Stuart Gent: It's just a little idea, but a lot of organizations take that idea and they just put it through this industrial shredder and it never survives. And it's not bad intent. It's just, everyone does their job, but as if it's run.
Jimmy Allen: Time and again, I see the same thing killing companies. Complexity, too many products, too many channels, too many processes, and we all know, for God's sake, too many meetings. Pretty soon we're bloated, we're slow, and we simply can't compete. And we know this by now. Business should be simple. There are only two motions. First delivery, flawless execution of known playbooks. The CEO's job? Focus on creating joyful routines. Second motion, development. Test and learn your way to new solutions. You're building new businesses to respond to changing customer needs. The CEO job? Focus on scaling and then simplify the rest. Now I know what you're thinking, "Jimmy, nothing about being a CEO is simple," but that's not 100% true. The CEO's job isn't easy, but it must be simple because if the CEO is lost in complexity, the organization is doomed. Simplicity gives focus and focus gives energy or what today's guest will call flow. But how the hell are you supposed to simplify in today's complex business landscape? Well, we might find the answer in an industrial shredder, a so-called shit product, or even a chartered sailboat. I'm Jimmy Allen and this is "The Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions." Stuart Gent is a partner at Bain Capital, co-head of Europe Private Equity. Bain Capital's one of the world's leading private investment firms and manages over $185 billion in assets worldwide. Stuart works with portfolio companies in the technology, financial, industrial verticals, but today he joins us as a lifelong student of our key topics, focus and flow. And to kick things off, I wanted to know, what does simplicity in business really mean?
Stuart Gent: As you know, I work in private equity, and my focus is on, you know, we tend to invest in pretty scale companies. And so often when you arrive, and one of the first questions I think, you know, we have or I have when we think about what we're trying to do with the business is, what is the heart of this business? What is it actually about? A lot of businesses have lost sight of that strategic clarity, which sounds like a grand term, but at its simplest it's, you know, who are my target customers? And why am I able to serve them in a way that's better than my competitors? And you know, how am I organized to do that? And what are all the opportunities that come out of that? And I've heard a lot of different variations of strategy. I mean, you know, grow our business is not a strategy, right? But a lot of people will talk about strategy as well, "We want to grow our business and improve margins." And I'm like, "No, they're just ambitions then. Then that's not a strategy." But I think if you haven't got the essence of why you exist, what you're for, who are you serving, it's very hard to then organize anything else. It's very hard to think about the organization, how you'd be more efficient, how you set things up because you don't really have a true north. You're just following different people's points of view.
Jimmy Allen: And Stuart, you know, so much of today's discussion, be it about AI or about turbulence almost makes it sound like CEOs don't have time for strategy. That somehow strategy is something that slows you down. It presumes a long term that isn't there. How do you reconcile that, you know, the need to go back to kind of the essence with an ever-changing world?
Stuart Gent: So I don't confuse strategy with a long-term plan, first of all, right? So one is, strategy is clarity of the essence of your purpose of the company, what customer you're trying to serve, how you're gonna win, and how you're gonna do that against competition. And the reality, if you're a scale business, those parameters don't move instantly. Like, you know, now new competitors arrive for sure, customers change, but those things change over time. Now, in today's world, if you take a view of, right now we've done our strategy, let's do our five-year plan and then let's lock ourselves in for five years and just keep going blindly forward with that I mean, that'd be crazy. So strategy and time are two different concepts, I think, and I think maybe that's where the confusion is.
Jimmy Allen: When I've talked to you about simplicity, you also say that we've gotta stop the idea that plans are always linear. And in fact, we have to anticipate that our plans will constantly change in what we do. Can you just talk about that a little bit?
Stuart Gent: When you think about a plan, I mean, ultimately it's a projection. It's a judgment at a point in time with all the information you have, but a lot of things change. And so it's not a question of, is it wrong, is it right? It's a question of, what have you learned as that plan unfolds? So then as you're building the plan, you've gotta have a view of, well, is what I'm looking at, is the data I'm using to project forward something that is linear or is it something that actually is more likely be to be discontinuous? And I'd argue, again, in a more volatile world, it's more than likely not linear. It's actually likely to be quite discontinuous. And so it's just, I think you've gotta be very careful that almost the mechanics of the plan almost predetermine the answer, as opposed to saying, "Where are there areas which I think of more as like an engineering problem?" So an engineering problem in my mind is, you're a retail business, you've got 25 stores. You want to get to 50 stores. And probably what you're mainly focused on is, how do I accelerate my ability to open an increasing number over time? But you have a very good understanding of all of the constraints of that because you've got a ton of history and data. Whereas, let's say you're same retailer and you say, "Now I wanna open 25 new stores of a different format." You don't what the format is. You don't know if it's gonna work. You don't know where to put it, you know? So any extrapolation of even the first store is at best a guess, and so I think you've gotta think about it quite differently. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have a plan which says, "We're aiming to get to 25 of these new stores," but I just wouldn't spend a lot of time on detailing out years two and three in that. I'd spend a lot of time on, how do we get the first one right?
Jimmy Allen: I also think it ends up robbing the organization of energy because you end up in a situation where the plan is wrong from month six or month nine, and the organization then loses faith in the ambition as opposed to saying, you know, "We set out a set of goals, but the plan by definition will be ever-changing." I think you just set all the wrong expectations.
Stuart Gent: Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting 'cause I'm saying two things. I mean, it's a nuance to this, right? 'Cause you wanna have a plan. You want to have a view of where you're trying to get to. But the amount of energy that goes into the detail of that and almost this view that you can predetermine at a very low level of detail all of the variables and how they're gonna play out. I mean, it's actually madness at some level, of course. And if you look back at any plan, you'll always know that you never did that, that you always got some of it wrong. But then you still, every year, you go through the same process. We had a board meeting recently and again, there was a lot of pressure to, we need to sign off the budget because we need to roll out to everyone all the detailed metrics that everything's built on. And I was like, "Well, but last year we did that and we missed the budget by quite a lot so all we know is that that process doesn't work so why don't we try something else?" And again, you come back to the efficiency point. So much time and cost is wasted producing these things, but I think they don't add a lot.
Jimmy Allen: Simplicity, to Stuart, starts with this. What is the heart of the business? Who do we serve and how do we win? Without that clarity, we're just lost in the noise. And simplicity demands we know when we're working on a linear problem, or what we'd call delivery, or a discontinuous problem, which we'd call development. And as Stuart puts it, without that clarification, it's absolute madness. I love this. The best CEOs turn out to be obsessed with rewiring their companies. They've learned to fall back in love with the process. Take Michael Dell, for example. Dell grew into a global powerhouse, but with scale, of course, came a loss of speed. Michael knew that he needed a way to move faster without sacrificing quality, and one focus he had was, "How are we actually making decisions?" So he built a simple repeatable two-step process. Meeting one, review the facts and alternatives, gather the data, lay out the real options. Meeting two, choices and commitments. Now make the call and commit. Create two meetings. Yeah, it's really that simple. So this Dell model came up at a recent CEO forum, and a couple CEOs pointed out that there's something really powerful. The real benefit of this two-meeting approach, it stops emotional advocacy because the team is forced to debate alternatives, real ones. No advocacy, no selling. Just testing ideas, surfacing concerns, putting issues on the table. And the secret sauce is that the people in that room are evaluated on the quality of those alternatives, not on how hard they push one of them. Then with time to reflect, they return with a clear recommendation. The result, less heat, more light, strategic debates that actually move the business forward because process matters. Fall back in love with the processes that simplify and watch what changes. Radical simplification is about focus. It's about narrowing to the choices that really matter in your business and that then gives you the time and space. And that then gives you the time and space to debate what is always the hardest issue. No kidding. Where do we put our people?
