How design thinking drives growth for the Fortune 100

Stephen Gates

If you start 100% remote, that is vastly different than we’re all used to being in an office, and now we’ve been forced into being remote. I think that for me, the areas that I will often start with are probably not the traditional areas that people would think because I can see two different teams. They have the same tools, the same processes. They hire the same people. One is wildly successful; the other one’s a low-grade dumpster fire. For me, it’s that ability to look at issues around trust, issues around communication, issues around how are people empowered? How are we taking on these cultural barriers that exist inside of every company? How are we bringing transparency to that? Because I think in many cases, that’s often what separates the higher-performing teams from the rest is their ability to be transparent, to trust each other, and to really be there not only for themselves but other people as well.

Stephen Gates

Thanks for having me. I think if it makes you feel any better, I still look at my portfolio and see all the mistakes and feel like I have just as much imposter syndrome as everybody else. I’ve been lucky to do some cool stuff throughout my career.

Stephen Gates

It’s a great question—this is something I talk about a lot. Because for me, great design is a visual expression of great thinking. I think that as you look at a lot of the career coaching I do, a lot of the teams I work with, even in my own career, a lot of it has been based in creativity, which means the ability to have ideas—to solve problems in a different way; to be able to go through and to do some of those things about how do we think and approach things.

Design then being whatever form and shape that takes, whether it’s an app, a video, sort of whatever that is. In many cases, as you look at teams, as you look at careers, the ones who are able to base that in creativity and be able to do something new, who can wrangle that imposter syndrome that every single person has, and Seth is completely right. I think that’s where you’re going to find value. Whatever people think is success or sort of whatever that is. Design is often, like I said, is the ability. It’s important, but it often is valued and looked at differently.

Stephen Gates

For me, Mad Man’s always sort of a bit of a caricature, sort of creativity. I think it’s a reference; a lot of people use it. Here’s the thing that I would say is that I think everybody, everybody—I don’t care who you are—is a creative. That’s one of the things that I love is that I work with companies like Fisher-Price. If you go in and talk to a roomful of kindergarteners, everybody’s a painter; everybody’s a singer; everybody’s a superhero. They are very free in that creativity. And it’s only through time, education, our careers, society that those of us who sort of do this for a living are the kids that survived. I think that in many cases, everybody is creative, just a lot of us forgot.

Design is that execution that does take a skill set. There’s usually a fairly high wall to be able to get into it. That’s been my long-standing joke. If you ever want to scale design, if you want to have to be a bigger part of your company, don’t ever use the word design. Because I think a lot of people feel alienated by it. I always do an icebreaker; it’s a simple thing to see in people. I have everybody turn to the person next to them and spend two minutes sketching them. The first word that everybody says after they do that is I’m sorry. And again, that’s not what this is.

Stephen Gates

For me, the podcasts that I’ve had of The Crazy One over the last four and a half years has really been an outshoot of my own career and what I see in a lot of other people, that I think for too many of us, we seem to feel like there’s this invisible script, or there’s a right way to do this. There’s a right way to create; there’s a right way to have this career, there’s a certain set of steps you’re supposed to take. My thing is, for creatives, the way that we are, the way that we have a career, the way that we work never looks like anybody else. I think we all tend to sit in this perpetual state of feeling like we don’t measure up, feeling like we aren’t doing it the right way, feeling like these sort of things.

Crazy to me was a way to be able to claim and see that difference and that uniqueness as power, not as a weakness. Because as a creative, your unique perspective, your unique experience, and skills, that’s what makes you great. That’s what sets you apart from everybody else. But I think for too many people, they see that as “Oh, I’m not like everybody else, so I’m not doing it right.” I think that’s what for me is it’s been just trying to embrace that mentality because I think for most creatives, that’s what their biggest struggle is, just making peace with themselves.

Stephen Gates

I’ll say for that, for me, there’s a difference between crazy and stupid. For me, I think crazy is…

Stephen Gates

…yeah, right. Crazy is data-informed, crazy is thoughtful, crazy is not abandoned and reckless. I think, though, that for me, in many cases… And again, as we go back to the word that we use, I think that design often struggles to have an impact on business whenever design is just being seen as execution. I think creativity can have one of the most profound impacts on businesses that are out there right now. I think for a lot of teams as they talk about collaboration, teamwork, innovation, agile, whatever that is, in many cases, that is a hunt for creativity and, again, reminding people how they do it. For me, I think it’s an outcome and an approach.

