Surrounded by Geniuses | Alan Gregerman | Talks at Google

First of all, thank you everyone for coming today. I think this is going to be our best Google Most author talk ever. Not to put any pressure on our author at all, just introduce most of all, most importantly, a good friend and a neighbor, Alan Gregerman. And thank you very much for coming today. We really appreciate it and know you do talks all around the world as you're mentioning at lunch from Dubai to Istanbul. And I'm glad you included Ann Arbor in your world travels and include Google Center. Yeah, I'm pretty sure at least now that Google is here, I think it's the center of the world. And just to give a quick background on Alan so everyone knows where he's coming from. He's the founder and President and Chief innovation officer of VentureWorks, which is a Washington, D.C. based consulting firm and that helps leading companies unlock compelling value for the customers they serve. It's pretty much in line with what we do here, I think, and his clients in our wide range of leading companies from Marriott to Lockheed Martin, Scrumy Communications and Verizon and now kind of Google, I guess to talk with us. He graduated as an undergrad from Northwestern and then did graduate school here at Michigan and was in geography. He got your PhD so he's worked as everything from a subway mechanic to a map maker. And now he is here with us today at Google. And thank you again for coming and thanks for being with us.

Thank you. Thank you Matt and thank you Elise, also for putting this together and thanks to all of you for taking time out of your busy schedule because as I got a tour, I realize you're all really busy and I'm cutting into your ability to do business. So hopefully I'll be able to offer some ideas to all of you that give you a different framework for how to be more successful. It's a pleasure to be with you and to share ideas about my new book, Surrounded by Geniuses. And I hope that you'll all read it and enjoy it and give me feedback on it. There's contact information there, so give me a sense of what you think about it. Surrounded by Geniuses is really a book about how to unlock the brilliance in ourselves and our organizations and to consistently be brilliant at the things that matter most. As Matt said, I believe the things that matter most are how can we continue to be better and better at delivering value to customers? Because in the end, for any business, customers are the folks that really matter to us. So I'm honored to be here because you guys are kind of brilliant. In fact, one might look at the newspaper and believe you're absolutely on the top of the world. And so it's truly an honor to be here. Having said that, I'd like to begin with a short kind of cautionary tale about being on top of the world. I realize you guys are relatively young, so you might not exactly get this, but hopefully you'll have a rough idea or you can search on the web for insight about this. And it begins in 1979 and begins with a pair of beans. It's 1979, and as I walk across the university of Michigan campus, or any campus that I might have been on, I am the coolest person in the entire world, okay? I'm the coolest person because I have headphones that attach to something that was absolutely remarkable at that time, and it was called the Sony Walker. Anybody ever heard of that? Okay? I can walk around anywhere and personally have my own music, okay? So in my pocket, I have cassettes. And those cassettes are the police. And you guys have heard of them. And Pink Floyd, of course you've heard of them. And Donna summer, because those were the three hottest artists in 1979. And wherever I go, I can walk around, I can listen to my music, okay? So I think this is the greatest thing. And the folks at Sony are absolutely, for their time, on top of the world. They were the coolest company in 1979, and in the 20 years that followed that they would sell a quarter of a billion Sony walk people, okay? Trying to be appropriate here, Sony walk people. And they would sell 500 million sets of earphones, okay? And they would sell all these earphones because they didn't last as long as the walk people did. And truly, they would own the ears of an entire generation of people. Okay, now let's fast forward. Fast forward to today and how many people are walking across campus being really cool because they have a Sony walk person? Absolutely no one. And yet people are wearing earphones, and their earphones are connecting to something that matters more. The folks at Sony who are on top of the world, who own the ears of everybody, dropped the ball. And they dropped the ball from understanding that music was becoming digitized, that the world was digital, and that not only was digital music important, but a customer experience really mattered. And so the folks that won right now, at least, are the folks at Apple who figured out how to combine really hot technology with a really awesome customer experience. The itunes, stores with the ability to drive almost everything other than, I think, Beatles songs to you guys, and the ability, in essence, to say you can have your music really, or your entertainment really. Personalized, brilliant company suddenly was no longer relevant in the thing that got them to be viewed in the world as the coolest company on the planet. So you guys the coolest company on the planet now, or one of them. I'm assuming. There are a lot of other ones, but you guys are really cool. And I'd like you, as we go through kind of thinking about today, what it means to be brilliant, I'd like you to think about how you consistently continue to be brilliant so that you guys don't forget to connect with the people that matter most. Surrounded by geniuses is really based on two compelling ideas. The first, and let me phrase those ideas in terms of questions, okay? And I might get a different response from you guys than I get from typical audiences, but let me ask this. How many times have you arrived at work, had a cup of coffee or some water or some tea or whatever you have to drink, gone to a meeting or two, said hello to some of your colleagues, and then gone back to where you sit at your desk and sat down and been overcome by the feeling that you were surrounded by geniuses? You guys think you are? Yes. When I ask this, in most normal businesses, no one ever raises their hand except for those people who work by themselves. But the reality is, in every organization, for us to succeed, we have to get everyone to be brilliant at what they're responsible for doing. So I want you to think about that for a moment. Second is how many of you leave work, get in your car or get on your bicycle or walk to your house or apartment or get on public transportation? I don't know that there's that much public transportation here in Ann Arbor, but you can get on public transportation, pass all kinds of crazy drivers, pass all kinds of apparently