Wisdom of Ignorance: Why Knowing Less Could Be the Smartest Move You Make With Alan Gregerman

Alan Gregerman is the President and Chief Innovation Officer at VENTURE WORKS Inc, a consulting firm that helps organizations create innovative strategies, products, and services. He is a keynote speaker, award-winning author, and business consultant who helps companies and organizations unlock their teams’ genius zones. For over 25 years, Alan has designed and delivered high-impact keynotes for organizations, including Google, Marriott, Verizon, Mercedes-Benz, Kaiser-Permanente, Citibank, and Lockheed Martin.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:31] Alan Gregerman explains the concept of enlightened ignorance and why embracing ignorance can spark innovation
[5:23] The importance of consistently exceeding customer expectations
[11:27] Why outsider companies drive innovation breakthroughs in industries
[17:50] Balancing iteration with innovation to remain competitive
[23:27] The most substantial blind spot for leaders: misreading the market
[34:38] How e-commerce brands can build purpose-driven loyalty
[46:17] Driving innovation and customer engagement through cultural curiosity and international experiences
[49:30] The role of humility in recognizing breakthroughs in e-commerce
[53:20] How to integrate future-focused thinking into e-commerce brands
[1:06:12] Alan talks about how curiosity shaped his professional journey

In this episode…

With the speed of innovation, businesses often fall into the trap of relying on what they already know. While past expertise can bring incremental improvements, it rarely sparks the kind of breakthroughs that transform industries. How can companies avoid getting stuck in the comfort of their knowledge and uncover fresh ideas to stay relevant?

Innovation expert Alan Gregerman encourages brands to embrace enlightened ignorance, a mindset that values curiosity, humility, and openness to the unknown. Outsiders often disrupt industries because they see problems without being blinded by past experiences. Alan also emphasizes the importance of balancing iteration with innovation, continually raising the bar for customer expectations, and finding creative ways to differentiate in increasingly competitive markets. He pushes leaders to reevaluate their expertise and adopt a mindset of constant learning.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Alan Gregerman, President and Chief Innovation Officer at VENTURE WORKS Inc, about how enlightened ignorance can catalyze innovation. Alan discusses why outsiders often spark breakthroughs, how businesses can balance iteration with bold innovation, and why raising customer expectations is crucial to long-term growth.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“Enlightened ignorance means beginning each day admitting we don’t know all the answers, yet striving better.”
“Customers love you today only because they haven’t found something better yet; they’re always fickle.”
“Expertise makes things incrementally better, but breakthroughs happen when we start fresh and see differently.”
“Every brilliant idea is just the beginning of a journey, not the end of innovation.”
“The future isn’t about making something better — it’s about creating something truly powerful and different.”

Action Steps

Embrace enlightened ignorance daily: Starting each day with curiosity and humility helps leaders spot opportunities they may otherwise overlook. This mindset encourages breakthrough thinking instead of relying solely on past expertise.
Continuously raise customer expectations: Don’t assume what delights customers today will satisfy them tomorrow. By constantly improving products, services, and experiences, you reduce the risk of losing them to competitors.
Balance iteration with innovation: Incremental improvements build efficiency, while bold innovation prevents your business from becoming obsolete. Focusing on both ensures long-term growth and resilience.
Draw inspiration from outside your industry: Outsiders often disrupt markets by applying fresh perspectives. Exploring ideas from unrelated fields can spark unexpected breakthroughs within your business.
Differentiate through customer experience: Offering unique value, like tutorials, personalized support, or exclusive content, keeps your business distinct. This helps build loyalty in increasingly commoditized markets.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:05

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale your from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Businessweek called today's guest one of the most original thinkers in business today, and for good reason, Alan Gregerman is not your typical business strategist. He's an entrepreneur, award winning keynote speaker, community builder and the author of four best selling books, including his latest, The Wisdom of Ignorance. Over the course of his career, Alan has partnered with more than 400 companies and organizations, from scrappy startups to global powerhouses, helping them unlock breakthrough ideas and measurable results. His talks, workshops and writing have inspired over 700,000 people worldwide, challenging leaders to stop clinging to expertise and instead embrace what he calls enlightened ignorance. But Alan isn't just a thinker. He's a doer from surviving a life changing stroke and relearning how to speak to rescuing dogs, kayaking the Swedish coast and studying non profits that empower kids, his story is as human as it is visionary today, he joins us to challenge every e commerce founder and executive listening to rethink what it really means to innovate, stay relevant and lead in an uncertain future. Alan, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Alan Gregerman 1:34

Oh, thank you. I love the introduction. That was very kind. Yeah, no, I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to share some ideas with your audience, yeah,

William Harris 1:43

well, I'm very excited to have you here, and I do want to give a shout out to James Bracken, the fourth with BookThinkers, for putting us in touch to bring this episode out, James. Thank you very much. I have one last interruption. Then we're going to get right into the good stuff. It is our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that IPO Ed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com Okay, I want to talk about your book you've written that ignorance may or may not be bliss, but the right kind of ignorance can be genius. Can you unpack what you mean by enlightened ignorance and why it's especially relevant now?

Alan Gregerman 2:31

Okay, great. Well, you know, to do that, I need to step back a little bit, and the little bit is innovation. Is my guess important to everybody who's listening to your podcast, you know, and every company talks about the power of innovation, but my guess is, most companies do it wrong, and the reason I say they do it wrong is because they rely on kind of what they already know and the expertise they already have. And that might have gotten you into the market, but the truth is, in a world moving super fast, the half life of what we know is really short, and so all of us need to embrace kind of a mindset, if you will, of being open to thinking in new ways. And so enlightened ignorance is really how I describe kind of six skills that are fundamental to opening to kind of being open minded and engaging the world around us and really kind of remaining resilient and relevant in a world changing really fast. And if you even think about e-commerce, I mean the variety of offerings, the way those offerings happen, how they're supported, change all the time. So think about this, even if I'm successful as an entrepreneur, and I go in on a Monday and I say, Damn, we're really good. You know, the customers love what we do, and we're getting new kind of buyers or new subscribers, and I'm feeling pretty darn good about what I do. The reality is, maybe not this Monday or next Monday, but a few Mondays from now, somebody else is going to try and create kind of greater value in the opportunity that I've already been kind of attached to. And so I really need to pay attention to that, and I really need to be open minded about each week. Can we do better, you know, can we offer better value? Can we support our products and services better? Can we resonate with the customer? Can we understand the customer more deeply? So there are a lot of things to think about, and I believe, quite honestly, kind of enlightened ignorance, or beginning each day and saying we don't know all the answers and but we know we can be better, is really the start to doing that.

William Harris 4:42

It reminds me of something that I talked about with our team here at Elumynt, which is, you go back to Amazon, a lot of people would have maybe stopped to say, two day shipping. This is great. Like, this is the pinnacle of the fastest shipping we can ever get. But like, people are still gonna want it even better, right? So can we get to. Same day shipping, one day shipping, same day shipping. Can we get it in an hour? And there's always going to be a push for things to get better, better, faster, more important. And so our goal, even as an agency, when we're serving our clients, is to simply say, where can we take it and how do we get there, versus saying, you know, well, this is what the normal SLA is from every other agency. It's like, okay, so what? How can we do even better?

Alan Gregerman 5:23

No, I think you're right, and Amazon is a really good example. I mean, there's so many good examples, but think about this is we used to be happy, of course, with two day shipping, and then we wanted to either pay extra or have an account that got us one day shipping. And I'm actually waiting for something that I ordered this morning that's going to come between seven and 11 tonight, but step back a step. So if you think about Amazon, some of your audience will remember a company called Sears, Roebuck, right? And so what did Sears do? Sears was a mail order business. Amazon's kind of a mail order business. Sears basically made it possible for people anywhere in America to actually get the same products that people who live in big cities get, as long as they were willing initially, for the stage coach to come to town, they were willing to wait for that, and then the train, and then a truck. And so Sears came up with this idea. And over time, the expectation for Sears was, can I get it quicker? Sears kind of dropped the ball, right? They had a nation of customers, and yet they seeded what they did to Amazon, which, and you're right. People keep expecting you to raise the bar, and it's in every single business. And so we need to stay connected to our customers. We need to make sure we understand what matters to them, and then we need to constantly be innovating or improving what we do to create greater value for them, because they're fickle. You know, a lot of folks come to me and they say, Well, you know, our customers love us and what we offer. And I say, well, they love you and what you offer, because they haven't found anything better yet, but I can guarantee you, when they find something better, they might love you a little bit less.

