Ep17 – The Sunk Cost Error and Radical Simplicity Edition with Scott McArthur

Ep17 – The Sunk Cost Error and Radical Simplicity Edition with Scott McArthur

James chats with Scott McArthur, who has worked with over 200 organisations around the World, delivering transformation programmes and keynote speeches. Scott’s ‘maker’s mark’ are his stories, which go much much deeper into the human condition than traditional organisational experiences.

 

A former business consultant and Board director, Scott doesn’t stop at the corporate stuff. He is also a published scientist, poet and writer and has won awards for consulting, training and speaking, as well as his contribution to Scottish rock music.

 

His co-authored award-winning book on rock music in Scotland has been made into a successful musical and inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.

 

Scott’s keynotes are particularly concerned with how we manage what he calls the “inner work” of our relationships, organisations and cultures.

 

They discuss rock music, the sunk cost error, the HR paradox, over measurement, radical simplicity, business delusion and modern education.

 

Contact Scott:

 

Web: www.scottspeaks.me
Email: scott@sculptureconsulting.com
Twitter: Scott_McArthur

Click for the full transcript

James Nathan: 00:55 Hello and welcome to the only one business show with me, your host James Nathan. In the studio today, I’ve got a fabulous guest for you who’s worked in over 200 organizations around the world delivering transformational programs and keynote speeches. His makers mark are his stories which go much deeper into the human condition than traditional organizational experiences. A former business consultant and board director, he doesn’t just stop at the corporate stuff. He’s also a published scientist, a poet and a writer, and won awards for consulting, training and speaking as well as his contribution, to Scottish rock music. His co-authored award winning book on Rock Music in Scotland has been made into a successful musical and inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame. His keynotes are particularly concerned with how we manage what he calls the inner work of our relationships, organizations and cultures. Please welcome the transformation sculptor Scott McArthur. Scott. Hi, how are you?

 

Scott McArthur: 01:53 Hi James. Nice to meet you.

 

James Nathan: 01:55 It’s lovely, lovely to have you on the show. I gotta to ask about the rock music, Scott. I’m a big music man. Who Do you play? Do you sing? What’s your thing?

 

Scott McArthur: 02:04 Yeah, well I do all of the above. But really badly. I was in a really bad heavy rock cover band when I was a kid. And eventually got thrown out without cause I was so poor. But my passion for music is second to nothing in my life.

 

James Nathan: 02:25 That is lovely to hear. I’ve got a similar background. I played in the thrash band. Me and my mate bought guitars at a hock shop and I don’t think mine ever stayed in tune. They realized quite quickly that I couldn’t do anything. My singing was awful, so they replaced me. Then they went on to win an Australian battle of the bands competition. Cut a couple of CDs together. Travelled the country….

 

Scott McArthur: 02:50 Well not being able to play never did Kurt Cobain any harm did it.

 

James Nathan: 02:55 No, no, not at all. I’ll just, I’ve just read a really great biography about him. He was a mad bugger. Mad, mad, mad.

 

Scott McArthur: 03:02 I think the live, you know, the unplugged album is absolutely beautiful. It’s everything in it from the sort of rawness of what makes rock great. There’s also sorta passion and agony and pain and angst. It’s just is just brilliant. Absolutely.

 

James Nathan: 03:27 Do you know, I’m glad you’ve mentioned that. I absolutely… of all the Nevada stuff. I’ll listen to it. That’s the one I listened to most. The back story, which I thought was amazing, was that only a few hours before he was in a hospital having overdosed and he somehow managed to pull himself together, get on the stage, drink half a bottle of vodka, get the thing done and then go off and shoot up again. Just remarkable.

 

James Nathan: 03:51 How does it, how does rock fit into business or are they just separate passions?

 

Scott McArthur: 03:57 The one passion I guess is the link, but I don’t tend to use it so much in the business world. I did for a while because what happened was my best friend who actually lives in Sydney and I were chatting one night about an old Scottish venue, The Glasgow Apollo, we are, you probably know ACDC live album was recorded. If You Want Blood. And we decided to do a website just for fun and it went absolutely mad. I mean, millions of people visited it. Within a year we had a book deal. We had a video show, about 30 or 40 appearances on radio. We had dozens and dozens of articles written about us and we ended up meeting everybody from David Coverdell to Gary Newman to Toya to, you know, it was a remarkable thing.

