Coaches on Zoom - Des Dearlove
(interview blurb)
Des:We came to realize that this wasn't just some superficial excercise in creating a ranking. These ideas do matter and they can make a big difference in the world. So that was kind of a light bulb moment for both Stuart and I.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is one of the cofounders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. He’s also a former journalist and columnist for The London Times, a contributing editor to Strategy+Business Business Magazine, and editor of the bestselling Financial Times Handbook of Management. He’s also the author of a bestselling study of Richard Branson’s leadership style.
(interview)
Alex: Please welcome, Des Dearlove. Hi, Des.
Des: Hi, Alex.
Alex: How are you?
Des: I’m good and I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me on.
Alex: Oh, it’s a pleasure to have you. So, we usually start our podcast asking what drink we’re sharing today, so, Des, what are we drinking?
Des: We are drinking a very fine beer, Asahi, super dry beer, that’s what I’m drinking. Anyway, I’m not sure quite what you’ve got there but that’s what I’m drinking. And I’m sorry, it’s probably a little bit early for you in Southern California but it is after 5 PM here in the UK and the pubs are open so we’re allowed.
Alex: You know, when we thought about how we wanted to run our podcast and the fact we wanted our guests to choose to drink, I said I will just be a good trooper and I will just, whatever people want to drink whenever the podcast is supposed to be recorded, I will drink it. So, it’s fun so I’m like having beer for breakfast. I’m actually having an organic German beer that they’ve been producing organic beers for a long time since 1816, apparently the world’s first organic brewery, so I like it. It tastes really good. I’ve never had it for breakfast. I think it’s going to be fun.
Des: Good, good, good, and I chose Asahi for a couple of reasons, actually. People think that Brits like warm beer, but I’m not a big fan of it. I mean, they have their place in winter, but lager is good for quenching your thirst and, obviously, there are some great beers in Germany, there are some great beers in England and the UK, but this one, this Japanese beer is my favorite. You may know this, but the Japanese actually pioneered super dry beer, which means, as I understand it, it’s fermented a little bit longer so more of the sugar turns to alcohol so it doesn’t have the aftertaste and it’s not as sweet which is why it’s super dry. So, yeah, so there you go. And it reminds me a couple of — there’s a couple of connections in my life. So, people who are Thinkers50, if they ever came to London, we would usually meet people at a place called the Fox Club, which is in Chelsea in London, and the Fox Club, the only beer the Fox Club served was Asahi beer. So I have good memories of that and I’m sure there are people who got to know Thinkers50 over a glass of that beer. Sadly, the Fox Club is no longer with us. It was a casualty of the pandemic. So we should raise a toast to the Fox Club.
Alex: Let’s do that.
Des: Gone but not forgotten. Cheers.
Alex: Cheers. Well, thank you for the background, I didn’t know that about the super dry beer and I do like — everything the Japanese do is just so well crafted, I love essentially anything Japanese. I actually may be going in April. I’ve been postponing that trip every time I have it scheduled for years so now I’m hoping that April is the actual — I’ll make it there and I’ll have an Asahi in your name.
Des: Well, there you go. It’s funny because when I drink it, it reminds me of a trip that Stuart, my co-founder of Thinkers50, and I went to Tokyo a few years ago. We were doing some work for technology company, Fujitsu, and the gig was that they had a new brand positioning and slogan, which was very sort of Japanese in a certain sort of way. It was shaping tomorrow with you, and they wanted to connect their senior executives personally to this new kind of story so Stuart and I had to talk to everybody on the board, the CEO, and try to tease out the connections between their lives, and most of them, these are Japanese people, Japanese companies, they had been working for the company probably for 30 or 40 years, they tend to stick around and do the same. So, it was a case of trying to remind them of their first connection with the company and their first impressions. Really interesting project. Yeah, it sort of stayed with me. And the guy I remember most, at the time, they were building a supercomputer and I think it was finished in 2014 and it was declared as the fastest computer in the world and we met the guy who was responsible for developing this supercomputer and he had a budget of a billion dollars to do this thing and this thing was, you know supercomputers, this thing was the size of several football pitches, this thing was huge, and he was under a certain amount of pressure. And so we met this guy and we were expecting a cool and trendy Silicon Valley type, a bit like you, Alex, that kind of young and good looking and all that stuff, but what we actually found was this guy was middle aged, very conservative. He was wearing a grey cardigan. I think he almost had like slippers on but he was not at all what you were expecting from the guy who is in charge of building the fastest computer in the world. So I always remember that because he stood up, because it threw the stereotype up in the air and, obviously, different culture. So, no, you should go. I’m sure you’ll have a great time in Japan.
