297 - The Human Element in Business: Understanding Perspectives and Fostering Collaboration with Making Science's Jason Downie

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Jason Downey, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the United States CEO of a company called Making Science. The website is makingscience.com. And first, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. And second, tell us a little bit about your backstory and then we'll get into what making science is all about.

Yeah, thanks Doug. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Just a little bit of how I got here. It's a winding road. So obviously 30 years in business of some sort. I started out my career at Bain and Company, management consulting. I did 10 years there. I quit Bain and Company and I joined a boy band and I, I sang a cappella and I toured America professionally for 4 years. I did 300 shows a year and with some kids I met in middle school. So I did that, left the boy band, bought a bar, a local bar here in Maryland. And I learned a lot about leadership and how to manage people and egos by managing bartenders. That was pretty fun. So 7 years there. And then, About a little over 15 years ago, I got, got divorced and I had to like a little bit of a reckoning moment and decided to get back into like my roots, business and consulting and things. So I got a job at a little company called Lodemy, which I had never heard of. It was an ad tech company. I didn't know what a cookie was or like how digital media worked or anything. So I had to, because of my gap in my career, 10 years of not doing business, I had to start like towards the bottom again. So that was humbling and interesting. So I was, I went from data analyst to chief revenue officer in 10 short years. Wow. Yeah. So I, it was a good, it was a really good ride. I learned, it was a startup. I started with 3 people on my team and ended up with 50 people, over 50 people globally and built a business from a couple million in revenue to $40 million in revenue over that time. And then Google came calling and so I got, got a job at Google as director of data and tech for the Americas. And I led a team of really smart, amazing people that whose job it was to advance the digital maturity of Google's biggest customers in America. Wow. So in my book was Procter Gamble and Mondelez, Mars, Coke, Pepsi, McDonald's, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, et cetera, et cetera. My book had about, I don't know, $3 billion worth of spend per year on Google, which was pretty amazing. And then got a job at Making Science leading, we're basically a Google tech partner. So we enable Google technology for those same brands, types of brands I mentioned earlier a minute ago to advance their digital maturity. But Google not being a, not being a services company, Google's a tech company. There's a, there's a big ecosystem of service partners like ours. I got to, I had the good fortune of meeting my boss who's the global CEO of Making Science. We're a 1,200-person company in 15 countries and it's an 8-year-old company. My boss also was at Google before, before me and So really built a powerhouse digital, like data agency of record, if you will, for big brands.

So explain to— that's an amazing story for those— I'm not technologically ignorant, but a lot of what you're talking about is way above me. It just, I learned how to code in 1969, but that was a long time ago. And I did not go, I did not, I learned at Dartmouth from John Kemeny, who was the guy who developed the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, basic programming language. And that's how I learned. But that was to prepare me for the technological changes that he and his colleagues at Dartmouth saw. And all of us in those days were getting prepared for what was to come. Uh, but I went into law, not into engineering. So when you talk about digital marketing and digital data and working with these big companies, what exactly are you guys doing? What's the service that you're providing?

Yeah. So we provide consulting services and technology that allow these companies to get better at marketing using data.

Like Google AdWords, they're using a Google AdWords platform, for example, or maybe something more sophisticated.

Exactly. So as one example, so Google Marketing Platform or GMP is like the tech stack that most marketers use to get their message out to consumers like us who want to buy things. And so when you Google something and you see all the search results, like those are like, a lot of those are paid. And so like, how do you opt, how do you optimize the money that you spend to pay for those ads, whether it's in Google Search or it's Google Display. So you see like the banner ads and things like that or YouTube. So you see a lot of things on video there, also connected TV, right? So you see ads on Amazon Prime, you see all that stuff can be targeted, it can be Optimized. You, audience is a big thing that, that we talk about a lot is, are you seeing the right audience to, to show your message, your targeted messaging? And then are the people gonna buy? Are they gonna convert? Are they gonna, are they gonna have great lifetime customer, lifetime value, for example? So if you're an insurance company or you're a car company or whatever you are, and you're like, I want to target Jason. Jason likes to buy Nike shoes and has a Ford Bronco, but isn't as interested in maybe an electric car or a, not that I don't love electric cars, my wife and I, my wife has one. So, so you can decide like who to target based on information and your business goals and things like that. So there's a lot of technology that keeps changing and now we've got AI that gets put into the situation and it's, I always say when I give a talk, like we're not in the first inning of AI, we're like still in the parking lot and we haven't bought a ticket yet. A lot of progress to be made. And what I tell my clients is you have to develop like a test and learn mentality and a culture of experimentation. Fail fast, fail cheap, learn from your mistakes. And a lot of folks have made the, the, the, a lot of folks have made the mistake of investing millions and millions of dollars in the AI, for example, and not knowing like what the ROI is going to be, what kind of results they're going to get. So that's a lot of the things that I, we help our clients navigate these days.

