Alexander Osterwalder Takes on the Blah Blah Blah of Corporate Life

I've been there and I'm sure you have too — that meeting where people just drone on, saying the same thing in a multitude of different ways. It's soul-sucking. I love that Alexander Osterwalder is rallying against the "blah blah blah" of corporate life. Alex is known for his work on business modelling and is the author of a wonderful book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers.

This podcast is a fascinating look into how to shift from talk-talk-talk to having more efficient, effective conversations. Listen in as we talk about:

• Why meetings are so terrible, and how to make all meetings better.
• How to get around some of the inherent flaws in the ways that we meet.
• What it takes to have the courage of your convictions.
• A "zoom in, zoom out" approach to thinking.

Be sure to follow Alexander on Twitter @AlexOsterwalder and check out his website AlexOsterwalder.com.

Bookmark it here to listen to later.

Don’t forget to rate this podcast on iTunes.

Full Transcript

Michael: Some of you may know that I was lucky enough to be selected by Marshall Goldsmith to be in his first group, his first cadre of his 100 Coach Project. It’s to basically pick people who he thinks can embody something about coaching and he’s going to teach us everything he knows about coaching, his key lessons, and our job is to take that and spread it ourselves. It’s kind of his legacy project.

And when I went down in December to meet with his first 25, one of the cool people I met is Alexander Osterwalder. You may know him as the author of a number of excellent books, one of which is, and this is a great book, Business Model Generation, and the other one is around value proposition.

So, Alexander, this cool, smart, tall dude from Switzerland, and I was, like, “Okay, I need to get him on this podcast.” So, this is a great conversation. He’s such a smart guy. And in it, we talk about why meetings are so terrible, what the solution might be to make all meetings better, whether or not you’re interested in business model generation or value proposition. How do we get around some of the inherent flaws in the ways that we meet? And also, we get into the conversation about what it takes to have the courage of your convictions. What does it mean to make ‘the choice’? And we talk a whole bunch more. I think purple jumpsuits even make a brief appearance in this conversation.

So, I think you’ll enjoy this, my conversation with Alex Osterwalder, author of some great, visual, important books around business model generation and value proposition, but also a great champion for design in our working lives.

Okay, Alex, I am so excited to get into this conversation. You know, I enjoyed hanging out with you so much when we were together in New York as part of the Marshall Goldsmith thing, so now I get to share your smarts with the rest of the world. Starting off, like I do all my calls, going alright, what are you taking a stand against? What are you no longer tolerating? What was irritating enough that you not only wrote two great books about it but you built an entire business around? Lay it out for me.

Alex: Excellent. Well, I think the thing I’m most allergic against is “Blah blah blah.” People sitting around a table. You know, you have smart, experienced people sitting around the table and then just talking. Like, I have an expression for this but I wouldn’t want to share this on your show. But what I think we can do better is use more structured tools to have better conversations. It’s not about not talking, it’s talking more efficiently, more effectively, and that’s why—and I was always fascinated by visual business tools, because they structure not just your thinking but they also structure your conversations.

So, when you put a structure on a wall and people put up sticky notes, it’s really not about the fun aspect of sticky notes, it’s about the serious aspect of how can we have a focused discussion, conversation, in a structured way so we have real outputs at the end of a meeting? So, after ten minutes, we have results. After 30 minutes, we have results. Or after 60 minutes, we walk away from a meeting and we don’t have this feeling that, “Oh my goodness, did we talk a lot, but what is it that we’re really going to do? What is it that we really understood? Where did we make a change?” So, “Blah blah blah,” for me is the enemy.

Michael: I love that. So, what do you think gets in the way or makes “Blah blah blah” conversations not work? I mean, as you watch people sit around those tables and talk and talk and talk and talk, what’s the issue there? What’s the challenge?

Alex: Well, I think there are a couple of challenges. I mean, the first challenge is the origin, right? Why does this problem kind of arise? It’s because in business, we do not have a tradition of using tools to make our conversations or our thinking a bit more tangible because we come from an abstract space, right? In design, let’s say you are an industrial designer, you’re in architecture, it’s natural because we’re talking about shaping some kind of physical thing, so we’re going to work with prototypes. It would be a disaster if designers would only talk and they didn’t have either sketches or physical prototypes to discuss the alternatives, discuss the advantages and disadvantages, right?

