Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: What's up, my friends? Welcome to another episode of A Brit and a Yank Talk Business.
I am Stuart Amadon. I'm the Yank. And with me is Tom Chowdacat. And he's the Brit. I think I said Chowdecat. Right then. Chowdhacot.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: I wasn't paying attention to hear you say cat.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Well, I'm glad that we resolved it.
So Tom is right now in the middle of writing. Yes, his laborious writing to serve the people, to bring. To bring great ideas into the space. So one of the things that you're writing right now is this.
You're writing about burning the ships, Tom. Burn the boats. Like, what are. What are we talking about? What's happening here?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: What is happening here?
I mean, when I started writing this thing, partly wonders, in conjunction with some stuff that you and I have just spoken about in how much people get paid in the States.
In the uk, there really isn't much of an incentive or there isn't a financial incentive to work hard.
You introduce minimum wage laws and progressive taxation, and you work harder, and you don't actually get paid that much more in line with kind of the effort that you put into your work and the rest of it. So my question is.
Well, the question that's kind of prompted this is like, okay, well, then what are the other things that kind of force you to. To work hard?
What does that look like?
There's a military strategist called Sun Tzu who wrote the Art of War, and he poses.
Well, a whole load of things. It's a great book, really short.
But this idea that if you're fighting against an enemy, you've got to give them a way out, because if you don't give them a way out, they will effectively fight till the death.
You put them in a situation where it's not possible for them to flee, so they're going to fight incredibly hard knowing that there's no other way out. So, well, what can that also look like? It can look like trying to take the shores of England. And this. Well, this didn't happen. But there's kind of a myth that the Normans burnt their ships when they landed in 1066, which is kind of fun because that's where my heritage is from, but we'll just ignore that for a moment.
So the question then is like, what does it look like to burn your ships when kind of money isn't the thing that's going to drive you to hard work? And the idea that God commands us to hard work, we engage with commerce and Work to bless our neighbors.
But also in kind of more critically, what I'm kind of thinking about is the fact that children are a blessing.
We're told to be fruitful and multiply and that children are arrows to a warrior. Yet in our day and age, seemingly we think that warriors shouldn't have many arrows and nobody wants blessings, so we don't want too much of that.
And there's also kind of anecdotal studies on the idea that there's this kind of correlation between large families and high net wealth individuals.
So the pagans would argue that like, okay, well, mum and dad earn lots of money and it gave them the income to be able to have large families. Now I would actually pose that that's probably, that's really, that's the other way around.
You obey God's law, you have lots of children, and suddenly there's this motivation where you have to, you've, you've kind of burnt your boats. Like, you have to earn enough money. Like one way or another, you've got to feed these people and you've got to get a house that's big enough to fit them all in.
And that spurs you on to work hard and generate that income and that blessing for others. And, and that really scales. So what else could that look like? Because I oppose that. There's also different levels to this.
So two of the other items in there that I kind of threw in were the idea that what's your endpoint that you're looking at? So if you have an endpoint where you have to generate income and you believe that work is good and that you want to earn loads of money, well, does a retirement policy make sense? And does your current job make sense?
Quit your job and stop paying a retirement fund and that will swiftly, like burn some boats and change the direction that you want to be fixated on and kind of the end point of all of this.
So I mean, that effectively is kind of a brief summary or synopsis of what I'm scribbling together.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Okay, so I think the Sun Tzu quote is pretty telling, right? So if you back somebody into a corner, they're going to fight twice as hard.
And I think effectively what's happened to Christians in the world today is we've been backed into a corner. Let's maybe start right there. We've been kind of forced into this situation where many people, not all Christians, not all Christians, but many Christians, have realized, oh, this is it. Like, this is Custard's last stand.
If we don't wake up now, we might not wake up. And so I think that's partly why we're seeing the resurgence reformation that we're experiencing right now. Christians are suddenly taking the education of their children very seriously. They're taking the economic sphere very seriously. Again, I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying we're seeing for the first time in, I don't know, 50 years, this upswell of Christians who are like, no, we're going to get involved in politics, we're going to get involved in business, and we're going to be hands on with the education and raising of our children like we have not been before. That's all positives and I think it is because, okay, we've been backed into a corner.
I think we realize that we might not get out of this alive.
And so we're willing to fight harder, we're willing to build more.