 

Scott McArthur: 04:49 So it was a great example of, of you know, how an idea can be made into something. So it’s not bad from that perspective. But I bet like a lot of things, some of the metaphors people use in business don’t always work. And I’m not sure the music industry works as well as other things, but I don’t touch as much. But I mean, I’m so proud of it. I mean the book is a really successful, we did a documentary, which has sold many thousands of copies and we ended up…. It was astonishing. We got contacted by a lovely fella called Tommy McRory and Tommy is a bit like Jack Black, you know that film, School of Rock, he’s a bit like Jack Black in Paisley and Scotland. And he came to us and said, look, I’d like to meet your story and to musical. So we sat there and we wrote a musical and we got some funding. We got some help from the arts council and BBC Scotland and all the rest of it. I mean put together this musical and James, 12,000 people turned up. I mean, it was, it was amazing. So, I mean, I’m very proud it, but it’s something that I tend to, you know, to share in the pub rather than from the stage.

 

James Nathan: 06:04 I’m sure there are some great stories there, which you probably couldn’t use on stage.

 

Scott McArthur: 06:08 Yeah. Yes.

 

James Nathan: 06:11 What a wild, wild thing to happen, that’s fabulous Scott.

 

Scott McArthur: 06:15 It’s had 10 million hits, you know, the website is unbelievable. Unbelievable.

 

James Nathan: 06:20 Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. So, in your heart you’re also a published scientist.

 

Scott McArthur: 06:28 Yes. Yes. Well, I started off my career when I left a university. I, eh, somehow managed to get a job as a research scientist and I spent three and a half years working with a man who changed my life called Dougal Gardner, who just died six weeks ago actually, AT the grand old age of 96. But and him and I walked a on arthritis. We worked on some brain disease on medical archeology, we did all sorts of things. We even were involved in some of The aftermath of the Lockerbie disaster. So we had an amazing, amazing few years together. It was wonderful.

 

James Nathan: 07:07 And, we all have backgrounds that are very different in some ways when we, but they also, they link in as well. Does that scientific thinking or the way you, I guess, learn to think as a scientist, is that doubled into the business world for you?

 

Scott McArthur: 07:22 Yeah, and I mean I think that is probably the thing that I have been most surprised by in the last few years because after my scientific career, I stumbled a very, I’m not going to pretend I had this beautifully planned career in mind and I stumbled about and I ended up working in one of the big utility companies. Because I was numerate stepping into what they used to call personnel planning, you know, mind-power planning back in the day. And that got me into that. But the scientific stuff came to faded for a while because it wasn’t I was having to deal with in, in organizations at the time, but in the last, probably, gosh, 15 years now I’ve been bringing more and more and more back into my work and I found that those as an appetite, not a huge, yeah, so quite disappointing.

 

Scott McArthur: 08:16 But there’s an appetite for scientific principles considered part of the rubric of a person working, whether their manager to leader or specifically a chang professional, whatever. So yes, as is is definitely part. And if you see me or hear me speak, I always talk about, you know, my scientific experiences. Plus it’s such a wonderful and retching discipline to be part of. And very few folk understand it properly, they think it’s all about facts, about, you know, sort crazy scientists with funny hair and everybody, it’s not. It’s bloody hard work. So yeah, I do I talk about it a lot nowadays. It’s an important part of my work. James,

 

James Nathan: 09:01 What does the inner work of relationships, organization and cultures mean?

 

Scott McArthur: 09:07 Well, I kind of, came at this from an angle, which might might surprise you. I don’t know about, maybe it won’t, but I was working for one of the big technology houses. Were I ran a team which was called the impact team. So I was looking at how we could make an impact on clients, potential clients, customers, etc. And I think I realized that the fundamentally like a mirror of what’s going on inside us. And that took me to, you know, I’ve been a meditater for 30 years, James. I love it, it’s my version of the cigarette break. And I put the two things together, so again, it wasn’t predetermined, but I just realized that maybe I could spend time, you know, sharing the experiences I’ve had in that space to help people really understand, you know, why they do things, why the habits are the way they are, why their beliefs are the way they are. And that eventually lead to four years ago I did one of these Tedx talks in Warwick, which is a huge one. It’s like two and a half thousand people, and I did it, and it was all around why facts don’t change people. And I got real resonance from the public and from organizations. So I think that was the genesis of certainly.

 

James Nathan: 10:26 Okay. Give us, give us an example in a client or somebody you worked recently where you’ve been able to sort of help them understand their business better from that perspective.

