Listening like a leader

Ryan Barry:

Hi, everybody. And welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan, and I'm always joined by the same person, and her name is Patricia Montesdeoca and she is dialed in today from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Hi, Patricia.

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Sunny Fort Lauderdale. Hey, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan:

I'm doing really good, thanks.

Patricia:

I'm so glad.

Ryan:

Do you know, I am drinking a very Boston beer right now.

Patricia:

Woo-hoo!

Ryan:

For those who don't work at Zappi, I record a video every Wednesday with somebody badass that I work with and chat to them about what they're working on, and I usually bring a beer. Today, I'm drinking a Wicked Easy lager, which is made by Sam Adams. And I wouldn't normally shout-out a beer, but I'm very proud to say they're a customer of ours, so I've got a lot of love for them. And I actually got a lot of love for this crisp, refreshing beer.

Patricia:

Well, I'll counter your American beer, very New England beer, with a lovely cup of PG Tips so that both of our sides of the pond are represented.

Ryan:

I dig it.

Patricia:

Yeah.

Ryan:

So we have two episodes to go here in season two.

Patricia:

We do.

Ryan:

We've had a lot of fun. We've been really pumped to see so many of you are listening, so thank you. As always, please help us spread the word. Give us a five-star rating, it does help. But today's interview is something that's actually long overdue for me personally. I'll get into this when we talk, but I've known Nick Graham for a long time. I've learned a lot from Nick Graham about a lot of things, and he is somebody who I've had the pleasure to do a lot of, quote, unquote innovation with.

Patricia:

Nice.

Ryan:

We've done some cool shit together.

Patricia:

Nice.

Ryan:

And I find him to be not only really good and competent in all the business things, but he's a lovely guy. So I'm excited to chat with him. Nick Graham is the head of insights globally for Mondelez International, which makes a lot of yummy things that we like to eat and snack on, my favorite of which is Oreos. I'm not going to lie to you, Patricia, 10:00 at night, nobody's looking, kids are asleep, we're having a few Oreos dipped in milk, not a big deal. A little guilty pleasure.

Patricia:

You know what? I saw a really cool hack for Oreos and milk the other day. You know those times when you just want to be distracted-

Ryan:

Yeah.

Patricia:

... so you watch somebody else's hacks? They take a fork and they stab Double Stuf Oreos, and then they use the fork to dip, and then they just kind of [smacking sound].

Ryan:

Wow.

Patricia:

I know it sounds gross, but I wanted some so bad, but Oreo still hasn't made a gluten-free version, which kills me.

Ryan:

Nick, you have to listen to your own episode now. I don't know if Nick's like me. Do you know, I've been on a bunch of other people's podcasts and I refuse to listen to it. 

Patricia:

You don't listen.

Ryan:

I don't want to listen to that. I have listened to this podcast once or twice because my executive coach was like, "You should listen because you'll be able to improve," and she was right. Nora is usually right. Today, we're going to talk to Nick about a bunch of stuff and I'm really excited to get into it, so if it's okay with you, let's just do this damn thing.

Patricia:

Do it.

Ryan:

I'm really excited about this conversation today, Nick. It's been a long time coming. We actually, you might not remember this, we were supposed to keynote a conference together, and then the world fell apart last year in New York. 

Nick Graham:

That was the biggest drama of 2020, that certainly was. The fact that we couldn’t keynote that conference. It was literally all that people could talk about last year.

Ryan:

You had a trip planned that you didn't get to do either, if I remember correctly.

Nick:

Yeah. We were meant to go on safari last year. It was actually meant to be our honeymoon and we moved it to this year, that's not happening, just so we're clear. So maybe in 2022, we'll get to do our birthday, honeymoon safari to Africa.

Ryan:

You just keep bundling things into it. So everybody, Nick's going to teach you a lot in the next few minutes, please just send him good vibes that he can actually go on his honeymoon, because it's going to be five years into his marriage and he still won't have gone.

But no, I'm really excited to talk to you for a variety of reasons. I've never said this to you, and I wanted to wait to say this until we were in public-

Nick:

Great. I love the fact that you're holding things over until we're live.

Ryan:

So there's this really interesting thing if you're not on the client side, that when you work in a space like insights, you work in market research, you work in consumer insights, but the truth is, you become an expert in what your company sells. Not all things consumer insights.

Nick:

Mm-hmm true.

Ryan:

So I worked in this industry for a very, very long time before joining Zappi, but I did segmentation, I did pricing, I did tracking. And I remember when I joined Zappi being like, "Ah, it's going to be easy. This company just makes everything more efficient." And then I remember going to Purchase, New York, and sitting with you and being terrified because I was like, "This man sitting across from me knows everything about advertising and I don't know shit." And I was like, "This is really embarrassing."

So the thing I'm going to say to you is, you taught me pretty much everything I know about advertising research. And now I would consider myself an expert, but I would like to thank you for-

Nick:

Well, I have to offer an apology to the entire marketing, research and advertising industries then, as a result.

