Do you know Badger? His video "Don't let yourself be scratched! How much does an hour of freelance work really cost?" is legendary in the freelance community. Because someone finally tells them, firmly but simply, how to ask for money.
Petr Pouchlý has been a Badger since he was a scout, especially under this nickname the whole community knows him. Petr is a designer of organizational development and business strategies. He is the founder of Court of Moravia, a freelance firm that develops leadership in other companies. They put a face on change in companies, they drive change. It's not about classical change management, it's about behavioural change. Behavior change. Because whatever we think, we always approach change with a kind of resistance by our human nature. Why change it if it works? Change hurts and if we don't believe in it, we don't do it, or we do it but with resistance.
Petr is not only a game designer, but mainly a teamleader and an incredibly fun and innovative presenter and trainer. He lectures on leadership at Masaryk University and is invited to conferences and companies. I've been waiting a year for this interview, it's longer than other times, but it's worth listening to because we've discussed:
🔸 How to manage change in an organisation?
🔸 What is the hardest part of change management?
🔸 Why must change have a face? And how to do it if I can't talk?
🔸 What is the Whale hunting methodology?
🔸 What are the basic principles of Whale hunting?
And as a bonus, download the 9 principles of Whale hunting that Peter has worked out for you.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is Zahžeh. In Zážeh we share our experience in B2B business, today we're going to share our experience in B2B business, in change management and we're going to talk about how to change in companies. Today, welcome to Peter Pouchly. Hi, Peter.
Petr Pouchlý
Hello.
Martin Hurych
Not to be confused, the captain of the Court of Moravia design studio, business mentor and teacher of service design at Masaryk University in Brno. Does that fit?
Petr Pouchlý
True, that could be me.
Where did the badger come from? And what does he have to do with Peter?
Martin Hurych
And a badger, which intrigued me. You even have it in your e-mail. Where did that come from?
Petr Pouchlý
Boy Scouts. It wasn't a scout then, we must have been just a tourist troop, because it was during the totalitarian era. I started out in the scouts, where everybody gets a nickname and I got the nickname badger. Through various peripheries, it then lasted with me until high school, where by happy accident I joined with a friend from summer camps in Biskupice. So it stayed with me through high school, a time when one usually discards childhood nicknames. Then came the digital age, the first message boards, MaMedia, Cyberspace, Mageo, where it was normal to have a nickname of up to eight characters and a 40-by-50 icon. So Badger survived the digital age and then I kept it as a brand.
Martin Hurych
What does a badger have to do with Peter? Do you have any similar characteristics?
Petr Pouchlý
That's a completely different identity. Almost no one calls me by my name. The badger is a mythological animal, appearing mainly in Anglo-Saxon mythology, and it has a tarot card of the liege. He's such a loyal and faithful supporter who can bite and not let go of his subject. At the same time, he is very sensitive to when the pack doesn't work or he is left alone, he is a loyalist. He is an animal accustomed to work, digging his castles, which he builds, expands and then lets the old parts to foxes and other animals that do not dig. He is such a loyal pawn that he wears a shield and will fight for his master at the worst. Whereas Peter is from a different mythology altogether, the rock, the key holder, the first apostle, but I never looked for a connection between them.
How did the Court of Moravia come into being? What does it do?
Martin Hurych
As you can see, today is going to be really special. That's why I enjoy Peter so much, and that's why he's here. I would have a similar question about the name of the company, Court of Moravia. How did that come about? It's not a standard company name in Bohemia and Moravia.
