Paul Lindley - Nurturing A World of Healthy Beginnings

Full transcript: Paul Lindley on London Real

4:34 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is the award-winning entrepreneur Paul Lindley, the founder of Ella’s Kitchen, the number one UK toddler and baby brand with a turnover of a hundred million dollars per year. You advocate entrepreneurship that promotes both profit and a social purpose, particularly benefiting the rights of children around the world. You’ve just published your first book Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like a Toddler, with a foreword by Sir Richard Branson.

5:01 The book advocates that we return to the mindset of a child in order to unleash our fearlessness and creativity and become our most powerful selves. Paul, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. Fry well research, you know this. It really hits home for me because I got a little baby boy that’s running around my house.

5:19 He’s about to turn 11 months and I’ve been watching him kind of grow up. He’s my first natural child. I’ve got a stepdaughter as well, and so you know, I do notice what he’s like and the way he discovers movement and the way he makes mistakes, and it’s, it’s kind of fascinating. And ever since I started reading your book, I’m looking at him differently, as in, learning what can I learn from him? That’s right, you’ll hopefully look at life differently as well as you look through his eyes at things that he’s seeing, and you’ll interpret them or try and understand how he’s interpreting them, and that’s kind of the heart of the book.

5:51 That the heart of the book really is around as all being able to unlock our personal potential, not by learning new skills, but by rediscovering old ones, those we had when we had the mindset of a toddler. So really looking through those eyes, which we all had. So it’s not toddlers over there, it’s toddlers ours, that person we once were and still our all those skills we learned over this amazing period with your sons, right, in the middle of now, between being a baby that can’t move and can’t communicate to a semi-independent person that’s running around and discovering the world.

6:22 All those skills we learnt in that time, every one of us, we tend to throw out as childish, and for our childhood, yet some of them are vital to our personal lives, our business license, our society. I argue, you know, this is a famous TED talk with Sir Ken Robinson. You mentioned in the book and I’ve watched it a few times, where, you know, he’s like, you know, schools are killing the creativity and spontaneity of our children. I mean, what is that? What is that balance between I guess learning and somewhat assimilating yet still giving them the freedom, so they don’t grow up like us.

6:53 Well, that’s what we do tend to do as adults is parent our children to conform. We want them to focus on a very short term when they’re at school on their exams and get the best exams, whereas they should be discovering the world, they should be using all the breadth of the skill set that they’ve got to make themselves the best person and best prepared for adulthood as they could possibly be. So in adulthood, when we’re looking to employ somebody, as a zone entrepreneur employing people, I’m looking for skill set, yes, and problem-solving, and those things that you can get qualifications for.

7:27 But I’m also looking for communication skills, empathy, teamwork, all of those softer skills which tend to be ignored, which I think toddlers excel at, and we all were a toddler, so it’s within us all. So what Sir Ken Robinson talks about in that TED talk, one fantastic example that I’ve got in there was how from three to five years old, 98% of us are creative because we think divergently. That’s what we do day to day. We can move from concentrating on one thing to another thing very, very easily, and that’s a sign of creativity.

8:00 By the time we’re 25, only 2% of us are thinking divergently on a day-to-day basis, so 96% of us, nearly everybody, was once creative and now doesn’t use that creativity now. Some of that, sure, is around the way our brain develops and prefrontal cortex sort of brings inhibition and embarrassment and things like that, but a lot of it, in my view, is to do with parenting and the way society wants us to conform, whereas we need the outliers to invent new stuff, to innovate, to be the entrepreneurs, to think differently, and to find solutions to some of the problems that we’ve got in our world, yet none of, none of the society, sort of the ecosystem of society promotes that. Right.

8:40 And so your point of this book is to get us to raise our children differently but also to get us as adults to kind of become children again. Yeah, that race to grow up, which is needed, shouldn’t be at the total expense of everything that we learned when we were under five, and my point is occasionally we should grow down maybe two minutes a day or something. Grow down, remember that person you were, and those fantastic skills that you had then that you can rediscover, that maybe you’re unconfident of having now, or you’ve got less tenacity or you prefer to not involve others in your world, and all of those things can help us be a better person.

9:19 You know, I know you’ve got some exercises in here, and I want to get through to those later, but I kind of want to give a little background here on where you got here or how you got here. And big question I want to ask you is, you know, you were in the television business working for Nickelodeon. You had a career after your career at KPMG, and then you decided to go ahead and become an entrepreneur, which is one of the most painful things to do. So, and you found Ella’s Kitchen.

9:42 I wondered if you could tell me why make that choice, because it’s a hard one. It’s a difficult road, and if I looked at your LinkedIn profile before that, I would say there was very little indication of you going that way. Could you tell me why you did that, and then a little bit about that whole adventure and what you realized by creating the company? So, well, the first point around why I did it, really. I never intended to be an entrepreneur.

10:06 I don’t think I’m very skeptical of people who say, “My life, I want to be an entrepreneur. Okay, what’s your idea?” “I haven’t got one, but I’m going to be an entrepreneur.” I think it comes when you’ve got an idea and you decide to go down that route or not. So for me, it came.

10:20 I’m always being the sort of person that prefers to be an outlier. I prefer to be the black sheep in the white sheep field, and I had an idea that I knew I would be more disappointed in myself, more regretful, if I didn’t follow it through and I saw somebody else do it, and I continued in my nice little corporate career. Then if I did it and failed and had to return to a job and find new work a couple of years later, I thought I would have learned so much in that period.

10:49 So that, what that was, that was my sort of point where I had to jump or stay, and I chose to jump, and I chose to embrace that journey with a firm foot forward, believing in myself, and then chose to take the path less trodden as I walked my way towards the journey that I wanted to get. Okay. And the idea itself, was when you found yourself feeding your daughter Ella, is that really what sparked it? Yeah. Well, a couple of things work together really.

11:14 I had Ella and we were going through weaning with her, as you have gone through the last few months here, and as first-time parents we were a little bit distraught that she stopped eating things that she’d eaten, and she wasn’t wanting to try new food at one point, not children end up doing this. But so I was using silliness and mess and games to open her mouth when she giggled and pop a spoon in, and I worked out that food, if food is perceived as fun for young babies and children, then they’ll like it. But the other part was really in that professional life at Nickelodeon where I’d been in so many groups and focus groups and understanding of children through the last seven, nine years.

11:54 It was where I understood how a tuna four-year-old were different, and how boys and girls develop differently, and how they related to parents, how they related to brands, and how our society was driving unhealthiness with children, and the obesity rates were increasing. So, a third of our kids are overweight and 20% of them are obese. And I was thinking, someone needs to make food fun, that happens to be healthy. Oh, I fancy doing that. And that’s how I got.

12:20 And unusually, I think I had the concept of what the brand would stand for before I had a clue what products would be in that brand, and I knew what the values were from that brand. I knew what the mission would be, and that was, okay, I want to try this journey, now let’s go. Do you think that’s the way companies should be started, with the mission statement, the values and then the product? I absolutely, 100% believe that. Yeah, I think every entrepreneur that I know successful over my last 10 year journey, none of them have started off saying, the point of doing this is to make as much money as we can.

12:54 The money follows the idea and the passion behind that idea and the creative way of achieving something that nobody’s thought before, but the purpose of the company has got to be beyond that, just striking making money, because that’s what empowers people, encourages people to work for you, motivates people to work for you, and the trust that you’ve got from them, that they can see that they’ve, their one little job is working to create this whole mission, and you take their one job out, whether it’s the receptionist or the kind of marketing director, everybody is needed. Everyone’s little [expletive] turns the lights go on, and this is the mission and Ella’s Kitchen, our mission is to improve children’s lives by developing healthier relationships with food.

13:36 We happen to make exceptional products, pre-prepared, pre-made food products for them. We also make cookbooks. We also use our influence for advocacy to get the government to change laws and to try and influence behavior around children’s food. All of that fits with our mission and all of that stuff, walking the walk, of that talk, of what the mission is, is why our people want to work for us, enjoy working for us, stay a long time, get motivated, get energized, get productive, and therefore make more profits.

14:04 Start with why, as Simon Sinek says. Exactly the point. Yeah, and we think about the same thing about our mission around here, and if you really have a great mission, trying to get your people to come to work is not necessarily a chore. Whereas if you’re trying to convince them to make that extra dollar, it’s it’s a different. You know, if this little theory that you know of, the millennial generation and a post-millennial generation that will be coming through, they’re the ones, those that are going to be the future leaders in our society, from that generation, want to work for somewhere that has values that overlap with their own values, that they can see that those values are making that lived and that they are making a difference, that their career is progressing, but also beyond their little career they are, they are part of a ripple.

