Why insights leaders should think like four-year-olds

Ryan Barry:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan and I'm joined as always by Patricia Montesdeoca, my co-host and our lovely producer, Kelsey. What's up ladies?

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hey dude. How's it going?

Ryan:

Doing good. Doing good. As I was telling you guys, we got a new puppy here at our house. It's really fun. New beginnings. It's a beautiful thing. We have a puppy named Hank and I am on video, but he's not here, so I can't show everybody, so when we launch this episode, I will do a little social share of old Hank. But yeah, everything's good.

Patricia:

Oh, you should show people.

Ryan:

Springs breaking here in Boston. I will, I will. He's sleeping. Let the little nugget sleep, you know?

Patricia:

Okay.

Ryan:

Today, we have a fun episode. It's timely because... Well, I always like to drink beer, but spring's here in Boston. It's officially spring, which means we have some nice days and then it reminds us that we live in New England, because there's some cold days like today. I'm really looking forward to the warmer weather and new beginnings and the leaves coming back and hopefully some peace and love in the world. Today we're going to talk to somebody who I have a lot of respect and admiration for. I remember meeting this person when Zappi was a baby and everybody thought we were crazy, except for this person. Turns out crazy is cool these days. 

So Tony Costella is who we're interviewing today. He is the global head of insights for Heineken. He's had an incredible career working for some of the biggest brands in the world, in both global and local roles. I wanted him to share his story about insights, transformation and digitization, but the truth is, as we'll get into, Tony brought more than that to this conversation that we're going to have. He's an incredible leader. He's somebody who I've shared ideas with a few times and I'm really excited for you to get the blessing of Tony Costella unfiltered. So enough of me, let's get to the conversation my friends.

Patricia:

Let's do it.

Ryan:

Tony Costella, thank you so much for making the time. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Tony Costella:

Thanks, good to be here.

Ryan:

It's a pleasure, and we're recording this on a Friday and we have very different afternoons ahead of us. Tony's going out to dinner with his daughter for her birthday, and I'm going to shovel 18 inches of snow that we're going to get this afternoon. Have a glass of wine for me.

Tony:

Or a beer.

Ryan:

Yeah, or a few. A few beers would be good. We're going to talk about a lot today and I'm really excited. I wanted to share this with you. I was in Jamaica a few weeks ago and I'm pretty sure they've changed their national beer to Heineken. I don't know if your sales data shows that. But I was in Jamaica a few years ago and I only saw Red Stripe and now it was pretty ubiquitous on the tap, which was nice. So I enjoyed several...

Tony:

We're winning either way, Red Stripe is one of our beers as well.

Ryan:

That's right, you're in my belly regardless. We'll talk a lot about some of your work at Heineken. You're running global insights at Heineken, but you've had an incredible journey in your career. I had the pleasure of getting to meet you in Amsterdam when Zappi was a baby, when you were at Reckitt and honestly to this day, I still attribute a lot of where we've got to, to those early conversations that we were having.

I want to publicly thank you for everything that you've done for Zappi, just to push us to be better. But if you don't mind to start our chat, Tony, you started your career in Procter & Gamble. Then you were at MasterCard, then you were at Reckitt and then now you're at Heineken. There's a lot of similarities, incredibly iconic businesses, but I'm sure there's been key learning and challenges that you've had to overcome in each of those steps that have led you to where you are. So instead of just doing the “my story,” could you reflect on your journey for us and tell us some of the learnings and iterations in your career that got you to where you are today?

Tony:

Sure. I'm one of those rare characters who actually from a very early age, decided I wanted to be in insights. So all of my career has been in insights. I did my internship at university at Proctor in the... It was called their CMK, consumer market knowledge, function and knew immediately that that was where I wanted to have my career.

So I joined them after university and what a fantastic place to be, especially at the start of my career. In 10 years there, I worked for them in the UK then in Belgium in the European business, then in Singapore on APAC, Asia Pacific, and then back to Europe, but on a global business.

So getting broader scope across very different categories, but what that really taught me, for 10 years, I really got the hard skills of research. And then as my scope grew, of business, so I really learned the rules, and what a great place to learn the rules. It's the best MBA you could have ever had to really understand how research works initially, and then how business works.

After 10 years, I felt personally my learning curve was beginning to flatten out a little bit and wanted to go somewhere where having learnt the rules, I could maybe break the rules.

Ryan:

I love that.

Tony:

That's where I went, moved across to MasterCard, very different in financial services versus consumer goods. A lot of big data, before big data existed in the consumer goods world with credit card data obviously. So really getting into the analytics space. But what I really learned there was some of the softer skills that complimented the hard skills.

P&G is an amazing company where ... And of course, nowhere as perfect, but it's as close as you can get in the world I've seen to where really is a meritocracy, great ideas always win and the data will speak for itself. That's not a reality. In the real world where the vast majority of people live, it's not just about having the best recommendation, the best answer.

It's a lot about the softer skills of how you can implement those, how decisions really get taken. And for me, that was a tremendous learning and I was there for eight years. Most of the time in insights and then broadening out to strategy and eventually even working with a European board and seeing how decisions really got made.

