Australia has the same
kind of thing the Irish did. I lived in Ireland for a long
time. Something you say that the
Irish, it's a Celtic thing, not an more than an Anglo-Saxon
thing. So countries like Canada, New
Zealand, which are sort of Welsh, Scottish, Irish tend to
have lower power distance, they're less hierarchical.
I mean, funny enough, being Welsh, my favorite airline is
Qantas. I've never been on Air New
Zealand. I'm sure it's magnificent and
it'd be even better, right? OK, But the reason is that I
like the I like, I don't like those airlines where people
grovel to you, OK And Crumptus achieves this thing where
obviously the person's there to bring you coffee, but they're
kind of your mate, you know, there isn't a power relationship
between you at all. And I think I I think that
you're absolutely right. I think I think it is.
It's an Irish and New Zealand, possibly a Welsh thing actually,
what with all the sheep, but but there's something there which I
think is is actually culturally significant.
And for me it was quite a struggle because as I was all my
work at the end of the day, it makes more people more money.
If you debottleneck you, you can make more, you can sell more.
And. And at the end of the day, it's
a lovely engineering problem to figure out how do we make more
money? So I had to try and square that
away in my head that didn't want to chase that.
And, and and it all clicked when I realised that next year's
culture is often determined by this year's products, the
profits. Yeah.
What you make this year, if you have a good year this year, next
year is going to be a nicer place to work.
Your workplace will be nicer, nicer if it's been a bad year,
there won't be bonuses. You may not be recruiting for
the people that you need and this scarcity mindsets going to
come in so that that was a thing where I had to I I I've now gone
in my head. I want to create a better
workplace bottleneck. Stuff creates a lot of that.
It also creates money as a side effect, which then feeds back
into the organization that creates next year's culture.
But that's just my personal opinion.
That's me messing with words so I feel comfortable with helping
people make money. You'll be.
Interested in the book called Abundance by Ezra Klein?
You've just got it. Have a fantastic timing.
And one of the things I think is that economics has given
government and politics a scarcity mindset.
You know, we're an advertising agency run by a holding company.
And I always say you can't run an abundance business on a
scarcity mindset. It simply doesn't work.
And the first thing that happens with a scarcity mindset, of
course, is absolutely crushing short termism.
And the the most short term of all short term things is usually
cost cutting because it's the one which makes most sense and
has the most immediate effect. And I would argue that a large
part of the failure of Western Europe to grow economically is,
is, is mindset really, it's this endless scarcity mindset that,
you know, the, the disproportionate power of the
financial function within organizations.
You know, So in government, I was talking to Matt Ridley at
not Matt Ridley. I'm sorry, I was talking to
Michael I. Love Matt Ridley.
He's. I'm meeting him actually in
October. So I'll pass on I'll, I'll put
it. I'll put him in touch with your
work. Yeah.
And I talked to Michael Gove who was a Cabinet minister, and he
said effectively in government the Treasury has right of veto
over anything and they demand absurd standards of proof and
certainty before you can try anything, OK.
And consequently, effectively, they also effectively look at
things from a cost saving point of view, not from an
opportunistic point of view. And so if you combine the two
things with a ridiculously high burden of proof, which is
impossible if you're doing anything new, because there's no
evidence about the future, OK. And and then the scarcity
mindset, which is the purpose of life, only finance people and
some engineers like this, the purpose of my life is to make it
more efficient, OK. I mean, there, there is a
minority of people who think like that.
Now, I've got a weird theory, by the way.
I think a lot of people say homo economicus doesn't exist.
You know, the economically rational man.
My argument is in any category, I don't think there's anybody
who's universally homo economicus.
But in any category there are people who behave like helmet
economicus within your category. And you don't want them as
customers. Yeah, Yep.
That's, you know, that's so, you know, those people are actually
at totally it. Always focusing your business to
appeal to your most economically rational customers is actually a
recipe for disaster. Everything gets commoditized and
doubled down to the lowest common denominator, doesn't it?
Yeah. But then going going back to the
point about scarcity versus abundance, how how you do one
thing is how you do everything right.
And what you're realizing is that a lot of people, instead of
focusing on how do we grow that focus on how do we keep where
we're at, right? And, and if you think you can
see it in sport as well, I think there was a headline about the
fact that Manchester United let go of like 200 members of staff,
but then still spend like 300 million in transfers or
something like that, right? It's like it's, it's like it's
almost like there's a lot of performative slash, almost like
corporate actions that make it feel like a gaining momentum,
but you're not actually shifting the dial at all, right?
It's almost like everybody's on their best behavior to put on
this picture that they're actually doing something.
But yeah, yeah. So.
So my dad has always told me something that some people might
find controversial, but I, I believe it to be true.
He says that the best way to run a country, unless you do it
pretty well, like the Swiss, is almost like a positive
dictatorship, right? The reason being is because you
have people that are committed to the long haul or the long
journey and are making decisions that are going to last the next
20-30, forty, 5000 years instead of for five years.
And the next party's going to come in and do what the previous
party said they were going to do.
And the next person comes in. You see that in football as as
well when you have a football manager that has a great Academy
of players that are coming in, but then they're basically
categorized based on whether they can stay in the Champions
League this season or whether they can avoid relegation this
season. So all the thinking becomes very
scarcity, short term thinking, and then they never evolve and
move forward because they never give you the tenure to it's.
Less than that, which is your you then get fired because you
don't win, you don't get through into the quarterfinals of the
Champions League and then your successor gets all the credit
for the young players that you hired at a bargain price.
The the other place which which is obviously famous for this is
the film industry, where people will overspend on films.
They'll commissioning films. They then get fired because the
film is very expensive. And then when one of those three
films is a massive blockbuster, they effectively the successor
inherits all the credit. So this this extraordinary
disconnect between what you might call long term actions and
short term credit seeking and, and, and on in terms of that
positive dictatorship thing, I've got another friend of Black
Rock whose point is that is actually the best form of
government, but it requires an absolute Lee Kuan Yew
thoroughgoing genius to make it work.
And generally, the most you can hope for is maybe two of those
in a row. And his argument would be, for
example, in China, you, you know, they kind of lucked out by
whatever you think of their system of government and so
forth. The people at the top were
startlingly clever at making things work.
And actually it you know, that that that's the danger that
actually democracy doesn't really exist to attain
optimality. It's because it gets rid of bad
people. I mean democracy is really if
you look at the value of democracy.
This is why I have often take issue with people who are
obsessed with proportional representation and I get another
proportional representation and democracy doesn't exist.
So you can have an optimal representative government.
The government has to be representative to have some sort
of legitimacy that's valuable. But the real value of democracy
is it's a non violent way to dispose of governments when
they're either bad or as you know happens, they just run out
of ideas. So would you therefore say that?
So would you therefore say that Democracy is a scarcity mindset
because it focuses more on what happens if you have the wrong
leadership as opposed to how do you actually grow and build the.
Country I would argue that actually there's there are two
kinds of continuity. I agree with you that if you
have that kind of Lee Kuan Yew system, and you could argue that
until recently, the US had a weird kind of continuity because
there wasn't that much difference between Democrats and
Republicans, to be absolutely honest, you know, But what's
what can happen is that, you know, the the system breaks
down. But particularly, I think what
happens is that if you, if you spend too long focused on the
same things, OK, and neglecting other things, OK, then what
happens is that that the Helen Taylor's theory is that human
neurodiversity evolved because in any group of 150 people, you
occasionally need to take have a different take on something.
And the great thing about ADHD or you know, you know, the
spectrum is that those people and I, I find them in included
in both of those actually. But I find those people
incredibly agreeable to work with because they don't, they
don't automatically have what you might call, you know, a
collective perception. You know, they don't necessarily
see things the way other people do.
And that's a necessary corrective, I think.
You know, I would argue that, you know, neoliberal economics
has had too long a run, you know, Yeah.
When someone says, you know, there was a French experiment,
why don't we look at, you know, gross national happiness, You
know, a lot of people go, oh, you're cheating.
It's really snarky, you know, changing the rules.
But yes and no, because we all know that wealth does not
linearly translate into happiness and well-being.
And therefore, anybody who's coming along at least with an
alternative take that might be valuable.
And also, of course, what happens is you focus people
focus on a bottleneck, they eradicate perhaps that
bottleneck if you're really, really lucky.
And then they continue to do what they've what they did
before. Whereas of course, what are you
like, you know, rats chicken cage factory should have done is
said, OK, we've kind of cracked the manufacturing problem for
the next 5 years. OK, we're making more bloody
chicken cages than we need. What we need is more customers,
possibly even what we need is more people to keep chickens
that we the category problem. OK, we've seen that not enough
people keep chickens for us to actually sell enough cages.
Or it may be that the people are buying inferior cages from
somewhere else. But you have to continually
shift your attention because it's a bit like the bubble in
wallpaper. You know, it keeps moving.