Petr Pouchlý
That's a good quiz question, what does one think of as Court of Moravia. Maybe a wine court, maybe a noble castle. The punch line is so funny. There are such things as role playing games. These are games where people sit around a table and one of the most famous ones right after DnD, which are the number one players on the market, is World of Darkness. Those are games where you're playing vampires, you're a secret vampire society. If you've ever seen Interview with a Vampire with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, that's what it is. In 1997 a guy came from France who played these games and said he was going to do it in Brno and called it Court of Moravia. From his point of view it was a vampire court of Moravia. I fell for it, I thought it was really cool. I was like 17, 18 years old at the time when I first encountered this gothic punk world. Xavier then went back when he finished his studies in Brno and I went on to create urban games under the brand Court of Moravia, which was a fictional game world. We adopted the name with a bunch of people who were doing interactive design through larps, through theatre without an audience, through live role play. Then when we started the non-profit and started doing more educational projects, where there were no longer vampires, but real themes, we kept Court of Moravia. That's how the community knew us. Then when we rebranded in 2010, 2011, and then definitely 2013 to an LLC, we kept the name because we couldn't imagine it being any other name.
Martin Hurych
So what are you doing today? What do you do for a living and what would be on your computers or on your desks if we came to you?
Petr Pouchlý
We'll have Mural or Miro and Zoom on our computers, but we have posters, sketches, stickers and magnets all over our desks and walls. We love visual representation, it's what's left over from design. We make our living today by delivering sustainable change within organisations. After we get a sense of what the change is supposed to be for and clarify with the client that it will never be as stellar as they envision it, we try to push it through everyone else's reluctance. It's a bit of a thankless job. It's always an advantage to have someone on the outside doing it rather than completely on the inside. We don't have as many connections, so that's the good thing about it, that we're not somehow easily employable, but at the same time it has a lot of other risks. We want to do something different and deliver it through design techniques to make it happen. But it's a long haul, even the fastest things take units of months and the big complex organisational changes like reconfiguring how things work can take anywhere from 2-5 years.
How to manage change in an organisation?
Martin Hurych
I'm going to go into it a little bit more here, because in the last episode there was an interim change manager. From what you've said so far, it sounds like you're doing it differently. So how do you do it?
Petr Pouchlý
Change management as a separate discipline is important to us. Technically it gives a head and heel, it's good to make a proposal of why we should do things differently and what good it will do. I can do it by setting the rules and others have to go along with it. But that can result in those people coming to terms with it in their own way and very cleverly doing the minimum to not be bothered by it but to make it work somehow. So there is some impact there, but maybe 20, 30% at best. Sometimes it completely messes up the organization and often what happens is that six months, a year later, the dog doesn't bark anymore. When we go for change, the change management itself, the technical solution, is often known by the client, especially if it is an IT solution. What we then do is how to deliver it to that organization, how to get the masses to embrace the change and follow it. That's a whole different discipline. Change management is the technical way of doing it, but the culture change is then getting those people ready for it. We really only focus inward on organizations, which is a huge advantage, because those organizations in general, whatever they call themselves, are at best enlightened absolutism. It's basically a dictatorship, which of course those leaders like to see as enlightened absolutism. The giant advantage is that when it has a strong sponsor who knows what it wants, which may not be easy, because then it's easy to push. In the public space, or in local politics for example, this is terribly difficult because there is not that one holder of that paradigm within the social field. There are different paradigms, different perspectives, different interest groups clashing, and that's the confusion that we avoid. We steal some techniques from this area on how to work, there are great inspirations there, but at the same time it's easier because there's usually someone in the organisation who tells you which way is north. The fact that it might not be the most strategically smart solution, or that sometimes it's important to get your head set right first, is part of the game, but after that it's good to have something to hold on to.
What is the hardest part of change management?
Martin Hurych
You say that on paper it's fine and terribly easy, but in reality it's hard, you've mentioned it here several times. What do you think is the hardest thing about change management or change in general in an organisation?
