Notes:
Sheared - Shedding Your Coat of Corporate Conformity in the Age of eCommerce
The 2021 eCommerce Organizational Benchmark Report
Transcript:
Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. No question, being an eCommerce leader is one of the most challenging jobs in commerce. You need people that are on your side. Shepherds, you might say, that get how hard it is and spend a lot of time thinking about how to help. Chris Perry and Oskar Kaszubski, co-founders of firstmovr, have sat in that seat across brands, such as Kellogg's, Reckitt, WellPet, Kimberly Clark and Mondelez, and now spend their days on education and change management advising. They've released a delightful and extremely useful new digestive free advice called Sheared - Shedding Your Coat of Corporate Conformity in the Age of eCommerce. Rob and I sheepishly asked them to be on to walk us through it, and like lambs to the slaughter, they agreed.
Peter Crosby:
So Chris and Oscar, thank you so much for bringing the power combo of both your brains to the Digital Shelf Institute. Now, I'm not going to be sheepish about this, your new ebook, Sheared - Shedding Your Coat of Corporate Conformity in the Age of eCommerce, is a fantastic resource for helping eCommerce leaders and doers basically rethink some of the assumptions and habits that may be holding them back from achieving maximum results. So I beg of you, Chris, please sketch out, what were you seeing across your engagements at firstmovr that brought this new thought leadership lamb into the world? And I warn you, I may or may not be done with these puns.
Chris Perry:
First, Thank you for having both Oskar and me, both you and Rob, for having us on. And it's so refreshing to be, I would say, in a room full of fellow sheep lovers who don't mind throwing themselves under the sheep bus with these fun jokes and puns, because this was a perfect analogy for what story we wanted to tell. But I think I have no doubt, Oscar and I are hopefully representing a lot of sentiment in this space today, having been in eCommerce and digital for decades now, which are centuries of eCommerce years. We kind of patiently waited for what we wished wasn't the pandemic, but became this accelerator, obviously, over the last two years of digital consumption in eCommerce.
Chris Perry:
And now there's really not a why is eCommerce or what is eCommerce question, it's more of the how and how do we accelerate this? But so telling the why story or the what story isn't necessarily as important, as we realized in our engagements with some amazing brands and fellow firstmovr leaders out there. It wasn't the what and the why, it was the why aren't we moving faster now that we know why and what is happening to us? And so it was really this, it's not that we don't know what's happening, it's that we're still not really moving. And so we thought, how do we tell this story in a way that we can identify bad behaviors in a fun way that doesn't point people out or call people out individually? Because that's not the point. It's not about disrespect, it's about storytelling to get people aware, maybe of themselves, but maybe of a broader behavior holding us back or fencing us in.
Chris Perry:
And we felt like the sheep was just such a good theme because we really, I know I've said this to Oscar many times, I'm like, "It's like it's such a herd mentality. I just got off the phone. I can't believe this just happened. He sends me back stuff all the time." And again, it's always with great respect for the individuals, but the behavior seems so silly. So we really wanted to identify those behaviors, but not just do it and then walk away and not give anyone something to act on. How do we actually change? Change is thrown out too freely all the time, and we don't actually lay out the steps for change. And so we thought we would do that with this fun story, and it really has gotten some awesome feedback. And so we took a risk, but it was a calculated one, and we're obviously excited to talk about it today with you.
Peter Crosby:
So Chris or Oskar, the thing in your subtitle is corporate conformity, it is that herd mentality. What do you feel like people are conforming to? Who's responsible for all this? What are they conforming to? Who's leading them? Or if it's not an individual, why do you think there's so much herd mentality? Oskar, do you want to feel that?
Chris Perry:
Yeah, Oskar, why don't you start?