And if you smooth the bubble and obsess about the patch where the
bubble used to be, meanwhile the bubbles moved on somewhere else
and too. Young to know about wallpaper?
Yeah, I know about wallpaper. The the, the, the, the skin care
makes me look younger than I actually am, but I know a little
bit about it. But then going back to the
conversation there, I think this is a very.
Important conversation. Because.
Why? Why did people stop using
wallpaper? What happened to wallpaper?
What did happen? That wasn't that.
That wasn't a manufacturing constraint, was it?
I mean literally, I mean high end interior decor.
It's still used, but I mean, wallpaper was universal in my
child. Fascinate.
Yeah. But I'm going back to that.
What you were saying there, Rory, about the fact that in the
US there was no real differences between almost like the right
and the left, which therefore meant that there was a level of
continuity in terms of ambition. There was unity.
I think that was like unity, continuity are all things that
were kind of like losing right now in society and culture.
It's almost like polarizingly one sort of the others.
It's all the you have a abundance mindset or the
scarcity mindset, right? You, you, there's never, it's
always an all conversation, never an and conversation,
right? And there's no commonality or
people trying to realize why should we preserve certain
things and why should we aim to innovate and create new things?
There should be a conversation about how you merge those two
different things. And I think that that conflict
is a, a bottleneck in society right now is that you're either
we're going this way or we're going that way.
And we actually had a conversation around AI, right?
And the fact that a lot of people are talking about jobs
being lost in AI, where the world's going in AI actually had
a really weird take, which was the fact that I believe that our
trajectory into the world of the Internet kind of distracted us
away from things that actually mattered in the world, right?
In fact, you have the smartest brains and minds not going to
build apps and things that happen on these devices and then
these things that are happening in the world today that have not
evolved at all. Like try, try and get a train in
the US. It'll take you the same amount
of time as driving, right? Try.
If you think about some of the other challenges that's
happening, we're talking about the housing crisis.
We're talking about what's happening.
I'm slower than driving, much slower than driving.
The only real rationale for most Amtrak journeys apart from the
high speed routes down the East Coast is that you sleep on the
train, which you can't do when you're driving yet.
And you have to drive on the other side of the road.
It's ridiculous, isn't it? I know they'll come round.
They'll come round eventually. I know.
Yeah, they're all hankering for a little king in in their life,
aren't they really, You know, a little bit more monarchy.
I I will actually, by the way, there is an extraordinary role
to monarchs, which is in one case, which is that.
Someone described them. I think you've probably been
welted Badgers as like the the king on a chess board.
It doesn't do very much, but the value is in in the space it
denies to other pieces. And it's one of the arguments
would be that if you become president of France, you
basically become delusional after about five years because
you live in a palace and you have all this bling and a
retinue and, you know, trumpets. OK.
And the point is, we allow the king to do the stuff with the
trumpets, and our Prime Minister lives in a terraced house, OK?
It's a very nice terrorist house, but it's still a
terrorist house, OK? And I think there's something
actually quite important about that, which is no, no, no, no,
Your job is to, deep down, your job as a government is to take
the bins out, right? Keep us safe and take the bins
out, right? And so, you know, but also there
are cases actually where having an extra piece on the board is
decisive in the sense that if you look at the death of Franco,
the Spanish monarchy, you know, let's face it, if we look at it
in historical terms and not the world's most successful
monarchy, it's usually, you know, like Philip the
incontinent was succeeded by, you know, Amy the Mad or
something like that. OK.
But the king at the time of Baron Carlos was totally
decisive in the transmit transition to democracy.
And so you have the very fact that they in a sense, don't have
a dog in the fight and of course, a very long termist.
There's another point worth making.
OK, Your fundamental thing is, you know, I need to make sure
there's still a monarchy around my great grandchildren, which,
you know, there are. You know, I'm, I'm aesthetically
not in favour of despotic monarchy unless you really luck
out. But and, you know, the
hereditary principle is brilliant for, you know, finding
those geniuses. But there is a mindset to the
whole thing which is complementary to everything
else. But then also, I know we talked
about sports and we're talking about like the monarchy and then
we talked about like politics and culture.
But you just think about it there, the red thread is
continuity, right? And sometimes, even if you do
not completely agree with the decisions, the direction of a,
a, a person in leadership, the fact that they're just going to
be there for a very long time just gets you in line and on
board, right? But if you if you think about
it, OK, whatever happens, if Jeremy Corbyn had got in, if
Nigel Farage gets in, you still have a king, OK, Right now it's
largely the formative. It's like Chelsea we we talked
about, we talked about full people.
Sorry to jump in there, but it's kind of like the continuity of
Chelsea was Roman Abramovic. Like the managers would change
but they knew that Roman would always be there.
Ranga or Manchester United with. Dealing.
What you call it with? Yeah, with Norwich City.
Exactly. Then you've got to remember if
you're an American and you're a left wing American and Donald
Trump gets in, you feel like you've lost your country, right?
It almost completely. Your country has been taken over
by an alien force. We don't really feel like that.
And there there is weirdly a a kind of left wing group who are
favourably disposed towards the monarchy because they think it
is more possible to engage in left wing experimentation.
If people believe there's a kind of like motif of stability, you
know, which doesn't change. So I mean, you know, this stuff
is, I mean, Stephen Fry's argument for the monarchy is
just empirical, which is if you look at countries that are
constitutional monarchies, you know, you've got the UK, Canada,
Spain, Japan, Thailand. I guess that's a bit weird.
The Netherlands, Sweden, OK Belgium, OK.
It's it's, it's, it's not a bad collection of pretty sane
countries. Now, we don't know which
direction causation lies. Is it because the countries are
quite moderately minded that they basically reach a
compromise with a monarchy? Or is it because they have a
monarchy that they're somehow, you know, more capable of
continuity and stability? We we'll never know, but you
could argue, well, correlation may not be causation, but it's
still correlation. This is what when it comes to
like the process of uncovering, first and foremost discovering,
uncovering bottlenecks and then the first step to getting them
almost like fixed. Clark, what would your process
be? So obviously you work with a lot
of brands and you work with a lot of organizations and
institutions. So what's the the first step
towards identifying A bottleneck and then what happens beyond
that point? OK.
So probably the first bit about that is that most people don't
know about bottlenecks. So, so that's almost the first
step, get getting them aware. They do know about queues
though, waiting queues. You know, if you see a queue of
cars, if you see a queue of people lined up at a cinema
waiting to get their popcorn, you know that there's something
slowing it down. If the queue is growing, you
know it's costing you money because people are walking away.
So you've got the symptoms and the most obvious sign, and it's
not the only sign of a bottleneck.
And not every bottleneck will have a visible queue.
But if you can see the queue and you can measure that, you, you,
you suddenly you've got a lot of numbers.
Oh no, no, you've actually got something that's really visible.
People talk about system thinking, but so much of it for
me is actually system seeing and, and being able to see the
queue that's been held up by whatever is at the front of it.
And when you look to go at the front of it, you'll be looking
to find, you'll be finding one type of resource.
And, and I know people don't like to be called resources, but
it could be a person, it could be a printer.
I don't know if you guys know of Derek Silver's, but he he's he
again, is that, you know, got very popular with his books and
stuff. And he once told me that he had
a bottleneck that was sitting next to him and it was his
printer when he ran the company's CD Baby.
And they couldn't print off orders quick enough.
And so they couldn't actually ship the CDs fast enough.
So what you've got to see is a build up of things that are
waiting. There's a queue and then you've
got to look there. And then you look and you sit
and you study. And it's not always the obvious
thing that sometimes it is because normally the obvious
things have been sorted out. But, but, but that's, that's,
that's kind of for most people, that's how you do it.
If you were in a factory, you'd walk around and you'd, you'd
wander around the factory and maybe you start at the front of
the factory with the stuffed leaves.
That's, but you, you start at the, the finished end of it.
You'd walk back until you got to the, the, the where all the raw
materials come in at the other end and you'd look for the
biggest pile of work and it'd be a big pile of work there.
And it would be sitting in front of the slowest machine, which
would be the, the bottleneck. And you go, oh, if we can just
speed up that one, everything else speeds up.
So, so that's when it's obvious. That's when you can make it
visible the the type of work I do.
I often use traffic analogies because if if the people are
motorists, you explain that there's no point in widening a
dual carriageway if there's a badly phased set of traffic
lights at the end of the road, because all you're doing is just
moving a jam somewhere else. And I keep writing about this
business where sometimes you have to go slower to go faster.
So smart motorways are massively counter intuitive because the
idea that by slowing down from 70 to 50 you might arrive at
your destination sooner seems mad to the individual motorist.
OK, the individual motorist has a heuristic go as fast as I can.
But because there has to be a gap between cars and the gap
increases not exponentially, but non linearly with speed.
