A Conversation With Tim Watson of Traction Six

Tim Watson of Traction Six has decades of experience in the email business, which he has turned into a foundation for helping businesses in all sorts of industries. The word 'email' didn't show up that often in the conversation about the future of email, but the context for innovations like email did. Tim's made a thought-provoking web of connections, drawing on his wealth of experience and knowledge. You may want to have a pencil handy, because the book and topic references come fast! This episode will particularly interesting for entrepreneurs — the Entrepreneurial Operating System came up frequently. Fascinating stuff!

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good morning or good evening where my guests, Tim Watson is from. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, a host of the future of email marketing. My guest today is Tim Watson, uh, founder of Zeta's fear and guy in charge of Traction Six among other things. Right. Welcome Tim.

[00:00:27] Tim Watson: Hey, thank you very much for having me.

[00:00:29] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, we're we're talking to you're in, you're in, um, somewhere in England today. Yeah,

[00:00:35] Tim Watson: I'm right on the south coast down in the middle. So

[00:00:39] Matthew Dunn: part of what time is it there? It's 7:00 AM here. 3:00 PM. Oh, okay. Not, not too, not too bad for either one of us, Tim and I have tea time, take a cup of tea time and my third or fourth cup of coffee today, Tim.

[00:00:54] And I've had a chance to speak before, but I've been looking forward to an opportunity to, to chat one-on-one and, and more in depth outline. If you don't. Some people might be listening to this outline a bit about your background in email, and then we'll segue over to your background helping entrepreneurs after that.

[00:01:13] Tim Watson: Oh yeah. Sure. Wow. So my background in email, um, you know, I guess my, my, my very first experience of email was, uh, I want to say it must be about 9 19 99. Um, so my background is sort of next between technology and marketing anyway. Um, and I got a small share where a product or solution, um, created. And I was looking to, you know, get that out into the marketplace in 1990.

[00:01:48] Um, and, uh, you know, how do I reach out? It was for very specific market segment. Uh, and I thought, well, I can certainly try email. Um, you know, there weren't really kind of that many ESPs around. I mean, there were some, but, you know, it was like, oh, well, you know, find some, find some, uh, software package that would do some bulk emailing from the windows PC, uh, you know, dads through the internet connection, uh, at, out there.

[00:02:19] So, um, you know, set it up, sent out some stuff, you know, found, you know, Yeah, don't say it too loud, but found some of this data for the appropriate market. Uh, and, and lo and behold it launched the, it launched the product. Yeah. Cause it was relevant content, you know, I, I knew exactly who to target really relevant.

[00:02:45] Um, and, and, you know, they use the definition of spam is relevant versus not relevant that actually people are very happy to receive an email from someone they have never heard of, if it happens to help them solve the problem they've got today, the challenge is that it's almost impossible. To, you know, find the right person.

[00:03:10] Who's got that challenge and target. Then when you know nothing about, which is the issue right there, that's the issue. So it's not the fact that it's kind of not an opt-in address or not. It's the fact that it's almost impossible to get a relevant email to someone who you don't know, because you probably have like three data points on them and it's not enough.

[00:03:31] And even if you have 10 data points, it's probably not enough. Okay, go ahead. Go for the tangent there. Um, so yeah, so I kind of had an experience with him then, and it works and, you know, did some good sales on the Sharewell. Um, you know, rolled forwards a bit and, um, got involved with ASP business and some other guys, uh, you know, on the board of directors, we grew a ESP, um, back in the early two thousands.

[00:04:02] And that grew really well as yes, all the SPS do. And did. And a trade sale of that business. Um, and I stuck with the acquiring company a little bit longer, uh, before I decided it was time to do my own thing again and took all the knowledge I had at that point of, you know, technology, digital, marketing, and email.

[00:04:25] Got I gleaned over the years and through working with some very, very nice brands and helping them with their email campaigns, uh, as part of the work within the ESP and set up shoppers, you know, uh, consultant on digital marketing, uh, of the niche of email, um, and work with, you know, gosh, I don't know, 150 businesses since then on their email.

[00:04:51] Right. Wow. Um, so that's how I got, got involved. You know, it was sort of out of, out of necessity, found the email worked and then, you know, very coincidentally you know, the opportunity to get, you know, to, to, to work an email again, with some other guys that I knew known for for many, many years, actually building a company around email.

[00:05:14] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I mean that's 99. That's pretty early on for email as a marketing channel. So I think it's fair that you kind of watched the thing grow, watch the baby grow up a good bit. Right.

[00:05:27] Tim Watson: You know, looking back on it, it was really crazy early on. I mean, yeah. What was I thinking?

[00:05:33] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, well, I don't know, uh, w you know, the state, the story we're telling ourselves, Look around the room and why isn't everybody doing this?

[00:05:42] Because it makes so much sense. Right. You know, G almost everyone's got an email address or they're getting 1 99, uh, oh, look, it doesn't cost a fortune and you don't have to pay someone else or ask them permission. You only have to ask the person who you're sending to. Can I send this to you? So yeah, it rear view mirror.

[00:06:01] It's inevitable that it was going to go. I'm sure at the time it felt like, oh man, what are we doing? You know,

[00:06:11] Tim Watson: it was not like there was lots of published guidance on how to do email marketing. In 1990, we were kind of like, it was work it out for yourself time, um, from, from, from all aspects from kind of like the, you know, the, the technology. Uh, the solution, what you say, how you say, how you, you know, w what kind of world what's not going to work, but the main thing is, guess what, you know, I offer to the right person

[00:06:41] Matthew Dunn: right off to the right person.

[00:06:42] Yeah. And as you said, you know, if, even if, even if you pick their name out of a hat or made it up at random, if you happen to be talking about something that they're interested in, helps them solve a problem right now, at this moment in time, you're not.