William Harris 7:13

For those young people who are listening, who don't know what Sears is, I believe at one time, they were the largest company in the entire world. They were number one on the on the

Alan Gregerman 7:21

industry, yeah, and they had an amazing catalog. Yeah, people don't know it, but they can ask their parents or their grandparents. And so it came to your house, and you look through this catalog, and it was literally everything, not unlike the categories of Amazon. And you could say, oh, I want that. You know, I need a new wheelbarrow. And so you'd order it, and then you'd wait patiently for it to come. Well, we're not so patient now, but think about there's so many examples. Think about Netflix. Okay, so some of your listeners might remember when their parents took them into a blockbuster store and they got a video, then the folks at Netflix entrepreneurs trying to figure out a new idea, realized that DVD technology like, that's like a blast from the past, like, made it possible to send something that didn't weigh very much, and so they started mailing us like movies that we wanted to see. So we didn't have to leave home, we didn't have to go to a store, we didn't have late fees. If they had continued to just mail us DVDs, they'd go out of business, right? So then what happened? Streaming happened. Okay, so everybody listens to the streams on their phone or their iPad or everything, and so streaming happened. But streaming is like a commodity, so think about how many of your listeners are in businesses, which, if they're not careful, become commodities. Okay? So the folks at Netflix said, well, streaming is a commodity. We've got to get people to stick to us. What are we going to do? And so they decided, original content, we've got to create these shows that people feel so attached to that they'll buy this service from us a commodity. Mostly last year, Netflix spent $18 billion to develop new content. So it's always a moving target, right? So we have to understand, in any business we're in, it's always a moving target. We can't show up at work on a Monday and expect that the following Monday, the world's gonna be the same.

William Harris 9:23

Yeah, here's an e-commerce correlation with that. Then, for those listening to there's a car parts company that we worked with. They sold a whole bunch of car parts, you know, aftermarket car parts a soup up your ride. And I don't even know if that's what the kids call it these days anymore, but, but they also ended up coming up with their own parts as well their own branded ones, that they were sort of their own, but they were third party retailers, so they're selling a bunch of other people's and so to your point, though, it's like, Well, okay, but I can get that same part from a dozen different stores. And as it gets more and more competitive online and the shopping results get more and more competitive, how do we have something that's just uniquely ours, similar to what. Netflix did? They said, well, we need to have our own parts you can only get at our store. So now you come to our store, you can get this part and you can get our part. You go to that other store, you can only get that part. You can't get that part in our part. So come to our store instead, right? A lot of opportunities like that.

Alan Gregerman 10:15

Well, I think there are, and I like to often say they're like, 101 ways to differentiate anything, but we have to be creative in doing it. So imagine I have an online retailer that I buy things from, and what's their competitive advantage? Their competitive advantage is they send me a part, and with the part is a piece of paper that says, ready to install this part. Go to our video on our YouTube channel. It's video number 847, and be ready, and we'll walk you through doing that. So they've made it a lot easier for us, right? And so that's one way to differentiate. So there's so many different ways. So you're spot on when you suggest to people, you know you got to be different. So you got to be different, and even in being different, you got to keep raising the bar.

William Harris 11:02

I love that. Speaking of, let's just say, breakthroughs, right? So you're talking about, you know, Netflix is a breakthrough. We completely changed the way things were done. You use Airbnb, Spanx and Uber as examples of breakthroughs that were born not from expertise, but from not knowing, why do you think outsiders are often better positioned to disrupt industries than insiders?

Alan Gregerman 11:27

Okay? No, I love this question. So think about this. It turns out, if we know a lot about something, we can make it better. We can add a different an additional feature. We can figure out how to support it better. We can write a better technical manual. We can do a bunch of things that make it incrementally better. But if I want to create a breakthrough, I need to take a fresh look at something. So breakthroughs imply that I'm going to do something different than anybody else has done. My expertise implies that I'm going to do better things based on what I already know. So I like to think about the fact that the folks who actually shake up industries reinvent what they do, actually start with a bit of a clean slate, or not knowing stuff. So you gave some great examples. Uber disrupted the taxicab business. The folks in the taxicab business could have noticed that GPS or GIS technology had evolved and it could be applied to cabs. They didn't do that. They wandered around aimlessly waiting to see if somebody on a corner was going to hail a ride. Okay, so two friends are in Paris on a winter night. They can't find a cab. One of them says, Well, you know, there's got to be a better way to get a ride. And the other says, Well, you know, there's technology now that can bring somebody with a car together with somebody who needs a ride, and we can pair people up and do that's how Uber got started. Okay? Airbnb, two friends, initially, eventually three friends, who all were design majors. Okay? They had absolutely no experience in hospitality. Sure, gone to the Rhode Island School of Design, a famous place, and they knew that a design conference was happening in San Francisco, and they also knew San Francisco was an expensive place to stay, and a lot of designers didn't make a lot of money. They decided to make their couch available. Okay, so Airbnb now the world's largest, by some measures, hospitality company. 9 million places you can stay. Started as a couch surfing, a micro business couch surfing, in which folks said you want to sleep in our living room and get a little bit of local knowledge from people who've lived in San Francisco, not that long we can do that, you know, Spanx. So Sarah Blakely, she was doing two really odd things that your listeners will go, Oh, my goodness. Are those things? She was selling fax machines, door to door. Okay, wow. So first, what's like a fax machine? Like? Are there any people who still use a fax machine? Now, granted, there's a reasonable level of security in a fax machine, but nobody uses them. And door to door selling, I mean, my guess is your audience is getting to their customers in a very different way than door to door selling. She was selling these and was uncomfortable with how she looked, because she thought that her underwear was kind of showing through her pants. She said, I got to solve this problem. So people who don't know a lot see a problem that matters to them, and then they just decide to figure it out. If I don't know a lot, I got to work hard to figure it out, and that's actually kind of a cool thing. So that's why I talk about the wisdom of ignorance. Is not because I want people to be stupid, but because I want people to have the right kind of ignorance that inspires them to say there's like, a way better way to do this. Yeah, and so that's what I want people to think about. And. Not that your listeners who are experts in something aren't awesome, but there gets to be a point when, as experts, what they see is, this is pretty darn good. Let me make it better. And I feel like the future of opportunities has nothing to do with making something better and everything to do with making something that's really powerful.

William Harris 15:19

I love that. Just a couple weeks ago, I had Jeff Webb on the podcast, and he started varsity spirit, which is, like the cheerleading thing, but he actually started, you know, the first cheerleading competition. He said at the time, ESPN had, like, billiards, and that was about it, like it was this, like little upstart, you know, thing. And he got it on, ESPN kind of helped them build this. But similar to him, he just started doing cheer clinics to teach them fancy new moves to do. And they go, these are great moves, but we don't have uniforms that let us do this. He goes, Okay, so we need to make better uniforms. He he had no business making better uniforms. He just saw a problem. And then they're like, great. We've got these great new moves. We've got these awesome uniforms. We don't have anybody to do this for, right? And he's like, Okay, well, let's make a competition where we can show the whole world everything that you're doing. And so it's just seeing a problem and saying, I don't know how to solve it, but I'm going to figure this out. I like that idea of what I would say, almost like lateral thinking, right? Where you're just like, I know this over in this area. What if it's if I bring what I know in this domain into this domain that it's never existed before. What does that do?

Alan Gregerman 16:23

Yeah, no. So that's a fantastic example. And think about this, I like to think about with all the companies we work with and all of the entrepreneurs that their brilliant idea is like the start of a journey. It's not the end of their journey. And if they're if they keep their eyes open and pay attention, they can suddenly see the full potential of their ideas. Just launching an e-commerce website, it could be awesome. Is a wonderful platform, but there's so much more you can do, and so you need to be open then and realize that journey is going to continue to iterate, and you're going to continue to add value. And as we talked about a few moments ago, if I stay connected with my customers, then I'm going to unlock other ideas, other needs they have that are related to what I'm doing, that I can fill. Yeah, how

William Harris 17:17

do you balance iteration versus innovation? Because I'd say, like, there's benefit to this, right? Like, if we go back to the e-commerce businesses, Amazon being a great example of a lot of iteration, right? They're one of the most iterative companies. But a lot of businesses, it is good to say. It's like, well, how do you increment your traffic by another 10% How do you get 10% better conversion rate? How do you just get 10% better average order value? Like, there's a lot that could be done there. But like you said, you take your eye off the prize and miss that somebody just kind of crept into your backyard and out innovated you. How do you how do you balance the two of these?

