Michael Margolis:

The three most important fundamental skills of the future is an ability to write, an ability to speak, and an ability to convey your ideas. We have to build our semantic fluency, work with language, and then ultimately, this ladders up to narrative intelligence. Storytelling is the universal source code, and I think we're all going to become better storytellers again by the simple notion that we have to.

Chris Do:

As you all know, I'm super fascinated by story. I have this theory, and I don't think it's a unique or original theory is that all memory is tied to a strong emotion and that emotion is also tied to a story. So I dare you right now, try to think of a memory without telling me a story and an emotion, probably not possible. That's why I'm super excited to have Michael on the show today. He and I chatted briefly before this on a different call, and he was telling me about these different ideas and things he's been doing the last 10, 20 years of his life. So I'm really excited to have Michael. Michael, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Michael Margolis:

Hi everyone. I'm Michael Margolis. I'm the founder of Storied, and I believe that narrative is the number one superpower of humanity. And for the last 20 years, I've been helping visionaries, leaders, and creatives tell a bigger story about the future. These days we have courses, coaching and community that's basically helping anybody take charge of their story.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. Now, I'm already a big fan of the concept, I'm learning about who you are, but there are people who are like, "Story? Story, schmory. Why should we even care?". Why should we even care? Let's start there. Let's just make sure people are on the same train as us before it takes off here. Why should we care about story?

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. So a few things. I think the first one is people never buy the product, they buy the story that's attached to it, and not just the story that you're telling, but rather the story that people are telling themselves about what that thing means to them. A great example of this, one of my favorite TV guilty pleasures is Pawn Stars. If you've ever watched the show, it's a 24-hour pawn shop in Las Vegas, Nevada, three generations of a family who own the business. People bring different curios and items they'll get at a garage sale or from the attic, and we find out their story, and in the process, they're either going to pawn it or sell it well. So, imagine for a moment, if I had this imaginary Zippo lighter, how much is it worth? Well, if it's a circa 2022 Zippo lighter, it's maybe 15 or 20 bucks.

But what if it's a World War II Zippo lighter? Okay, now it's maybe worth a couple of hundred bucks. Well, what if it's actually my great great Uncle General George Marshall's Zippo lighter, and I have a photo black and white to him smoking a celebratory cigar on D-Day with that lighter? Now it might be worth a couple of thousand bucks or priceless. It's the same hunk of metal with a wick and butane, the objects the same, but in each of the three examples, there's a different story that's attached to it. And we might call in the expert before you go spend a few thousand bucks on this thing, and the expert says it's worth $5,000. But if we took a poll of an audience and said, okay, how many of you want to buy this for a $1,000 right here on the spot? Most people won't take the deal.

Why? Well, maybe you don't smoke. Maybe you're not into war or World War II. Maybe you have no idea where to find someone to sell it to, to do arbitrage on it. There's all these reasons of why you would exit out of the story, but for a certain person, they would identify and want to be a part of the story. And this is true of everything in life, and it's something we almost take it for granted. We're invisible to it, but again, nobody's buying the product, they're buying the story that's attached to it, and not just the story you're telling, but the story they're telling themself of what that means to them.

Chris Do:

I think you raised a few really good points. It's not just your story, but the story that exists in the mind of the other person. So it might be a family heirloom and it's deeply connected. It's like in Pulp Fiction and Butch's father dies in the Vietnam War and he's given the watch, and he had to carry it through extraordinary means, and then in middle of all this danger, he argues with his girlfriend, he's like, "Where's my watch?" She goes, "It's right there where I put it." He goes, "Where's my watch?" And he's being hunted by everybody, but he's going to risk his personal welfare because the watch means something to him. Now, you and I, it's like, no, it's been through a lot, I don't want that watch. I wouldn't even take it for free. But for Butch, it meant everything. So the story is the meaning that we attach to things and to everything that's in our lives. What is another example of a story that we've all agreed to that has meaning to us, but has actually no value at all? Can you think of anything?

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, look, it plays out in all sorts of ways. I mean, here's my wedding band, this is just a hunk of metal. If I were to sell it, it would only be sold for scrap gold, even though it's priceless to me personally. Or some people collect wine, I collect chocolate. I think I was telling you about this, right? Rare, exotic, single origin craft chocolate. I used to traffic in kilos of it. I geek out on chocolate. I'm the kind of person I'll spend $20, $50, I've spent $250 on one bar of chocolate.

Chris Do:

Wow.

Michael Margolis:

Most people think that's freaking nuts. But for me, the provenance, the rarity, there was a story behind it that meant something to me, and it also delivered on the price value equation. But most people would never spend $250 or $50, but you might spend 20 or 10, but that's a pretty bougie bar of chocolate.

Chris Do:

It is. You're a little nuts about chocolate for sure. And before we lose anybody, what does providence mean? It's an important word for us to understand because it's connected to story.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. So providence is basically story of place where something comes from. And in the world of food, providence literally goes into the taste of a place. So, in Italy, they have these AOCs, or I think that may be the French label of it, but it's the way that different regions around the world have branded that specific place, like Parmesano, like Reggiano, it's cheese, that can only be called that, that's made in that region. And the same is true for different kinds of wines. So different wines have the labels on that and so on. And it's literally the taste of a place and the belief that it's in the terroir, it's in the soil, it's in the water, it's that ineffable thing. Just in the same way that pizza only like in New York, you cannot replace or copy New York City pizza because of the taste of the place. I don't know if it's the water, I don't know what it is, but you can't beat a New York City slice of pizza.

Chris Do:

I'm going to be in trouble for this. But is that just a story or is that real?

Michael Margolis:

Look, I lived in New York for about six years, and it's real, my friend.

Chris Do:

You have to say that as a former New Yorker, I mean, they'll throw you out. They'll take your New Yorker card back.

Michael Margolis:

It's the truth. I mean, there's some good pizza here in LA. There's some respectable pizza here in LA, but there's something about New York pizza, I don't know what it is.

Chris Do:

Okay, so blind taste tests. Are you willing to bet a million dollars that two really good slices of pizza, you can say, this one's definitely from New York?

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Really?

Michael Margolis:

Now, mind you, I have an advantage. My father is a mad scientist and inventor in the food tech industry. He worked for Nestle for many decades. It's part of my story behind chocolate. I grew up in Switzerland as a kid, all this and that. So I have that sixth sense taste where I'm able to taste things that other people don't taste, and I'm pretty obnoxious about it. You don't want to go to a restaurant with me, let's just say that, I'm that guy that's asking the questions and like, oh, this is so amazing, and I'll start telling stories and whatever else. And so either you're into it or you're not.

Chris Do:

Right. Okay. You've opened up a can of worms, and this is how we're going to begin this conversation because there's lots for me to pick apart here. So when it comes to the origin for where something comes from, like champagne only comes from champagne because that's a place in France.

Michael Margolis:

Exactly.

Chris Do:

Kobe beef comes from a place called Kobe in Japan, and they will sue you if you try to call it Kobe beef, and that's why they invented something else but we'll won't go there. But to the point of your wedding band, there's a lot of sentimental value. There's a story about how you guys came together, about the strength of your relationship, about the promises you've made. Then there's the gold part, which is like when you said it would be melted down for scrap and it'll be sold for whatever gold is sold for. Now, the real question is why is gold valuable? Now, what I understand about value is there's two parts, and maybe I might've missed one of these things. There's the utility value, which water has high utility value, and then there's exchange value. Water's not worth much, even though it's a necessary part of life, and if you're really thirsty, you'll give anything to have some water, but it has fairly low exchange value. Whereas gold, the story we've all told ourselves, it does happen to be the rarest element on earth, one of the rarest elements on earth.