Ryan:

Oh, we'll see. I think we might be onto something. But I do remembering leaving, because I had this thought in my car. I vividly remember it, on the Merritt Parkway being like, "I've got a lot to learn." Because the subsets of the types of insights work we do all have their own vocabulary, their own stakeholders, et cetera.

Nick:

I think it's true as well, I think what you learn as you go through this journey, as well as actually even when you think you understand the methodology, the context is always so important. The context of what it is actually you're testing.

And then particularly the category, the way that the business operates. I've done a whole host of both consulting and client side jobs over the last 20 something years, and one thing I've learned is you can't be arrogant and assume you know everything, because the minute you do that, actually you discover you really don't. You really don't, or you don't know it in that context.

So I think remaining curious and humble about what you really know. Bringing your expertise, but assume that the context is always going to be so different, either because the world is changing or because what it is you're doing is quite different, that the rules you think you have in your head might not really apply in this situation.

Ryan:

It's a really important point. Have you read any of Adam Grant's stuff? His whole mission right now is to get more people to think like scientists? Have you read on any of his stuff?

Nick:

I haven't, no. But I will add it to my massive bookshelf here, which is just groaning under the weight of marketing and advertising and research books.

Ryan:

There's so many.

Nick:

Some of which I've actually read as well.

Ryan:

Yeah, the truth is, most business books, they're 10-page thesis statements that a publisher made that turn into 200 pages. So if you can find the right 10 pages, you'll officially get through it.

The reason I bring up Adam Grant is this notion of knowing what you don't know, is such a gift if you're willing to embrace it. So I'd love to stay there for a minute. So your last several years, I mean so Nick's been in his role for 27 years. He just turned 30 and Happy Birthday, Nick.

Nick:

Thanks.

Ryan:

So you went from a consultancy called Clear, to a global role at Pepsi, to a key role and a key P&L at Pepsi, now to a global leadership role. Take us through some of the things you've had to learn along the way, but also things you've had to unlearn, because I think it's a really interesting set of context changes that you've gone through in your career and your journey.

Nick:

Yeah, I think a big part of it is reacting to what we were talking about before, is just being willing to challenge yourself along the way. None of the changes that I've made have been for any other reason apart from my desire to learn and to challenge myself. So when I moved from the world of consulting, I'd done that for 10, 12 years. And I really enjoyed the consulting side. I liked the breadth of work that we did.

But the thing that always slightly frustrated me is that you were divorced from the action. You were divorced from the briefing and you were divorced from the action. So when I was looking to make a move, when I was ready, I sort of followed my nose at what I felt uncomfortable about, where I felt frustrated, where I felt like I wanted to lean in a little bit more. And the bit that I really wanted to lean in on were understanding, how do you even get to a brief? How do you end up going to a consulting agency like Clear, and how do you even define the problem that you're trying to solve?

And often what I found when I was on the consulting side was, in my humble opinion, at the time, the problem wasn't the right problem. Often the problem you were given was a very specific, maybe somewhat myopic version of what the actual issue was. You’re always under the gun to quickly, "Let's go, let's get moving. Let's get moving." And to me the most important part of a consulting project was always really taking a step back and defining, "What's the real brief here? What are we really trying to do. What would success look like?"

And sometimes through that, you actually discovered that it was a completely different problem that you were really trying to solve for. And then at the other end of the journey, as a consultant, you go through this great project, you get so enmeshed in the business and in the brands and the consumer, and then you have to hand it over.

You never really understand why something did or didn't work, in reality. And for me, I've always gotten a lot of, I guess a lot of validation, a lot of enjoyment out of actually seeing the work that I've done land in the marketplace, right?

There are still innovations and creative work that I love pointing out to anyone who will listen, literally, "I did that. I was involved in that." It's literally the only thing that my mom knows that I do. 

So when I was thinking, having done consulting for a dozen years, when I was thinking about really what I wanted to do next, it was funny. Client side was never immediately on my radar. The more I thought about what I was struggling with or frustrated with or where I thought my challenges were, the more it just became, it was obviously the next step. And it was interesting actually, the catalyst to it all, was Pepsi had been one of my clients when I was at Clear.

And actually in an interviewing period, I did some consulting work directly with the Quaker team in Chicago, and it just was so much fun. It was so much fun really being part of a team, really seeing all of the things I just talked about, up close. And I just realized, a bit like we were talking about before flipped around, is I didn't know anything. I thought I knew all these things. I thought I knew all these things about architecture and about positioning and about strategy and I realized I didn't know anything.

Because again, I had no context of how these decisions were being made. My knowledge was all academic. It was academic and learned through consulting projects which are somewhat exercises in academia, because you're not actually having to put them into practice.

Ryan:

Right.

Nick:

We were doing some brand architecture work on Quaker and I remember I had to go and present this to the global team and all the business units, and the questions I got was like, "Wow." It was the most terrifying and the most energizing experience, because I realized that all the questions I was being asked, I'd never really thought about them properly.