There are literally situations where if you all slow down to
50, you'll proceed to your destination at 50 miles an hour.
If you continue driving at 71, person just hits the brake
lights for a second and you end up with people driving at 5
miles an hour or nought miles an hour for 10 minutes, which more
than none does the benefit you gain from going at 70.
So people have this. I I'm I'm a lone defender of
Britain's smart motorways because I actually argue that
the benefits are invisible to the, the, the, the costs that
are visible to the individual motorist.
But the benefits, of course, are a traffic jam that never
happened, which they never get to see.
When I lived in Scotland and I used to have to commute between
Edinburgh and Glasgow to to get home, I would deliberately annoy
the people behind me by leaving maybe 3 or 4 car lengths in
front. And I did that knowing that if
the cars in front slowed down, I had a buffer in front of me
where I could slow down without causing all the cars behind me
to suddenly do that. Brake light, slow slow so slow
all the way back for for for miles.
And I know it annoyed people that were behind me, but I
actually speed up the entire traffic while I was commuting
anyway. To a certain extent.
It would be lovely if you wanted to dictate it.
I had a friend who was devoted to complexity theory who became
so obsessed with not breaking because he was aware that his
brake lights created congestion. OK because she ended up running
into the car at fright. OK.
Because he, he basically optimized his driving around the
minimizing use of the press anyway.
But he was doing jobs. Work.
Yeah, you've got to be careful. So if I take that your question,
where do you find bottleneck? So that's the obvious one,
right? If you walk into your hospital,
you just look at the waiting lists and you know what sits at
the end of them. There's you've got a candidate
and, and my 2 bottleneck books have got lots of examples there
where you just, you just look and you go, oh, OK, there's not
enough operating theatres or maybe there's not enough nursing
staff. It could be surgeons.
You know where it is, but you don't know exactly which type of
resource it is. So those ones are all when
people are doing the work. If, if, if you're dealing with a
leader, and that's what I do these days, it's a lot harder
because leaders do not want to be called a bottleneck.
And, and maybe Rory, I or actually both of you isn't your
marketing geniuses. This is my can actually, can I
tell you a story? I, when I was talking to Paul
when we were sitting this up, he said, have a story to tell about
botany. And I've got to tell you this
one because I'm so proud of this and it will, will illustrate
the, the, the situation. A colleague of mine, I sort of
not a colleague, sorry, a client of mine, Angela, Angela G'day of
she's works for a company called Wise Tech in Australia.
And I started working with her about five years ago.
And during that time, she grew her team from having about 25
people up to having between 3 and 400 people spread all around
the world. And just a few months ago she
won the Australian Businesswoman and Tech award.
So she's, she's done really well.
She's got this amazing personal story.
I, I, I was there sort of helping her, supporting her to,
to just constantly, you know, to grow from 25 to 50 to 100 to 150
to, you know, there's a lot of work you've got to do with your
whole team, but also as the leader.
Now the trouble, if you look, I've worked with a lot of people
like Angel, but of course I mentioned here because I like
showing off because she's just done, you know, she won
Australian Businesswoman of the year award, right?
But as we work with each other, it, it was really hard, even
though she knows about the theory of constraints, because
Wise Tech, the company that she works with, uses theory
constraints all through them. She, she, she knows about it.
It's really, really, when we first talked, she said, you
know, it was, she was quite open about this.
It's it's really, really hard to admit that you as the leader of
a bottleneck and your organization cannot grow unless
you can. Yep, you, you, you're basically
you, you are. If you think of a bottom, the
other way of thinking about you are constrained or you are
limited by the number of hours that the leader can stay awake.
So the the analogy I work with her and and I would have used
Russian dolls, but she's Russian, so I couldn't use it.
And what do you snakes? But it's Australian.
So you people get offended if you compare them to snakes.
You know, they that that snakes as they grow, they shake their
skin. I've actually popped into chat
cheat CP and I think I've found the most wonderful for me
metaphor for, for how how people grow and how leaders grow.
And, and it's like a hermit crab.
So if you can, you can look at your own lives and you can look,
say where you're going to be when you're say 70 compared to
where you were when you were 17. And, and through your life, you
will have been in one shell at 17.
And then you outgrew that shell and suddenly you had to do
something brave like like a hermit crab.
You have to go naked for a little bit and then go to
another bigger shell. And then when you got in that
shell, you bought stuff with you, which you probably
shouldn't have. And then you're missing things
because you've got a bigger shell and your brain has to do
so much more work. And then you just get
comfortable in it. And what happens?
You keep growing. So then suddenly you got to look
around for another shell. You got to do that naked dash
again from your shell to the next one.
And you get to there and everything you knew.
Some of it's actually slowing you down now, some of it doesn't
belong in your head. So you've got to get rid of it
And, and as you grow, you've got to learn to trust yourself.
You've got to go through this imposter syndrome over and over
and over again. You're almost like forming,
storming, norming and performing inside your own head, but also
with your own team. I, I, I find that really, really
just just satisfying because I just think myself, I know the
shell Lyman 5-6 or eight years ago I was living in Scotland and
now I'm back in New Zealand and I had to choose a totally,
totally different thing. And it wasn't just moving from
physically from one place to the next.
My mind had to move from one place to the next.
And as I like working with people like Angela, you know,
it's just so incredibly interesting.
I don't know how to do their jobs, but just sitting down
thinking, you know, what got you here is not going to get you to
the next step. You need to grow.
How, how do we do that? And, and, and actually, if I'm
quite frank, and this is everyone that I work with, it's,
it's all about trust. Everything is about trust, trust
with other people because you grow bigger and bigger.
You have to suddenly start working with the people that
scared you. You've got teams that used to
work for you. Now they've got layers of people
working with you. But more than anything else,
that's actually about the trust of yourself.
That was a great good old finding wasn't it?
What they called psychological safety.
I think if I'm right, Google did a lot of research into what
created high performing teams. I think they did.
And they he wrote their book about it.
They got Yeah. Anyway, sorry, yeah, I know
you're an expert in Agile as well as being an expert in
bottlenecks. Out of the two out of the two
effectively inform each other. Oh, OK, so yeah, I'm, I'm both
and, and my book Rolling Rocks Downhill was about that and, and
I mentioned my new, new book that I'm working on before I
think we started recording when I, when we, we talked about how
I have to change the name because it sounds rude when I
say it out loud with my accent. So I won't say it here in case
you get expletive warnings and stuff, but this is so.
So what Agile does is, is it basically takes the idea from
the Japanese manufacturing, which we all kind of inherited
and understand now, which is that you don't leave all your
testing of your cars until the end of the line and then beat
out the, the, the, the, the fix the stuff there.
You build it as you go along. So Agile just works in small
chunks and it's so obvious everyone, no one knows it's that
this office built an agile today, but every app gets
updated every few days or every week that they've got agile
process behind them. Where it works for software is
you have to, if you just think about the bottleneck stuff of
it, you don't want the leader of your team, someone like Angela
who I mentioned, you don't want them to be the bottleneck
because you could have 3 or 400 people who are busy waiting on
strategic decisions. And forgive me for doing a Venn
diagram here, I know people can't see it, but three circles.
One, the two at the bottom are expertise and management skills.
So that's the stuff that every leader has in them.
And that the top one is the job they're meant to doing, which is
actually leading. And when they get really, really
busy, they sacrifice leading in order to be the expert in, in,
in the business domain or, or whatever it is they do and, and
to manage all of the day-to-day stuff.
And So what they do, they get so busy, they sacrifice.
Actually, leadership is the second thing that they
sacrifice. The first thing is their home
life. So they sacrifice their home
life, then they sacrifice leadership and then they just
become busy, busy, busy, busy bosses.
And then you've got, if you want to spot that kind of bottleneck
to go back to Elfs original question, you find that
bottleneck by going are they a leader question 1/2.
Do they have a whole lot of unanswered decisions and
questions in their inbox? And if they've got those two
there, they won't admit they're a bottleneck because it sounds
like a, an insult or an accusation, but they then need
help to claw back time because otherwise all of those decisions
are slowing down their entire organization.
So if you think about system seeing, that's a way of seeing,
is this person a bottleneck? And, and, and you'll know that
really good. No, not not good.
That's the wrong word. You, you know, when you have a
non bottleneck manager because they seem wise, they seem
thoughtful because they have time to talk to people.
They seem just really organised, usually because they have an
assistant or a chief of staff who who works with them.
And more than anything else, they have to, they have time to
do that top bubble on the Venn diagram, which is thinking,
which is what leading is. It's thinking about the big
things. And if you get rid of that, you
de strategize your business because your leaders aren't
don't have enough time to lead. Because I think, I think there's
a really interesting insight here, not only into leadership
as bottleneck, which is fascinating, but one of the
things those people do when they're very busy is they create
a bureaucracy around them, OK? And they try and devolve
decisions and the bureaucracy doesn't have the confidence that
a leader does. So it effectively defends itself
by creating highly systematized uniform modes of decision
making. OK, which then mean that the
organization is unable to cope with outlier in any respect.
