Human Touch: The Author of 'The Grid' on Making Better Business Decisions and Delighting Clients

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Spencer Levy
I'm Spencer Levy and this is The Weekly Take whether you are in real estate or retail, whether you're an innkeeper or captain of industry, an adviser or salesperson, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, any line of work, clients and customers, or at the heart of your decisions. On this episode, an award winning author and thought leader shares his unique perspective on business thinking and customer experience. 

Matt Watkinson
The customer ultimately is a major stakeholder and you ignore them at your peril. 

Spencer Levy
That's Matt Watkinson, the author of two books, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, and his most recent title The Grid. Matt is also the CEO of Methodical Consulting, a Los Angeles based advisory firm. Matt and I will talk about the nuances of the business decision matrix across industries and sectors, what his latest book calls a tool for every business. We'll discuss risk challenges, collaboration and more with a focus on the people, the clients and customers who are buying your products and services. Coming up, a deep dive into customer experience. That's right now on the weekly basis. Welcome to The Weekly Take. Matt, thank you for joining the show. 

Matt Watkinson
Thank you so much, Spencer. My absolute pleasure. 

Spencer Levy
Great to have you here today, Matt. I want to talk about the term customer experiences, because we're in the real estate business here and in the real estate business, particularly in retail, maybe secondarily now in office and in other asset classes. We talk about the experience of the tenant -- which is the customer for us -- being the key to the long term success of any business enterprise. What's your point of view, Matt? 

Matt Watkinson
Well, my point of view, and I suppose it comes from practical immersion in that field, is that really what I think people are talking about is that you're talking about trying to create as much value as possible. And that in certain contexts and in certain categories of markets, the way to identify how to add the most value to the customer is to think about what the totality of their experience is like. And that becomes, in certain contexts, an umbrella term for: Do we have the right product at the right price? Do we have the right brand that resonates with people? Do we communicate well through advertising and marketing? And do we think about the nature of the interactions that people are having with us across the life cycle of being a customer from first to last? And is there a degree of cohesion and coherence between those things? I tend to think value first and then experience as a means to creating value. And that's how I try and articulate it to people: to give them a way of trying to break that down pragmatically so that they can make specific interventions where it's going to help. I mean, CBRE is a huge business. Everybody has heard of them. Right? But if you're a small business and people haven't heard of you, should you be focusing on the interaction design or should you be focusing on raising awareness? So I'm trying to approach this in an integrated and a holistic way with the overall aim being to create as much value for the customer in the business as possible and seeing the experience as a means towards that end. 

Spencer Levy
One of the things I like the most about your two books is they're very, very structured in how you go about handling problems. So let's go to The Grid now. And why don't you summarize the book in your words, how you organized it and what you were seeking to achieve. 

Matt Watkinson
The Grid was perhaps not necessarily a logical successor to the first book on customer experience, but it is a success that I ended up writing for a very simple reason. What I observed was a lot of people would make decisions without necessarily thinking about the broader implications of those decisions or with those decisions, not having really been based on a solid understanding of the problem in the first place. People would assume that the customer experience was the problem, which is why they were phoning me with it. Just because everybody else was spending money on that and not really thinking, well, is our problem adoption barriers, awareness, brand appeal, pricing, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. So what I thought we needed was a way to see all the factors that kind of determined the success of a business on a single page as an interconnected whole, where you could pinpoint those constraints much more clearly, or if you are making an intervention in one area, how you were hoping it would impact the others. If we are to improve our customer experience, will that impact acquisition of new customers? Will that impact retention? Will that lower barriers to purchase? Will that give us more pricing power? Will that reduce our cost to serve whatever it might be? Actually get all those factors into a kind of structure where people could work through them methodically and look at them in a structured fashion and see where to make interventions for maximum payoff? And it was inspired actually by the situation in my personal life where I struggled with knee pain for years. I tried everything and I'd even had surgery on both of my knees and nothing had worked. And the reason was because everyone I was going to see was focusing on the knee because that's what hurt. Right? But then I went to see another therapist who said, well, when it comes to body pain, it's the victim that screams, not the perpetrator. That was the phrase that they used. And she kind of traced the problem back to these muscle imbalances in my hips and glutes and stuff and gave me this program of exercises for that which actually fixed the knee by taking the pressure off these muscles going down my leg. So I was like, oh, my God, this is exactly the problem we have in business, which is we rush to where we feel the pain or we focus on this local area that we are responsible for and aren’t considering the thing as an interconnected whole or as a system where actually we might be wanting to intervene elsewhere and we're feeling the latent consequences of that. So it was really inspired by that. And the aim was to try and create this kind of systems way of thinking about business that would facilitate communication between people of different disciplines. It would allow people to see the bigger picture. And ultimately it would lead to better decisions with less risk. That's what I was hoping to do. 

