- This is Edwin k Morris, and you are about to embark on the next
Pioneer Knowledge Services because you need to know
a digital resource for you to listen to folks share their experience and knowledge around the
field of knowledge management and nonprofit work. If your company or organization
would like to help us continue this mission and
sponsor one of our shows, email, BYNT k@pioneerks.org. - Hello, I'm Joseph Micelli. I live in St. Petersburg, Florida. The
most interesting thing near me is my grandchildren. They live about three blocks away, which is remarkable in these times. Probably the most exciting job
I've ever had was working in radio when I was 13 and being a disc jockey for,
I guess, the better part of my life while otherwise
pursuing a professional career. From my perspective, the great mentors of my life start with my father. I was very blessed to have a father who I hope my gravestone
said he was half the dad, his dad was, and then mentors in the professional side in academics, but also people like Howard
Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, or founder of the the modern
day Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, horse Schultze, all of
whom have taken the time to help me grow in my understanding of how to deliver a service business. I am inspired when I see students, I teach at a university when
I see students understanding that we're placed on this earth to serve one another,
not to be served. Wow. - I like - That. I just wrote
a book called Customer Magic that looks at a concept of magic, meaning that we should challenge
the seemingly impossible. And so when it comes to
caring for customers, we should throw away all of those. This is the way it's always
been, sort of mindsets and start thinking about what if we could and the what ifs of
customer service delivery. - How does a 13-year-old get
a walk in the door like that? - Well, it was really a, you
know, in the day of 45 records, I think, uh, they were playing
a backward masked sound effect and it as a competition. And, and they kept saying,
, if you figure this out, you'll get six inches of
records, meaning six inches of 40 fives and a ham . Um, and so I heard this so many times and I finally said, I think I've got it. It it, what you're saying
is if you get this, you'll get six inches of records
and a ham just backwards. Uh, and they said yes. And I came in, got the tour,
the station manager said, kid, you want a job here? You just come back with your
third class broadcast license and endorsement from the FCC
and we'll put you on the air. Ah, did he know that I'd
actually study and I'd do that and my parents would drive me
two hours to take the test. I'd fail. I'd come back
six months later and lo and behold, I actually
had the broadcast license, walked in his door and Martin Donoff said yes to this kid doing something on the air. Uh, and to this day, it's one of the great lessons about if
you're gonna make a commitment to somebody and you live into it, it's amazing the impact it can
have on other people's lives. - It really is a
exponential realization of what the future could be. Right. You co-created that,
that person set up the tea, you knocked it outta the park, and now it had led to many things that you never would've guessed. Yeah. - Yeah. I think that I became
a professional communicator. I say that in that I write books and I'm a professional speaker, and I think that that got
me started in that journey. I don't think I'd have ever imagined that's where I would be. - Do you think that in
your academic career and now in the ability to
produce content in the form of books and speaking, that communication was the primary skill that projected everything else after? - Absolutely. And quite frankly, I don't consider myself a writer. I've done 13 books now, many of which published by McGraw-Hill. I've had some real success in that space, but it's not, I'm not a writer. You know, Thore was a writer. He woke up in the morning,
he needed to write, he was compelled to write. I'm a compiler of information, and I much prefer verbal
communication to writing it down. Uh, those skills have transferred
reasonably well, I guess. - How did that set you up for the academic structure
of psychology? So, - My parents had not
graduated from high school, and my mom, I dropped out
I think in eighth grade. So we didn't have a family
tradition of education. Um, I was fortunate I was
adopted into that family, but I was, I was fortunate,
I think, to appreciate that knowledge was bigger
than my small town, that there was a lot
more out there than the boundaries in my small town. And if I could, I had curiosity, I think intellectual curiosity, and it just kept feeding itself. And so in my advanced
stage now I realize just how little I know about anything. And in those days, I thought I knew a lot, but that there was just a little bit more outside of the border. Now I'm convinced I know nothing. - Well, with that as the backdrop for what we're gonna talk about,
we have a better understanding of the foundation of which
you have been built upon. I wanna bring back your, when your initial first
come into the show, uh, you brought up the mentor of your father. Can you tell me what
exactly was the imprint and the goodness that came
from that relationship? - I think he genuinely
cared about my growth and development above all else. You know, Peter Senge,
the MIT professor says that that's what love is. Love is the genuine concern for the growth and the development for those who serve. And my dad was very capable of doing that. I think a lot of people love with a lot of self-interest in their love. Yeah. My dad was pretty
amazing in his capacity to love on me. Uh, and then I think he got the
derivative benefits of that, but it wasn't with that
intent in mind for me to, to pay him back in some way. It was that purity of focus on me. And, and quite frankly, as you get older, there aren't a lot of people
who are gonna do that. Right. I mean, but it was
