Multichannel Success Podcast series

Season 2 Episode 5 - HR The Digital Challenge - Transcript

##### David Worby

Welcome to this week's episode in season two of the Multi-Channel Success podcast.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Today we're talking about HR and the digital challenge around it. I'm Mark Pinkerton from Prospero and I have with me David Worby from Prospero.

##### David Worby

Hello.

##### Mark Pinkerton

And James Minter from Harrington/ Beringer Tame.

##### James Minter

Hello

##### Mark Pinkerton

And David Kohn from The Multi-Channel Expert.

##### David Kohn

Hello

##### Mark Pinkerton

So, the first question we should ask is what do we actually mean by digital? Because we kind of work in that space and we think about it all the time but what does it actually mean?

##### David Kohn

Yeah, so I think this is like sort of the existential question of what we both do. So, we were talking earlier, I think we're both normally approaching organisations at almost exactly the same point where they've got some kind of a digital challenge and they're looking for advice and you guys obviously provide advice and we will do a little bit of advice but provide the person. But I think, you know, for us, I mean I started working with Patrick, my partner, just over 10 years ago and even then when we were describing what it was, the kind of people we were finding, I found the word digital problematic because what's it mean? And there are lots of clients of ours out there who do think, you know, we need a digital person so it does mean something but it's a bit of a nebulous term. For me, you know, I think there are very few things going on in retail that don't involve some element of digital but at the same time very few things that are purely digital. So I think we're trying to get our heads around and having listened to some of your previous podcasts, I know that you're on the same page of this, move more towards the idea of the customer roles rather than digital because I think that describes a much better, it's a better description of the things you can now do with technology, say digital, that allow you to pull together data on your customers, whether that's in retail stores and online, whether you, how you map out their customer journey, which again is almost inevitably going to be a little bit online, a little bit offline, and how you then point the organisation towards that customer. So, to me, digital is more about customer now rather than digital and I think it's maybe in the interest in your views, but in the old days what did digital mean? I think, you know, to a degree it was probably biased quite a lot around performance marketing with some conversion online and maybe a little bit of CRM, but it was very heavily biased towards just that performance marketing, whereas for various reasons which we can go into, I think the whole landscape has changed around that. Yeah, certainly we refer.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, certainly we refer to it as digital commerce from our perspective. So David?

##### David Worby

Yeah I think for some it is the channel but I think also being quite cynical for a second it's difficult to imagine many organisations today determining that they don't want to be somehow digital. That doesn't mean they want to become a digital organisation but they don't want to kind of embark upon digital activity. So it's become a buzzword, it's become a word almost that's applied to suggest credibility in terms of forward thinking attitudes to customer, forward thinking attitudes to commerce, forward thinking attitudes to a whole range of subjects. So I think to some extent it's overused and we were saying off air that we see adverts now maybe for digital strategy people when it's evident that really the job isn't about digital strategy it's just about strategy because the organisation is a digital organisation. So the cynical part of me says slightly overused, the kind of commercial practical person in me says it's what we're all about but I think if I go back to when I started it was really a definition of a channel. It was this new channel that was about digital commerce but somehow the technology that empowered it has become now so much more far-reaching than it ever was in the early days.

##### James Minter

Yeah, look, digital permeates everything within most organisations, particularly retail organisations. And I think an organisation has to understand how digital can improve whatever it is, whether it's buying, whether it's understanding the customer, whether it's operations. The other side of the coin, which I think is interesting in terms of those of us that have come from a more digital first environment, is how some of the older skills, some of the more traditional skills of retailing are coming back into digital, both the digital trading channels and the digital marketing channels.