Spencer Levy
What I love about the system, it's very clear. To use the terms of my criminal law professor. It's all a seamless web, these different areas. And I'll just read them very quickly. In the customer experience, it's desirability, profitability and longevity. For the market it's rivalry, bargaining, power and imitability. And then for organization, its offerings, costs and adaptability. And so the question really is that you've got these nine distinct factors and none of them is more important than the other. Would you agree with that? 

Matt Watkinson
Yeah, absolutely none of them is more important than the other. And they're all interconnected intractably as well, which makes it kind of a challenge to say, well, this is more important versus not is more important because it ultimately comes down to the context of the individual business in question. So, you know, one of the great things I think about The Grid is it allows you to get very specific about your own particular context when you're making decisions rather than just kind of blindly copying what other people around you are doing without really knowing whether they're doing the right thing or not. Right. It gives you that structured way to say, OK, this is exactly what our problem is. It's an adoption or purchase barrier that's being erected. Or OK, it's a cash flow thing. Rather than just trying to jump to a solution that might or might not be appropriate for your particular enterprise. 

Spencer Levy
Let's talk about our enterprises of the audience here, which is real estate. And let me start with a story about my grandfather. My grandfather was a pharmaceutical salesman. I used to go on sales calls with him and the territory that he had was Queens and Manhattan. Rite-Aids and other drugstores at the time. And I used to go in with him and I knew what his territory was. It was well defined, the number of stores where his products were, what we're in a new world today. And my customers today were my clients. They are owners of office buildings, the owners of retail. And it's not quite so well defined what their territory is -- particularly with the Internet, particularly with technology, particularly right now that we're talking over a Zoom call. How do you redefine territory if you're in the office business or the retail business? 

Matt Watkinson
Yeah, I mean, these are big tectonic questions. I often think about whether businesses are in the convenience space or they're in the kind of experience space. In marketing, for example, we talk a lot about mental and physical availability. The more physically available something is, the more likely somebody is to buy it. And the more mentally available it is, the more likely it is to come to mind when the need arises. So you look at Starbucks, for example, they are literally everywhere. They want it to be physically available. They want it to be physically available to make it easy to buy. This is a strategy. There's a strategy that says we're going to be everywhere. Right? But if you're in the convenience business as a retailer or, you know, other aspects of business, hospitality, hotels, whatever it might be, where they're really in the experience and it's worth going there, it's a destination, and it's special, and there is some aspect of that experience, some tactile, some sensory, some social aspect of the value of that product that is beyond or distinct from that convenience, right. I think where a lot of people have gone wrong -- retailers in particular, and this is my perspective on it -- they've dabbled. So they've dabbled in convenience, but never become more convenient than the people who have it convenient. They've dabbled in experience. Or maybe we'll put a cafe in the store. They've never executed it in a way that anyone really wants to to go there. They've got showrooms. But the showroom is still a kind of warehouse-y thing that isn't, you know, a destination that anybody really wants to go to. 

Spencer Levy
Well, this really comes down to a concept you repeat in the book often, which is called Wants versus Needs. And it's a concept that I use all the time in the context of office and hotels and retail. All of that is a Want, not necessarily in a Need given technology. So isn't the challenge even harder now to create what a true Want is? 

Matt Watkinson
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think about in office spaces, for example, I think people are realizing, you know, this space that we have where we bring people together to collaborate and to work, what is the purpose of that space and how do we utilize it effectively? And how do we use it to enhance the wellbeing and productivity of our employees so that they create more value for the business? And I've got very little doubt in my mind that physical spaces play a role in that. Even in my own work spaces. I have conceived of a workspace that is optimized for my personal kind of productivity. Everybody's mind, I think, has a grain. And if you go with the grain of your mind, you can do great things. And if you're forced to cut against the grain of your mind, you struggle. Some people work really well, like me, from like 5 a.m. till noon and then I may as well be a zombie for all the value you're going to get from me. I have another colleague who seems to do his best work from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Other people it's a little bit different for them, but what this technology is doing is allowing people to work in a way that is optimized to their specific grain, as I like to call it. Well, now we're getting used to that and we're realizing that that makes us more productive and that actually may be that open-plan offices suck because you're constantly interrupted and the level of background noise is a stressor. I think that this is a great opportunity for people to say, wow, like what can we do with our physical spaces given that to unlock even more value from these kinds of things. And so I think it's a great opportunity for people to ask big questions about that when it comes to the office, for example. You've got to have a reason to go there now, basically. 