I think that's what Covid did to a lot of American Christians. Whenever that happened, they realized the size of the state, they realized their dependency upon the state, and they said, oh no, we have to fix this, we've got to do something about this.
Now as far as how do we. So in other words, the strategy works okay, this is an effective mechanism for us to build from. But then the next question that we have to ask is, okay, now how do we do it intentionally because it worked.
How do we help our people to recognize that what they're stepping into is a high degree of risk?
It's not safe. This goes back to other episodes that we've recorded before.
It's not safe here. And so I would pose the question to you, Tom, like, what are mechanisms, what are systems inside of your business that you have or could implement to stress to your employees, hey, the boats may not be burned all the way right now, but they are burning.
There's a high degree of risk here and that's good.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: I mean, so I've got something else kind of playing in my head at the same time here.
I've been asked to deliver a talk at like a men's breakfast in a few weeks time.
And the question to that is simply, Tom, how did you get here?
And the premise of it really? And what I want to talk about is the fact that there's actually more to being faithful to God's word and being a Christian than fire insurance. Now it's, that's kind of like duh
[00:08:16] Speaker A: and like, well, it's, it's duh for some, but it's not duh for all right,
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah, well, obviously, obviously.
But I suppose the burning of boats.
I don't know. I. I don't. I suppose this might just be a cultural difference because I don't think we are anywhere near where America is in that you guys saw Covid and when I say you guys, potentially there's a collective of Christians that saw Covid and went, what the hell is this?
We're going to go do this thing over here.
We don't have that.
But I wonder if what we are starting to get here instead of kind of the idea of kind of burning boats is the Christianity isn't just fire insurance. Like, we're called to something and oh, wait a minute, like, what is masculinity? And Christians in America seem to actually, like, they're actually interesting rather than a bunch of kind of wet Ned Flanders. And like, how did they get there? And like, what is that?
And that answers the question, you know, you kind of see that and you go, hang on a minute.
This is of substance. It's got a gravity to it, which is like pulling things in and pulling me in. Like, what exists behind that. So I don't know if, I don't know if kind of in the States you potentially are having a boat burning or what feels like a boat burning, whereas I'm not sure if you see that so much in the uk.
Yeah. So I hadn't thought of it that way around.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I do think it's happening because whenever we were there with you guys just a couple of months ago, there was a lot of folks gathered together in a room for that conference that seemed to be all thinking in the same way, thinking the same way about education, thinking the same way about corporate worship, thinking the same way about the family as a whole. So you might be experiencing the seeds, Right.
And not so much the fruit just yet, but the, the waves are happening, man. It's.
It's beginning.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: Could the. Could it be we're in a. Well, I suppose you were alluding to it a minute ago. We're in like a pre.
Boat burning stage.
So, like, yeah, two of the reasons that I started the business, one was because, like, I want to be able to say stuff that is faithful and in line with God's word on Twitter and not be worried about getting fired in conjunction with that. Like, I want to be able to give jobs to Christians who have been fired for saying such things.
So, yes, I suppose the thing that we're trying to. Or the, the structure that we're trying to build there is kind of preemptive for the boat burning.
Now there are some other boat burnings that have occurred in order to. To kind of speed up the building of this thing.
Yeah, I don't know.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I would agree.
As far as, like, the place, the position that you're in in England, it's not so much there's no going back from here, this point. Like, maybe they. They've. Their.
Their boats have already burned, and so they come to you.
They're like, please help, Tom.
But I think also there is. So one of the things that we say to employees whenever they come to work at page 50 is I just make it really plain to them whenever they're coming in the door. I'm like, hey, all of this could go away in a couple of months.
We're not safe here.
We are people who operate with risk because we're not risk averse. We're fine with risk.
We are people who say what we believe in the public space.
There could be degrees of blowback that happen from that. And I stress that to every single employee that we bring on. I'm like, if you're coming to work here, you're accepting a degree of risk just stepping in the door.
And in a sense, that is me trying to help them realize the boat burning. And if somebody did blacklist us because of our religious or political beliefs, that would affect these employees for the rest of their days. Oh, you worked for those guys. Oh, well, you can't. I don't know if you can work here. I don't know if we'll have a place for you.
There is a sense in which that happens, and I don't intend on turning that down.
You know, if anything, I intend on turning it up before I'm dead.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: I suppose it is a boat burning.
