Matt Britton Fireside Chat With HP Global CMO Antonio Lucio - 2/6/18 San Diego CA

Now you know why I never drank coffee before I met with Matt.

I would have meetings with Antonio and I would go into a little bit of a rant and he would just go for like 30 seconds. I just knew he was just trying to like compartmentalize everything I was saying to his constructive conversation. So I get it.

So first, congratulations on the Eagles winning the Super Bowl. Thank you. It's been a die hard Eagles fan for how long?

Since I was six years old. Yeah.

And I saw in social media a beautiful picture of you and your son living the moment, which was amazing.

Yeah, it was amazing. Thank you for saying that.

Excellent, Excellent. So really, you know, we come from a brand, which is very interesting. When we started the journey and you would talk to our customers or even our consumers about the HP brand, they will give you utility. They would say things like, it's reliable and it's very good value for money. There was no affinity, no love, no preference. So when we talk about raising the profile of the emotional connection, that's what we're talking about. But in a world like you described, which we also talk about in a world where Alexa or Siri or Google is making some of the decisions for you, how do you build that brand love?

Well, I think that utility has to be more seamless. So I think you look at Alexa and it's seamless brand utility. The example I talked about with HP creating washing machines is seamless brand utility. Hitting a button, having people come to your house and do your hair and makeup is seamless brand utility. Look at what you're doing with your printers, where you're sending. That's seamless brand utility. Right. And I don't know how well that's doing, but I use it in my household because who wants to actually think about those things? And I think that does create a great platform to create brand love on top of it, because it gives you license to communicate with consumers. Because another big thing is besides the super bowl, right. How are you going to make sure that people are going to hear you? How are you going to. They're going to hear your message. And if you can get into their home, you can get into their workplace, you can get into the their pockets, then you have the ability to create that brand.

So within this environment, when you and I met years ago, you were very strongly saying it's the death of television as a way of connecting with customers. So that, you know, we spent 73% of all of our media in digital.

So you agreed?

I agreed. In fact, we started at Visa we moved it, we moved it from less than 40 to 65%.

Very short period of time.

A very short period of time. But the question is, yet at the same time you get called to MSNBC and to all these programs to talk about the Super Bowl. Is the super bowl worth it?

Well, I think the super bowl is worth it and I think the Grammys and the Oscars are worth it. But I think that's it. I think, you know, the NFL is the most watched program amongst both male and female viewers at 37 of the top 50 shows on television in the past year. That's why they control billion dollar deals with networks and the reason why it's the only thing that consumers are going to be tuning into live, which means that they have a good chance of their actual messaging being seen. I think almost everything else you're seeing time shifted. Now, like perfect example, this is us as NBC's top show. They're promoting it during the Super Bowl. The there was a huge episode for people who followed the show afterwards. Every single person I talked to didn't watch it directly after the Super Bowl. They watch it on itunes or they watch it on Netflix. They watch it through their own channels. And just to clarify one point, death of TV in terms of the TV industrial compacts as it currently exists. Because you ask a 12 year old what ABC is and they'll tell you it's the Alphabet. You ask them what Fox is, they'll tell you it's an animal. They don't know what TV networks even are. They don't tune in to TV networks anymore. The actual device I believe will become a giant tablet hanging on your wall. There's still a laid back viewing experience, but I see that heading to a world of programmatic, hyper targeted data driven content, which is something you also spoke about this morning. I think that's where things are headed. I think the reason why it hasn't taken off yet is that the computer and TV have not become one. You know, these smart TVs really aren't getting it done. TVs need to be touchscreen and they need to be intuitive. And once it becomes as intuitive as a giant tablet on your wall, I think you're going to start to see this big shift in that old world TV complex.

Right. You spoke a lot about Amazon and we agreed. But we also in markets like China, for example, companies like JD.com are Amazon in steroids.

Yep.

Alibaba or Alibaba as well. And what we like about doing business with them is that they do Share the data. And what we are actually able to do, account based marketing to levels that we had never done before. Do you see that in the US at any point in time?

Yeah. I mean, you look at a company like Away that sells luggage, started by two young women in their late 20s, which is just an amazing story. They're going to do 40 million in revenue, $200 luggage, which actually has an iPhone charger built into it.

That's the one that I use, actually.

Warby Parker, right. Billion dollar company that took on an 800 pound gorilla in Luxottica. They don't sell on Amazon, so I think they're selling direct. Can be super impactful. It allows you to control the channel, customer service, data retargeting, it just takes work. And I think what those companies have in common, that ones who have gone direct, is they just go direct and they protect their brand fiercely and they can protect their consumer experience fiercely. So I think it's much more challenging for, for a company like HP who has thousands of accounts around the world, I presume to actually rein that back in and go direct. And I think going in the middle becomes somewhat hard. I think the way you do it is through subscription services and things that become very intravenous, like, if you will, to get your products and services into people's homes. I think services is huge. I think Best Buy was ahead of its time with Geek Squad. I think getting into people's homes is incredibly impactful. And that's why you do see the acquisitions like Past Rabbit by Ikea. You're going to see much more of that moving forward, for sure.