Oskar Kaszubski:
Yeah. Again, thank you for having us. But for me, CPGs or large organizations are like rubber bands. If there is too much change, you pull the rubber band, the rubber band's going to come back to its natural state because of what the CPG needs to report to the street, all of the different financial kinds of constraints that every single organization has. So in a way, the whole organization needs to survive from a quarter to a quarter, answer any analyst results, answer any board questions, go to events like Cagney and to be able to showcase what they are trying to do about their growth. But if you actually are looking historically, a lot of the CPGs have not had growth in the last 10 years, they've been struggling with it, just because of a lot of the competition. So in a way, the organization is trying to balance it out, how to bring in some new ideas into it, but they also know it but they got to survive next quarter and they got to survive next quarter. So that's why those bad behaviors come out, and basically the whole organization is like, "Well, it has worked for us in the last hundred years. It can work for one more quarter." And I think that's really what's happening.
Chris Perry:
100%. And honestly, the word short-termism or quarterly capitalism is a real thing, and honestly holds most companies back outside of maybe the tech giants, the Amazons of the world, who've been able to kind of showcase consistent growth and then over time started to build up that profitability through other unique ways to market. But it's that short-termism and that history that holds people back, because whether visible or not visible, it's holding a culture in place that is often risk averse, is organized in some silos, not with bad intention, just by nature of how we used to go to market Often there's not clear growth goals in place. So we're all about growth, but that's like me saying all of us are going to walk north today. Well, north could be to Alaska, to Russia, to Canada, to Iceland. We could all end up in very different places north. But if we really had a very specific north direction, one specific degree on the compass we were going to walk ,we'd all end up in roughly the same place.
Chris Perry:
And so when you don't have that, you end up figuring out how to navigate in that environment. And that environment sometimes can be very ineffective. So that's where you get a lot of bureaucracy and politics, because people figured out how to game the system they're in, not operate in a real system that would be for the real game we're all actually really playing, which is long term growth and sustainability and profitability and whatnot.
Rob Gonzalez:
What's interesting about this moment that we're in now, and you all go through eight factors in your delightful book here, but what's interesting about the moment that we're in now is that everyone at this point understands that eCommerce is a thing for all categories, and it's only going to get more important. And over the last 10 years, the major FMCG manufacturers have all first dipped their toes in eCommerce, they had an Amazon team, then maybe they had the VP of eCommerce, then maybe they had a digital center of excellence somewhere, then maybe they had a chief digital officer. And there's been all of this attempt to build teams, get talent, have executive responsibility towards something having to do with digital. And yet, to your point, they still struggle with the transformation here.
Rob Gonzalez:
Benedict Evans, the analyst out of the UK, shared data that he got from IRI recently. If you look at brick sales for FMCG companies, the big FMCG companies have about 60 to 70% of market share between them in all major categories in store. Online, the small, medium businesses and upstarts have 70% market share. So every dollar that becomes digital, the old CPG companies are hemorrhaging share there. And it's a real wake up call. Now what I wanted to dig into here is getting into detailed failure modes on how a large manufacturer with a hundred years of history can want to change, can put somebody in charge to change, and still fail to make the change. The hidden failure modes to address this stuff, I find super interesting. So OsKar, can we start with what my personal favorite is, executive commitment and executive sponsorship for digital shelf transformation?
Oskar Kaszubski:
No, that sounds good. So what we would like to see in an organization is an organization where the CEO basically has a list of publicly and really persistent priorities, that it's both talk about on the street, as well as talk within the organization, when it comes to eCommerce and digital transformation. A few things that we would like to see is also being able to actually explain the terminology and explain the methodology. Because if you actually go to a room and ask people what digital means or what eCommerce means, and you ask 12 different people, you're probably going to get 12 different answers. So the CEO should really think about how to set the tone for that entire narrative, to be able to kind of get the whole organization embedded. It's like, Hey, we are not only rowing towards north or walking towards north, as Chris said, but the north is. So that definition, where are we going, why we need to change, it definitely needs to come down.
