Easily listen to It's a Customer's World with Andy Murray

Artwork for podcast It's a Customer's World with Andy Murray

Steve Dennis on Navigating Leadership and Transformation in a Customer-Centric World

Episode 46 • 23rd April 2024 • It's a Customer's World with Andy Murray • Sam M. Walton College of Business

Andy Murray

Hi, I'm Andy Murray. Welcome to It's a Customer's World podcast. Now more than ever, retailers and brands are accelerating their quest to be more customer centric. But to be truly customer centric, it requires both a shift in mindset and ways of working. Not just in marketing, but in all parts of the organization.

In this podcast series, I'll be talking with practitioners, thought leaders, and scholars to hear their thoughts on what it takes to be a leader in today's customer centric world.

[Transition Music]

Andy Murray

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to It's a Customer's World where we dive deep into the future of retail and the pivotal role of customer centric leadership. I'm your host, Andy Murray. And today we have a truly insightful episode lined up for you. Joining us is a returning guest, none other than Steve Dennis, a visionary leader and author of the bestseller, Remarkable Retail.

However, Steve's back to talk about his newly released book, Leaders Leap. When I read it, I knew I must have Steve back on the show to talk about the book as it gets into what I think is the heart of the challenge around transforming organizations. And that is the leadership challenge. In this episode, Steve and I talk about his insights on leadership, the genesis of the book.

And we go deep on a few of the principles essential to creating a leadership mindset, a mindset that's required to transform companies into being truly customer centric. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[Transition Music]

Andy Murray

So Steve, welcome to the show again. It's good to have you back. I think about two years ago, we had a conversation before you were just launching remarkable retail. So, you've had quite a journey in the last couple of years and now another book.

Steve Dennis

Yeah. I'm a glutton for punishment apparently, but yes, thank you.

Not because I'm on the podcast. I meant writing a book, another book, but thanks for having me back.

Andy Murray

you described a story back in: 2000

Steve Dennis

Sears, yeah.

Andy Murray

He was the CEO to lead the strategy work on a turnaround. And you describe really a textbook approach to doing strategy work really well. The top consulting firm, deep analysis, customer conversations, running experiments. You described a moment where it shared it and felt really good. And then one of your direct reports came in and said, strategy isn't really to win, but make it maybe suck less.

Could you take me to that moment? Because as I read that, I thought, wow, first of all, I would love to have heard that statement six months earlier would have been my first response, and I probably would have went into a defend mode, but you didn't, you went into some deep reflection on that and I'd love to know what caused you to start to deeply question the strategy once you got past the shock of that question.

Steve Dennis

There's a lot to the Sears story that I won't drag your audience through, but Sears had been struggling quite significantly for more than, I don't know, a decade at that point. And there were several attempts to try to fix things. Some of which I was involved in a bit, but this was the first time where I was really leading the primary effort and on the senior leadership team.

And I think part of the reason why I tell that story is, I think there's three reasons, really, because there's always three, it seems. One is that the ability to get so caught up in the work that we lose perspective. And I think in that case, even though deep down, I knew that what we were doing was not revolutionary and started too late, frankly, that we didn't have a good chance to really be successful.

So, I think I knew that, but I was caught up in the moment and kind of group thinker or what have you. Or this is my job, I've got to do the best I can do, even if ultimately it's not going to make a difference. I think the second thing is really the focus that most companies tend to have on incrementality.

And we were dealt at that point, and again, a lot of detail to this, but just fundamentally, Sears had gotten itself into a real corner. And so, our degrees of freedom, for lack of a better term, were limited, and that really set constraints upon what we could do. Which is a reason not to get yourself into that situation in the first place, if you can avoid it.

So unfortunately, we didn't have a workable time machine. I'm not aware of anybody who still does or who does. And then I think the other lesson, which really, was a foundational piece for me because I don't think it was so true then. But what it takes to be successful, what it takes to be remarkable as I talk about in my first book just keeps getting harder and harder.

