Bold by Design: Brendan Dowling on Purpose, Ireland, and the Leaders of Tomorrow [004]

Ron Boire: Well, hello everyone. ⁓ We're kicking off some ⁓ exciting new stuff here at the Epline Group and RonBouwer.com starting our podcast series. And I'm really excited that ⁓ one of our very first guests is a ⁓ real global and industry leader. Brendan, I'll let him talk a little bit about some of the stuff he's working on as we kick this off, but he's grown into a an executive coach like I am. ⁓ I think he's a visionary about the future of Ireland. We're going to talk a lot about that and a real believer in the power of love and leadership. And I think we're really connected on that point. We met last year ⁓ in Ireland at the reinvention summit where I guess both of our good friends, ⁓ Aidan McCullen was ⁓ launched this conference. I think we'll probably get into that a little bit in our conversation here. And one of the things that Brendan's passionate about and I'm also passionate about is the future of Ireland. He's in the game. I'm watching the game and trying to help a little bit from the sidelines. So welcome, Brendan. Again, I'm really excited to have you here as one of my first victims, mean guests in the pod. And I'd love to, you we're going to spend as much time as you like to talk about.
Brendan Dowling: you. Thank you.
Ron Boire: some of the work that you're passionate about. We want to talk about kind of the work you're passionate about, where you came from, where you grew up, and what do you want to be when you grow up. And talk a lot, I hope, about some of the philosophies you have for the future of Ireland. ⁓ so welcome and ⁓ say hello to ⁓ our hopefully thousands of viewers. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Yeah I look forward to talking to you Ron, thank you for having me on.
Ron Boire: You're welcome. You're welcome. So we originally met ⁓ in the spring of last year, right? So at our friend, Aidan McCullen, and we'll put, we'll give a little background on Aidan and the show notes and stuff. And for those who don't know Aidan, Aidan was a footballer, which outside of the U S means a rugby player, I think. ⁓ And
Brendan Dowling: Yeah.
Ron Boire: He said, really incredible. I'm going to get him on the pod. He said he was going to get on the pod Brendan, but he's one of those people that are so busy that I don't know when it's going to happen, but he's a guy. ⁓ guess he's now in his early forties, right? Early to mid forties, Brendan. And he was a footballer on the Irish national team. ⁓ He's one of these guys that like you, you truly hate this guy. He's six foot three. He's gorgeous. He's fit. He's smart. And, ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Yes. and Exactly.
Ron Boire: Yeah, he's all of that stuff. So when we get him on the pod, maybe I'm not going to show his picture, you know, side by side. I'm not sure it's going to look good for me, but what I find most remarkable about him is the complete reinvention of himself. And I think he's a great analogy for what's going on in Ireland and where Ireland's going. And he had this passion about starting this conference called the Reinvention Summit, which was to kind of reinvent the reinvention of Ireland.
Brendan Dowling: correct.
Ron Boire: I guess that's where we maybe we first met and then how the connection was made with Aidan. So tell me a little bit about kind of currently, I'd like to start a little bit with like currently like what are you working on? And you know, if we started in the Revention, wherever you want to start, then I want to kind of go, I want to go back in time and talk a little bit about your journey because I think your journey is pretty fantastic. And we also almost connected a couple of spots on that, on that journey.
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. currently, ⁓
Ron Boire: in the music industry.
Brendan Dowling: very privileged to be leading a number of leadership programs on behalf of the government. It's Enterprise Ireland, which is a government agency, and it was created to help our indigenous companies to scale internationally. So I'm one of a team of people in the IUC Business School based out of Barcelona, some of the team from Enterprise Ireland themselves. So I'm what they call the lead business advisor coach. So I'm helping design, run and manage a team of ⁓ advisors and coaches. the idea is that we take successful companies, so they've already succeeded. They're typically tens of millions up to hundreds of millions in turnover. and we're trying to bring them up to scale them internationally and make them world class. So we act as what we call business advisor coaches. So the team have been there, done that, worn the t-shirt themselves. So we act as advisors to the CEO and our senior leadership team. And then we also act as leadership coaches and we flip between the two. So it's a year long program. We cover about 200 CEOs a year across different programs and 30 CFOs and most of them are CEOs. ⁓ and the objective really for Ireland is we're trying to scale our indigenous companies and in the current circumstances our foreign direct investment has been obviously the the growth engine of the Irish economy here to for Needless to say we're all worried about that given the economic environment that we're operating in at the moment it's still really important to us it's still very strong FDI but our indigenous companies we're trying to get them to scale and become multinationals themselves to continue to have the economic welfare that we have today.
Ron Boire: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting is there's this, ⁓ I love the Enterprise Island story. There's this ⁓ mythology that, you know, all the goodness in Ireland came because of some tax laws and then, you know, all the money magically fell from the sky. But that's really not the way it happened. I mean, that's certainly they got a little boost there, but. So go ahead.
Brendan Dowling: it. Yeah, exactly. People probably came for different reasons, but I think any company that came in, as you know, most of the big US companies, been the pharma and tech, etc. have set up their European HQ in Ireland. I think a few things in particular, US, we've benefited massively from the US. I think we have a shared culture. know, most of our people went to the US many years ago. We have a shared, we've shared values. And more importantly than when they come to Ireland, they see that we have a highly educated population and you know, we've good ethical hard-working people. So we work really well together. So I think they might have been maybe attracted by by tax initially, but when they get here they become embedded and they realize that it's the place to be for innovation, reinvention, all the different things. We're quite creative. We're very resilient. we're, yeah, exactly. We keep reinventing ourselves. So first time, yes.
Ron Boire: Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. So on the education and kind of reinvention front, one of the things that, so my business partner Rita McGrath, I don't know if you've met Rita, I you may have. Yeah, the world has met Rita. She's one of those people, ⁓
Brendan Dowling: I've more previous times. Yeah. Yes, yeah, she's my best friend.
Ron Boire: Rita was involved with some of the original Enterprise Ireland work 30 years ago or so. ⁓ And of course, John, her husband, is very Irish, so a lot of passion around Ireland. But we've gotten involved a little bit with New Zealand. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, correct.
Ron Boire: One of the case studies for kind of the future of New Zealand has been like looking at countries like Ireland and looking at Singapore and looking at some of the Nordic countries and some of, you you look at a country with a handful of millions in population and they have these great social programs, they have this great growth. So we actually brought ⁓ a couple of CEOs from New Zealand to the reinvention summit. ⁓ And one of the things that I've discovered just kind of looking at Enterprise Ireland is they this tremendous venture capital portfolio. And someone told me, I don't know if it's accurate, but it's probably directionally correct that this is one of the largest venture funds in Europe.
Brendan Dowling: It is the largest, yes, and most active Europe, all government backed. Yeah, so they're an amazing organization. have up to a thousand employees. The vast majority of any indigenous companies that are scaling internationally are what we call clients of Enterprise Ireland. They help you at all different levels. So they help you through funding, through grants. But some of the key supports are training. And that's the area that I'm involved in because believe it or not, the highest bang for the buck that we get
Ron Boire: Yes. Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: as taxpayers to help grow our Irish companies is training. Leadership development is the key. And they've done a lot of research on this. we are in comparison to other countries. This is a very unique offering that the government do help scale our companies. And the results we see are just outstanding. Mostly when people finish the programs, they say it was transformational for them as a leader, but equally for their organization and their teams. So that's the objective.
Ron Boire: Yep. Yeah, it's I have this unfortunate past where I did a lot of work in private equity for a decade or so. And one of the things that's absolutely true in that space is they're really good with the spreadsheet, but they don't understand the people in the leverage you get off of ⁓ an empowered, ⁓ motivated person who's passionate about what they do is incredible. ⁓ know, one of the one of the concepts that I know that you're excited about is this.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. That's right.
Ron Boire: the power of love concept and how that affects leadership. And I think Freud way back when said there's ⁓ only two things in the world that matter, work and love. And I'll extend that to say if you love what you're doing, life doesn't get any better than that. give me a little bit of the framing about, so to that point, you're working with
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Yeah, it's true. ⁓
Ron Boire: ⁓ up to 200 CEOs a year. That's a really big number. are the challenges? What's the focus? If you think about, know, I'm an Irish CEO, you're like, hey, Ron, you're doing a good job. Let's help you be great. Where do you start?