Alex: I love talking to journalists or former journalists because you always have a good story. I had my — we hosted my friend, Bryce Hoffman, who’s also a journalist before becoming a consultant and there’s always — you guys are really good at creating stories and wrapping stories around a lot of the different things that we talk about, which is always fun, and I can already see the beer working because you already threw me a handsome compliment. So, that’s what happens with beer over coffee. So I’m really excited to have you here today, Des. The Thinkers50 organization is fascinating. It’s been lauded as the Oscars for management thinking. I mean, you guys have really done the trailblazing job of building the organization over a pretty long period of time and I don’t think that a lot of people know too much about the beginnings of Thinkers50 and how it became what it is today. We’d love to learn more about that today and also learn more about you. So, you started your career as a journalist, correct?
Des: That’s correct, yeah. I was a business journalist.
Alex: So let’s go back there. What drew you to journalism and how did the journey start and we’ll culminate on Thinkers50 and how you got there?
Des: Okay, so I grew up in a very small village in Sussex in England, which is in the southeast of England so it’s about 30 miles from London, from Central London, and 30 miles the other way from Brighton, which is on the sea, on the coast, so it’s kind of —
Alex: I just know UK cities because of their soccer team so I’m like, oh, Brighton, yes, I have no idea where it is but I know what the soccer logo looks like.
Des: Yeah, there you go. So, if you drew a line between London and Brighton and you put an X in the middle of it, that’s where I grew up, on the Ashdown forest. So I went to a very, very ordinary state school and captained my local football team, you mentioned football, and played for the school and loved my football, and actually support Chelsea, which, I don’t know you’ve been following the news today but it hasn’t been a great day for Chelsea, we just fired our manager because we had a very bad result last night. Anyway, I’ll draw a veil over that. So, yeah, it was, you know —
Alex: I’m sorry.
Des: I always say — that’s okay. I always say I went to university to avoid working in — really to avoid some of the jobs that other members of my family were doing because I just didn’t think I could do that. I just wasn’t — I could see that, I mean, they’re working very hard. They worked on building construction sites, they worked in factories, they did that stuff, but it wasn’t something that I particularly thought I was cut out for. So it was really that’s what took me to university. I studied politics and economics, got joint honors degree in those subjects, and then, of course, you have that moment, as we all do, when you come out of college and you think, well, what the hell am I going to do with this? And I always remember my parents, I think it was probably graduation day and they’re driving me and they’re both in the front of the car and they said, “What are you gonna do now that you’ve sort of grown up? What’s next?” And I didn’t even think about and I hadn’t thought about it but I just said, “I wanna be a writer,” and I could see them exchange glances in the mirror and think, “Oh, okay, that’s great,” but it just suddenly, it occurred to me, I just suddenly knew that’s what I wanted to do and the only way I knew to do that, from where I was from, was to become a journalist because that was the only thing I could think of. I didn’t think, I didn’t have pretensions of being the great novelist or writing film script so being a journalist sort of made sense. So that’s what I set out to do. I moved for a while to South Florida so I was living there and I worked for the local newspaper, the Boca Raton News. I wasn’t reporting or writing, I was just doing, I think I was making ads or something, but I got a bit of a taste for newspapers. Then when I came back to the UK, I did a postgrad course in journalism and then started freelancing, got a few lucky breaks, ended up writing a column for The London Times, which was a cool thing to be doing, about management and business, being a commissioning editor for The Times and I started commissioning this other journalist called Stuart Crainer, who, as people who know Thinkers50 know went on to become the cofounder of Thinkers50. So there we were writing about management and business and we became more and more specialized about the kind of thought leadership, the ideas that were coming through. Tom Peters had set the world on fire with In Search of Excellence. It was the first real blockbuster business book. But by the time Stuart and I started working together, the sort of trickle of business books had become a torrent. In other words, just so many books coming through. And it was clear to me that the managers of the world, they were already time pressed. They couldn’t keep up with reading all these books, and some of them weren’t worth reading as well. So Stuart and I got together actually over a pizza and a couple of beers and we said, “Hey, there’s an opportunity here to create some kind of consumer guide to help busy managers sought the nuggets of gold from the fool’s gold.” And at the time, I think Business Week, I don’t think the Financial Times by then had even started doing its business school rankings, but the Business Week did its business school rankings and there were rankings for the law schools and there were lots of these different rankings, but nobody had done a ranking of business thinkers, management thinkers. So we said, “Well, we could do that,” but really more of a journalistic gesture, a kind of a controversial, because everybody loves rankings and everybody loves to disagree or to agree or whatever so we did it this first time in 2001, that was the first time we did our ranking. And, to our surprise, people seemed genuinely interested. It made the front page of one of the national newspapers in the UK. I can only think it was a very slow news day that day because we had a deal.
Alex: Yeah, the Chelsea manager didn’t get sacked back then. I don’t know if Chelsea was even doing well in 2001. But, yeah —
3: Certainly not doing as well as they’ve done —
Alex: No big news that day.
