George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Today we learn what kills strategy and that climbing the corporate ladder needs to be a two-way continuous journey. Great strategy isn't about technology, budgets, or PowerPoint, it's humans. Humans need to bring it to life and those humans need to be set up to understand, contribute, and succeed. I'm joined by Kevin Ertell. Kevin started at Tower Records and built towerrecords.com at the dawn of e-commerce. It's such a cool story. Then he went on to Borders, Sur La Table, and then Nike, leading billions of dollars of retail operations.

(00:29):

That arc made Kevin obsessively curious about one question. Why do smart strategies keep failing? He interviewed 62 operators, collected over 1,000 years of combined experience, and wrote The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right. Kevin also runs a Mistere Advisory where he helps companies actually execute on the strategies they've already built. Check out the book and his work at mistereadvisory.com. Very excited to welcome Kevin.

(00:56):

Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. Kevin, thanks so much for being here.

Kevin Ertell (01:36):

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

George Jagodzinski (01:38):

I love your story, Kevin. And I wanted to start with the roots of it because I got my roots in the early dot com first e-commerce era. So we're kind of brothers in blood on that one.

Kevin Ertell (01:49):

Nice.

George Jagodzinski (01:49):

You started at Tower Records before e-commerce. And last we talked, it sounds like a lot of that was formidable for you, and that has set a foundation for you. Tell me a little bit about the foundation it set and how.

Kevin Ertell (02:02):

Yeah. I mean, Tower was incredible for me. I started there as a senior in high school, and actually stayed for 20 years, and left as a senior vice president. It was those early days at Tower working in the stores. Tower really believed in growing people from inside and definitely bringing people up from the stores, and they believed in this amazing amount of autonomy. So I started as a clerk, and eventually became a buyer in the store and a system manager and then a manager.

(02:33):

And when you managed a Tower store, it was like running a small business. I mean, you managed the P&L, you did the local marketing, you brought the product in, brought the product, did the merchandising, hired the staff. My joke is always if the plumbing broke, I had to get that taken care of too. It was everything. But you really learned leadership skills, you learned business management skills. You just learned how things work.

(02:57):

So that was really formative for me to be able to do that. And then I moved my way up. So as a manager, I started to get involved in a computer in the store. And just like no training on it, but played around with it, got good at it. Eventually that led to the corporate office asking me to take a role in corporate in the tech department, traveling around the world, training people how to use a computer system. So pretty good as a young guy in his early 20s to be able to go around the world.

(03:27):

And to your point about e-commerce, I had this tech background now and I had this retail background. And when e-commerce started to become a thing in the late '90s, there I was, it was perfect for me. I had both of those things combined, and led the team that built the first towerrecords.com, and eventually became the senior vice president of tower.com.

George Jagodzinski (03:45):

That's so neat. I didn't think about this last time we talked, but I remember Pandora's origin story is it was an in store kiosk. Did you have exposure to that in your story when that was going on?

Kevin Ertell (03:57):

Yeah. Savage Beast they were called at the time. Tim Westergren was-

George Jagodzinski (04:01):

That's a pretty cool name.

Kevin Ertell (04:02):

Yeah. And he developed this algorithm that was powered these listening stations that was absolutely the beginning of Pandora. And he had that with Tower. Yeah, we used it quite a bit. It was really, really cool stuff. Way before the Spotify algorithm and all that was that.

George Jagodzinski (04:19):

I love that. But getting the freedom and the autonomy that you had at the store, and then playing every single role, that had to really set you up, not only for empathy for everyone on the team, but just context to the details that need to happen to turn strategy into reality, right?

Kevin Ertell (04:37):

Right, absolutely. I think it's been very important for me to have started there so I understand all these elements that have to come to life. A strategy or a big idea in a corporate office is a very long way from what's happening on the shop floor. Having the understanding of what it takes to have some of these ideas actually come to life because I've been there at the very basis of it has definitely been critical for me. It's something I never forget and think about it every day in how to implement stuff.

George Jagodzinski (05:10):

Yeah. How do you go about replicating that with your own teams?

Kevin Ertell (05:15):

What it comes down to is what I loved about Tower was the how was delegated to us. We understood in the stores what Tower was about. There was a very clear understanding, that the owner, the founder of the company, used to come into the stores and he would look in the jazz section. And he would look at your Miles Davis collection. And he said, "You have to have certain Miles Davis records even if they don't sell because having them tells people that we carry everything."

George Jagodzinski (05:47):

[inaudible 00:05:49].