[00:06:56] Tim Watson: No, no. I mean, you know, there's the legal definition.

[00:06:59] There's a user definition that you just definitely choose. If, if you, if you turn up on my doorstep and you're helping me in some way that I need, but I can't thank you enough for contacting me.

[00:07:12] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. That's, that's it right there. Well, um, you know, there's, there's a pivot in your life at some point and, and you're now you're helping.

[00:07:20] You know, coach entrepreneurs down the path with a, with a particular methodology. Can you talk about that?

[00:07:27] Tim Watson: Yeah. Sure. So, I mean, yeah, but I guess my background in terms of, you know, building a business with DSP, actually there was another business I've been part of a few years before that kicked off and built it.

[00:07:41] I left, I left that business, uh, when I realized the vision wasn't for me, um, Uh, and, you know, obviously, you know, create my own marketing consultancy business, you know, on top of that. So, but, you know, I'll be honest. One of the frustrations that I've found was that, um, you know, particularly people looking for help, um, they, you know, they, they need the help and they can benefit from getting the, uh, you know, the knowledge and the experience of people external to them.

[00:08:13] Right. You know, there's stuff that they don't know. Um, but I got, I got frustrated because I would, you know, how people understand what they need to be doing to improve their results and their marketing and everything, and spend time and effort and blood and sweat. Right. You know, kind of the roadmap and the strategies that will kind of make them successful.

[00:08:42] Um, but it, you know, the frustration was it very often I could feel the dust collecting as I walked out the door,

[00:08:50] Matthew Dunn: you're going to turn into action, kind of, uh, you

[00:08:53] Tim Watson: know, it's kind of like, you've got the sinking of feeding of. You know, there's something, you know, they, they, they get it. They, they, they, you know, people go great.

[00:09:02] That's fantastic. That's just what we needed. Um, this makes total sense. Yes. This, we need to get on with this now. Um, and you could just sort of see that there's a thousand other priorities hitting them. That's going to stop them getting to it. Um, and it, and it was a frustration because, you know, I. Yeah, not delivering as much value as I could, not because of what I was providing, but, um, because of the people's businesses ability to, to, you know, work out what they should be doing and prioritizing.

[00:09:38] And, um, I found the answer in 2015. I wasn't particularly looking for it, but. Yeah, scratching my head and going, you know, how do, how do we help businesses better? How do we help these entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial businesses better? Um, and I came across, uh, working with one of, you know, a very good client, um, this book, traction, uh, that you can see on the shelf there like Whitman, um, which describes what.

[00:10:10] Terms the entrepreneurial operating system, which is a way of harmonizing human effort. Uh, and it turns out that, you know, businesses I've worked in work with an experienced actually one of the big struggles. There isn't kind of a really good, solid, um, clear, shared vision, um, with a way of getting everybody on the same page, aligned on priorities as to what needs to be done.

[00:10:39] You know, this 90 days, this 12. This is three years kind of thing is that the strategic planning processes would, would not that functional. Um, and you know, businesses suffer from this kind of flipping back and forth and today's priority. Um, and a thousand things are important. Yeah. When everything's important, nothing is important.

[00:11:03] Yeah, for sure. Um, and an AOS helps, helps the business just get better, uh, um, at getting traction and it's names of book, you know, it's about getting clarity of vision. So everybody's on the same page with the vision, for the business where it's going, how it's going to get there. Great. And that discipline of accountability.

[00:11:24] To get the traction. So everybody's executing on it. Right. And also creating some healthy teams on the way as well as partner. Um, so in 2015 came across the boat, working with a business. Um, we implemented the EOS concepts, tools and disciplines into that business. I was really blown away by it worked it.

[00:11:46] I thought it was going to work well, but it worked really well. Wow.

[00:11:49] Matthew Dunn: Okay. Okay. You didn't, it wasn't just a book. In, in AOL, it was theory and action turned into. Yeah,

[00:11:58] Tim Watson: absolutely. Absolutely. So it's a, it's, it's very practical. Um, you know, there's lots of really great books around, um, which are, yeah. I read an awful lot of books and there's things, you know, some of them it'd be for me to come and read spines, but, and there's a whole, like more books in the cupboard, but, um, you know, and that they're very inspiring thought provoking books and they've got great content, but not many of them.

[00:12:25] Oh, sort of like a practical guide to how to actually help your business run better. Um, how to remove some of the common frustrations that entrepreneurial businesses suffer with. Right. Whereas attraction's a very practical guy, so yeah. Implement that. Great. You know, that particular business. Grew 54%, 10 million over three years.

[00:12:49] Um, you know, that, that, and it's carried on working for an ever since. Uh, I started using those same. Tools and disciplines then with other businesses I was involved with and I'm found that it works again again and again, and it worked for them and which couldn't have been too much shock shocked me because, uh, there's, uh, things over 12,000 businesses actually running on EOS right now.

[00:13:17] Uh, and you know, it's in lots of different industry verticals as well. So as a framework for, you know, and a set of tools, sort of, it's a simple, practical, proven system at this point. Um, and there's a way of deploying it as well of implementing it, which is proven. Um, so I, you know, I've, I've found that as much as people kind of said, look, we want help with this.

[00:13:40] What really moved the needle even more, was helping with that, which was say, right, let's get the whole business running, you know, just right. And, uh, uh, what was the leadership team to make sure everyone's aligned with that vision and how you're going to get that help you get back? Accountabilities throughout the business, get focused on what's important and get the, get the right stuff done and, you know, stop, stop some of the stuff that particularly, I think marketing's particularly susceptible to getting distracted.

[00:14:11] Yeah. Um, you know, it's like, oh, I need to do this. You know? Well, I'm. You know, nothing gets done because everything's a distraction to what should be being done. And at some point, know, people forgotten what the priority was in the first place. And ah, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's tough. So yeah, that's it.

