Martin Lindstrom: Branding and Culture Expert and NYT Bestselling Author

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's guest is the remarkable Martin Lindstrom. I must admit, there is so much laughter in this episode, and at times we're talking over each other and laughing over each other. I have a good time podcasting anyway. Where was I? Time magazine named Martin one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2009. Thinkers50, a ranking of the top business thinkers, has selected Martin three times. Martin has written seven New York Times best selling books, and the Wall Street Journal called his book Brand Sense one of the five best marketing books ever published. His latest book is the Ministry of Common how to Eliminate Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate Bullshit. His clients include McDonald's, Burger King, Swissair, Swiss Post, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Lowe's Foods. In this episode, we cover why politicians should live near each other in Washington, D.C. how breathing through a straw or wearing a burqa can help your marketing, and how to get chickens and companies out of their cages. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the Paper Tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest.

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Taking notes while being brief about speaking gigs. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds, and office layouts. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Martin Lindstrom. Has the Pandemic killed empathy?

There's no doubt about that. The Pandemic has Killed empathy. And the reason why is because we're all stuck behind our screens. And as we stuck behind the screens, what happens is that we increasingly become addicted to technology. We are in a situation where we right now are spoon fed with information, but we don't have a pause anymore. And it's the pause which are helping us to be creative, to have new reflections, new thoughts. So what happens is that we almost like a spoon fed and we're following someone else's leads. And as that happens, we forget about picking up the signals from everyone around us. That skill set is something you have to maintain. I remember when I some years ago started to travel a lot. I spent time in consumer homes across the world. More than 3,000 different consumer homes across close to 100 countries. And remember me being introvert. Suddenly I became extrovert. I started to be able to connect with people in a different. So my empathy muscle started to grow. But what I notice is as I now stuck behind the screen, I lose that empathy skill set. And then of course it's amplified through social media. Social media is this self enforcing bubble which is telling us all the stuff we want to hear and I'm the best in the world type of scenario. Twitter with 280 characters. How can you be emotional in 280 characters? You can't. So all those factors almost like peeling one layer after another of empathy and then we end up in a pretty bad situation. And that's where I think we are right now.

Short of the pandemic ending and we're all back together in person, what can one do?

The first thing you can do is that you can do an inventory check. It's a little bit like when you do defragmentation on a computer. You do it because you want to make it faster. You put memory into the different compartments and as you do that, what happens is that you suddenly are seeing the world slightly different. What is your defragmentation? Here's the issue. We have applied all the bad habits we had before COVID 19 to our current way of working. Most people are working back to back, one zoom call after another and we're exhausted in the end of the day. We don't have toilet breaks anymore, we don't have reflection breaks anymore. That tour we had to the meeting room where we would talk to our colleagues or the water cooler moment are gone. Which perhaps in the past was seen as unproductive by the cfo. But actually now it's shown to be that social glue connecting people is gone. So what I would do is to do a check of your day. And I did that the other day. I created a little map where you on the vertical side would have do on the top and and don't in the bottom and on the left. On the horizontal, you will have shouldn't, and on the right side you'll have should. And then I said, what stuff do I do every day which is falling onto shouldn't and don't. That is remove it. Guess what? 45% of what I do every day fell onto that bucket. It was stupid things I just did, which just did not make sense. And so I went through this little model. What should I remove, what should I park, what should I improve and what should I keep? And what. I realized I only had a to do list, but I actually had to create an un to do list, get rid of stuff. Because I think there's no such thing as going back to work when this stuff is happening over. I call it going forward to work. And by that I mean you need to almost do a reset of what we do. So before we jump into the new reality, use this as an opportunity to look yourself in the eyes and say, what am I doing right and what I'm doing wrong, instead of raising into another reality where we just add another layer of complex activity. If you start that process, by the way, already now, that by default will bring back empathy. Why is that? Because you will remove a lot of that stuff which are occupying the time where you just are passenger in the backseat. And as you do that, all the common sense will start to come back because there's a direct correlation between common sense and empathy. The more empathy, the more. The more common sense. And that again, will make you connect better with people. So it's a very simple due diligence. You have to do an inventory check.

I'm just very curious. So unless it's confidential, what kind of things were on your not to do?

