Detonate Your Business with Geoff Tuff

How do you feel about best practices? After today's episode, you will likely feel differently. Our guest today says we should detonate our business. Are you ready? Let's go.

Welcome to the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. We are here each week to talk about leadership, Teamwork, organizational culture, and human potential with experts from every walk of life. Your host is Kevin Eikenberry, a bestselling author and leadership thought leader for 25 years. This episode is sponsored by Kevin's book, The Long Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. Order your copy today at remarkablepodcast.com/book. And now here's your host, Kevin.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Our guest today is Geoff Tuff. We're going to introduce you to Geoff and then we're going to dive in. How about that? Geoff is a principal at Deloitte and a senior leader of the firm's innovation and applied design practices. In the past, he led the design firm Doblin and was a senior partner at Monitor Group, serving as a member of its global board of directors before that company was acquired by Deloitte. He's been involved in some way with Monitor for more than 25 years. His work centers around helping clients transform their businesses to grow and compete in non-traditional ways. It's one of the reasons why you're gonna love our conversation. Over the course of his career, he has worked in virtually every industry and has used that breadth of knowledge and experience to bring novel insights about how things might operate for clients that are stuck in industry conventional wisdom. He's a frequent speaker and writer on the topic of growth through innovation and has written for a variety of outlets including the Harvard Business Review. He holds degrees from Dartmouth and the Harvard Business School, and he's the co-author of a brand new book titled Detonate: Why and How Companies Must Blow Up Best Practices and Bring a Beginner Mindset to Survive. Geoff, welcome to the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for having me. That was quite the intro. I hope I live up to it as we go through this.

Hey, most of it was written for me, so, you know, your mother did a fine job, Geoff.

Yeah, right, exactly.

So let's— we're going to get to the book and all of that in a bit, but first, just tell us a little bit about your journey or your path to get to this point. A lot of times people want to know sort of, so how did you get here?

Yeah. So, well, in some ways it's a very straightforward story and I certainly don't have nearly as many twists and turns as many other people and actually as we recommend in the book, Detonate. There's a chapter that we actually dedicate to having a very fluid career and being willing to jump around a little bit, but I haven't jumped around that much. I started my, I suppose, my working life as a failed novelist, and not until now have I actually published a book. I've done a lot of writing, but along the way, I've been a strategy consultant for almost 26 years at this point, really focusing most of my time on the subjects of organic growth. It started off as kind of organic growth in the core business, so marketing and sales excellence, and over the course of the last 11, 12 years or so, I've really been specializing in innovation and in developing new business models to compete differently. So, Betnate, actually, I think of as being, in many ways, a culmination of a lot of those experiences, a lot of the conversations I've had with clients, a lot of what I've seen clients struggle with, and a lot of the frustrations that my co-author Steve Goldbach and I have had in working with clients when it's so clear what they need to be doing differently, but the organizational norms stop them from doing it.

They're so tight in. You know, it's interesting, for those of you listening, you know, we have a variety of guests here, and I'm happy to have all of them. I think that while what Geoff and I are going to talk about today will apply to all of us, I think as someone who read the book, the bigger the organization that you're in, the more you're going to nod your head and shake your head as you read the book. Would that— would you say that's a fair statement?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And it's interesting, we've had a number of conversations in forums that are made up primarily of earlier-stage companies and entrepreneurs, and we frame a lot of the lessons in Detonate as things you've got to avoid as you scale, because the reality is, it's completely normal to build up organizational playbooks as you get bigger and more successful, because you have a successful business model. And the more established a company, the more successful the business model, the more the people who are running the place want to be able to lock that down and say, okay, this is how we operate. And you don't tend to have that necessarily if you're a brand new company, but as you get bigger and more successful, all those same tendencies and temptations will occur. So, we'd like to think that the book is broadly applicable and there are lessons in there for everyone, even though we draw our lessons primarily from the big corporate clients that we've had over time.

Yeah, and that was sort of my point. I do think it applies to any of us listening, whatever sort of organization that we're in, size and stage. But I think as I read it, I was thinking way back to more than 25 years ago in my corporate experience and certainly a lot of our corporate clients over time, and I'm like, yep. There it is. And one of those things is, you've got it right in the title, Geoff, Blowing Up Best Practices. Like, best practices are like the Holy Grail. That's what we're trying to get. And now you're telling us to blow them up?

