Octopus

If you landed from Mars and your first impression of our world was through our newspapers and news channels, you’d probably conclude that our planet (and our species) wasn’t in very good shape. (You’d be right). Depressingly, our world increasingly seems to exist in black and white with little space for shades of grey and compromise. Here are some examples… - The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 48% since 1850. The ‘natural’ (rather than manmade) time it should have taken for this to happen is 20,000 years. - Antarctica is losing 150 billion tonnes of ice per year (equivalent to the weight of Mount Everest). - The average American throws away 2kg of waste every day (so 635 million kg per day across the entire US population). - The global population of fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals has fallen by 68% over the last 50 years. Not a great stat given that it’s directly correlated to the overall health of the Earth's ecosystems. We can clearly choose how we react to all of this. All the stats above can be countered by other facts which are far more uplifting. Whether that’s hundreds of millions of people being lifted out of poverty or increased life expectancy across the board. Although we rarely focus on these points. Our brains have been conditioned to focus on what can (or does) go wrong rather than what can (and does) go right. ‘Bad’ things are far more newsworthy than good things. This fundamentally changes how we think about the world and those around us. We become more jaded, more cynical and (bluntly) less happy. Mindset is everything and that applies as much to an individual as it does to a company.

I thought I’d write about some customer stories from companies which have gone above and beyond. These ‘WOW’ moments are hugely powerful, both internally (employees are proud of how their company has chosen to behave) and externally (customers are often so touched that they proactively choose to share their experiences with friends and families). During the 2013 Christmas period, an airline asked passengers checking in for their flight what gifts they were hoping to get for Christmas. When they landed, before the bags came out, 150 personalised presents arrived on the carousel - including a 70-inch Plasma TV. At a US supermarket chain, an employee noticed that hundreds of lettuces were thrown out each week. She suggested bagging the outer leaves and leaving them at the checkout with a sign: “Free lettuce for your pet rabbits.” Sales of rabbits in that region grew a hundredfold in the following two years. When Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol was tampered with 50 years ago, leading to seven deaths, the company acted immediately. They ran TV and radio ads, driving through the streets of Chicago with loudspeakers warning people not to take Tylenol. They later introduced the first-ever sealed pill bottles. Months later, their brand reputation had actually improved. What’s the moral of these stories? We all have countless chances to create WOW moments, but routine often gets in the way. So put yourself in the customer’s shoes and use your imagination to do something remarkable.

What’s the biggest lesson I’ve learnt in business over the last 25 years of building Octopus? Great business is simply about how you make people feel. It’s about empathy, understanding and getting the basics right. And it’s down to every little action from every single person across an organisation - a business is only ever as good as its weakest link. Companies are almost always desperately bad at looking after their customers. Getting it right just requires a different mindset and for your people to be empowered to do the right thing. And remember that it’s okay to make mistakes. Being honest, apologising properly and moving forward in a kinder way is so much more human.

In 1994, when he was CEO of Pixar, Steve Jobs said “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” At the start, however, Steve Jobs wasn’t a very good storyteller. One of his most notorious failures was the Lisa computer. In 1978, he was trying to create the first computer to use a graphical user interface aimed at businesses. There were so many development and technical problems along the way that by the time it came to market, the price was set at around £8,000 (£42,000 in today’s money). While the price made it exceptionally difficult to compete with IBM’s personal computer, Jobs felt the superior capabilities and advanced features of the Lisa would be enough to convince the business community to invest. He just needed people to understand how great it was. So, he decided to take out an eight-page advert in the Wall Street Journal. The advert read like a laundry list of the Lisa’s superior features and capabilities - the hard drive, the interface, the memory, and page after page of technical jargon. In total, Apple sold 10,000 Lisa computers - nowhere near the amount needed to cover even the development costs. After Jobs was removed from Apple in 1985, he began exploring new areas to invest his time and money. He ultimately became CEO and majority stakeholder at Pixar Studios. At Pixar, he learnt the power of storytelling, and when he returned to Apple in 1997, he used this new skill set to revolutionise the business. In my view, there are a few lessons to great storytelling. The first point to remember is that facts are boring. With an ironic nod to this point, here are some statistics. Humans only remember about 5% of the facts we’re told ten minutes after we’re told them. On the other hand, people remember 65% of stories. Stories make us feel things. Emotion is far more powerful than logic.   The second point is that great stories need to hook you from the start. And as a rule, you have about eight seconds to capture someone’s attention.  

Whenever someone asks me whether they should set up their own business, my answer is almost always the same: yes. No matter the business idea, no matter your age or experience, I always think it’s worth trying. You’ll learn so much during the process, and life’s too short to live with regrets. There are, however, a few vital traits any entrepreneur needs, and one of the most important things (perhaps the most obvious one) is passion. You need to feel so strongly and so passionately about what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, that you never want to stop. The whole concept of work/life balance probably won’t cross your mind because you’ll genuinely love what you do. I have three children who I love to bits. Octopus comes a very close second to how I think about my children. That freaks people out, but it’s true. Building a business will consume your life, so you need to be prepared and willing to accept that. If you’re not unbelievably passionate about it, you’ll probably have a problem.