Stuart Gent: Yeah, I mean, I say this semi-jokingly, but my first reaction to, you know, when a team come up with, "Here are the initiatives and here's how we're gonna staff it," my first reaction is usually to say, "Okay, whoever you've put on that list, like, they're not gonna get the job because they tend to be the people that are free." And actually what you need to do is say, "Who are the people in your organization that you really don't wanna put on this initiative?" And then they're probably the people that you want, which is difficult 'cause you don't want to free them up because that's gonna cause you a problem in the run side of the organization. But the reality of all of the kind of more creative, new areas is you need your absolute best people on it and you need to give them the capacity to actually do the work. So I think you've gotta do two things. One is, you've gotta be ruthlessly clear that if it's our most important stuff, we need to put our best people on it and be honest about that. And then you genuinely need to take work off their plate, which again, are two unnatural acts for an organization 'cause they both, they create two problems you've gotta solve, but I think it's very important that you do that.
Jimmy Allen: Yeah, I wanna probe on this more with your experience. There's a book that I think is one of the best books on this topic, which is "The Phoenix Project." And in it, they refer to the, "everybody wants Brent" problem. And it's interesting 'cause they say that you end up with one guy who tends to know everything about the systems and everybody wants on everything. And the authors say that, paradoxically, Brent is actually one of your biggest performance issues because Brent has never institutionalized the capability so it scales along with the firm's ambition. And yet all of our HR systems tend to reward Brent astronomically. You know, "If we lose Brent, we're doomed. We need to give Brent a bigger bonus." And we often then underinvest in the people that build capabilities who seem to always have lots of people available on different things because the institutional capability's real. You must deal with this daily that there are people that are needed on every single initiative. How do you know if they're a true star and we need to make sure we free up their capacity and do everything, and how do you know if they're are performance issue that somehow almost holds the organization hostage because they've not institutionalized their capability?
Stuart Gent: I think, yeah, the issue's real. I think the question we ask is slightly different, which is, what we're trying to do when we invest in a company is we invest with a thesis that through our ownership we can create a better business, right? That's ultimately the core of what we're trying to do. And a key part of that is therefore the transformation of that business. And a key part of that is the creation of capability process, new routines that shift the run organization to that new world, right? There's the dimension of the here and now, like the next quarter or two, what are you getting done? And that's an action-oriented, like in your analogy, that's the sort of Brent thing. Like, how are we making progress? How are we getting stuff done? How are we implementing stuff? But I think you've got a second dimension, which is, how am I building the capabilities that are gonna give me year two and year three of that program effectively? Like, I can't run this as a project forever. I've gotta institutionalize it as a capability. And so yes, I want traction and impact, but simultaneously, I wanna be building capability that's gonna turn that into a routine, into something that makes it, you know, sustainable and something that's gonna last forever.
Jimmy Allen: So as you pull all this thinking together, again with kind of the role of the importance of simplicity, based on this conversation, what do you typically, how do you typically focus one of your CEOs? Or what do you say to them about the job of CEO given the run change, the engineering problems, creative problems, scaling problems, what is the job of the CEO?
Stuart Gent: I think for me, what's unique about the CEO role is they can reorganize the organization and the system at will, and nobody else in the company can do that. And I think increasingly, I think the best CEOs are the people who, once they've laid out that journey and they've built alignment, they've done all the good clear leadership stuff that everyone understands, what they really focus on are, what are the problems we've now gotta solve? And what are the problems that I, uniquely, as the CEO can solve? And I think if you look at... I'm always intrigued by some of the hyperscalers. You get the sense that that was what, a lot of the time, the founders are doing. They're just going from the next problem to the next problem to the next problem and they're leaving the run to the team. You know, they built a team that can do the run, they brought in new people, but ultimately they're like, "I got five problems I'm trying to solve and I'm gonna reorganize the teams to get the right people focused on that, and I'm gonna stay on those problems until they're solved." I think the, you know, worst type of CEOs are the delegators of that. They're like, I describe they're kind of, the people who don't run to the ball. They're like, they just find the problem and they give it to the team and they don't want to get involved in case it goes wrong. And that's when it doesn't work. You know, I think the best people are the people that just jump right into it and they just keep driving it until they get to a solution.
Jimmy Allen: For a CEO, focus isn't optional, it's the job. Yes, you need the right goals, but just as critical, you need to pick the right problems to solve first. Steve Jobs nailed this point back in the '90s. People think focus means saying "yes" to one thing, but real focus is saying "no" to the hundreds of good ideas that you won't pursue. Jobs was a master of radical simplification. When he returned to Apple, he stripped things back to just four core products plus a few things in development. But then he famously stood in front of hundreds of engineers and explained to them why Apple would not be pursuing their pet projects. That's laser focus. Another great voice on this is David Fleck. He's founder and managing partner at Freeflow Ventures, and he spent his career helping founder-led startups face the hard scaling challenges and win. Today, he's backing deep tech solutions for human and planetary health, and he knows what it takes to keep focus when the stakes are at their highest. You're the first one that was really talking to me about the distinction of startup versus scale-up. What are the scale-up challenges that founder-led companies tend to face?
David Fleck: I feel like I'm saying the same things in almost every meeting, but that's okay because it's the same observations, you know? And one of 'em that I find myself saying all the time right now is just the need to focus. If you are a startup, you earn the right to exist because you do one thing and one thing only better than anyone in the world. And you have to lock that in. I see companies all the time go, "You know, we're a platform. We can do this and we can do this and we can do this." And I'm like, "That's great. You can do that over the next 10 years. Over the next two years, you can do one of those things and you can do one of those things better than anyone in the world, but you have to be super focused and just execute, execute, execute maniacally."
Jimmy Allen: One of the things that comes up again and again with my founder discussions, is what is the unit you're trying to scale? If you don't have the single unit right, there's no point in scaling it. That demands unbelievable focus. Now, let's assume you have that focus. What is the next scaling challenge that you've seen these companies go through?