So in Sears’ case, there were some obvious gaps. We were closing those gaps. That was really the focus where our best competitors were at 10 and we were a five. We were going from a five to a seven, but unless you get to a 10, customer probably doesn't care ultimately.

And that was really what John was saying when he said, this is a strategy to suck less. It's not to become really a winner. So that's really since then, the 20 plus years since then, it's really affected my thinking a lot, both from the when you get behind, it's really difficult to catch up, arguably more and more difficult every day that goes by. And the demands of the marketplace, whether that's because of I think we're going to have to be a little bit more practical in our response to the new competition or changing consumer demands or disruptive technology, just keeps raising the bar on performance.

And it's not good enough to be, as I often talk about a slightly better version of mediocre. You really have to distinguish yourself.

Andy Murray

It's interesting the story I resonated with it because when I went to the UK and joined the exec for the first time in a retail exec at Asda, we were running a negative two comp at my first exec meeting, and we'd been running negative two comp.

And the tone wasn't that bad as if I were in the U.S., heads would be rolling. I talked to the CFO afterwards and I said, "How come there's no more energy here to say, this is unacceptable”. And he said, “you have to realize we're holding market share, which means we're in a declining category, which meant we did not consider Aldi and Lidl as competitors”, but no one told the customer that.

Steve Dennis

Exactly. Yeah.

Andy Murray

And, and we didn't actually get a chance to do real change. I had a hard time getting change until six months later, we had a negative seven comp and then we could throw the toys out and start to really work at it, but then we lost so much time. But anyway, I just related, I think that story still plays out today in terms of, what's happening at exec and exactly why this is so hard.

IAB annual conference in late: 2022

Steve Dennis

It was not there, but it just as well could have been. It was at an ICSC conference.

Andy Murray

You talked about pivoting, and I've done keynote speaking and I know how hard that is and I can't imagine, I can't get my head around this idea that in the hotel room the day before or two days before maybe, you completely changed the script and started something brand new.

Something had to be deeply disturbing you to do that because that's a high risk move. It's a bold move and that means there was something really, really in there that... And so, what was it that, that pulled you so hard to make something that's... you just don't see that in the keynote, professional keynote space.

Steve Dennis

Well, as I say in the book, most, most professional speakers will tell you not to do this. What was going on was I was... I think it was two things. One was I was in a series of conversations with clients, as well as just looking at some of the things that were going on in retail and when we were starting to move into more of a post COVID world, there was this narrative and I was talking to colleagues and as I said, clients, as well as some reporters about, “oh, department stores are back”.

And I remember saying to them, “department stores are not back”. That anything that is going on is an aberration because of stimulus payments or what have you, but the department store model is broken. It's been broken for 20 years and a year from now it's going to look like a really stupid thing to say.

And so, I was feeling like, “how is it that people don't understand this?” Like, I'm, maybe I'm wrong, the data since then shows that at least I haven't been for the last two years, but I just felt like all right. I got to be more in people's face about like “wake the eff up”. Like with the level of denial here is quite extreme.

The other thing that was going on was I was starting to work on this new book and I was trying to figure out what it was going to be, and my publisher and a friend of mine were having a bunch of conversations about how they thought I needed to bring more of my personal story to it and just more storytelling.

And I remember saying, “I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that”. You know, I was defending my status quo. And they were like, “look, how are you giving this advice to people when you won't take it yourself?” They were calling me out on that. And I was like, “Oh, that's actually a very good point.” And then, so I was just in this space where I'm like, I'm going to try something different and I might crash and burn, but if I'm going to eat my own cooking, as well as maybe just have people get a little angry at me because I got in their face, like I wasn't doing it as a stunt, but I just felt like I'm pulling my punches.

I'm phoning it in a little bit. I'm saying the same kind of things I've been saying for three or four years and maybe I need to amp it up a little bit.

Andy Murray

IAB leadership conference in: 2022

And my first thought was “finally, somebody's taking on the elephant in the room.” It's not necessarily just talking about technology and innovation. It's the fact this stuff's not, we're not moving. We're not seeing the kind of... and from living inside of retail, unless you've lived there or I'm sure it's CPG in other places, there's real dynamics that come against that.

