Creating Culture That Drives Better Outcomes To Scale and Transform You Business with Jason Korman and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #356

When you look at typical change projects, they're usually driven by new processes, new procedures, and people are just told to go do them. What we do is we take those processes and procedures, we socialize them, we create language around it, and then we wrap it up in marketing to make the change irresistible. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and.

This is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Jason is the co founder and CEO of Gaping Void Culture Design Group. His company helps create more engaged organizations that consistently outperform their competitors by designing a better and more meaningful culture. Their work is based on a proven management science, trademarked culture science to develop tools that create sustainable change at scale. Jason and his team give leaders the tools to build awesome organizations by aligning employees, customers, and the external world while delivering a real human, emotional, immersive connection to work. In this episode, Jason Korman will share the secret to designing ideas that stick and spread. You'll learn how to reinforce your message, articulate your vision, and build a culture that supports your business from the inside out. Jason will also reveal why your business doesn't actually run on rules, but on norms you create and uphold. If you'd like to join Jason Korman, Joe Polish, and 400 more of the world's greatest entrepreneurs at this year's Genius Network annual event, then apply today for your invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com hello, this is.

Joe Polish, and I'm getting ready to do one of our very interesting, weird, bizarre ways to record a podcast. I'm driving. I'm personally not driving. I'm a passenger. And this guy, Jason Corman is driving. As we head to Sedona for a. What are we going there for?

Gender intelligence Deep dive. Yes.

So what exactly does that mean?

We go to Barbara Annis palatial mansion in the mountains of Sedona with the most incredible views, where we spend two days digging into what it means to be gender intelligent and how to create environments which are more inclusive in organizations. Yeah.

So in a nutshell, Barbara Annis is just this brilliant woman who is the world's leading expert on gender intelligence. She's written five books. You can look her up. She's amazing. She's speaking at this year's Genius Network annual event, and she's just really awesome. So the reason I wanted to do this record this is I've known Jason for. I don't know, I think we first met maybe 2012, 2011, something like that. Something like that you are the CEO of gaping void, which you partnered with Hugh McLeod, and you turned it into a pretty big, successful business that does all kinds of stuff. So let's give a little bit of background on who you are, what you do, and why do you do it.

We started gaping void over 10 years ago, and based upon some work we'd done in the prior business, we saw that when you put the right messages and ideas in the hands of folks within large organizations, you give them the power and influence to shift at scale, shift what goes on there. And so we built a business which is really based upon designing cultures and executing in all sorts of organizations, from big tech to the Air Force and Department of Defense to healthcare, for entrepreneurs. And it's really about designing culture as an operating system for businesses and giving entrepreneurs and CEOs of large companies the ability to influence people at scale and use culture really as a management system.

For all of the people, people that are listening right now to best without seeing, you know, gaping void. And you're welcome to go and maybe even put this on pause and go check out gapingvoid.com and get an idea of it. You could also go to my Instagram. And so many of my posts contain imagery that you guys have created that goes along with a lot of my social media posts, a lot of my emails. I incorporate so much gaping void work into what it is that I do at Genius Network and what it is that I do in my company, because I think it adds such a unique element to it. So how would you describe what you guys create? And why would an entrepreneur look at including this into their company, into what it is they do and how they do it?

One of the challenges that we have as leaders is having the tools that we need in order to articulate what our vision is and what the norms are that we want people to follow and. And that will deliver our vision. So in our work. And, Joe, the work we've done for you over the years has been a little bit different, but in most of the work we do, we go in and solve very particular problems around culture, around innovation, around problems like digital transformation, diversity, inclusion. And inclusion is a big subject these days. And so we go in, determine current state, map that to an ideal state, and then it's about designing the narrative that will get the organization to where it wants to go. So the fundamentals of that are about language, because all transformation is linguistic, attaching language to visuals and then using those visuals to spread the ideas, because the ideas that spread win. So it's really around crafting a vision for the future, delivering the norms and language that will make that happen, and then spreading it in a sustainable way.

What is the difference between that in marketing? I mean, is this marketing? Are you a marketing company? I know that's part of it, but I'm sort of asking it in a way for someone listening. What would they be hearing this for the first time? How would they think about this, the.