14:49 They are an individual ripple that’s creating a wave that they feel that overlaps with their values. Therefore I think, I think the big corporates and the big FTSE companies, etc., I have got to sort of really be honest about what their mission is and how the, the short-term pressure to deliver financial returns over a quarter versus their long-term mission affects people wanting to work for them and believing that their long-term vision is something that is being seen through. So I’ve got this little theory that if we don’t change things, more young people are going to be want to be entrepreneurs and work for young companies that are growing and standing behind a mission, and that’s great on the one hand and a huge advocate for small business, mission-led business, entrepreneurs.

15:38 But it does present a problem. If my pension, your pension, all of our structure of our society is built on big companies and the talent is not wanting to work for them. So there’s, I know there’s a lot of ecosystem stuff that needs to be looked at. I think with the way capitalism is being played out this century. Yeah, and I want to ask you about the innovator’s dilemma concept later as you talk more about Ella’s, because the way you looked at it, the way you innovated with the packaging and the names and stuff, it wouldn’t have been done at a huge, huge company.

16:10 And so we will get to that later. You also mentioned something. We had a guest in here named Daniel Pink who says at work three people want three things, which is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Once you make a certain amount of money, those three things are important, and I think it’s really important to remember that, and that purpose is is really employed, perhaps one more to that, those, and that’s connectedness. They want to feel part of a tribe, of a community, listened to but that.

16:34 So all of those things are internal rewards, and what company’s corporate culture tends to do is emphasize the external rewards: the promotion, bonus, the office by the window or whatever, and status. Yet I really think, and toddlers a fantastic example of this, and everyone, we all were a toddler, remember? You know, they want the rewards that are personal, that are inside, that make them feel good, that make them feel like they’re mastering something, or they’ve got the freedom to make mistakes and that full of that autonomy, that they’re connected to people, and there’s a purpose behind the journey that they’re going.

17:10 So you know, from Ella’s Kitchen, for example, half of our bonuses are based on people living their values. We have Net Promoter scores every six months, and you know, if managers don’t live the values and treat people as people, one of our values is to be childlike, for example, and then they don’t get that bonus. And you know, that’s usually motivation. Interesting. And they get what, evaluated anonymously by people in the company.

17:35 Okay, and that rates them on values and on individually as a team, right? And an employee Net Promoter Score. We’ve got a very high benchmark that we go for. We’ll be in the top 1% of companies in terms of would people recommend other people, their friends, to come and work for us. And you know, that is an indication that we’ve got.

17:55 We state our mission, do we live it or not? And we live by that. Yeah, super important. I want to talk about some of the aha moments you had early on with Ella’s. But one thing I remember you talked about is that you understood from the get-go that it wasn’t moms that bought the food, it was really the toddlers that made the decisions.

18:12 Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because I would say most marketing executives for the major food brands in America would probably differ with your opinion at the time. They would. And my view was, as a parent, foremost, that however many times I bought, so if I went in the shop and bought something, I’m influenced by the marketing on the shelf, everything. If my baby or toddler spat it out ten times, I’m not gonna buy at the eleventh time.

18:40 So really, I think food is much more than just the taste. It’s stimulating all of the senses. That’s what our business tries to do, try and stimulate the child’s full senses, so it’s a real sensory experience. And good relationship with food is not just about tasting the food, it’s about the social aspect of food. It’s about families eating together.

19:01 It’s about children being involved in knowing where food comes from, I mean, preparing food, and all of that. It brings out the humaneness of people, and that’s what we did as a brand. We built the business, at my family, effectively in the early days, is Ella’s Kitchen. It’s about a normal family going through the struggles and delights and strains of bringing a child up, and try it back to relate that to another normal family who chooses to buy our products sometimes, and say, it’s a parent, a parent relationship rather than a corporation to consumer, and that needs authenticity, and you need to be truthful about everything behind that.

19:38 But that’s the marketing route that we took, that is different to saying mum, and it’s generally mum that goes into the store still, but it’s only 80 percent or so. So you, you know that does play a real role, and he plays a huge role at home as well. It’s close to 50/50. Two people are feeding their babies if it’s a two-parent family. And above all of that, we thought, come from the child’s point of view, come from the child’s eyes, point of view.

20:08 If they are stimulated, if they recognize the colour of the pack, the smell of it, the texture, the feel of it, then they’re more likely to eat it. It’s almost hard to believe your story to a certain extent, but I love your optimism because you sit around at your family table, you coat, you make up some smoothies, you get your kids around the table, including Patty, your son, and you do a focus group, you know, and like, this is a company that’s later it’s sold, you know, for a huge amount of money to, you know, an American conglomerate. But it actually happened that way, right?

20:38 It did, and we still use, you know, if we’ve got a new product coming out, we’ll obviously use focus groups and groups of kids, babies, and they don’t lie. Let’s put a bar book that young toddlers are honest. They haven’t learned to lie yet. All the toddlers kind of get that up by quickly, younger ones, and when they’re tasting our food, you know, there’s no niceties about, oh, I don’t really want to tell them that it tastes too sour or, you know, there’s an off note there or something.

21:05 They’ll just spit it out, throw it on the floor, or throw it up the wall. But if they love it, they’re absolutely, shake, and that’s exactly what you want when you’re developing a product. You want it, you want unfiltered honesty in in it. And you know, it touches into little wins. One of the chapters is about the honesty of toddlers and babies that we can learn from in adult life.

21:26 And so your son, you call the product your bank, you steal your best seller, or the red one, because he was into the colour and reminded of something them in the house. And you also went for these packages that you could squeeze and you couldn’t see through, and it’s funny. I came on the other night and I told my, my my lady that you were coming on the show, and she pointed to the kitchen and there’s a bunch of your packages so, like, obviously you know you’re doing something right.

21:50 But when you had to make that decision to go against the grain, I was that a big chance to take? Huh. Yeah. The whole journey is a big chance to take and evaluated risk as I was going along, but you know, the, the confidence to listen to my own gut feeling as a parent about how we fed our child, and the little focus groups, let’s call them, but like our friends and my wife’s book club and the little NCT group that we were in. And so their feedback meant more to me than the professionals who were in the supply chain and was saying, you know, people had glass jars forever, they’re not going to change, they need to see the food.

22:30 And I’m thinking, well, fundamentally it’s orange. Our recipes are going to be different, but they’re not engaging to the child, so let’s try it. And then with the colours we have very bright colours on our packaging now. Again, the professionals were saying, well, your main message is about being organic, so you want greens and browns and pastel colors and things, and I’m thinking actually I want a child to recognize this and get excited about that, and let’s have it bright old primary colors, and that creativity is quite childlike, and you know, it fits into my whole theory, but it bucked the trend.

23:07 People hadn’t done it before. It was a risk. It did take off, and you know, you can look back on that and say, okay, that was a quite a powerful moment. The fact that we’ve, you know, we’re really proud that we’ve disrupted, and you know, I wouldn’t hesitate really to say revolutionize the baby food market. Other people used pouches now.

23:23 Other people have learned that actually it’s more convenient for the parents, it’s more in less processed. You don’t have two processors, and much, if you get the recipe right and children like the texture. So that’s we’re proud that people have chosen to move with that times, and the market is predominantly pouches now, and we started that. That’s less disruption. Yeah.

23:48 And the end, then the toddlers themselves can grab it and feed themselves and really get to know their food better, and as opposed to just Daddy trying to stuff it in. Yeah. I don’t like anything in life. If we find some ownership, it’s a real internal human thing, that if you find ownership of something, then you’re, you know, more passionate about it. They’re, you’re more likely to try it, more likely to like it, on all of those things, and that’s played through in the formal research we’ve done subsequently, but the gut feel I had as a parent.

24:17 Speak on this thing about innovator’s dilemma, and then I want to start learning a bit about how I can be a toddler, but you know, it’s a, it’s a concept that’s been out there for a while, in that an established company doesn’t want to cannibalize its own sales and its profit margins. And I saw this in the city when it came to kind of electronic broking, everybody wanted to kind of hold on to their golden goose and milk it as long as possible. And it takes an innovator, a startup, to come in with nothing to lose, with lots of great ideas, maybe thinking like a toddler, you know, to shake things up.

