Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. I’m Greg McKeown. This is part two of a conversation with a CEO, an entrepreneur, and a brilliant mind, Brian Murphy. He’s not just the founder and CEO of ReliaQuest, he’s also someone who can dissect the entrepreneurial journey with us, with you. In part one of our conversation, we started literally at the very beginning of his life, his first memory of chasing his brothers and getting his hand trapped in the door and followed that piece by piece in the great race of his life, and we had a deep dive on a single principle, and that is this: to do the simple things savagely well. What a great one-liner and a great addition to our own toolkit as part of The Greg McKeown podcast community. And we also went deep into a specific practice that he learned in a sales class in his undergraduate degree, which was feel, felt, found. Of course, you can go back to listen to the whole episode if you haven’t caught up on that yet. Where we ended was before the great journey of his current entrepreneurial venture, the thing he is best known for in business, and that’s where we’re going to begin the conversation now.
Brian, welcome back to the podcast.
Brian Murphy:
Great to be with you, Greg, thanks very much.
Greg McKeown:
Help us to go on that journey. From that class, you then went and actually were an accountant at PWC, and at some point along the journey, you shifted from being an accountant to formally being an entrepreneur. How did that take place?
Brian Murphy:
So I went, I signed up to be an auditor at PWC and was recruited by their management consulting side the technology side of PWC, and they taught me a bunch of programming languages and ultimately sold that business to IBM. And so I worked for financial services kind of compliance Sarbanes Oxley compliance consulting and just had this idea that I wanted to do something bigger. The group that I worked with were two owners. I was the sole operator in central Florida. They were up in North Florida and I kept bringing them some ideas on how we could go bigger and expand and hire differently, and I appreciate they were honest with me at the time. One wanted to go into politics, and he did, and the other one said this looks like a lot of work, and I’m pretty happy with where we are today.
And so I tell people how I worked for ReliaQuest. I never would have started ReliaQuest, but that was the jumping-off point where I told my wife hey, I think you know, at the time, our daughter was two, and our son wasn’t born yet. And I told my wife I think I can make a go of this in a different field. Instead of doing the Sarbanes Oxley kind of financial consulting, let’s go over to the IT consulting side. And that was in 2007. And for $150, you too can register a company on sunbiz.org in the state of Florida, and I called myself CEO, and that was the beginning.
Greg McKeown:
There’s a story that I’d come across that you wrote this out on the back of a napkin at an alumni event. Is that true?
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, I’d had this conversation in Jacksonville with the two owners of the firm, and then I was driving from Jacksonville to Tallahassee and to dedicate, we’d done a big capital raise for a student organization there, and we’re out of dedication, and you know, I just really started to form some ideas and my brother-in-law was there, my older brother was there, just a bunch of friends. We just I just started talking out loud and with my older brother and a friend of his and my brother-in-law, and started taking notes on napkins at, you know, midnight in a bar there, and that was really. I went home from there with a bunch of napkins on Sunday and sat Renee down, and you know, she said, “Well, let’s give it a whirl.”
Greg McKeown:
So it’s a literal napkin story,
Brian Murphy:
I wish I still had the napkins. The ideas must not have been great because I didn’t keep them.
Greg McKeown:
So you kept them in a different way, but that’s an important conversation that you had with your wife too. I mean, it takes courage for you, and we emphasize that I think, in the entrepreneurial stories, but that’s courage for her too. That’s a. You know she’s, she’s depending on you, she, you both have a young daughter, and it’s a. It’s a risky move, but she believes in you, and she believed in it, and that’s not nothing.
Brian Murphy:
She had way more courage than I did. I mean, she had to have faith because it wasn’t much of a plan, Greg, it wasn’t much right. I mean, it’s a couple of something, napkins, and that, you know, and then, a year in, we go through the greatest financial crisis, you know, the second largest financial crisis in American history, and she never questioned. She’s just, she’s very tough and in just an amazing person and I always tell her that you know, if she and I aren’t good, I can’t be good Like that’s. It’s a, it’s a baseline, it’s a foundation. I can, we can go do a lot of things, but she and I got to be good for me to be able to do that.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this idea. I feel this is true in my own life, too, that if everything’s great but my relationship with Anna doesn’t feel great, then nothing’s great. And vice versa is also true. If our relationship is great and nothing else is great, we’re going to be fine, everything’s great, it’s okay, and it doesn’t get enough exposure, I think, these themes that have grown out of this conversation in the first half of the interview as well the role of your father, the role of now we’re, of course, exploring the role of your wife. These family relationships and their I suppose we could say, obvious, other than they’re not always emphasized, but they’re clear role in enabling, let’s call it, external or public success. So much of that is enabled in these private relationships that don’t get the headlines, but they clearly are the golden thread, or drivers, of what we’re seeing externally. Has that been true for you? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth.
