Episode 59 · 5 October 2023 · 1:07:35

How to Build a Ministry of Common Sense: Insights from Martin Lindstrom

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Coffee badging: the new hybrid work trend
panel interview#hybrid-work #coffee-badging #workplace-trends
Introducing Martin Lindstrom and the Ministry of Common Sense
intro#martin-lindstrom #common-sense #guest-interview
What is corporate BS and who's affected?
panel interview#corporate-bs #workplace-culture #organizational-behavior
Auditing your business for corporate BS
panel interview#corporate-audit #bs-detection #business-process
The practical steps to eliminate nonsense
panel interview#eliminating-nonsense #practical-steps #workplace-efficiency
The critical role of purpose
panel interview#purpose #company-values #employee-engagement
The surprising role of empathy
panel interview#empathy #leadership #culture-change
Martin's hot take on remote vs. on-site work
hot take#remote-work #on-site-work #martin-lindstrom
Final words — implementing common sense in your organisation
panel interview#common-sense #implementation #final-advice

Show notes

Why Every Business Needs a Ministry of Common Sense — Martin Lindstrom on Killing Corporate BS

This week on Truth, Lies & Work — Al and Leanne are joined by Martin Lindstrom, Time Magazine's "Most Influential Business Thinker" and author of The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS.

Corporate BS is everywhere. The endless email threads, the meetings that could have been an email, the processes that exist purely because "that's how we've always done it." But what if the antidote was simpler than we think? Martin joins Al and Leanne to make the case for common sense as a business strategy — from auditing your organisation for nonsense, to the surprising role of empathy in cutting through red tape, to his hot take on the remote versus on-site debate.

What We Cover

1. The corporate BS epidemic Martin defines common sense as "the sum total of our observations, experiences, insights, and lessons learned" — and corporate BS as what happens when we ignore all of it. We explore why even well-intentioned organisations fall into the trap of process for process's sake, and why the problem is often worst in companies with the best intentions.

2. How to audit your business for nonsense Martin walks us through a practical framework for identifying where corporate BS is hiding in your organisation. The first step? Free people up for time. Go through that inventory of processes, meetings, and approvals — and ask the uncomfortable question: does this actually need to exist?

3. The critical role of purpose Values are words on a wall. Purpose is where your people live and breathe those values. Martin shares how aligning operations with a meaningful purpose is one of the most powerful ways to cut through the nonsense — and why it's not as fluffy as it sounds.

4. The surprising role of empathy Empathy is in short supply, especially post-pandemic. Martin reveals how cultivating empathy among leaders and employees leads to more sensible, more compassionate workplaces — and why the correlation between empathy and common sense is impossible to ignore.

5. Martin's hot take on remote vs. on-site Martin weighs in on the debate that won't die. His take? It's not about where you work — it's about "enclosed cognition." Creating a mindset shift that helps you separate home from work, wherever you happen to be.

Top 3 Takeaways

Audit everything. If you can't explain why a process exists, it probably shouldn't. Free people up for time by going through your inventory of meetings, emails, and approvals — and kill what doesn't serve you.
Purpose beats values. Values are words on a wall. Purpose is where your people live and breathe those values. If you want to eliminate corporate BS, start with a clear sense of why you exist.
Empathy is a business strategy. The ability to feel with other people is disappearing — especially among younger generations. But empathy drives common sense, and common sense drives better business. It's not soft. It's strategic.

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

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Al ElliottThe dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across 3 teams and 4 systems. And in our case, it's about 216,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

Leanne ElliottWhat you should be doing is using HubSpot, because why? HubSpot connects it all— every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation— into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story. And when you know more, you grow more.

Al ElliottNice. Check out hopspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Martin LindstromElderly man comes up to me crying. He hugs me and he says, you saved my life. And I was kind of baffled because I never seen the person before. I didn't know what this was all about.

Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to the Truth, Lies and Workplace Culture podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a business psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al and I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottWe are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures.

Al ElliottYeah, and you should definitely be grateful that Leanne's here today because she's not very well. You're in bed all day yesterday, weren't you?

Leanne ElliottI was. I was. I'm not ill very often, but when I am, it seems to— it's like I save it all up for just one really bad cold. Um, so yeah, apologies if I'm a bit bunged up, but you know, I'm here. The show must go on.

Al ElliottI think it sounds sexy. I think I like it when you sound bunged up.

Leanne ElliottOh, thank you. Thank you.

Al ElliottWeird.

Leanne ElliottSo, Al, what are we talking about today?

Al ElliottVery, very excited today. We've got Martin Lindstrom on the, on the pod. Um, he's just like the most famous guy in the world. Uh, he's a Danish author. He has been named one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. His most recent book, The Ministry of Common Sense, which is how to eliminate bureaucratic red tape, bad excuses, and corporate bullshit. It's right up our street. Just even, well, probably because he swears a little bit in it, which is obviously very much up our street. So we're going to be bringing you this exclusive interview, which Leanne did with Martin, um, a little bit later on in a few minutes. But first, It's our favourite time of the week. It's the news roundup.

Leanne ElliottCue the jingle.

Al ElliottOkay, Lee, what you got?

Leanne ElliottI have a new word.

Al ElliottNew word alert.

Leanne ElliottCoffee badging.

Al ElliottNormally, I don't know what this is because it sprung on me, but I do know what this is because I sent it to Leanne earlier this week. So tell us, what does coffee badging mean?

Leanne ElliottYou tell me, Al, you tell me.

Al ElliottSo coffee badging is, from my understanding, is, is when you get a badge for getting a coffee. For example, if you've got this sort of hybrid situation, um, at work where you can work from home some days and work in the office other days, then you get a badge by coming in for a coffee. And so you turn up, have a coffee, everyone goes, oh yeah, Martin's coming. No, that's a bad example because Martin's our guest. Geoff's coming. Oh, he's always here, isn't he?

Martin LindstromYeah.

Al ElliottGood lad, Geoff. And then you slip out the back door when no one's looking and go back home and get your pyjamas on and watch a bit of Netflix and do some work while you're watching Netflix. How far am I away from that?

Leanne ElliottYeah, quite right. I'm not sure about the Netflix thing. I think that's why people are being called back into the office, this lack of trust. So I'm not sure I can endorse that part. Part of the message, but in terms of definition, yeah, that is what coffee badging is. Basically going into the office long enough to have a coffee, see your colleagues, get that badge that you've attended the office that day, and go back home. It was quite an interesting article. Was it in Forbes, Al?

Martin LindstromCan you remember?

Leanne ElliottWas it Forbes?

Al ElliottSounds like, yeah, I think it was Forbes. Yeah, sounds about right.

Leanne ElliottYeah, so they were quoting some research. Apparently 58% of hybrid workers are coffee badging, while another 8% said they haven't coffee badging but would like to try it. I guess it's that same old argument, isn't it? Is it, is it the cost of living crisis? Is it better to work at home, at the office? You know, why don't people want to come into a fixed place of work? And it could be cost. It could be the cost of the commute. It could be the cost of childcare, pet care. Then you've got the hidden costs like office attire. You know, you can wear the same outfit every day at home and no one's going to notice or judge you. And then of course there's the added time. You know, 61% of workers spend up to an hour commuting each day, and 20% spend up to 2 hours.