It's not, “Oh, there's the future. Let's all jump at it.” And you were talking about how hard that is. And I think that is really fresh right now. And it's really important. It's this change getting down to mindsets. And the mindset affects it. It's not that we can't see the change. We see it pretty clearly.

And the other thing I wanted to point out was that we saw a lot of pivot. We accelerated through COVID. There are ecommerce play from six years and six weeks. And so, we know it can be done. And I want to get your thoughts on that is why once we seen the COVID and what a retailer can do and how it can change and do a lot within a short amount of time:

How come that doesn't stick? Why, we know change can happen. But why didn't we learn from that?

Steve Dennis

One of the things I try to do with this book, I sometimes joke around and some people will get this. Some people won't. Some folks are probably aware of some of the work that Clayton Christensen and Jim Collins have done over the years, though. The work that sort of touches on why great companies fail or why transformations don't work, that's a bit old now.

So, I'm trying to bring a fresh perspective, but this is not just a strategy book. I definitely make some points about strategy, but I make a lot of points about personal leadership which I don't think has been... it's covered by people like Brene Brown, perhaps. So, it's a little bit like Brene Brown and Clayton Christensen had a baby in terms of this book.

But what I've observed for myself, as well as working with people, and I think COVID is a great example, is fear gets in the way of a lot of great work. Which the reason why people don't get up and talk in front of audiences or pick up that guitar, or I'm not pointing out anything that anybody doesn't really know.

With COVID, the fear that I think happened that drove change was the fear of, “man, how much money are we going to lose? How are we going to sell this inventory we have, if we don't figure out curbside pickup?” I know one retailer I worked with, but I was talking to them for three years. Like, why don't you guys have curbside pickup?

We rolled it out at Sears years and Neiman Marcus years and years earlier and customers like it, it works. All the reasons. Well it’s complicated and people don't come into the store. They won't buy the impulse. There were all the reasons not to do it. And I'm like, okay, then test it. I don't know if that's, maybe that's true for you.

It wasn't true with other two retailers. Or actually at that point I had a couple of consulting clients that did it. So anyway, there's so much about our relationship to fear. I think that's so important. I just have this article that comes out, that came out in the Harvard Business Review about this idea that safe is risky.

And I think the ability, and it's not easy, like it's very easy for me to say, I appreciate it's not easy to do. First of all, I think we have to accept we're hardwired evolutionary biology, not to get too much into biology or psychology, because it's definitely not my core area, but we're wired. The fear of, you know, fight, fear, fight, and freeze kind of thing, we're wired to, to keep ourselves alive.

And so, our bias is not to do the risky thing. There's only a few people really that have some weird gene or adrenaline addiction or something that'll, you know, be bungee jumping or what have you. But so it's a natural thing. So I think one, we have to accept that fear is this dragon we have to slay just about every day. But particularly if we're going to do something that, you know, that we really need to do that's believed is risky.

But standing still is the riskiest strategy of all in most cases. But it's hard for people when you're sitting there to, to say, “gee, I can keep monkeying around with this business I've been in with for 50 years”, or “I can keep doing the things that made me the EVP or president or CEO.”

Like that's worked really well, but now I'm going to say, “you know what, actually, those skills aren't going to be super helpful going forward. I need to learn some new things or bring in different voices or what have you”. So, I think what happened in COVID was it worked to, in a weird way, it worked to the company's advantage.

Because my fear was, I'm going to be stuck with all this inventory. I'm going to lose all these customers. I'm going to get fired because we don't come close to making our plan. So, what the hell, let it rip. It's out of desperation more so than inspiration.

Andy Murray

Yeah, it's funny, those just look at casual dining, those type of chains and retailers that had been experimenting with home delivery or curbside pickup where other casual diners didn't when COVID hit.

All of a sudden, even if it just had a test going, there was so much further ahead because they were trying to innovate and they had a pattern that could at least go to and scale. And the ones that struggled the most had refused to even take tests and experiment in that space and got really hurt by it.

uote in the book is about the: 2023

Steve Dennis

There are, and I try. One of the things that's hard about, cause even though my background is in retail, Leaders Leap is not a retail specific book. So, I'm covering, I believe, from my experience, working with smaller organizations and advising nonprofits, that a lot of these lessons apply to lots of different sectors.