Brian Murphy:
And I think, ultimately, your family for a large case, especially in the beginning, they get the leftovers of you right, so they don’t get the full weight and the benefit of you. You’re spread out. You’re just trying to survive. I’m just trying to make payroll. I just want, when she goes to the grocery store, I want her to be able to pay for the groceries, and so they deal with all the bad parts of you, or the not sleeping, all that they see, these things that the outside world don’t see. So that’s why they just. My wife has so much courage in everything that she’s said behind.
Greg McKeown:
And the people closest to us, of course, they see the truest version of us in a sense. Certainly, they think they see the messiest version. They see the exhausted side. They see us when we’re not putting on, I don’t want to say putting on a show, because I’m not sure that’s quite right, but when we’re not projecting anything, when we’re not playing a role, just how we are off the stage, they are dealing with all of that reality. So, of course, that’s tougher. Tell me about that year of the Great Recession. How many employees did you have before that just hit? I mean, it wasn’t a single day, but there was kind of a key day.
Brian Murphy:
It wasn’t a single day when that Bear Stearns Lehman, when that started falling, we were doing project billing, consulting projects, and so we get to 25% complete, we could bill 50% complete, and they’re all IT based, and about $250,000 of outstanding AR went away in a couple of weeks. Just large companies were calling and saying, “Hey, I don’t want to do this, but we’re being told all of our spend is canceled, our customers are canceling, it’s all gone.”
And so that was tough. But we had eight teammates at the time, and I learned a couple of things. One just to back to that kind of feel component. I knew that the people calling me did not want to be calling me and saying they were just representing a logo and a brand, so it wasn’t personal, and I didn’t take it personally, so I didn’t react. I just like to move a motion, don’t react. Understand the moment that you’re in. And then the idea of going home and telling Renee, or having to call my dad, or seeing certain friends and support me and say I failed, that was more painful than just saying and figuring out some other way.
And so, fortunately, we had, no one on our team was former military, I wasn’t but we had a small little contract that was doing information assurance on a government military contract. We would be a sub to a sub to a sub and we knew nothing about that world that we just had done a lot of work on. So we started. If we were going to eat. We had to figure it out, and we go over the way and that information assurance contract, that’s what the military called cyber security before they named it cyber, and that’s how we got into cyber.
Greg McKeown:
So that contract existed prior to the day of the meltdown.
Brian Murphy:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, but that was the only thing really that existed afterward.
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, it was real easy to figure out where to focus. It was either go home and tell everybody you failed, or I’m going to learn some acronyms, you know.
Greg McKeown:
One of the reasons that you have that advantage. I mean that’s a tremendous, I mean that’s a tremendously lucky moment. And you have a contract with an organization that is at least somewhat recession-proof. They are still affected to some degree by economic cycles, but nothing like the tech industry in general, nothing like the consulting industry, which was just immediately decimated, you know, pretty much for the next two years, I would say, after the meltdown. So you have this contract. Is it a big contract, or did you grow it into a big contract?
Brian Murphy:
We grew it into a big contract, I mean, we were a pretty small contract, very small, but small is relative. I mean, I could make payroll for a very small amount of money, like that organization would pay us and think it was a small amount of money. To me, it was a small fortune, right? And so I didn’t need much. Now, I mean myself, I wasn’t on the payroll for probably the first two, three years of the company, and then after that, I was on off, on off, and so I would say I’ve never missed a payroll other than my own and I’ve never not paid a bill.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, I’m sure you are proud about that. And rightfully so.