And that for me was incredibly eye opening and realizing that all the great analysis we did and research and analytics to drive the thinking was one thing. But then how decisions get taken and how you influence to really implement those with the key decision makers can be some very different factors. It's not that they don't understand the research but there are other factors which maybe you are not considering,

Ryan:

Right. Actually, if you don't mind, let's stay there for a sec because I love this ... Everybody who I've ever met who started their career at P&G knows their stuff. Just something in that program, and I love what you say about breaking the rules. Well, learning the rules so that you can break them.

But I want to unpack what you were just talking about. I noticed this on your LinkedIn, you had an experience that read to me to be outside of insights. So you're at the table. So to the extent you could summarize, what are some of those misconceptions of, we think in insights it's X, but the way the decision is taken has some other factors. If you could unpack some of that, that'll be really useful for people.

Tony:

Sure. I think a good way to talk about it is specifically with an example. I think it's sponsorship, MasterCard like Heineken is a big sponsor of some big global assets like the European Champions League in soccer, football. Year after year, we always ask, can we calculate the return on investment? Can we do the analytics to prove what value this brings to the company. How much should we invest behind it, does it pay out for us?

Did all the analysis, looked at it every different way and so many times we said this doesn't pay out. It's impossible to find the numbers to say this pays out. I can tell you because I've been in some of the high level meetings with our very top customers where that sponsorship and some of the assets and some of the ways that we could use those assets with our customers, you can't ever quantify those in research.

You're never going to get to those. So there's always the danger of falling into the trap of thinking you've got an answer because you're measuring what you can measure rather than understanding what else is behind this decision that you can't see?

I love the example of the damage pattern of planes coming back during the second world war and saw that all the planes that were coming back, they were all damaged in the same area. But that's exactly the area you don't need to reinforce because planes that are coming back are surviving that. You need to focus on where you are not seeing damage, because you need to reinforce those areas.

And it's that thinking of how you switch and say it's not what we can see, what is behind us that we can't see, what are the decisions and the factors that we can't get to with the research that we need to understand? It's through getting close to the decision makers that you get to that.

Ryan:

What a fascinating insight. We'll get back to your journey. I imagine that insight has helped you a lot at Heineken, because there's two customer sets in Heineken, isn't there?

Tony:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But yeah, it's fascinating. And you know what, it resonates with me Tony, because a lot of times I'll get data sets from our business intelligence team or our insights team here at Zappi and in my head goes to, yeah, but what about this, this, this and this. It's some sort of a market orientation.

I know when we were meeting ... We had Mark Ritson join us a few weeks ago on our customer call and that whole market orientation is a skill that I think that point he made really resonated with me because that's where some of that nuances and intuition comes from.

Tony:

Yeah. I think that's for me one of the key things is, at times can be so frustrating when as an insights function or an insights leader, you're bringing brilliant analysis with a very clear recommendation and then it's not acted upon. Do you get frustrated or do you understand “what am I not getting?” This is a learning opportunity because the people who are making those decisions, it's easy to say they're just stupid, they didn't get it. But that's probably not the case. It's probably that you are not getting some of the factors that they're having to weigh into their decisions.

Ryan:

What a useful experience. It's something that I think as an insights industry, we talk a lot about this coveted seat, but it's the empathy of understanding what their lens is that would help that recommendation be better in the first place. It's fascinating.

Tony:

Absolutely.

Ryan:

That's cool. All right. So you developed some soft skills and how long were you at MasterCard Tony?

Tony:

Eight years altogether.

Ryan:

So then you changed categories completely.

Tony:

Yeah. Learned so much, but really wanted to get back and closer to consumer goods again, where insights is really at the heart. So an opportunity came up at what's now Reckitt, and formerly RB, and really great company. Very, very different again but it's all about learning and don't focus on the job title or your salary.

Focus on am I still learning? And to go to another very different company, very different culture, tremendous learning. I was only there a couple of years, but I learned so much in those two years. For me the biggest thing there, the mindset of speed over perfection. I think this is ... It's something that this is where you and I first met, as you mentioned before, Ryan and we talked about the fact that insights has historically been all about getting it right.

And the focus has always been on being 100% sure. We've been often the gatekeeper. I've been there to make sure things are robust and correct. But then often having insights after something's launched is no use. Getting ... Six months later after something's launched understanding that what your key insights and what's driving early trial is pointless by then.

I'd rather have something early and good that can actually drive some decision making, even if it's not perfect, than having the perfect thing too late. And RB is brilliant at that, at getting the right focus on and a balance between speed and perfection to really make decisions and move at the speed of business today, which many companies are still struggling with.

Ryan:

I have to give you credit. ESOMAR’s 2021 report suggested over 50% of projects were done in house last year. We're talking about, I think 2014, 2015?

Tony:

Yeah.

Ryan:

I want to give Tony credit because at that time the line was, “We're not using software, we're an insights function. We would never do that.” You were one of the first pioneers to say, "Guys, there's a different way to do this." And it's funny when you were reflecting on your P&G years and said, "I learned the rules so I could break them." It gave me a different understanding of that vantage point in our early days of kind of breaking some rules together.

But I got to give you credit, because you were breaking rules in whatever they call this category now before it was vogue. Now it's quite mainstream, but that's pretty cool.

Tony:

It was fun. But then the global Heineken opportunity came up and to move to the beer industry and a company with a lot of opportunity to become more consumer oriented as well. Was a great opportunity. So I've been here now at Heineken for almost five years. Incredible company, love it a lot. I guess what I've learned most here is Heineken is the most decentralized company I've ever worked in and contrasting that obviously to Reckitt that's probably one of the more centralized.