Yeah. Stacy Brown is in our board.

Oh, there you go.

She's a terrific, terrific leader. You mentioned WeWork. We are, we are building a very strong strategic partnership with WeWork for two reasons. Number one, they understand the Millennial workforce better than anyone, but at the same time, they need utility.

That's right.

So we are working together to define what the office of the Future is in both the experience they bring, plus the devices that we bring. Based on what you've seen, what is it that the Millennial is looking for when they're approaching a workspace?

I think that there's social aspects. They want some semblance of community. They want a place where they can be themselves. I think that goes back to the side hustle of them having to hide who they really are. They don't want to have to worry about what they're posting and actually who they are. I think the best companies I've seen embrace the person who nobody's perfect, right? You have CEOs saying we shouldn't hire them because I saw them do this, yet who knows what they're doing themselves. So I think, because if that transparency is there, you know, then I think they can truly be themselves. I think a misnomer is hours equal output when we all know that hours don't equal output. And if you set people up based on their output versus their hours, which sounds very simple and why wouldn't we be able to do it? But that should mean that if you're done, you should be able to leave, but you better have the output that you need. I also think mobility is huge. This generation does not want to be going to the same office every single day. They want experiences and experience come through travel. So if you can enable that which wework, the platform itself has. I think that's hugely impactful.

It's really remarkable for us, speaking to our leadership team and the vision that they had for the millennial workforce where you would be able to travel because mobility is really important. You will be able to travel around the world, lock in to your desk. That desk hopefully will be smart, powered by hp. And no matter where you're in the world, the moment that you plugged in with your mobile phone into that desk, that desk becomes yours. And it has all the relevant information for you to.

And that's the personal IT application we were talking about versus somebody hiring, worrying about it for an enterprise. They are the enterprise of themselves. They are the CEO of themselves in their own little bubble. So how do you think about. Talk about personal systems? Well now that has taken on a whole new meaning in the world where somebody is run, they're running their own business within themselves.

What we found very interesting, and Alex was there with me, that they're taking. It's not just we work, but we live. So it's almost that you're making a service of your office and your apartment is all renter is for a fee or you don't pretty much own anything except yourself and that you're moving from city to city or from location to location seamlessly with two things in common. One is that everything that you have, information wise, is traveling with you. And the second piece is that you're able to get a sense of community regardless of where you're in the world.

I think that's the best example of how things have changed. The Gen Xers growing up and their version of success was the big corner office, much space themselves and the big house. The 3,000 square house with a big backyard, privacy. Right now, that's not the vision of success. The vision of success in the works that you just talked about and the vision of where you live is being in the center of everything. So people are giving up that space and privacy for the connectivity and the proximity. And that's a huge change culturally, what you see happening everywhere, which is why they're selling 300 square foot shoebox apartments in San Francisco. People don't need the space. They'd rather just be in the middle of everything.

Yeah, that one. And one of the numbers that they mentioned to us, which was that if there's one thing that you can do to improve employee engagement is reduce their square footage by half, which sounds counterintuitive. More space. No, no, it's actually the opposite. You reduce it in half. You create this sense of community, people on top of each other. But there's a feeling of well, being that. Which for me was amazing because it was not only. Not only applicable for the millennials, but for even the older workers around the Millennials.

That's right. Is that what you've. Yes. And that's an important distinction, is when I talk about the millennials and these trends, what Youth Nation was about, what they're doing is impacting society. You have Eric Schmidt, who just left Google as chairman. The reason he got the job as CEO of Google is he went to Burning man, and he met Larry and Sergey at Burning man, which I don't know how many of you guys here are familiar with Burning man, but it's not something that 20 years ago a CEO would want to be seen at. And this guy's dressed up without a shirt, and he's like doing God knows what. And he got hired to run arguably one of the most powerful companies in the world. So people are, you know, people are growing up faster. So kids are growing up faster than ever before, but people are also growing old, slower. And I think it's a big, big insight that I'm learning that people are acting younger, they're getting married later in life, they're doing things at later ages in life that they would never be seen as socially acceptable, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And that's impacting the way that people think. And they would probably want to do things that might be seen more as a millennial trait later in life, because that world is all heading towards really the same age. I don't know what that age is. I know it's not 42, what I am, but maybe it's 28. Maybe it's 29, but there is a perfect age. It seems like the young kids are rushing to get to, and the older people actually want to hold on to in terms of how they live. And that's something that you're seeing almost in every industry.

