#41 Retail’s Blindspots: Innovation, Technology & The Future of Commerce with Carl Boutet

Speaker A: Coming up in today's episode, the evolution and innovation of the E commerce business model.

Speaker B: So how do you diversify your business model? How do you find new sources of revenue that could help you get away from that purely wholesale to retail historic model? And that applies in all environments. Right? So is there something that's subscription based? Is there something that I can do that gets people that they will actually want to engage with my brand in a recurring manner like Costco?

Speaker A: That's Carl Butte, a retail strategist, founder of StudioRx. Also today, what are the underhyped technologies that could change the face of E commerce?

Speaker B: One that I keep paying a lot of attention to, tied to this payment technology is the whole RFID thing I think is really interesting. It's a 30 year promise. It's starting to fulfill itself and that's sometimes what these technologies take the scale that make it work and so the business case catches up.

Speaker A: That's all ahead on Fixing the Game podcast. Join me on a mission to unveil strategies and hacks that turn the tables on the tech giants. They created the rules, ensuring only they can win. It's time to fix the rigged system. Listen, learn, transform your mindset and conquer the digital game. Your winning journey starts now. Welcome to Fixing the Game. Uh, today I'm joined by Carl Butte, global retail strategist, educator and founder of Studiorx World. With over 30 years of experience advising top brands, also being an educator and working at universities. I'm very excited to have you here, Carl. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Luke.

Speaker A: You have a really broad experience in the industry. Tell me about your highlights from your careers and how you ended up running Studio rx.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's a, as you point out, it's diverse but it all points back to in some shape or form to retail in the broadest sense. Basically my real retail career, if you want, started with my own company that opened the first national network of wireless retail in Canada where I was in partnership with Costco was my company that was doing store in store with over 60 Costco locations. Canada's a pretty big country, 5,000 kilometers basically from N10 for those 60 locations to drop into and then some that were outside of Costco as well. So I owned and operated that business for almost a decade and then went into more of a consulting phase and business development phase, working with more independent retail. And then the last couple of years I teach emerging, uh, technologies, new business models at McGill University's Retail Management school and they have a master's in Retail management. So that's where I do that, as well as the digital marketing and analytics courses at the Asian Institute of Technology, which is based in Bangkok. But I also teach in the Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi campuses in Vietnam twice a year. So I get to go around the world, see lots of beautiful places, and I do a lot of public speaking, keynotes, workshops and some thought leadership with a couple of books now under my wing.

Speaker A: And if you travel across the world, do you see different challenges of retail in different parts of the world, or is it. Pretty much everybody's struggling with the same

Speaker B: stuff, Though there's differences, obviously the legacies are not the same. The realities of how people consume can be different from some regions to another and even within some regions. Because I teach at the Asian Institute of Technology, I often ask questions about Asia and I say we got to break down Asia into many subcategories because the consumption is very different. Especially let's. If we talk something like China, but even then we talk about Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is almost a billion people spread across a dozen countries in 12 different languages with very different realities as well, both socioeconomically and logistically and those sort of things and technologically. But they do catch up, um, very quickly. And that's maybe where they're more. The similarities come into play is more on. Let's say right now everybody's thinking about leverage and these sort of things. That's commonality. But there were different stages of maturity. And sometimes being at a higher stage of maturity is not necessarily a good thing because that comes with a lot of legacy that we can talk about.

Speaker A: And can you give some examples of this legacy? If you work with US Retailers and you also mentioned digital transformation, what are the typical challenges of retailers right now?