mindless advertisements, and then get home and say to yourself, oh, my God, I live in a world in which I'm surrounded by geniuses. Any of you, you're more likely to see a world filled with absolutely aggressive drivers, totally mindless advertisements, and some folks that you might scream at who you think are total or partial idiots. And that's your view of the genius that's around you. And yet, I would argue that not only do we need to be geniuses, but we need to figure out how to unlock genius around us. Because, in fact, the world is literally filled with absol. Absolutely unbelievable insight that we can apply to our world, but insight that's never been applied to what you do, but insight that challenges us to look very differently at what we do. And I'd like to spend a few moments getting you to think about that. First, let me say, when the word genius comes up, we often think of folks like Albert Einstein or Madame Curie or George Washington Carver or Leonardo da Vinci. Those folks are really pretty bright and probably even as smart as you guys are. Those folks don't hang around at the water cooler here. But the reality is, what genius means today in business is being able to look at customers in a different way than anybody else has. Being able to look at the stuff that we have and somehow create a way to deliver greater value with what we have now and what we could have than anyone's ever done. And for all of you who interact with a customer on a day to day basis, you're the ones who can figure out how to be brilliant because you're the ones that hear what the customer says. You're the ones that look at the customer challenges and figure out, is there a way for me to do something better, to optimize, I think, in your terms, terms optimize the value that I deliver for them. And that's the challenge. But to do that, we have to walk around with our eyes wide open. So it's 1948, and a guy named George de Mestral is walking through the Alps with his dog. And I was fortunate enough to get an exact replica of it. This is the dog that was in one of those movies where people are possessed, you know, turns head around. So just after Halloween, it's a perfect dog. And so he's walking along through the Alps with his dog and he notices that his dog is covered with birds. Okay, has anybody ever walked in the woods and gotten burrs on your hands? Or a dog? And unlike everyone who for thousands of years thought that this was really just a nuisance, he decides it's really cool, pulls some burrs off, takes them back to his little house, looks at them under a microscope and says, this is absolutely brilliant. Something found in nature that can absolutely do something really cool. I bet there's an application for it. Well, fast forward to today. There are literally 80,000 products that use his walk through the woods. What he had discovered was Velcro. He discovered Velco because he believed that in the world around him, it was worthwhile to be curious. You'll discover the next great thing for Google or any organization by looking around you and believing that it really matters to be curious, that you are just a glance away from discovering something that could be a brilliant breakthrough. If you can apply it to the world of what you do now when I say everyday geniuses that we all have the potential to do it. I don't know how many of you have ever rented a car from Enterprise rent a car, but if you ever have. Enterprise rent a car was nothing not that long ago. Today they're the largest car rental company, and they're the largest car rental company. Not necessarily because they have better cars, because I think none of them have better cars. But don't you film this for the folks that hurt? Not because they have better cars, they're better today because in 1974, a branch manager, an Enterprise rent a car suddenly, when pressured to figure out how to be different in Orlando, Florida from all of his competitors, said to himself, I've got an ide. Rather than make it a hassle for somebody to pick up a car, we'll go and get them at their home. And that became their theme. At Enterprise. We pick you up, we're going to make it easier than you having to drive to a place to get a car. That was the catalyst for them passing all of the other car rental companies, becoming by far the biggest car rental company in the world. But it was a challenge that he got from looking at the world around them and figuring out what mattered. Picture the scene. And I don't know how you guys do brainstorming, but picture the scene. In a typical organization, organization, when there's a big challenge like we've got to generate greater revenue, we've got to sell more, we've got to make this work better. You get a bunch of people in a room together, okay? And someone who's the boss of that challenge says, okay, you know, our backs are to the wall. We need to do better here. Corporate is really pounding on us. We have to come up with better numbers. Does anybody have an out of the box idea? Anybody ever been in a meeting like that? Anybody ever uttered those words, does anybody have an out of the box idea? Kind of an embarrassing thought to say. And then all of us look around and go, o, oh, you wanted an out of the box idea. Not the same tired, lame old ideas we always had. Aha. Well, if you want an out of the box idea, wait a minute, I think my BlackBerry's ringing. I gotta go to another meeting. Oh, I gotta call a customer. I really can't be here. But I'm sure the rest of you are smart enough to make this happen. Typically, even though you're relatively young, as adults, by the time we become adults, it's relatively hard to Suddenly say, haven't had a brilliant idea today, but let me turn on the part of my brain that comes up with a brilliant idea and just click it on and have it happen. If you were six year old, that would happen instantly. But as adults, in order to come up with a brilliant idea, we have to change our perspective and actually get out and bring fresh ideas and insight to the world that we live in. If we don't do that, we generally are doomed to fail. Let me give you the best example I have found, and it's profiled in the book, of what it means to have to change your perspective. How many folks here swim? Any of you swim competitively or have swim competitively? So you know the basic four swimming strokes, they are freestyle, backstroke, breast and fly. Okay, great. Freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and fly. And the fastest swimming stroke is the freestyle. It's like by far the fastest, except for roughly the first 15 meters. A good breaststroke, I mean, a good butterfly swimmer can actually keep up with a good freestyle swimmer, but then you get tired because the butterfly is really hard to do. Okay, so freestyle is the fastest. Anybody have any idea what the slowest stroke is? Breast. Breaststroke. Breaststroke, Absolutely. By far the slowest stroke. Okay, so I mention