Spencer Levy
Let me challenge you here for a second, Matt. In your book, you speak specifically about values versus beliefs and how people make irrational decisions not only all the time, but very often the most important decisions, such as buying luxury goods, buying things that are more expensive simply because they're more expensive. How do you tie together this rational versus irrational thinking when thinking about a business problem, when you realize that your customer might make irrational decisions?

Matt Watkinson
It’s a really good question. I mean, it’s a really good question. We often assume or like to assume that people are making rational decisions, particularly when it comes to their business. And there's kind of been this great awakening that we're not really making rational decisions a lot of the time. You know, a lot of the time, to quote the psychologist, I think it’s Jonathan Haidt, who said, the rational brain is the press office and the emotional brain is the Oval Office. We use our rational brain to justify the emotive decision that we've already made and convince people that it's a great decision not necessarily to make better decisions in the first place. But I think even being aware of that tendency that we have is vital because for our own personal decision making, you know, we do have this kind of cognitive override ability. If we are aware of our biases, if we're aware of our tendencies, if we have other people to spot us, maybe we can compensate for those tendencies even though we can't eradicate them. 

Spencer Levy
I think the reason why we're using that word awakening is because we've been so ingrained in what you put into your book: what was originally called the Toyota production system, where everything was about more efficiency, everything was about more just in time that people's beliefs, people's values were lost along the way in the name of efficiency. So would you agree that that was the problem and maybe the solution now has happened during covid where people were reawakened? 

Matt Watkinson
I think what you're talking about there, like, efficiency, our methods have been about increasing efficiency and that has become our mentality. Our mentality is an efficiency mentality. And the problem is with any idea, any good idea taken to extremes becomes toxic and any good idea applied in a context where it's not relevant is likely to do more harm than good. Right. And I think one of the things about The Grid in particular is we have this box here that's called adaptability. And the reason that this is one of the big nine is because we're in a dynamic environment. And if we can't respond to change, we have serious problems. Unfortunately, though, adaptability is a bit like car insurance where it's a waste until suddenly you need it -- and then you really, really need it and you wish you had it. But it's so easy to sacrifice, especially if your leadership or your commercial pressures are quarter-to-quarter. How am I going to make the numbers this quarter? Well, I can sacrifice some adaptability, I can get a bit more technical debt. I can cut a corner here. But the problem is a continuum of short-term decisions are not the same as a long term decision, are they? And now we have this problem, you know, perhaps induced by the pandemic, perhaps induced by any other kind of major change -- it can be a new technology. It can be a new competitor -- where if you cannot adapt either structurally, cognitively, operationally, physically, whatever it might be, you know, you suddenly realize, man, we should have kept some slack in the system to cope with this and we don't have it. And now it's where a dragster can only go in a straight line. And we've got big issues. 

Spencer Levy
I would use an analogy that people became or maybe are too dependent upon math, the model, the data. Because I think that in the logistics business, which is a big part of what we do in the industrial sector, you could get it down almost to the minute of when a good is produced in China and the time it will hit your desk in San Francisco, but then covid it. And now we have a tremendous backup of ships. And we saw the Suez Canal crisis where one boat stuck half the commerce in the Middle East because everybody was just-in-time. Everybody knew that too much inventory was a bad thing. And then covid hit, which nobody anticipated and we all paid the price. Would you agree that post-Covid people will value resilience and adaptability more? Or do you think we'll ultimately revert back to the efficiency-first model where we were pre-Covid? 

Matt Watkinson
There are a couple of different themes that come to mind when you ask that. The first is, you know, this idea of data and predictability. One thing that you learn is that there are things that we can predict, or at least there are causes that have reliable effects, you might say. And data is great for optimizing those things. But the things that matter most can almost never be predicted. Right. That's the problem. Will people keep that kind of sense of resilience and their own fragility in mind, or will they default back to being increasingly more efficient? It's very hard to say. I think people generally have short memories and I think it will be done on a case by case basis because some businesses are already of the mindset, the. We've got to be inefficient if we want to continue growing -- like, growth is an inefficient process. Efficiency is great when you're talking about things like manufacturing or supply chain or operations or I.T. and those kinds of things. It has its place, but not everything can be done efficiently. And sometimes trying to do things that are inherently inefficient efficiently is totally counterproductive. 