But there's another interesting thing with the bureaucracy,
which termly occurred to me the other day.
We tend to get angry with bureaucrats or public sector
workers. Because we pay them a salary.
And my argument is most, in most cases, what they do is probably
worth the money. The cost actually is not the
salary you pay them. It's the extent to which they
create bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the fast
flowing of a system. And there's a wonderful have you
read, by the way, The Unaccountability Machine by Dan
Davis? You recommended it and I
purchased it. You may notice a patent here.
Don't. Worry.
Keep making me spend money and I want to read it but I haven't
got. Back to it yet.
So, so, so one of the things he, he's very interested now that
obviously when you're talking about agile and you're talking
about say, Toyota's Kaizen manufacturing process, that was
a guy called William Edward, William Edwards Deming, wasn't
it? Or West Edwards Deming.
Yeah, OK. And he was effectively in a
sense, partly the architect of the Japanese economic miracle
and understood things like to optimize the whole, you have to
sub optimize the parts. Now most people in a siloed
organization, procurement are optimizing cost savings,
marketing and trying to optimize customer satisfaction, OK.
You know, if you have both those entities entirely focused on one
thing rather than understanding the whole, it's effectively
completely counterproductive. But Dan Davis is also very
interested in, I don't know to what extent you've ever got into
cybernetics, Have you? I I.
Read a little bit about it, but you'll just.
You'll discover a bit which is it's effectively that we tend to
use financial flows within an organization as the the sole
form of information flow when of course there are lots and lots
of other information bottlenecks.
You say it's not just a financial bottleneck or a
production bottleneck. There are informational
bottlenecks and constraints and so forth.
And one of the things that drives him practically insane at
the moment is that if you want to get planning permission for a
house in the UK or, or a factory or whatever, you're allowed to
consult extensively with the people at the council who give
you approval. OK.
And that's all fine and dandy because you can find creative
ways between the two of you of overcoming problems.
And then you submit your proposals for approval.
None of the people who have spoken to you are allowed to
play any part in the approval process.
And the idea is it's to prevent corruption or right, whatever.
Maybe. But as a consequence, you're now
starting all over again with a group of people who want to
justify their existence by finding problems.
Yes. You effectively, you effectively
turned a one stage process into a, into a repeat process where
in many cases, and then of course your, your appeal gets
turned down and has to start all over again.
So the entire consultative process, which could have been
creative and valuable, now becomes actually largely
wasteful. And he gets really, really
obsessed with the order in which things happen.
And I think, I think there's this wonderful thing.
Greg Jackson, you you probably know, do you have octopus energy
in New Zealand? No no, but I know I still read
all of the UK. Papers, it's only a matter of
time again, but Greg, who I regard to be a thorough going
genius who should be Prime Minister.
Greg also founded a business which is I think called
Consultant Direct. And this was you go to the GP
and what used to happen was the GP would say I need to refer you
to a consultant. In the old days, my grandfather
was a doctor. You would actually be handed a
letter to take to the consultant, OK.
And then the consultant would open it.
Now what would happen is you, you, you then go home and then
you'd wait for a good for a consultant's appointment to
become available. And then you go and see the
consultant, OK. And Greg just had a load of
consultants who are available on the phone, OK.
This was his, the business he started up at the same time he
actually started on because he's no longer involved in it, but he
founded it and the GP with you present would call a consultant.
Three things. So by removing it, by the way,
when you had to take the letter to the consultants, there was a
colleague, my grandfather's, who wrote a letter to the
consultant. She was a friend of his which
started here with this old trout and the woman opened the letter.
So it was a dangerous thing to do anyway, but it was a
completely ludicrous sequential process when it should have been
a parallel process. What Greg's system would do is
you bring the consultant, and the consultant might say one of
three things, yes, I need to see this person.
OK, Second possibility, in which case it was pretty similar to
what happened before. However, 5060% of the time, two
other things happen. One, you don't need to see me.
You need to wait for eight months and come back.
OK, actually, or you don't need to see me at all because this is
a case of X and it's going to go away.
OK, Awful lot, by the way, of back pain and things like that.
Basically the best advice is to wait eight months, don't
intervene too soon. It's a third thing was, yes, you
do need to see me, but have these tests first.
So now by getting the test commissioned by the GP first,
you'd bypassed a whole extra weight in the process from the
patient's point of view. OK.
And another one is have these tests and unless it shows a GPOL
level of seven plus, OK, don't bother coming to see me yet.
OK, So it basically turned an absolutely moronic linear
process into regardless of the circumstances we go through the
we go through the motions into a depending on six or seven
different things, we will now create new optimal paths, each
of which is different from, you know, it's no longer a system,
but that that that kind of business is the kind of business
which literally we need to look for because it benefits
absolutely everybody, OK, It benefits the NHS, it benefits
the patient, it benefits the GP, it benefits, by the way, it's
especially benefits the consultants because they can now
make some money while they're on a golf course in Villamora
answering the phone, right? Which is without stereotyping
hospital consultants, you know, but I think that's what quite a
lot of them would like to do. So you watch it talking about.
Yeah, exactly. Can I tell you my wife's
bottleneck story? I think, I think your listeners
would would like it, but I got to tell you that what I'm about
to tell you is not the full truth because and it's not
wasn't actually my wife, it's a fictional blah, blah, blah.
Because I tend to tell it, I try and make it more interesting
than it probably was at the time.
So before we got married, I don't know how this happened
that we got married because we used to go out for dinner and I
tell her all about bottlenecks and theory of constraints, which
is is is is embarrassing in retrospect, but she married me
nonetheless. And then we moved to Scotland
and she got her first consulting job, which is an old age
psychiatrist. And the person who she replaced
had been there five days a week and we just had our first baby
and she was going back to work for three days a week.
So she was suddenly same, same area, same patch, same number of
patients, all of that, but she was doing three days rather than
five days, which is a big, big, massive opportunity to create a
bottleneck because you had five days capacity made into 3.
And when she got in there, she just looked around and I, again,
I'd make up a lot of the stuff to make it sound interesting,
but she looked around and she went and she, she just realized
that she's inherited a six month, 26 week waiting list,
which is not good if you for, for old age psychiatry that you
know, you, there's, there's limitation, natural limitations
at play here. And she was really unhappy with
that, that the end result that she got it down to, I think
about 10 or 12 weeks over a six or maybe nine month period.
And, and her first bit was going, and she didn't tell me
this for a couple of years until afterwards, because she went
around and goes, right, where's the bottleneck?
And she went around and goes, right, I've got all of these
people working here. Where's the bottleneck?
Do we have enough nurses? Yes.
Do we have enough beds? Do we have enough food
preparation facilities? Do we have enough transport for
people? Because it was a rural area?
She went through all of these things with GPS, everything.
She's trying to go, if it was a crime scene, she was trying to
think of the bottling detective book.
She was trying to identify the suspects, right?
Who could possibly be the bottleneck?
And then I like to think that one day she's standing and
looking at the mirror and going, I've eliminated everyone.
And then she looks at herself and goes, that must be me as as
the IT was suddenly it was her and it was the least obvious
person. And so, so now Can you imagine
you're 1 consultant and you've got the these things that I list
off some things she did. So one of them was she looked.
And in my book, I have the focus formula, which is FOCCCUS.
If it's refined, the three things coordinate, collab,
collaborate, a curate. What she did is curated the
patient. She looked at them and her
predecessor had seen everyone on every year come back.
And she looked at them and discovered some people should be
coming back every three months. Some people should be coming
back to see a nurse. Some people should be coming
back to see her every two years or maybe just going to see their
GP if they thought they needed to.
So they curated the stuff and just like a curator in a museum
because. Previously, they were optimizing
for the average a patient was a patient was a patient was a
patient. And it was all average.
Yeah. So she did this.
This is my argument with airports, which is that they
curate that half the people want a shopping centre and the
frequent Flyers basically want a direct route to the plane.
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, meant she has to just to
divert a little bit mention well, I shouldn't say divert
with airports in mind, but Manchester the the domestic
terminal used to I don't know if they still do.
It's been 10 years and I just kept to go through it every
every few weeks. They used to use as they would
have a deliberate bottleneck would be the rate that they let
people through security because it was limited shopping space,
limited seats and they couldn't let people in fast enough.
So they just slowed down security and if the worst place
in the world to be slowed down and having to stand and wait the
security and I'd hope I don't keep I'm just they were
assholes. There's no other name for it.