Brendan Dowling: Thank Yeah, so we all start in the same place. The number one thing we start with is ambition. And believe it or not, that is the single most important thing, because if a CEO of an organization doesn't have the ambition to go global or to scale or to enter new markets, create new products, innovate, whatever, it just is not going to happen. So we start with ambition and to trigger ambition. You know, we have we obviously have joint conversations, but one of the key things we trigger in terms of ambition is pure a peer group. So call it peer pressure, but peer conversation where one is saying to the other and there are peers that respect each other and admire each other. We could do more, we could go faster, bigger, bolder, we could be more innovative, et cetera. So that's point number one. The second part of it, suppose, is once you've got the ambition, it is to understand their leadership in terms of motivating and having a very, very clear vision for their organization. step two is that we jump in on vision. And I know some people might not raise a vision, but in every organization I created in the past, the vision was the most powerful thing that we did. And I remember years ago having a fantastic chairman in the UK. And used to say to me, if you can inspire people to believe in your vision, the world will conspire to help you. And when you talk about Aidan starting this podcast.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: Look at a guy that just represents all of that. had a vision to create the Reinvention Summit, to create his innovation show. And he just went and did it and it became a reality. And as you correctly say, that guy's so busy now with what he's done. But from being a rugby player to being, you know, within the top 50 thought leaders in the world is an incredible journey. But that vision piece is critical to us. And once we have that, the next piece we go to is we make sure that everybody's aligned around a common objective. that's mission and purpose and that is really really important in the modern world. Years back it wasn't so important but today with the younger generation of workforce They really do care. They need to have a purpose. need to. It's not just to make loads of money and to grow a business and hit commercial objectives. They really want to know that they're making a difference. So when we're doing companies, companies that do anything, med techs, energy generation, making beds for somebody's home, you know, we're really trying to focus in on the mission of why are we, why do we exist and what's our purpose? Yeah.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: And then we get into all the other stuff of mission, the values, the culture, all the other things that you would have in a strategic growth plan.
Ron Boire: No. So, ⁓ and I think when, you we talked a few weeks ago about this, which I just became really fascinated about, this is kind of a trip around the world, right? You're, you're setting these, these CEOs up ⁓ and first doing the, I love the qualifier around ambition. I think purpose ⁓ may be the biggest qualifier.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah.
Ron Boire: for me, it's one of the things that I think about a lot, both personally and with the companies I work with. ⁓ But tell me a little bit about the journey you take them on around the world. Some of the best institutions in the world, some of the biggest thinkers in the world, I guess, they get exposed to.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Well, our flagship program today is a thing called Leadership for Growth. We bring 37 CEOs on that each year. It started about 20 years ago with Stanford and we sat down like Enterprise Ireland, fairness, the CEO at the time, a called Frank Ryan, ⁓ he understood the power of leadership and what leadership could achieve in terms of supporting indigenous Irish companies to scale. So they sat down with Stanford and they created an amazing program that's continued
Ron Boire: Thank
Brendan Dowling: to grow and evolve over 20 years. So at the beginning it was CEOs only. They realized they need to widen it to the SLT, that everybody needs to go on the journey together, that we needed to create a strategic growth plan together, a leadership development plan together. And ultimately it became a year long program now that it is today. So today is what I AC Business School, which I've hovered around number one, two and three, custom education university in the world. They're one of one, two, three every year.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: They're amazing. ⁓ And the reason why they're amazing to stand out as well as university is they're very customized. And for us, you know, small Irish indigenous companies relative, let's say some of your giants that you have in the US, they customize things to make it really practical, really applied and really good learning that can be implemented to scale the companies. So it is working really, really well. And hence the model. We have thought leadership at the front of the classroom, but it's all about pure learning. facilitate peer discussions and peer learning and then once certain things land for individuals we then as business advisor coaches take that learning and we apply it to their business with their SLT in workshops etc. So we're taking the learning from the classroom applying it to their specific business and hopefully getting implementation and results as a result of all of that.
Ron Boire: So you talked about resilience, which I think is in today's society and in today's leadership. think one of the things that's missing a lot is this idea of resilience. I think, of course, I don't know if I told you that, my mother was a nunin. My son describes her, or just she's past, but used to describe her as his badass Irish granny. And in the whole...
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Very Irish.
Ron Boire: Noonan Klan had this resilience to them, this kind of toughness. I see that as something that's definitely missing. And you spent a lot of time all over the world, and I want to get into your journey a little bit too, because I think your journey has been absolutely fantastic. Give me a little comparison between what you see in other global leaders, in particular, think the US and what you're seeing with
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Mmm.
Ron Boire: leaders in Ireland and I'm particularly interested in these issues around purpose and mission and resilience, know, and kind of the commitment to achieving. What's your perspective on that?
Brendan Dowling: Yes. You know, I suppose we're very resilient as a nation because ⁓ we're a very small island. So for entrepreneurs to grow a company of any significance and to make money or achieve your objectives, we have to get off island. So we typically are born with a global head on our shoulders. So from the day that I started as an entrepreneur, it was always global. You we didn't we didn't think local. You start local. And because I say the other thing, too, that's unique to Ireland. You know, when I remember going to different things and meeting US entrepreneurs. and we would be tiny relative to some of the US entrepreneurs in terms of the revenues and the employees they have but we've a much much tougher market because it's so small and we're so innovative it's so competitive so we've so many companies tech companies you know med tech companies food companies etc and because we have such a very small market we have to compete really really hard to win business I remember for example myself being in the mobile phone world and
Ron Boire: and
Brendan Dowling: selling tech for digital media into a mobile operator in Ireland. we had a million, they had a million subscribers, like somebody like Vodafone. And you would work for years to get in there and win a deal with them. I got on a plane one time and I went to, went to the Philippines and I met Smart, know, mobile with 24 million subscribers and brought straight up to meet the CEO shook hands, said, let's do a deal together, et cetera, et cetera. And I was blown away by, I don't mean. it in a bad way, but how easy it was to do business internationally relative to how tough it was to do business in Ireland. hence we tend to be very resilient. The one thing I would say though about my counterparts in the US that we need to be better at is the US, the mindset of the US traditionally has been very powerful as in global dominance, know, the land of opportunity, ⁓ we're the biggest and the best and that's the vision piece that you ultimately do become.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: So some of the biggest giants in the world come from the US. We would like to adopt some of that thinking as much as we're resilient and we achieve really good results when we go in and go international. One of the key problems and challenges we have in Ireland is that because it's so tough. We sell out, know, our entrepreneurs sell when they're doing 40, 50 million. And mostly it's to de-risk because they're up against people that are better funded, more people, more customers, more everything. So we tend to sell out. So one of the key objectives we have is to turn, you know, not to be the acquired, to be the acquirer. And that's a key theme that we're pursuing so that we have a more global mindset that we're, you know, funded and ready from a leadership point of view to take on the
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: world and stay going, stay the course.
Ron Boire: I was talking to Sean, is it Sean Davis from Enterprise Ireland? And he said that's one of the things that they're looking at with kind of the investment fund is how do you, you if you're an entrepreneur, I get this. mean, I, you know, again, I was in the valley of darkness and private equity for a while. you know, you've been working your whole life for 10 or 20 years.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Boire: to build a business and you built it from no revenue to revenue, no profit to profit. And somebody comes along and says, Hey, listen, I'll give you, know, $12 million a year business. And you're a poor kid that, you know, grew up in Dublin, $12 million. That's life changing. It's, know, it's generationally changing. Right. And so it's, you know, these people were selling out too soon and saying, we're trying to get them to 50 and then we're trying to get them to a hundred and then we're trying to get them to 200 million.
Brendan Dowling: Okay. Correct. Peace. Correct.
Ron Boire: ⁓ And ⁓ it's a real challenge and I understand why it's a challenge. mean, it's just, ⁓ you know, I've been working hard. I've had nothing. My family has, you know, sacrificed. I've sacrificed and here's somebody offering me something and I can live the rest of my life and my kids would be fine. And so I'm taking the money, right?
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Yeah, right. And that's a great thing. Again, the US investors, I've worked with many US investors in my career. You guys are very good at saying, you your attitude is let's de-risk the entrepreneur. let's take that worry away from them and let them focus on scaling the business. We're probably the opposite. A lot of the European investors and Irish investors are probably much more conservative. So they're the opposite view. They're kind of saying, ⁓ let's keep them focused, let's keep them hungry, and let's keep them going because they'll keep scaling. Now that attitude is shifting and changing, to be honest. But the risks that are associated with trying to stay the course. So we're trying to make sure, and this is where government come in and help and they are doing a lot to help on this but we need to be able to de-risk our entrepreneurs so they can stay the course so as you correctly said they're not worried about paying their mortgage etc because as well some of the tougher things that we have here is that you know entrepreneurship hasn't been celebrated in the past So if you go bust here, you're pretty much on your own. You're not even entitled to social welfare at the level of everybody else because you didn't pay enough stamps. So yeah, it has been tough. So you're on your own. I suppose.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah, wow.