I'd never really thought about them from the lens of some of the internal clients, because I just didn't have that experience. So to me, that was the aha moment of this is really what I need to do next, because this is the bit that I just don't understand. I think, to be honest, that's kind of been true of every single shift that I've made. At some point in the journey, usually for me, after about a three to four-year cycle, you sort of reach that plateau. A good plateau, but a plateau where you feel like you know what you're doing.

I always feel like I start to search for what are the things that make me feel uncomfortable? What are the things that I don't really know? Where have I still got to learn? And that's usually what then drives my next jump, I guess. 

Ryan:

That's really interesting. It's constant learning and leaving your comfort zone and a really good articulation of it. I can totally resonate.

All right, so what's the thing you're wanting to learn now? What is the comfort zone point? What is the thing? What's the comfort zone push?

Nick:

Well, I think you're right. I've never been motivated by the status piece. That's not what interests me. It's actually it's what's the challenge. When I went from the global role at Pepsi to the business unit role, it was really motivated by... I just wanted to get my hands on the business. I'd seen it again, from a distance. I'd built global strategy, I'd built global capabilities, but I wanted to actually see, how do you even translate that into the business unit? Into the day-to-day? And I learned so much through that journey of how you actually make an impact every single day from strategy through to very tactical execution in the business and the power that insights can really bring.

What became obvious to me, I think, in the last year was how, as you were doing the day-to-day, how I was sort of realizing that there were these big questions that kept coming up, particularly from my team about, "Well, what's the future of this team going to be with big data, with data and analytics teams being built at PepsiCo and lots of big corporates? With shifts in the way we're doing marketing, much more data driven marketing."

All these existential questions about the future of the function and the future of the industry, and the reality is in a business unit role you just don't have the mental capacity to think about those things, but they're so critically important. And the reality is, they do matter so much because they shape how you think about who you're trying to recruit, the capabilities you're trying to build, the tools, the partners that you actually need to work with, but you're so busy delivering against the business.

I realized three to four years into my last job at Pepsi, which is, I loved the adrenaline rush of being in the business. But I began to realize that the bits that I was really excited about and uncomfortable about was how do we really take a step back and think about, "What is this team for? What's it going to be for in five years time? In 10 years time? What's the capabilities and the skills that it really needs to be successful in future?"

So that was really what drove me to this next role at Mondelez is, when they first came to me, I honestly thought for a moment, I honestly thought they must have been reading my mind, because literally the brief they gave me was, I was like, "Wow, no one has ever articulated so brilliantly and at exactly the opportune moment, exactly what the next challenge is that I want to do."

Ryan:

I love it. All right. So I want to unpack a few things about your transition. I've never heard anybody articulate the tension between global and local as you just did in this reflection, because I remember when you were at Global Beverages and we were talking about strategy a lot, capability, where the world's going. 

And you're right. If you're in a business unit, you are focused on that month, that big customer.

Nick:

Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Ryan:

How do you connect, and obviously this is going to be a huge challenge for you in your new role, how do you pull out and synthesize the great things that happen organically on the ground and get those people at the right times to pick their head up? Because I've always articulated it this way, that the people delivering insights day-to-day, can't think about the insights operation.

Nick:

Right, yeah.

Ryan:

That creates a huge tension, because then how do you scale and synthesize? And so let's just talk about this for a minute, because this is one of the biggest challenges in our whole industry.

Nick:

Yeah. It's a good question, and again, it's really obvious in big, global companies, but it happens in every function, it happens in every slice of company which is, whoever is in the day-to-day business, inevitably it's really difficult to lift your head above the parapet and see, "What's the bigger question? What's the bigger operational functional existential question that we're trying to deal with here, because I'm just literally trying to get through the next month, get through the next year."

And I think, to be fair, that is exactly what you should do in a business unit. That's really what you're trying to do. You're trying to help drive the business forward every single day.

I think it's interesting, over the last whatever it's been, two, three months that I've been at Mondelez, what you see is, while obviously the folks in the business units are really focused on the day-to-day, their incredible brilliance as you sort of said, that's happening organically through the work that they're doing.

Ryan:

Yes, right.

Nick:

The pilots that they're doing on new ways of doing forecasting, or the new tools or new vendors that they're using. One of the things that's been really powerful and really helpful just during the transition is, is helping step back from the thing that they've done to understand what was the driving force behind it? What's the fundamental motivational problem to solve that they're trying to get at?

And what I've been trying to do with the rest of the global team is synthesize what are the big problems to solve. Though sometimes we're not great at articulating because we're so quick to go into the solutions. And how can we ladder those up and collectively solve those bigger problems.

So rather than the global team coming down and saying, from on high, "These are the solutions to your problems. And we're going to make you faster, bigger, better, stronger, whatever it be," actually listening and translating what the business units are already doing, and maybe helping them ladder it up a little bit, but helping translate that into the global transformation agenda, because to me I think business units feel and see the white heat of the transformation, day-to-day, they're just not always able to stop and articulate it and help us synthesize it back into a bigger agenda.

But their experiencing it, it's just we need to be able to translate it back and structure it into, "Okay, across all the business units. Here are the big problems to solve, here are the ones that we share. Here are the ones that are more unique to a particular set of business units." And then let's collectively work at how we really solve for these.