Kevin Ertell (05:48):

And so it was just little things like that. Or there was a guy that was the head of stores and he used to come around. And when he'd come in the store, if you had a rack that had space, there wasn't a CD filling up the space, he would say something like, "Hey, we don't sell wood." But the point was that these were kind of mantras or value statements that you knew.

(06:10):

And so you knew how to run a store. And a Tower store would be the essence of a Tower store no matter where it was, even though it was very tailored to its local market, and it was wildly different each Tower store in many ways, but very much the same in other ways because there was a strong ethos and strong understanding of what it meant to be a Tower store.

(06:29):

And that's the kind of thing that I think about all the time too. What's the essence? What's the thing that matters the most? Let's get super clear about that, and then leave people closer to the work with the autonomy and the freedom to stay consistent with that essence, but make it right for where they are and what their team is or their environment is.

George Jagodzinski (06:50):

I love that delegating the how. Because I know the way we talk about it is I always like to call it you need a portable vision. Your vision needs to walk the hallways. But you go into too many organizations, and people are doing lots of work, and you ask them what the vision is and they can't articulate it. You ask them the why behind, and they can't. You have some frameworks for that as well, right? Was it the ladder?

Kevin Ertell (07:14):

Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, the ladder of abstraction is this concept by a linguist from the 1930s, Hayakawa. And he came up with this idea where he said language kind of works in these different levels of abstraction. And people in different areas talk about it in different heights, for lack of better word. And he called it a ladder. And his example was in the farm world basically. He said executives or stock traders or whatever, they might be talking about agriculture or stock or livestock sort of thing. They'd use these sort of words. But if you go all the way to the farm, they're talking about the cows, or even like Bessie. There's this very specific language when you're closer to where execution's happening and there's a strategic language that happens in boardrooms where it's a shortcut for some broader view.

(08:07):

And his point was, if you want clarity, you have to work your way up and down that ladder. The farmer person can't be just talking about Bessie to somebody who's talking about wide scale asset investment across livestock. There has to be a connection. And the opposite is also true, that people at the very top level can't be talking about strategy at a level that doesn't make any sense to someone like me who was on the shop room floor. You have to make that connection, constantly go up and down the ladder. And when you do that, you're able to keep people aligned to the vision. And to your point, the vision can travel the hallways because you're moving the language back and forth so that people get the big picture at the same time they understand the details.

George Jagodzinski (08:53):

That's fantastic. Yeah. I always preach common language. But something that I'm guilty of is not taking it up and down the ladder enough. I'm curious if you have any practical ways, because as a busy executive, your context switching like you wouldn't believe. I might go from a board meeting one minute immediately then into something with a front of house worker, and I'm using words that they don't even know what the hell they mean. I'm guilty of that all the time. How do you help yourself?

Kevin Ertell (09:25):

I think one of the biggest things is to ask people to say it back to you. I find there's a big value in not just saying things to people, but saying, "How did you hear that," or, "What did you understand about that?" Having that dialogue and asking questions goes a long way because otherwise it goes by people. They miss stuff.

(09:47):

The example I always give is this. Imagine, we've all been in a bar conversation. You're in this loud bar and you're talking to somebody. They're talking to you, and you're hearing a lot of what they're saying, but not all of what they're saying. But when they smile, you smile, when they laugh, you laugh. The key to that is to think about it from the other point of view. Because when you're the one talking, you know exactly what you're saying, and they're smiling when you smile and they're laughing when you laugh. So it's very easy for you to make the assumption that they get everything you're saying. But if you don't have a little bit of a back and forth and ask questions and make sure you're double checking that they are getting it, then you can very easily fall off course even though you're getting all the right signals.

George Jagodzinski (10:32):

That makes a lot of sense. That's a good framework. Now you write about in your book why strategy fails. I'm curious to start with some concrete examples. I love the juicy stories of where strategies failed in your history. Not to dig a blade and twist it, but I think it's good to learn from.

Kevin Ertell (10:51):

I don't know. When you call it a juicy story, it feels like you're taking a flight.

George Jagodzinski (10:55):

I'm curious. I'm curious George.

Kevin Ertell (10:57):

Well, that's good. One good example is one where I forgot a lesson I should have known. And when I was at Borders, and we were creating the Borders Rewards Loyalty Program, and we had this big idea for what this loyalty program was going to be. And we pushed it out into some stores and it failed. It did not work. And we started to dive back into it.