##### David Kohn

Okay so I think obviously the biggest move and I know you've spoken about this before again on some of your previous podcasts but post-Covid really for various reasons not just because of Covid, if you thought that digital was just about performance marketing actually that's probably the bit that's the least popular area in the digital journey now and I think a lot of emphasis has moved out to brand marketing which is increasingly through digital channels and at the other end taking the customers you've already got and making sure they're converting properly, making sure the retention programs are really good and it can include other things like you know payment systems. Customer services has changed hugely over the last few years with chatbots and the amount of data you can then get from those to then re-inform what you're doing in your in your main business so.

##### Mark Pinkerton

So, what trends and changes are we seeing in the market right now? I think that's really a question for James.

##### David Kohn

Yeah, so I think well that's definitely one of them. So I think if we look at, sort of, stand back and take a bit more of a philosophical view, actually marketing never really changes. There's some fairly core things about marketing that are always the same. What has changed and certainly what defines digital is the pace of change and the technology that allows you to do that marketing. So if we look back, you know, 15 years ago there was this new thing called PPC. If you were clever enough to understand that technology you were leaps ahead of everyone else and you could gain quite a lot of profit out of that channel because no one else understood it. If you fast forward to three or four years ago loads of people were jumping onto social. It probably wasn't really mature enough as a channel three or four years ago but now in 2023 social is a hugely profitable channel if you get it right and if it's relevant to your business it might not be relevant to your business. So I think to answer that question there's weirdly, it seems to be going, to go back to David's point, there's an element of it washing back the pendulum, swinging back to some of those more traditional aspects of marketing like awareness and sentiment, I think you were talking about in some earlier podcasts, rather than sort of hardcore performance marketing which has been hit by, you know, the demise of the cookie, the rise in prices for performance marketing and possibly the fact that everyone else is doing the same thing as everyone else. So it's less easy to sort of stand out in that channel.

##### David Worby

One of the other trends I think that this comes packaged with is the need to be technically savvy. I think going back maybe 15 years ago it wasn't as important as it now is to be able to demonstrate how your skill works technically. We used to sit there and technology was owned by the CIO and technology was in a box in a corner and it was created or invested in by someone else. I think today that's not the way it works and I think operatives and capability around whether it's marketing or whether it's operations or whatever it is has to seamlessly fit an understanding of how technology can enable that person to do their job into the specific requirement of what it is they're doing.

##### David Worby

In the old days if you like the skills were kind of a little bit analogue and a little bit non-digital. Today I think the people who are making progress in this world don't see technology and capability as two separate things. They don't have to be able to all build code but they still have to be able to do that.

##### Mark Pinkerton

So, we have to, you know... certainly have to have an understanding of it. Yeah and certainly we know that marketing, you know, as a discipline has probably spent more money on systems than many IT systems, many IT departments and I think that's a corollary of needing that technical savviness within your marketing and your e-com teams.

##### David Worby

Yes and I think maybe later in this podcast we'll get on to the kind of specialism of skills versus the more general skills but I think as a trend in finding people who can move your business forward, one of the key differences between them today and when some of us started our careers was that familiarity and understanding of how technology is fundamentally the thing that makes a difference.

##### Mark Pinkerton

And are there any trends in the roles that people are recruiting for that have changed in the last few years?

##### David Kohn

Well, I don't know, it comes back to that specialisation thing. It depends where your business is, I think, you know, if you, when we're looking to place people in an organisation, and we do everything from, so we're a recruitment business and we've got an exec search arm, so we see, we've got visibility over, you know, £35,000 a year jobs up to £250,000 a year jobs.

##### David Worby

Yeah. Um...

##### David Kohn

I think there's, you know, reflecting on what I just said, I think there's, right this second, a lot more emphasis on things like CRM and that retention element, which feeds through to the customer type roles. Certainly at the senior level, there's much more interest in people understanding brand as well as performance marketing, and going back to that more traditional mix of above the line and below the line marketing, which is a different skill set to that very data driven ROI, very technical marketing that we had before. What else? I think, yeah, I think we're going to come to the sort of specialisation of whether we've moved to a place now where actually people are very siloed in their roles. I think that's an interesting question. I think, you know, back in the day, digital was seen as a solvent in a business where it would try and break through silos, so you had a better understanding of the totality or the holistic view. As the whole genre has matured, then I think there is a danger that you end up with people who are working in SEA who don't understand what people are doing in CRM.