Brian Murphy:
So it was very small, and we just had to Google our way into understanding what they were asking for and, when it got far enough along, where it assembled this team that could go do this work. So it was like four people that could go do this work.
Greg McKeown:
Did you keep the eight people you had before?
Brian Murphy:
We did, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
And you kept the same eight people. You’re going to work together. You’re saying, “Okay, the only way this works is if we figure out this contract and we turn this into a big contract.” That’s our lifeline, and everyone understood that.
Brian Murphy:
Exactly. Yeah, Chris Elliott, who still works for us today, was our second-ever employee. He was there at the time, and, well, you know, I Google searched our way. We stay up all night just working through the night, trying to figure it out.
Greg McKeown:
What does this mean? What are they asking for? What is it? But? Were you learning Cybersecurity? Was your primary focus, or is it just the language of the military?
Brian Murphy:
It was the language of the military, it was the acronym. I didn’t know what a VSAT terminal was. I didn’t know what the yeah, we didn’t know any of it. I didn’t know the difference between a secret and top-secret clearance, and that was really funny. It just shows you that, one luck is undefeated and two people will show you grace along the way. And we delivered this team to go do the work and the subcontractor said, “You know, well, I need your cage code. I need your contract vehicle.” And he could clearly tell he didn’t…there was no Zoom video, but he could tell by the blankness of my answer. He’s like, “I’m going to assume you don’t have any of this, and we’re going to figure out a way to get you paid on this, and then I’ll explain all this on the back end.” And that’s what happened. So somebody took an interest, and you know, like I said, luck is undefeated and you got to be thankful that people show you grace.
Greg McKeown:
For people who are listening to our conversation who have not worked with the military, I don’t think you can really understand how complex the language of the military can be, frankly, how ridiculous it can be because there are acronyms for absolutely everything. I remember the first time I was working with one arm of the military, and we were just doing a keynote for them. It wasn’t a complex piece of work. We had the pre-keynote call. It was about an hour. My assistant was on the call at the same time. When the call ended, she said I didn’t understand anything from the beginning of that conversation to the end. So I’m hoping you did, and the truth is I didn’t understand much more than she did. I really was amazed at the level of, well, yeah, just the acronym talk. I thought corporations were bad with jargon, and I think they are, but it was nothing on this. So that was a double whammy that you had.
Brian Murphy:
It was. But we had to eat. I was cash-advancing credit cards. I took out a second mortgage on the house and making others pay. You just had to survive. We figured it out, and we started to grow that concept from there and got good at information assurance, and they coined it cyber and we quickly decided by, you know. You’re right, that 2008 to 2010 was brutally difficult, even with this small vehicle, and the economy really wasn’t getting back until like 10 or 11. And then we pivoted to start asking ourselves, well, let’s go do this for commercial accounts. We understand that procurement. I did not understand because we didn’t have contract-writing vehicles and all that stuff. So we were essentially getting squeezed. You know, margin compression on the military side, and then we picked it, but yeah, we were fortunate enough to have a shot there.
Greg McKeown:
When did you get your second contract with the military?
Brian Murphy:
I think we I looked at it as when we got our second subcontract, we always worked as a sub to a sub. So our second, the one that really took off for us we got our first in that 08 that we had sat on for a while and then started to work. We got our second in the end of 2009, the beginning of 2010, and that’s where a lot of just volume came in through that contract because we had gotten really good at the information assurance and satellite engineering work, and they had a. They were awarded a big contract, and so, the way you know, the way these things work is they all get awarded at the same time, and then it’s like a jump ball who can fill it the fastest.
We were in advantage because we were so desperate we’d work nights and weekends and we fill out teams while others were sleeping, and so they had this big contract where I think they needed 50 people, and we found 30 of them, and that really made us. That put us on a new trajectory.
Greg McKeown:
The day you got that second subcontract. That was the day you knew this company was going to make it. We can be successful.
Brian Murphy:
Yes, yeah. The thing is, I had to later pivot the business at the end of 2012. So, if this is 2010 and 2012, I looked at the business again, being self-aware. We were winning, you know fastest growing company, and all this, we were feeling good about ourselves. We’re doing, you know, 10, 12 million dollars revenue in that point, and it was a good sized business, but I knew it wouldn’t last.