 

Scott McArthur: 10:37 Well, a lot of the things I do is around assumptions and biases. I’m not in the game of, you know using to the scientific processes to have people report from their biases. However, what I will do, I’ll certainly demonstrate to them how we all see the world differently, because of how we’ve developed, where we’ve developed who, we grew up with you know, you know, what experiences we’ve had and I can do that in a number of ways. And one of the things I do, I’ve got an experiment that I do live with audiences and I’ve done it, you know, with with five people, and I’ve done it 5,000 people. When I was working one of the big retailers. I get them all to imagine something and then demonstrate to them by what they see, just how differently we all see the world. That inner perspective is really important. And if you are leading a program or you’re trying to change yourself or your organization or your country even, you know, you need to get people to see things the same as you or at least try your best to reduce the noise.

 

Scott McArthur: 11:40 If I use the word… If I ask everybody to imagine an iPhone that most people would be able to do that, you know, and, they can describe it to me, and they would do it slightly differently. But they would do that. And if I asked them to describe what we were talking about, describe music then things will start change. But then if you say, okay, describe value or service. So our entities want to be used in organizations or is all over the place and people tend to go back to their own experiences. And one of the things I encourage people to do is try very, very hard to bring those picture if you like together so that everybody at least has a rough idea of what everyone else is talking about. So I do like, yeah, I use the art a lot, James.I’ve been working with an artist now for 20 years and what he and his team do for me if they draw, you know, graphical map metaphors for you know, what your organization wants to see. And, and again, pictures cut down the noise, more of the inner stuff that’s going on. So you get much, much more clarity in terms of your programs so I’ve then used that literally in dozens of transformation programs.

 

James Nathan: 12:48 Okay. And, assumptions and biases come into all aspects of our lives. Of course. How does how does that impact the businesses that we work with?

 

Scott McArthur: 13:00 Well. Okay. I mean, one of the things that…. Let me give you an example. So for example, I was working with the submarine guys from the Ministry of Defence. The submarine cluster, they call it in the Ministry of Defence and my client was the 3rd Sea Lord, who’s now moved on. He’s a diplomat in America now, but Andy was his name. And Andy and I spent a lot of time trying to understand why they’re building it’s submarines at the time. These are these huge 2 billion pound submarines. And we’ve got four of them in the UK. And morally, I’m not so sure about them, but certainly as a piece of kit, they are remarkable things.

 

Scott McArthur: 13:43 And at one point we sat down, there was a couple of us, there was me and a guy called John and who was the Ops Director and Andy who was the 3rd Sea Lord. And so he’s a direct job descendant of Samuel Pepys. So this is how this guy is a fascinating fellow. And we’re chatting about it and, he said to me, he said, and this is really embedded in me. He said, you know what you said, if we really had thought about this and we hadn’t been so sure what we’re going to succeed, we would have stopped. Another guy, turned to me, looked at me and he said, ah, you know what that’s about Scott. Don’t ya?. And he said, it’s called the sunk cost error and I thought, what’s one of them? Cause even though I was a scientist and reasonably numerate, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. So he said, well, think of it this way, we will all actively engaged in a conspiracy of optimism.

 

Scott McArthur: 14:38 I just sort of looked at him, and I went, ah, the bias there was that we were going to succeed no matter what. And it’s an unusual bias that, cause normally you hear biases as negative things. This is a positive thing. They were determined to succeed. But they went 54% over budget and there an academic who writes some very dry books called Taleb, you may have heard of the Black Swan Book. And that’s exactly what Taleb was talking about. That’s not from his book, but that’s from my own experience, but, that’s the Scottish Parliament, that’s the Millennium Dome, that’s the Astute Submarines. And these biases are so strong that they stop us from actually seeing, hold on, hold on, hold on. We need to stop this or we need to do this way. That’s important as, and it’s astonishing how difficult we find that level of self awareness, you know, we don’t really understand our biases and I don’t know if we can, I mean, some people think we can I think it’s so complex.

 

Scott McArthur: 15:42 I’m not so sure, but we can try and, what I try to do then is to say, okay, let’s, let’s look at us sensibly as a scientist. And a scientist would say and this is how you build, again, the public growth in math and science. We would very rarely say this is best practice because they know the in complex situations, particularly involved in the human brain, for goodness sake, you can never really guess. We don’t really know how…. We, you know, we know how the cosmos works but don’t know how a mouse operates. You know, as a physics is a doddle compared to biology. It’s so far away. I mean we are literally like…. there are a handful of theoretical biologists in the world and there’s a reason for that. It’s nowhere near the theoretical level yet because we’re still trying to work out the basics of it. So what I’m talking about is promising practice and say, you know, the moment according to the latest met analysis and according to latest trends, this might work. And I’m very cautious of certainty lately in that area. People say why? I use the implicit association test to show people their biases. Well, it’s no quite as good as you might think and certainly isn’t accurate or as accurate as you think.

