The Analytics Power Hour · 2026-08-04 · 1h 4m
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
66 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Rusty Rahmer explores why organizations with massive investments in analytics, MarTech, data lakes, and marketing teams often fail to achieve proportional business growth. The root cause traces back to the digital era's early economics: when email lists and digital channels rewarded volume and reach, companies optimized for scale rather than sophistication. Teams built impressive capabilities in silos - analytics, content, media, MarTech - each working independently to demonstrate their own value. Now that markets are saturated and reach-based growth has plateaued, the same structural silos prevent the horizontal, customer-centric problem-solving required for continued growth. Rahmer draws on 20 years of experience at organizations like Vanguard and GSK, where he witnessed this pattern repeatedly: quarterly reviews show progress (new data models, software upgrades, above-average campaign performance) yet business dials don't move. His book 'Working As Designed' argues that companies have the right tools - they're just using them wrong, oriented toward functional excellence rather than shared customer outcomes. For B2B operators, CMOs, and transformation leaders, this conversation clarifies why traditional funnels and activity metrics mask systemic dysfunction and what systemic change looks like.
Organizational silos reward each function (analytics, media, content, MarTech) for independent excellence rather than horizontal collaboration. Teams work separately to solve the 20% growth goal handed down by leadership, never connecting their strategies, so the integrated solution never happens.
For 20 years, digital channels economically rewarded volume - buying larger email lists lowered per-unit costs and drove growth through scale. Now markets are saturated; additional reach produces diminishing returns, requiring instead timeliness and relevancy, which demand customer understanding and cross-functional coordination.
Companies already own the right tools and data capabilities to deliver personalized, timely customer experiences - they're just using them oriented the wrong way, toward functional siloes instead of customer problems. The solution is reorienting those same tools, not buying more.
Rusty recommends starting with a shared vision of where the company needs to be commercially in five years, then restructuring how goals, incentives, and cross-functional work are organized around that outcome rather than functional metrics.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode delivers solid, substantive ideas about organizational structure, customer-centric marketing, and the shift from reach-based to relevance-based strategies. However, much of the core insight is conceptual rather than data-driven, and significant portions are devoted to analogy explanation and friendly banter that dilute density. The core thesis - that organizations are optimizing for activity rather than impact due to siloed functions - is valuable but not novel.
We've saturated the growth market. We've reached every corner of the market we can possibly reach. And now it's about quality of marketing, getting back to getting away from reach and frequency and getting back to timeliness and relevancy
The solution to that 20% growth is sitting somewhere in the data strategy or it's somewhere in the media strategy or it's somewhere in the Mar-Tex that it's not, it's all of those things functioning together to solve that problem
The ideas presented - customer centricity, cross-functional teams, problem-based segmentation instead of outcome-based segmentation - are not new. While Rusty articulates them well and frames the organizational structure conversation around 'centers of excellence vs. journey pods' with some freshness, the underlying frameworks (agile, test-and-learn, customer journey mapping) are well-trodden. The critique of functional silos and the call for outcome-oriented rewards structures are valuable but not contrarian.
I'm not the first person to preach customer centricity. But I think it's been a forgotten concept
This entire book is not about any one unique concept. It is more about all of these concepts that companies are putting into play
Rusty Rahmer is a highly credible guest with direct C-suite and practitioner experience. He built analytics and digital capabilities at Vanguard, led transformation at GSK (a massive pharmaceutical company), and is now a CPO at a startup plus consultant. His experience spans the full lifecycle of these problems - building functions, scaling them, then realizing they weren't working as intended. This is someone who has actually lived the problems he's discussing, not a theory-peddler.
Prior to that, he held analytics and marketing leadership roles at GSK and Vanguard
I've led a lot of transformations over the last 10 or so years
While Rusty provides concrete examples from his experience (GSK pharma sales, Vanguard digital transformation, the $300 cost per sales call in pharma), he rarely grounds abstract concepts in hard numbers, timelines, or measurable outcomes. The pharma example about segmenting by problems vs. outcomes is useful but lacks metrics on actual uplift or ROI. Many claims remain illustrative rather than evidenced - 'test-and-learn adoption is slow,' 'nine-month delivery cycles,' 'significantly more expensive' - without quantification.
When I think about sending a very expensive resource like a salesperson out, I can't send them out to very small customers where the customer opportunity is very small. I have to send them out to the place that they could have the potentially biggest impact on my bottom line. Costs something like $300 every knock on a doctor's door
When it takes nine months and nine months of cost to get an idea in the market, I can't do two of those
The hosts ask generally good questions and there are moments of genuine curiosity (Val and Julie's probes about segmentation, how to get buy-in, the journey mapping critique). However, the conversation often drifts into friendly banter, extended analogies that go nowhere (potato chips, Plinko, waffle fries), and long monologues from Rusty where hosts simply nod along. There's limited pushback on vague claims, and most questions invite Rusty to expand rather than challenge or sharpen his thinking. The episode reads more as a comfortable conversation between friends than as investigative dialogue.
You just stopped. And there's no answer to that. There's just silence.
Val, that's what you're talking about because later on in the year after we've had that discussion and everybody's going off into their silos
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Twenty years of digital marketing created something of a monster: companies poured enormous investment into analytics teams, MarTech stacks, media capabilities, and data infrastructure - and then watched all those functions march off into their respective silos to work really, really hard at producing activity rather than impact. Rusty Rahmer , founder of Starize AI and author of Working As Designed , joined Michael, Julie, and Val to dig into why that happened, why it's still happening, and what it actually takes to flip the shovel over and use the right end. Along the way, Rusty - who Val correctly identified early as a spontaneous analogy machine - explained why customer journey maps on walls are basically the statistical average American life that literally nobody lives, why waffle fries are structurally superior to ridged chips (and what that has to do with cross-functional team design), and why the most important question a marketing leader can ask a room full of executives is also the one most likely to be met with complete silence. This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y .
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
[Announcer]: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. [Announcer]: Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language. [Michael Helbling]: Hi everybody, welcome to the Analytics Power Hour and this is episode 303. [Michael Helbling]: Does it ever feel like we repeat the same steps sometimes even though no one's really [Michael Helbling]: thinking about whether they actually apply in the scenario?
[Michael Helbling]: That old saying, the definition of insanity, repeating the same activity while expecting [Michael Helbling]: different results, I think we've all been there and yet as analysts, maybe we're slightly [Michael Helbling]: more clued into when it's happening than others in a business, I'd like to think so. [Michael Helbling]: Maybe not. [Michael Helbling]: The idea here is are we thinking a step or two deeper as analysts or are we just sort [Michael Helbling]: of rolling with the same set of activities with no critical thinking applied?
[Michael Helbling]: Well, we're going to talk about it and now I want to introduce my two co-hosts who are [Michael Helbling]: definitely deep thinkers, Julie Hoyer, welcome. [Julie Hoyer]: Hey there. [Michael Helbling]: And Val Kroll. [Michael Helbling]: Hello.
[Michael Helbling]: Hello. [Michael Helbling]: How's it going? [Michael Helbling]: Good. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm Michael Helbling.
[Michael Helbling]: Well, we wanted a guest and our guest is someone we have had on the show before, but not for [Michael Helbling]: a while now, Rusty Rahmer is the founder and chief product officer of StarizeAI. [Michael Helbling]: Prior to that, he held analytics and marketing leadership roles at GSK and Vanguard. [Michael Helbling]: He has a new book called Working As Designed and today he is our guest. [Michael Helbling]: Welcome back to the show, Rusty.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Thank you. [Rusty Rahmer]: Thanks for having me back. [Michael Helbling]: I appreciate it. [Michael Helbling]: And as far as bios go, Val and I also worked with you on the board of the Digital Analytics [Michael Helbling]: Association back in the day.
[Michael Helbling]: So we are friends going back a long way. [Michael Helbling]: So it's great to have you back on the show. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: So to kick this all off, you wrote a book.
[Michael Helbling]: So obviously you've been thinking about this for a long time and then you decided to get [Michael Helbling]: pretty serious about it. [Michael Helbling]: Talk about that a little bit because I think probably something was brewing for a long [Michael Helbling]: time that kind of came out in the form of the book, but just talk about that journey [Michael Helbling]: a little bit and then we'll dig into some of the content and some of the things in the [Michael Helbling]: book itself.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: You know, people ask me, when did you start the book? [Rusty Rahmer]: Well, I feel like I started the book 20 years ago, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: It's the experience of the last 20 years that I think, you know, at Vanguard it was [Rusty Rahmer]: about building, you know, at the front end of the digital wave, building out the capabilities [Rusty Rahmer]: of, you know, a user experience organization, a data and analytics and data science organization, [Rusty Rahmer]: marketing and MarTech and then, you know, digital transformation, then going to GSK [Rusty Rahmer]: and helping them a different problem, right?
[Michael Helbling]: They had all of these capabilities and it was about, you know, why aren't these capabilities [Rusty Rahmer]: working the way that we think that they should? [Rusty Rahmer]: Why haven't we gotten the value out of all of this? [Rusty Rahmer]: And that's a pretty common problem, I think, as I've moved on to consulting and I can see [Rusty Rahmer]: it over and over again at different companies and it felt like a problem that I had experience [Rusty Rahmer]: solving and that I was surprised is so prevalent out there and so I felt like I had something [Rusty Rahmer]: to say about that and I wanted to put it down and writing and my experience is what I was [Rusty Rahmer]: observing and what I think the solutions and the core of the problem and the solutions [Rusty Rahmer]: to that are.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So that's really what it was. [Michael Helbling]: No, I think that's great. [Michael Helbling]: So talk a little bit about the book contents itself, like, you know, kind of what was the [Michael Helbling]: driving idea behind it? [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I think there were two key observations.