So, we are, to a certain extent, you know, a bit disadvantaged by working on something more abstract like business strategy and value propositions and business models because there’s no tradition of the object, of the artifact. So, if there’s no tradition, there’s no training. So, we’re trying to get people to do something they were never trained to do, and that’s very hard. Like an IT team, you know, they could not come up with a database infrastructure without using visuals, but again, there’s a tradition there. We don’t have that in business.

So, that’s the initial challenge, why we even have this problem. We don’t naturally understand that by working on an artifact, “Hey, can I visualize my business model? Can I visualize my strategy?” Once you do that and once you have that visual artifact, you have better conversations because you’re talking about the thing in front of you, so that’s the first aspect.

And very briefly on the second aspect, is we don’t know how to do this, so we don’t see the value before having done it. It’s a very experiential thing. And typically, when we see people, when you watch people use the business model canvas or the value proposition canvas or other tools like that, you know, from other thinkers, the strategy maps from Balanced Scorecard from Kaplan and Norton, or the Blue Ocean Strategy tools, which are very visual, you work with those; you intuitively really start seeing and feeling the progress that is made. Because we’re not trained like that, we don’t use them, and because we don’t understand the value of it, we really have to do this a couple of times to get into it.

So, those are two big kind of constraints that are holding people back from massive change, but I think people are so fed up with meetings these days, which is one place where we can use these tools, that there is a change happening.

Michael: So, one of the things that—I mean, I love the fact that you call the two main tools that you have canvases because that immediately makes it feel like visual and artistic in the way you do that. But one of the things that I notice with the way you’ve designed it is just by the nature of the beast, with the various boxes that you’re asking people to tackle, there’s a limitation to space, you know? There are boundaries around it.

Alex: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: And I’m curious to know how important are those boundaries in terms of driving the conversation forward?

Alex: I think the boundaries are exactly what you want to talk about, these constraints. A very good way to frame it. That’s where we come back to “Blah blah blah” to a certain extent. If you sit into a business meeting and you just take a piece of paper and make little Xs when people about strategy, make another X when they talk about implementation issues, make another X when they talk about who are they going to hire, and you’ll see they’re all over the place because we don’t really put good boundaries to our conversation. So, we will conceptually float around between very different aspects: the competitive environment and the strategy and competitors, and then we’ll go right into, “Who could we hire to help us with this?” And we don’t realize that we’re all over the place because it feels like we’re talking about important stuff.

When you give some boundaries to the thinking, you say, “Okay, now let’s talk business model,” and then you work on the different aspects of the business model. And then you say, “Okay, well, what about, you know, does this business model make sense in today’s world?” Then you will expand the boundaries and you will start talking about competition, right? It’s not about that the topics are wrong, but when we don’t put boundaries we’re all over the place and the result is that we don’t have results, right?

So, I think that the way you framed it with boundaries is a very good way to say, “We’re working on one specific job to be done. We need to design a business model. We’re working on another specific job to be done. We need to understand our competitive advantage.” You draw a boundary, and then the tools you use should also have boundaries. Your objective has boundaries, so why doesn’t the tool you use to structure the thinking around that have boundaries?

So, with the business model canvas, we came up with the nine building blocks that every business model has, and we put the boundaries there and people need to fill in the boundary in the blocks. But on the other hand, they also need to tell the story, but it gives shape to this conversation.

So, I think, getting back to “Blah blah blah,” if we don’t give a bit more shape to these things, if we don’t draw boundaries, we’re all over the place and the result is that we struggle with a clear output. So, boundaries help a lot. Now, we don’t want them to be too rigid because then it would be stifling, right? It’s this kind of finding the middle ground between leaving space for creativity and adding some constraints to have good and focused conversations, but not being too rigid.

Michael: One of the things that’s really obvious when you pick up the book or you go to the amazing resources that Strategyzer, your company, offers online, everything looks elegant. You know, the business model canvas, it’s this incredibly elegant structure of how these pieces, what these nine pieces are and how they fit together. And you know, they’re great—I don’t think Einstein actually ever said it, but the way it’s been quoted is, “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” What was the process for getting to that elegant end state? I mean, was it fast? Was it slow? Part of me wants to think that you just sat down in a Swiss coffee shop and just jotted it down and went, “Voila, here it is!” but I suspect that’s not the whole truth.