Al ElliottWow.

Leanne ElliottYou know, when you add that up over a week, that's a lot.

Al ElliottThat's pretty much season 1 and 2 of Sopranos, I think.

Leanne ElliottIndeed.

Al ElliottI also saw another— there's a great Twitter account called Fesshole, and it's all about confessing. And the whole thing is, it's anonymous confessions. And I saw this confession the other day, which is very similar to this. And this guy says, I've collected all the— a huge jar of change over the last 5 years from home. So what I do is I go into the office, I say hello to everyone, I go to the vending machine, put my 2ps in, and then press the, press the cancel button, the return button, and I get a quid back out.

Martin LindstromOh, nice.

Al ElliottSo he says, I've got about 40 quid left, and then they're never gonna see him in the office ever again. And people think that he's coming in to say hello and he's not, he's just coming in to change. Anyway, what else we got, Leigh?

Leanne ElliottWell, it is event season, Al. I feel like we have 2 event seasons, like this kind of run-up to Christmas, and usually in the spring. I think everyone just kind of hibernates January, February, March, don't they?

Al ElliottYeah, yeah, yeah.

Leanne ElliottBut yeah, event season is continuing in full swing, and once again we have another event to tell you about. Al and I have been invited to speak. We are going to be speakers.

Al ElliottWe'll be professional and everything. I don't think I can swear on this one.

Leanne ElliottNo, you can't. It is a virtual event this Saturday, 7th of October, called Burnout: The Silent Pandemic, hosted by Tiffany Castagno, founder of CEPHR, and Minatsuki Iya, founder of North Star Solutions and Services. It's a cool event. It's the first of a 3-part series to support leaders and others navigate and prevent burnout. So we will be there leading the first session, which is quite exciting. Um, I'm a little bit nervous about putting Al in front of that type of audience, so we'll see how that goes, but I'm sure it'll be fine. And the November one you'll probably be interested in too, as it is led by Sally Clark, who featured on our burnout episode. So yes, join us Saturday, 7th of October, 10 AM New York time, 3 PM UK time, where Al and I will share our approach to burnout and creating amazing workplaces in which people experience positive wellbeing. We'll also answer all and any of the questions that you have, whether they are related to burnout, wellbeing, or indeed something else.

Al ElliottOkay, we've got one last piece of news about, uh, events, do we not, Leanne?

Leanne ElliottYes, we have.

Al ElliottHave we mentioned this before?

Leanne ElliottHave we mentioned that we are the official podcast of the 6th MAD World Summit this October?

Al ElliottI believe we have.

Leanne ElliottI'm not sure we've mentioned it enough though, so let's mention it one more time. So yes, we have been invited to the 6th annual MAD World Summit happening October 12th in central London in the UK. We will be interviewing some of the event speakers from some incredible organizations including the Royal Mail, L'Oréal, IBM, just to name but a few. There is still time to register your tickets and come along to the event and meet Al and I and all the incredible speakers. Or if you can't make it, don't worry, we will be bringing you all the exclusive content. But to be honest, you probably do want to make it. We're good, but there's only so much we can fit into a podcast episode, you know. It's a full-packed day of events, workshops, networking opportunities, There is so much. So rather than me sit here and try and explain everything, I spoke to the Global Head of Content at Make a Difference Media, the company that hosts the MAD World Summit, Claire Farrow. Claire, over to you.

promo (MAD World Summit)The MAD World Summit's been around— this is its 6th year, um, and MAD stands for Make a Difference. We're all about helping employers support the mental health and well-being of their employees, and we also look at how workplace cultures can improve to do that. So yeah, we've got a fantastic lineup of speakers. We think we've got 126 speakers, something like that this year. So it's bigger than ever. We've also co-located the DE&I Symposium this year alongside MAD World Summit. And that's because we're recognizing how interlinked DE&I and wellbeing are.

Martin LindstromMoving forwards.

promo (MAD World Summit)So that's just a quick overview of what the event's all about. So I think there's a few things that make it different. One is that we're very focused on sort of practical solutions. So, you know, it's, it's sort of where you go to really hear about best practice, share ideas and experiences with people from across different sectors in real time. And, you know, we have lots of opportunities to do that, like roundtables and, you know, coffee breaks and and all the usual networking as well. The other thing that really sets us apart is the energy of the event. I mean, people often talk about the great kind of positive energy that we have. And actually, to be fair, that's a lot of that is down to our co-founders, Simon Berger and Mark Pegu. And they kind of recognized right from the outset that this needed to be something that would really capture people's hearts and minds.

Leanne ElliottIt really is going to be an awesome event and some hugely valuable insights and lessons are gonna be really applicable to smaller businesses too.

Al ElliottOkay, Lee, let's get onto our guest, Martin Lindstrom. Martin is a Danish author, as I said, a Time Magazine Influential 100 honoree. Never seen that word before, Leanne. Just wrote, you wrote it in the script. I'm gonna say it, but I dunno what it means. Uh, he has written 8 books including Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends. Biology, Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. Nice title, by the way, there, Martin. Good choice on that word. Interesting. That was the first book I bought, uh, by Martin, uh, before I even knew who he was. Um, and then obviously the one we're talking about today, The Ministry of Common Sense, uh, which is the focus of what we're talking about today. He's the founder and CEO of Lindstrom Company, which is the world's largest business and culture transformation company. And he's worked with some pretty big names, Standard Chartered, Burger King, I could do with a Burger King right now. Swiss Airlines, and many, many more. So let's go meet Martin and hear a bit more about his work.

Martin LindstromBut I have been working with branding since I was 12 years of age. Can you believe it? And I realized at some point that when you want to transform organizations, you can't just put makeup on them. You actually have to go deeper. And that depth basically means that I have to understand the culture. And the culture, as you know, increasingly is collapsing around the world. So we started to do an enormous amount of work understanding the psychology of why we behave the way we do, not just when it comes to the consumer, but also to, to when it comes to the employees. So what I'm doing is I'm helping companies to transform their brands, their culture, and their businesses. And we both look into brands and into, to culture Um, I've written 8 books, 8 New York Times bestselling books, which have been translated into more than 60 languages, which is crazy. And then I help the who's who of brands around the world, everything from Uber to Google to Coca-Cola and Nestlé and all these brands.

Leanne ElliottSo Martin's latest book, which I have here, is called The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate Bullshit. It is brilliant. I read it and then I was like, you know what? This would make a brilliant audiobook because the narrative that that Martin puts in with his stories and his tone is just brilliant. They do have an audiobook. It's not read by Martin, it's read by somebody else, but it is hilarious. I'm not sure I've ever read a business book before that's made me laugh out loud, so highly recommend that. The Ministry of Common Sense is dedicated to restoring logic and sanity in organisations that are being crippled by pointless rules. Martin asks what happened to common sense and shows readers how they can get it back. If you've ever rolled your eyes at somebody, it just doesn't make sense in your workplace? I think we all have. This is the book for you.