Having a role that was so incredibly about influence versus control and realizing that globally, we have 150 to 200 people in the CMI sphere or community of CMI. Less than 10% report directly to me. So it's how do you change the world, a company of more than 100,000, with 10 direct reports.

It’s not easy, but a whole group of people and a whole community out there. It's about how you influence and do that through influence rather than control. But how that can be so much more powerful because when people have the freedom to choose or not to choose, and you can convince them and they come on board because they really believe it's the right thing for them. Then it's much more powerful than just being told what the answer is. But it takes patience, but when it sticks, boy, does it stick.

Ryan:

The patience point is key and clearly five years in, I have some inside baseball to know you're really good at this. Because I think the patience ends up coming with a faster result. We had a different conversation we don't need to get into details of, I was blown away by the progress of some of the stuff that you've been driving.

But let's unpack these points here. So you were brought in five years ago, you're trying to bring Heineken to be more consumer focused and there's a tension inherent in that sentence. So talk to us a little bit about the journey and I want to cover the two sides of customer relationships in the beer business, but also the global/local tensions and ideally get you to reflect on some kind of best practices that you've garnered along the way to make things work.

Tony:

Sure. I think a good place to start is to talk about patience and have some incredibly quick results. At times it's felt like it's been glacial, the change, to me and to our team. At times, at the moment we are going through tremendous transformation and we are really picking up.

But the way I often explain it is it feels like there's an overnight transformation that's been years in the making. Because what happened for a number of years, Heineken... Well, the beer industry overall, what's been driving growth for the last decades in this industry has been footprint. So there's been a lot of white space markets to grow into and acquisition and bringing together of breweries and so on. That's what's been driving growth. It hasn't really been consumer driven growth for the last 10 to 15 years.

Doesn't mean we haven't been consumer focused and we've always been a company, at Heineken there's always been a big focus on building brands and love marks and insight to build advertising. But it's not been truly consumer centric. That's not where growth has come from, and that's the company I joined. And so a lot of the things, I saw so many opportunities, but honestly at the C-suite level, there wasn't the need or the passion to take on a lot of these things because honestly, that's not where the focus for growth was coming from.

Ryan:

Right.

Tony:

So a lot of things were going on and what we were driving as a function was we were driving change but we've done a lot of it under the radar because honestly senior management… it wasn't central to their plans. But the fact that all of that was going on under the hood, separately we were also having conversations and building that burning platform to help people see that actually, well, what's got us to where we are today isn't going to get us to where we want to go tomorrow and helping people see that for us to continue the growth and that the growth that we've had historically, we're going to need to get growth through… we need to make a shift to be more consumer centric. That takes time and so it's taken us some time and a change of management, it's not all been driven by us of course. At the very top, a new CEO has come in, which has driven that change as well. But now we're ready and so now we can very rapidly roll out some of the big transformations that have been bubbling under for quite some time.

A great idea can fail or not have the legs that you want it to. Doesn't mean it's not a great idea. Sometimes the timing has to be right. You need to be careful not to keep pushing and burn something before it's ready. When I understood why it was that the C-suite wasn't picking up on some of these things, it was like, okay, it will come but so let's keep building. And we know that it will come, so we're ready for it.

Ryan:

A lot of people just don't know that about the beer industry though. The customer sales orientation. I guess, on the spot question that I'm thinking about here, so I really like beer as you know, it's one of my favorite beverages. But my personal beer consumption is mostly in the home now.

Was that a compelling event? Did you notice a step change in your consumption and do you think that greased the wheels I guess a little bit, because we are all been on Zoom having more time at home. You have a leadership change, but I just wonder was there a consumption change that you were able to observe broadly that sort of helped fuel some of the stuff you were trying to do?

Tony:

Obviously through the pandemic and changes in behavior, yeah there's been a massive shift as you'd expect and had a big impact on the industry. There's also very different margins in in-home versus in the on trade at bar and restaurant. We're doing a lot of work trying to understand which of those behaviors are going to stick? And will people return to bars in the same way that they did before? How much of the at-home drinking will continue? What will socialization look like in six months time, in six years time, et cetera.

There's a lot of work going on there, because suddenly in an industry and a company where everybody thought they understood beer inside and out, where most of our top management have been 20 to 30 years plus, definitely in the industry and most of them 20 years plus in Heineken, they not just thought, they do. They understand the beer industry very, very well, but then suddenly there are questions, what's going to happen? So, yes, definitely the CMI function suddenly became a little bit more front and center, That was already happening as well with the realization that we needed to get growth through consumer and better answering consumer needs.

Ryan:

That makes a lot of sense. I want to go to the next topic with you. You talked about patience and influence, and I remember when I first met you in your Heineken chair, you very bluntly were like, "Hey, I don't have the ability to just push this on people." And it was you setting expectations and something you always do really well.

But talk us through how you create the pull that you create, because Tony's talking a lot about patience, but the results I've seen are fast. Give us a little bit of reflection of some of the processes you go through to drive adoption with influence over authority. And just before you answer, I want to say to everybody, whether somebody directly reports to you or not, I believe a lot of the way modern business culture's going is whether it's reporting lines or not, the people closest to the problems need to be empowered to make the decision.

