The Ministry of Common Sense with Martin Lindstrom

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to Brainfluence, I’m Roger Dooley. I’m super excited to welcome today’s guest to the show. Martin Lindstrom has been on the show before, and you may know him as a pioneer in the Neuromarketing space, but he’s also been a huge innovator in the brand space. He’s had seven New York Times bestselling books. And the book we’re going to talk about today, I predict will be number eight. It is The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses and Corporate BS. Welcome to the show, Martin.

Martin Lindstrom:         Thank you, Roger. As always, it’s good to see you.

Roger Dooley:     Well, you know we had this conversation sort of, way back to the beginning of April when, the book was due to release in the summer and we got a good jump on that by recording an episode and audio only in that case, this one is on video as well, but then the pandemic hit everybody’s lives changed. The books release was pushed back to January. We could have just played that, but so much has changed since then. But I think that really my understanding of the world and how it works has changed a bit. And I’m guessing that it has done the same for you too, Martin. Since we talked, then what is the pandemic changed for you or your perceptions about business and the way we do business?

Martin Lindstrom:         Do you know what Roger, it’s been a fascinating journey I have to say. And what has happened is, I called this the entry point theory. You know, in the old days, we would always talk about having seven different entry points. And may be one entry point was that you got married, or one you got a new job, or one you were retiring or maybe there was one would say is you got new children, right?

Martin Lindstrom:         And suddenly you see baby strollers everywhere, baby could have benn everywhere. And it fundamentally puts you on another track. You certainly patches things differently. So you need to have a house with more space or baby equipment and go to school and all that stuff. So that’s an entry point. Now until recently there was only seven entry points, but because of COVID-19, I would claim that for the first time in living memory, we now are seeing the arrival of the eight entry point. Due to what I’d call a global centralized behavior change happening. And it really is super fascinating because what it means is that consumers are behaving fundamentally different at certain areas of their lives.

Martin Lindstrom:         I’ll give you an example. When the COVID hit, I was stopped in Australia, I couldn’t get out of there for three months. I went to a wedding, it took one day, and then I was stuck there for three months. And what happened was that I noticed how people were approaching strangers dogs more than normal. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And after a couple of days, I saw this in a repetitive pattern. So I realized that as I’m writing about in one of my previous books, that we all are out of balances and it’s the outer balance, which represents the new opportunity for a new brand or a new service, without a balance is the tactile balance. It means that we suppressed for the tactile sensation. And as we suppressed for that, what it really means is that we crave it.

Martin Lindstrom:         We may not be able to express it consciously, but subconsciously we crave it. And really that’s the reason why the pet sales believe it or not has gone up 350% over the last six months. And it shows you how once I get a pet, of course need I need to have a dog house or whatever, I need to have a garden was this fence that by the way, I may not have children now because I have a pet. So you could see how that is a clear eighth entry point. So what I have seen and witnessed during COVID-19 is that we’ve had these behavioral changes happening. And I think this is honestly just the beginning.

Roger Dooley:     That’s a really interesting, and I want to talk about empathy too, in that context, but first a huge theme throughout the entire book Martin, is empathy and the importance of empathy, whether it’s empathy with customers, empathy with employees, team members and so on, I’m curious, can you define empathy in your context?

Martin Lindstrom:         Well, empathy is the ability to see the world and feel the world from another person’s point of view. And empathy, it sounds like a very fluffy thing, particularly in a corporate context. But what I’ve come to realize is that there is a direct correlation between empathy and common sense. Why is that? Because common sense only exist if it’s common, and common is the ability to see things from another person’s point of view. And what is fascinating and what I discovered throughout the writing process of the ministry of common sense was that increasingly empathy is disappearing. A recent study shows that empathy levels in the United States alone has dropped some 50% over the last decade. And not only that, what’s even more interesting is that factors, which we didn’t think about as they has a profound impact on us and the degree of empathy levels we have.