##### Mark Pinkerton

It's become a silo in its own right. Yes I think we're naturally moving on to the next question which is where are the key challenges for retailers right now?

##### David Worby

What we're seeing is an explosion in the number of roles that are required, an explosion in the set that are required to be digitally capable and therefore the subject of a deeper more knowledgeable set of capabilities is a challenge for organizations because whilst it gives them the specialism that they require in the areas where they want to be outstanding as opposed to where they just wish to be in the pack, that creates challenges for organizations when having people in maybe some cases large numbers who have such deep subject knowledge. A, it's difficult to retain them because there's always someone willing to pay them more money to be able to bring their specialism to a different environment but also you end up having a small or in some cases a large group of people with such deep understanding that it may actually be so such as to kind of rule out their knowledge and understanding and transparency of the wider organization because all they're doing is this very narrow subject and I think whilst that brings that specialism it brings organizational challenges not least of which is leadership who sometimes don't understand the extent to which that specialism really exists. Or they don't understand that the skills involved actually would be transferable to a different part of the organisation.

##### David Worby

I guess what I'm trying to say in my rather bad English is, in the old days we all knew a little bit about everything and therefore we were all able to be part of conversations and decisions and strategies that involved all elements. It seems to me increasingly difficult to do that in organisations now where that specialism is so deep that actually it defies even the manager of that person to really understand what's going on.

##### David Kohn

Yeah, so I think with every client we go to, one of the first questions we're going to ask them is what their mix is between in-house teams and agencies, because that to a degree answers your question. And therefore, are we hiring somebody who's going to do stuff in-house and be a very deep specialist, or are we going to be finding somebody who manages agencies, which is a very different skill set, but at the same time requires some of the same knowledge? So I think that's a really important thing, and I'm trying to think of, you know, there's some fairly well-trodden sort of ways of deciding which elements of your marketing or your digital should be in-house and which should be agencies. So typically if there's something that's very fast-moving, very new, that would be handed off to an agency, and there's these cycles, aren't there, where once the organisation understands what the agency's doing, then they might seek to then bring that in-house. Or there may be a situation where they're super happy on concentrating on their products and what they do best, and then handing that stuff over to agencies. But again, it's at what level do you need that expertise? Is it managing agencies? Is it doing stuff in-house? And I think the second bit to that thread of conversation is if you've got these deep specialists, then your senior management then becomes that linking layer that should then be very good at setting mission control and enabling these elements of the organisation to understand the bigger picture and where they fit into that picture.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Without necessarily dictating how things should get done..

##### James Minter

Yeah, I know that Prospero, you ask the question, what do you want to be brilliant at when you're looking at outsource versus insource? And I think that's a great way of looking at it. There are certain things you are very unlikely to be brilliant at, unless you're of a huge scale. So managing PPC, you're very unlikely to be able to have the skills and the knowledge and the number of people that are going to do that as well as an agency. So the things that you do have to be brilliant at, number one is product and number two is understanding your brand and being able to execute your brand. It doesn't dictate for me that you must outsource these other things, but the things that you must insource are the things that define who you are as a brand and what you mean to your customers.

##### David Kohn

Disagree with you slightly there. I think that if you've got, take an example of the discipline of PPC, PPC has now been around for a long time, there are a lot of people in the market who can do that job and actually it's probably easier to bring that in-house. There are elements like social media and there are loads of people who say they do social media but actually do social media well, is a much smaller talent pool and that will tend to reside in the agencies so it's probably better to go where the talent is rather than try and employ those people in-house.

##### Mark Pinkerton

So it's partly where the ecosystem exists.