Des: Yeah, yeah. So, all of a sudden, we had this, which we weren’t unaccustomed to, a small success on our hands. We also, slightly tongue in cheek, we put Dilbert in to the ranking and if you remember Dilbert, Scott Adams —
Alex: I do, I do.
Des: And Scott Adams very graciously mentioned this thing on his website and, of course, the traffic that drove to our little website, it just melted the whole thing down so our website fell over just because he mentioned it. So it was a fairly auspicious start, really. We’ve done the Thinkers50 ranking every two years since. So, it’s a global ranking, we rank the top 50 management thinkers. In the years in between, in the 20 years in between, we’ve added three other lists so we have the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement awards which are, as you say, the Financial Times calls the Oscars of management thinking, which has always been very helpful, and, therefore, an award for innovations and one for leadership in different categories. And then we introduced the Thinkers50 Radar, which is the up and coming, the rising stars of management and we publish that every January, that’s 30 people to watch who are on our radar and should be on your radar. And then the other part, we introduced the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame, so people who have been in the ranking and reached a point where they should go to the hallowed halls of the pantheon of the gods, we elevate them, which has the fortunate effect too that it means that some of the great management thinkers who may not be quite as active as they once were or even doing their best work, they don’t have to tumble down the ranking. They were once great, we try to respect that and to put them into the Hall of Fame at the right moment. So there basically the list. And then, this year, we added another one which was Thinkers50 Business Book of the Year and we do a list of books that you should read.
Alex: I just finished the Agassi autobiography, it came out probably 13, 14 years ago, but it took me a while to get to it, but it’s so good. And those latter years where he’s one of the best tennis players of all time, but when he’s in his mid-30s and that greatness was not as easy to come about as it was when he was 25 years old. So I think doing that for management thinkers and separating that and saying, “These are the greats, we don’t rank them anymore, you don’t have to keep producing new ideas and changing the landscape of the work that you do to be able to continue to stay afloat in the rankings,” that makes a lot of sense.
Des: Well, we think it’s respectful, but also they shouldn’t have to run that race every two years. It’s not fair — I’m talking about people like Charles Handy, Marshall Goldsmith, they’re established, I think we can hang our hat on that.
Alex: And also, it opens up a path for new ideas, new people —
Des: That’s the other thing, we need —
Alex: — not have to compete with the greats, right?
Des: Yeah, we need to clear the way as well to allow the new and the people in the radar to come through, otherwise, it could get a bit stagnant. It could be the same old same old people and we don’t want that.
Alex: So now I keep just thinking about tennis analogies because with the US Open going on and reemergence of tennis is something I love, it’s like I can only think about the greats in tennis as you’re saying that, but going back to ideas.
Des: Federer and Nadal are great examples of how you can sustain. The greats don’t go away, that’s the thing. I mean, incredible, absolutely incredible.
Alex: Yeah, it is really incredible. And there’s periods where you see the same people, like every final is Agassi versus Sampras, Nadal versus Federer, so it is opening up the pathway for new people to come in, especially when it comes to ideas. I’ve always believed that ideas power the world and now there’s so much information. I mean, if anything, we’re drowning in information. There’s like too much. So how do you go about thinking about which ideas are worth bringing up to the surface? Because there’s so many good ideas out there. I mean, it’s part of the nature of the world today and access to information and the internet that there’s a lot of people doing great work and there’s a lot of really great ideas. How do you assess merit for these ideas to be put in a ranking system?
Des: To echo what you’re saying, really, but when we first started doing the ranking, we pretty much, most of the people in the ranking, I’d say sort of 90 percent, were from North America. There were a lot of people probably from Harvard Business School and Stanford and the top American schools. As the world is globalized, we’ve had to cast a wider and wider net so it was hard enough keeping up on that population of people, now, we’re supposed to know who the thinkers are coming up in China and India and Korea and all over the world. And the task doesn’t get any easier. What we’ve tried to do, and I think it’s been probably one of the better innovations, is we very much rely on people within the Thinkers50 ecosystem as our eyes and ears. So, when we do the Radar now, we will ask the 50 people who are ranked, we will say, “Hey, you know who’s coming to, you know who’s perhaps at your business school or your consulting firm,” because some of these people, they’re not all academics, they might just be entrepreneurs, “but you have an idea.” So we use them to, as I say, as our talent spotters a lot, because the other thing is, as you get older, you’re trying to keep in touch with younger ideas and people thinking new thoughts and, as I say, not getting caught up with the old guard but I have to say, there’s a great generosity of spirit too among the people in the Hall of Fame. They often are either mentoring people or they know of people so it’s very much these days a collective effort, which I’m pleased to say takes some of the pressure off Stuart and I in terms of identifying people who we should put through our methodology. And then we have our 10 criteria, which has evolved a little bit but basically fall into two axes. So on the one side, you’ve got what we call viability, how viable are ideas, and we look at things like what I call the four R’s, so we look at the rigor of the research, we look at the relevance, which is really important, how relevant the idea is to what’s happening in the business world, we look at the reach. Is it just one industry? Is it across industry? Is it global? And we look at how robust the ideas are. So that’s on the viability side. And on the visibility side, which is the other axis, we look at things like, it used to be all about looking at mainstream media. These days, of course, we look at social media, that’s one of the things we’ve changed. We look at how — well, we actually do look at speaking fees as some kind of a gauge of what people’s market worth is, but we also look at the number of citations for their work and so how well thought of, how influential they are in the academic world. So there’s a bunch of these criteria that we use, but in terms of identifying who to put through the methodology, as I say, we rely increasingly on the eyes and the ears of people. So we always say to people get in touch. If you think someone merits our attention, we don’t pretend to be able to cover the entire globe, but please bring these people to our attention and we’ll have a look.