[00:14:32] So it was kind of accidental and I kind of went, you know what? This. I can not so much more value for people by actually, you know, from all of my experiences and having understood how to use and implement arrests to working with people on that

[00:14:49] Matthew Dunn: entrepreneurial operating system. Correct? No, that's correct.

[00:14:52] Yeah. So, so most of your time now, Uh, am I correct? Coaching consulting and coaching on implementation of EOS for yeah, basically.

[00:15:03] Tim Watson: Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. That's where I spend most of my time now. I'm not kind of a couple of fingers in a little bit of a activity around email, but most of my time is.

[00:15:13] It's exactly around that implementing USP, which is kind of a little bit of a blend of, of teaching facilitating and coaching. Yeah.

[00:15:21] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Okay, cool. And you probably ended up getting to work with a range, a wide range of industries and businesses. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Uh, are your clients mostly, you know, UK EU or are you stretching out more globally?

[00:15:35] Tim Watson: Um, you know, the fantastic thing called internet when, when I, um, you know, make the switch, you know, we sold the ESPN or decided to go out and do mine's thing again and set up the consulting business within digital marketing. Um, you know, I had in mind that that would be a very. UK centric business that it would be, you know, working with with people who are local-ish.

[00:16:04] Right. Um, um, but that's turned out not to be the case. It turned out that because of the internet, which was getting better and better, right. In the, uh, you know, a few years ago, um, that it became very practical to, to video commute, um, and work with businesses remotely. So I was working. I've already at that point with businesses around the world, substantially the U S and UK, but other places as well.

[00:16:34] Um, um, and, and, you know, that's continued in the, you know, the, the businesses I'm working with. Um, you know, I'll get on a, you know, run a session with a, you know, a client and got one way. People from us UK and, and like Asia. And it's a management team that split over three continents. So we get together on zoom and that.

[00:16:59] Matthew Dunn: Um, so did the pandemic and everyone going, oh, I guess we can work on video. Did that actually kind of help?

[00:17:09] Tim Watson: Um, you know, um, I mean, you know, from my personal experience of when the, you know, the pandemic hit and it's all kind of like, oh, we've got to do all this stuff over zoom and video. And I was like, no change then.

[00:17:23] Yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I had, you know, phone numbers that followed me around and, uh, virtual phone numbers, virtual lever thing, and video, you know, used every single video hosting solution around video.

[00:17:41] Matthew Dunn: Do you remember what it used to be? If you could Coke someone on to, uh, you know, to a video conference, you pretty much guaranteed that you were going to spend 10, 15 minutes to a tech support, helping him install, get the meeting ID connect. It was such a pain in the butt. I would switch solutions looking for the one that was just.

[00:18:03] Click hello. And it worked

[00:18:06] Tim Watson: and now everybody's there and sort of go to meeting and WebEx and join

[00:18:11] Matthew Dunn: me and all, yeah, Skype was kind of the dominant dog and it, it, Microsoft managed to really kill Skype. Like what a, what a door.

[00:18:23] It was a real shame and, you know, timing is everything. And I, I'm not taking any way, anything away from zoom. Technical achievements. It is easy, slick, polished, et cetera. But they were also at the right place in the right. Oh, oh

[00:18:39] Tim Watson: gosh. I mean, yeah, they had this, they had the right solution and it just hit the rhino.

[00:18:45] It's very slick, very easy. You know, it takes about three minutes to learn it yet and it just works.

[00:18:51] Matthew Dunn: It just works.

[00:18:52] Tim Watson: And suddenly the whole world needed it. I mean,

[00:18:56] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And it's become, it's become the verb. Right. You know, oh, I've got a zoom. Uh, I had switched to zoom, um, nine months, maybe 12 months, you know, before COVID showed up and made life.

[00:19:11] Interesting. And watching it just go. Um, believeable yeah. I I'll be very curious to watch them as a company. After out of this, et cetera, like, oh, okay. You got gotta, you know, happens once, once a decade kind of boost, what are you going to do? Like where do you take it from here? Because they can just park camp on it and be the sort of defacto standard.

[00:19:38] But sooner or later, you know, Microsoft has already taken market share away from them with two. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you've got, you've got all of the complications of privacy, security, et cetera, uh, that, that always rear their heads when human beings are involved in something. Um, and I'll have to grapple with that.

[00:19:59] It's like consume become bigger than a video conference platform. It'd be an interesting question.

[00:20:04] Tim Watson: Well, they certainly doing some stuff on their own kind of trying to be bigger than the video conference platform in terms of the features that building in and the capabilities around kind of trying to be your, um, your, your, uh, business, uh, virtual PBX type of thing.

[00:20:21] And, you know, they bought I, and they bought someone didn't they? Not too long ago.

[00:20:26] Matthew Dunn: I can't remember which company I tried to keep track. Mergers and acquisitions, uh, playing. Okay. Wow.

[00:20:36] Tim Watson: Suddenly I'm still kind of telecommuting around and, uh, yeah. Could commuting as well a little bit, but, uh,

[00:20:44] Matthew Dunn: where you already, were you already working mostly virtual, you know, before everyone had to work, mostly virtual heavily heavily asked me to, to welcome to my world.

[00:20:55] Thank you. This is thanks for joining me. This is much easier. Um, I was, I was chatting with, uh, do you know Tim Moore at soccer?

[00:21:04] Tim Watson: Um, no, I do.

[00:21:06] Matthew Dunn: Um, uh, second labs is a smarter backend for email and I'm sorry, Tim. I'm kinda mangling what you said yesterday. He was, he was a guest for a podcast episode yesterday.

[00:21:16] We had a great in-depth geeky email conversation, but, um, but we, we were just talking about the, we were talking about. And doing a job have been redefined so quickly and, and are not going back. Right. You've worked remote virtual for a long time. Me too. And now a whole lot of people are getting to do it.