Martin Lindstrom:         So for example, the fact that we are trying to express our feelings using Twitter, only having a hundred plus characters to explain this whole huge story is a good indication, but it’s also the fact that I’m looking at model STEM sized video feed now, when I’m talking to people on Zoom or on teams, more obsessed with the look of myself than actually the person I’m talking with, oh, and this is surprising, I’m sure you’ll find this fascinating, Roger. The fact that Botox in fact have an impact on our empathy level. In fact, experiments conducted with mothers and their babies where mothers were not moving the face at all, basically made the baby throw a tantrum within 30 seconds. And what we know today is that those micro movements are literally disappearing. And as a consequence of that, I can’t connect with people anymore. So empathy is disappearing slowly, in fact, fairly fast.

Martin Lindstrom:         And the reason why that is kind of concerning is because the same is happening in corporations. And corporations which already now are split into silos and KPIs and have no interest in working with each other. Now, certainly couldn’t care less about working with others. And sadly that’s where you see common sense is disappearing. Certainly what for you is pretty obvious is for me not, because I don’t see the world from your point of view. And in fact, I really don’t care. And that’s the level where, so that’s really the foundation for empathy, right?

Roger Dooley:     What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy?

Martin Lindstrom:         Oh, I love that question. Really, the difference is very simple. If you are seasick and you imagine you are on a ferry and the sea’s really, really high, and there’s a guy standing next to you and he throws up and you say, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” And you give him a napkin, that’s called sympathy. But if you start to throw up next to the person is called empathy. So really what it talks about is the feeling of what other people feel.

Roger Dooley:     That’s, I think really important from a customer experience standpoint, for example, because if you’ve got an executive and they realized that, geez, the customers have to wait in line a long time for my service that we’re providing, now, you can feel sympathy toward them, but actually feeling empathy is different. That might actually create change as opposed to, “Wow. I really feel sorry for those people that are stuck in the last seat in the economy,” it doesn’t recline. If you sat in that seat for eight hours, you might say, “Gee, this isn’t a very good seat. Maybe we should improve this somehow.”

Martin Lindstrom:         Absolutely. And you’re right. Let me give you an example. One of our clients is one of the largest pharma clients or companies in the world, and they are the number one player in the respiratory and the asthma field. And I remember when we began working with him, I asked him, “When did you last spend time with patients?” And guess what the answer was, “Never.” So, I said, “You must be kidding,” and they had all sorts of excuses about compliance and regulation and said, “BS, let’s just talk to them.” So I went up, I talked to compliance and persuaded them to bring the employees from this Pharma client, into the homes of patients. The first time in the company’s history, it’s nearly a hundred years old at this company. So here’s what happens.

Martin Lindstrom:         We go into the home and this young girl starts to talk about how she feels excluded from a tribe, how she feels disconnected, she feels embarrassed having asthma. There was a lot of emotions attached to what she said. And I said to her, “How do you get around this?” And she said to me, “Well, listen, I actually have a little secret,” and she dug down in her bag and she put up a straw. And then she said, “I ask other people to breathe through the store while holding themselves on the nose.” And I said, “That’s really clever.” So I took that idea with me and I shared it with senior management at this company. And I had everyone using a straw, breathing through it for one minute while switching off the light and have the sound of a every breathing person in the background. Like that type of feeling. Within 30 seconds, half of the senior management spit up the straw, and I switched on the light and I said to them, “So why did you do it?”

Martin Lindstrom:         They said, “This is ridiculous. I can’t breathe this way.” And I said, “That’s exactly how your patients are breathing every minute of their entire life.” And that had a really a profound impact on how they saw, or rather felt the minds of their patients. And immediately thereafter, R and D was redesigned. The way they were communicating with consumers were redesigned. In fact, everything in the organization was redesigned. In fact, today when new staff are joining the company, they receive an empathy kits. And what’s really fascinating is the increase of empathy in that organization has decreased the lack of common sense. So what we’re seeing is a direct colleagues with common sense is directly related with of course, empathy.