You've probably been up the ranks and and and iTunes ratings
and things now. OK, so Eurostar, Eurostar keeps
arguing we can't possibly have competitors on the high speed
rail routes because there isn't enough capacity at the lounges
at Saint Pancras and the and the boarding area at Saint Pancras
now, right, there are enormous potential boarding areas at EMS
Fleet and Ashford. If you said to people, if you're
prepared to use high speed one to travel to Ashford and you
board the train there, OK, we'll give you, you know, double
points on our loyalty program. All right.
And much nicer sitting waiting. And much nicer.
Some people do that anyway. I know people in Greenwich
should used used to drive to EBS fleets to catch the Eurostar
because the boarding experience was bad.
You know, you just get people to board somewhere else.
You only need this is the thing. You don't need everybody to do
it that an engineering solution will get everybody doing
something different. A psychological solution gets
the people for whom it's least inconvenience to do the thing,
and that's enough. And then the focus.
Coordination and curation. The 2GO together.
So she basically curates, she created the patients and goes,
these people don't need to come back every six months.
They need to come back every 12 months.
This is it's. So obvious, isn't it?
But hadn't we done before? So she did that.
Another thing she does is change the rural area.
She had to go to different hospitals and drive between
them. So she thought, oh, I normally
couldn't get away with this because it would sound like I'm
being selfish. But she went and talked to the
various old folks homes in the wards and stuff and said, would
you mind if we change the order? I did this because if I go in
the opposite order, I will be going against the bad traffic.
So I'll be here quicker. It'll give me half an hour extra
every day. So can you just see how clever
and simple it is that that's like maybe 10 or 15% more
capacity? She, she used to eat with old,
old folks. Again, this is just sort of
simple psychology and I've used this with a lot of business
people. Actually, no, I want to go into
that, but she's going to go along to she's got old people
don't always turn up for their appointments.
So and it's just the curse. And I'm sure you've heard Robert
Giordini's idea of asking people to commit to turning up and to
phone them if they're not going to.
And just stuff like that. That doesn't necessarily work if
you know, if you've got someone who's got memory problems.
So she just goes, sometimes it's going to happen.
And they would do all the follow up and encourage people to turn
up. But but for people that didn't,
she just started making sure that she is so obvious that she
had work that she could do if someone didn't turn up.
And then, quite often, she'd actually better do a home visit
for them on the way home. Because she because she got less
administrative work to do, so she had time to go and see them.
Yeah. She just did an admin work that
she may be doing at 4:00 at the end of the day.
She did it during the patients time when they didn't turn up
and yeah. There's a brilliant one, by the
way, in terms of bottleneck. When I went in for I think it
was a cataract operation. You have some really weird
things, like if anybody's got a latex allergy, they have to be
the first patient of the day because obviously surgeon
surgeons use latex gloves and it's rare, but it but it's a
really serious allergy apparently, but must be really
bad if you're, if you've got a sexual fetish for latex allergy,
that must be really awful. But one of the brilliant things,
by the way, was simply the they realized the bottleneck wasn't
shortage of surgeons OK. It was that you had to stop and
clean the operating theatre in between each patient.
If you ran one surgeon with two operating theatres, the old
theatre was being cleaned while there was an operation going on
in theatre too. And then you flipped and then
you flipped and you effectively double capacity with no increase
in employment. There's an even better story by
the way, which you'll absolutely love.
I've got some friends in Kent to run a waste collection business
and they've got the contract to for a London borough to collect
all their bins and they had a massive problem with effectively
missed collections. And then then of course the
people complain. They said you didn't collect my
bins, you didn't empty my bins. The problem was weirdly solved
by getting rid of one person on a garbage truck, because now you
had two people and one guy was responsible for the left hand
side of the street and the other guy was responsible for the
right hand side of the street. Right.
When you had three people, there was a level of informational
confusion eventually meant that that's not my bin, that's
Barry's going to collect that one, and then Barry didn't
collect it. I'm stereotyping garbage
collection people as male. They tend, they tend to be male,
right? And consequently actually by
removing one person, you actually improve the the level
of efficiency. It's surprising that how often
they actually. It's really, really interesting
because actually, if you look at informational bottlenecks or
general confusion, sometimes fewer people fundamentally
operate more effectively. And the conversation of, sorry,
just jumping in there, the conversation of like human
bottlenecks and and Clark, I think you said something there
about your wife that actually she if obviously if you had to
recreate the aha moment, it would've been like looking into
the mirror, which is basically identifying that you are the
problem. But that's very, very
interesting because it means that the, the, the likelihood of
a nation A-Team being over to go from stagnation to flywheel and
therefore unlocking the bottleneck also requires
self-awareness of the leader, right?
So you need to be able to look at yourself 1st and even
consider yourself being the problem.
So I had a lot of challenges when I was making that
transition from being an executor to being a leader
because 1. I loved getting involved in the
work itself. I loved being the creative.
But then also what happens is it almost like developed this
almost like history of success That therefore gets you thinking
that what's got me here is going to be the thing that's going to
get me to the next level. But the world changes.
I. Heard about chilled crabs?
They've got to be different. 100% And the thing that unlocked
that thinking was one had a conversation with Ben, Ben
Francis, who's the CEO of, of gym Shark.
And basically he told me that I should find an outlet, right.
So Lewis Hamilton, his bottleneck was the fact that he
took F1 was his everything, right?
So he put all his focus in F1 and when he started to get other
things to be able to transmit his passion, he was able to be
very rational in his car, right. So I, I started posting on
LinkedIn. So that was 1 unlock, but then
then so I was still able to get my creative edge, but then come
into the workplace unemotive very rational because it was no
longer about me. It was more about the work.
Now another trip that changed my life was going to matter.
And actually what the message was was find unlock the
bottleneck, but it actually was transmitted.
The information was transmitted looking at three main things,
which was the fact that you should not let yourself be
crippled by perfection, right? You should focus on impact over
effort, right? If you think about the marketing
world and just the way that agencies are almost like set up
and the fact that it's all about time, it's all about perfection.
It's all about the visuals. But really the how you make or
how you almost like contribute to organizational changes
through unlocking bottlenecks that are not necessarily things
that take you a lot of time. It's just about finding areas to
unlock and, and Gym Shark's whole model was all about
focusing on impact of effort. We did a shoot in Japan that had
a crew of 20 people that didn't shift the dial at all from a
sales perspective. But curating a flat lay image
from a lady that was part of our community that made the, the,
the content of the, the, the, the leggings feel like it was in
one of our ordinances wardrobe that actually got the
relatability factor that we needed to be able to ship the
dial. And we started to think
actually, is there a simpler way to do it?
So you actually had an access of impact versus effort, right?
The, the next one was all about false constraints, right?
A lot of the times we create constraints that tell us, well,
we can't do this because either somebody hasn't done it before
or we haven't done it before, or it's something new.
But often they're not. Those are false, right?
And if you actually try to have a a test and learn a mentality,
which is we're not going to. Now changes as a failure, we're
just testing and learning, right?
That is another thing that a lot of people are very fearful of,
especially when you think about European culture, if you will.
But then actually the the biggest one I think that a lot
of leaders are really scared about is this whole notion of
almost like taking yourself out of business.
Gary Vaynerchuk seems to say it's like, if you think like a
competitor that's trying to get you out of business and you
innovate on yourself, you're more likely to be able to keep
fighting another day. And, and the issue with a lot of
people is once they get to the top, they stop almost like
innovating against themselves. We used to say, think like 19
year old Ben, right? So Ben started Gym Shark at 19
in his mother's house and he would look at the Nikes and it
doesn't say where's the area that they're missing and how do
I innovate there? And Roy, you talk about this a
lot and I think a lot of people fail to do that to themselves,
even if it means hiring the 19 year old Ben to come in, audit
your business and then taking that on board for you to be able
to innovate and keep moving forward.
And. It's very interesting because
actually benchmarking is often a massive obstacle to finding a
bottleneck actually, because patently the benchmarking hasn't
solved the bottleneck problem, OK.
And what you're then doing is you're, if you like your
widening roads where it makes no difference because one of the, I
suppose one of the implications of bottleneck theory is that
there's an off if you're, if you're not cognizant of
bottlenecks, there is an unbelievable amount of wasted
effort effectively, in some cases actually not not even
pushing the needle ineffectually, but pushing it in
completely the wrong direction. Oh, you can totally.
Yeah, yeah, totally. You can totally bugger things up
by spending your money. One of the things you, you, you
know, like Perito 8020 rule. The roading systems are such a
good thing to, to look at, to understand the stuff.
If you're going to spend stuff money on roads in order to speed
them up, you identify the bottlenecks and, and London
probably has 100 in Edinburgh, where I used to live outside
Edinburgh, there were probably about 3.
And, and everyone knows where they are and you can look at a
map and you can spot them. But if you're going to do
advertising, so, so the bottleneck thing is maybe .1% of
the actual square meters of the city space.