[00:21:43] And it's, it's an amazing transformation. Yeah.

[00:21:47] Tim Watson: I mean, I've taught, uh, you know, one of my clients, uh, Brandon, plenty ERs, and it's kind of like, okay, it's time for review, you know? Um, how's it going? And he's like, you know, the business is going great. You know, we're just downsizing the office. Um, Business and cry.

[00:22:07] You got double number of PayPal, but your downside is your office because you just don't need the office size. You know? So I went down the size of the office of businesses going. Great.

[00:22:15] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Isn't that, isn't that something, um, do you think, well, so a couple of questions occur to me one, and I'm just guessing, and you get to talk about it.

[00:22:26] Um, I'm guessing that this redefinition of work fits perfectly into the EOS methodology.

[00:22:35] Tim Watson: Yeah. Um, I think, I mean, it's certainly going to be some interesting stuff in terms of, um, you know, seeing how people are. Um, you know, join and grow and develop within a world, which is heavily virtual or hybrid or whatever, you know, one of the CEOs, uh, said, you know, he's is he, hasn't met about 50% of his staff at this point.

[00:22:58] Right. Um, because that will at the end of a wire, um, Uh, so yeah. Um, what was the, what was the question again?

[00:23:10] Matthew Dunn: Well, no, just wondering how, you know, you've got to know

[00:23:14] Tim Watson: how he

[00:23:14] Matthew Dunn: has fits with it and vice versa. Really? Yeah.

[00:23:18] Tim Watson: So w I think the one thing that that gives is, um, it gives kind of like handrails for how to be clear on.

[00:23:29] Fijian. It gets clarity to people around what the, where the accountability is, what the focus should be, what needs to be done. Um, so is that actually, that's really helpful, um, within the virtual world, because where, where you haven't got the, you know, the management by osmosis, the walking around stuff, and just chatting and trying to stay coordinated, informally, having something which is a set of hand rails.

[00:23:58] Which helps guide and make sure that everything is aligned and in sync. Um, you know, and it's not, it's not kind of like an onerous framework or something. It doesn't get in the way,

[00:24:09] Matthew Dunn: uh, which

[00:24:12] Tim Watson: yeah, no, it, it, you know, you don't even notice it's there in a sentence, but, um, you know, it just helps the right amount and it, it's simple and it's, that's the genius of it is so simple.

[00:24:26] And I think complicated. Does this different work. So people come up with this fantastic, crazy complicated way of working that will just be like genius.

[00:24:35] Matthew Dunn: At work or it won't last, or

[00:24:40] Tim Watson: it's too complicated. People can't understand it, engage with it. It does because it's complicated. It starts to become restrictive and sticky.

[00:24:47] And now you're fighting the system rather than working with it. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, the is working great in a hybrid environment or remote environment is helping. Yeah, helping a lot and helping people know what they do to focus on keeping that accountability there. Um, rather than, and I, there was some step stories.

[00:25:08] I don't know that probably in the U S press as well, but there was a lot stories on the BBC press in the UK of, of some, some guy saying how he was using, you know, screen watching software to make sure that his people were doing the right stuff. And so, and it's like, Oh, my God. That's just terrible. Um, you know, I can't imagine.

[00:25:31] I mean, it's like, what are you thinking that is not going to be a successful way to engage? Couldn't couldn't

[00:25:39] Matthew Dunn: agree with you more, you know, one of the, I read the other day that one of the, one of the hot selling, uh, one of the hot selling items, um, these days. You know, pandemic, uh, easing period is, is a little gizmo that makes it look like your mouse is in action because you've got, you've got companies misguided in my humble opinion, monitoring every keystroke and mouse click.

[00:26:07] And you're like, I want to go get coffee, but I'm supposed to be at work. So I'll put my mouse on the little vibrating pad. So it looks like I'm still doing something.

[00:26:16] Tim Watson: I hadn't seen that. That's hilarious if you're measuring.

[00:26:20] Matthew Dunn: We have a different problem to discuss.

[00:26:23] Tim Watson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, but that's just the innovation of mine, of happiness, isn't it?

[00:26:28] You know, kind of like, uh, uh, and it's just so, so wrong. I think it was, uh, it was Jim Collins who said, as soon as you need in your soon as you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you made a hiring mistake. You know, if you really feel like you've got to manage someone that tightly. Yeah. Yeah. You've got the wrong person or.

[00:26:49] Yeah. You're not a manager or

[00:26:52] Matthew Dunn: manager. Yeah. Or you're there, or you're the wrong person. Yeah.

[00:26:56] Tim Watson: Yeah. You're the problem, you know, it's either as a person, you are, it is a problem wishing, you know, but I mean, you know, uh, that's, that's just so, so, so bad. And I think, you know, that's why. Being focused on outcomes and what needs to be achieved.

[00:27:14] Um, getting clarity around that, uh, you know, we have, we have mechanisms to do it. You know, things are written down like, you know, smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic time bound. Everything is, is defined. Um, Um, there's clarity, you know, whether it's going to take you five minutes, five days, five months to, you know, deliver something, the clarity is there.

[00:27:40] Um, you don't, you know, you don't have to monitor if the mouse is moving or not. Right,

[00:27:45] Matthew Dunn: right. Because honestly, sometimes shutting the screen off and, you know, hands off the keyboard and thinking maybe the most. Oh, yeah.

[00:27:57] Tim Watson: Well, I mean, certainly a lot of us are obviously heavily knowledge work has really, um, you know, and, and thinking is, you know, critical.

[00:28:08] Um, I love this quote actually from Henry Ford, which he said, you know, thinking is the hardest type of work to do, which is why so few people do it. Um,

[00:28:23] Uh, and it's just like, it is actually, you know, sitting back and just

[00:28:30] Matthew Dunn: thinking, yeah,

[00:28:32] Tim Watson: it's, it's really, it's really quite hard, you know, to try and sit back and get that clarity and think about what's going on. Think about what needs to be happening. And certainly, you know, as, as business leaders, um, you know, you, you need to be.