Roger Dooley:     Well, this seems to be your emo these days, Martin. To go into organizations and actually somehow place executives who are multiple steps removed from the customer into the shoes of their customer. I love the little demonstration did with the Colombian telecom company. Why don’t you explain that one?

Martin Lindstrom:         Well, you have a good memory, Roger. Many years ago, I was in Colombia and this telecommunication company wanted me to develop a new customer journey, and they had all these PowerPoint slide, it was very elegant, very fancy, and I said to them, “Do you really understand how you service is?” Absolutely. They were convinced they understood every minute of it. I said, “Fine.” So what I did was I by coincidence actually managed to find a big warehouse and we build up a replica of one of the telecommunication stores inside the warehouse. And I then asked the whole senior management to show up and sit in this waiting room for us to start the workshop. What they didn’t know was that this whole warehouse set up was designed as a replica of how the experience would be in one of their telecommunication stores across Columbia. So literally, you would have a person with a machine gun outside or stand up.

Martin Lindstrom:         That was not the surprising part. So the surprising part was when you come inside this thing here, the temperature would be around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and you would be sitting on plastic chair with a squeaky sound. You would have this television running, which really was out of focus. It kind of this television from 1800 something, right. It would be seriously loud. And any time there will be a new person called to the counter, there’ll be this huge loud beep sound, which would be like, yeah, I heard, right. Anyway. People would be waiting here, and then what I did was I had measured the average waiting time. You would wait to be called up. Now the average waiting time was 59 minutes. Okay? I’m not kidding. So 59 minutes, I had the whole senior management waiting there and I locked the doors. And of course they were furious, but this is the most ridiculous, most unprofessional workshop that ever I would be fired.

Martin Lindstrom:         The money had to be returned, all their stuff. After 59 minutes, I called them up. They started to smile. I think they got what the message was. They went up to a person and they had to ask for a request, I mean, giving them their request to already. And the person would say, “Thank you for waiting. I’m sorry, I can’t handle it. Can you please take a seat again and I’ll call you to another person.” And then they would wait for another 30 minutes. And that was literally reality. Now two people laid on trying to get me fired, but the reality was, the comedy in the end of the day managed to get it and I hang on there and we turned them around. But I had to establish a sense of empathy with these guys because they thought I would turn them around with ads and funny apps. And the reality was the backbone of the whole thing was just broken.

Roger Dooley:     So do you think the lack of empathy on the part of executives is a personality flaw or is it more just, gee, they want to be empathetic, they’re happy to be empathetic, but they just really aren’t close enough normally to be empathetic, or is it somehow both?

Martin Lindstrom:         It’s funny because I assisted in a coaching session with a CEO the other day, and I encouraged him to have his staff spend time in consumer homes across the world. So that could get a sense for what consumers were thinking and where there was new product or innovation opportunities. Then he said to me on the call, it’s actually yesterday, he said to me, “Martin, it doesn’t work. They don’t want to do it.” I said, “Okay, fair enough.” I said, “So, I have a question for you. Have you done it?” “No, no, no, no, no. I asked them to do it and they don’t want to do it.” I said, “It starts with you. It start from the top.” If you go out and do it, you shoot a video two minutes long, where you have a profound insight, you send it around and you do two weeks in a row, and then you ask one of your colleagues to do it one or two times. And you amplify that through a message where you say, “Well done, everyone should do this,” then it will happen.

Martin Lindstrom:         Do you know what? It starts from the top. It really does. And it starts from the top because, remember the difference between a corporation and an entrepreneurial company is that an entrepreneurial company began typically with the founder having a problem himself or herself. I mean a good example of that is a true story. Two people, two founders of a company, they sit down in the dorm rooms. One is smoking weed, and as he’s smoking away, his friend is shooting a photo of him and submitting it to some social website. The day after, they wake up after this horrible hang over and they get even more hangers now, because now they realize the whole world, including their parents have seen this. And he’s saying to his friend, “I wish you wouldn’t have sent it.” And the friend is saying, “Well, no, I wish there was some way you could retract that photo.”