24:45 And a lot of times that cycle repeats. Do you see that ever changing in the future? Do you agree with that concept, and will it always be those upstarts that kind of educate and potentially bankrupt those companies in our pension schemes? Well, if you look back at the S&P 500 or the FTSE 100 or whatever, so 30 years ago there would be a huge minority of the companies that were there then that are still there now, probably ten percent or something like that.

25:11 I don’t know the exact figure, but and it’s because of exactly that point. These startups that came along have become established and being able to grow because the big companies weren’t prepared to take the risk. Now I see that that’s, that’s a fact, and it is a sustainable economic model. I think is if you let the startups fail, learn, adapt, prototype, develop, and then when they’ve got something that works, go and offer to buy them, and that might suit the entrepreneur, the scale-up opportunities, might be a good thing for both sides.

25:46 There are other ways to do it though. You know, there’s a huge sort of focus on entrepreneurship now, so having entrepreneurs on the inside and have that thinking developed, and I think there’s more miles to go in that. Still, you know, there’s, there’s private equity, this type model where the big companies invest in startups and kind of offer their resources, but don’t control the destiny. Leave it, leave it with the entrepreneur to make the operational decisions and some of the strategic decisions.

26:16 There are the fact, you know, in fact remains we need innovation in our society, whether it’s for practical purposes of improving our lives by wanting to buy something that’s better, or it’s more fundamental in the way we operate as a society and the solutions that have tried and tried and tried again, and we sent us keep trying the same old solutions, and this is, we’re thinking like a toddler, being an outlier, being a risk taker is needed, otherwise we don’t move on. Right now the ideas for this book came about through Ella’s, right, because now you’re in touch with the children. You try to keep it playful at work, so I’m guessing a lot of this has developed over the years, maybe internally, and then at the end you kind of realized, wait a second, there’s a big message I want to get out there.

27:01 Yes, I think, you know, I do a lot of talking to entrepreneurs. people want to be entrepreneurs and the question is invariably come up at the end, what’s your advice, what was the secret to success etc, and I can talk about X, Y or Z within that, but fundamentally I worked out or x y&z and a and B and C were all toddler traits. So my advice to them, if you know, one of my sort of things is don’t necessarily take advice from people, because it’s, it’s them, they’re in their world at the time that they experienced it, that they’re passing on.

27:35 But my advice is think like a toddler, think, think as you once did years ago, and just, and the things that are in that book. So so it, that dawned on me, and then I started thinking, well, maybe I could write a book for entrepreneurs. And when I sat down and we started structuring it and thinking and talking to the publisher, they would hang on, everyone was once a toddler, anyone that is experiencing something new or trying to improve what they were, something that they do, were trying to conquer a challenge.

28:04 This is relevant to. So if your kids are just leaving home and you’re perhaps, say, in your 50s or 60s and you know that the centre of who you perceived yourself as has changed, maybe you need the confidence or the creativity or the, the determination to do something new. If you’ve just had kids and you’re a mum, back to return to work, maybe there’s things in there that you can look within yourself to give you the confidence to put that CV in or to try a job that you didn’t do before.

28:32 All of those things, right, back to the entrepreneurs or the student leaving university, thinking what am I going to do with my life? Every one of us, I think there is messages in there to say you can be more free thinking, you be more self-confidence, you mean more imaginative my thinking as you once did many years ago. And you have about nine different steps, and here I’m just going to read them off. It’s on page 22 if people want to check on their own books, but these are kind of the traits of the toddler: be confident, be creative, dive right in, never give up, get noticed, be honest, show your feelings, have fun and involve others.

29:05 Now those are big concepts. How can people kind of try to get to be like a toddler, because you have lots of exercises in here and things like that? Yeah. If someone is watching or listening, what’s one way they could try to experience that? Well, let’s, let’s break it down a little bit.

29:19 That those nine things really showed themselves during this amazing period when we all went through, between sort of six months and maybe two years, when we all learnt to smile, we learnt to walk, and we learnt to talk and we learned to play. And that’s how I structured this book. So, so creativity and confidence is really about that first time you smiled and took the reaction of someone liked you smiling, you got confident to smile even more. Diving right in and never giving up.

29:49 Every one of us chart started to try and walk and we fell over 500 times and we cried and we cut our lips and we bruised our knees and all of that sort of thing. There was something within us that got up again, and none of us knew that it was the 500th time or the 1,000th time or whatever they do. Would work, but one day it did work. And I’m saying that when you try something difficult and as an adult and you’re tempted to give up, just remember that one person that you once were and try that one time again.

30:16 So that, so we can go through each individual one, if you like. I’ll just give you a quick story about a little girl that starts a school first day at school, and the teacher asked them, all the class, to draw somebody that they loved. So they all, down, then she, this is the teacher’s way of getting to know the kids, and she stops this one little girl and she says, well, who’s that? What’s that? And kind of holds it up and can’t, might quite make out what it is, and the little girl said, oh, it’s God.

30:44 And the teacher said, but nobody knows what God looks like. And little girl says, well, they do now. And her confidence in what she’d drawn was God. I mean, who are we to say that God doesn’t look like that? But her creativity and her confidence to kind of just say, this is what I’ve done, and this is what now we’ll all have similar stories of what we did when we went to the nativity play and we were asked to dance, when never danced in public before or whatever it is.

31:09 We all have within ourselves, or we might notice in our children or our friends’ children or whatever, that sort of creativity and confidence. Now I can give you examples from all sorts, all those other different seven attributes of being a toddler that we can easily find and see, and, and so my whole concept is grow up. Absolutely, do grow up. There’s all their skills and experience we need, but don’t at the total expense of the skills that you learned when you were a child.

31:37 Throw them all out as being childish and for your childhood, because if you grow down one or two minutes every single day and recapture some of that, you’ll look at the world in a completely different way. And you know, I one of the at the end of every chapter there’s a link to a YouTube video and one of them is this dad with his little girl, maybe she’s about 18 months, two years old, and she’s seeing summer rain for the first time and they’re looking outside of him, they garage on the driveway and they go out, have a little dance, and her face about rain is just amazing. But it’s interesting looking at the dad’s face because he’s as excited about it as she is.

32:12 Now my just question, whether when he goes to work the next day, whether he acts like that when surprises or something new happens, or whether he puts his work face on and doesn’t react like that. Now I’m saying do, and just next time we’re driving home and it’s raining and we’re kind of annoyed because we can’t see it, just listen to the sound of the rain on the windscreen or watch the clouds or something like that. Learn just look at the world in a slightly different way, and you can.

32:38 If we relate that back to maybe a workplace, you know, question why we have a meeting at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and just kind of put your hand up and say, I’ve got the confidence and the creativity to say, I don’t think we should have it, because I think the one we have on a Wednesday evening, we should combine the two and have this sort of agenda. And actually maybe those sort of things, it’s just those little things that can change our life. So little wins, but I can make big changes, but also little comic wins, as in little people, other people, we should get the inspiration from, not the bigger, the powerful.

33:10 And this concept of growing down for a few minutes a day, if I want to practice it, say tonight after you’ve left, is that where I just kind of get into the mindset of what a toddler might do, might think, review the things I’ve thought about that day, what I’m gonna do that night, and just think what would a toddler do, and that might actually be inherently more fun, more creative, more empowering. Is that, that is, I would, the first chapter, I invite people to grow down, and I invite them to find a seminal moment from their childhood when they were happy, and they can remember all the sensorial things that were going on. So not really from a photograph where it’s just a vision, but what, or if people have got children, from a moment in their childhood or grandchildren, but, but you know, remember how the fire smelt or the stars were or the music was, or the laughter, walls or, and get into a moment.

34:02 I’ve, the moment I choose, which gets me there every time, is this moment with my son Paddy. He was four and he just started school, and after a couple weeks he returned home and he was so happy. He came in and he said, daddy, my friend Natalie brings a boiled egg to school and she opens it by cracking it on her head, and he thought this was just great. So I said, shall we eat, should we do it? Let’s go in the kitchen.

34:24 So I boiled an egg. I called it. I swapped it for an uncooked egg, and I turned around to him at the little island in the middle of our kitchen and I said, give it a go. And he cracked it, and for like two, three seconds there was total silence as the egg dribbled down his face, and then he laughed and he chuckled in his voice as he told me, that, Daddy, you tricked me. But that moment is so seminal for me because both of us were falling around on the floor laughing at this joke, and I remember the steam in the, in the off the oven, and I remember he was wearing a little football kit and he had an Incredibles lunchbox, and the music, I remember it was on the radio, and all of those things.