Speaker B: It's around investment, right. And it's around how you maximize those. And so if you have a lot of investment in your brick and mortar, which is great and is needed, and sometimes more investment in a lot of cases could be needed while you're still anchoring a lot off of that, as your consumer might have moved to more digital channels, and then you're lagging there. Whereas if you're in parts of the world that are more emerging economies and that don't have necessarily those large cost structures around their physical, then they can move with more agility into the digital. So China's the famous example. There things that Alibaba and TMALL have accomplished in this, their whole infrastructure around, um, logistics, payment, which are the conductive tissues of digital commerce, came up a Lot quicker. And then ye the famous examples like even places like Africa where they went from unbanked to digital wallet, basically no one fell swooped here. I think we're more seamless in a lot of ways. The investments have been made to make those worlds come together in the West a little more fluidly just because we had so much investment already in physical, in emerging markets. Now they're trying to catch up to that piece where malls for instance, and even department stores, which are a real struggling concept here, they can be doing pretty well in certain parts of the world that are using that as discovery centers really like we were maybe 50 years ago.

Speaker A: Mhm. And you mentioned your work on your couple books and one of them is retail as blindspot. Right. Can you tell me what kind of inspired you to write this book and um, what this kind of businesses don't see coming?

Speaker B: Yeah. So both my books were inspired by my Asian travels in many ways and the one before that was just a couple years before. It's called the Great Acceleration. It was on the heels of me being in China coming back from chairing the Omnichannel conference in Bangkok. I was in Shanghai for a week literally before Wuhan broke out. So the mid January had uh, a lot of conferences, conversations with Chinese business, Canadian, Chinese business owners and talking in touch with uh, sort of the people that were rallying them and how they were dealing with the pandemic and how that sort of forced the acceleration of digital transformation in a lot of ways. So I the first book was chronicling that as I came off of that trip and looking around the world, how digital transformation accelerated during that period. It takes a big revelation from that happened for me while I'm in the other end of the world to write a book. And this time it was the blind spot that sort of launched when I was teaching my first course in Hanoi, my digital marketing and analytics course, the first week of December 2022. So not quite two years exact later. We all probably remember what that first week of December was. Technologically it wasn't a pandemic that was coming our way, but it was definitely another tsunami in the form of generative AI. I'd been following some of the movements in large language models. I did a pretty extensive course in 2014 around data science at MIT. I thought myself was pretty well informed on how data science was progressing, all the different technologies. In 2017 I'd worked a lot in computer vision. I did some natur, language processing, machine learning. And then that first week of December totally caught me off guard while I was in Hanoi teaching this course. And I shared with my students. Yeah, I said there's this thing that came out this week called ChatGPT. Seems pretty interesting. I was just toying around with it this morning because I caught it in an article in Bloomberg or something like that. I shared it with my students that morning and during the break one of the students happens to be a chief innovation, uh, officer for a large pharmaceutical in Vietnam and comes back at the end of the break. So I tried this chatgpt and I was like, oh great, so what'd you do with it? Because we were doing poems, funny jokes at that moment still that first week, trying to figure out what this thing could do and he'd use it to create an internal memo for a pretty important topic for the company that they were launching, something very specific. And I uh, said that's an interesting use case. How did it do? And he said it really, actually did a really good job, probably as well as I could have. And this is ChatGPT first week of being open to the public. And I said that's amazing. Wow.

Speaker A: Is your focus on retail or in general technology?

Speaker B: I, I said earlier I have a very broad definition of retail. So uh, yes, the focus is on more. I'd say B2C dynam, but I do it's. It's so broad and far reaching. B2C now is, is B2B in a lot of ways too. Right. The dynamics are very similar. We're so integrated into the supply chains and the logistics and all sort of the B2B side of the house that it's. Those lines are. As much as I've been talking a lot about digital and physical blurring, I think B2B and B2C is blurring as well too as B2B companies go direct to consumer as well in some cases have divisions that will go and sell direct. So yes, it does have a retail angle because that's more where my reference points are. But I think the lessons pretty much spread across. And if you talk about even about something like personalized experiences of B2B, people are more and more interested in personalizing. They're no longer doing the sort of the broad industry swaths, they're getting much more targeted and AI is obviously paying a mess on that.

Speaker A: What are the biggest blind spots that leaders face today?