David Fleck: Hmm. I think the next thing that I oftentimes see is, well, not thinking big enough, actually sometimes is an issue. I talk a lot about the three Ts, you know, team, TAM, technology. Like, that's pretty much what we're looking at every time, you know, full-time dedicated team. Are they superstars? Are they a plus team? TAM, you know, what's the market size? Technology, is it differentiated? You know, does it provide optionality in terms of what I just described about like, one, two, and three over the next 10-year life? But the TAM, that's the thing that sometimes, especially with scientists, they may have something that's really unique and special, but it's not pointed in the right direction. You know, I equate it to like sailing, for example. Like, if you're off by one or two degrees, you're fine maybe for the first few hours, but if you sail in that direction for days, all of a sudden, you're just way off, right? And so like, I described it as like, we're tapping them a little bit here and there just to make sure they're going in the right direction because you have to go after that opportunity that credibly is gonna result in a billion dollar company.
Jimmy Allen: The first thing is, they don't think small enough, meaning, what's the core? Don't talk about all the things you can do. Let's be focused on one thing. Having succeeded at that, then the next problem is, they don't think big enough. The other thing I just wanna touch about, you and I, I remember this so vividly. We were sitting in the San Francisco office. You drew what I refer to as the staircase model that I tell everybody and I give you credit for. So the staircase is, it allows you to go up and to go forward, and there are different motions and different mindsets. What's the flat part when you actually move forward? Freezing resources. Founder mode would be, it's just a straight up bloody slope. And what your model is, is these are equally important steps.
David Fleck: Yeah, well, and you know, the company that was my last one, and that was just a wonderful experience but it wasn't a straight up and to the right experience. It was a up and down and up and down. And then finally, you know, kind of an up at the end, but it was a lot of lessons along the way. If you look at the history of whatever company you're emulating right now, they had near-death experiences. That's just part. I can't name one company that didn't have a near-death experience that ended up being a multi-billion-dollar company. It's just what happens. It's where your mettle is tested, for sure and where you figure out what kind of founder you are. Like, are you gonna give up? Are you gonna keep going?
Jimmy Allen: For founders, focus is a tricky word because we praise them for their big dreams and outrageous ambition. But, and there's always a but, you can be everything you want to be, just not all at once. Focus is not the act of killing ambition. It's how bold ambitions come to life, one step at a time. Just like that staircase, growth comes in bursts. On the rise, you're in the growth phase, throwing money, people, even a dash of chaos at the problem. When speed matters, you learn fast. But then the step flattens, that's freeze mode. You're still growing, but the focus shifts. You optimize, fix processes, reset your people. You learn to do more with less. And then you climb again. Growth, speed, learning. Freeze, optimize, reset. And then you rinse and repeat because here's the truth. Growth demands yes, but it demands no even more. Yes unlocks ambition, but no, interestingly enough, unlocks creativity, and leaders need to know the difference. Are you solving engineering problems? Then let's build a playbook. Or are you solving creativity problems? Then let's build some space. That's what Stuart's obsessed with because it simplifies, because it energizes, and because it creates flow.
Stuart Gent: I sort of think of this... I'm simplifying. There's three types of problems that businesses are resolving, right? One is the way to run the business. The day to day, just all the things that come up in running any business that need to be decided on and moved forward. There's, at the other end of the spectrum, there are creativity problems, which is generally, I want to do something new. And in the middle is what I call scaling problems. I want to take an idea that's working, and I want to take it through my whole enterprise. And the thing that I'm always focused on is, what do we know? Organizations design themselves to optimize for a run, which makes sense 'cause you want to be efficient, you want to be effective. The problem is, if you then ask that same system to do something new, because there is no data on anything new. By definition it's new, so you don't have history. You don't know what will work and what won't work, and you certainly don't have any information to project things on. And what tends to happen then is that the, I always describe it that the idea part gets treated as if it's a run issue. I use this sort of picture of a Post-it note and an industrial shredder. And my point is, the Post-it note is the idea. It's delicate. It's like, it's just a little idea. But a lot of organizations take that idea and they just put it through this industrial shredder and it never survives. And it's not bad intent. It's just, everyone does their job, but as if it's run. And actually what you need to do is really change your orientation to, how do we keep this idea alive and recognize that that idea is, the other sort of important part is to recognize that idea isn't probably right, but it will lead you to something that could be very interesting. But I think for a lot of the time what happens with new ideas is just that the run organization treats them as if it's a day-to-day problem, and that idea doesn't survive.
Jimmy Allen: As leaders, we need to create the right conditions to spark curiosity and creativity. We need to give ideas room to grow and breathe. Get rid of the industrial shredder. Simplicity sharpens focus, which ignites flow. But for goodness' sake, don't mistake it for efficiency. Too often we drown our organizations. It's those tyrannies of functional excellence programs where in every room we enter, we're invited to have another PowerPoint enema. And this is something Stuart's seen up close. So you've talked about two things, and I want to kind of go through them in a little bit more detail. One is just presenting a language to it. I love that, you know, that, "Guys, are we having a run problem? Is it creativity? Is it scaling?" And then the second thing is to recognize that each of those three problems need to be approached with a different mindset. One of the things that we've seen a lot is, the only time these discussions happen is in budgeting or performance reviews. And it's all one system, and you have the same management team one hour being in a defensive run meeting with all the experts bashing the hell out of them, but in the same meeting, within 15 minutes, they're in a creativity and scale meeting but no one's changed mindset. And I think you've thought a lot about this, about how energy works and do you actually separate the meetings?
Stuart Gent: I think what we've learned around people, conscious, subconscious, how people react to different situations, how creative they can be, you know, all of that, I mean, pretty basic knowledge says you need to set things up quite differently than the conventional corporate calendar. If you're trying to be more creative, you've gotta create space, you've gotta create time. There's huge value in going outside. You know, you want to create an environment where people feel comfortable laughing and joking. I mean, it's like, it's almost the fast track to access your subconscious. Like, and so, you know, with pretty much all of our companies in quite early days, we go through this sort of process, which is mainly outside, and it's built around getting people into nature and getting them into quite dramatic backdrops exactly because it creates this neurological impact, which is, people who are more open-minded, they're more curious, they're able to think more expansively and so you get better ideas.
Jimmy Allen: Often what we view as the expert is set up for the run side. So you know, a typical CEO will be surrounded by the functionalist specialists in running the business and the span breakers for running the business. And then that group is asked to posit about new, new things. But often even worse, the board can be set up as a set of super experts within that industry as currently defined, often, and I'll use the gender on specific, you know, wise old men who have been there, done that. How much do you kind of feel we need to like, fundamentally change the people in the room as we move to the creativity and scale?