[00:28:48] Getting that clarity on a regular basis, getting the, you know, just thinking about things. Um, yeah. And UMass isn't going to be moving.

[00:28:56] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If your message is moving, your brain may not be on where we're going to have to fight to reinvent the processes and system. That don't not, don't just allow for that, but actually in enable that, and I put that poorly, but I'm, I I'm thinking for example of software developer kind of MySpace, it's pretty well studied that a one or two minute interruption can pretty much blow a day of.

[00:29:30] For a good developer. Cause you know, they're in flow, they're in the middle of this. They've got all of the pieces and variables in their head and someone comes in and asks them if they filled in their time sheet or some stupid ass thing like that, poof. Right. You're not, you, you may not ever reconstruct what you had going at the moment and you know, enabling them to do the job of that's a thinking job, right.

[00:29:54] Enabling them to do that by doing things like giving them an office instead of acute. Like, we're starting to realize, oh, that's the valuable output, right? Like that. I particularly liked it to rail on the open office concept. Cause I've always thought that was just completely idiotic and refuse to work at a cube myself.

[00:30:13] But why? Because I can't think if I'm constantly interrupted and really you probably should pay me for, you know, pay me for. This work, not this work. Not right. Yeah,

[00:30:27] Tim Watson: yeah, yeah. Totally get it. I mean, I've known people sort of say, oh yeah, that only take me a couple of minutes when I didn't believe there's anything, which is a two minute task.

[00:30:38] Yeah. Because if you switch context, And you go and do something, particularly if you were, if your head was deep in somewhere, it's going to take you a lot of energy to get your head back to where it was and deep into that

[00:30:54] Matthew Dunn: thing. Yeah, yeah. Which we, you know, we're all, we're all may have culpa guilty of, of, of context switching a lot more than I should.

[00:31:04] And I know that cognitive cost is atrocious, you know, task, a task B task C. You're not doing any of them. Well, if you're doing a piece of them all in the same, you know, one or two minutes span.

[00:31:16] Tim Watson: Yeah. Yeah. If you see flipping back and forth. Yeah,

[00:31:21] Matthew Dunn: yeah. Or, or you're, you're placing more of a load on your, you know, more of a load on your, uh, compute machine or on your head, uh, then you should have, I've actually gotten to the point in like, okay, I'm going to S I'm going say it, and it's going to be recorded.

[00:31:35] I have, I have big old time blocks on my calendar and the. That are basically pissed off. Leave me alone. I'm thinking, you know, I'm actually concentrating on. And I just leave them blocked. Cause I've learned that that's, that's kind of the sweet spot for me for the work that requires real concentration and meetings.

[00:31:54] Generally speaking by, they can wait. They can go later in the day or later in the afternoon. And. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:01] Tim Watson: It's important is it is absolutely important that you block out time for yourself to get to do your thinking work, get your clarity and so on. Yeah. But I'm interested now. You got me interested. W when is your, um, when your most creative inspirational moments, when do they come?

[00:32:24] Matthew Dunn: Um, I'm a long-term student of. Creativity thought and creation creative process. Um, so I understand why it works this way, driving, which I don't do that much anymore. And, and like random, not actually working activities where the brain just goes, wait a minute, you could put those two things together. Wow.

[00:32:53] Shower, plant nano, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So,

[00:32:59] Tim Watson: so that, that, uh, um, um, please, please. You said that because that's what I hoped you were going to say. Um, and there is this kind of like, you know, block of time to get deep into some. Thought task. Yeah. But the, but the, you know, where you've got to work things through and you're thinking, and you're deep in it and so on.

[00:33:19] That's great. The inspirational creativity side of things, um, probably doesn't come in those blocks of times. They come in a time when you're a little bit unfocused, a little bit de-focused and there's even a case of if you're like. You're a really great morning person where you get up, you got huge amounts of energy and you can really stop plowing through things you get in the flow and you get a whole load of stuff done probably means your creative stuff is in the evening.

[00:33:47] Yes. Um, when, when you're, you know, you're half zonked out, um, when you're kind of your brains, any half that, and it can wander around and, and vice versa. If you're kind of like a person who. You know, we would do all of your study and revision in the evening, probably first thing in the morning when you, when you're kind of like, well, it's probably when you're going to have things, so Sophia I'm, you know, like yourself, you know, when I'm, uh, I'll I find, you know, reading, reading some book about something around.

[00:34:20] And I'll be reading it. Um, and it, there's just things that start to trigger off and I'll start thinking about and, uh, and creating, solving challenges is getting, getting new, um, new perspectives on things. Not necessarily directly related to what I'm reading, but because I'm not focused on it. You know, and, and, and of course, you know, they're all classic of, you know, you going to the bathroom and you come back having been to the bathroom, you know, with, with the answers that, you know, you've been at it, BOM, BOM, BOM, BOM, BOM.

[00:34:57] You've got everything in your head, it's all there, but the pieces aren't connecting, the neurons, aren't quite firing. And then you got my camera's going all crazy. And then you go off to, you know, off to the bathroom and take that little. Right. Well, you're not directly thinking about it and suddenly bam, it becomes clear.

[00:35:18] Fascinating.

[00:35:19] Matthew Dunn: Okay. Now we're going to get really esoteric. Have you ever read the act of creation by Arthur K. No, no dude, dude, you put that, I'll send, I'll send you a link. It may, you may have a hard time finding it in print, but like if, if I were taking three books to the proverbial desert island, that would be one of them and a Kessler, famous journalist, famous novelist and surprisingly smart dude.