I learned that through the history channel, I believe. So it has some utility. It's a good conductor, but not the best. It has certain properties to it, but really it's just because we all have collectively, as humanity said, gold is worth a lot. But if you abstract that, when the US left the gold standard many, many years ago, now we all carry around these pieces of paper that have low utility, but have high exchange value because as long as we agree to it, then it has value. But the minute our faith and confidence in the US currency wanes, which it may be in that state today, then all of a sudden that's just now a piece of paper. So the story matters a lot.

Michael Margolis:

So here's what you're tapping into, and this is we're taken the red pill, so to speak here, because we're literally looking at the matrix of life, is that every experience, every object, every relationship is stored in the mind with a story that's attached to it. And what you're starting to tap into, this is something that I really geek out on that 99% of most books and trainings on storytelling overlook, which is actually the difference between story versus narrative. So what you're actually talking about is a narrative.

Chris Do:

Okay.

Michael Margolis:

The narrative that, for instance, I'm going to open up my wallet here, I only have one bill in my wallet because we don't even deal with paper currency anymore, but I've got a $5 bill. But the narrative that this thing is a currency of exchange of value, we have many different narratives that run our lives. Most of the time we tend to focus on story. Story is a single event. It's got a beginning, middle, and end. It's a closed loop. It's something that happened. Whereas a narrative is a more abstract shared belief. And when you start to understand this, it's like the narrative is a Christmas tree, and the stories are the ornaments that go on the Christmas tree. My favorite example of this is the American dream. The American dream is a narrative, and as an abstract concept or belief, it means a land of opportunity.

It means you can reinvent yourself. There's a lot of different concepts related to the American dream, but then each of us have our own individual stories about the American dream. For instance, my father, he was born and raised in the bush of Africa, and he got a Fulbright to the States, came in the late sixties and became naturalized as a US citizen in the early 1970s, first generation immigrant. He still gets misty eyed when the national anthem comes on. He's more patriotic than my mother who was actually born and raised in the States. So this difference between story versus narrative, we are drowning in a sea of infinite stories, yet we have very few shared collective narratives, especially for the change that we're going through in the world right now. So a lot of the work we do is helping people to think in narrative and then create a unifying shared narrative that transcends the differences or the conflict of where people basically are opting out or exiting out of whatever message that you might be communicating.

Chris Do:

You're making a pretty important distinction here, so let me make sure I understand it.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

Story is individual, it's concrete, and there's a certain specificity to it. Narrative is shared broader and abstract. Is that the key difference here?

Michael Margolis:

Yes. Exactly. A story has a beginning, middle, and end, it's an event, it's an anecdote. It's this thing that happened, right? It's a closed loop. A narrative is a more abstract concept, it doesn't necessarily have a beginning or an end. When did the American dream start? Did it start in 1776? I don't think so, right? It's a little fungi, and there's concepts within the American dream that go all the way back to Ancient Egypt, and one could argue in Greece and all these kinds of things. It's an open loop, and this is really, really important because I'd love to connect this to your passion around the future, which is the following. We live in a society that's obsessed with data. I work with a lot of technical driven organizations like the biggest tech companies on the planet where data is king, okay? Data is a story of the past, whereas disruption is a story about the future.

So we have to start with the future first, and then we use the past the data to legitimize and validate the future we're trying to create. Most of us have that order or sequence turned upside down. We're constantly looking backwards instead of looking forwards. And this is where we trap ourselves within a past story or within even an existing narrative that may not be the right story for the future we're trying to create. It's a paradigm shift, but once people get that, they realize, holy crap, this is why. It's like that old saying, the thing that got you to here isn't the thing that gets you to next. So the story that got you to here isn't the story that gets you to next.

Chris Do:

I fully a 100% align with that. You just described it in a very different way, but it's something I've talked to people about before about how when we set goals, most people do it in a forensic way. They look backwards and say, well, if this has happened in the last five years, then the next five years will look just like this. And you and I, and any historian knows that that's absolutely not freaking true. Otherwise, there would be no disruption, there would be no innovation.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

So instead, we look to the future about the goals we want to set, and then we look at what can support that, and we invent whatever we need to get to that place. And they sound the same, but they're radically different. They're so different.

Michael Margolis:

What you're speaking to is what I've come to discover is one of the first principles. It's one of the fundamental principles of innovation, disruption, and transformation. And it's like one of the secrets hiding in plain sight. For any of us who are leading change or doing something that's new and different. You're being hired for your possibility mindset, the ability to see and name the possibilities and the opportunities amidst change, amidst constraints. But we often are leading with the data, trying to prove and validate something and trying to posture instead of widening the aperture and really unlocking the creative mojo and the generativeness in any situation.

Chris Do:

So while we're on this, I have to ask you this question then, what is the role of research as it relates to innovation? How do we balance that? Because it seems like the more mired we are in research, the less likely we are to innovate.

Michael Margolis:

I might get myself into trouble here.

Chris Do:

I'm hoping you will.

Michael Margolis:

Okay. I have an inherent bias, and for better and for worse, but I find that the majority of research is garbage and is a distraction. When I'm working with narrative, and just to give everyone listening some context, I've been doing this for 20 years. Much of my work has been inside the biggest tech companies on the planet. We're talking Google, Facebook, Uber, Shopify, and helping those executives and teams literally sell the future and how they do it internally. So building those kinds of presentations of translating the strategy. But in the meantime, I've also worked with every creative independent consultant coach, the whole creator economy and all of that. So I'm cut from the same cloth as you and many in your community, Chris. Here's what I've learned working with narrative is that when you're looking to work and change the narrative, you have to index to power, permission, and authority.

There's an old saying that Plato has. It's also attributed to the Hopi Indians, which is "Those who tell the stories rule the world." So the thing about story and narrative is very few of us think that we have permission to tell the bigger story, that's the biggest obstacle to this. And so if you are going to go and change the narrative for a product, an organization, a team. I always focus on I have to work with the most senior authorized leader of the organizational system, and I'm indexing for conviction. Conviction actually is the currency. Conviction is the way that basically belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you start from that place, where's the inherent conviction in the system, that the conviction about the future? And then once we have that thesis about that, we can go test and validate that thesis with research. But too often people lead with research, which is basically outsourcing, well, I don't know.

And it's great to come from a place of not knowing or I don't know what I don't know, fair and valid, but when it comes to actual leadership or driving change or repositioning a brand, those kinds of things, you got to start with conviction because if the conviction doesn't exist in the organizational system, the world's best research in the world is going to wrought on the vine. And I know a lot of researchers have experienced this, right? You do this amazing work and then people won't buy into it because they don't see it, they don't feel it, they don't believe it. So that's the piece, it goes back to belief. And we have to start with where's the existing belief? And the people who have the power to promulgate those beliefs kind of reinforce the beliefs and/or evolve those beliefs. Does that make sense? What do you think?

Chris Do:

It does, but I want to get back to a point that I think you were making, and you said some pretty bombastic things. It was like, I don't know if this is the exact quote, but research is garbage and worthless. Were you going to expand on that? I do want you to talk about that.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. Well, like I said, I said a lot or a lot of research is, and then my caveat that I then explained is actually research is really valuable once you actually have the guts to put a stake in the ground and say, here's the thesis. Here's what we think matters, here's what we think is true. Great, now let's go test and validate that. Too oftentimes people do this open-ended research fishing expeditions that basically comes back with, it's either a pizza with nothing on it, or it's a pizza with 32 toppings and it has no sense of coherence, right? I've worked with a lot of UX research teams and they'll come up with these beautiful frameworks that's 12 different ways we could think about the product. And the heads of product are like, dude, just give me a POV. What's your stance? Cut through this noise for me.

