GSD Podcast - Using the Consulting mindset to scale your company with John Kirkman

Jeff is joined by John Kirkman, who has years of experience from stints at Deloitte, Nike and now Convoy. We covered ALOT of ground in this one, with the first topic being how to use your consulting chops to the enterprise when large companies are forced to change. John has a ton of experience in Large scale logistics and Executable Strategy in Supply Chain, so it was great to chat with someone who was in the trenches on complex problems

Other topics are:

• Remote Teams and management

• New tools don't Fix old problems

• How to quickly navigate from ambiguity to clear details to solve complex problems

• Fast context switching when you have multiple clients

Transcript:

Jeff  01:14

Hey, this is Jeff, I hope you're having a good week when you're listening to this. Here, it's Today is March 24. Starting to get a little warmer here in Boston to bundle up. So hope wherever you listen to it's nice out there wanted to introduce the next podcast with John Kirkman. John, John's awesome. Just sort of quick note, we had a couple little technical glitches. I think his kids were like playing a massive game of Minecraft in a file and put into the router, but there may be one or two jump cuts where you hear me ask a question that doesn't get answered. But I sent it out to get smoothed over and process this interview actually happened a little while back, I want to even say maybe December, maybe January. And and send it out, got it all fixed and everything. So perhaps you might not have even noticed that there was an issue, but just in case he was not ignoring. So. So John's awesome. He was introduced me from George Jagodzinski, who was on the podcast a few episodes back. And both these guys are just dyed in the wool consultants, John was working on really complicated Supply Chain Management logistics things as a part of Deloitte practice for for many years, he was then hired by Nike to come in and take some of that experience. And we talked about that, you know, a lot of us who have been in professional services, we get brought into, you know, whip things up, or you know, you know, shaped shaped the team up and things like that. But, you know, sometimes it's not just making people work faster and do things like that. So we got into that subject. I do want to say, and I remember this happening in the wild, and we were chatting, that we went over some niceties and some basic types of questions and everything. And then I feel I was editing it right around maybe like the 2022 minute mark, the conversation turned and kind of just, it was really, like we found something and we just were talking about it. And I just really liked the part of that interview, like moving forward. So that was great. I hope you dig. If you're listening to this, and you want to be on the podcast, just let me know. I got contacted by quite a few people recently. So I'm really excited to have people outside of my network. But whether you're a leader or you've just been doing this two or three years, I'd love to hear from you. Just happy to talk shop and get it recorded because a lot of us are going through the same stuff. So lots of exciting stuff coming out. I've got like two ones, one, somebody pretty big. Next week, so look forward to that one. But in the meantime, really enjoyed John here, and I look forward to talking to him again. Thanks. All right. John Kirkman is with me here. Nice to meet you, John. Or not meet you. Nice to get your podcast catch up again. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting note on this. For anybody that's a frequent listener. George Jagodzinski was on the podcast, he loved it so much. And he's basically said, You got to talk to my buddy John and like, the reverence that he spoke of you like is the same, like, like, like two of my buddies that might have backpacked through Thailand in their 20s like that type of that type of reverence. Like

John Kirkman  04:51

that's it George and I go back a long way. It's been a fun journey with him just kind of, you know, working starting work with him and then you know, kind of growing from there. So it's, we have both professionally history and personal history, it's just a lot, I have a lot of reverence for that man as well.

Jeff  05:06

That's great. It's also like to my dream of when I started this, which is like, let's get some people outside of my direct network like Georgia items on a stuff together about like, you know, we met through George, and we haven't worked together, had a quick chat, and we immediately hit it off and was like, oh, there's a bunch of things we can talk about. So we're gonna go through John's background. And first of all, what we're really going to be focusing on today is, it's something I've seen so much of is people that have been consulting for a while and doing consulting, and then being pulled into either startups or larger organizations, basically saying, like, we need somebody with that consulting mindset to come in here. And kind of, it's always shake things up, right? Or like, it's always it's never like, oh, just want to come in here. And have you do this job, like, which, you know, we can get we're gonna get into because those are fixes and those can take years off your life and stuff like that. And I apologize, I tried to turn all my nose off, but it's not gonna happen, I guess. But. So let's, John. Yeah, let's start post college and how you sort of do the quick five minutes and of how you got to where you are? And

John Kirkman  06:16

yeah, yeah, happy to. I'll try to make it a breeze so we can get to the meat of the details. Yeah, I went to school in the DC area and had an opportunity. I was focused on kind of Industrial Engineering and school systems analysis and engineering. And I really, I love the idea of supply chain, I gravitated towards it at an early age, just because it's so metered and metrics, right? So mathematically brained and all that stuff. It's just fun to kind of use a supply chain, as example of I did this on Tuesday. This is what happened next Tuesday, right? Yeah. So right out of work worked with a company called worldwide retail Exchange, which is kind of before SaaS Software as a Service was a thing that was that was in vogue at that of those days of dropship and stuff, or was it like, no, no, it's pure technology. Right. So where, in the parlance of that time, Walmart was had invested heavily in retail links to connect their, their distributors. And the whole network was kind of connected to retail and every other targets in the world Kmart. So the world kind of said, how do we do that. And they got together and kind of CO funded this, this initiative, that a bunch of grocers joined as well. But you know, it bounced around kind of that that space for a little bit of time. But I think, you know, kind of jumping to the formative years, was really at Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting, where I joined as an experienced hire as a senior consultant, and then work my way up through eight years up to a senior editor. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's

Jeff  07:33

good news on that is that you didn't have to have your own apartment, right? Because you just

John Kirkman  07:37

Oh, yeah. Well, it's funny, you mentioned that there was, there's several people on my team that they just brought their suitcase with them and had a Pio address, right. So it was one of those where you can look at the evidence. And in fact, during recruiting stuff, I would tell people don't go to New York as a BA or consultant, go live in Cleveland, and getting paid the same amount of money, you're banking cash, in your 20s you're not gonna be home anyhow.