##### David Worby

And I think it's how things have changed, because I remember right back in the day,

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, and I think it's how things

##### David Worby

we outsourced it because we didn't understand the technology that underpinned it and made it happen. Or you couldn't buy the technology to run things. Well, maybe, because maybe something didn't exist in those days, but we used to walk around thinking, why do we outsource this? Because no one knows our brand better than we do. So we had the IP in our own heads, yet we still outsourced it because we didn't understand how it worked. That understanding has now moved to the client side. So the IP has always rested with the client. Now the technology can rest with the client, and an understanding of it can rest with the client. I suspect that if we were able to do a poll, we'd find that outsourcing of PPC relative to 15 years ago is probably a lot less now, because you've understood enough to be able to take it on board.

##### James Minter

That to me is more a practical question as opposed to this question as to what do you need to be great at. To me, the fundamental challenge is number one is you've got to be a brand that means something and number two is that is built on an understanding of the customer. In order to be a brand, you have to have creativity. You have to be able to find ways of communicating with emotion. I'm not saying you can't do that through outsourcing. Many people use ad agencies and creative agencies but when you talk about IP, for me, the IP that is most important for you is not the IP of how good I am at managing PPC, it's how good I am at representing what my brand means, really understanding it and really knowing how to communicate that to my customers and my prospective customers.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I want to move on to the question in terms of the type of organization that we're talking about. What are the stresses and strains that those different types of organizations face?

##### David Kohn

Well, I'd say there are two aspects. If we compare a start-up with a scale-up, we very rarely get involved with start-ups.

##### David Kohn

They can't afford our huge fees.

##### Mark Pinkerton

They can't afford it.

##### David Kohn

We've got a solution to that. I think if you're in a scale-up, you're probably doing two or three different jobs at once, which helps with what we've been talking about, which helps you connect all the dots because you've got a better visibility of the whole problem. You've got to be more entrepreneurial, and you're trying to make revolutionary changes, whereas if you're in a larger organisation, typically, you're more about evolutionary changes. The other thing is, if we use the word digital or customer, but let's go back to digital,

##### Mark Pinkerton

And I think

##### James Minter

The other thing is I think all the most successful digital people that we hire, if they've been doing digital for a length of time, I think, are defined by the fact that they are quite entrepreneurial. They're in probably the most dynamic area of business in 2023, or they have been for the last 15 years. They've got to be right brain, left brain. They've got to understand technology, and they've got to understand human emotions, and they've got to see what new technologies are coming up over the hill and how they're going to apply those to the organisation. At the same time, they can't just be entrepreneurial. They can't just be mavericks who just jump on the next bandwagon. They've actually got to be able to bring the whole organisation with them, and so I think there's an element of the sort of corporate... business person melding with that very dynamic entrepreneurial personality, which is very difficult to find.

##### Mark Pinkerton

I was going to say, you're describing a unicorn there.

##### David Kohn

And I was going to say, you're describing a unicorn there. Well, yeah, but they do exist. And I think, to me, we'll define that as a sort of corporate entrepreneur. I think in the scale-up it's the other way around, but it's very much the same problem but the other side of the coin. You've got to be able to come into a system which is probably quite chaotic, quite messy, very inventive, but there are no systems and processes, and that won't scale, that business will not keep going without falling flat on its face. So how do you put systems and processes into that organisation without trampling on the entrepreneurial DNA of the company? So I think that thread goes through all digital things in my mind.

##### David Worby

Maybe we should take a break here for a message from our sponsor.

##### Mark Pinkerton

I want to move on to the issue of churn, I mean certainly we see it from our consulting clients that we go to where people have only been in the job 18 months and are now looking to move on. It seems to be fairly typical in the digital world, even at a relatively senior level, in fact, perhaps especially at a senior level. Are there other problems that that churn manifests itself in within the organisation? Well I think churn...

##### David Kohn

If I see a CV where people have moved every 18 months for the whole of their life, I'm quite suspicious. Are you?