So that's the piece that I'm speaking to. A lot of research we can get over obsessed with the clinical side of it, right? We overlook the fact there's always inherent bias. So let's actually just name our bias based on where we have conviction, and then let's go and test and validate that. And there's great humility that comes in the things that we can learn through that reality check. So just walking things back a little bit, research has a really important role, it's just I often find people use it as a crutch of, well, we really don't know who we are and we really don't know where to go. Well, research ain't usually going to be the thing that reveals that for you. But again, that's my own bombastic bias to it.

Chris Do:

Okay. Now, it would seem to make logical sense that you do your research first, and then from the research you extrapolate data points and you say, well, here's the thesis. But from the way it sounds to me, it's like, come up with your big idea, come up with it based on your hunch, your vision of the future, and then use research to validate and to test this to see if it's actually true. So it's an inversion of sequence. Is that correct, first of all?

Michael Margolis:

It is. And I know a lot of researchers, I piss them off. It's sacrilegious to how people think about the so-called scientific method of research. But what I'm speaking to is the inherent fundamental nature of the way that we actually build narratives and the way that we go about then testing and validating them. But we always have these filters and biases, so we might as well just actually embrace it.

Chris Do:

Yeah. I just want to hang there for half a second before we move on to the next point, which is I have a certain amount of disdain for research too, that's why I'm just not going to let you walk away from this.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

But I think the problem is very few people actually do it correctly for the right reasons. It's usually to justify an expense. And because a lot of people's jobs are on the line here, so they tend to do over research, built on flawed bias thinking only to produce the results that the researchers themselves sometimes subconsciously, unconsciously, are looking for. So it's like you shape the data because you ask the question in a certain way, and then when you go to interpret the data, it reinforces something you already believe to be true. So that's usually where innovation goes to die. And very seldom do I get research from professional corporations who then hand me, this was the research, Chris. I'm like, there's nothing in here. There's 277 pages of nothingness of marketing speak nothing of real value, that is an insight. Like you said, give me one or two insights, give me a point of view, give me a voice, a direction or something. And research says, that's not my thing. It's not my thing.

Michael Margolis:

So I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist, and the thing I'm most fascinated with when it comes to culture is what are fundamental, timeless, universal truths? And by the way, great researchers know this and they bring those forward. I'll give you an example. Some years ago, one of the things that made my name and career was I got a call one day out of the blue from a head of product at Facebook. It was the shortest sales conversation I ever had. It's called the French Tech Mafia. This person saw one of their friends' head shots on my website as a former client, and they called up, their friend was like, hey, what do you know about this guy? Your photos on the website and ends up that they had worked together. So he called me, he's like, hey, I heard you did great things for my buddy, here's the situation.

So we ended up building the narrative for Facebook groups back in 2016. And in 2016, Facebook groups was a red hair stepchild within the Facebook core app. Really wasn't understood by the company and the world, but they had a new head of product and a new head of design who did some brilliant work, they did the foundational research of really understanding the product in people's lives, and they had a new roadmap, this and that. Well, anyways, they were then struggling because they were drowning in millions of stories of how people's lives had been changed through groups they didn't know how to build the narrative. So we built a narrative on the structure of belonging in the digital age. That's a universal truth, that belonging is this timeless thing, and how is that changing or evolving in this new digital environment?

What role does Facebook have to play as the biggest community platform on the planet? Well, that narrative had such an oversized influence and impact. It shifted the mission and the strategy of the company for more than five years. Where literally community building became woven into the company's mission, even became woven into their north star metric of meaningful social interaction, so on, and so on. But it came from talking with the leaders who were running that group, understanding where they had conviction, helping to crystallize that into the truth, and then building the rest of the narrative, including the data that supported the vision of the future that we had to convey. If that's a helpful example. And I think that it's our job as leaders, and/or if you're an agency or creative designer where you're working with clients, right?

You're a midwife to that universal truth. It's about drawing that forward, but ultimately it's making choices around that. You get muddled with universal truth when you give people an all you can eat buffet of 12 different truths of what it could be. There's not conviction in that, there's not a point of view. And I think most people who are in professional services, we're being hired for our story and we're being hired for our ability to midwife or steward someone else's story. And the hardest part of storytelling is it's an exercise in choice making, deciding what matters most and what belongs on the cutting room floor.

Chris Do:

Okay. This is some pretty heady stuff that you're talking about at scales in which many of us will never see in our lives. Let's pull it back down to the individual. I'm a human or maybe I run a small five person agency of some sort in the creative space. How do I take any one of the concepts that you've talked about or you're about to talk about and apply that? Help me ground this conversation and bring me back to earth here because I'm not thinking about the world's largest social network.

Michael Margolis:

One of the things that I see a lot, I struggled with this myself in that for my whole career, I've been unemployable. I've always had to create jobs for myself, and I've been self-employed my entire life. And one of the challenges that you have when you're an independent solopreneur or you're a small agency is imposter syndrome. Well, I'm not the expert that some other people are, I don't have the level of experience yet, and so on. So the thing I tend to focus on, and this full circle back to our opening conversation, it's the following, character trumps credentials and the way that you reveal your character, not only as with a point of view, but go back to your origin story, help people understand what are the forces that have made you and shaped you and how you see the world, right?

Because a million designers, there's a million creatives, there's a million web developers out there. There's a million of whatever trade or profession you're in, but there's only one that has your story. And so that becomes the place where you can literally reveal your own inner authority, the more you know who you are, and you can communicate that to others.

Chris Do:

Making some notes here, you said character trumps credentials.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

It's a nice phrase. Where's the evidence? What's the example? Give us something to support this statement so that we can dig deeper into it. Now, before you answer that, I was listening to this radio piece many, many years ago, and it said, we used to live in the age of character, who you were the substance of who you were mattered. Now we live in the age of charisma where if you're charismatic, you can get away with being a horrible human being. And it seems to be true. I'm not sure those are the exact words, but there was the age of character. We're talking about World War II, the substance of who you are, what you say, what you do, your actions actually can get you to very high positions in companies and government.

But now it seems it's the age of charisma, it's like these charismatic people who seem to have all the fun. Let's just talk about, say, some social influencers today who haven't really done much with their lives, but are already millionaires and billionaires because they have a certain amount of charisma, je ne sais quoi, whatever it is that people are enamored with them. Help me understand that, then.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah, the thing I've been sitting on, because to me the most interesting example, it's a political one that I know is going to poke the bear, but let's just go there having that kind of conversation. So I mean, take a look at what I literally said, character trumps credentials, and there's obviously a big symbolic word in the middle of that statement there with trump. You're bringing up something I think that's really relevant, which is yes, in a popular culture today, character and charisma have merged into the same cosmic slop. And in the world of politics, we saw this ever since basically John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon first televised presidential election cycle in the US, which was at the end of the day, what Americans were voting for was your personality, was who are you as a... So when I say character, I don't mean boy scout character.

I mean USA network character's welcome. The notion of be an interesting character, be someone in something that we remember, which to me is more of that blending place of charisma, and then a character, which ultimately character is simply the way that from a screenwriting perspective, the best way that one demonstrates or reveals a character is not by telling us who this person is, but by showing us through the choices and the actions that they take. You think about it that way, and the reality is that we're drawn to characters versus the credentials. There's a thousand people or a million people that have an MBA or have this degree or whatever the things are that are the check marks on the list. What we want is someone to tell us a story and a story that we identify with, that we relate to.