But I think it's just that translation, that bridging, that I think is really important.

Ryan:

Yeah, it's like so few people get at actual problem definition. I think you had said this reflecting on your experience at Clear where it's like, "Are we really trying to solve that problem? Or, is there a more systemic problem?" And I could see it. If you're running hard at launching Bubly, that's what you're doing. There's no other thing you're trying to do but get that game-changing seltzer beverage in the market. I'm only using that as an example because you did it and it was a brilliant launch. It really is, by the way, I just drink too much of it now.

The thing I want, because I want to go into this journey with you of learning and listening with your regions, helping them understand. So now that you're out of a regional P&L chair, let's assume half this audience isn't. What do you know now, 30 days removed from being that close to the day-to-day that you wish you knew then in terms of how to better connect with the people in roles like you're in, your team? People you are actually trying to curate and synthesize the best practices.

Nick:

In a way it's interesting, because having been in a global role at Pepsi and then into the P&L business unit role, I've seen both sides of the fence and PepsiCo, much like Mondelez, much like lots of global businesses, has been through its own journey of globally driven, regionally driven, business unit driven, back and forth.

The reality is, I mean, there is... News flash, there is no perfect model and no perfect structure that's going to resolve all of those issues. We all know that. So finding the right balance between the folks on the ground, just as in my past job, where you are delivering day-to-day. You know the business and you know the business problems better than anybody else. It's difficult to sometimes see above that, because you're just trying to deliver under such urgency.

But buried in that are all the problems that you need to solve. It's just you just need to find a moment sometimes, and a partner to help you surface those back up. Prior to my last role, when I was in the global team at Pepsi, I think sometimes, there's a temptation for folks in global roles to think they know the answer, or that they are in the ivory tower of best practice.

What I've seen having been in the business unit role, and having seen what I've seen at Mondelez is, there's incredible work already happening in the business. And they're already solving problems.

Ryan:

Right.

Nick:

It's not like they need global in many respects to solve some of the problems. And that's the right way. Some of my business units are so far advanced, and they should keep moving, because they have the resources, they have the capabilities to keep moving.

I think the biggest shift I saw at Pepsi and I think is the mentality I'm trying to bring to this role, is the first thing global needs to do is listen and understand what is really happening, and just simply ask, "What's the best way that I can help?" Ask that directly, but also try and infer that from listening to the business unit and hearing what actually is going on. What are your struggles? What are the things you wish you could get to that you just can't get to? What's keeping you awake at night?

I know, again from my last job, when people ask me that, I would talk about the day-to-day business but also, I've got all these bigger concerns about where we're trying to go as a function, and I think part of global's job then is to listen to that and tease it out and work out what are the things it can really help with?

Some of them are going to be short term wins. Some of them are going to be co-creating to just help scale up things that the BU are doing or build things that the business units need to build. And sometimes they're going to be things that the central global team needs to go off and spend months, years maybe, building on behalf of all the business units. It's the important but not urgent stuff. The stuff that is never, ever going to be burning on fire, until it's on fire.

But the global team needs to get the right balance between those things, because if you only focus on the important not urgent, everybody's going to go, "Well, what does global do? How are they actually helping drive the business?"

Ryan:

What is the value here? Right.

Nick:

Right. So if you could just find the right balance between those important urgent things that you can… but don't interfere if you don't need to interfere. If it's just like, "I just need some oversight so I can work out how I can lift and shift this across this unit." That's great.

But there are times, particularly with some of the smaller business units, where they actually really need global help, because they don't have the resources, they don't have the capacity or the capability or they're desperately looking for, "I need a much better way to do X." And they want the global team's perspective and help and, "Oh, have you thought about this vendor, or have you thought about this approach?"

So there's no one size fits all. When I say, "Global needs to ask how I can help?" To each individual business unit and stakeholder. It's going to be lots of different answers. So you need to work out what's your strategy to help different clusters of business units solve their problems, while also thinking about, "Is there then a bigger set of things that sit above the day-to-day that the global team can be working on for the longer term health of the function and the business?"

Ryan:

Yeah, so there's an overall synthesis at a one-to-one level that you articulate.

So talk a little bit more about this. So you've spent time with your direct team which is a global team. You've spent time with the regional insights teams and it seems like to me your goal is learning problems with the idea of saying, "Where do I have short term wins?" but also synthesizing.

So take us through a little bit more of what are some of the stakeholders that you've gone through on this journey. You're now 60-so days into this new role, what are some of the other process steps?

Nick:

So the first couple of weeks, I spent a lot of time with my direct team and with my direct peers. So the global marketing organization, my direct reports to just understand the lay of the land. It's funny, I remember when I first came in, somebody asked me to describe, I think it was a week in or something to my job. And I said, "It's a bit like watching your favorite move in a foreign language with no subtitles," because you kind of know the plot. This isn't my first time in an insights organization in a global company. It's not that the themes or the plot line are that different, but I have no idea what people are talking about half the time.

Ryan:

Interesting.