(11:22):

And what we found was, most of the time customers didn't get it and they said the bookseller that they talked to didn't get it. But sometimes we'd find customers who really liked it. And what they had in common was a bookseller who got it, who really understood and explained it to them well. The problem was that was very few and far between.

(11:44):

And what I realized is, when I was on the floor at Tower Records, I never really cared about the corporate strategy in the same way I cared about the person who was standing right in front of me. I mean, that was what mattered to me, the person right there.

George Jagodzinski (11:58):

It's almost impossible.

Kevin Ertell (11:59):

Yeah. And I forgot that lesson as we pushed it out. I was thinking about the strategic value to the whole company, and we just weren't thinking about that. So we learned from this. Luckily it was pilot stores. And what we did is we went back, and when we went to launch it full-time after talking to lots of booksellers and understanding what was working for them and what wasn't and what they understood and what they didn't understand, we created two marketing programs when we officially launched it. One to customers and one that was internal to booksellers.

(12:31):

And on that one, we did lots of things in the company we'd never done before. We had a call with everybody in the company and the president of the company. We sent out book tote bags to every single bookseller in the company. And inside that book bag was a brochure. But what we did is we had a normal size brochure for customers, but for the one for employees, it was really big, way oversized. And on the front it said a program you'll be proud to share. And we tried to make the point that this is big. And all the points inside of it were all about why it mattered to the person in front of them. Nothing about why it mattered to the company. So it was all about the person in front of them. And it took off. It went really well once we had sort of made that pivot. So that was a rough lesson to learn but happy that we turned it around.

George Jagodzinski (13:24):

That's a fantastic example. Thanks for sharing because it's reminiscent to me of, again, since we've been in e-commerce for so long, all the different multi-channel, omnichannel, all that stuff. Everyone, it was about technology. And people spent ungodly amounts of money on the technology. But omnichannel is really about alignment and buy-in across all of those channels. One of our prior episodes, we had Ian Dewar from Anthropologie, and they had a great approach to it as well when they were just moving from brick and mortar to online. It's a fantastic example.

Kevin Ertell (13:55):

Yeah, I love that.

George Jagodzinski (13:56):

Now Borders is no more. Towers is no more. What have you done, Kevin?

Kevin Ertell (14:03):

Yeah. It's rough, man.

George Jagodzinski (14:05):

Do you just curse them? Are you witch that's cursed them after you leave? Is that what happens?

Kevin Ertell (14:08):

No, no. Other places I've been are still going. You've heard of Nike.

George Jagodzinski (14:13):

Yes. Yeah, I have heard of them. They're pretty good. But I'm curious, what is that like though? Because you're a very empathetic, caring person. You're obviously an operator who loves to build things. What is it like to look back to see those fallen ships that you were once a part of?

Kevin Ertell (14:33):

I mean, it's a bummer, and those are industries that just got massively disrupted. I think we're missing something in the world without having those. I mean, there was a whole culture around music stores, record stores that just doesn't even exist period really anymore. There's some small independent ones, of course. But Borders bummer, really bummer. The industry changed. Also, one thing Tower and Borders both had in common was they got saddled with a lot of debt, and it made it very hard for both those companies to pivot because they had so much debt.

George Jagodzinski (15:07):

That's also something we share in common because my old thing was Toys "R" Us, and they had a very similar fate. But let's move into more positive things. So you've written this book. What did you learn that was a surprise as you were going through it?

Kevin Ertell (15:21):

I think a couple things. One, I have my experience that I wanted to share, but I talked to lots of other people, over 60 other operators across lots of different companies. And the one thing that I thought was a cool thing that I learned is, even though I talked to people in all sorts of different industries, all sizes of companies, some of the things that people said worked were pretty consistent across all of that. So that was a really good thing to learn.

(15:48):

I think one thing that I heard more than anything from people was slow down to speed up. That you've got to make sure you get stuff right before you go fast. And I'm as guilty of that as anybody as a sort of type A guy that just wants to go, go, go. And I really heard enough from people over and over, and saw in my own experience, if you don't spend that time to slow down and get things kind of organized and set up right, you actually just slow down later in a much worse way. So that was a powerful one.

(16:20):

I think the value of communication. And in the book, I spent a lot of time researching the psychology of communication and really understanding why it's so hard for we humans to communicate with each other. And spend time learning about that and finding ways to get through that was a really valuable bit of information I learned in developing the book.

George Jagodzinski (16:42):

That's huge. How did that help your relationships?