Petr Pouchlý
It's not at all easy to do on paper, that's not what I meant. I just mean that classic change management works a lot with the muster of assignments from the desk. Somewhere a great war plan gets devised, but every war plan fails the first moment of the battle. It's not the plan that's important, it's the planning process. Now I'm going to go back to what's hard. We, as humans, are both incredibly lazy and terribly smart to stay lazy. That defines Homo sapiens sapiens. Our brains only function in two modes, the learning, experimenting, exploring mode and the delivering and performing mode. The head can only work effectively in one mode. It can switch, but the older we get, the more entrenched our performance-oriented routines become. We are determined by our environment. Because of this, when we are in the performance phase, we do what we already know how to do to deliver the same performance over and over again. We feel relatively comfortable in that because it's some security in a relatively uncertain world, and we're rewarded for it. When someone suddenly tells us we're not doing something right, we take it terribly personally and do everything we can to stay with our status quo. Being able to switch into experimentation and learning mode is normal for kids, but we systematically kill that in them through elementary and middle school. They then get their last fits in college and often enter the workforce thinking they already know everything, they are no longer learning and developing. So it's hard to switch back into learning mode. There is the strongest clash between the status quo and the new reality, because I feel threatened. I don't have many certainties in my life, and they're stealing my job. A lot of people go to work for mental rest. They have cognitive challenges at home, while at work they do what they know how to do, what they're good at, and what's on their business card. He's already been scooped up as being good and they don't want to lose that face, it's a matter of ego and some certainty inside because we need to have some things certain. The more insecurities there are, the more we hold on to the job. Ironically, given that we have some 3 pillars, friends, extended family and work, that family is a constant constant change. We are evolving, so even in a partnership between two people, what was three years ago doesn't apply because the relationship is moving somewhere. Now kids come into it, now a whole new state with aging parents, and there's an awful lot of uncertainty. So I can't find certainty there and I have to react to that because it's pushing me emotionally. Friends kind of change over as different stages of life end, so I feel like the strongest friendships were in high school and college. Then those die because people have kids at different times, and it plows through everything. So friends are just sort of neighbors and acquaintances rather than a real security of intimacy. That leaves me with work. Ironically, work is the strongest pillar that holds stability. If things start to change at work, the soul of each individual feels threatened and logically fights against it in various ways. It doesn't deliberately try to sabotage itself, it tries to maintain its own integrity and a kind of peace. It's hard because it goes against the very foundation of who we are. We hate change.
Should change be planned and communicated in advance?
Martin Hurych
I realize now that some of my clients have the desire to evolve their business, they have the desire to improve it permanently, they have the desire to evolve with the market, they have the desire to innovate and change permanently. From what you're saying, just so I don't just pound these people and permanently cut their legs off at the chair, should that change be planned and communicated in advance? Should it be timed somehow so that those people are ready for it, or how do you approach it?
Petr Pouchlý
Change happens all the time. Every day there is a change and it's like pouring milk into coffee. If I put one drop of milk in my coffee, it looks like nothing has changed from the outside, but that drop of milk is there. By gradually pouring milk into the coffee, it eventually becomes milk and coffee. Change is constantly happening and flipping the change is a constant state of mind. The worst of change management is to say we are in state a, we will be in state b, and after the change we don't have to change again. It sells well, everyone wants to hear it, even the innovative leader wants to hear it, but it's not true. So breaking it down into sub-points is an important first step. There's one giant trap at the beginning. A lot of owners don't really want to change. They want others to do things differently, the way they want to do things, they see that as change, but basically they just want others to change. Often the difficulty is to really make that change happen, so the leader really has to be one of the pillars. They have to be seen to believe in the change, they have to talk about it and push it forward. That means that they have to know the art of the king's speech, we call it the art of the command speech, and they have to actively step into it and have the energy and power to do it. In a lot of organizations, the hardest change is when the owner says they want the change to be someone else taking over from them. It doesn't matter which role he or she is trying to get out of. It's terribly hard because there's a missing leadership aspect where the person who is his number two suddenly feels that the king is tired and is withdrawing from the battlefield. He's got to take over, and that