 

James Nathan: 16:58 So I’m listening to your, examples there as Scott and you know, being an old accountant, well having been a previous escaped account I guess is the best way to describe me….

 

Scott McArthur: 17:09 In full recovery?

 

James Nathan:  17:09 Well. Yes. Well I think it’s something you can’t recover from. And I look at that and think, well, you’re talking about government businesses and it’s all well and good, you know, when we spend other people’s money, I mean HS2, if that was run by a corporate, it never would have happened in the first place. Are these issues…… Is it different in the corporate world?

 

Scott McArthur: 17:30 I don’t think it is. I mean, again, a story I mean I try very hard, sorry another aside, but I try very hard to always base my work on storytelling and the way I can get, I call it practical wisdom and I can share practical wisdom via story. So let me tell you another story. I was working for, I still am working for them actually, so I better not say who it is, it’s a big retailer. And they were looking at bringing in one of these big platforms, you’ve heard f them, Oracle or SAP. There’s only two or three of them really in the big market, mega projects. And so 100 million plus projects. And they were sure that this particular platform would be the answer to their problems and they spent about 35 million quid and you know, putting together a spec, put together a launch, a pilot, all the, the good things that you do in terms of inverted commas, best practice of implementation.

 

Scott McArthur: 18:30 And I sat down with them and this was a, this was quite an interesting moment in my career actually cause my Managing Partner was not necessarily happy with me at this point. And I said to them, you do realize you don’t need the system. And there was silence in the room. And I said, well, what you actually need is to think about it the other way though. And how can you engage your people to help you be a more successful business and it ain’t going to be via one of these systems. And so they canceled the system, they didn’t buy it. But I see it all the time, I mean companies buy particularly in the IT world, you know, massive, its extraordinary the amount of money they spent on it platforms, but they won’t give the staff a day off for their birthday. You know, and it just, it beggers belief and I call that one of the things I’m looking at, I’m writing a book called the paradox and it’s a great paradox that we will spend literally hundreds of millions of pounds on technology that we know doesn’t work, but we won’t spend hundreds of pounds and give our staff a break. It’s bizarre.

 

James Nathan: 19:36 It’s absolutely counter to the reality of how we work as well. We all know that our staff treat our clients the way we treat them. We all know that happy workers are happy people, that businesses are better. You know, wherever we invest, it doesn’t even need to be money. Does it? Time, giving someone time. You know, it’s very simple stuff and it makes for a better, better world.

 

Scott McArthur: 20:01 Absolutely. I mean, I mean again, if you forgive me for this, one of the other things I’m convinced of, and it’s something that people always look at me with slightly squinty eyes given my scientific training. I actually think we over measure now at work. And one of the things that I’m very, very evangelical about is that reduction of measurement. And when you say that, I mean it was funny I said it at a conference recently for the HR community and I got a standing standing ovation because they are feeling paralyzed by it there’s so much measurement. But what you need to do is the right measurement. I’m not saying you should stop measurement, but I think the right measurement is the answer. And one of the things I really am a strong pusher of is this notion radical simplicity. In a world where you know it’ full of noise and expiring information. And you know, it’s difficult to, you know, manage your day, but all time stressed, measuring more is not going to help. It just makes it more difficult to cope. So one of the things, as I say, I’m very keen on, you know, I’ve got this idea, I got it from a technology buff. Were I call it the Golden KPI, key performance indicator. And that Golden KPI is time well spent. So if, you’re, if you’re measuring anything, measure time and say, okay, this meeting there’d be really good value from this meeting, or was it a waste of time and given we only live for 38 thousand days and you only get about six thousand of those days to yourself and your job. Surely we should be thinking in those terms rather than spending more and more and more time measuring, measuring, measuring. I think we need to free things up and certainly that notion of radical simplicity on the Golden KPI is getting quite a bit of traction in the market for me just now James. People are interested.

 

James Nathan: 21:56 Yeah, I’m sure they are. I mean, I’m just thinking back to my accountancy training and you know, ratio analysis and what are the big aspects of that is how do you read a set of accounts? Now I’m going to bore everyone to sleep if I tell you all about it. But the basis was what does it mean, what do these numbers mean? And I think in, you know, you’ve unhatched something quite interesting there in my mind, in terms of measurement, because I believe very strongly in measuring, but I don’t believe in doing stuff for the sake of it. And just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should measure. But also, you know, I, and I just a lot with my clients, I sit there and say, well, why are you doing that?