Brendan Dowling: there was a public perception as well that you've loads of money if you have a big company but the reality often is very different ⁓ in terms of what's in the bank account and you've remortgaged your house probably for your business so you you're highly leveraged and hence the risk is very high so we're trying to address that and there is a lot of movement on that including government talking about new investment funds ⁓ so in fairness there's a lot of conversation at the moment
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: about nationally, we have a lot of savings. People were frightened by the last recession and price inflation, et cetera. So we have piles and piles of savings in households today that we're trying to get moving and put into investments. So in fairness, government have said they are looking at a new investment fund like they have in Sweden with First North Nasdaq, where people can invest in indigenous companies on a small exchange and have a tax-free benefit of any gains. So that has been muted at the moment by government they will do something radical to support our indigenous companies that are trying to scale because funding is still a challenge for us.
Ron Boire: Yeah, I think that's a huge opportunity for Ireland. You when you look at the US, have, again, I do business in New Zealand and other smaller countries and Canada as well. You get on a phone call and somebody will say, hey, know, what's, or Zoom more accurately, what's going on in the US? And you know, you've got all this tariff thing coming and you know, this and my response has become
Brendan Dowling: Yep.
Ron Boire: The US economy is so resilient and so strong that no matter what we do, we can't mess it up. We keep trying to screw up this economy and it just keeps getting stronger and stronger. And I think part of that is driven by this, it's okay to fail mentality. If you listen to Peter Thiel or Mark Andreessen, we invested in hundred companies and if five of them go, that's a win. And those 95 failures,
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Ron Boire: become people with founder or CEO experience and they go, well, this, person has failed before. Let's give them something to try again. And it's really, that's just not the case in Europe. It's just not the case in a lot of the world. Now I grew up in a Japanese company. I grew up at Sony and that's for sure not the case ⁓ in a Japanese company where, know, if you fail, you get the window seat and you get to sit there for 10 years looking out the window and people go, ⁓ yeah, that's, that's like, that's the guy that did the mini desk. didn't, we don't talk to him anymore.
Brendan Dowling: concepts. Yeah. Correct. I guess. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. And you know, we all have fear, even myself. My father was an entrepreneur and I saw him lose his business when I was about 14, 15. But back then it was unforgiving, you know, so we, you know, we had a tough upbringing because of it. So I saw the results of failure and you didn't get a second chance back then. That was a long time ago now.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: Hence it made me like I did. I'm a qualified chartered accountant. And the only reason I went down that route was to make sure that if I failed as an entrepreneur, I would always be able to get work and I would never be hungry and not be able to pay the mortgage. I was like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I did not have most of the time. I don't normally confess to being an accountant. Yeah.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Even if you had to be an accountant. I do have to confess, I don't think I've shared my power of love chart with you, but we'll put it in the graphic here. ⁓ So I do a four box because this thing started many, many years ago when I was being asked to go out and speak to NBA candidates at universities. In one of the first play, this was back early 2000s, and ⁓ I was asked to go to Harvard. ⁓ and recruit some of their MBAs. But I was told, as only Harvard would tell you, well, you can't actually recruit them. You have to give them something of value. It's not about you can't solicit them. And I was like, well, this is kind of odd because you're trying to get them jobs. OK. So I came up with this idea to talk about my photography. And as you might imagine, I'm not a world class photographer. But I enjoy it.
Brendan Dowling: Thank you. Yeah. Yes.
Ron Boire: And so I created this presentation where I essentially said, listen, I was told that I can't recruit you guys. So I want to talk about my photography. I want to talk about photography. So I started the role. did Ansel Adams, Oak Tree at Sunrise, and talked about that famous picture. And then I talked about this guy, Chris Carter, who's nobody's heard about, but he's an environmental portrait photographer in rural Texas and showed some of his photographs. And I could see the woman in the back of the room visibly start to sweat, right? Like she was in near panic mode about this guy's, he's not going to talk about anything of any value. Uh, and then I said, listen, let's, let's talk about, I want to play a game called the CEO game. So it's start telling me all the words that come to mind when you think of a CEO. And of course they were like intelligent, strategic, you know, uh, driven.
Brendan Dowling: you
Ron Boire: you know, smart, all this. One of them, by the way, is tall because the average CEO in the US is over six foot tall. And I said, well, you miss them all because the real world, the real word is love.
Brendan Dowling: Thank Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ron Boire: You know, I believe in the power of love and I believe that people that love their work and love the people they work with create amazing things. And I said, because we're at Harvard and I know it's got to be on a two by two, here's my two by two. So on the Y axis is ability and on the X axis is love. And in the lower left hand corner, if you don't love what you're doing, you're not very good at that, that's called hell.
Brendan Dowling: Yep. Yes. me. Yeah, yeah.
Ron Boire: And on the right hand side, you love what you're doing, you're not very good at, that's called the hobby. That's my photography, right? ⁓ And if you're really good at something, but you hate it, I call that accounting. And of course, I always give a nod to the great Amir Ziv, who was the head of accounting for many years at Columbia, who was the only passionate accountant I ever met in my life. But Amir is a famous ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Love you.
Ron Boire: accounting professor at Columbia. And then in the upper right hand corner where you love something and you're really good at it, that's heaven. And that's what we're all trying to get to, right? Yeah. And that brings me back to kind of this purpose and mission because in my career, all of the failures, I mean, 100 % of them have been because I was on the left side of the chart, meaning I didn't really love what I was doing.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, you're in flow. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Mm. Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Boire: And I was in it for the wrong reason. I might've been really good at it, right? I wasn't an accountant, but I was a private equity CEO and I knew how to do it. And like, this is not a complicated thing, but you're also dealing with, as I affectionately call them, amphibians and crocodiles. And ⁓ so you're not, you know how to do the job. You've done the job before, but the net result is I'm not here to grow a company. I'm here to sell a company.
Brendan Dowling: people.
Ron Boire: and frequently here to take it apart. And so that journey from the left side to the right side is all about finding the purpose and the vision and the principles that are supporting it.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. I'm passionate about it. I know it sounds, but says it a lot. It makes such a difference, you can spot them a mile off. The people with passion, vision and commitment and real purpose, they just knock the lights out every time. You've seen that, I'm sure, as well. So, total believers in that. So we're trying to find that. And when we're dealing with companies, we do interview them before they come on any of these programs to make sure they already have ambition, they already have some kind of a vision of where they want to get to, et cetera. And then you try to just light a fire under that and ignite it even more to push them on,
Ron Boire: Yeah. And ⁓ so I know your coaching is another big piece of what you do. Talk to me a little bit about what that looks like for you personally and what that looks like for the ambitions you have for Ireland.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, well, as you know, my past been around the block. had a lot of success, but also a lot of failure. I think you learn a lot from failure and you've got to pick yourself up and brush.
Ron Boire: Yep, that's where I got my PhD.
Brendan Dowling: Yes, well, you learn a lot from it. so from our point of view, coaching, coaching is very powerful, as we all know, but it can only go so far sometimes. So what we know now is that with coaching, the answers are within, but often they don't know what they don't know. So hence you've got to flip to advisor and say, in my experience, reframe and tell stories. So we use a lot of storytelling and we find it very powerful to talk, know, to depersonalize the conversation. particularly when you're dealing with something that's the burning issue of the day and you know we start our coaching sessions with what is keeping you awake at night ⁓ and that could be anything but coaching you can get through some of that but then when you can say well in my experience or I met somebody and here's a story let me tell you the story about Joe blogs or Mary blogs about how they resolve this situation so you're depersonalizing it and then you can like like we do and universities we're doing case studies you know get into very horny
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: subjects by using, you know, an unrelated character stroke company and then figure things out through that process. So hence we find the power of combining. Now, it's very important that our our advisors stroke coaches have been there and done that and have credibility at the level that we're operating at. you've got to start with that. They've got to be you've got to be credible to these to this level of person, because by definition, they're high achievers that are already they've already
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: succeeded to an extent and you're trying to bring them to that world class level. But once you can flip between the two then between a coach stroke advisor, they wouldn't even know that you're flipping between the two. But it's a very powerful combination when you can get the right people sitting opposite the CEOs to to help them grow, grow both from a leadership perspective, in a personal sense to and this is your right where the love comes in because wellness is a big component of it today and we've
Ron Boire: Yep.
Brendan Dowling: the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland who are world leaders in positive health. So they've come in on board and they're helping us teach and also supporting our coaching so we can hold the hand of our CEOs from a wellness perspective. So we're trying to give it a holistic approach. It's leadership, it's their personal wellbeing. So we, know, one of the things when I was on the road, I was on road for years, you know, on a plane for seven years all over the world and
Ron Boire: Mm-hmm.
Brendan Dowling: I was like a zombie. I was walking into walls because the bathroom was on the left on one hotel and then it's on the right the next night and eating, snacking in airports and going out for rich meals with senior executives, cetera. Not seeing much of my friends and family, not eating well, not getting to the gym, et cetera.