succession is a completely different discipline than when that leader is leading. A lot of times the leader doesn't want to lead the change, and it's one of the important pillars. When I cut him off, it's always multiply harder, which is why you don't get these changes from the middle or from the bottom terribly well. It sounds awfully nice on paper, but quite factually any change from below was not about the democratising society voting something in. Any change in human history from below has been that another leader, more powerful than the previous leader, has come along and knocked him out of the saddle. Sometimes the revolution ate him right back up, Robespierre could tell the story, and sometimes he stood his ground and basically became the new enlightened absolutist. The last thing he wanted was to further the revolutionary movement. He wanted to preserve the new status quo in which he sits on the throne. It is good to think about change in a broader context. We start by expanding the context of what you want to achieve with the change and at what minimal change it already gives you value. Only then do we talk about what it's going to cost and if there's a positive plus, then we've got a job to do. The second key question is what happens if the change doesn't happen, what change does the status quo create. Every new day is a new day and people come in with a new thing, a new energy, or conversely an old energy, and a lot of people don't want to see that. It's the basis of some whole coaching. The foundation is being able to imagine with that client what the future might look like if they succeed, and then being able to imagine what the future might look like if they fail. An awful lot of people are too lazy to think about what the future might look like because it would force them out of some satisfied box. That's also why a lot of people say they hate coaches. So we start with this. By the way, it also often leads to the fact that we don't go any further in business because the client kicks us in the ass and says it would be too complicated. It scares them, but more importantly they realize it's not going to be as easy as it looked. Sometimes they even realize that it's not a change that's really going to do any good. On the other hand, interesting things happen where people really see the future challenge, understand why they're going there, know how to tread the path, and let others follow. But it's complicated and a lot of business owners and boards don't have the chops to do it.
Why must change have a face? And how to do it if I can't talk?
Martin Hurych
You said that if the leader doesn't join, it's either impossible or multiply harder. My bubble is often the introverts who really want change, but maybe they aren't the rhetors who get in front of the company and start talking it all up. If I take and empower a number two, can it work?
Petr Pouchlý
It's working. I can be completely invisible, a strategist somewhere in the background, but the change must have a face. People need something to follow. If those people know the guy is just the Mouth of Sauron, it's not gonna work. When that happens in that company, that person is a buffoon. It doesn't make sense, it dehumanizes the whole thing. As long as it's on the level that the owner has the aura of a quiet brain, but at the same time firmly believes in his COO or someone else, it works. There just can't be a sense that he's planting some kind of padding. On the other hand, if any nobleman or lord of the fief could not speak to his people, he was not regularly seen, so all the tournaments, celebrations and harvest festivals were made, so it was terribly difficult. When the lord of the fief installed a new baron or count, he would come to the subjects whose lord had fallen in the field and show them the new leader. He introduced his qualities, showed his CV, explained why he was good, and then they did a ritual together in which he knelt down and said he would be his fief vassal. Suddenly they all saw that the king, though distant, had empowered someone else, was in dialogue with them, and would come once in a while. That is why the Czechs accepted some foreign rulers as their own. That is why, in a way, the current Babiš also goes around with his bus to every Upper Dolní, because that is where the 8,000,000 voters are. He is in touch with them, he does it very well, he does not take the black A8 to the square and papalise, but stops two corners away and walks there. These people need to feel that the monarch is theirs for a while at least and then they are able to forgive him for having fabulous wealth because they have been brought up on fairy tales that monarchs are not to be envied. I have to be seen and heard as a leader, and that's my job. If you look at the world's companies, the Fortune 500, the American ethos is there. These people can speak, they are visible, they have a brand, and you can't do it without that. So if I'm a different type, if I'm a technical person, I'm going to holport with someone who pushes these things, but is not just an established number two. They have to be the soul of the company, the face that goes to be seen, and then it works.
What is Whale hunting methodology?
Martin Hurych
It generates a bunch of questions in me, however we still promised a trade in this piece, so let's turn the page. You mentor companies, you work with them, you tweak their business strategies. When we talked about what fundamentally each of us are coming from, you told me that your book that inspired you is Whale Hunting. If I understand correctly, it's primarily about trading with corporations and big targets.