Alan Gregerman 17:50

Yeah, no. So that's fair. So again, think about this. The folks who are listening have a business to run, and there's no reason to believe that their business isn't doing pretty well, and so to the extent that what you do resonates with your customers, you want to devote a certain amount of time to making it better, to making sure the stuff you already do delivers value, but you also want to spend some time testing some other ideas. So you want to think about the world of the customer that you're in and what are some of their other potential unmet needs that are aligned? I mean, they're not going to buy Ultra processed food from somebody who sells, you know, IT equipment. Well, we shouldn't sell Ultra processed food anyway, but what we want to say to ourselves is, what else could we be doing where we're credible, but we need to figure that out. And then I devote a certain amount of time to saying, let's think about innovating in those areas. Now, there's an advantage for folks right now, and that is that the expectation for a new product is relatively low. And you know, so probably much of your audience has heard of the idea of minimally viable products, or MVPs, and that means folks like us, all we need to do is get a six pack of IPA, some artisan pizza and a few friends for a weekend and come up with an idea, and then on Monday, we share that idea with some customers. So in the past, folks used to say, I'm not launching this puppy until it's perfect, right? And so, you know, in the most famous person who ever thought of the world that way was James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy. He wrote that he made 5000 iterations or modifications before his cordless vacuum, wow, hit the marketplace and it was Showtime. Okay, we don't have to do that. The reality is, come up with a good idea, do your best thinking over a weekend, share it with customers you trust, ask them to figure out how to make it better. Spend the next weekend taking their. Ideas and applying them, and before you know it, you've got, like, an 80 or 90% valuable product that you can think about launching into the marketplace. But again, the two key things are, be open minded. Don't be burdened by what you know, and talk to customers because they're the ones with actual needs. You know, I like to say to customers of all of the companies I work with. Tell me what could be even more amazing, you know. So I believe that you you really like what they do, but tell me what could be even more amazing in your wildest dreams. What could these people be doing that make you go, wow,

William Harris 20:39

this is probably the best case that you could make for working on the business instead of in the business. I think it's too easy, if you're working in the business, to miss those things, and you will do the iterations, and those are important, but you have to have the time that you set aside on purpose to say, I'm not focusing on that. I'm going to break away from that. I'm going to think just more higher level, more strategically, about what's going on, and even potential brainstorms, I can see the value of you get a couple of other good entrepreneurs together in a room, you know, you say, hey, once a month, we're just going to just try to come up with as many ridiculously crazy ideas as we can, which is something that There's a guy, Akash, who runs genies comm. And I forget the exact name of but I think it's unnecessary. Innovations. Is the thing that he does where he's like, just, how do you come up with an innovation of things that don't even like, they, um, they didn't need to be innovative. And so he came up with these finger forks. And they're like, They're these little forks that you wear on your fingers and you just, you eat your food, like that. It was completely unnecessary, but it was just to practice that idea of just like thinking so far outside the box. That's practical, to just say, what if?

Alan Gregerman 21:48

Well, no. So I like that. So we've done exercises with folks in which we've asked them to think about, so I love that idea. We've asked them to think about, come up with a totally different way to eat or a totally different way to consume content, or whatever the case is so challenging yourself to think that way, I think is important. But then the other thing you talked about is, if I were getting a group of friends together, I would get a group of friends from different industries and different backgrounds, because their ideas and inspiration are going to kind of spark our own best thinking. And if we went back to the Netflix idea, they didn't begin by thinking about creating Netflix. They began to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs by simply thinking about, is there an idea out here that we can grow to scale and make money on? And they farted around, can I use the word fart? So they farted around with all these ideas, and then they came up with this idea of mailing DVDs to people. But it wasn't like they started out and said, Let's compete with blockbuster. It was, let's come up. And I think you know your audience, it's a lot of very entrepreneurial people. They're looking for ideas and opportunities. So the reality is, think about your core business. Always make it better and more valuable for your customers, but imagine what else you can do that really matters, and if it's somewhat related, then you're credible. You can talk to customers right away about I

William Harris 23:15

love that. You told me the other day that half of the Fortune 500 companies from 20 years ago no longer exist. Longer exist. What's the biggest blind spot that leaders today are repeating?

Alan Gregerman 23:27

Well, well, so there's a lot, of course. So they misread the market, or they don't pay enough attention to the market. So they assume, and think about it, and I'm guessing for a lot of people listening, you're successful today. Why would I change? You know? So here is somebody saying, you know, you're going to have to be different in the future. And you go, I'm doing great right now. You know, we're getting a lot more subscribers. A lot of people are buying our stuff, whatever our stuff is. And so I really don't feel like I need to change. And so I think it's that mindset that we're actually really, really good now, that mindset is tied to expertise, is we're doing what we know. We've assembled the right experts for Golden we can kind of do that. So that's a kind of problem. Another problem is that we're not humble as leaders, you know? So, so I would argue the best thing that any leader can do with their group, whether their group is five people or 100 people, is periodically sit down and say, you know, we don't know the answer to this. We don't know the best way to do this. That's okay. We need to figure out the best way. We need collectively to figure out the best way. So I want us as a team to go on a journey to figure out the best way. So I think that's really important. I think also people underestimate their competitors. Okay, they did a competitor assessment. They've determined, Oh, we're so much better than those folks. And so then they just assume that the competitors are insignificant. Well. First, some of your existing competitors are better than you realize. But second, you're more likely to be disrupted by somebody who has never, kind of in your business than you are by an existing competitor. Great point, and so so you have to be, you know, I talk about these six things, and we'll get into them because we have time in the book that form enlightened ignorance. But one of the things I talk about is the idea of being paranoid, you know, and that doesn't have a great connotation, but here's what the idea of paranoid means. It means somebody is always following us, okay, and so, and it's in our interest to regularly turn around and imagine who could be following us. So I have a customer, and their business for many, many years, was remarkable. It was a few 100 million dollars a year. They did energy efficiency business, and so they partnered with utilities, and utilities would hire them to go into homes and wander through homes and do an assessment of where they were leaking energy and how they could be more efficient. So the utility could say, here's some improvements you can make. And they were thinking about who are the other companies that are doing this? And there were some other good companies, but not of their scale. Company comes along with the technology in which they literally can drive down a street with a heat sensing camera and take a picture of a house and see where it's leaking energy. And so they propose, you know, we don't have to set up an appointment. We don't have to come to your house. It's way cheaper to do this. And then our system will then tell you, based on where we see from this heat map, energy leaking exactly where you should make an investment and how much money you're going to save, suddenly they go, Whoa, didn't see that coming. And so I don't want your listeners to to be at a point where they say, didn't see that coming. And so part of that is being a bit paranoid. And so what does that mean? I got to get out there. I got to pay attention. I got to go to shows where people are kind of offering new ideas. I got to read a lot, you know? I got to ask people who haven't been my customer, who are you using and why? I just got to be engaged and know things so I don't get blindsided.

William Harris 27:17

When I started off working in startup world, VC backed company, SaaS company. One of the things that we would do is, you know, if somebody asked us about one of the competitors, is we'd say, I don't, I don't know who that is, but, you know, just disregarded he could be a big competitor, right? But you just, I don't know. Maybe they played our space, I don't know, right? And it was just disregard it. And it was somewhat tongue in cheek, having a little bit of fun with it, right? But at the same time, that's the opposite of paranoia, right? And so I think, you know, what you're helping me to see is, it's like, that's probably the wrong approach. It's like, you need to be aware of who these people are. You need to be a little bit paranoid of them. How do you develop, let's say, healthy paranoia? How do you develop that?