Jeff  07:56

It's so true. And you know, I, I joke, but like, so many people have gotten so much out of that, that experience. And some of the people I learned from did that. And it's a tremendously valuable if your life is set up to have that sort. Yeah.

John Kirkman  08:12

Yeah, exactly. It. Could I do that again. I mean, I just got married last year. So it's like, Could I do that? Again? No, probably not. But it was, again, formative for me. And in that space, I was still focused on supply chain. So our strategy and operations practice at Deloitte, I sat in our kind of the intersection of supply chain and retail, kind of going through all that stuff as well. So it was, like I said, forming a bunch of leaders there that I still are still very connected to our investments in the planet to senior partner there now. And so yeah, just kind of grew up through that through that process. When

Jeff  08:43

you were doing that, were you working? When I hear strategy, I always wonder how to decouple that is from like, the developers, and you know, that whole project team that is actually building software and everything. Did you mind just getting into that for a minute? Yeah, yeah,

John Kirkman  08:56

sure. And I think this is just structurally how Deloitte and I know that it's changed over the years, but how it's structured at that time is, you know, strategy and operations was, you know, we had different functions, we had a technology specific function, we had kind of an entire SAP focused sector, SAP implementation, because Oracle, photic, focus, etc. So we partnered with them a lot, but we didn't have fingers on keys to do any of that. And primarily, like, a lot of, you know, I think it's a lot of the ethereal stuff that your BCGs are kind of the others of the world getting into. It's like, you know, this is this is what the stripe is a pie in the sky strategy. And I think at the time, the CEO of Deloitte, I had a very profound phrase that stuck with me as executable strategy.

Jeff  09:35

So we had a quick little internet glitch as it happens these days. So we turned our videos off, and we'll be chatting. So But John, you were talking about, you had just started to say, executable strategy, and we're starting to explain that.

John Kirkman  09:52

Yeah. And so I think it was, yeah, it was very formative for me, right. So in in that space, it's not just about talking about the 10 year vision. Are there so that it's really about what is the three year kind of horizon that we're looking at or five year horizon, and then let's go help you do it. And I think that's it was different, you know, having done interviews at that time and a number of different places, it was different to me in the sense of, hey, we're actually going to, we're actually gonna make this real, right. It can't just be a pie in the sky vision, it's got to be kind of thoroughly thought out, and kind of that we can go do with you such that it shows the value. And I think that was demonstrable for me in terms of like, how the light was approaching at a time taught me how to approach project how to approach kind of just career wise, like, what is the value and then stop thinking about the, you know, the crazy, awesome vision, let's, let's start talking about like the crazy awesome. Now,

Jeff  10:38

that's so important. And I think and kind of goes to some of the context for today's chat, which is, in the professional services world, you just have to keep showing value. If you're not showing value. I see later, we're gonna bring it back. Yeah, it's

John Kirkman  10:53

a it's a constant scorecard, right. And there's, I think, for me, it's, it's, it's, I need that in my career I need, I need that kind of aspect of measure kind of what I'm doing. So I'm never going to just punch a punch, punch a card and collect my check. It's really kind of day to day, you've got to pay the rent kind of deal. And you got to do the work, you got to kind of show up and kind of do the work. So I think that for me is was super formative. And certainly I took a lot a lot away from them.

Jeff  11:17

That's great. And so where do you switch over to next after? Yeah,

John Kirkman  11:22

so I was there for about seven or eight years, and then moved on to as actually moved to Europe. Actually, my buddy has a technology startup over there. That was a focus on supply chain, transportation management and kind of inventory management optimization. And so the call I kind of had with him was this idea that a great company that we have a software, we think there's products that we can kind of manage out of this, how do we scale this? How do we create an invitation team? How do we create a consulting team? How do we create? How do we go through the inflection point of we have a startup technology to it, we have a gestated kind of great technology afterward, right, that says platform that has modules and all that stuff. So a bunch of really fascinatingly smart folks, we had partnerships with the Eindhoven University for a lot of industrial engineering stuff, and it was just really kind of cutting edge. You know, because I think in the time that we're in, there's a lot of Transportation Management software's out there, if you can extend if you can look at the entire ecosystem of supply chain, you can start to dissect, so customer support customer implementations, that sort of thing is kind of where I felt that's great. Again, very formative, very, very awesome for me to do that spent about a year and a half there, and then got a call from Nike to come do strategy for them as well. So from your move to here to Portland, Oregon, and focused a lot with Nike, focusing a lot on kind of the supply chain technology space. So thinking through you know, the transition from Wholesale to retail can be quite complex. And when you when you build your entire environment for a wholesaler, as a wholesaler, rather, even just kind of the technology processes are different, right? So how we think about full truckloads as opposed to end each, right. So think about a pair of shoes as opposed to a truckload of shoes, you know, not only is just from an operational point of view, but actually from an execution of, of the technologies that support that vastly different. So a lot of fun problems to solve there. I was on that roll. I also did marketplace operations strategy for them, do you ever

Jeff  13:11

get into the, like the last mile problem or any of that stuff?