wonderful to have a parent who understood that was his
primary job, to stand there and clap when I did something Right. That, uh, he was there for. - That is absolutely amazing. And I say that because
as a person on the planet for a certain amount of
decades, and children and grandchildren and just
the society in general, that's a very charitable position. That's a very other oriented viewpoint. How do you get that kind of skill? How do you get that kind of perspective and awareness in an organization? - I, I can tell you that
one of our core values for my company is otherness. It's a totally made up word. I just consider it the
opposite of selfishness. And I think it's something that we say we value in our organization. We realize that it is, and there are many people
have talked about it. It's a concept that's
been around for a while. But the notion is that if
you create value for others, you become valuable to others
and you seek to be valued. And I really think we have a
societal challenge right now where I'm on TikTok and I do that thing, but there are a lot of people
who just say, I wanna be so interesting that people
can't stop looking at me. I wanna be so interested that people become interested in me. Mm. I wanna become so interested in you that the reverse is true. And, and just the beginning
of this particular meeting that we have has all been very much your powerful interest in whatever it is that you've been pursuing. And I think that's what
brings people to you. - I think that's a two
step process, right? So that's the first heavy step, trying to not be selfish in orientation and to be otherness directed. Other otherness can be people, society, a community, a group, whatever. But how do you execute? How do you train somebody
to have that mindset? And you say you have a pillar of otherness in the organization,
but how does it show - Up? Well, that's a great question.
I mean, what Enron had, integrity is one of their core values. , you know, I, I, I think the challenge is do we reward
people in the organization who are taking care of customers? Do we reward people in an organization who support their team members? Are we rewarding people
who will step on anyone to get ahead on their personal gain? And I think as a leader, it does start with servant leadership. I'm, yep. You know, I'm,
I'm a big proponent of it. I think that if your leaders
are, look at me, grandiose, pompous, righteous. Yeah. It's pretty hard
to convince the team that they should be doing
anything other than that. 'cause that's how you get to
the top in the organization as evidenced by the behavior of the top. Yeah. I, I'm a big fan of
saying it kinda starts with you. And if you don't have humility, and if you don't have, if, if
you're not there cleaning up after the event and you're a leader, you're not really reinforcing
a culture that does - That. Do you think the age of
authoritarianism in an organization, not quite a government,
but authoritarianism and the structure of we don't
trust anybody, so I have to make sure you're
doing stuff at all times. You know, the double checking and all that, that adds
to the layer of non-trust, which detracts from anything positive. Yeah. Is, is there some transition
you see in the big world of organizational change
that we're moving, everybody's either moving this way or they're fighting for
their piece over here? - I, I don't see the
change as a groundswell. What I do think is, if
you're one of those people who is a contrarian about
this, you're successful because everybody going one
direction gives you a real lane to go a different direction and differentiate yourself if
you can execute against it. So I, I do think it's important
just to your point, I, I wrote a book called Stronger
Through Adversity in the middle of the Pandemic. - Say that title again Slower please. - Yeah. I'm not pitching the book, it's just stronger through adversity. And I talked to 140
leaders who were trying to position their
organizations to come out of the pandemic stronger
than they went into it. It was fascinating to me. I chose to not interview any politicians. Right. You know, I don't care what political leaning you have that I just didn't see
the otherness of it all. There was a lot of self-serving,
posturing going on. But you would see nonprofit
leaders, I interviewed plenty of those from the head of the Red Cross and the head of the United Way. And you'd see for-profit
leaders, whether that was the CEO of Verizon, uh, Hans Vesper or CEO of Target, uh, Brian
Cornell, who really were trying to find a way to put the needs of customers maybe even higher
than they ever had before, because they were frightened that customers weren't
gonna come into their stores or maintain relationships with them. So I think there were
some environmental factors that caused people to put
a higher priority on others because they weren't sure
those others were gonna show up for work or they weren't gonna show up to buy the products. Yeah. - Would you say that was a
fear-based response versus an altruistic, uh, kind of approach? - I do think a lot of it
was fear-based, but I, but for some people, even
though fear was the trigger, I mean, I think Tony Robbins
says we either change out of inspiration or desperation. Right. , I think for some, it might have started from desperation, but it feels pretty good
to, to serve others. In fact, if you look at
the happiness literature, the Harvard Longitudinal
Research studies on happiness, I mean, one of the things that
brings us greatest happiness is transferring our care to others. And in your world, probably
transferring knowledge to others as a source of, of great happiness. Yes. You know, Ericsson and the research on generativity, all of it talks about the fact
that we want to give something to the next generation. That's a purpose moment for us. Of course, over the life arc for me, I think you did see some
people, people who go, Hey, paying more attention to our customers. This kind of feels good. - Yeah. What, who knew?