[Rusty Rahmer]: One was sort of where are we now, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like looking around at different organizations, I see the same problems, identifying that [Rusty Rahmer]: problem and sort of describing the solutions that I've put towards that and what I think [Rusty Rahmer]: the core of the solutioning is. [Rusty Rahmer]: And then secondly, like how did we get here, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like there's a pretty clear path that led to this place that we're in.
[Michael Helbling]: And it's both of those things that I think were what's in the book, you know, to sort [Rusty Rahmer]: of describe how we arrived, what it is that the problem is that you're feeling and then [Rusty Rahmer]: how do you solve that problem are really sort of what's underneath it. [Val Kroll]: So what are some of those symptoms of like how we got here? [Val Kroll]: Let's dive into it. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Okay. [Rusty Rahmer]: Well, let me start with what I think people are probably feeling today, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So as I led each of those organizations, whether it was user experience or it was analytics [Rusty Rahmer]: or Martek in the tech side, media, I think everybody in those organizations feels like [Rusty Rahmer]: there's something wrong with it. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like we could be doing so much more with what we do here.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like we're so underutilized to this problem of growth or whatever the company is trying [Rusty Rahmer]: to solve. [Michael Helbling]: And I think that feeling comes from very siloed organizations, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: I think I see the problem that chief marketing officers, chief growth officers, chief commercial [Rusty Rahmer]: officers have spent a lot of money over the last 10 to 20 years buying software, buying [Rusty Rahmer]: capability, hiring teams, building teams.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And largely I don't think that they're getting a large percentage of the potential value [Rusty Rahmer]: all out of all of that investment that they've made. [Rusty Rahmer]: So from the C-Suite's perspective, I put a lot of money into this on faith that this [Michael Helbling]: will produce value for my commercial organization, and it just doesn't seem to change the net [Rusty Rahmer]: result very much. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I don't understand what's wrong here, but it's not working.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And I think the reality of that is that it is going back and looking at the history of [Rusty Rahmer]: how we arrived here and the moment that we're in. [Michael Helbling]: And I think to switch gears a little bit, I think if you go back 20 years before the [Rusty Rahmer]: internet, you know, 1998 or whatever you're sitting at your work computer, you don't even [Rusty Rahmer]: have the internet on your computer, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, it's hard to even imagine the world back then, but that's the way that it was.
[Michael Helbling]: And marketing your organization was print, you know, maybe, you know, some partner distribution [Rusty Rahmer]: methods, but it was expensive. [Rusty Rahmer]: Print is really expensive to send out. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so TV ads are there, you know, there's some phone advertising, but everything is [Rusty Rahmer]: an expensive channel. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so your reach is relatively small.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's relatively limited by your geography, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Well, digital comes into the picture and completely blows that paradigm out of the water, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Now you think about buying an email list, and you're actually rewarded for sending it [Rusty Rahmer]: out to more people than it can actually, you know, like the more people you send it out [Rusty Rahmer]: to, the lower the cost of purchasing that list goes down, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So you're rewarded for your reach.
[Michael Helbling]: And what that did from an economic standpoint, it allowed companies to enter markets where [Rusty Rahmer]: they were not previously competing with their brand, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: To create, oh my God, now I can reach the world with what my product or message is, and [Rusty Rahmer]: I can sell to the world. [Rusty Rahmer]: So for 20 years, we focused on reaching, reaching and building capability, digital capabilities [Rusty Rahmer]: that would help us reach audiences, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And even bad marketing with the kind of reach you were able to achieve with the digital world [Rusty Rahmer]: drives your organizational growth. [Rusty Rahmer]: It just does. [Michael Helbling]: I mean, fractional return on that investment means massive growth for your organization [Rusty Rahmer]: just based on the scale that you're currently achieving. [Rusty Rahmer]: But it's really lazy marketing, to be honest, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: That reach and frequency marketing is lazy. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so you've been purchasing all of these capabilities. [Rusty Rahmer]: You've been buying Mar-Tech stacks, Ad-Tech stacks, you've been building analytics teams [Rusty Rahmer]: and data lakes and data environments. [Rusty Rahmer]: You've been hiring media teams.
[Rusty Rahmer]: All of that has been growing in investment, but it's all working as like, we have to build [Rusty Rahmer]: up this function. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's never existed before. [Rusty Rahmer]: We've never had an analytics team before. [Rusty Rahmer]: We've never had a data team before.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And so the mission of those organizations has been about how do we build and deliver [Rusty Rahmer]: some value immediately and then scale this organization to what it's going to need to [Rusty Rahmer]: really drive the growth of this company. [Rusty Rahmer]: So we're sort of stuck in that time where these functions are still working in silos, [Rusty Rahmer]: trying to do analytics activities that show we could be the best analytics organization [Rusty Rahmer]: in the entire world.
[Rusty Rahmer]: We could be the best content creative people in the entire world. [Rusty Rahmer]: We need all the Mar-Tech tools, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So the Mar-Tech teams are out buying things that the organization doesn't even need yet [Rusty Rahmer]: just to have them, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: And I think that's not how it's actually working, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: I think we've saturated the growth market. [Rusty Rahmer]: We've reached every corner of the market we can possibly reach. [Rusty Rahmer]: And now it's about quality of marketing, getting back to getting away from reach and frequency [Rusty Rahmer]: and getting back to timeliness and relevancy, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Which means, hey, I actually have to understand my customer better than I've ever understood [Rusty Rahmer]: my customer before in order to show up in a timely and relevant way to that customer, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And that's actually what all of these capabilities we've been building have been designed to do. [Rusty Rahmer]: But when you look at the system that they're operating inside the company, they're still [Rusty Rahmer]: working in these vertical silos instead of working together on horizontal problems, like [Rusty Rahmer]: growing the company with its customer base, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So I think that's a bit of how we got there, which is understandable, given the thrust [Rusty Rahmer]: of digital and digital capability and the speed at which that's grown.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And then it sort of explains why we feel like we're underutilized in the same system as [Rusty Rahmer]: well, why people aren't doing more with the data that we're creating, why Test and Learn [Rusty Rahmer]: isn't being adopted as fast as it should be, why media dies at the front door of the company [Rusty Rahmer]: and OmniChannel doesn't connect to it, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: I think all of these problems are functional silos out of that arc of growth and evolution [Rusty Rahmer]: that's happened over the last 20 years.
[Val Kroll]: And one of the things related to what you were just talking about, Rusty, is that really [Val Kroll]: resonated with me. [Val Kroll]: I've seen it so many times in organizations. [Val Kroll]: Like you said, it's like the best content team in the world, the best performance marketing [Val Kroll]: group. [Val Kroll]: And they produce a lot of reports with their analyst partners showing all this progress [Val Kroll]: and performing above industry average for those different campaigns.
[Val Kroll]: And so the way you talked about in the book is like, how can we be doing so much that [Val Kroll]: says we're doing well, but we're still not getting to where we need to go? [Val Kroll]: And the way the system responds is, well, we just need to be doing more. [Michael Helbling]: And I was like, great, highlight, underline, startles. [Val Kroll]: That is such a repeatable pattern that I think people absolutely feel.
[Val Kroll]: But when was the first time you started to take a step back and acknowledge boring [Val Kroll]: more on top is just not moving us forward anymore? [Val Kroll]: Like when do you have a specific moment or story where that realization really started [Val Kroll]: to come to life for you? [Rusty Rahmer]: It's a little of two things. [Rusty Rahmer]: Again, it's a little of having jumped silos to build these functions out and then getting [Rusty Rahmer]: the GSK and owning sort of every touch point of the customer, the entire customer experience [Rusty Rahmer]: really was like, oh, my God, now I'm sitting [Michael Helbling]: on top of this entire organization and I'm saying things that they can't solve.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like this is like a square peg. [Rusty Rahmer]: And the problem I'm trying to solve is a square peg in a round hole operationally. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like no one, no one can function the way that I'm asking for them to function or solve [Rusty Rahmer]: the problems that I'm throwing on to the table. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so transformation sort of has to happen around that.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And I think I think leaders experience it every day when they're the ones, you know, [Rusty Rahmer]: a chief marketing officer is responsible for, I know, 20% growth and they go in every [Rusty Rahmer]: year and planning season and they set that goal on the table and they say, hey, our goal [Rusty Rahmer]: this year is being handed down to us as 20% growth, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: And in that room is the head of analytics, it's the head of media, all these different [Rusty Rahmer]: heads in there of all these different functions.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And as soon as the media is over, everybody leaves and everyone's going to work really, [Rusty Rahmer]: really hard to try and achieve that goal, but they're not going to talk to each other [Rusty Rahmer]: and they're all going to work in their little silos. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like the solution to that 20% growth is sitting somewhere in the data strategy or it's [Rusty Rahmer]: somewhere in the media strategy or it's somewhere in the Mar-Tex that it's not, it's [Rusty Rahmer]: not, it's all of those things functioning together to solve that problem in a way that [Rusty Rahmer]: we have not set up the company to work or reward more importantly to reward.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And Val, that's what you're talking about because later on in the year after we've had [Rusty Rahmer]: that discussion and everybody's going off into their silos and is trying really, really [Rusty Rahmer]: hard to make that goal happen, to try and be the hero, we're going to get together [Rusty Rahmer]: quarterly and we're going to talk about results and we're going to talk about, we've [Rusty Rahmer]: built new data tables in the data, and we bought this new, we replaced this software [Rusty Rahmer]: with some new AI driven, whatever.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And like, we built new customer segmentation model, like we've got it, we all worked on [Rusty Rahmer]: stuff independently, but the dial's not turning because it wouldn't, it wouldn't given those [Rusty Rahmer]: pieces independently working rather than, you know, working together on a common problem. [Michael Helbling]: Hey Tim, imagine for a minute you're an e-commerce marketing leader and you just launched a new [Michael Helbling]: checkout yesterday. [Tim Wilson]: And now you're wondering, did performance change or did the tracking break?