Alex: No, I’d be lying if I’d say all that was pure brilliance of me sitting down, figuring it out, because it’s a very long and winding process and it happens a lot with my main co-author, Yves Pigneur, who was my PhD. supervisor. We conceptually prototype, right? Until we get to some kind of simplicity and elegance, and thank you very much for calling it elegant; I’m happy you see it that way and our design team will be happy. But we actually strive for that. It’s definitely, you know, something we want is, number one, simplicity, number two, practicality, but then it should also be aesthetically just pleasing because why should we, you know, with our business tools, work with ugly stuff that we don’t want to kind of touch, right? So, it’s this whole thing that goes together and it’s about design not as a purely aesthetic thing, but also design as figuring out the best way, the simplest way, to help with a specific job to be done with a specific task.

So, if we take the business model canvas, that was an entire kind of PhD. to find the foundational concepts, and then, in reality, testing this with real business people, iterating until we found the right kind of shape. So, first, it was a concept and a doctoral dissertation, etc., very abstract, and then it only became a tool over time, using it with practitioners. So, that took a lot of time.

If we take the value proposition canvas, our second big tool, which you want, among other ones, that one was a deliberate kind of process outside of any academic work, just prototyping, “Okay, how could a concept look like?” and then testing it. So, the first one we got, if you Google it, I won’t tell you the name to make it too easy, the way we called it first, you’ll see the early concepts, the early shape. And literally shape: we worked on the shape of the value proposition canvas. Why? To make it easy to use conceptually for business people. So, we got the concepts right first and then we worked on the user interface. I think business tools have a user interface just like a website, right?

Michael: Right.

Alex: If the user interface sucks—sorry for the word—the people are not going to use it. So, I think we need to think of these, not just business tools but also the content in the books that we put out there in business, we need to think about user interface and user experience. And you know, there are some great business concepts out there but their user experience is a disaster, and that’s exactly why business people don’t adopt them. So, the adoption rate of tools, of conceptual tools in business, is relatively low. And it’s not because the concepts are not good. I believe, and I don’t have the evidence for this because we didn’t do research, but I do believe strongly that there’s not enough effort in the elegance of the tools and making them practical, making them usable beyond the pure conceptual aspect.

Michael: I am violently agreeing with you on that. You know, one of our core values at Box of Crayons is actually pursue elegance. And if you don’t make the tools intuitive, your analogy with the Web interface is exactly right: people have had the experience of good Web interaction and terrible Web interaction and they don’t use the Web interactions that are bad.

Alex: Exactly. Yeah.

Michael: And it’s the same with the tool concepts, but at-work concepts as well, but the failure rate is probably just less obvious there.

Alex: And I think it comes back to this idea, there’s no tradition in business tools or business concepts to actually work on the interface, on the user experience. So, you’ll inevitably get it wrong, even with the concepts, the first time. So, what we do, what we did with the value proposition canvas, is we put it in front of people and said, “Use it to shape your value proposition or describe your value proposition.” And we would watch carefully like anthropologists. Where were people struggling? And then by understanding where they struggled, the kind of questions they asked, we would iterate. Literally like industrial designers or architects, we would iterate the concept and the interface until we get it right.

So, you have to remain humble, I think. That’s what designers are trained to do because probably, as human beings, we’re not humble by nature. We have to really understand we’re not going to get it right the first time when we do something new. So, there’s only one way to get it right, which is to relentlessly test this thing and adapt it and change it until we get it right. And accepting that is, I think in particular, hard for smart and experienced people. If you’ve been consulting or advising CEOs for decades, it’s kind of hard to remain humble and say, “Oh, I’m not going to get my business model right the first time,” right? But that’s what it’s about, and that’s how you make things practical and elegant at the end of the day.

Michael: Okay, Alex, here we go, the three, quick questions in the middle of the interview to mix things up. Question number one. I ask this of everybody. What was the crossroads moment for you, that big moment where you made a decision to go this way or that way that made all the difference?

Alex: The decision was actually made for me. I had two job interviews. One was with McKinsey, which was a pre-interview with the consulting firm, and the other one was with Yves Pigneur, who became my PhD. supervisor. The McKinsey interview, it was like under a steamroller. I got crushed. I was not prepared for that. So, I went with the best choice I could have ever made in my life, which was to do a PhD. with Yves on business models.

Michael: Perfect. I love that. I was hoping you were going to talk about your burgeoning career as a Swiss beach volleyball player, but another time, another story.

Alex: You bet.

Michael: Alright, second question. Whose work has influenced your work? You know, that might be an author, a role model, a family friend, but whose work has influenced your work?