Alex: I would like to see the speaking fees before Thinkers50 and after you get ranked in Thinkers50.
Des: Marshall Goldsmith always used to say, Marshall used to say, “Oh, you’re in the Thinkers50 now, it’s official, you’re one of the top thinkers. You know you can now double your fees.”
Alex: Marshall, not only is he a great coach and a great guy, he also is a great marketer so there you go. One of the things that comes across to me as you’re telling us this story and pizza and a couple of beers getting started is that the Thinkers50 organization has been a very entrepreneurial endeavor by its two cofounders so I want to talk a little bit more about that. As an entrepreneur, I am I’m keenly aware of how difficult it is to create something and to start with an idea and start executing against that idea. So, you’re more than 20 years into working on you and Stuart’s vision that you have for what Thinkers50 could be. So, let’s go back. First of all, tell us about the name. How did you guys come up with the name? And then tell us a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. You’ve talked about the website crashing because the Dilbert author mentioned you guys, those stories are always, it’s a nice backdrop to understand the history of an organization. So, let’s talk about the entrepreneurial journey.
Des: Yeah, so Stu and I have — I mean, in fun, we have this conversation where he knows deep down that it was my idea and if he was sitting here, he’d say exactly the same thing. We play off each other a little bit like that. But I think the idea came first and then the name, I’ll give him credit for that. I think he said, “We could call it the Thinkers50,” but, I mean, obviously, the genius is in the original idea.
Alex: Clearly, yeah, it’s an organization about ranking ideas, the idea is the genius part, for sure.
Des: No, seriously, the idea from the beginning was to be, we wanted Thinkers50 to be the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading business and management ideas of our age. And, over time, we added a little bit on the end, because we came to realize — so the bit we added on the end is ideas that can make a positive difference in the world. So I think when we first started out, as journalists, we were, as it were, professional skeptics. We both would have had editors who were saying, “Yeah, this is all smoke and mirrors, all this stuff, it’s not real these ideas, these people are just making money.” We did believe even then that there was good stuff and not so good stuff. There were real nuggets of useful and clever stuff and then there were stuff that you could pretty much ignore.
Alex: Well, you called it fool’s gods so that was very descriptive.
Des: Exactly. And, over time, we actually went on a bit of a journey. I mean, I’ll talk about the entrepreneurial journey in a second, but there was an awakening, a different sort of journey, where, as I say, we were quite skeptical and then we started talking to people, I mean, the one that sticks in my mind is C. K. Prahalad and he wrote his book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, where he said, actually, capitalism and good management can be a means to alleviate poverty in the world and it can make a real difference if you do it properly. And he was a very sincere guy, very, very clever man, and we began to buy into this. Clay Christensen was also very charismatic and very influential in our journey. And so we came to realize, actually, this wasn’t just some superficial exercise in creating a ranking. These ideas actually do matter and they can make a big difference in the world. So, that was kind of a bit of a lightbulb moment for both Stuart and I and I think, fortunately, we sort of went through it at a similar moment. The entrepreneurial journey, well, trial and error. We’re great believers in if you have an idea, just have a go at it and see what happens. And some of the ideas have been better than others, some have not done so well, but if you throw enough stuff at the wall and if you protect your brand, I think if you’re sincere about your brand and you protect it and you cherish it, you don’t allow the experiments, because a lot of them are experiments, to impact or have a negative impact. In fact, we built it into the DNA of the brand to say we want Thinkers50 to be known as an organization that experiments, pushes the boundaries, tries new things, and then it’s okay if something doesn’t quite work out and that takes a lot of pressure off. I think a lot of organizations with a brand to protect get very conservative and very defensive, but, as I say, I think one of the smarter things we did was to build that into our stated DNA, and people know they can approach us, you and I, recently we’ve been having a great conversation about what we can do together in collaboration and we’re open to that. We’ve always been open to conversations, but we are, and you also know this, we’re also very protective of the brand and what it stands for.