So, Matt, you built an amazing organization in mri. I remember just going in and feeling the energy. How did you do it? How did you build that true community of millennials? You being on the older side of that particular group, how did you build that?

And the way I did it is risky, but I don't think you can ever break new ground without there being potential downside. And the way I did it was hiring people that I believed in, that had the core traits but never would have been able to be put in that position anywhere else and let them go out there and watch them flail and actually see how they work. And sometimes they sink and sometimes they swim. But getting that talent and putting them in big situations versus having them run and get the coffee for a couple years really is how I did it. And now I see these people and, you know, my head strategist is now the head of strategy at Uber. You know, I have people running major organizations, starting their own agencies, all who, when I hired, had very little experience, but they had the intangibles. So I think sometimes.

What were the intangibles?

Initiative is number one. I think anybody who walks into work every day and expects to be told what to do, those jobs are going to be outsourced or offshored, Right? Why would you tell somebody who's expensive in San Francisco what to do? If you can tell somebody in Costa Rica or India or somewhere where you can get cheaper labor what to do? It's just we live in a globalized workforce. Initiative is everything you want. People who are going to come in and take initiative, and the first thing I ask is, show me initiative you've taken in your life in some way. You weren't. No one told you to do this, but you went and did it. Did you write a blog post? Did you create a side project? Did you create art something? Because if they're not going to do that in their own life, they're probably not going to walk into work and say, hey, I have a big idea. But the important part about initiative is then you also have to let people follow through on it. So I had somebody came up for an idea for a software company, and he proved it over and over, and we ended up spinning it out. And now I end up working on myself right now, because I let somebody actually take that initiative. I think so many big companies is the reason that Microsoft didn't invent Twitter, right? Or why Ford didn't invent Tesla. It's because a lot of times that initiative gets shut down, or the younger people who don't have the curse of knowledge, don't have the audience or the stage, actually drive that change in innovation. And then the people who aren't connected with it know no different. And the company never changes. So I think that's really what it's all about, is initiative, respect, and also lastly, just recognition, which is something that's not new to the HR world, but recognizing people and the world where people want to create their personal brands. You know, I was on a board. I'm on the board of a charity called Pencil of Promise that build schools in underprivileged areas around the world. And one reason that Pencils of Promise is so successful as a charity, they've now built nearly 500 schools around the world. If you go to Laos in Southeast Asia, you see them like you're seeing Starbucks in a major city. I mean, it's just incredible. And a close friend of mine started it. And what makes them impactful is that when you invest and a school gets built, you actually can go visit that school and see your name on it. So it actually becomes a physical manifestation of what you've built versus throwing money to the Red Cross and you don't know what what's ever impacting it. And I think that's a great analogy for workers. If you create something, you want your name attached to it. You want that recognition, whether it's being on the credits at the beginning of a movie or you somehow memorializing what people have created. Because if they don't feel like that they have an impact in the organization that's tangible, I think they become much more disenfranchised and much more focused on their side hustles that they do. See, I think that's hugely important.

So you sold the agency to publicists. Not going to get into the benefits of a holding or not. That's another day.

All different.

Fireside Chat, another beer. What do you miss?

Well, right now, I've never been so excited as I in my entire career because I joined Crowdtap, which was the software company I spun off. It was running the board, hired somebody who wasn't an entrepreneur, and the company stopped innovating. And I came in and I basically have pivoted the entire business to a consumer intelligence platform, which is really exploding right now. It's called Suzy and essentially allows companies to ask any type of consumer a question, a variety of different forms, and get data back during the same meeting that you're in. So one thing I saw through my agency life is that so many decisions, large and small were made on guesses, punches, myopic thinking. And in this world, no decision should not should be made without the power of data behind it. Doesn't mean it has to drive your decision. But there's a reason you use Waze to give you directions, because other people have been there before. They tell you, don't make that left, you're going to traffic. Well, I want to essentially create a ways for business. Very simple, very easy, very intuitive. Because sometimes market research is too expensive or takes way too long and you need to make decisions now. So I basically came on board and only kept the people who. Who I felt like had that initiative, who had those qualities, and we're doing it all over again. But I've learned from my mistakes. And so to be honest with you, right now at this moment, I don't really miss much. I miss some of the great people that have been through my lives, but I love seeing them succeed at other places. And I'm supercharged about the future. It took me a couple years to get there, but now it's really exciting. And the Eagles just won the super bowl, so it's a good week for me.

Excellent, Excellent. Matt, thank you so much for spending the time with us. Matt Britton. Thank you, Matt.

Nice having you.

He's great, isn't it?