34:59 And for that moment I didn’t think about the spreadsheet error that I had to solve in my business that I was just starting. I didn’t even think about what we’re having for dinner or the phone calls that had to be made that evening. I was just in that moment, and I was a total of myself. And I’m saying if we just can live in a moment for a second and remember something like that, you look at the world in a different way. And you know there’s so many things about being like that, fruit example decision-making.

35:25 So toddlers obviously live in the same physical world that we live in, yet their ability to make decisions is very binary. Is the world black and white? I like you, I don’t like you, therefore I’m going to come to you or I’m gonna run away. I like this food, I don’t wanna watch this TV program, I don’t, I’m gonna pick up my clothes. I’m not.

35:42 It’s very binary, yet we live in it. Obviously we have got more complicated decisions to make sometimes, but not all the time. And what they do with gut feel and using the information they’ve got and not worrying about the information that they don’t have is something that I think we can learn from. And I’ve been talking about very all the time, well, that was once you and me. So we once made decisions much more quickly than we’d and we’re comfortable with them and moved on.

36:08 And it’s little aspects like that. It’s those little wins that I think that we can, we can move forward from, not from learning from okay, this guy’s written a book and he says do this, through that, by reflecting who you once were and doing it yourself. And so and sometimes I ask myself what would Chuck Norris do in this situation? What I should be asking myself is what would my ten month old boy. Yeah, I think I might agree with you now.

36:30 We all, we all hear that we need to be more present, and we read books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and these are some of the similar messages you’re saying, because the toddlers are present by definition, right? They’re not overthinking things, they’re just being in the moment and who they are. Right, exactly. And I think that we live in a world where it is complicated but we over complicate that world. We need to declutter a bit and work out what prior, different priorities are in our lives.

37:00 And I think we’ll conclude, you know, the priority of being happy trumps the priority of being rich. Oh, and we get that confused sometimes. You know, I do, and I’m, you know, over in a book about how I shouldn’t, but you know, so it’s just stepping back, pressing pause, rewind a little bit, work out what you know. Is it really that daddy who I talked about watching his daughter see rain for the first time? That’s a moment that he would never get again.

37:29 So I bet he was glad doing that rather than doing the meeting that happens three Monday morning and doesn’t really achieve anything, and it’s just, it’s, you know, we’ve got to work out a way of blending our lives. I think the whole, the whole idea of the previous generations have, you’ve got to work on a life balance and you’ve got to try and achieve that as though they’re, they’re kind of butt up against each other. Well, hey, we should be providing working environments to have values in them, and people want to go to work, and it’s not a balance, it’s not a tough thing.

38:00 I’ve got these values and, but at nine o’clock in the morning they change to these values. There’s a whole blend, and you know, as we can work more flexibly at home, abroad, kind of in the nighttime, the daytime, we can blend our lives better, and being able to do that, I think we will free up some of these toddler things about being creative and being more playful and involving others more. They say that the company culture is a leading indicator of the customer experience.

38:29 You know, I think Tony Hsieh says that, the CEO of Zappos, and the more I think about it, it’s true. I mean, if you really have people inside your company that are excited to be there every day, it will end up in the consumers’ hands, and vice versa. If they’re not, it will end up disappointing, and I think that turns something, there’s an established, you know, fact on its head, and that is that businesses should focus on their customers and everything should be focused on my customer.

38:53 I began to conclude that actually that’s not right. If you focus on your team, you stand by a mission and you believe in that and you act towards that and you motivate your team towards that mission. Automatically your customer will receive the product, the service that they want, that you promised to deliver under your mission, and that your team will stay longer, be more motivated. So it’s really about primarily focusing on your team. They understand why their company exists, they understand what they have to do and how the to link you soul Ella’s, you know, for a nice chunk of change.

39:28 It was a great exit, something you had to be proud of as an entrepreneur. What were just some of those company culture pieces that now that you look back that made and continues to make that company a success, because you’re still firing away as if you were an independent company? I know I’m sure, I’m sure there’s some aspects of the toddler here, but if I walked in to your place and ready, what are some of the three things I might notice right away? As in, this seems different than Microsoft, how it hurts you.

39:53 It, yeah, you would get the point that people enjoyed being there. So there’s this fun, and we can, we can interpret fun in different ways, depends what the peoples of people are, but there’s a buzz, as a vibe, there’s something in the air that people are playing off each other, and they’re they’re their friends as well as, as colleagues, and there’s just a vibe there. The environment itself, the physical environment itself, is a converted barn or two barns that it’s not like an office.

40:21 We’ve, you know, it’s not, it’s not formal in any which way. So when we do product launches, there’s, you know, dressing up days or there’s like toddler meals and there’s all sorts of things that, like, part of our culture. If you’re a, you know, a pig farmer, you might have a very different culture, but encouraging that culture. I think Winston Churchill once said that when we build buildings, we shape them, but thereafter they shape ours. And I think you see incredibly important, the environment and the culture of a company in the ultimately, the valuation of that company.

40:58 So you ask me, be kind of the the decision points of sort of how I got comfortable and more, why, why ultimately we sought who we did. And I would say I thought about it a little bit like a horse race in that it’s all to do with the word value. So the first thing that would come across is values. So no matter what else comes down the line, I wanted to mind daughter’s names on our company. I want to be involved in some way.

41:21 In which way? I’m chairman now. I’m not the chief executive, and being able to stand back. I wanted to know that the values of the people who were selling for similar to ours, and that they would respect ours thereafter, and that we’d be able to continue with the mission that we originally had. And I’m delighted that we picked the people that do believe in that.

41:40 And since acquisition we’ve become a big corporation, so our values are enshrined now within our articles of association, and really, really proud of that. Second, so number of potential acquirers get over that hurdle, then it’s the valuation and value, and is there an overlap between what he wants, what we see the value in, what they, what they do? And we did reach that. And then the third thing, added value, and how is this partner acquirer going to add value to our company?

42:06 You know, we had a growing business in the United States that was under pressure because there was more competition, that there was more people prepared to follow us, but who were venture capital backed, were perhaps making losses but perhaps the game for market share, and we wanted to compete better there. So what, what do we do? Do we risk our European business profitability to throw that up? Do we come out of the market? Do we find a partner locally that can help us with distribution and help us with efficiencies in the supply chain?

42:36 And that’s what we chose to do. Okay, that’s very interesting. It’s good for entrepreneurs to hear your mindset on all those pieces. Talk to me about charities because they always seem to be integral into the companies you founded, including the one you’re running today, and tell me, does every great company by definition need a charity to be involved in it? I had a guest in here a few years ago that said, Brian, donate money right away to charity.

43:01 He said it will come back, and it comes back in the strangest ways, and almost a direct correlation. So even if you are Scrooge, the most selfish person out there, it’s actually a good business decision to do that. And I have to say it’s been true when I’ve done that. I mean, we’re involved with Founders4Schools and with Westminster Kingsway College, and every time I do something there, which you might see, and I go there for a morning to help the kids, usually within a few weeks later something pops back in that is just like, where did that come from?

43:28 What’s your, what’s your, my type really is actually, its business that is the best institution, or companies, the best institution that we have to create sustainable social change or environmental change. So you know, having a sustainable model where you’re making profits and you’re reinvesting some or all of those profits in something that is good for the community or good for the environment is vital, because because we, we create an economy fueled by businesses and profitability to serve a society. In my view I don’t think the two things are equal.

44:08 I don’t think we have a society to prop up an economy, because then you monetize everything. It’s kind of, we talk about toddlers don’t care, you know, about monetary value. They care about being hugs and having empathy and having fun and, you know, learning stuff. So I worry that we, in, in the drive for short-term profitability in the ecosystem that we have within everything, the institutions, you know, in our society, whether it’s education and a drive for short-term exams for teenagers, whether it’s in big business in quarterly returns to get a share price up, or private equity in three, four, five years, sort of flip of a company, or with politics, where on average a politician is perhaps two-and-a-half years away from an election, if it’s a five-year cycle.