Stuart Gent: We were looking at a business. They had a big North America business. Revenue growth wasn't great and you know, I mean, teasing your industry a little bit, you know, everyone was pitching us commercial excellence and we were gonna rank the sales team and assess their capability and you know, and there's always, you do these things and there's a third who are great, there's a third who are average, and a third who are not, right? And then we were gonna go down that path. And I was like, "Do you know what, I just wanna go out with a couple of sales guys." And so I went to the States and I spent a couple of days driving around with a sales guy and I was like, "He seems pretty good." Like, you know, he was organized and he had a list of customers that he'd got in touch with, and he had his pitch and his material. And so we went out on the road and we went to 10 customers and we sold nothing. But the problem was the product was shit. It was nothing to do with commercial excellence. It was to do with the fact that actually, we didn't have a competitive product that was designed for that market, and no one was listening to the sales guys. They were coming back and saying, "I'm trying to sell this thing, but I can't 'cause I need all these extras." And the response of the organization was, "Sales team's rubbish" as opposed to, "We actually need to deliver them something better." And the only way you get that insight is you've gotta get right to those people and you gotta trust them. 'cause it wasn't actually a sales issue. It was a product issue. And that's what I mean by learning. And the only way you learn that is you went out and you went out and tried it and you listened carefully and you came back and you go, "Hang on a minute. This is what we need to focus on."
Jimmy Allen: You know, our observations in a lot of our work on Founder's Mentality is, the more you get the leadership team to do the right thing, the more inherently exhausting it is. You know, relevance, being profoundly relevant to your customers and the talent that matters is bloody hard. Having a culture where red is good so that you embrace the gap in performance is inherently exhausting. And you must know that, you know, you have enough pattern recognition to know that the job that you're putting forward is exhausting. Do you start building resilience from day one?
Stuart Gent: You want an ambitious plan, right? We're ambitious owner. We wanna hire ambitious people. The bit that's not talked about is how just incredibly hard it is to do all of this stuff. I think if you actually have that discussion with people and you recognize it up front and you talk about some of these themes. This is gonna be hard. We're gonna have to learn a lot. And you create language around that, it actually takes a lot of the pressure out of the system. I think there's this really interesting distinction I draw between pressure and stress. So pressure's very powerful, I think. But pressure is, I want to perform and you know, how I bring everything together matters. And you know, when I'm doing a piece of thinking or I'm gonna do a presentation, you know, I'm putting myself under pressure to do a good job. And that creates really good, I think, that's quite, it's powerful energy. It's good for your brain and it's rewarding. Stress is when you're just overwhelmed. You've got too many things to do and not enough resources to do them and/or you're trying to achieve something that isn't really achievable, and that's paralyzing for people. And I think if you're trying to achieve something difficult and you're treating it as if, you know, you've built this plan, and if we're not on plan, you're failing. And everything that goes wrong is therefore the fault of the people, right? That's gonna create stress. It's gonna create a sense of failure. It's gonna be, you know, emotion and energy-wise, a miserable place to be. Ironically, with exactly the same results, if you create an environment where you say, "We're gonna learn, we're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna correct them on, what have we learned? And how are we all collectively working together to do that?" Then you actually, that it is quite fun. I think some of the most rewarding experiences you have is when you do go through these difficult times. But I think you've gotta set things up in a way that enables that energy to flow. I mean, there's an interesting anecdote for this for me, which was the pandemic because teams accomplished incredible things in the pandemic, right? Everyone says, you know, "It was amazing how the organization came together, how we solved this problem." There was no plan. There was no definition of success. For a lot of businesses it was like, "Gotta survive." And so in a very difficult situation, actually, it brought out the best in people. I'm like, how do you create that orientation in the business that you've got today? And how do you make sure that what you're not doing is creating fear, in particular, which is really fear of failure and stress as opposed to positive pressure and really good energy applied against a difficult problem. And again, I come back to, if you've not thought about the fact that what you're trying to do is difficult, you haven't understood what it is you're trying to do.
Jimmy Allen: Focus on the heart of your business. Understand the nature of the problem. Is it linear or is it discontinuous? Create the right process for each kind of decision, which considers deeply how energy flows. Great leaders talk this way, the heart of things, energy, flow. In fact, if you dive into the Founder's Mentality website, we got a whole bunch of weird and wonderful words from the best CEOs. To learn more, hit the link in the show notes. Now back to Stuart and a round of rapid-fire questions. What brings you energy?
Stuart Gent: Imagining possibilities and bringing them to life oriented around both people and outcomes. And so that, to me, is the stuff I enjoy doing.
Jimmy Allen: Do you have energy vampires in your work?
Stuart Gent: I think there are energy vampires everywhere. People just whose default setting is, "No," that's the tough one for me. You know, it's just like, you know what? I'm not sure I've got the energy to deal with that.
Jimmy Allen: What's the best advice you ever received?
Stuart Gent: As I was starting in, as I was shifting from consulting to leading a business, a chairman said to me, you know, one piece of advice was, "When people in your team come into your office, don't let them leave the piece of paper on your desk." And it was a really thoughtful way of just making sure you didn't become the person trying to solve all the problems because it would just overwhelm you.
Jimmy Allen: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
Stuart Gent: Look, I think it's, when anyone tells me, "Don't do X because Y will think Z," right? And if you're trying to do something difficult or bold or interesting, somebody will tell you that people won't like it. I just ignore that.
Jimmy Allen: So let's recap some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Stuart.
Stuart Gent: If you haven't got to the essence of why you exist, what you're for, who are you serving, it's very hard to then organize anything else because you don't really have a true north. You're just following different people's points of view.
Jimmy Allen: Simplification begins with clarity. Get to the heart of things. Name the problems and mobilize to solve them.
Stuart Gent: I think the best CEOs are the people who, ultimately they're like, "I've got five problems I'm trying to solve. I'm gonna reorganize the teams to get the right people focused on that, and I'm gonna stay on those problems until they're solved."
Jimmy Allen: And simplicity starts with who we are and how we make decisions. One thing that's amazed me in my conversations with CEOs is how they're now taking ownership again of the processes in their companies. I think 10 years ago it was kinda macho and kinda cool to say, "Look at, the way we get things done is we work around our processes." That's an abdication. The great CEOs today are rewiring their companies and they're taking ownership of what's going on. Why? Because bad processes destroy. Good processes nurture and they create focus.
Stuart Gent: Pretty basic knowledge says you need to set things up quite differently than the conventional corporate calendar. If you're trying to be more creative, you've gotta create space, you've gotta create time. There's huge value in going outside.
Jimmy Allen: Flow doesn't just happen. You've got to create the right conditions for it. That means removing friction and shifting to learning instead of just rigid planning. It's about fueling progress with positive pressure but not with stress. So look, I wanna circle back to Stuart's story about shit products. Without a frontline and customer focus, you know what? All the creative meetings in the world aren't gonna help you win because failure to get to the true heart of the matter is, as Stuart says, "Madness." And madness is never cured by process. And leaders can't get trapped in the horizontal, stuck in the head office, obsessing over alignment with their direct reports, spending endless times in planning meetings. They need to go vertical. They need to reconnect with the customer and the frontline that keeps customer promises. Vertical, horizontal. Great, Jimmy, another set of multisyllabic concepts we're gonna have to learn. Just trust me on this one 'cause in our next episode, I'm gonna sit down with David Haines. He's CEO of the Flora Food Group, and I don't think there's a better person on Earth to help us unpack what it means to go vertical. So tune in, and as always, stay curious.