Got it. And there's a huge amount of data aggregation that goes on in this whole process.

Totally. Yeah. And it's interesting that you say that because the signal loss is actually pretty severe. There's privacy. Yeah. These days, right? Like back when I was at Loadami back in 15 years ago, there was a lot more signal, like cookies, if you've ever heard of those things.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And they track you as you go around the internet. And so it's, there've been a lot of privacy laws put into place in Europe. They put in a law called GDPR in 2018. And then now CCPA, the California—

I live in California. We have—

so, you know, so, so like the cookies are going away, right? Safari, Apple Safari took out third-party cookies like 2017 and then Firefox did it.

We thought that was going to be the end of Facebook, right?

Exactly. There's other ways to do it. So when I was at Google, Google announced they were going to deprecate the cookie in Chrome and that's when everybody really lost their minds. And so marketers were like, okay, I need to figure out how I'm going to do business in the future. Like what we call durable solutions, post-cookie, post-signal loss. And so what we tell people is basically your relationship with your consumer is the goal. So like you can still target them and track them, but you have to get consent. It has to be explicit consent. So if you're an Adidas, say, and you have an app and you want people to, you want to get somebody's email so that you can learn more about them, you give them a 20% discount on shoes and then it's called the value exchange, right? So you give, and so what we're telling people now is We're moving from the era of precision marketing to predictive marketing. So basically now you take those, the little bit of gold that you have from your relationships, and then you use AI and data science and machine learning to expand those audiences into the platforms. So into Google, into Meta, into TikTok, wherever you want to put it.

And then you can see how close was our prediction to reality and you refine and reiterate and that sort of process.

You got it. It's collect, organize, activate, measure, do it again.

I totally get it. Now I understand. Making science.

There you go. Digital, digital marketing in 3 short minutes.

There you go. So what is it that gets you excited in the morning? You get up and go to work and you've been doing this stuff, you've been in this sector for 15 years before that, lots of other interesting business experiences. What today motivates you to, to keep, keep chugging along?

Yeah, I, I love people and I love to solve problems. And I love to win.

So a little competitive, huh?

Yeah, it's weird. I'm not really in board games and things like that, but I just love the satisfaction. I love when this Making Science Adventure, just to back up a second, I've only been here, I've been here like just 2 years and we built a team, like Making Science is global, but the US business was pretty nascent when I took over. So we had to build a team. I brought some folks from Google. I brought some folks from other, my network and. We had basically zero customers less than 2 years ago, and now we have over 20 customers and we have, we're paying for ourselves, we're contributing positively to the corporation globally. And that was, that's, that's exciting. Growing my old business from $2 million to $40 million. I just, I take great satisfaction in that. And the team along the way to do it together is just, is the best. It's like being, I guess I was never good enough to, I played little sports in high school, but like most of us, not good enough to do it for my job. But I imagine that's what it's like. You know, if you're in the NFL, my, my hero, Tom Brady, you win a few Super Bowls. It's gotta, it's gotta be that sort of feeling. I love it.

Wow. And, and so what is it you think that's unique about yourself that you personally bring to the table that has made all of this work in order to, for example, create this team and make the team really perform well?

Yeah, I think I've, I always consider myself to be I don't know, just myself, pretty authentic. I try to just bring myself to the job every day and to my interactions with both my team and my customers and prospects and my family, whatever. It's just, it's, I'm unapologetically myself for better or for worse. I have this acronym that I keep trying to make into a book, but I haven't made it quite, had enough commitment to make it stick yet. But I think of TEAM as an acronym, transparency, empowerment, accountability, and measurement. Right? So I think if I do those 4 things with my team, I'm as transparent as I possibly can be. I tell them the truth and they see what's coming. I empower them to do a good job. I hold them accountable and then measure it so we get the satisfaction and good news in public, bad news in private. All that sort of stuff is just part of my, my, my style, I think. And my team, the biggest compliment, I just said this earlier on a business call this morning, like the biggest compliment that I ever got in my career was when I came from Google into making science and I was able to bring you know, 8 people that worked at Google with me that were just, that I had worked with in some capacity before. And that was just the biggest compliment you can get is that people want to keep working with you. They see you have a vision and then you want to do something special and that's the best reward you can get.