that because I'd like to tell you a bit of a story. In the late 1800s, there was only one part of the world in which people really cared about competitive swimming. And that part of the world was northern Europe. And there they had competitions all the time and they were always trying to beat each other and they were always trying to swim really fast. But that was the only place in the world. And the people who were really keen on competing and swimming were white people. Really white people as white as white people could be. They kept going to meets and they kept swimming really fast. They thought. The interesting thing about what white people did, and they were the only people in the world who cared about swimming, was that the only stroke that the people who cared about swimming swam in competition was the breaststroke. The slowest stroke known to human beings, but the fastest stroke known to them. It was the only stroke they knew. 1844, a swim meet is held in London, England. Two Native Americans come and they literally crash the party. They get in the pool and unbeknownst to the white people, they actually start swimming freestyle. God, the white people looked at them, God, what are those savages doing? How are they swimming that way? This is really weird to me. They won every single race they entered. One might have assumed that the other folks would be kind of curious and start to swim in a different way, but they didn't. They continued to try to get faster swimming the breaststroke. They decided that was the best one for them. Maybe it's because you don't have to put your face in the water, though, actually, it'd be really good. Now you do. 1873, a young man named John Trudgen, who I believe is like, kind of a guru of business, had not been around when these guys crashed the party. But he heard about the fact that people came from another place and swam differently and was determined to go and figure out how. He wanted to teach his swim team how to swim this new lake. He got on a boat and went to South America to study how people swam there, and he found a group of people who swam the freestyle. He got a guide to take him there. He took notes, he asked questions. He figured out how to do it. He learned how to swim their way. He brought back pictures, and he came back and taught all of the folks that he was teaching how to swim the freestyle. And within a matter of a very short time, they all won every race that they entered. Finally, after 10,000 years, because that's how long people had been swimming the freestyle, freestyle in every part of the world but northern Europe, white people now knew how to swim faster. I would argue that we spend an awful lot of time in business not being brilliant or as brilliant as we could be at the things that really matter. Swimming mattered to these guys, yet they had no clue how to do it faster. And even when they got a clue, they were unwilling to change. Now, you wouldn't think about swimming or swimming fast without doing a different stroke. They could have been, I think, given the benefit of the doubt, for taking a while to learn how to swim faster, because it was hard to get to places where people swam faster. They didn't have a particularly powerful search engine in the late 1800s. It took a long time by boat. Now we have no excuse. We can get anywhere in the world within a matter of two days. We can get anywhere in the world within a matter of a few keystrokes to figure out exactly what's possible and what other people are doing that are brilliant. And even if only half of the information on the Internet being generous there is actually accurate, we still have access to a lot of brilliant information. Our challenge is to figure out who's better in all walks of life and what matters to us and how we can be brilliant at making it happen. Well, if today we can go anywhere in the world, then why don't we try to figure out as we go anywhere in the world how to unlock brilliant ideas in all aspects of the world around us. And one of the things that I try to do in Surrounded is to get people to realize. And here, there's a chair here. Right this way. Your table's waiting. Is that inspiration need not simply come from other companies. You know, I don't know if you guys ever spend any time thinking about what your competitors are doing. Do you ever do that? Maybe somebody in Mountain View does. I don't know. If you were to figure out something your competitors were doing that was brilliant and copied it or did a bit better, you wouldn't be that much different than that. Them we win in business by being compellingly different than everyone else. So if I want to be compellingly different, I ought to think about a way to be truly unique. So I look for inspiration in all kinds of places. What I'd like to do for a few minutes is share with you some places where you can find inspiration, and then we'll open it up to kind of your thoughts and any questions that you have. 1912, a guy who runs a family dry goods store in a town of Freeport, Maine, suddenly realizes that he's not excited about running the dry goods store, but what he loves to do is go hunting and fishing. His only problem is that he regularly catches cold and his feet are regularly getting wet. So he decides in a stroke of brilliance to invent a shoe that's going to keep his feet dry. He takes a rubber bottom sole, which was not a new concept. Actually, the Mayans had invented rubber bottom shoes in the year 900. A leather insulated upper glues them together and makes a shoe. And is very proud of himself. His feet stay warm. He is so proud of himself, he decides to create a company that sells these shoes to all. And he creates 100 pairs, sells them, and then finds within a month that 90 of the pairs have fallen apart. He could have said, well, I'm sorry, this was a stupid business idea, and stopped being in this business. But instead, he decided to do something that turns out to be one of the boldest moves in business history. He redesigns the shoes, sends them back to people, and sends a note with the shoes that says, I apologize for what happened. If at any time now in the life of the shoe that you purchased from me, it doesn't give you value commensurate with what you've paid, send it back to me. Be no questions asked. I'll either give you another shoe or your money back. He had in the process created what we now know in modern times as the first unconditional guarantee of satisfaction. A guarantee that the customer decides whether they're satisfied. Do you guys offer any guarantees? There was not a dry eye in the house. How could we ever be better? Let's assume someday you have a lot of competition and you're trying to figure out how to be compellingly different than them. If you were to say, look, I'm going to create a campaign for you. If you don't, only if you don't, not only I wasn't an English major. If you don't, not only get all the hits you want, but