Kevin Ertell (16:46):

It help my... It helps everyone because you start to realize that what you learn, as you sort of study all this stuff deeper, is that we all bring our own interpretations of everything to every conversation we have. Because my joke is always, my wife and I are about to have our 25th anniversary.

George Jagodzinski (17:05):

Congrats. That's huge.

Kevin Ertell (17:06):

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. And we know each other better than anybody. We've spent half our lives together. Yet somehow we still have misunderstandings. It's because, as much as we're together, we have a life both of us before we got to this point, and even now we still have different experiences. And all those come to play in when you are saying something and someone else is hearing those words and interpreting them. And that's why communication's so hard. And so in a workplace where you don't have anywhere near all that history together, it means you have to be even more careful and even more, back to our conversation earlier, even more often checking to make sure what you said was heard in the way you intended it.

George Jagodzinski (17:49):

Yeah. That's huge. Along those lines of the communication and the clarity, I'm sure there's plenty of listeners, not me, plenty of listeners that have a strategy they've been trying to move forward, but it's unsuccessfully moving forward. And they think, this is so simple. Why is this so hard to do? What's the path forward for those folks?

Kevin Ertell (18:13):

Well, that is what the whole book is about, thankfully.

George Jagodzinski (18:18):

Step one, buy Kevin's book.

Kevin Ertell (18:19):

Yeah, right. So in the book, I break it into, it's called the Six C's System that I have in there. I break it into two parts. The first part is setting the stage and the second part is showtime. The first three C's are in setting the stage, and that is co-creation, clarity, and capacity. And so that's all about getting things right. And co-creation is so critical. Bringing people together who are going to be involved in bringing this thing to life. When you do that and they help co-create the strategy, then you're getting alignment and buy-in. You're getting validation that it's going to be something that can work, and you're getting commitment, which is absolutely critical.

(18:58):

Then you get into clarity. And that is all about making sure that you have a clear language without the ladder of abstraction we talked about earlier. It's about making it as simple as possible and it's about making it meaningful for people everywhere. Then capacity. Man, capacity is a huge problem. You have to make room for it. All of our businesses have stuff going all the time. If you have this new idea, and you don't make room for that, good luck. It's not going to go anywhere. So that's setting the stage.

(19:28):

And then showtime is the next three C's, which is communication, coordination, and coaching. So communication I talk about, it's got to be early, loud, and continuous. You got to start making the case for change before you even start writing the strategy so early. That it's got to be loud. There's so much going on, like kind of the bar conversation we were talking about earlier. And continuous is critical. You can't just say it once. Coordination is all about making sure the various components of what you've got coming to life are working together, that you're making kind of accountability a team sport. People understand they're accountable to each other.

(20:04):

And then coaching is really the active part of leadership. It's the part that is motivating and incentivizing and making decisions and pivoting where necessary, but really staying on top of it no different than a coach in a basketball game. So it takes that whole system. You can't just have the idea and unleash it on the organization. You have to run through that whole system. And it's not always sequential. It's back and forth and working through all those six C's, but that's what it takes to make your idea come to life successfully.

George Jagodzinski (20:36):

It's a great framework, and every single one of those probably is a lot more difficult than you would imagine. I'll poke a few into those. So the co-creation, although some of them are easier than you think too, I'm curious what examples you might have, but I'll throw an example out that we've seen is we're typically brought in because a company wants to change. And there's always a stage where we're putting names in boxes. We're saying, "Who has sign off on this? Who has input?" Your RACI, all that good stuff. But then I always ask, I've learned to ask the question, "Yeah, but who's going to care that they weren't involved?" Because I've seen people, they'll say, "Oh, so and-so doesn't care. They're busy. Don't bother them." And then later we find out, oh, they care and now they're bothered because they weren't involved at the beginning.

(21:19):

But that same person, if they were involved at the beginning, they are busy, and they might actually just check out of the process themselves once they've been invited to the first couple of things. But it's a very different environment now because they feel like they were included. And that's not an empty invitation. It's just like you need to be aware of all those kind of dark corners of the organization to make sure you're looping in.

Kevin Ertell (21:43):

Totally. I think it's super important when you're co-creating by the way that you bring in your advocates and your detractors. Bring those people in you know are going to be a detractor early because, by the way, they're going to represent things other people think. So the earlier you can sort of understand that. And sometimes they might be a detractor simply because they didn't understand it right. So it wasn't even that they actually disagreed with the idea, but if they don't understand it right, it doesn't matter whether they officially disagree with the idea or not. They disagree with their interpretation of it and that's all that matters that caused issues. So I think that's super important to bring them in.

