0:02

What do tires and oat cuisine have

0:04

in common? The answer was obvious to

0:06

brothers Andre and Edward Michelin. France in

0:08

1889 had just a few thousand cars

0:10

on the road, barely enough to keep

0:13

their fledgling tire company afloat, so they

0:15

created a guidebook to show people all

0:17

the fun day trips they could take

0:19

in an automobile. The little red book

0:21

with the humble beginnings would go on

0:24

to become the most coveted guide to

0:26

chefs and foodies everywhere. Of the million

0:28

or so restaurants in the world, only

0:30

137 have achieved a three-star rating in

0:32

the Michelin Guide. The rating process

0:34

is akin to a papal search

0:36

in terms of secrecy, and only

0:39

those restaurants offering unparalleled creativity and

0:41

exceptional cuisine worth a special journey

0:43

can dream of earning three stars.

0:45

Today on Cold Call, we welcome

0:47

Professor Michael Norton to discuss his

0:49

case, Elboulie, the taste of innovation.

0:51

I'm your host Brian Kenney, and you're listening

0:54

to Cold Call on the HPR Podcast Network.

0:57

Mike Norton is a behavioral economist whose

0:59

research explores the effects of social norms

1:01

on people's attitudes and behavior, and he

1:04

investigates the psychology of investment. His new

1:06

book is called The Ritual Effect, From

1:08

Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power

1:10

of Everyday Actions. Mike, welcome. Thanks, Brian.

1:12

Great to have you here on the

1:14

show. We haven't had you here before,

1:16

so it's really, I mean, I think

1:19

a lot of people have probably heard about your

1:21

research. You do some really interesting research on things

1:23

like happiness, and the ritual stuff is fabulous. So,

1:26

I want to hear more about the

1:28

ideas in the book. And

1:30

I think what I'll ask you to do is start

1:32

by telling us what the central issue is in the

1:34

case, and what your cold call is to start the

1:36

discussion. The cold call for this case is how much

1:39

should this guy be charging? That's

1:41

all it is. That's it. And they bid each other up,

1:43

and they bid each other down, because

1:45

he's charging a very low amount, and

1:47

the restaurant often doesn't break even and even

1:50

loses money. So, some students

1:52

say he should charge a million dollars. Some students

1:54

say he should give it away for free. So,

1:57

the opening question, even though it's just a price, you're not

1:59

a... literally make a price thermometer and we

2:01

go up, it starts to highlight what

2:04

is the role of business, what is the role

2:06

of art and creativity, and how do we monetize

2:08

these things, and should we monetize these things. Okay,

2:10

all right. And for those listeners who don't know,

2:12

Elba Lee is a restaurant located

2:15

in? Outside Barcelona. Outside Barcelona, and we're going

2:17

to hear all about that from Mike who's

2:19

been there. That's what I want to hear

2:21

about your experience, but also about the creativity

2:23

that the central protagonist in the case brings

2:25

to the work that he does. When you

2:27

told me about your book, and I said,

2:29

you know, let's talk about it on cold

2:31

call, this was the case that you chose

2:33

to highlight the ideas in the book, and I'm

2:35

wondering why that is. We have this funny thing

2:38

that we do with food and drink, which is

2:40

we don't just eat it and drink it. We

2:42

do all kinds of things with food and drink,

2:44

even like, you know, we're going to have a drink

2:47

with friends, and before we have the drink, we

2:49

raise our glasses up in the air, link

2:52

them together, which kind of risks spilling it and

2:54

stuff like that. And then we say in almost

2:56

every culture in the world, a one

2:59

or two word phrase that means health

3:01

or luck or good, something like that.

3:04

And so we do stuff with liquid, literally,

3:07

if you just think it's just liquid, we do

3:09

things with it that are very emotional, very meaningful,

3:11

totally connecting with family with past generations.

3:14

I mean, we really use food for

3:16

these very emotional things. And that

3:18

was partly what drew me to El Bulli,

3:20

which is this incredibly ritualistic

3:23

way of eating and consuming food,

3:25

where yes, the food is

3:27

good, but it's actually not really about the food.

3:29

It's about the emotions that Fran Adria can create.