Alan Gregerman 27:58

Well, so I think paranoia is like a human trait. I mean, we're actually kind of born and wired to be a bit paranoid. I mean, think about, you know, when we had dreams or nightmares as kids. Think about the book, one of my favorite books, that was a really bad movie where the wild things are, you know, to where the wild things are. So Max, a kid behaves poorly. He's banished to his room. I don't know why, and then he suddenly sees his room filling up with monsters, and his job is to kind of win them over. Okay, so I think it's like a human thing to be a bit paranoid or worried about the worst possibly happening. We need to use that to our advantage. And so that is, we need to realize that we always need a wake up call, and that wake up call means we just got to engage the marketplace better than we do. My fear for some e commerce businesses is that they spend too much time wherever they're located, either in their fulfillment center or working remotely, and they don't get out and pay attention to a lot of the things that are going on out there, because the world of E commerce, it's different now than it was two or three years ago. And so I'm buying things from different places than I used to. Our company is buying things from different they have different business models that support them. I mean, even think about, you mentioned SAS the cloud. You know, that's like, we have all of our stuff in the cloud. Somebody asks me for, like, a document, and I go, Oh, there's not, like a piece of paper with any of that. It's all kind of in the cloud. Now, you know, think about, you know, Amazon, of course, the biggest of E commerce companies, so they did a lot of things to improve delivery, but they do some other things. They're really good at data mining and data science, and so they actually pay attention to that much better than other companies do. And so I'd argue, if you're not going to hang out with your customers. Is collect a lot of data and actually analyze it and think about it. Okay? So I buy for myself and my wife, who's from Sweden, a lot of this genre called Nordic murder mysteries. Okay, and so it's actually good if you like, to read mysteries that have a murder involved. I started buying these books. Amazon goes through all my data. Whenever a new Nordic murder mystery comes out, they send me an email. They say, you know, you've bought these before. Do you think you'd like to do that now? Contrast that, and they're a big customer of mine. Marriott, one of the largest hotel companies in the world. And for the longest time, I've been saying to them, you ought to take all my data. You have, like, years of me traveling, and you ought to try and figure out how to customize. We can do this now with AI, we can absolutely customize. Let's say you have Marriott has what, 60 million customers. They could send them each an individualized message. AI allows them to do that. Okay? But instead, what does Marriott do? It gets to be winter, they send me the same generic message, it's getting cold in the North East. Would you like to go to a resort? Well, you know, the truth is, I don't go to resorts. I'm like a city guy. I like to go to museums. I like restaurants. I like to go to concerts, and they don't even know enough about me with 30 years of records of my travel to send me something and say, gee, we see every winter you go to like a city, and you go to theater, and you ask the concierge about this, huh? So that's frustrating. So that's why I like Amazon. You know, the folks at chewy, so I have three dogs, okay? Or we have three dogs. So chewy is really important to me, and so when a new product comes up, the folks at chewy send me a message, and they say, So Alan, you know, there's something that your dogs might enjoy. Do you want to try this, or we have pharmacy now. You don't have to use us in a separate pharmacy. So their thing, people who are paying attention their customers, whether it's hanging out with them or collecting data and analyze it, are the ones are going to win.

William Harris 32:15

Yeah, you have three dogs. I have three dogs as well. They're cocker spaniels. We have mom and the dad and we kept one of the babies. Now they have formed their own pack and so, oh, sure, that meal is new, yeah. Feed them, yeah. So what kind of dogs you

Alan Gregerman 32:31

have? So we have three rescued dogs. So we like a kind of breed of dog called flat coated retrievers. So if anyone looks them up, they look like black Golden Retrievers. They're actually wonderful, sweet dogs and beautiful. We had a purebred. Then we decided to go back to rescuing dogs. We rescued a couple of them, and then the oldest one passed away. We rescued another one from a kill shelter in Kentucky. We went to pick her up. She came out of kind of a rusty, grungy van. She was covered with bugs, and they gave us a space certificate, and five weeks later, she had seven puppies in our bedroom, and so we kept one of the puppies. We were told you only want to keep one of the puppies from a litter. So we kept one of the puppies that doesn't look at all like her. It's given us the opportunity. I don't know how many of your listeners, are in Kentucky to come up with the idea of a Kentucky spay, which is a little bit different than a spay in some other places. Yeah, that was amazing, but I have to be honest, you know. So we're talking about the fact that we live in an uncertain world. So of course, we didn't plan on having puppies. The 10 weeks of raising these puppies before we found homes for them was one of the most delightful things I have ever done. You know, you'd clean their pen. We kind of made the basement their pen, and then once you'd cleaned you'd had seven puppies crawling all over you, you know, so after two hours, I realized I had to go back to work.

William Harris 34:02

All good. That's hard to do. I like that. You started digging into paranoia here a little bit. I want to dig into the other six essential gifts here, these innate gifts that you identified. I want to go through each one of them, and then and then, I want to go kind of one by one here, but so the six that I got make sure I got them right here. Purpose, curiosity, humility, respect, future, focus and paranoia. We touched on paranoia a little bit, but I come back to purpose. Then, how can e commerce brands move from just selling products to building purpose driven loyalty?

Alan Gregerman 34:38

Okay, perfect. So let's first step back and think about purpose. And I hope everyone listening understands that in the absence of having a clear and compelling purpose, you just can't win long term in business. So purpose is what should drive us. We don't exactly know everything we need to do to live our purpose, but purpose drive. Drives us. Purpose is what we share with everybody on our team, and we say we need to come up with new ideas tied to this purpose. We don't say to everybody on our team, we need to be brilliant and creative and innovative. We'll get a lot of random cats and dogs. I'm coming back from working with a customer in India. I'm at the airport in Delhi, and there's a table that has a box that says, suggestion box. Tell us how we can be better. My guess is a lot of people are filling out stuff. Nothing's going to happen because they haven't made clear to us, this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to be the fastest, easiest, most seamless airport to travel through whatever the case is. You tell me that stuff. I'll give you my ideas. You tell me whatever. I'll say, Well, you know, I'd like a healthier choice in the vending machine. So okay, so purpose should drive us, and we all should have a compelling purpose, and that purpose should be something we wake up trying to do. It's not the products we sell. It's what we do to make the customer's lives better or more remarkable. So I'd love everybody to start with that. If they start with that, that then aims our focus. We have a target to shoot at. I mean, think about this. And I don't know how many of you go to target ranges. So I was recently at a place where I could learn to shoot a bow and arrow. And they said, Okay, there's the target. The target was helpful. Imagine I went to that place. They gave me a bow and arrow and there was no target. I would just tell everybody to kind of move pretty quickly out of the way. But anyway, yeah, so, so purpose gives a direction that then drives the other thing. So the second thing is curiosity. Now I want to be curious about hitting that target, figuring out all the ways I can deliver value and hit that target. And so I use my curiosity, I turn it on, and I say to myself, there's a world of ideas and inspiration. Now let me step back, and this is I don't know if it's going to blow the mind of the people who are listening, but this is the most important fact I'd like people to think about, and that is what I call the 99% rule. 99% of all new ideas throughout history are based on someone else's thinking or something somebody saw in nature. Okay, so that has profound implications for how I innovate, because if that's the way the world works, why would I sit around a table with experts and say, Okay, does anybody have an out of the box idea? I don't need a totally original idea. I need to find a brilliant idea and adapt it to my world. So if that's the case, curiosity should say to us, let's get out of the office and look for brilliant ideas. Let's look around and see what are other people doing? How are they meeting the needs of their customers? How do they help their customers to think differently? So now think about if I'm in E commerce, and one of my knocks on E commerce, I probably shouldn't say this on your podcast, one of my notes is so uneven, how e commerce companies support their products and services, you know? So some give me, like a chat that then says, this is AI generated. And so I pretty quickly know the limits of this kind of chat bot and what I'm going to learn. And then I need to say, Okay, fine. What's a phone number where I actually get a human? Others give you a human because they care. Others say, you know, we've put up a lot of information that will help you to solve this problem, and we understand your problem. We don't understand that you want to go through 500 Frequently Asked Questions we understand your issue, and here is the two pager on how you solve your issue, whatever the case is. But the reality is, if I want to be awesome at supporting customers, then I need to think about a model that customers are going to appreciate based on what matters to customers, and it could be high touch, you know, if I'm selling stuff that's pretty valuable, customer has a right to expect that I get to talk to somebody who's fairly smart about it, you know. And so if I'm going to buy, you know, high end audio equipment or a camera or something like that. I can go into a store and talk to people I ought to be able to online or through calling to actually get somebody who knows a lot. I love a bunch of Well, I love lots of companies, of course, but I'm a big fan of this company called Rei recreational equipment. It's the world's largest kind of outdoor cooperative. What do I love about Rei? They focus on six different things. You can do outdoors, you can hike, you can camp, you can bike, you can, oh, there's other, there's I'm missing the other. You can run. You know? You can do a bunch of things. Okay, everyone who works in. A department at REI is an enthusiast in that sport. If I'm in the bike part of REI, I ride regularly. So when someone comes in, I not only know a lot, but I'm passionate about it. Okay, so I'd like to have an e-commerce company connect me with someone who's passionate about the challenge I'm trying to solve, then I'll feel like, whoa. They're really there for me. Some of your listeners have probably gone to this amazingly ginormous Swedish store called IKEA. Okay, and so IKEA, the world's largest home furnishing store. IKEA, is also really renowned for providing not such a great level of actual customer service, but actually doing a lot of thinking behind the scenes so you don't need them, because what's IKEA's whole kind of purpose to enable you to have a beautiful place, and you do it yourself, you know, It's kind of a it's kind of a DIY kind of place. So what does IKEA do? Well, they know in every one of their stores, they've gone around that geography to look at the typical size of apartments and rooms, and they customize the groupings of their furniture based on those sizes. So it's going to be different in Minneapolis or Seattle or San Francisco or New York or India. And so they make room settings that you can look at and picture yourself in there, and it's actually going to fit in an apartment where you live. So that's one thing they do. They also give you some tools so you can measure things, draw things, think about things. They make it easy for you to take something out of I think easy. There are a lot of memes that talk about how challenging it is to put together Ikea furniture, but their whole idea is, our purpose is kind of do it yourself low cost furniture. So now they have to think about how they do that brilliantly. And of course, you can get somebody if you need to, but that's not their main focus. They're going to make it so that I don't need somebody I can go home and do it. So I think all of us need to think about the fact that curiosity should stretch to all kinds of folks in all different kinds of businesses. Folks should leave their office and they should look for remarkable kind of places and ideas, and then say to themselves, what's remarkable? I walk around with a little journal every day, and when I see something remarkable, I write it down, and then I say to myself, can I use this to help one of our customers? Is this a way to get our customer to think differently? But your folks listening, should go around to wander around. It's actually fun to do too. Go to new businesses. Go to places with new business models. Go to museums that talk about kind of technology and ideas. Go to hip neighborhoods and see, are there some practices people are connecting with? You know, you go into a restaurant today, a new restaurant, and there's a QR code you scan right? Because they don't want to print up menus, fine. So you scan that, some of them even just have you order on your phone because they don't want to deal with you. I'm not certain I like that idea, yeah, but it's happening, so I simply want to know about that and see if people are kind of enjoying that. Okay? Because if people are enjoying that, maybe that's something I need to do. Maybe I need to have a QR code that takes somebody someplace and solve something for them. I don't know the answer, but I want to wander around and do that. I take people to performances. I take them to see kind of artists that they've never heard of who are new. And I try and get them to figure out kind of what are they doing that's different. Business is about being different. We need to expose ourselves to all these different things and then figure out what are the best you know. Think about this. Some of your audience probably has attended a performance of Cirque du Soleil, sure. So I take corporate teams to Cirque du Soleil performances. Do I understand what's going on or the language they've created, probably not, but I do understand this. We go half an hour to 45 minutes before, and I ask people to do this, and that is, write down everything they see. That's part of the entire experience of going. It's not just the show. It's when I arrive, it's how people greet me, it's how I get seated. It's how the audience is engaged in the performance. It's how they wrap up the performance. It's how they sell their swag afterwards. And then I simply say, this business, no matter what kind of business, e commerce or anything else, is a performance. And so you need to understand the steps in your performance and make them all awesome, because the initial steps before you somebody even buys from you, are building awareness, getting them excited and getting them willing to change and try you. Then the steps after that are, stick with me. I got something new for you. So, you know, I just like people to get up and experience the world, because they're going to. Ideas, I