Okay, well, hang on a second. Let me just take the nonsense apart. Well, there's nothing. There's. I'm sorry, there's nothing on the list. Well, listen, let's do the clean version here. YouTube. YouTube. Oh, my gosh. YouTube, right? I spend. So this is interesting guy. I think you will love this. I started to try to find out when am I creative and when am I not creative? And I mapped it down every hour as much as I could for a month. Here's what I realized. I was much less creative in the evening than I normally was in the past. And I couldn't understand why and then I started to say, what am I using my time on? And it was YouTube videos. I was sitting there 45 minutes, one and a half hour, looking at what's in crap, and I can't even remember what it was. So I had all these things. I had another thing where I said that has to be improved. When I went to work, which really is just in the neighbor room, right. I did not have a transition. I think a transition is a way to reset your mind. I call it enclosed cognition. Back in the days, scientists were doing an experiment in New York City where they had the opportunity to wear lab coats. And there's three different lab coats. There was one lab coat where it said doctor above the lab coat, one lab coat where it said dentist, and the third one where it said nothing. When people put on the lab coat where it said doctor, that became more intelligent faster than answering questions, and more self confident. Do a figure dentist a little bit higher, but not as high as the doctor. And then the one without a sign, nothing changed. And we call that enclosed cognition. It's a little bit what you try when you go to the theater with your wife and she puts on the high heel, you put on the tux, you kind feel different, you transform. We did that in the past when we're sitting in the car to work. We don't do that anymore. So one of the things I realized was the way I went to work was wrong. I actually had to go around my house first, and I did that. I do that today. I actually go out, out of my house, and then I go back into the office.

What, you go outside and come back in?

I do. I do. Because I transition my mind. It's what you try when you're running or if you sit in a car and listening to music on the way to work. It's where you defragmenting all your information, right. And then what I do is I see every call as a door, which is opening and closing. I open a door, I go into that world. When I close the door, just before I do that, when we're done, our call, I'll take my notepad, right? And I start to take notes about what I learned. And I'll do that for 10 minutes to reflect, almost like to close that door. And when I'm done by the day, I don't rush out to my family. No, I sit in my office and I fall down again. I synchronize to another mood because I actually do think we have different, metaphorically speaking, time zones in our body. You know, when you are at work, it goes fast, hard routine. Then you come home, it's a different routine, and you can have a clash between those two different worlds. So I decompress basically before I go back, go around a building and go up again. And I know I sound like a nutcase and I didn't mean to say what's on that list. Right. So wait until you hear that. Then you sort of. Martin, I don't. Stop this engineering.

I think that was enough. When you say, quote unquote, YouTube, are you watching people using lathes to make wooden bowls? Or are you watching teenagers getting drunk? Or are you watching TEDx?

Of course, it's not the TEDx thing, but it is stupid things where you go on Ellen DeGeneres and you watch, I don't know what about some idiot coming on, talking about something you can't even remember two seconds after you watch. You know what I mean? It is things which I, in the old days would have called a smoking break. Right. It is things where you kind of just reset your mind. But I just realized resetting the mind doesn't take one and a half hour. And here's another thing. This is important. Sorry.

That'S a lot of deep fragmentation.

But, you know, he's. What's so intense. Interesting. So some years ago, four years ago, I remember I. I was spending time with Malcolm Gladwell in Zambia and we talked a lot about creativity.

Spending time in Malcolm Gladwell in Zambia?

Yeah.

It was right after you left Barack Obama with Richard.

No, no, no, not at all. I remember this conversation about. We had about creativity. And I realized after this conversation that I lost my creativity a lot. And I had it because of the smartphone. And I know you had your days in Apple, but here's what I realized, that the phone was sucking up my creativity. So one of the things I started to do was to say, what can I do to get my creativity back again? So I got rid of the phone. I don't have a phone today.

You got rid of the phone?

Totally. I don't have a phone. No, no, let's do. Really? Four years ago. Yeah, that's it.

You must not have kids.

I can give you the entire excuse list. There's a lot of excuses for why you can't have a phone. But here's the three things I learned. I learned. First of all, this is fascinating. I learned that when I had a phone, I was never present. I would be standing in a bar waiting for someone and the person wouldn't show up. And what's the first thing I would do. I'll grab the phone and do anything with the phone so I don't look like a complete loser, right? The second thing I would do was I would not see anything. I not see details because everything would be through a lens. But the third thing was the worst thing I learned that I never got bored. And boredom is the foundation for creativity.

Boredom is the foundation for creativity.

Yeah. How so is that pause in your life where you allow your mind to wander away, where you're allowed to combine two ordinary things in a new way, where you allow you yourselves to be inspired by what you see rather than what you dictated to see, and then combine it with your mind. And I realized that side was gone. I was never bored. I would be sitting in a taxi from the AFK and I hammer through 250 emails on that trip into Manhattan, right? And I would feel so productive. And then guess What? I'll get 250 emails back later on. And it was all wasted, right? The reality is I was never bored. I was self entertained, right? So I got rid of the phone and what happened was that suddenly my creativity came back. And then I started to again map down when I'm my most creative. And I realized I was most creative in the water.

I don't know how you could not know this, but the Remarkable People podcast is sponsored by the Remarkable Tablet company. And in the next section, Martin describes how he does his best and deepest thinking. It's while swimming. So maybe we need a remarkable tablet that's at least waterproof. Maybe even better you can use it underwater. So Martin can take notes in the middle of the pool and not wait till he gets to the end. But I digress. The Remarkable People podcast sponsored by by the Remarkable Tablet Company. Martin on swimming.