Petr Pouchlý
It's not as rocket science as it sounds. Whale hunting is a methodology from Tom Searcy and Barbara Weaver Smith that is terribly old. It's the late 1990s, the beginning of the noughties in America, where consultative sales and selling of complex long-term solutions begins. A lot of it has to do with modern technology. So there was a need to do it differently. In the meantime, consulting and long sales has been inherited by a lot of other people, but these people have given it a coherent form. I left corporate, where I had been doing international business in telecommunications for the last 5 years, and if I had been sitting in that corporate chair, I would have automatically made those moves because they seemed obvious to me there. But as I left for a small studio, I lived under the impression that those rules didn't apply to us. We were selling something in Croatia and their CFO, as a rule the most important person, wanted us, set us up and gave me a clear list of people who would make decisions about us. I took it, but I didn't hear from any of them. It was 2014, they were discussing us and 6 other options and we didn't get the offer. So I asked Juraj what we had done wrong and he told me that he had given me the contact details of the people who were going to make the decision about us, and from them he learned that I had never called them. I felt like a two- year-old schoolboy at that moment. He recommended that I read a book called Whale Hunting that might help me.
For a long time I let the book lie aside, until I got to it some 2, 3 years later, when it was necessary to put some sales process in our company. It wasn't quite buoyant anymore and at that time we were considering buying our first salesperson, pulling in someone who was downright salesy. So I jumped in and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It's nothing that would surprise maybe you, it has a logical sequence and it's broken down into 9 steps on a beautiful parallel to Inuit whaling. You're a small studio, a small player who prepares all year to hunt one big whale. When it succeeds, your village grows and thrives all the next year. The time when the whales hang around Greenland and northern Canada is 3 weeks out of the year. If it doesn't work out, you're out of luck, you have to hammer seagulls and seals, you're chipping lichen and you're not doing well. The parallel is very apt. It's about you, as a small player, conducting business with a much bigger player who has some reasons why he wants you and some reasons why he doesn't want you. You also have some reasons why you want him and, of course, some risks that are involved. After all, taking down a seal is not nearly as hard as taking down a whale in an umiak, which is a boat for 6 people and a spearman. You also have to hit a good whale, you need to hit a female that isn't pregnant, and anything you hit outside of that will drag you down. After you hit her, the whale drags you around the sea for maybe 5, 6 days and you have to not starve to death in the meantime. Again, it's a nice parallel to normal business, where you already believe you've caught the whale, but by the time the real work starts and the first invoices come in, there's still 4 months to go, and you haven't made a stock in the umiak in the meantime. So there's a lot of nice parallels there that are very apt, but it's not particularly revelatory. What I think is the most interesting part of Whale Hunting is the eighth and ninth chapters that tell what has changed. It's no longer sales that sells in isolation, selling complex solutions needs the involvement of the entire organization. I really see this everywhere these days, and it doesn't matter if it's a small startup or a giant corporation. If sales is uprooted from the rest of the organization, it doesn't work. The salesperson is then Ironically, the one the client trusts the least. The salesman is the fun guy who basically opens and accepts, but there's a difference between a spearman and a real shaman who adds the glamour. Today, it's much more often the product owner of that delivery solution than the salesperson. The salesperson is kind of the connector there.
Martin Hurych
I call him a business case projectionist. I think selling complex solutions is complex on both sides, because complex solutions on the buying side are solved by a bunch of people, and they think of it as a complex problem. You, in order to solve it, have to pull in a bunch of your people. That means it's a complex issue on your side as well.
Petr Pouchlý
It's true. They call it caribou deer over there. The other people at the table are having a dialogue with each other in a completely different language, and in order for someone to give you the finger to implement another hostile system into their ecosystem, they need to know that there aren't people on the other side who don't know what they're talking about. They're just selling it. Plus, it has to be compatible. There's a non-trivial courtship dance that often neither the negotiating parties nor the procurement or sales person can understand to this depth because it's not their specialty. This is especially true when that organization has multiple products, or different variations. You can't teach that to the salesperson and then it's really about that teamwork. Whale hunting builds on that a lot, but for a book from the late 90s, I don't think it's fully gotten there yet. What I take from this for small businesses in general is to have a process, a CRM, and stick to that. They literally say 90% is process and 10% is magic. What I see with a lot of smaller and medium sized companies is that they have some sort of database but they don't know how to actively work with it. They throw a harpoon somewhere, the poor whale keeps pulling the harpoon, but they don't fight, they throw the twelfth, fifteenth harpoon until the whale has to come up behind them and ask them to hunt it down.