Alex: Oh, there have been too many. So, basically, in business, I’d say anybody who, you know, did visual tools. Blue Ocean Strategy authors Kim and Mauborgne. Michael Porter. All of those people. But then, I think most influential were the innovators, people like Prince. I was always a big Prince fan.

Michael: I love that.

Alex: People who’ve done things differently, so I’ve always admired them.

Michael: Perfect. And rumour has it you look very good in a purple jumpsuit, but again, another story.

Alex: Another time.

Michael: Alright, third and final question. So, one of the things we stand for at Box of Crayons is helping people do less good work and more great work. Great work, the work that has more impact, the work that has more meaning. So, what does that mean for you at the moment? What’s your great work right now?

Alex: So, my main goal is to get people to use these kinds of business tools. The more people we can convert, if you want, to users of visual tools, the happier we are.

Michael: Love it. Alex, that’s brilliant. Let’s get back to the main interview right now.

So, the first book you created, the Business Model Generation, has one of the best subtitles. It’s not even a subtitle, it’s a pre-subtitle, and I’m going to read it out aloud because I think it’s so good. It says, “You’re holding a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises.” And then, you go on to say, “It’s a book for the Business Model Generation.” So, I love that. And we’ve just been talking about the importance of design and how elegance and how the tools that we use to shape our thinking have to be accessible and useful for us, or else they just don’t get used; they get abandoned or misunderstood.

But one of the things that your process and your models and the elegance creates is the need to actually take a stand for something. You know, when you have a box going and a post-it note saying, “Okay, put what you think here,” what is that? You know, make a decision on what customer you serve or whatever it might be. You’re actually asking people to have the courage of their convictions.

Alex: Mm-hm.

Michael: And you know, the word I love in that subtitle is “defy.” You know, defy is a bold word.

Alex: Yes, yes.

Michael: You know, you’re like, “I’m going to go against the tide. I’m going to take a stand. I’m going to put my finger up at somebody around that.” So, how do you support the people you work with to have the courage to make the bold choice? Because people get that in theory, but when faced with it in practice, you know, it’s a little unnerving.

Alex: Yeah, you bet. And we do try to help people who really want to change their business, who want to change the world, to give them the tools to do that, but it’s more than the tools, as you said. I think the easiest way to frame it is that, you know, you’re going to make a bold statement, but you also are going to say that it’s possible that it will change, and we will only go in that direction once we find the evidence for that to really work. So, while it’s a bold change, the risk of it is actually not that big.

So, let me kind of frame it in a different way.

Michael: Nice, yeah.

Alex: When we execute or improve a business and we make a statement about numbers, so, “We’re going to produce this much more revenue next year,” well, that’s a bold statement that you have to back up by delivering because you know the market, you know the business, you know most of the variables, right? You’re not doing something new. So, it’s not very bold, and if you have an aggressive statement you’re probably going to back it up with real data from running your business.

In innovation, it’s slightly different. It’s not about making crazy big bets at high risk, it’s actually about going into completely new directions and having a bold vision, yes, but then accepting that you’re not going to get the execution strategy or the path towards that bold vision right immediately.

So, bold vision may be ten years down the road, saying, “I think the world is going to look like this: a PC on every desk,” or so. And then, the way you get there is something you’re going to iterate on a lot, aggressively, meaning that whatever you say you’re going to do first, if you can’t do it, it’s fine. You know, it’s okay: you can change, because it’s not about execution when you are exploring new ideas, it’s actually about experimentation, tons of failure, but also tons of learning. And then, if you’re good at it, tons of adaption until you get it right.

So, it’s not about, “Hey, here’s my idea. I’m going to just find the datum and then execute it.” No. “Here’s my idea, and I think I’m on the right path, but I’m going to experiment, and if I’m wrong I’m going to change.”

So, you take away, to a certain extent, the weight of being bold because you’re saying, “Well, we have a process and we believe in this process. The process is powerful and it will get us there. And if we start with something bold, we’ll also end up with something bold if we remain bold, but we don’t need to get it right at the beginning.”

So, by saying, by admitting you don’t have to get it right, your statement can be bold, but you can also change; you take away the weight. And I think, at least from what I see in companies today, what we fear is I make a bold statement: everybody is going to, you know, keep me prisoner to the statement I made. But that’s not the case in innovation because things can change. And some of the greatest VCs of our time, like Vinod Khosla, they say, you know, board members that say, “This is what you said a year ago and you’re not doing this,” they don’t get it. They’re actually not realizing that the best entrepreneurs, the best innovators, they change a lot until they get it right. So, while they might not change the vision, they will definitely change the path towards that vision, and that’s I think something that makes boldness, the weight of boldness, a lot lighter.