[00:35:43] Um, he would say, and what he says in the act of creation, which is all about that creative aha process across this. Is that you need both of the things that you just talked about, you have to do the hard donkey work. The I'm concentrating, I'm focused to do he, his term is load the underground. You actually have to not be able to solve the problem.

[00:36:09] So your brain's kind of like, ah, I, you know, I, I worked at this and I've got all the pieces there and I, the hell with this, I'm going to go take a walk. Right. And on the walk or in, you know, in the car or something like that, then the human brain does this amazing cross circuit. Like, wait a minute. What if we connected it that way, but trying to get brilliant by just driving around or just taking walks, isn't going to get you there because you don't have the load.

[00:36:41] You know, potential waiting for lightning to connect the cloud in the ground.

[00:36:45] Tim Watson: Got it. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. You got it. You've got to have all of the things sort of in your head, knocking around all the pieces, all the bits of the puzzle on the desktop or the mindspace. Yeah.

[00:36:57] Matthew Dunn: And

[00:36:58] Tim Watson: then let the brain relax and it will just go and start that one goes there and this one goes here.

[00:37:03] This one goes here.

[00:37:04] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah. Or, or you'll see a, you know, a structure and a connection between. For completely arbitrary looking reasons. Oh yeah. That is like that son of a gun, right. Boom solution, you know, solution sort of presents itself. Yeah. It's uh, and, and back to the, you know, back to the virtual work and even the, you know, operating system for business kind of things, allowing for both or even structuring for both, we may we'll have to get better at that.

[00:37:38] I suspect because. And I won't say this quite very well right out of the gate. I think a lot of that was happening inadvertently around the edges of social interaction when work tended to be done, live with other people. And now that we're in. Doing that, now that now that there, I don't have to go to the room for coffee, where I bumped into the guy who's talking about something else we're going to have to start designing work for that it's like eventually a company would go, did you take your walk today?

[00:38:12] Why? Because we actually figured you're more likely to do something really smart. If you put the keyboard down and go for a walk and, you know, studies have shown that, that did that, did that, did

[00:38:21] Tim Watson: that? How, how can we still have that? Um, those moments, um, if we are sort of doing it by accident, the knocking into people and accidentally, you know, water court or whatever, um, where, you know, you overhear something or you get, you know, um,

[00:38:40] Matthew Dunn: yeah.

[00:38:42] Company. Oh, and a blanket on the name of the company. I think they're mentioned in. To great. No, they're not. There's an, it's an engineering company down in Seattle and it won't come up with the name of them. They designed a headquarters for the company, but they put a cap on the height of the building and the cap was dictated by the number of flights of stairs that someone will take.

[00:39:05] And the point that they were after, which was absolutely right, is that elevators really screwed up collaboration because. You don't talk to people in elevators and you don't stop and pause and have a conversation in an elevator and you don't run into people from like other disciplines

[00:39:28] Tim Watson: on the, on the stairwell.

[00:39:29] You're kind of like, Hey yo, Hey Tim,

[00:39:32] Matthew Dunn: I hear you doing this stuff. Like, cool. What's the, what's that new company? . We we learn, we glean, we grow, we connect, which you don't do in, in, in elevator sized elevator structured buildings. Cool. Huh?

[00:39:51] Tim Watson: Interesting. Yeah.

[00:39:53] Matthew Dunn: And Amazon just Amazon Amazon's headquarters are 90 miles south of me.

[00:39:57] I mean, I'm in the Northwest north of Seattle. They just spent, you know, caca, Jillian dollars, uh, on this like garden space in the middle of their metroplex. At the south end of Seattle. And I mean, it's a big building with plants and nooks and crannies. And like, it has, it doesn't have desks. It's not there for people to work.

[00:40:18] It's there for people to take a break, hang out, interact, and I would be willing to bet that thing pays for itself very, very, very well in short order. Yeah.

[00:40:28] Tim Watson: Yeah. I I'm, you know, I'm, I'm with it. I'm with you on that and I'm sure they doing the right things. Yeah, how does one measure it? So, yeah, I'm kind of, you know, on a data person.

[00:40:43] I love data. I love, you know, not just reading numbers, but thinking about why the numbers are like the numbers are, um, and looking behind the now. Yeah. Not like, you know, read the numbers out. This is what it says. No, no, no. Let's think about what the mechanics let's see how those numbers are talking to us.

[00:41:00] How is it stacking up and what are the interactions going on there? What might be the reasons for that? You know, the numbers, but as the big why question, which is, you know, far more fascinating, but so, you know, my, my, you know, question on Amazon doing that, or any companies. Great, but you know, how do you get the numbers, which shows what going on and show you what, what value you're getting from that sort of stuff?

[00:41:24] Um, yeah, it's tough, huh?

[00:41:27] Matthew Dunn: Well, it's a tough question because if you're making a. Speculative investment leap. Like let's use Amazon as a proxy here where we're going to build a big dome with a bunch of plants in, in paces places for people to hang out. Well, what are the numbers that justify that you will not have an answer, right?

[00:41:47] You're going to make a big old leap of intuition. Yeah.

[00:41:54] Tim Watson: belief. Yeah. Um, and you know, that that's, uh, I, I, I get, I get, it sort of goes against my scientific sense of, you know, if we can't measure it, we can't verify it. We can't approve, you know, if it's a few sodas, whatever, but when it's, you know, some, some millions it's like.

[00:42:18] Uh,

[00:42:20] Matthew Dunn: it's called it's ballsy. Well, and, and, you know, measurement by, by definition measurements, you know, uh, uh, post. Post post Factum right. While we can put some numbers on this. Yes. Now that it's made bill doing its thing, but projecting the numbers in advance, you're applying an old model and hoping it works out again.