hits that are so perfect for you that these people are beating a bath through your door. They're hanging out in your front yard, they're desperate to do business with you. You don't have to pay. Kind of a scary concept, isn't it? Our commissions are riding on, but the reality is if we could somehow guarantee that what we say to the customer is a promise we could keep, we would be unbeatable. This guy did it. His name, he had an odd name, so we now know why he uses initials. His name was Leon, leonwood B or LLB. And today his company is like a 3 billion dollar company based in Freeport, Maine that guarantees absolutely everything they sell, from shoes to fishing poles, to umbrellas that are bound to break, to kayaks to all kind. They guarantee unconditionally. If you're not satisfied, send it back. You get your money back. What if we had to win in business, had to be faster than all of our competitors? We could look around and see what companies out there are fast. Or we could go to the savannas of Tanzania and we could hang out with these guys. And I brought an almost exact soft replica of the world's coolest animal, which is the cheetah. And they are the cutest animals on earth and they happen to be the fastest land mammals. Anybody have any idea how fast a cheetah can go? 70 miles an hour. And what's even cooler is they can go zero to 50 in two and a half seconds. So that's a pretty good start. Now having said that, how many of you can go? No. Even with a really expensive car, it would be hard to do that. Having said that, cheetahs are not fast all the time. In fact, they're only fast to do two things, okay? That is get food and protect their young. Those are the only reasons they need to be fast. But to be fast in doing that, they have Been designed by nature to be unbelievable. So if you think about a cheetah and you compare them to all the other creatures on the planet, this is not an exact replica. Cheetahs have longer legs proportionally than any other cat. Okay. That allows them to take long strides. They have the longest tail of any cat. That allows them when they're turning quickly to have some stability. They have the smallest heads of any cat. You know why? Less wind resistance. So that matters to a cheetah. They have amazing ears that allow them to hear a mile away because they've got a to chance check on these folks that they might need to munch. I don't know. Their cafeteria is not as nice as your cafeteria. I understand that. But they're pretty focused. They're okay with the same meal every day as long as they eat. They have the largest heart and lungs per body size of any creature because they've got to have an exhaust system that allows them to really kind of get that air in and out. They also have paws that are much more like a dog's paws that allow them to grip as they turn differently than the other cats with retractable claws. And they have a cool thing for those of you who are fans of Michigan or other football, because you see on a sunny day, football players put kind of paint or something under their eyes. They got it from cheetahs. Cheetahs have tear marks because they're generally in the sun. That reduces the sun's glare. So they can go really fast after a gazelle and not have to worry that the sun will blind them. If I want to be faster in delivering value to customers, and I understand what makes cheetahs fast, we can make an organization compellingly fast. If I don't exactly understand, then I'll simply copy what competitors do and never figure out a remarkable and unique way. What if I wanted to be brilliant 24 7? Okay. Are you guys brilliant 24 7? Some of you are shaking your head yes. Some of you, not individually, but as an organization. Are you brilliant 24 7? Okay. So anywhere in the world, anybody has requests, I can get them to the right person and deliver compassion value. Well, we need to do that because clearly we're in a global economy. And as I understand, a significant percentage of your business is happening all around the world at any time. Well, I could go and visit companies that claim to be brilliant 247 and, you know, I'd have a horrible experience. In fact, we changed all of the computers in our company's office from Dell when I had a remarkable Dell customer experience, which many of you have had. I called Dell customer support and I get a message that says, thank you for calling Dell customer support. We're delighted that you called our award winning technical support. I heard that message 13 times in the 40 minutes I was waiting. I was so excited, you know, that all these times I was getting award winning customer support, I could only imagine how brilliant it would be when I actually got somebody to serve me, because it was that brilliant during the time they refused to serve me. You know, it was gonna be awesome when I find. But I didn't last that long, okay? I heard all the brilliant things they did. And then I recalled that the last time I called Dell that the person I finally got after 40 minutes had no idea how to solve my problem, but that if I was willing to more, I could get somebody who knew how to solve my problem. So that was kind of cool. For less money. Think about that. It's kind of a brilliant strategy. For less money, you get somebody who's incompetent but will at least tell you that they're incompetent, and then they'll delay your ability. So you think you're being. Well, just let me talk to my supervisor. You know, they're really smart. It'll just take five more minutes. They're an expert. Well, they couldn't figure that either. Well, you could plug the mouse in. That might work. No, but seriously. And then if I was willing to pay a lot more, presumably I warranted somebody really intelligent. Well, I started thinking about the fact that 247 really matters, but that most companies aren't brilliant. 24 7. So I found a place where people were brilliant. And remember, surrounded by geniuses is about looking around the world at places where people do brilliant things and figuring out how we can learn from them. And the place that I found, and I won't turn this on because it'll be kind of scary. The ambulance sound was a place called the R. Adams Collie Shock Trauma center, which is the only dedicated shock trauma hospital in America. Now, shock trauma hospitals function on one really kind of golden rule. And that golden rule is that if somebody's in a traumatic accident, if they don't get help within an hour, they may live a bit longer, but the likelihood that they'll ever return to their normal life is very small. Anybody ever watched the show Critical Hour on Discovery Town was filmed at this hospital. Okay. So these folks suddenly had a challenge because people were going to come in who basically were going to die unless they did something in an hour. So first they had to get them there in an hour and then they had to, had to be brilliant. And so they decided to do two things. If you're lucky