Al ElliottBrilliant. So in this episode, we're gonna lead you through how you can start making your own ministry of sense in your business to transform it, um, and your culture. We'll be asking Martin 5 key questions. So we're gonna say, what is corporate bullshit and what businesses are affected? 2, how to audit your business for corporate bullshit. Number 3, the critical role of purpose. Purpose is a huge one for us. The surprising role of empathy is number 4, and number 5 is Martin's hot take on the remote versus on-site argument. So, Leanne, shall we crack on with that first one, which is what is corporate bullshit? Let's be honest, we've all experienced it. Um, I haven't worked in a company for like 20 years, but even back then I remember things like, uh, you get locked out of your computer and then you contact the IT department and they say, oh, just go on our website and there's some more information on that. I'm locked out, that's ridiculous. Um, being CC'd into like email threads where there's 6,500 other people on there, you're like, We still get that one.

Leanne ElliottWe might not be in an organization, but we still get that.

Al ElliottWe had a conversation this week and I'm like, there are 17 people on this email thread. If I was one of those 17, I'd be really pissed off. So Martin believes that leaders don't usually think there's much corporate bullshit in their organizations, but the actual number is off the charts. And he's seen a lot of this firsthand.

Martin LindstromI actually remember when I went into the office of Standard Chartered Bank. And this is a lovely bank and lovely people in there. And for the American audience, it's one of the 10th largest banks in the world. And I went up to a lady which was responsible for creating new regulations and guidelines in the company. And as she was talking, I flicked through these amazing books she's created with, I know, thousands of laws and guidelines and God knows what. And I stopped at one and it talked about how Every contract you do has to be sent by fax as well. I said, do you have a fax machine? She said, no, I don't have a fax machine. I said, why do you ask people to do this? She said, well, that's an old one. But having you, why don't you remove it? She said, I'm only paid to create new rules. I'm not paid to remove them once they're not relevant anymore. Now, that changed later on. And in the case of Standard Chartered Bank, we actually started up what is called the Ministry of common sense. It's the first ever in the world where literally we have a whole team full-time internally in the bank just to remove stupidities and nonsense. And this has been up running now for 4 years, removed thousands of stupidities in there. And it all came back to the fact that when you work in these big corporations, there's a lot of BS going through this system. And My mission is to remove that.

Leanne ElliottSo in his book, Martin defines common sense as the antidote to corporate bullshit and the sum total of our ability to separate right from wrong, efficient from inefficient, valuable from worthless, orderly from sloppy, mature from childish. The list goes on. It is a very funny book. His point is common sense is practical, common sense is reasonable, it's dynamic, it's interactive, it's obvious. Or rather, it should be obvious. And when common sense is in place, it leads to a sense of happiness, productivity, and improved quality of life.

Al ElliottThe question I need to ask as a small business owner is, is this just the giants? Is this the IBM that have this corporate bullshit, or do we have it as well in our, in, in like any kind of business? Martin explains that time is the key factor here.

Martin LindstromThe longer a company has been around, the more bureaucracy you have. Mainly because a company which, let's just go back in time. If you are a small startup, let me give you an example. There's these 2 kids, they have this wonderful evening, they're smoking weed in their dorm room and they take a lot of photos, they post them online. And the day after, mom and dad is noticing these photos and of course panic breaks through and they Meet up and they say, oh, I wish we could retract those photos. Now, that became the foundation for Snapchat. Today, a $50 billion company. That was founded based on these kids feeling the pain, experiencing this pain themselves. That is how most companies have started, whether that's IKEA or it's Uber or it's any kind of company really. And then you could say empathy is really, really closely linked with the company. and the people being employed in the company. But as a company grows, the company want to protect what it has. It want to protect its assets. It don't want to be sued. It don't want to have people stealing their insights. So they create all these rules and all these regulations. And with that comes all this red tape. So there's a direct correlation between the age of a company and the degree of bureaucracy, the size of a company, but also the size of a country, and whether that country have rules which is driven by lawyers a lot, which like the cases in the United States where everyone is petrified of being sued. And because of that, the companies have even more red tape. So there's multiple factors, but I'll tell you one interesting thing. We know we have something we call the bureaucracy index, and we know on average the bureaucracy index among larger companies in the United States is 65%. Now, 100% basically means that 100% of the time is used on bureaucracy. 65% means that 65% of the entire time you spend working is spent on nothing. Basically, you only are productive for 35% of your time. In Europe, it's slightly lower, it's around 52%, but it still gives you an idea of more than half of the time is basically wasted.

Al Elliott50 to 65% of your time at work is wasted. It's spent doing nothing. It makes you wonder that if people— if leaders are worried about people at home watching Netflix like I advise the people to do, why bring people back to work? Because it's just as bad in the office, if not worse. I don't know about you, Lee, but if I work in an office, I get so distracted. People go, got a cup of tea? Oh, we're going to go in a meeting. And I'm like, I've got nothing done today. You sit down, you put your headphones on at home, you get 2 or 3 hours work done, like Cal Newport calls deep work. You get that done and you feel like you just had a much better day, don't you?

Leanne ElliottCouldn't agree more.

Al ElliottNow, Martin went on to explain that organisations with the best of intentions can suffer from this common sense crisis, especially if they operate in an industry which has got lots of red tape and bureaucracy. Red tape breeds red tape.

Martin LindstromWell, I think that during COVID-19, there was a very, very strong indication of how bureaucracy just was lost in many organisations. One example would be Lufthansa. The Lufthansa Group was one of the largest airline groups in Europe and in the world for that sake, wanted to follow the regulations about COVID spread. So what they decided to do was to create these rules, which were wonderful, that when you disembark from the plane, they do it one zone at a time. So first, the first 3 rows, and the second lot of rows, and so forth. And these people will disembark out of the plane, you know, basically 6 passengers at a time with a nice distance. They will go down the staircase down on the tarmac straight into a bus. Okay, like, it would be like this big jar, you know, with a big mouth just eating all these small sardines, right? Going straight into this huge bus. And it would be packed with everyone, so much so that the sign behind you saying you have to keep 1.5 meters distance or 6 feet distance, you couldn't even see the sign because everyone would be standing like that. That is a classic example. And in particular, Lufthansa, but also many companies in the airline industry had great struggles managing this and are still lost in bureaucracy to a great degree. When I spoke to them at Lufthansa and I said to them, hey, why do you do it? They said, well, actually one of our airline companies are doing it in the perfect way. I said, why don't you learn from it? They said, we're paralyzed, we just can't do it. You will notice that industries which are driven by compliance a lot also are suffering a lot from that. And that is banks, insurance companies, the medical sector, travel, where there's so— life and death quite often is at play, or where a lot of money is at play.