That’s the thing that I’ve seen over the course of my career is going into companies and be able to remind people of that. We would ship seven times more product in the first year than we did the past seven years. Like at Citi, we won digital bank of the year within 18 months of taking that approach. I can tell you the teams that are high in a creative IQ; they can ship product about four times faster, five times cheaper. Their companies are worth about 26 times more. It’s not voodoo; it’s just a more human-centered approach to doing things. In often cases requires a recalibration around collaboration and how do we work with our customers.

Stephen Gates

What I mean by human-centered is it’s interesting because I think for a lot of companies, what kills their creativity, what kills their business is, in many cases, there is an internal war over who’s right. Is design, right? Is technology, right? Is engineering, right? Are executives, right? Who’s right? When at the end of the day, your customer doesn’t give a damn about any of that. I think that for me, what it really is, is it’s a recalibration to remember that we are designing for people that have needs. That too many times whenever we convince ourselves that this is what a customer wants without actually talking to them, this is why we launch stuff that people don’t want, and we don’t get the business impact.

There are few too many companies who I work with; when they ask me what their superpower is, my answer is their ability to rationalize mediocrity. They talk themselves into why their customers want this stuff without actually working with them. For me, it’s human-centered in that there are real people. The real people in the way that we work, come together, trust each other and work internally but then also how do we work with our customers?

Stephen Gates

You go talk to them. I think for me…

Stephen Gates

For me, that’s always been a huge part of my work is trying to break my ideas. I don’t want to go do research to validate what I think; I want to go do research to see if what I’m doing actually works. Now, who I talk to probably tends to be a little bit different because I believe in… I want to talk to amateurs and professionals. I think there’s this myth that I want to go talk to the average consumer. The average consumer to me yields average insights. I want to go talk to beginners, somebody who has never done what I’m designing for because there’s a lot of truth and how naive they are. And then I’m going to talk to professionals. I’m going to talk to somebody who does this all the time. If I’m designing a chef’s knife, I want to talk to somebody who’s never cooked and a professional chef, because on the one end, that naiveness is going to give me insights, and then the professional is going to do that. Again, I think trying to take your ideas to those extremes yields much better results.

Stephen Gates

My approach has always been a traditional design thinking, design sprint, whatever the methodology is. If I want to go out and just find out what are the facts. For me, whenever I worked in Starwood Hotels, instead of staying in corporate housing, I lived in a hotel for 364 days. I wanted to live in and actually see what was going on. Out of that, you find the insight. The unmet need. What’s that thing that people want? Maybe they know it, maybe they don’t. Then let’s go have a bunch of ideas and then let’s go test those. I think whatever you say here is the one idea; you tend to look for validation, as opposed to, again, opportunity.

Stephen Gates

For me, it’s that depending on what it is, two to four at the most. Because anything over three or four is you’re just shotgunning and hoping. I think, again, if I’ve done the facts and done some insights, I should be able to narrow it down to something a little bit smaller. But for me, that’s what I’m looking for is to be able to say, “Okay, look. Is the insight, right? And if the insight’s right, then how do we start to do the execution? If the execution’s right, then how do I start to do the design?” It’s a rolling, iterative process, where that way, I’m sure at each step I’m validating what I’m doing, and I’m building on it.

Stephen Gates

100%. That to me is design as an executional piece, which is we’ve done all this work, we’ve done all this thinking, and we just give it shape and form. Because for me, that’s why I said, great design is a visual expression of great thinking. If I haven’t done the work, if I haven’t done the thinking, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it’s not going to have an impact. For me, it really is doing all the work that leads up to… I think that’s the problem—is that everybody likes the outcome. That’s what everybody wants to go for. It’s like, “What does it look like?” I think in many cases, as the more modern and creative, your job in many cases, I think is just trying to keep people open to possibility.

Stephen Gates

In many cases, for me, this is when visual design has become product design. That it used to be like you said, we would just come together, we design something we like, and we put it out there. For me now in an organization, it’s working with the engineering team, it’s working with product, it’s working with executives, it’s working with research and strategy, it’s with… And these are all making, quote-unquote, design decisions. I think in many cases, each one can’t function on its own because that’s the thing, design without engineering is an art gallery and engineering without design is a parking lot. We need each other to be able to do these things. That’s where for me a lot of that collaboration and teamwork… But for me, it also very much is that… Design is no longer a department. I think also for me, it’s talking about it more as creativity and how do we all come together to be a part of that and solve it? That’s where the magic happens.