Big businesses, small businesses, nonprofit or for profit. So, it's hard to give super specific advice when there's this world of organizations out there. But I think that we all know cultures, entrenched cultures in particular. I worked at Sears and Neiman Marcus. I've worked with Walmart, Nike, other cultures that are pretty strong cultures.

And it's not easy to change. So, I don't want to just have to get up one morning and say, “Whoa, I got a whole new relationship to risk”. And “I meditated once and so my ego is gone”. And like I realized it's not going to, you know, easily happen. So there's those forces, a very difficult force for sure, would be companies that are in the public market that are not viewed as growth companies.

You know, it's a lot easier, maybe not so much anymore, but for a while, it was okay for Amazon to lose money in retail for a long time to build out this infrastructure. And I often say, cause people will say to me, just to go back to Sears quickly... people say Sears was the everything store. It could have been... it had a catalog. It could have been Amazon.

And I'm like, well, that's a cool story. But first of all, even if I or anybody on my team or management had come up with that idea, there was no way the board was going to support it because I couldn't go in and say, “okay, now we need $50 billion or whatever, some massive amount of money. And we're going to lose money for the next 10 years. But trust us, then it's really going to be great because we got like media networks and like, and we're going to start a cloud computing division.”

There's so many things that are unique to that point in time. But more importantly, as a publicly traded company that had value investors, not to get into investment theory so much, but people didn't invest in Sears because they thought it was a growth company, cranking out technology innovation.

So Macy's finds itself in the same situation, even if they had a plan or pennies or pick any company that's struggling, even if they have this really bold plan, the ability to convince the board first and then Wall Street to support it is not trivial. So, the lesson is don't get into that position in the first place.

Like this book is not for, I don't mind if the people at Macy's want to buy it and have me come consult to them. But I think unfortunately, as I quote, my former boss at Sears is saying, “we know how the movie ends. We're just not sure how long it is.”

Andy Murray

One of the things that you do a good job, I think, of highlighting is to pay attention and look at things differently.

We, my experience is the big consulting firm comes in. They do the analysis, but unfortunately, most of the analysis is against what they view as the competitive set and financial history. And then you get something that is eight massive change objectives that are too many to implement at any one time.

And then it really wasn't informed by the customer relevance, the consumer experience, and where that's going. And I think you've got a point of view from reading the book that, you've got to have a little bit of a watch out there of just relying on the typical playbook of the CEO hires the big consulting firm, they come back with the hundred page deck, and you and the strategy director, take off, and that's where it seems to start to go wrong at the very beginning.

Steve Dennis

Sometimes, and I've worked with all of the major consulting firms over the years, and I've seen really great work from them, and I've seen not so great work. I've also seen where they've done great work, but the client is not ready. So, there's all sorts of reasons there, but you have to, if you're a big company, certainly an established company, you have to figure out... And you haven't been particularly innovative, you have to figure out a path to pay for things along the way.

Like you're not going to blow up your entire business model and launch. We've seen some examples of where that's gone horribly wrong. So, you have to be really careful, but I think that there's two, at least two key things I think to focus on. One is don't kid yourself, you know. The kind of subtitle to my book or not the subtitle, but kind of the mantra around the book is aim higher, move faster, act more boldly.

On the aim higher side. I think is one of the big changes over the last few years, and I definitely go into this a lot my first book, Remarkable Retail, is that in a world of abundant choice, 24/7 access, et cetera, all the things that, you know, the internet, ecommerce have brought us, is customers don't have to settle for merely good or even quite good.

So you just have to understand that the bar has been raised for performance. So some of the benchmarking, I think that you get out of consultants or traditional consumer research and get to back a little bit to the story about Sears, we had done all that stuff. And we're like, “we can be, deliver as good of value as Kohl's or we can be as convenient as whatever, then we're going to be great.” But people aren't going to switch back to us just because we're the same.

