Dan's Daily

This week, Proctor and Gamble announced it was writing-down the value of its Gillette shaving products brand by $8 billion.

It’s a bit hard to put $8 billion into perspective, so here are a few things you could buy with that kind of money:

• Two Manchester Uniteds
• 140 SpaceX Falcon 9 launches
• 1.6 million round-the-world flights
• 8 million iPhones
• 1.1 billion pizzas from Dominos

Filtering out the corporate jargon, P&G’s reason for the write-down was: millennial males are now growing beards and aren’t shaving as much as they used to.

Sure, that makes sense, but we should also consider the impact ’direct-to-consumer’ brands like Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, and Cornerstone, are having on the Gillette-style incumbents. By delivering the same product, at a lower OPEX, with more youthful branding, it’s no surprise Harry’s was bought for $1.4 billion earlier this year.

The bigger lesson for me is how company valuations can be so fickle. A company’s valuation is the estimate of its present-day value based on its expected future financial performance. In this case, the P&G executives took a massive bet that the future of male grooming would be clean shaven. It’s now clear that assessment was patchy at best.

But at least patchy is now in vogue.

If there was anyone who had reason to stay out of the mental health spotlight, it was John Kirwan.

The man is a New Zealand rugby legend. One of the best to ever set foot on the field. If you need evidence, check out this moment when he was playing for the All Blacks and single-handedly cut through 15 burly Italians to score one of the tries of the century.

Rugby has a lot of machismo. Probably too much. So one can only imagine the pride and pressure one must feel at the top of the game to keep up appearances.

However, 10 years ago, Kirwan broke with all tradition and spoke out publicly about his battle with depression.

You couldn’t miss him. He was all over billboards and the evening ad breaks (No Netflix yet, folks!). And his message was simple and clear: depression and mental health challenges are real, and it’s ok to talk about them.

I’ll be honest, I dismissed his message at the time. In New Zealand, mental health just wasn’t spoken about in school, with friends, or even among family members.

It’s only now that I can connect the dots.

Over last few years we’ve seen a societal shift on this issue. It’s now normal to talk about healthy professional boundaries, taking time-off to recharge, and to admit when we’re not feeling 100%.

We can have these conversations because of the great work of many brave people, but there is a reason why I specifically remember John Kirwan.

In a time and environment when he was seen by many as the epitome of strength and masculinity, he spoke publicly on a very real issue; one that was deeply personal and laced in stigma.

Someone of his pedigree could’ve comfortably hidden behind their fame. Someone of his wealth could’ve funded and fought the battle privately.

But when someone like John Kirwan is brave enough to tell their unexpected story, suddenly there’s an audience.

I overheard an odd conversation last Sunday in a newly-opened cafe next to my home.

Employee: “How are you today? Are you a regular?”

Customer: “I’m good, thanks. Yeah I am, I get a scone here every day.”

Employee: “Hmm, you should consider a gym membership. These scones are really fatty, so if you keep eating them, you’ll probably need it.”

Silence.

With raised eyebrows, I slowly turned around to check-in on the gentleman who attempted to laugh off the comment before high-tailing it out the door.

With every interaction, we get an opportunity to tell a story, a chance to build trust with our audience, and to give them a reason to come back.

And unless we’re superhuman, at some point we’ll need to trust someone else with the story. It pays to pick wisely.

When someone in your team does great work, praise them publicly.

Although goals and targets guide our daily planning, I’ve yet to see a tasty-looking metric produce a bigger smile than a sincere, specific, and public display of gratitude. At the end of the day, we’re all humans who want to belong and be valued for the work we do.

We should also be aware of the inverse of this maxim: when someone is underperforming, we should provide criticism privately. Criticism delivered in one-to-ones, directed at the work and not at the person, shows we care enough to speak the truth in a safe environment. This builds trust. And soon enough, they’ll provide opportunities for us to praise them publicly.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a few of my reflections on Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madsen. I picked it up after a glowing recommendation from the legend Steven Pressfield, and it hasn’t disappointed.

I also have a soft spot for improv. When I was 13, it gave me my first taste of the theatre, and helped me discover a self-confidence I didn’t know was there.

People usually put improv in the “I could never do that” or “Hell no, I don’t wanna look like an egg” category. Mostly, it just means very few have tried it.

This is where the first, and most important, rule of improv comes in: to say “yes!”