What is the Challenger sale method?
Petr Pouchlý
By the way, the other resource I really like for this is Challenger sales. That's a book by CEB, which has now been bought by Gartner, which unfortunately has pulled a lot of the resources that were previously available under itself. Fortunately, we caught it at a time when they didn't have as much under their belt. It's a god research sometime after the 2008, 2009 crisis where they did research on about 17,000 traders across 400 US firms on what types of traders exist. They have 5 basic archetypes that they didn't create just to then fit those traders in there, they created them from data research. I don't think there has been more research anywhere, or at least no one brags about it. They described on it how those people typically operate and how the most successful marketers operate, which they called challenger. Lone wolves are relatively successful, but you can't build a company on them.
Martin Hurych
If I remember correctly, coffee drinkers are the worst off. Isn't that right?
Petr Pouchlý
It's true. On the other hand, it must be said that the book works with a world that is not post- Bolshevik. We're still in the post-Bolshevik segment, where a coffee maker in big contracts can still be significantly more effective than many others. The lobbyist ties stretching back 3 generations still work well here. We're still the Balkans in this. Lobbyists don't stand much of a chance in America because the environment is significantly more liberal, lobbying is significantly more regulated, and they go after corrupt behavior harder. For our biggest businesses, it is still true that the network built up over the years works. The whole world is becoming pensioner controlled, but in post Bolshevik countries it is extreme. People who would have retired everywhere else are still holding the business by the balls here.
Martin Hurych
You can see in the Challenger sales that there is an expected drive from the buying side as well. Because you want to do business, so let's not hold back and if you challenge what the other side thinks, it's accepted, which is often not the case here.
Petr Pouchlý
By being in the realm of small startups and scaleups, I see that it's completely different there. It's not because it's a startup mindset, part of that mantra certainly is, it helps shape that, but it's much more of a completely plutocratic or meritocratic mindset of where it's going to clink. When these people have that good habit here, it's like heaven and smoke. That's changing and it's really a very generational thing for me.
9 basic principles of Whale hunting
Martin Hurych
I grew up in corporate on Selling above and below the line, which is perhaps a more scientific description of what you said, because the basics are very similar there. I would just ask you, you said it has 9 basic principles, if we can name them briefly here and then if you could write them up in a bonus that we'll add to this episode.
Petr Pouchlý
He could. We even made our own infographic for it, which we ran through Barbara. They even kind of adopted it, so it's possible that they're now using our graphic somewhere in their seminars, which is nice, plus they didn't even ask us to license it. It's got 3 parts. The first phase is the seek, the search for the whale and the search for it. The second phase is the hunt and the third phase is the processing. Each phase has 3 sub-phases, where in the first phase you have to figure out what type of whales you want to hunt and why. You have to figure out who you want to sell to and what you want to sell. Then comes the prospect sorting, where do I find them, where do they live, how do I get to them and then comparing your rowboat. You have to get close to them, start a discussion, don't sell, just know it's compatible and the whale is sending a signal that it will pull. The hunt phase starts with the first hardest one, you have to hack the speargun. Say very firmly that you are going into business and everything must be dealt with as quickly as possible. That's the totally cursed world of HR that we've been in for years. You don't want to do business with the HR department because they are promise makers who want it badly but forget to tell you in the meeting that they have zero political power in the company. It costs a lot of time when they are pulling you around and still hoping to buy you. If I harpoon, there's an important part of the ride. You have to endure the testing from the client to see if you're really valid for them, dispel all the gloom, deliver first value and show them that you have value for