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ai and use code APH. [Tim Wilson]: Fewer tabs, smarter agents, less workplace archaeology. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think you see it every day. [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, I really think you do.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The advantage was having sat above all of those functions and going, okay, you know what [Rusty Rahmer]: I don't need is more exposures with no one going to a high value action on my website. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like, are you working with the OmniChannel team to deliver, like, after we expose them [Rusty Rahmer]: to deliver a journey that moves them closer towards the high value action that I want? [Rusty Rahmer]: Oh, no, you guys never talk. [Rusty Rahmer]: Okay, this is a system that produces and rewards this, and now we need to change the system [Rusty Rahmer]: that we're all operating in to reward, to give you a different problem to solve and [Rusty Rahmer]: to reward you for working as hard as you're already working, but to solve a different [Rusty Rahmer]: problem than what you're trying to solve today, right?
[Julie Hoyer]: And what you said really hit home of it's time for us to turn back to thinking about [Julie Hoyer]: how timely and relevant it is. [Julie Hoyer]: For the customer, and I have also found working with a lot of my clients is that in the pressure [Julie Hoyer]: of activity, like you were just describing in the silos of their organization and the [Julie Hoyer]: pressure to do more, get more out of it, or at least that's, again, the habit that we've [Julie Hoyer]: created, people very quickly lose the lens of the customer and the customer experience.
[Julie Hoyer]: And at the end of the day, that is what all the functions that the company need to work [Julie Hoyer]: together to change. [Julie Hoyer]: I am curious, how have you found a way to help teams get back to thinking about the [Julie Hoyer]: customer or helping teams reach across to the other teams involved? [Julie Hoyer]: And I'm curious from the different positions that you've held or now you've been moving [Michael Helbling]: into like consulting, like you mentioned, is there anything you use to kind of convince [Julie Hoyer]: people of that or scenarios where you've been able to help change those working habits?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: And Julie, two things there. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think first, I probably even said those words too, getting back to the customer sort [Rusty Rahmer]: of experience. [Rusty Rahmer]: Honestly, it should have always been about the customer experience from the beginning [Rusty Rahmer]: of time, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: When it was a small hardware store that you walked into in your neighborhood, like they [Rusty Rahmer]: knew in order to do business, they had to help the customer solve a problem. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I think as this digital era has helped companies scale, I mean, any company you take, [Rusty Rahmer]: if you go back 20 years and look at what they were, you know, the number of people that [Rusty Rahmer]: worked there, the size of revenue, all of that, that is a magnificent scale.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And I think that challenges companies to figure out how to even grow their organization to [Rusty Rahmer]: be that big and handle that much customer work. [Rusty Rahmer]: But I don't think we ever should have lost track of, I still actually need to be good [Rusty Rahmer]: with customers. [Rusty Rahmer]: That's why I called it a little bit of lazy marketing in between because it did get away [Rusty Rahmer]: from that even though it shouldn't have. [Rusty Rahmer]: And now if you're going to grow, you've reached as much as you're going to grow with bad marketing.
[Rusty Rahmer]: If you want to grow that baseline from what it's at, you've got to get good at the customer [Rusty Rahmer]: experience. [Rusty Rahmer]: You have to solve customer problems again. [Rusty Rahmer]: So you've got to know your customer better than you ever have before. [Rusty Rahmer]: And again, the good news is all of this tech stack and everything we do is actually ideally [Rusty Rahmer]: designed to solve that problem.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You're just not using it. [Rusty Rahmer]: The cover is a shovel upside down, digging a hole. [Rusty Rahmer]: That's actually the metaphor that's trying to be conveyed on the front of the cover. [Rusty Rahmer]: You have the right tools.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You're just got to flip it over and use the other end and it will solve the problem for [Rusty Rahmer]: you. [Rusty Rahmer]: To your point, Julie, I think what I like to do, I always, as a leader who's led a lot [Rusty Rahmer]: of transformations over the last 10 or so years, I always think it starts with vision. [Michael Helbling]: I think you sit down and you talk about where do you need to be in five years from now commercially? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like what goals do we need to be achieving five years?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And what's it going to take? [Rusty Rahmer]: How do we have to operate in order to achieve that, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: And well, we need to do more when you're, okay, great. [Rusty Rahmer]: A fundamental question I love to throw in there that's sort of a blockbuster question [Rusty Rahmer]: that really stops the conversation in its tracks is, okay, what are the customer problems [Rusty Rahmer]: we have to solve in order to turn them into better customers to achieve that result you [Michael Helbling]: just talked about?
[Michael Helbling]: And they just stop. [Rusty Rahmer]: And there's no answer to that. [Rusty Rahmer]: There's just silence. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I go, look, fundamentally, marketing is about changing mindsets.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It is about, if they were already going to buy it, I wouldn't need to waste money marketing [Rusty Rahmer]: to them, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: That I wouldn't need to do that. [Rusty Rahmer]: So it is about changing a customer that isn't going to do this to some degree. [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe some customers are further away from doing it than others.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But in some way, it's about interjecting myself into that customer and changing an outcome [Rusty Rahmer]: that benefits the customer and me at the end of the day. [Rusty Rahmer]: And if I'm asking you, what is it going to take to change the mindset of your customers [Rusty Rahmer]: or what problems stand in the way of your customers being better customers for you, then [Rusty Rahmer]: I don't know how you're ever going to achieve those goals. [Rusty Rahmer]: That is fundamentally the question.
[Rusty Rahmer]: That's the only way to achieve growth is solving those problems for your customer. [Rusty Rahmer]: And the fact that you're sitting here quiet tells me we haven't done enough to know our [Rusty Rahmer]: customers and what problems they have that are preventing them from being better customers [Michael Helbling]: for us. [Rusty Rahmer]: And that's something we better get back to doing. [Rusty Rahmer]: And look, I'm not the first person to preach customer centricity.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But I think it's been a forgotten concept. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I think many companies would say that they are customer centric because they have [Rusty Rahmer]: a lot of customer data. [Michael Helbling]: But that customer data is a lot like saying, this side of the river holds the biggest fish. [Rusty Rahmer]: So if I fish here, I catch big fish.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's not how to catch them. [Rusty Rahmer]: It has nothing to do with how to catch them. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so you really don't know your customers because you don't know what the problem is. [Rusty Rahmer]: And therefore, you can't solve it and move big fishes or small fishes over to the side [Rusty Rahmer]: that you want them to.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And so I think it's about that. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think that's the moment where they sit back in their seats and go, you know what? [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe we actually don't know the key to that question and knowing it is unlocking the future [Rusty Rahmer]: for us. [Rusty Rahmer]: So how do we do that?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And so you've got an ear to start talking about how you start solving that problem and [Rusty Rahmer]: how you start getting back to knowing your customers again. [Julie Hoyer]: And you know what's interesting, you talk about knowing your customers. [Julie Hoyer]: Another thing I've run into a lot is when we get into segmentation of customers, again, [Julie Hoyer]: at the thought of, oh, we'll figure out who's alike and then we'll market to them accordingly. [Julie Hoyer]: It's like getting at the idea of caring about the customer, figuring out how to work with [Julie Hoyer]: each user type.
[Julie Hoyer]: But sadly, the first thing I see a lot of my clients reach for is they segment them based [Julie Hoyer]: on outcome. [Julie Hoyer]: They say, who are my big spenders already? [Julie Hoyer]: Or who are already really loyal and who are the people who are not loyal? [Julie Hoyer]: Which is interesting because it's so backwards to thinking, well, wouldn't you describe them [Julie Hoyer]: by similar characteristics and then you'd hope to interact with them to then drive the [Julie Hoyer]: actual outcome measure for the different groups?