And by the time we implement, the gap closing, the competition is probably that much further ahead. So you have to really reorient yourself to how much amplification you need on customer value to meet evolving customer needs, but to distance yourself as much as you can from the competition.

So, I think that's just one frame that traditional benchmarking doesn't help. The other thing is most approaches, and this has been a thing for years, I didn't just come up with this. “What business are you in?” is a question. And you mentioned the needle thing. I would like to do another shout out for the late great Clayton Christensen and his idea of customers jobs to be done, which some folks might be familiar with. If they are not, it's worth checking out.

Other people have come at it the same way, but ultimately what is the value that you're delivering to the customer? What's the problem you're solving or the solution you're delivering? And sometimes, often, product focus companies just define the product too narrowly.

So, if you're Blockbuster and you're in the video rental business, there's one way of looking at it, or you could say, I'm in the weekend and evening entertainment business, right? There are other ways to solve that problem, which Netflix first solved through CDs, then it's solved through streaming. Now it's solving through its own production.

VRBO and Airbnb is a different way, it's not a better hotel, it's better in some sense, but they didn't just incrementally improve on the hotel because we've got a cooler bar, bigger rooms, and fancier fitness center. That's the way Marriott and Hyatt think about it, or Lyft, Uber.

There's plenty of examples of where people have opened the aperture. They thought more radically about what the end delivery is in terms of customer value. But the other thing of course, is marrying technology in an interesting way and not necessarily assuming, I've got to own the hotel, I got to have a big box store in a mall, I have to have the taxi fleet configured in a certain way with medallions, and all that kind of stuff.

So, I think you've got to be willing to, in some cases, blow up the way you think about it. And be able to maybe reconfigure your business. Now, if you're an existing company, and this, I think is something Walmart's done beautifully. If you think about a company that you would say, how much more growth can they there be in this model? They're so humongous and yet they're outpacing the vast amount of their competitors. And not that they're going to be a hyper growth company, but I think about their ability to keep thinking about different ways to execute their supply chain strategy and so forth.

So, it's not a radical reworking. If they had listened to the conventional wisdom, they would have not invested in their stores. It would have put everything into e-commerce rather than thinking about a hybrid. So, every situation is going to be a little bit different. But I think if you can't open the aperture, you can't be willing to think about getting inspiration from other sorts of businesses. Then you're probably not looking at the problems simply enough.

Andy Murray

Yeah. A couple of points there. I think what I've appreciated about working at Walmart was the number of dig sites they would open up to be testing new ideas, knowing full well, that may not scale. But that's okay. They don't ask the question, will it scale before you get started? You experiment and test, which then maybe one out of 10 will scale. That's okay. But that culture of constantly innovating.

Steve Dennis

Yeah. One of the things I found myself saying, I say that a little bit in this book, but as I've been talking to people about the book they're really interested in “What's that secret formula to be super innovative?” I said, “I wish I could tell you.” There are some things I think from a process standpoint, gating process, that there are things that are good practices to speed innovation.

But I said, “The two things that I found in my experience is innovative companies try more stuff and they know when to shut something down. They accept that failure.” In my first book, I quote Seth Godin, who says “Failure is not a failure is not an option, then neither is success.” So they embraced that. But part of that is knowing when to say “Yeah, interesting, but didn't get anything out of it.” That's just inherent to the process. Or here's an interesting piece to keep, but the fundamental original idea is not working. Or scale, step on the gas when you've got something that looks scalable. So, I think it's much more orientation to having a culture of experimentation and understanding that failure is part of the process and trying more stuff.

I worked for too many companies where we used an Easter cliche, I guess, and put all our eggs in one basket. Then when it turned out for whatever reason, it didn't work. And it was like back to the drawing board three years and many millions of dollars incinerated later.

Andy Murray

There's something else too, I think that goes with that.

And I've seen, we were launching a lot of different projects, but then it really came down to the leadership mindset. There was some real learnings about who do you put in charge of innovation and who raises the hand? Because traditionally on some of the bigger things, it might be who's a good operator and knows how to get things done and can push things through.