Yeah. You leaving Google, it's gotta be a big decision because one, it's really hard to get a job at Google. Two, Google pays really well. You may have the opportunity with stock options and everything else. So it's, that's leaving that kind of environment is a real testament to your leadership.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just, it's a big company. Huge. It's a city.

Huge.

Exactly. It's a city. And so there's different pluses and minuses to that versus being at a— I call this my Goldilocks job. I think Lotame was too small, Google was too big, and this one's just right.

Wow. Good for you.

Yeah.

So I, I wanna pivot a little bit to listening. You didn't get to where you are without becoming a good listener. How did you develop your listening skills?

Yeah, it's trial and error over the years, right? I'm 53 now and I, I'm definitely a much, much better listener now than I was when I was 23 and just learning hard lessons. I'm also, I'm also sober. So I quit drinking 7 years ago and I spent a lot of time like working on myself and working on thinking about me and how I could be better. And what I've learned about myself is I'm a control freak and I, it's hard for me to, it's hard for me to let things go and like how I react to things. So I work on it every day, like with myself and Being a listener is part of that. I, I, I spend a lot of time talking to other folks who have similar afflictions and it's just understanding stories and understanding how people are, who they are and what motivates them is really like interesting to me. And it's really, you can't do that without listening. So I, I feel like when I work with my team or work with my wife or my family or whatever, it's like, what is the motivating factor here in this conversation? What are people's superpowers? What are they great at? What do they take satisfaction in doing? Like we all, we all have it and At the end of the day, we all want to be like valued. And so knowing what kind of value we each can provide to any given situation, to your job, to your family life is like, everybody has that. So 10 different people on my team have 10 different perspectives completely. Like they, we, we all go into the same room, we listen to the same thing, we all leave and there's 10 different opinions, like 10 different stories, 10 different stories. And so like understanding like how, what makes people tick in that regard is, is really hard. And so you have to listen. And so spend a lot of time practicing that continuous improvement, kaizen, right? What is it? Progress, not perfection, right?

That's exactly right. Never, never look for perfection. Just look for incremental improvement. That's what I teach my clients is you're never looking for perfection. All you look for is can we improve just a little bit? Every single day.

1% better every day.

And boy, it makes you—

In 100 days will be 100%. No, I'm just kidding.

Exactly. It's astounding how that kind of an attitude can change things. So where do you see yourself in 10 years? You're 53 now. Say you're at 63. You're going to continue. You're going to make US Division of Making Science into this massive— Yeah, I hope to.

Yeah, I hope to. I think in truth, I see myself retired in 10 years. Okay. Yeah. Some sort of—

I don't think, I don't think you're retired. You're gonna just be doing something different.

Yeah. But I, so my wife and I, I really, luckily I like her. We love to travel. Oh, okay. Um, and so we have like a lot of people, we have this map on our wall where like we put pins in the places we've been and I feel like we've been a lot of places and, and I look at the map and it's like empty and it's like, what the heck? You know, it's like the world is such a big place. And we love to trek and I like to. Exercise, and I think it's the key. Physical fitness is the key to growing old, to, to growing older the most reward. And so we do a lot of trekking. So we climbed Mount Kilimanjaro a couple years ago. We trekked to Everest Base Camp last year.

18,000 feet. That's gotta be a little tough.

Yeah, for sure. Elevation is definitely no joke. Kilimanjaro is 19,300 and Everest Base Camp is 17,500, like you said. And it's, right. It's a different world up there. And but it's really rewarding. It's another thing you train. You work really hard, right, for several months and then you do it and you're like, that was gratifying. What's the next thing? So I have a lot of those aspirations to do that sort of stuff, but we'll see where we are. As of right now, we talk about 1% improvement. My perspective has changed big time from 5 years ago to now. So we'll see where I am in 5 years. But I think traveling is definitely on the agenda. I think I'd love to find a way to, to give back. My kids are, our kids are 20 to 25 years old and grandkids will be coming, hopefully not too soon, but at some point. What does that even mean?

I don't, I don't know. So when you look at your leadership team, team, how, what are the kinds of things you're doing to develop the younger people in your team so they can come up and take senior leadership roles in the future?

Yeah, like I said, I think empowerment is really important. What we do is hard and we talked about a 3 to 5 minute primer on it, but most of the clients that we have are like, they have Frankenstein implementations of tech.

They've stacked all this stuff that barely fits together.