Nick:

So it’s just understanding the language people use and I learnt very quickly that words, even simple words, don't mean the same. So I was like, "Wait, so when you say that, you actually mean this?" So my first week with a close knit team is just understanding what's on the agenda, what matters, what's going on? Just trying to sort through the swirl. And actually one thing I did is, I created for myself just this massive mind map. And as I met people, particularly in the first couple of weeks, I just scribbled on problems that I'd heard or solutions that I heard, just interesting nuggets I didn't know what to do with.

…Words that I used to be careful of, because they had different meaning in Mondelez or people had a bad experience with certain words. Okay, so it was like, "Okay, I'll just make a note of that." Because I found it really difficult in those first few weeks to just try and make sense of it and sort of synthesize it, and I'm a very visual thinker. So it was a really helpful way for me... I remember two or three weeks in, I was like, "Actually this is a really helpful way for me to start to think about what are the big buckets of problems I'm trying to solve for. Or, there's a whole set of ideas that people have of things we could do. How does that connect together?"

So it was just a really helpful way for me to do that. And then when I first started, I was literally just taking notes on my laptop and very quickly it just becomes too overwhelming, because it becomes very linear. Whereas in fact, I think the really, really powerful thing is when I started to do that, I saw all of the connections and I saw all of the themes that were coming up again and again and again, by doing that.

Then I think the second set of folks that I met were in the business units, right. So the insights and analytics leaders in the business units, the marketing leaders, the business leaders. So, because Mondelez is a very local first, but not local only mindset, as we said, really understanding what the business problems are that you're trying to solve for and hearing it directly from them, was incredibly important.

And that's where I could start to see where some of the themes were. Talking to the business leaders, some of the same asks kept coming up again and again. Both like, "Hey, this is what I want in terms of training capability for the team, but these are the tools and capabilities that I need in order to be able to drive the business, or the thing that I'm frustrated with right now that I can't do."

Then actually one of the things that was most helpful though, that it wasn't originally on my onboarding schedule, I really wanted to talk to my cross-functional partners, or indeed, including people who'd never really worked with the insights and analytics team before. 

Ryan:

Give me an example of a few of those, Nick.

Nick:

So that would be like, I mean obviously our finance team, we worked closely with. And our IT team. But people like our communications team. And we hadn't had as much connectivity I think, in the past with our communications team and our investor relations team. But a lot of the questions that they're dealing with have a consumer/shopper/insights element to them, because shareholders or investors or journalists are asking questions about, particularly right now, in the COVID, post-COVID world is like, "How are consumers reacting? How are they dealing with things?"

But what was interesting is, by asking to speak to some of those cross-functionals, again what you can see is there were bigger enterprise questions, and bigger enterprise problems to solve. So that to me, it was almost a series of concentric circles, in terms of the team you're working very closely with, day-to-day. The business unit teams who are very closely in as well, but you're not working with every single day. And then somewhere the more tangential functions, where your more periodic relationships or very limited relationships, where you're actually like "Actually there are bigger questions we can solve and bigger things we can work on together, maybe on a less frequent basis, but you can start to see the shape of the agenda start to build out."

Ryan:

So, I've said this about you behind your back. If someone asked me to describe an incredible listener, I say, "You should meet Nick Graham." And I've thought this about you for a long time, because you always listen to understand. And it's something I've learned from you, actually. And you just articulated it.

So vocabulary's different from company to company. Hot topics, I won't use the word politics to describe, but hot topics are different and they have different connotations and different teams are motivated in different ways and I think so often, Nick, people take new roles and they're like, "Oh, new t-shirt, same song, I got it."

And that step that you've given yourself to let your neurons connect all these points, I bet you you're now ready to run fast with your agenda, pretty clear in that big bunch of pieces of paper. But I feel like so many people, Nick, feel like when they start a job, they have to make impact quickly, and I don't care if you're a 300 person company like mine, a big, big company like yours, each company deserves to be treated as its unique thing, before you simplify the experience.

Nick:

Completely. Partly because it is, right?

Ryan:

It is different.

Nick:

One of the things that was clear to me, again, going back to that analogy, it's tempting to think, and we talked about this right at the beginning of the podcast, you think you know things, because superficially they seem very similar, right?

Ryan:

Yes.

Nick:

If people raised a problem they would go, "Oh yes, I've heard this problem before." But the important thing is you dig into really understanding the context again, behind it. Because sometimes you'd hear, "Oh, I need a better way of forecasting, X, Y, Z." I'm like "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I heard that."

But unless you ask the question and like, "What's going wrong with it today and how does it get used here?" Your brain immediately goes, as you said, to the linear patterns you've already referred to, "Oh yeah, I've seen how this gets used." And actually, sometimes I would hear, I would ask those questions and you would actually realize it's a completely different problem. 

You've just got to pause and allow yourself that time to really ask the questions and really interrogate and push yourself to make sure that you're not jumping to just solve the last job that you worked in, right?

Ryan:

Exactly.

Nick:

You're not just trying to solve those issues.