3:31

Okay. Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of people

3:34

can relate to that because we all love a

3:36

certain dish that was cooked at home when

3:38

we were growing up. And these things are, they

3:40

even much later in life, they bring back memories

3:42

and emotions, right? We've got, I'm Irish Catholic, so

3:44

we've got St. Patrick's Day coming up. So we've

3:47

got corned beef and cabbage. Not a good one

3:49

for me, but yeah. Any other day of the

3:51

year, I don't think I would choose corn

3:54

to be. It's called boiled dinner. That

3:56

doesn't sound good either. Very good. And

3:58

yes, on that day, it can... me

4:00

to my grandmother who's gone. You know, we really

4:02

think of food as connecting us to

4:04

very important things in our lives. Yeah. So

4:07

let's talk about El Buly. What

4:09

are its origins? How did it... If the

4:11

case describes this, I thought it was fascinating. Yeah.

4:14

It's kind of like a small seaside. If

4:16

you think of going to a beach and just

4:18

having a little restaurant that's right off the beach...

4:20

Yeah, like the Clamshaft. Exactly. That's how it

4:22

started for many, many years. And then this guy,

4:24

Farhan Adria, came in and over

4:26

a period of years and years,

4:29

it wasn't an overnight thing, he turned

4:31

it from a get a sandwich kind

4:33

of thing to an insanely

4:35

complex, you know, 30 course meal

4:38

with amazing innovation that became the

4:40

hardest restaurant to get into in

4:42

the world. He somehow used his

4:45

own creativity to go from

4:47

Clamshaft to Three Stars. I think they said

4:49

it was like a putt putt. It

4:51

was a mini golf course, right? Not

4:54

high end, I guess is what we could say. Yeah. So

4:57

tell us about Farhan Adria. How did

4:59

he learn his craft? There's

5:01

a quote in the case that I love from him, which

5:03

is when he started to become a chef,

5:07

what he did, which is what most people

5:09

in creative industries do, is you copy. First

5:11

thing you do is copy. There's this famous dish

5:13

by the chef, and so you copy it. With

5:15

music, you try to copy the solo, the Clapton

5:17

solo in order to learn it. And

5:20

he said one day just had this thing

5:22

where it was like, the translation is to

5:24

create is not to copy, which

5:26

is an obvious thing in a way, but

5:28

also deeply insightful. So he just said, stop,

5:31

we're not going to copy anything. We're

5:33

not going to do anything that's ever been done before, no

5:35

matter what. And by the way, even when we

5:38

do something, we're only going to do it one

5:40

time and then we're never going to do it

5:42

again. We're not even going to copy ourselves. Wow.

5:44

We're always going to be innovating instead of sticking

5:46

with what we know. And that's a very, very

5:48

tough task to have. It's a lot of pressure

5:50

to put on yourself. Exactly. Like a band never

5:52

plays its greatest hits ever. It's a tough, tough

5:54

gig to do. But he decided

5:56

to be, he uses the word ruthless, ruthless

5:59

about creativity. and force them every single

6:01

year to come up with an entirely new menu.

6:03

Yeah. What's the

6:05

experience he's trying to create for the patrons

6:07

who go there? It's funny because the, so

6:09

it's outside Barcelona up in the mountains. And

6:12

so just to get there, first off you've

6:14

got to get to Barcelona. Yeah. And people

6:16

would fly from all over the world

6:18

to do that. Then you take this crazy car ride up

6:20

in these mountains and there's no signs.