I think you're going to teach everybody that's listening to this podcast a lesson that they should employ whether they have direct reports or not. But talk to us a little bit about some of your learnings and best practices in this space.

Tony:

Sure. This is still a model. I talked earlier about P&G teaching me the rules. Still a lot of the models that I use and frameworks I use in my head come from there. The rules are still there. There is always a 3E model which I love for how you lead and drive change. It's envision, empower and enable.

First you've got to build the vision and help people see what the change can look like and help build an idea of what the future can look like. And help build an idea of what the future can look like. That's a really key part.

Ryan:

Yes.

Tony:

But then once you've kind of locked that, it's how do you empower people? And very often, especially in a lot of our markets, there's a lot of local challenges. People will talk about budget issues, they'll talk about time, they'll talk about capacity, capability, et cetera, all of which are definite and very real barriers. But the biggest barrier of all is fear.

And you can talk about it as fear of change, but in general, there's also a fear of “I know what I'm doing. I know how to do my job and I do it very well. If I start outsourcing and saying that this stuff that I do really well today, and that all of my business partners really appreciate me for doing, if I say that has a lower priority or I outsource that more, or I automate that, then I become less valuable.”

It's how you address those fears. And that's probably been where we focused a lot with our partnership, Ryan, is how do we address that fear? How do we make it easy for people to make that first leap and get comfortable with, "Hey, it's okay. A, you can do this and B, you are going to look like more of a star. They're not going to appreciate you less, all of your business partners, they're going to appreciate you more.”

And get those experiences, have those first couple of brave people who want to jump with you that you then put up in lights and make them the stars and then they can be the advocates. So me in a global role sitting and talking to all the people in the markets who have a very different job to what I have on a day to day basis, I'm just sitting, talking in my ivory tower.

One of their peers talking from another market saying, "Hey, I did this. My business partners loved me for it. It was amazing. I got this..." It's a very different conversation. So getting those early to break down the fear, break down the barriers to empower people that, yes, I can do this.

Then the third E is the enable which is deliberately third with the tools, the training, the capabilities, et cetera, so that they know how to do it. But unless you've built that vision first and empowered people by going with those early champions, there's no point enabling because you're not going to get started.

Ryan:

I'm glad that you said you intentionally put it third. I can't tell you how many people call somebody on our sales team or some other friends of mine who own a research technology type of business and says, "We need to buy agile software." That's the wrong way around, right? Why? I try to implore people to ask why first, because to what end?

Just buying a shiny toy is just going to perpetuate the problem. I mean, you were talking about your Reckitt experience. I've just now, by the way, gotten used to calling it Reckitt, it's been RB in my head for 20 years. But anyways, one of the things that resonated with me when you were reflecting on the Reckitt experience is getting an answer six months after about early trials too late.

But how often do we still see data sets coming in the day before something goes to the liquor store or the day before it goes on air? And at that point, we're just grading homework. We're not saying here's how you make it better. Here's how you resonate with it. But that takes vision and empowerment first to be right.

I'd love to talk to you a little bit about this. There's a tension that I see Tony, which is I'll put myself ... I'm going to make up a fictitious example. I'm a Heineken insights manager in Negril, Jamaica. That's right, I just was drinking Heineken, it was wonderful.

It strikes me that my job is exclusively to sell more Heineken in Jamaica. I work with marketing and we're innovating, whatever we're doing. And there's an interesting tension because a lot of the vision and the from/to that we're all trying to drive as an industry is quite operational and skill development oriented.

I always find a tension of a local insights manager. I'm not even talking about a senior person. How do they find the time to even pick their head up? It brings me back to central CMI, whatever you want to call it, being a really important operational partner, for lack of a better word.

I think the question I have for you, which will dovetail us into the second part of our conversation is knowing that and if you disagree, please tell me, because it's just what I see because obviously I don't walk in either of those examples’ shoes. But knowing that, how do you go about crafting a vision that has empathy for what they see on the ground and how do you bring them along that journey of creating the vision?

Tony:

You're absolutely right and I think ... But already that's a great start point is for somebody to think my job is to sell more beer or to make more profit rather than my job is to test the concept, to optimize the advertising. That's already a start for point is my job is to help the company sell more beer.

But I think always it's important to help everybody understand, what unique role do you individually and my role is to help us as a function to say what's our role within the organization to do that? Occasionally we do go out directly to customers, but we're not the ones typically directly getting the sales in. We're not the ones in the breweries, but so what's our role in that?

And for me, I think it is about getting the consumers by growth to really at the heart of the decision making. We can talk about consumer inspired, consumer centric, whatever words we want to use. And it doesn't mean very much. I think what people can often misinterpret that is: we want to test everything.

Ryan:

Yes.

Tony:

That's not what being consumer inspired is. I talk a lot about the difference. Again, going back to P&G days, we had a mantra of “the consumer is boss.” I once wrote a thought paper there saying, okay, let's do the year end performance review for the consumer as the boss. Let me give feedback to the consumer as boss, are they doing a good job and I said well, there are two different roles and you see this, the classic two lists that you see of being a leader versus being a manager.

And again, as consumer insights, you can use your consumer to manage the business, which is where you're talking about managing risk, a short term focus, using tests to inform decisions A versus B, et cetera. A very managerial approach and some people think of that as being consumer focused but that's not being consumer led. That's just using insights in the consumer to manage risk. That's a good part of being a good manager, a good leader is to do that, but you also need the leadership. The leadership comes when you have a future focus, when you inspire and when you provoke and that's a very different role.