Alex: That’s very interesting because the entrepreneurial journey, a lot of it is risk, your tolerance for risk, how do you approach it, how do you balance it, and you’ve created an organization that, given what you do, it sits in — you can’t take too many risks when you’re building this powerful brand that basically rates ideas, you’re in a very valuable position in not only the market but like the contribution that you have towards the world so there’s this sense of responsibility which limits your willingness to take risks. So being able to balance that is important, especially when — I feel like a lot of the great thinkers always take risks with having a little edge to an idea and maybe framing things in a way that is going to draw your attention and that entails risks. So, being able to understand it and align the values of your organization with it in a way that creates the brand, creates this very established solvent brand, but it also is aligned with the fact that these thinkers are taking risks.
Des: If I can follow on to that, I think you’re right and a good example, now you’ve made me think about, I think it’s partly about understanding where the risk is and what the risk is. I think one of the features, one of the characteristics that absolutely stands, I mean, we’ve been very fortunate to meet some of the, I have to say some of the brightest business thinkers on the planet, and one of the things that stands out for me, among those people, the very best ones, they retain an intellectual curiosity long after you think that — they’ve written all these books, they’ve met all these people, they’ve done all these fantastic, they remain restless and curious and that’s one of the defining features. Again, I’d like to hope there’s a little bit of that in the Thinkers50 sort of DNA. One of the things that — I mean, we all, I mean, I’m sure everybody listening to this, the pandemic was such a jolt, we had just done our 2019 Gala so we sort of dodged the bullet in the sense that we got our event done before the pandemic and the lockdowns and all that stuff happened. But all of a sudden, we couldn’t do our normal thing. We had a decision to make. I said to Stu, “We can’t just go into a bunker for two years and not stand up. We have to — this is a community of people.” And what we did — so the risk we took wasn’t to do with the brand as such, the risk we took was we organized with some partners, we organized a 24-hour sort of series of webinars which started in Australia and then it went literally around the world so it came across the Middle East and it came across Africa and it came across Europe and to the UK and then we crossed over and we did a couple of webinars on the East Coast and then we went across America and we finished — so the final one was in California, your neck of the woods. And so 24 hours, 24 webinars, the support from the thinkers — and, basically, it was the only thing we could think of to do to try to be helpful. All the money went to people in the frontline trying to provide services, but the uptake, the generosity of spirits from the thinkers, the risk there was not doing anything, you know what I mean? The quality of the people we invited to those webinars and the people who very, very generously gave an hour of their time and all the effort and energy that goes into doing that and then we gave away a whole load of places to entrepreneurs in Africa and parts of Asia who wouldn’t have been able to normally afford tickets for something like that. And I was amazed because some of those people who joined us, whatever time they were, wherever they were in Africa, they were still with us by the time we got to California.
Alex: That’s amazing.
Des: I mean, they should have been in bed a long time ago but they were getting value from this. They were connecting with people who, I’d like to think they’d read their books. They might not have even read their books. So, you see, I mean, the risk there is it could have fallen flat but, you know what, or we could have asked all these people to do it and they said no or we didn’t get an audience but we did get an audience and, yeah, the risk was removed from the brand and the risk would have been to have sat on our hands and not done anything.
Alex: Sometimes, the biggest risk is not to take the risk, and you learn — that’s also connected to the power of management thinking because when you’re in a position where you’re in business, whether you’re working in an organization or an entrepreneur, you’re a coach working with executives, being able to reference some great thinkers that really have that curiosity that you mentioned and explore that curiosity to the nooks and crannies to really understand certain aspects of human behavior, organizational dynamics, systems thinking, that really opens pathways for people to execute and that’s the connection between the great ideas and the people reading and listening to those authors. And putting those to action, that’s a beautiful thing for me about when someone has a great idea, spends all this time and effort and takes a risk to write a book, you put yourself out there when you’re working with those ideas and pulling them from the ether, almost, and creating them. And then some of them have such a tremendous impact in the world were the people that are operating and executing base their way of looking at the world and acting based on those ideas. It’s really a beautiful thing. When you say curiosity, I just get reminded of one of my favorite thinkers of all time, which is Einstein. To me, he took curiosity to the next level, like let’s redefine the experience, what you see is not reality and time flows different and it’s contingent on the space-time continuum. I mean, how can you do a couple of thought exercises and come up with conclusions like that? Obviously, I’m oversimplifying, but the power of ideas is it’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?