Leanne ElliottSo we've heard what corporate bullshit is and the types of organization industries that can be impacted. But the truth is, Corporate bullshit can exist in any organisation, in any environment where people come together, so even smaller businesses can be affected. I have my own personal experience. So, when I was a service delivery manager for the Department of Work and Pensions contract in the UK, I was asked to consult on the setup of a new contract in the southeast of England. The leadership team were really struggling with the logistics when it came to reimbursing the travel of participants. So basically, we'd support people either in terms of training courses or work experience placements who were claiming benefits, looking for work. So it was important that we reimbursed that travel for them, and on a weekly basis. People can't afford to wait a month before they get that, that travel money back. So I was listening in this meeting about how they would give the bus tickets and the petty cash to the hosts of the placements who weren't employed by the organization, that they'd need to sign some sort of form to say they understood the accountability of it and what they're responsible for. They'd then need to fill in another team— another form for the finance team so they could get paid. That would also require their bank details, some form of ID, and then they need to reconcile their petty cash and bus tickets on a monthly basis to show where they'd gone. They'd then have to get that sent special delivery because it would contain customer details to the contract manager in a separate location, who would then have to send it special delivery again to the finance team in a different location. So they finalized this very convoluted process, and the MD turns to me and says, Leanne, what do you think? Will this solution work? And I was like, sure, in principle, but can I ask a really stupid question? Why can't the placement officers who see the customers once a week hand out the travel reimbursement? Silence. Open mouths, and then howls of laughter from the MD, who just turned to me and said, Leanne, that's why you're here. Is it because I had a great idea? No, it was because I was removed enough. I wasn't in the weeds of the setup of this contract. I was coming from an objective, more outside point of view. I think this is a problem with corporate bullshit. Often, we're so involved in the day-to-day, we're so involved with this is just how things are, we don't always have the time nor the clarity and patience to stand back and go, is this best? Is this the best solution or is this bordering on corporate bullshit? So that was my experience, even a small company, of corporate bullshit.

Al ElliottSo Martin comes up with this idea of how to audit for common sense, which is our part 2 of the episode. So the key thing here is how are you actually looking for this bullshit? Martin explains that everyone can fall into this trap, and even him. A spring clean can be the solution.

Martin LindstromYeah, yeah. First of all, I think you need to do a spring cleaning, metaphorically speaking, of your daily life. And the question is when you did it the last time. I didn't do it for a long time, I have to admit, but I do do it at certain points of time. And spring cleaning means that you basically can categorize your daily life and work into 4 different buckets. One is stuff you do which you're really good at. One is stuff you do where, yes, it could be better, or it could be more productive or more relevant. One bucket is stuff you should just remove. It's a waste of time. And one is, let me think about it. If you take and do an inventory check of the way you use your time, you'd be very surprised that not everything is jumping into the first and the second pocket. There'll be a lot of stuff which doesn't fit into those, which are going into bucket 3 and bucket 4. A private example, until about a year ago, I actually watched too much YouTube videos. And don't ask me what I was watching. I have no idea about it. It probably was cats jumping up and down or something, right? But the reality was that I was probably burning 1.5 to 2 hours every day. So I learned that by doing timesheets. And those timesheets helped me to not just look at my consumption of YouTube videos, but also unnecessary meetings, unnecessary stuff, which were just filling my diary, either because I was polite or because I never thought about it was wasting my time. In the case of YouTube, by the way, I deleted all my cookies on YouTube and suddenly I would find the most irritating, boring videos pop up in my feed and I would never watch YouTube again, literally. And I think this is my first advice. Do an inventory check, do a spring cleanup, and look at those things, what's basically saying, hey, you have to improve it or you have to get rid of it. If you do it the right way, you will notice that around 30% of your time is in one way or another either wasted or could be optimized. That will free you up with other stuff.

Al ElliottMartin says that once you've done your own spring clean, then go and help your employees or your teams with their Spring clean. I think a lot of leaders assume that if they want to implement this big change, there's enough time that their team and their organization and the people have enough time to implement this. They just don't. You need to start with any kind of change by giving them time back so that they can, they do have the time to make the changes you want.

Martin LindstromWell, you have to, when you make a change happening in an organization, you cannot assume that everyone has time to adopt your wonderful ideas of being more customer-focused. And that is the general assumption and the general mistakes among corporates and corporates going through changes when they're transforming for the better. One assumes that person X sitting in department Y can take aside 1/3 of his or her time and change everything. Can't, because we are inundated with, and we feel overwhelmed with work every day. We never have this little time available. And we've never been this busy. So the first thing you do is to free people up for time. Go through that inventory check, you go through that spring cleaning, or use other methods to do it. You remove things from people's desks so they actually can breathe again. And once you do that, you put them in the shoes of consumers and have them experience what the reality looks like. Once you do that, you identify what we call the low-hanging fruit. That is one initiative, a small initiative you can implement straight away And you most likely will see a result within a week or two. Let's say you last for 90 days. Now, after 90 days, you look yourself in the mirror and you ask yourself, did it work? And what impact did it have on the organization? And you're highly likely to learn 3 things. One is certainly people are more motivated because you're actually giving them time they needed in order to do changes they actually wanted to do but never were able to do. 2, the customer probably will like you more. They'll start to smile more and they'll say, gosh, what happened here? And 3, you actually will start to have evidence it pays off. And what we learned by setting up ministries of common sense across the world is that the money you earn, you actually split in 2. You earn some money, so 50% of those you take back to that division or that function, which now is starting to earn money from cleaning up all the mess they made. And then the other 50%, uh, you give back to other people in the organization to get them going. So it's kind of a donation. And that means this is actually funding itself.

Leanne ElliottMartin went on to explain who should be responsible for this process, advising that that will really depend on the type and size of the organization.

Martin LindstromWell, it's a really good question. And the answer is, I actually don't know. Um, because it depends very much on what type of organization it is, the size of the organization, and what industry it works in. If it's a very small organization, it's pretty obvious it's the owner which is doing it because the owner most likely will have a finger in every pie and therefore also have respect in every function or division, whatever it is you have if you're a small company. The problem is that There is no such thing as a culture person. And if there is a culture person, then you'll notice that that function do not have enough power to make changes across the operation side, the legal side, the customer experience side, the marketing side, whatever it is. And that's the reason why there is no one person you could go to. What you can do, however, is start with the owner, start with the CEO, and create a The task force where you have a small group of 4 people, each of them responsible for various areas, collaborate in order to create a change through the organization as a team rather than as a one-man show. Because as soon as it becomes a one-man show, you can't do it. And you can't do it because quite often this is interlinked in organization across multiple different functions. You just can't lift it yourself. You need to have the support and involvement. And the passion from everyone.

Al ElliottNow, this next bit I think is really cool and something I wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't gone through this book and heard from Martin. He says that once you've done your own spring cleaning, once you've done your employees, you should concentrate on your customers. You should ask them. Speaking to your customers and learning how they experience your product or service is absolute gold when it comes to identifying corporate bullshit. Martin's got some more great examples.