I call it the water moment. Yeah, in the water. It's funny if you ask a lot of Pisces in particular, I'm a Pisces, you'll say. A lot of them will probably say they are creative in the shower or when they're swimming. And I realized I was really creative there. So I start to write my books. Think about an odd case. Here we go. And it's not even on that list I didn't want to tell you about. But I would literally have and still do a notepad in each end of the pool and then I'll take notes and it would be free floating. It's amazing how creative I could be. And I think all of us have spaces where we can be creative. We just haven't discovered where they are and we haven't allowed to discover where they are because we so fast paced in what we do. We never pause, we never do that defragmentation. And therefore we end up kind of being slavers ourselves somehow. I don't even know what your question was and I'm just rambling on.

The answer was so good that that's the mark of a good answer. It doesn't matter what the question was. All the guests on remarkable people get a remarkable tablet from Norway. You're gonna love this. If you love to take notes, I'm gonna send you one. I'm gonna ask you for your address later, but thank you. First of all, I have to ask you what camera are you using? Because your setup is really good.

Oh, thank you. I'm using a Sony camera with a very fancy lens. I have a two camera set up right now.

Oh, excuse me.

Yeah.

Well, from the country that makes great watches, I would expect you to have something like this.

Thank you.

So yeah, I use a Sony too, but I only have one camera. I'm, I'm gonna have to like step up my game.

Show me the length of your camera lens. Okay. And we can talk size matters, sadly do in the lens industry.

We only 15 minutes into this, I only have asked one question, so next question. Is it common sense to get vaccinated?

Yeah, it is. But here's the reality. That's my point of view. And common sense consists of two words. And one is common and one is sense. And common means you see it from multiple points of views. So my logic here would be that if you believe that human mankind should continue operating without closing down the entire world and having a breakout happening in Miami, Florida with people going into panic, then I think that it's common to say, well, you have to take care of others. Right? So yes, it's common sense. Then we can discuss if it's the way it's been rolled out in various places of the world has been common sense. That's probably less of a yes answer, more of a no answer. But yes, I believe it's common sense to get a vaccine.

And what has not been sensible about how it's been rolled out.

I think there's some fundamental issues that's been going on here. It's almost like it came as a surprise there was a vaccine coming out. So where a lot of countries, in particular the US are really good at scale rollouts. One never really practiced the rollout before it happened. You certainly saw that and see that in Europe Right now. So as a consequence of that, oh my gosh, we have a vaccine now. How do we roll it out? And I think one of the things I've learned that's back to creativity, combine two things in a new way and you will get some great out of stuff out of it. One of the suggestions I had back in the days when I wrote an update in the New York Times about this topic was I said, why don't you team up with Amazon and have them do it because they're really good. Why don't you team up with all those airports which back then were empty, A lot of them are closed down. They can handle thousands if not millions of passengers. Why don't you use infrastructure to do it? Why don't you team up with retired nurses? All that stuff, all those fundamental simple questions drowned in bureaucracy and bs. Because you had set rules based on a machinery which were designed for not having a virus. The problem with a bureaucracy is it's designed around one fixed status. It's not designed around changing the foundation of it. But when you go through this machine, people are trying to squeeze something into a machine which is already not operating well and then it's broken. So you had to rebuild machine. And I think that realization of that it's okay to throw old rules out of the window, it's okay to have different reporting lines would work. So one of the things I've suggested to the new administration to set up a ministry of common sense. And that would be really busy, I'll tell you.

Did you apply for the cabinet? Can you take the pay cut?

Oh yeah. But the, the reality with this stuff is bureaucracy is so extreme. I'll give you an example. I was jumping on a plane the other day and as I was sitting in my seat, there was this announcement going on. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board of this plane. I regret to inform you that all cabin service has been completely suspended on the entire flight. And by the way, the lavatories on the front of the cabin has been exclusively reserved for the cabin crew only. So here we were, 131 passengers which had to walk down the aisles like a TSA lane. And then we had to end up breathing in the freshly brewed smell of toilet now mixed up with the faint whiff of COVID 19 in the end. Right? So you're sitting down in the seat, okay. Have you heard about the new entertainment system? They have a modern plane, it's the latest. It's called a contact tracing form. It's wonderful. It's really entertaining. So I sat with this contact tracing form and the first question was, have you been in close proximity with anyone you don't know the last 12 hours? The only thing I had to do was to look at my right and get her name and phone number for the contact tracing form. Then the second question was, as you know, you don't have pens anymore, right? Because people like you develop these smartphone devices. So people don't have a pen. So of course this brilliant passenger decides to borrow a pen from the purser and now this pen is walking down the whole plane. 131passengers end up with me. Okay, and the second question is, have you tossed anything anyone else had tossed over the last 12 hours? Where did common sense go? This is bureaucracy at play. It actually have a term. There was a study done in Australia called safety clutter. And it shows that 65% of all safety rules implemented in the western world are due to bureaucracy just to please the person inventing the rule to get a promotion in the company.

But at a personal level, when someone personally doesn't believe in getting vaccinated, that's not compliance, that's not legal, that's not corporate hierarchy. That a person made that decision. Why would they make such a, what I think common nonsensical decision.