them. He then allows himself to slow down and let you pull him to your body. We, in our change management, have the very first job, which is a standardized product we call a compass. We sit down with the client for a day, on a paid basis, and help them clarify their thoughts through a facilitated design process. We then shake those down, tell him what we've heard from that, and tell him what it would be like if we proceeded in that way. That's what the client is paying for, because otherwise we'd be salting him. That way, we can tell him that it's not for us, that it's not the most effective way for him, and we give him a fair bounce. Once you're free, you're a commodity, not a client. It's also sometimes the case that before a client lets us do a big firm-wide change, they'll have us snap the Gordian knot of two small departments. The moment you succeed in this and get to the big project phase, you get to the phase that is called beaching in Whale hunting. This involves beaching the whale, where you have a short time to sew its mouth shut so it doesn't sink and then dismantle it. Every night after that, other predators come to share the whale with you. What this means in practice is that you start a project from a client, it's paid for, everything looks great, but it's not. The first 2, 3 months are terribly fragile because the client starts to realize where the real pain is. People who you've never seen before, but who you start digging under their hands, start to get very actively defensive, waiting for every mistake you make. It's hard to sustain this beaching phase, but then if you succeed, then it goes smoothly in turn and the salesman just watches that everything works. Then there are important things like celebration. The Inuit believe that if they return the whale's head to the sea, it will grow into a new whale. Celebration says you should appreciate the client in return. It's some post work, it's nurturing even in progress because in 2, 3 years your work will be over and a new one may start, but I have to maintain that relationship. It can happen that the project owner takes over that client, stops owning the business and the client buys it, especially if it's a small scaleup or a startup where there's not a lot of money. All of a sudden the client says they're all secure with them, and Covid and war come into it, and in our design industry right now, this has been a big problem for the last year or two. Corporates have learned to buy up these designers the way they learned to buy up HR people 20 years ago. After 2008, they built their own HR teams and the outside contractor was uninteresting. That's why Czech andragogy is completely ruined today, because it was dragged by the outside world and today it's closed. A few companies are doing it well and the rest are desperately scraping together the scraps. That's what will happen with design thinking, of course, or even over time with change management, because those organizations will pull it in. From the perspective of an Inuit village, you might have a hunter or someone from the umiak fall in love with a girl from the next village, but you, as a shaman, need to make sure your village flourishes. That individual people fall in love with another Indian girl, or a polar bear, happens, but you need to hold on to it. If a company grows up and enjoys the fact that nothing can go wrong, you need to keep an eye on it, because anything can go wrong. So this is the last stage. What I really like about the book is that it's about a huge respect for the whales. It's not hunting for fun, the Inuit are very grateful to the sea and the whales for their livelihood. All the people who work on a job should respect that client. If they talk badly about them inside the company, it could be the client learns or leaks something, and it spoils the whole mutual trust. That's what you, as a shaman, have to prevent. Nobody wants to work with people who don't want to do it. I have to say that one of the strongest arguments we had, even in the value proposition, was that we want to make change. We enjoy it and the client feels it. We have a bucket of feedback on that, which we collect from at least 10, 15 clients every year, and it's a recurring theme there that people believe in us, that we really want to take this change somewhere. At the point where it's not and people are not enjoying it, they either want to change the job or they want to change the whole job because there's no other way to do it in our business.
How is Whale hunting in Court of Moravia?
Martin Hurych
So how is Court of Moravia your Whale hunting going?