Jimmy Allen: Time and again, I see the same thing killing companies. Complexity, too many products, too many channels, too many processes, and we all know, for God's sake, too many meetings. Pretty soon we're bloated, we're slow, and we simply can't compete. And we know this by now. Business should be simple. There are only two motions. First delivery, flawless execution of known playbooks. The CEO's job? Focus on creating joyful routines. Second motion, development. Test and learn your way to new solutions. You're building new businesses to respond to changing customer needs. The CEO job? Focus on scaling and then simplify the rest. Now I know what you're thinking, "Jimmy, nothing about being a CEO is simple," but that's not 100% true. The CEO's job isn't easy, but it must be simple because if the CEO is lost in complexity, the organization is doomed. Simplicity gives focus and focus gives energy or what today's guest will call flow. But how the hell are you supposed to simplify in today's complex business landscape? Well, we might find the answer in an industrial shredder, a so-called shit product, or even a chartered sailboat. I'm Jimmy Allen and this is "The Founder's Mentality: The CEO Sessions." Stuart Gent is a partner at Bain Capital, co-head of Europe Private Equity. Bain Capital's one of the world's leading private investment firms and manages over $185 billion in assets worldwide. Stuart works with portfolio companies in the technology, financial, industrial verticals, but today he joins us as a lifelong student of our key topics, focus and flow. And to kick things off, I wanted to know, what does simplicity in business really mean?
Stuart Gent: As you know, I work in private equity, and my focus is on, you know, we tend to invest in pretty scale companies. And so often when you arrive, and one of the first questions I think, you know, we have or I have when we think about what we're trying to do with the business is, what is the heart of this business? What is it actually about? A lot of businesses have lost sight of that strategic clarity, which sounds like a grand term, but at its simplest it's, you know, who are my target customers? And why am I able to serve them in a way that's better than my competitors? And you know, how am I organized to do that? And what are all the opportunities that come out of that? And I've heard a lot of different variations of strategy. I mean, you know, grow our business is not a strategy, right? But a lot of people will talk about strategy as well, "We want to grow our business and improve margins." And I'm like, "No, they're just ambitions then. Then that's not a strategy." But I think if you haven't got the essence of why you exist, what you're for, who are you serving, it's very hard to then organize anything else. It's very hard to think about the organization, how you'd be more efficient, how you set things up because you don't really have a true north. You're just following different people's points of view.
Jimmy Allen: And Stuart, you know, so much of today's discussion, be it about AI or about turbulence almost makes it sound like CEOs don't have time for strategy. That somehow strategy is something that slows you down. It presumes a long term that isn't there. How do you reconcile that, you know, the need to go back to kind of the essence with an ever-changing world?
Stuart Gent: So I don't confuse strategy with a long-term plan, first of all, right? So one is, strategy is clarity of the essence of your purpose of the company, what customer you're trying to serve, how you're gonna win, and how you're gonna do that against competition. And the reality, if you're a scale business, those parameters don't move instantly. Like, you know, now new competitors arrive for sure, customers change, but those things change over time. Now, in today's world, if you take a view of, right now we've done our strategy, let's do our five-year plan and then let's lock ourselves in for five years and just keep going blindly forward with that I mean, that'd be crazy. So strategy and time are two different concepts, I think, and I think maybe that's where the confusion is.
Jimmy Allen: When I've talked to you about simplicity, you also say that we've gotta stop the idea that plans are always linear. And in fact, we have to anticipate that our plans will constantly change in what we do. Can you just talk about that a little bit?
Stuart Gent: When you think about a plan, I mean, ultimately it's a projection. It's a judgment at a point in time with all the information you have, but a lot of things change. And so it's not a question of, is it wrong, is it right? It's a question of, what have you learned as that plan unfolds? So then as you're building the plan, you've gotta have a view of, well, is what I'm looking at, is the data I'm using to project forward something that is linear or is it something that actually is more likely be to be discontinuous? And I'd argue, again, in a more volatile world, it's more than likely not linear. It's actually likely to be quite discontinuous. And so it's just, I think you've gotta be very careful that almost the mechanics of the plan almost predetermine the answer, as opposed to saying, "Where are there areas which I think of more as like an engineering problem?" So an engineering problem in my mind is, you're a retail business, you've got 25 stores. You want to get to 50 stores. And probably what you're mainly focused on is, how do I accelerate my ability to open an increasing number over time? But you have a very good understanding of all of the constraints of that because you've got a ton of history and data. Whereas, let's say you're same retailer and you say, "Now I wanna open 25 new stores of a different format." You don't what the format is. You don't know if it's gonna work. You don't know where to put it, you know? So any extrapolation of even the first store is at best a guess, and so I think you've gotta think about it quite differently. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have a plan which says, "We're aiming to get to 25 of these new stores," but I just wouldn't spend a lot of time on detailing out years two and three in that. I'd spend a lot of time on, how do we get the first one right?
Jimmy Allen: I also think it ends up robbing the organization of energy because you end up in a situation where the plan is wrong from month six or month nine, and the organization then loses faith in the ambition as opposed to saying, you know, "We set out a set of goals, but the plan by definition will be ever-changing." I think you just set all the wrong expectations.
Stuart Gent: Yeah, and I mean, it's interesting 'cause I'm saying two things. I mean, it's a nuance to this, right? 'Cause you wanna have a plan. You want to have a view of where you're trying to get to. But the amount of energy that goes into the detail of that and almost this view that you can predetermine at a very low level of detail all of the variables and how they're gonna play out. I mean, it's actually madness at some level, of course. And if you look back at any plan, you'll always know that you never did that, that you always got some of it wrong. But then you still, every year, you go through the same process. We had a board meeting recently and again, there was a lot of pressure to, we need to sign off the budget because we need to roll out to everyone all the detailed metrics that everything's built on. And I was like, "Well, but last year we did that and we missed the budget by quite a lot so all we know is that that process doesn't work so why don't we try something else?" And again, you come back to the efficiency point. So much time and cost is wasted producing these things, but I think they don't add a lot.
Jimmy Allen: Simplicity, to Stuart, starts with this. What is the heart of the business? Who do we serve and how do we win? Without that clarity, we're just lost in the noise. And simplicity demands we know when we're working on a linear problem, or what we'd call delivery, or a discontinuous problem, which we'd call development. And as Stuart puts it, without that clarification, it's absolute madness. I love this. The best CEOs turn out to be obsessed with rewiring their companies. They've learned to fall back in love with the process. Take Michael Dell, for example. Dell grew into a global powerhouse, but with scale, of course, came a loss of speed. Michael knew that he needed a way to move faster without sacrificing quality, and one focus he had was, "How are we actually making decisions?" So he built a simple repeatable two-step process. Meeting one, review the facts and alternatives, gather the data, lay out the real options. Meeting two, choices and commitments. Now make the call and commit. Create two meetings. Yeah, it's really that simple. So this Dell model came up at a recent CEO forum, and a couple CEOs pointed out that there's something really powerful. The real benefit of this two-meeting approach, it stops emotional advocacy because the team is forced to debate alternatives, real ones. No advocacy, no selling. Just testing ideas, surfacing concerns, putting issues on the table. And the secret sauce is that the people in that room are evaluated on the quality of those alternatives, not on how hard they push one of them. Then with time to reflect, they return with a clear recommendation. The result, less heat, more light, strategic debates that actually move the business forward because process matters. Fall back in love with the processes that simplify and watch what changes. Radical simplification is about focus. It's about narrowing to the choices that really matter in your business and that then gives you the time and space. And that then gives you the time and space to debate what is always the hardest issue. No kidding. Where do we put our people?