6:22

So you get lost, which is

6:24

like, you know, I'm not an operations professor, but

6:26

typically you'd want to have good signage. Little direction

6:29

help. Totally, or a map or something. But you

6:31

get kind of lost and you're winding around these

6:33

roads. You get there, they take you out on

6:35

this veranda to look over the ocean. Then

6:38

they take you through the kitchen. You get

6:40

to see the chefs at work. There's

6:42

like 20, 30 chefs sometimes working for

6:44

you. And then you finally get

6:46

to your table. So no

6:48

food has happened yet. You've already had

6:50

an insanely interesting and weird experience. And I

6:53

think for me, that's what's so interesting about

6:55

what he does is even before the

6:57

food, which is technically why you're there, they've

7:00

structured this very ritualistic, you know, go off

7:02

into the mountains, you know, like a wise

7:04

holy man or something, enter

7:07

this new world and then the food

7:09

comes at you. And

7:11

what's the anticipation? Like, so I would imagine, so

7:13

you went and it's incredibly

7:15

difficult to get a reservation

7:17

at this restaurant. What do the numbers look like on

7:19

that front? At that time, the restaurant

7:22

is closed, by the way, unfortunately, if people wanted to

7:24

go because he decided to do other,

7:26

he actually said, well, I'm not even going to do it. I'm not

7:29

going to do food anymore. I'm going to be creative another way. So

7:31

he's ruthless through his whole life. At

7:33

the time, they estimated like one or

7:35

two million reservation requests and

7:37

they served about 8,000 people a year. So

7:40

the demand was high and

7:42

very, very difficult to get it. And in fact, we, if

7:47

I'm being honest, one of the reasons we wrote the case

7:49

was to see if that would help us get a reservation.

7:53

And at first it did not actually. We said, you

7:55

know, we're very fancy Harvard Business School professors. They'd like

7:57

to write a case and they said we're booked. You

8:00

can't come. And then about a month

8:02

later they said, I don't remember the exact date, but

8:04

they basically said you can come if you come on

8:07

July 4th or July 17th or whatever the date was.

8:10

Or you can never come. And

8:12

we all went. I mean, that's the kind of thing,

8:14

you know, if you can get

8:16

in there, you go. And so we all

8:18

changed all of our plans immediately and went

8:20

over. So you're already, like your anticipation level

8:22

is already through the roof, you know, before

8:24

you even start the journey to get to

8:26

the mountaintop, right? And then

8:28

they've created, they say they're sort of building the experience

8:31

up for you as you get there. The

8:35

kitchen staffed by 30 people, there's only

8:37

80 patrons. So you've almost got a

8:39

one-to-one ratio for, you know, staff to

8:41

patrons. What happens after that? Yeah,

8:43

so you sit at the table and they start the food.

8:47

And it's almost impossible to describe

8:49

the food. But one of the first, I

8:52

think the first thing or one of the first

8:54

things we had was they call it spherical olive.

8:57

They give you a little spoon with one olive in it.

9:00

And you're like, really? You know, I mean, one olive,

9:02

I came all this way with the, you put the

9:05

olive in your mouth, it explodes. It's

9:07

not an olive. It's actually an essence

9:09

of olive that they use a special

9:12

thing to create a coating around just

9:14

olives. And the coating

9:16

itself is olive. So it's like eating

9:18

a thousand olives at the same time.

9:21

And it just blows your mind. The very first

9:23

thing is the teeniest little thing that

9:25

already you've completely never had anything like it.

9:27

And then one of the early things that

9:29

he also gave us was a strawberry. You

9:33

know, you're like, come on, man. I mean, this is kind of expensive. I don't

9:35

know how, you know, I can get a strawberry. Exactly.

9:38

And so you bite into the strawberry and you

9:40

taste a gin and tonic, barbecue

9:44

and a strawberry. Oh my God. And his

9:46

idea was that he would give you an

9:49

entire summer day, like a

9:51

family barbecue where you have a drink and

9:53

you eat food and then you have dessert

9:55

like fruit. The

9:58

creation was like, can we do that? a

10:00

second. So I mean that's the

10:02

kind of innovation and bizarre ideas that

10:04

they were having and then they're able to

10:06

execute them which is just extraordinary. So I've

10:09

got an olive and a strawberry and it's

10:11

already the greatest meal I've ever had in my life.

10:13

I mean that's the level of innovation that they're able

10:15

to bring. And then they just have to keep topping

10:18

it with the next thing that they do which

10:20

sounds like an impossible task and then they redo

10:22

it all the next day for the

10:24

next group of people coming in. Right. He got very

10:26

famous for making foam out

10:29

of all sorts of things like carrot

10:31

foam. So it was like essence of

10:33

carrot in a foam and eat it,

10:35

disappear in your tongue. So people

10:37

would go and say, give me the foam.

10:39

You know, I want foam. That's the greatest hit. And he

10:41

said, there's no foam. No foam. No

10:44

more foam here. Sorry, you can't have any foam. No

10:46

foam for you. Exactly. So he literally just would cut

10:48

it no matter what and try something new. You have

10:50

to be an adventurous food eater, I would think. So

10:52

you don't go there and like no, I'm going to

10:55

pass on the olives. I mean you basically eat what's

10:57

put in front of you. So

10:59

I went with my wife, my then girlfriend who

11:01

has a mild shellfish allergy,

11:03

which may or may not be real.