Greg McKeown:
Why did you know that?
Brian Murphy:
Because we were a sub to a sub to a sub, and so every time a Marine Corps contract would come back at a more competitive rate, that shaving of the feet all the way down. And to learn the vernacular of inside the military, I started volunteering at an organization called AFSIA Armed Forces Communication Electronics Association at MacDill Air Force Base and just started to listen and that you had a mix of active duty officers and industry partners, and I could just tell by going to those luncheons and listen that the spend was ending and we needed to pivot the business and we needed to go 100% commercial, and so I had to go back to Renee and say, “Hey, we’re booming at this time, but I need to turn off all of that and we need to go 100%.” Because then we only had 14 people, but we needed all 14 people to be focused like I believe that you needed ever. You couldn’t peel off one or two people, you had to do it all or do none of it. And that was another kind of great moment in the ReliQuest journey. It’s really been two companies, and we had to shut down one and then rebrand the other into all cybersecurity.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, help me understand precisely how that worked. Did you really turn off the contract first when you just literally don’t have a contract? We got to go get a contract, but did you transition by saying, okay, we’re keeping that contract, but we’re going to go start the commercial focus, and once we have a contract there, we’re going to turn this one off?
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, we had some billets that we were still working as part of the existing vehicles that we were on or through those subcontractors. We didn’t chase any new ones, and the guy was going to keep that going. And then I turned everybody over to start cold-calling commercial accounts.
Greg McKeown:
So every person, no matter what their competency, was now a salesperson.
Brian Murphy:
We redid the scripts and got on the phones, and started cold calling.
Greg McKeown:
Redid the scripts, you’re like right back to the, you’re right back to the class in college.
That’s it. That’s it.
Brian Murphy:
And helping everybody in the business to know that they’re a salesperson as well as whatever other competence they bring to the table.
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, if you don’t quit, you can’t lose, right? So it wasn’t smart enough to quit.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, but you’re not doing yourself proper justice with that because what you did in actually saying no, we have to make this proper strategic tradeoff, not where we’ll straddle it, which is like my experience working with, let’s say, 500-ish organizations over the last 10, 15 years is that almost everybody, almost all of the time been faced with a tradeoff wants to do both, because it’s like you don’t have to really. In fact, you don’t make a decision. That’s what a straddle strategy is right. Decision means to cut or to kill, so it’s like a straddle strategy isn’t making a decision, but therefore you don’t feel as responsible for picking the wrong one. And it’s really interesting to me that you framed what you did in the way that you did. You literally had that conversation with Renee. You said no, we are out of that. We got to completely focus on a different market now and going forward.
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, I mean, I had help. I had a group of people I respected kernels in this AFSIA program telling me you know, I knew something was ending, I knew that was getting more difficult. And then the people that were telling me I was insane to even be thinking of this were some of the members of our team at that point, family members, friends. They weren’t telling me I was crazy because it was a bad idea. I knew they were telling me they’re crazy because they cared for me, right, they didn’t want us to get hurt.
And so I think sometimes when you’re making a decision, you have to remove that people’s emotional need to like want to see you be okay to protect you from the decision you should make, right? So sometimes those are at odds with each other. And I knew that sitting on a sinking ship, that wasn’t good. Sitting in the middle of the road, this just means you get hit by both sides of traffic, right? And so I’m going to pick a road, and I remember telling Renee really early on, look, this thing is either going to be really massive or you’re going to see the nuclear fallout cloud from space of the failure, like one or the other.
Greg McKeown:
The business is over or just launching.
Brian Murphy:
That’s it and but that’s that’s like taken. I’ve always been a student of history, and I love the Industrial Revolution and what I’ve always loved reading about those figures in that time was there were no rules at the time. They had to make it up as they went, and they took these massive gambles like not gamble, but their gut. They knew it was right. Just nobody had done it before, and they were willing to see the gamble through, right? They just didn’t stop. I mean, Carnegie was bankrupt almost how many times right and then figured out you could build a bridge with steel. I mean, it’s the guts that took, and they just didn’t quit. So Rockefeller could have quit when the light bulb was invented, and it wasn’t going to need, you know, kerosene any more. So it’s just, it’s to me there’s so much to be learned by people that have come before you.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, and this is the second time I want to say like yes, yes to this idea of I just didn’t quit, like I. That’s obviously part of your story, and it’s certainly part of your mantra because you keep saying it, but I don’t know that it’s doing justice to the actual thought process, that you really go on. So, of course, you are having this sense of, like, no, I have to succeed. But it’s combined with this, I would say, fairly developed awareness that in order to succeed, we have to seriously change, not around the peripheral things, not 5%, not 10% here, not let’s prepare for the future by doing a bit over here, but a seriously clear understanding. And that, I think, is the difference. I think it explains something of your own success. I think it explains something of Carnegie and these these industrialists.