Spencer Levy
In your book, you have a quote that says, essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful. So essentially human judgment ultimately is the great arbiter of successful versus less successful businesses. Would you agree? 

Matt Watkinson
Yeah, and I very deliberately included that quote in the opening of the book because I was proposing a model and I was saying, look, this is a mental scaffolding. It's a way to help you think through decisions. You know, it's not the only thing you need to know. It's just a way of structuring your thoughts. It was acknowledging that there's infinite nuance and complexity in the world and in business. 

Spencer Levy
Hmm. Well, you have a quote in your book about quality. It says, quote, The best product doesn't always win. The product that everybody knows about, does. It reminds me of a case study I had when I was back at Cornell at AgEc 101 when we had a great professor named Richard “Doc” Aplin and he brought in the inventor or the marketing department from a fabric softener called Snuggle and Snuggle, had a little bear that was really cute and pink and everybody wanted to hug that little bear. The problem was that the actual fabric softener may have been inferior to the market leader, which was Bounce. But because they invented this little bear guy, it started beating Bounce, which was better. So tell me, when it comes to quality, what did you mean by the best product doesn't always win?

Matt Watkinson
Case studies are legion for this, Spencer. I mean, if you think about Beats, Beats, headphones, and maybe some people are listening to this, the kids have gotten more. They've gotten themselves. They took over 60 percent market share in three years of their particular category of kind of premium products. Isn't Beats headphones better than a Bose or a Sennheiser when it comes to build quality? When it comes to audio quality? When it comes to comfort? I think few people would agree with that. But they created this massive awareness and this insanely powerful brand that really resonated with their audience. And people were saying: I'm buying Beats and then I'm deciding which product I'm buying. They weren't saying I'm buying headphones and I'm choosing between the Beats and the Bose. You saw the same with GoPro. At the same time that GoPro was launched, another company was launched called Countour. They certainly believed that they had a comparable, if not better product. But what did GoPro do? They got them in everyone's hands and they got thousands of these amazing viral videos on YouTube and people bought GoPros. And if you asked people who are Contour, they say, I've never heard of Contour. People cannot buy a product if they don't know it exists. And massive salience is a weapon. You know, people buy what comes to mind. I say this is somebody who has learned this the hard way. I've personally experienced just how important it is to raise and maintain salience among your buying base and that you cannot just rely on having a great product if you want to succeed. It's the whole thing is the brand. It's the awareness, it's the customer experience and it's the product. It's the whole thing that you’ve got to be focusing on. 

Spencer Levy
Well, there's other factors that are involved with the great product or great customer experience, and they all go together. And so the simplicity concept and you have a quote from IKEA in your book which says: “Expensive solutions to any kind of problem are usually the work of mediocrity.” And IKEA is obviously a very successful company. But simplicity comes down to the simplicity of returns, which is something that many online providers have been expert at. But there are some places -- and I say this, yes, I do know this store, Hermés, you can't return anything. I know this for fact because I bought my wife a bracelet once, which was the wrong color. And boy, oh boy, it was not get in return no matter what. There you have an example of one business model is ease of doing business simplicity. But you have another retail product that, due to its exclusivity, due to its luxury, takes the complete opposite approach. So, Matt, which approach do you choose? 

Matt Watkinson
This is a really big, big, big point and I've got some pretty strong feelings on this. People want business to be a science. They want it to be an exact science in the way that physics is. The problem is that it's just not, and it's never going to be. And it's never going to be because the act of playing the game changes the rules and the dynamics of all of the variables involved are way, way, way too complex. But I think there's this desire to turn business into an exact science to make it a deterministic endeavor. I mean, if you look at the jargon, if you look at the way that the people talk in business, it's all very pseudoscientific. But it's not actually a science. And wanting it to be a science is in many ways counterproductive. Because when you look at who gets the biggest payoffs and who does the big innovation, how do they do it? Well, they try it. And if it works, they do it some more. And if it doesn't work, they try something else. And of course, we look at data to inform our decision making. And, of course, we try and be efficient. And of course, we try and place good bets. And of course, we try and analyze the factors that are potentially knowable. And of course, there are law-like patterns within specific disciplines like marketing, like the lure of buyer motivation or the lure of double jeopardy or whatever they might be. But that doesn't add up or aggregate up to a law of business success. People have been chasing that El Dorado for decades. You know, the idea of that, we could make success predictable and they've all failed. Everybody has failed because it can't be done. And that's the big -- well, I mean, we're getting into the themes of my third book now, which is coming out next year -- but that's the big theme. It's like this is not a science. This is largely a creative endeavor. It's a social endeavor. It's a philosophical endeavor. It's anthropological. There are scientific-ish components to it. But business is never going to be an exact science. And wanting it to be so is just going to cause people problems. 