William Harris 45:01

feel like you've developed what I would almost call like this, this structured, active curiosity, right? Like, it's not that you don't just end up going to the Cirque du Soleil and it's like, hey, so we went to Cirque du Soleil, and it's like, but there was no plan. And so if I just took people there and had no plan, then it's like, well, you walk away with nothing, but this is like a structured act of curiosity as you're going through it. I love that approach that you had of just thinking through the whole experience all the way through. You could do that at a lot of different places and think through, what do I like about this, what I like about that, going to the restaurant, like you said, you can go to all of these different events and venues and situations and say, What do I like, what I dislike about it, and then apply that to a completely different business like E commerce, and say, Well, what can I take from this, from this restaurant experience? How can I take what I like there and make that into my e-commerce business? How can I take what's going on at Cirque du Soleil and bring that to my e-commerce business? And, like you said, even outside of other people's thinking, it's even nature right, where it's like, I think the one of the bombers that we made was based on, like, a peregrine falcon or something, right? Because it's just so stealth. Like, you're like, How can I take what nature is doing, right? So it's like, what do we love about nature, the trees, the green, the whatever, right? How do I bring that into my e-commerce, business, all these different facets?

Alan Gregerman 46:17

Well, that's a better way to innovate, right? Because there it's better to take ideas that are proven somewhere and see if they make sense in our business than it is to come up with something remarkable. I mean, ideas abound, so some companies still endure, even in a world with E commerce, you know. And one of the companies, like Macy's struggle, but companies like Nordstrom thrive. Why did they do that? Because they're renowned for customer service. They've been renowned since 1920 for customer service. What happens at Nordstrom? I buy something, and the salesperson comes out from behind the counter, wraps it nicely, hands it to me and says, If you ever need anything else, I'm always here for you. Okay, that has a direct corollary with e-commerce. We just have to online figure out how to create that same experience. You know, I remember having an e-commerce experience where I bought something and it wasn't even a big ticket item, and then I get an email, and the email, I thought, was delightful. The email said, just wanted you to know, Alan, that our entire team here was so excited about you buying our product that we all wrapped it together in our favorite wrapping. Then we went outside to the center of town and held a parade in your honor, we marched down the street. Now, I know they didn't do that, but damn did. I think these people are clever. I feel really cool about that. So again, there's so many ways to differentiate what we do, and we're only limited by kind of our imagination. You know, you mentioned nature, so probably everyone in the modern or Western world has some product, whether it's a raincoat or something else that uses Velcro. Okay, and so we say to ourselves, God, what a genius thing. This must have been like folks wearing lab coats sitting in a lab, experimenting with these things that stick together. Velcro was created by a guy walking his dog. So we talked about dogs a moment ago. A guy in Switzerland's walking his dogs through the Alps. He notices his dog is covered with burrs. That's probably happened for 30,000 years. That's how long people have had dogs. He decides burrs are awesome. God, this is incredible. How can my dog just brush against it and it sticks to him, takes the burr off, looks at it under a microscope, goes, whoa. It's even more awesome than I imagined. Birds are like hooks that just kind of lock into you. I bet their application to that. Applications, yes, today, there's over 100,000 categories of products that use Velcro, and that's how Velcro was invented. It wasn't like a out of the blue thing. It was a guy paying attention. I believe all your listeners can pay attention. They just got to get out and pay attention.

William Harris 49:17

Pay attention to the right things too. Speaking of the next one, then I think that works well with humility. How does humility help us spot these breakthroughs in ER, e-commerce businesses?

Alan Gregerman 49:30

Okay, good. So I started a business. I started it because, damn, I'm smart, you know, and so now we need to do some new things. And I could either say, Damn, I'm the smartest guy on the planet. I started this business, or I could say, I kind of was really smart. But all of us are a little bit lucky, you know, of starting a business and growing it as a function of not know, only knowing what you're doing, but good timing and good marketing, good customers. Um. So I could say instead, well, you know, I don't know all the answers. There are new things we could do. I don't exactly know how to do them. I should be humble about the fact that I don't know everything, and that together as a team, we'll figure out the next generation of what we do. But I think, unfortunately, humility for most leaders is like a bad look. We hire people. They expect us to know everything, right? Actually, they don't. They expect us to lead, us to be awesome. And so part of that is admitting I don't know everything, but not in a you know, I got a little bit of pushback when I first suggested the idea of the wisdom of ignorance. People said, Well, you know, it's not good to not know things. And I said, Let's differentiate stupidity from what I call enlightened ignorance. Okay, we're surrounded by stupidity. Okay. I'm not certain wherever people live right now who are listening whether they'll be in a state that allows you to get a vaccine. Okay, vaccines are actually brilliant. Okay, no matter what the current federal government says, vaccines have saved more millions of lives than anything else going on there. Okay, so I'm not talking about stupidity, or saying science is stupid or not paying attention. I'm talking about a kind of ignorance that challenges us to be better, that challenges us to be humble and say, I don't know the answer, or I don't know the best answer to that, let us as a team find the best answer to that. So that, to me, is what humility is. All about humility sometimes is I need to do better. Okay, so think about it. Some of your audience may shop at Patagonia, and so Patagonia is now kind of renowned as a company that sells sustainable kind of products for engaging with the outdoors. Patagonia used to it started as a company that sold basically rock climbing supplies, and a lot of its initial supplies were supplies that actually damaged the rock. It was a way to hold steady in the rock. We banged, kind of our anchors into the rock, and then we climbed the rock. The founders of Patagonia said, We love the environment. Why would we injure the environment? Let's rethink what we do and offer. And so they created new ways of climbing that actually didn't damage nature. And so that was a sense of humility. We're not doing it the right way. We can do a better job. So I love the whole notion of either I don't have all the answers, or there must be a better and more sustainable way to do the stuff that we do, or maybe we should be offering different things that are more valuable to people, or maybe we should be more helpful to people, not just in what we offer, but the results that they get out of it.

William Harris 53:01

So let's go into future focus then, because I think this is an interesting one. It leads into a lot of what's going on with e-commerce right now. Because there's a lot of things shaking up, AI being one of them. How do we build future focused thinking into our E commerce brands?