John Kirkman  13:16

At the same time, kind of during my, my tenure at Nike I was very much involved with we have here in Portland, something called Portland incubator experiment. And so, here at pi, there's a lot of this basic liaison are kind of part time mentors for the startups. How do these startups think about creating a business? How do they kind of do all that and all that jazz. And so I got involved through a friend of a friend with a venture fund here that owns homeschool outerwear, which is a breast, snowboard and outerwear brand, to kind of just kind of consultant kind of come in and say, Hey, how do we how should we think about inventory differently? How do we reposition ourselves in the marketplace, you know, in kind of sideways times? And so I've been doing that for a little while. And yeah, it's just been kind of site consultant doing digital transformation along with George has been perfect. Okay, around that area

Jeff  14:04

as well. I didn't realize he was on that project to

John Kirkman  14:07

know I different, I mean, different spheres. Right. So homeschool was kind of my project. And then there's a couple of clients that I just leaned in on a little bit with Jordan. Stuff that he was doing. So yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's kind of that's how I got to now. Yeah, so it's, that's still here in Portland, Oregon. It's beautiful. It's rainy as it is,

Jeff  14:25

when we're allowed outside. Exactly. Right. And so what are the types of things you do? And now?

John Kirkman  14:30

Yeah, I've done a lot of like consulting around just kind of this digital transformation. I think COVID You know, I think that that phrase gets lost. I think watching I'm not going to relive the conversation with George but I think with a lot of companies now that the stark understanding of what, what being digital means is transformative. I mean, it's not to belabor the word but it's it's one of those moments where people kind of talked about it as the wrecking ball was hitting the building kind of deal. And I think I think the ball has crashed to the to the wall and people are saying Oh, Oh, we actually do need to pay attention to that. So a lot of the work that I'm doing are for kind of the mid tier brands and kind of local brands here of like, really understanding how to embrace that how to be digitally native as they start, particularly some of the startups. And I think those people have an advantage and then setting up kind of the structure organization around that. And then, you know, kind of work and still have ideas of like, you know, Georgia had this these ideas around behaviors that persist. So how do you create an environment where remote is the new norm? Because it is, right? And how do you kind of embrace and grow that? Yeah, effectively.

Jeff  15:31

I know, we were chatting about that a little before we joined on, but like, you know, it was never my preference for remote team beforehand. And now we're all remote. We're, everybody's out. Unless, you know, they're on the front line or something like that, or some other people. Which we can probably I know, we're gonna react to just keep spending a bunch of time on that. Like, for me, I always had this philosophy that was your you earn being remote, like you might have been in the home office. And then it's like, hey, my wife's family wants to move out here. I want to be an X, Y, and Z. And now, there's not that choice. Have you been helping people out with that? Or sort of just in this whole remote and digital aspect of stuff? Yeah,

John Kirkman  16:16

yeah, I think that's, you know, that's a question that continues to percolate up is just how do we specifically how do we embrace the remote environment? Because I think there's there's this transition that's happening in the workforce, right? You've got what I would call it, you know, not to I'm not trying to castigate anyone, but kind of old guard of like butts and seats matter. Oh, yeah. And having maybe this speaks to the point of like, being in consulting, my last year consulting, I spent 256,000 miles in the air, I spent three to 30 nights in a hotel. Right. So I was on four different projects across the country, managing remote teams. And as we talked about, you earn your rent every day and consulting. And so I, you know, I kind of grew up that way. But it's, you know, you get to a corporate environment where people just expect butts and seats, it's a little bit different there. So that that transition is tough for a lot of folks in the how, you know, a lot of things that I took for granted from a consulting perspective, that how you do that is super important, and how you embrace the kind of the ethos of the environment, or create the ethos of the team. Super important relevant for that

Jeff  17:17

actually was thrown that subject can we peel back to, to the Nike conversation, because I knew we had like a glitch and stuff like that, too. Like, did you feel that you were an anomaly coming in with a consultant background, and you're dealing with lots of people, we're just been like, I've been here 10 years and that stuff, and like, we brought it in and sort of like, the change agent thing? I'm

John Kirkman  17:37

not trying to be diplomatic about this, but I think there is that. Yep. Nope.

Jeff  17:44

I hear you again. us back.

John Kirkman  17:45

Sorry about that. You know, connected directly to the Wi Fi point itself. Oh, gotcha. Yeah,

Jeff  17:52

I think it's Nike every time we want to talk about Nike. So,

John Kirkman  17:59

for your question, your your questions related to you know, did I experience kind of the return of some angst? I would say,

Jeff  18:06

the change agent brush back? Yeah, absolutely.