Stuart Gent: Yeah, I mean, I say this semi-jokingly, but my first reaction to, you know, when a team come up with, "Here are the initiatives and here's how we're gonna staff it," my first reaction is usually to say, "Okay, whoever you've put on that list, like, they're not gonna get the job because they tend to be the people that are free." And actually what you need to do is say, "Who are the people in your organization that you really don't wanna put on this initiative?" And then they're probably the people that you want, which is difficult 'cause you don't want to free them up because that's gonna cause you a problem in the run side of the organization. But the reality of all of the kind of more creative, new areas is you need your absolute best people on it and you need to give them the capacity to actually do the work. So I think you've gotta do two things. One is, you've gotta be ruthlessly clear that if it's our most important stuff, we need to put our best people on it and be honest about that. And then you genuinely need to take work off their plate, which again, are two unnatural acts for an organization 'cause they both, they create two problems you've gotta solve, but I think it's very important that you do that.
Jimmy Allen: Yeah, I wanna probe on this more with your experience. There's a book that I think is one of the best books on this topic, which is "The Phoenix Project." And in it, they refer to the, "everybody wants Brent" problem. And it's interesting 'cause they say that you end up with one guy who tends to know everything about the systems and everybody wants on everything. And the authors say that, paradoxically, Brent is actually one of your biggest performance issues because Brent has never institutionalized the capability so it scales along with the firm's ambition. And yet all of our HR systems tend to reward Brent astronomically. You know, "If we lose Brent, we're doomed. We need to give Brent a bigger bonus." And we often then underinvest in the people that build capabilities who seem to always have lots of people available on different things because the institutional capability's real. You must deal with this daily that there are people that are needed on every single initiative. How do you know if they're a true star and we need to make sure we free up their capacity and do everything, and how do you know if they're are performance issue that somehow almost holds the organization hostage because they've not institutionalized their capability?
Stuart Gent: I think, yeah, the issue's real. I think the question we ask is slightly different, which is, what we're trying to do when we invest in a company is we invest with a thesis that through our ownership we can create a better business, right? That's ultimately the core of what we're trying to do. And a key part of that is therefore the transformation of that business. And a key part of that is the creation of capability process, new routines that shift the run organization to that new world, right? There's the dimension of the here and now, like the next quarter or two, what are you getting done? And that's an action-oriented, like in your analogy, that's the sort of Brent thing. Like, how are we making progress? How are we getting stuff done? How are we implementing stuff? But I think you've got a second dimension, which is, how am I building the capabilities that are gonna give me year two and year three of that program effectively? Like, I can't run this as a project forever. I've gotta institutionalize it as a capability. And so yes, I want traction and impact, but simultaneously, I wanna be building capability that's gonna turn that into a routine, into something that makes it, you know, sustainable and something that's gonna last forever.
Jimmy Allen: So as you pull all this thinking together, again with kind of the role of the importance of simplicity, based on this conversation, what do you typically, how do you typically focus one of your CEOs? Or what do you say to them about the job of CEO given the run change, the engineering problems, creative problems, scaling problems, what is the job of the CEO?
Stuart Gent: I think for me, what's unique about the CEO role is they can reorganize the organization and the system at will, and nobody else in the company can do that. And I think increasingly, I think the best CEOs are the people who, once they've laid out that journey and they've built alignment, they've done all the good clear leadership stuff that everyone understands, what they really focus on are, what are the problems we've now gotta solve? And what are the problems that I, uniquely, as the CEO can solve? And I think if you look at... I'm always intrigued by some of the hyperscalers. You get the sense that that was what, a lot of the time, the founders are doing. They're just going from the next problem to the next problem to the next problem and they're leaving the run to the team. You know, they built a team that can do the run, they brought in new people, but ultimately they're like, "I got five problems I'm trying to solve and I'm gonna reorganize the teams to get the right people focused on that, and I'm gonna stay on those problems until they're solved." I think the, you know, worst type of CEOs are the delegators of that. They're like, I describe they're kind of, the people who don't run to the ball. They're like, they just find the problem and they give it to the team and they don't want to get involved in case it goes wrong. And that's when it doesn't work. You know, I think the best people are the people that just jump right into it and they just keep driving it until they get to a solution.
Jimmy Allen: For a CEO, focus isn't optional, it's the job. Yes, you need the right goals, but just as critical, you need to pick the right problems to solve first. Steve Jobs nailed this point back in the '90s. People think focus means saying "yes" to one thing, but real focus is saying "no" to the hundreds of good ideas that you won't pursue. Jobs was a master of radical simplification. When he returned to Apple, he stripped things back to just four core products plus a few things in development. But then he famously stood in front of hundreds of engineers and explained to them why Apple would not be pursuing their pet projects. That's laser focus. Another great voice on this is David Fleck. He's founder and managing partner at Freeflow Ventures, and he spent his career helping founder-led startups face the hard scaling challenges and win. Today, he's backing deep tech solutions for human and planetary health, and he knows what it takes to keep focus when the stakes are at their highest. You're the first one that was really talking to me about the distinction of startup versus scale-up. What are the scale-up challenges that founder-led companies tend to face?
David Fleck: I feel like I'm saying the same things in almost every meeting, but that's okay because it's the same observations, you know? And one of 'em that I find myself saying all the time right now is just the need to focus. If you are a startup, you earn the right to exist because you do one thing and one thing only better than anyone in the world. And you have to lock that in. I see companies all the time go, "You know, we're a platform. We can do this and we can do this and we can do this." And I'm like, "That's great. You can do that over the next 10 years. Over the next two years, you can do one of those things and you can do one of those things better than anyone in the world, but you have to be super focused and just execute, execute, execute maniacally."
Jimmy Allen: One of the things that comes up again and again with my founder discussions, is what is the unit you're trying to scale? If you don't have the single unit right, there's no point in scaling it. That demands unbelievable focus. Now, let's assume you have that focus. What is the next scaling challenge that you've seen these companies go through?