Ron Boire: out.
Brendan Dowling: You know, I know how hard that is and I know you need physical and mental wellness in order to go on a journey like that. we do take a lot of responsibility as in we care and we love these people that we work with. So reminding them as well in the middle of this, we're not just saying scale your company so Ireland can be great. We're saying, you know, we look after you too and we'll help you get that work life balance right and go on the journey because I remember at the end of one of these programs.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: we brought in a a guest speaker who had been on the programme a few years previously and participants in the room said, they said, if there was one word that you could use to describe what you got from this programme, what would that word be? Now this guy had taken a company and might have been, I'd say it was about 10 million turnover and he turned it into 50 million in the space of a couple of years. So he had done a multiple factor of scaling the business. But the word he used was can. And through the program, he learned how to put in proper processes, controls, develop his leadership, delegate work and responsibility, etc, etc, etc. So instead of the firefighting down in the bowels of the business, we're constantly saying we want to teach you how to work on the business rather than in the business. This person was able to say, calm is the word I use because I've got my life back. I get my work-life balance and it's a much bigger business doing much bigger and better things. But can't was the word he used.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting. So I got into coaching by accident, ⁓ which is how all the best things in my life have happened. It's how I met my wife, the whole nine yards. So, ⁓ the, ⁓ Rita and I were doing a variety of work kind of in the, right around the COVID era, COVID times.
Brendan Dowling: Like myself. wow.
Ron Boire: And every company we went to invariably would say, ⁓ this is really interesting. love your strategic platforms and all the work that you're familiar with that Rita's done. know, our leadership team's a mess. It almost came down to like the team's a mess. And Rita kept saying to people, well, know, Ron's run a lot of companies, maybe he can help. And so one of these companies said, all right, I have a couple of leaders that that need a coach. I said, sure, I'll do that. I'm like, I've had a coach. ⁓ I've never had a
Brendan Dowling: you Yes.
Ron Boire: great coach, I can tell you that. I've had interesting coaches that were helping me with segments in my life. But when you say this advise coach advisor relationship, ⁓ first of all, I had to figure out like, what does it really mean for me to be a coach? Because I'm not a behavioralist. haven't studied anything. I don't know how people's brains work other than I've worked with thousands of leaders like you have.
Brendan Dowling: you. Yes.
Ron Boire: And I sat down and said, you know, when it was going really, really well for me, what was going on? And the answer was I was physically healthy, emotionally healthy and mentally healthy. My family was healthy and my team was healthy. And when it wasn't, I was never healthy.
Brendan Dowling: Yep. Yes. Oops. correct. Yeah, you're authentic and you have to arrive at that session authentic and you have to have the balance yourself. You can't be holding somebody's hand to get there if you haven't if you're not there yourself. Yeah, it's so true. And our best coaches are all there. They're all in good places. It's a key criteria. They've been there on that. They've had their hardships too, because like there's nothing as great as having an appreciation for things based on what you've been through in the past. So you appreciate everybody and everything. And the one thing I would say, I definitely said it was the best job in Ireland. ⁓ But the people I meet are so interesting. Everybody at this level have a really, really interesting story. So every time I sit down and meet these people for the first time, I'm going, wow, it's so interesting to hear your story. So, you know, that's the real benefit. And when you care about that and comes back to, as you said earlier, and you care about people and you love them. it really does give you an empathy and a listening that you just go, wow, that story is incredible. So, for example, even with coaching, you know, I'd start off with the coaching session by saying to somebody, tell me about your life since the time you were a child and tell me, know, your family, your your family's, what they did, how you interacted with your siblings and all the way through your career to where you are today. And it's so interesting when they do that. ⁓
Ron Boire: Yes. Yeah, I learned that technique years ago when I was at Best Buy. They had this fascinating process where Brad Anderson, who was the CEO then and frankly one of the best CEOs I've ever worked with and one of the best humans I've ever worked with, he's the one that introduced me to ⁓ servant leadership and ⁓ the concept behind servant leadership. But he was big on education and you would... start your tenure. started there as an executive vice president, but I started at Best Buy University like everybody else did. like one of the things they did, which was absolutely fascinating is you draw your lifeline. put, you know, you do a little two by two and you say, okay, I was born and then these things happened to me. every single person I've ever seen do that, know, my God, the journey they've been on, there's no boring people in the world. Very, very few. If you really just like,
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, yeah Yes sir.
Ron Boire: How did you get here? I mean, guess if you're born with enough money in your pocket, you could be pretty boring. But most people are just not boring. They've been on this journey. That is that everyone can learn from if you listen ⁓ correctly. A couple of things. I want to circle back to ⁓ mission and purpose a little bit. And then I want to kind of get a little bit into your journey. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: you Correct. So true. Yeah.
Ron Boire: One of the things happening, so I'm going to another AI conference in a few weeks. Everybody's talking about AI, AI, AI, and you see these, you know, Microsoft just laid off more people because of AI and Amazon just laid off more people because of AI. And ⁓ I've been using this, this, this phrase and I was actually, did a keynote for a large insurance company last week and we talked about this as well. You're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody who uses it better. I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know. We all say it because I think we want it to be true. ⁓ How are you thinking about this in terms of what you're talking to about, talking about with your CEOs, what Enterprise Ireland is talking about with their companies?
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Mm. Yep. Hmm? Hmm?
Ron Boire: Then there's two big components here. The one is obviously the technological component and then I'm, I use AI. use Claude. ⁓ Claude did a profile on you that I was like, wow. It's just, I mean, it's, it's amazing. The profile that Claude did on you in about 10 minutes that would have taken me. I don't know if I ever could have got this detail. It would have taken me a week to do this.
Brendan Dowling: Okay. Really? ⁓
Ron Boire: ⁓ so I can see that I see the power of this when I, when I said, know, Hey, tell me who this guy, Brendan Dowling is, and he's going to be on the podcast. You know, how do you think he's going to behave? And, know, literally Claude said he's Irish. So he's going to be self deprecating.
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. Thank you. ⁓ you Wow.
Ron Boire: Right. So let him tell the stories and don't let himself deprecate too much. And, ⁓ you know, get to the real story. Don't let him say, shucks. It's no big deal. Literally it's in your, didn't write that Claude wrote that. So when I say this tool is so good, is it, what does it mean to your companies and what's it mean to your CEOs? And how are you, how are you thinking about that?
Brendan Dowling: That's incredible. Yep. Yeah, so yeah, we've had a lot of different conversations, a lot of different professors coming in as well, a lot of practitioners coming in. So absolutely it's revolutionizing the world and the world of work as we know it is transforming rapidly and it's the speed of transformation. I know I'm saying what everybody else is saying, but when you speak to these CEOs and they're starting to tell you, so for example, working with a major construction company, the CEO said, I didn't really understand this, so I hired a really, really top thinker in AI and I paid a fortune for him and we did a one week workshop. He said at the end of that, said it's writing my government tenders which are really complex tenders it is now negotiating my contracts with me I haven't spoken to my lawyer since I've adopted AI it's giving better insights and getting my contracts done faster if I win a contract it's setting up my bills of material and my project planning so it's revolutionized something that most of us in the room would have thought well construction might take a little bit longer before AI hits that so that's the things of the revolutionizing but
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: equally. My sister is a young child that's doing what we call the Leaving Cert here and about to go to university or applying for university and she said to me could you have a chat with my son because he hasn't studied a lot you know. And I sat with him and I said here's my view of the world so in my world when I qualified and started looking at university it was a rat race of academia. You had to learn off stuff and regurgitate it in order to get into the professions which was law, medicine, engineering etc etc. In my view that world is now pretty much gone as we've known it which means that the people who are more resilient, better communicators, love each other in terms of relationships, are innovative, creative, there's a whole new world opportunity for these people because they can leverage the power of AI and solve problems that they've never done and knowledge is now pretty much a generic
Ron Boire: you.