Way to think about it? And that's a really good question. I remember we have an organizational psychologist on our team, one by the name of Marla Gottschalk, who is number one organizational psychologist on LinkedIn, 2 million plus followers. And I was having a conversation with her one day and she said to me, do you mean to tell me that all this od organizational design and organizational change people do is really marketing? I said, well, yeah, it is. And that's the problem. Because what we do is we wrap change management up in marketing to make it irresistible. And for a lot of people, when you look at typical change projects, they're usually driven by new processes, new procedures, and people are just told to go do them. What we do is we take those processes and procedures, we socialize them, we create language around it, and then we wrap it up in marketing to make the change irresistible. And that's why it works. And so it's really, what we do is a new and different form of change management, but we're solving problems that traditionally 70% of the time plus are not successful because the people doing the change really don't understand what it is that humans want when it comes to making change happen. And that is, it's got to be emotional or it's not going to happen. So we wrap up all sorts of change management challenges around emotion and connection to a better outcome, better future.

When I first heard about you guys, Dan Sullivan actually had one of Hugh's first books, which was called Ignore Everybody, which is a great book. Funny, hysterical, contrarian, filled with profanity, little angry and edgy as hell. Then the second book was. Was that Evil Plans?

That was Evil Plans, yes.

And then the third book is Blogging in youn Underwear.

Yeah, Freedom is blogging in your underwear.

How much of your business has been built, like, how did you guys actually build your company? I mean, you have this, this, this business that sells what a lot of people think of as artwork, but you refer to it much differently. You almost get, you almost sneer every time you hear the word artwork.

Yeah, we don't use the A word. Why not well, yeah, I'm scared. I spend most of my day scared. So Hugh was a cartoonist living in the north of England. I had a company based in the uk, where we produced wine in countries around the world and sold them to major grocery chains around Europe. We wound up acquiring a little South African winery. And shortly thereafter, I found Hugh online, where he was drawing angry, profane cartoons and blogging brilliantly about marketing. And so I engaged Hugh to come work with us. And we ran in 2005, six, what were really the very first social media campaigns ever done. We did it for wine brand, and within a couple years we won at age 50. So it was like us and Starbucks and McDonald's and big brands. And we in many ways in those days were the poster child for this idea that you could use blogs and social media. It was pre Twitter and it was pre Facebook. So it was really just blogging. You could use blogs to actually build brands and businesses. So we developed that business. Hugh was doing his drawing and what have you. And in connection with that business, we were doing a lot of work with just sort of having people play with our product. So I was making wine in South Africa, but as a wine marketer, I was far more interested in how you sell it rather than how you make it, because one of the big lies in the wine business is that it's very hard to make great wine. It's not. It's actually not that hard. The hard part is always selling it. So selling it was always really an interesting challenge. And so what we did was create ways to engage bloggers around around wine using it, having them display posters that we would create and do blog posts and have dinners and we'd sponsor it. So in the process of doing that, we became close with a bunch of tech people, because those were most of the people involved in those sorts of things. Those days, everybody was trying to prove the concept of blogging. And so we wound up becoming close with a guy who worked in the UK at Microsoft, and we created something called the Microsoft Blue Monster, which you can go Bing it or Google it, and you'll see dozens and dozens and dozens of articles and case studies and what have you about it. But what we did was put this idea in the hands of people at Microsoft that they could transform that company by starting a different kind of conversation. And that was really the beginning of what became gaming boy culture design. We saw that you could put these ideas in the hands of people and no matter where they were, within a big organization, they can make change happen.

Was it you combined with Hugh that brought it to that level. I mean, would Hugh have ever done any of this on his own?

You know, I think Hugh's an amazingly talented guy, and he's a great artist. He's a great cartoonist. And really, what's always interesting is when you take art and apply it to business problems, it's something that on the face of it is, well, especially 10 or 15 years ago, wasn't so obvious. But you can make amazing things happen by doing that.

You know, what's great is I got you to say art. You hate the A word. So let me bring that back, though. So when you have something in a society and a culture and the languaging, where they're so used to identifying, oh, this is art, and you're trying to shift that or change that, I mean, look, I don't live in your perception perspective. My perspective, though, is even to this day, when I see it in as many different ways as I've heard you describe it, my brain still defaults to thinking of visuals and be it animation, or be it paintings, or be it cartoons, sketches, as still as a form of art. So is there a danger in your mind if you start referring to this as art, or does it just somehow commoditize what you're doing? I'm trying to figure out how you think about.