Right? . I - Mean, they're not
just a means to an end. They're like real people. And I like it. - You know, the bifurcated folks out there that one way is a stick
the other way is a carrot. And it's like, you know,
how about we just lose that whole paradigm and just
go with a happy community? How about that? Treat people like people and have trust kind of just develop. Yeah. - And we can manage the
exceptions to trust. I think this is the
problem we've gotten to be so cynical in our
society about everything. Nothing. You can't trust anything. And AI's probably gonna
make it a little bit worse. Like, am I even really here? Is this a giant deep fake ? I think we're gonna get to a
point where we're not gonna be clear, but you gotta extend
some level of trust to be able to manage what happens when
somebody violates that trust. There's a lot of people out in the world, and if you are around a
pack of hyenas, you know, you may want to kind of
try a different group. And I think that's true with customers. You know, assume positive
intent from the customer. 'cause if you don't, that
customer is not gonna form positive intent about you. And then it's, if you do assume that and they violate that, then manage that. That's what management's about.
But don't treat everyone. Yeah. Like they're a criminal
walking in your door. - What would be your definition? I'll ask for two definitions and I'll ask, are they the same thing? In your mind? Is a customer
the same as a consumer? - Oh, absolutely not. No.
Okay. tell me. I hate the word consumer.
I mean, I come on, - Everybody loves a
- Consumer. I do consume things. I do consume things. I sometimes use it because I've used customer
17 times in a sentence. And so I need to come up
with a different word. But really, truly a consumer,
you might as well any user, let's put that out there too. But you're a software user.
No, you're a person. Okay. You're a person and it's
about a personal experience. All business is personal. This is between you and
me as people. Right. We can make it transactional. We can make it like, well,
you do this all the time. I do this all the time. Who cares? You know, it's another one. Chalk it up. Or we can like be here
together in a real moment of we're not gonna have this moment again. And for some fluky reason, we're here now. So let's make the most of it and enjoy the uniqueness
you bring to the table. And I'll try to bring some
too, I hate the word consumer 'cause it is very sterile
and, and very corporate. - Well, it's transactional, right? I mean, I think it all just
bases from maybe a 200 year old mentality of what capitalism is, is that everything is transactional. Mm-Hmm. . And I
think that's the dichotomy here that people get trapped in because we are so heavily laden in our
experience on the planet, in this metric of this for that there's some transaction,
I'm gonna get something. And that kind of goes
towards what we were saying. Are you altruistic in your modality or do you have to have an exchange? And I get what you're saying,
the customer consumer. But let's go to customer experience. Can we up the game a little bit? You said about the
organization being a bunch of humans interacting. I mean that's, that's what it is. Maybe 30 years from now
that will all change. But for right now, until we
have digital twins doing the work and we can sleep, what
is a customer experience approach that makes it a
better organizational position? - I'm gonna yield the word customer. 'cause I use it all the
time, though. You would know. I'd rather talk about
human experience just so you, so you know it. Okay. And in the context of the humans that we call customers, I
think that the challenge for that is just appreciating
that it is not just a moment in time that most
of us are in a relationship. So e experiential focus,
I think looks at all of the factors that shape the relationship and all those factors
in a given moment too. But all those factors stringed
across the entire journey. So rather than just the
transactional element of the service, I handed you
something, you gave me money. The experience is all
of the sensory elements, the way I enveloped that
experience in some kind of desired emotional context. That's what what I think the
experience folks like me do. And it's experienced
designers, then we look at that across the journey and we say, okay, what can
we operationally succeed at? I mean, I can't do everything
all the time to everyone. Mm. So if I can triage those
moments that matter most, how do I focus on those and then really make sure that