Brendan Dowling: in this new world. So I see huge opportunity for a whole new crowd of people who heretofore weren't good at remembering things and regurgitating things, which I wasn't. I was an entrepreneur, so I was a dreamer. So I got into terrible trouble in primary school and secondary school because people thought I wasn't smart because I couldn't regurgitate the stuff that was being beaten into me, metaphorically obviously.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, but I was an entrepreneur, so I was a problem solver and a dreamer and it's the dreamers that change the world. But if I had had the power of AI in front of me and that knowledge at my fingertips.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: God knows what I could have done with it. So I think it's a huge opportunity as well as a threat. So it's a threat to traditional academia in terms of jobs that the lawyers, the accountants, et cetera, et cetera. Like, so for example, we had a real, an AI expert in finance that came in and their venture capital and AI finance tools only. And we had them in with us on one of our programs. And he showed a single slide of a man standing on a skyscraper in New York. And he just said to everybody in the room, that is the finance department. of the future and he said that future is now for those that adopt it but you will not have people in your finance department it will be somebody who's strategically aligned with all the other departments of the business and represents the finance function. Now I would agree with that. Now the other thing I think too, the one on AI is I also think it's an incredible thing like I see my mother at home at the moment living in the country alone my father's gone and she's craving company. think AI, you know, I know Alexa and a few of these things that that frightens her. But AI is some somebody that can relate to her, understand her and speak to her in a tone and in a way that can become a friend in time. Now that might have to be caricatured in a teddy bear or something like that. So it's not a threatening thing.
Ron Boire: Go.
Brendan Dowling: But I do see having really engaging conversations and making isolation something of the past and for people to share knowledge, have entertainment, somebody to do things for them that she cannot, for example, select anything on Netflix. I have to select a movie for her and press play before I leave the house. She will not navigate it. Now she's 88.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: But with AI, once she's comfortable, she could say, please, please play me Casablanca or whatever her favorite movie is, you know.
Ron Boire: And I think that, so part of the answer is learning what those leverage points are, right? So I think about how I might use it. And we, we do work with some pretty large clients that are, that are building AI tools. One of the things that is interesting. So you may be familiar with Rita's concept around sitting around corners and, you know, inflection points. And we've created a model.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah.
Ron Boire: where you start with kind of, what do you think the future is? it the concept of seeing around corners is look five years, 10 years into the future. And I actually think it's easier to predict 10 years out than 10 minutes out. and so robotics, for example, you say, you know, a theory would be in 10 years, there'll be five billion or a billion.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yeah. .
Ron Boire: bipedal robots in the world that will you know do everything from lawn care to surgery and That's how that's what the world's gonna look like and if you listen to people like Elon Musk and others you you just say well That's gonna it's a fact. They're so passionate about it You know, it's gonna happen But but the question for the business becomes what's the tipping point and like where how do you track these things? So you may have several of these ideas and previously you would say, okay, well
Brendan Dowling: Mm. Yeah.
Ron Boire: You you use this idea of backcasting and say, well, in 2036, there'll be a billion robots. So what does that mean in 2033 and 2031 and 2029? And what would be the headlines in the newspaper? And what are the things you look like? That starts to become a very complex task. Right. And so you start to track, you know, dozens and dozens of data points. Well, now with AI, not only can we create the backcast and say, here's all the things, the scenarios that
Brendan Dowling: Yes. Hmm.
Ron Boire: would be true that would lead up, you know, one, two, and three finally become a billion bipedal robots. You can get it to track hundreds of thousands or millions of data points that you couldn't possibly do before. does it, does it eliminate and eliminate the job of a strategic planning manager? No. Does it change the job dramatically? Yes. Right. And then the question is, so the training and support, ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. ⁓ Yeah, exactly.
Ron Boire: for that become critical. mean, back to ⁓ kind of this comment, there's only two things in the world that matter in love and work and the work you do with your CEOs. ⁓ Finding a CEO that understands that the mission and purpose of the company is the real work, right? It's not making the bed frame or the rocket or the whatever it may be. It's that.
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. Yes.
Ron Boire: You know, getting that purpose right, getting that clear gets people motivated to, if you will, fall in line to find their mission and purpose and align it. You know, was with, like I said, I was with an insurance company last week and you could, you could put them in the accounting bucket if you were a cynic, right? But these are people who are fantastically passionate about what they do because they provide a service that if somebody's house burns down, they rebuild it.
Brendan Dowling: Yes, correct. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Ron Boire: And yes, they make a profit doing that as well. They should. But you can you could be a cynic and say, well, you know, it's insurance and, know, you know, ⁓ it's it's a product you hope you never use. Right. So you spend all this money on it and hopefully in your whole life, your house won't burn down. But if it does, they're passionate about, know, we're going to get in there and we're going to, you know, make sure the house gets rebuilt and make sure it gets rebuilt the way it was and replace what we can replace. So finding that passion is important. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: yet. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's... Yeah.
Ron Boire: When we talked earlier, ⁓ you gave me this incredible ⁓ journey through your life as an entrepreneur. And you said you studied accounting as a safety net, and ⁓ thankfully you became an entrepreneur. So we get to meet. ⁓ One of the things that I thought was fascinating is that you were in the music and the ⁓ digital audio business at the same time I was.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah.
Ron Boire: And in fact, we had a lot of the same kind of connections, but I don't know that we were ever in the same meeting room at the same time. But we were in the same building at the same time. I'm quite sure that we were probably both at 550 Madison in New York at the same time on different floors. Take me back to the beginning. you know, growing up as a, as a kid in Ireland, and I imagine the times you were growing up, you know, there wasn't, it wasn't the age of abundance. So.
Brendan Dowling: Thank I'll be in the show. Yeah. and Mmm. wasn't yeah
Ron Boire: Tell me how you got kicked off of this journey and where did it take you?
Brendan Dowling: Thank Yeah, it's a good, so I suppose I was a gatherer, hunter as a young guy, so lived in the country, in the middle of country Ireland, so shot and fished for supper literally, shot pheasants and rabbits and you name it, fished for salmon and sea trout, so that was kind of the upbringing, there was eight children in a farming environment, so hence I was the gatherer, hunter type guy, but was born to be an entrepreneur, I was a dreamer and I couldn't stop the I was dreaming of flying, know, literally I used to dream of running down the schoolyard and putting my arms out and taking off. They were my nightly dreams. But wanted to see the world and wanted to do things differently to everybody else. So it was always a bit of a black sheep too, which I didn't understand at the time. But my first real venture, I was always at work ethic. But my father unfortunately when he when he did go post it kind of was a wake-up call because I was going to take over a family business But my first business was when I was actually in KPMG. I I looked after shave and I have you know, my favorite after shave at the time was Ralph Lauren and I remember saying I could make that and I could make that better and
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: I'm in KPMG saying, you I'm going to make the best aftershave in the world. So that was the vision piece. Now everybody laughed. In fact, they've bent over laughing because
Ron Boire: I just laughed.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, yeah. there is, know, from the middle of nowhere, making of, you know, an aftershave that only the French do and the Americans do. But I went into it. I always started at the top. don't know what it was. I always knew I had to start at the top. So I would have gone to the number one department store in Ireland, which was Brown Thomas. I met the little old lady that was the buyer of cosmetics. And I shared my vision with her and I said, I'm to make the best aftershave in the world. Now, needless to say, she didn't believe a word of what I was saying. But KPMG get me credibility. So in the end I wore her down with my passion and my vision and she said okay if you make it I'll buy it but it has to be better than Ralph Lauren so it took me a year to do that but I did and I came back to her and we put it on the same shelf as Ralph Lauren and first year of sales I had sold them 10 to 1 and the rest is history.
Ron Boire: Wow, that's amazing. What was it called?
Brendan Dowling: called Nautique, N-A-U-T-I-Q-U-E, and it had a navy ⁓ box and the emblem was a yacht in full with full spinnakers, et cetera, in gold embossed writing. So it did very well. ⁓ But that was the beginning. It's a long story what happened subsequently. But then when I became qualified and got out into the market, I really wanted to get into something that was going to change the world. And that for me, I started playing with mobile phones. I was probably mobile phone user number 100 in Ireland. I used to sell them and put them into cars. I remember going in Mr. Tony Ryan, was the owner of Ryanair, putting a mobile in his Mercedes S class and driving around the city for the day while I put a mobile.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: phone in it. But then I started renting mobile phones because nobody could afford them and then ultimately created what they call a mobile virtual network operator. Very disruptive business model. But again I had a vision to say I can offer the best mobile phone service in the world by offering good customer service, good billing, clarity etc. That took off, I was so disruptive that Vodafone bought it to bring it back in to their mothership. Then in next round I ran the third mobile operator in the country called Meteor and helped them go after a mature market and again disruptive strategy and strategic thinking. We were some of the first to go after children in the market in terms of topping up and all you could eat and it became a compelling value proposition and we won 20 % market share. And then finally I ended up doing digital media because it was the next generation of where the mobile phone was going and so I could see that people wanted to consume content on a mobile. That was what my vision of where it would go.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: many boardrooms said to me that will never happen nobody would ever watch a movie on a phone that size of a matchbox I disagreed I fundamentally again you know again it's the dreamer it's kind of where will the world be in five to ten years time it was always that dreamer and I created that company and scaled that and sold that to British Telecom and that was when I started to meet all the big blockbuster digital guys there were our content guys that was trying to go digital and we were the ground breaker so people like Disney, Timorny, and my music industry etc. which was all transforming with digital. It was a whole new thing. So that's kind of the general background.