44:58 What are those things drive short-term decisions? Everything in society that we value is long-term: what we’re going to leave the earth for our children, what our pensions are going to be, the security of our country, the environment, all of those sort of things. So pressures on short-term decisions versus the long-term happiness that we want. Those two things are disconnected. So my point is more and more companies, as we use technology more, as we have a more open and transparent society, we will drive, we will encourage more businesses to serve their community from which they draw their employees, their investors and their consumers and customers, to do social good, because they’ve got the model are sustainable.

45:40 So, and again, young Millennials, post-millennial people coming into the workplace soon, they will want to work for companies that they feel have values and they’re making a difference, and I’m not just making shareholders money. Sure, the shareholders are taking a risk, and I’m big capitalist. I believe that we need you know, risk and reward intrinsically linked, but ultimately you’re doing all of that for a purpose. You don’t want to count your money forever in a bank.

46:03 You want to do something with that money, and whether the business itself, or whether the, you know, entrepreneur that becomes a philanthropist or something uses that money, but ultimately we want to improve our society through the creation of wealth. And that’s where I think social enterprise, be, cooperation type stuff. And ultimately, any company I think who will succeed in the future will have a so sheral aspect to their business that, you know, is way post CSR.

46:32 It’s really the why within the company. The why is to do something good, and the what is we create money to do that good. And it’s absolutely fine for shareholders to take you know, a proportion that is relevant. There is related to the risk that they took, but I think is really, really important to get the people who want to work for you and trust you to buy from you that some of the some of your otherwise profit is reinvested in doing something good for the society that we want our toddlers to inherit.

46:59 Yeah, I think it has to be kind of really incorporated in with the why and not just be kind of the bolt on. We also put a dollar of every 100 into this charity profit. And like you said, Millennials, it seems like this generation, they just, they seem to care more and be aware more of the global situation, and they’re not gonna want to work for you unless you have a bond. I put it, look, at any of us, there is a point where we would prefer to give a pound away than to earn a pound.

47:25 You know, it might be for somebody, it might be at a million pounds earning a year, other people it might be 10,000 pound. Obviously you need a roof over your head and you need to be secure in your living, but above that, the internal reward from giving a pound rather than taking a pound is a big, big thing that I don’t think he’s really recognized in the way we set up rewards within bonuses and remuneration within companies. And it’s not rewarded within the examination system, the education system, where academic results are trumped everything else.

47:57 And you know, you’ve got a highly empathetic young person who we need in our society to be a social worker or a nurse or employee for anywhere. You need to be empathetic to the surroundings around you, the people around you, yet those young people are less encouraged and feel less worth because they’ve got poorer academic results sometimes. Maybe yet we need both of those people in our society. And so another way we’re, I think, thinking like a toddler, are thinking using all the skills that every one of us.

48:26 How does a toddler can improve the way our society operates? Talk to me about some of the, your charities. Is the key to e I hear you’re out there rapping. Is that true? Yeah, and you were born in Africa as well, so you have roots there.

48:38 Tell me about these things. Okay, the key is the charity that I co-founded with a guy who’s become a very good friend, but who, you know, frankly we should never have met, and if we did we probably wouldn’t have got on. The average person would have said he was a child soldier in South Sudan. He’s a rapper now, hip-hop artist, and you know, we met and we found actually we had tons in common, and we thought business is a solution to society’s ills. We work to do with children.

49:08 We were passionate about Africa, and we felt that what our charity does is to support African entrepreneurs whose businesses help children. So we find the brightest in need entrepreneurs on the continent, and we’ve got an accelerator, workshops, mentor, some grants to help them thrive and scale their businesses. You know, Africa is a continent that in the past has been held back because of a lack of communication, lack of capital, corruption, things like that.

49:39 In the future, in the next, the rest of the century, about four billion new people are going to be born into Africa, so that population is going to go from 1 billion to four to five billion. So most young people towards the end of the century will be in Africa. Now young people bring innovation, they bring risk, they bring energy. So if the other things sort of work, and access to capital and all technology and making the world smaller, so the world should help that.

50:06 Africa should, we should be hugely optimistic about the opportunities to come out of Africa. Now, the key is either to ease our education and entrepreneurship, and there, to ours, are the two keys. If you can empower and engage people with those, because formal jobs don’t exist there. So to go and find a job is not going to be the solution. To get educated, to get some of the jobs that are there, is one, but most people are going to have to invent their own jobs, and that’s where I get excited about the innovation that can come through.

50:36 So that’s what I do there. I work with Ashoka, social entrepreneurs network, who have these fantastic fellows who have world-changing, change-making ideas, and they’re trying to find a business solution to them. So a fantastic woman called Mary Gordon, who’s got a business called Roots of Empathy, which teaches empathy with babies in classrooms to children, and can show over years the way empathy goes up, and in a society aggression goes down a bit. Finding a business model for that.

51:09 I work on the board of an organization called Bite the Ballot, who’s trying to get people engaged in civil society and getting on the voter registration, and that I’m trying to use the insight that they have in research and engagement with young people to use that data in big society and try and make an economic model out of access to that data. And then finally another organization called Toast Ale, fantastic. This is, it’s, it’s really driven by food waste and the fact that 44% of all bread baked in Britain today will go to waste tomorrow or later this week, and trying to use some of that bread to create beer with the yeast and the wheat to the finest craft beer, that’s called Toast Ale, and trying to build a brand and a business around that.

51:55 So first and foremost, you buy that because it’s a fantastic craft beer, but when you look under the story, actually it’s about food waste, and it’s about saving, so using surplus fresh bread that otherwise would go to waste and avoiding that. So there’s that. And then, you know, the business that I’m actively involved in day to day now, my startup, Paddy’s Bathroom, you know, is around creating, servicing a need that Ella’s Kitchen consumers have in a different room.

52:24 Paddy’s Bathroom, in the bathroom, right? So it’s the encourage kids get dirty, come back and have fun in the bath, getting clean, and for the parent, be comfortable that actually the biggest organ on the body, the skin, he’s not going to be harmed by abrasive things and synthetic things that are in there, like SLS’s and parabens. We’ve got a very clean deck of ingredients in our products, but the idea is to have fun, but the social aspect is for every drop of water that our consumer users with one of our products, we create a drop of safe clean water in Africa with our partners for a child that doesn’t have access to safe clean water.

52:57 And my bet is that the, the emotional connection between the consumer and the recipient is something very human, and they can talk to their two about you, you know, a child in another part of the world that can’t turn the tap off and on and see water come through, and there’s an opportunity there to talk to them but also passively do good. And that’s a great example of how business so well, everything like Ashoka does, and having Paddy’s Bathroom and in this kitchen trying to do it. You’ve got a mission that’s good as well as make profits, and that’s the solution.

53:26 Do you have a special connection to half a comb? What’s it like growing up in Zambia? Is that where you got your tan from? This is just high blood pressure. Are they bright?

53:34 You know, I yeah. I love Africa. It inspires me. It brings you know, toddler out in me. The Big Sky, the smells, the people, the whole environment.

53:47 I get really joyous whenever I go back, and I just think the solutions to Africa are within Africa, though, within Africans, and it’s for them to find it. We can help, you know, spark a little fire and they can build a fire, and we can all collaborate a lot more than that. The one other organization that I’m involved with, more than one, but we’ll touch on Sesame Street perhaps. Yes, because because it links with, you know, the work that I do is really around children’s welfare.

54:17 And you know there’s nothing more special than Sesame Street with, you know, its mission to create smarter, stronger and kinder kids. That’s what we want. That’s what, you know, that’s what my book’s about. Kindness is so important to children. Yet, you know, if you asked adults where to rank kindness in that kind of sweet way, down, you know, usually in the city where I used to be.

54:40 Exactly. You know, surely we want a society that’s kind. So, the work that they do through the Sesame Street show and the outreach from that and the licenses that they’ve got within that. You know, they just created this brand new character called Julia, who is autistic. She was a curious, lovely, sweet four-year-old muppet that has autism, and the way that they introduce that concept to children through the show is important for families with autism in the family, but it’s vital to people who don’t have autism in the family that will interact with autistic people.

55:17 That’s really gentle. You know, so scientifically, Rhys a way of doing it. And then the final thing that they’re doing at the moment is working with the IRC, the, the refugee, the rescue people for refugee camps and bringing a childhood back to deeply traumatized children who are not getting an opportunity for education. I’ve seen horrendous things going on and need love and need, you know, their childhood maintained, because there’s all sorts of evidence that shows that when children are robbed of their childhood they lose part of their adulthood as well.