Martin Lindstrom:         And that became the birth of snap. And what I’m saying to you here is that founders to be get very close to empathy because they felt it themselves. And guess what? There’s very little lack of common sense in those companies. The bigger the organizations are growing, the more they’re disconnected from the consumer, the less common sense they have.

Roger Dooley:     I think it applies to the internal processes. Of course, to the, you had one of the Larry’s example about a company that only allowed swearing in the presence of a customer because they wanted to stop swearing. But since some customers swore, then it was okay, which, I mean, it’s these sort of compliance issues or best practice issues or whatever can really take on a life of their own. How can a company avoid getting caught up in these crazy rules that somehow seem to be… somebody thinks they’re necessary to be sure that everybody’s behaving correctly?

Martin Lindstrom:         Well, listen, I’ve developed a fairly simple methodology, which is really kind of a due diligence to your company. First of all, finding out, do you lack common sense? And there’s some fundamental questions there, which I’m sure will help you to find out that you most likely are in a mess, but let’s assume that you have a problem. I would claim that around 80 or 90% of corporate America do have a problem today. Then there’s a simple process you could take yourself through. So if you imagine that you on the screen would have two axes, you will have a vertical and a horizontal axe. Basically on the vertical axe, you would have two different types of factors. You would have should on the top and you’ll have shouldn’t in the bottom. And on the left side, you’ll have do and on the right side, you have don’t.

Martin Lindstrom:         Now, first of all, common sense is in the opposite corner of nonsense. Nonsense is of course lack of common sense, right? So common sense is thriving up his should and do, and nonsense with shouldn’t and with don’t. Now here’s the trick to all this stuff. What you have to do is to ask yourself a couple of fundamental questions, and let me just ask two of the questions. Remember, this is all about seeing the world from outside in. If you want to be more customer focused, see the world from outside in. If you want to understand the pain you have internally, see the world from inside out. So let me just share with you what I mean here. So for example, if I now want to fix this, take a customer service as an example, right? So what you see here on the screen is from the outside point of view, which of your products or services would your customer like to kill or eliminate? Well, let me give you an example. Okay?

Roger Dooley:     Let me interrupt you for one second here and point out for our audio listeners that you really came prepared for this conversation with actually a couple of small slides that you’ve cut away too. So in this case, the video experience might be a little bit more interesting than the audio experience. I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out if they can’t tune into it on YouTube.

Martin Lindstrom:         Everyone listening. I apologize profoundly for this. I’ll try to explain this as are you not able to see anything, is that okay? So, let me just go back to this. Imagine one of our clients, which is Swiss International Airlines. Swiss had a problem, because a lot of customers, when they were boarding the plane and they had complaint issues or whatever, the first reaction from the air host would be, “I’m really sorry about that, here is a customer complaint form, fill it out.” And of course the passenger will say, “When do I hear back from you?” And they’ll say, “Between eight and 10 weeks.” Now, this guy is super furious at this stage. That would be eight to 10 weeks of renting online, which is not particularly healthy for our brand. I don’t need to tell you here. Right? So here’s where we go into this system again.

Martin Lindstrom:         So everyone who is not right now watching, I’m going to explain for you what you are listening or seeing at this time. So the first question you need to ask yourself is, what are the assumptions justifying this approach? Well, in Swiss International Airlines case, it will be, “Do you know what, it’s too expensive to handle it up in the plane.” I mean, cseriously, it’s much more cost efficient to do it on the ground. And by the way, I’m not sure they can handle it on top. And by the way, if they were handling it, that probably would be stealing. Probably something like this. I’m making it up. Okay? Now, this is interesting. The second question you have to ask yourself is this. If we scrap this approach and stopped pretending people were rational, what would we change? Well, I don’t need to tell you if you are jet lag, you are not rational.