Ron Boire: Yeah. So the commonality there is this ⁓ vision and this innovators spirit. What is the thing that tied this all together for you?
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, it was always a vision. would say I was being a dreamer. I always had a vision of where the future would be. And I always challenged everybody when people were saying, so for example, in a mobile phone world years ago, we're making a fortune out of selling calls and selling text message. I could see Skype. I could see WhatsApp. I said those things eventually will become zero. There'll be no revenue in it. So for me, everybody said the next big thing was going to be paying a premium for a video call. We paid a million euros to a consulting firm in one of the mobile operators to tell us that the next big thing is going to be video calls. And I fundamentally disagreed with that. ⁓
Ron Boire: Do want to tell us who the consulting firm was?
Brendan Dowling: They're based in the Nordics, that's as much as I'd say. But I fundamentally disagreed with it. And I said, no way would I pay a premium to look at my boss or to see my staff, you know, to crack a dawn on a mobile phone, et cetera. And so I knew it would be more social use, which is what it became. But I kind of held the line on things like that. The same with content. When people were saying, you know, that people won't watch content on a mobile phone, I was always saying, if the content is compelling enough, people will use a mobile phone. So I had many arguments. I remember when iTunes was first launched, we had the equivalent of it. When iTunes was first launched, people said, radio's dead. And I was in a boardroom full of radio investors. And they said, radio's dead now because you can have any playlist you want. can create your own playlist. And I said, guys, you're forgetting one major thing. I said, when you look at a radio, you press one button and that button says, entertain me. And that is what people will not do. They'll make one or two big playlists but they will not entertain themselves and keep making you create their playlists. So radio has continued to blossom. It hasn't disappeared.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. was like you probably involved in a lot of the digital radio initiatives and USADR was a big one here. I don't know if you bumped into those guys. And ⁓ I remember back when USADR was launching, I was running the audio business at Sony in North America. And I remember having the meeting with USADR and they were like, so what we're going to do is we're going to make everything digital here and all these analog radios are going to go away. And I remember looking at him and going, so you want me to tell my grandmother that her radio won't work anymore? Is that where you're going with this? And he goes, yeah. And I said, Virginia Moon is not giving up her radio. You guys are going nowhere. And even to, mean, to this day, you still buy a car and it's got an analog radio and you you still have the digital sideband stuff and, it's just, it radios about community.
Brendan Dowling: That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank Yeah.
Ron Boire: It's about information and it is about entertainment. I'm a huge radio fan as you can see behind me. There's a very old Macintosh AM-FM radio sitting back there. It's right there. I'm big fan of the Blue Dials despite my Sony upbringing. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Ron Boire: We didn't run into each other around the music thing. I was running the audio company at Sony and you were trying to convince Sony Music to let you play a song on a phone. At the same time, Steve Jobs was just doing it and not asking permission. So guess the lesson there is don't be part of a big company that wants to ask permission, just be part of an upstart.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yes, true. We did convince him though for Nigeria, I think I told you that.
Ron Boire: Eventually, it all got there, right? I do recall this and you may you remember the Secure Digital Music Initiative, SDMI, I'm sure. And I was assigned by ⁓ John Breach, who was the president of Sony US at the time to be the person who kind of sat in on SDMI. Actually, it might have been Fuji on the sheet that assigned me. But somebody said, hey, go sit in on this and make sure nothing happens.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yes. Thank
Ron Boire: It wasn't hard to make sure nothing happens because it was one of the stupidest ideas ever. For listeners, SDMI stood for Secure Digital Music Initiative and the record companies and some of the electronics companies had this brilliant idea that somehow they could put a digital wrapper around all these MP3s that were running wild in the internet and nobody would be able to transfer them from one device to the other. And ⁓ that went exactly nowhere. But it took about two or three years for it to go nowhere, as I recall.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah, yeah and that's part of what we teach because you know, I remember years ago one of the things I did build was a streaming service that could do exactly what Netflix did before Netflix and I remember going to the CEO of our biggest, were blockbusters, they were called Extravision in Ireland and going to them and they had 156 retail stores renting videos from a retail store and I remember saying to them, listen I have the tech.
Ron Boire: So,
Brendan Dowling: I have the library of movies that I had secured and I said I'll give it to you free of charge We'll do a 50-50 revenue share. Will you allow me stream movies through your retail stores and upsell it? Absolutely no way because I said that is a massive distraction You might do five videos a month one ten months two That's versus millions of videos that we're renting every month and no way would you do it and they couldn't see Where the future did the company doesn't exist today? It went it obviously folded as all of those video retail stores did. But they're the type of things and the battles we had. Sometimes I would have said that maybe bleeding edge, bleeding edge. Because sometimes I was too far ahead and trying to convince people to do things differently. so, for example, for me, my son said to me recently, what do you see the next big industry or next big business? And I said to him, said, look at an industry that's broken. And in Ireland and most countries in Europe now, the traffic, transport is broken. It's certainly broken in Ireland because we very bad national infrastructure.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: So traffic in and out of Dublin city is hours and hours wasted in traffic. So when you've got something like an industry like that's totally broken, something has to come and fix it. And to me that's going to be drone transport.
Ron Boire: Yep.
Brendan Dowling: And that's going to happen very, very fast for all of us will travel by drone. And if I was investing today, I'd be preparing for that. It's going to be like the mobile phone revolution. It's going to be a revolution of transport and a drone will land on my garden. I won't own it. I won't fly it. And it'll bring me where I need to go. And it'll come back and collect the next person and off it goes. Now it's happening, but it's not happening on mass. But when you see what's happening in the EV market with batteries, et cetera, it will happen very, very fast. And it'll be an incredible industry.
Ron Boire: Yeah, there's a little teeny ⁓ bits of light in that space here in New York with some, I think one of them, ⁓ one of them is actually run by one of the guys that was the ⁓ CFO of Sony US is now the CEO of one of these drone, drone transport, which are essentially little helicopters and not the drone as we would think about drones, or I would think about drones at least. ⁓ I think, you know, one of the, one of the organizations that we work with is in the transportation industry. And if you think about, and they own, ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. No, it's all right. Yep. Yes. ⁓ Okay.
Ron Boire: 400 plus thousand trucks and you think of what's gonna happen to that truck in the next ten years. It's pretty astounding between autonomous vehicles different energy sources ⁓ Robotics, you know even even nanotechnology and how that's gonna affect the supply chain ⁓ Those are the those are the problems that are really fun really fun because
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, was like on my own. I live on a farm here. My wife's a farmer. And, you know, it's very hard to get labour today to work on a farm and do some of the jobs that have been done all the years. But we see technology is really starting to come into the farming world with modern tractors, but we'll have autonomous vehicles very soon. They're there today. They're just very expensive. But when you go out and want to spray a field, know, the labor and thinking has gone out of it with technology and GPS. And that that's going to revolutionize the farming world or, know, significant investment to achieve it. the cost of this technology is reducing day by day with AI and all the other software development tools that are available. Google.
Ron Boire: Yeah. Well, you see even the cost of compute, the drop of the cost of compute in just the last 12 months is astounding. the, um, I don't know if you saw that video of the Chinese robotics company. Um, we'll put a link to it in the video and I'll send it to you if you haven't seen it, but I mean, it's just stunning what these bipedal robots can do. Um, I know that Tesla has announced that, um,
Brendan Dowling: Yeah.
Ron Boire: They'll be in production at the end of this year and into next year. And there's a other bipedal robot companies. said to my wife, said, so when I go to Arizona, I always take a Waymo and Waymo and it's, they're kind of fighting their way through regulation. And I think Tesla will be shipping at the end of the year, their autonomous self-driving cars, fully self-driving.
Brendan Dowling: Hmm.
Ron Boire: And I'll sit in the back of this Waymo and I'll take a little video of it and I'll send it to my wife and and she'll write back every time that freaks me out. But the math is overwhelming. The Waymo is, you know, 20 times safer than you and I. I mean, I used to I think I used to be a good driver. I probably never was. I'm definitely not a good driver anymore. And I get distracted. I'm like.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, correct. Yeah.
Ron Boire: You know, I'll drive someplace that I don't think, well, how did I get? don't even remember driving here. So how good a driver was I? But the Waymo in these autonomous vehicles are one step. And I think there's a future where where we don't own a car. mean, to your point with your drone, you know, I push a button on my phone and a nice sedan shows up and it takes me to the play and I can have a drink and not worry about getting in my car. takes me home.