I am enveloping those moments in the branded experience I want my human customers to enjoy. - You're talking about the construct of the organization itself. Are you saying that the consumer
slash customer slash human is only external in your paradigm? Oh, - No, no, no. And that's why my human thing is so critically important to me. Yes. Why I, why I clinging
to it with fervor. Let's take Airbnb, right? Yep. I wrote a book about Airbnb and so on any given
day, an Airbnb employee who we would call having
an employee experience may very well be also
renting out their apartment on the platform. So now they are the host or the business, if you want
to think about it that way. And then they may that next weekend go and stay at some other Airbnb. So now they're the guest or
the customer, if you will. Now in reality, they're
all the same person. Yeah. They're no different. And so we need to think
about the human experience of the employee, of the buyer and the seller, the
customer, the organization, - The vendor, the everybody. Yeah. Everybody. Your nucleus
has just shifted from the role to the being. Yeah. So that's what I heard
you say, the center of the universe in this is the person base. And then roles define
different perspectives and what those roles either
influence or what we measure or how do we treat that
experience, not so much the person, the person in that role. - Amen. And, and in my business sector, we often talk about journey
mapping the customer journey. Yeah. Like that's what we do. We kinda look at when do they
consider us, when do they, you know, what's the
sales cycle look like? What do they do at purchase,
what do they do post-purchase? But I tend to focus more
on an ecosystem model. So I want to know not only what
is happening in the journey, the customer, and we may use
that as our anchor point, like that is the, the flow through. But I wanna understand how,
what is the employee experience relative to the sales cycle,
relative to the service cycle? What is the vendor
experience along the way? Because oftentimes what'll
happen is you'll have a really bad customer experience only because you've set up the
employee not to be able to execute against it. Or you have supply chain problems that are happening somewhere else. And you really need to get a
different vendor relationship in order for the customer
experience to be done. So for me, uh, that
may be our anchor point around the customer, but the ecosystem mapping is much more relevant. - I like the ecosystem mentality. And as you were describing
that, I was envisioning, I've seen graphics in finance and or stock information that has all these other elements in parallel to what you're tracking. So you can see where's
everything in, in perspective to that point in time. Because they all influence, right. You can't just measure one thing. Customer experience, we're
gonna measure it. Yeah. Okay. That's one bit. That's, that's like on a biology level, that's you taking my temperature, but not looking for anything else. You know, I like that very
much a holistic viewpoint, but I gotta say it sounds
like a boatload of work. - Oh my gosh. It's a
boatload of work. . But it's so rewarding. You
know, I'll give you an example. I work for a company called Clayton. Clayton is a subsidiary
of Berkshire Hathaway. They are mostly manufactured housing. We would used to call trailer
homes. Mm-Hmm. . They also site build and they do a lot of modular construction, partly manufactured and partly on site. So the thing about that is they own almost all the verticals. They own a lot of the supply
chain. Mm-Hmm. . They own the manufacturing. They own a good chunk of
the distribution channels, the manufactured housing, uh,
lots on the side of the road, but they also have distributors. If you measure somebody and say, how satisfied were you when your modular home was installed? And they're not satisfied . Right. You can blame the distributor. Like something must have
happened in that last leg of this journey of the product. But there's so many other
factors upstream. Yeah. And there's been some
great books written about. Now I think there's a book titled Upstream that really talk about how many of the problems flow downstream. Yeah. And yet we are trying to solve them not at their root cause locations. - It's like defining a riptide,
talking oceanic stuff here. I mean, that's something
that's not on the surface. It's like, how would you know
in if you're a trained eye, you might know, but I mean, the general populace would
be like, riptide, what? I'm just going swimming.