 

James Nathan: 22:40 Well, why are you doing this? And, and just looking at, you know, it’s that philosophy of will it make the boat go faster? It’s not gonna make a better business if it’s not going to improve something, then you’re doing stuff. And if you’re doing stuff, you’re wasting your time. And a lot of businesses make their staff do that, you know, you have to do all this. Why? Because that’s what we’ve been told to do. And the thinking goes out the window. It’s almost like the, you know, I don’t want to use the word delusional, but the, you know, they believe that if they keep doing it or if something will change and you know, as well as I do, it’s a…. I’m not sure there’s that horrible quote, you know, if you did the same thing expecting a different result attributed to about 15 people. Are businesses delusional though? Is there a level of delusion attached to all of this?

 

Scott McArthur: 23:33 Oh, that is, I mean, if you look at the products that companies buy they have no evidence behind them that simply don’t work. Yeah, of course there’s delusion.

 

Scott McArthur: 23:46 I mean, I can touch a few nerves if you like….for example, Myers Briggs, Myers Briggs doesn’t work. There is no evidence that it works. And you are the only, the response you get from people who are interested in that? It’s usually a bit anecdotes. Well, any scientists will tell you that anecdotes are the lowest form of evidence. It doesn’t matter how many anecdotes you add together. It’s not data. And so there’s examples like that and I’m in the other paradox support and it’s fascinating. The things that tend to, and things that tend not to work are expensive. Things that tend to work are free. So there’s philosophical and psychological models like you may heard of Ocean or you know, some of the other techniques that are free, but people won’t use them because they’re not packaged beautifully. Like the more expensive tools that the evidence is they don’t work. And it fascinates me.

 

Scott McArthur: 24:41 So there is a delusion there, but I have to also reign back on how your listeners might think they are. Because I think most people are doing their best. You know, I’m not having a go at people. It’s just that they sometimes don’t get the opportunity whether it’s time or over measurement or whatever it is, the noise that’s round about them. I mean, I’m very interested in the idea that the attention economy, you know, they’re so busy with so much coming at them, they’ve no got time to do a deep dive into their thinking and that they’re happier reading something and you know, some Mickey Mouse Journal that it works. Then actually looking behind and understanding and I mean to really understand a lot of that stuff it takes decades. You know, it’s not some you can just do, you know, do a two week course and suddenly you’re a therapist. That’s not how the world works. A lot of, some people think it works.

 

James Nathan: 25:32 No, I’m laughing because I’ve seen so many people recently who’ve done weekend courses in coaching and then suddenly start a business. Yeah, yeah. I’m a coach. Okay. Well what does that actually mean? You know, where’s the experience that you’re bringing to the party? Oh, I’ve done it two week course. Okay. Yeah, go on.

 

Scott McArthur: 25:49 Absolute right. But again, I see that as somewhere I can help because I guess I mentioned earlier that practical wisdom thing, I hope and pray that my experiences can help people shorten the path to wisdom. You know, if I can give them, you know, a connection to something or I can show them something that maybe it makes them surprised or go, oh really and then go off and find out for themselves, you know, oh, I remember that Scottish guy saying that there was an issue with us. I should go and, you know, I should be….. I encouraged them to rediscover that curiosity. There’s a lot of the time you lose that curiosity and I do believe that it’s a, it’s a muscle that we don’t practice enough once we get over the age of about 10, but I have a ferocious curiosity. That’s my whole power behind everything I do, is my curiosity.

 

James Nathan: 26:43 Well, you mentioned 10 year old. My daughter’s 10, and she’s absolutely fascinated with space at the moment. We were in Orlando for the Easter holidays and we went down to Cape Canaveral to NASA. And you know, ever since she wants to be an astronaut. You watch her mind expanding and expanding as she reads and reads and reads. It’s incredible. I hope it never stops.

 

Scott McArthur: 27:06 It’s beautiful. My hero and I have a few, but my hero top of the list is Carl Sagan who did the cosmo series many, many years ago. And he sadly passed away in 1986. But he opened my eyes. I was at university when he was, he was really at the peak of his powers. And he spoke about the beauty of it and the, and the sheer size and complexity of it. And it’s just a beautiful thing. And I thought that, oh, it’s almost like a spirituality without the need for another being, you know, it’s so big and so massive. It’s wonderful.