Martin LindstromWell, I think a very good way of indicating if this is the case or not is basically to to take the seat and see the world through the consumer's point of view. An example I'm writing about in my book, The Ministry of Common Sense, is when I was in Miami watching television and I had this highly complex remote control, which basically had 2 numerical notepads and it had 2 off buttons and 2 on buttons. And I remember I had to watch this television and I couldn't switch it on because it was just so complex. Anyway, after 5 minutes, I succeeded. I watched television with 10 minutes, tried to switch it off. But when I clicked the first off button, the light in the room dimmed in kind of a moody, sexy way. And when I clicked the second off button, the air conditioning system switched off, but the television was still running. So I had to have my butt in the air, unplug the whole thing. It was kind of ironic. And that's really my story, except that 2 or 3 months later, I'm flying from Miami to JFK. And I'm sitting next to this guy and he's, we had small talk a little bit and he asked me where I'm from and I tell him I'm from Lindstrom Company and we're transforming organizations and building cultures. And I asked him, where are you from? And he says he's from this company. And I, sorry for swearing here, I said, what the heck went wrong with you guys? Because that was that remote control I'd been fiddling around with 2 months prior, That was him working and developing that remote control. So he sat there like a deer in the headlights, looked at me, and of course could not understand a thing. And I pulled up my PowerPoint and explained this whole thing. And he said to me, listen, this was very smart of us doing it because we had an internal conflict. We had one department responsible for TV, another one for Netflix, a third one for audio streaming, and then we had the recording department. And all these ones were fighting for the real estate, so the space on the remote control. And I decided to say, well, why don't we split it into zones? So one zone is owned by the TiVo people, one is by Netflix, one is by the recording. And I said, that means you have 2 numerical notepads, right? And you have 2 off buttons and 2 on buttons. Yeah, he said. But do you know what the good news, he said, was? It actually means that we know exactly what our roles and responsibilities are in our company. And I said, yeah, and it means I can't even switch off your remote control. This is a story about how there's a disconnect between seeing the world from inside out and seeing the world from outside in. And it's a little bit like, metaphorically speaking, a bridge. If you see a little crack on the outside of the bridge, you can be pretty sure the entire foundation is in jeopardy. That foundation is what I experienced from a remote control point of view. So the best thing you can do as a CEO or as an owner or a senior executive is to spend time with the consumer and listen to what they experience. Go out shopping with them, buy stuff online with them, go to the restaurant or the customer service department or whatever it is. I mean, a very big supermarket chain we're working for right now is open until 11 o'clock around the world. opens up at 7 in the morning. It's open every single day, yet the call center closes down at 5 o'clock every day and is closed during the weekends. So whenever there's a complaint going on in the store, they can't even say, well, call the call center, but they have too few staff to actually handle the complaint in the store. So we have a limbo of 2 days, up to 2 days. That is the lack of common sense. So you need to feel that pain of the consumers. And once you do that, well, then you, the ball is rolling. Oh, of course, no, sometimes companies come to us and I, and they have us measuring the bureaucracy index. And then we go out and measure that by observing the entire culture and figure out how much time people are spending on bureaucracy, give them the number, benchmark against other companies. And quite often people fall off the chair because they realize they're wasting 2/3 of everyone's time internally.

Al ElliottCorporate bullshit can be identified easily by how much time you spend on something. So assessing your time, your team's time, your customers' time, um, are fundamental steps to auditing your business for this corporate bullshit. And you can reintroduce some common sense once you find that. How much time do you think you're actually wasting due to red tape or bad excuses, or worse, we've always done it this way, so we can't do it any other way?

Leanne ElliottI think that's such a good thing, isn't it? If, if you or anyone else has ever uttered in your business, When someone asks, why do you, why do you do it that way? That's just the way we do it. Smells like corporate bullshit to me. You know, often when we work with clients, one of the biggest strains on employee experience and well-being we'll identify is workload. So, as I said, one of the biggest gifts you can give your employees back is, is time. When we feed this back to clients, they'll often smile, roll their eyes, and go, yeah, but you know, that's SME life. Maybe. But unless you've gone through this process, you've spoke to your team, you've spoke to your customers, you've audited for red tape and corporate bullshit, then that's a bad excuse.

Al ElliottMeetings, we all know this, meetings, usually you put half an hour in the diary. So you go, well, I have to have half an hour. This is just ridiculous. Other examples, for example, you could just make sure you don't have high-value people working on low-value tasks. Why should the head of sales be doing all of the admin for the sales when you can just get someone to come in and do that and free up that hour? I think a great example of this is The 4-Hour Workweek, where you have to find out what high-value tasks people need to be doing and take away all the other stuff. The greatest gift we can give our employees back is time. And as we've heard, they're also gonna be more open to change and growth when they've got the time to think about it.

Leanne ElliottBut you might be saying, Leanne, what if I'm in an industry that is heavily Regulated red tape is simply part of what we do. But as Martin explains, this excuse might actually be more reflective of a business owner's not knowing how to break the cycle.

Martin LindstromI think the upside, if there is an upside, that these companies rarely do extremely big mistakes where they burn their fingers, meaning they mess it up. Legally and receive huge lawsuits. But the problem is that as you have so much red tape wrapped around you, you are not very nimble. You're very slow. You're very slow at adopting innovation, adopting a behavioral change among the consumers and the customers. You're very slow at writing or reading the writing on the wall in terms of my culture have a serious problem. So the downside is much greater than the upside. And the upside, you could say, is very temporary. In fact, I would claim that quite often the operation succeeded, but the patient died. And that is, I think, the dilemma organizations kind of increasingly are aware of now. They just don't know how to break that catch-22.

Al ElliottMartin's got a great story about Swiss International Airlines.