11:07

But it's

11:09

not the kind of place where you push the dish

11:11

away and don't eat the food. And so what she

11:13

would do is when the servers weren't looking

11:15

after I ate mine, she would switch

11:17

her plate with mine as an eaters as

11:19

well. And so yes, it is a... That's

11:22

a doubly experience. I mean, they're standing over you,

11:24

you know, sip that, take that bite and then

11:26

do that. And you're really going

11:28

along with their vision of your ride. So

11:30

they're giving you instructions on how to consume

11:32

the food. Absolutely. Okay.

11:35

They're really right on you. And they've really thought it

11:38

all through that, you know, if you drink this before

11:40

that, that's what you

11:42

need to do because we've structured the flavors such that this

11:44

interacts with that. If you do it in the other order,

11:46

you might miss something. So they've really...

11:48

He talks about it almost as a movie as well.

11:50

It's like scene after scene, all connected

11:52

to each other in some way. So how... I

11:55

mean, do you have insight into how they're able

11:57

to do this and how they're able to pull

11:59

it off? they get their inspirations from?

12:01

One thing they do is unlike many

12:03

other food services is they

12:05

closed for half the year. Yeah. Every year,

12:08

which partly relates to why they weren't making a lot

12:10

of money. Right. It's hard to only be open half

12:13

the year. They

12:15

were basically saying we're gonna close

12:17

entirely and start from scratch

12:19

and they would just go around the world

12:21

and try to find things. Mm-hmm. Literally there's

12:23

a there's a great video where that I

12:25

forget which vegetable they find. It's

12:28

a Japanese vegetable that they hadn't used before and

12:31

they spend like a week doing

12:33

everything you could possibly do to this,

12:35

you know cutting it like this, broiling

12:37

it, steaming it, whatever the thing they're

12:39

doing. They're just testing. They're truly almost

12:41

like rigorous scientific method

12:44

where they're carefully controlling for every factor

12:47

and then they write everything down. They

12:49

had a huge encyclopedia. They called it

12:51

the bully-pedia for all of the things

12:53

that they learned about all these foods. They

12:55

really had to do it that way in order

12:57

to say, you know what we didn't know is if you heat this

13:00

to exactly 302 degrees, what happens is

13:02

that. Amazing. And then they would say, keep

13:04

that. That's going on the menu next year. This

13:07

is structured creativity. This isn't just like,

13:10

oh we're gonna go out there and try things.

13:12

I mean they're really, they're taking an approach to

13:14

this. There is a process that they're following. For

13:16

sure and it's in the end it just seems

13:18

like magic, like most amazingly creative things, you know.

13:20

Once you receive it, it's just extraordinary. Yeah.

13:23

And then often when you look in the background,

13:25

you know creative people are working really, really hard

13:27

with lots of failures in order

13:29

to eventually get something that really is

13:31

truly innovative. Right, right. The

13:34

chef visited the HBS classroom. I'm

13:36

just curious about how that was. What was

13:39

the interaction with the students like? It was,

13:41

it was extraordinary. He, one of

13:43

the things that he, so I've had many, many

13:45

guests in the HBS classroom over the years of

13:47

course and so have all of us and he

13:50

is the only guest who's gonna come to two classes

13:52

the first time he came to campus. After

13:54

the first class he came over to me through a

13:56

translator and said, what's the deal with the boards? And

14:00

I said, you know, what do you mean? Well, you're pushing them

14:02

up, you're dragging them down, you're writing all over them. You know

14:04

what? For our listeners' benefit, they may not

14:07

have seen the classroom. We literally have, is it nine? Nine

14:10

blackboards that are all movable, spread across

14:12

the front of the room. And by

14:14

the end of a class, those are

14:16

typically filled with notes from the teachers.