I think the best way to get people on board, if you're sitting on my side of the chair, okay, Because I'm not saying necessarily everything I'm saying is right here. But the best way to get other people on board is to use a secret weapon which is called empathy. And let me tell you a story. So one of my clients is one of the larger pharma companies in the world and they are the leader in respiratory field. And they reached out about two years ago, said hey, we want to get closer to the patients. So they asked me to. So if they could get closer to the patient, I said to them, you're a hundred year old company, tell me, when did you last spend time with the patients? And they look at me and they said, never. Just like that was okay. I said. And they said, well that's compliance. I said, P.S. i said, so I went to compliance, we changed compliance, they agreed. We went to the home of a consumer and we end up in a home of a 28 year old lady and she'd had asthma in her whole life. And I asked one of these profound questions. I said to her, how did it feel like to have asthma as a child? And she starts to cry and she tells me about how she was teased in school, she had no friends. She was a disgrace for human mankind. That's me quoting her at parties. So I said to her, listen, it looks like you have a lot of confidence today. What changed? I said, I'll show you. She pulls out her handbag, and out of her handbag she takes a straw. I said, this one is my magic. What do you mean said? Well, listen, I always give this store to people I meet, friends and colleagues, new friends and colleagues, and ask them to breathe through the store while holding themselves for the nose. And when I do that, they immediately feel how I feel as an asthma patient. And that created a sense of empathy. So I took that idea and I went to the board and we had the whole board shutting off the light, putting a straw into the mouth. I had this heavy breathing going through the speaker as a patient, right? And then had everyone holding themselves in the nose and breathing through the straw. And after 30 seconds, one executive spits out the straw and he says, this is ridiculous. Why do we do this? No one can live like this. And I said to him, that's how your patients feel every minute of the entire life. And they're paying you salary. And if you could hear a penny drop on the floor, you would have noticed that. It was almost like the company was hit by a magic wand. We started to develop empathy kits, kits where people had to breathe through a straw before getting a job in the company. RD started to feel it so they could develop products and services around asthma. One of the concept we came up with was, why don't we find out what the air quality control is outside before you go out as an asthma patient? It's such a simple insight, but we learned that through the store technique and the whole company changed. And the reason why, Guy, I'm telling you this story is because if you want to convince people of another opinion, there's two things you have to do. Bill Bernback, the great advertising guy for many years, he always said that when he had a conflict with people, when he disagreed with people, that different opinions, he would grab a little note he had in his pocket with four words on it, and on that paper note, it would say, what if he's right? And that's the first thing you have to do. You have to go through your own sanitary check and see if you're seeing the world and experiencing the world from that person's point of view. The second thing if you say do not, I think I'm right you should do, is to go one step further and make them feel what people would have COVID 19 lost family members. The people which are gone from their homes make them feel the same thing through experiencing those people and their pain and suffering. And what you probably will notice in nine out of 10 cases, they'll say, do you know what it may be? I don't trust this chemical I'm putting into my veins. It may be this is not the perfect vaccine, but it may be we are doing it as a greater good as a population on planet earth to survive and help a lot of other people as well. I think that's my answer. Is it perfect? No, but maybe worth the go, right?

Conceptually, the straw story, also your telecom story about making people wait in the 95 degree room, those are where you forced company executives to gain empathy by actually going through the experience. But do you think that people can mentally imagine being in another person's place and that being effective enough, or do you literally have to breathe through the straw?

It's a very good question. I think that you probably would have a sliding scale and let's say the briefing through this, the straw is probably the 10 out of 10 or the 9 out of 10 experience. Let me give you the 10 out of 10 experience because we actually talked about that internally. That would be that I do a, a ice bucket moment where I have people lying in a bathtub with water and they have to breathe through the store while lying under the water. That probably will be a 10 out of 10 because then you had it, then we really feel it. Right? Yeah. And then you can slide it down to a 9 out of 10, 10 where you do it without the water piece. And then of course you can look at people having a lot of pain and suffering. I'll give an example from a real example from an asthma patient. There was a patient with a respiratory disease issue. And when I asked the executives, how do people with respiratory disease live? They had no idea. So we went into their homes and I realized that for those with severe problems, they literally would place all the chairs in around circles and they would sit in the very middle and then they would throw themselves from chair to chair as they would crawl towards the toilet or to the bed because they couldn't walk very far. So they would basically be in distance off throwing their own body and the rooms would be very dark and very messy and it would not be very pleasant experience. I think a lot of executives on one hand would look at it and say, gosh, is that how our patients live? Some of them would say, this is disgusting. And I think some of them would really feel the pain because they could see the tears in their eyes. So I think there's different degrees. One thing I've learned through all this process is probably comes back to neuroscience. When I wrote a book many years ago called Biology bu Yology, that there is an area in our brain called a somatic marker. It's a term defended by Antonio Damascus. And what he discovered was that when something so profound happens in our brain, we'll never forget it. It's called a somatic mark. There could be a negative or positive. A negative would be 9 11. You remember where you were? Where were you on 9 11?