Martin LindstromWell, Swiss International Air Lines, like any other airline companies out there, is driven by compliance. I mean, if a plane crashes, a lot of people die, and that could be due to an instance of neglect or where you simply were just not following rules and guidelines and regulations. So I don't need to tell you that when you sit in meetings and people are generating great ideas or thoughts, The first red card anyone can raise in a meeting like that is, well, wouldn't that be dangerous? Are we not repeating that crash we had in 1985? And that's exactly what happened inside Swiss. So when we began the journey with them, the first thing I did was to act as an employee in the cloud serving passengers to understand how passengers are interacting with the cabin crew. And through this process, I realized that when you board a plane and maybe you are a connecting passenger and you've had a dreadful trip prior to boarding Swiss International Airlines, let's say your luggage disappeared, you missed 2 connections, you're sitting on the tarmac for 6 hours, whatever, you will be in a certain mood, and that mood may not be delightful. But guess what? You board the plane. Now there's a new crew on board on this plane, and they have no idea about what mood you're in. So you're sitting there at the seat, you're now flying from Los Angeles to Zurich, let's say. And as you are up in the cruising heights, and you switch on your screen only to realize the whole screen has broken down. So now you have to sit there for 12 and a half hours looking into a black screen. Now, if you've had that prior experience, you would be, so to speak, a ticking bomb. And now the cabin crew comes down to you, complain furiously. You try to be slightly polite. You're jet-lagged on top of it. It doesn't make it better. And of course, the cabin crew should be at this stage able to say, well, I'm really sorry. Well, they actually are, but the problem is they can't do more than saying I'm sorry at that stage. They basically say, I'm really, really sorry about this. Here's a custom complaint form. If you fill that out, we'll get back to you within the next 7 to 9 weeks, which really was the case. So of course, at this stage, you have 7 to 9 weeks to basically abuse Swiss International Air Lines on every possible social media channel just to destroy that bloody airline company, right? And that was really the case. So what I realized through this process was when you When you look at the whole procedure, why couldn't we take that responsibility up in the cloud? One of the things I discovered was that an average customer complaint cost around $81 to handle, and that is without the compensation. That's just the ground handling. So we said, well, why don't we change that? Why don't we instead say, well, let's use those $81 for compensation and give the power to the cabin crew? And that's exactly what we did. We gave them a palette of complaint tools they could use, and we gave them the option to react immediately. And as a consequence of that, it was really interesting. We learned 3 things. We learned, first of all, the customers loved it. The passengers loved it because they were listened to, taken care of, and it was solved straight away. Yes, maybe they didn't get the TV screen, but they got free Wi-Fi on the whole sector, plus they got an upgrade voucher for next time, plus they got free chocolate, plus they got free champagne, plus they got— it was so much that people say, oh, that's fine. Okay, I get it. It's bad, but not that bad. The second thing which happened was that they actually saved money, believe it or not, actually saved money by changing it because we could just use the handling money and we didn't have to give compensation money. But the third thing was even more interesting. We learned that the purpose of the cabin crew increased because suddenly they were given a mandate to actually be what they signed up for the first time they got their job. And this is a good example about how you empower people in the cloud or in any parts of organization by looking at things through a Ministry of Common Sense lens, where you basically ask yourself, why haven't we done that? And in the case of Swiss International Airlines, there were all sorts of different internal excuses. But when you peel the onion, you realize by just saying why, You realize at some stage there is more, there's no more answers. It's like, I don't know, we should change it. And that's what we did there. And I think that's what most companies should do. But quite often they give up very quickly because we're busy, we sit on teams, we have to move on. And guess what? I'm not even paid for it. I'm not compensated for it. So why should I bother, right?

Leanne ElliottSo as we've said before, values are words on a wall. Purpose is where your people will live and breathe those values in everyday working life. Purpose is what happens when values are embedded in operations, in working behaviors. It's how we do things around here.

Martin LindstromYeah. Well, it sounds fluffy, and I didn't believe in purpose until, I think, 10 years ago. Um, and I think the reason why I didn't believe in purpose was because quite often we would have a vision statement in the reception. Uh, hanging up there, bit of dust on top of it. Or we, we would, um, we would look at the annual report. It will start with some vision or some purpose statement, and it would ring hollow. You would feel it would be sort of a piece of makeup put on top of something like veneer. But what happens is that Generation Z, Or said, are looking at their parents now and their parents are my age. And they will look at the gray hair. They'll look at how it's a worn down, worn out generation which have been working their whole life, striving towards getting a higher title, more power, earning more money. And they would have looked at their degree of depression and anxiety. And they said to themselves, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be like my dad or my mom or my parents. And that's where we see this Generation Z now. They are increasingly saying to themselves, I want to go against that. In fact, I don't want to collect assets like they did. The more I collect, the more happy I am, meaning consumption. I want to collect memories and experiences instead. I want to rent If companies do not take that into account and they place you or anyone of Generation Z in front of a screen, and now they have to hammer away 8 to 10 hours where 65% is bureaucracy, you can be pretty sure the loyalty is basically zero and the new employer out there is just a link away. So what I think is really important for organizations is to build a purpose into it, which is fundamentally true. And which resonates with this generation. And if you can do that, if you go to work and you're not just doing it because you're earning money, but you're doing it because you change the world a little bit, you change people's happiness level a little bit, you make people more happy or more content, then I think you will attract a lot of people. And you better get going with this because this is just the beginning. I fundamentally believe that companies in the future cannot survive If they're not supporting the environment, if they're not supporting equality, if they're not having a purpose, those factors are not ticked, they would be all dinosaurs just fading away slowly.

Leanne ElliottAnother aspect of leadership behavior and the culture that is critical to eliminating corporate bullshit and building a ministry of common sense is empathy.

Martin LindstromBut what it comes down to is that you need to build a culture where empathy is really driving the way you interact with the surroundings. Remember, empathy is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person and feel what that person is feeling. And this is really interesting because common sense is almost the same. It is your ability to see some, something from a perspective, right? From another person's view, from a common point of view. So there's a direct correlation between common sense and empathy. So basically what it means is if you don't have empathy in an organization, you actually don't have common sense. So if you go into the medical space, for example, where it's highly regulated, one of the things we've worked a lot with is to find out how can you infuse common sense into the everyday lives of patients, into healthcare providers, into whatever it is. And I'll give you one example. out of many, but one example is one of the largest respiratory disease pharmaceutical companies in the world based out of Italy. And they've been around for nearly 100 years and they wanted to be more customer-focused. So I said to them, when did you last spend time with your patients? And they said, never. I said, really? For 100 years you haven't? That's true. We couldn't do it because of compliance. Anyway, we persuaded them to do it. And I end up in a home of a 28-year-old lady and she had asthma her entire life. And I asked her one of these questions, which later on shown to be profound. I said to her, you've had asthma your entire life. How did it feel like to have asthma as a child? And she started to cry. And she told me this very touching story about how she was bullied in school. She had no friends. She was ditched from parties. She was a disgrace for human mankind. This is me quoting her. So she was very impacted by it. I said, listen, when I look at you today, you come across as having a lot of confidence. Why is that happening? And she pulls out a handbag and out of a handbag, she kind of pulls out a straw and said, this is my secret. I said, what do you mean? Well, she says, whenever I meet someone new, a new colleague, a new friend, whatever it is, I always give them this straw and then ask them to hold themselves with the nose and breathe through the straw for 1 minute. And after 1 minute, they will exactly know how I feel as a person. So I took that idea and I had the board doing the same. And after 30 seconds, one guy spits out the straw. He said, this is the most ridiculous thing ever. Who can possibly live like this? And I said to him, that is how your patients live every minute of their entire life, and they're paying your salary. And if you could hear a penny drop, you would've heard it. And this is really the first step towards establishing a sense of empathy, because as a consequence of that, we developed an onboarding kit to all new employees where they actually received a straw. They had to breathe through the straw. And we developed this to build it into marketing, into R&D, into operation. So literally, empathy took a centerpiece of everything they're doing today. And with that, the organization slowly changed around. So my experience is it's possible to do in an organization which is compliance-driven, but your tool has to be different. And empathy quite often is a powerful tool.

Leanne ElliottDid you know that the UK's number 1 management podcast, that's us, by the way, and the UK's number 1 marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network.

Al ElliottWe actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.

Leanne ElliottAnd we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode.