[Julie Hoyer]: But I find it really interesting that so many companies end up actually segmenting on outcome, [Julie Hoyer]: which seems so backwards. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's so about you, not about your customer, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: And I get it. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's particularly in pharma, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like that's an industry that I spent time in that I could see right away grew on a really [Rusty Rahmer]: expensive resource called a salesperson showing up at a doctor's door, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Which I don't know, costs something like $300 every knock on a doctor's door. [Rusty Rahmer]: And though that ability has drastically been reduced by legislation, they don't really have [Rusty Rahmer]: the ability to do what they used to be able to do or be as effective with sales folks [Michael Helbling]: as they used to be able to.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So they're going digital, but it's exactly that, Julie. [Rusty Rahmer]: When I think about sending a very expensive resource like a salesperson out, I can't send [Rusty Rahmer]: them out to very small customers where the customer opportunity is very small. [Rusty Rahmer]: I have to send them out to the place that they could have the potentially biggest impact [Rusty Rahmer]: on my bottom line. [Rusty Rahmer]: I get it.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But when you extend that thinking to digital, you're making a mistake, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like digital doesn't cost the same amount of money. [Rusty Rahmer]: And that was you were putting the problem set on a human to interact with another human [Rusty Rahmer]: to figure out what the problem actually was that needed to be solved, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Now you've got a digital ecosystem, which can reach bazillions of people, very, very [Rusty Rahmer]: low cost, but you don't know the problem you're solving as you're blasting all this stuff [Rusty Rahmer]: out all the time.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So you still create segments that are like, these are the biggest fish. [Rusty Rahmer]: Let's spend the most marketing dollars on these biggest fish when in reality, if you [Michael Helbling]: stepped back and you said, you know what, there's probably only four or five problems [Rusty Rahmer]: that my customers have that if I could solve these problems, they would be a better customer [Rusty Rahmer]: for me, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: And if you segment your customers on that first and say, okay, here are big fish and [Rusty Rahmer]: little fish that all share the same problem.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And if I can solve that problem, I would turn all of them into better customers for me. [Rusty Rahmer]: Now, some of them within solving that, there may be different ways of solving it. [Rusty Rahmer]: I may send a rep out and maybe I wouldn't send a rep out to a small, but I know the [Rusty Rahmer]: problem I'm sending the rep out to solve and I know what I'm asking my digital marketing [Rusty Rahmer]: or my customer journey marketing to solve as well. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's just, I'm deciding how much to put into the solution, but the solution is the same [Rusty Rahmer]: across the board in terms of the value that has to be exchanged with that customer to [Rusty Rahmer]: move them from where they are to where I want them to be, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: So I think that segmentation has a place. [Rusty Rahmer]: It just isn't the first cut of segmentation. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's a second or third layer of segmentation that says, okay, once I've segmented on the [Rusty Rahmer]: problem I need to solve and I've got solutions to that problem, right, which is a portfolio [Rusty Rahmer]: of solutions. [Rusty Rahmer]: I can decide which of that portfolio of solutions I should invest in which customers based on [Rusty Rahmer]: cost and potential return on that investment.
[Julie Hoyer]: And I think if a company gets that far and they're hemming and hawing about the incremental [Julie Hoyer]: value of a solution on a certain subset of users for a problem, like, I'm sure they're [Julie Hoyer]: doing pretty damn well because that is like top tier thinking, like, if you've made it [Julie Hoyer]: to that step, like, I want to come meet your company, like, honestly. [Val Kroll]: Totally. [Val Kroll]: Well, and so that's, I cannot wait to talk about some of that portfolio stuff in the [Val Kroll]: way you're talking about thinking about, but I want to go back a little bit to the transformation [Val Kroll]: it takes to be able to get to what you guys were just talking about because I know you [Val Kroll]: reference like the cover of the book is about like turning around the tool like you have [Val Kroll]: it, you're just not using it correctly.
[Val Kroll]: But I do have the privilege of, you know, being in your circle. [Val Kroll]: And so I, and you're also the king of analogies, so I can't wait till we do the tally at the [Val Kroll]: end of the episode for all the amazing analogies you give us. [Val Kroll]: But our view, and there's so many that have stuck with me, but I remember you were talking [Val Kroll]: about a team that was mobilized and ready to do some of this work. [Val Kroll]: And I think the way you phrased it, hopefully I don't butcher it is like we're ready to [Val Kroll]: work together to make Thanksgiving dinner.
[Val Kroll]: And the request I'm getting is for a side of cranberry sauce, more cranberry sauce, just [Val Kroll]: like put more cranberry sauce on my plate. [Val Kroll]: And so I want to talk a little bit about like, who needs to be involved in some of this transformation [Val Kroll]: and how do these groups kind of work together because like Julie said, getting an organization [Val Kroll]: to like put aside your segmentation that you've been so emotionally like your crutch for the [Val Kroll]: past however many years to something that you're talking about with this transformation.
[Val Kroll]: Like talk a little bit more about like what that takes and who you have to get bought [Michael Helbling]: in. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, it's a great question. [Rusty Rahmer]: And as I just mentioned with the customer centricity, right, like I don't I'm not the [Rusty Rahmer]: first person to preach customer centricity. [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, that's been out there for a long time.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I think there are this this entire book is not about any one unique concept. [Rusty Rahmer]: It is more about all of these concepts that companies are putting into play. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like they think they're being customer centric, but they're not applying it correctly. [Rusty Rahmer]: They have agile, but they aren't totally applying it from front end to back end.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's only a it's only a tech build. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's not a front end strategy, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So I think it's on this book is about a lot of those tool, not just more tech stack and [Rusty Rahmer]: had tech stack and and teams that you have built, but also ways of working that you've [Rusty Rahmer]: deployed, but you've only got like a percentage of it's deployed, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Because this is this is where it comes together, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: I think at the there's sort of an arc of maturity you go through here, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: I think there's sort of when you don't have functions, you build centers of excellence [Rusty Rahmer]: to create consistency across your organization and to get you over the large investments [Rusty Rahmer]: that need to be made around capability and discipline and structure, you know, the design [Rusty Rahmer]: systems for the UX team, you know, analytics, so you don't have 10 sources of truth, you're [Rusty Rahmer]: down to a, you know, a limited set, you've, you've got definitions of data dictionary, [Rusty Rahmer]: like all those things come with center of excellence and they're really good and they're [Rusty Rahmer]: really important.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But ultimately when you talk about solving these customer problems, they largely become [Rusty Rahmer]: a bottleneck pretty quickly, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Because you need localization of the problem solving and not only that, you need quick [Rusty Rahmer]: feedback loops, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: This is where, you know, Val, of all people, test and learn, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: She's so close to your heart, but how difficult is that to introduce into a company that's [Rusty Rahmer]: organized into the site?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like it doesn't work. [Rusty Rahmer]: First off, it takes them nine months to take an idea to market. [Rusty Rahmer]: When it takes nine months and nine months of cost to get an idea in the market, I can't [Rusty Rahmer]: do two of those. [Rusty Rahmer]: I just need to get it out and get some kind of result.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I have no time to test any alternate ideas, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So this has to get these teams, these teams that can do this work closer to the front [Rusty Rahmer]: end, be able to deliver pieces of things in a hurry, evaluate quickly with analytics if [Rusty Rahmer]: it's working or not, and pivot quickly. [Rusty Rahmer]: It can't go through year-long planning cycles, nine-month delivery site, it can't do any [Rusty Rahmer]: of that. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like that, look, you're not going to build that thing overnight.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You have to mature to it. [Rusty Rahmer]: But ultimately, when you have a team that is comprised of all of the different functions [Rusty Rahmer]: that make digital run from data strategy to analytics and two kinds of analytics, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Long-term analytics and fast, quick, dirty, is it worth it? [Michael Helbling]: The thing we just put it out in the market, how much traffic is coming to the website [Rusty Rahmer]: from that?
[Rusty Rahmer]: What are they? [Rusty Rahmer]: Are they achieving high value act like quick and dirty? [Rusty Rahmer]: To media buying, all of this needs to be done on a rapid scale with a team that comprises [Rusty Rahmer]: all those disciplines, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: It's not cheaper.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I won't tell you it's cheaper. [Rusty Rahmer]: Centers of Excellence are really cheap because you scale them across the entire organization. [Rusty Rahmer]: When you start building these teams, you're borrowing discipline from the Centers of Excellence [Rusty Rahmer]: and you're dedicating them to a set of problems, right? [Michael Helbling]: So you might say in this case, you might say, all right, let's pretend we're at a pharma [Rusty Rahmer]: company and we've identified that there's a valuable cluster of customers who need more [Rusty Rahmer]: evidence in order to write the script for our drug over what they're currently writing [Rusty Rahmer]: the script for.
[Rusty Rahmer]: We've got a better drug, but they've been writing that for 10 years. [Rusty Rahmer]: The existing drug, our new drug, better results, but we have to prove that to them in order [Rusty Rahmer]: to get that, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Now, there are different value exchanges that can happen to do that. [Rusty Rahmer]: You can get them data and white papers that say the results are better.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You can have them talk to a peer. [Rusty Rahmer]: You can get them to a conference where they see somebody, a key opinion leader speak on [Rusty Rahmer]: it. [Rusty Rahmer]: So there's different ways of solving that, but I've got to build journeys to get them [Rusty Rahmer]: to those high value actions. [Rusty Rahmer]: I got to get somebody to a conference and that means I've got to make them aware of the conference.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I got to find the right people who would be open to going to a conference. [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe that's geography-based. [Rusty Rahmer]: I've got to build a journey that makes it easy for them to sign. [Rusty Rahmer]: There's a whole journey that goes behind delivering that value exchange, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: I need a team who is dedicated to that problem set of not just delivering those value pieces, [Rusty Rahmer]: but also evaluating, are these the right solutions to somebody that even needs more evidence? [Rusty Rahmer]: Or are there better solutions out there? [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe a podcast on something like this might be a better solution, whatever. [Rusty Rahmer]: So they're looking at not only the tip of the spear, the high value actions or the value [Rusty Rahmer]: exchange pieces, but also, are we getting people to sign up for those things?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Are we actually exchanging those value when we pick a customer and we say, we want this [Rusty Rahmer]: customer to attend a conference. [Rusty Rahmer]: How good are we at getting them to be able to do that? [Rusty Rahmer]: Are we improving the journey that gets them to do that? [Rusty Rahmer]: When they do go to the conference, is that the right solution?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Is that moving them or not? [Michael Helbling]: That all needs to be rapid design, analytics behind it very quickly. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so you need a team who has all of those disciplines or can borrow all of those disciplines [Rusty Rahmer]: to deliver in that in a very agile or lean way, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: You're working model with some hybrid of agile, lean, kind of on-bonnish thinking that you [Rusty Rahmer]: put together to solve that problem.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But every two weeks, you're putting something out into market, you're getting results back [Michael Helbling]: immediately and you're saying, okay, this is working or this isn't working, fail, go [Rusty Rahmer]: on to the next idea. [Rusty Rahmer]: And that's where Test and Learn finds its home with all of these other disciplines helping [Rusty Rahmer]: to do segmentation more precisely. [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe we targeted the wrong audience with that message, content helping to improve the [Rusty Rahmer]: messaging consistently, time after time, you got all of that at your disposal to try and [Rusty Rahmer]: solve that problem.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Now, it is more expensive, I will say it again, than the center of excellence. [Rusty Rahmer]: But if all the center of excellence is doing is pumping out more cheaper, that's not impact. [Rusty Rahmer]: This is impact because I'm going to give them a problem. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I'm going to say, here's the population that I know that I want you to target to change [Rusty Rahmer]: that this is the population I've defined as having the problem of needing more evidence.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And I'll be able to look at that population and say they've moved or they haven't moved [Rusty Rahmer]: as customers as a result of the actions that this entire team has put forth. [Rusty Rahmer]: So I have a measurable result of impact at the end of that in a way that the center of [Rusty Rahmer]: excellence who just pumps out websites or pumps out email campaigns or pumps out like [Rusty Rahmer]: doesn't have any connectivity to an output or an impact output associated with it.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So it's just pumping out actions, but not results. [Rusty Rahmer]: This is tied to a result. [Julie Hoyer]: I really like how you started to define what a journey, so you were saying it's for a specific [Julie Hoyer]: audience with the same problem. [Julie Hoyer]: Because another thing I find is I spend a lot of time talking to my clients and stakeholders [Julie Hoyer]: about a journey, what they consider a journey.