John Kirkman  18:10

Yeah. And again, like he's only been around since 1972. So thinking that through of like, folks is still there that had been there from the beginning. Yeah. And, you know, there's just massive transition, they're going through, you know, being a wholesaler is one thing and having to deal with, you know, big sporting goods or kind of a footlocker to the world. It's, you know, it's one thing to do that to talk and manage direct to consumer. I mean, that's a whole different world. Right. And so, part part of that, that transition, kind of bringing me on board was around how do we think about that change? And how do we effectively manage that change?

Jeff  18:43

Yeah, it's, it's that, I think, sometimes, and, you know, we're trying to be diplomatic about it, but that mindset of earning your dollar, and we can be replaced easily. Hey, I'm only laughing because I think you and I keep getting pulled into these situations, like, we want that consulting fee, or like firing the, you know, fire in the veins. And, you know, people kind of lose that. Like, I will say, you know, one of my stories, and I won't say which company it was, is that, you know, we a lot of companies have moved to agile in two weeks sprints and things like that. And I was brought in, and the issue is developers if they weren't such a contrast, if they're just a project team, because it involves QA and PMS and everything as well to spot like, if the product the product team was not delivering all of the features that they had signed up for a sprint, and it was like, oh, we'll just roll it into the next one. Right. And, and that was like, in there were eight sprint teams, and they're all doing different stuff and couldn't be measured. And part of the conversation was around that, which was like, well, it's not the tool. And it's not the person it's the mentality around And what is failure? And what is success? And what are the expectations of something like I get it, like you missed a story in a sprint, if that happens to everybody, but to accept it and just kind of like hand wave it off and go play some ping pong, like, I just don't remember that happening from, you know, the consulting days it was like, No, we gotta get this done. And unfortunately, that might be a very long Red Bull field. Yeah. But that's sort of what we were brought up through. And it's kind of like, just be an interesting point of keep going on like, the dogs barking so I'm gonna go into me and go off the ball. Like, since you've been there, you don't want to be in that scenario. So you plan so you don't get into the 20 hour Red Bull fueled days.

John Kirkman  20:49

Yeah, it's it's funny to like there's there's there's an aspect of trying to think through like diplomatically that, that there's also an aspect of companies hiring consultants and saying, Hey, we need you know, joke about this. Sometimes we need 10 years of experience in consulting, 10 years of experience in industry and 10 years of experience doing X Y, Zed things. And then once you get to that company, those 30 years of experience don't matter anymore. Now you need to assimilate. And it's I think it's what you're saying, it's like the fire, we want that further, we want that fire, go get him kind of attitude. But once you get here, all we want you to assimilate and be like everyone else, it's like, there's there's also a push and pull and take on that as well. And I think it's also, you know, especially the larger the corporation, it's harder to find the ones that really kind of accentuate, I guess, the consulting skill sets, such that they can empower change as opposed to be, because I think a lot of folks view consultants, particularly strategy consultants coming in and saying, you know, kind of the seagull manager come in and squawk a bunch of times with the crap everywhere and kind of fly away. And so, so I think there's also the aspect of like, as you think about the industry, as you think about these corporate environments, how they want this, this kind of train of thought, but they are gun shy on the amount of change that may need to happen. So I think there's how do you embrace that? How do you take advantage of that, and kind of grow that side of that organization? Through that change?

Jeff  22:09

Yeah, and probably the toughest part of that. And, and I try not to do this, because I'm not the best at it is the George was talking about this, like, people want the new tool, right? Like, oh, we're gonna put this platform in. And it's like, that's not really going to fix your problems. Are you still bumping into those scenarios today for these companies that are immune not to mention anybody, but like, for those that are kind of in this new digital transformation, or or transformation, because they absolutely must, or they, you're still dealing with these like, well, what if we just, you know, got everybody on this platform? And it's like, yeah, well,

John Kirkman  22:45

there's a, there's an adage that learned at Deloitte, that I think it's pertinent here isn't that a fool with a tool is still just a fool, right? So when you think about implementing the next shiny tool, it doesn't solve the problem, it gives you, I joke, that it's a tool with a crummy process or current business behind it. It's only gonna make that bad process happen faster. It's not going to fix the process, it's not going to change the process. It's gonna make it happen faster. So that could be good. It could be bad, but don't expect the tool to be that one. no silver bullet or Lynch payments gonna change the world. Yeah, yeah. to your to your question. I mean, it's yeah, all the time. People say, Oh, we just, it's a next shiny thing. Let's go get that.

Jeff  23:26

I know. And then you just says, you start pulling these things apart. It's systematic. And there's just, it's, it's a hard gig, man, it's like, you've got to change like, 50 to 100 people's way of viewing things. And there's, you know, it's like dealing with like a divorced couple, and they have all this baggage, and it's man, it's, it's just the transformations as hard. It's hard work. I don't do it anymore. I'll try and fix a point problem. But, you know, it's it's a tough gig. So God bless.