Ryan:

And there's all these examples. I'm the same way, I'm an action oriented person, but when you learn to listen first, you actually do go faster. So I'll tell you a quick story. So I just hired a new head of operations. She came from the finance world, knows nothing about research. Now she knows a lot about research. And I told the whole ops team when she joined, her name's Alice, Alice isn't available for 45 days. 

Alice, all of a sudden has almost wrapped up her listening tour, understands the vocabulary and is like, and the assertions she was making, I was like, "Wow, that's pretty good," because she gave herself that opportunity to learn.

I mean how many times, your point about forecasting, we all nod our heads. Actually, let's pick on a buzzword, Nick. AI, we all know what that means, right?

Nick:

Mm-hmm.

Ryan:

We all know what that means and how we want to apply it and so we nod our heads, but all actually means something different. So it's really important.

Nick:

And so I think a good one is things like transformation. So what do you mean by transformation? So, we talked about transforming the insights function, but that means different things to different people. So one of the biggest questions I asked people was, "Just tell me what does that look like? What does that mean to you? What does that feel like? Let's say five years from now we have successfully transformed this function, made it really future proof, fully ready for 2030, how do you know? How will you see the difference?"

And that's been one of the most instructive questions to ask people because then you get a sense of we don't all mean exactly the same thing. There were definitely some connectivity there, there's some big themes. Look, I studied French and History at university, so language and context are so important to me.

To me, one of the most important things is, just what you said about words is, listen to the words people use and the things they do and don't say, and just allow them to speak. Because sometimes, I have a terrible issue which I'll fill the gap in conversation. If somebody just leaves a gap, I'll be like, "Oh, I have to jump in here to fill the space." But it's just sometimes leaving some space and allowing people to find their words, or just ask them to explain a little bit more.

I mean one of the pleasures in a way of being new is, you can just ask lots of questions and allow people to talk. And sometimes it's the first time they've even been asked to really articulate some of this stuff, as well, right? So it's actually hopefully for them, a really empowering experience as well, but also for you, you come away going, "Oh, actually I have a much clearer understanding of what we mean by these words now, than I did before."

Ryan:

It's so true. For everyone of you who's listening to this who leads people, if you remember nothing else, remember what Nick just said. Give people time to think, give them time to articulate what they actually want to say, because then you'll actually understand how to lead them.

All right. So, you asked everybody at Mondelez, my last question is going to ask you, what does transforming insights mean in a world where analytics and consumer data come together, why data, what data, whatever buzzwords you want to associate. What does it mean to you, Nick? And I will not finish your sentence for you.

Nick:

So, we could just leave a really awkward gap here, where I just wait to see which of us fills it, right? So I think it's an evolving... I'm not going to answer this perfectly because it's still an evolving journey, I think, right? And I think what's clear to me, at least, is that there's a really powerful role for insights and analytics in the future, it's a bit of a more messy and blurry role than I think the role that it used to play in organizations.

So what I mean by that is, there was a time if you went back, let's say, even the '70s or '80s, when the consumer insights team, analytics team was the owner of data in an organization, and the consumer voice, and their job was to bring data and insight to the organization.

I think the reality is, because of big data, because of data strategy, data architecture, all of the stuff that... Like data is the new gold. It's the new oil. So the way that data is fundamentally reshaping and driving the entire enterprise forward is… insights needs to be much more than, and can't be just the owner of data anymore. Because insights doesn't own data, data is owned by everybody.

And actually you need everyone to be able to own and access and handle and work with data, because first of all, that will make the business much smarter and more intelligent and be able to move faster. But also because it's just not feasible that insights and analytics can manage the huge amount of data anymore.

And again, you need to be able to integrate that data and connect it across. So you're going to need a really strong partnership with the IT team, the data and analytics team, and understand your roles relative to one another, in collecting that data, cleaning that data and connecting that data and making it accessible to the business.

To me, the role that insights needs to play then in the future world, if you like, is to be, particularly for the strategy/marketing/sales organization, part of the organization, is, how do we help make meaning from that data? Because one thing that scares me a little bit is when we talk about the future of insights and analytics as, well there's going to be all this data, AI's going to solve it, and data science is going to solve it, and all of these incredible technologies are going to solve it.

And sure, they will make managing the data and making the data useful much easier, but to me, the key piece for insights and analytics is, how do we make meaning out of that data for the business? How do we make it useful and meaningful for the business? And I think that's the role that I&A needs to pivot into, is not worrying about owning the data, but how to be the absolute experts in making meaning from that data.

One that means is a couple of things: one is, I think, it means getting comfortable connecting data sources together and extracting insight from the blurry, messy middle where the data sources meet. So where shopper data meets consumer data, where big data meets empathy. To me, it's the intersections of all of those data, and extracting the insight and the meaning from that. That's going to be the pivotal point at which insights needs to play, which is it needs to get in the middle of all of that, and really pull out the powerful insights for the organization from there.