Oskar Kaszubski:
But where we see a lot of those failed moves is a few things. Number one, is sometimes we have a CEO that feels it comes in from outside. They want to actually bring a lot of the change. They are all embedded into eCommerce. But the challenge that they have is that they have 11 other C-suite executives that are not necessarily bought in. And if you think about it, that happens with supply chain, that happens with IT, with R&D. A lot of those people don't change that often, you don't have that many new people coming into the organization. There are a lot of people that probably have been at that organization for many, many years. So most likely there's going to be a case scenario where the CEO's coming from outside, he's totally bought in, and he's trying to institute a new direction.
Oskar Kaszubski:
If a CEO has grown in from its ranks, we don't see that embedment and that belief in eCommerce happening that often. Because then again, they are really focused internally on the organization, what made the organization work. I think some of it is also happening because all of the C-suite executives are not necessarily shoppers. I have said for many, many years, one of the key problems that we have is that all of the decisions around digital commerce are made by middle aged white men that never shop online or never shop in the store. So they really don't understand the criticality of that behavior that's changing. Why parents nowadays, bombarded with social media, don't have time to go to the store with their kid, because their life is exposed. So I think from that perspective, that's definitely a problem.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Another example I'll give you is where eCommerce or digital becomes a little bit of a bandaid and they bring in a chief digital officer into the organization. And that chief digital officer is supposed to be kind of setting up the pace of change, but nobody else has bought in. Nobody else has the same incentive across the organization. So the chief supply officer doesn't have any eCommerce incentive, the CMO doesn't have any eCommerce incentive. So just having that band aid of a chief digital officer basically becomes very empty. But Chris, you always had a lot of those examples around measure measurement and the KPIs. Any good stories that come to you?
Chris Perry:
For sure. And we're going to talk a little bit about measurement in one of these areas today, but I think from an executive perspective, again, it's one thing to say it because you know you need to say it, it's another thing to nod whether you really agree with it or not because the other person said that it was important, and technically they are the face of the company to the public and internally. The reality is, a lot of times the executives aren't measured on change either. So it's great to say, "I believe in change." If I'm not measured on it, what am I going to do when I have to make a decision between something that meets my metrics and something that meets what my heart tells me is really where it's going to go, what's going to keep me employed, what's going to keep me getting my bonus?
Chris Perry:
And it's not because of bad intentions. We're all measured. We are what we measure. And so that goes back to a personal level too. We had one president of a business division that we shared, I'll leave them nameless to protect the innocent, who literally said, "I love the story of this investment opportunity to double down in eCommerce. I'm not allowed to do this. My boss doesn't allow me to do this in my PNL." Now, I don't know if that was true. I don't know if that was just, to be fair, a BS answer so that they didn't have to give us what we were asking for. But it did feel sincere at the time, because I really don't think they were really allowed to make those extra investments and pull away from things they knew were tried and true in the past. And so that is a reality. We have to change metrics, which we'll talk a little bit more about here. But that also has to start at the top, because they're measured on that short term to the board, to the street, and that's what's going to keep them in their careers at their level, is delivering on what everyone is expecting of them.
Rob Gonzalez:
It's interesting. If I tie some of these things together, Oskar said that the CEO could come from the outside, not know the company's culture, could in general, as a CEO be disconnected from shoppers and the shopper experience. And could also be saying, "We need to transform and maybe tell a good story or do some type of a digital thought leadership exercise with Amazon on Amazon lockers and future of shopping," or whatever, but not actually drive the organizational change. It's almost like if you're missing any one of the major components, like not actually understanding the new shopper journey, not understanding digital, not understanding KPIs, and not being connected through culturally to be able to drive the change, if you're short on any one of those four, the whole thing can collapse.
Rob Gonzalez:
I'm just, I'm just thinking, this is going back a few years, but Ron Johnson and J.C. Penney. Came from the outside, was definitely a digital guy, but didn't know the J.C. Penney shopper, didn't know the J.C. Penney culture, and J.C. Penney isn't what it was before his tenure. And so it is really interesting, the observation that taking somebody from the outside who "knows this stuff" won't necessarily get the job done. So can we move over to the actual KPIs that you'd want them to drive a little bit? Is it reasonable to jump over there?