Martin Lindstrom:         It doesn’t exist, right? You are just furious with a smallest little problem. So here’s the idea. The last question you have to ask yourself is this, having 90 days to secure or to succeed, what or which one of you changes required the least effort generating the biggest impact. Now, if I go back to this model and I take this through the common sense issue, common sense is to fix the problem on the plane, right? So what we did was we started to measure how much does it cost to handle a complaint on ground? Well, guess what? It costs $98. And that’s just the administration fee. That’s with the health and compensation. So I said to them, “Why don’t we just give that fee away to everyone? I mean, you can even convert it into free internet and there’ll be even less in a value in the end of the day, but perceived higher.”

Martin Lindstrom:         And then by the way, as you fixing it on the flight, what is happening now, people are certainly emotional again, they thank you. What happens even more, the stewardess or the person is going to feel they have a mandate that can actually to handle the complaint. They have time to, they can give them an extra beer, whatever the will. So we did that. We implemented that in 90 days. And why was it 90 days? And this is super important for all of you watching and listing, 90 days are important because we do not have patients in the organization and them all. And if you want to make a change happen, you have to make it happen extraordinary quick, and prove that it works. And this is really important, Roger. Celebrate it within the organization. Why is that? Because us people go back to the default behavior and do what they did in the old days.

Martin Lindstrom:         But if we prove, wow, this works, people want to be part of this change. They feel motivated to do it. And suddenly it actually cements a behavioral change in the organization. So this is my long waited answer to you, that what I tried to do in my new book is not just to give you a lot of crazy examples, but also to say, you know what? You actually can make a change happen. And it’s not that difficult. We just need to get it going. Right?

Roger Dooley:     And that example reminds a little bit of Ritz-Carlton with their empowering any employee to spend a couple thousand dollars to fix a guest’s problem, without any approval at all.

Martin Lindstrom:         Yeah.

Roger Dooley:     That really is powerful in so many ways. First of all, as you point out, it’s preventing the problem from getting kicked down the road and festering, it’s probably completely changing the customer’s perception of the situation and turning a negative into a positive or how you can do that, oh, that’s phenomenal. But as you say, too, I think if management celebrates that that’s really important because, I’m sure that some employees might not feel empowered to take that action. And think, well, my supervisor is going to think I’m giving away the company’s money. Or if I do this too often, maybe I’m going to get a bad performance review or something. But by celebrating this when it’s done appropriately, you’re sending a message to everybody to do it.

Martin Lindstrom:         Absolutely.

Roger Dooley:     Everybody can afford that $2,000. But in this case, much smaller amounts that were involved.

Martin Lindstrom:         Well, this is what’s so fascinating about this. Once you give a mandate to staff, we have consistently noticed that the staff feel so proud and so honored by it that they don’t want to mess it up. So the degree of theft or cheating is extraordinarily low, and in no way it can be justified going through an administration system required to keep an eye on people. It just doesn’t make sense. So common sense is to give people a mandate and trust them. All statistics without a single exception show, when you do that is more cost efficient than if you put up cameras everywhere and monitor people’s behaviors second by second, right?

Roger Dooley:     Yup. Martin, most of your examples are from business, but you’ve got a few crazy examples of government policies. And for some reason, I don’t want to pick on the country of Italy. It’s a wonderful country. I love visiting Italy, but some of the craziest ones are from there. Like when the pandemic hit, making restaurants have only one bathroom open, and something about round ice cubes on airplanes being a potential weapon. I’m not sure how that worked. I don’t want to perhaps create a dangerous situation here, but do you even have an idea of how you could use round ice cube for a weapon?

Martin Lindstrom:         I’ve been thinking a lot about it I have to say. Now, I asked several government officials in Italy about how come around ice cube is actually illegal in Italy, but a square one is legal? Recently I just discovered that if you have a bad experience on board, on any of the trains in Italy, you can always send the complaint after 60 days.

Roger Dooley:     They want you to calm down a little, I guess.