So there's stuff that's behind the scenes is
what we're getting to. Uh, one thing I wanna wrap around is I looked up customer
experience by digital.gov. So this is our government,
their customer experience. CX is defined as the sum of
all experience a customer has with your organization. For those that aren't getting
this customer experience, it's more than just, I called yesterday, can't you look up the records and the notes we just spent yesterday on? And if a system, an organization
doesn't have a knowledge system in which all that stuff
can be tracked and pulled up and fresh, and the user, the operator on that side can just say, oh, oh,
I see all the problems here. Let me, you know, that's a broken system. What you are saying is
let's go beyond that longitudinal mentality of ownership. Right. Ownership of the user experience
or customer experience. Because that organization
is taken it upon itself that everybody's gonna
share in the authority and responsibility of this customer. We have built the system,
whoever picked up the phone, it's your job to make sure
the customer is served if you don't have that. But if you wanted to approach a holistic human experience model, what would be your top five things an organization has to have? Right? - First and foremost, you have
to select the right people. You can pour a lot of
knowledge into people who don't have a lot of talent. And what you're gonna
end up with is people who are just a little
below average . There is, you know, the
talent selection thing is very relevant. And my recent book is
called Customer Magic. It's about a company called Macquarie. And, and so they used to go out and just try to get the top
tech graduates from university who didn't have a customer
experience mindset at all. They didn't have any
DNA, they hadn't thought through the lens of customer experience. They couldn't identify what a good customer
experience was or not. They're also, some were
really smart people who didn't have a hunger
for knowledge acquisition. Right. To kind of stay with
the value of selection. You know, hungry, humble,
and smart is pretty good as a starting point. And I think they really went
to Patrick Lencioni's model, which is really that hungry, humble, and smart as a starting
point for selection. And also making sure
there was the capacity to develop talent around
customer experience and customer service delivery. So I think that's important.
And to just follow through with them, they also had just a hodgepodge of knowledge sharing. They had articles that
you had to really hunt and peck to find that
were not easy to find. So in real time, you,
you weren't getting it to the customer in a meaningful way. And, and quite frankly, there was enough diversity
of thought there. There hadn't been a lot of
clarity of what is best practice or what is acceptable
evidence-based information. Mm-Hmm. . Um,
so they really had to build that muscle up, right? They had to go from a bunch of wikis. You had to find wherever to a real shared learning knowledge base system. So, so that had to be done. And then you had to inspire people to be contributors to that. Mm-Hmm. Not only consumers of it. See, I used a consumer pretty - Easy, easily
- Done right there. Slipped right into it. They, but but in, you're not
just consuming the content, you had to be creators of the content. And so they developed
ways to incentivize Yeah. People to make contributions to the learning management system. And they evaluated the quality
and the complexity of those, and the value of those articles. And they tracked which articles
were getting used most. And when they found some areas, sometimes they would just
do inservices on that. Yes, we had that resource.
Mm-Hmm. . But rather than just having
the resource sitting out there somewhere, if it was
getting hit all the time, maybe we needed to do an in-service on it. And sometimes that's stuff like, how do I fill out my own
employee benefits question. Right? It's the one that's
getting hit all the time in the, the knowledge system. So anyway, I I think
those are, I don't know if that was five, but, but I think it starts three, three and a half. Yeah. Okay. Well that's that. In my world, that's five.
All right. So I'll call that. - So let's, let's reverse it. What's the least thing you'd focus on? What's the least you could give a hoot? - Oh God. Some of it is
stuff I do professionally. So I don't know. I mean, I
think one of 'em is just, I think learning management
systems that, and, and I create content for
learning management systems. That's why. Okay. I'm a little
bit of an issue with this. Um, I think learning management systems that are nothing more
than we have to do it because, you know, HR said
HR said we gotta do it. Yeah. There are, there are some of those that are just necessary evils
because of regulation, but, but I'm talking about programs where everybody knows we're doing it. It's supposedly soft skill
training, for example. Yeah. There is no way I'm
gonna walk out of there and do anything different. I am just trying to guess
at the check test questions. Mm-Hmm. without
even reading the material or engaging the content. So that stuff I think is really silly, but there's a ton of it out there. And it, it's a proxy for
actually having conversations with your team or learning
in real time, debriefing interactions and helping
people internalize knowledge and be able to demonstrate
it in various scenario based circumstances. So, - So all of what we've talked
about to me, of course, everything is, I have very
thick knowledge management lenses, so everything
is knowledge management. But in your experience with
everything you're talking about with skills and actually
building up the work culture to participate and to inquire
and to up their game, right? You're upskilling these
folks to get things better. Who owns that? Who's in charge of that? - Well, uh, you know, that's a big problem