Speaker B: There's a couple obviously as soon as you start talking about them, they're no longer as blind. I'm more concerned about, like I use the example for instance and it's the poster child of overenthusiasm and technology of the metaverse. There was a period during the pandemic we got very enthralled by the metaverse, and now it's become the beacon of technology. Ten years ago, we were laughing at beacons, held all these promises that didn't deliver. Now we're laughing at the metaverse. And I say, you gotta be careful, because each one of these technologies actually underlay something that's there. Maybe it didn't have that didn't live up to our famous hype curve, that we were expecting that everybody was going to move to the metaverse and never leave their house again. I think that was never a realistic proposition. But there are lists still, billions of dollars, mainly in the video environment, but in others now, too. And this idea that we have this thickening digital layer is not changing. One of the key constructs that I talk a lot about is the idea that we're not going away from digitizing our worlds and we're leaning more and more into that the contextual sort of layer that's around us, which in many ways the metaverse could represent.

Speaker A: So metaverse is a brilliant example, but how do you decide which trends you hop on and which ones you just observe, and at what stage do you jump in?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And actually there's one repetition that comes back from the first book, and it's something that I actually started working on previous many years before writing the first book, something called the Relevance Index that I built. And the idea here is to help you make those decisions around investing. And how do you want to differentiate in the market? How do you want to remain relevant? Because the idea right now, I think, is more and more a world of differentiation, where we know the brands that have struggled, the retailers that have had troubles. Right now in Canada, there's a lot of talk about HPC because it's always our oldest running company in the Americas, pretty much that, as we speak, basically disappearing and will be probably gone within two months. That's a perfect example of a retailer that stopped differentiating, that just tried to be average at everything. So how are you going to use, what are those technologies that you're going to invest in? They're going to help you differentiate. There's some that you had their baseline. There's some things you just can't get away from, and you need to make those investments just to remain in the game. But if you want to perform in the game, then you need to differentiate and know those Attributes are pretty straightforward. It's price which is mostly logistics and supply chain game, uh, accessibility or convenience which is also a technological investment investment often in your digital assets and in your stores. What are you doing to make sure that each touch point creates value and removes friction? So that's around accessibility and then there's the whole delight which the researchers called experiential. What is it that you do that basically people are prepared to make an extra effort to come to you for it could be in store online, could be the way you train your people, it can be the environments you create. And the last one that I think is more and more going to be very relevant in our current geopolitical world is purpose. How do. What do you stand for? Are you a buy local initiative? Are you strong on the environmental agenda? Are you socially engaged to special causes that make people connect with your brand at a more visceral level? So those are the four attributes I could. I think there's technology investments that can make be made in all four of those. But there are baselines. You know the whole AI thing is I wouldn't even use the word AI by the way, before December 2022 I tell my clients if somebody comes to you saying I work in AI run the other way because it means they don't know what they're talking about. It's just like saying I work in math now because of gener AI and now do we just catchphrase it all into AI? I can appreciate that we have to bucket it all. And I say it's if you're going to differentiate using AI it's like saying you wanted to differentiate using electricity. It's a baseline. It's something that's just there that you need to leverage compute some m of these ubiquitous technologies and other you're not going to differentiate on them.

Speaker A: And of course this also transition from to more use of AI is probably quite challenging for a lot of these companies. It's one thing to say okay, we're aware of the trend and we know it exists and we want to do something but. But actually what are the typical like use cases where you see that the companies can adopt already today and what is something that will take years to actually realize?

Speaker B: Things are moving so quickly? It's hard to think. You know I think in years now often in my speaking talk you saw this chart that emarketer did around. Did you know the rise of E commerce over the next 25 years would go to 50% of consumption? I have troubles imagining what E commerce even looks like in 25 years let alone or even 5 years let alone 25. I think the use cases are pretty obvious right now. We've seen a lot of it in digital marketing, how we both create and the content that's produced to even the analytics and the correlations we make. And uh, I think there's this fundamental shift happening especially in larger retail. We're capturing more and more data points and letting the AI build the correlations and the Personas that help us target better. So that I think is the low hanging fruit right now. And I know some companies are already hitting that wall right now. They're like okay, now what I think the more interesting stuff is actually in the back of house around operational. I have a colleague where I teach at McGill named Maxim Cohen who does a lot of research in demand prediction and pricing. He's a true data scientist and does research and basically wrote the book on this stuff. We'll see. We'll get more and more granular around that uh, more and more predict predictive and prescriptive and how we get to do that in the back of house uh, to increase and that's where say it's basically the baseline because if you're not going to be using it then you're going to be at a disadvantage. It won't necessarily be an advantage anymore.