enough, like Matt and our family, to live in Maryland, Everyone In Maryland pays $18 a year for eight strategically located heliports throughout the state that are there in case anyone's in an accident there so that people can be helicoptered to the roof of this hospital. So that's something that we're pretty lucky about. Maryland is pretty small state, so geographically we can do that. But the other thing is, they realized was if the clock is ticking, we can't afford to not have all of the experts around. So unlike other hospitals, they organize in two 12 hour shifts and on each shift is every expertise, every specialist that they ever needed to handle a case is always at the hospital. They're communicating with the ambulance or the helicopter, they're asking them to assess the patient, and then they're meeting them at the emergency room door or on the roof to begin to provide additional, additional medical care. When they arrive, they understand 24, 7. Because unlike the folks at Dell, imagine I called this hospital and they said, well, thank you for calling the Kali Shock Trauma Hospital. It's a privilege to serve you. Our award winning customer service providers are either off premise or somewhere else or maybe in the cafeteria. But as soon as they come back, if you're not dead by then, we'd be delighted to serve you. So they don't have that choice. And I would argue in business, because customers are fickle, we don't have a choice. We absolutely ought to be the ones that are brilliant all the time if we're going to get the customers to continue to want to do business with us. So those are a few examples. Let me give you one more. How many of you, in what you do, believe that your challenge is to build really strong kind of relationships and have meaningful conversations with your customers? I'm assuming a lot of you, okay? So you can go to all kinds of courses. If you guys had sales training courses, I would imagine, and you've had customer relations courses and you've probably read all kinds of cool books because there's this huge bookshelves filled with sales books. So you could do that or you could get inspiration from the folks who are absolutely the most brilliant at having relationships that matter. And those are girl Scouts, okay? So I always wonder, why is it that 8 year old girls can get everyone in the world to buy more product than they want? To buy. Well, you know, you can freeze these. You know, I don't mean to be rude, but I was looking in. Your freezer's pretty darn large there, so. But how is it that they can get everyone to not only open the door, welcome them in. How many of the customers that you serve offer you hot chocolate? Now, they probably know you get free food here, but how many of them say, please come in, I missed you, you know? Did they say, I missed you? God, I was desperate for you to call. Is it that time of year again when the folks at Google will be calling? God, I didn't think I could make it another day. You saved me. Has that ever happened? Probably not. And that's what happens to Girl Scouts. God, you're back. Thank God. I noticed your brother. He's so big now. Is that your dog? She was just a puppy last year. How's school? How are you? Tell me about your family. What are you doing now? Are you still doing fencing? What are all the cool things you're doing? Please come in. And the challenge of the Girl Scouts is not to get the meeting, but to get out of the house in time to make more sales calls. And so they have conversations that matter. Because the conversation really to start is absolutely nothing about, you gotta buy my code cookies. It's everything about reconnecting with something that matters to people in a way that strikes at the heart of what it means to be a neighbor and a member of a community that really matters. I argue if we study Girl Scouts selling cookies and we apply what they know, we could be far better at engaging customers and having conversations that matter. And if we looked at our conversations against a template of the conversations Girl Scouts have, we could be downright brilliant. How do we commit to getting folks to understand as well that even if we have a bunch of customers, they're the most important customers to us? Imagine that you're at a nice hotel and you have a question, or you have a need, and you go to the concierge, okay? And the concierge has a really cool job because their job is to solve every single problem than any guest has ever had. That's their challenge. You know, those problems could be absolutely absurd, or they could be problems that really matter, but it doesn't matter, because they're a guest, they're a customer. We care about them. So as absurd as it is, the concierge says, look, I'm going to find the answer. I'll solve that problem for you, and I won't rest until I've solved that problem. And then quickly they go on their kind of. To their network or their Rolodex. Well, that's an old concept, but they go somewhere or they Google to find the answer, you know, because you guys have made it easy for them. And then they quickly get back to somebody and say, that's brilliant. Or they call a friend to solve the problem. If we could be so skillful that anytime, anybody, a customer asked for something and we didn't know the answer, we could somehow network all of our buddies and then figure out who knew the answer within the company and then call the customer and say, I searched the entire world for the best answer and I got it for you. That would be pretty good. Darn impressive, wouldn't it? Yes, we can do that. We have the power to do that. Let me give you one more example, and let me wrap up a little bit and then take any questions that you have. How many of you have ever seen this guy here? Spider Man. And you know that spider man is a class of creature called a superhero, okay? And superheroes are superheroes, unlike mere mortals, because they have superpowers. Okay? So Spider Man's superpowers are spidey sense, which is the coolest. I mean, he can shoot webs, he can climb surfaces, he can cling the surface. But spidey sense is truly his coolest power. You're all living here, okay? And if you want to get a refresher, get Spider Man 1. You can get it at Blockbusters. There's probably no great demand for it right now. Okay? So he has spidey sense, and spidey sense allows him to. To do what? Save people. He saves them by anticipating danger. Okay? He can sense danger happening. Okay? Have you guys ever, in dealing with customers, ever had danger happen? Has anything ever not gone quite right in dealing with us, even here at Google? That's kind of good to know for the rest of the mere mortals out there. So sometimes danger happens, and it happens because we don't anticipate something not working out. Right. What if we had the ability to anticipate danger? What if we, instead of struggling along, decided that Spider man was a great source of inspiration? By wandering the