If you're going to do advertising, you look along the
roads with billboards and you're going to do an 8020 thing,
you're not going to do all the side streets you're going to,
you're going to put them in the places where the traffickers and
they're very similar ideas of, you know, making the most of a
small amount. The the bottleneck idea takes it
to an extreme. And actually like from a
marketing point of view, My, my favorite marketing example of
this is so lame. You 2 will roll your eyes in
Edinburgh when you come up the steps from Waverly Station.
There's an Apple store there. And there was in the times
where, you know, replacing the screen was really expensive and
there are all those little places you could go get them
replaced. They probably still exist.
One of the shops went up there. They paid someone to stand
outside that Apple stop with a little sign that that said, is
your screen broken? Go down the steps and turn left.
We're down there. You know, it was absolutely, you
know, that was the extremely well placed version of that.
No billboards would have got them anything.
It's all about just being clever and thinking different, isn't
it? Can I?
I now? I don't know how much time
you've got, but considering I have two geniuses in front of
me. That's I wouldn't go that far
I've. Got a question?
See how I start? With I hate you when people say
that because it basically says you have to solve this problem
in you have. It's the same thing.
Yeah. Live on there, yeah, but OK,
yeah. Sorry, here we go.
It's just a little thing, right? So I'm writing a new book and
you know when you get, you're just inside it.
You don't like your own writing and everything.
You can't. It's so hard to touch it.
I have a title that the, the, the book is like a really short
book. It's about how to deliver your
most important software projects on time to really aggressive
dates. And the metaphor I use is of
when Taylor Swift went to on whatever the Calgary, I think it
was whatever city somewhere in Canada, she went there and they
actually put a motorcade on for her and they shut down one of
the lanes so that she could get from the airport to the stadium.
And that was negotiated. And they basically said, you
know you are. Not one had that as well, I
think. Yeah, it was controversial,
Yeah. Totally.
But then they look at the the the value of it.
There's millions, there was hundreds of millions of dollars
in value in actually getting her to come there and she wouldn't
get there if she's going to be stuck in traffic or after
arrived the day before. And so they had all of these
countries are, you know, all these cities competing with each
other. So that's the metaphor.
And the idea is it's, you know, you set up a motorcade for your
most important projects and you make everything else sit in
gridlock because they are, you know, they're they're third
class citizens of all the other projects, right.
Yeah. The the name that I have for it.
And I love this name, but I would love your reflection from
people who aren't in stuck in my inside my head.
I want to call it cash cows make the best burgers.
You like it, Alfred? What do you?
Reckon so so so so on my side something that was kind of
similar and maybe this will help.
I, I think this is actually coined or something, but it was
a big unlock. I was listening to this another
podcast and there was a guy called Mr. Wonderful on it, and
he basically said that they talk about the fact that a lot of
people talk about intellectual intelligence, IQ, they talk
about emotional intelligence. And the big one is all about
focused intelligence, right? And actually, if you think about
the commonality between some of the most successful leaders, the
billionaires of the world, some might be more IQ, some might be
more EQ like Steve Jobs, IQ like Jeff Bezos.
But then I think that there's a commonality between all of them
is focus, right? And actually there was a metric
that they say Steve Jobs used and it was basically signal
versus noise, right? And it's like actually within an
18 hour day, there's five things that you have to get done that
are completely almost like significant towards moving
forward and closer to your longer goal, right?
And you should have those three things, only your five signals,
right? That should be done no matter
what. And everything else that is
almost like takes you away from that is noise, right?
And basically now when you're seeing things coming your way,
you're able to almost like this is the best leaders are able to
now distinguish what's noise versus what's signal, right?
And I think that's the effectively the thinking that
you're looking to establish, right?
It's like, what is one thing, what's in one pile?
What's in the other pile, right? What's what's gold and what's
shit? Right.
What is, what is, what is almost like momentum and what's tar,
right? If you're able to visualize the
feeling of what it feels like getting stuck, what's clutter
versus? I think a lot of people tend to
use a word that almost like feels like what it feels like to
get involved in that thing. It's almost like a noisiness.
Busyness versus like freedom. Right after that kind of like
feeling. I would go with something that's
a feeling as opposed to necessarily a a metaphor, if you
will. That's, that's the trouble.
I had someone else who's written a few books and I've got 5 or
got 5 now there's a bit, there's six.
And she advised to make it very, very, very agile on time, which,
you know, which is actually to some people's kind of appeal.
It's really hard to, to, to judge it, isn't it?
The, the to, to try and sum up something that's that's
attractive people actually because of you, the reason I'm
asking, I'm thinking, I'm obviously I want free consulting
advice. But for a lot of people like me
who come from an engineering background, we, we are the what,
Mark Watneys of the world, you know, the Martian, we are the
ones, the botanists that go up and grow potatoes and we science
the shit out of everything. It's very hard to, to, to put
ourselves to, to, to look at the, the stuff that you guys, I
don't know, I presume it comes naturally to you the way you
guys think. Or is it really really hard
work? Well, I don't know whether he's
going to come in here. I think he's thinking.
I think he's still thinking about it.
It's sort of mean. I mean it.
It does take hard work, but I mean, the one interesting thing
about working in an advertising agency, well, there are lots of
interesting things about working in an advertising agency, but
the thing of lasting importance about it is that it's a very
unusual incentive scheme. If you're in the creative
department, which is if you come up with an obvious solution, OK,
it's a bad career move and OK, at the worst level, it over
focuses you on the counter intuitive and the oblique and
the surprising. But on the other hand, you need
people like that in the world because everybody else, if
you're in a bureaucratic role, OK, and you say here is a
solution that makes perfect sense, we'll go.
Well done, Jeremy. You know, have a promotion to
G7, OK, in a creative department, an ad agency, you
know, if you come up with five completely obvious decisions in
a row, OK, you're out of a job. And, you know, it's artificial.
It's weird, but it's kind of important, I think.
I like that it's set up to weed out the boring.
Yeah, yeah, it filters out the boring.
I like that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
But it's not interesting that, you know, that is actually, you
know, in most cases, boring and logical is absolutely the way to
go. It's the best career move you
can possibly make. And the great thing about
working where I did that, interestingly, my brother's kind
of a mathematician and astrophysicist.
And of course, one of the strangest things that I've
started doing on YouTube is watching people solve
mathematical equations, which sounds like the worst idea for
television you could possibly conceive of.
But what I've suddenly realized is that all it's not about your
mathematical ability. Actually, it's about your
creative ability. You know, quite often there's a
geometric problem, a problem in geometry, which is completely
impossible. And then someone draws a line
between A and C and points out that these two angles must be
the same. And it goes from being
intractable to absolutely obvious.
And you know, there, there's an awful lot there which I found
fascinating, which is that in a sense with consumers or
potential customers, maybe you're just missing a single
line, which takes the problem from, if you've got to prove
that a triangle has 180°, the, the angles within add up to
180°. You draw a line across the apex
that's parallel to the base. OK, it's a straight line.
OK. And you can show that what angle
is angle B? The middle is angle A, and the
third angle is angle C. Since they make a straight line,
then those 3 angles within the triangle must also, but without,
without drawing that parallel line, you're literally just
staring into space. And so cognitive bottlenecks is
sense what advertising is designed to overcome.
It's, I don't get, one of the things that's driving me nuts at
the moment is, you know, I don't think anybody solves the real
cognitive bottleneck to overcome range anxiety in electric cars,
because I think everybody's looking at it by direct analogy
with petrol and they're getting panicked.
The actual truth of the matter is, once you buy an electric
car, the problem is, well, totally irrelevant I would say.
My my two friends that have electric cars both live up very
totally different parts of the country, up very, very, very,
very dark, windy mountainous roads and.
They. Reckon that they are just just
miles better for where actually for where they live because they
don't actually have to go there if they're running low, they
plug it in at home. But exactly, you don't have ABP
station at home. OK, that's one obvious thing.
We wouldn't need that many petrol stations if everybody had
a hose pipe at home that delivered a pint an hour of
petrol, right? But also also they will enjoy
their electric cars much more if they realize that they're
actually recharging while they drive downhill.
Yes, that once if they if they live in a hilly part of New
Zealand. Now, what you cannot do when
you're going downhill in a petrol car is convert carbon
dioxide back into fuel. OK.
But in an electric car, every time they're going downhill,
they're getting some of their money back.
Right. I like that.
Once. Once they're made, once they're
made conscious of that, they will find, I mean, my great joy
is literally I don't when an electric car, if someone slows
down needlessly in front of me, I don't get angry anymore
because previously they robbed me of my kinetic energy and
forced me to waste it and dissipate it as heat.
Whereas now I'm just getting my money back and it's fine.
I'll go on it. And of course, because the
acceleration was really good, you don't really care anyway
because you're back at 60 miles an hour and bloody 4 seconds.