Des: Yeah, fundamentally, think of someone like Copernicus too where if you say that the earth is no longer the center of the universe and that we go around, you change everything when someone comes up with an idea. Einstein, Darwin, once you have the theory of evolution, everything changes, whole our whole understanding of ourselves, the human condition, it almost changes. And, okay, probably, disruptive innovation isn’t on that scale but, in its own way, and there are other obviously big management ideas, I mean, go back to Taylor, assembly line, all those things and some of the new ideas that are coming through now, they will change the face of —
Alex: Scientific management. That took me back to grad school.
Des: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: That’s also connected to risk. I mean, Copernicus, think about the great philosopher Socrates, like the way he died. I mean, ideas are both powerful and dangerous and that’s where we’re talking about risk earlier, like ideas, good ideas are inherently risky because they sometimes don’t support the existing paradigm.
Des: Exactly. Clay Christensen was big, we always say, he had a sign when I’m visiting him the first time in his study at Harvard and he had a sign, it said, “Anomalies welcome.” Basically, if you’ve got an anomaly that doesn’t fit my theory, I want to know about it because I want to make my theory better and together we could — and that that attitude of “Let’s make it better” rather than a lot of people in his position would have had a different attitude, which would have been, “I’m the master, this is the theory,” and that’s become the paradigm but, no, he was very conscious of that, that there was more work to be done.
Alex: We call certain things like meditation, like your meditation practice, there’s no such thing as your scientific practice but science is a practice and, oftentimes, we get confused around how to utilize science and scientific insights and the whole body of scientific knowledge gets — it doesn’t move forward because we don’t understand the true nature and purpose of how to use that tool, which is science. One of my favorite books of all time, Thomas Kuhn, The History of Scientific Revolutions, I mean, he coined the term “paradigm shift.” I mean, once you understand science in that context and put ideas and management ideas in that context, then you start looking at risk and the formulation of ideas and innovation in very different ways. It’s fascinating.
Des: Yeah, and Clay Christensen, that was his thing. He was saying that’s the problem. If you’re on the inside, you cannot see that you are in a paradigm and the paradigm needs to be challenged and broken, but he could see that and that was the book that he would always cite as being why we need to keep challenging and keep pushing. But it takes — I say, it takes that restlessness and that intellectual curiosity to keep pushing the boundary. I would like to think too the Thinkers50 has got a little bit of edge to it. We try not to be too conservative. If there’s an opportunity to be a little bit edgier, we do try to do that as much as we can. Be a little bit disrupt —
Alex: Oh, you have to.
Des: Yeah.
Alex: You have to, and that reminds me of the definition of entropy. Entropy is a different concept to me. It’s a difficult concept to understand and I remember I found this definition of entropy and it really made sense to me. It’s the amount of energy in a system that cannot be used to sustain the existing system. When you think about it in that way, entropy is not this scary thing that leads to disorder, it’s actually that element of disorder that creates the order. And I’m trying to think about the book that I got that from, it’s in one of my many books over there. It’s The Self-Organizing Universe, I believe it’s called, and Eric Jantsch, such a good book. But when you think about that, that you have to take risks, especially when it comes to things like the greatest management thinkers, because if not, it becomes stale, it becomes what Kuhn defined as normal science, and I love that Clay Christensen could see himself in normal science and say, “Okay, if we’re gonna get to a next paradigm shift, I can’t just rest on my laurels of being the god of this stage of normal science,” and being able to — because you’re dethroning yourself, essentially, and that is a very humbling way of looking at things and, essentially, it’s the only way to look at things to truly be great. But so many people fail to do that, including us. It’s just hard to see that it’s a blind spot.
Des: Yeah, no, it is. But, you know what, if the originator of disruptive innovation couldn’t see it, then we would be in trouble. So to be fair, he’s absolutely honoring his own ideas and his own theory. The innovator’s dilemma is that you don’t see the next thing because you’ve got too much — you’re too invested in the old thing, and you could apply that, but I’m sure he got that. He was a very smart guy.
Alex: I respect that even more, because I’ve gotten very disillusioned by a lot of people that I’ve really admired their work when you don’t see them walking the talk. And walking the talk to me is not actually the standard and the norm, it’s an anomaly. And it is one of those things that I’m hoping, as humanity evolves, we are a little bit more aligned with our actions and our thoughts and our ideals, especially people in positions of power. How many times do you see someone not follow through? We saw it with the pandemic, some politicians saying, “You can’t go out to restaurants and go into The French Laundry,” or, like, “You can’t go to a hair salon,” and then being caught going to one. I mean, we really have to get more alignment.
Des: Well, Alex, we’ve just parted company with a prime minister who forbade everybody from having parties and then they were having parties in Downing Street. And, I’m sorry, it’s even worse when you make the rules, when you’ve made the rules and then you still don’t follow them because you’re above the rules or they don’t apply to you or — I don’t know, I really don’t know what gets into people’s heads how they do that. If you’re supposed to be the leader, shouldn’t you hold yourself to an even higher standard than everybody else? There shouldn’t be gray areas in this. It should be absolutely clear and he should have — if he found people — Boris Johnson came back and found people having a party and he wasn’t aware of it, he should have stopped them, not joined in, but, anyway, hey.