[Julie Hoyer]: I've heard people say, I think maybe the purist is like, well, the journey should be defined [Julie Hoyer]: by the business ahead of time. [Julie Hoyer]: What is the ideal flow? [Julie Hoyer]: But then these companies spin up huge websites, huge digital ecosystems, they offer labs, [Julie Hoyer]: they offer webinars, they offer e-com online or their salespeople in person, and it gets [Julie Hoyer]: very complicated fast. [Julie Hoyer]: So then people want to say, well, we have all this behavioral data.
[Julie Hoyer]: Let's just use AI to surface the pattern, and that will tell us the actual journeys. [Julie Hoyer]: But what I hate about both of those is it's completely disconnected to the customer. [Julie Hoyer]: So I really like how you put those bounds around it, because I think that's something [Julie Hoyer]: that I've been searching for, because I've started to just get so crabby when people [Julie Hoyer]: want to talk about journeys. [Julie Hoyer]: I'm like, oh, freaking journeys again.
[Julie Hoyer]: There's no good answer. [Julie Hoyer]: But I really like the angle you're taking on it. [Rusty Rahmer]: So, Julie, you just stepped on a landmine for me. [Rusty Rahmer]: I am here.
[Michael Helbling]: Yay. [Rusty Rahmer]: Customer journey exercises. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, my God. [Rusty Rahmer]: In my life, if I could count the number of times I've walked by a room and looked in and [Rusty Rahmer]: saw like this massive arc of customer journey with stars and arrows and boxes, like graphic [Rusty Rahmer]: designer skills going to waste on this magnificent board that is a customer journey, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like from whatever, biggest waste of time I've ever seen. [Rusty Rahmer]: Actually, it's an exercise that's probably not a waste of time to do, but is so non-reality. [Rusty Rahmer]: So this is the analogy I like to give around this. [Rusty Rahmer]: If we were to take the average American's lifespan and say, well, what's the journey?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Well, I don't know. [Rusty Rahmer]: I'm born. [Rusty Rahmer]: If you average it out, you're born. [Rusty Rahmer]: You graduate high school.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You're born to two parents. [Rusty Rahmer]: Oh, by the way, you're a family of 2.5. [Rusty Rahmer]: I don't know who the 0.
5 is, but you have a 0.5 of a sibling. [Rusty Rahmer]: You go to high school, you graduate, you go to some four-year college, you get married, [Rusty Rahmer]: you have 2.5 kids of your own, you retire, whatever.
[Rusty Rahmer]: That's your entire life story, you go on vacations, you retire, and that's it. [Rusty Rahmer]: Literally no one in the United States lives that life. [Rusty Rahmer]: Literally no one lives that life. [Rusty Rahmer]: That's what a customer journey on a wall looks like at a company, and no one actually walks [Rusty Rahmer]: through that thing that way.
[Rusty Rahmer]: That's an average of people's lives that literally no one lives. [Rusty Rahmer]: The reality is, some people do go to college. [Rusty Rahmer]: Some people are born with six siblings, some are born with one, right, or none, just one [Rusty Rahmer]: individual child. [Rusty Rahmer]: Some go to college, some don't go to college.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Some get married, some don't. [Rusty Rahmer]: Some get divorced. [Rusty Rahmer]: Some have kids with the first relationship. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's messy.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The real world is messy. [Rusty Rahmer]: You can't create an arc that touches all of those points and pretend that that's a reality. [Rusty Rahmer]: That is not a reality. [Rusty Rahmer]: What you can do is exactly what we're talking about here is say, okay, no, I can't do a [Rusty Rahmer]: whole arc.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But if somebody's online shopping for a kayak, I can give them a journey to get them to a [Rusty Rahmer]: kayak. [Rusty Rahmer]: I can detect that, and I can get them to the kayak, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe they buy another one after that, so that's like a divorce. [Rusty Rahmer]: They go through the same purchasing thing again, okay, no problem, right, if it's fine.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You can only sort of detect in the moment what their need is and try to solve that need. [Rusty Rahmer]: You have different needs that you can solve for, but you can't configure them in a definitive [Rusty Rahmer]: way that they're going to go through them, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Even if you say, my biggest problem with this new product launch that I have is I have to [Rusty Rahmer]: create awareness. [Rusty Rahmer]: No one knows about my new product I'm about to launch into the market.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Okay, well, your first journeys are all going to be around awareness-based, right? [Michael Helbling]: Okay, great. [Rusty Rahmer]: Let's fast forward five years into your new product out there, and a competitor comes [Rusty Rahmer]: into the marketplace, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Here's a really good customer of yours that keeps buying your product, but suddenly there's [Rusty Rahmer]: a competitor in the market.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Well, they might have to go through awareness again. [Rusty Rahmer]: Any awareness might be how your product is better than what the competitor's product [Rusty Rahmer]: is, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like, sometimes they go back through the same journey again. [Rusty Rahmer]: That's what I'm saying.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So I think to try and create a journey which links all of these subjourneys together is [Rusty Rahmer]: insane. [Rusty Rahmer]: It never happens, but there are micro journeys. [Rusty Rahmer]: And at the end, at the tip of a micro journey is a value exchange. [Rusty Rahmer]: If I can get them to do this, they will move closer to being a better customer for me.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And if I can use data and analytics to determine what that need is, which is what I should [Rusty Rahmer]: be using it for, then I can put them on the right journey and score and evaluate my ability [Rusty Rahmer]: to deliver a good journey and a good value exchange to move them towards it being a better [Rusty Rahmer]: customer for me. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think the other analogy that's in the book that kind of works well here is the game of [Rusty Rahmer]: Plinko, right, which is this old wooden nickel game.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Drop it in the top. [Rusty Rahmer]: It hits these nails, and there are four buckets at the bottom that have different points associated [Michael Helbling]: with them. [Michael Helbling]: I think the wooden nickel is the customer. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I think at the bottom are the journeys that we're trying to put them on, like, okay, [Rusty Rahmer]: if I could get them on this journey, they'll become a better, if I can exchange this value [Rusty Rahmer]: with them through this journey, I'll make them a better customer.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Each one of those nails they're hitting on the way down is an opportunity, it's an interaction [Rusty Rahmer]: with your brand that is an opportunity for use data and that interaction to try and guess [Rusty Rahmer]: which bucket they need to be in at the bottom of that. [Rusty Rahmer]: And that is the game of data and analytics at the end of the day. [Rusty Rahmer]: When I use this to look at patterns and identify what my customer need is at scale for this [Rusty Rahmer]: group of people, this is the problem that they have with our brand.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And if I can identify that, now I know from marketing what problem I have to solve. [Rusty Rahmer]: I can measure the actions that I'm taking, the journey that I'm taking to try and get [Rusty Rahmer]: them to exchange that value, which I believe was, I can measure all of that and tell you [Rusty Rahmer]: how effective all of that is at changing my customers into better customers. [Val Kroll]: I like that a lot. [Val Kroll]: And I will say that the one thing that I repeated in my notes as I went through your book, [Michael Helbling]: I was like, the process is testing, like in there, in a couple of like, carrot, like that's, [Val Kroll]: yeah, where that all fits in.
[Val Kroll]: I love that. [Val Kroll]: So like if we have these problem mobilized pods that are focused on continuous delivery [Val Kroll]: of the portfolio of solutions that could potentially relieve or solve some of these [Val Kroll]: problems, like paint the picture. [Val Kroll]: So one thing that we didn't really get to talk about too much is like the system and [Val Kroll]: the system's expectations of how people behave today and how they're kind of rewarded for [Val Kroll]: activity to how the system behaves in this like more idealistic vision that you've painted.