world and encountering him, we could figure out a way to help our customers to avoid danger. Then we could be awesome. If we guarantee things, and if we had amazing spiders, we'd be even more brilliant. I believe we can. We can anticipate danger. In what ways? Anybody have an idea how we can anticipate danger? I think we can anticipate danger by always engaging the customer, by always finding out what's going on in their world, by always seeing if their needs change, by always looking to see if something going on in the world outside of them is going to impact their world by simply being smarter. And after all, you guys are really the way to search for smartness. So you can use your tools and your ability to engage the customers and your ability to share knowledge with each other as real keys to creating compelling spider sense. Here you can, as an organization, be the ones that truly anticipate danger in ways that nobody else can. And your challenge is really to figure out how, as an organization, to be compellingly brilliant at spotting issues before they ever occur. Well, hopefully when you read the book, you'll see that there are details about all these examples. I mean, I could stand up here and talk for days because I really like this stuff. Stuff a lot. You'll also find some other things that hopefully will be remarkable to you. One is that I believe, and I'm sure your company does lots of market research, that a far better thing to find out what consumers are up to and the challenge they face than spending millions of dollars in market research, I would argue is watching reruns of the Seinfeld show. Yes, and I would argue that because remember the Seinfeld shows, A show about nothing. Okay. Every week, these four really pathetic characters and their pathetic cast of absolutely go through all of the stupid little things in life that drive people crazy. If we were to watch that and pay attention to the things that drove them crazy, we would see in a mirror the things that we do as a business to drive the folks that we serve crazy at times. So watching that reruns and then sitting down as a group and saying, okay, now what's the corollary to our little world? Would get you incredible insight very quickly about how to really zoom in on the little things that. That bug people. Because are all the customers right now saying, these guys are perfect at everything? I'm not sure that they are. I mean, I'd like to think they are. I'd like to think that they truly see the value all the time. But I believe at times you guys drive them crazy, too. Not as bad as my friends at Comcast whose business model is to torture them. I think that's their tagline, abusing the customer until they can't take anymore. Comcast, the perfect monopoly. Oh, so if any of you have friends working at Comcast, my phone number's in there. I'd be glad to Talk with them. But you'll learn from that. You'll learn about. You know, there's a chapter in the book, I believe that if we make our customers feel healthier, that we make them feel more energized, more able to kind of use the stuff that we provide them to get more value out of it, we can win. But instead of giving you business examples right at the start, I take you in the book to an exercise class on the west coast of Sweden, where my wife is from, to a public aerobic class in which I share with you an organization in Sweden called Friskies and Svetis, which is a national aerobics organization in Sweden. Aerobics instructors go to every village in Sweden during the summer and offer aerobic classes three times a week. And then the instructors, at the end of an hour, take people on a 5k run. That's kind of a weird concept, but it's a concept based on a national ethic of staying healthy. And they also have kind of nationalized health insurance, so they can't afford for people to get sick. But imagine this organization is out there to try and get everybody, no matter what their athletic level, to be healthy. And they're committed to getting that to happen. And they're excited about that. And their motto is that we're going to make people smile when they exercise, even if they hated exercising when they showed up here. And they do that. They have 4, 400,000 members right now, and it's all about that. Well, I believe what we can learn from them is how to get people to smile, even when what they're doing is painful. And so the challenge is how do we get them to see the true potential of what we offer? So I'd love you to think about kind of all the different ideas in the book and to think about how if we wander the world in search of inspiration, we can be far better than we ever imagined we could be, and far better than our competitors. Let me leave you with one thought, and then I will take any questions that you have and I will hang around for those of you who want to stay and talk more. And here's the thought. Not long ago, I was walking our at the time, nine year old daughter at the bus stop. And it was probably a bus stop that Matt used when he was a young guy. And I was walking to the bus stop, and as I was walking to the bus stop, this really strange guy walks down the street. Okay. I'd never seen him before and not in our neighborhood. And he really looked Peculiar. And I was a little bit kind of nervous about him. So I turned to our daughter and I said, Carly, sweetheart, I just need to remind you of one piece of advice that parents give their children. I'm assuming your parents gave this to you, and that is it's not a perfect world out there and Mama and Papa can't always walk you to the bus. So I want you to promise me that if you're walking by yourself, you will not talk to strangers. Anybody ever get that advice? So will you promise me that? To which Carly, at the age of nine, looked up and said, but, Papa. Ah. If I don't ever talk to strangers, how will I ever make new friends? And how will I ever learn new things? If you only talk to the people you know, the reality is you'll never learn new things. Your challenge is to talk to strangers with a bit of caution, you know, not the really weird ones that walk down the street as individuals and as an organization, is to consistently talk to strangers and to commit to talking to people who are so much different than you and commit to talking to people in organizations and businesses that are so much different than what you guys do. Because if you understand what makes magic for them and can combine their magic with what you guys already know, you have a chance over a long period of time to be remarkable. You have a chance, unlike Sony, to never miss what's going on in the world around you and always figure out how to deliver compelling value. So I've raced through a lot of stuff. I hope it was interesting to you. I would be delighted to take questions. I could talk for longer, but I'll open it up. Thank you for giving me the chance to be here. Any questions? It's all totally clear to you.