For example, if one of the actors in your troupe opens a scene with, “Watch out, there’s a bucking bronco running straight at us!”

You don’t say, “No there isn’t…”

That’s called blocking.

Instead, you say something like, “Yikes! Grab the saddle, let’s ride!”

You may not know where your fellow thespian is going. They may throw you a ridiculous, off-piste suggestion, but your responsibility is to go with it. Together, you’ll discover the story waiting to be told.

There is a lesson in there too for how we approach new opportunities, friendships, and the unknown. A “yes”, rather than a “no”, can take us to some weird and wonderful places.

Since 5 October 2015, large retailers in England have been required by law to charge 5p for all single-use plastic carrier bags.

The latest statistics from Defra were made available earlier this week for the 2018-19 period and the results were good.

Looking at the UK’s 7 largest retailers, 70% fewer plastic bags have been issued between the 2016-17 and 2018-19 periods, which is a reduction of 778 million plastic bags.

What struck me most about the above was just how bad Tesco was. In 2016-17, Tesco was issuing more than 3.4x the number of plastic bags than any other retailer (640 million plastic bags per year vs. Morrison’s 191 million). Even when normalised for its overwhelming market share, Tesco was a horrible performer.

Since then, Tesco has managed to reduce plastic bags issued by 515 million, or 80%. This is good progress.

The below chart shows the improvements that each of the 7 large retailers have made over the past 2 years.

I wouldn’t be too quick to compliment Tesco and throw shade at Sainsbury’s though. Tesco was severely obese on the plastic bag front and had a lot of “quick win” kilograms to lose, whereas Sainsbury’s was performing much better than Tesco in 2016-17.

What’s more helpful is to look at the 7 large retailers’ market share vs. their share of plastic bags issued.

What we can see here is that Tesco and Sainsbury’s are leading the way, with both of them issuing fewer plastic bags than you’d expect based on their market share of the 7 largest retailers.

We then see that Marks and Spencer and The Co-operative Group are issuing double the number of plastic bags relative to their market share.

This final reflection is purely anecdotal, but I feel the above conclusions in my weekly grocery shopping routine. Tesco and Sainsbury’s both charge 10p for a sturdy plastic bag that can be reused. Marks and Spencer charge 5p for a plastic bag that is flimsy and easily broken. It’s easy to see why Marks and Spencer issue more plastic bags relative to their market share when they make decisions like that.

Overall, I think this piece of regulation is excellent, predominantly due to its high leverage: a small change in regulation (charging 5p for a bag), that requires minimal measurement and enforcement from government, has resulted in a reduction of more than 750 million plastic bags each year.

Note on my analysis for full transparency

Note: There are many ways to analyse and interpret data like this, and journalists will often manipulate data to get better/worse figures for a story. So I’m linking my analysis here. Feel free to make a copy and play around with it.

I took the Defra dataset and removed all retailers except the largest 7 (Asda, The Co-Operative Group, Marks and Spencer, Morrisons, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose).

The only information I added was the market share data. I could get the 2018 market share data for all retailers from Wikipedia, except for Marks and Spencer, as it isn’t strictly a supermarket.

Therefore, the method I used to determine Marks and Spencer’s market share isn’t perfect, and I want to acknowledge that. I took their food revenue from Statista, and then derived their market share (3%) by normalising it against Tesco’s 2018 revenue (£57bn) and market share (27%).

I then performed simple sums and percentage change calculations to reach the above conclusions.

I get my haircut at Jimmy’s. He’s a one-man band operating out of the same North London locale for more than 30 years. He’s cheery, nearing 7ft in height, super-greek, and a joy to chat with each month.

I went to see Jimmy early this morning and was shocked with what I saw.

“Jimmy, you look fantastic!”, I said.

“Thank you for noticing, my friend. I’ve lost 21 kilograms in the last three months!” replied Jimmy.

But he didn’t need to say a thing. The grinning smile behind his huge handlebar moustache said it all.

For the next 20 minutes, Jimmy told me all about how his low-carb diet and disciplined cheat days (where he could eat whatever he wanted) enabled him to go from 138kgs to 117kgs.

Jimmy gave me a great gift today. He exemplified the lesson that no matter our age (he’s in his late 60s), we’re all capable of change. We don’t need to be the victims of habit and circumstance. We can change.

I work with some remarkable, humble people at Bulb. Many of whom go above and beyond in all they do.