14:18

That's right. And we love to

14:20

do a very dramatic, you know, push the board

14:22

up to reveal something, the board underneath it had

14:24

on it. So he said, what's

14:26

the deal with the boards? And I said, well, we try to use them, you

14:29

know, to structure the conversation, make sure we're

14:31

having the discussion we want to have. I

14:33

showed him my teaching plan, which had boards,

14:35

like little squares drawn on my teaching plan

14:37

saying what was going to go on each

14:39

board. So he looked at it

14:42

and he said, we need to use this

14:44

in the restaurant. And I said, what

14:46

do you mean? And he said, we need to make menus

14:49

where what happens is you push them up

14:51

and down and reveal things over time, over the meal,

14:53

and we can surprise you that way. And

14:55

it's just, I've had as I said, many, many

14:57

guests in the classroom. He's the

15:00

only one who said, let me think about taking

15:02

the vertical board and turning it into a horizontal

15:04

thing with food on it where we use the

15:06

mystery and surprise. That's kind of

15:08

where he was always had his brain is always

15:10

going. Exactly. Yeah.

15:13

Yeah. They

15:15

loved him because he was very direct. And

15:18

he was very, I'm going to

15:20

say critical, where he was saying, yes,

15:23

it's important to make money, of

15:26

course, but what's really important is

15:28

to be creative. So whatever you do, find a way to

15:30

be creative in your life. And I

15:32

think that was, it's valuable

15:34

for me to hear too. And also I think for them to hear as

15:36

well. So let's think about your

15:38

book now in the context of the

15:40

chef and Il Bully. What

15:42

kinds of lessons can we

15:45

glean from his approach to doing things? If

15:48

you think about food, we

15:50

talked about staying cheers with glasses and things like

15:52

that. We can use food and drink and we

15:54

do use food and drink for everything in

15:56

our lives, weddings and funerals

15:59

and birthdays. And you know we have a

16:01

birthday cake where we make

16:03

a cake we frost it very carefully so it looks

16:05

beautiful Then we stick

16:07

wax candle and light them on

16:09

fire Yeah So the wax drips on the cake and

16:12

then somebody blows all over the cakes like all the

16:14

germs and you know I mean when you break it

16:16

down like that It's an insane thing to do part

16:18

of the ritual part of the ritual right so and

16:20

we all sing this Toonless song and

16:22

everyone sing it in their own key. It doesn't sound

16:24

good even you know I mean doesn't make any sense

16:27

But of course it's huge right and even the number

16:29

of candles tells us we went from

16:31

that age to that age So you can really think about

16:33

the most basic things Adding

16:36

meaning to them adding emotion to them

16:38

and having people have a much better

16:40

experience as a result Yeah, do rituals

16:42

make us perform better? I

16:44

mean if you have a ritual that you do does

16:46

it does it enhance the way that you approach something

16:48

if you look at any

16:51

athlete any professional athlete or any musician or

16:53

anybody who has to bring it in the

16:55

moment like that You'll find that

16:57

almost all of them have not just

17:00

like a tiny ritual But an

17:02

incredibly elaborate ritual that they engage it

17:04

Serena Williams has I think she bounces

17:06

the ball five times before her first

17:08

serve And two times before

17:10

her second Wow it's it I know it's

17:12

a different number each time the doll has

17:14

insane things that he does with his clothing

17:16

and his headband and everything Like that, but

17:18

we do see in moments of stress

17:21

Performers bring it and the doll says things

17:23

like I know I don't need to do it But

17:26

when I do it, I feel like I'm ready to go

17:28

Okay, and we do those things too, right?

17:30

So we don't do I don't bounce the ball 50

17:32

times before I start teaching obviously But people off if

17:35

you say do you do anything, you know before a

17:37

stressful meeting people say you know what? I you know

17:39

what I do I go in

17:41

the bathroom and I talk to myself in the mirror

17:43

Mm-hmm very very common actually you sneak into the bathroom

17:45

Make sure nobody else is in there and then say

17:48

to yourself in the mirror like you've got this you

17:50

could do this Yeah, so even though we're not the

17:52

doll or Serena Williams Many

17:54

of us also bring the same kinds of things to

17:56

bear when we're under stress. We try to

17:58

bring a little bit of ritual, right? Right. And we know

18:01

that there are faculty here who have, I'm thinking

18:03

of Jan Rivkin, for instance, with his colored chalk.