Hey, I'm a corporate strategist, so let me just— let me give you the most logical answer I can to that. That best practices exist for a reason. There are good ways to operate, there are bad ways to operate. All of us have learned things about the way companies should run over the course of 50 or 60 years, whether it's us personally than our organizations have learned those lessons. And there are kind of norms that are valuable to follow. But if you're looking for some degree of competitive advantage, if you're trying to do something differently and you recognize the best practices are available to all of your competitors as well, and everyone is seeking to deploy best practices, then by definition they're no longer best, they're average. Steve and I believe, as we've seen them at play in companies over time, is that we're now, over the course of the last 2 or 3 years in particular, we're now entering an era where relying on best practices isn't just a blocker to discovering and actually leveraging real competitive advantage. It's really dangerous because the pace of change in the markets that we serve and the pace of change throughout our entire business models has accelerated so much recently.

Yeah.

But the best practices that worked even 10 or 15 years ago not only are going to hold you back now, they might actually create a really dangerous operating condition.

So, you and I have been at this a long time, and, you know, we've heard and probably said for a long time, well, the pace of change is getting more rapid. And you just said it again, and I'm channeling my inner audience here thinking, some people are saying, well, that's just Number one, that's what consultants say, and secondly, is that really true? So, like, can we dive in there a little bit more? I mean, is there something fundamentally different in the last 3 or 4 years that's really making that— I think it's always been true, but is it still true? Talk about that just a little bit more.

Yeah, so without getting deeply into physics, I think you're right. Please don't.

This is not the Remarkable Physics Podcast, so let's not do that.

Yeah, no, and I would be quickly out of my depth if I tried to do that. You're right. We have talked for eons, especially consultants have talked for eons about the pace of change accelerating. And sometimes I think that is a misnomer, or it's misapplied to situations where just surprising things have happened, and change has happened, and we just hadn't been expecting it. That's not really an acceleration of change. That's just change, surprising change.

Yeah.

I think what's different now, what's different now, and we're just starting to see evidence of it, is in the last 2, 3, 4 years is the impact of exponential change is actually taking root in markets. And so, we've done a lot of work with our clients over time and with various different partners. There's one that we mentioned in the book called Singularity University, understanding the impact of exponential change and what's happening in the world today. The basic notion there is that for— well, first of all, everyone, I think all of your listeners have probably heard some version of Moore's Law and the fact that computing power has been on an exponential curve for Not just since computers have existed, but actually, you can go back 110, 120 years and extrapolate from other technologies the same sort of exponential curve. Now, what we're seeing is that there's a whole variety of other technologies and trends that because they sit on computing power and they're enabled by computing power, they themselves have the possibility of being exponential. So, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, Biomedicine, all of those things could, in theory, be exponential when you look at them on the surface because they're sitting on computing power. What we're seeing in the last 2 or 3 years is we're just starting to see that knee of the curve where there may have been gradual change, and I can't really draw on a video call—

No, that's fine.

The difference between a linear curve and an exponential curve, but for some period of time, they look very similar. And we just assume that that early stage of an exponential curve is the same thing as linear change. But then when you hit that knee of the curve and things really start to change dramatically and you see that doubling effect, that's where things go haywire. And we're starting to see that haywire effect in a lot of different markets. And the big problem here, the thing that I really want to impress on anyone that will believe me on this is that it's not just an interesting trend. It's just not like you look out there and it's an interesting impact in the world. The problem is we're all wired—

Yeah.

to think linearly. And we've all grown up in a world dominated by linear change, and we literally cannot conceive of what it means to be living in a market or in a business model that is being disrupted exponentially. And I think we're just right in the middle of that, as I said, the knee of the curve where we're starting to see all that change start to occur. So, I could probably go on for another hour explaining all the various different examples of where we see that. For now, I think I'd summarize it by saying it is that exponential effect that's causing this accelerated pace of change.

And I appreciate that because, you know, I think that's why the book is needed now, maybe more than ever. And the book we're talking about is Detonate: Why and How Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices and Bring a Beginner's Mind to Survive. So in the book, you talk about 4 big principles, which, Geoff, which I find to be profoundly true, which is probably one of the reasons why I like the book. So, let's talk about— we kind of got ahead of ourselves here a little bit. Let's go back to those core principles that guide the book, and can we talk about those a little bit?