So we've developed something called semiotic management systems. So semiotics, we're all used to those things. It's things like the Golden Arches, things like flags, banners, the Make America Great Again hat probably one of the most powerful semiotics created in the last 10 or 20 years. So semiotics are really about attaching meaning to an object and using an object to spread the idea. So when we look at making change happen, when we look at how you design, getting ideas to spread, what we're looking at is how you design a device to make the idea spread. So we use a visual tool, and you could look at it and say, oh, it's art, it's artful. But what differentiates what we do from art is its purpose. So it's not art for art's sake. And I have a little exercise that we'll run through sometime about clearly differentiating art from semiotics. But art is really subjective. It's, you know, people look at it and they imagine what they might about it. They, you know, it's completely personal experience. Semiotics. And what we do are objects are designed in a very specific way to achieve a very specific way of thinking about Whatever the ideas you're attaching it to Said, they're just different things. And it looks artful. It certainly does. And that's part of why it works. It's a lot of why it works. But it's not art. It's created with a purpose in mind.

Okay. You know, one of the things that our genius network member friend Jason Fladlane says is whatever you're selling, you want to put information in front of it. So in the process of creating this, did Hugh first think of it as art, and then it developed into something else or. Because he would always do blogs, he would write books. I mean, so there was, you know, there was words. It's not just interesting imagery. There's always meaning behind it.

So for Hugh. Hugh has always been an artist. He thinks of himself as an artist, and his art is cartooning. And cartooning is a really interesting form of art in that by its intent, it's made to disrupt and do things right. So if you remember several years ago in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo publication, these Arab terrorists, extremists, walked in and shot and killed, I think, 11 people there because a cartoon upset them. And cartoons are designed to actually be provocative and to get people to think about things they might otherwise never think about or think about things differently. So there's a rich history. I can't remember there's a fellow's name, but the guy who was the lead cartoonist at the Boston Globe, he said, I'm going to botch the quilt. But it was something along the lines of, if he's doing his job well and correctly, then he's upsetting people every day. And so there's a really rich history of cartooning as a device for social change. And what Hugh always was very good at was picking out things that might be banal or uninteresting or just accepted as a norm, you know, a social norm in the past. And calling it out, whether it was, you know, whether it was about company hierarchy, which you can. Which you can Google, just Google gaping boy, company hierarchy. You'll see this amazing, simple drawing that will change how you think about companies and at the same time pisses off a ton of people. So, you know, Hugh's amazing skill is really two things. One is linguistic. One is language. How do you create language that gets a point across in a really economic way, really simply? And then the other is simple drawings that reinforce the delivery of the message. So for him, that's his art. That's what he does.

Are you guys coming out with any other books or anything anytime soon.

There is a book in the hopper that we're working on which is really a culture design book. It's going to be the very first book ever written which tells any person, large company, entrepreneur, it doesn't matter if you're running your own business or a business with 100,000 people, how to design your culture and execute. Really simple 150 pages, probably with a step by step guide on how to actually design and execute culture.

Define culture because there's so many odds, authors, speakers, speeches about culture. And I mean, it's one of these fluffy words used a lot of times like, what the hell does that mean? How do you actually create it so.

Well, there were two questions in that. So first, first is, what is culture? And it's really the set of norms and behaviors that a community has, whether that community is a company or whether that community is a social group. So it's what people agree that is the accepted practice. And there's a difference. And it's about norms, right? And norms are different than, say, laws or rules, and that laws or rules are made by a small group of people that other folks have to follow. But norms are things that evolve over time that are accepted to be true and accepted to be the way that we act in a certain environment. So what we all think about in our business life is that our organizations run on rules, but they don't. They actually run on norms. So what we do is design norms and we have a series of frameworks around that to get clarity around how to design norms. But we design norms and then execute them and replace the positive norms that will deliver your organizational outcomes. We replace the bad norms with those norms that will drive the outcomes that you need to have. So it could be solving problems around patient experience. For example, how do you get people in a healthcare environment to give better patient experience? That's not about protocols, that's about norms. It's about how we act, how we treat each other, how we treat patients, what our expectations are, what our beliefs and mindsets are that will drive a better outcome. And it's really that collection of beliefs and mindsets and mental models and, and values and principles that really make up the culture. And the design piece is really pulling that apart, understanding it, creating new language, creating ways to spread the language, and then integrating it into the organization.

So for the small entrepreneur out there, is this like, too much to think about in the beginning of building and growing a business? I mean, you started companies, you've sold companies, you help a lot of, of companies define who it is they are, how they grow, how they scale. What are some of the things that you've learned about starting from just a one person operation up to building a big organization? You work with multi billion dollar companies at this point. So what advice would you have for the entrepreneur out there that's either a single person to 10, 20 employees that sort of size.