Stephen Gates

I think as certain people is that I’m into good trouble. But I think for me, what I’m trying to do is I’m just trying to find the source of truth. I think for a lot of the teams that I coach, for a lot of the teams that I’ve led, it’s just about great, “Let’s take those requirements. Let’s take that product strategy. Let’s do those things and let’s actually see if that’s what people want.” Because to me, that reality is going to happen at some point, and all I want to do is facilitate the conversation and see how do we come to the best idea, the best insight. For me, like I said, this is not about who’s right but how do we actually have real conversations and find some source of truth in the work that we’re doing that is not based in who has the biggest title or who has the biggest org?

Stephen Gates

Yeah, two and a half years ago when I joined InVision, it really was based out of my public speaking, out of talking to a lot of my friends and things like that. Seeing that I’d never seen more organizations that wanted creativity. They wanted design, they wanted… Probably, I would argue that we haven’t seen since the last Industrial Revolution, yet there was so much frustration. There was so much, “How do we know what to do next?” Whenever I got to InVision had worked with a number of amazing collaborators. What we said was basically, how do we determine the maturity of an organization? As we look at their creativity and design, what are the different dimensions that we could use to decide which are the ones that are doing really well, and which are the ones that struggle?

The initial model, we came up with 12 different dimensions that we look at. Out of that we can look at, where does an organisation sit on a five-tiered scale, of one is often to what you said, teams are just sort of told to make it pretty. Or again, everybody’s doing what the executive says, up into level five, which is going to be very mature, that sort of creative approach is central to the business. And this tends to be indicative of all the companies that we love. Out of that came a maturity model, and we had gone out then and done what was the world’s largest study of this, where we talked to 2200 different companies all over the world.

And, out of that, the results that we found were what we suspected, is that 83% of the world’s companies are in the middle to the bottom of that maturity curve. We have an incredible opportunity, incredible desire for innovation, yet there is something that is keeping that from happening. And how do we do that? The model helps us be able to go in, do the evaluation, and then create a roadmap about what are the things we need to work on to start moving that team or that company up that maturity curve?

Stephen Gates

It’s all sorts of things. In a lot of cases, the bottom one through three, is just how do teams define success? How do they do research? Instead of just taking whatever everybody gives them and making the best of it, how do we institute process? How do we institute KPIs and metrics? How do we start to put measurement and collaboration and those sort of things in place? With some of the higher ones, then it really just becomes about, again, what is the institutional impact of executive behavior? Of working on feedback? Of looking at, how are we workshopping ideas and doing different things like that? It’s always a little bit different because you can’t take an organization of any size and say, “Okay, look. You’re one maturity level; you’re one score.” But usually, in general, we’re able to start to identify what are those things or behaviors that are going to start to be able to lay the framework for them to start to build that creative muscle and maturity.

Stephen Gates

Oh, yeah.

Stephen Gates

I think because that’s the thing that we’ve definitely seen. Because in many cases, we’ll get people who are like, “Hey, what’s the impact of design? How do we quantify what that is?” It’s sort of what we’ve been talking about. It is both an approach and an outcome. An approach and how do we bring people together, and outcome into what design is. On average, what we’ve seen with this data is you look at high maturity teams versus low maturity teams, the projects that go out the door make about four times more money because they’re actually connected to what consumers want. Since there isn’t the endless back and forth, they’re able to do it about five times cheaper. That their ability to get it to market, because they’re doing that and they’re sure what it is they’re doing, is about six times faster. And the valuation of those companies on average is about 26 times higher, because of, again, if I can do it, if I make more money and do it more cheaply and do it faster, the valuation tends to then follow that.

Stephen Gates

For most of the time when we see the most success, there is an executive sponsor, godfather, godmother, somebody who’s going to be able to say, look, I’m going to give this the support, the cover fire or the whatever it is to be able to let us do some of these things to prove this value. To be able to try this out. That we’re going to get over these antiquated thinking of this is going to take longer, and it’s going to be more difficult, and we’re going to… I think that in many cases is where we see when we’re able to come in and institute that with that support, that’s where transformation works. In many cases when it’s grassroots, whenever it’s a little bit more… It concentrates a bit more on the way a company behaves as opposed to the way they think, that’s why 75% of transformation work fails… is because again, we aren’t empowering everybody in doing those sort of actions to let it really come to life.