Chris Perry:
For sure. And I think that ultimately, again, KPIs for every organization can get uber granular and will vary by function and level and region and global and local. But like I said, I feel like most people feel that everyone is enabled towards overall growth, and yes, but the brand team often, yes, has some growth goals, but they don't directly activate everything. I was a brand manager in my past life, so I was like two degrees from Kevin Bacon, but the sales team was one degree or half a degree from Kevin Bacon. So if we didn't deliver the goal in my performance review, and I didn't do this, but I could literally say, "Well, sales didn't activate." I could give some bogus reason for why I didn't enable the sales team. "It wasn't me. It was they didn't activate my plans or they didn't sell in." And maybe that was partially true. All together, we didn't hit the goals. But they were measured on the month. They were measured on the quarter. They were measured on the year. I was measured on my three year pipeline. And again, it was okay if I changed my packaging, because I can see it in the market, it'll be done by the time I get promoted, and I'll move on and somebody else will come in and inherit whatever I left over. Because a lot of these rotations are relatively quickly in a lot of CPGs.
Chris Perry:
So from a KPI perspective, honestly the digital shelf metrics are a huge part of this. A lot of people write them off because that seems so tactical. Well, yeah, it's blocking and tackling like every few minutes, all the time. This isn't, "Hey, I worked for six months to develop my relationship with the buyer. And when we had the reset in store, we took him to dinner and they gave us some really great placement at eye level and a couple end caps. And we're done. And now we got to deliver." But it's a different type of effort, and that effort has to be on everyday excellence, not just everyday excellent relationships. It's got to be a relationship with the algorithm and the dashboards and vendor central and all the partners and tools that help you do this.
Chris Perry:
So it does feel really tactical, but those KPIs can be tiered. Obviously, the people on the ground have certain ones, and then obviously leaders are accountable to the overall improvement against those goals. And then one thing we do, and we can talk a little bit more about this. I know Oskar has perspective on this too. We try to teach, a lot of times, in our training programs and whatnot, leading and lagging metrics, which sounds like a really simple concept. But you don't control sales and share, you never did, but that's our goal. Those are what we're told we're supposed to achieve. You literally don't control those. What you do control are actions that lead to leading metrics like traffic, page views, which you can drive with investment, in stock rates, content completeness, but also some level of qualitative quality of content, reviews, recency, rating, number. There are all these things that you can control that lead to traffic and conversion and order value and repeat rate and profitability, which are the leading metrics that drive the lagging metrics of sales and share and long term customer value. But if you don't organize them that way, everyone's trying to go after growth in very different ways, like we said, different degrees of north.
Rob Gonzalez:
So let's tie it back to the theme and maybe put a bow on it. We're talking about failure modes of executive leadership for digital shelf success and digital shelf transformation. And there's a strong case to be made here that what a C-suite is reporting on has to include some of these KPIs that you're talking about operationally. And it can't just be sales, can't just be shared, it actually has to include more of the in the details weeds on digital, just because the nature of digital is fought and won and lost in the details, which is, as you're saying, very distinctive from brick. I will say, just as a final thought before moving on to the next topic here, that I find it interesting that none of these or nothing close to them are in any 10 K right now. Which, if you're the CEO, to something Oskar said right at the beginning, quarter by quarter, you've got to report to the street. And there's not a single one of these non gap metrics that I see talked about in any of the 10 Ks that I've seen. And yet, eCommerce is there all the time.