Sure, yeah. And, you know, without going through the entire book, I'll say we start at the beginning of the book just talking about the operating condition and why it is that we see such a dangerous and downward spiral right now in terms of operating conditions. I can come back and talk about that. afterwards if you're interested. We then identify the 7 most common playbooks that we see companies ill-advisedly relying on too much, and then we say, instead of relying on those 7 playbooks, there are 4 aspects of an operate mindset, or 4 principles that you need to bring to your jobs day in, day out. And I want to be super clear here that it would be tremendously ironic if a couple of guys came along and said, blow up the playbooks, and then operated some more playbooks to use differently. Or to use instead. And so these are principles. There are aspects of a mindset, there are aspects of operating that can be applied in a bunch of different ways, but there is no new playbook that's behind that. But the 4 principles I think of can be split between thinking differently and acting differently. So there are 2 associated with thinking differently, there's 2 associated with acting. The first of the thinking differently ones. Is to always bring a beginner's mind. That one is obviously on the COVID of the book. It's something that I think has been leveraged and talked about a lot, certainly in startups, but recently, increasingly in scale companies. It's something that Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff from Salesforce, and others have touted. It all goes back to— I think it was originally rooted in Zen Buddhism. And there's a quote I'm probably gonna—

Listen, you quote one of my favorite quotes in the book.

Okay, good. Well, you're probably gonna write better than I would then, but it's from Suzuki's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And the quote is something along the lines, you can tell me if I've got it wrong, Kevin, but in the expert's mind, there are few possibilities. In the beginner's mind, there are many. Did I get that right?

Yeah, and then I think the next line actually, which you don't have in the book, the next line is, Yeah. Remain a beginner always, or something like that. But that's the point, right? The point is, once we've decided, once we've locked in, there's nothing else to learn, there's nothing else to get.

Right. And I'd say at the core of most disruptions that we see, especially in markets where we're seeing startups come in and just fundamentally operate differently from incumbents, it's because those entrepreneurs, those people who are naturally inclined to bring a beginner's mind, who don't have decades of history of operating in this space, say, I wonder if I could do that differently. I wonder if I could do it better. And they happen to have the advantage a lot of the times of not having the installed base of not only an existing business that they need to go and serve, but a bunch of assets they need to keep busy. But a lot of the time, it's actually just about opening up the range of different possibilities for how to do something. So, a critical mindset, one of the 4 key principles, is to always bring a beginner's mind. The second principle around thinking differently is to focus everything you do on driving human behavior. So, this will not be surprising to anyone that comes from the world of human-centered design and a belief that human beings are still important. But I would say, and Steve and I base a lot of the book on the premise that even the most digital companies, if you will, the most digitally focused, digitally enabled companies in the world today, if you look at the most basic economic unit of analysis of how they make money, it still comes down to someone, somewhere doing something.

Yep.

And said differently, if you're operating at a certain level, whether you're talking about a growth rate, or a margin, or what have you, the only way to break trend in that— so the only way to do something differently, improve your performance, increase your margins, increase your growth curve, what have you— is to have someone, somewhere do something different. Okay, if you believe that, and I think in some ways it's incontrovertible right now, then the job of business should be about understanding the behaviors, the sum of all behaviors that make up our business value system, with some degree of understanding of what the relative economic value is of each of those behaviors, and where there's most leverage in going and doing something differently, and then aligning all our resources on Impacting those behaviors that have the most value. But if you look at what the job of business is, for most businesses, it's filling out templates, it's going to meetings, it's doing the annual plan, it's doing all sorts of things that actually have absolutely nothing to do with understanding fundamental human behavior and how we make money from driving those behaviors.

And how do we—

The more we can drive the mindset—

How do we understand those behaviors? How do we coach to those behaviors? How do we influence to those behaviors, etc.? It's leadership.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think it's easier, at least as we have conversations about this concept with people, it's easier to think immediately how it applies to customers in the end market. But the same principles apply to any of your employees, any of the operators on your machines, any of your suppliers, any of your partners, any of that. We are all still, thankfully, humans at this point, and that's going to be— I do think the focus on human behavior is one of the key sources of advantage for many companies moving forward. Those are the 2 ones I think that are inside the ledger.