When you said these massive risks, what I actually think is happening inside of you and inside of them is a clear understanding of what’s going on, where the trends are going, and therefore they work with real clarity, not just gumption, not just I will not quit. If you just have that. Without the clarity, you’re dead. The business is over. There’s no Carnegie to even talk about. There’s no ReliaQuest to be able to have a conversation about here. You just be still with the military. I will not quit dying out. So it’s obviously a combination of clarity plus the willingness to change.
Brian Murphy:
I think you’re dead on. I think, as we’ve grown and cybersecurity has changed so much from 2010 to now, data is moving everywhere. Right, I mean, it’s in clouds and devices, and I think about even pushing the business to continually innovate and build intellectual property that allows us to detect incidents and respond to them in an automatic way, regardless of where the data sits. That was driving the business to where you knew you needed to be. When I look at some companies that haven’t done that, and just kind of stayed static, they’re still in business, they’re probably still doing well, but they’re not going after this addressable market. They’re not trying to solve a problem.
I think for us, I was always trying to solve a problem. I’d always asked myself like, what problem I’m solving for? Who’s the customer? Like who? What problem are they solving for? And then I would mix that with I have a need and a desire to be willing to do the things that other people aren’t willing to do. Like I know that if I’m willing to do that if I’m willing to put the customer’s problem in front of my own need to do anything else, there is an outcome that you can get to there. I think there’s a way through. Now you have to hire the right people and inspire people to think that way. There’s so many things that have to go your way, and you have to get lucky, right? Market timing and all those things. But if you’re not willing to solve the tough problem and not willing to listen, I think you’ll ultimately get beat.
Greg McKeown:
Well, and you’re talking about listening in a very particular kind of way. It’s not just making somebody feel good because you’re listening, which is nothing wrong with that. You’re talking about listening in a richer sense than that, in a complex way, because it’s, of course, listening to internal customers, and it’s listening to the market, and it’s listening to signals on the periphery. It’s a rich term for you if I’m understanding the way that you’re using it.
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, for sure, it’s just being intentional and looking past, I’ve learned over time that what somebody’s telling you they need and what they need are generally two different things. So try to solve the problem that’s being talked about, not the thing that they want right, and that’s something that’s often talked about but hard to do.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, you’re talking there about. They say, “Oh, I’ve got this problem, can you come and do something about it?” And level one would be to respond. Level one, responsiveness, would be yes, we can do that for you.
But what you’re really saying maybe you don’t use these words, but is, “No, but we will solve your problem for you.”
Brian Murphy:
Exactly right. “If I can get you to that endpoint in a better way, would you be open to listening to that? Or not even a better way, in a different way, you’d be open to think differently about how we get to that endpoint.”
And that it’s so important, I think, in entrepreneurship to not chase the shiny car because when you have to make payroll and somebody comes to you and says, if you do these three things, I’ll give you this amount of money, man, it takes a lot of discipline and a lot of focus to not just say take it and don’t get me wrong, we’ve done that several times to make payroll, but if you want to build a real business, you can’t have that strategy.
Greg McKeown:
You can, I mean, you have to at some point add Value beyond what the person was originally thinking, and that’s what allows you to grow a big business, and the creation of that additional value comes from Not just listening to the words they’re saying, not even just understanding the meaning behind the words they’re saying, but to understand their problem better than they understand their problem.