And Trump did a brilliant job of that, of just if you talk to people who love Trump, they'll tell you, you know what? He speaks his mind, and I like someone who speaks his mind and he speaks truth to power, and he keeps it real, right? And I understand the appeal to that. I have a great respect for that, along with obviously the chaos and the instability that comes with his style of management and everything else. But we have to understand there's a reason why his narrative has such an appeal, why he's such a character that people connect and relate to. And one of the biggest mistakes that people make with the way things like story is we tend to infuse our judgments as the corrupting force. Like AI is a great example. AI is not good or bad, it's not right or wrong, it just is.

It's here, it's not going to go away, the question is what do we want to do with it? But most of the time, what's happening in the way we tell a story or we interpret a story, we're constantly labeling it. Our brain is wired to label things as good, bad, and wrong, and that's the place where we're experiencing narrative collapse in our society and in any organization.

Chris Do:

Let's go back to the politician, the former President of the United States that you talked about.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Let's keep the judgment out of the conversation and let's look at Trump as a brand.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

So we don't have to get here and get half the country super angry at us one way or the other. Okay?

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

One thing that Trump has done is he's understood that it's better to be a flawed person and be real as who you are than it is to be a perfect fake person. And he's understood that, and maybe instinctively or just that's the way he's always been, and it becomes this paradox as far as I'm concerned, that he's the most relatable unrelatable person you know.

Michael Margolis:

A 100%.

Chris Do:

I'm not a billionaire, I wasn't raised by billionaires. I didn't grow up with gold, gilded toilets and faucets, and he has his private jets. He's divorced and marries models and owns pageants and buildings. How is that relatable? But the everyday person, the person on the farm, person living in the Midwest, even people on the coast are saying, I get that guy. I might not like all parts of him, but at least he's not fake. And here's my observation of the left here, is they're so worried about what everybody thinks and pandering to one group to other, that they're in the same way speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Can you just be real?

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

If you're angry about something, just say, I'm angry. If something's distasteful, just say that, at least then we know where you stand.

Michael Margolis:

Exactly.

Chris Do:

And in this hyper analyzed media culture that we live in, no one is going to say something and the person that does, it's a breath of fresh air. So we can take this back. We can take this all the way back to people who are running a business. If you're a mom and pop and you're running a bakery, if you're running a pizza parlor, whatever it is that you're doing, or running a creative service agency, if you have no story, you are interchangeable. And that is the definition of a commodity.

Michael Margolis:

Exactly.

Chris Do:

And we struggle with that. So there's this watch, there's the Rolex, right? Or there's a Timex, or there's a Cassio and there's a G-Shock or whatever it is, and we all have different stories or the narrative about those watches are different. So we're willing to pay more or less because of that story. And so we have to understand that if you don't have character, if you're just a generic cardboard box personality, then you're going to then face whatever consequences that comes with, and it's you're going to be, oh, well, we didn't get you on this job, we'll just get the next person because there's nothing unique about you. Creative people struggle with this tremendously, and I would love for you to speak to this. Here's what they struggle with, isn't it about the quality of the work?

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Shouldn't it just be about that? They think it's objective, but it's clearly subjective that my work is better than John's or Mary's, but Mary has got a million followers, is speaking on every stage, presumably getting tens of thousands of dollars more, and I can't scrape two nickels together, what's the problem? Help me understand that, Michael.

Michael Margolis:

Look, I have my own version of it as well, because I'm obsessed with my craft. At the end of the day, our customers, the people we're serving, they want to know that there's competence, that there's a process and there's proven outcomes, and there's something that they can trust. But most of our customers and those we serve do not want to know how we make the sausage. This is my challenge because I'm a story philosopher. I can geek out, I can split hairs about the ontological rhetorical structure and framing of something. At the end of the day, people just want to know what does it do and does it work? Is it going to do the thing that we want? Okay, well, does it make us feel good and does it inspire and motivate? Okay, great, let's go. Yeah. So I think it's this obsession with craft, and I think part of the challenge that you're speaking to is that when you're starting out, price of admission is learn craft, right?

You have to build technical competence, functional, whether it's, oh, I'm good at Adobe Photoshop, or, oh, hey, no, actually I know how to code and whatever those things are, and I see this happening, is that we don't realize this, but as you progress in your career, you are going to be less and less involved on the technical craft of the work. In the world of tech, it's like you become less and less a product manager, you're more and more a people manager. Your success in your career trajectory is more and more in your ability to persuade and influence and motivate and inspire and make a business case and negotiate conflict, and all these things that are more the soft skills and relational skills. It's all what I call narrative intelligence, but it's a hard shift to make when our identity is rooted in technical competency.

Chris Do:

Okay. I need to ask you this question, and then I have to follow up on the tease that you shared with me on our previous conversation or call.

Michael Margolis:

Okay.

Chris Do:

So, let's go here, and then I want to save room for this last one, which is a big one. So the question I have for you is this, talk to me about positioning, differentiation, and X factor and how we can apply that in our business. Those are three really big words, positioning, X factor and differentiation. What do you mean? Tell me more about this.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. Well, we've been talking about this, which is, and frankly, we are on an accelerated track right now because of what has happened with Generative AI, we are going to increasingly see more and more commodification across all creative industries. And so if you're worried about that race to the bottom of commodification, the only way forward for all of us is to seek and find higher ground. That's positioning differentiation in X factor. The most powerful way to unlock X factor, the only thing that nobody can compete against is your story, it's your own unique snowflake. And the way to unlock and tell that story is to find something that's at the intersections and that speaks to something that's ineffable. I'm going to give you an example of this for everyone. This is again, a very tech example. We were working with a venture backed startup that's in the developer space, working with developers all around how you manage your code at scale, really super, super geeky stuff.

And they had just raised their next big round of funding, and they were having a hard time with the narrative. They were all about developer first, the street cred. So they were talking about how this product that sliced it, diced it, chopped it, frat paid, you could do it for breakfast, you could do it for dinner. They were lost in the features and the functionality. And what they needed was more of the enterprise B2B positioning, how do we sell this to a C TO, a CIO, the executive decision maker? And what we found there was a step ladder from... So there's three ways to think about this aspirational value, emotional value, and functional value, and it was moving up the ladder. Long story short, what we got to was a story around developer happiness because developers that were using their tool when they started to use it, they couldn't live without it.

And developer happiness was this intangible ineffable thing that actually they could position and differentiate themselves against GitHub and some of the other folks that were encroaching on their territory. And it's fascinating, long story short on this is that the executive team loved it, but they didn't have the conviction to own it. They went back to some of the generic things of developer velocity and developer success, but if they had actually gone and claimed developer happiness, that would've been this X factor thing, which actually, by the way, showed up in the research talking to the customers and the users, but the conviction wasn't there at the leadership level to live and own and to really live into that larger narrative.

Stewart Schuster:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

Last week you asked me this question as we were wrapping up our conversation, you said, "Chris, give me 10 minutes or 15 minutes and I'll help you sharpen your narrative because I know you're preparing for a talk."

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

I've since gone on to do the talk, everything worked out great, and I just want to see you do some of your magic.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

Is that possible doing a 15-minute window where you can demonstrate your wares a little bit?

Michael Margolis:

Yes. I can walk everybody through our signature three-step narrative framework, but to really bring it to light, I would love to workshop with you something that has stakes, something that's meaningful to you where you feel a little bit stuck or haven't quite got the story straight. Without putting you on the spot, is there something that comes to mind that we might be able to run through this?

Chris Do:

Yes. Do you want to tell us the three-step signature framework and then we could apply it, or do you want to just leave that alone for right now?

Michael Margolis:

Give me the example, let's workshop it and then as I'm workshopping it, I will then help everybody to see and understand what we're doing.