Brendan Dowling: Rick. Yeah. ahead. And as you say, it's safer because we have, God forbid, we have a lot of tragic summer road today. But if you compare road safety to, let's say, air traffic control, like Ryanair, thank God, has never had an accident. So when you compare that, if you apply the air traffic control logic and AI to drone transport, it will massively reduce because human error is always the factor, isn't it? So when
Ron Boire: It's always here.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, so hence, you can be like, say to my children, I have four children, they're driving all the time. I say it's not you, it's the other person. So always expect the unexpected as a human driver. But as you correctly say, I think it's going to eradicate some of the problems we have on our roads, which is amazing thing.
Ron Boire: Yeah. What do you think about how it's going to change your infrastructure? If I don't own a house or don't own a car, I don't need a garage. All of a sudden, my housing cost changes and my utility changes in my house. you know, the same thing with robotics. I say to my wife, said, if you could buy a device for $30,000, which is kind of what Musk is saying the entry level is, which means it'll be 50, but whatever. So you can buy it for $30,000.
Brendan Dowling: correct. Thank
Ron Boire: and it'll clean your house, do your laundry, mow your lawn, you know, do your dishes, make you dinner. Would you do that? It's like, absolutely, I would do that. Of course I would do Think about your mom. She would say, can you turn on Netflix for me?
Brendan Dowling: The car that you have outside your door today, what have you paid for that? And that will be potentially gone. Apart from the fact that I like to touch and feel of an engine, which is some of our petrol heads. But apart from that, you won't need it anymore. So you'll replace your car with the robot and you'll use that same disposable income to pay for the robot. And the key thing about this is going to give you back so much time that you didn't otherwise have. Like the amount of jobs like cutting grass or cutting a field of corn or whatever that we do here, you know, we're constantly going but if somebody give you back all that time what would you do with it you know you do
Ron Boire: That's the big productivity boost from AI. And I like cutting the grass in April and May, but by August, I don't want to cut the grass anymore. It's no longer therapy. Now it's a job, right? It's therapy in April and May, and it's a job in August and September. And we live in an incredible time, and our children live in an incredible time.
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. Yeah, good fellow. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. ⁓
Ron Boire: But this transition, and this is kind of back to your mission and a little bit of my mission, the mission is how do we as a society, how do we get through this? How do we make this transition? How do we move from a lot of doers to a lot of makers and creators and thinkers? What does that look like? How do we leverage up this technology? Will the technology in fact become what we think it can become, or is it?
Brendan Dowling: Mm.
Ron Boire: does this thing stall? mean, those are all the kind of really, to me, really interesting questions.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. The key question that I was addressing when we were at the Re-Invention Summit was our educational system. Our educational system has been designed around, as I say, regurgitating and memorizing and learning different things that we've done in the past. But I think this new world, we're going to have to tap into creativity, communications, resilience, all those things, leadership, ⁓ all those things that we haven't been teaching in our school curriculum. have now become critical not only to adopt and work in this new world but even for mental well-being which as we all know is on the rise in terms of our younger generation are suffering very badly and it's a curve that's just going up and up and up in terms of the suffering and it's because they're not playing, they're not allowed to be creative, they're not using their talents in the way that they could etc etc Some do and a lot do but I do think we have to reinvent our curriculum our educational curriculums to be ready for this new world and allow children to be more creative and I think there'll be more time for creativity if we facilitate it but it doesn't exist in the it's very a minor component of our curriculum today in comparison to what it's currently teaching so teaching I don't mean the bad way teaching maths and teaching you know Shakespeare etc I know I'd be criticized for saying these things because they are great too. But couldn't we be teaching people how to handle conflict, how to navigate their way through be resilient online and how to communicate online, how to hold on and how to be creative and tapping into different aspects of creativity that they might be good at, et cetera. There's a whole world that is untapped. And if we don't allow ourselves to change, and so it's hard to change. Nobody likes change. know, we're all creatures of habit. We all like to do what we always did. But you got to be brave. That's the bravery that we're trying to that in fairness the Irish government that we've reinvented ourselves a number of times the last time we had the crisis in 2007 that when we had the last recession the Irish government created what they called the global Irish economic forum and they brought Irish leaders from all over the world 300 of us into Dublin Castle and We sat there for a long weekend with all with the Prime Minister and our ministers and top entrepreneurs and top thinkers from all over the world and we came up but loads of solutions like, so for example, national broadband came out of that, that thinking to say it's critical to our future that everybody has good broadband in their home. Like me here on a farm up a few years ago, I couldn't have had this call because my broadband was so bad, but now it's, it's all over the country thanks to ⁓ David McCourt and his team. And if they've rolled it out nationally and now we have, ⁓ we can, we can deal with the current and future opportunities.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: of remote working, know, so those that type of thing. That's where governments have to reinvent and sit and say, OK, let's try something new here. So, for example, it's public knowledge now that the Irish government have sat down with Enterprise Ireland and they're about to launch a brand new program that is targeted at companies that are doing a couple of hundred million turnover to bring them to in excess of a billion and turn and basically create our own indigenous multinationals. And this is something that has never been done.
Ron Boire: code.
Brendan Dowling: the world before and it's incredible thinking by government and by a government agency like Enterprise Ireland the program is going to be called Atlas as I understand. So it's and I'll probably be bidding for it in terms of a tender but it's revolutionary and it's radical, it's great thinking, I think it's going to make a big big difference, it's going to launch this year but again nobody in the world has ever done it, there's no model to follow and they're just saying let's
Ron Boire: Okay. Yeah
Brendan Dowling: Start from scratch and let's create something new because we need it
Ron Boire: Yeah, and think one of the things I learned when, so growing up in America, you grow up incredibly arrogant. You don't know how arrogant you are, but you, it's a disease and it's, some of it deserved, right? Most of it not deserved. And I remember growing up thinking, you know, this is the greatest country in the world as everyone should think about their country. the first time I went to Japan, I was stunned at the insecurity.
Brendan Dowling: Yes.
Ron Boire: And I've been to Japan maybe 75 times and ⁓ some of my best friends in the world are in Japan. But ⁓ I didn't understand this insecurity. ⁓ And then I went to ⁓ Korea for the first time and I encountered this insecurity. And in Singapore and in New Zealand and in Ireland.
Brendan Dowling: Hmm. Hmm. Yes.
Ron Boire: And I've kind of coined this as island insecurity, right? So there's this, and you lose perspective on things. So the US economy is $30 trillion. It grew by a trillion last year. It'll grow by a trillion two or a trillion four this year, no matter how hard we try to mess it up. at the top of my head, I don't know the size of the Irish economy, but it's not a trillion.
Brendan Dowling: Yes. No.
Ron Boire: And that insecurity is what drives innovation and greatness. you look at Japan as my favorite example, because I kind of watched it, you know, is when I went to work for Sony, my grandfather, I won't tell you the exact quote, but he said, oh, that's that Japanese company. But he didn't say Japanese. And I went to work for Sony in 1986, January 1st, 1986.
Brendan Dowling: Thank you.
Ron Boire: They were about a billion dollar company. And when I left, they were a 40 or $50 billion company. But there's always this insecurity that drove them always this we're going to get beat. We're going to get beat. This isn't going to work. And I see that in Ireland. I see that in our work that we do in New Zealand, where when you go to New Zealand, they don't talk about like Americans will talk about. I. Right. They talk about we.
Brendan Dowling: Mm-hmm. ⁓ That's right,
Ron Boire: You know, we have to make New Zealand great. And I heard the same thing in Ireland when we went to the Re-Invention Summit. wasn't about my company. It wasn't about me. It was about the country. And I think that's a powerful idea and it's a powerful feeling. I love this idea of Atlas. I love the word Atlas. I love the idea of Atlas. ⁓ And I think if you want to do it, I think it's going to happen.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
Ron Boire: I think you'll fail a lot and you'll succeed a lot. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, I know it's ⁓ Yeah, correct. It's been signed off by government. The budget is there. There's a tender on its way out. So it's happening. Yeah, they're going ahead with it. But it was interesting thing that you say a bunch of investors from Silicon Valley came to Ireland to look at our tech companies. they heard a lot of pitches from tech companies. And at the end of it, they said to Enterprise Ireland, they said, you know, it's really interesting. We listen to pitches all day long in Silicon Valley. And when we listen to
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: to a US pitch, they they pitch us a Ferrari. And we open the bonnet and we find a Volkswagen. But said, in Ireland, you pitch us a Volkswagen and we open the bonnet and we find a Ferrari. So that's And now we have to learn a little bit to be more ⁓ bullish, is the word I'd use. I wouldn't use the word arrogant, because you're incredible nation. ⁓
Ron Boire: Yes.