So by the way, I'm being lent for a week and Lotus and Mayor
said to test drive. So I will report back on this
experience. Absolutely.
That is, they're the electric Lotus.
And I also, I also had a look at the Genesis GB 70, which is
unbelievable. I mean, it's partly that people
can't cope with the fact that you can have a luxury car and a
sports car in the same car. Same thing.
Yeah, because we've grown up with the idea that there's a
trade off between the two, which maybe an Aston Martin can solve,
or a Bentley. Top Gear years ago.
I just want bottlenecks aren't always bad.
No, OK. No, no, no, no.
So Top Gear, Richard Hammond, I must have been 10-12 years ago
now, was racing around and he had this car that was so fast
that she had to put a bottleneck and a limiter so that the thing
wouldn't go over. What say, I don't know, 220
miles an hour? I'm making up numbers here.
I know nothing about this because the tyres couldn't
handle it if it went faster. The tires were actually the
bottleneck of the car, but they put in the bottleneck, you know,
and probably some electric limiting thing, a deliberate
bottleneck that slowed the thing down so that it could actually
go faster, it could go as fast as it possibly could.
I'm going to give you another example.
I don't have it here. We just got a planning
permission got signed off today for our new en suite.
When, when the builder finished the the shower, I got in the
shower after spending all this money and I go, the water's
dribbling out like it, you know, You know, like if I go to a
massage, I want to hurt. If I have a shower I want.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
What's? Yeah, and so I rang the builder
and he said I'll send the plum around.
They put a little restrictor in the in the shower and you can't
remove it, but the plumber can remove it and it will let the
water flow faster. The plumber turns up and says,
oh, that's the safety thing because of some weird
circumstance that would never work in this place.
But there was a bottleneck deliberately put in as as a
safety mechanism. And then he he removed it and
the whole thing went faster. And if I've been open and
honest, I have a bottleneck in my tummy.
I had bariatric surgery about four years ago and.
They. To be fit to be put a bottleneck
in there so that I couldn't consume as much food.
It was almost like a much nicer version of wiring my mouth shut.
But it does another thing. It's not just a physical
restriction or limitation or constraint.
It actually turns off the the voices.
Yeah, kind of like Ozimpic Dozer.
Here's this. Saying so, it's both
psychological and physical at the same time.
It's it's both. Yeah, and and just so you got
without, I've got one other thing I want to tell you just I
have this list of things I I must share with the world.
This one. The the thing with bottlenecks
is it's actually all around us ways the way that people like me
think about it. And I only just realized this.
The, the, the perfect analogy for, for bottlenecks and when
you know, you have them actually not the analogy is that the, the
problems don't happen if your organization runs at the speed
of your slowest bit. It's every, everything's fine.
It, it happens when you try and run your organization faster
than the bottleneck. And the analogy is, it's like
when you remember when you were a little kid and you were
running downhill and suddenly you started running faster than
your little legs could carry you.
That, that that's what happens when you don't manage your your
bottlenecks because everything else tries to go faster and you
end up tumbling over and falling over, breaking your nose,
scraping your knees. And so obviously if you were
running as fast as your legs could carry you, you wouldn't
fall over, you'd be fine. It's it's trying to go too fast.
It would be like taking off that restrictor in the car, the
Richard Hammond car, and then racing like a Suddenly the tyres
explode because you of. Course, of course, of course.
That's brilliant. And that needs to be the
actually the the reframe for, for bottlenecks because that,
that, that the problem in the solution, but they're actually
not the symptom. Yeah, all the stuff from going
faster, that's all the bad stuff.
Yeah, I was, I was going to say because often than not when you
think about new startups and scale UPS, they always, if you
think about what metal used to use the whole move fast and
break things or, or, or build the rocket ship whilst you're
flying it. Those are all analogies that
basically talk about removing bottlenecks that are preventing
momentum, right. But if you think about the
chaotic nature or the culture within those organizations,
sometimes because there are no bottlenecks or the right type of
bottlenecks, you're not able to actually almost like preserve
what's very important and ensure that people don't burn out,
right? Which is super interesting.
That's the that's the ultimate I'll tell you how to ruin an
organization. If if you ever seen that, that
CIA guide, I think it was for sabotage.
Just right. If you want to ruin an
organization, get ACEO and his who says right got all these
leaders here and they look a bit relaxed.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to give them each a
special project that's going to take up half the time.
I'm going to take away their, their assistant so that they
have to schedule their own calendar unless you, you know
what they'll probably do. And then the leaders will all
get clogged up. All of their inboxes will get
clogged up, full of decisions that aren't made yet.
You remember, that's the for a leader, that's the most obvious
visible thing. And then all these decisions get
delayed. It's kind of like what you're
talking about with the, the, you know, the councils and the.
You, you, you just make it so that the the leader doesn't have
time to actually do all of the expertise, which is decision
making, all the management, which is decision making.
And worst of all, actually worst of all, they ruin their family
lives and then and they burn out and their partners leave by.
By the way, IT has facilitated a lot of this stupidity.
OK. Yeah.
Because in the day, I actually am old enough to remember when
most people in in the office of any seniority didn't type
anything. OK, That was that.
That was woefully inefficient because very often the typing
pool was the bottleneck. OK, Now I'm not making this up.
In Ogilvy in the 1970s, people I spoke to who went there in the
1970s said the shrewd career move was to spend an hour a day,
Terry Thomas in the typing pool, which is you go and go there.
You'd charm the typing pool and bring them presents because then
you could get things typed faster than your colleagues.
Good, because they liked you. OK, Now the typing pool went.
That was inefficient. That was that was ridiculous
duplication of effort that way. But now you have senior people
doing their own calendar management or doing their own
timesheet. OK, you know, and it looks
wonderfully efficient because you get rid of people who are
generally in overhead. But the productivity of the
people who actually add the value has now gone down by 50%
if I mentioned. Angela With Angela, it was when
I started working with her hermit crab, Angela, Woman of
the Year, etcetera. When I first went there, the
obvious thing that she needed was either APA or Leo McGarry.
You know, The West Wing, the chief of.
Staff. Yeah, yeah.
And we had to sneak in a chief of staff disguised in another
role just so that it could take a lot of the management stuff
off her. And then suddenly she was able
to do so much more. She had time to think and, and,
and so much of her time was thinking, how do I grow this
into the next hermit crab shell? How do I do that 20 times?
There was always a bottleneck, Dee bottleneck, bottleneck, Dee
bottleneck. But to get us a chief of staff
and it, it involved skullduggery and sneakiness.
But then three years later, everyone in that position was
saying I need a chief of staff because they could actually see
the difference. But but you can't see the
difference if you've never if, if you're not as old as I think
you're a couple of years older than me, Rory.
And it's horrifying, isn't it? My hero Ellie Goldrich said.
He, you know, you know when you've reached that age, when
you've been down to do up your shoelaces and you when you're
down there, you think, oh, is there anything else I can do
while I'm down here? I think I've, I've reached that
that age and I've just completely lost what I was going
to say. No, no, if if you've got not got
the experience of seeing what it was like to have assistance,
it's very, very, very hard to come up with a, a logical
explanation that, oh, I'll get more done and I'm the bottleneck
and therefore everyone will actually benefit and the whole
organization will run faster without people.
It's it's quite a big mental leap for people to make.
Very, very interesting deal. Yeah.
That I, I, I mean, I think that's been genuinely
catastrophic that in other words, what we've generally done
is we've replaced people who are support staff with, with HR, you
know, legal compliance. We've replaced them with bossy
bureaucrats, and it's a double loss for people who actually
create value. You know, if you're a hospital
consultant, you've got fewer orderlies working for you and
you've got more assholes without a medical qualification bossing
you around. Story with that orderlies or.
Yeah, you please. Yeah.
All right. And there's AI Wish this is my
story, but it was the CEO of three hospitals somewhere in the
East Coast of the UK. It was sort of at a conference
and I think his name was Michael, who knows.
He pops up picture on the on his slide deck there and he says
this is what it cost to increase ophthalmic surgery by 23%, the
productivity. And there's a picture of two
chairs. And he said it wasn't actually
these, these are my kitchen chairs.
Two of them in the real world back in the hospital.
I went to visit the ophthalmic surgeons.
And they were, I was sitting down talking to them and they
were saying, hey, we're really, really, really busy.
And he goes, I know you're busy and I'm worried about that
because your job, you know, you, you can't be tired.
And I don't want you guys and you're currently working 110% of
your hours. And they go, no, no, no, we're
fine. And then one of them says it's
actually OK because we get a lot of breaks during the middle of
the day. And you go, oh, OK, what's what?
What's happening? There.
And they say, oh, you know how it is.