I've got a good friend who we. We did some podcast episodes together a couple of years ago. He's still running his podcast, but me kind of being associated with him one, but then also kind of joining in on those conversations. Was a boat burning, like, even. And it kind of. It's fueled these conversations now. Like, I. I feel very content at having any conversation with you and it being recorded and published because of, I know, other conversations to the same degree or whatever you want to say already exist. So, like, we're already in this space where, like, you can't go back on this stuff. And it's. And it's incredibly. It's incredibly liberating as well. So not only do you have kind of the motivation to keep going, but, like, the Freedom. Like you've said this once, so you kind of have to stick by it and say it again, like go for it.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
There is a sense in which it's freeing because now you don't have to.
You could already be fired or not make the bids or whatever it might be. But let's also talk about the. What we don't want to do is burn boats because we're pyromaniacs.
Right.
And I think that that can be a thing that people deal with in this particular space, in our particular time and culture right now.
Some folks like to watch things burn. If I'm just going to run the analogy to its end. Okay.
And what I mean by that is they would like to say the controversial statements for the sake of the controversy, for the sake of getting the reactions. This is one of the reasons that I don't like and I think they're just poor strategy to begin with. The, the anonymous accounts that operate inside of social media platforms.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: But I would say that's not, that's not boat burning.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: No, that's what I'm saying. I agree.
I agreed 100%. They're, they're cowards.
They're hiding and not willing to put their name behind something. If you, if you're gonna say something, put your name on it and actually take the risk.
The risk, the absence of risk is creating this culture where people can just shout whatever thing, whatever controversial statement, whatever controversial thing they would like to shout from the rooftops and not feel any consequence of it. That's not reality. Also, it's just not true.
One of the things too that people should probably understand is there's no real such thing as an anonymous account on the Internet. Like your IP addresses are stored.
I work in digital technology. Everything that you've said is attached to you whether you like it or not.
But this idea that it could.
But this idea, sorry, this idea that it could not be attached to you has given us a degree of idiocy in interaction in the public sphere to where whenever you and I come along and say things that are well reasoned and articulated and willing to attach our names to, feels like it has less of an edge or less of a risk which might be a benefit to us. Honestly, it could be beneficial. I don't know.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: So where's the anarchy that you kind of alluded to there? Are you suggesting that the, the anons.
I kind of just running around burning stuff, but in a half hearted way creating havoc and a bit of a mess that potentially you and I have to deal with.
Yeah. Is that. Or are you preempting, like, people making reckless moves? Because I think in the uk, I'm like, I've got a.
People aren't going to be reckless. Like, it just. It's not in our nature. We just don't do it. Like, I want to encourage people to take greater risks and just point out that, like, risk taking is good and there is a ditch on the other side. And I almost have to say that because that's what they're terrified about running into. So at least I can be like, I am aware there's this ditch you're all scared of. It's a lot further away than you think it is.
But I'm not scared about people going into the ditch because not many people are going to go in there. If they do, they're going to learn a lot and great work for, like, ending up in the ditch. You found it.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
So maybe what I'm saying is.
Yeah, I think this is a better way to put it. There's a difference between a strategic burn and a Marxist burn. A strategic burn says, hey, we can't go that way. We can only go this way.
That's a strategic burn. Okay.
It's also comparable to, like, the way that we would. So in the States, we'll burn the underbrush in forests from time to time to be able to help the trees take hold and grow larger and keep the underbrush away from the base. And we'll burn the underbrush. It's a strategic burn, a burn it all to the ground mentality so we can start over.
That's a Marxian idea.
That's an evolutionary idea. Out of the ashes will rise new life.
We'll destroy everything so that new things can come up, because everything's crap anyway. That's not a Christian ideology.
A Christian ideology would be fundamentally that, hey, generally speaking, the trajectory of human history is positive, and we're going to continue to walk along that positive trajectory over time. That doesn't mean that everything that happens is good.
That does mean that sometimes you have to make the decision to burn down an institution. Sometimes you look around and you say, well, this didn't work, so we're gonna have to just shut it down before the left is take it over. So here we go. Yeah. And then you move on to the next thing.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: The example in there is potentially someone posted this on, like, a substack note. I think
[00:19:24] Speaker A: the.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: The potential responses that you get to being called a Nazi one is that one of them is to go well, I'm. I'm not that God is good. And the other is to go, oh, yeah, well, I'll just accept the term. And if you're gonna call me anyway, I might as well use that as an excuse to burn some stuff or actually look a bit like a Nazi.