Yeah. It's, oh, you know, it's very, it can be very daunting. And so we come in and look at it and try to help them figure out what's working and what's not working and how to move it around. And I tell my team they have to be great listeners too. What we do is like a lot of discovery. You've heard the old adage, like two ears and one mouth. And it's like that, it's like asking the questions and asking the next right question and listening to the answer and asking the next one and all that sort of stuff is like the most important thing. And so empowering them to do that.

Yeah, I was gonna say, and also learning to listen for what, for what not's being said.

Right.

In between, you know, oftentimes you can go in, you can go in and start talking with clients about what the, what their situation is and they don't know what aren't they telling you or what are they hiding from you because they don't wanna look bad in front of their boss.

Totally. I had somebody on my team just yesterday, they, they had a call with a client and, and I asked them like, what, what can we help them with? What's the next project? He said the SVP was in the room. So people weren't saying like, oh, I need help with this. I need help standing this up. So we have to go back in and get them alone, you know, or get them with, with people just in the smaller team, because when you're in a big room, a lot of times you don't get the full truth, right?

Right.

So, or, or the, or all the information, whatever that may be.

Yeah, exactly. Because the SVP has one view of the world and every, everybody underneath has a completely different view of the world.

Yep. However many people are in the room. They have that many different views.

Exactly. Yeah, I've dealt with that a lot as a professional peacemaker and mediator. I've dealt with that problem a lot. Once when two people see the same thing and one says the sky is blue and the other one says the sky is black, right?

And it all comes back to this, the thing about people's motivations and their, and wanting to feel valued and wanting to, whatever goals they have, right? Like I tell people, like I'll ask people, what's your job here? And they're, they'll say, my job is to sell something to this person, or my job is to deliver this project to that person. And I'll say, no, your job is to get that person promoted. Exactly. And if you get that person promoted, they'll be your client forever.

No, you're at that. That's a brilliant, that's brilliant. And that's exactly correct. It's, it's all about the people.

Your job, people on my team's job is to get promoted based on what I think or what our leadership team thinks. And the way that they get promoted is by helping other people get promoted. It's just like everybody wants to, to be loved and get it.

And everybody wants to be heard and validated and these basic human needs. I don't care whether you're in the business world or some other sector. Human beings are the same across the board. Have the same—

I'll tell you a funny story. I was in New York a couple years ago and I was, it was raining and I was like in a taxi and I get out to go to this, go to a meeting and I just see all these people. Like if you're afraid of things or you don't know like who's like humans are tribal, go to New York and just see like the vast different types of people and everybody's running around and it was cold and it was rainy and everybody's scurrying from wherever they were to get to the other thing. And I'm just like, man, everybody right now just wants to be warm and dry.

Exactly.

It doesn't matter like how old or how young you are or what color you are or what gender you are. Like you just wanna not be in the rain. So it's like, it was like either get an umbrella or get inside or whatever, get a coat. And I just, that really struck me that day for whatever reason. I remember posting it on—

Commonality of our needs.

Yeah. Of who we are. It's like we all want the same things at the base, right?

Exactly correct. One more question. I'll let you go, Jason. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Man, I already told the boy band thing, didn't I?

Yeah, you did. I'm a jazz violinist.

Are you really? That's awesome.

There you go.

That's awesome. Um, so my favorite TV show is Survivor. Which is like a very first reality show. Yeah. And it might be weird for somebody, like I'd never watched it up through 15 years of it being on and I just caught onto it like 5 years ago and I watched everything from the beginning.

Wow.

And what I love about it is that it really speaks to like the, like what, what we've been talking about here. That show is all about that.

It's really like group dynamics. Mm-hmm.

Group dynamic. Like people get off this boat, nobody knows anybody, nobody has any preconceived, and then you see somebody and you talk to them and you're like, And these people are trying to build consensus and trying to get people to do things, to do what they want them to do and to do it. It, it's just fascinating. I, I don't watch it for the, the challenges are fun and all that, but I really watch it for the group dynamics and how people can influence other people who are strangers 2 days ago, who are now like trusting them to do X, Y, Z, or get you, you get people to be on the same page. No motivation other than everybody wants to win the million dollars.

And they're all, all, all ultimately, ultimately competing with each other.

That's right. And so how do you, and then at the end you start voting people off and then those people that you voted off have to vote for you to win. It's, it's totally amazing. Like it's the most incredible human experience experiment. Oh, and by the way, it's all on national TV. So it's insane.

Craziness. Jason, thanks so much for your time today. It's been a great conversation.

Yeah. Thanks, Doug. Thanks for having me and good luck.

Thanks. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.