(22:19):

There's also this concept called procedural justice, which is a psychological concept, it's kind of a funny name. But what it basically means is that people can get on board with something they disagree with as long as they feel like they were truly heard and listened to. And that's what's called procedural justice. So you bring them in and you at least get them involved. That helps get them on board to commit later because you were genuine about trying to understand their input and their ideas.

George Jagodzinski (22:49):

That's cool. The other aspect I want to poke into is the continuous part of it. Because one thing I've seen kill a strategy is when things take long, people leave. And the honeymoon period wears off. And there's people are in and out, and all of a sudden no one knows what they're doing, they're just doing it. I'm curious at Nike, very large organization, I don't know if you have examples there or elsewhere where you've really needed to push on that continuous aspect of it.

Kevin Ertell (23:19):

Everywhere. I found that you have to talk about stuff all the time. There's actually, again, another one I learned in writing the book, but there's this guy, Hermann Ebbinghaus, from like late 1800s psychologist, and he had something called a forgetting curve. So you talk about people coming in and out, but it's even people that are there still. So it turns out that we forget about 90% of what we learn within 30 days if it's not reinforced.

George Jagodzinski (23:47):

That's horrifying.

Kevin Ertell (23:48):

Yeah. But that's just human nature. So what he found is you retain a whole lot more of it if it's reinforced. And when he talked about reinforcement, what he said is that you not only have to say it multiple times, but you actually have to say it in different ways and use different media and all that kind of stuff. The more we hear things, see things in different ways, the more it starts to take hold. And so that's critically important.

(24:12):

Now you add the other thing that is, yeah, if it takes even longer, you've got people coming in and out. So even more important that you're continuously, first of all, onboarding people, and connecting them to everything going on as much as you can, but then keeping that flow going all the time. That's what I learned a while back, and I've tried to use many different forums to do that, whether that might be when I was at companies like Nike, I always had a weekly newsletter, and I would always, every week I'd write something to the team and I'd make sure I'd be reiterating things. And we might have monthly all hand meetings, and I would try to connect things that were happening, whether it's something where we're doing a learning session or whatever we're doing there, always connect it back to the strategy.

(24:58):

And then my favorite way to do it is in celebrations. So when somebody hits a milestone or they do something well, yes, absolutely celebrate them for that in its own right, that's important. But use that as an opportunity to connect it to the strategy. This was great because it did this thing for the strategy. It pushed us forward on this milestone of delivery that was part of the strategy that we talked about. You can continue to use all these different points to reiterate the same strategy message and north star.

George Jagodzinski (25:30):

I love that. It's funny. I was going to ask you about that curve, but I forgot the name of it, kind of ironic, since the last time we talked.

Kevin Ertell (25:37):

Yeah, we didn't talk enough apparently in between then and now.

George Jagodzinski (25:41):

It hasn't been reinforced. I'm curious if you've dealt with these zombie strategies. The strategy has been put out. Again, so it's just been going on too long. People have lost their way. How do you jump back in and breathe life back into it? Because now there's baggage associated with the strategy, in addition to all the other complications.

Kevin Ertell (26:02):

Yeah. I mean, that's a problem, and I think you almost have to revalidate it sometimes. So find a way to go look, rather than, hey, we're just going to start the strategy up again, maybe it's more of a, hey, we have this strategy. We haven't been doing much with it. Let's pull it back out and see if it still makes sense. And then you can run people through different validation schemes.

(26:26):

One of my favorite is a technique called the six thinking hats. This came up with a guy named Edward de Bono, I think his name was, in the '80s. But it's a great technique. Have you ever been in meetings, by the way, where some idea goes out there and people in the room start talking and arguing about the idea. But everybody's coming from a different perspective. And it's just this loud conversation that goes nowhere.

George Jagodzinski (26:50):

Oh yeah. A million of those.

Kevin Ertell (26:52):

I've been in those two. What de Bono said was, "Hey, this is a problem because everyone's coming at it from a different perspective. We're not thinking in unison and we're disconnecting with each other." So he came up with this idea of these six thinking hats. And they're metaphorical hats, unless you want to have fun, and then you could put real hats on. But they each have a different color.

(27:11):

And so there's the white hat, and what you'd say is, okay, everyone's going to put on the white hat. So we are all going to discuss the strategy or whatever it is with the white hat on. And that means we're only going to talk about it from the perspective of what facts do we know or what facts do we need? That's it. Do that for a few minutes and you switch. And you say, okay, now we're going to put the yellow hat on. That's about optimism. So all we're going to do is talk about why this strategy can work, what are the good things about it? And everybody has to talk and everybody only from that perspective.