I spent this morning’s commute thinking about what makes a good decision-maker, and I came up with five things. The first is not worrying too much when some of the decisions you make turn out to be wrong. Just change your mind (and try not to be too embarrassed). As the CEO of one of our venture portfolio companies once said, “I may well be wrong, but I'm definitely not confused.” The second is having a trusted group of people to test your view on. This is very different to building consensus (which is painful, takes forever and normally ends up with a decision that’s so watered down that it doesn’t achieve very much). Ideally, your group of trusted people need to think differently to you. The third is about owning the decision. Individual accountability is hugely important. As organisations get larger, decisions tend to be owned by committees rather than people and that doesn’t work well. The right people thrive on the ownership and empowerment that comes from being allowed to make decisions. The fourth is about communication. You don’t need to involve everyone in the decision, but you do need to explain it to everyone. This allows your team to understand what’s changing (and allows them to hold you to account). It also helps to make you more human (largely because some of your decisions will be wrong and you’ll then be able to stand up and explain what’s happened and what you’re going to do about it). The final one is around speed. Procrastination, endless committees, meetings and processes kill organisations. They just add more treacle into the company’s DNA. A big part of keeping an entrepreneurial feel is about encouraging and empowering everyone to make decisions, and to do so quickly.

25 years ago, Guy, Christophe and I, fuelled by the naivety of youth, decided that we wanted to set up a business. The problem at the time was that none of us really had any idea about what the business should do. Our first few ideas – largely focused on the travel and entertainment industry – were woeful. After a few months, we landed on one (spoiler alert: it was Octopus). How we got there, I hope, might be helpful to other people who are thinking about starting their own company. The first point to make is that you don’t need to invent something totally new. It’s perfectly OK to take an existing idea and then try and execute it better. The second point to make is that it usually makes sense to start close to home. Our very limited experience when we set Octopus up was in the world of investments. While our two years of work experience didn’t count for much, it helped a little. The final point to make is, as Nike would say, to ‘just do it’. If you wake up thinking about setting up your own business, you should get on with it. Don’t do an MBA and don’t wait until you have more experience. You’ll learn ten times more quickly doing your own thing than you will working for someone else. #Business #Advice #Entrepreneur

A few weeks ago, I was given a book called ‘From Strength to Strength’. It’s about ‘finding success, happiness and purpose in the second half of life’. It puts life, and what we choose to do with it, into brilliant perspective. There are a few points worth pulling out I thought I’d share: The first is that our brains don’t work quite as well as we get old. Personally, I now have to write things down so that I don’t forget them. I’ve also forgotten to pay for parking in the station car park five times in the last six months. I get out of the car and then my mind – which is almost always far too busy – just disappears off somewhere else. Helpfully, the author addresses this brain deterioration point relatively early on. He explains that humans have two forms of intelligence. The first is ‘fluid intelligence’. This is our raw processing power. This peaks in our mid-thirties and then starts going downhill relatively quickly thereafter. The second is ‘crystallized intelligence’. This is our ability to use the stock of knowledge we’ve learned in the past. This form of intelligence doesn’t peak until we’re in our mid-sixties. It broadly means that when we’re young, we have raw smarts. When we’re old, we have wisdom. Or when we’re young we can generate lots of facts. But when we’re old we know what to do with them. The problem, sadly, is that most of us are in denial. We cling to our fluid intelligence even though we’re effectively fighting nature. We simply don’t want to recognise that we’re getting older and that our bodies and brains are changing. Because of this, most of us don’t change how we live our lives. We define our success in the same way that we did when we were younger. And that will never work. 60-year-old Simon won’t be able to do the same things as 40-year-old Simon. And if I try to the chances are that I will upset myself and others in the process. I always read books like this with one eye on Octopus. One of the questions I was asking myself on the way through is ‘at what age are entrepreneurs at their best?’. The author didn’t write about this, but I imagine the data would say it’s at around the age when the two intelligence curves cross. So when you still have lots of raw smarts but you have a pretty good idea of how to apply them. That happens in your early forties. I won’t spoil the book but for those of us past 40 – particularly those of us who find it difficult to switch off – it’s worth giving it a go.  

If you’re thinking about starting your own business, you don’t need some radical, game-changing idea. Simply borrow someone else’s idea and execute it better. Most established companies really aren’t that brilliant. They get a lot of things wrong and they’re generally struggling to change at the speed the world now moves at. This creates huge opportunities for faster, more agile start-ups. #StartUp #Entrepreneur #Advice

As some of you may or may not know, I achieved a life long dream of mine recently, to Row across the Atlantic as part of the World's Toughest Row, alongside Gus Knott, Jack Ogden and Matthew Bromham. We will be sharing the tales of our epic journey on the 16th of April at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), supporting Tusk, and very kindly sponsored by Natural High Safaris. If you would like to come and join, please get your tickets below!