Chris Perry:
Legitimately, if we say the words growth, digital, transformation, maybe sprinkle in a D2C, maybe we acquired a digitally native brand so we can mess them up as well, we're going to look awesome, and we're going to talk about the growth we never got because we didn't do it right. I'm not saying that to be mean, I'm not trying to be CEO of a company, but it's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and mock them. But my point is, to Oskar's point before too, you can't say digital transformation and what you actually meant was D2C, because that is a piece of it, that's not all of it. But if you're just measuring on growth, no one knows how you got that growth. You can't just say, "We're going to double our business online." How? How are you going to do that? There's all these different types of growth you could go after, what kind are you going to go after?
Rob Gonzalez:
Chris, you gotta make that bingo card for 10 K, digital transformation bingo. I would play that.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Yeah, but you forgot one secret ingredient. You got to say, "And five billion in two years."
Chris Perry:
Oh no, no, exactly. You're not legitimate unless you hit five billion. Okay. So why five billion? I don't know. It just sounded good, because we'd already hit two, so we needed to hit five. If no one asks, it sounds really smart. But the moment one person asks the question, the Jenga tower falls apart.
Peter Crosby:
Well, I think that's where, the conversation that we're having, not that I understand it, but I can put myself in the seat of somebody who's making these choices. And as you said, peanut gallery aside, it's a super complicated job with the incentives that they don't control that they are subject to. So I think that's where the section that you wrote on focused leadership is a super way to think about it, because at the end of the day, it's individual human beings who have taken on these leadership roles who have to figure out how to work and drive this change in the midst of things that they don't have complete control over. So I'd love for you, Chris, to dig into this area of focused leadership and how you think about the people and how they work, the ones that can jumpstart this business.
Chris Perry:
And I would say, we deliberately chose focus leadership, we used to call this dedicated leadership, but focus leadership. And this really, ultimately, it's a dynamic term. Because with any new or new initiative, which often, as you all said at the beginning, starts as a special project and then becomes a team and then becomes a center of excellence. At some point, someone had to be accountable to it, which goes back to KPIs. Someone, for eCommerce, was owning eComm. Every change, whether it's the metaverse or voice or whatever, social, everything has to have someone who owns it to begin with. But it shouldn't necessarily be dedicated, I.e., separated, dedicated, and it may have to be in stages. But you almost need your innovation pipeline laid out for the succession planning, because what happens is that most companies do evolve their structures. They get great talent in place or they try to get it in place, but they miss the structure part and they miss the structure evolution plan.
Chris Perry:
And because it feels easier to keep eComm as kind of this separate thing, you end up with this very separate, dedicated but separate thing, that never re-embeds in the organization. And Profitero put out that 2021 benchmarking study, which was flush with cool stats that really support a lot of this. But they flagged that it was like 15% of organizations that they surveyed had an integrated team across functions, and only 13% of organizations had embedded KPIs, which goes back to our point. And those two work really closely together.
Chris Perry:
Now, we've had some leaders that we've talked with had said, "I don't think my organization's ready yet for the embedded." We're still kind of what Profitero called a sidecar, or it's an embedded team that's kind of just in sales as a siloed team. And that's fair. You may not be ready yet. But if we actually laid out the plan the same way we laid out our growth goals, by year three, we're in an integrated phase. What would need to be true to make that true? Because if we don't have that planned out, we stay in a sidecar. Maybe it's a really good sidecar. We've had, we've seen a couple big companies, CPGs, create separate business divisions for eCommerce, which I find really interesting, is if eCommerce was the professional B2B business that was completely, or the pharma business that was separate, and yet it's a business that's across all businesses. So why would you separate that out like it was a different PNL? It's the same PNL with the same ultimate consumer and customers, it's just in a different type of go to market approach. So you do need focus and you do need special talent, but some of the best people I've seen are homegrown talent, and you just need to lay out a logical plan for how you're going to evolve not only growing the team, but re-embedding the team.