To do that, the kind of things that you need to be doing are very different. You need both of those, but for me and then translating that specifically into consumer insight, it's the difference between testing and learning. Testing's great and we need to do testing, but if we really want to be leaders rather than managers, then we need to do learning. How do I translate the business questions into learning opportunities?

So in your example of an insights manager in Jamaica, a question that I always ask when I speak to our country teams is, what's your plan for the year? What I'm always looking for is do they show me a learning plan or a research plan? And there's a big difference between those two.

A research plan you need to have, you need to manage your budgets. You need to make sure that all of your key assets are tested. Great, you need to have that. That's a tick in the box, but have you got a learning plan? Have you understood, have you spoken to your senior leadership team? Directly or indirectly?

You don't have to have the direct relationship. You don't have to report to the CEO or to the country manager, but have you enabled a discussion with the senior management about what the biggest unknown questions are that we have as a business, that if we address them can unlock growth. Once you've understood those questions, then you build a learning plan which will have elements of research in it. But you start from a very different place rather than saying, “What's my research plan and how do I spend my budget, and I need my Nielsen and I need my market shares, and I need all of my brand health tech.”

You get into different discussions. What's going to unlock growth. A really great insights team is… each time is they're working and understanding what's that learning? What's that opportunity? What's that unknown that if we can discover, if we can learn is going to get the next tranche of breakthrough growth? I solve that question. I answer the question with the team, we address it and then we move on to the next.

It's constantly challenging to get better, but not initiative by initiative, not saying for this single initiative, what do I need to learn? But for the company growth or for the country growth or for the category growth, depending on what your scope is, let me not just solve it for this one initiative, but really address this question much more broadly and solve it once and for all so I can cross this off my list and go to the next big question.

Ryan:

Wow. If we had three hours, I would unpack about every other sentence you just said, because my friends that are listening, there is some gold in Tony's words. The manager versus leadership tension you just articulated, I don't know that I've ever heard it said so well. I don't know Tony, if you've read this book, it's called Turn the Ship Around.

Tony:

No.

Ryan:

It's about a Navy submarine captain that was like ... The Navy's quite hierarchical. It's procedures, SOPs, everybody follows a chain of command. This gentleman basically had this thesis that that's wrong. If we enabled everybody to be a leader, we could do great things. I learned more about submarines than I need to know as a businessman, but it talks a lot about that tension.

I think, to put that in the consumer context, the consumer is our leader versus our boss. It just really resonates with me because you go back to the Henry Ford quote, the faster horses thing.

Tony:

Exactly.

Ryan:

And a lot of people use that to say consumer insights is whatever, whatever negative thing they want to say. That's not what his point was. His point was you use them to inspire you, the expert, to make a decision and that's sort of what you were articulating there.

Tony:

It's exactly the same. People have misinterpreted Steve Jobs who said some similar things about research, but he was a massive user of research.

Ryan:

Yes.

Tony:

But to understand and to be sure that he was understanding what the real needs were and to deliver against that and including the unarticulated needs. If you only ever focus on asking people questions, then you're never going to get the real insight.

Ryan:

That is that reframe as an industry. I love ... To go back to your last point about your 3E framework. The enable thing, up until you said what you said, I thought you meant tools, vendors, whatever. But if I elevate your last point, you actually mean research holistically.

What are the things we need to know, now what do we do to do it. It's a level of abstraction higher than I thought, which is quite inspiring for me, frankly. Research is a mechanism to learn. You see it, I'm helping a friend who runs a software business. He is boldly going to advertise on the Super Bowl in a few weeks, and he's a CMO. It's quite interesting to see he gets it intuitively.

He's not trying to say, is it just good enough to air? He's trying to say to himself, all right, I have a conviction about this creative territory and he's using the learning, he's using the tool to learn how to make it better. Which to me is something that creators want. They don't want red, blue, amber, or whatever color scheme we want to use.

It's quite fascinating to me. We have a few minutes left and your daughter's waiting, so I don't want to keep you late. But I want to ask you a couple more questions. The question I wanted to talk to you about next is, we'll stay with the trend of leadership here. What are you looking for in people?

It's an incredibly competitive market. I imagine Heineken's hiring all over the world and you have for every role, if you're anything like me, there's ample talent, but what are some of the attributes you look for in an insights leader?

Tony:

I think it comes back to understanding what is our role as an insights function and as an insights leader. I think if you'd have asked most people 10, 15 years ago, we'd have said our role is to bring insights to the organization. Then you hire for people who have the skills to create insights and of course implement them.

I think now the way that we describe what's our role is to drive transformational change. That's exactly what I was just talking about is, understand what's the biggest next thing that we can understand and address, fix it systemically, change the organization so that it's systemically fixed, and then move on to the next topic. So we are driving transformational change which means you need change agents.

So then you are hiring for people who have EQ first and understand how decisions get made, how to influence across an organization, how to drive change. When I'm interviewing, when I'm talking to people about potential roles, that's what I'm always looking for is examples and how... Because it's never easy and we talked about the challenges in a multinational organization.