Spencer Levy
Well, I think that's precisely the lesson we're learning today in certain segments of commercial real estate, where everything we assume to be correct -- I often refer to commercial real estate as a box of bonds because that's what it is, a bunch of long term leases within a structure is a box of bonds. That has been turned on its head with people wanting flex space, with people wanting shorter-term leases, with people wanting outdoor space, with people working from anywhere. But I think what's happening is it takes disruption to reach that conclusion. You cannot reach it at the beginning of the journey. You reach it somewhere in the middle. Do you agree with that? 

Matt Watkinson
I think it's certainly fair to say that, yeah, it takes a discontinuity or it takes a big change for people to realize, wow, big change is possible or happens all the time and we just don't notice it. So, you know, part of the change, Spencer. is our brains are working against us. Realizing that our need for control is so pronounced that we fall for anything that promises that we can have guaranteed results or that we are in control of what's going on. There are all these kind of cognitive biases that are obscuring the randomness of the world from us or this kind of seismic change that does occasionally happen. And so it kind of catches us unawares. Like Mike Tyson said, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Well, you know, we all get punched in the face from time to time. And the lesson is that we're not the exception to the rule, you know? 

Spencer Levy
Well, you wouldn't go so far as to say that it's unpredictable. You can't reduce it to a science. We're not like the feather in the movie Forest Gump floating on the wind. There is some structure. And that's the point of your book, The Grid, that while there may be a lot of uncertainty, thinking about it in the right way will help you reduce that uncertainty. Is that a good way to sum it up? 

Matt Watkinson
I think that's fair, or at least allow you to anticipate what scenarios might be coming your way and plan for them and separate out what the known risks are from the unknown risks and the factors that are under your control from the factors that aren’t. And hopefully that's liberating psychologically. And one of the reasons why we have a lot of culture problems in business where information is suppressed from the leadership, who should know when things go wrong. When projects are derailed, we don't do postmortem so we can learn from them. Or we have this kind of what Gerd Gigerenzer calls a “negative error culture”. Because if our mindset is one where we assume that the facts are knowable and we assume that through analysis, we can arrive at the best decision and that we can get perfect information because we think it's a science. If we don't do that and what we do backfires, it's an indictment of our abilities. So of course we want to suppress that. But when you cross the threshold of acceptance that the world is dynamic and unpredictable and messy and there are things that can't be known, then that burden of having to know, perhaps that guilt of I didn't know,  that acceptance that, yeah, is probabilistic and it's not deterministic and I couldn't have known then allows you to work better as a team, it allows you to have a better culture. It allows you to communicate upwards more effectively. And it just takes a lot of the stress, in my opinion, out of your day to day life as a manager or a business professional. And that's something that I hope to see more of in the future. 

Spencer Levy
You know, I'm a big fan of science fiction movies, and I kept thinking, while you were giving that answer, that I should take the red pill, not the blue pill when they offered at The Matrix, because it frees your mind. You need to free your mind from a lot of the structure that you put yourself in this business structure box, because by freeing your mind, you'll be better off in the long term. 

Matt Watkinson
Yeah. And, you know, one of the challenges we have -- and Annie Duke wrote about this in her book, Thinking In Bets; its a really kind of powerful concept and a great book instantly -- is that in our mind, the idea of a great decision and a great outcome, a kind of inseparable from one another. If we get a great outcome, we think we made a great decision. And if we get a poor outcome, we think we made a poor decision. But in reality, there's a lot going on between the decision that we made and the eventual outcome. There's a lot of factors that are unknown or unknowable or beyond our control. So it's entirely possible to make a great decision and get a poor outcome on account of those factors or actually to make what would in the cold light of day be quite a poor decision and still luck out and get a great outcome. So the way I try and explain this to people is that if you think about going for a job interview. Well, there are a number of things that you can do to shift the odds of success in your favor. You can research the company. You can show up on time. You can dress appropriately. You can have a list of sensible questions to ask. You can anticipate what questions they might ask you, those kinds of things that everybody does. You can get your resume professionally written, whatever it might be. But ultimately, you don't know who you're interviewing against. You don't know the politics at play. You don't know whether they've already decided that they're employing someone internally and they're just going through the motions because it's what H.R. have told them to do. You know, there's all sorts of unknown and unknowable factors at work that affect your likelihood of getting the job that are totally beyond your control. Yet if you get the job, everything's great. I did a perfect interview. If you don't get the job, there must be something wrong with me. Why didn't I get the job? Well, actually, you might still have given the perfect interview even if you didn't get the job. There are just unknowable factors that intervened. And you see this in everything in life, right? This happens in everything. We're not in this deterministic scientific business world. We're in this probabilistic, uncertain world. And once you get your head around that it is really liberating. It’s liberating because you're free to innovate on behalf of your customer rather than just in response to them. You're free to place bets and not flagellate yourself if it doesn't work out. And you're free ultimately to escape this trap of continuous incrementalism in your kind of golden cage to try much more expensive, different ideas. Yeah, it might not work, but if it does work, the payoff is going to be far bigger than you would ever have gotten if you just did the same as you're doing today, but a little bit better. 