Alan Gregerman 53:20

Okay, good. So again, you know, and I don't want to sound like a bit of a broken record, but I believe the absolute best thing that anyone in any company can do is periodically get up and pay attention. Okay, so I believe that we're not future focused when we don't pay attention and that the future, while we don't know exactly what it is, is constantly sending us clues, but we got to get out there and pay attention to those clues. Okay, so we can look at all the other e-commerce brands and see what they're doing, and are they doing things that are different? Have they tweaked their business model? Have they made it more responsive. How are they using AI in ways that people like? How are they using AI in ways that kind of piss off their customers, you know? So we can pay attention to that. But more importantly, let's pay attention to the world as it wanders by us, you know. Let's do that where we live and then when we travel. So here, you know, just by iPhone. Okay, Sweden, where my wife is from, and where we spend half of every summer, is now a cashless society. So you go to a bank and you say, I'd like to deposit some money, and the banker says, oh, no, this is a bank. We don't have money here. And I go, Okay, time out. You know, I'm an old guy. Let me understand that. They go, No, all the money we have here is, like, electronically done. You can't get cash here. And similarly, I can't buy a ticket. I. Other than using my phone to go on public transportation. So I have an app for the public transportation. It's kind of on the honor system, but I log in when I'm about to get on a train, and I buy a ticket, because the ticket's good for 90 minutes. Everything is here. Okay, so they've made it kind of E once I get over the fact that I need to up my game. They've made it really easy. Everything is here. There's an app for everything. So I think about I should be paying attention to that. Okay, so there should be an app for everything. So I run an e-commerce business, but I also probably have an app that's going to be more interesting than just a listing of the products and services that I sell. And so I want people to be as successful as possible with the things they buy from me. I want them to get the most value out of it. So I'm going to drive information to them. So I want to share wisdom about it. I want to share things to do and not do. I want to get them to imagine how this product is the launching pad for some of their other aspirations. And I can do it using technology, but I got to go out and see how other people are using technology. And so, you know, I go into a museum. It used to be you'd go into a museum and they'd say, Do you want to buy the headphones, you know? And I'd go, Well, I guess I could do that. Now, they don't say that. They say, Do you want to download the tour on your phone? And I go, I have my phone. I'm used to my phone. Sadly, I'm holding my phone a lot, kind of download this, you know. So they've gotten with the program, and they're kind of a public institution. My guess is your audience could get with the program, but get out there. Pay attention. See how people are using technology. See how it works and doesn't work. See what new trends are happening. So technology, customer trends, market trends, what's kind of popular now, look at all those things that gives you a clue to where the future is going. Then try to move your business in the direction of that. We have such luxury now, because we can get out of the office. A lot of the people who are listening may be working remotely. They can wander around and compare notes on what they saw from different places they're in. They can also go online, whether they use Google or ChatGPT or Claude, AI, which is my favorite, but I should plug anything here. That's a good one, yeah. But whatever they use, they can use that as a start for thinking about it. I want to explore my city. I live in San Francisco. I want to explore my city. Can you share with me five kind of hip new businesses that are really popular now? What's really exciting about these businesses? I get five ideas. I go to these places and kind of hang out and see what's going on. So no, I just feel like there's no excuse for not engaging the world, and any entrepreneur should be doing that regularly. It is so presumptuous to think that being brilliant today assures us being brilliant tomorrow, but paying attention to the world assures us we can be brilliant tomorrow.

William Harris 58:27

I'm gonna ask you a question. I just wanna frame. I don't expect you to get this right, but I wanna use that as a way to kind of gage where things are. If you had to guess, what percent does e-commerce make up of total retail revenue in the US?

Alan Gregerman 58:45

Okay, so that's, I would say it makes up 90% of my personal spend. Sure, in terms of total revenue, this is a big country with a lot of unwashed, uninformed, I don't know, 15 to 20%

William Harris 59:04

you are remarkably better than most people. Yeah, it's probably right around 20% but you ask most people, and they're like, it's gotta be 70% 80% right? Because they think about it in the terms of their lives, but it's about 20% and that's growing at a very, very fast rate, right? And so we can see this e commerce is still in its infancy, and it's going to grow a lot more. So that's something to be aware of for the future of e-commerce. But what I think a lot of e-commerce say, what's the blind spot to e-commerce? It's going back into this offline, you know, experiences as well. I've got some Gen Alpha kids and them and their friends want to go hang out at the mall. And this is a thing that, you know, maybe we used to say malls are dying. No, not anymore, not the way, if you talk to Gen alpha, Gen Alpha says, well, we like to buy commodities on Amazon, but otherwise we like the experience of going to the mall. We want to buy things. We. Want to see them, hold them, feel because so much of their life already exists online. Anyways, they look they crave these in-person experiences. And so if you're an e-commerce brand, I would say one blind spot to be aware of that I see a lot of e-commerce brands having is making sure, how are you curating offline experiences, you know, storefronts, but also just experiences outside of storefronts as well.

Alan Gregerman 1:00:23

No, I think you're absolutely spot on, and so I think that's part of the huge upside. I would like to think e commerce grows, but that people still long for these experiences, and that on both sides, we need to up our game. Okay, so the traditional mall isn't going to win in the future. I mean, we're seeing those decline. So malls have to be more interesting, right, right? And so malls have to have entertainment. They have to have some reasons to draw us there. And we need to think quite honestly about what are the things people are buying in other places where they just believe I have to go to a physical place to buy them. And some of those things we're not going to compete with. Some of the things we want to kick the tires right? So I'm probably going to buy a new wheelbarrow online, but I'm probably going to Home Depot to actually try some out, because online, I can't try them out now. I could try them out if they put some videos up of people who work in their business using different wheelbarrows side by side, then I might be willing to push the button and buy that. But in the absence of that, I'm going to an actual physical store to try it out.

William Harris 1:01:34

The video is not as fun. It's still actually fun to go to that and just like wheel around the aisles,

Alan Gregerman 1:01:39

yes, so we don't need to try and win those customers, but we do need to be the best at what we do, and we do need to for what customers want from an e-commerce experience. We need to create a better experience there, because in that respect, we're competing against other e-commerce providers. There's certain ways we're not going to compete with a brick and mortar. You know, I use Uber Eats, not as often, because I love to go to restaurants, okay, and they could be delivering the same food a little bit colder than I'd get it at the restaurant. But the reality is, I like to go to the restaurant, and I can look at pictures of the restaurants food online. It's not making it happen for me, because it doesn't smell or taste there. So I think there are a bunch of things, which hopefully we'll still have. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge upside for e-commerce. And as you said, anything that's kind of a commodity. I gonna buy it at a place where I can get it faster and pay the best price. Having said that, you know, I'm an author, this is my new book here. But the reality is, I do like people to go to bookstores. The fact that Amazon sells like 80% of business books. That's not super helpful to me, because at a bookstore, I'm on the new non fiction book table and somebody can say, God, that's a beautiful cover. Should I and that's an intriguing title. Should I pick this book up? But on Amazon, unless I buy ads on Amazon and they send people in my direction, and then they click on, look inside this book. They're not going to find out about me. Plus, I like bookstores, you know, part of life and part of business, we've been talking about it, you know, part of it is having a purpose and having a plan, but part of it is serendipity. Okay, I don't know who I'm going to meet, who could be a customer, unless I get out there and engage with a lot of people. I don't know who's going to be interested in my book, or I don't know what books I'm going to be interested in, unless I go out there and go, Wow, they put that on the table. That's really interesting to me, and so I want a fair bit of serendipity. Can we on e-commerce sites create serendipity? We probably can, but we need to think differently about it.

William Harris 1:04:10

Well, good news for you. I like bookstores and I like physical books. I have bookshelf back there with all the physical books. I used to get some ebooks. I just don't like them as much I want the physical book, then I'm probably that's maybe because I spend most of my day behind a computer screen or my phone screen as well. And so if I get a chance to break away, I like to,

Alan Gregerman 1:04:27

well, I'm hoping your listeners are the same way, or I'm hoping they like physical books or audio books. You know, I don't want them to get an electronic I've actually read the audio book for the wisdom of ignorance. Cool, you did that. You're the voice for it. I'm the voice that. I think that's special when the author is the voice, yeah, so I'm hoping that's more appealing. My wife only listens to audio books, and so I want to say I did for her. No, I did it because audio books are growing, you know, we're all busy, and. That's another thing that's going on in the future, right? We're all busy, and so you see more people listening to podcasts while they're jogging or walking. You see more people reading books while they're walking or jogging or on the bus or the subway or in their car. And so I wanted an audio book, because that's a growing part of the market. As an author, I could have said, just create a regular book or let audible, owned by Amazon. Find some out of work actor who doesn't care about my content to read my book. But my view is people need to have an authentic experience, whether they're buying the physical book or they're or they're listening to it in terms of the e book, I don't know some people are going to do that. I'm okay with that. I guess

William Harris 1:05:47

I want to take a little bit of moment to get to know who is Alan Gregerman, because I think it's fun to get to know the human being behind the book. As a kid, you told me that you would sit on floor with atlases asking endless questions about the world, how did curiosity shape who you are, and then, you know, lead you to be the person that writes a book about the wisdom of ignorance?