Chris Do:

Okay. The thing that I'm getting close to figuring out is this new mastermind thing that I'm doing called Brand Lab. And it's a big pivot for me because we've been historically serving creative people and teaching them business skills. And then I realized just at the other side of the coin is to teach creativity to business people. So, in that way, we might unlock something beautiful and wonderful, that there's all these frustrated creative people who've lived that left brain life. And I wrote this line, it says, helping left brainers think right. The art of business and the business of art, and it's what we're trying to do inside the Brand Lab. So there's the brand atelier, and what I want to do is help them find their voice, their two word brand, to be able to succinctly communicate who they are in the world to tell their origin story, some overlap here obviously.

And to be able to use that in showing up in the world as a real person that has strengths and weaknesses and not to run away from it because I think we're so pre-programmed to just want to fit in and to be like everybody else. It's such a strong instinct and I have to break them from that.

Michael Margolis:

Okay. So I want to make sure I get this right, and if we're all tracking along. This is about the Brand Lab, and historically it was about helping creatives develop their business skills.

Chris Do:

Yes.

Michael Margolis:

But if I understood correctly, you're now evolving this to actually help business people unlock their creativity skills?

Chris Do:

Yes.

Michael Margolis:

Great. Okay. So this is a great example for everyone, that all narratives are ultimately built and rooted in polarity. There are opposing forces in some form. This is rags to riches, get the girl, lose the girl. There's always this force. So what you're doing is you're flipping the script, which is a great setup. I want to understand now for this new audience, what's the thing that's standing in the way of you putting out this new story in the world?

Chris Do:

I don't know. We've launched, it's brand new. There are some resistance from my creative community who feel like, oh, you're just leaving us behind, Chris. And then there's these business people who question, what is creativity going to really do for my business? What are the X and O's on this the thing? So that's a hat trick we're going to have to solve.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. Okay. A really important distinction for everyone listening, the moment that one tells the new story, Chris, you've put forward this new story of we're going to help business people become more creative, unlock their creative skills, anybody who lives in the old story, which was creatives and building their business skills, people who are in the old story are likely to feel wrong, bad, judged, stupid, or defensive. And so now that the art and science of this is how can we tell the story of the new without making people in the old story feel left behind or that they're not good enough? Right? Does that resonate?

Chris Do:

Yes, so far, yes.

Michael Margolis:

Okay. Now, but let me clarify something for a moment. Where does this community of creatives, you're teaching business skills, how do they fit in the new story?

Chris Do:

They don't, not yet. How they fit in the new story is this, and the way that I'm positioning it is I come from this world of creative, that's the place I've played in for over two decades, coming on three decades now. When I talk to the business people, once they figure out who they're supposed to be in the world and they have clarity around that, they're going to need creative people to help them. That's how we bridge these two worlds, because the creatives need clients to work with, and the business people need creatives to execute the plan. And so I'm going to build that bridge.

Michael Margolis:

So just to clarify something though, because I've seen this new platform that you've put out, and a lot of this has to do with the different stage of maturity that a business is at.

Chris Do:

Yes.

Michael Margolis:

Right? You're still talking about though businesses that are in the creative industries?

Chris Do:

For Brand Lab?

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

No, I'm talking about mortgage brokers, lawyers, people that you would not think that's a creative person. Wow. Really? Okay. Finance realtors, they self-admittedly say, I'm not a creative person. I'm like, well, I don't think that's true.

Michael Margolis:

Got it.

Chris Do:

It's just the narrative you've told yourself.

Michael Margolis:

Yep. If we zoom back out a little bit, widen the aperture, the way that you have built and constructed this narrative creates a duality that is us versus them of like, this is who we used to serve and what mattered to us, but now this is who we serve and who mattered to us. And it feels like a binary trade-off, right? It's plus on this, but it's going to be like, we're going to lose this. And so now the question becomes, is there an even bigger narrative that we could find and tell that's a bigger tenter umbrella that everybody can fit underneath?

Chris Do:

I think there is, I told the story, and it sounds like it's the binary, but it's not in reality because all the programs that serve creative people are still there. And it's my intention to have communicated this to the people who want to know, I intend to use the new source of revenue to help bolster up some of the creative stuff. And one of the things that I'd love to do, I envision myself as a little bit of a Robinhood steal from the rich to give to the poor. The rich in my mind are corporations, the ones who want to sponsor communities like ours so that it amortizes the cost of courses down so that it's super affordable to anyone in the world, or maybe that they will grant scholarships to these people.

It's a long road to get there, and in the meantime, what I have to do is to finance other kinds of creative courses. And so the only way I can do that is to go to the people who want to spend the money, who have no issues with spending the money, and the impact that's created with them will be in exponential return, an X fold return. So it's not going to matter to them. Then we can use those resources to build and create more programs for creative people. And so the bridge or the gap between the two are going to start to close.

Michael Margolis:

Okay. So what you've described is the way we all rationalize when we're trying to make a strategic change, and I just went through a business model, pivot myself from running a seven figure consulting business to, okay, we're now in the courses coaching and community business, and it's been a bloody painful recalibration, and I can get all deep. You're in the weeds of the functional, we're moving the Lego blocks to here and this, and here's how this works, and so on, and it's where we all naturally go. I want to move upstream to aspiration and emotion. And the thing I want to talk to you about is let's come back to your namesake, the future, because that is a badass name that's the torch that you carry that has been the gathering force that bring people together. And so what is it about the name, the future, that is so important to you, and how is that baked into not only everything you've done, but everything you want to do and create an offer in terms of how you serve the world and how people benefit from this work?

Chris Do:

Well, the name and the meaning is about looking into horizon, being able to dream beyond what you can see. To peer into the night and know that Dawn is coming, and to be optimistic and not to have foresight, but to anticipate what is to come and to always adapt and to evolve. We often end our video podcasts or video episodes by saying, you're not defined by the past, the future is what you make it. It's a rallying cry to say, you know what? No matter what circumstances you've started at in life, which you cannot control, which you go from today into tomorrow, it's entirely up to you.

Michael Margolis:

Where does that, what you just shared, where is that in your current messaging and new positioning?

Chris Do:

It's only in spoken word or when I speak to people.

Michael Margolis:

Because what I would say to you, when I hear that, that to me is a timeless truth that's baked in the DNA of your work. That is, to your point, a rallying cry that's unifying, that transcends the boundaries and the differences. While yes, you might have some new ideal customer profile, certain personas and some of this funnel related things about the business side of it, this narrative about the future and the future is what you make it. And we can dream beyond what we can see in this invitation to adapt and evolve in this moment, which is such an inflection point moment in our economy and in our society. How do you respond to that, thinking about elevating more of this core DNA about the future in your namesake?

Chris Do:

I like what you're reflecting back to me. When we first started to teach, we tried to get people to understand this concept, and it's a very popular idea is that wouldn't it be great if as creatives we're invited to the table where the decisions are made, so we have to instill within you all these business skills. We have to bring the business world to you. But there was no guarantee that you would get to that table, it was just an idea. The designer should be there at the front, not at the back, not just to be an order taker, but I also see it now as I'm talking to the business people who need this, well, now I'm at the table.

I can open this door and invite you in, and so now it's the two parts to the puzzle. We can get these two things to come together faster, in my opinion, time will tell if that's true, where I'm actually at that table where those people are making those decisions. Now I understand how they work and what they want, and I'm going to invite you to come in and hopefully we just accelerate that process.

Michael Margolis:

Is it too far of a leap to say you're ultimately building a platform or a marketplace for businesses to connect with creatives and creatives to connect with businesses?