55:51 And you know, that’s part of, again, what my book is around. It’s, it’s ensure that children have a childhood, and that their innocence, in that sort of way, that they can look at life retains with children, but take some of that as your adult as well. Take some of that inspiration from the people that you can see around the children. Abut that work, that person that you once were, fantastic stuff. Are you going to spit a few bars of rap for us?

56:14 Well, that you know, again, where does life take you? You know, I have, except a rap album, a hip-hop album I’ve written, that, the, the one of the, one of the songs on the album and not trying to, you know, that I admit to that, and I like Emanuel, my, my friend, is, you know, raps on it. I did the first little intro, but you know what I try to do there. The song is called “Every Child’s Plate”, and ultimately it’s around children’s eating and children’s diet and the fact that we’ve got malnutrition across the world.

56:49 It may be in starvation and malnourishment, or it may be in obesity. It’s still malnutrition, and trying to find a different medium, in a different way, to reach people through rap music to get in a really important message across. A positive message across, and you know, we can, you can play it. We can show people the link to it and see whether that works or not. But again, that’s just, I, on my deathbed in many many years’ time, let’s hope that’s something else that I’ve done that I would never have expected to do.

57:17 And I think experiences and many things in life as possible is part of the excitement of living life as a toddler through, I altered great example of growing down. I think that, yes. Now, do your kids ever come to you and say, “Dad, stop, name and company”? Well, the good news is I’ve only got two kids, so we’re done on that. What I tried to do was try and show my children through my actions that you should live your dreams and you should do things that excite you and aim high and be prepared to fail and kind of watch that.

57:50 So, and you know, time will tell whether they’ve taken that on board, but they’ve seen that, and also have values within business in that. Um, but you know, they’re teenagers, so they think it’s really cool, but they also think it’s really embarrassing. So yeah, but it’s just using our real life as a family to be authentic, to say this is, this is how I’m sure you as other families live and the pressures etc through both Paddy’s Bathroom and others kitchen.

58:13 Yeah, I’m sure when you first started the company, it really opened doors, because you know what, a great way. I mean, all great companies have a narrative and it’s just like, well, this is a guy named it after his daughter. It’s like, I would lean in, I want to hear more. Yes, real talk. So, you know, again, the industry that we went into, the baby food industry.

58:29 You know, there, one of the things I had observed was it was a very functional industry. It was glass jars. The heritage, well, they were selling as a heritage really. It’s like, your, your mom gave you this, therefore give it to your child, and yet life had moved on so much, and the thing that I thought was, well, actually, we are at the most emotional we ever are in our whole entire life’s when we’ve got our most precious baby. So work with that emotion, work with it and make people feel good about it, rather than a function.

58:59 And therefore, you know, we know say our mission is around improving children’s lives by developing healthy relationships with food. It’s not about providing baby food, it’s about developing relationships with food, which is far beyond that. Yeah, big why. They’re the most important question the London rulers wanted me to ask you was not about, you know, the little wins and the company history, but how do you get Richard Branson to write the foreword of your book?

59:22 How does that happen? And what is your relationship with, with the Sir Richard? Okay. So I thought of the people that I really respect in business and who thinks like a toddler. The first person I thought of was Walt Disney.

59:37 Now Walt Disney, in the 1930s, see this fantastic quote that says that the most important natural resource that we’ve got, precious national natural resource that we’ve got, is in the minds of our children, and he went off and built the whole Walt Disney Company on the back of that, which is all about imagination and growing down, really. Frankly, yeah. So he’s no longer with us, then. I thought, well, who has epitomized you know, getting noticed, no fear of failure, getting out there, involving others, being highly creative?

1:00:07 Richard Branson. I do know Richard. I supported many things that Virgin have done over time. They do some fantastic work with startups. Virgin Startups, they’ve got a food printer program.

1:00:20 And so I asked, and Richard has got four grandchildren that are toddlers and babies at the moment. He absolutely believes in that philosophy, and said, this is how I built Virgin. And you know who better to ask? And I was so, so humbled that he sought to do that. And you know what, he wrote exactly overlapped with that.

1:00:44 You know, the way Virgin has built its business based on the values that he’s got, and Ella’s Kitchen has done its. We both have thought like toddlers, and very grateful for him to do that. Yeah, it’s a beautiful foreword. He really talks about how he’s inspired by his children, and I met his, Sam, my son Sam, a couple times. It makes great documentary films.

1:01:01 And then the grandchildren. And you know, I think people these days don’t know the Richard Branson that I remember growing up with, the guy that was like, you know, taking a hot-air balloons around the world and taking these cross-Atlantic trips, and like he was the original guy that, you know, you know, he grew down, right? That’s really. And one of my chapters there is by getting noticed, and he’s just the fantastic. That all of those things are about getting noticed, but you know, both of those guys, Disney and Branson, have been inspired by toddlers.

1:01:29 Let’s say now, I also pick up on businesses that have been absolutely formed because a toddler asked a question. So back in the 1940s, a little girl called Jennifer, and she asked her daddy on holiday one time, and they were taking photos. Why do I have to wait three weeks? Do we get home to get the photos developed? Which kind of goes over the head of Millennials these days, I guess.

1:01:51 Then they’ve got the phones, but back then we had to wait. And he was an inventor, a guy called Edwin Land, and he went off and thought about it and thought, she’s got a point, and he ultimately developed the Polaroid camera. So by the 1960s, every second household in the US had a Polaroid camera, and by the 70s a billion photographs were being taken every year on Polaroid fish just because a little girl had questioned why she had to wait. Second one back in the 70s, then a little boy called Adam asked his daddy what a tickle looked like, and his father was called Roger Hargreaves, and he went off and created what he thought a tickle looked like.

1:02:25 They looked at it together, they agreed, they thought, what a happy looks, what happy looks like, what greedy looks like, and they created the Mr. Men, and that’s a business. There’s a hundred and twenty million books. It’s got franchises and all sorts of other areas, and it’s in 40 different languages because a little boy asked that question. And you mentioned earlier my son Paddy, you know, talked about, and he liked the red one because red was like it’s fire engine.

1:02:49 And I thought when we were trialing different ideas of smoothie flavours when he said that, I thought we shouldn’t call it anything to do with a strawberry or a raspberry. We should call it the red one, because that’s how a four-year-old thinks of it. So, so that thing of, you know, toddlers. We can get inspired by toddler-like thinking, but toddlers have actually created businesses that are worth many millions and billions of dollars between them. Yeah.

1:03:13 My grandma had a Polaroid when I was a kid, and she used to snap them. And here, something’s crazy. My, my 13-year-old just got a Polaroid equivalent for her birthday, and her mother was telling me how cool this was, and I was like, wait a second, didn’t we phase these things out with digital? Trial. It’s all retro, and it prints out the picture right there, and you could stick it on things.

1:03:31 I was like, all right, I’m going really, really fact, a bit. What do we do about childhood obesity? I mean, you’ve been there on the frontlines. You kind of rebel eyes, revolutionize the food industry. You know, we’ve got these AI devices you know, and kids are getting these things younger and younger.

1:03:46 Maybe they’re becoming more inactive, poor food choices. It seems the lower the education, the poor, the food choices, sometimes that close our access to foods with high-fructose corn syrup, and and just bad choices, which, which are have a look on. Well, it’s a highly complicated problem, but you just went into words there that are the two words that I think everything else revolves around. One is education, now with a capital E, but with the smaller lead, people, fewer people know how to cook, do a recipe, if you know what a food group, the different food groups and things are and therefore unconfident about cooking.

1:04:19 Access was the other word that you said, and the fact that you know in some communities it’s easier and shorter to get to a chicken shop than it is to a supermarket, and by the time they get there they don’t have pots and pans or a freezer or anything at home anyway. So, so access and price and education and sort of confidence in being able to cook, to problems that lots of things revolve around. Now my learning is that not just with this, with everything that’s kind of wrong with that in a society, a the good news is most problems are man-made.

1:04:53 There is enough food in this world to feed everybody a decent number of calories every day. There’s enough shelter to give people, and enough money to go around. We choose not to do that so man can find a solution to the problem the man created. It needs toddler thinking, in my view, to be outliers and find that solution. But we can do it, but if we do it, my experience is we need to do it as a community, in a society we need to involve the food industry, the retailers, the government, local government, charities, individual parents, community leaders, the media.