John Kirkman  24:02

And I think, you know, speaking about Nike in particular there, I think, from a strategy point of view, their strategy group is full of a lot of strategy consultants, and rightfully so I think there's a, you know, that that, that pursuit is no one that you want to think about, from a brand perspective, you want to think long term are kind of this kind of pie in the sky vision and kind of create users around that to kind of trickle down to the brand itself. So I think kind of the actuation of the brand rather. And I think that's super, super relevant, I think we're becomes tricky is when you land because when you think you need a consultants mindset to come in, to just like I said, assimilate is where I think becomes a bit dodgy. And, you know, even in my past, I, you know, got the feedback. You know, they might not give me the details, but I got the feedback and industry of like, Oh, John is great. He's really smart. witbank smart. He just was very consulted minded. It's like, Yeah, well, that's your hiring. Right? So it's one of that that catch 22 But where I found like, you know, thinking about what I'm doing now and kind of the the experience I've had here in Portland If the consultants skill set, I think translates can translate very well to corporate advisors. I'm not here to disparage that. But I think in the startup world holy cow is that is a skill set of being a consultant. particularly powerful, right? You think about managing ambiguity or kind of, you know, being a jack of all trades, master of none, knowing when to be six, six inches deep or six feet deep, right? It's, it's helping organizations that are going through a startup, kind of entrepreneurial phase to think about these things in broader term, and help them understand how to kind of partner piecemeal this together. So it's not, you know, we're full of sales today, eating the elephant all at once, right? So how do you

Jeff  25:36

give us just dealing with that on a call right before this one where I was like, Okay, you want to throw that MVP out there? Okay, cool. Just by that we think of like privacy policies, and then user license agreements, and they're like, what? And I'm like, Yeah, you know, like, you're sending this out to enterprise users, and they're gonna need to, like, sign on and create an account and be like, Oh, really? And I'm like, yeah, and then like, you feel the bad guy for, like,

John Kirkman  26:00

for pulling the parade, right?

Jeff  26:02

Oh, my God. Exactly. But you know, not to, you know, because I know, we can get into all the crappy stuff and everything, but like, you know, one of those other benefits I can think of, you just touched on it with the managing ambiguity of work. I don't know, you focus a lot on supply chain, but maybe post supply chain world, it's also like, being able to context switch, right? Because essentially, it's always the same problem that we just talked about, but it's like, like, you know, being able to walk in and say, What do you guys do? Like, Oh, you do X y&z? How do you feel? Or do you have any sort of things that's kind of glare out at you? Is that like you said, you were working on for customers at one time? Like, I definitely know that drill? Were they all sort of different verticals? Are we you're stuck in one vertical? And you're just kind of seeing the same problems over and over again?

John Kirkman  26:52

Well, I think, yeah, from a, from a consulting years, I think the the reason, there's like rubrics and kind of baked things at you know, templates, if you were, if it were at consulting is you oftentimes see the same problem percolate again, and again, and again, I think, in particular, my experience at Deloitte is is we had industry, and then we had kind of a focus, right? So it was like industry and sector of like, what what you're actually doing right, so I was the cross section of retail and supply chain. And so, you know, thinking about that, it's a, I typically saw similar problems across those environments. But it's when you know, the beauty of the consulting tools, you can be sideways to that. So did a lot of sourcing procurement projects as well, which you wouldn't think of supply chain oriented, but very much is. And so you know, it's the the, the approach becomes a metered, measured approach, we, with great certainty, can say, hey, we can save money in this category, for instance, where we can optimize inventory flow in this way, or kind of do these things, right. And I think, you know, oftentimes, consultants get criticized because, well, you've done this before. So just give us the blueprints and be on your way. It's like, well, it's not just about the repeatability the problem or the solution to a problem. Rather, it's about how do you integrate that with the current environment, so you can bounce you can see the same exact problem from one customer or kind of client to another. But it's how you solve it. You know, it's fundamentally different how you deal with the organization, and you think about the organization is completely different. So

Jeff  28:14

100% agree with you on that. You there's, there's certain people I work with, and in sometimes you're trying Oh, yeah, we're just gonna do X, Y, and Z. Like, yeah, they're we're not going to do that. Like, okay, let me think of a different way around. So you gotta be able to get outside of that template.

John Kirkman  28:28

Yeah, yeah. In the consultants that typically fail are the ones who rely on the template, right? It's like, oh, we saw this before here, go do this. Yeah, that just that just even thinking about that is like, just go do this. Well, they hired a consultant to come help do that. Right. It's, it's not just the dealing of that. It's the how do we create the journey across that? Again, going back to our value conversation? How do you create value with using a solution to probably have already solved? What the value becomes of like understanding the environment? Why this hasn't been solved before? Because if there's no, there's all these templates out there and kind of approaches and rubrics to making decisions, of course, people are going to have some latency to adopt that. But why Why wouldn't it change? It's because I think a lot of the organization structure a lot of the power of it, I guess, the superpower of consultants is really understanding how to layer that solution in within kind of integrated with with the environment, it's in with the organizations and because the complexity of those are just vast,

Jeff  29:19

so something totally to the side, but like I was hearings, where you were just saying, I'm like, now, like, in the remote world, because we know what this would be like, if we were in person, we'd be you know, walking the halls and having the big conversations and doing those sticky notes and the whiteboard drawings and things like that. Cuz this is some of the work that I think is difficult to do remote like it's kind of there's a reason why Accenture and Deloitte and everybody else was successful with the in person models and everything's because you kind of need to be there to have those conversations and work through these issues. And we didn't talk about this beforehand or anything, but I'm curious, like, what tools are you using to come How to convey these problems and your solutions. Like, just to help you out, like, I occasionally use Miro now, which is like a whiteboarding tool and stuff. Like, I'm curious, like in this new remote world, how you're kind of addressing some of these, because these are big problems, and they're hard to fix.