Stephen Gates

Yeah, I get asked to talk about that because of the work I’ve done with that. Here’s what I would say is I think the differentiator with Apple or Nike or a lot of those big companies. I think one is; there is a genuine dedication to how do we put out the best product? And to really look into and to really mean what that is. I think, organizationally, they really trust their people. They aren’t hiring different people; they aren’t doing different things. They have pushed the power down through those organizations, to empower those teams to be able to make decisions to invest in that. People all the time are like, “We want to be like Spotify.” It’s like, “That’s great, but any team in Spotify can do a test on up to a million consumers without asking anybody.” I think that investment to trusting people, to creativity and that what it is they say they do is not a tagline. If you go to Apple and you talk to people, and they talk about changing the world, that’s a genuine goal. That’s not like, “Gee, that would be nice to be able to say.”

Stephen Gates

Yeah. For me, this is why, for a lot of the work that I’ve done, I tried to base it in a design methodology. Whether it’s design thinking or design sprints. We have the freedom and a framework. At its core, you can use design thinking or that design approach for anything. I can use it to construct an org; I can use it to design an app. One of the best moments when I was at Citi, we had scaled our design thinking practice from 0 to all 300,000 people in the firm. One of the best moments was walking into a conference room on a floor that was not mine, that was occupied by a team that wasn’t mine. In design thinking, there’s a famous statement called a How might we? that you use to launch a brainstorm. Where there on the whiteboard was written, “How might we have a great baby shower?” The value had transcended work. That’s the thing; it’s more of what is the approach that we can use to solve whatever the problem is that’s in front of us.

Stephen Gates

Yeah. That’s literally why I have the oddly enigmatic title of Design Evangelist. Because I think you’re certainly not alone. I think one, on the design side, we haven’t done ourselves any favors in trying to make this accessible. But I think also again, in trying to say, “Okay, look, this is inclusive. This is this sort of thing. Hey, if we can just open up to it…” this is why my job literally exists.

Stephen Gates

It sounds dangerously like something out of that HBO documentary series Silicon Valley, where it’s like, what does that mean?

Stephen Gates

What it really is, it’s this conversation—this is what the job is. About 70 or 80% of my time is coming in as a teacher, a coach, a therapist, an interventionist to work with brands of all sizes and all maturities to help them figure out this very conversation. We say we want design. We say we want to be more creative. What does that look like? How do we actually get that done? What is the approach we should do? I think that takes a lot of different forms and how I do that, but it really is just coming in and saying that for a lot of companies, they need a third party or consultant who can come in and, I think oftentimes, say the things that might be politically suicidal, for somebody to say internally. To be able to say, “Look, this is what’s going on.” And to bring in something like the design maturity model where we can then benchmark and base this in data to have that conversation. That’s really what I do, is to come in and just to help companies figure out how to be more creative and innovative and embrace design.

Stephen Gates

Right.

Stephen Gates

Yeah, there’s a lot of CEOs that have our app on all their phones and those sort of things. I think that the reason why is, again, is you talk about what is it that those teams are doing different or higher maturity teams are doing differently. That ability where it’s not, “Let’s have an idea, let’s design it and let’s launch it.” Now it’s, “Let’s find some insights, let’s prototype a bunch of ideas, let’s see what works, let’s refine those, let’s do it some more. And we need a single central source of truth, as we do that.” Our tools range from a virtual whiteboard, which since COVID everybody loves is that ability to put up to several hundred people into a virtual whiteboard, everybody gets thrown a marker. We can all get in there and work. The ability to prototype ideas, to design, to be able to help our engineers bring that to life. That’s why I said is, I think that was what we tapped into was just that want of how do we find something we all can put in our hands and relate to and work with, and to make that creative process accessible to everybody.

Stephen Gates

You’re headed in the right direction. The tools can take a bunch of different forms. A Google doc or anything else, you can use it a lot of different ways. But it’s about how do we get to primarily cloud-based collaborative tools to help with the design process? Like a design operating system inside of a company, where we can come in and be able to say, “Great, if everybody needs to come together and do a brainstorm, here’s a whiteboard. If you want to collect a bunch of assets to do a mood board, here’s another tool for that. If you want to build a prototype or design something…” and that the ecosystem that we have is all interconnected. So that, then again, everybody can access, and it’s a single source of truth because often those tooling can get very fragmented, which can make it hard to be able to point people to one place where they can figure out what’s going on.

Stephen Gates

Oh, a 100%.