Alan Gregerman 1:06:12

No, I mean, that's fair. You know, first, I want to say I believe Everyone's curious, but I believe depending on kind of how we grew up and what we were told by school or parents about what was important we lost. The lot of us lost the knack for being true. So my mom was a World History teacher. My first gift that our present that I remember is like a Hammond world Atlas, not the best world Atlas, but it was okay. I used to sit on the floor of our den, and I would thumb through pages, looking at places, and I would point to places that I would say to my parents, what goes on in this place? And they go, we have no idea. I say, Have you ever been there? My parents were relatively poor growing up. They hadn't when I was a child, ever left America, you know, and so, but my parents would always say, I bet it's interesting. Why don't you try and learn more, and someday, maybe you'll go there. And so the reality was, for me, I always imagined this is like a big world, and a world is filled with people with lots of ideas, and I would benefit from knowing a lot of those ideas. You know, the reality is, we get stuck thinking that what we know and who we hang out with are kind of the things we need to know. And that's not really true. So I do a lot of consulting with pharmaceutical companies. I'm in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and in the center of the city is the Malaysian national herb garden. So I don't know how many people who are listening have been to an herb garden. This herb garden has 400 herbs that people have used for 1000s of years because they didn't have pharmaceuticals. Okay, actually, some of them worked. Actually, some pharmaceuticals are based on these herbs, and so the reality is, people knew a long time ago things that were pretty useful for us to know. I mentioned my wife is from Sweden. So Sweden has it's an evil in America, socialized medicine. Well, let's break that one down, because that's a misnomer. You know, we've been told it's kind of bad. What does socialized medicine mean? It means the government pays for health care. What's the government's incentive if it's paying for health care, is to have you not need a lot of health care. Have you be healthy? Is there anyone listening to this podcast who wouldn't prefer to be healthy over going to a doctor? Okay, so the Swedish government pays for aerobics instructors to go to every town in Sweden in the summer and lead free public aerobics workshops. Wow. Their view is, if you stay fit and healthy and active, you won't be a burden on the healthcare system. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? To my mind, it's kind of a good idea. I'm striving to be as healthy as possible. I'm not trying to see as many doctors as I can, you know, but our system is the more I go to a doctor, the more I contribute to GDP. Okay, so I'm trying to, so I don't want to keep the economy going by not being healthy. Okay, so the world is filled with ideas and so that. And from a young age, I just said, God, I would like to meet people in all these places and explore. And fortunately, in my work, I get to travel, because I speak a lot about these ideas, and I've been fortunate enough to speak in like 35 different countries, but I get to travel and I hang out there. Actually, I don't just go someplace fly in, but I go there, and then I say, Good, I'm going to spend a few days and actually get to know some of the things that these people know. So. Been kind of curious about that. I've always been curious about it. In college, I majored in geography, okay, and so, zero surprise. Well, yeah, no, but I was in a department there were, like, 10 majors and 12 full like, professors, like, I got a lot of attention, but geography, to me was the study of places and why people think and do different things. I remember my one of my college roommates was going to be a lawyer who studied political science. I got invited to their house for Thanksgiving. His dad, very prominent lawyer. And he said, So Alan, what are you studying? And I said, I'm studying geography. And he goes, do you know all the state capitals? And I said, Well, I actually know all the state capitals, but I'm not studying geography to win a trivia contest, sure, and actually study it to have an idea of how the world works. But, you know, so I studied geography. I actually have a PhD in geography. Really into geography, but having said that, I've always been interested in the fact that the world is full of so many ideas, human ideas, things found in nature. Why wouldn't I want to kind of learn and know those things? And then it turned out, when I started my consulting firm, this was actually really cool to know, because I could then say, Have you thought about this? Or do you know that these people in this part of the world do this? Or have you thought about kind of how this thing in nature? There's now a whole field that we call biomimicry, and that's where people are trying to figure out things that go on in nature that can be applied to products or business processes. I use that in what I do, and I'm not an expert in it. A big company came to us and said, We want to reduce the cost of packaging our products worldwide. This is huge, like a $20 billion company. They said, People told us, you're reasonably clever. You think differently. Can you help us? And I said, Yeah, who's going to work on this? They assigned a team. I took them to a produce market. We didn't even meet in an office. They said, You need a conference room and I go eventually. I took them to a produce market. I gave them each $20 I said, I want you to buy everything that you find in this produce market within your $20 budget that actually protects its product really, really well. And we took all these back, pomegranates, oranges, bananas do a good job of bananas ripen too fast. And then we took all these things apart, and we started writing notes about what makes these things remarkable. And then we started to design the next generation of their packaging based on things we found in nature. They saved $155 million a year in packaging their products and had less breakage. Yeah? So to my mind, like the world is, I don't wanna say the world is our oyster, but because is it an R month? Yeah, September is in our month. No. But the for those of your listeners, you're supposed to in a cold weather climate, you're supposed to only eat oysters in months that have an R in their name. So not okay, but no. But I just believe there's so many cool ideas out there. Why not try and capture those? Why not be engaged with them? And in the process, we start to figure out where we need to get to, what we need to aspire to be, I guess for your question,

William Harris 1:13:27

absolutely what I think. I think I've share your love and curiosity for different peoples and nations and language and culture, and maybe less of the geography side, although I appreciate it, but maybe not to the PhD level. But yeah, I can remember, even as a kid, I want to say it was maybe third or fourth grade, I rented every book that our school library had about Japanese, right? And then it's like, then I went through every, every book that they had about Australia, and everything that I possibly could. I have to ask, though, speaking in 35 countries, is there one that surprised you, or something that you're like this? I didn't expect, but I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed it. Or maybe there was an experience there where you're like, I was treated exceptionally well. I really liked that, you know, I they gave me all the blue M and M's or whatever. I don't know, right? But it's like, is there an experience here from one of these countries that you're like this was, this was unexpected.

Alan Gregerman 1:14:24

I, you know, I don't want to say because, of course, my wife is from Sweden, but I have to admit, in some places, people might really like what you talk about, but you get very little outward kind of sense, you know. So Swedes are very proper. They never interrupt. They don't show this is a stereotype, of course, but they tend not to show a lot of emotion about things. So you can talk about things, and I tend to be kind of energetic and a little bit dramatic. I use only props. When I speak, I don't have a PowerPoint, and so I bring like things on stage that begin a story. And so the fact that Swedes didn't respond a lot, and then at the end came up and said, that was the best presentation we've ever heard. That was a little bit funny to me. I tend to like places where people are a little bit more outgoing and engaged. And so I've really enjoyed speaking in Turkey, where people are really hungry for new ideas and really excited about implementing them. I've enjoyed speaking in India, where people are really looking for ideas that will help them a very entrepreneurial country. I don't know I want to say, I shouldn't say this. The farther south you go, the more lively people are. The farther north you go, the more they all speak English better than I do, but that's true. The thing though, underlying what you've asked, though, is an important thing that I'd like people to think about, and that is, as humans, we're 99.3% the same. That's science. And so the reality is, the ideas I talk about about innate gifts that humans have. People have them everywhere. Some cultures may emphasize them more or emphasize them less, but as humans, we all issues. We all have the desire to make a difference. We all have the desire to be curious. We all can be humble. We began by being humble. We didn't know anything. You know, imagine when we all tried to ride a bicycle. What a humbling experience, because we fell on a lot of our parts and skinned a lot of our knees. We didn't know how to do it, but we persevered. But we all have these abilities. We all have the ability to be respectful of others. We all have the ability to think about the future. We all definitely have the ability to be paranoid. We're almost exactly the same, but we tend to identify the point 7% of other people that's different than us before we ever acknowledge that we're the same. And so when we do this, we find reasons why we don't collaborate. They shouldn't be our customers. I shouldn't hire that person because they're a different background, they have an accent, they are different age. They're a different color than me. They have a different religion than me. They grew up in a different place. Whatever the case is, I like people to think about that. We should use our similarities as a glue that brings us together, then use our differences as the raw material for doing new things as we bring different perspectives. But I mentioned this because as I travel around and speak, I'm talking about things I hope that are human. I'm talking about the power of all of us to be smarter, the power of all of us to unlock our genius, to be more curious and to create breakthroughs that make our businesses and the world a better place. I don't think there's a single place on earth where a regular person doesn't resonate with those ideas. I mean, that's my hope. So I get a different response, of course, in lots of different places based on their personality, but I feel like I feel at the end of the day, and it's either because the audience gives me feedback, or somebody comes up afterwards, and I'm kind of connecting with people, you know. And so then the other thing is, you know, everybody, or most of the people who are listening probably had to sit through a statistics class in college or high school, and remember, in statistics, they told you about something called the normal distribution. It's actually called the Gaussian curve. It's like a 200 year old idea. And the idea was that at each extreme there are there are people who are either, like, remarkably excellent at something or remarkably not so excellent at something. And the large 80% of people are kind of in the middle. And I used to say, what a bogus idea. You know, this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Well, the reality is this, I find with every audience that 10% of people are, like, super enthusiastic about these ideas, and they say to themselves, I'm going to go back and try and figure out how to implement these ideas at my business. 10% of people, it's like, why am I here? You know, isn't it time to meet at the bar, and the other 80% are like the unwashed masses. You know, you're trying to get some of them to come over to this side of the normal distribution. If I can get 10% of people in any country to be super excited about my ideas and willing to try. Something. I'm feeling great, okay? And the 10% who don't want to be there, I apologize for you being invited to the event. I'm sorry about that. And the people in the middle, I'm trying to win some of you over. You know, you're kind of, you're a source of great kind of upside. You know, you were talking about the upside for E commerce, businesses, as a speaker, those folks in the middle, they're my upside. Yeah, so that's it. But no, I I've loved everywhere I've spoken. I try to customize what I do. Of course, I'm going to spend some time and learn about the place you know, so that it's so that what I talk about is relevant. And yeah, so I've loved it all. And certainly would I love people to give me a stand, you know? Oh, yeah, sure. You know that's there are certain countries where they're more likely to do that, probably because they've been deprived of good speakers, you know. So if I'm credible, you