They ended up. What would they do? Well, they would typically say, let me take it offline. I'll take it as a skunk works project, which they always stink when they're done. But then when it comes to the reveal of what they built a year later, nobody else buys it. They don't, it just doesn't fit. It doesn't work.

And versus a leader that knows how to collaborate, that has a bit more of a growth mindset that values collaboration. They're not afraid of the unknowns. I think this book gets at that kind of the mindset challenge because same company, but just different leadership mindsets on how you drive innovation can make or break the project enormously.

And the culture tends to go to the most successful operator to probably lead it. But they go through incrementality, not through a questioning curious mind. So that starts to get to, I think, what the core of the book is about. The leader, the seven mindset leaps and let you to just kind of top line that.

Steve Dennis

Yeah. Just happy to going back to what I said earlier, just became really curious about, it's a question that I don't exactly say in the book, but I keep coming back to is: “If the world has changed so much. Why have you changed so little?” And in some cases, the “you” is the company or the organization. In some cases, it's the specific leader.

And what I try to do with these seven mind leaps is do a little bit of, okay, here's the conventional way of approaching it and here's a leap to a different way of thinking about it. Which hopefully are both helpful and a little bit provocative. As I mentioned, a couple of the points I make are strategic points. Things like, I believe the era of trying to out Walmart, out Amazon is very tough. I call it demassification. I don't know if that's a real word, much more interesting niches and some other things. But as it relates to leadership challenges, I think a lot about, there's to me, this interesting intersection between ego, ignorance, and fear.

And I know ignorance is sometimes a charged word, but what I mean is that, if you're not doing the work, if you're not waking up to new realities and being radically honest with yourself, which is both breaking through denial, but also going out there. I call it exploring the perimeters of your ignorance. Actually understanding where you're comfortable and where you're knowledgeable. But pushing yourself to say, “Gee, why couldn't I?”

I worked with a company a few years ago that got into this very aggressive exploratory process. They said, “You know, we believe innovation in our space is yes, it's going to come from our direct competitors or adjacent spaces, but it could come from the hospitality world. It could come from the banking world.” And they really tried to see. Because now in this frictionless world, as consumers, our experience, whether it's B2B or B2C, it's not just limited by the companies in our town, right? Aside from people traveling more and more all the time, we can experience the best shopping cart from Germany or whatever it might be. So that often defines how customers think about whether you're serving them well or not. It's not just, I'm buying a shoe. So, I'm only considering the people where I can go buy a shoe.

So, I think there's a lot about figuring out what you need to know, being honest about what you don't know. And then being open to that, being curious and going to explore that. That's related to where the ways ego get in the way. Some of that is imposter syndrome. I'm in a meeting. I don't know what they're talking about when they talk about gen AI, micro fulfillment centers, whatever it might be, and being willing to be vulnerable. And bring more people under the tent, so to speak, to inform you.

The other big idea I think is, we talked about fear already a decent amount, I think the other one is this idea, which is a good book by the way, though it's not exactly pointed in the same way, is What Got You Here, Won't Get You There.

And what I've seen more and more is you go back to, and I've been guilty of this for sure even in writing this book, like when I started writing it, I wrote it very much in the way that I wrote Remarkable Retail. And for a bunch of reasons that wasn't really getting the job done, but it was comfortable.

Okay. I've written a book. I know how to do this. I can write it in this particular way, which was going to be largely about lots of data and big bulletproof kind of arguments and things like that. And for various reasons, that wasn't the way to go. Now, whether this way is the way to go, we'll see, but it's different. But I think if you've worked your way up through the ranks of big companies, as both of us have done, there's a pretty prescribed way of doing it and it tends to reinforce certain behaviors, but yet where you see the biggest failures of transformation are in these big companies that were once successful. So, at some point that way of doing things appears to have run out of gas. So I argue that you should just assume that what's made you successful in the past, not that it's completely irrelevant, but don't assume that the particular set of skills are going to serve you.

