I have AI, you have AI, we have to invest in AI, but now how do we differentiate? Well, guess what? You spent all your differentiating money on AI.
Rashad Tabakawala, thank you so much for joining me today. Rashad is a speaker, advisor, and the author of Restoring the Soul of Business, Staying Human in the Age of Data, and also the forthcoming Rethinking Work, both from HarperCollins. Rashad and I first met in his capacity as an advisor to Publisys Group, a role he moved into after a four-decade career launching some of the first interactive and digital agencies, then moving on to become chairman of Digitas and Razorfish, and eventually Publisys Group's chief growth officer. He's the author also of a popular Substack newsletter, of which I am a subscriber, The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past, as well as the podcast What Next? So thank you so much for joining me and fitting me into your busy schedule, Rashad.
Well, I'm a self-employed or unemployed person, so my schedule is not as busy as yours.
Well, so, I mean, speaking of your self-employment and your newsletter, which is fantastic, I highly recommend it. The most recent newsletter that you sent out, you had a really great anecdote in there about recent interactions that you had with two brands, with both State Farm and with Singapore Airlines. Can you tell me about those and what differentiated the experience you had with State Farm versus the experience you recently had with Singapore?
The piece that I wrote was called Small Things, and I begin with the fact that for over three decades, I have been insured, my cars have been insured by State Farm, and that over the years, I noticed that the little plastic card that they sent used to first be a thick plastic card, then a thin plastic card, then a cardboard card, then a cardboard card that you had to cut out from the surrounding paper, to now it is a thin cardboard card where you can barely figure out how to cut it out of the surrounding paper.
And I sort of recall that, you know, there are only two interactions a year I have with them, assuming I do not have an accident or a claim, and that's when I opened this particular thing. And now recently, they asked me to buy other stuff, they're completely mis-explaining why my premium has gone up, but what I do see is that the quality of their card has gone down.
And it makes me sort of wonder what combination of financial wizards, accountants, and optimists, I don't know, I guess they're saving the planet or something, have decided that this is the way they will interact. So that was one example, which is such small things do matter.
The second one really is where I recently went for a board meeting to Singapore, and I flew from New York to Singapore on Singapore Airlines, and I flew back from Singapore back to the US on United Airlines. And I compared the two experiences, one which I would call adequate, no big problem, which is United, and one which was extraordinary, which was Singapore.
And I realized that they were both flying obviously from the same airports. Why is it that one experience was so much better than the other when the planes were the same, and the flight distance was the same, and the catering was the same? And it was of the small things which were this, that the stewardess, stewards and stewardesses knew your name on one, they smiled at you, the hot towels were thick and hot, versus thin and not warm, or the cold towels were not cold.
The crockery and cutlery were minimum viable versus a notch above. So these small little touches, which I computed, would probably have saved United by doing all the silly things that they were doing, would probably save them $20 per passenger. So I can see an accountant saying $20 a passenger, you know, 50 passengers, we're basically saving $1,000 a flight, I'm just saying business class, okay, $1,000 a flight, we do this, you know, 365 days, we have therefore saved $365,000.
I looked at it slightly different. For $25, that's all it costs, on what is likely to be a $5,000 ticket, you can take an experience from average to extraordinary. Maybe you want to think about that, because that will get you at least one additional customer per flight, which by the way, is more than the savings, it offsets, the additional revenue offsets all the savings you found the other way.
And so that was, and that just goes on to saying that all of us sometimes in the world of business and marketing, think about everything, but the small interactions that make all the difference.
I'm curious to dig into that more. I mean, well, by way of a detour, because a passion that you and I share is figuring out how to make humans, society, the planet, a better place to live. State Farm or United Airlines, not to pick on them, has several ways that they could do that, and that they are doing that.
They spend money on CSR, spend money on ESG priorities. As you mentioned in your newsletter, they could spend time and money on making ads that make our time watching TV slightly less annoying, slightly less helpful. And they probably should be doing all of those things. It's correct to be doing all of those things. It's not one or the other, but why is it so often that companies neglect to spend money on the most important touchpoint with their most important constituency, which is the products that their customers buy?
I think the three reasons they do that. One is there's internal divisions, which is people basically say, this is my ad budget, I'm not going to reduce it. And you people who basically have in-flight service, or the people who basically are in charge of customer care, I'm not giving you my ad budget.
So one is they don't think about this as a holistic experience, they think about this as fragmented experiences with fragmented budgets. And in many organizations, as you know, budget means power. I'm not giving up power. So that's number one.
The second one is in many cases, cost savings are easily measured. Generating greater customer joy is harder to measure. And so what we do is we value what we can measure in the near term versus figuring out a measure of what is valuable in the big term.
And I don't know whether it was Einstein or somebody who basically said, some of the things that have meaning cannot be measured, and not all things that have measure have meaning. And so there's a measurement factor, there's obviously the internal fight factor.
But the third one, to a great extent, is a lot of companies and people now do ritual-like jobs. So I'm not claiming that this is true for our company and other places, but I read this book that basically said that 50% of jobs are fake. Another way of saying it is we spend 50% of our time doing stuff that actually is just activity. And when you do one or two really great things, what do you do the rest of the time?
So you'd rather fritter away doing these activities of optimizing and things like that versus saying, let's do two really amazing experiences. It may not take a whole bunch of time, but then what are we going to do the rest of our time? So it's the common theme is you start looking at your belly button and how to measure your belly button versus looking at something outside.
Yeah, so in your most recent episode of your podcast, What Next, your guest spoke about a bit of the leadership concept of mutuality. Placing that in opposition versus what they refer to as speed and greed. I don't think anyone wants to be associated with greed, but maybe call it speed and profit maximization or speed and effectiveness. What I find as someone who is tasked with driving innovation is that you need a mix of both. And I think this touches on what you were saying before is that it's a mix of EQ and IQ. AI is a mix of cost cutting and revenue growth.
You need also, it seems, a mix of mutuality, which is consensus building, but also speed and decisiveness to be effective at driving innovations forward. And my question to you, how do the best innovators balance the need for empathy and consensus building versus decisiveness in action? Is it trying to get a balance on each decision or are you trying to have your decisions average out to somewhere that's like a 50-50 split between the two?
What I've sensed the best ones do is not necessarily each decision or even balancing decisions. It's basically determining when you have to have that every decision or many decisions need this combination of speed and mutuality. But the way you basically do it is you say, you set a deadline, but you very quickly at the very beginning of every project, get as many voices into the room as possible. Everyone providing their perspectives and what they believe is right or wrong.
But then you don't allow people to dither. Then the leader says, I've heard everybody and here is the decision that we are going to make. If anyone has final opposition, say so. But after this, till we go to the next decision, everybody is 100% going to execute what we have all decided or I've decided. But after listening to people's point of view, and we will not change our minds unless there is a new set of data that come in.
So there are three key things. You basically want inclusion of perspective so people can say, here's why I think and what I think. So you want to create an environment of mutuality there. You want to then say, okay, we have now decided we're going to make this decision and that's a decision of both focus and speed. So you need mutuality, focus and speed. But then you have, we will change the decision. We won't