[Val Kroll]: Like, can you talk a little bit about that? [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, again, and we've achieved this, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: I think at GSK, this was sort of the pinnacle of what we were able to do was put these teams [Rusty Rahmer]: together and the reward structure completely changes, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: We're not rewarding activity anymore. [Rusty Rahmer]: We're saying, here's a population that needs to move closer to the ideal customer set that [Rusty Rahmer]: we have. [Rusty Rahmer]: And here's a set of problems that we believe is standing in the way of them being that, [Rusty Rahmer]: iterate and solve that problem, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Validate that we've even got that, like maybe we've got the wrong, the way we've segmented [Rusty Rahmer]: these customers into this problem set may be wrong.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The value, the products, right, in the experience products, the value exchange experience [Rusty Rahmer]: products that should, you know, our conferences, maybe that isn't the answer to this problem [Rusty Rahmer]: that we think it is. [Rusty Rahmer]: Maybe that really doesn't move a customer forward. [Rusty Rahmer]: So look at the portfolio of things that we're trying to get them to do and our ability to [Rusty Rahmer]: actually get them to do that and help us optimize that and the way, again, reward.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Again, I think people today in the silos of the existing system are really innovative [Rusty Rahmer]: and ingenious. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think every team I've ever led has extremely talented people in it who are trying really [Rusty Rahmer]: hard and defining new ways of solving problems for the company. [Rusty Rahmer]: It just isn't latched up to something, a common problem that actually delivers impact the way [Rusty Rahmer]: that this system does and that we can reward and recognize those for that kind of innovation [Rusty Rahmer]: and ingenuity against a well-defined problem and a system that can measure the actual outcome [Rusty Rahmer]: of the efforts that they're doing, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And so, again, I can measure the cost of, you know, with a really broad brush, I can [Rusty Rahmer]: measure the cost of my centers of excellence today. [Rusty Rahmer]: I know how much they cost me. [Rusty Rahmer]: I know how much the tech stack they're working in costs me annually. [Rusty Rahmer]: I know how much headcounts in there.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I know contracts. [Rusty Rahmer]: I know all the answers to that, right, at a very high level. [Rusty Rahmer]: I know that cost. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I also know how much our impact that entire organization is having out in the real world [Rusty Rahmer]: in terms of growth.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I know those two things. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I know this model is significantly more expensive than that model, but I can show [Rusty Rahmer]: the results and the outcomes are significantly higher than the money that's being spent [Rusty Rahmer]: in this other model. [Rusty Rahmer]: And when I can do that, I can reward and recognize the people within the system for the [Rusty Rahmer]: amazing ingenuity that they're having within that system. [Michael Helbling]: So in the operating model chapter, you kind of develop this idea of, like, [Michael Helbling]: developing those cross-functional teams as opposed to sort of like center of [Michael Helbling]: excellence concepts.
[Michael Helbling]: So just to clarify boundaries a little bit. [Michael Helbling]: And also, I think if I was a business leader listening, I sort of have some [Michael Helbling]: questions about like, how deep should that go? [Michael Helbling]: Should I try to take everybody? [Michael Helbling]: Cause like some people are just specialists, like they are working on that thing.
[Michael Helbling]: And do I need to throw them in a cross-functional team or is there sort of that [Michael Helbling]: structure? [Michael Helbling]: And then I set up a like a tiger team sort of set up. [Michael Helbling]: Like how do you, how do you bridge that gap for people or advise people? [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, I think it's a great question, Michael.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And I think there are, it's hard to put that in the book, the experience and what [Rusty Rahmer]: I think, because I think, well, I say this because I think a smaller company has a [Rusty Rahmer]: different answer to that question than a larger company does. [Rusty Rahmer]: So it's hard to prescribe that clearly, but here's what I would say. [Michael Helbling]: I think, you know, this is, this is another analogy for you, Val. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think potato chips with no ridges break really easily in the dip.
[Rusty Rahmer]: They do. [Rusty Rahmer]: The reason ridges were invented is it makes the chip stronger, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: But ridges only go one way. [Michael Helbling]: You have to orient the chip correctly, Rusty.
[Michael Helbling]: Well, that's correct. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, yeah. [Michael Helbling]: Come on, you know, what's stronger? [Michael Helbling]: This is not our first time dipping a chip.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Anybody who dips horizontally is making a huge mistake. [Rusty Rahmer]: And that's the other. [Rusty Rahmer]: There's going to be half a chip in the dip. [Rusty Rahmer]: That happens.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's not going to be good. [Rusty Rahmer]: No, but, but what's even stronger than, than that, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Which, which I would say, if you only went with teams that were, you know, journey [Rusty Rahmer]: aligned, you would have horizontal, it's stronger than the plane chip where [Rusty Rahmer]: nobody's aligned to anything. [Rusty Rahmer]: But it isn't the strongest function that you're the strongest model that [Rusty Rahmer]: you can have.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The strongest model is the waffle fry. [Rusty Rahmer]: Seriously. [Rusty Rahmer]: The Chick-fil-A waffle fry is the strongest potato in the world. [Rusty Rahmer]: It can't be broken any way you try.
[Rusty Rahmer]: All right. [Rusty Rahmer]: So you get it. [Rusty Rahmer]: Crosscutting is actually twice as strong as, and I'm sorry, there's [Rusty Rahmer]: probably some engineer that'll tell me more to a waffle chip. [Rusty Rahmer]: Trader Joe's has a waffle chip.
[Rusty Rahmer]: They do. [Rusty Rahmer]: They absolutely do. [Rusty Rahmer]: That is a supreme dipping material vehicle. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's nice.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's real nice. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yes. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yes. [Rusty Rahmer]: So you get the point.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I think you can't just go one direction with this. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think to your point, Michael, in addition to these, the players on these [Rusty Rahmer]: teams that are, that are multifunctioned, cross-striped, whatever you want to call [Rusty Rahmer]: it, still need to belong to a discipline, a guild, which belong, the center of [Rusty Rahmer]: excellence still needs to exist. [Rusty Rahmer]: The work just doesn't get done in the center of excellence. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's now transferred out to these teams.
[Rusty Rahmer]: But the members of that team belong to the guild of the center of excellence, [Rusty Rahmer]: because we, if you just let it go, you lose all the discipline of a center of [Rusty Rahmer]: excellence that has, you know, updates the technology and the stack that they [Rusty Rahmer]: actually work in to make sure that continues, that there's a roadmap for [Rusty Rahmer]: that, that documentation continues, that standards for design continue. [Rusty Rahmer]: Right.
[Rusty Rahmer]: You can't, can't turn it all loose. [Rusty Rahmer]: I think you still retain a small center of excellence that continue to represent [Rusty Rahmer]: the guild and the need of the guild to be able to do its job fast and effectively. [Rusty Rahmer]: I also think it can, in a large organization, you should separate out the [Rusty Rahmer]: value delivery products, so conferences, white papers, these things should be [Rusty Rahmer]: developed by teams outside of the journey teams.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Journey teams should be mainly focused on identifying the right audiences, moving [Rusty Rahmer]: those audiences through the content journey and evolving the content journey [Rusty Rahmer]: to more effectively move them to exchange the value. [Rusty Rahmer]: But that portfolio of value things is actually another team that should [Rusty Rahmer]: actually develop and own those. [Rusty Rahmer]: Ultimately, if you can afford to do it, I think if you're a small [Rusty Rahmer]: organization, this sort of collapses a little bit on itself, you know, smaller [Rusty Rahmer]: teams, smaller, see if, you know, all that stuff.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So, center of excellence. [Michael Helbling]: But then you run into the age old Glen Gary, Glen Ross problem, you know, these [Michael Helbling]: leads, these leads are all good. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, the leads. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's a great movie, by the way.
[Rusty Rahmer]: No one has the patience to watch that movie anymore, but it is amazing dialogue. [Val Kroll]: Well, before Michael says what I think he's about to say, I have to ask, the [Val Kroll]: book was written in a very specific format, a format, the way to kind of phrase it. [Val Kroll]: So I think, Christine, you need to tell your future readers that are currently [Michael Helbling]: listeners, a little bit about how you made some of those choices. [Val Kroll]: Yeah.
[Michael Helbling]: Good question. [Rusty Rahmer]: So I actually wrote it long form originally. [Rusty Rahmer]: So it's a 500 page, there's a, there's a 500 page version of that book. [Rusty Rahmer]: And when it, before I even started writing the book, I have some mentors that [Rusty Rahmer]: I, that are sort of guiding me through the process.
[Rusty Rahmer]: We've written books before they are C-suite individuals who, who sort of were [Rusty Rahmer]: the people I was trying to speak to the most to help them understand why the [Rusty Rahmer]: money that they're spending isn't, you know, returning what they, what they [Rusty Rahmer]: really want. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so I had pitched the idea to them very early on, is this a book? [Rusty Rahmer]: Is this worth a book? [Rusty Rahmer]: Is this worth a book?
[Rusty Rahmer]: And they were like, oh my God, yes, definitely write that book. [Michael Helbling]: So, so they, they sort of, you know, helped me affirm that there was, there [Rusty Rahmer]: was something to be said here. [Rusty Rahmer]: I developed the 500 pager. [Rusty Rahmer]: I send it to them and they're like, I'm not reading it.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Like, who are you talking, like, what is this? [Rusty Rahmer]: Like, I don't have time to read this, you know, whatever. [Michael Helbling]: And they're like, when you came in here, you told us about this and we were all [Rusty Rahmer]: in, we totally understood it and we were ready to go back to our companies and [Rusty Rahmer]: make a change. [Rusty Rahmer]: Just tell us that's like, talk to us like you did then.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And so I had to go back and take the 500 pages and turn this into what is more of [Rusty Rahmer]: a conversation with the reader than, you know, than the 500 pages. [Rusty Rahmer]: It is really meant to be a conversation. [Rusty Rahmer]: It is spaced with timing, which, you know, when you first open it, it'll look [Rusty Rahmer]: like poetry. [Rusty Rahmer]: It is not poetry, but you will, after the first page, you'll sort of fall [Rusty Rahmer]: into this groove of single spacing pauses versus double spacing pauses.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And it helps make the points that I'm trying to make in shorter, you know, [Rusty Rahmer]: less stories, less get to the more get to the point CEOs sort of speak. [Rusty Rahmer]: And it, you know, it condensed the book significantly and it helped me say the [Rusty Rahmer]: same thing in a lot less words that I think C-suite people will be willing to endure. [Michael Helbling]: In fact, it's a funny story here. [Rusty Rahmer]: I'm working, I'm more of a podcaster.