Speaker A: So so if you're a retailer today or someone who's listening to this podcast is in E commerce what would be the 23 use cases you would any size because some of the things that you mentioned maybe apply for larger to larger companies but what would be your universal use case that you would recommend?

Speaker B: Yeah so I like the branding that Microsoft is using around Copilot. I think it's the idea that you always have this person uh next to you that you can quickly reference and ask and get their opinion on anything you're really working on hearing somebody I think it's a great idea has a little post it on their computer said did you ask chatgpt just to remind them every time to go and say okay I'm thinking about this campaign, I'm thinking about running this promotion, I'm thinking about entering this market or create or listing this product. What do you and just see what it comes back with and it can hallucinate. It's been known to do that unless but still it can inspire ideas and I like to think of it more of as an inspire and then which you add sort of your human element. I speak a lot with small businesses and I say you have access to basically the same chat GPT that the largest conglomerates in the world have. Maybe they can train their own models and do some things that are more specific to them. Which if you spend just a day or two on yours, you'd probably be able to do the same as well.

Speaker A: One of the premise of this podcast, why I started this is to fixing the game going against these monopolies huge corporations that dominate especially the digital industry like now as you probably observed also in retail, the business model of even building E commerce and buying advertising and selling it doesn't work anymore. It became too expensive and stuff like that. So actually what you talk about ChatGPT and I think for everybody listening, we actually have very easy access to these tools that actually level the playing field for everybody. And that's super fascinating. I think I would love to hear from you trends or things that. Because I think that's really the skill that people need to have to reduce the noise of things that are not relevant to them. And I think you alluded to that with like your relevant index. Yes, but what do you specifically see currently that is totally overhyped and what are the specific technologies or something that is also underappreciated from the perspective of commerce?

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't really believe so much in overhype. I think there's always signals within that hype and I think there can be over investment. Uh, definitely. I think think I encourage leaders to think iteratively. I think this idea that you got to go all in on anything is also is equally dangerous. So I'd want to balance that out a bit and say even we referencing our metaverse example earlier M. Yes, we didn't go all into the metaverse and maybe there's a social media company that might want to rethink its branding around that originally but still it doesn't make it all wrong. So I'll carve that out and then say there's. I don't think there's anything out there that I've seen that is complete folly. Which is there's things within that are worth probably unpacking, tracking and then. And some things are just too early. Uh honestly. But that that can be just. And I can give you some examples of that around payment technology that even at the lab where I instigated the retail innovation lab at McGill University, which is in partnership with uh, Circle K Kushtal, who's very much in the news right now around the 711 merger discussions. But we looked at different frictionless payment like they wanted to replicate Sort of an Amazon go experience which we did and it was too early a business case just didn't play out. The costs of compute and sensors and everything didn't make it val argument for them to make those investments beyond the living lab we have then. So now they've. But they that did guide them towards uh, down a different road that led to something that's a smaller scale of that but much more efficient which they might not have got at if they hadn't started with that. That curiosity which is really the key lesson and blind spot at the end is just you got it. There's nothing you should totally avoid. I think you need to be curious enough to try at least be interested in all these. And the other thing I always warn people about and talks to all of what we were just saying is never bet against Moore's Law. Right. So if the business case doesn't make sense today because again compute and technology is too expensive, guess what? That tends to trend downward. So maybe when you needed a thousand cameras and terabytes a second of data processing to make a solution work, probably in two, three years, either the costs of those sensors are going to go down exponentially as the processing goes decreases as well. And the business case makes more sense sense.