We're wrapping up one surgery. So the one of the nurses will
call down to the waiting area 200 yards away and say, bring
down the next patient, please. And then they'll go to get the
patient, but they have to be wheeled down in a wheelchair and
they have to have an orderly. And sometimes that might take 10
minutes. So we have a little, you know,
little actually, they don't drink caffeine, so they don't
have a cup of tea. We have a little rest in that,
that that break there while we're waiting for them.
So he goes, oh, that's interesting.
And then he pops down to the storage area in the basement,
gets 2 chairs, gets an orderly, I presume to help them carry
them up, puts them outside the surgery and makes that the
waiting area you see, you know, simple and just.
But he again, he had that kind of that quirky cleverness
because they feel a little differently.
Well, so this this conversation for me, it's almost like it felt
like inception, right? A bottleneck within a bottleneck
within a bottleneck. And I think that we've probably
have definitely throughout this conversation, I just wanted to
almost like sit down, experience it and make sure that the
listeners got the time to listen to both of you geniuses speak,
right? Because if you just think about
where the world is right now and we were just talking about
bureaucracy and the fact that actually often than not movement
happens at the top, at the bottom, the middle is, is often
people trying to justify or, or individuals or societies trying
to justify their worth, right? It actually deters as a way from
what's what's supposed to actually be doing right.
And I feel like if you have more people, I'm not just focusing on
the individual word, but think about the bigger picture and how
them as a vehicle within this wider system is actually
contributing towards the direction that we're going into
that. I think the society would move
further a lot quicker, right? I think there will be more
innovation. I think there will be more
growth. And I think we talked about the
importance of abundance, right? I feel like we're in our society
right now where scarcity is prominent and effectively
everyone thinks what's in it for me and what we got to lose, not
necessarily what have we got to gain?
And how do we how much more can we grow as a civilization and as
people? And I think that this
conversation is very, very important depending on who's
listening, right? And I think that it can
influence a lot of different spectrums because of how big of
a universal unlock this is. And that's the reason why me and
Rory decided to to do this thing is because we feel like it's
important to have these conversations as society moves
forward. But Clark, I actually, I was
just going to ask almost like parting message, final message
for everybody that was listening.
It is one big take away for people to take in.
But then also, I think it'll be great for you to let us know
where people can find you some of the work that you're doing
right now to ensure that we send some great traffic your way all.
Right. I like traffic.
That sounds like a really good idea.
OK, actually I got can I offer a suggestion for you, Alf?
OK, take the course that you've done on personal branding, copy
it and rename it Personal Branding for Left Brain
Thinkers. I will do that right now.
Because it's it's, it's something that that people like
me in my 20s, I probably would have rolled my.
Eyes also, if you do that, put the price up because the more
specific the target audience, the more you can premiumize.
There you go. I think, and I think it will,
will you could do it for doctors.
You could have this same content, but it's it's like the
I was at nurofen for back. I actually went night like I
heard this from Rory, you know, have I, I went, I had a
toothache and, and I went and I was looking for nurofen or it
was ibuprofen and I wanted one that was specifically for sore
teeth and they didn't have 1. And I got in a Strop in the
supermarket and I just grabbed the same 1 and I knew logically
that it had for teeth, it would be the same thing.
And I went home and then I refused to take it because it
wasn't for teeth. So that's rational for you,
isn't it? OK, if OK, I'm just going to
think what's really, really useful for people.
There's, there's lots of things you can do with this stuff, but
I, I think that the most important, but, and, and you
both repeated it. I'm going to use a slightly
different way of putting it. And it's not about bottlenecks.
But if, if you do, if someone does happen to look at the
bottleneck detective book, you'll see there's actually 2
halves. And I pointed out the first half
is about scarcity, which is about bottlenecks and the
second-half is about abundance. And when you, and it's all the
same very short story, but at the midpoint, the manager
involved suddenly realizes she's been trying to save a lot of
money and now the debottleneck and they've got more money
coming in. And, and it takes quite a
movement for her to switch from trying to save with escape
because of the scarcity to, to be in the abundance world.
And if there's anything that the analogy I have is when people
are walking along the street on a rainy day, they look down and
they, you know, they, they look at the footpath and they try and
keep the rain off and they don't look around.
That same St. a couple of days later when it's sunny again,
they look up and they're looking around.
And that's how I think there's that scarcity.
It's all it is actually a physical thing.
You're not looking around. And but then if you can just
figure out how to lift up and look around and see that bigger,
wider world, It's almost the opposite of like whether one of
those that you know the good. Cameras you have.
Where you can focus in and you can get that boker effect and
blur out everything else. Sometimes you have to do that
and you focus in and find the bits where you have to focus
literally your attention because they're the bottlenecks,
whatever way you think of a bottleneck.
But sometimes you'd have to unblur the background and make
sure that you can actually go wide angle and just see
everything. Both of those views are really
good. So, so, so I'm going to end on
this by saying your books called, of course, the
Bottleneck detective. And obviously we're a bottleneck
podcasts, but the word detective is also inordinately important
here because actually this isn't genius.
It's just noticing different things.
It's genuinely it isn't, you know, internal.
Well, actually come to think you in a lot of genius is just
noticing different things. I mean, Einstein, really, you
know, I'm suggesting I was dumb, right?
But he simply asked questions and saw things that other people
hadn't seen. Or he looked at things in a way
that was from what would it be like to ride on a particle of
light, for example. We know.
And the detective question is all about effectively.
And I always make the point about detectives, which is you
don't start by trying to prove things.
You start by trying to find out. And there's an investigative
phase and then later there's an evidential phase where you have
to prove it in court. And what I think business has
done is it's conflated the two, which is it said that everything
you do has to be evidence based. But sometimes the evidence tells
you what to do. And sometimes it's by doing that
you create the evidence. So sometimes the evidence drives
the action, and sometimes the action uncovers the evidence.
And we've created this weird linear, one unidirectional world
where you have to, everything has to be data-driven, but which
means you could only do the things the data tells you to do.
But what the police would do is they would do things which
generate information, OK. And I, I think there's
something, you know, I think in a way that if you look at the
scientific process, 80% of scientific breakthroughs
actually occur through chance observation or inspired
experimentation, not through sequential application of, you
know, of, of, of, of, of existing pre-existing
information. And I think, I think that, you
know, there's, there's a really, really fundamental problem here,
which is probably the bottleneck in many cases of discovery is
not actually that we're not doing science enough, It's that
we're too reliant on what we already know.
Yeah. And going back to what we're
saying at the very start, and I'm and I'm going to almost like
at my words on here about my lecturer marking me down because
of lack of Harvard references, right?
It's all in the same thinking. That's all scarcity thinking.
Where's your evidence before you've actually done the thing,
right? And if just to go even bigger, I
was having a really great conversation with my Co founder
Michael about the current state of Britain or Europe.
And obviously we all know that scarcity mindset is the
bottleneck that's keeping us where we are.
But if you think about it even deeper, it's, and I think that
Jeff Bezos was asked what's the main difference between the US
and Europe when it comes to like economical, almost like growth.
And it's fear, right? The fear of risk, right?
And if you think about where a lot of the money in Britain is,
is either in the ground, so land or in the bank account or in the
pensions, right, where don't make our money work.
We actually need that money to be reinvesting in the future of
the country. Rising property prices are a
massive economic bottleneck which have been not, which have
not been captured by existing economic models because they
don't distinguish between land and capital.
Yeah. OK, that's all down to how you
define something will determine what you see.
And by the way, the other reason I think detective, by the way,
is a great world is, is that sometimes the breakthrough comes
from noticing something really trivial.
And every case I read about where, you know, the Joanna
Yates case, the Dutch guy, you know, they asked him to account
for his movements and then said he says, you know, and then, you
know, one PMI went to Asda. But of course, you'll know that
already. They what?
All right, OK, why would we know that already?
They got CCTV at Asda and they asked a perfectly reasonable
question. Who the fuck thinks like that?
You've done something about anything, right?
OK. You know, really, really tiny
little things. It's like poker.
It's the towel, OK? There's information that is in
the public domain. That information, by the way,
that's in the public domain is generally pretty worthless.
The information that is, that you notice, that everybody else
ignores, that's the stuff that's really valuable.
The dog that didn't bark. In the night, which is my
favorite, my favorite ever case of by the way, I was talking to
someone in the British Special Forces and whenever they go into
a situation, then notice they're told they're taught to look for
two things, which is the presence of the unusual or the
absence of the usual. So, so, so the, the point is
that if you're going into a market in, you know, Iraq or
something and you know, and obviously if there's something
there you weren't expecting, that's important, but we're very
good at noticing that. But if the usual falafel vendor
isn't there, and that's also something to make you alert.
All right, Well, well, Clark, this.
Has been this has been AI think we should do a bloody second one
of these because I think this has been absolutely.
I absolutely love this. Every moment of it.
It's lined up, it's lined up sensational.
What a pleasure. Amazing.
Great interview. Well, thank you everybody too.