Michael: I love that, and it reminds me of a couple of things. First of all, the idea or slogan or statement of intent, which is “Fail faster to succeed sooner.” You know, it’s that kind of rapid iteration piece that keeps telling you where you’re going.

Alex: Mm-hm.

Michael: The second thing that it’s bringing to mind is just that reminder about just how visual strategy actually is. And I’m not just talking about the business models that you’re creating, but the metaphor you’re using, which is, “I’ve got a destination and I’ve set a bold destination, but the path to that is going to shift and change as I encounter a swamp or quicksand or a monster or whatever.”

Alex: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: You’re going to go, “Okay, I’m not going to go that path. I’m going to go around that path.”

Alex: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Michael: And you know, one of the things I read a while ago but I think is very interesting is how many successful CEOs are dyslexic, and it’s a disproportionate number. And there’s something about dyslexia being framed as a different type of intelligence, a more visual intelligence, and so they may be less good at words and abstract concepts but much better at visualizing how to understand the world. And I think that plays into a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about.

Alex: Mm-hm. And I’d like to add to that, because I think it’s very interesting that you’re emphasizing this visual aspect and how important it is when it comes to strategy. I think it’s even more important in a world that’s changing rapidly, where business models are expiring, value propositions are expiring. The need for alignment gets a lot larger because it’s not as if you would define the thing once and then it’s an execution problem and then we just all have to stand straight in a row and execute, right? No, the world is changing so fast that continuous alignment is actually very challenging, and you can’t get to that continuous alignment without using visual tools, visual things that help people understand, “Oh, we’re going in this direction. Okay, this is where we’re investing our energy.”

Oh, and then, maybe a month later, it’s changing, but you also tell people the why, right? Because if you don’t tell people why we’re going in this direction and how we’re going in this direction, I believe you’re going to lose some of your best people. Because the best people today are not, you know, in particular when it comes to innovation, they’re not just soldiers who are going to march on. They actually need to think of how to adapt in a changing world. So, helping them do that with bold, kind of visual statements will get them into the right direction. They know how they can adapt.

Michael: I mean, I wish I could basically have a 90-hour conversation with you because this is so interesting, but we don’t have time for that. But I want to pick on something that I saw in the second book in terms of the value proposition. And when you talk about the process, you talked about—one of the early things you talk about is the importance of zooming in and zooming out, in terms of how you’re seeing your situation. There are times where you need to step back and there are times you kind of need to step forward. Can you just explain the power or the importance of this idea of zooming in and zooming out as a way of, I guess, making your thinking more rigorous?

Alex: Yeah, I think it comes back to this whole idea of navigating between different business jobs to be done, right? I think what’s probably interesting to observe is that entrepreneurs are intuitively good at this. People in large organizations or established organizations, not so much, because they have a very specific task. So, often, not always, they need to understand a very specific part of the world, but they don’t need to look that much beyond it to be good at their work.

When it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship, you have to think about a lot of moving elements at the same time. So, if you’re thinking about, “Okay, this is my product and here is how I think it creates value for my customers,” well, you’re going to already have to figure out how are you going to test that? So, you’re zooming kind of in the timeline, “Okay, I’m going to talk to these ten customers,” etc.

But then, if you have this idea, “I want to launch this bundle of products and services,” immediately, as an innovator or entrepreneur, you’re going to have to zoom out and look at the bigger picture, asking yourself, “Okay, how much is it going to cost me to bring this value proposition, to create this value proposition and then bring it to market? How big is this market?” So, you’re immediately looking at a bigger picture of, “Okay, can I do it? How can I do it? How much is it going to cost me?” And then, on the other side, you know, “Is this really going to create value? How much can I actually capture value? How much is the pricing? What kind of pricing?” That’s already zooming out to a bigger picture.

And then, you might ask, “Hmm, okay, zooming out another layer to the business environment. Who are the competitors in this space? What are the big technology trends? If I launch this product with this business model, can it survive in the next decade?” So, you always have to zoom in and zoom out to think about all of these moving pieces, and it’s very hard. Entrepreneurs intuitively somehow figure this out in a lot of trial and error, but I think we can use tools to make this zooming in and zooming out a little bit easier for normal people like myself. I need these tools to visualize, “Oh, what am I talking about now? Am I talking about the business environment? Am I talking about how I’m going to get my team aligned? How can I do that? What are the aspects we need to focus on?”