The 8 principles, right? Let's talk about the acting principles.

Yeah, so the acting principles, the first— and I may get the order wrong, but one of the principles is to make minimally viable moves in everything you do. That term probably sounds remarkably familiar for a lot of people, because we ripped it off from the world of product development, where we talk about developing minimally viable products. And as many of your listeners probably know, the notion there is that instead of going through a long, drawn-out, complicated product development process before you take something to market, instead, take the smallest step forward you possibly can as you're developing something new, and then take it out into the market quickly as a prototype to get market reaction. And if customers, or whoever your target is, if they like it, They continue on down the build path. If they don't like it, then go and try something different, or tweak the design, or what have you.

Yep, there's the keyword, everybody. There's the keyword: try. Try something!

Yeah, exactly. And there's absolutely no reason why that same principle can't apply to everything we do in business, whether it's trying out a new compensation system internally, whether it's operating in the market like we just talked about, whether it's about approaching a market differently, being open to working with ecosystems, or what have you. The 6 or 12 or 18-month plan or planning process to get to a place where you have a hypothesis and you want to go and test something. The key here— excuse me— the key here is to take, identify really clearly what it is you want to be testing, and identify then the smallest possible step you can take in the market, ideally in a real operating condition, to get real feedback about whether it's a good idea. And just like you would do if you were doing minimally viable products, if it looks like it's a good idea and employees are accepting of it, for example, then Take the next step and build yourself towards success rather than doing what a lot of companies— and this is one of the things that drives me nuts these days, especially big-scale corporates where there's a mantra that we should try to fail. I know that's a bit of an overstatement, but failing is great. Failing should be celebrated. Failing should not be celebrated. If you failed, then you've waited too long to go and test something. It's literally impossible to fail if you make these minimally viable moves. That's a critical aspect of acting differently.

Gotcha.

And then the final— yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, the last—

So the final one, the other, the 4th one, the other act differently principle is about embracing impermanence. And this is reasonably broad-reaching, but the core idea here is that one of the reasons we're stuck in the way that we are in big-scale companies these days is whether we recognize it or not, we kind of make the assumption that The company's going to be around forever, and there's always going to be a role for me. And what I really need to be able to do is just meet my performance expectations or exceed my performance expectations, climb the career ladder, and enjoy a long career. So I talked before about this vicious cycle that we think is causing such danger in most companies today. At the heart of the vicious cycle is the idea that if we just do what the playbooks say, we're going to get along just fine. But the reality is, if you look at the data, and there's lots of different versions of this chart, but there's a great chart that shows what the average time of a company, what the average lifetime of a company was on the S&P 500 60 years ago, or 50 years ago, and it was something like 50 or 60 years. If you look at what's happening today, the average lifetime is less than 20, and it's dropping. And so, most employees of most scaled companies, call it on the S&P 500 or somewhere else, are not going to be able to enjoy a career-long path at that company because it's not going to exist.

Right.

It's just, if you just go by the law of averages. And so, understanding in the broadest context that we can't assume businesses and business models will be around forever. Understanding in our personal context that jobs and linear career paths that you can dictate from day one are not going to be around forever, and that we should instead be open to measuring our career progress by the different experiences we have and adapting our capabilities as As in as agile a fashion as possible is a much better way of running our career. And that's, that's actually really daunting for a lot of people who like to say— especially risk-averse people who say, I'm going and joining a big-scale corporate because I want to have someone tell me what to go and do and how to operate and to have a long career. But the reality is, it's just not— it's not likely to happen moving forward.

It's not nearly as likely as— and people like you and me have been saying that for a long time, but it's becoming more and more true. You know, Tom Peters was saying this in the mid-'80s.

Yeah.

It's every— it's just more true now than it was, and you just shared some data that helps make that, makes that more reality for all of us. So, I want to go back. The first of the principles you mentioned was the beginner's mind. I mentioned that I, you know, love the same quote that you talk about in the book. How do we operationalize?