Petr Pouchlý
An honest answer would take another hour of explanation, because we have been through a very difficult time. We've basically reduced our numbers and focused significantly more on just going change delivery. We were doing it before, but we were doing some other things around it and it wasn't a very pleasant period. One aspect of it was that we didn't do well in the spring because the external threat was so strong that we couldn't execute two big orders. As a result, although we now had a holiday and could focus on changing things internally, the business was sitting on its arse. We weren't prepared for that. Rather, in January we naively told ourselves that Covid was finally finished, but after the light at the end of the tunnel came more darkness. Some people on the team didn't stand for it, including me. I made the mistake of resigning myself to it a little bit, covering it up for being dedicated to my daughter and my family. It was great, but I felt like I ran out of energy. But I'm grateful that I do the business and I'm the talking head, but for years I've been partners with Sylvia, who is my right hand, left hand devil. She's the one who sits on the phone, makes the calls, makes my appointments, has built relationships, and clients often ask me when I'm going to take her with me. She's a mom of two, she has some medical condition of her own that makes her happy to be home and when I need to be live with her, I go to her and we go for a walk. It would be a hard commute for her and without her I would be in a rut. If I can recommend anything to anyone, whether in a CEO or CSO role, have your Dr. Watson. It was awfully cool that when I was running a little low on energy, she was able to take those reins and pull it forward. Now that the heat has stopped, because I'm not totally a fan of summer, I like fall because people start responding to emails, I'm back in shape and I'm downright excited to get to work. Silvia's chasing me from meeting to meeting, and it's great. It's something Whale hunting doesn't prepare you for. Otherwise, we live by it. Our CRM is our gold. I really have to say that I was trained out of corporate and we had our first CRM sometime in 2010, the second one in 2013 and we used that until the year before last. Then we switched to a third one because they stopped open source developers to support it, so we had to go elsewhere. So we went to a solution that looked great in ads, but those developers would need to have their heads bashed against the wall sometimes because the thing lags, syncs badly, and so on. But we found that the competing ClickUp, we have Monday, is even worse, but unfortunately we haven't found anything that's better about ours. Monday is not a typical CRM, but that's fine with us because we can set up the processes. We set them up as if we were going after some nice looking Power BI, because for us it's also important that CRM colleagues didn't want to do it when it was ugly. That's a big pitfall of a lot of CRM, by the way, is that it's ugly. But that doesn't change the fact that when someone is selling Monday, and not exactly cheaply per account, one would expect synchronization between one's own servers to be a basic thing. That's a problem we were dealing with in 2006, not 2022. It's not that bad if you're not a power user and don't have a bucket of other things set up over it through Integromat.
The implementation for a lot of clients is that you have an excel spreadsheet, people fill it in and it annoys you. Let them fill in the excel spreadsheet, the Tooth Fairy comes in at 2am, sucks the data out and fills it in where you need it. Let them write the excel spreadsheet, let them put it on SharePoint because we'll do the rest of the magic. Getting people to click into your system is the wrong way to think about change. Not that it can't be done, but it's unnecessarily laborious. If people are filling it out wrong, it's okay, the robot algorithm will do it for you for $20 a month. You got people to do business with. You need to have data in the CRM, but you don't need a salesperson to write it in. Then when you buy a salesperson who suddenly sees that you're not a pain in the ass, they're then willing to compromise and have a completely different discussion with you. This isn't just about the trader, it applies to every role. Long story short, we have Whale hunting ourselves, we like to use it and have modified it for both small businesses and corporates. For each company the proposition looks a little different because we pull different aspects out of it. The story works great everywhere, but we combine it with sub things. It's not that we just take one book and tell that story. We set up the sales process primarily in terms of connecting with the rest of the organization. Now, leaving aside the startups and scaleups that have nothing, that's where we set it up from the beginning.
Where to find the Badger?
Martin Hurych
Good luck with that. Now that you've charmed and cajoled someone, where can we find you?
Petr Pouchlý
Thank you. LinkedIn is probably the easiest, I have my phone and email right there in the description. You can also find me on courtofmoravia.com, which is a very funny website by the way. And then we'll get it together.
Martin Hurych
Thank you, it was great talking to you.
Petr Pouchlý
Thank you for inviting me. See you on your TV screens and in your ears. Bye, guys.
Martin Hurych
It was a badger. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and like wherever you are, whether it's YouTube or your podcast app. Be sure to download Peter's bonus, which we'll be tweaking together, 9 Principles of Whale Hunting, which you can find on my website, www.martinhurych.com, in the Ignition section. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.