Speaker A: Uh, rfid. Where specifically do you see what applications do you are at the moment trending or.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because it works on both. I find it really interesting on several fronts. That's why I think it's worth paying attention to because at the back of house obviously the whole it's been predominantly used in the last decade, two decades for supply chain. Right. And understanding inventory counts and measuring around that. So that, that's. That was core use case. And then more recently some retailers were able to use it for payment to accelerate payments. Think of the Zara's and decal and clothes of the world that usually vertically integrated brands that manufacture their own goods. So it's easy for them to tag put those RFID tags from the source which is a key component. And it still is a bit of a challenge in the equation. But then what I'm thinking more and more about is it's a conduit to the digital asset. Right. So we've been thinking a lot about, I said earlier the blurring of digital and physical. Often the challenge there is how do you move between the worlds and RFID could be that gateway as basically what the QR code is in a lot of ways. So how can we use these technologies to unlock the digital contextual layer more and it can create a lot of other value beyond the physical product. So that's the part of RFID that I haven't seen really used to its full prominence yet because I think it's early. And I know organizations like JS1, the ones that created the barcode in the first place and now are trying to create or are creating sort of the lexicon around the QR code and what are the attributes that are going to the descriptor fields? It's, I think it's gone for a couple of dozen or a couple of hundred of different things that can go in because they recognize, recognize that physical products can now demonstrate a lot of digital attributes. So they want to link those worlds. And RFID I think is really interesting. I think we're looking for things now. Friction is such a thing that where we can't get and we have to remove and pulling out a camera and zooming in on a QR code, as easy as it's become as a reflex now, it's still like everything we can do. And the key principle for me, anything that doesn't create value, value. So I talk about, let's say payment if going to a cash register, uh, and a path to purchase. If that moment of going through the cash register doesn't create value for the customer, then technology is going to replace them. So we're going to keep removing these points where we say, okay, is it creating value? No. What can technology do to reach so we can invest on the things that do create value. So maybe it's investing in the human capabilities and the people on the floor and spending more money training them and giving them incentives and elevating the whole thing. That's where people say, yeah, that's the reason I came here or the reason I even did online with you is because you did this. That felt really special to me. It didn't feel special to me to go through the cash register or scan a QR code.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. We also talked about all these changes that are happening. They're probably impact business models that are created. I mentioned the case of paid advertising. Yes, this is the simplest case. Uh, how do you see the business models evolving, Evolving in retail and omnichannel?

Speaker B: I love that. And I think you're raising a more important point, Luke, because part of this course I teach is emerging technologies and new business models. And I think they go, they often go hand in hand. Because the historic and let's go back to retail business model of buy wholesale, I can buy it for A dollar and sell it for two. And off of that profit justify my operations and off that gross operating profit. And then that model's under a lot of stress just for a bunch of different reasons. Either Temu Shein, Ultra fast, whatever you want to call it, direct warehouse model can play make it hard for even the H and Ms. In the world to compete in that environment. So how do you diversify your business model? How do you find new sources of revenue that could help you get away from that purely wholesale to retail historic model. And that applies in all environments. Right. So is there something that's subscription, uh, based? Is there something that I can do that gets people that they actually want to uh, are ready to engage with my brand in, in a recurring manner like Costco like I mentioned. That's right. Who pay. The people pay to go shop there. And that really changes the whole model. The one that I'm paying a lot of attention to is retail media. It's a fascinating sector. It's pretty much owned by three or two or three companies right now. And the lion's share of it and even one company is like 80% of it, which is Amazon right now. But it inspires new ways of thinking where you start looking around saying okay, retail media.