[Rusty Rahmer]: I listen to things more than I read the physical copy. [Rusty Rahmer]: So, you know, I get the book published and I'm working on. [Rusty Rahmer]: Okay, now I got to get to the part that I would actually enjoy, which is the podcasting part. [Rusty Rahmer]: Everybody's like, my mentor's like, you have to do it.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It has to be your voice. [Rusty Rahmer]: So you got to do this. [Rusty Rahmer]: I'm like, okay, well, I've never done this before. [Rusty Rahmer]: So, okay, let me look into this.
[Rusty Rahmer]: There's a lot of work, editing and all that. [Rusty Rahmer]: But I'm like, wait, there are these great AI products out there now. [Rusty Rahmer]: You record like a 30 second sample and it'll, I'm like, yes, this is it. [Rusty Rahmer]: I'm going to do this, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: So I go, I buy the software, I record the 30 second sample. [Rusty Rahmer]: And then I immediately turn it loose on the first chapter of my book. [Rusty Rahmer]: And it actually did a pretty good look. [Rusty Rahmer]: It did a really good job of being me reading the first chapter, [Rusty Rahmer]: which was the problem, right?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Listen, I turn, I turn all of my devices to like speak in British [Rusty Rahmer]: because everything sounds smarter if you have a British accent. [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, you sound brilliant with a British accent. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like Siri talks to me and because I like to think that I'm around smart piece. [Rusty Rahmer]: So, okay, all my devices speak with a British accent to me.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The opposite, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: So you could read the script of idiocracy, [Rusty Rahmer]: but if you do it with a British accent, it sounds like the Magna Carta. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's amazing, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: Oppositely, if you have a Philadelphia accent and you read the Magna Carta, [Rusty Rahmer]: you sound like you're reading it at idiocracy.
[Rusty Rahmer]: And that's exactly what I was like, oh my God, is that my accent? [Rusty Rahmer]: Do I sound like that? [Rusty Rahmer]: It was terrible. [Rusty Rahmer]: So I ended up having to hire someone to do it.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's almost done. [Rusty Rahmer]: But like, it's so much. [Rusty Rahmer]: But I'm not even, I only write to the guy in email [Rusty Rahmer]: because I don't want him to hear my voice now. [Rusty Rahmer]: I won't talk to him on the phone because I don't want him to hear out there.
[Michael Helbling]: Yeah, water. [Rusty Rahmer]: Water, water. [Rusty Rahmer]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: This is awesome.
[Michael Helbling]: This is so good. [Michael Helbling]: And the book is really good. [Michael Helbling]: And it does read. [Michael Helbling]: Once you get into it, you do read with a little bit of cadence.
[Michael Helbling]: And I definitely picked that up as I was reading it. [Michael Helbling]: I was like, at first I was like, oh, what's going on with this book? [Michael Helbling]: And then I was like, oh, actually it kind of does flow once you get used to it. [Michael Helbling]: So it is well worth it.
[Michael Helbling]: And I don't think it's just for CEOs either. [Michael Helbling]: Because I think even when you're sitting in a seat, [Michael Helbling]: I think you can advocate for some of these things. [Michael Helbling]: If you're not the senior executive in your department, [Michael Helbling]: you can sort of raise your hand or start to apply some of the principles [Michael Helbling]: even in where you're at. [Michael Helbling]: So, okay, we do have to start to wrap up.
[Michael Helbling]: Awesome conversation. [Michael Helbling]: Thank you so much, Rusty. [Michael Helbling]: It's been too long. [Michael Helbling]: And you've been working on this super hard.
[Michael Helbling]: It's like, wow, you've got a lot done. [Michael Helbling]: I was like, what have I been doing? [Michael Helbling]: No, so thank you for all the work, putting that together [Michael Helbling]: and coming on the show to talk about it. [Michael Helbling]: Okay, one of the things we do is go around the horn, [Michael Helbling]: share a last call, something that might be of interest to our guests.
[Michael Helbling]: Rusty, you're our guest or might be of interest to our listeners. [Michael Helbling]: And Rusty, you're our guest. [Rusty Rahmer]: What is your last call? [Rusty Rahmer]: Have you guys read this book, Analytics the Right Way?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Have you heard of it? [Michael Helbling]: It's, sorry. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: Little plug for Tim.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Little plug for Tim. [Rusty Rahmer]: No, that's good. [Rusty Rahmer]: Um, lately, I have fallen in love. [Rusty Rahmer]: This is the second time I'm listening to the same seven series podcast.
[Rusty Rahmer]: It's the first time I've ever listened to a podcast twice. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's by Chris Hayes. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's called the AI End Game. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's about seven podcasts, about an hour each podcast.
[Rusty Rahmer]: They're not terribly long. [Rusty Rahmer]: He has guests on to each episode. [Rusty Rahmer]: What I love about it is it covers every, it's a, it's very sort of top thinking, [Rusty Rahmer]: you know, about AI, right? [Rusty Rahmer]: In the world, everything from philosophical.
[Rusty Rahmer]: So he'll have, you know, some, some professors on that will talk about what is [Rusty Rahmer]: intelligence, what is sentience, can AI ever achieve this to the political [Rusty Rahmer]: ramifications of how do we govern this? [Rusty Rahmer]: How do we write policies to control this? [Rusty Rahmer]: Where do we need policy to control it? [Rusty Rahmer]: To history.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Talking about AI summers and AI winters of innovation and how, how we got to where [Rusty Rahmer]: we are and what the weaknesses and strengths of where we are and capability is. [Rusty Rahmer]: And even economics. [Rusty Rahmer]: So, you know, how, what's this going to do to jobs or what do we think it's going to [Rusty Rahmer]: do to jobs? [Rusty Rahmer]: What's it going to do to the stock market?
[Rusty Rahmer]: All of these different things covered in this series. [Rusty Rahmer]: Really big thinking, I think, from some of the smartest people in the world as guests. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I really love this podcast. [Rusty Rahmer]: Like I said, it's my second time through it because I think there's so much to think about [Rusty Rahmer]: and see differently than, than the AI software where we're interacting with every day.
[Rusty Rahmer]: The more larger ramifications of all of this stuff, which is, which is really cool. [Michael Helbling]: Nice. I'll have to give it a listen. [Michael Helbling]: All right, Julie, what about you?
[Michael Helbling]: What's your last call? [Julie Hoyer]: My last call, funny enough, is actually a David Epstein letter newsletter. [Michael Helbling]: And it's him and Brad Stuhlberg. [Julie Hoyer]: And it's them discussing two books that they recently published earlier this year.
[Julie Hoyer]: The books are The Way of Excellence and Inside the Box. [Julie Hoyer]: And it's a really cool discussion back and forth and a really nice highlight of both of the books. [Julie Hoyer]: And it really made me want to go and actually get them and read them in full. [Julie Hoyer]: And the title of the newsletter is How to Pay Attention and Care Deeply in a Chaotic World.
[Julie Hoyer]: And so I'll just give a few teasers of like quotes just from the beginning of it, [Julie Hoyer]: but it was such an interesting read. [Julie Hoyer]: And like I said, I think that the books diving into these concepts more would be super interesting [Julie Hoyer]: to go and check out. [Julie Hoyer]: So the first one is the quality of your attention shapes the quality of your relationships, [Julie Hoyer]: work and leisure, which is to say the quality of your attention shapes the quality of your life, [Julie Hoyer]: which really like hit home for me.
[Julie Hoyer]: And then they talked about it's changed from time management to attention management. [Julie Hoyer]: And then the last one I'll give you is Wealth of Information Creates a Poverty of Attention. [Julie Hoyer]: So like those three things just like really caught my eye. [Julie Hoyer]: So highly recommend reading the newsletter.
[Julie Hoyer]: And then I would not be surprised how many people go and purchase the books for more. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, Julie, if we're telling people to like trim down, like I think that goes against [Michael Helbling]: what we're doing here. [Julie Hoyer]: But it's over. [Julie Hoyer]: It's about quality, right?
[Julie Hoyer]: We've got quality here. [Julie Hoyer]: It's okay. [Julie Hoyer]: Yeah, yeah. [Julie Hoyer]: That's right.
[Michael Helbling]: Thank you. [Michael Helbling]: Appreciate you. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: Keep listening to this, but cut everything else out.
[Michael Helbling]: Everything else trash. [Julie Hoyer]: We need your full attention, people. [Julie Hoyer]: That's right. [Michael Helbling]: Val, what's your last call?