Rob Gonzalez:
Some of this also comes back to KPIs. I don't know how many reorganizations you've witnessed in FMCG in the last five years, but they seem to like doing it. They make it a sport out of it. And a lot of it has to do with digital. They're just mucking around and trying to figure out what's the best way to organize for success. And to your point in calling out the data on Profitero, a vanishingly small number of these folks are actually working it across the whole business as an overlay, which is really what it is. And I do wonder if one of the focus leadership here, if all you did was pick pieces of the digital pie for each existing department, without a reorganization, but for each existing department to own, how much improvement you get from just doing that. You take the supply chain and say, one of your KPIs is you're never out of stock on Amazon, or you've got six sigma in stock rate for Amazon and for eBay and for Walmart or whatever, you pick the set. But if you just did that and suddenly the SVP of the supply chain owns that KPI, it's like you don't need that much more coordination. You don't need a digital center of excellence. You just do that and you make a significant improvement.
Chris Perry:
To that point, that's why the secret sauce of this is actually what we call organizational enablement, which is the KPIs. If you get the KPIs "right", even if it's a moving target over time, the other things come as a result of that. Because once someone's accountable, if they don't understand something, what are they going to do? They're going to seek education, they're going to seek collaboration. And if that new KPI requires way more effort or time, what are they going to do? They're going to structure a little differently. They're going to assign more people onto it. So I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying it's couth, it's solved for you, but the KPI forces an incentive to figure out whatever you don't have in place to make it happen. We just need to actually embed those KPIs.
Peter Crosby:
Yeah. Oskar, one of the things really that jumped out at me in this chapter was your note about organizations not carefully nurturing their eCommerce leaders for retention. And the job market for digital is so competitive out there right now. We're seeing it across the companies that we serve, just how many people are making moves right now. And I was just wondering how you guys thought about what steps people should be taking. What is needed to retain talent in this era?
Oskar Kaszubski:
Number one is, I think a lot of organizations don't know how to create a career progression for eCommerce professionals. They are being seen as functional leaders. And that becomes a little bit of a challenge, because all of those eCommerce leaders do not necessarily want to be eCommerce leaders forever. They need new challenges. They don't want to get bored. How many times can you actually build the same North America eCommerce team or global eCommerce team, even with the best in class capability?
Chris Perry:
Three times, thus far, we can do it.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Three times, four times. Chris, I've done it at Kellogg, Mondelez, Kimberly-Clark. Chris done it at-
Chris Perry:
Kellogg's with Oskar. It's like a rerun at this point, not because it's easy, but you have a playbook and you know how to do it, but
Oskar Kaszubski:
Yeah, but the challenge, what it is, I go back to 2010, '11, and '12, where eCommerce and CPG was this great battle between Kimberly-Clark and P&G, they really started a lot of it. And then it was all about diapers. Back then, the conversation was really that in five, six, seven years we're going to see eCommerce leaders as chief customer officers as CEOs, that they're going to rise up to the top. But that has never happened, and portion of it why it really hasn't happened or maybe rarely it happens, is none of the single organization invests time to get eCommerce leaders that they bring in from the outside to actually invest and to get them to be better peoples leaders, be better corporate citizens, et cetera. They are really kind of sucking them up dry for all of their eCommerce knowledge, the books of tips and tricks. Like if they are a magician with a specific playbook, they are trying to run through that playbook and then move on. And unfortunately, that happens quite a bit, is there is lack of that commitment to those eCommerce leaders to really, not only bring in their outside eCommerce expertise, but also understand really the nuances of the category when it comes into shopper, the nuances of the brands, really spend time on de-siloing the organization.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Because there's a challenge, we work with a lot of organizations, let's say they have a pet division and they have a snack division, and the challenge what it is is that the pet division best practices are never being implemented in the snack division, despite the pet division is uber competitive and has a lot of that movement. So they are not spending on that organization enablement, they are not spending time on actually extracting any more value. It almost seems like for anybody hiring eCommerce talent into CPG, they are also running a playbook. We're going to do a search, we're going to pick the best candidate, now it's all about diversity from a specific background, and then we'll see what happens a year, two year from now. And then a lot of the times they're waking up because that leader walks away after 12 to 18 months because that leader is actually being bombarded on LinkedIn due to shortage of talent by recruiters telling them, "Well, you are a senior director now, but I can get you VP title and 50,000 dollars more if you jump somewhere else."