Speaker A: What do you refer to as retail media?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, okay, good question. So retail media historically doing until recently. So it pretty much popped, popped up about four or five years ago really on people's radar because Amazon had this other line revenue which was basically the advertising that they're selling on their website. Right. And ended up with $16 billion. That's five plus years ago. So it was like okay, at one point they had to disclose what this other revenue was. They're like holy, Amazon's making that much money off their advertising. That's crazy. Like $16 billion to continue fighting the fight. And they used to, they were making it still making a ton of money. Aws. And so they have all these sort of. So they've got a lot of retailers thinking differently about how we make money in this business. And there's. So not everybody can go and do cloud compute. So what are the other opportunities? And they said we have, we're monetizing attention. That's what advertising is. Right. And then. And that got turned into the word retail media as other retailers, uh, and now we have something we call retail media networks are vying to aggregate same way social media did in a lot of ways that attention and get more intelligent. Now the force multiplier is not just AI in this because there is AI around personalization, but is also the fact that now you're advertising directly in the environments where people consume. It's not on a bus shelter, it's not on a billboard, it's not on a tv. Although I'm probably just one degree away from me being able to consume in any one of those environments. It just basically requires me to open an app and buy. But what if I'm doing it right in the app or right in the store where I'm shopping? So that's retail media. You've always seen advertisements. When you go into your grocery store or supermarket or the department store, there are paid advertising opportunities. There just haven't been very done. And with the digital mindset of how you can really better target and from

Speaker A: the like again going back to the business models you explained, okay, the challenges of the old model of wholesale and then direct it to consumer. So what do you see? What would be a. I know it's a very generic question because it's difficult to say, okay, this model fits. But for a, I don't know, medium size retailer, whether it's in Europe or Canada, what do you think is what are the must things that they need to implement or at least thinking about to be successful today?

Speaker B: There's still the core principles they won't change around the merchandising. Having great merchandising is always going to be more than important now because people it's not, it's no longer the thing that we forget is what digital brought is. It basically brought transparency. So the discovery piece is no longer really that important. It's more the inspiration piece that's become critical. So what can I do to inspire and that a lot of that has to do with the merchandising, both online and in store. What do I do to really bring product that people want and can I develop it? Can I play a part? Can I set myself up, can I set myself up to stand out and differentiate once again just with the products and maybe the services that go along with those products that I sell that help me diversify. And I think that's the second piece of this right now is I would be thinking a lot about diversifying my revenue streams and um, even my target markets if I can. Like I gotta remain relevant and build strong onto one. But do I, I think the world has taught us recently we don't want to be overdependent on a singular. Like if we can diversify so that we are a little more resilient, then that's. That I think that's the second part of this, where if at one point something's not working as well. I see a lot of retail concepts, for instance, embracing hospitality more and more, where they have food offerings, for instance, or they'll have entertainment, or we'll try to blend those worlds more, you know, And I think that's what we're going to see where I'm going to go into a sporting goods retailer like Dick's right now, and it's going to basically be a big sporting amusement park now. And not everybody's going to do that and doesn't make sense. But I have a friend here in Montreal who has a great soccer store and she has a zone where when you want to try the shoes, you go, there's a. You can kick the ball and something that nobody was really doing. And she's a one store independent. But she just said, okay, I can't build a climbing wall. It is not really relevant. I don't need to build a stadium. I can just create a space where, where they can put the shoe on and kick the ball into a net and even have a radar to measure how fast I'm kicking the ball and make it fun at the same time. So, you know, what's the next level of that? Where does that go from here? How do you create these environments that are more than here's their soccer shoe. Do you like it or not?

Speaker A: Uh, but I think it's also what you described sounds complicated because it's like these people who are, were traditionally involved in, in retail. They had a very simple business model. So simple describing is like presents.

Speaker B: Yeah, it felt complex to them at the time, but, uh, yeah, I think right now they look back and say, yeah, those were like pretty much any business, by the way, Luke.