London Business School.

And. And who did you call that day?

My wife.

So can I just ask another question? What did you have for dinner at your last birthday? And that's the difference between somatic marker and not. Somatic marker is an emotional bookmark. It's so profound, you'll never forget it. When you create strong empathy experiences like the straw, all that stuff, it creates a very profound empathy bookmark in your brain, a somatic marker, and it stays with you for years. It's almost like a mini trauma if you just do it superficially by reading a spreadsheet from a research company. And 2.6% is feeling like that. It's almost like 0 out of 10 in terms of impact. I think a lot of companies increasingly looking at data through a screen, but they don't feel what's in between the numbers. And I think when you want to do RD or amazing communication or creating amazing cultures, you have to feel it yourself at the end of the day. I strongly believe in being in homes, living with people and breathing with people, because that's where you have a transfer of empathy taking place.

Let me ask you a real world situation. So right now, I have had maybe five people who were deaf, so they cannot listen to my podcast, and they're asking me, can I have a transcription? And I have had transcriptions done. It takes about five hours. If one of us does it, or if we do it using machine learning and then somebody cleans it up, it still takes five hours. Probably that means it costs $250. And so five people have asked for something that costs 250, and tens of thousands of people have not asked for it. So using your test, if I were a deaf person, I couldn't listen to my own podcast. That would be a. I don't know if it's a marker, but it would be like the straw. But I doing the math, I say to myself, should I spend 250 bucks per episode for a handful of people.

I'll give you my opinion about it, but I'll tell you a story first. So I have both been a woman and I also been blind. In Sydney, Australia, I decided to be blind for a week. I basically shut down my eyes and I followed a blind person around for a whole week to understand and feel what they were feeling. And what was so remarkable throughout this experience were that suddenly I saw the world clearer, meaning I heard it clearer, I smelled it, I touched it, and tasted differently. My senses were suddenly tuned up. It was remarkable. It was almost like addictive. To try it in Saudi Arabia, I was asked by the government to understand the psychological effect of women driving. As you know, women, until recently was not allowed, sadly, to drive in ksa, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And when it finally was introduced, it was very strange because not a lot of women signed up for it and I couldn't understand why. So I dressed up as a woman with burqa and I was a woman for a week. And what I felt through that experience was how women were teased, bullied, looked down at because they were sitting in a car or even talking about the topic because I was there with them and I saw the stairs. I felt the whole. The vibrations that helped me to understand an entire new mindset, a new segment. So what I'm trying to say here is there's two benefits of you doing it. The first benefit is it probably will open up the eyes for an entire new segment you never have understood before because you've never been like that before. And through that, you'll see something through their eyes, which would be profound. The second, that would be the ethical side and also the creative side. I'm talking about here. From a financial side, I will ask myself. There's a lot of organizations out there supporting deaf people, but I don't think a lot of companies are equally supporting them. If you teamed up with them and you became the first podcast, which actually is appealing to people with a death and actually going full on for it, I think you'll get the entire community with you, that community, if you team up with their associations, because they will say, that guy, he believes in us. So I think as you have a lot of supporters, which are much more supporters than the one you have already, because you're tapping into a community feeling where they feel a sense of belonging with you.

So I, I guess I know my action items. No, seriously. I mean, yeah, I'm a victim of the kind of thinking that your book is written to help or cure. I had my rule and I, I did it for financial reasons. So I would like to know, for an anti vaxxer, what is the edge of the chicken cage?

First of all, let me tell you the story about the chicken cage syndrome. So an experiment was done with chickens some years ago and they were put into a cage stocked there for half a year. And one day they lit out on beautiful green grass. The sun was shining and the birds were singing and the chickens went out and after 30 seconds they went straight back in again. And I call that the chicken cage syndrome. Chicken cage syndrome is the fear of the unknown in the end of the day. It's what you're experiencing in companies when there's a new creative idea coming out of a meeting and people saying, that's interesting. Which basically means a. Right, that's, that's what I've learned over the years. I'll give an example, I'll give you example.

An interesting idea.

Yeah.

That means they're not interested.