Do you have any examples of Google in your book?

I don't think I do in this book. But, you know, there's always the possibility, you know, to do that at some point.

I have a comment or just as the wheel's turning, as you're talking about the Girl Scout cookies, so I'm in a sales role. There's a lot of people here and, you know, you said something to the fact of why does everybody want to buy from these children? Among other things, and why is it the one you don't buy? You feel the most guilty. So it's thinking, what do they have, you know, besides other children, obviously, or what do children have that would make, you know, you more willing to buy? And I think that a lot of it has to do with being non threatening. So There's I. I mean, we're all incentivized in a way that we could be aggressive and I think that that's more likely to counteract. So I think that's one thing that I took away, to be non threatening and be approachable.

No, and I think you're onto something there. So I think I have my own take on it. But think about from your perspective, what's unique about kind of these, that they're non threatening, that they're not trying necessarily to sell me something. They'd like it if I bought something so they could get a bigger stuffed chicken or something. But they're not really. That they're about reconnecting with you and they're hoping that you buy. Right. And so how do you make it so that you're non threatening, that you deliver value? What if we always thought about as salespeople, that our first and foremost objective, whether we made a sale at any one moment, was to make the person we're talking with smarter or feel more whole as a person.

Exactly that.

If I can accomplish that, then they'll engage me in a conversation about how to truly meet their needs in a different way. Then they're more open to buy. But I have to first say, what really matters to me is kind of your health and success. And if I've got stuff that would work for you, I'm delighted. But let's figure out how to make you smart. I was just wondering, with the clients that you have, do you give this speech to them or do you say like, here is my book and if so, what has been their reaction? Okay, good. No, and that's a great question. I give seminars in companies, but what I like most to do is I take teams of people away and I design kind of experiences in the world in which I take them around cities looking for inspiration. And so I take them to museums filled with ideas. And you guys can do this here. I mean, I think you guys have a little bit of flexibility. So let's say you had a challenge to solve that you didn't exactly know how to solve it. Then get a group of you together and go to a museum, you know, go to the Detroit Institute of Art, go to the Henry Ford Museum, go to a place where a lot of people have done a lot of great thinking and now they're stuck on walls there. Okay. And so go to places filled with ideas and stuff. Say to people, I want you to wander this museum looking for inspiration that might give us a different perspective on how to solve this problem, if it's a history museum, what did people do in other centuries and other civilizations that might have helped us to do it? So I do those things. I took a team recently from a retail store and their challenge was they wanted to figure out a new and novel way to have their staff greet the customers in a way that would matter. So at 6:31 morning, I asked them to show up and meet me at 3100 Connecticut Ave Northwest in Washington D.C. and they were assuming this was a place to meet and so it was a place for me to meet. And they arrived there and when they got there, this big sign that said, welcome to the National Zoo. And they looked at me and said, is there a reason we're here? And I said, there's a huge reason we're here. And I said, it's all about perspective. You lack a new perspective on how to really engage customers. Here's our challenge this morning. We're here at a time when animals wake up. And so what I'd like you to do actually is I gave them all 97 cent clipboards from Staples and I gave them a nice pen that I knew would work. And I said, here's your challenge. For the next two hours, you're going to wander the zoo zoo recording all of the cool animal greetings and behaviors you see. You're going to see how animals greet each other in their own species. You're going to see how animals greet other animals that are in other species in other parts of the zoo. You're going to see how they approach and engage you when they see you there. You're going to see how they approach the zookeepers when they're there. I want you to write down everything you see that animals do that you think is absolutely cool. And I don't want you to think about your business. And then we're going to take this and we're going to figure out how to change your customers. And they looked at me and said, you are the weirdest person I've ever met in my life. I got up to do this one person. I recall saying, there is not enough coffee on the planet or, you know, there is not enough coffee in the Googleplex for me to be willing to undertake this activity. I said, just bear with me. If at the end of two hours, this is the worst experience of your life, I guarantee you I won't make you do it again. They came back two hours later and the look on these people's faces, they were so excited and energized. They heard animals singing to each other. They heard animals do or saw animals doing kind of a ritual dance together. They saw animals who kind of backed off because they thought other animals really didn't want them to come close. And the reality is, we got into an amazing discussion about ways to engage customers through the thought of music, through the thought of kind of what we might say, through the thought of knowing which customers to give space to and which not to give space to, to the thought of how many animals we'd want to