##### Mark Pinkerton

Are you? Because I think we see that as a pretty normal career path for people we interact with.

##### David Kohn

Because... No, well I think, yeah.

##### David Worby

Yeah, I think it's more common than it used to be. I'm not sure that makes it... good.

##### Mark Pinkerton

No, that's true, that's true.

Yes, it's certainly not unlikely to be a job for life for anybody, is it?

##### David Kohn

Well I think there are two things, one is if an organisation is big enough they should

be able to progress through roles, so they might spend 18 months in a role, but you may

have done that two or three times.

##### David Worby

But I wonder of your view, does deep specialism make that more difficult to achieve, and I wonder whether we're kind of guilty here a little bit of assessing an increase in churn in the way we used to think about churn as a negative thing. In many ways in a digital organisation it could be seen as a positive, because you're constantly on the move and you know if the speed of change is as quick as we think it is, because you're constantly on the move.

##### David Worby

then why wouldn't churn also increase proportionally with that desire to move?

##### David Kohn

Well I think the answer to that is, I love to see a CV for example where the first job someone's done in digital is SEO. Because I think that's the bedrock of all digital marketing. It's all about keywords, it's about massive data and pulling out the aspects that you need to concentrate on. It's understanding Google, which may or may not be relevant in the future but there's a whole load of base bits of knowledge that you can acquire doing that.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah. ...quite doing that.

##### David Kohn

So it's a fantastic foundation for then going up.

##### James Minter

We'll be right back.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yep.

##### David Kohn

And again, CRM. CRM is all about, or should be all about, huge amounts of data, mapping out customer journeys and working out through testing and learning which ones are working well. So that feeds brilliantly through to a customer director or a customer officer later on in life. So I think some deep specialisation is fine if you're then progressing through other roles. I think if you've stayed in CRM for 15 years, you may be an amazing specialist in CRM but the question is why?

##### James Minter

Certainly, when I was looking at people at Heels and Snow and Rock before that, if somebody was at the early stage of their career, I was pretty happy to see them job hopping because I felt that was giving them more variety, giving them a chance to pick up more skills. I, like James, am very suspicious of leaders, people that are heads of e-commerce, e-commerce directors who have spent 18 months here and two years there, because however good you are, Rome is not built in a day. You've got some big strategic projects, you've got some cultural change, you've got business performance, and to me you simply cannot prove your merit in that short a space of time. Even with all the test and trial, even with all of the very quick response we get to things, to really build a business, whether it's digital or non-digital, you've got to show that you've been able to do it over an extended period of time.

##### Mark Pinkerton

So effectively that is that's a sensible solution to a challenge at that point is making sure that those things are in place Yeah, although frequently those are not in place Yeah, you know having the clarity of strategic vision is sorely lacking in many retailers

##### David Kohn

Yeah.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, how can somebody determine whether or not they should recruit versus develop skills? And do you have advice on that?

##### David Worby

Well, I'll go first, because I think David said something earlier that I think a number of us agree with, which is this idea of defining what you want to be very good at, and building a picture within your organisation of the tasks that need to be done, the capabilities that you need to exhibit, and whether you want to excel at them, or whether you want to just be, if you like, capable of delivering. And I think that might sound like a rather odd thing to do, because why wouldn't everybody want to be outstanding at everything? But in reality, that's a high-risk business, and that is unlikely to be as successful as you might want it to be. So we would always recommend, and indeed we have recommended to clients we've worked with, that they really think hard about what they want to specialise in and be outstanding at, and that might be product, it might be customer service, it might be a number of things. And I would argue at that point that when you have a clear map of the things that you want to be brilliant at, you want to build your reputation around, you probably need to take complete responsibility for that. Because finding that service within a plethora of the service industry will mean it's not as outstanding, it's not as good, it's not as fruitful as you want it to be. So you've got to build your own internal capability for those things that you want to build a reputation for. The rest, I guess, fall into two other categories. Outsource it, which we used to do a lot of, and there's a thriving market for almost every capability you would want in digital.