Brendan Dowling: we need to be a little bit more bullish and be able to articulate. And it's the vision piece, if you can inspire people to believe in your vision, the world will conspire to help you. So hence, that belief, we're going to be the greatest, we're going to be the biggest, we are the biggest, the best, et cetera. That belief system is very important for us. So for example, we know we've worked to do on that Atlas program around that belief system and creating a culture within an organization and a national pride like we did with our rugby team that Aidan would have played with, where we literally could go out and be world class and beat everybody else, even though we're a small island. But the belief system, starting with the belief, ambition and belief and then ultimately your culture. And I think that can transform economies. And that's what we will have to work on, I think.
Ron Boire: Yeah, and I think it's work worth doing, right? So ⁓ on education, think ⁓ I hear the guys in the technology space talk and even some conversation that we have on and off around folks around Columbia when I'm down there with Rita. ⁓ The conversation goes quickly to
Brendan Dowling: Yes.
Ron Boire: ⁓ Would you tell, you have a bright young man or woman today, should they go to college or just join a tech firm? All these tech bros are saying, just join a tech firm. You'll get more of an education in two years at a tech startup than you will at Columbia, wherever you may want to go. And I think there's There's some truth in that. There's some power in that idea. And, know, back to this AI conversation, Ireland's one of Ireland's superpowers has been ⁓ education, the highly educated, you know, hardworking workforce. What's the future of education look like in Ireland? I, there's a piece of me that thinks the U S won't change, but someplace.
Brendan Dowling: You know. Mmm.
Ron Boire: somebody's going to do it differently. Somebody, you know, if we look at, for example, what's happened in the US in terms of trade education, we've destroyed the trade school system in the US with the concept of higher education, which de facto means everything else is lower education, right? The reinvention of education probably won't happen in the US. It's going to happen someplace like Ireland or Zealand or, know.
Brendan Dowling: Mm. Yeah. Hmm Yeah. Yeah, well, it's happening in China. Like they made an announcement last year that all of the schools and children from the age of four are going to start with AI. You know, and they're going to have AI and they're going to build on top of AI and they're going to understand it and use it and leverage it as ubiquitous knowledge. I think that's a starting point. I remember even getting my first calculator and you weren't allowed to use it. I remember computers coming out, you weren't allowed to use it. There's no open book exams, know, very, very few open
Ron Boire: Yeah. Yep.
Brendan Dowling: open book exams, you have to learn off and regurgitate. That's where we have to reinvent ourselves in terms of education. But for example, my son is currently doing a commerce degree in a university here in Ireland. you know, like that he was complaining about he wasn't learning a lot. And the courses are, you know, there's very few hours, there's very few lectures, there's very little that's inspirational about it. So he said to me, I'm not learning anything. Now he's having fun. And I said, enjoy the fun part of it. But he came to me one day and he said to me he to do a year of work experience and he was looking at all the big four and the consulting firms and he said, dad, that's not me. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to learn anything. So he came to me one day and he said to me, dad, if you were starting your career again, what would you do if you were me now? I said, that's a brilliant question. said years ago when I was... Yeah.
Ron Boire: Genius question!
Brendan Dowling: I said to him years ago when I was doing commerce, I had the privilege of meeting Tony Ryan from Ryanair as well. And he was offering us jobs and I thought he was talking, he was talking billions and I couldn't get my head around billions like that. So none of us took jobs with him. But I said to him today, I would now go to the likes of a Tony Ryan and say, I will be your executive assistant, but please let me attend all the meetings. I'll carry a workload for you. I'll do everything you want me to do and take work away from you. He said, that's a brilliant idea. I'm going to do that. So then he to me what entrepreneur in Ireland should I do that with? Yeah exactly and given my background I know plenty of good guys so I did put him with one amazing guy who's scaling company and making acquisitions and a really really good guy so he worked with him for nine months and he learned so much by being in the field and by doing and observing ⁓
Ron Boire: Give me the introduction.
Brendan Dowling: great person doing an entrepreneurial gig. So this person is acquiring, they have big board, they private equity, they're raising money, they're doing all the things that in commerce you couldn't get your head around that through a book and through a textbook. So I would hope and what I've talked a lot about firstly is apprenticeships and I don't mean learning how to be a plumber or a brickie which are great jobs and those guys are making serious money today because they can command a premium because so few people are going into it. ⁓ But I mean literally all of us and this is where I come into what I do today. I'm at a stage of life where I'm giving back as well. We call it the green jersey. So the former CEO, the CEO that really got this moving, guy of Enterprise Ireland, he used to phone me and say, Brendan, I need you to put on your green jersey. Now that meant you were going to work for free.
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: It was okay, you know, because we've done well and we're in a good place in life. So, so many people are willing to put on the green jersey and that is the rally call that we do. And we say to people that have been successful, that got education, that traveled the world and did well, we're saying put on your green jersey now and let's all rally and let's support this next generation. So we mentor, we coach, we support, et cetera, et cetera. So, and nearly everybody, if I'd the phone to an entrepreneur and I want you to do X, Y or Z. They'll jump and say, yeah, no problem. Where, when? They'll jump on a plane. have speakers that come to Barcelona for me, somebody coming to Madrid in the next few weeks, even in New York, people that, and they'll jump on a plane and come over and speak to Irish people in those locations to help and put on the green jersey.
Ron Boire: Yeah. So I hear you saying it's an and right. That, ⁓ and I think it's an end that the university system, secondary education doesn't go away, but it's got to, it's got to evolve. There's a couple of universities here. One of them, ⁓ Northeastern up in Boston has this, ⁓ curriculum over you go four years, but one year is, and I think, Down in Philly, who is it? There's another school that does this where you literally, you go work someplace for a year in the middle of your four year. I think that's a step in the right direction. But I think, you know, what your son said is what, you know, I would have, my wife and I put the kids through college, obviously, and you write these really big checks and they go to school for 151 days. And within that 151 days, they have class, you know, on.
Brendan Dowling: Yeah. and all the Arshin.
Ron Boire: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. you go like, wait, why am I writing a $75,000? What's happening here? Right. ⁓ But I do think that there's there's something to be said for a liberal arts education. ⁓ There's something to be said for technical education still. But I think there's an end there that that, your your son probably is experiencing that is, you know, how do we get how do we get people more engaged in the real world?
Brendan Dowling: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. follow up simply. Mm.
Ron Boire: and using some of these tools that we've been talking about ⁓ and create this environment where resilience can be put back in the system that, you know, curiosity, ⁓ creativity. ⁓
Brendan Dowling: Exactly. Yeah. I hate to say it, but I would... I would argue that like, there's lots of research to support this, creativity, you know, when you're born, you're fully creative. You're touching your feeling, you're tasting, you're creative, you're breaking, you're fixing, you're doing all these things, you're playing. And I hate to say it, but the system knocks that out of you over a period of time. And particularly when you go to university, I remember having arguments with professors in a good way, but they were telling me I was wrong because I had a bigger idea, a bigger vision, bigger picture, et cetera, et cetera. And so they would
Ron Boire: Yep.
Brendan Dowling: fail me if I didn't regurgitate what they had said. And that can knock creativity out of people because we're trying to get people, hate to say it, to conform. But what we believe is the way things should be based on what we know today. So one of the key things that some of the better universities do and all your great universities that you have in the US is to practitioner based learning where they bring in speakers. I'm sure you've been to many universities as a guest speaker. But when to bring in the practitioners, that's when the light bulb come on for
Ron Boire: Yes.
Brendan Dowling: people and people really engage. They're really, you know, there's role models and you're learning. And then the academia combined with the practical really can light a fire in somebody because you're given frameworks to say, this is how you might go at that. But keep the big thinking, keep the big vision, keep this, that and the other. So that combination is really powerful and the university that do it know how powerful it is. But we need that in the school system too. It's very rare that schools They might bring in the odd parent here or there to speak to the kids but it needs to be built into it that we're doing real stuff as well as academia and hence allowing that creativity to flow. My daughter works for a company called Junk Couture and they make fashion out of rubbish and they're in the US as well and they're in some of the schools in the US but they're all over Ireland and they're worldwide at this stage. But they call the sport for creatives is what they do.
Ron Boire: Yep. Mm-hmm. Right.
Brendan Dowling: create couture out of rubbish, they create amazing looking gowns etc and they put them on stage and have a world final which they had there a few weeks ago and it's the sport for creatives. Now we need more of that too as we have sport and people on the soccer team, the baseball team, the football team, they're the heroes that are carried around on the shoulders of their schoolmates but the creatives also need to be carried around on the shoulders of their schoolmates as heroes because
Ron Boire: Yeah.
Brendan Dowling: they've done something so creative and so innovative you know.
Ron Boire: Yeah, yeah, putting that getting that embedded in the system is going to be a battle because the society, the new religion of the world is sport. Right. And we see it. We see it all the time. You see it in the US with football and basketball and and sport being the religion.