have surrounding a customer. You know, when they were trying to learn something or make a sale, the thought thought of who is the best person to actually come up and engage. And they totally based on that redesign their. We had to do a lot of other work, but that was the starting point for doing that. I take people when they need to figure out how to be better teammates. I take them to the ballet and I ask them to look at dancers, because if one dancer screws up, then the whole thing falls apart. We don't think about in business, but if one of us screws up, lots of people are harmed. So if we get people to see places where teamwork really has to happen, then it's compelling. If you want to think about overall what you do, go as a group next time Cirque du Soleil is in town, and look at what they do and think about the power of a performance. Because business is really a performance. You guys each and every day perform for the customers, and there are things that they do that would absolutely matter for you. So what I do is I do some seminars, but I also take people out in different places around the world to get them to think differently. And I think. And the book really gives you. There are like 30 field trips you can take at the ends of chapters, each chapter of the book. There are field trips that you can take with your team that are fun ways to get you thinking differently about stuff that might matter to you. So hopefully that's helpful. Other where did the idea for this.

Book come and how long did it take you to sort of coalesce?

Sure. No, that's cool. One thing. And at lunch, we were talking about the fact that I'm actually trained as a geographer, and my great passion in life is kind of traveling and seeing that different things happen in different parts of the world, that everywhere people do things that are remarkable. Like the folks who knew how to swim, you know, but they weren't so keen on letting everybody else know about it. So I have really, I think, kind of spent My life and career always wandering through streets and going to museums and looking for ideas that were quite remarkable. And what I was finding is that as I went into companies, most companies had very traditional ways of being creative. You know, those were brainstorming things. Okay, let's just, everybody, let's just brainstorm here. And the reality was they were missing the chance to be remarkable because they weren't bringing a lot of fresh ideas into the room. So I started five years ago to start taking our customers on these excursions in cities around the world. And what I was finding as I was doing that was it really was freeing up adults to have different parts of their brain work. And so I started to then think about what are some of the ideas that we found that are the most exciting for us and the ideas that truly matter. And then I started to think about, let's try and put that into a book. And then the process of writing a book. It depends how schedule you are writing a book. And I think by my ninth book I'll be really good at writing a book. So this book kind of took a little while to write. Part of it is I run a company. I also run a non profit organization, low income schools. I'm trying to be a reasonable dad, you know, and a reasonable husband. So I generally write between nine at night and one or two in the morning, which sometimes is a creative time. And sometimes, you know, I throw everything away kind of and start the next day. So as a follow up, will you be writing more books? I am actually writing another book now. I've started it and you can look for it, but it won't be out for a couple years. But it's based on this last idea that I mentioned to you and that's the whole notion of the power of strangers. And it's a book about how we can be more organized about meeting and learning from strangers. So that's kind of the next thing I'm working on. So I'll hopefully have a fun way to get you to kind of meet without wandering the world yourself. Some really interesting strangers that you'll hopefully learn some stuff from. So we'll see.

Can you mention really quick what your.

First book was about? Lessons from the Sandbox. Oh, I'd be delighted to because I love that book too. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Nice meeting you. Thank you. The first book I wrote was called Lessons from the Sandbox and was a book about what organizations could learn from small children about how to be more creative and innovative and so the book looks at 13 things we all did really well as kids. Like being curious, asking a lot of questions, trying things even though they seemed impossible to do, being enthusiastic about stuff. Making play our job instead of making work our job. And you guys do some fun things here. So I know there's a play component here. Putting things together that didn't belong. Surrounding ourselves with things that made us comfortable, our favorite stuffed animals, and things that would allow us to be at a position of strength. We had to do our best thinking. So those types of ideas. So what I was looking at was what do we do and what did we know naturally as kids that we've lost the ability to do naturally as grown ups and how do we get back? And so that had a good. I mean, that book was fun and it had a very interesting kind of. Of falling in a lot of places. And then there were some countries in which that was just such a foreign idea. So that when it got translated, I would be getting emails from people saying, you honestly believe kids are smarter than adults and that adults can learn from kids. And I'd send back, yes, I really do. In fact, I not only really do, I know it's true, and hopefully you'll figure out the answer to that one pretty soon. With all due respect, and if you don't like dealing with with me, try Comcast. Other questions? Nope. Well, I appreciate the chance to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.