Stephen Gates

Yeah, I would say to our conversation as we had sort of talked about, you need an approach and a methodology that’s going to bring people together and allow them to be able to brainstorm, that allows you to get people to the table and how to do the approach, are tools that allow that to actually come to life. If you have different teams in different places in the world, if people are just even in the same city but in different places, that ability to come together, to collaborate, to build, to prototype, to do those sorts of things, and then be able to have it in one place, makes it as a much easier communication tool because I think that’s what these companies have tapped into is that often their systems are fragmented, their teams are fragmented, and that ability to say, “Okay, great, here’s one way that we can work,” I think often, again, really provides them with something that they’ve really been wanting.

Stephen Gates

No, it definitely has. I think even for us, as recently as last week, Freehand which was that whiteboarding tool, I think a lot of it for us is even, you’re using these as platforms for different companies to be able to now show off how do they use the tools. We’d launched a bunch of templates—and this is everybody from American Express, to Xbox, to KPMG, to IBM—where they’re coming through, and now they’re sharing. “Hey, look, these are the templates we use. This is the way that we work.” Again, I think, that ability for them to be able to see that there’s a lot of different ways to be able to use it. Because again, I think that’s the part of any creative process is you can do it a lot of different ways, which is, I think both the strength and the challenge sometimes in tools like that.

Stephen Gates

What we see is it with a lot of the companies we work with, I think what they’re able to do is to be able to get those insights, get those ideas for whatever it is—apps, websites, whatever that is—and to be able to quickly get them into a prototype and get them in front of consumers. If you look at what’s been going on with COVID. There’s a lot of different companies where their ability to say, “Okay, look, what does curbside delivery going to look like? What does in-store pickup going to look like? What are we….” The ability to quickly get this into testing and be able to quickly see what works, and then the ability to then great, go ahead, design it, code it, launch it, that way to be able to do that, to be able to move with speed but also certainty. Because that often is the balance of, “Hey, we have this idea. But if we’re not able to prototype it and test it.” Then in many cases, we’re hoping that that’s going to work. That’s a lot of the advice we work like hope is just not a strategy.

Stephen Gates

For a lot of teams, it means tested with customers. Now that can be online testing; there’s a lot of different portals. It can be going into the store; it can be… But I think in many cases, it is about how do we get this into the hands of real consumers to see does it work? How do they work with it? I think this is where this whole prototyping piece becomes really critical because even as a designer, you can say to this work, yes or no. If it took somebody five minutes to make it work, it didn’t really work. I think that ability to watch, how do people use it? Could we be better? Can we try different variations? And again, those ideas can come from anywhere, but that fluidity and that agile way of being able to work make a really big difference.

Stephen Gates

One is just, the natural growth that we’ve been one of more companies really wanting to figure out how do they make design a bigger part of what it is they do. Obviously, there’s been a big push because of COVID, and things like that of into online tooling. Of how do we as we’re all separate coming together to run a brainstorm or do a workshop or design something or… Again, I think there’s a lot of those. I think we’ve seen a real compression in remote work in this style of collaboration, and that digital nomad approach to things. There’s been a real compression that’s been happening. Again, there’s been a big uptake and a big interest in the tools that we had because this was the workflow that we’ve always been building towards.

Stephen Gates

We did. It’s been interesting. As a company, we were founded in 2011. The entire company, which is—the number varies every day—somewhere around seven or eight hundred people have been 100% remote since we were founded. And it’s been…

Stephen Gates

Yes.

Stephen Gates

The last few months have been interesting because I’ve been with the company just somewhere over two and a half years. We were the first, whatever it was—a year and three quarters, two years—you’re a bit of a sideshow oddity. Where it’s sort of like, “Oh wow, that’s interesting, you guys can do that.” And then obviously, COVID hit, and everybody had to do that. It was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you come in and come talk to us about this?” It absolutely requires a different way of working, a different way of onboarding, a different way of hiring. For us and other companies, it is really proven. And again, I think a lot of other companies have been forced to see that even the most sceptical studies will show you that remote work is about 20% more efficient than being in an office. We have obviously huge teams, all of these teams have been 100% remote since we started.

Stephen Gates

There always are, no worries.

Stephen Gates

I think you have to be more deliberate. Because in many cases, I think this is what a lot of companies have discovered was, as they went from being in person to being fully remote, two big things really happened. I think one is in that shift, a lot of the organizational sin got exposed. Which was really the things that we could overcome by running into each other in the hallway, and issues that we…probably long-standing issues around leadership, trust, tooling, process, those sort of things came to the surface because we didn’t have the shared context of, we can smooth over those cracks by being in person. I think the other one is just that you need to deal with people and relate to them differently. A lot of it for us is really being more deliberate in how you work and simple things. Like whenever you start a meeting, you don’t jump right into business; you actually want to talk to somebody. You want to think about how do you use your tools differently with it. For us, Slack isn’t just for work. There’s a watercooler channel. If you want to talk about cars, or games, or dogs, or kids or other things like that. How do you form a community? How do we make time for each other?