If you tell me I do this, very easy, then you haven't done it. It's when you come up against that, that you hit the barriers, how do you overcome them? That really matters. One of my favorite little expressions is to think like a four year old, act like a seven year old. Which I love. When you're dreaming and you need people who are the change agents, who are curious, who can imagine a different future and can see that, wow, this really magical thinking. In the way a four year old gets so excited when they go out and see snow for the first time, the whole world is full of opportunities. Not constrained by what is done today, but just imagine anything is possible.

Ryan:

Yes.

Tony:

That magical four year old thinking is fantastic, but on its own, you're a dreamer. If you couple it with seven year old heroic action, then the people really make change. What's the difference? Well, a seven year old, by the time you get to seven kids realize that the world isn't perfect. I'm not spoiling secrets. I don't know young your listenership is, about Santa Claus.

You've seen that your dad that you thought was absolutely perfect, you've seen him fail at some things. You realize that the world isn't quite as perfect as you imagined it was. But the difference with a seven year old is they see that through people, but still believe that they are incredible and heroes and can do anything.

I always tell a story. I have a twin sister who when she was seven, I told her you know that anyone can fly, right? It's just you have to say the magic word while you're in the air. So she opened the dictionary and jumped on “aardvark” because when you're seven years old, you believe that you can do anything.

When barriers come, you find ways around them and you won't let them get in your way. And so that's what I'm looking for is that spark of four year magical thinking combined with pragmatism and that we can knock down any barriers and overcome anything with the heroic seven year old thinking action.

Ryan:

Honestly, I love it, man. I was thinking a lot about this. So my kids are all young. They're all below seven, believe it or not. Their curiosity is incredible. But my son just turned six and right before Christmas, he goes, "Dad, you mean to tell me a big fat man gets down the chimney and we have a wood pellet stove and he comes out the wood pellet stove with a bag of toys. Really dad?" And it's like probably my last year getting away with “son, it's magic.”

But the curiosity of asking those questions and I think, not to go on a massive tangent about this, but I do think societally, we beat the curiosity out of people. To find people who naturally have it is incredible. And you think about how linear business is, we trade on quarterly cycles and our boss said so, therefore we must.

I mean, this is a climate that we've all inherited and on a personal level, I'm trying to think more like a scientist. Just because I think I know something doesn't mean I shouldn't ask why. Right?

Tony:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Anyways the curiosity point really resonates with me, but so does the self confidence thing, particularly because everybody suffers with imposter syndrome, right? Like it's-

Tony:

Yeah.

Ryan:

We all do. I have it some days, I'm sure you do too, Tony. Right? It's there.

Tony:

Yeah. But that seven year old thinking is you get knocked down and you just pick yourself up and go, "Hey, I'm here."

Ryan:

I got it.

Tony:

That's what we need, that persistence to keep going because particularly in the insights world we live in, not everything you recommend gets through. And as I was talking about earlier with patience, you have to keep the persistence to believe that you are right and keep going and finding ways through to really drive change.

Ryan:

That's right. All right. So I'm going to bing one of my last two questions because I just find you to be an incredible leader and we had a one-on-one recently and you were sharing some things you're doing. It's tough to be working right now. We're now on our third year of do we even get to see each other? I'm supposed to go to London this Sunday, will I test positive for COVID today or tomorrow? It's just a question you have to ask.

What are some of the things you are doing as a leader to keep integration, cross-functionality, morale high? I mean, I know you're trying stuff all the time, but I just feel like if I had one more question to ask you, it'd be the most valuable thing that you could share with everybody listening.

Tony:

Sure. And it's not easy. It's incredibly difficult for everybody and everyone's in different situations at home, and everyone's on Teams calls back to back all day. One of the things that we were really worried about as a team, because everybody has different business partners as well. So we're worried about the more… the interactions that happen in the office that you can't replicate.

Some of them for the chance, discussions you overhear that spark thoughts and help you drive your business. But also some of the ability to just let loose, you just come out of a meeting with your business partner who has in your eyes just been completely idiotic, hasn't got it, is so stupid, they don't know what they're talking about. And you just need to vent with someone who gets it who's been there too.

We all felt we were missing that a little bit. What we set up, we have our weekly team meeting on a Monday morning, sets the tone, ask everyone how the weekend was and things about the week ahead. But then what I've done is every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and we try and make Friday meeting free, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 4:30 to 5:00, we have a completely optional check-in where I try to be there as many days as I can. And it's like a surgery in a way where... And sometimes it's a quick rather than having to set up a meeting and find time in diaries, you can whizz through and you can answer five or six questions and it's not just me answering.

Other members of the team will jump in with their experience. And you're getting that cross fertilization of ideas that come. Quite often, that meeting is just, we don't talk at all about meetings or the business. We just talk about rubbish and talk about frustrations and whatever. It's just that mental unload towards the end of the day, it's deliberately 4:30 to 5:00 so that we can kind of put a mark at the end of the day and say try not to have any meetings after this.

Of course, we're in global roles. So sometimes it happens, but try not to so that if you are working after this, it's on your own terms, not in meetings. It's just a way to close out the day. For some of my team, they don't need it and they're fine and come every now and again, just to say hi. For some of the team members, myself included, it's a savior. It keeps me mentally sane to have that quick check in and feel connected with the team.

Ryan:

So I have to tell you this, you told me this story, I want to say three weeks ago, I've stolen this from you and I've changed our daily meeting and I've noticed already more galvanization among ... And this is our Zappi senior executive team. So, thank you. I have to thank you.