Alex: It happens all the time. I mean, I know of a lot of great leadership development companies that are really world class at shaping leaders in other organizations but when you look at the way those organizations are run, it’s not reflective of the work they do with others. Sometimes, it’s just hard to apply those concepts to you. So even more kudos to Clay Christensen, right? Because he could have been the ultimate “I don’t follow through with my thoughts and my ideas and my actions” and from your experience in working with him, it sounds like he did so that’s magnificent and he’ll always be remembered as a fantastic, incredible thinker. Everything I’ve ever heard about him has been extremely positive and I think we were all very saddened very recently when he passed.
Des: Yeah. Quite, absolutely. Great guy. I mean, he was such a good friend to Thinkers50 as well. I mean, when his health wasn’t great, he traveled to London, and we knew his health wasn’t great but he carried on. Not only that, he did a session on panel and I kick myself because we had too many people on the panel, we ended up with about eight people on this panel, and you had one of the greatest minds, but he only took his turn, he didn’t over speak people. He had an eighth of the time. In fact, probably he had less than that but I just thought, really, what a waste. It should have just been him, on his own really or him and another. And then he spent the rest of the day in the audience, just being one of the audience and asking questions and being interested and, again, I think that tells you a lot about how the really good ones are. And he obviously was huge. He was about six foot 10, six foot 11 or something. So he was very — you knew he was there, he was a very imposing person. Everybody knew that not only had he had his time on stage — because some of these people will go off to their hotel. They make the appearance then when they’re not the center of attention, they’re either on a plane to the next gig or they’re — but he participated all day and was part of the community. Very impressive. As I say, his health wasn’t great at that time. We’ve probably talked enough about him, great man as he was. Let’s talk about some of the things that we’re doing together.
Alex: Let’s do that. Let’s talk about coaching, because coaching puts it together, so we’ll start by how did you add the Thinkers50 list of best top 50 coaches, like maybe we’ll talk about the genesis of that.
Des: Well, I think I said at the beginning, our mission of Thinkers50 has three parts so there’s the identify the rank and then the sharing of leading management ideas.
Alex: Des, coaching, it’s such a powerful approach for people development. Tell us about the Thinkers50 perspective on coaching. I know the ranking of coaches is relatively new so we’d love to hear from you a little bit more about that franking and your view on coaching.
Des: Yeah. So the Thinkers50 mission has three parts, as I said earlier. We identify rank and share the leading management ideas of our age, but it’s the third part where we can really make a difference, which makes all the difference. We like to say there’s nothing so pragmatic as a great idea, but you’ve got to get those ideas into the hands and the heads of the people can use them. So, here’s the connection. We see the coaching community very much as the honeybees of management ideas ecosystem. They take ideas, their own but also other people’s, and they buzz around the ecosystem and they take them into the C-suite and they whisper them into the ears of people who can make a difference and that’s where the traction is. That’s where the ideas can get out there. And we relay that message to the thinkers as well. The coaches are really important because they’re a conduit for the wider audience. It’s a way that you can scale your ideas and really get them out there. I mean, obviously, they will be doing their consulting work and their teaching work, but, actually, this is a huge opportunity. That’s how we sort of we see it anyway. Now, of course, coaches need ideas too because that’s their bread and butter too is to have the latest thinking to be able to bring it to their clients and to be able to tell them the new things. So this is a win, win, win. This is good for everybody. So what happened was, when we elevated Marshall to the Hall of Fame, it meant that he was no longer — the need for independence and no conflicts was removed. He had a permanent place in the Hall of Fame. Now, Marshall, of course, turned around at that point and said sort of, “Thanks for the compliment. Okay, so you’re slightly saying I’m over the hill but I’m not,” kind of thing, but his point was, he said, “Okay, right, now, I’ve got this new status. I wanna give something back,” which is very Marshall, and he said, “How about if we together create this award for coaches?” So we said, well, it was a very generous offer and our knowledge of the coaching community is not as great as people, obviously, who are more connected with the community, like yourselves as well. Marshall brought with him connections to the coaching community. That’s how we met Alex, obviously. So that was the connector and that award, I think it gets probably — well, it’s certainly one of the most popular awards. I mean, we added it in, I think, in 2017 or 2019, it’s sort of a staple now, but it gets a lot of attention and it’s slightly different because we really winnow the award down from a large number of people. It’s very competitive. We rely on people in the coaching community to tell us who we should be considering. But, in the end, obviously, our independence is paramount so we make the final decision, we make the final call. But we’ve been really pleased with the quality of people that we’ve identified with the help of people in the community.