And yeah, that's not strategic in any way. That's setting your own hair on fire and then running around like a maniac.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it does take.
The whole point of the Conquistadors burning the ships was that it was a strategic play. It was a thought forward strategic play. Hey, we can't go home, or at least we're not going home for a long time, okay? So you got to. You have to survive here. You have to build here.
And so there, I think in business specifically, there's opportunity to think that way.
Hey, guys, we're here now. We got to build forward. Now you as the leader, have to make sure that you do that in a time where it's going to work.
You don't burn everything down at a time where it's actually going to destroy the business.
But you look around and you say, well, I think if we have no choice but to go forward and build this way, then we can make it forward.
We could do this.
There's a similar situation. One of my favorite movies, the Hunt for Red October, has this moment in it where the captain of a Russian submarine is defecting, and he's got his officers to agree to defect with him. And they all sit down at a table for a meeting. And some of his officers who have already agreed to defect with him and come to the United States, they're starting to get cold feet and they're freaking out and they're saying, oh, no, we don't. We don't actually want to do this. Oh, let's just go back. Let's just go back.
And this smart leader who's the head of them, he sits down and he says, just so everybody knows, before we left, I wrote a letter to Moscow to tell them that we were all defecting.
And everybody's like, what?
Why did you do that? Now it's suicide. He was like. And he gives the exact same analogy. He was like, well, let me talk to you about burning the ships. We can't go back.
We can only go forward now. And it was to their advantage. Now. It stressed everybody out and everybody panicked.
But at the end of it, they did make it to the States. They did manage to defect.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
I suppose the question here then, those who are like, no, Your climate.
So there's different degrees of boat burning. You know, another way could be I've got lots of kids, they, they need lots of food.
Or another could be I've gone and bought a really big house and I need to pay for my mortgage.
Now two different things may look similar, I suppose. Where is the ditch on the other side? And how do you, how do you identify it? How do you try not to end up in it?
And also in here, I suppose the underlying question is or point helping others to see that there is a ditch or helping to recognize that the others are terrified that there's a ditch on the other side and being like, no, it's okay, we know where it is.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think what you're really asking is how to develop skills of risk assessment.
And you, I mean, you develop skills of risk assessment by taking risks.
You start by saying, well, this could end really badly, but it probably won't.
So we're going to shoot for it. Like an easy example is what businesses do this all the time. They look inside of their business and they say, what's the least profitable thing that we do? Okay, that, okay, we're not doing that anymore. Well, that makes everybody freak out because there are people who, that's what they, that's their whole job. They do that and they say, is my job safe? You know, and then there are the other people who say, but that, that thing that you're about to cut off counts for like 25% of our revenue every year. Like, what are you going to do when we don't have that 25% of revenue? And you as the leader have to say, hey guys, we're not doing it anymore.
It's not. We're not here to be safe. We're here to grow and build.
You kind of have to build that into your culture. I would say beforehand. We're not here to make sure that everybody just gets to keep cushy jobs for the rest of their days and has the four hour work week or whatever.
We're here to build an institution that continues to grow aggressively to serve other people in the world.
That's what we're chasing.
We're not chasing safety. Safety is not the primary goal.
Success, Glory to the Lord is the goal. And that's a risky mission. Right?
There's going to be problems all along the way. There's going to be risk all along the way. We've had really bad months in our company, like months where it's like, oh no, are we going to make it that's happened and it is partly because of risks that we've taken as a business. We've hired people maybe a little sooner than most companies would hire them, but the opportunity seems to be presenting itself and the work is coming in. The numbers are there for its effect. But you know this, just because the numbers are there right now doesn't mean that they'll be there in 60 days, doesn't mean that they'll be there in 90 days.
But also that hiring is a type of ship burning, at least for the business owner and the C suite people, because you've got them on the team and now they have to get paid.
You know, I've heard stories of business owners, of employers who the most life transforming thing for them in the business is when payroll is coming up in a few days and they realize they don't have the money to cover it.
That's one of those no take back moments where they say, oh, okay, then I have to, I have to get to work and I can never do that again. Whatever that was, whatever got you into
[00:26:18] Speaker B: that situation, I want to read out because talking about safety, I mean, this is kind of just hilarious.
So this is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt and we're moving to a new premises sometime soon. And I want to stick this on the wall, okay, maybe remove the word America, but this is what I want on the wall. So the things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, and love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life.