This is, this is true. Charlie Bell, the late Charlie Bell, former, former, former CEO of McDonald's, reached out to me some years ago, many years ago, and he asked me if I help him redesign the Happy Meal. And I said to him, yes, I'd love to, if I can make it healthy. Talk about challenges here, right? So I. The goal was to make 6 year old eat broccoli. That was my goal. So using narrative, we created a narrative where the broccoli was the bushes in the forest and the cucumber was the murder weapon and the blood was the tomatoes. And we had this amazing narrative and we lost the pilot in Germany and the kids loved it and the franchisees loved it and the parents loved it. For the first time ever, little Peter was eating broccoli. So I went to O', Brick, which back then was the headquarter of McDonald's, South Chicago. And I showed it to them and they said, it's interesting. And it's not like interesting, it is interesting. It has to be dragged out. So I went back to Europe, said, yes, I love it, it's interesting. And then there was a silence for two years. And then the new Happy Meal came out and it was a cardboard house. A little burger, a little fry, a little juice, now with an apple. And that's where I learned the concept of the immune system, the defense mechanism for change. The chicken case syndrome. We talked about the fear of the unknown because just around that time, Morgan Spurlock came up with Supersize me. The writing was kind of on the wall. But the organization was petrified of change. They had the largest toy manufacturing process in China. They produced so many carpet houses it was not even funny. How can we change things? So the chicken cage syndrome is about removing fear. Amy Edmondson developed the term called psychological safety. And it is to infuse safety into your mindset or into the organization. When you come back to your vaccine question, AstraZeneca is coming out with their vaccine and in Europe they're first approving it and then they're not approving it and then they're approving again. That's the best way to say to consumers, stay away. Don't get anything at all. You need to work with two manuscripts. When Alfred Hitchcock was producing his movies, he always worked with two manuscripts. He worked with Mann manuscript, which is the blue script. That's the rational stuff. The props, the stage light, whatever it was. But then he had the green script. The green script was him mapping down how he should feel throughout the entire movie. He should feel empathy. The next minute you feel scared, then you should feel fear, then you feel love. And minute by minute, he will map down the entire movie. He will have green script and blue script. That's the reason why he was so successful. He really looked into the feeling of his emotions, of the audience. I don't think we've done that today with the rollout of the vaccine. I think we've done the blue script somewhat, but we never said what is the emotional curve people are on, considering moving to the place, getting it, talking to people, what are they going to say? What's the justification? What's the argument? They should have to recruit others. What's the peer pressure? You want to work with or not work with it? That whole green script is almost non existent. It's like, well, here's a vaccine. Go and enjoy. Right? So I do think we need to understand the green script. And that's, that's not just for the vaccine. That's for every company launching a product or service or for us in life as a whole. There's always two scripts, not one. Right?

This is my last question about politics and vaccines. So let's say Joe Biden calls you up and says, martin, I need help. How do I influence, persuade, create empathy in Congress? What can I do? Can I give them all a straw?

I think if you go back in history to Washington D.C. you will notice there was a rule which were implemented and removed around 20 years ago. And the rule was that everyone working in the Senate had to live close proximity to the Senate or nearby each other, which is not the case today. When you live nearby. You go to the pub in the night, you meet each other at the restaurant. You're standing in the train on the way to work together. You synchronize emotionally. I think that synchronization has disappeared because it's remote. It's two different camps. You're seeing the world from two different points of views. But when your kids are playing together at the schoolyard, they don't care about if you're green or black or white or whatever view you have of the world, that it's kind of really difficult to become really angry at the person having that kid, which your son is really good friends with. And I think that's what we saw with the Bushes and Obamas teaming up, that they had differences in their views, but they can still, on a human scale, work and talk together. What I'm saying here is we need to synchronize the folks on the green script in Washington, D.C. you need to find activities where they're not sharing politics, but where they share everything else but politics. And I think that probably will be my first step, that is to require people to live around Washington, D.C. and it probably would be to create programs where they are forced to see and experience the views from each other's point of view. Because then you get a human connection, and it's the human connection which is gone right now. Now it's become more a game about I'm right and you're always wrong. It's more about how much airtime do I get or did I win? That discussion on TV is nothing to do with did I hurt his feeling? Actually, our wives are really good friends. I shouldn't be that harsh. Actually, why don't I listen to him? Because my wife told me that is not existing. So that would be a very simple way of doing something which actually could have a profound impact. Now, of course, I can give you 700 other arguments around what you also can do, but I think that could be a pretty good step of just implementing a law which disappeared 20 years.

Ago, completely switching off politics and vaccination. What would your common sense advice be to apply to increase the effectiveness of Zoom meetings?