Alex Cleanthous:

What are some of the things that with onboarding? Because obviously, you go through the whole process, you interview hundreds of people, you shortlist, you shortlist further, you do some final checks, and then someone starts. And then you screw up the onboarding, and then the whole experience is gone. And then all that work is for naught. Right?

Alex Cleanthous:

What are some good approaches to onboarding remotely?

Alex Cleanthous:

Ahhhhh…you’ve got a lot of good content in there. I’m trying to keep it concise. I’ve got so many pathways I want to take it. But let’s continue to keep it concise enough. Leading teams now remotely, is I think, a challenge for every leader these days; especially for a lot of the companies that work online, they’re all essentially… pretty much everybody I know is working from home at least 50% of the time. It’s now optional to go into an office if you have to go at all. Where’s the leader? How do you lead a team remotely? Because it’s different when they’re in the office because you can see them. It’s different. How do you do it remotely?

Alex Cleanthous:

Sorry…just quickly…

Alex Cleanthous:

It’s an anxiety party. That sounds like every party I’ve gone to.

Alex Cleanthous:

Okay…so I brought…yeah…

Alex Cleanthous:

How do you build teams that produce? How do you create those high-performance teams remotely? The first part is environment. That’s what we just spoke about. And now it’s about the work. There’s this big discussion on work is better when you’re in the same office because you can talk with each other and there’s the bouncing of ideas and all the energy. We don’t really have that option now. How do you ensure that high performance work?

Alex Cleanthous:

Yeah, right—sounds complex. It sounds like there’s a lot of changes that a lot of organisations are going to have to make to operate this way from the old way of working. Not for InVision that started that way, but it seems like there is a big shift for lots of organizations. Is there any advice to them? Which is the majority at the moment.

Alex Cleanthous:

How do you build that transparency? Is it Zoom calls with just Slack updates? Is there an approach? Is there something to think about?

Alex Cleanthous:

Okay. Okay. That’s my last question on remote. I’ve got one more question because I just have to ask and then we’ll go into the quickfire questions, which is questions that we would get through really quickly. Makes sense—quick fire. You’ve won over 150 major design awards.

Alex Cleanthous:

What’s your approach? What’s your approach?

Alex Cleanthous:

What’s interesting about that, is that through this podcast today, it seems that that thinking, it starts at the very beginning at the research stage, at the questioning. Questioning everything and ensuring it’s human-centered design, which means that the visual part’s last, but the design awards, oftentimes, they put forward the visual.

Alex Cleanthous:

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s good stuff. I’m very inspired at the moment—quickfire questions. I got five quick questions for you. Number one, what book has had the biggest impact on your success?

Alex Cleanthous:

Great headline too. Number two, what’s your number one piece of advice for hiring awesome people?

Alex Cleanthous:

That’s great. I haven’t heard those two before either. I’m going to start using them too because they’re really hard to answer.

Alex Cleanthous:

Mm-hmm. Yep. Ah, that’s a whole other podcast. What’s your best management or productivity tip? Your best time management or productivity tip?

Alex Cleanthous:

That’s great. What’s the best piece of business advice that you’ve ever received?

Alex Cleanthous:

The most confident, uncertain person. What does that mean?

Alex Cleanthous:

Yeah, right. Cool. The last question, how do you relax after a crazy day at the office or at the home office?

Alex Cleanthous:

That’s super interesting. I’ve never really approached cooking that way, which is probably why I don’t cook that much. I’m going to use it now. I’m going to try and hack my brain and say it’s a creative process that has thoughts and finishes.

Alex Cleanthous:

Yeah, awesome. Stephen, if there’s one thing that you’d like the people that are listening to this podcast to do, that one place to go— site or somewhere—what should they do?

Alex Cleanthous:

I can confirm as well; I did check out a few of the podcasts, a few of the videos, a few of the keynotes—pretty inspiring stuff. You are extremely engaging and very straight up. It’s like a breath of fresh air in this space, so I highly recommend it.

Alex Cleanthous:

Yeah, that’s a super point to finish on. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been such a great conversation. To everyone, that’s listening, subscribe, check out those links that he just said, and we’ll talk soon. Thanks, Stephen.

Alex Cleanthous:

See you.

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