in most organizations. , whoever is in charge of it needs to have the ability to influence through it throughout the organization. That's the big problem. You can put it wherever you want, but unless that person is empowered to affect their peers
in other departments, to make it be so, yeah. And normally it needs to be
incentivized in some ways that the departments have
to have a stake in the game. It's just like pushing
a rock uphill, really. - We're, we're at the C level, right? We, we are at the chief level. So what chief needs to be
the one runner this, well, - If you want to invest in a
chief, uh, customer officer or a chief experience officer, both of which exist a lot now in the
c-suite, those are relevant, but you'd have to be a pretty good size organization to do that. Often it lives in hr, which then disempowers
it because who cares? I'm sorry. I've worked in HR and I just have this, this, uh, orphan syndrome about it all. I mean, it, it's not a
revenue generating center. So it's often a, a problem area. Yeah. Um, it's great if you can get it in ops, if ops really believes that, um, knowledge development in the area of service delivery is an
operational competency, but it's not viewed as much. - So is it ever part of any strategy, would you say then the organization
should at least build in some capacity for building the muscle by at least putting it in the vision of where they want to go? - Oh, come on. It is in the
vision all over the place. Seriously, there was a study
recently that said like, 92% of organizations have customer experience
differentiation somewhere in their strategic hierarchy, many of which have it as a primary differentiator
for their brand. Mm. Problem. Isn't the vision of it or the spoken prioritization of it, it is putting money behind it. And when push comes to
shove, are you still willing to put customer experience
is a priority over sales? - What's in the brochure is one thing, but in actuality on the
ground, it's like, yeah, how does anybody ever gauge it? If the marketing department is really pushing it, we're doing it great. We're awesome, we're doing it great. Yeah. - There, there are two
companies, for example, that I've worked with where I've seen it really be attractive. And both companies ended
up being bought by Amazon. Ah, first was, was Zappos,
which is a company that I worked with the late Tony Shea, God
rest his soul was a visionary, CEO who said, our contact center is going to be our best marketing department. We can sell ads all we want if we wanted to go out and do ads. But the best ad is the
two minute conversation with somebody in a contact center that is far better than
anything we can promise in a 15 second sexy ad. Mm-Hmm. . So he really invested in a contact center. He called those professionals as customer loyalty team members. He saw them as playing a
critical role on creating real loyalty opportunity, undivided attention, really quality knowledge basis. They could draw upon really
well-skilled human beings who created personal
emotional connections. Notice the word personal in
there, human person, personal, emotional connections with the people that they serve, and
really did a great job. And then Amazon bought them. So to their credit, I'm right now working on a
book that'll be out in 2025 about one medical, which is a
company that Amazon purchased for $4 billion in 2022. And they are healthcare
clinics that deliver a very high quality human experience. But you have to pay a
membership fee to get that, to get access, to get more
convenient experiences, same day, next day appointments with
a primary care doctor. But they invest in it. Those investments have paid
off at scale to the point where companies like Amazon
want to acquire them, - You bring up a, a
interface of service, right? Concierge, there are
levels of service that come with a price tag. Oh, if you pay this extra money, then you'll have your personal concierge, which means human contact. I don't have to get in
line, I don't have to call, and this call center takes forever, or I keep getting hung up on,
which is absolutely the worst, the concierge level. Do you, can you speak
anything about that idea of concierge? That one-on-one? - Well, ideally you would create
a value proposition in some businesses where people
wouldn't have to pay more to get it . Like it was just, it's just
the differentiator. So like, - It's just how we do
- Things. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, you know, sometimes there is a slight
price premium already built into the price delivery. So you have to be willing to say, I'm willing to pay for service. Maybe not in a membership
fee, uh, like, um, concierge medicine would be, but I am
willing to pay a little bit more because I know they're gonna
be answering the phone. And sometimes consumers
just don't want that. I mean, consumers want the tech that says, I don't care if I have a
human to serve me, as long as I can get the right
answer, which is fine. And, and that's where I think
your people process technology concepts really come in strong. There are times in that customer
journey, in that ecosystem that you wanna make sure you
have really quality self-serve with really quality knowledge,
information available to the chat bots so that people can get their
questions answered without having to opt into human. Mm-Hmm. . But
we've gone really way far there. McKinsey just recently put out a study and said, even millennials,
18 to 28 year olds who were notorious for wanting to communicate on digital
platforms are asking for more human resolution moments in their product journeys. We are starting to see maybe
a little pendulum swing where a, a reactionary
approach to too many chat bots that aren't providing us the
quality information we need, or just, just the sterile
nature of constantly interacting with something you know, is not real. - I see that I, I can see that as an experiencer in the world, that I would much rather
talk to somebody than to try to go work my way through a