##### Mark Pinkerton

You could have a sawed-off L35 and it's damaged it a bit.

##### David Worby

Yeah, it has, but you can kind of, you know, there are partners who will literally take, scoop your whole business up from nose to tail and do it all for you.

##### David Kohn

Yeah.

##### David Worby

Yeah. And for some businesses that may well be an attractive proposition or to take elements of it and outsource it.

##### Mark Pinkerton

But that's at a business level, rather than an HR.

##### David Worby

Yes, so I think before you come to a decision about what you want to find people for, you've got to go through an exercise to understand what you want to build a reputation for. And I think that leaves a middle ground which is open for debate.

##### David Kohn

Well I think, so I think another answer was great, so do you train internal resource or do you go externally? Yeah. I mean I think, let's look at some, so this is a weird flashback to my previous life. When I left the Navy, I used to be in the Navy for 10 years

##### Mark Pinkerton

When I left the Navy...

##### David Kohn

and I started up service officers in a club. In the Navy you're given a bunch of people and you have to make the best of those people you're given. And it's sort of a point of pride that you turn them into the right kind of person to do the job. And I never, I didn't realise when you actually went into the civilian world, you normally, if someone couldn't do their job, you sacked them and you found someone who could, so it's much easier. I think in digital, it's slightly different. I think if you've got somebody in your team who is very clever, who understands data, who understands human emotions, so they've got their right brain, left brain, and they're capable of being trained, and they really have a passion for the product you're selling and your business, it's probably worth training them up. Otherwise, you want to go off and find somebody who's an expert at doing that thing, who's got a really good track record, who's going to bring some extra knowledge into your organisation.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, I remember one instance where we were dealing with a client and to point out to that client that the one person that they really needed to get to keep hold of in their organisation was actually the junior analyst because even though it was her second job she completely got it, whereas most of the people around her and above her didn't, which was a very strange set of advice to give to the client.

##### James Minter

One thing I would say is, and this may not be the solution to the problem, but you should be looking to develop everybody, everybody in the team, whether they're in the digital team per se or whether they're in the non-digital part of the business. You should be looking to raise the skill level of everybody because that will make you a better organisation. Now, that may not be sufficient for you to fulfil your strategic objectives, but unless somebody has a super specialised role, and even in most cases where they have a super specialised role, like a developer, it will not hurt them to have a better understanding of the customer, to have a better understanding of digital marketing.

##### Mark Pinkerton

At the same time, do you think it's a good idea, in the way that some retailers do, in terms of moving people around the business, they might be on supply chain for one role and then the next role they're running e-commerce, to me that doesn't inherently make sense because there are certain skill sets that you need to make a successful job of e-commerce which are not necessarily the same as dealing with customers in store or supply chain or whatever.

##### James Minter

Agreed, I think you know their roles. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to bring somebody in

##### Mark Pinkerton

So that's the sort of old-fashioned retail model.

##### James Minter

from day one to have a position of you know, significant responsibility, but you look at some of the Old-fashioned companies like your Mars is or M&S; in days of old They would put people into multiple different departments at early stages in their career, but my point is more general. It's to say that Whatever anybody is doing in your team It will probably be improved by them having a broader perspective a better understanding of what you're trying to do as a department by what you're trying to do as a business by what you're trying To do as a brand and I think You know in businesses. I've I've been responsible for we have had quite high churn because people come in Relatively unpolished and they leave with a much greater skill base and they go and get a much better job. I Always considered that a feather in the cap rather than a problem because it meant we'd done a good job Making them

##### David Kohn

there's another aspect we haven't actually touched on which is the whole agile methodology, which is such an important aspect of elements of digital and should really be. So just a quick recap on what agile is, if you've got a modular system like a computer programming system you can take out bits, change them, test them and then put them back in without shutting down the entire organisation. And the way that's done in digital organisations is you have your weekly stand-ups, you have sprints and people are given tasks to get done. They're tested, there's data and if it works that's incorporated in the system, if it's not you start off and do something else. I think the important aspect of that is that the teams are not just a developer, they should be someone who's a developer, product, commercial, there's a whole range of different disciplines within that team to make that thing happen. So you have to be able to work with those people and have that,

##### Mark Pinkerton

You've got to be able to work with it.