I know it's the thinking principle, but what's your advice to us in terms of operationalizing Yeah, so I'd say, like a lot of things, it's a behavior modification, and the behavior modification has to start from the top. And so I think probably the most straightforward and most immediate way any leader can start to have impact and can start to drive people towards bringing a beginner's mind is to ask different questions. Yeah. So, you know, I think a lot of times we're asking the same questions over and over again. In whether you're in a management meeting, or you're in a planning meeting, or what have you, if you can steer away from questions like, what's the ROI on this move for us? Which assumes that we have all the right data. It presumes we know the right way of whatever the ROI— say, let's go back to product development. Let's say that we're developing, we're considering between 2 different products that we want to go and create. Then we're presuming that we're operating in a world where we can go out and get real good customer data, and we can measure how much people are going to buy of a certain product at what price point, and we can But the reality is, if we're living in an exponential time, and markets are changing quickly, and we're suddenly shifting from the world of operating in the world of known or knowable opportunities to unknown and unknowable, which we talk a lot about in the book, right?

Right.

Then, if you're asking for an ROI, you're asking people to lock themselves into our assumptions of the past to predict what's going to happen in the future. So, a better question in that situation would be, how can we move more quickly to get this to market? Or, what can we do to get immediate customer feedback on whether or not this is a good idea? And that will start to shift— it's not immediately telling people to bring a beginner's mind, but it'll shift you away from saying, let's work off the assumptions of how things have operated in the past, and more towards being as market-facing as possible to get immediate feedback and take some of those minimally viable moves. That's an example of one thing that can be done immediately by anyone.

That's perfect, and that connects to the other principles, which of course makes it all the more powerful. So, I'm listening and I'm nodding my head with you, Geoff, and I'm a middle manager, let's just say. Again, channeling my audience here. I'm a middle manager and I like this and I'm gonna go buy Detonate and I'm gonna read it because I'm excited now. But you just said this stuff's gotta start from the top at some level. How do I use some of these ideas as a leader in the middle? Somewhere, and how can— separate question then— how can I influence senior leaders around that?

Show it works. That's the main thing. And so I want to be— so when I say it starts from the top, I don't mean that change can't occur unless it's mandated from the top, but the more we can demonstrate as the most senior leaders of an organization the right behaviors, then the more likely it's going to take off. But if you don't have that type of leadership, or if You don't think that's the right place to start, and there's a lot of companies that actually are actually run by the middle managers and not by the senior leaders. And for those people, anyone that's operating within a P&L, just going and doing something and demonstrating success is the best possible way to take steps forward. This is all tied back to the minimally viable move. I was just going to say, you're just telling us to make a minimally viable move is what you're telling us to do, which I think is a good idea. Actually go do something. The perverse— well, maybe it's not perverse, maybe it's natural, but the perverse thing that I think happens today is someone hears this, they're compelled, and they would love to go and change things. And it's really interesting, actually, how often we have people kind of laughing and nodding when we talk about the operating conditions of most companies. But then when they go try to do something, they go stick it in the 12-month strategic planning process. And there's some 12-month plan for how we're going to detonate things, and the whole point here is, Don't go ask for permission, because you're not taking on such massive risk by doing a minimally viable move that it's going to blow up the company or blow up in your face. Just start demonstrating that you can operate differently by doing small things, and success will get— in almost every organization I've been in, success will get attention.

It will get attention. It may not be immediate, but you'll get attention. That's right. So, we are talking with Geoff Tuff about his new book, co-authored with Stephen Goldbach, Detonate! And you're gonna wanna get a copy, of course. But before we shift— Of course.

Of course.

Before we shift gears, the next section of this program is brought to you by our new book, The Long Distance Leader, and you can learn more about it by going to longdistanceleaderbook.com. So, Geoff, what I have for you now, and everyone, I did not tell Geoff this was coming, I have what is called the Fast Break. I have 3 words. I'm gonna give you a word, Geoff. I just want you to, whatever you wanna say about that, whatever top of mind comes to your mind about it, right?

Ready? Yeah, we'd love some forewarning on this, Kevin, but yeah, go for it.

Well, of course, but I got smart people here.

I've never had—

here's the thing, no one's ever failed because there's no wrong answer. You wanna tell me, what do you think about these ideas, right? So, um, and I picked some that I think, you know, I think will be close to home, so I think you'll be safe. Are you ready?