Brian Murphy:
Exactly right, and being willing to have so many of those conversations. I mean, we’re you know, in valuation, multibillions of dollars, 1,200 teammates worldwide, but I will still Do a hundred in a hundred campaign. I’ll talk to a hundred customers for one hour and a hundred days, and I just know what are they thinking, what problems are out there, what are they solving for, and that drives in me and gives me ideas around other companies we could acquire, other things we could go build share with my teams. We join those calls together.
So you just have to stay curious when I know that I don’t know the problem. I know that other people are in the fight, and I just need to listen to what they’re telling me and be willing to provide a solution for it. Or if you want to say, that’s not what we do, but we have to focus on the problem and focus on who that customer is, and that’s what we’ve gotten. You know what those are. That’s one of those things that are simple things or seldom easy. That’s really simple to understand, brutally difficult to stay focused on, and brutally difficult to do and execute on a consistent basis.
Greg McKeown:
What are the questions do you ask people in that one-hour conversation?
Brian Murphy:
Yeah, I think to me it starts with, you know, What problem are you solving for? And they’ll give me generally the solution they want to go with, right? And so I want to understand well what teams in their organization we work with a global 2000, so it’s never just the security team that’s working out, the network team, help desk, it could be all parts.
Greg McKeown:
And the question is?
Brian Murphy:
Who’s involved, like, what other departments are impacted by this right? Because I want to know, like, what’s the scope? Are they thinking too narrow, or is there a way that we could partner with another technology in the program and the in the Company? My favorite question is the kind of the last one, and I have a five-question framework, but my
Greg McKeown:
No, I want to hear those five questions. So give us the framework.
Brian Murphy:
So I start with what problem we’re solving for the second thing, and we use this internally, you know, if you have an idea, you got to bring these five you, this framework, you have to have three of the five questions filled out, and we’ll work together as a team to get all five.
But what problem are you solving for?
Number two, Who’s involved? Like, what teams are impacted? You know, who’s involved? What different options did you look at, right? So what are the different options that you weighed?
Number four, what recommendation are you making?
And number five, and my favorite, what are the unintended consequences of going with that recommendation? So I want you to think about when or if this breaks, why? That doesn’t mean we still don’t go with it. But sometimes people get that kind of confirmation bias if they start the thing they want to do Like so, you start with the thing that you’re recommending, and then you back up to the problem you’re solving. You back up to. You can generally suss that out by asking what are the unintended consequences of going this direction.
Greg McKeown:
Why does that suss it? Why does that suss it out that question?
Brian Murphy:
It forces them to be contrarian to their idea, and the thing that they want to do it forces them to think about if you were to break it, how would you break it?
And I use that both externally with customers to understand the problems they’re working on. These are large, complex organizations, and I’ll never know as much about their business as they do, so I have to be curious. And Internally, it keeps us from chasing shiny cars. It keeps us from spending hours and hours having an idea and getting excited about the idea and not really Weighing it through right. And that second question of who’s involved that generally puts things puts the brakes on things pretty quickly because other teams come in a lot. Well, you’re not thinking about this, or you’re not thinking about this, and so you didn’t. It allows for collaboration. We don’t get siloed.
Greg McKeown:
So when you’re using that framework internally by having the which teams are involved in this, that helps to stop the person advocating for a solution that only addresses a portion of the real problem.
Brian Murphy:
Exactly because, in concept, we are not a department or a group, we’re a company, we’re ReliaQuest, and so we have to think about everybody, right, is it? And you know it’s? I’m big on like systems. So on any major decision, any small decision, I weigh a final like. So we decide a direction, we’re gonna go. I bounce it off the three questions: Is it good for our teammates? Is it good for a ReliaQuest? Is it good for the shareholder? Is it good for the customer? And if we can’t say yes to all three, we never do it. So you have to do this because things move quickly, and people get excited around ideas, and ideas are great, but creativity can also kill performance, right? Can kill outcomes, and the need to be creative can slow things down. So who are we in business, who are we solving the problems for, like, who’s the hero in our story, and is it good for the people that it needs to be good for? And we have to, as leaders, you know, be maniacally focused on those outcomes.
Greg McKeown:
What do you mean by the term systems? When you said I’m a big believer in systems or my student of systems, maybe is what you said. What do you mean by that?