18:05

There are faculty who are kind of famous for

18:07

the things that they do before they come out,

18:09

because teaching a case

18:11

at Harvard Business School is a performance

18:13

of sorts. Completely. And I actually realized

18:16

studying ritual is one of these things where I started

18:18

doing it like at a remove,

18:20

kind of like I'm a scientist and I'll study

18:22

the humans. Yeah. And then I realized

18:24

I'm doing them all the time. And I have a teaching ritual,

18:26

which is I always write my teaching

18:28

plan is exactly what we're going to do in

18:31

class. Always write it on yellow

18:33

lined paper, yellow. If

18:35

it's on white, I don't. I can do it, but

18:37

I don't like it. Interesting. And it's

18:39

always in the same black leather binder that my dad gave

18:41

me 25 years ago. Every MBA

18:44

class I've taught at HBS has

18:46

been exactly that. And I didn't even realize until

18:48

I started studying rituals. And I just started looking

18:50

at myself saying, oh my God, I'm doing this

18:52

stuff all the time. Are

18:55

rituals different than habits? They

18:57

are. I think habits are often like the thing

18:59

that we need to get done. We need to

19:01

go for a run. We need to engage. We

19:03

need to teach our class, for example, like we

19:06

have to do it. Rituals are often something that

19:08

we add to change our emotions

19:10

or change the meaning of it. So I don't

19:12

need yellow lined paper. Sir Ian Williams doesn't need

19:14

to bounce the ball five times. But

19:17

when we do those things, it changes it

19:19

from just bouncing a ball or writing on

19:21

paper to something that's more

19:23

meaningful that really affects our emotions. And so I

19:25

think we do use rituals for lots

19:28

of emotional tasks in our lives. Okay.

19:30

Let's go back to Chef

19:32

Adria for a minute again, because I'm

19:34

curious. You mentioned the way

19:36

he's thinking about the chalkboards, which is

19:38

kind of amazing. Does his creative approach

19:40

translate to other kinds of endeavors? In

19:44

his life or he? So he has... Or even

19:46

in our lives. I mean... He's

19:48

tried to do... He gives himself challenges like

19:50

let's reinvent the potato chip. Yeah. They'll

19:53

just pick things and see if they can

19:55

reinvent it. And he actually now is working

19:57

on trying

19:59

to... kind of a book that is

20:01

about being creative, some tips

20:03

on being creative from someone who's incredibly creative.

20:05

And it turns out, and many creative people

20:08

have this struggle, it is hard to

20:10

articulate exactly. You can say,

20:13

follow this process, but there's often

20:15

something else in there that is very difficult for

20:17

us. He said this thing, someone

20:20

asked him, how do you find such talented chefs

20:22

to work for you? Because many

20:25

of the chefs who worked in that restaurant then went

20:27

on to start their own restaurants that were successful. And

20:30

they said, how did you find these talented

20:32

people? And he said,

20:34

you have to understand, people think that Steve

20:36

Jobs is the most creative person in the

20:38

world because he made a product that billions

20:40

of people wanted. But he said,

20:42

and this is an example, he said, someone

20:44

who's studying fruit flies in a laboratory can

20:47

be more creative than Steve Jobs. It's

20:50

just that nobody cares. But

20:52

he said, I'm looking not for the end result,

20:54

I'm looking for the creativity in the person, which

20:57

means he's looking in very different places

20:59

for creativity because he's saying, do

21:02

you have the spark or not? Not, have you

21:04

made something that people were interested in? Right, of

21:06

course, of course. Which I guess

21:08

leads to another question, which is, are there examples that

21:10

you can think of where companies

21:12

have tried to harness that kind of

21:15

creativity to create an experience for their

21:17

customers that's akin to, maybe not as

21:19

intense as what you experienced at Elboulie,

21:21

but akin to that? We,

21:24

our daughter is eight years old,

21:26

and so that's prime Disney age.