1:05:25 We all need to do this together and collaborate. Like one of my chapters is about involving others as toddlers do. We need to come together and do that solution at Ella’s Kitchen. We’ve done a program called Start Smarting in one community in Leicester where for a month we got a group like that together and tried to do a pilot to show what could happen when people come together. And the example that gives me great hope is in Oklahoma in the U.S.

1:05:50 Now, a few years ago, I think it was the mayor of Oklahoma City was an obese guy, and he wanted to lose some weight, and what he did was motivate the whole of the city to lose a million calories. I think, you know, a million pounds, million pounds of fat, that’s what it was, and as part of being mayor and as part of running the government, he introduced cycle lanes and opened up the parks and had advertising around and stuff, but he motivated the people that collectively, they, we’re going to do this. So people were motivated to jog, to go to, or pick up literature about how to cook, and the supermarket, centenary, and they did it.

1:06:33 They look like they lost a million pounds of fat. No, that’s, you need, you need a role model or a motivation or some inspiration to do it, but we all need to do it together, and it’s a really hard battle and it’s, you know, it is about calories in, but it’s also about calories out, and it’s about the ecosystem that we’ve created that is B so genic and we need to start change summer and the government needs to make some priorities about decision making etc. My view, they had a golden opportunity last summer when childhood obesity strategy was put forward, and it was severely watered down from what it could have been, but let’s continue to work with the government.

1:07:08 Let’s encourage them to prioritize it. We want healthier children. We want healthy children to make healthier workers, but happier people, and you know, we can look at it from a society point of view. We can look at it from an economy point of view, and what we can do with the taxes that we need to raise to support the NHS to reduce the bill over there from less these people, but step by step. Yeah, I think movement’s a big part of it too.

1:07:37 And I was talking to you earlier about one of the guests we’ve had, him multiple times on the show. His name is Ido Portal, and he’s a movement guy, and it’s he’s all about very much so growing down, just like you, as an, get back to just moving every day, moving like you used to as a child. And I told him about my son, and he said, he said, Brian, he’s closer to the source than you are. So like, watch how he moves, watch how he enjoys the movement and learns and plays all the time.

1:08:00 And you know, I think we need to definitely consider getting back there, not only from a mindset that you’re saying but even from a movement perspective. Well then that’s where, you know, I, I talked about earlier about having high ambition, about being determined to get there. You know, I would hope that this book can be, you know, just a starting point to create a different way that we behave, in a different way, movement, if you like. And really, when you look at it, we are living in a society now that has never been more stressed.

1:08:28 We are under so much pressure, whether that’s financial pressure and the recession that we’ve been through, or whether it’s pressure between blending your life at home, your life at work, and your responsibilities to your parents who are living older, and our children, and all of those sort of things, and with that, mental illness is increasing. So we’re all, that’s all pressurizing us, yet we’re living longer, so we’ve got longer to deal with this pressure. And at the same time, you know, statistics and research that I did within the book, we already walk 10 percent faster than we did in the 1990s.

1:09:03 So that’s not the human race or people in Britain. That’s you and me who living here. 20 years ago we individually are walking 10% faster than we did 20 years ago. Evolution, you know, the way our, we worked hasn’t got that out when you look at the way people concentrate. Properly concentrate on something now, because of the immediacy of everything around us, the way we concentrate.

1:09:25 We can concentrate on average for about eight seconds. Okay. A goldfish concentrates the nine seconds. Okay. So if we need to really get under the skin of anything and really find solutions to our family, our business, or our society’s problems, we need to concentrate for more than eight seconds.

1:09:41 We need to declutter our life so that we can have fewer things that we can concentrate on. But the statistic that sort of got me most was, you know, we are exposed to more information in a single day now than we were, than our ancestors were in their entire lifetimes in the 16th century, so 500 years ago. So that’s sustainable. So we created this highly complex, highly fast world, and we, it’s not going to sustain. Our businesses are not going to sustain it.

1:10:11 Our lives are going to be longer, they’re going to be much poorer in the quality of life if we don’t do something about it. And my contribution is we need to declutter. When you simplify, we need to be more free thinking, more imaginative, more self-confident, all of the things that we all want, whereas toddlers, and we want to embrace some of the skills that the human race has that we see in a three, four or five year old now to help us get there, and be less concerned about the wealth that we’re creating and more concerned about the happiness that we’ve got and offer.

1:10:40 Yeah, I’m a big fan of unplugging. We have something around here called a low media diet that we all go on, and it’s just about turning things off, deleting the push notifications, and giving yourself time and space, you know, to be with yourself. A lot of times we avoid being with ourselves because you can always check that Twitter before you go to bed, and it’s a great way of not engaging, and it usually ends up in these step function. You know, life crises.

1:11:04 I think play is a fantastic example of that. I’ve got a whole chapter about having fun and play. Now there’s so much evidence to show that play-deprived adults are less energetic, less motivated, more susceptible to depression. Michael Stewart Brown has done a lot of research on this. Yet play is something that we tend to associate with childhood and children.

1:11:28 Yeah, if we said that about learning, it’d sound ridiculous that only children need to learn. Yet they’re so connected and there’s this whole paradox to do with play, that is, you know, its definition is that it’s something that you do too for entertainment or enjoyment, for no ulterior purpose in the moment. Yet we learn so many skills that are relevant from the rest of our daily life because of that: spatial awareness, collaboration, trial and error, of creativity, the fact that it might be more than one solution to try and get to a destination, all of that type of stuff.

1:12:02 Yeah, as adults we find ourselves too busy to play. Yet the paradox here is that if we did free time up to play, we would be able to get the rest of our stuff done in a shorter amount of time, because it would help us with all those skills that I just talked about. And you know, we’d be more energized. I know for one, for certain, that if I’ve got a problem with my business, the idea that I just sit behind my computer and go, okay, let’s think about it, I’m far less likely to find it than if I’m taking the dog for a walk, going for a bike ride, or playing with my kids, and it just kind of filters through my brain.

1:12:40 That’s where I know the work really comes in, the bits between work. I think, you know, the bits where we’re chatting to people and it’s still percolating, or, you know, one of the things that we do, you know, this kitchen to encourage play and fun is really find opportunities for people to talk to each other and more importantly listen to each other. So we have clubs, we have free lunches and all sorts of times where, you know, on the face of it, it’s frivolous, but what’s actually happening is the guy in operations is talking to the person in sales, and they’ve worked out actually that if this person did something slightly different, this person would find it much easier to do their thing.

1:13:18 And they already see themselves as one part of a big team, and actually they find that over, because they did yoga together, the company they’ve paid for. Yeah, yeah, super important. It’s a theme that comes up a lot with our guests here. You know, all culture comes from play, all movement starts with play, and you know, a lot of great companies started with that play environment. So a great point.

1:13:36 Can I ask you some questions about your success secrets, things that you’ve figured out with your own self that kind of gave you these step function improvements in say productivity or being a better leader? And along with that, how the heck do you do so much? I mean, you just listed out charities as long as your arm. You know, you’re doing, you know, you’re chairman of LS, your, you know, with Paddy Paddy’s Bathroom as well? How do you do it all, and was there something that you noticed, say 10 years ago or 15 years ago where you’re like, if I do this every day, I can be much more productive?

1:14:36 A guest on recently, his name is Kevin Kelly. He’s one of the founders of Wired magazine. Now he’s a prolific writer and he said, you’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind. That has actually maybe a little something to do with your book, and I was wondering, what have you changed your mind about in the last six or 12 months, different thinking about business or social issues, or anything? Wow.

1:14:56 Okay, so I’ve already touched on the fact that actually I changed my mind about business. It’s all about serving your customer and focusing on them. I think it’s about serving your team and giving them a mission and motivation that they will automatically service the customer. I think you know the world is so complicated. I’ve changed my mind over simple, the idea that there are simple solutions.

1:15:31 We’ve got, we’ve got it. We’ve got to take a simple solution and iterate it. It might be the wrong, we’ve got to get momentum. We’ve got to start doing things, and you know, let’s not form fully thought through, fully, you know, blueprint of things. In my book this had a big impact on me, that the fact that this, a test by a guy called Peter Skillman.

1:15:53 I just call the marshmallow test. And, as marshmallow, there’s 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, there’s some sellotape and some string, and teams are given 15 minutes to build the tower structure that will support the marshmallow, and this has been done over 40 or 50 years. There’s lots of demographic and empirical data to show what sort of types of people do best at this, and way up there, higher than CEOs and MBAs or toddlers, because what they do is generally they start with the marshmallow and they build the mash, built to the marshmallow, and though the thing will fall over, and they’ll work, it’s fallen over because that’s not right over there, and they’ll iterate.