John Kirkman  30:17

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I took away from consulting and kind of thinking that through was is if there's always a presentation, right, there's, there's a deck on this, and I'm gonna spend the evening creating a deck of slides and do this and do that. And I think there's certainly power and a place for that. But I think where we're in now is you can't just call people together, meeting, go through a deck and say, Hey, you guys understand your point about using apps that have whiteboarding that allow people to kind of collaborate back and forth, is really transforming how, I guess consultants would engage clients, but also how clients engage themselves, right and thinking that through. So for me, it's same thing. So the mero app, and there's, I use a lot of slack, right? So slack for me is so much better than email, because I get to sign up and kind of not sign up for the feeds, right, and to kind of collaborate on that. So that's a platform of choice for me as well. But also, you know, Zoom has some great technologies. And I think a lot of these meetings, stuff are starting to emerge as powerful and way to capture stuff in a meeting and then send it out afterward. This is kind of where the power of those come into play. You know, it's like setting up the meeting, when you go to any any client's site, you got to make sure the technology works, you got to make sure that there's a projector usable, but like all that types of stuff. Now,

Jeff  31:31

I told you to get the m&m cookies to like,

John Kirkman  31:34

more, but now it's about making sure that it's translating what you would typically think about a meeting space into requirements for software, and some of those things you might have taken for granted before. But that becomes kind of software requirements. And that's how I've been kind of evaluating those those types of sessions before. Yeah, don't get me wrong. It's not to say that not not using PowerPoint and others to kind of CINDEX across. But it's just I think, the collaborative nature of what the scope of work that I'm doing requires you to be a little bit more intimate and interactive with with with the clients.

Jeff  32:04

Yeah. And it is it's that interactivity that like, hey, let's just go grab 15 minutes or grab a coffee and talk about this problem, or how are we going to get through this and being able to grab people quickly, and like, he would just whiteboard this out or whatever. Like, we were just talking to people. And now it's like, you got to schedule a meeting, but everybody's booked because there's zoom. Yeah, yeah, long and all these things. And that's,

John Kirkman  32:25

that's also the the proclivity to kind of have, you know, what I call death by 1000. paper cuts with 30 minute meetings all day, it's like, Alright, when can I carve out space? Because, for me, how my mind works is I need to carve out time for myself, I have to do just whiteboarding stuff for myself, right? And thinking about, like, how do I organize this? And how do I catch that and, and that I think was easy to do. When you sit in office in a corporate event, you just shut the door and say, Hey, I'm busy working on the whiteboard stuff. Yep. But people look at your calendar as well. They're available, they're readily available. So I'll just schedule a meeting. Or if they see something, you know, it's just becomes a calendar jockeying exercise. Yeah. Where I think it's just tougher and tougher to click hit that, that sell time to kind of whiteboard yourself or kind of randomly grab, because that's inspiration is not plant, right. It's kind of just, it appears sometimes

Jeff  33:09

that Oh, like, Hey, do you got a second? Like I just yeah, like, like, there's none of that anymore? Right? Like occasionally, right? Like, it's like, okay, let's fire up a quick, you know, Slack slack meeting or something like that. But like, so on that note, I mean, I'm sure this is not some new hack or anything, but like blocking the putting those blocks on your calendar, like Do Not Disturb. So it's still happening, right? Like, that's why we have to reschedule this one. But like, yeah, no, exactly. But like, you know, I will go and drop like a three hour block in my calendar. So just nobody can touch. And so if somebody does grab one hour, I still have like, two, but it's hard, right? Like, I was just walking with my wife, we were walking the dog on a quick break and said, I think I need to carve out some time this weekend, actually, like, write the stories. And suddenly, like, when do I like do that? Do all the interviews, compile all this stuff together? And now it's like, crap, now I actually have to write like, you know, do that, because I'm doing some product management for somebody right now. Like, do actually write the user stories and do all that stuff and explain to the devs and get so that, you know, for me, I never want developers, you know, gathering requirements when they could be coding and stuff like that. So it's like, what am I going to do that? Like, when do I have time to you because you know, like, I'm sorry, I'm like, going off on a tangent here. But I, if I have, like, if a meeting ends, and I've got 15 minutes before the next meeting, I'm not gonna like, oh, let's go super in depth on some user required, like, it just doesn't happen.

John Kirkman  34:38

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I haven't found the person that can just turn on their brain like that. And just jump into that and get a little piece of the work done and then move on to something else. I think we as humans are geared around kind of finishing or kind of being entrenched in something and moving on to the next thing after we're, we're through that process.