Okay, good.

Change.

Change? Often talked about, rarely tried. How's that? So I think there's— it's very easy to kind of nod our heads and say, yes, we must change and change is good, but it's very difficult. And this does obviously tie directly back to the book. It's very difficult to actually go into it and change. I'm not just talking about operating in companies. Now my mind is going all over the place. You don't want to know what I'm thinking now. But as human beings, it's hard to change.

It's hard.

And in relationships, In relationships with kids, with what have you. Change is not easy. And that sounds trite saying it, but what I'd say is that the big problem is most people don't go try it.

There you go. Second one, consulting or consultant?

Well, now again, my mind is going in all sorts of different directions. And my first direction is to feel defensive and say that I have to defend our value, because I did— look, I'm probably one of the first ones to say that the traditional perspective on consultants and consulting is probably fair, which is that it's a lot of high-fee people coming in and telling you things that they've learned from somewhere else and not actually creating much advantage. The whole reason that we have not just written detonate, but actually structured Deloitte in the way that we have, and the way that we're trying to advance our business is to not only shift with the times and work on things that are more relevant, but to actually drive value for clients. And so, if you look at the company that we have today, it's fundamentally different in our value proposition and how we serve clients than it was 5 years ago, and it's going to be fundamentally different 5 years from now as well, because we're in the business of creating value. And I think that's an easy thing for a consultant to say. Obviously, I think there are differences between various consulting firms, and I happen to believe that ours is the strongest, but I'm sure every one of my competitors would say the same.

Well, we would certainly hope that you would feel that way, right? And then the third word for you, Geoff, is innovation.

So this is something that I have spent a lot of time obviously thinking about, talking about, working with clients on. I don't know if we're playing like one-to-one word matchups here. No, you're doing perfect. The first word that pops to mind is frustration, and it's frustration from a number of different fronts. First of all, I'm frustrated that the word has become meaningless, and when I think about it, it is simply a way of doing things differently in the market to drive growth. And growth here, I mean growth in economic value. It could be top line, it could be bottom line, it could be a bunch of different things. But in reality, innovation is just, in some ways, good strategy about how to operate a company. And unfortunately, it's been encumbered with so many bells and whistles and BS about brainstorming, and squishy balls, and pizza teams, and all the rest of this stuff that people have completely lost sight of what the purpose of innovation is. The second reason I'm frustrated by it, and I have good reason to hope that this is changing now, is it's always— so let's say over 12 years of talking to senior executives about innovation, it's always been important. So it's been really easy to get an executive conversation saying, hey, I've got something interesting to say about innovation. I've got some observations about what's happening in the world. You get the meeting immediately, and we have a fantastic conversation, and whether be intended to do some work there or not, there's mention of, let's definitely follow up and let's have another conversation, and you follow up a week later, a month later, and the reaction was, that was awesome, but I've got to close the quarter. And then, so you come back the next quarter and try to have a conversation about innovation, and guess what? There's another quarter to close. And so, I think if the mindset is that innovation is always important but rarely urgent, Then nothing is going to change. But because of the things we've talked about in this discussion so far, I actually think that a lot of companies, a lot of executives are waking up and recognizing that innovation is now urgent. It's not just important.

So I'm going to say one more thing about innovation as it relates to this book, everybody. And so you've got these 2 really smart guys write this book. You're certainly clear about that from having listened to this conversation. One of the things I love about this book— I just turned here— is The book has cartoons.

It's a picture book. It's a picture book.

It's— well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but it does have pictures. And yeah, and I think every single one of them, as I'm thinking about it, I chuckled at as I read them, which means it did exactly what you wanted it to do. And it does differentiate the book a little bit. And so for all of you—

And I will say, I gotta offer a shout out to Tom Fishburne and Mark Atunis. He's actually pretty well known as a corporate cartoonist, but he does a great job of taking a concept and turning it into a picture that saved our readers 1,000 words. So not only do I thank him for that service, but I'm sure our readers thank him for what is now a readable and slim volume as opposed to a 1,000-page tome.