Al ElliottAnd 2 out of 3 of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not gonna say which. Fel, host of Nudge, UK's number 1 marketing podcast. It's brought to you— we need to do this in 3s— the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Leanne ElliottThe audio destination for business.

Al ElliottSeamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil.

Martin LindstromWe've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work.

Al ElliottAnd we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business, and brands as well. It is.

Leanne ElliottIt's such a fascinating topic. It's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioural science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that'll be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better?

Martin LindstromIt can.

Leanne ElliottAnd Are We All Just Status-Seeking Monkeys?

Martin LindstromI am.

Al ElliottGo and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottBut come back.

Al ElliottYeah, come back.

Martin LindstromDefinitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this.

Al ElliottI'll cut that out.

promo (MAD World Summit)Keep that in.

Leanne ElliottAs Martin explains in his book, empathy is in short supply, especially post-pandemic. Many of us are experiencing compassion fatigue, you know, the physical, emotional, psychological impact of helping others. And research from the University of Michigan has also found empathy to be in decline. So this is a study that Martin quotes in his book looking at 14,000 college students between 1980 and 2010. They found a significant decrease in empathic concern and perspective-taking. And perhaps controversially, the research concluded, and I'll quote, a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality, reality TV, and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow, and unfettered in their individualism And ambition. Oh, I told you, but I've said this before, before Gen Z came along, the millennials were the devil. Martin quotes his research in his book and shares his belief that empathy has declined even further since 2010. I asked, why does he feel this is such a big problem?

Martin LindstromWell, it is a problem for multiple reasons, and one of them is when you remember the correlation between empathy and common sense. We live in a world where we don't look each other in the eyes as much as we did in the past, whether I'm on the phone, so you don't see people on the street, or right now, I don't see you in the eyes and you don't see me in the eyes really. I'm looking at a lens. So we're losing eye contact. And eye contact in meetings is a buffer. So when you sit in a meeting and you're 10 people and you come up with a crazy idea, There's no way you can gather the feeling of if people like it or not if it's in a Teams meeting. If you just pause for 5 seconds, the first thing people will say is, you're on mute, unmute. So we can't even think, we can't even reflect it. People which are introvert can't even attend because they wouldn't be like a machine gun talking, right? So empathy is slowly declining, and we've never seen such a big decline as we saw during COVID-19. But even before, you would've noticed that one experiment done over 10 years showed a decline. among Generation Z of 65%. And so empathy, the ability to feel with other people, is disappearing. We build walls. We survive and thrive in small bubbles, which are self-fulfilling prophecies. So that directly correlates with me working in large organizations where I basically do not have an interest in helping other people when it comes to empathy. I dig down in my little silo, I do my work, I do it with producing a lot of PowerPoints and a lot of bureaucracy, and then I move on. There is no feeling of, I have to help that person, or let's stick together, let's create teamwork, because you can hardly do it in a digital format. So yes, it is in a fast decline, and it probably will continue being in a decline for many years to come, I would say.

Al ElliottControversially, Martin believes that remote work isn't always brilliant. It could have a detrimental impact on our kind of what he calls The interpersonal sensitivity. So Liane asked him, where do you stand on this whole debate, debate of 2023? Can remote and hybrid work work?

Martin LindstromI'm pretty sure you tried sometimes. You have a good girlfriend or boyfriend which you haven't seen for some time, and then you meet up, and when you're together, you say to yourself, wow, I just missed this. I completely forgot how it was to be together, together with him and her. That is an emotional muscle. That muscle memory is like water in a glass deteriorating or evaporating over time. We forget the importance of the human interaction. We forget about that wow feeling when we go to a festival or concert, or we just hang around with friends without phones being the centerpiece. We have the same problem in organizations. We forget about the importance of human interaction and basically create a one-off rule which says, wow, everything has to be happening online. There's no travel anymore. We can be productive. But that leads me to the second problem. The second problem is we don't have that emotional buffer. That means that there's certain things online is really good at. Online is powerful when it comes to status meetings. For you sort of revealing how far you— where's the problem, a very rational conversation. But this media is really, really bad when it comes to ideation, or when it comes to consensus-seeking, uh, or it comes to very emotional conversation, whether you have to hire, promote, or coach a person. So you have strength and you have weaknesses.

Al ElliottSo you might think that means, oh well, Martin's 100% bullish on office work. Well, it's not exactly. See, Martin emphasizes there's a need for individuality, compromise and potentially hybrid working.

Martin LindstromAnd I think what organizations have to come to realize is you can't just say one size fits all. You have to say, if you want to be creative, if you want to use the right side of your brain for certain purposes, then you schedule things in an in-person meeting. If you want to create an amazing culture, it's an in-person meeting. If you want to do status meetings, it's a rational exchange of information or education, you can use the online channel and then you can mix it. And of course, that's extremely tricky if you have a bunch of women which got used to working from home because they have the kids at home and that's actually pretty convenient. And I understand that. Then suddenly they will say, well, I don't want to go to work at all. But I have to say, we need to understand, just like you are using different skills at work, you know, some skills, maybe you're really good at writing, Others are, you're good at calculating. Some are good at negotiation. Some are good at presentation techniques. You need to also be aware that each of those skills are amplified through different channels. And you can't just say, no, I don't want to do it. You have to say, okay, if I want to utilize my creative skills or culture skills, I also need to suffer a little bit with, with being present. And it's not just women, it's men as well. It's young people. It's lots of different groups which have become somewhat addicted to the idea of we can do a 9 to 5 in front of a screen. You also have to remember, this is the last point, when we don't interact with people, we're actually suffering a lot. We don't know it, we can't feel it, but subconsciously, we know today that the majority of the way we work and the reason why we live longer is because of human interaction. That's the number one. And number two reason why we live longer is when we have a sense of belonging and a purpose in life. If you take smoking, or alcohol consumption or eating unhealthy. It's number 7, 8, and 9 on the global top 10. So when you sit behind a screen, you feel you're interacting with other people, but actually that physical proximity, that tactile sensation is not stimulated. So there's multiple factors which you have to be aware of that it may seem on a short period, in a short period of time, being very convenient to do stuff at home, but you really have to understand it has to be a combination of both sides to make the full picture complete, right?

Leanne ElliottMartin does make the point in his book that a lack of common sense and an abundance of corporate bullshit could be making remote work or hybrid work more difficult. And the recent research that's come out in the last couple of years has shown that to be the case. If we look at things like employee engagement and well-being, remote work acts as what we call a moderator. So if employee engagement is high, remote work will work really well. If employee engagement is low, remote work is really, really difficult. This can all be summed up by being intentional. And Martin also begs his readers to remember that not everything has to be a meeting. Ask yourself, what is the goal of this interaction? Is a meeting the best or most effective way to achieve that goal? Not everything needs to be a meeting.

Al ElliottMartin's got this great idea that if you are remote working, it helps, then you can separate your home and your work life. By getting in and back out of the right mindset.