The other thing though, which I think is a harder thing and really does. Get at the the problems of ego is to say, “Not only may it not serve me all that well it might actually be getting in the way.” I love Adam Grant's work, I draw on it here. Adam Grant's idea of rethinking unlearning, I think, is so powerful. I think you should buy my book first, but then you should buy Adam's book. But I think that's a huge thing and it's tough to admit that when, you know, when you've had success for many years in lots of cases, doing things a particular way.

Andy Murray

For sure. I mean, there's a lot to unpack on what you just covered there. And you spent quite a bit of time about crushing your ego and thinking about that and talking about it. At what point did you get the epiphany that humility and vulnerability is such an important bedrock idea to be the kind of leader that can take leaps?

I mean that can also be very terrifying for someone that is not wired that way. Perhaps have been brought into the culture of how things should be, because of how they grew up. All those things you said. But for you, that wasn't an easy journey. You worked hard to work through that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve Dennis

n find an easier way, but in: 2008

I was really struggling at my job, the things that I felt most passionate about. I was not able to persuade the leadership to go along with them. I was convinced I was right and they were all wrong. And that got me into a bad headspace, but also wasn't particularly effective at getting anybody to listen to me as it turns out.

But I had lost so much perspective. Like if I wasn't successful at my job, I was not a successful human being. I mean, that was kind of the way. I have a fairly public about this. I've had some struggles with depression and anxiety. And so that really brought things to a head. My marriage was a mess. My health wasn't good. So, in a weird way I had, it's a little bit, maybe this is a weird tie, perhaps but I got to a point of desperation that it was so clear that things weren't working that I had to take a hard look. So maybe it's like the COVID moment of clarity or something where it's a bit of desperation.

Like I wish I could have worked that out earlier and not brought so many people along with me. So hopefully some of the advice in here, that's not just have a crisis in your life. Sometimes that's what it takes. But try to really be examining where you're not able to see clearly. Because you're too attached to a particular way of doing things, too attached to success, not letting people in.

I was terrible at asking for help. It would have been a lot better if I had asked for more help, both in my personal life and professional life earlier. But I was like, when I was struggling at work, it was like, I'm going to go fix it. I'm going to figure this out. And I'm not going to admit that I'm maybe not as skilled as I need to be in a particular area or whatever.

And there's always particular situations of the job, the job I had. and the people I had to deal with That's not so important. I think we all, have to work to your particular situation. But my ego was really ruling the roost and my lack of vulnerability and my fixation on a particular way of getting success wasn't helping and hurt a lot actually.

Andy Murray

Well, I'm glad you kept it in. I found it very instructive and helpful. I think the vulnerability came through in that, and I see it. And Nietzsche's got a great quote that's probably designed for those innovators that are trying to do transformation, and that is, “be careful when going out and slaying dragons. As you look into the abyss, the abyss is looking into you.”

And I've not seen, I've seen a lot of big transformational projects where the leader, they change. They have to change, right? Because to be successful, you've got to go through this personal journey. And this kind of leadership is very personal.

It'll challenge your value system. It'll challenge your belief system. That's why I like this book so much. I'm not trying to keep pushing the book, but because these minds are there, they're real and they're real factors in being successful at transformation because these were a barrier to you to be as successful as you want it to be until you work through it.

And I think that's true, probably anybody that tries to lead transformational change and get an organization to go where they may not want to go or they're afraid to go, it's such a, it changes the way you operate to get there.

Steve Dennis

For sure. And one of the things, and I think I say this perhaps more elegantly than I'm about to say it. But when I think about what causes people to hesitate or to slow walk whatever initiative they're doing, I can tell you one of my default excuses was I need more data or I need more information or we need to do more analysis. And I hear that. I have a client right now that's what they're stuck or treading water because we need more analysis.

And I said on a call the other day to them, to their president, I said, “with all due respect, I don't think you need any more data. What you need is a lot more courage.” That is the defining fact. I'm not, believe me, I built my career on lots of analysis and consumer, and so I am a fan of data and analysis.