flipping chat bot that'll never answer the question anyway. Or they keep throwing you stuff off of a frequently asked question page that was made 15 years ago or 15 months ago that
it's like, ugh, stop. Just so the ability to shortcut and get to an actionable
answer is really the motivation of the experience journey. - Amen. In hallelujah. And
this is where you come in, like I think every organization
should have people like you around nonprofits for profit . They should just have somebody
saying, Hey, how do we get to the right answer as
efficiently as possible? And, and give people
options in those moments where it's really hard to get a, a right answer quickly. Like - What would be your definition
of knowledge management? - Well, I mean, I feel like
this is an unfair question, you know, um, going up with a PhD and I'm here in kindergarten
with my crayons, drawing a picture of
knowledge management for you, and I just broke the
crayon in the process. The pressure just, I, I think the key is that we are all trying to navigate this life journey. Sometimes we think we already
know everything we need to know, kind of as evidenced by some of my earlier comments, . But, um, and then at
other points, and, and, and it's notorious for
entrepreneurs, by the way. I mean, entrepreneurs
think they know everything. Uh, don't need to hire consultants. You know, they're just driving and I, and I'm one of 'em, I get that. But then there's a point
where you realize, holy Bezos, I don't know this, and now I've
gotta find a reliable source to get the, the answer that's gonna help me get past my problem. And now I can Google it. Oh, oh my gosh, there's an effort at knowledge management in my world. It's an effort to help
us search for knowledge, but it's really just
search for information. It's, you know, knowledge
to me is not information. Information is, is plentiful. Knowledge is the ability to find things that we can act on that'll
affect our outcomes. For me, uh, that's not a
knowledge management system, it's an information search system. So then what do we got?
Well, if we've got ai, ai, theoretically, if we
asked the right probes should help us pull the best
information to our attention and, you know, language based
model, and it's pretty cool, but it's still not good enough. You're the expert, right? Somebody has to help me
with the best process, and I'm looking for somebody
to do that curated management. - I'll challenge your word of expert because I think anybody can add
value to make things better, so you don't have to be an expert. Right. Everything you just
talked about re reflected back when I did a master's in knowledge management. The thing that gives me, - I'm sorry, I I gave you a PhD. Yeah, I'm sorry. I, I
that's probably happened after this story, but keep going. The, - The concept of the Greek term phronesis. I have really wanted to reinstitute and reconstitute that word use
phronesis is a type of wisdom or intelligence relevant
to practical action. And that's what I love
about the whole idea of knowledge management. It's not information or data management. It is about making something actionable. Back where I used to work
in military intelligence, we were always focused on
actionable intelligence. Meaning, okay, I got something,
let's go do something. Not just, I am stacking
up all these reports and boy oh boy, you're
trying to deliver derivatives of all this stuff that creates
an actionable objective. I think the, the classic thing is that where I've seen in bureaucracies, and I'm sure we could talk
all day about bureaucracies, but there's a certain level of I - Wouldn't want to
- No . - It's not a topic i I wanna
spend much time on, go ahead. - But they do exist, and they
do exist for some reasons. The thing that is clandestine or maybe just overt in that paradigm or structure is that
there's a certain element of just floating, we're
just floating along. Don't rock the boat. Nobody like has any initiative
because it doesn't help. Uh, you'll get punished for
taking chances, you know, all that sort of thing in an
inhibited environment, going back to your eco mentality of
biology, that anything that is prohibited by the environment
to not grow, change or morph, it is punished. If it does that, then that
builds human experiences that support that model. And anybody that's the contrarian
to that is the outsider, troublemaker, loud mouth entrepreneur knows
everything gonna fix it. But how does a organization
that could be, and, and I'm not saying all,
all organizations that grow to become huge or mid to large, get a element of bureaucracy. Is that something that
just happens with size? Oh, - I think it, it definitely
happens with size as a result of, I'm trying to think of
the right word for this, but I, I think you get a
certain legacy mindset, a a certain carry on,
you know, the, the value of your organization, it
becomes riskier to go outside of the norms. When you're an upstart,
you don't have anything. You have the shirt on your back and an incredible work ethic, right? But once you've developed brand equity, that was the word I was looking for. Ooh, keep talking long enough, Joseph. You hit on your own word . Um, once you, once you
get equity in your brand, it becomes hard to take
the risks at scale. So I, I think that's the
challenge is that people get more conservative over time. - There is a book from, uh, Charles Handy that I just read called The Second Curve, which basically talks
about an organization that reaches a peak. And if they're not looking
for the second curve, they're gonna ride that
curve down to the bottom. Again, the, the cycle of, and his advice is to
always be experimental. Basically be experimental in trying things that are not normal for
your organization in order to create another second curve. So you're continually riding
the wave, so to speak. What has been your experience
watching organizations contract grow plateau? Would you agree with that?