Chris Do:

It's not too far of a leap. I don't want to say that word just yet, but yes.

Michael Margolis:

Okay.

Chris Do:

I think you were reading what I was sending out, which is they need creative services. My creative people need businesses to transform. It ideally is a match made in heaven versus sling it out on Upwork or Fiverr, which is a bloodbath.

Michael Margolis:

Yep. All right, so we've staked out a lot of cool territory. I want to walk you through right now the SSFB narrative method, which is people have to see it and they have to feel it in order to believe it. So we've been staking out the territory, we've found some interesting vectors, and so on. So the first thing with see it, talk to us about how the world has changed and what is now possible that wasn't possible one year ago or three years ago. And this is obviously in the context of the audience you want to serve. So what's changing in the world, and what's now possible that wasn't before?

Chris Do:

Well, the biggest thing that's changed in the world is due to the pandemic. So, remote work, the idea that we can actually work with people that aren't in our city, there was a lot of resistance behind that, now it's just a normal thing. We also now have a lot of freedom to live and work in places that are not connected to be asynchronous in how we collaborate and how we produce things. So the future's been there for years, and now the world just welcome, like, oh, we have to do Zoom calls. We have to teach online, and we can telecommute in ways that we thought we always could but didn't, and now we can. And some other things have come up, I'm not saying in the last couple of years, but it seems to be on the upward trend, which is business fascination with design and design thinking.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

That's super hot, right?

Michael Margolis:

Yep.

Chris Do:

Stanford has the D School for design for entrepreneurs, we're just a little late to that party. They've already known this, that in each and every single one of us, regardless of what suit you put on, there's a creative child waiting to play. And that's me saying, hey, we're not different. We're the same. Just allow me to help them see that in themselves and we're all going to play together.

Michael Margolis:

Okay, so I'm hearing the pandemic changed a lot, it's broken down certain boundaries or limitations. And with that, I really loved a phrase that you said, which is the future is here. I would really elevate that phrase and explore what does that really mean and look like, what future is here, what is it we can do now that we couldn't before? And widen that spectrum across multiple vectors. So the technological forces, the economic forces, and the cultural forces that basically make the future that you see a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's inevitable. This thing that we thought, well, maybe no, no, no. Like William Gibson once said, "The future already exists. It's just not widely distributed." It's To celebrate that. And I think frankly, a lot of the ways that AI is already fundamentally disrupting creative industries needs to be a part of this as well. And being able to position and elevate the optimistic perspective amidst the sandwich of suck.

Right? I know it's scary and there's a lot of reasons to be upset and frustrated, but resistance is futile, it's here. You can't put this Pandora back in a box. So the question is, HOW are you going to adapt to this? And that's where frankly, there's this intersection. Both business people and creative people are both like we need each other with how we go forward. So we're talking about, we started with see it, which is the context for change. The world has changed, and because the world has changed, we need a new story to reflect that new world. The secret is we have to help people see how change equals new possibilities and opportunities. Because most people think of change as just constraint, loss, fight, flight, freeze, defensiveness, fight back against it. So we need to tell a love story about the future, and you've started to stake that out.

I think there's probably even more dimensions to that to really round that out full 360, so that's one. That's the see it, boom. So that's the big zoom out, help people see. Now we're going to zoom in. We now need to look at the feel it, which is who's at the center of the story? What do they want and what gets in their way? And this is a challenge, deciding what character, what central character we're going to put at the middle, because that affects the perspective or point of view by which this entire narrative gets built.

The easy answer, by the way, the pat answer is you make the customer the hero of the story. You put them at the center, but sometimes it's not so clear who the customer is, or we have a B2C to B2B story, or we have like, oh, I'm working inside a company and I have these internal customers and clients and all these examples, it gets convoluted, but who do you think is at the center of your story, if you had to pick one central character symbol that would speak to both business people and creatives?

Chris Do:

Well, that's a tough one. We serve such a diverse group of people.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. What's unifying about people? Think back to your namesake.

Chris Do:

Okay. The thing that unifies this is we're all creatives. We express it a little bit differently how we serve people is different, but it's all the same DNA. And the reason why it was such a surprise to me that business people would want to explore creativity was because I just had a preconception this is how all business people think. And it turns out I was very wrong, at least with this group that I'm learning a lot about. And it's so fulfilling for me to encourage that creativity to flourish. It's like a field of flowers waiting to blossom. And when I see, well, let's just call a suit, so to speak, and say like, oh, I have these ideas, Chris. I'm like, those are good ideas. I never saw myself that way, and you're giving me permission to do this. And hey, welcome to the club fan. That's actually not two people, it's just one kind of person.

Michael Margolis:

So what I'm hearing in that there, there's some central character or this universal persona or identity, which is I have ideas about what's possible, about what we could do, what we could build, what we could create that would make things better for others or that would help fulfill a larger promise. There's something in there. Yeah?

Chris Do:

Yeah.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. And obviously we could spend more time unpacking this, but if we think of that, then as a central character, what is it that character wants and what gets in their way? What's the desire and what's the dilemma? So let's start with desire. What do they want?

Chris Do:

I think this is a universal narrative.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

I think we all want to be aligned with our purpose. And when we're out of alignment, we know instinctively something's wrong. But in terms of our goals, we're not hitting our goals, we're not meeting our health goals, we're not meeting our relationship goals. And it's something I've been able to experience in the people that I see who are successful in all dimensions spiritually, in their relationships, in their business, they're really aligned. So I have this slide that I share with people, and it's like a recycle symbol, but it's off filter, so it looks a little bit weird, it's not connecting. And what I want them to do is in their mind, put the parts together.

So, for me, just to relate it, I used to make commercials and music videos, it gave me a financial reward, but something was missing. Then when I taught, it gave me a reward for my soul, but something else was missing. And when I ran my business, the analytical part of my brain's, like, I'm very happy. It isn't until I put all these three things together, the desire to teach business and creativity and video production, when it comes together in a really neat story, then I find my bliss, and now that broken fragmented triangle is now just solid.

Michael Margolis:

One of the things that I love about you, and I love about everything I've known about your work and the future is you have a real pragmatic sense of how do you make things work? And there's something really interesting about that, which is there's something, actually, I don't know if you're familiar with Landmark Forum, but I recently experienced their work, which is pretty powerful, life-changing work, and it's all about ontology, the stories that we tell ourselves. But there's one of the things I took away that speaks to the heart of this, which is the word integrity. So we often use that word and we weaponize it. We turn integrity into this moral judgment where we make people wrong or it's like an attack. Integrity from a landmark perspective is simply, is this working or not working? That's it. And if it's not working, what do we need to do in order to make it work?

It's value neutral, there's zero judgment to it. I found that to be an incredible liberating way of looking at integrity. And I bring this up because my sense is you're someone who, that's part of your character, you focus on the engineering of how do we make something work in a manner that honors the creative process and also honors the business process? Does that resonate? Okay, so let's lean into this. So you talked about what it is that people want is the sense of purpose, but there's a dilemma. What's the obstacle that stands in the way of being able to live into purpose whether you're a creative or a business person?

Chris Do:

I think it's integration. So creative people feel the conflict in that, oh, I don't want to deal with business, numbers, I don't want to talk about finance, it cheapens, it hollows me out. And then on the business side, it's like, oh, I'm not a creative person, I don't have that gene. I don't have that panache or the eye for designing creativity. And so they can't integrate these fractured halves or more than two parts, however many fragments there are, they can't integrate. And the story that I love to tell because I'm just a dork or a nerd, is I love comic books. And my favorite character is the Incredible Hulk. And it's not for what people think. It's like the Hulk is Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, in a more popular form, Dr. Bruce Banner's the most brilliant scientist in the world. He's level seven intellect, he's one of the five smartest people on the planet in the Marvel universe.