1:16:33 Whereas CEOs, MBA type people will spend a long time to start with working out who should be the CEO of this little group, and they’ll focus on a blueprint of trying to get the perfect thing first time, and then suddenly the work out there run out of time, the perfect thing hasn’t quite worked, and that sort of start momentum, just start, have a simple solution to a complex problem, and it will involve, it can evolve to a complex solution to a complex problem, but don’t start with a complex solution. Just work your way to it, and I, so that’s me trying to declutter in my problems. My challenge is by just kind of getting some momentum and doing and again that’s what children do, that’s what toddler does when it starts to walk.

1:17:16 You know, it doesn’t think this actively, but it is happy to start to crawl before it starts to walk, and then to start to walk before it starts to run. And you know, just simple, learn, learn by your mistakes, happy. Another thing I’ve learnt is be comfortable with failure and fail fast, but actually failure is part of a journey, as we learn, as I’ve learned from watching my children, watching reflecting on my own childhood, you know, trick, learned from it, adapt, trust people get better.

1:17:49 Yeah, what keeps you awake at night? I’m a sort of person actually that sleeps on things, so if I’ve got a decision to make I’m much more comfortable making it first thing in the morning, having slept on it overnight and percolated it, and if it’s a real challenge thing, I don’t really have a problem staying away from getting to sleep. As if I wake up in the night then my mind’s just buzzing straight away, but you know, the downtime on my brain, working, certainly find solutions.

1:18:24 I worry about the future for our children as a generation, I suppose, and the fact that we invariably don’t learn from our failures as a race. You know, Rwanda happened and they said they’d never be genocide again after, you know, what happened in Bosnia. They said after what happened in World War Two that Europe would never go down to that again, yet we didn’t learn, and it happened, and I might, you know, so these big two political things we’re not learning.

1:18:55 I worry about short-termism in everything in my children’s development into adults, that too much focus is on them passing their GCSEs and their A-levels, you know, for two years of your life when you’re 17 and 18. You’re looking at three subjects, and that’s all your focus, because society is going to reward you by the results that you get. Yet they should be being 17- and 18-year-olds and enjoying life and taking risks and finding new things that they excite and enjoy.

1:19:23 They enjoy, they should be pursuing music and drama and sport and debate and all of those sort of things. Yet we’re sort of not encouraging that. Likewise with companies, you know, companies should be taking risks more than I think they currently do. So you know, the big companies have got stockpiles of cash because they’re taking a risk evaluation. They don’t want to invest it in buying another company, or they don’t want to invest in a project because it’s too risky.

1:19:52 Well, my view, going back to the simplest, simple analogy I did earlier, was you know, start, do something. We have that stockpile of money to do something for society, and you do that in your company, your shareholders will be rewarded, because innovations come through from investment. It might not be the first one. It might be the third or the tenth one, but just keep going. That’s how you’ll get a competitive edge on your in your industry.

1:20:20 Paul, I always ask everyone here a couple questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Paul and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? I would tell him not to worry too much about whether people think that the, your, your happiness will be around people, not status, and your relationship with people, not status or money. And I would say kindness, remain kind. You know, your relationship with people will be happy.

1:20:55 You know, compassion and dignity and things like that, which aren’t really taught in school. Thought of, you know, when you think of capitalism, when you think you’re getting a job there, the things that as you grow older you sort of value, and then be consistent in that throughout your life. When you help the old lady across the road, when you pick up the dog poo that your dog’s just dropped in the park, that’s all very good things, but equally take that into the workplace, take that into your political views.

1:21:25 Be active in voice your political views, but rear espect full and understanding and empathetic to other peoples, and, and so you know, we’re a community, we’re a communal animal, and do good for your society in any way that, they’re the sort of things that I would reflect on now. I tell my children they will make you a happier person. It’s good advice. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received could be entrepreneurial, could be from a parent or someone along the way where they said that, and you’re like, okay, yeah, that’s that’s a big one.

1:21:58 Kimmy – two simple ones, and I preface this by, I don’t necessarily believe in advice. Advice is what it’s cracked up to be, because someone’s advice is just a reflection of their experience at a certain time with a certain circumstances, which may or may not be relevant there. are two simple things. Were one for from Sir Ken Robinson Ken Morrison, who founded Morrisons supermarkets. I once asked him for a piece of advice, and he said, he said, you see them, and he pointed to my feet.

1:22:28 He said, keep them on the ground, and you see that, and he pointed my head. He said, keep that in the clouds. And I think that’s great advice. Be humble, be a servant leader and realize that good things that happen don’t happen just because you’re brilliant, or at all, because you’re brilliant, because of circumstance, most of which you can’t control. But have your head in the sky, be free thinking, be imaginative, imagine the why nots, be that toddler and help the world to change, because we can all do that.

1:22:55 So that was one. The second one, it’s kind of bizarre in a way, because I met at a trade show the founders of a company called Earth’s Best, which is an American baby food company, one of the pioneering organic baby food companies from the 1980s, and it’s weird, because I asked him for a piece of advice, little knowing that five years later I’d be acquired by the company that owned Earth’s Best, and I’d run Earth’s Best in Ella’s Kitchen, 300 million dollar business as a CEO for the first year after acquisition, and I’d run their company. But go back, I said, what’s a piece of advice?

1:23:32 And he said, you know what he said when I find it difficult to make a decision, my heart’s pulling one way, my head’s pulling another. I don’t know, this is kind of very toddler, especially in its thinking. He said, what I do is flip a coin, and I’m thinking, please don’t tell me you go with what it is. It’s a no, no, no. He said, he said, when it lands, your heart will tell you whether that was the one that you want.

1:23:53 That’s the side that you wanted it to land on, and you listen to that, and I think, okay. And I’ve done that a number of times. Interesting. So you introduce the randomness, and then feel, and then that tells you how you really feel about the situation. Exactly.

1:24:05 Okay, that’s a good one. Last question. You know, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us, listening to us around the world somewhere. You know, China, could be from a country in Africa who wants to grow up one day and be like Paul, you know, exit companies for lots of money, be involved in charities etc etc. Say what kind of advice would you give to them in order to get to a position where they can do these things?

1:24:28 My advice is my thinking is that we all have, we’re all blessed with some skills. We’re human, we’ve got, we we are, we have our own story that is different to every single person that has ever been born before, a set of circumstances, her skills, and a mindset that is different, River. So your job in life is to find your your, you find yourself. That means, you know, very few of us are lucky enough to find ourselves in the first thing that we do. It takes persistence, but you will be the happiest person you can be if you find yourself, and you’re yourself will not be me.

1:25:09 So don’t look to me as the person. There might be things that I’ve done that you can get inspiration from, but form your own path, take the path less trodden, but take the path that is yours, because your combination of the skill sets, your experience, and your mindset is like nobody else’s before. Create your own story, and and constantly try and find that. You’ll be the most self-fulfilled person when you find it, and as I say, some people are extremely fortunate and find young age.

1:25:35 Some people go through their last not finding it, but I, job of all of us is to try and keep finding that. It took me 40 years to find mine, but once I found it, I’ve been going with it ever since. You know, from now on I’m gonna stop asking myself what would Chuck Norris do. I’m gonna say what would my son Caden do. So thank you for that.

1:25:49 It’s a great book, little wins, it’s I think a best-seller already in about five days, so people can grab a copy. I’m guessing on Amazon and in booksellers and things like that, to get just really a new look on their perspective at any point in their life and introduce that concept of growing down into all aspects of their life and see where it takes you and look at things in a different way and probably get new experience. That’s it, to be the best person that you already are, rediscover that person.

1:26:15 That’s all I’m saying. I love it. Well, thank you for coming in for tweaking our minds a little bit and talking about these ideas at London Real. We say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours with Paddy Paddy’s Bathroom with books and everything.

1:26:26 Yeah, the only thing I would say to people watching and listening to this is really just, if anything that you’ve heard from this causes you to stop for a moment and just look at the world in a slightly different way, grab that, embrace it, do it again, do it again, and you’ll notice so many things in your life that you can just nudge a little bit and improve and learn from and make yourself happier. Right, start building it as a habit. You know, awesome.

1:26:55 Fall, thank you so much, and I wish you all the best. Thank you, Brian.