So, this zooming around in your business, in and out, forward and backwards, looking at the best past data and looking forward to what you want to do to implement your strategy, that ability is becoming more and more important for business people because the world is very complex, right? And because it’s changing very fast, we can’t just launch a new product and then say, “Okay, well, it’s just Version 2 of what we’ve always been doing,” because the Version 1 might have expired. There’s just no market for it anymore; people are not willing to pay for that.

So, you’re automatically going to have to zoom out to the business model, so this ability to think about all of these aspects of a business almost simultaneously, or navigate between them, is becoming an increasingly important business skill. Not for everybody, but definitely when you’re doing something new, when you’re in innovation. Then you need this skill. You can’t innovate narrowly. And technology innovation is not innovation, it’s about how do you look at this in a broader picture and how do you create growth for your organization or for your start-up?

Michael: Right, I love that, and I love the fact that when I imagine your models, you know, your canvases up on the wall, the very process of stepping up to the canvas to fill something out and then stepping back to see how it all fits together, you’re physically doing that zooming in and zooming out.

Alex: Right.

Michael: So, it’s a nice way to bring the conversation full loop to say the artifacts and the environment that you set up, so that actual, visual thing you’re working with, actually helps you change the way you think and the way you interact.

Alex: Correct, and I would add to that, you know, that traditionally we often think in PowerPoint presentations, right? Somebody beams(?) up a PowerPoint presentation and then we talk first about the value proposition, then the market. It’s very hard for us with our human brains to keep all of those connections. Yet, if you have a wall and you have all of those aspects, you can immediately move back and forth, right? You can see, “Oh, that’s what we were saying about the value proposition. Okay, over here, we have the data around the customer testing that we did.”

For me, the wall is the new desk. I’m quoting my friend, Dave Grey, here. You cannot understand a complex business world in a PowerPoint deck or in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s not that we don’t need those things, but we can’t understand the relationships between all of these aspects in a PowerPoint deck. It’s too narrow. The boundaries are too narrow. You can’t understand this in a slide.

So, using the wall as your thinking tool is incredibly powerful. With the visuals out there, you will see connections that you couldn’t see before, and it’s very powerful. It’s experiential. So, once the business people start working like that, they have a hard time leaving it behind them. This is why we came up with the “No blah blah” card that you can hold up in your meeting if there is too much talk and no structured thinking that makes things clear to everybody, because visual means clarity, right? Visuals without clarity is not good, either. You can create cognitive murder with visuals. But what we want is clarity, clarity for everything we do, and everybody should understand that’s how you get alignment, right? So, that’s what we’re looking for.

Michael: Alex, speaking of holding up the card to say, “Stop talking,” our time is up. But I know that we’ve just whet people’s appetite for the work you do and how you think about it, so if people want to find out more about Strategyzer, your company, or your two books, where would you point them to on the Web?

Alex: Just go to strategyzer.com or Google my name, Alex Osterwalder, and you will find all of the stuff we put out there. We have a long tradition of giving a lot away because we really believe people should use these tools, so they’re freely available. You can use them. We have a lot of consultant friends who are making a lot of money from these tools, so we sometimes jokingly say our business model is to make other people rich, which is very gratifying, right? So, go ahead and find that stuff. We also have a blog, blog.strategyzer.com, where we publish our newest tools and findings and experience in companies as much as we can.

Michael: Alex, will you spell Strategyzer for us just so we know where to find that?

Alex: Oh, that’s difficult for a Swiss, right? It’s S-t-r-a-t-e-g-y-z-e-r, dotcom.

Michael: Perfect. That’s lovely. Alex, it has been a total pleasure. I knew it would be. Thanks for your time.

Alex: It was my pleasure. Brilliant questions. I really enjoyed this.

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3. Brené Brown on How to Be Vulnerable 
4. Cal Newport Takes on a Distracted World

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ABOUT MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER & BOX OF CRAYONS

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner and Founder of Box of Crayons, a company that helps people and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. It's best known from its coaching programs that give busy managers the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.

Download free chapters of Michael's latest book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever here.

Already read it? Fantastic! If you felt so moved, an Amazon rating/review is always greatly appreciated.