He's super unemotional, he's fragile, he's weak, he's been abused by his father. He has strained relationships because he just can't tell people how he feels. Some people can relate to that. But when he gets angry, he is pure emotion turned into rage. And something I read about the Hulk recently is the Hulk has unlimited power. The angrier he gets, the more powerful he becomes. So if he reaches a certain state of anger, he cannot be defeated by Gods, not by anybody. So if you want to take him down, you got to take him down quick. So these two people, one person, it's like this multiple personality disorder, and they can't live in harmony.

Dr. Banner is fearful that the Hulk will explode and destroy towns and ruin lives. The Hulk is always belittling puny Banner because he's his weak point. Banner thinks too much. Banner trusts too many people. So somewhere in the storyline, Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk learn to accept each other, and they become Professor Hulk. So then he has most of the strength of the Hulk, the intellect of Bruce Banner. So he has emotions and his logic are in order, and he becomes a God among men. And now he's no longer hunted, he's no longer a threat to anybody because he's in complete control. They come together in harmony, it's why he's my favorite character.

Michael Margolis:

I've never had the Hulk broken down like that for me. And what I find fascinating about this description is that you're speaking to the inherent, the inner conflict, which is by the way, what I think is the next level narrative. So classical storytelling is hero, victim, villain, it's us versus them. Which heroes, okay, great, but who wants to be the victim or the villain, right? There's an inherent nature to that framework that actually does not scale for the world that we're in right now, which is worldviews and value systems colliding. And so you're speaking to something new and different here, and that inner conflict. And the challenge that we all face is that in the world of business, if you're talking to everyone you're talking to no one, that truism, and this is one of my biggest Achilles heels because I'm like you to a fault.

I'm like, come to Jesus baby, this is for everyone, right? This is the great awakening, storytelling's our birthright. But there's this fine line we have to walk of, okay, how do we speak to something universal while still making it relatable to the various different people we want to serve? Because we're all walking around with our identity hats on. So I would continue to look at this dynamic of the central character and this tension between what they want and what gets in the way, and yes, purpose, and then yes, this tension as you mentioned, but I would say there's something in there around permission. If you talk to a creative about business or a business about creative is everybody has these considerations, the yes buts, the yes buts, but I don't know this, I don't speak that language. I've never been good at that.

There's all of these qualifications or considerations that take people out, and there's something for you, your work is actually about getting people to say yes to themselves and say yes to their dreams and say yes to their bigger future. And I think your gift too is making people feel safe to actually widen the aperture of who they are and what they want and what they want to build and create. And there's something in that territory to me that is an incredible tent revival, like come on down to the party.

Chris Do:

I know it's a broad message, but it's like a dog whistle, only certain people can hear it.

Michael Margolis:

Yes, exactly. And look, so much of the times that we're in right now and what we're going to see with the disruptions of technology, and especially because of AI, what we're going to see is this evolutionary moment where we have to actually embrace the paradox. Trying to keep things in a pretty little box. The boxes are disintegrating, to your point, what we need to do is reintegrate, we need to reclaim the parts of ourself that we've put on a shelf or the things that we thought weren't who we are, and widen the dynamic reign. And as you know, the journey of leadership, being a good leader is actually being good at being outside your comfort zone on a more frequent basis. That's basically what leadership is, being really good at being uncomfortable doing something you've never done before and making that your new normal.

Same thing that the armed forces do. Special forces like heart rate, variability, stress response. It's like the ability to be calm and present amidst foobar, amidst everything is upside down. And there's something about the dojo mindset that clearly is deep embedded in your work and helping people to widen that dynamic range. All right, so I know we could continue on this forever. I want one last piece to at least stick the landing for you. So we zoomed out to the see it, we talked about how the world is changing, the new possibilities and opportunities that come with that, that was zoom out. Then we zoomed in. We really looked at who's at the center of the story. We need someone that we can empathize with, identify with, and we looked at the choice to make there in a way that could be more unifying as opposed to repelling in a way that addresses this paradox right now.

Because repositioning yourself in the market of a very different market you want to serve or widen to serve multiple markets, and how can you move into the new without abandoning the old, right? So we've staked out some of that. Now, the third piece to this is the believe it. This is the evidence of truth. So what can we point to that will validate and legitimize the promise that you're selling, right? This new future of what you're building and what you're inviting people into, what can you point to that's like, oh, business people becoming more creative, creative people becoming more businesslike. Yeah, duh. It's so obvious to you and it's possible. What would you point to? What's the facts, the evidence, the proof that supports this promise that you're selling, which is a really inspiring and appealing promise?

Chris Do:

Well, I think there's plenty of evidence that exists already.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

I mentioned before the D School of Design exists in Stanford's business school. There are no dummies, I wouldn't bet against Stanford, and they've been doing this for a period of time. You can look at IBM's acquisition of companies that have design thinking in their name or something, they're just gobbling up companies like this. So the left brains are seeing that the value that design has, and Apple is probably one of the most successful companies that have that strong integration of design, design thinking, user experience design, and they lead. And it always boggles my mind that they've been doing this for decades, yet the second or third place companies can't seem to match all the quality, the components that they've been able to capture so effortlessly from product to product.

Scratching my head. Marty Meyer writes about this insights numerous studies about how S&P companies perform that have integration of innovation and design thinking and how they perform. And just in the market itself, they have an X percent boost just because they spend enough money on R&D or design led thinking. So it's already there. They're just at the tip of the spear or not enough people are recognizing that just yet, it's business as usual.

Michael Margolis:

I love that. You're absolutely right, and I've tracked that evolution as well. Here's one interesting wrinkle in all of this, Chris, is inside all the biggest tech companies on the planet right now in the last six months, it's fascinating, not only the big tech companies, but also Fortune 500s, they have all decimated their central design organizations. It's this really weird thing that's going on right now. So UX research has been decimated, but also just design as a function has gotten decimated.

And I've talked to a lot of friends who are VPs and leaders in those organizations, and a big part of it has to do with this earlier conversation we had, which is design as a profession is too obsessed with craft and not functional or fluent enough in making the business case and being able to translate their work to the executive boardroom and being able to really make the value propositions and help people understand, and especially now in an environment where the cost efficiencies of AI, a lot of companies are going like, well, yeah, we're going to start to automate more of this and we're going to start to outsource more of this.

So it's a little bit of a step back, but I think the fundamental thesis is spot on, and ultimately AI disruption, the more and more things get automated and outsourced, basically what Generative AI I think will do is it will make us better storytellers, it will make us better philosophers, it will make us better creatives, it will make us better ethicists for the very simple forcing function that it demands us to. Because if the machines are doing X, then what the heck is our role in job? Right? It's a fundamental existential thing, and that's where design and creatives at its essence and its DNA, is about asking those questions about looking at the inherent relationship between things and how do we strengthen and improve those relationships.

Chris Do:

A couple of things I want to say to that. I think you're right. When we're getting into a really tough economy and things are not going well for a lot of companies, the companies that you think have more money than God, when they're laying off people and shutting down departments, they're withdrawing from cities and offices, there's lots of financial problems going on, the first thing they do is they slaughter what they feel is unnecessary, which is all the creative fruit people. And you're also right in your assessment, a lot of designers who are in business roles don't fully embrace the responsibility that comes with making those hard decisions that are traditionally for business types. But I think if we want to create a leader, a visionary of the future, that business and design should not be taught in two different schools and two different campuses by different instructors, they should be taught in an integrated way that's seamless with each other.