I think that Zoom meetings are right now appealing to our sense of sight in particular, but they do not pick up the small data, as I call it, the seemingly insignificant observations you make in a meeting. Let me explain. I'm pretty sure that if you guys are going to pitch a big new program for an executive at a TV station or whatever in la, that if I asked you after you went out of that meeting room, how did it go? You would say first, well, he said this and that. And then you'll say, but I looked him in his eyes and do you know what? I think there's something there. I looked at his body language. He had his arms like that. You will explain that we know today that 60 plus percent of the communication we have between each other is not through the verbal voice, it's through the signals we pick up. And that's more or less I would claim gone on zoom. So what I would do is to analyze and find out what are these subconscious clues we're sending to each other through a body language, through the eye contact and start to map this down. The first step you could work with is to constantly measure people's attention span. It's fair to say that even though I say to people, don't multitask. When you're on a zoom call after five minutes, it's so boring, you do it anyway. That's just that email, it's so irresistible. So you check it out, right? When that is happening, you're not there, you better just leave, right? And so we know for a fact at least men can't multitask. That's a, that's scientifically proven. Women is a different story. But certainly men, they're out of the game. So the issue here is I would constantly monitor how present are people and I'm not doing through a robotic type of artificial intelligence format. I would have a check in every 15 minutes where I would say, do you feel this is a waste of time right now, the discussion, is it relevant? And if the average curve is going on kind of, you know, 30% think this is relevant and 70% thing is, is not relevant anymore, then you better stop the whole conversation or split the group or whatever. So I would create a way to find out a temperature check first of all. Second, I probably would find out a way to make voices which are not heard, heard when you do your voting and whatever that you do it in a way where people actually can express concerns, where it also is fleshed out rather than black and white, where you actually give opinion which are nuanced. These nuances don't exist because it's like I have talking time for 35 seconds now and then I'm out of the game. I can't come with a long winded thing. So that would be a second thing. The third thing is I'll build in breaks, not breakouts. But breaks when I'm on. The first thing I do when I meet you is I don't say hello anymore. I say, you're on mute. Right. Hello is gone. Okay, so. So pauses and silence on Zoom are banned because it either means you're frozen or it means that you are not doing what you should do. You are multitasking something else, and it's a bit embarrassing. I can't say anything. So I would actually allow pauses where people actually can think rather than just hammer away answers. And I'll find a mechanism to allow those pauses where people are not multitasking, where they're reflecting. So these would be some of the tools I would work on. And then I'll make the sound quality much better, because right now, it's tinny, irritating sound you have. If it's beautiful podcast sound, it's much more engaging. But we don't care about sound. We much more about seeing ourselves all the time. So that will be some of the small things I will choose.

I've done 70 or so of these interviews, but you have the best setup of anybody I've interviewed so far.

Oh, thank you. Really, thank you. Like, I.

And I hope you can see that I have a good setup, too, because I'm using a Sony and I'm using a mic. That helps. I mean, it helps.

It. It does help. Because you want to rest your eyes. You know how it is when sometimes you just go daydreaming for a second. We can't have 100% attention, but if. At least if I can look at something and is visually somewhat okay to look at rather than blurring and what is happening there. So I do think we need to optimize every signal we send when we are on Zoom or teams. I said to an executive the other day, you have a dog. You love it, right? Yeah. And it's standing there in the corner all the time. Yeah. Put it behind you in the basket so people can see it. And he did that. And immediately it was crazy. His dog said he's more human. It's such a simple thing, because suddenly we could talk about the dog, and we have something to connect around. It's not this clinical thing. I do think we should be aware of every signal we send. Not just what we say, but what we know, what we see, what we taste and touch and hear tells a. And I think a lot of people forget about that. Every brand tells a story. And what I learned from a huge neuroscience study we did around it was that the most important sense we have is a sense of smell and then sense of sound and then sense of touch and then sense of sight. But most brains were just appealing to the sense of sight. But it's almost like a tape recorder. If you can record five tracks, you record it basically into your brain on five tracks, and you record it and remember it five times better. Typically, our neuroscience work showed, but today, for some reason, if you can cut a channel, just let's cut it right? And I don't believe in that.

So you make a lot of keynote speeches. And I was wondering, what do you think the ideal virtual keynote speech length is?

Well, thank you for the question. I'll give you two answer. It probably is in the end of the day, 25 minutes. But I would also claim that if you have a way of seeing the audience or having someone seeing the audience and getting a sense for the attention span, then have the length which fits to their reaction rather than a fixed length. And I've done that a couple of times where I said to the conference organizer, they gave me a slot of an hour, and they said, how long is your speech? I said, I don't know, let's play it by ear. And I played it by ear. And what was interesting was the first part of my speech was actually only 21 minutes. And then I felt the energy disappeared. And then there was one question from a guy, and it was such an interesting question. And it took me 18 minutes to answer that question. And everyone was so taken by the depth of the answer that they thought, this is just a. This is not a canned speech. It's real. So they asked questions and suddenly it was an hour. It was a keyNote speech for 20 minutes. But in reality, it was one big keynote speech. It's just engaging the audience. Right.

I'm glad because whenever people tell me, okay, your slot is an hour, I just like, yeah, I am not. I don't know of any human who's capable of keeping somebody virtually for an hour keynote talking by himself or herself.

No, Well, I. I have some tricks. I have two tricks, in fact, and I can show them to you, which I don't know if the listener at all. Do the listeners have the access to the video feed as well?

No, this is purely audio.

So what I'm going to show right now is that I can do drawings on the screen. There we are. This is super important because sometimes I actually do a lot of drawings while I'm talking to people. And that helps to engage people, particularly when they ask really interesting questions. And the other thing, thing I Also do quite often is that I use a lot of B roll for my speeches. So I have a whole B roll archive. And the B roll archive really allows me to amplify what my message is. So right now, if you were to watch my screen, you will notice I'm running B roll now. And that means that whatever I'm saying is supported by a visual effect.