[Val Kroll]: Okay, so mine is a New York Times article that my husband sent me who is a philosophy major. [Val Kroll]: And the title is The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors. [Val Kroll]: And it talks about how a lot of AI companies like Anthropic and Google DeepMind are recruiting [Val Kroll]: philosophers to join their kind of crew and some of the things that they're really leaning [Val Kroll]: into as some of their like skill sets that are different or have a different perspective or [Val Kroll]: angle than others is around like obviously the ethics, but like being able to take like [Val Kroll]: abstract concepts and make it easier to digest like all those like conceptual challenges around [Val Kroll]: AI.
[Val Kroll]: But the one thing that I found really interesting, I mean, it's super interesting and they have like, [Val Kroll]: you know, different quotes from different people. [Val Kroll]: I was like, oh, like what are they called like forced to play philosophers? [Val Kroll]: Like thinking of being so funny. [Val Kroll]: And I was like, no, they're just philosophers.
[Val Kroll]: Like it's just philosophers. [Val Kroll]: That's the title. [Val Kroll]: It's like, okay. [Val Kroll]: Wow.
[Val Kroll]: All right. [Val Kroll]: Well, there you have it. [Val Kroll]: But it's just so cool to think about like how AI and, you know, some of these roles and how it's [Val Kroll]: kind of morphing and changing what is seen as mission critical to like move us forward. [Val Kroll]: But it was kind of a fun read.
[Val Kroll]: So that's my last call. [Michael Helbling]: So you're telling me they can't be advanced philosophers? [Val Kroll]: Senior advanced. [Michael Helbling]: Advanced philosophizing.
[Michael Helbling]: Sort of like how we do an advanced analytic. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, exactly. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: Sorry.
[Val Kroll]: That's good. [Val Kroll]: No, good. [Val Kroll]: Those data philosophers. [Val Kroll]: Yeah, exactly.
[Val Kroll]: Yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: I'll tell him that he'll love that. [Val Kroll]: Good data in front of it. [Rusty Rahmer]: Just to build on that for a second.
[Rusty Rahmer]: There has been a longstanding philosophical test. [Rusty Rahmer]: I mean, I mean, they've been wondering if computers will ever be able to imitate a human [Rusty Rahmer]: for a long time, ever a chief sentence or whatever. [Rusty Rahmer]: And the longstanding test has always been if a human in a blind test cannot tell that [Rusty Rahmer]: they're having a conversation with a computer, that has been the philosophical bar [Rusty Rahmer]: that sentience has had to reach in computers.
[Rusty Rahmer]: If he could do that, then it would be blown that away already. [Rusty Rahmer]: And so the need to define what is it that makes us different than a computer is like [Rusty Rahmer]: a huge philosophical debate right now. [Rusty Rahmer]: And I'm sure that gets right into it. [Rusty Rahmer]: It's really exciting times for that.
[Val Kroll]: How about you, Michael? [Val Kroll]: What's your last call? [Michael Helbling]: Well, mine is a little more fun this time, but I do love a good allegory. [Michael Helbling]: And a blog post that Charlie Tyson worked with shared with me by a guy named Gerard Rubio.
[Michael Helbling]: It's sort of an allegorical story about startups. [Michael Helbling]: And I thought it was well written and kind of a fun read. [Michael Helbling]: So we'll have a link to it. [Michael Helbling]: But basically, he's sort of talking about a guy who's decided to start an oven business [Michael Helbling]: and goes off into all the different things that happen to a founder through that process.
[Michael Helbling]: And I think now in this day and age, because it's so easy to do something with AI, [Michael Helbling]: I think everyone sort of has this thought of like, oh, I should start a company. [Michael Helbling]: And then this will sort of get you through probably the first few years of that pretty easily. [Michael Helbling]: And if you were thinking about doing a product. [Michael Helbling]: So it's a good read.
[Michael Helbling]: It's a fun little read. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: Well, Rusty, again, thank you so much. [Michael Helbling]: What a pleasure to have you back on the show and hang out a little bit.
[Michael Helbling]: It's always great. [Michael Helbling]: I appreciate the insight and the wealth of experience that you kind of distilled [Michael Helbling]: into your book, Working As Designed, which is available, I believe, on all the major platforms. [Michael Helbling]: So you should probably pick up a copy just so you can say, I have a book by Rusty Raymer. [Michael Helbling]: And also read it.
[Michael Helbling]: Yes. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: So that's probably more important than say you have it. [Michael Helbling]: But anyways, all right, I know as you've been listening, you're probably thinking, [Michael Helbling]: hey, I've got a couple of questions or things like that we'd love to hear from you.
[Michael Helbling]: And the best way to do that is through our website or our LinkedIn, or you can email us [Michael Helbling]: at contact at analyticshour.io. [Michael Helbling]: And also, as you're out there listening, please add a review or comments also where you listen [Michael Helbling]: on Spotify or wherever. [Michael Helbling]: So we'd love to hear from you or see reviews and ratings is there as well.
[Michael Helbling]: Always is awesome. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: So I think that's it. [Michael Helbling]: And I think I speak for both of my two co-hosts, Julie and Val, when I say no matter what your [Michael Helbling]: organizational structure, whether you're a center of excellence, a Tiger team, or a cross-functional [Michael Helbling]: porridge, or you're defining two big customer journeys, keep analyzing.
[Announcer]: Thanks for listening. [Announcer]: Let's keep the conversation going with your comments, suggestions, and questions on Twitter [Announcer]: at analyticshour on the web at analyticshour.io, our LinkedIn group, and the Measure Chat Slack [Announcer]: group. [Announcer]: Music for the podcast by Josh Crowhurst.
[Announcer]: Those smart guys wanted to fit in. [Announcer]: So they made up a term called analytics. [Charles Barkley]: Analytics don't work. [Michael Helbling]: Do the analytics say go for it no matter who's going for it?
[Michael Helbling]: So if you and I were on the field, the analytics say go for it. [Michael Helbling]: It's the stupidest, laziest, lamest thing I've ever heard for reasoning in competition. [Michael Helbling]: You do in the French Quarter, nothing crazy. [Michael Helbling]: And we had come out of a place and there was a lady that was really pretty inebriated, I would say.
[Michael Helbling]: And the rest of us were just like, oh, well, and we kept going. [Michael Helbling]: But Rusty, because he's such a nice guy, stops to try to help her into a cab and make sure she's [Michael Helbling]: okay. [Michael Helbling]: And she turns around and she goes, you have the most beautiful salt and pepper hair. [Rusty Rahmer]: Me, Marles, really, her two eyes are going different directions.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah. [Rusty Rahmer]: So obliterated, right? [Michael Helbling]: It was something so funny. [Michael Helbling]: Because I was like, oh, yeah.
[Michael Helbling]: But Rusty, because he tried to be nice. [Michael Helbling]: And this lady's like, oh, wow. [Julie Hoyer]: But your image cut through the fog that she was in when she saw you clearly. [Rusty Rahmer]: Hold five with me, I'm sure.
[Julie Hoyer]: There's a whole group of good-looking men that help me into a cab. [Val Kroll]: Yeah, I think one of the stories she tells. [Michael Helbling]: Through this day, he has this image of her guardian angel. [Michael Helbling]: Amazing.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Convinced she went to hell, unfortunately. [Michael Helbling]: Anyway, good times. [Tim Wilson]: I can, I can, I can hop into the PIVOTS FOR ANALYSIS on, so, listen. [Rusty Rahmer]: I have to write a couple more books, at least, okay?
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, at least. [Michael Helbling]: I'm on it. [Rusty Rahmer]: My movie is next, by the way. [Rusty Rahmer]: So that should help me.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Oh, well, that's perfect. [Rusty Rahmer]: Perfect. [Rusty Rahmer]: The analytics movie. [Rusty Rahmer]: That's what I want to hear.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah. [Val Kroll]: Nice. [Val Kroll]: The red stapler becomes, what would it be? [Val Kroll]: I was told I could have access.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, I was told I could have access to the snowflake tables. [Rusty Rahmer]: Yeah, and if I could just, if I could please give me back my access to the snowflake tables. [Tim Wilson]: Oh, Gershoff. [Tim Wilson]: Can't you hear it?
[Tim Wilson]: It's a whole movie, I'm telling you. [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, it's a tie between Gershoff, Joe Sutherland, and Gary Angel. [Tim Wilson]: Oh, Joe, yeah. [Tim Wilson]: Joe.
[Michael Helbling]: Oh, we. [Michael Helbling]: I feel like there's somebody else. [Michael Helbling]: How many times have each of them been on? [Michael Helbling]: Three.
[Michael Helbling]: Haven't we had Chelsea on three times, too? [Michael Helbling]: I thought so. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: Because we did two in quick succession last year with her.
[Michael Helbling]: Well, this is what I always try to do analysis on. [Val Kroll]: Yeah, is this like the high problem of like 2010, where it's like capitalization, so it doesn't. [Rusty Rahmer]: Look, it's like a real company here. [Rusty Rahmer]: Tim does all the work, and he's got four bosses.
[Rusty Rahmer]: Tell them what he did wrong. [Michael Helbling]: You know what? [Michael Helbling]: Meanwhile, meanwhile, Tim's over there typing into Claude, and Claude's like, [Michael Helbling]: you're absolutely right. [Michael Helbling]: I did forget about that, guest.
[Michael Helbling]: You're right to bring that up. [Michael Helbling]: You're right to call me out on that. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, that's right. [Val Kroll]: One was like the last time.
[Val Kroll]: How many times have Tim and Moee fought or something? [Tim Wilson]: Oh, what triggers Tim? [Tim Wilson]: Like, those are always. [Tim Wilson]: Does it take up on notes and argument?
[Val Kroll]: It's pretty good. [Michael Helbling]: Rock flag and turn around that shovel.
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