David Fleck: Hmm. I think the next thing that I oftentimes see is, well, not thinking big enough, actually sometimes is an issue. I talk a lot about the three Ts, you know, team, TAM, technology. Like, that's pretty much what we're looking at every time, you know, full-time dedicated team. Are they superstars? Are they a plus team? TAM, you know, what's the market size? Technology, is it differentiated? You know, does it provide optionality in terms of what I just described about like, one, two, and three over the next 10-year life? But the TAM, that's the thing that sometimes, especially with scientists, they may have something that's really unique and special, but it's not pointed in the right direction. You know, I equate it to like sailing, for example. Like, if you're off by one or two degrees, you're fine maybe for the first few hours, but if you sail in that direction for days, all of a sudden, you're just way off, right? And so like, I described it as like, we're tapping them a little bit here and there just to make sure they're going in the right direction because you have to go after that opportunity that credibly is gonna result in a billion dollar company.
Jimmy Allen: The first thing is, they don't think small enough, meaning, what's the core? Don't talk about all the things you can do. Let's be focused on one thing. Having succeeded at that, then the next problem is, they don't think big enough. The other thing I just wanna touch about, you and I, I remember this so vividly. We were sitting in the San Francisco office. You drew what I refer to as the staircase model that I tell everybody and I give you credit for. So the staircase is, it allows you to go up and to go forward, and there are different motions and different mindsets. What's the flat part when you actually move forward? Freezing resources. Founder mode would be, it's just a straight up bloody slope. And what your model is, is these are equally important steps.
David Fleck: Yeah, well, and you know, the company that was my last one, and that was just a wonderful experience but it wasn't a straight up and to the right experience. It was a up and down and up and down. And then finally, you know, kind of an up at the end, but it was a lot of lessons along the way. If you look at the history of whatever company you're emulating right now, they had near-death experiences. That's just part. I can't name one company that didn't have a near-death experience that ended up being a multi-billion-dollar company. It's just what happens. It's where your mettle is tested, for sure and where you figure out what kind of founder you are. Like, are you gonna give up? Are you gonna keep going?
Jimmy Allen: For founders, focus is a tricky word because we praise them for their big dreams and outrageous ambition. But, and there's always a but, you can be everything you want to be, just not all at once. Focus is not the act of killing ambition. It's how bold ambitions come to life, one step at a time. Just like that staircase, growth comes in bursts. On the rise, you're in the growth phase, throwing money, people, even a dash of chaos at the problem. When speed matters, you learn fast. But then the step flattens, that's freeze mode. You're still growing, but the focus shifts. You optimize, fix processes, reset your people. You learn to do more with less. And then you climb again. Growth, speed, learning. Freeze, optimize, reset. And then you rinse and repeat because here's the truth. Growth demands yes, but it demands no even more. Yes unlocks ambition, but no, interestingly enough, unlocks creativity, and leaders need to know the difference. Are you solving engineering problems? Then let's build a playbook. Or are you solving creativity problems? Then let's build some space. That's what Stuart's obsessed with because it simplifies, because it energizes, and because it creates flow.
Stuart Gent: I sort of think of this... I'm simplifying. There's three types of problems that businesses are resolving, right? One is the way to run the business. The day to day, just all the things that come up in running any business that need to be decided on and moved forward. There's, at the other end of the spectrum, there are creativity problems, which is generally, I want to do something new. And in the middle is what I call scaling problems. I want to take an idea that's working, and I want to take it through my whole enterprise. And the thing that I'm always focused on is, what do we know? Organizations design themselves to optimize for a run, which makes sense 'cause you want to be efficient, you want to be effective. The problem is, if you then ask that same system to do something new, because there is no data on anything new. By definition it's new, so you don't have history. You don't know what will work and what won't work, and you certainly don't have any information to project things on. And what tends to happen then is that the, I always describe it that the idea part gets treated as if it's a run issue. I use this sort of picture of a Post-it note and an industrial shredder. And my point is, the Post-it note is the idea. It's delicate. It's like, it's just a little idea. But a lot of organizations take that idea and they just put it through this industrial shredder and it never survives. And it's not bad intent. It's just, everyone does their job, but as if it's run. And actually what you need to do is really change your orientation to, how do we keep this idea alive and recognize that that idea is, the other sort of important part is to recognize that idea isn't probably right, but it will lead you to something that could be very interesting. But I think for a lot of the time what happens with new ideas is just that the run organization treats them as if it's a day-to-day problem, and that idea doesn't survive.
Jimmy Allen: As leaders, we need to create the right conditions to spark curiosity and creativity. We need to give ideas room to grow and breathe. Get rid of the industrial shredder. Simplicity sharpens focus, which ignites flow. But for goodness' sake, don't mistake it for efficiency. Too often we drown our organizations. It's those tyrannies of functional excellence programs where in every room we enter, we're invited to have another PowerPoint enema. And this is something Stuart's seen up close. So you've talked about two things, and I want to kind of go through them in a little bit more detail. One is just presenting a language to it. I love that, you know, that, "Guys, are we having a run problem? Is it creativity? Is it scaling?" And then the second thing is to recognize that each of those three problems need to be approached with a different mindset. One of the things that we've seen a lot is, the only time these discussions happen is in budgeting or performance reviews. And it's all one system, and you have the same management team one hour being in a defensive run meeting with all the experts bashing the hell out of them, but in the same meeting, within 15 minutes, they're in a creativity and scale meeting but no one's changed mindset. And I think you've thought a lot about this, about how energy works and do you actually separate the meetings?
Stuart Gent: I think what we've learned around people, conscious, subconscious, how people react to different situations, how creative they can be, you know, all of that, I mean, pretty basic knowledge says you need to set things up quite differently than the conventional corporate calendar. If you're trying to be more creative, you've gotta create space, you've gotta create time. There's huge value in going outside. You know, you want to create an environment where people feel comfortable laughing and joking. I mean, it's like, it's almost the fast track to access your subconscious. Like, and so, you know, with pretty much all of our companies in quite early days, we go through this sort of process, which is mainly outside, and it's built around getting people into nature and getting them into quite dramatic backdrops exactly because it creates this neurological impact, which is, people who are more open-minded, they're more curious, they're able to think more expansively and so you get better ideas.
Jimmy Allen: Often what we view as the expert is set up for the run side. So you know, a typical CEO will be surrounded by the functionalist specialists in running the business and the span breakers for running the business. And then that group is asked to posit about new, new things. But often even worse, the board can be set up as a set of super experts within that industry as currently defined, often, and I'll use the gender on specific, you know, wise old men who have been there, done that. How much do you kind of feel we need to like, fundamentally change the people in the room as we move to the creativity and scale?