How are you drawing on screen?

I'm drawing on screen because I'm using a green screen right now. So I'm using it for the iPad here, and then it's going through the atm. I am green screen keying it out through a software, and then it goes on to the screen.

Oh, my God, Martin.

But I don't have a phone. You're such.

That is quite the juxtaposition there, Martin. So let's say you're the CEO and you listen to this podcast, you read your book, and you say, okay, hell man, I gotta fix this. What do I do?

It depends on what the fixing means. But I think if I assume the fixing is that you stocked in the past, you have a huge organization which can't move and adopt to change. And when it's adopting to change, it's too slow and too late. Perhaps your culture is not very good. In fact, it's really bad. If that's the starting scenario, then the first thing I've learned is to go back to the chickens. So let me tell you part two of my chicken story here. I mean, everyone listening right now. You must think I'm mad. I apologize for everything I'm saying here. Right, but so how do you get the chickens out of that chicken cage? Well, imagine that you have four chicken cages. And I'm not going to illustrate this right now because it would be sad for everyone.

I want to see.

I'm going to do a show and tell at the same time here, right? So, so imagine that you have four chicken cages standing around a square, and you have a square in the middle. You see them from the top, right? Now if I open the doors to these chicken cages and I have these chickens, they want to get out of the chicken case. How do I get them out of the case? My question to you is, Guy, if I had a piece of corn, and you want to place that corn somewhere to get the chickens out of the chicken case, where you would place the corn, well, at the edge.

You told me.

You will not place them in the center because the center is too far away. You are right. Just outside the chicken cage. And I'll explain that For a second. If you place the corn in the very center of the square. Wait, why don't you take that away? Put that back. So here's the issue. If I place the corn in the very center of the square, the chicken, let's say Chicken A here, standing here.

Let'S say that's Ms. McConnell.

Exactly. Let's say that's Ms. McCann. Mitch McConnell is looking out of that piece of corn and saying, heck, that's far away. I'm not paid for it, my KPIs are not supporting it and I'll not have enough support. So what is he going to do? Mitch McCollum will look to Chicken Bee, which will be all his colleagues in Parliament and Senate. And. And he will say, what is Chicken B doing? Chicken B will say, my gosh, this is far away. So we look at Chicken C and Chicken C A, Chicken D, and all of them conclude this is too far away. They'll go straight back into the cage. And you have not made a single chain in the organization. So what is it you're going to do? Really, what I've learned is you place the corn straight outside the chicken cage. Why is that? Well, I call that a 90 day intervention. It's a short little activity you do which will have a profound impact on the organization. But it happens in only 90 days. When you, for example, have a customer and the customer is really angry about a certain thing, then try to remove that little friction and celebrate that within the organization. That is the trick. Or internally, if there's so much friction going on internally, try to fix that internally first and then give people the briefing space to actually move out. And what I'm saying here is that a 90 day intervention is a short little thing. I'll give you an example. So we work for one of the largest banks in the world and I had this workshop with around 800 executives in the meeting. And one guy said to me, I'm so frustrated working as a banker. I said, what frustrates you the most? He said, what frustrates the most is emails. I get 800 emails every day. I said, would you like to change that? He said, absolutely, I'd like to get rid of it. So I said, are you aware there's a direct collision between the number of emails you send and the number of emails you receive? So here's my idea. Why don't we get rid of the CC button and the Reply all button in Outlook? And of course the folks in reply said, oh, you can't do it. No, we will oversee the ccs and all this stuff. I said that, frankly, all you guys in this room, how many of you actually ever read those cc's? And not a single hand was raised. I'm not kidding. Not a single hand. So we did it for three months, 90 days. After 90 days, the number of emails had dropped from 800 to 360. Two emails per person on average, is a true number. And that's zero complaints. And that became almost the first. First piece of evidence within the organization that change is possible. And then once we did that, we did another 90 day and another 90 day, and slowly the chicken went out of the chicken case, ate one corner at a time. And it created a sense of agreement, subconscious agreement between all the. I'm using the word as a metaphor for our chickens, because all folks in the organization said, do you know what? Change is possible? My colleagues, even the guy was so stubborn or so conservative, he actually is willing to change change so I can make change happening. And that is the transformation of a culture. Because in the end of the day, just like McDonald's, it's the culture which is making it tricky. Right.

I'm gonna end right there because that is just. That is a great story and a great way to end this podcast. So let's say someday you're out of four seasons or a Ritz Carlton, and you're hanging out by the swimming pool, and you see somebody swimming, and he has a notebook or a remarkable tablet at each end. He stops, he writes down a few notes, and then he continues swimming. You can be pretty sure that that is Martin Lindstrom. I hope you enjoyed this episode and you learned about breathing through straws, why politicians should live closer to each other, and how to get chickens and people out of their cages. The remarkable Martin Lindstrom. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, who jumped through all kinds of hoops to make this episode. This episode. You don't even want to know. Until next time. Mahalo and aloha. This is Remarkable people.