(27:44):

Then you do the black hat, which is, okay, but what are the risks and the challenges with it? Then there's the green hat, which is, okay, what are the new ideas or innovations we could do around this kind of thing? And then the sixth hat is blue, which is the facilitation hat. So it's really these five. But that's a way to maybe reinvigorate a strategy too. Because you go and you ask everybody now, talking from the same perspective, does this thing work, or where are we at or we need to change anything?

(28:09):

That technique though is so powerful because it forces everybody to think sometimes from perspectives that are not natural for them. You have the negative person who has a really hard time with the optimism one, and the opposite is also true. But it gives them new empathy for people who think that way, and it forces them to get out of their normal thinking. And that in itself really helps, not only to validate, but it sort of drives buy-in too, and ultimately commitment. So it's techniques like that you can use I think to reinvigorate and even modify a strategy maybe that was dormant.

George Jagodzinski (28:47):

That is really powerful. And something I heard in there also is everyone's got to talk, everyone's got to say something. And that's huge. And then that tying it into each other from a personal level, it kind of removes them from the business for a bit, and probably gets that apathy out of the way too. Because once that apathy has set in, and that's just death.

Kevin Ertell (29:07):

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.

George Jagodzinski (29:11):

So in writing the book, what was the number again, that curve, how many thousands of hours of experience are put into this book? Thousands of years?

Kevin Ertell (29:20):

It was 1,000 years. Yeah. I got it to-

George Jagodzinski (29:22):

1,000 years.

Kevin Ertell (29:22):

... 1,000 years by talking to, I think, 62 different people I interviewed for the book, and that got me over the 1,000.

George Jagodzinski (29:29):

Was there an assumption you had going into this thing that after that 1,000 years of experience, you're like, oh, I was wrong about this thing.

Kevin Ertell (29:38):

I don't know that there was anything that I thought I was necessarily wrong about, but there were definitely all of these points were greatly enhanced from talking to everybody, and understanding the depth that is required for some of these things that was more than I probably thought or had implemented myself. But seeing the power of it too. And learning from different people's stories where you could see how things, maybe I hadn't given as much thought to that I should. Communication was a good example of that. Dug into a lot of stuff around incentives, for example. We all talk about incentives in terms of financial incentives, but that's one incentive, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And there's other more powerful incentives honestly that have much more impact like social incentives. Like getting a reward is good, but looking good in front of your peers or helping your peers out. All these things are social incentives. Feeling valued amongst your peers. These drive a lot of work on the day-to-day business, but they aren't often intentionally put in place, but they could be.

(30:45):

And then the other type of incentive that's really, really powerful is what I call a convenience incentive. We all do the easy thing. If there's a choice between easy and hard, we're almost always going to choose easy. So if you're intentional about building your execution plan so that the right thing is the easiest thing, you're going to be far more successful. But you got to really think that through. How do you make it easy? How do you take out bureaucracy or whatever is getting in people's way that makes it harder to do the right thing or the important thing? If you don't make that easier, it's not going to happen.

George Jagodzinski (31:22):

Yeah, I like that. One I've learned also is competitiveness as a team. It's just we're going to beat so and-so, and just rallying around that, and picking an enemy, even if it's a fun enemy to pick.

Kevin Ertell (31:36):

Yeah, I love that one. I mean, coming from retail, we used to do that all the time. You rank all the stores, and so you're always trying to be the top of something. But that's a great example of a social incentive. Maybe that has a financial incentive, but probably not in most cases, but it is what drives behavior.

George Jagodzinski (31:53):

Yeah. I mean, it's worthy of spending a bit of time at the beginning of these meetings, these strategy sessions and meetings, just talking about what's the language that we're using, what are the motivations that we have? All of those norms that we're going to have as we move forward.

Kevin Ertell (32:07):

Yep, absolutely. The more intentional you are about that, the more likely your strategy is going to come to life.

George Jagodzinski (32:12):

Well, Kevin, I love your whole perspective and your book, everything. In your life and your career, what's the best advice that you've ever received?

Kevin Ertell (32:21):

Be curious. That's probably it. I think be curious is even more important than be empathetic.

George Jagodzinski (32:28):

As someone named George with a Curious George lunchbox behind me somewhere here, I am on board, Kevin. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Ertell (32:38):

Thanks for having me. Love talking to you, George.

George Jagodzinski (32:41):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and pretty please, drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.