Martin Lindstrom:         I guess so. I mean, where is the common sense. Listen, this issue is everywhere. And what makes me really sad and concerned I have to say is that, we’ve become compliant. We’ve given up, we shake our shoulders and say, I guess that’s how it is. And it’s become worse and worse. I mean, with the pandemic, as we all stopped behind our screens, I mean, here’s the reality we’re sitting in back to back soon calls all of us. Where did the toilet breaks go? There is no toilet break, right? It’s gone. I don’t know how people go to the toilet for eight hours because no one is saying, “Hey everyone, can I stop here and to the toilet?” So they sneak out pretending like they’re not going to the bathroom and guess what? They come in, and now that completely behind the conversation. So they start off where they’re left and suddenly the whole thing goes in loop, right? Which is crazy.

Martin Lindstrom:         Or my favorite one, I was just interviewed for a major newspaper in the U S yesterday and the person said to me, “Martin, how has our language changed because of COVID-19?” And I said to him, “Listen, in the old days when we meet each other, we’ll say hello. Now we say the first thing we say to people is, you’re on mute.” And listen, this is so crazy because what I’ve experienced time after time now is that we do not cater for the human dimensions in what we do. We increasingly fall victim to technology rather than asking yourself, where is the common sense? I mean, an example is the other day I had to book an airline tickets, and the system was super simple to use. It was not bad. I booked my trip, arrived into JFK. Then I had to return two days later, I went up to the counter, everything was fantastic, and the person looked at me and she said, “Listen, yeah, you probably are a months too early now.”

Martin Lindstrom:         I said, “What do you mean about that?” “You booked it a month ahead.” “No, I haven’t. I booked it exactly that date.” So he said, “Here it is,” but that was the evidence, I booked it a month later. So I went back to the website. But do you know what the website did? It all took books and months and those days you are saying ahead of time, just to be sure you can enjoy where you’re going. Right. Well, no one thinks about it when you’re putting in the 5th of March, 2020, that actually, it probably changes to 2021. Right? And this is really the idea we’re talking about here. That technology sometimes is developed by programmers that are sitting in their little inside out world, with very, very little contact with the outside in the world. And I think we just give up, we don’t challenge it anymore. We don’t question it anymore. So we end up with these people that are super frustrated about everything, become grumpy and really the whole culture in collaborations, starts falling apart because of that.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. That was a huge topic of my book, Friction, that there is so much friction caused by the sorts of things you’re talking about. User interfaces, customer interfaces that are created by people who either know what they’re doing, or just simply don’t think like customers. And then if the customers can’t figure it out, it’s well, the customer is stupid. No, if the customers can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do, it’s not the customer that’s stupid, it’s whatever process you design that’s stupid.

Martin Lindstrom:         Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s so right.

Roger Dooley:     And so companies, at least in some cases have the impetus to improve customer experience. I mean, it’s just about every company says they’re trying to improve customer experience. I would say the number that are actually prioritizing it over this quarter’s profits and such is a smaller number. But, we mentioned governments. Do you see any governments that are really devoting any resources to try and improve their citizen experience, to eliminate bad processes, long wait times in government offices?

Martin Lindstrom:         I actually do. One of my clients is the Republic of Georgia. Now I’m sure you’re not very familiar with that place, but that is a country in Europe, in Eastern Europe. They actually, a couple of years ago, it created regional centers you can go to, and in that center, everything would be sold in an hour. So if you want to have a new number plate within an hour, if you want to be married within an hour, if you want to move house and address with an hour, you want to start up a company with an hour. That’s a guarantee. And you literally go to the same building and everything related to authority based actions is happening in this house. And quite often, much quicker than an hour. That was introduced four or five years ago and has been a tremendous success in Republic of Georgia. And I think that’s a really good example of things working well.