So when I wrote the curriculum, The Future, if you will, it had business classes, it had negotiations, and it had design and design principles, and they're all integrated because why are we talking about this as two separate languages? It's really one language, and hopefully I'm the guy who's beating the drum and building or preyed around this of more than just one. But I want to point out two things here, or maybe at least one thing, the creator economy.

Michael Margolis:

Yes.

Chris Do:

We seem to be ushering in a new era that is a offshoot of the information economy where we can see people like Logan Paul getting together with Deji and forming some collaboration to create one of the fastest growing sports drinks companies that is going to be worth more than a billion dollars. Here's the guy who's fallen off the creative wagon a couple of times himself, but has been able to resurrect and revive his career in his life into becoming a potential billionaire. Then you have Mr. Beast who was literally offered a billion dollars for his companies and he turned it down because he thought it was undervalued. I don't think he's dreaming here. And so there's a whole new paradigm where I don't know how many people graduate from business school thinking, I have a roadmap in 10 years on how to become a billionaire.

Yet there are people in the creative space, maybe as far as high school education in terms of their formal education who are now on that path today. So I think it's a case for both business people understanding the need for creativity and innovation and creatives who can play in these open fields and just dominate and crush. Lastly, to your point of AI, I think the future, since if AI can do a lot of what it is that humans are doing today, it'll come down to this. I'll just put it out there and let's get your temperature on this.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

The winners of the future, of an AI enabled future, we'll be the ones who have really good tastes. They understand what good writing looks like, how it reads, how it flows. They understand what good music sounds like, what is a good combination or a genre of bashing or mashing of things. They know what aesthetically is pleasing and elevated and good taste. Because we can see, you can pump out a thousand iterations of images really quickly, but are they any good? And do you know that that's good or is that the machine telling you it's good? So the curators, the taste makers will be the ones who will be at the tip of that AI revolution.

Michael Margolis:

I love what you're saying, Chris, and I do very much agree. The way I've described this is what Generative AI has done is it's a forking moment in human evolution. And as part of that now, knowledge is dead and wisdom is queen. Wisdom in one respect is discernment, and that's what I hear as a synonym as you talk about taste making. It's about being able to make conscious effective choices to know, again, like a good story, it's an exercise in choice making. What matters most versus what belongs on the cutting room floor. The ability to cut through the signal versus noise and to cut through that noise to have really strong signal that other people identify with and resonate with. There's something else that you said that I think is a really important point for us to reinforce, which is, you talked about one language. So my number one career advice I give to everybody is learn the language of the world you want to be a part of.

When you speak that language, you belong in that world, you have a seat at the table, but literally language fluency is the path to agency and everything is language. I've got a trainer at the gym I work with, and I was asking him, I was like, hey, so how many languages do you speak? Because we were talking about this. He goes, oh, yeah. Well, I speak two languages. I speak English and Spanish. I was like, yeah, no, no, no, but widen it for me. What are the other languages that you speak, right? Do you speak the language of soccer? He's a former professional soccer player. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I speak the language of soccer. I'm like, okay, great. Well, do you speak the language of functional kinesiology? He's like, oh, well, yeah, actually that's a whole nother... And he started to realize every craft, every domain, every area is actually just a language.

And that's one of the ways we can bridge this thing of like, oh, no, that's not me. We tend to collapse things down to identity. Finance is just a language, right? Graphic design is just a language, but even within design, there's then how many different dialects. There's a difference between UX design versus print design versus web design, so on, and so on, and so on. But language, and the thing that excites me most with Generative AI is that words are the new code. We've literally reached this new place at a societal level. There are three of the most important scientific breakthrough revolutions in the last a hundred years. One was genetic biological code, DNA. The second was binary computational code zeros and ones. And now we're ushering in this new age where words, semantics are the new code. So that's my biggest advice to everybody right now, is not only learn the language of the worlds you want to be a part of, but learn language.

These are the fundamental building blocks, and the more you develop... One of the godfathers of the AI movement, his name is Patrick Winston. He used to run the MIT's AI lab. He says, the three most important fundamental skills of the future is an ability to write, an ability to speak, and an ability to convey your ideas in that order, right? And this is from one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence. We have to build our semantic fluency work with language, and then ultimately, this ladders up to narrative intelligence or that storytelling is the universal source code, right? Storytelling, it's in every religion, it's in every part of culture, it's just literally how we make sense and meaning of things. And I think we're all going to become better storytellers again, by the simple notion that we have to, because we're all going to have to make sense and meaning of what is exponential change. And the more we can find the opportunities and the possibilities, basically tell a love story about the future that's going to lift us up and then lift up the people who are around us.

Chris Do:

Michael...

Michael Margolis:

Chris...

Chris Do:

It's been a really meaty intellectual conversation. There's some words here that our audience is probably looking up, and I include myself in there, and my head hurts in the best possible way. I thought we'd do something a little funny as we wrap up today.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah. Please.

Chris Do:

Okay. And we're just giving people a taste of what they can experience within your ecosystem. So before I do the funny bit to end it, how can people find out more about you and the programs that you're running?

Michael Margolis:

I appreciate that. So everybody can find me online at storiedinc.com. We're in the process of refacing a lot of stuff. So probably the best ways to plug into our ecosystem is one is check out my latest books Story 10x: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable. You could find it on Amazon and on Audible and Kindle, but if you go to storiedinc.com/story10x, you can download a sample of the book, 70 pages. It's meaty. You'll get right into it, all the things that we talked about broken down. So that's the best way to plug in. We have a new flagship course called Narrative Influence, it's a five-week sprint method. We run that every three months. And then lastly, connect with me on LinkedIn. That's where I share the most content in musings, Michael Margolis Storied, you'll find me there.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. My guess has been Michael Margolis, and he's written the book Story 10x, it's a beautiful book. I can't wait to dig deeper into this. And if your brain is still put together after our conversation today, I strongly encourage you to go visit him. Check him out.

Michael Margolis:

Thank you.

Chris Do:

See what's going on under the hood there, because I know we just scratched the surface now.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

There's this bit that they used to do on the radio with this show called Frosty, Heidi and Frank, I don't know if you remember them, if you listened to radio.

Michael Margolis:

No.

Chris Do:

Okay. Anyways, they would do this thing at the end of the show, they would apologize. We'd like to apologize to everybody we've offended, and they would get into the list. Now while you're going, I wrote down some things.

Michael Margolis:

Yeah.

Chris Do:

So, okay, so I wrote down, okay, we'd like to apologize to sausage factories, to researchers, to politicians, to the right, to the left, to AI itself. And anybody else that you could think of, Michael?

Michael Margolis:

I want to apologize to Chris. I want to apologize to Chris's mom and dad. I want to apologize to everybody who believes in Trump and everybody who hates Trump. I want to apologize to the Zippo company and to Pawn Stars. Let's see, who else do we need to apologize? I need to apologize to chocolate makers around the world, and I need to apologize to all of our listeners for indulging me in my brain stretching, heart expanding discourse. Thanks for going along for the ride. I come in peace.

Chris Do:

Wonderful. And I'd like to make the final apology to anyone who's made it this deep into the episode who hasn't veered off the road. And there's this expression, the expression is, "A human mind once expanded, does not shrink back to its original shape." And I hope your mind has expanded today. Everybody, just remember one thing, you're not defined by your past, the future is what you make it.

Michael Margolis:

My name is Michael Margolis, and you're listening to The Futur.

Stewart Schuster:

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur Podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Stewart Schuster. Thank you to Anthony Barrow for editing and mixing this episode. And thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It'll help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me? Head over to thefutur.com/heychris, and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.

‍