[00:42:39] So, no, it's not right. Mark Zuckerberg, not a fan Facebook, not a fan, but the fact that they've got the balls, your word to put at this point, $12 billion already into metaverse like. Wow. Like gutsy, gutsy move and you know, he's got the control and the cash to be able to do it. I hope it doesn't pay off cause I don't want people living in Facebook, but it, I do admire, I do admire the commitment to make.

[00:43:13] Tim Watson: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Wow. That's that's, that's pretty major.

[00:43:18] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, it's pretty. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty major, you know, and history says someone somewhere in a garage is doing something that'll end up being, you know, more meaningful for that, you know? New vector,

[00:43:32] Tim Watson: right? Yeah. There's, it's kind of like, yeah, there's a business kind of put a 10 billion into something and then some will, some will, will for a few thousand dollars start on a concept, which actually was, it turns out before the

[00:43:45] Matthew Dunn: more important yeah.

[00:43:46] Which, you know, uh, it's kind of, it's kind of reassuring. That that happens so often it would be a boring, awful world. If the only way to, you know, innovate was to have $10 billion to throw away

[00:44:01] Tim Watson: he has his hands. Suddenly I was just toying with, in my head. I was walking down to the. Um, down to the bakers to, to buy a nice B-roll and cake today, I just saw a headline.

[00:44:14] Um, uh, I think it was Oxford Oxford group of make the next step with fusion. Yes. Yes. So I saw kind of like, you know, they've gone further, they, they're starting to produce more energy, uh, fusion and they're putting in or whatever. It's that kind of getting to the point where. Fusion may actually be possible.

[00:44:35] Um, and energy basically will drop by, uh, you know, in price by a factor of 10 or a hundred or something. At some point it's not going to be flight, you know, 10, 20, 30 years or so. No doubt. Yeah. But energy suddenly becomes really, really low cost compared to what it is now. And it's like, and it's green, it's green energy.

[00:44:55] So everyone's. But it's like green energy. Fantastic. You know, and it's like, what are the implications of energy going down in price that much? I mean, there's a simple things like cryptocurrencies suddenly blow out the water as being worthless cryptocurrencies crash because. Yeah, I see. Crypto is based on energy, costing something.

[00:45:18] And as soon as you combine for $0, then crypto goes down the pattern as it does. If you know, quantum computing works out because the algorithms, you could just invent coins like that. So, yeah, crypto. As it currently stands and no doubt some loose so that, well, maybe, but you know, that goes down. But what about everything else?

[00:45:40] You know, if energy becomes so cheap, then you know, the whole, you know, when the whole world has been based on the price of oil and when oil was cheap, you know, the economies go up. But when, what was expensive. Um, you know, economic activities been suppressed, well, margin energy goes down by a factor, a hundred economic activities, not going to suddenly hit the roof, suddenly doing things which are expensive on energy, who cares.

[00:46:07] Um, you know, let let's, let's put, you know, Saunders in the Antarctic because it's cheap to do it. You know, let's, let's, uh, pump water around. Um, to the, to the desert, because while was in the customer pipeline, the cost of the energy to transport the water there is, is nil, you know, or whatever. I mean, I didn't, in fact, you know, if economic goes up there, then we'll be limited by the cost of raw materials would be, you know, like, but it doesn't cost to dig stuff up with ground and smell steel and stuff anymore.

[00:46:37] We just need the, you know, the raw materials to make steel, but the energy cost is zero. So we'll probably get a whole new. Set of environmental challenges. Yes, because we will start doing a lot of stuff. Um, the energy costs constraint us and stop us doing that. We will start doing and will potentially hurt the planet in other ways.

[00:47:01] Um, but also kind of, it will change. It will change the whole world. So incredible. And how we function, what's important and why, how our decisions are made. You know, that is just mind boggling.

[00:47:17] Matthew Dunn: Well, what we saw at what we thought was a, you know, an immovable constraint, it turns out it wasn't, I mean, rough, rough analogy, but aren't we at the baby step stage of having done that with communication.

[00:47:38] You'll be communication was done at, at, you know, human and wind speed up until 150 years ago. That was about as fast as you could get, you know, Polian, semaphores this side. Um, and now, and seriously in the 20 year span that you and I have been talking about emailing someone around the planet, talking live to someone in England from, you know, from.

[00:48:04] The Pacific Northwest is like, we didn't talk about the cost of this video conference. Did we?

[00:48:11] Tim Watson: Communication

[00:48:14] Matthew Dunn: communication is become somewhat like you're saying about energy, but communication has done this darn you're free vector, and we're still trying to figure out how to, you know, how to reinvent and operate with constraints gone on, on that particular.

[00:48:31] Yeah, I know

[00:48:32] Tim Watson: now if like, you know, the whole, you know, the whole world is limited by the cost of energy. And if you suddenly remove that, but what are we going to be limited

[00:48:41] Matthew Dunn: by? Where are we going? What are we going to be limited by

[00:48:44] Tim Watson: simply doing things which are any intensive and doing things in an efficient way,

[00:48:49] Matthew Dunn: not matter anymore.

[00:48:50] Yeah, that's true. That's true. And then we'll have the, uh, can we, can we do, can we harness that energy to fix the stuff that we've managed to be. Quite badly, right? If, if, if carbon extraction is daunting because it's energy expensive, whereas suddenly

[00:49:08] Tim Watson: it's not

[00:49:08] Matthew Dunn: right. Yeah. Yeah. No, as fast I read it and China's had some breakthroughs with a fusion, I think as well.

[00:49:17] Um, my hope, and this is, this is, you know, we're, we're off, down a rabbit hole, which is awesome. Um, maybe fusion will not have the brand problem that nuclear. Because on a rational basis, being an environmentalist and being anti-nuke is, is not a very sensible position, honestly.

[00:49:39] Tim Watson: Uh, hopefully fusion seen as, as radioactivity safe.