Martin Lindstrom:         In Switzerland, I acctually just had a new number plate today for a car I bought. What was fascinating was I called this place where you get these number plates and they pick up the phone straight away. Normally I would expect press five, and this is monitored for quality assurances and all that stuff. They picked it up and I said, “Listen, there is a possible for me to come in and pick up the number plate now?” They said, “Of course, Mr. Lindstrom. You can come any time.” I said, “You must be kidding. Seriously?” “Yeah. Yeah. Just come.” So I went in there and there was no line there was nothing, you just went through the whole system. And I said to her, when I was at the counter, I said, “I mean, how come it’s so perfect?”

Martin Lindstrom:         She said to me, “That’s Switzerland.” I said, “Well, yeah, I get that point. But why? Who pays for this?” She said, “This is very simple.” Very interesting story. She said, “What happens here is, every morning we have an auction, and you can actually buy whatever number plate you will, whatever price is bid on this auction. So if you want to buy a number plate which is having a Zurich 1000, it will cost $50,000 to get one of those. If you want to have a simple one or more complex, one it’s 5,000 or easier one is only 1000 to $500.” The number plate that got was $25, right? So they have this auction. So when people return their cars, they put them on auction every morning and they earn so many money on that. That in fact, they just paid for the whole thing. And this is what I’m talking a lot about in the ministry of common sense, that if you build up your ministry and as you know, now having read the book, these ministries actually do exist.

Martin Lindstrom:         I built them up in real banks, in companies, in airlines, in shipping comedies, all that stuff. Then when you do it, it should have a simple principle. Two of them, one is it should be profitable. You actually should earn money from it. 50% of the money you earn, like the number plates go straight to the first division you work with to compensate for the time you spent. And 50% goes to the next division for you to pay for your way to get through the system and fix the issues. The second thing the minister of common sense is doing is it’s self-destructive. Once it’s no longer needed, it disappears. But the purpose of the ministry of common sense is to basically vacuum clean one stupidity out of the organization after another. And in the end of the day, it’s been tremendous successful. I mean, in one of the largest banks in the world which I’m referring back to in the book, first of all, they had removed more than 3000 stupidities and believe me, they have a lot of NPS is through the roof and so is EMPS.

Martin Lindstrom:         So it’s not just a crazy idea, it’s an idea which we now know has been proven and tested. And it’s an idea was I think every company should adopt. Because in the end of the day, I think frustrations as you point so write down in your book at such a high at the moment that company culture is falling apart and people are asking themselves a fundamental question, why the heck do I want to work here?

Roger Dooley:     I could probably go on all day with you Martin, but probably this is a good place to wrap it up. I think the book, which for our video watchers, I am holding up a copy of it, at least a pre-print galley, there’s so much good information and-

Martin Lindstrom:         What did you think about the book?

Roger Dooley:     I loved it. I mean, to me, the ideas are so much in sync with my own. That probably helped because we tend to like books that maybe don’t challenge our basic way of thinking. To me, I was just letting out little smiles and cheers as I read through the book. So that probably made it resonate a little more, but no, I think it’s not only very useful and informative and hopefully it will provide some inspiration, but it’s really very entertaining at a times funny. I think even a busy executive could enjoy reading this and get a lot of value out of it. And it it wouldn’t be like doing homework.

Martin Lindstrom:         Thank you.

Roger Dooley:     So Martin, how can people find you, your book and your ideas?

Martin Lindstrom:         Very simple. You can go to Martinlindstrom.com and there’s a pop up there you can click on, and by the way, there’s all sorts of things going on and stuff. You can find me on Twitter. It’s #MartinLindstrom. You can find me on Facebook, it’s Martin Lindstrom, or you can find me on LinkedIn, which says Lindstrom company. And of course, if you interested in buying the book, I guess Amazon is the answer to whatever question you have.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Well, we will link to the book and those other places that you mentioned Martin on the show [email protected]/podcast, and we will have text, audio and video versions of this conversation posted there as well. So Martin, it’s been great catching up and wish you the best of luck in getting through the remainder of the pandemic and also with a new book. Take care now.

Martin Lindstrom:         Thank you.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.