21:29

And so if you have

21:31

been to Disney or you've ever entered

21:33

the park, extraordinarily. I'm a fan. I'm

21:36

a fan, yeah. I mean, people have very

21:38

different feelings about Disney in general. But just

21:40

from a standpoint of bringing

21:42

you into an experience and changing

21:44

how you're thinking and feeling, extraordinary

21:47

how they pull people in. And

21:50

really, for kids, it actually feels magical

21:52

to them. Can managers

21:54

sort of bring this out in

21:56

their employees? Is there a way to kind of pull

21:59

that kind of creativity? out

22:01

of people or are there are people just sort

22:03

of locked in their day-to-day I got to get

22:05

this thing done so stop trying to make me

22:07

be creative one thing that I do whenever I

22:09

teach this case which is very very fun so

22:11

we'll have the regular case discussion etc and

22:14

then I'll often do a second session where

22:16

I say okay now you be for on

22:18

Adria and I'll

22:20

give them a task like sometimes we'll

22:22

do like fast food so I'll say

22:25

you redesign the happy meal you redesign

22:27

the milkshake you redesign the drive-through in

22:30

the way that Ferran Adria would do it and

22:33

they've only they've read a case and they've chatted

22:35

about this guy but he's so creative that they

22:37

can bring it to it you know he deconstructs

22:39

things and builds them back up in interesting ways

22:42

and they're able just like that

22:44

to take on his perspective and they come up with all

22:46

kinds of amazing amazing ideas

22:48

like the the

22:50

hamburger is actually the milkshake for

22:53

example is it came up with yeah another one was this is sticks out

22:55

so much

22:59

but it was and the drive-through what

23:01

you would do is you would pick your cow which

23:05

is not feasible yeah and

23:07

yet you see the creative you know I mean

23:09

you really are starting to think just very broadly

23:11

and I think what's important about that is none

23:14

of the students work in that industry but

23:16

you can give them these creative tasks and

23:18

start to bring the creativity out yeah so

23:20

that I think is very important it's not

23:23

just like we have this specific business problem

23:25

let's be creative about it you

23:27

foster a culture of let's be creative

23:29

about any kind of random thing

23:31

that's in the environment and then let's bring some

23:33

of that to our business I love it because

23:35

it almost takes the pressure off you if you

23:37

were to do that with your with your team

23:39

for instance and you have them focus on something

23:41

that's got nothing to do with your business it's

23:43

a way of maybe turning that switch on that's

23:46

got a little bit less pressure associated with it

23:48

we do in our lab group

23:50

which we call very creatively nerd

23:52

lab here at HBS with with faculty

23:55

and the PhD students we work with

23:57

will often do things like Put

24:00

the Beatles songs titles in a

24:02

hat and you have to pull one

24:05

out and you have five minutes to create a research

24:07

project based on the title And

24:09

they're not going to happen The idea is

24:11

not now go do the project. It's can so you can

24:13

think of, you know, can't buy me love You

24:16

can think about research, but you know 100 exactly

24:18

so we we do that in order to just

24:20

start the You can look

24:22

anywhere for an idea in the world and just

24:24

get in the habit of trying to have ideas

24:27

and be creative And then hopefully yet

24:29

it eventually translate to the thing you actually need to

24:31

do for work. Yeah Mike this

24:33

has been a great conversation as I knew it would be Well,

24:36

i'm asking one last question, which is

24:38

what lessons do you think listeners can

24:40

glean from adria's approach at elbily? I

24:43

think he helps us remember to savor

24:46

More than anything else. I think uh

24:48

when we're eating and drinking or doing

24:50

anything in life It can

24:52

just be eating and drinking or it can

24:54

be something that connects us to other people

24:56

connects us to our family to our past

24:59

Filled us with excitement. So I think he

25:01

as it kind of reminded me at least

25:03

that there's a lot of potential in boring Technically

25:06

boring everyday things like you got to have

25:08

lunch Yeah, you can build more into them

25:10

and I think get more enjoyment out of them

25:13

Yeah, and I guess does that also relate to

25:15

the way that you can create? Um

25:17

experiences for your customers that might

25:19

not otherwise have the same emotional

25:22

impact exactly Delighting I think the

25:24

word delighting, you know delightful or

25:26

delighting someone is a wonderful. We

25:28

don't experience delight Very often

25:30

in our lives through our kids. Sometimes we experience

25:32

that we're delighted by our kids But

25:35

but great marketers actually create experiences that

25:38

delight us. It's a wonderful emotion that we don't get

25:40

enough of Yeah, I love that and the

25:42

book i'm going to say the title one

25:44

more time is the ritual effect from habit

25:46

to ritual Harness the surprising power of everyday

25:49

actions mike norton. Thanks for joining me on

25:51

cold call. Thanks so much, brian If you

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26:15

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26:18

Kenney, and you've been listening to Cold Call,

26:20

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