And it is a slim volume, about 200, I mean, readable pages outside of index, etc., a little less than 200 pages. So it is, if you've been engaged in this conversation listening to us, you're gonna, you know, that the ideas are valid and I would just tell you it's a very readable book as well. I'd encourage you to pick it up. So, before we start to wrap up, Geoff, I've got 2 more questions for you and the first one has nothing to do with work because it's a question of you're a busy guy, you're a smart guy, you're out doing all this work, you're writing books and what do you do for fun?

Well, this is the summertime so what I really love to do is sail. And I would like to say that I'm sailing all the time. And by the way, when I say sailing, I don't mean grand yacht. I don't mean something very fancy. I have a little day sailor, and I spend most of my weekends trying to convince my wife or kids to come on the boat with me. And I usually get at least one sail in, but if it's not sailing in the summertime, it's skiing in the wintertime. So pretty simple pursuits.

Excellent. And another thing that I ask every Every person that I have on, and I like to ask smart people any place in my life, is like, what are you reading? What would you recommend? What are you reading that you found interesting that others might find interesting as well?

Oh man, so should I tell you the truth? Because I could make something up here and—

Oh, I think the truth is really a good policy, Geoff.

Okay.

So, we, you know, we—

I do too. So, we started the conversation about some of my background. I talked about my history as a failed novelist. I would like to say that I spend all of my downtime reading business books and business articles, but that would actually be a lie. Right now, I am deeply embedded in a book by Ken Follett. It is not fine literature. It is not, I would even say, necessarily the best fiction out there, but it is absolutely absorbing. It is actually the second in a trilogy he wrote about England in the 1100s. I am now on to the second one that is in the 1300s, and it all centers around the building of a cathedral. And what that meant not only as a— the first one was called Pillars of the Earth, I believe. But what it meant as a kind of central component to various different townships and way people came together. So, it's beyond a good absorbing read, it's a good little bit of history as well. So, as I say, it's not— I don't think it's going to change anyone's business performance, but it's a good way to entertain yourself in the summer.

Well, and you know, I'd actually, you know, I don't, I don't know, I don't feel like I read enough fiction, quite honestly. And I actually believe that you're shortchanging yourself and shortchanging everybody else because when we step back and read something else, it allows our minds to open up. And I would, I would submit that it may not be something that you read in the page of Pillars of the Earth, but that where that took you allowed you to help detonate something in your business.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think don't underestimate that. I'm saying that to you, but I'm saying it to everyone else.

No, I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek. And if you want— and if you really do want a great— if you're not a great fiction reader and you want an absolutely fantastic book, probably one of my favorite books of all time, it's Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Almost anything by David Mitchell, but Cloud Atlas in particular, which I think they turned into a movie a few years ago. It's a really awesome read.

There we go. We got a twofer from Geoff today, everybody. So, the question you've been wanting me to ask from the very beginning is, Where can we learn more about the work and the book and all that stuff?

DetonateTheBook.com is probably the best way to burrow into the various different ideas and find more about what not only is in the book, but how you can get access to it. It's available on Amazon. We thankfully hit a bunch of the bestseller lists in the first month that it was out, so it's getting reasonably well distributed. If anyone is interested in hearing more about the innovation and strategy work we do, it's It's not hard to tap into Deloitte and the variety of different services we have there. But I know this was not a paid promotion, so I'll put it at the book, detonatethebook.com.

That's perfect. detonatethebook.com, everybody. The book is Detonate: Why and How Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices and Bring a Beginner's Mind to Survive. It's so very strong with the survive thing at the end. So now a question for all of you listening, and that is, now what? All right, you've gotten about 30 minutes or so of Geoff and I talking, and you hopefully have been challenged by some of the ideas. You've been more than entertained. So, my challenge to you is, what are you gonna do? What action are you gonna take? Perhaps, what is the minimum viable move that you need to take in your business today, or whatever else that strikes you? But the challenge is to take from this something that you can go act on and not just have it flow over you and move on to the next activity in your day. So, Geoff, thanks so much for being here. It was a pleasure to have you.

Absolutely. I love the book and encourage everybody to read it.

everyone to pick up a copy. And, and so thanks again for being here. And to all of you listening—

Sure thing, thanks, Scott.

You're welcome. And to all of you listening, we're here every week.

Yeah, thanks to all the listeners.

Yeah, exactly. Come back again, everybody. We're here every week with another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Thanks, everybody.