Alex: Wonderful, thank you for that. I love how you’re looking at coaching because it’s the way I look at coaching. I’ve always seen it as an organization, it’s a one-on-one intervention, obviously, there’s group and team coaching, but when you think about just one-on-one coaching, it’s a one-on-one relationship that can have organizational impact and now we really are getting good in organizations, around thinking about coaching cultures and really thinking strategically around how you provide coaching and access to coaching to people, rather group than we’ve ever had. I mean, more people are getting coaching today than we’ve ever had in the world. Power of ideas and the power of coaches to augment those ideas is incredible so I’m very happy to hear that you share that view as well. And I think that’s also why we’re very excited about the work that we’re doing together, which is really to work with a group of Thinkers50 and Radar30, thought leaders to create a program specifically for coaches, which I know we both are very excited about.
Des: Yeah, I think we see this as such a great opportunity and Thinkers50 hasn’t worked in this space in this way before so there’s a novelty. We talked about the need to do different things and do new things but we see this as such a great opportunity to bring the world’s very best management thinkers to the coaching community and to really ask the thinkers to apply their ideas to coaching. So, this program, we’ve selected — it’s very curated, it’s very bespoke. As you know, we’ve selected five of the leading management thinkers and the thread that joins them is they’re all coming from a psychology background, they’re all coming from a brain science background. They have been put together, as we like to use the phrase, “the dream team.”
Alex: Yes.
Des: They fit together, this is going to be a fantastic course. And as Dan Cable from London Business School, who’s one of the five, one of the dream team, he keeps saying it’s going to be practical and it’s going to be tactical and I like that phrase and that’s what we want. We want it to be practical and we want it to be tactical. We want to give people, we want to give coaches the tools not only to improve the way they operate but for them to then pass that on and to bring the ideas and share the ideas and be the honeybees and get them into the hands and the minds of the people who are running big companies and can really change the face of business.
Alex: Absolutely. And I’ve been accused of not being too salesy sometimes, some people think like, “Well, you should be a little more.” I don’t like being salesy but I want to talk about this in our podcast because it is really an amazing collaboration that I think it’s very well thought out around how do you bring some experts from tangential fields to coaching and provide them and equip coaches with perspectives and tools that will help them be better coaches. I mean, one of the things that when I wake up in the morning I get excited about is we help the helpers. Coaches have such an impactful — they’re in such an impactful position to enact change. And when you provide coaches with great powerful ideas, then they go out and do that, that that thing, the honeybees do, like you’re mentioning, and really expand the impact of those ideas. And it’s a two-way relationship. Coaches need great content and also their clients need to get access to great content. So I’m very enthused about the partnership that we’ve formed and we’ll be launching very soon so I’m glad we got to touch a little bit on that. So thank you, Des.
Des: Yeah. No, I’m excited too because I think we’re pleased with the selection. We’ve selected these people, the thinkers, because they’re incredibly relevant to the coaching community. This whole kind of movement towards bringing your whole self to work and all the implications of that, I’d like to think companies are finally, finally moving away from some of the negative performance measures and asking how do we unleash people’s best version of themselves, and that’s what the dream team is, their sort of superpower is they’re going to help us understand the very latest research and ideas around not how we assess people in a negative way but how can we bring our best game. I think that’s the way that — I’d like to think that’s the way the world is moving. So we’ve got people like Francesca Gino, who’s an award-winning professor researcher at heart. I mean, the list is just, yeah, gold plated. It’s a really good list.
Alex: I’m very excited. I love how you’re talking about unleashing people’s potential. I mean, that’s what the job of a coach is, and providing resources to do that from different perspectives, a diverse view of what makes coaches effective, and how, as a coach, you can enact that is wonderful. So we should have a lot of fun doing that. So it’s going to come up pretty soon. So, yeah, it’s very exciting. So, Des, it was such a pleasure to connect with you in this way. I feel like we’re always tactical, we’re always talking about the projects and things we’re working together but we haven’t had a chance to just have a conversation around ideas and why we get so excited about management ideas and the work that we do and how it all comes together. So it was really enjoyable. Thank you for coming to our podcast today.
Des: It’s been a lot of fun. I love the riffing around ideas. I love Kuhn, it’s like we could talk for a long time. I really enjoyed it.
Alex: Absolutely, and it’s nice to kind of do it. I mean, we had a virtual beer together, we recorded it and now people get to listen to it. To me, this felt like an actual conversation I would have with a friend over things that we’re passionate about and that’s ultimately what we want to do in Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, provide more content, have a good conversation. I love listening to other people’s various conversations so we’re providing that to people. So it was just great having you and I am very excited about all the work we’re doing together.
Des: Thanks.