[00:49:43] It's a fish

[00:49:43] Matthew Dunn: to bread.

[00:49:45] Tim Watson: Yeah. Okay. Marketing terms. So the difference between fishing and fusion, which, um, yeah, but for anyone who doesn't know spits in the asthma versus smashing two atoms together and combining them and they both produce energy, just one has bad side effects.

[00:50:01] Matthew Dunn: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And the other, the other, the other doesn't it's just, can we, can we, can we contain to contain it to.

[00:50:09] Uh, make it happen continuously tough, tough science problem. Right. We've been working at this for close to a century, and we're only now starting to see some, you know, more output than input, kind of. Yeah,

[00:50:24] Tim Watson: I've, I've kind of as I, you walking down to the local bakers and just kind of thinking, thank you. I know I've now got the PCs knocking around in my head, possibly when I go to the bathroom next door implications of what zero energy could mean to the, to, to society.

[00:50:44] But I ate, it's absolutely fascinating. I feel like, you know, the. Uh, of the cheap energy

[00:50:54] Matthew Dunn: and

[00:50:54] Tim Watson: it changes, it changes. Everything could be so fundamental. I don't think we even start to understand how fundamental it be, how it changes everything that you

[00:51:06] Matthew Dunn: do now. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're absolutely right.

[00:51:09] And, you know, yay science, right? Like if that happens, Call me Pollyanna. I seek. That's a great thing. We'll we'll have, we'll take a century to figure out how to start adapting or more, but I'd much rather see that happen. Um, I would be optimistic about what we could do with that. Let me put it that way.

[00:51:32] Tim Watson: But if we're talking about, you know, the, the, you know, the, the, the farming revolution, the industrial revolution, the computing technology revolution, we'll probably be talking about the zero energy revolution as being, you know, the, the, the next big thing, but in terms of the thing, which suddenly changes, you know, everything, everything,

[00:51:53] Matthew Dunn: you know, there's this super, super.

[00:51:57] Jen, Mark Anderson, who runs a strategic news service, an email newsletter of all things. Um, and mark is a just brilliant polymath. Um, I have been known because he happens to live not far from here. Um, he proposed what he called the carbon. He called it the carbon trifecta. He said, we need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into graphing so that we can make things with.

[00:52:25] And it's a virtuous cycle cause that, you know, that particular material graphing invented in your country, um, has such astonishing, useful properties that an infinite supply of that would only be. And it'd be much better to have the carbon, you know,

[00:52:42] Tim Watson: kind of nanotechnology I'm thinking

[00:52:45] Matthew Dunn: well that among other things that have graphene, you know, single, single layer of carbon, single layer of matrix of carbon, atoms is a super conductor is a super insulator is stronger than Kev LAR like, like there's this ridiculous list of things.

[00:53:01] It's just right now, it's still too hard to manufacture. It's probably because of energy costs.

[00:53:05] Tim Watson: Right. So now if energy comes down really, really suddenly graphing becomes really very viable for toys or whatever

[00:53:15] Matthew Dunn: is yeah. Yeah. For everything. Yeah. We'll see if I could get, if I could have a, you know, like one molecule, six superconductor, a parka so that I didn't have to carry such heavy stuff.

[00:53:25] Backpacking. Like that alone seems like a win to me.

[00:53:31] Tim Watson: Yeah.

[00:53:31] Matthew Dunn: Wow. Well, look at that, Tim. I've tied up an entire hour of your afternoon and we've gone down many rabbit holes and we didn't talk about email that much and I'm perfectly fine with that.

[00:53:42] Tim Watson: Absolute pleasure.

[00:53:43] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Seriously is. So if a, if someone's listening to this and they're like, Ooh, EOS, that sounds really interesting.

[00:53:50] Um, you know, beyond reading a book, which is hard to you, can't transform a business by reading a book. Like what steps do you suggest an entrepreneur.

[00:54:01] Tim Watson: Um, you, you say you can't transform business by reading books. I mean, there are, there are quite a few people out there who've read traction, taken the practical tools format and started implementing it into the business.

[00:54:14] And there are people who look at it and go, you know what? We want to spend a lot of time and you're not learning how to implement these tools, but to keep running off this, this, and we'll get someone in who can show us how to do it. Just straight up. There are people who do it on gum, go and buy a copy of traction and see what it is.

[00:54:32] So, uh, you know, I'd say, you know, he emailed me, you know, Tim dot Watson, EOS, worldwide.com. Um, and, uh, you know, I happy to tell you more about traction by a copy of the book, traction by Gino Wickman. Um, Both great things to do.

[00:54:51] Matthew Dunn: Website is traction

[00:54:54] Tim Watson: the website. So is that it's actually changed? What is it?

[00:54:59] Yeah. So, so the, the way to get hold of me now is the EOS community's got a, in the last month has been closely knit, more closely knitted together, which is great, which means I now get, uh, an EOS worldwide, uh, Monica, uh, pre previously it was all a little bit disparate. Um, but it's now been kind of knitted together cause that's like 430 implementers around the world.

[00:55:28] Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've put you on one. So we worked really closely together as a community. We support each other and talk on a very regular basis. Uh, very quick. We get copy of traction with that. I'm

[00:55:42] Matthew Dunn: looking at my screen. I'm like, I gotta read this. Yeah.

[00:55:46] Tim Watson: And, um, well tell me what you think when you do, um, you know, or, or get in contact with me.

[00:55:52] Uh, say tim.Watson@eosworldwide.com will reach me, um, be happy to give you any help, like how. 'cause we go, how does that work? Tell me about how it really works. I get it. But

[00:56:07] Matthew Dunn: what's your practical expense? What's the practical experience. We'll wrap recording there. Thank you so much. My guest has been Tim Watson, Tim, have a fantastic afternoon.

[00:56:16] Thank you. Bye.

[00:56:18]