And if anything, I have a little sign on my desk in the other room that says, “hold on, let me overthink it”, which was given to me by a very dear friend of mine. And so guilty as charged, but when it comes down to a lot of this, it's courage and it's courageous leadership. So yeah, you got to have a good strategy.

You got to have a good plan. You got to have your Gantt charts and all that is good. But the defining factor, I think more and more is the ability to radically embrace the reality and that will get you hopefully to a point of desire to change. And then you got to, you know, channeling a little bit of Hamilton, summon of all the courage you require and take that leap.

Andy Murray

I think also, not just an individual level, teams can fall into that. I had a few different changes of CEOs in different environments to work through at the exec level as I'm sure you have as well. And you can tell when a team is struggling a bit because you get these complex problems.

There's two types of problems I think a board or an exec has to deal with. Those that are complex and you do need to go back and get more data because it's hard to understand. But then there's those that are just hard to swallow. And it's the hard to swallow that paralyzes the board because it means killing a pet project or maybe taking the brand where you don't know where it's going to go, right?

But getting more data, the worst thing you could do in those situations is send that project manager, whoever back to get more data. It's soul crushing for them. It's just the wrong thing to do.

Steve Dennis

Yeah, I think the other thing too, which is I think a pretty typical solution, but a typical approach is, it's rarely all or nothing. It's usually a mix, hopefully, of a portfolio of things.

I think that getting the team alignment is critically important. I think that one of the things as a leader is you have to demonstrate that you've got the team's back, right? If you're putting yourself out there as leading a transformation, you've got to demonstrate if people get with the program that you've got their back.

But I think the other part, and I talk about this a little bit, stealing some ideas from the Heath brothers who talk about shrink the change is you can approach problems by making certain things more bite size so that you don't have to eat the whole elephant. But also often you have a portfolio approach.

And again, we talked about that earlier. I think one of the things to do is it's not, you don't have to present this as, “Oh my God, we're going to be totally different company in six months.” That's rarely going to be the right thing for an organization. But if you're going to get traction around transformation, you've got to make steady process and I think that's where standing up pilots or maybe it's making an acquisition, but having that portfolio approach that doesn't make people freak out that suddenly it's an all or nothing proposition. And you're either going to go, you're either going to be a hero or go down with the ship. I think most people are not going to respond well to that, but you also have to be really careful about who's on the bus or off the bus.

You know, the, I taught one of the things I talk about is the speed of disruption and the need for speed. And you've got to really look hard at the impediments to that. And sometimes that's people like people that won't get on board, right. And you don't have to be harsh about it. It might not be the right thing for you to be at this company.

And that's okay. The sooner you're honest about that and get on with it, I think the better off you are. But at the same time, building agility in the process, building that experimentation into the process that will help bring people along. But none of this, particularly for big, complex organizations. The last thing I would ever say is that this is easy work.

It's not, it's hard. It takes a lot of courage, it takes time, if you haven't been doing some of this, it does take time to work through these cultural issues, process issues, talent issues, etc.

Andy Murray

Yes, a hundred percent. It's not an easy journey, but with the right mindsets, and I think that's why, the mind leaps, taking them as a whole body of work.

Not just, it's not just about ego. It's not just about paying attention and staying awake, being awake, but it's the collection of those, I think that becomes a holistic way to lead that you've got to pay attention to and really tap into. Well, man, I've really enjoyed our time together. Congratulations on the book.

I can't wait to see it hit the market. I think it's definitely a worthwhile read for anyone that's trying to lead change in their own life, personally, or in corporate environments, no matter it's CPG, retail, or medical fields, you name it. It's the same set of core fundamental issues. So great having you on.

Steve Dennis

Thank you. It's always great to talk to Andy. I appreciate it.

Andy Murray

That's it for this episode of It's a Customer's World. If you found this helpful and entertaining, I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends. And I'd be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes. And if you really want to help leave us a five-star rating and a positive review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen, It's a Customer's World Podcast is a product of the University of Arkansas's Customer Centric Leadership Initiative and a Walton College original production.

More Episodes

46. Steve Dennis on Navigating Leadership and Transformation in a Customer-Centric World