 

James Nathan: 27:48 Why do you think it stops when you’re 10 then?

 

Scott McArthur: 27:51 Well, that’s a good question. I think there’s a number of reasons for that. I think in a contemporary context it’s because we’re so busy and I mean there’s something, and this is something I often say on stage.

 

Scott McArthur: 28:05 You know, we create children who are, you know, stressed by their schoolwork and students who are harassed by getting a good degree. And we’re surprised why we have the stressed employees when they leave university. And I just don’t think that’s a virtuous transformation. So I think again, Eh, some of it’s down to measurement. There was a….. one of my favourite quotes about the wonderful Ken Robinson, he said this, he said human resources are sometimes like natural resources, you have to dig deep to find them. And I, and I think as wonderful human resources are like natural resources, sometimes you have to dig deep find them. But I think with kids, we don’t allow them to mature at their own pace. We still use that post industrial revolution model in our schools. And I don’t think that helps.

 

Scott McArthur: 28:59 But a lot of the pressures, you know, making a living, getting a job, companies you know making you work in a certain way with a job description on you and you’re having to pay your mortgage. So there are real pressures on you to conform I guess. But I think it’s a complex question and I don’t really know the answer to it, but what I do see is when I work with people and I try my best to get them to think, know, be curious again. It’s wonderful when you see them changing James and getting curious again, you know, asking the why question. No, not yet. Not believing everything they’re told.

 

James Nathan: 29:31 I just…. I’m an absolute optimist. I’m a nightmare for it to be honest. I know, I look at it and I really believe that the world is going to be better. You know, look at what we are talking about education there. I’ve got one child at at a local secondary school and sorry, local primary school and one of the private secondary school. And I think that the difference in the teaching styles is vast. And, you know, there’s, and I’m not going to be kind of a, you know, first world about this problem, but, you know, my daughter’s going to have to do a set of exams called SATS. The only purpose of those is for the school to rate itself. Secondary schools don’t look at them, the government secondary schools don’t look at them.

 

James Nathan: 30:16 Nobody wants to know anything about them apart from the school itself. But they put these kids through stress. You know, and then I look at the way my boy’s being taught. He’s in year seven, so he’s 12. He’s still very young. But he’s being taught to think and to expand his mind and to question. They’re not taught facts. They’re taught to think. And I think that’s a very, very important difference. You know, if we, if we carry that through into our business environment you know, we take people out of unis… unis for me was, I grew up at uni you know, changed my outlook on life completely. And I think that it’s vital that almost everybody, if they can put themselves through an experience, not necessarily a formal experience, but an experience like that, when we come out within just, I mean, I came out of university full of joy and full of life and went and photocopied for three days on my first days on an audit and thought, what the hell have I done? You know, you’re bashed back down to the lowest level. And then prove yourself. It’s completely arse about…… I’m going to start ranting. [laughs]

 

James Nathan: 31:30 Oh look, you know, if you ever pick up video my Vlogs, I do a lot of video casting from walking the dog are mostly ranting about something or other. One of my mates said to me, you should just recall it…. changed his name to the daily rant. Excellent. Scott, I’m so delighted you spent so much time and given us so much to think about as well. Could you leave us with one big thought? I’d love to hear your golden nugget, your one thing that people could do now and in the years to come to make their businesses a better place.

 

Scott McArthur: 32:02 Okay. I, that’s a lovely question. Let me take you back to when I was a kid and I was, had a definitely what we experienced when I was a kid and I had, you know, serious exposure to the church and there was a lot wrong with that, but there was some bits of that really have helped me understand things as I have gone into the business world. And one of those things was a wee mistake in the Bible. I think we could recognize really, really turn it round, and make us really appreciate what service is all about. And that mistake is often called the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. I think there’s a typo there I think it should be do unto others as they would have done unto them. And if we turn that around, and I’ve had someone call that the platinum rule. I don’t know where that came from, but how you have someone say that I think that is absolutely magic when you think about it deeply and it’s in France who said it well, he said, you know seek first to understand before being understood, Stephen Covey nicked it of course, but it was St Francis of Assisi who actually wrote it.

 

Scott McArthur: 33:10 That to me is the nugget. You know, listen, engage in dialogue, gaging conversation, have strong opinions but have them gently held. And that for me is the nugget.

 

James Nathan: 33:24 Scott, I love that. Thank you so, so much. It’s been great chatting with you.

 

Scott McArthur: 33:28 Thanks very much James. It’s been a pleasure.

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