William Harris 1:21:01

know, self deprecation,

Alan Gregerman 1:21:05

you know. So it's all good, but no, I mean, I like to speak. I like to share ideas. I like to learn from the audience. I like to tailor what I do. Every speech gives me an opportunity to learn something new, and every new place I go to gives me an opportunity to learn something new. So I'm super excited about that.

William Harris 1:21:22

Yeah, no, that's wonderful. I you know you, obviously you talked a lot about Sweden there. One of my favorite things about learning other cultures is learning languages. It's something special. There was a time I was a nurse, and so it was always nice when you could speak a little bit of the language of somebody that was there.

Alan Gregerman 1:21:39

Oh, god, yes, really challenging time. I mean, if you can speak to them,

William Harris 1:21:44

and so I don't remember a lot of Swedish, so hopefully this one doesn't offend you when I say because it's the only one I remember with ya Girls Day, right? Oh yeah, I love you.

Alan Gregerman 1:21:54

So well, that's for the right person, a really good thing. Yeah, yes. And you have three dogs. So let me tell you, when we sing the birthday song in Swedish, which is Yamo and Leva, the dogs start howling. So go online find the kind of words in the sheet music for Happy birthday in Swedish. Just sing it to your dogs. I tell you, Oh, give that a shot. It'll drive them nuts. Now, that's funny, yeah, but I think, you know, let's be honest. I mean, I would love to speak a lot of languages in a lot of countries, they're so good in English, and most of my ideas I've come up with in English, so, you know, so they see that, and they say, No, that's okay. You can speak in English, it'd be better for us. And then in other countries, you know, if they don't speak as much English, they're willing to work with you as you kind of butcher their language. And I try, and our son lives in Spain, I try my best in Spanish. They work with me, you know, because they're much more patient than other people are. Yeah, but it's it's good, and it's another remember when you cut through? So I'm riding on a commuter train getting into Istanbul. The commuter train is elevated, so picture that. It's an old train. I'm standing up because it's packed, and the doors swing open, and it's like we're hanging like 100 feet above the ground, and an older woman tugs on my sweater and says In Turkish, what I now know, because a young man came to help me. Don't worry, it'll be okay. This happens a lot here, and I we get out at the station. I walk with her. I thank her profusely. I He the young man stays with me. He's kind of the interpreter. And then we have a conversation. And in that conversation, I ask her about her life. She tells me she has grandchildren, her grandchildren, kind of the age of my kids. I asked her what she likes. She says family matters to her. Community matters to her. She loves to cook. Family and Community matter to me. I love to cook. I asked her what she's doing. She says she's going in town to go to museum. I said, Well, tell me, I love museums. And in that moment, she spoke Turkish, I spoke English. We had a young man interpreting for us for like 20 minutes, and I realized this 80 year old Turkish woman is so much like me. And then I said to him, I know she's a Muslim woman, but I'd like to give her a hug before I leave, is that okay? And he asks her, and she gives me a big hug, and suddenly I make a human connection. Okay? And so I'm all about in my speaking, and I hope in my life and with my books, making a connection, and I'm trying to talk about things that I believe are universal. But of course, I believe that. For entrepreneurs and E commerce entrepreneurs, this stuff really matters, of course, but I'd like to think that in some way, some of these ideas are going to help somebody think differently about their business or their personal life or the world they're in.

William Harris 1:25:15

You know you talking about this reminds me of there's a speaker named Louis Giglio, and he talks about how the sun has light, the moon has no light of its own, right. The moon is just a ball of dirt reflected, right, yeah. And the only reason we see light from the moon is because it's reflecting the sun. Its job is to just sit in the way of the sun to reflect the light to Earth, right? Similarly, at least in my belief we were created from the dust of the earth. So I'm no more than a moon, right? Like I don't have necessarily a light of my own. My Job says we were created in the image of God, like this is what I believe, right? And so I believe that we are created in the image of God, and so we are reflections of him. And to your point, every single one of us, we're just different facets of the same image bearer, right? Like we're just different facets of this reflection of a creator, a loving Creator. And so to look downwardly at anybody because of any of these small, insignificant differences, it just doesn't make any sense, because it's looking down on the very thing that created

Alan Gregerman 1:26:18

you, right, right? And No, we should honor the fact that we're pretty similar to other people, and then be super respectful of the fact that there's some things that are different about them that would be worth me knowing. Yeah, maybe they look at the world differently. I mean, you know, we spend so much time with stuff, and not that folks shouldn't buy stuff from the folks who listen to your podcast, but we're so focused on stuff. Like I had to take my car in. Somebody hit my car. I needed a new battery for my electric bicycle. I had to go and do that. You walk through rural places in what we call developing countries, they're in some ways more developed than us. And you get invited to people's homes, which are relatively modest, and they would literally give you half of everything they had. You know, they have a totally different idea about that. And we're so focused on stuff, and they're focused on connecting with other human beings, and we need to be more that way.

William Harris 1:27:22

Completely agree. Alan, it has been so fun. Talking to you, getting to know you, learning from you. If people want to connect with you, follow you, read your book. What's the best way for them to get touch, stay in

Alan Gregerman 1:27:33

touch? Yeah. So let I'll spell it out, though. Maybe you'll put it in notes as well, but I will have certainly go to my website, which is AlanGregerman.com, and there you'll not only find out what I'm up to, you'll find out about my books. And then I have some, I don't wanna say thought leadership. I have thoughts. You know, the website designer said you should call it thought leadership. I have thoughts and I put them up there, I blog and do other things. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, Alan Gregerman and do that. Connect with me. Don't just follow me. Connect with me. I'd be delighted to learn what you're up to. And yeah, so you can do that for sure. I'd love it, of course. If you buy my newest book, The Wisdom Of Ignorance, I believe it's valuable, you know. But I'll make this offer. If you read it and don't find it to be valuable, I'll buy it back from you, you know. So I love the idea. It's one more idea I'll share with your audience, and that's the idea of an unconditional guarantee of satisfaction. We've had that for 37 years in our consulting business. LL Bean had it for 107 years, until they gave up on it. Think about what you do that matters, and think about if you can guarantee the experience or what you offer to people. And so I'll guarantee my book. I mean, I put it out there in the world? Yeah. So those are all the ways you can find me. You can Google me on Google or whatever. Just put my name there. A lot of things will pop up. Yeah. So that's

William Harris 1:29:14

wonderful. Well, thank you again for your time sharing your wisdom with us. It's been a lot of fun talking to you, and I hope you have a great rest your day.

Alan Gregerman 1:29:21

Well, thank you. I really love the conversation, and I really appreciate the chance to be on your podcast. Thanks William.

William Harris 1:29:27

Thank you everyone. Have a great rest your day.

Outro 1:29:31

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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