So it's going to look a little messier in some respects because they're not going to be the simple structures and simple silos and simple clear roles in some respects for the team that it used to play, but I actually think insights can then play potentially an even more powerful role in the future, because in this tsunami of data that we're going to have to deal with, it's not how much data you have, it's what you do with the data, and how you extract meaning from the data.

I think that's the bit that insights and analytics needs to really focus on is, how can I be the absolute experts at helping make meaning of this data, as quickly as possible for the business so it can act on it.

Ryan:

So my friends, we're out of time. We could do another hour just unpacking that absolutely awesome description of the future of insights. I'm going to plus one what Nick said and in about a year, I'm going to invite Nick to come back on so he can talk about his progress because I'm excited to watch this journey.

Nick, you've taught us a lot. Thank you for being so gracious with your time and your perspective. Everybody who's listened, you can send Nick a note to say thank you to him for dropping some knowledge on us. But Nick, thanks so much for your time. It was a lot of fun, as always.

Nick:

It was great hanging out with you and I've learnt so much about myself from having you tell me things you've never told me.

Ryan:

Yes you taught me everything I know about advertising and when somebody asks me, "Who's the best listener in the world?" I think of you. So thank you for that.

Nick:

Thank you. I will take that away with me.

Ryan:

That's it. All right, everybody. Thank you.

Ryan:

Patricia.

Patricia:

Yes, Ryan?

Ryan:

I just had a lot of fun talking to Nick.

Patricia:

That was so much fun to listen to.

Ryan:

I made the mistake of asking him a question when we were basically at time, so I'm pretty sure he had to miss or be late to his next meeting, so thank you, Nick, for being late to your next meeting.

Patricia:

Sorry not sorry.

Ryan:

I just had to ask.

Patricia:

Sorry not sorry.

Ryan:

I'm not going to let him tell me he asked everybody else what they think about the future of insights and not get his opinion, you know what I mean? We're going to get that info.

Patricia:

Oh yeah.

Ryan:

So what'd you think, Patricia? What are your takeaways?

Patricia:

You've talked about Nick so many times in conversations, you bring him up, you mention him, you paraphrase him, you hold him up as an example, so listening to this chat, it felt like I was re-meeting or actually getting to meet somebody I already kind of knew. So it felt almost intimate. I really liked it. I really enjoyed it. I've got six amazing takeaways from this chat, and they just kind of fell together really easily in my brain. I don't know if Nick's going to mind, but my summary is going to be in a different order from what you and he chatted, right? Because I saw it in a different way in my brain. So the whole thing, the whole chat with him, you wanted to talk about new roles and how to get into a new insights role. And it's all about how any of us can change from one role to the other, so that's how I'm going to do it.

Trust me, I'm not going anywhere, but I did feel a kinship when I went to change roles from my previous corporate role to Zappi, so I was feeling identified. So the first thing is he said, "How do you decide when it's time to move somewhere else?" And he's like, "Be willing to challenge yourself. Be willing to consider what is your comfort zone and what is not your comfort zone and push towards your outside, not the inside of your comfort zone. Lean away from your comfort zone so that you'll find out what makes you uncomfortable and go there. Don't stay in your comfort zone, go learn something new, go find more adrenaline." I loved that.

So then he goes, "Okay, once you do that and you figure out where you want to go, let's just fast forward and you've gone through the interviews and you're in your new role." Second point, how to enter a new role successfully. He said, "Enter humble." End of sentence.

Ryan:

He's good.

Patricia:

Oh my God, just enter humble. Then he went on to explain what that actually means because everybody says, "Well, be humble," but he explained it. He said you may have many years of experience, but experience does not mean you know anything. Just because you have experience doesn't mean you know shit, because you may know everything in your past, but you have a new job, new coworkers, new issues, new objectives, new problems, new vocabulary, new priorities. You're in a different context, dude, so you know nothing. You've got experience that's going to help you through, but you know nothing, and understand that.

Number three, it's a journey. Map it. Create a mind map. I love mind maps. So he said, create a mind map to connect and separate what needs to be connected and separated, because some items you think they should belong together and they don't, and some items you think they belong separate and they're together. So in order to figure out which is which and who's who, create this mind map so that you kind of understand who's who. He said start with the groups of people. The first one is your posse, the people you're with every day. Those are clear. The second set of folks. which I love how he calls them folks, those are your business units. Those are the people that you kind of share, marketing leaders or business leaders. They're not the local ones, but they're the next one. But you have to understand that you have to think not only local first, but not local only. So he talked about that.

Ryan:

I love that quote.

Patricia:

Oh, it was great. It was the second group of folks, that's your second circle. The third circle, winding in in a little bit, a third set of folks are those people that your role is indirectly aligned to, but still related to. That's the cross-functional. Those are your consumers. That's perhaps the finance team. And then those three sets of concentric circles work together very closely day to day, but you have a fourth set that you cannot eliminate. You cannot ignore. Those are the people you never deal with, but you're successful because of them. Never forget those.