Spencer Levy
Well, I agree with you the way you think, but I think too many people in the business world follow the philosophy of Kris Kristofferson in the song Me and Bobby McGee, where freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. That is their last option, not their first option, which is, I think, the difference between the way you think and the way many business leaders think. 

Matt Watkinson
By my own admission, I have not always thought that way. But we're all a work in progress. We're all learning. We're kind of trying to grow and develop. And that's been my path. I have followed my nose from psychology theory and experience design into strategy into systems and the more I learn about strategy and the more I learn about systems and the more I learn about business, the more I learned, oh my God, there is always a component of chance and we're dealing with probabilities here. The element of chance is irreducible beyond a certain point, and we're better off acknowledging that and acting appropriately, then ignoring that and deluding ourselves into thinking that the future is knowable and ultimately creating situations that could turn out to be catastrophic as a consequence. 

Spencer Levy
Any final thoughts, knowing that our audience are office owners, retail owners, any final thoughts for them, number one? And number two, if you want to plug your new book, go ahead. Or if you want to plug The Grid, go right ahead, too. 

Matt Watkinson
That's very gracious of you, Spencer. In thinking about commercial real estate, think about my clients and the businesses that they are in and they're all over the place. We've got clients in luxury. We've got clients in pharmaceuticals, we've got clients in technology. We've had clients in snack food, airlines, all sorts of things. And I am an expert in exactly none of those. We've still been able to help those clients because we understand how to look at it systematically. And we understand the customer ultimately is a major stakeholder and you ignore them at your peril. So one of the things that we are trying to do, or always take the conversation in this direction with, is this concept of a higher objective. What do I mean by that? Well, every product or service is a means to an end. The marketing pedagogical professor Theodore Levitt said nobody wants a quarter inch drill. Everyone wants a quarter inch hole in the wall. And I think that some of these industries are at that inflection point where we've got a lot of people who are just busy making drills and they've lost sight of the fact that what people want is the hole in the wall. So I guess my final remark would be, I think that this is a great inflection point for people to do a similar exercise in these kind of real estate businesses and say, what is the actual need? Now, what is the higher objective and are we stuck thinking about the drills or are we thinking about the hole in the wall. That just as a mental construct, I find to be tremendously valuable, almost regardless of the category, because that's ultimately where innovation comes from. So the opportunities to innovate and the people who reshape categories and the people who ultimately thrive in the long term are people who are able to keep that higher objective in sight and not get drawn down into the weeds constantly of just making a better drill bit tomorrow. It's thinking about what the need is, how it's changing, and all of the other ways that it fundamentally might be satisfied and who that means you're competing against. And in terms of, you know, a plug, it would be great if you read The Grid. It's helped a lot of people. I put a lot of work into it. It's a quick and easy read and hopefully there's a lot of value in it for you if you've enjoyed the conversation that we've had today

Spencer Levy
Well, I certainly enjoyed the conversation. I certainly enjoyed that book. The Grid I enjoyed your prior book, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences. And on behalf of The Weekly Take, I want to thank Matt Watkinson, author and CEO of Methodical Consulting for joining us here today to talk about some big ideas on The Grid and elsewhere. Thank you, Matt. 

Matt Watkinson
Thank you. 

Spencer Levy
For more on the topic of this episode and our show, check out Sebree Dotcom, the weekly take. And since you are our customers, we invite you to share your experience of our show. So please send us your feedback and make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen. We've got more informative and insightful episodes coming up. We’ll revisit data centers, we’ll shine a spotlight on Miami, Florida, and its stature as one of the great global cities in the world and a bunch of other really exciting stuff on the horizon. For now, I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.