Jeff  34:54

has reminded me I hadn't thought about this for years, but back when I was a developer and Oh, this guy Troy, I think, as you know, but good friend of mine worked at a couple different places. We were both developers and we were writing custom solutions for, you know, somebody would sell our software, and then we would customize it a little bit for them. And then, you know, our boss, not, you know, hard guy to work with, definitely, you know, I know now he was pushing for high quality. But he'd be like, hey, I really need you to get this thing done before the day. And we look at our clock. And we were like, Hey, that's a 17 minute task. And it's 445. So unfortunately, that would go into tomorrow. So

John Kirkman  35:37

yes, yeah. It's funny too, because, you know, the other aspect of the remote as remote working and COVID. And kind of All That Jazz is, what I find is a lot of people schedule meetings to just show that they're working. It's like, Yeah, I know, I believe you I, in consulting, I had the kind of jargon of like, I mentioned output, not input. So I want to see the quality of work at the end of day, if it takes you 20 hours, if it takes you 40 hours, you know, if it takes you 60 7080 We gotta have a conversation. But yeah, I'm gonna drop it right into it. And so what I find oftentimes now, what's happening, not just with me, but a lot of my friends, my wife, as well as a lot of meetings just show up to say, Hey, I'm doing the work. And it's like, yeah, we all are doing that. I don't need a 30 minute meeting to kind of talk about that. I know, see, when it's stuff,

Jeff  36:16

like meetings, like, I try, you know, I'll schedule them, Supergirl, you know, 20 minute meetings, and so 30 minute, like, you know, 5010 instead of 15. Like, I'm always trying to just cut them down. So everybody will be on point. And interesting, because we both have kids, I will tell you when I made that switch, because I was at a startup and an amazing startup, by the way. But there was a dinner culture there, which was essentially in CEOs brilliant on this basically, like, like, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get really nice crepes for dinner or really nice. This or that I just gave away hoping you, like, everybody like, yeah, he's like, not gonna order them till 630. And which was great for the people, like we're all know, kids and stuff like that, in built this culture of like, Hey, we're gonna really stretch this work day out for me. So that worked. That was fun. And definitely, you know, it was, like, kind of career making time for me and everything. But then I had kids, and then I was like, Hey, I actually can get a lot done in 40 hours. And I was like, I wasn't bullshitting. I wasn't doing any of the side Joe's like literally, like, I need to crank. And then that's kind of when I, you know, the GSD started getting known as like getting shit done. It was really like, I just don't have the time. I don't have like, this time anymore. I need to be able to be super efficient in the stuff that I do. And I actually feel I've lost a lot of that with COVID for exactly a lot of the stuff that we've talked about.

John Kirkman  37:45

So yeah, and it's what we used to do in consulting as well to kind of mediate or kind of not mediate, but measure. effective meetings is also just put out a building report and saying, Okay, you guys wanted the meeting, we had seven consultants there. 13 people from your side there from our side, this is how much that meeting cost. Yep. Did we achieve that objective that we wanted in that meeting? Or no, we continue to have these types of meetings. And you know, and I see this problem persist in a lot of different areas where it Nike to some degree, it was like have the meetings before the meeting, so you can get the meeting alignment in the meeting that's already gotten, oh my god, you out the cost of that. It's just like, it shows you right in your face of like, holy cow, that's an expensive decision that should have been done over unsession just get shit done and decide and go.

Jeff  38:29

I you know, it's trying not to say my favorite thing. So let's say like, isn't it interesting that I started saying like, this is a $5,000 meeting in some of the startups I would go to, and they're looking at me, like, I've got 10 heads, and I'm looking around, I'm like, as if we broke our salaries up, like we're all like billing, or something like that, like, or whatever it ends up being. There's 15 of us in here. We have a two hour long, exact stuff every, every week, and then we will have further on conversations. And it's like, just YouTube people need to talk, figure out, get it done. Like, you know, forget about, you know, oh my god, we're gonna see unravel so much stuff here by like, you know, not everybody needs to be part of the conversation. Like it's okay for two people to go off and make a decision. Now, we don't have to be super democratic. And everything. Yeah, it's

John Kirkman  39:21

there's not disparaging and consensus building at all. And I think that's important as particularly in our corporate environment, building that consensus, but when it becomes so belaboured, that consensus wherever everyone sees consensus as I have a decision, right as well. And so that becomes a very bureaucratic and if everyone has a decision, right, then no one has a decision, right? It's what I found.

Jeff  39:42

I just laughed because I realized what wound up happening here and through this tangential conversation, is we actually started showing the consulting mindset as it applies to some of these things right? Because I have this like, why like people We'll always get pissed off at me, like, I'm gonna go back into my work like you guys go around and do whatever you got to do once yourself, let me know when I need to be brought back into this conversation. And you can kind of do that now. And like, I'm like, I'm just going on mute on Zoom, and like somebody ping me when you need me to come back in. And, you know,

John Kirkman  40:19

it's, you know, it's even prior to COVID. That happened as well with with leaders that were in meetings and one of the tools or tricks that I've learned from consulting, to manage the meeting size, and because typically, the larger the meeting, the more spin, or whether that's been happens in the meeting or outside the meeting. And so one of the tricks of the trade that from from a consulting perspective is, as people want to join a meeting, you ask just a blunt question. So what is your role in this meeting? Why do you want to listen in while send me the notes after that? You know, it's kind of that that just that obtuse? Because again, the more that people are in the meeting, the less work actually gets done in that meeting to decide like, Wait,

Jeff  40:53

why is finance here? Like, what, what?