The world of work has changed. People are seeking and need to find more meaning and deeper emotional connection to what they do every day. And there's a lot of reasons why that's happened. But let's, for the purpose of this conversation, let's accept that as true. So if you believe that people are looking for more meaning in their work, then as an employer you actually have an obligation to give that to them. And if you don't, you will never attract and retain the best people because people will be looking for a place where they get deeper connection to doing something that's meaningful every day. So it really doesn't matter whether you have, whether you're a solopreneur or whether you've got a small team of people. You've got to think about meaning, purpose, connection, how you get people to be motivated. So Joe, you remember two years ago we went to spend some time with BJ Fogg up in Sonoma County. After that event, we developed some models with BJ around how to design for culture change. So bj, you know, for folks who are listening information, runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford. So we took some of BJ's principles about behavior design and applied them to culture change. Really powerful. So you've got to create motivation in people. What we call a future motivated state that gets people excited about turning up every day. You then have to create a set of articulated beliefs, which is really the norms. What we would call norms, some people call values. But it's not just values. It's a really detailed understanding of what it means to be in a business and the worldview that you want folks to have. And then what you have to do is take those two components and socialize the heck out of it. And you've got to relentlessly integrate it into the work experience. And that's where the culture design comes from, combination of those three things. But anybody can do it. You don't have to have a big company. If you have a big company, you've got resources, it's great. You've got resources. It's also harder. But it's something that if you fail to do, you will never be as Successful as you could be, what are.

Some of the biggest struggles that you've had to work through in defining your own culture and your own company?

There's two parts of business in many ways, where you've got a group of creatives and you've got a group of people who are delivering against your projects, often in big organization, big environments. And aligning the development of creative to solve problems within organizations is not that easy to do. It involves a lot of interpreting data and, and interpreting what winds up being mass collection of information about how people view their work experience and then connecting that to the change that needs to happen and then articulating, visualizing and executing. And so it's tough to keep the creatives and sort of the project management folks aligned on the executions. So that's a huge challenge. Figuring out how to make creative things looking solutions make sense for hard ass business people was one of our greatest challenges. But we mostly almost completely overcome that. We have a study that we're about to release that we've been working on the last year and a half. We call it our CEO study. And basically what we're able to collect data around is the following sort of flywheel of culture, which is that CEOs who invests in culture to create great work environments have the following scenario often occur in their business. And when you think about people like Herb Keller, who recently passed away was CEO of Southwest Airlines, or Tony Shane Zappos, or Satya Nadella at Microsoft, who's been a client of ours for years, here's what happens. So when you create great cultures, your employees tend to really love the CEO and love the company, and that spills out to customers. Customers become more enthusiastic. And you just think about all the crazy passionate people there are about Southwest or Zappos as an example, or even these days about Microsoft. And so what happens is you get this combination of employee love of customer fandom, and that rolls out into the media world. So you see great glowing articles about the company, especially the CEO. You can see Satya Nadella these days getting tons of great press about the work that Microsoft is doing. And what that leads to actually is enhanced margins, enhanced operating results. So there's very clear financial connection. We partnered with a guy named Len Sussinger at Harvard Business School to do the research on it. And Len gave us some work he'd done a few years back on demonstrating how great company cultures actually drive profitability. And so you get profits. And because people are happy with their work and because they feel safe and because things are people can focus on new things, you get great innovations, and those innovations actually drive along the flywheel to greater return on equity, greater share performance, which ultimately translates into more success, influence inside and outside the industries before this CEO themselves. And the CEOs also wind up making more money. And so you have this flywheel where culture actually drives profitability, operational success, CEO success, and CEO earnings. And that's the door that smart CEOs are walking through now. Because when you normally think about operational excellence and making money, you think about better marketing, better sales, more efficient production. But the answer is actually is around culture because there's this flywheel that drives the optimization of your operations and you wind up having a more successful business. And you can point to, you think about the CEOs who are household names, just make the list and then check out the cultures and you'll see it's driven by culture.

So if the culture in a company is either non existent or needs a massive overhaul, what's the first thing to do?

Well, okay, so there's no such thing as non existent. It's either not deliberate or toxic or whatever. Well, it's either deliberate or it's not deliberate, right? So, but it's there. So the first, first issue is, you know, understanding the current state. So, and when I meant non existent.

I mean, the person that owns it can't even define what it is.