I mean, I find this hilarious that we're talking about risk assessment when like half of what we do all day long is risk assessment. But the idea that like you can't work out, it's like when you're training, okay, whether it's for endurance sport or weightlifting or whatever it is. Like someone mentioned this to me the other day, they were like, tommy, you over training. And I was like, I hadn't even considered that. Am I over training now? I don't think I am in the particular setting that I'm thinking about. But like we want to be at the cusp of over training. And the only way you're going to discover that is by occasionally going over the edge, is occasionally kind of making the error, occasionally failing.
So if we want to be making real progress, if we're forever in the preempting a potential failure or a risk or a hazard that may not exist and may have only existed one in a hundred occasions, and really the worst thing that happened was someone broke their finger.
The cost of that broken finger is actually incredibly low. If you're talking those kind of stats and depending on kind of the work that you're doing and you need to be weighing those things up, incidents are going to happen kind of full stop. And this is going to sound ridiculous. My industry are always talking about zero harm. Like that is written absolutely everywhere and I hate it. It is impossible. It is a joke. It's going to send everyone backwards.
And you see it crippling industries. You wander around, some companies, some large energy companies in particular make massive pieces of hardware and they are terrified about the health and safety managers. And that's because the health and safety managers, if they suspect that something might maybe go wrong, they will come down like a ton of bricks on individuals.
Productivity disappears.
And just marrying that with the business piece, occasionally we want to fail actually because we need to know where those limits are and where those gains are and what's going to happen in the future. We can't learn without that.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Yes, well, and the failure. Yes, the failure teaches you what not to do. That's such an easy pithy way to say that. Like you to only avoid failure the whole time. You don't learn nearly, I would argue you don't learn nearly as much. But having the freedom and the opportunity to fail is great.
It teaches you to own it. It teaches you to be teachable.
You and I have had this conversation several times, like just about, hey, that last thing that we delivered wasn't great.
So we're going to course correct and make sure that it gets better moving forward. That's only ever helpful, do you know what I'm saying? And to operate in this space where you have no room to screw something up, you're not going to get better. Now there's a difference between chronic failure and occasional failure in a new space. You know, like chronic failure points to you have a systemic or a personnel problem and you better fix it.
Yes. You know, but occasional failure is such a necessary part of what we do.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah, well I think in there you've got, there's a recklessness or a degree of humility. Like a recklessness is just, it's irresponsible kind of full stop the end. Whereas a degree of humility you're going to learn from your failures and you're going to allow people to tell you that stuff is, you did that rubbish, do it again better next time. I have the opportunity to grow and it's through that failure you grow. I suppose it's exactly like the weightlifting piece. Like you're tearing muscles, you're breaking stuff, and the correction of that breaking stuff is a growth of strength.
That's the analogy that we should be thinking about.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. Yes.
So burn the ships.
Just don't burn for burning's sake. Don't become a pyromaniac.
But, you know, go find some ships
[00:30:52] Speaker B: to burn and do a risk assessment.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And think about it before you do it. Or, you know, at least a little bit.
My hope for a podcast like this is to be able to push people in who are risk averse, to push them to take some risks and maybe screw it up first.
That's only going to be helpful.
It's only going to be able to. Oh, yeah, I made a mistake.
That taught me a lot. Let's move on.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: I mean, something else I'm going to throw in. So when I used to be employed working somewhere completely different, my favorite days were when everything went wrong.
I once drove in a small car to Mongolia. Okay. And my favorite day was the day that we tried to drive through a Ford and we flooded the engine and the car wouldn't start and there was no one around for hundreds of miles and we had to, like, flag people down and take the top of the engine apart and not really know what we were doing.
They're awesome days.
Like, you just have no idea what's going to go on and how are you going to get through it. And that's the fun of it. So, like, I think you're terrified of things failing when actually, like, they're not that bad when they fail and you have no idea what's going to happen. And it's a overcorrection of control. Like, not only do you want to go, I don't want to end up there, but it's like if I end up there, I don't know what I would do.
Get over it.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: Yeah, get over it. Get to work.
Take risk. Amen.
Done. Guys. Thank you all so much for listening to another episode of a Britanny Yank Talk Business. If you've got topics that you would like to see discussed on the show, we would love to hear. You can go to brittanyanktalkbusiness.com and submit those topics through our form. Yes, that's right. We have a website, ladies and gentlemen. We have a website.
Thank you guys so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