Oskar Kaszubski:
So it's a bad behavior that is being instituted all over the organizations, and a lot of it is just those large CPGs fundamentally don't know what to do with those eCommerce leaders next, and they just don't offer them anything that's exciting to them. It's a problem, it's definitely a problem within the industry.
Chris Perry:
If I could just add one thing. If you've ever read that book, Languages of Love, I know we're going a different direction with the podcast right now, yeah.
Peter Crosby:
Yeah, where is this going?
Chris Perry:
I am very much a words of affirmation person. I don't need a medal, I don't need who's who. I just want whoever I was trying to serve and who's expectations I was trying to exceed to acknowledge that that had happened. And if it didn't, how do I make it better so that we can? And I've gotten really good at that over the years, listening and trying to exceed expectations. But in a change leader role, where, to your point, you're just there to be extracted. They would never say that, that's not what they really mean, but you're there to carry the baton, the next relay race set, is that role is so emotionally draining. And I say that, nobody has to play a small violin for us, but my point is that role is so draining and you are being beat up in a way that no one in CPG is being beat up anymore. Every job is hard. This job is like four times as hard because you have to justify why you're just trying to do the job. Over and over and over again you're educating, you're trying to activate, you're explaining, you're validating, you're trying to learn, you're trying to stay on the forefront.
Chris Perry:
And it burns you fast, which is why it's really easy to go like, "Oh, I'll just change the environment. Because for a little bit of time, they'll just appreciate me for being new and value-added, as opposed to taking me for granted unintentionally." And I only say that, it's not bitterness, it's that you need affirmation that somebody understands that you're fighting this fight for some reason. You get up every day to make an impact with potentially no credit directly, no one will ever remember you were there to help carry the torch, but you did. And I think that would help a lot of people too.
Peter Crosby:
Chris, can I just tell you how amazing you are?
Chris Perry:
Well, thank you. It's a couple years later than I was hoping, but I really appreciate that.
Peter Crosby:
That's literally why we started the Digital Shelf Institute was exactly because I would meet these amazing leaders who were working so hard across the organizations, in addition to their stuff. And I just felt like you guys need to talk to each other, just to, like-
Chris Perry:
Remember you're not alone.
Peter Crosby:
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Rob. Go ahead.
Oskar Kaszubski:
But despite what Chris says, he does love some affirmation, because he sends me late at night some new designs for new content, new campaigns, and he gets mad if I say, "Okay, looks good." He wants-
Chris Perry:
Oskar sends me gifs that don't indicate whether he likes it or not. He sends me like zeros and ones moving up and down the strand. I'm like, "Is that good? Do you like it?" So that's just me as a personality.
Rob Gonzalez:
Yeah, it's funny. The difficulty of the head of eCommerce job and how disconnected it could often feel from the core company culture is something that we hear a ton. I looked informally at the set of Digital Shelf Institute exec forum members. There's not quite 200 active members or so. And I went back and I looked at the beginning of COVID to present. And a third of them have changed jobs, which is crazy turnover for an executive of the caliber of people that we're talking about. You always used to joke that the last 10 years the CMO gig at a CPG company was an 18 month job. And we're really seeing that same sort of thing play out in eCommerce. And that's not a great way to build a long lasting sustainable set of focused leaders that can get you there all the time. Yeah, words of affirmation, I learned something about you today, Chris.
Chris Perry:
It's just, at the end of the day, this sounds silly, and this is like everyone has a different Meyers Briggs type, and so not all eComm leaders are the same type. But I'm not here for whatever short term award or bonus. Yeah, do I want to make money and support my family and would a bonus be awesome? That's not what motivates me. I'm here to, I want to make an impact with you today that literally, that obviously I need affirmation on that you know that we made that together. I don't need an award just to feel good. It's not about ego, it's impact. But if I don't feel that that's ever going to happen, I'm going to go seek it where I think I can. Now, unfortunately, the grass isn't always greener. And you find out, again, for that six month honeymoon that you're appreciated up until you're too familiar and they're like, "There's that Oskar again, saying that we need to do that thing that I smiled at him the first time he said it, but I'm not really going to do it."
