Transformation – Jaison's Blog

I Never Need to Do That Again! Well Maybe Just Once More . . .

[My views are my own]

By endurance we conquer.
Ernest Shackleton

Five years ago, I discovered the Long Island Greenbelt Trails, and I became obsessed with the idea of running from the North Shore of Long Island to the South Shore.

About 9 months ago, on a whim (and without consulting my loving yet skeptical wife) I signed up for the Shore2Shore 50k Ultramarathon which I ran on Saturday.

Check out this video to understand why the S2S 50k was so challenging.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

If you adjust for the difficulty of the trails, it was probably the equivalent of running over 50 miles on paved roads.

My Garmin watch estimates that I burned over 5,000 calories.

My strategy was to target an average heart rate of under 140 BPM.

I knew that aerobically I could go all day long. The question was how long my hips, feet, knees, lower back and nervous system could endure the abuse.

There were three different times I hit a low where I was ready to hike out of the woods and jump in an UBER.

At one of those low points, another runner said to me: “Just keep going, there is a second wind just around the corner.”

Around mile 18, I started to pass other runners that had hit the wall.

I just kept shuffling along, targeting 137 beats per minute.

For inspiration, I was playing Coldplay’s Lovers in Japan over and over again, and as I passed the other runners, I got so emotional that I almost cried.

That was when I knew I was going to finish – even if I had to crawl.

On Sunday, I could barely walk.

I made it outside once to walk two blocks to Tal Bagels.

I spent most of the day on the sofa watching Physical 100 on Netflix with my kids.

I told my wife (who was relieved that I hadn’t dropped dead on the course) that I NEVER EVER need to do that again. “I’m one and done.”

However . . .

. . . now that my batteries are recharged . . . and I can walk again, I believe it is really important to keep doing really hard things, especially as we move through mid-life.

There is a second wind just around the corner.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog; and please pass it along to your friends.

Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Building a Bridge to a Digital Future

[My views are my own]

In 2013, I joined Time Warner to help lead the spin-off and IPO of it’s publishing division — Time Inc.

The iPhone (which had been launched six years earlier) was rapidly moving up the adoption curve, as was social media. The net result was that our magazine newsstand and subscription businesses were under immense pressure.

Time Warner’s approach (before the IPO) had been to focus Time Inc. on being a print publisher.

This had left us woefully unprepared for a digital future at the time of our IPO.

Sport Illustrated didn’t even have a website. Officially, all of the digital was to be funded, developed and operated by Turner — another division within Time Warner.

We needed to quickly begin developing a pipeline of growth initiatives to extend our brands. Time Inc. was a house of more than a hundred individual magazine brands primarily focused on producing a print product.

However, there were pockets of innovation (e.g., maverick groups that under the radar had quietly launched and self-funded sites, social media, digital video, licensing, products, events). I met with our brand leaders from around the world. We brought those ideas back to the leadership team and cascaded them through the organization.

We also studied what our competitors were doing like Buzzfeed and the New York Times (which was years ahead of us in transitioning into a digital-first news platform). And, we copied them shamelessly.

In the early days of developing our growth pipeline, we funded hundreds of small trials. We called it “planting trial and error seeds” to learn which areas would produce green shoots. We quickly killed ideas that were faltering, and pyramided more funding into areas that were showing promise.

By the time we sold to Meredith in 2018, we’d bought, build and partnered more than $1 billion of digital and adjacent revenue.

We’d positioned the company — and designed a blueprint — to successfully build a bridge to a digital future.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog; and please pass it along to your friends.

Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Unmasking Myself as a Non-Conformist

[My views are my own]

“When masses of people succumb to an idea, they often run off at a tangent because of their emotions. When people stop to think things through, they are very sane in their decisions.”
Humphrey B. Neill

When I first started on Wall Street, I worked for Peter F. Marcus. He was brutally tough, but also like a father — a real mensch.

In my first weeks on the job, he gave me a book called The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey B. Neill.

He told me that if I wanted to be successful in my career and life, I had to make my own path, and develop my own ideas. And, the first step in doing that is to be a non-conformist when using my mind.

The book changed my mind . . . and my life.

It set me on a path that was uniquely my own.

Let me be clear, I’m not advocating knee-jerk contrarianism. If the train is coming down the tracks, and everyone else is stepping out of the way . . . you don’t remain on the tracks in the name of contrarianism.

However, in emotionally charged and uncertain situations, it is human nature to seek the comfort of the herd — and to look to others for confirmation of our ideas.

The problem is that the crowd does not think, but acts on impulses. For this reason, widely held public opinions are commonly wrong.

To break from the pull of the crowd, requires something that Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital refers to as Second-Level Thinking.

“First-level thinkers look for simple formulas and easy answers. Second-level thinkers know that success in investing is the antithesis of simple.”
Howard Marks – “I Beg to Differ“

Howard Marks provides the following elements for second-level thinking:

What is the range of likely future outcomes?
What outcome do I think will occur?
What’s the probability I’m right?
What does the consensus think?
How does my expectation differ from the consensus?
Is the consensus psychology . . . too [optimistic] or [pessimistic]?
What will happen . . . if the consensus turns out to be right, and what if I’m right?

Over the past nearly 30 years — since Peter Marcus gave me Humphrey B. Neill’s book — I’ve trained myself to be a contrarian thinker.

This doesn’t mean that I go into meetings and habitually take the opposite position.

But it has allowed me to understand that in most situations, there is a sub-conscious (emotionally-charged) force that is influencing the team — and frequently standing in the way of progress.

In my work as a transformation leader, my job is to help the team to see things in an unemotional and more logical way.

To bring them together around a more favorable future state.

In this way, I think of myself as a “Horse Whisperer” in and around emotionally-charged situations.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog; and please pass it along to your friends.

Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

We Are All the Comeback Kid

“I’ve lived my life in situations where I’ve come from nonexistent or last and been able to find my way.”
Barry Diller

[My views are my own]

I’ve dedicated the past decade of my life to helping companies pivot, reposition, return to growth . . . and make a comeback.

Given the power of disruptive innovation in the global economy, which I wrote about here and here, there is a nearly endless supply of new and interesting challenges.

For me . . . the comeback is not just a job . . . it’s a deeply ingrained philosophy.

I believe that the key to a life well lived is to strive and reach for more (like a child learning to walk) . . .

. . . to experience painful failures along the way . . .

. . . and to learn from those painful failures.

When I look at everything I’ve learned over the past 50 years, it’s a continuous string of thousands of mini (and some not so mini) comebacks.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Starting Point: Return on Tangible Capital

“The goal is not to have the longest train, but to arrive at the station first using the least fuel.”
Tom Murphy, Former Chair and CEO of Capital Cities / ABC

My starting point for evaluating business decisions, and making investments is Return on Tangible Capital (ROTC).

It is a measure of the cash generated by the business relative to the tangible assets deployed in generating that cash.

EBITA * (1 – tax rate) / (net working capital + PPE)

It’s essentially applying bond math to businesses, investing and management.

In other words, if a businessperson paid to build or own those tangible assets, what would be the yield on their money.

In general, bigger numbers (yields) are better when it comes to creating shareholder value.

But, to generate a big number (or excess return), the company requires some form of advantage.

Without a sustainable competitive advantage (or moat), other businesses will copy what you are doing; they will enter your business; and, they will drive down your returns.

Executives and investors would benefit from asking themselves what they (or their company) is doing to protect or enhance those returns.

Return to Growth Playbook

[My views are my own]

I’ve spent the past decade obsessed with helping companies to transform.

As a senior leader at two of the biggest business transformations of our era, I’ve been honing my “Comeback Playbook” or plan for “Return to Growth.”

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this “Transformation Blueprint” would be applied to the high growth disruptors that have collapsed over the past 9 months.

My top ten list for collapsed disruptors is:

You are at war. Preserve your cash. Reduce your burn rate.
Assume that the next period of boom conditions is a long way off. Your focus now should be on preservation/survival.
Get real with your shareholders, board, employees, and customers. Get out ahead of what may possibly be tougher economic conditions in the next six to nine months.
Garner alignment at the board level. You don’t have time or energy for managing the warring factions.
Downturns almost always result in a rationalization of competition. You want to be one of the survivors to benefit from more rational market conditions on the other side.
Slow the pace of growth, and focus on fixing the machine. What are the three critical path items that you have to improve/fix over the next six months. Margins? Customer churn? Overhead costs?
Evaluate your leadership team, and their direct reports. Conditions in the market for hiring talent are likely to become more favorable. Upgrade where necessary.
Coach your team. Most have probably not lived through the Global Financial Crisis or the Dot-Com Crash. They will likely need to develop new mental models for how to operate. Help them to adapt to a war environment.
Consider a combination with a peer. Use the merger as an opportunity to reduce overhead costs while doubling down on your best talent — especially salespeople, engineers and product development.
If you are generating cash (or you’ve got excess capital), consider equity repurchase. Read up on Henry Singleton of Teledyne in Chapter 2 of The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

NYC’s Ranked-Choice Vote: The Killer App for Failed Politics

[My views are my own].

I love a good transformation story. It’s become my life’s work.

There is probably no better story of emerging transformation than the first time use of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) in yesterday’s elections in New York City. I’m super pumped!

It is not perfect, but IT WAS A REALLY IMPORTANT FIRST STEP! And, it is potentially transformational for beginning to fix the polarization of our politics.

Michael Porter — the Harvard professor that developed the framework of competitive advantage — and Katherine Gehl wrote an excellent book on this in 2020 titled The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. I highly recommend it.

In the book, they applied the duopoly model that limits competition to our two political parties. And, to them, ranked-choice voting is the killer app for breaking open the system.

The key takeaways are that:

Electoral incentives are biased against moderation and compromise.

“Members of Congress, state legislators, governors and other state officials have to first win a low-turnout party primary, in which ideologically militant voters are more likely to vote.”

This results in a race to the extremes of ideology for party candidates . . . and for funding. I.E., you don’t want to fund a candidate that can’t win a primary. So fund the most extreme candidate.

This system favors ideology over solutions and gridlock over progress.

The machinery of politics “quietly determine[s] everything from how candidates get on a ballot and how we vote to how a bill becomes law. And both sides of the ideological divide are to blame. Waves of unchecked engineering of these rules and practices — orchestrated jointly by Democrats and Republicans — have optimized the elections and lawmaking machinery to protect and perpetuate the politics industry itself and grow its power, not to produce results.” [Gehl and Porter, The Politics Industry]

“The tragic result . . . is a polarized government unable to compromise to solve the nation’s greatest problems or realize its highest aspirations.”

But, over time, ranked choice voting (RCV) has the potential to fix polarization in politics. It can “ensure that the winner will always have support from the broadest possible portion of the electorate.”

What is ranked-choice voting?

Voters are asked to rank their preferred candidates. For example, for the New York Mayor’s primary, we have been asked to rank our top five.

If a candidate gets 50% plus 1 after all the first-choice votes are counted, then that candidate wins.

If no one gets 50% plus 1, it goes to round two. The candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated and that candidate’s voters’ second choices get redistributed to the other candidates.

This process continues until someone reaches 50% plus 1.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my FREE newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Also, please accept my apology for the sloppy editing, etc. My objective here is to quickly ship work and new ideas . . . not to spend hours making sure the language is perfect. I hope you enjoyed.