John Kirkman  40:56

What role? It's, you know, it's again, it sounds obtuse, but I think it's kind of, especially in a time where everyone's, in this time where everyone's kind of just hair on fire, I got a new part time teacher, I've got to do the work, I've got to do all these things. It's, it's super important kind of manage the time correctly. And that simple trick and help dispel or this these large, meaner, kind of fragment those meetings, the meetings that matter the most?

Jeff  41:20

Yeah. And it all dials back to the consulting, this is a $2,000 meeting, or we need to show value. And it's like, you have these things that are built into your mind. And it's sort of like, yes, let's get this stuff done. And I swear to God, yeah, we can go off all day on things, but I think it's really just showing where, where, where some of the skill sets can be brought in to really streamline and make sure that organizations can be just super effective. Yeah. Like, let that just go do what they need to go do. Right.

John Kirkman  41:57

And the other thing, too, is, is typically as a strategy consultant, or bring in from from an executive, so just the power of being able to as a consultant to say, okay, you know, if you reach a deadlock in a meeting or discussion, the card that, you know, the ultimate card that I can always play is like, Okay, well, the CEO wants us to go do this. So I don't need to tell him. So what is it? And all sudden, it's a little a little I don't, we don't have to tell the CEO, it's okay, so then. So I think that's a skill set that I haven't yet found how to translate that to the corporate world, because everyone in the corporate world is on that team. Right. So they all have some reporting structure up to that. But that was, it's an interesting card to play as a consultant, because you're just like, hey, let's talk to the bullshit. All right, I gotta gotta tell the CEO something. What do you want me to say? I might agree or disagree. We, we've, we've lost track of the side of that, or the opportunity here. So what do we need to tell the CFO? And how quickly people jump in line after that is amazing.

Jeff  42:48

Yeah, the the amount of like, this shit again means like, pulled up. And yeah, like?

John Kirkman  42:55

I mean, frankly, it's a lot of posturing. Right. So empathy for that, too, like, in the corporate world, you got these consultants come in and think that they run the show. And that's not that's not the mindset I ever had. But I could appreciate that some people have been burned in the past on it. But I don't see it for when I don't enjoy it all. It's people that just throw up firewalls or box just to just to throw out the wall. No, for no other reason than to say I can throw up a wall. That's very frustrating.

Jeff  43:20

My guess here, you'd probably know that better than I is that, you know, it's always a pendulum swing. It happened. One. So somebody said, I'm gonna make sure I'm in that meeting the next time and then suddenly, like, that's the culture and everybody's, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I just looked at the time, and we get to 22 Oh, my Oh, my God. So um, let's, let's do this. Because I was probably got one with you, me and Jordan, to go through some more stuff here. But like, let's, I think this is probably a nice break point. Like, I'm going to ask you sort of what's the big initiative that you're trying to, like, you know, finish off the year, whether your big focus for right now? And then we'll, we'll close it down? And we'll we'll come back in and chat again. And another time?

John Kirkman  44:04

Yeah. So yeah, it's, we're two weeks out from Christmas. And typically organizations start to shut down now. Yeah. Some of the stuff that I'm working on is still around holiday. So I'm still in kind of the retail space. So to kind of just a high level consulting with, with some of these retail partners and startups is how do you deliver on what you got consumers to buy? And how do you think through that stuff? And I think, you know, again, from an operation from a supply chain point of view, it's much easier in that role to say, Okay, this is just what needs to happen. These are the things we just don't need to go do. It's there's not, we don't have time to burn. So there's a burning platform for that. But setting up next year and kind of going through what's post COVID looks like for about organizations. And then and then as Jordan, I kind of talked about a lot of like what behaviors persist beyond COVID. You starting to map that out? That's more for me to think through as you think about digital transformations like what are those behaviors that can persist? That helped kind of disrupt how we think about talent? How do we think about building teams, all that all that jazz as well. Yeah, I've

Jeff  45:03

heard some really because I'm working on a video project, but like basically at a big zoom not soccer as much and stuff like that, but you hear when we started talking about the different user profiles, like all the cool stuff like that HR is doing now with like, interview rooms and, you know, making sure that you know, that all these things that would would have been done in person to make people feel like they're joining a fun organization or not a boring organization, you know, or how to make sales meetings better or how to do X y&z You know, and this is these force transmitted formations that have happened, and then it's like, okay, well, do we just go back to back to interviews? Oh, so are we gonna go back to that thing where you show up for six hours and get drilled down people now? Or are we going to actually, so that is a interesting point. I hadn't even thought about that. So yeah, it's

John Kirkman  45:53

it's funny to like think it through just from a deliveries, we had a telepresence where the end of the conference room table would have the video screen on the other side, it just looked like a table went on. Well, that's step one. That's basically creating corporate environments within a corporate environment. But now that's, that's been blown up to say, how do I create every individual seat around that table so that we're all connected in that way? It's, it's a different way of thinking.

Jeff  46:14

That's great. So listen, John, just hang on for a quick second. I'm gonna start recording. This is awesome. We went super deep in a couple areas, and just really enjoyed that conversation. That's super fun. I would pause Moses brought through what we're trying to figure out from it. So thanks, again. I'll stick your LinkedIn where people can find you and all that fun stuff, and just hold on. Awesome.