Martin LindstromMake sure when you are jumping on Teams or Zoom meetings that you first of all are transferring yourself from one mindset to another. You tried it yourself when you go to work in the old days. You leave your apartment or your house, you will sit in the car. And when we didn't have the phones, we would listen to the music, to the radio. We'll look at the landscape, we'll look at people passing by, and we would basically kind of synchronize into another mindset. Right? Um, that mindset is extraordinarily important for you to jump into. We call that enclosed cognition. And enclosed cognition is really born out of the idea that some scientists gave a bunch of people lab coats, and above each of the lab coats, identical looking by the way, there'd be one sign saying doctor, the other set of lab coats would say dentist. And the third one, there wouldn't be a sign above. When they put on the doctor's lab coat, they would answer questions faster, have fewer errors, and the self-esteem went up. The dentist, a little bit more than average, and the one without sign wouldn't have any impact. And that's called enclosed cognition. And enclosed cognition is really what we do when we go to the theater, dress up, or I put on my fancy watch, or whatever we do. It changes our self-esteem. It changes our mindset. So my second advice beside the spring cleanup is for you to do transitions. So when you go to work, you leave your home, you walk around the apartment block, as silly as it sounds, go back into that room, do your work. And once you've done your work, you walk around the whole block to reset your mind and go into the room again. That will help your brain to synchronize. So these are 2 pieces of advice. There's a lot of advice I could give you, but hopefully that gives you a sense of that our brain is a very fine-tuned mechanism, which is not like a machine which you can just turn on and off. It has to be adapted to the surroundings and the new change of our work environment. And sometimes we really take it for granted that it will work, but we should be careful doing that because it will impact our mood, our self-esteem, how productive we are, and even how we look and interact with other people.

Leanne ElliottYeah, I mean, I think that the remote hybrid in-office debate is going to rage on for a good while yet. There are pros and cons to each, there are benefits and drawbacks to each, and what works is, is likely going to depend on the individual and on their individual preferences and individual circumstances. But what we do know is that the only way is forward. There is no way of going back to the office setup, the traditional office setup that we had pre-pandemic. The genie is out of the bottle. We have to think about work in an entirely new way that will incorporate remote work into it. So again, I think, you know, it's about intention when it comes to these new ways of working. And to quote our incredible guest today, Martin, you can either observe the future or influence it.

Al ElliottAbsolutely love, love, love that quote. So let's finish up with a few final words from Martin about how you implement a ministry of common sense in your own business?

Martin LindstromYou have to remember that Rome was not built in one day, or to use another metaphor, when Mother Teresa started to change a revolution, or Martin Luther King did it, or Gandhi did it, Gandhi took one village at a time and he walked from one village to another and he spread the word and the word were gathering momentum, what we call a movement and the moving movement became bigger and bigger, and suddenly it changed India and it changed the world. This is important to have in mind when you do transformations of organizations and of cultures. You cannot change an organization with, let's say, 100,000 staff overnight. You have to start in the small and build small movements and let those movements grow in an organic way and have people recruit people, recruit people based on energy, based on passion, based on hope, and based on evidence. And if you create small pilot studies like what we did with Swiss International Airlines or with Standard Chartered Bank or any of these many companies, then this functions as evidence to show to the world it is possible. Because you have to remember, a lot of people, a lot of employees have given up. They're basically saying, okay, here we go. And then Project Why. Well, I don't understand why, and I will be doing it. Project How, Project Transformation, Project 2030, all these different initiatives with a new CEO who says, this is the moment we're going to change it to make our company the best in the world. What people have been hurt so many times, the cry wolf has really taken so much power that people have been more or less numb. And as they become numb, They don't trust any messages. So the only way you can make people trust a message is to prove it. And that's where you do small interventions, what I call 90-day interventions, small interventions, which immediately can be measured. They don't need a lot of red tape to be removed. And then you can celebrate the success after they've succeeded. Then you create a movement around it and you recruit more people, which is believers. They do the same experiment. and you recruit more, and suddenly you change an organization. So don't be fooled by changing half a million or a million staff for that sake overnight. Start with hundreds, then go to 200, then go to 500, then 1,000, and so forth, right?

Al ElliottAnd he said he's never going to underestimate the power of culture again.

Martin LindstromWell, it's been a hit and a miss. It's been a hit in terms of I come up with, I think, great ideas. I was asked many years ago to reinvent the Happy Meal for McDonald's globally with the former, former, former CEO. Yet when we came up with the most wonderful concept, which were healthy, the machinery just couldn't handle it. And the idea drowned and ended up with an apple in a Happy Meal, a sliced apple though. And I think what I realized there was, it's not just a matter about coming up with great ideas and concepts, you need to work with the immune system, as I call it. So the defense mechanism for change. So ideas will only survive if you're good at navigating it. As Warren Buffett once said, and lunch will eat strategy for breakfast, right? And I think, or no, I think in the end of the day, what we're talking about here is that the culture is so powerful that if we do not take that into account from day one when you are changing organizations, building amazing cultures, doing innovation, then you're losing. You're losing immediately. So I've come to learn and respect that culture is a major ingredient in that cake I'm baking every day for millions of staff, I would say, around the world. And I think that If you're not passionate around it, if you can't send energy within the organization, why would people believe in it? I'll tell you one story, just sort of a wrap-up story, just to give you a sense of what really motivates me. One of our clients is Lowe's in the United States, and I worked with them for 11 years. And the owner called me 11 years ago and said, Martin, we really would like you and your team to come in and help us because they were close to bankrupt. So we worked with them, we changed the culture. It became by far the most successful supermarket chain in the United States. And about half a year ago, I went to one of the Lowe's stores in North Carolina and this elderly man comes up to me crying. He hugs me and he says, you saved my life. And I was kind of baffled because I'd never seen the person before. I didn't know what this was all about. So I said, tell me more. And he said, listen, And we are 3 generations working here. My kids and their kids are working in Lowe's and have done that for basically the last 55 years. Had we lost these jobs, our entire family would have been in ruins. You saved our lives. And that I realized was much more rewarding than money, fame, or all the books behind me or whatever it is. Because I change lives, I save lives. And I think you cannot imagine anything better. And that's the reason why I'm so motivated because it actually has a purpose. And I think we all need a purpose. Me too.

Al ElliottMartin, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. So many good tips, so many great books. If you just go and start with this Ministry of Common Sense, you will love it.

Leanne ElliottIt really is. It's such a good book. It might actually be my favorite, my favorite business book that I've read of 2023. Um, it is— it's so— get the audiobook as well. It's so funny. It's like a 6-hour-long podcast. It's just hilarious and brilliant. So yes, Martin, thank you. We will leave the link to Martin's LinkedIn in the show notes along with where you can buy the book. Next week we will be bringing you a very special episode for World Mental Health Day, which is next Tuesday, the 10th of October.

Al ElliottAnd then If you are in London, I think we might have mentioned before, on the 12th, come and see us in London at Mad World Summit, madworldsummit.com.

Leanne ElliottSee you next week.

Al ElliottBye-bye.