Speaker A: I mean, and now we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, now we're talking. You're talking about like AI and the personalization, different channels, distribution. So it requires a completely different mindset than probably leadership teams.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And culture, that's the kind of the key message I always leave off with is you can have the best technology, you can have the best strategy. If the culture isn't there to embrace it, then it's all for nothing. So how do you create that culture? How do you bleed? How do you bring the people around you? So I'll come back to the example of my friends at Sock with the one soccer store where she, she, uh, got invited to Nike's head office. Not because she started one of the first to start using RFID as well, by the way. And not because she has a soccer uh, pitch inside of her store because her TikTok pretty much competes with Nike's with one store and they wanted to see how she was doing it. And she said, you know how I did it? I gave it to somebody who knows it a lot better than I do who's in my store and was. And she had the stuff that he's doing on that TikTok freaks me out most of the time and I don't even want to look at it because what the heck is that? But guess what? It brings a ton of attraction. And uh, probably every other less than 20 year old or walking into the store is coming in because of something they saw on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Like because you need to give those, let the people that know this stuff come from that world, embrace it, bring it. And she's very interested in AI and technology and all the other stuff too. But she knew she needed people. She worked with our university, she worked with other universities to try to bring in some of the technical knowledge to be sort of at the forefront there too. And it's that mindset and it's that thing that you have to partner and work together. And I'm a big believer in ecosystem. So what's the ecosystem that you build around you? And maybe it's that ecosystem thinking that really gets you now. What? Even if you're, you're small, medium, large, already have a built in ecosystem, but if you're a small or medium, you can be part of an ecosystem that allows you to, you know, take all these opportunities and turn them into, uh, into a business case.

Speaker A: And just to wrap up, what would be your like words of advice for, for brands navigating change and how can they keep up with the change and still stay customer focused?

Speaker B: Yeah, the one word curiosity. Curiosity. It m doesn't maybe help the focus piece so much because it's hard to discipline, does not jump on everything. But I know the reason I kind of wrote Blind spot is I did it was by choice because I know it was a word like even great acceleration before the word acceleration was being on everyone's lips. And I coined sort of the term in April of 2020 because I was a bit ahead of the trend because I was in Asia earlier that year. And we're accelerating, we're accelerating. So could this be the great acceleration as we had the Great Depression, the Great Recession, so could this moment in time be rethought about as a great acceleration Blind spot was something in the last year too is like our business leaders. I'm just what keeps you up at night Blind spots. What am I not seeing? What can catch me off guard again that I like I had pandemic last time that totally caught me off guard. I don't want to live that again. So how do I make sure so it's that curiosity and not just discounting something just because you don't understand it and or it doesn't make sense to you at the first level. Try to get people closer to you that do understand it and try to get is web3 got any value to it still? Is there something within there that I should still be looking at even even though it feels like another pandemic hype. So yeah I would say that's a key word is embrace curiosity and keep that. That means keeping an open mind and asking the right questions.

Speaker A: Hey, thank you so much. Is there any. Are there any parting thoughts you want to add about your book or where people can find you?

Speaker B: I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn so Carl with his C pute that's usually the best channel. We're the one I'm most engaged with and take it from there. My website is studiorx World so the books can be found there as well. By the way, the books, the physical books I keep only for my speaking engagements and my clients. But the digital book you can download no problem from the website. It's not on Amazon and I know those are places for now anyways. That's by design obviously something that I'm trying to maintain that first degree relation with with my readers. But yeah, studio LinkedIn.

Speaker A: I'm.

Speaker B: I. Yeah I think that's how we connected and that's probably the. The best place to find me.

Speaker A: Cool. Hey, thank you so much Carl for sharing or the insights and your experience. Experience. I feel a lot of passion and energy and I will be curious also to take a look at the book. Thank you so much for today.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me Luke.

Speaker A: That brings us to the end of today's show. My thanks to Carl. Uh, to find out more about what and what we do, go to our website what Digital. And if the topics resonate with you, download my book of hacks which contains the ready made recipes for growth that I've collected in my own client work at what and picked up from conversations with my guests on this podcast. You can find it on what digital. Remember to subscribe and to look out for the next episode. You will find it wherever you get your podcast. That's all for now. Goodbye.