However, some of them work with such quiet determination and diligence that I often only learn about their herculean feats through others.

I sometimes wish they’d preach what they practise.

How would it change the way we approach our work if we understood the care with which they approach theirs? How would it change the way we see our challenges if we understood the way they see theirs?

But perhaps the most important reason for them to share their work, is for us to have the opportunity to give them the praise they deserve.

“The word is priority, not priorities, and it originated in the 14th century from the Latin prior, meaning first” shares Gary Keller in his book The One Thing.

When deciding how we spend the few hours we’re given each day, it’s easy to hide behind plurals (and gross corporate jargon).

Top priorities. Key deliverables. Important outputs.

Writing down a list of priorities is easy because we don’t have to commit to anything. We can create an endless list of nice-to-dos and, despite not making any progress towards our goal, feel like we’ve been productive.

The hard part is asking ourselves the question “what is the one thing, that if I put all my effort and focus into right now, will take me the furthest toward my goal?”

And once we complete that one thing, we repeat the process. Over and over again.

Before the 1980s, Japan hadn’t imported a single piece of fish.

At the same time, and on the other side of the world, the Norwegian Government was bleeding money through salmon fishing subsidies.

Norway needed to find a market for its salmon. And what better market than an almost-pescatarian country paying 5x as much for fish used for sushi vs. fish used for grilling?

There was one problem, however.

Japanese didn’t eat raw salmon. Everything about it was wrong. The colour, smell, the shape of the head. But perhaps the biggest issue was the widespread fear that salmon contained parasites that could make you sick.

Enter Bjorn Olsen.

Throughout the 1980s, Olsen led arguably one of the greatest campaigns to change consumer perceptions.

What started as a complete failure, where no government representative or major fish company would touch raw salmon, turned into a massive success following a shrewd partnership with Nishi Rei (think: the Kraft Foods of Japan).

Olsen orchestrated the sale of 5,000 tonnes of Norwegian salmon at rock-bottom prices to Nishi Rei, in return for their commitment to sell the salmon in their stores as fresh sushi. It worked a treat. Nishi Rei’s endorsement meant salmon sushi became widely adopted across Japan.

Soon after, the rest of the world followed suit. In the United States alone there are now over 4,000 sushi restaurants grossing over $2 billion annually, compared to a non-existent market 50 years ago. Now when I see a colleague lunching on salmon sushi, I smile and think of Norway.

And to top it all off, Bjorn Olsen also moonlights as a 7th Dan Aikido Black Belt and is the Chief Instructor of the Norwegian Aikido Federation. Could he be any more badass?

H/T Planet Money Podcast for their delightful story telling. You should check out their episode on this topic here.

Your customers don’t care about your excuses.

They don’t care about a supplier’s late delivery, a rogue employee’s poor service, or a government’s stiff change in policy. They’ve got their own lives to lead, businesses to run, and problems to solve.

What they care about is you delivering on a promise despite the head winds.

In a buck-passing world, companies that take failure on the chin have an advantage over those that deny wrongdoing: they’re often given a second chance.

When faced with the option of denial and losing a customer for life vs. taking it on the chin and getting a second chance, there really is only one choice.

In 2016, five friends and I built a boat made from recycled plastic bottles and travelled the length of the Mississippi River. I’ll write more about it in a later post, but if you’re interested, you can watch the short documentary we produced here.

One thing I learnt was everyone will have an opinion about what you should or shouldn’t do.

Part of our preparation was to seek advice from others. Surprisingly, those who’d travelled the river before said “you’re going to be fine”, whereas those who hadn’t said “you’re unlikely to make it safely”. Some even went as far to say “you’ll likely die!”

We can’t control others’ opinions, but we can control who we listen to.

What we allow through our ears, we allow into our minds, and ultimately into our actions. Had we listened to the people with no experience on the river, we’d have never set sail in the first place.

When embarking on a challenging endeavour (job, relationship, travel, or project), it’s worth considering the believability of each person offering you an opinion. Ray Dalio says that we should give a higher weighting to the opinions of people who are experienced and wise in the area we are seeking advice in. When preparing for the Mississippi River, I spoke to more than 5 people who’d done it before. They helped me see the challenges I’d be facing in a clear light, rather than projecting their fears of the unknown on to me.

In the weeks and months ahead, you’ll no doubt have to make a few important decisions. The question is: who are you listening to?