Tony, I can't thank you enough. I really wish I could say something like I'll see you really soon for a beer, but we must make a point to do it. Honestly, you've been extremely gracious with your time. Really open, everybody here listening will have picked up a few insights. I'm sure Patricia's going to have a tough job distilling what we talked about because you covered a lot. But seriously, thank you so much, Tony. I appreciate you and I hope you have a great day.

Tony:

Thank you. You too. Have a good one. Have a good beer.

Ryan:

All right. That was so much fun. I've done a lot of podcast episodes with a lot of really great people. I could have talked to Tony for another hour. Unfortunately he had to go somewhere with his daughter. We ran out of time. But Patricia, you always do such a wonderful job of distilling my crazy. What were your takeaways from this conversation today?

Patricia:

Now, before I go into takeaways, I wasn't going to let the...'I don't have a picture of Hank' just go, did you now?

Ryan:

Let's go. You want Hank on the screen?

Patricia:

Look at this, everybody. Look at Hank everybody.

Ryan:

Oh man.

Patricia:

Everybody, that's Hank and Wally. 

Ryan:

That’s Hank, and Wally's the OG. For the viewers, Wally's below my feet right now. He's 14 and he's a stud and that's Hank. We adopted him from New Jersey this weekend and he is a-

Patricia:

Look at those paws. Just look at those paws.

Ryan:

What he sounds like when he walks around the house, you ready? He's always, yeah.

Patricia:

He's talking to you. You got to figure out what he is saying. You need me to do key takeaways from Hank. That's what you need. I agree. But I understand what my dogs say. You have to figure out what there's saying. 

So you and Tony talked, it was a pleasure to listen to. I really love listening to them. I found that the first time I heard it, cause I listen to them twice. You had five main topics, right? And so I distill this to five main chunks. You talked about career learning, differences between research results and what actually gets done in the business, driving change and transforming Heineken, four, management versus leadership and five, you straight out asked him, what are you looking for in insights professionals? So those are the five chapters of what I'm going to take away for you right now.

Let's start at the beginning: key career learning. I don't don't always share these, but they were so pertinent to the rest of the conversation.

Ryan:

They were.

Patricia:

So he said they were number one, maintain a learning mindset. It's not just about being right. It's about learning. Two: focus on the speed of business over perfection. Good on time or early is better for decision making and then perfect too late. I love that one. Okay. Three, learning the broad scope of business teaches you the hard skills of research and showcases the rules. Keep the rules in mind because you know, we're going to break them in a second.

Ryan:

God damn right we're going to break ‘em.

Patricia:

Oh yeah. Analysis of big data uncovers hidden patterns and correlations. These are used not just for papering the walls, but to develop strategy. Big data helps you develop strategy. It's the combination. Number five, the softer research skills influence board of directors, decision making and rule breaking. Perfect number five. Just done. All right. I think it was perfect because he...what I really liked about his career learnings is how he so simply wove them into his actual success at Heineken. So keep that mind.

Ryan:

Yeah for sure.

Patricia:

Chapter two, big differences between research results and what actually gets done in the business. I have not met the first young early in career researcher that doesn't get frustrated when what they recommended doesn't get done. Right.

Ryan:

For sure.

Patricia:

You know, life is just that way. Another magical number five: brilliant analysis with very clear recommendations is not always acted upon. Maybe, perhaps, pardon the dog going down the stairs. This is real, this is live. Because the recipient does not understand the nuances of the data or how it affects decisions. What does this mean? Improve the reporting, make it more real. Number two, the project success often can't be quantified because it's challenging to find the numbers to show payout. Mostly because most activities don't pay out. So define success up front. Maybe it's not a pay out. Maybe it's something softer. Maybe it's equity, but measure it, and figure out how you're going to measure it from the beginning.

Right? Number three, the metrics behind the decisions made are not usually available. I mean they're like ideal and perfect so companies end up measuring what's available. So it's kind of like looking for things where the light is not where you lost them. What do you have to do for this one? Get practical and creative. Find metrics based on reality, not ideal, right? Number four, in order to influence decision making, you need to measure and understand both the key metrics as well as the decision maker's motivations and the business needs. So get real, be empathetic with your stakeholders. Be understanding of your business so that your research actually gets used. And number five, when optimizing, analyze what's obviously broken as well as what's still working. Remember his example about the plane? When you're optimizing and evolving, everything needs your attention.

Ryan:

Yes.

Patricia:

Things that need to get fixed as well as the things that need to be maintain strong. It was really cool.

Ryan:

Always under construction, right?

Patricia:

Oh yeah. We as human beings as well, not just the business. 

Third chapter. Driving change, driving transformation for Heineken. This one's a simple one. First one. I loved it. I gave it a separate number. Patience versus quick results. I loved his sentence, 'overnight transformation that's been years in the making.' That one was perfect. I love that one. But then he went in for like the second one about the 3E model for leading and driving change. And it's really important. This is one of those recipes where the order of the ingredients is just as important as the ingredients themselves. You have to start with envisioning. You build the vision, help people see what change can actually look like and help them build the idea of what the future can look like with them in it. 

Ryan:

Yeah. For them in it.