As always, the cycle, - You know, it's working
with Howard Schultz, I listed as a mentor of mine, and one of the things that
he would say is that we, we can take a few big bets every year, and if we don't, we're gonna be dead. If we take too many big bets, we're gonna be dead too, right? Like we can't, yeah, right. Swing for the fences every time somebody throws a pitch at us, right? We gotta take the curve balls and just, you know, get them in the gap. That's the mindset that makes sense. When I was working with
Starbucks originally, it was all about the
place, the third place. We were creating an experience
where it was somewhere between home and work, where
it was a level of comfort, affordable luxury experience,
but it was place-based. And then when I wrote
leading the Starbucks way, we were focused on
digitalizing the experience and meeting customers where they were. And at that time, we were
coming with products like, uh, via, which was just a little
freeze dried coffee packet in the old days that was
kind of looked down upon. They put a lot of science and technology into the quality of the freeze dried. But you could have Starbucks coffee with some water in a canteen
on the top of a mountain. You didn't have to be
at a Starbucks store. We didn't have to proliferate
a Starbucks store inside of a Starbucks store, which was the style we had been going for. So I see this as really the iteration of let's be somebody different now. Let's be a digital
relationship building brand where you can buy our products
in a lot of different ways and use them as you see fit. You can buy a Keurig machine and put a Starbucks product in it, even though Keurig was a
competitor at the time. - To wrap things up, what
would be your best bit of advice to the listener? - First and foremost, know what
you want every single person to feel every time they
interact with your brand. Whether that is the vendor,
whether that is the employee, whether that is the customer. Know what you want 'em to feel. If you don't know that all
the operational things in the world aren't gonna get
you where you want to be, because here's the beauty of
human experience delivery, unlike manufacturing,
where you get raw material that's consistent every single
time it comes in the door and then you imply a process to it and you end up with 0.001 defects. When you're talking about people,
they're coming in the door in such varied raw material. You still want to try to
impose a process on it, because without it, you
can't run a business or an organization. So you want the process to be in play. You wanna hire really talented people who can apply the process, but also can understand
the nuances of human beings so they can adjust the
process to the raw material. Then you need to define for
them what success looks like. As Brene Brown says,
you have to paint done. You have to tell 'em that. When people leave here,
we want them to feel wow, delighted, nurtured. We want them to feel enlightened. Whatever it might be that
you want them to feel. Once you tell those talented
people, that's the outcome. You give them some
processes, they can nuance. You have a great, great human experience for those people we call customers. - So does it beg the question
then why there is not a international standard on feelings? - Uh, begs the question on. No, I think culturally we have
very different perspectives on feelings and how we express feelings. It's a cultural phenomenon,
not an international standard, but I do think we're learning
a lot about happiness, that certain cultures have
really helped us focus on emotional wellbeing as a driver
of productivity, as a driver of life, quality as a
meaning and life driver. To me, emotions. I'm
Italian. Come on, . Of course, I'm gonna say it, and I, I'm an Italian psychologist. One of my professors was Felic Shalia the love doctor at USC, invariably, I think
feelings are everything. Just like you have thick lenses for, uh, knowledge management, I have a hammer and everything looks
like emotional nails to - Me, that's all a grand
amount of fuel for the mind, for all our listeners
to chew on and recharge and rebrand their own
organizations with feelings and people at its center. Thank you, Joseph, for being here and sharing your insightful radio voice. - Thank you very much,
Edwin, for your time. - Thank you for listening to, because you need to know
the reference podcast and knowledge management. My name is Sony To as an art administrator because you need to know,
has been my go-to podcast and has helped me hone
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