And he didn't say it directly, but he immediately put into my mind, oh man, that's so important to know who those people are, and to make sure that you know what those four circles share and what they don't share. And so he talked about all those things and I thought it was amazing listening to each of those people. Because that's the one word, if I had to do word counts, that's the one word that was said most during this podcast, "Listen. Truly listen." Then he said when you figure that all out, your four concentric circles, you're going to find that number four, there's a tension. There is always a tension. Let me repeat that. There will always be a tension between global and local. It's forever present. And it's not a bad thing. Going into this journey of your new job and understanding that you have to listen and listen and listen because you know shit is going to help you understand the reality of the positive tension or the negative tension between global and local.

But you need to see beyond that. And he said, this is number five, the real issue is not the tension between global and local. It's a bigger problem. The bigger problem is, how do you get people to do the business as usual and have their heads down and produce and be effective and efficient? And at the same time when they're synthesizing, go and scale. The two things are counterproductive and that's the true issue. I was just floored by that. Just floored. Nobody, and I'm very old, lots of experience. No shit, but I have lots of experience. I've never heard it phrased that way. The problem isn't global versus local, it's BAU, business as usual versus strategic scale and thinking bigger picture. And he said that the only way to decide what is similar and what is different in those four groups of people is by listening to these sorts of problems, and that's how he figured that out. By listening so that he could understand the global-local interaction. I thought that was ridiculously beautiful.

And then he brought it all together with the question that you asked when he was already late for his last meeting is to give him an example. So that's my number six, and it was data. So when he said transformation, of course, I'm customer transformation, so my ears perked up. And so he starts talking about how different and how similar transformation is, and then he talked about data. And he went back 50, 60 years and he said, let's think about data and transforming. What was data? The word data hasn't changed, right? We know that if we opened the dictionary 50 years ago and we opened it today, the word data means the same thing. And transformation probably reads the same too, but can you think of anything that's more different than data 50, 60 years ago and data today?

His example was ridiculously simple and ridiculously huge for me because he talked about the role of insights being so different because insights used to own data and used to own the transformation of data, and both data and transformation have changed, and therefore it's ridiculous to assume that insights should stay the same. So he talked about that journey and how even if you don't leave the company you're in, your job is changing every day because life changes. And so he walked us through the journey of data and transformation throughout the last 50 years on how it was messy and how we have to get used to the messy, and he did that all showing us how to listen, how to think about the two things, business as usual and global strategy, and going larger, going bigger, and still understanding that evolution, it's all an evolving journey, and you have to be comfortable with the discomfort. I loved it. Absolutely loved it.

Ryan:

That's a great summary, Patricia. And I feel like the irony of the conversation with Nick and your summary is that all those things are exactly why customer-centric organizations win. Because you can't just rest on your laurels with the customer, you need to say, "Oh, they need something new. Their needs have changed." They've gone to a different TV station, they're shopping somewhere else, or whatever it is.

Patricia:

Yep.

Ryan:

And so that tension exists everywhere, and that's why there's a tension between global and local, because it doesn't matter what somebody in Boston says, the person in Turkey is more important for that company's success. So the truly customer-centric companies of the world win. Shocker. I could have talked to Nick for another two hours, by the way. I really enjoyed that. 

So next episode, we've got a real special guest on this podcast. You might know her. Her name is Patricia Montesdeoca. She is the SVP of customer transformation at Zappi and the esteemed cohost of the Inside Insights podcast, which is also powered by Zappi. I couldn't think of a better way to wrap up season two than to talk to you Patricia, about your journey.

We’re going to talk about how you spent the majority of your career working in big business. And then you're still a young lady, but you've been in business for a while. You said, "You know what? I'm going to go join a startup. I'm going to go join a startup and try something new." And I want to talk to you in a lot of detail about your from-to, and how you see and draw parallels between that journey and what you see our customers struggle with.

Just to give you a little teaser, Patricia works with insights departments for a living to help them implement digital, more efficient, always on ways of working using Zappi's platform and other systems. So she's working with some of the biggest companies in the world to do this. Name a few of your customers quickly. Just give us three.

Patricia:

Well, let's just start with Pepsi and Colgate and McDonald's and IBM and 3M… Can we go on? Should we continue?

Ryan:

Yeah. We're very fortunate to work with some incredible companies. Patricia's team leads the implementation for all of them. I can't wait to talk to you, Patricia. We are getting ready to wrap up season two, which we're really excited about, because season three, we're going to be back for more. Patricia and I have been signed on the dotted line for season three.

Patricia:

Yes.

Ryan:

So we're excited to hear from you. If you want to engage us at all, we want to talk to you. We want to meet new people. We want to talk about abstract things, current events, things that are important to the world and the industry. Hit us up on LinkedIn. Hit Kelsey up at insideinsights@sappistore.com. And do you know, folks listening who are still here, Kelsey's going to Aruba next week? She deserves it. Kelsey is the producer for the podcast.

Patricia:

Oh yeah.

Ryan:

She does a great job, and she's going to Aruba next week. So that's amazing. Thank you all for listening. Patricia, thank you as always doing a great job with the summary, and we'll hear from everybody in ... well, you'll hear from us really, in a couple weeks, so thank you.

Patricia:

Thank you. Bye.