Chris Perry:
After a while, you're like, "We're not going to make any impact here. I'm here to help you survive and then thrive. You're just here to make it ..." I've said before, this isn't against anybody, but I feel like I've met a lot of people in life, I'm sure you have too, that I feel like they're on this lazy river, like they're just on their own. And I'm so happy that you aren't worried that there's a waterfall around the corner, but I am, and I want to make sure we don't die. So I'm worried about that. And you're just like, "Yeah, yeah, we don't need ..." It's two different types of people, but I'm here to make sure you don't die and that you actually keep enjoying that lazy river. But you just want to keep enjoying it like you don't worry about that. So I don't know. It's that type of firstmovr, which is why we founded firstmovr, was to champion that mentality of few future proofing yourself over and over again.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Tell this story about the rocket. Remember the story about the rocket?
Chris Perry:
So I joke with Oskar a lot, this is just an important thing. So when we were at Kellogg's, and Oskar led our global organization and I got to be his North America arm and build out that team as well, and we had an awesome some team in place, I remember sometimes some of the leaders when OsKar would be in meetings where we were educating or trying to build our plan and get buy in, there would be this after where it was like, "Hey, Chris, I kind of got what Oskar was saying, but I'm just not ..." And so I always equated it to Oskar was on Mars terraforming the planet. He is already there ready for us to colonize and move, he's getting ready. But everyone else was like, "Terraforming Mars?" And I realize I would always say, "Oskar, we've got to build a spaceship first, because they can't even fathom leaving the planet. First, we got to build a spaceship. I'm glad you're already prepping the planet, because we're going to get there with that spaceship." But I always tried to say I was the Redwood tree to Oskar's cloud, because nobody could get off the ground, but we were going to grow up to meet him, and so that we were a good pairing that way. I don't know if that was the part you were asking me to tell, Oskar.
Peter Crosby:
No, I got the analogy.
Chris Perry:
There's lots of analogies, not just sheep.
Peter Crosby:
Well, that's what I was going to say, the sheep somehow ended up on the rocket ship. I don't know where this ends up.
Chris Perry:
It's an ark. It's an ark.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Rocket sheep.
Chris Perry:
We need to bring two of every type of sheep on our ark up to Mars.
Peter Crosby:
On that note, we can tie all of this together, but the important thing is is that you guys have written a phenomenal and fun piece of encouragement, which although we've sort of focused in our conversation on failure modes, really what the piece goes through is the four steps then that you can do to make progress in these areas and of awareness and inspiration and assessment and acceleration. And that's what's nice about it, is it's not just like, "Oh my gosh, look how troubled all of these things are," but actually the eight areas and how you can make forward progress on it. And so we will make sure to have a link to the Sheared report in our show notes.
Chris Perry:
It's free for everyone. Easy download. You don't have to sign up to get it. We want to democratize change, right?
Peter Crosby:
You are a giver and a prince among men, Chris Perry.
Chris Perry:
Thank you for those words of affirmation.
Peter Crosby:
Oskar, good to see you too. But serious, both of you, thank you for the investment in ... Because I know this is the fruit of, well, really decades of work in this, and then particularly the work that you've done at firstmovr, to get into the weeds of what it takes to keep moving through this growth pattern. And so thanks to both of you for doing this and then coming on to share, we really appreciate it.
Chris Perry:
Thank you.
Oskar Kaszubski:
Thank you.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Chris and Oskar for coming on. The link to their report is in the show notes, as is the link to the Profitero organizational design research we mentioned. Thanks as always for being part of our flock.