##### David Kohn

that gives you a mini holistic, if that's not a tautologous, view of what the company's trying to do or certainly what that problem is trying to do, or what that group is trying to do.

##### Mark Pinkerton

trying to do and how it attaches. But you may also be working in multiple groups simultaneously so you have to be it it's a complete you're right it's a it's a different skill set to be able to be dumped into a project group and work effectively within that. So time is marching on so I kind of want to ask the question around what is needed for a digital leader today?

##### David Kohn

So I think the, if we go to several aspects, one is they've got to be data literate. That's absolutely key, the fundamental base of everything we're talking about, I believe. But they've also, in 2023, got to understand the wider marketing context. It's not just about performance marketing, it's not just about data, it's about understanding brand and how that melds into the customer journey. One of the other aspects, I think they've got to understand agile methodology. I think in a broader sense, taking a slightly more sort of stepping back a bit, they've got to be able to look at the range of very exciting, shiny new technologies and channels that are coming through and be able to take a rational risk approach to how they're going to engage with those channels. I think that's, to me, that is almost like the sort of, there's that and the ability to bring the organisation with them.

##### James Minter

To me, the digital leader of the past could be a technologist and a geek. You could get by by being the guy who knew how to execute against your very specific digital or technical requirements. That's no longer a starter. You've got to be somebody who can combine those left brain skills with the right brain skills or whichever way the sides of the brain work. But you've got to be able to combine your technical skills with the human and the emotional skills. That for me is what I'd be looking for in a digital leader. That's what I want to see in a CEO. Somebody who can combine both sides of the brain.

##### David Worby

Yeah, I'd add one more thing in which we talked a little bit about off-air, which is the challenges that are faced by leaders who need to be both entrepreneurial, but at the same time, corporate. And the challenges that they face when trying to build a business that's fast-growing, agile, dynamic, within a wider organisation that probably isn't. And that cultural challenge of being the person who is championing growth and progress, when the rest of the organisation is kind of struggling to kind of, not so much survive, but certainly struggling to grow, I think brings around some real subtle leadership challenges that are not for everybody. Yeah, yeah.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, you may well have a different appetite for risk compared to the rest of the organisation which creates all sorts of conflict.

##### David Worby

And you may well have a different appetite for risk. It's very easy to become the outlier and the one on whom all the risk is kind of heaped. And I think that takes a particular person who can bring people who are not directly involved in that journey, there obviously are some groups of people who aren't, but somehow make them feel like they are on that journey.

##### David Kohn

I'd say they're almost the opposite to an IT director, because an IT director is a cost centre, they're risk adverse, and they don't understand what the rest of the business does. That's a horrible generalisation, but it's not a million miles away from the truth.

##### Mark Pinkerton

You

##### James Minter

Not a million miles away.

##### David Kohn

Might be true, yeah. An additional director needs to be completely the opposite of that.

##### James Minter

And I think just take David's point one step further is a lot of people that grew up in e-commerce grew up in a period of relentless growth and they're unused to dealing with the sorts of problems that David's described, those of efficiency, those of profitability and they've got to bring those skills into play otherwise they'll become redundant.

##### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, and certainly after the last couple of years where we've had negative growth in terms of e-comm, absolutely. Okay, I'm actually going to say that we should end it there, because our time is up. Thank you very much to James. Thank you. And to David. Thank you. And David. Thank you. And thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.

##### David Worby

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