Brian Murphy:
I think quick checks, right? Like I, my least favorite four-letter word is weight, and so I have to create some guardrails of like what questions can, what things can we be questioning to allow us to continue to move things forward, but also be checking, to be professionally skeptical that we may be wrong, right, and I think that we can’t be so optimistic. I’m an optimistic person, but I challenge things all the time; like I, you know, I think that companies seldom lose from outside forces. I think companies win and lose from the inside out, and I want to create these checks and balances along the way to make sure we’re not believing our own story and our own IO. If we challenge ourselves enough inside the building by the time it gets outside, it’s going to do some real good.
Greg McKeown:
There are so many places I still want to go. One thing I must say is because we talked about a Clayton Christensen insight in our first interview. This part two of his most famous book is The Innovator’s Dilemma, in which he identifies the problem. And then he wrote a second book later, The Innovator’s Solution. So the innovator’s dilemma, very simply stated, is that when innovation happens in the market, the dominant players in that market are disincentivized to change and adapt and utilize the new market, the new innovation.
Okay, the only solution, the only solution that Clayton Christensen believes exists, for that is that a company needs to take a portion of their employee base and make them into a separate company, Because the incentives are so misaligned, If you try to do it within the company, everyone just still wants to do the safe thing, the thing that already pays the, so that the gravity pool back towards that is so immense that people can’t overcome the innovators dilemma, even when they know it intellectually. And so the reason I’m saying all of that is that both that story right back in the day when you said, okay, we’re not doing this anymore, we have to do this future thing, or the hundred and a hundred where you’re gathering this new insight constantly and challenging that internal story, the story with reality, right? Because that’s the gap I think you’re talking about. That’s so killer to organizations. They get out of touch and irrelevant with their customers. And I just wanted to say I think that you’re an example of someone who is actually implementing the spirit of the innovator’s solution in the way you’re describing it.
Brian Murphy:
It makes complete sense, and I think for me I have to be disciplined enough on a regular basis myself, just as an individual, that I’m founder and CEO, and I can’t forget the founder, entrepreneur piece and I think if you stay entrepreneurial enough, you can challenge even yourself and challenge your own standards. But if you get caught up being the CEO, I think you tend to see the missing innovation cycle or two, and that’s the tug of war. And the bigger we get, the more we get, the more of an entrepreneur and founder I stay because there are enough people that are in that kind of, yeah, managing exactly. So I need to be contrarian, almost I need to be like how would I break this? Like, if I wanted to beat me, how would I beat me? And that’s kind of the mental tug-of-war that I have. That’s going on on a regular basis.
Greg McKeown:
I think this is the spirit of the of the Andy Grove idea of Only the Paranoid Survive. Yeah, he’s not really talking about paranoia in a psychological, in a strictly psychological sense, but that idea of no, we’re already wrong, we’re already wrong right now. All that matters is working out how wrong we are. And how fast can we figure out how wrong we are? By constantly listening and getting back in touch with the people that we’re trying to serve, and so on, in the ways that you described. Do you have a final word for us?
Brian Murphy:
I just appreciate you taking the time, and this has been amazing for me at the way you unpack things and connect things that I just really haven’t connected. So it’s funny coming in, and I’m telling my story, but you’re translating it in a way that I’ve never really understood it before. So thank you, it’s, it’s, it’s been amazing, and I would just encourage everybody out there to, you know, keep chasing their own possible it’s, it’s all possible, but if you don’t chase after it, it never becomes possible.
Greg McKeown:
It’s a beautiful way to end here, Brian, both for you and also for the listeners. What I want to say is I think that I think that there is more to your thinking processes. The complexity of it, you know, the book side of it, if we had to say it in those terms, then is obvious to you. I think there’s an unconscious competence to that, and that’s an opportunity, too, because if you can sort of have a higher awareness of that yourself, you’ll be able to inculcate that more consciously into the culture of the whole organization. We want you to be a reading organization, that sort of idea.
And for everybody listening, I have three questions that you’re familiar with. What is one thing that stood out in today’s conversation? What is one thing that you can do immediately, you know, I mean within the next five minutes, the next 10 minutes, to just begin the journey of whatever that insight was? And the final thing is, who can you share this with? How can you continue the conversation now that this conversation has come to a close? Thank you really for listening.