No, of course. So, you know, so this is a process you go through which is really understanding, you know, what it is you're really doing. Right. You know, there's, there's this old HBR article, Theater Levitt Marketing Myopia. Right? Great article. It was written in 1960. It's still appropriate. He asked the question, what business do you think you're in and what business are you really in? And so you got to figure out what business are you really in. Even if you have a dry cleaner, so you're really in the dry cleaning business, or are you in some version of how do you help your customers? Are you really in the business of making people feel better about themselves? But whatever it might be, right, the business you're actually in might be very different from the business that you think you're in. So you've got to establish that. You got to understand what are you really doing for customers. What's the best version of that look like? You have to understand what the nature of your employees are. And when you're doing your best, what does that look like? What does that feel like? What's the language that would describe that and then you've got to really go through process of creating the language around how you get people to do the things that need to be done that will deliver great customer experience, that will allow you to execute better than your competitors. And that describes the things that happen when you are doing your best work. And it feels oblique and opaque, but it's not. Once you start to think about it, the idea is, and the language will come to you. You gotta put it all together and you gotta figure out how you're gonna spread it. You know, I mean, there's lots of companies that have their own special version, like Chick Fil A, you know, is a good example. And that's a very much culture driven business. The culture's not for everybody, but it works for them. So, you know, Amazon's got their culture and lots of people, you know, like to say bad things about it. But it works really well for Amazon. Right? And so you've gotta decide what it is that's unique and special and different and it's going to drive your best outcomes for your customers and your people.

How do people learn more about Gaping Void and what can they get from you? And what do you guys actually kind of do? And this is kind of a setup for, I mean, I do a lot of work with you guys. You've done a ton of stuff for me. It's incorporated through Genius Network, through my company, through a lot of different stuff. So where to put people? What's the best way to interact with.

You and learn from you? Gapingvoid.com G A P I N G V O I D one word. And the great thing about having a kooky company name is that all you have to do is put a gaping void over page 1, 2, 3, 4 through 10. So there's no other company called Gaping Void so easy to find online. And what do we do? It depends on the type and size of your organization and the problems you have to solve. But we do things, you know, we design. We can do anything from design cultures of innovation, which we do for the Air Force and Department of Defense. We can do what we call end to end culture design, which is remaking the whole thing from say, employment brand to customer experience. We can do very simple projects around what we call culture walls, which can be done pretty inexpensively, which really is about creating that language and then visualizing it and giving you the tool you need to go drive it sustainably within your business. So it really depends what the problem is. And we work with mega companies, but also entrepreneurs and so really there is a threshold, which we can't do with things, but really it's about understanding the problem, figuring out an effective way to solve it. And we have lots of products. We're all about making change happen very often. And in the culture world, people are focused on assessments, and we're not. We assess, but we're really focused on tools for change.

Tools for change, yeah. And, you know, I think at some point I'd love to create a Genius Network book or something, because you've done so much imagery for all my Genius Network annual events. There's so much good content there. People love it. I mean, like, I will encourage people, again, go check out my Instagram and all the different ways that I've incorporated it. We do it into the monthly Genius Network letter. We've gotten culture walls for all of our members in the 100k group, which is called Genius X. And so in the little bit of time we have before we arrive, safe and sound at our hotel to start the Gender Intelligence workshop. Anything else that we should say that someone should like to impart to our listeners?

Well, you mentioned gender Intelligence. There was something we didn't say, which is. Which I think is, like, these days is really important. And Barbara's training around gender is really, in many ways about creating environments for inclusiveness. And people think about inclusion in business, about race and gender and all that, but it's not right. It is, of course, that's a piece of it, but that's not the biggest piece. The biggest piece is creating environments where people feel that they can actually. Where they're included, where they can speak up, where they can actually contribute, especially when you're in a challenging environment. So the problem, say, at Boeing recently with 737, was in many ways due to the fact that people did not feel as if they had the power to speak up. And so. So business people in large or small companies, you've got to create inclusive environments where people feel that they can actually speak their mind and identify problems that need to be solved and not get into trouble for doing it. So it's a big thing these days, and we need to build businesses that are actually inclusive in that way. Awesome.

Well, and you help people with whatever it is that they're trying to communicate. You effectively do that. One thing I should also mention, too, it's a great demonstration, but it also drives people to my website. We incorporate the Genius Network site. The Genius Network events is filled with gaping void imagery, and it allows me to communicate things that if it was just based on copy and photos, I don't think I'd be able to communicate. So more than anything, I wanted to give always of the listeners an opportunity to see there's ways that you can add more expansion to whatever messaging, whatever communication you're putting out there by incorporating what Jason has spoken about. So check that out. Gapingvoid.com is the company and Jason Korman is the man. And until next time, we are on our way to do our workshop. Have a wonderful, wonderful day evening, whatever time it is, wherever you're at, and see you on the next next podcast.

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