Stuart Gent: We were looking at a business. They had a big North America business. Revenue growth wasn't great and you know, I mean, teasing your industry a little bit, you know, everyone was pitching us commercial excellence and we were gonna rank the sales team and assess their capability and you know, and there's always, you do these things and there's a third who are great, there's a third who are average, and a third who are not, right? And then we were gonna go down that path. And I was like, "Do you know what, I just wanna go out with a couple of sales guys." And so I went to the States and I spent a couple of days driving around with a sales guy and I was like, "He seems pretty good." Like, you know, he was organized and he had a list of customers that he'd got in touch with, and he had his pitch and his material. And so we went out on the road and we went to 10 customers and we sold nothing. But the problem was the product was shit. It was nothing to do with commercial excellence. It was to do with the fact that actually, we didn't have a competitive product that was designed for that market, and no one was listening to the sales guys. They were coming back and saying, "I'm trying to sell this thing, but I can't 'cause I need all these extras." And the response of the organization was, "Sales team's rubbish" as opposed to, "We actually need to deliver them something better." And the only way you get that insight is you've gotta get right to those people and you gotta trust them. 'cause it wasn't actually a sales issue. It was a product issue. And that's what I mean by learning. And the only way you learn that is you went out and you went out and tried it and you listened carefully and you came back and you go, "Hang on a minute. This is what we need to focus on."
Jimmy Allen: You know, our observations in a lot of our work on Founder's Mentality is, the more you get the leadership team to do the right thing, the more inherently exhausting it is. You know, relevance, being profoundly relevant to your customers and the talent that matters is bloody hard. Having a culture where red is good so that you embrace the gap in performance is inherently exhausting. And you must know that, you know, you have enough pattern recognition to know that the job that you're putting forward is exhausting. Do you start building resilience from day one?
Stuart Gent: You want an ambitious plan, right? We're ambitious owner. We wanna hire ambitious people. The bit that's not talked about is how just incredibly hard it is to do all of this stuff. I think if you actually have that discussion with people and you recognize it up front and you talk about some of these themes. This is gonna be hard. We're gonna have to learn a lot. And you create language around that, it actually takes a lot of the pressure out of the system. I think there's this really interesting distinction I draw between pressure and stress. So pressure's very powerful, I think. But pressure is, I want to perform and you know, how I bring everything together matters. And you know, when I'm doing a piece of thinking or I'm gonna do a presentation, you know, I'm putting myself under pressure to do a good job. And that creates really good, I think, that's quite, it's powerful energy. It's good for your brain and it's rewarding. Stress is when you're just overwhelmed. You've got too many things to do and not enough resources to do them and/or you're trying to achieve something that isn't really achievable, and that's paralyzing for people. And I think if you're trying to achieve something difficult and you're treating it as if, you know, you've built this plan, and if we're not on plan, you're failing. And everything that goes wrong is therefore the fault of the people, right? That's gonna create stress. It's gonna create a sense of failure. It's gonna be, you know, emotion and energy-wise, a miserable place to be. Ironically, with exactly the same results, if you create an environment where you say, "We're gonna learn, we're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna correct them on, what have we learned? And how are we all collectively working together to do that?" Then you actually, that it is quite fun. I think some of the most rewarding experiences you have is when you do go through these difficult times. But I think you've gotta set things up in a way that enables that energy to flow. I mean, there's an interesting anecdote for this for me, which was the pandemic because teams accomplished incredible things in the pandemic, right? Everyone says, you know, "It was amazing how the organization came together, how we solved this problem." There was no plan. There was no definition of success. For a lot of businesses it was like, "Gotta survive." And so in a very difficult situation, actually, it brought out the best in people. I'm like, how do you create that orientation in the business that you've got today? And how do you make sure that what you're not doing is creating fear, in particular, which is really fear of failure and stress as opposed to positive pressure and really good energy applied against a difficult problem. And again, I come back to, if you've not thought about the fact that what you're trying to do is difficult, you haven't understood what it is you're trying to do.
Jimmy Allen: Focus on the heart of your business. Understand the nature of the problem. Is it linear or is it discontinuous? Create the right process for each kind of decision, which considers deeply how energy flows. Great leaders talk this way, the heart of things, energy, flow. In fact, if you dive into the Founder's Mentality website, we got a whole bunch of weird and wonderful words from the best CEOs. To learn more, hit the link in the show notes. Now back to Stuart and a round of rapid-fire questions. What brings you energy?
Stuart Gent: Imagining possibilities and bringing them to life oriented around both people and outcomes. And so that, to me, is the stuff I enjoy doing.
Jimmy Allen: Do you have energy vampires in your work?
Stuart Gent: I think there are energy vampires everywhere. People just whose default setting is, "No," that's the tough one for me. You know, it's just like, you know what? I'm not sure I've got the energy to deal with that.
Jimmy Allen: What's the best advice you ever received?
Stuart Gent: As I was starting in, as I was shifting from consulting to leading a business, a chairman said to me, you know, one piece of advice was, "When people in your team come into your office, don't let them leave the piece of paper on your desk." And it was a really thoughtful way of just making sure you didn't become the person trying to solve all the problems because it would just overwhelm you.
Jimmy Allen: What's the worst advice you've ever received?
Stuart Gent: Look, I think it's, when anyone tells me, "Don't do X because Y will think Z," right? And if you're trying to do something difficult or bold or interesting, somebody will tell you that people won't like it. I just ignore that.
Jimmy Allen: So let's recap some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Stuart.
Stuart Gent: If you haven't got to the essence of why you exist, what you're for, who are you serving, it's very hard to then organize anything else because you don't really have a true north. You're just following different people's points of view.
Jimmy Allen: Simplification begins with clarity. Get to the heart of things. Name the problems and mobilize to solve them.
Stuart Gent: I think the best CEOs are the people who, ultimately they're like, "I've got five problems I'm trying to solve. I'm gonna reorganize the teams to get the right people focused on that, and I'm gonna stay on those problems until they're solved."
Jimmy Allen: And simplicity starts with who we are and how we make decisions. One thing that's amazed me in my conversations with CEOs is how they're now taking ownership again of the processes in their companies. I think 10 years ago it was kinda macho and kinda cool to say, "Look at, the way we get things done is we work around our processes." That's an abdication. The great CEOs today are rewiring their companies and they're taking ownership of what's going on. Why? Because bad processes destroy. Good processes nurture and they create focus.
Stuart Gent: Pretty basic knowledge says you need to set things up quite differently than the conventional corporate calendar. If you're trying to be more creative, you've gotta create space, you've gotta create time. There's huge value in going outside.
Jimmy Allen: Flow doesn't just happen. You've got to create the right conditions for it. That means removing friction and shifting to learning instead of just rigid planning. It's about fueling progress with positive pressure but not with stress. So look, I wanna circle back to Stuart's story about shit products. Without a frontline and customer focus, you know what? All the creative meetings in the world aren't gonna help you win because failure to get to the true heart of the matter is, as Stuart says, "Madness." And madness is never cured by process. And leaders can't get trapped in the horizontal, stuck in the head office, obsessing over alignment with their direct reports, spending endless times in planning meetings. They need to go vertical. They need to reconnect with the customer and the frontline that keeps customer promises. Vertical, horizontal. Great, Jimmy, another set of multisyllabic concepts we're gonna have to learn. Just trust me on this one 'cause in our next episode, I'm gonna sit down with David Haines. He's CEO of the Flora Food Group, and I don't think there's a better person on Earth to help us unpack what it means to go vertical. So tune in, and as always, stay curious.