Patricia:

Then after you've got them understanding it, seeing it, tasting it, feeling it, empower them to address the fears that will inhibit the change. So make sure that you get them to see it, get them to taste it, get them to love it. Then attack their fears right away. Make it easy for people to make that first leap to get comfortable. Many times you have to find the first couple of brave people or at least one brave person who want to jump, make them stars, make them advocates. It'll be easier for them to bring people along because they saw that person jump, they didn't die. Let's go. Right? The third one, only after envisioning and empowering happen, is the enabling. Provide the tools, training, capability so they know how to do it. You don't buy the tool first, you buy the tool third, right?

You have to make sure that you tell them the things that they need to know and how to use the tools, what to do with them because it has to be third. You know, you can't just use a tool. Instruction manuals don't work that way. You have to envision it and then empower it. You were really emphatic about people just want to buy tech. Work doesn't work that way. You got to know what your problem is. Right? 

All right. Chapter four. This one's also short and sweet. Management versus leadership. He just summed it up beautifully. You can use your consumer to manage the business, right? You can use them to manage risk. You can short term test focus. You can use tests to inform decision a versus decision B. That's how you use consumers to help you manage the business.

But you can also use consumers to lead your business so you have a future focus. You can use consumers to help you find inspiration and provocation for your company. You test to learn, not to find out a number. You test to learn, right? You test to translate business questions into learning opportunities. That's done by creating a learning plan, not a research process, but a learning plan, right? That includes the research. That helps you understand the big unknowns. You can find ways to answer the big unknowns, move on to the next one. The big unknowns include unarticulated needs. This is not about a faster horse. This is about a car, right?

Ryan:

Right, right.

Patricia:

The last one for everybody who's looking for work, which we should all be always looking to be the best insights professional… professional in general.

He had three, it was great. And I totally empathize with this. Number one, he looks for people who are capable of driving transformational change, being change agents. But he quickly followed that up by saying they must have number two, strong emotional intelligence so they can understand how decisions get made so they can influence those decisions because you can't just do it. You know, if you don't have the EQ. Then he qualified it even further to say they need to be able to influence decisions across the organization. Not just here, not just there, not just marketing, not just sales, not just management. Across the whole information. The whole corporation. Now that's a large task. It's possible. It's doable. It's learnable, but it's a big one. Right? And the third one, my absolute favorite. Thank you Tony forever and ever. He wants people with the spark of a four year old's magical thinking. Curious, creative, who believe anything is possible. Combined with the pragmatism and heroics of a seven year old who knows the barriers and still believes everything is possible. You just described your son.

Ryan:

That's true. That's true.

Patricia:

It's true. It's true.

Ryan:

I really hate how societally we beat the curiosity out of people and the bravery. I was reflecting on this last night with McKenzie Davis who I'm a huge fan of..

Patricia:

Me too.

Ryan:

Absolute rock star, young in her career and just every time she gets an opportunity in her career, she kicks ass. Anyway, enough gloating about Mckenzie. But McKenzie, if you're listening, I know you are, by the way, we love you a lot.

But the thing I was saying is like people, to get places in their career, have to feel like they have all the answers. Then you get to a certain place where you're like actually the smartest thing is to not know, but still to be bold. I just thought Tony's framing was incredible.

Patricia:

It was really helpful. I mean, I had a mentoring call this morning, right. My mentee is changing into the next role. He is going to do his master's. I was telling him that in my new phase, moving into consulting, being more independent, is people think, oh, she can do that because she's been there, she's done that. I'm like, absolutely not. I know how to learn. That's my number one.

Ryan:

For sure.

Patricia:

I have a lot of experience. I've done a lot of things. I've been a lot of places, lots of amazing companies but my number one talent or capability is learning how to learn. I talked to him about me paving my own road, but I'm paving it, making sure to avoid muscle memory, to avoid potholes that we fall into. Right? Because we think we're supposed to know it all that we jump, but it's all about learning to learn and keeping the learning mindset as said in the beginning. Four year old and a seven year old, I love it.

Ryan:

You know, I've asked that same question a few times of our guests. The answers usually are the same.

Patricia:

Very similar.

Ryan:

We're going to talk about this more in an episode coming up. I see a rise of two distinct types of insights professionals. The change agent who can tell a story and synthesize human truths and trends that influence business strategy. And I'm telling you, insights operations is going to become a thing, because with all these different data sets, all these different technologies, you can't expect the same person who's trying to sell more beer to be able to do the ops job. It's the same exact thing that happened in software with the rise of revenue operations. People like on our team, Scott and Danielle are rev ops, they make Salesforce and the system and the marketing automation and all that stuff talk, so that the marketing team can create content that people like. It's going to happen in insights.

I might be wrong, but I really don't think I am. It's the same two trends. People need to be able to scale capabilities or scale learnings that drive results. That's what's happening in this industry. 

So my friends, this was a fun episode. The next episode is going to be another heater with Christian Niederauer. Christian is incredible. You're going to learn about a man who started his career in academia, who spent a lot of time in local businesses activating, and now is running global insights for Colgate-Palmolive, one of the biggest companies in the world. He's a hell of a guy, good human being, really progressive insights leader. You're in for a treat. 

I hope that you enjoyed this episode. We have five, I should say six, more episodes coming up in season four. We're going to keep bringing the heat, my friends. So I hope that you're enjoying. If you have any ideas hit us up, but otherwise rate us and tell your friends and we'll see you next time.

Patricia:

Later, dudes.

Ryan:

Thanks for listening everybody.

Patricia:

Bye. Bye.