Certainly as a leader, a lot of what you're trying to do is help people understand the
narrative that they find themselves in.
That journey that we're all going on at different times, whether it's a company or a product
or a particular person's individual journey, it's a very powerful framing tool.
So when you use that framing tool, you can help people understand where it's going and
why it's a good thing to get to the other side.
Much more powerful than saying to somebody, let's increase profits by 20%.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review.
And welcome to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything
And along the way, we're hoping to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Didier Ilzinger, the chief executive of Culture Amp.
Hi Didier, how are you?
Hi Sally, thank you for having me on the show.
Well, thank you very much for coming into our Melbourne studio and talking to me via
Didier, as I said, you're the chief executive of Culture Amp, an employee experience company,
which companies use to conduct engagement surveys and gain insights from the world's
leading companies about how they best motivate and develop their staff.
You are a privately owned company valued at about 2.3 billion Australian dollars, or so
I'm told, and you employ around 950 people across lots of different offices.
Do you spend a lot of time traveling?
I do. Yeah, there was that window for about 18 months where I didn't travel at all in
COVID, but other than that, I'm on the road a fair bit.
OK, great. Let's start.
We've only got 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
Didier, my first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up? What happens?
I get up at 5.30 in the morning and I go and hop into the pool, which is unheated, walk
out and then lower myself to the neck for about five minutes.
So that's my start to the day, is to get very, very cold.
Ah, so you're into the cold ice bath slash cold shower slash cold pool brigade.
I started doing it because I just went in a cold plunge at a pool spa things and thought,
ah, that's actually quite nice.
And I thought my pool might be like that.
And so I kind of believe the science, but I can't tell you it's made any difference to
my health. So I don't do it, prescribing any wonderful thing.
I just actually like it.
It's a bit like a rinse, if you like, and you know, you walk in all a bit foggy and
then you come out a lot sharper.
Wow. And do you think you'll keep on doing it like forever?
I see no reason to stop because I do it because I enjoy it.
Like, I think that's the key thing.
I try and tell people I'm not masochist about it.
Like, it's cold when I get in, but I actually quite enjoy it because once you stop and just
stay still, you get covered in a little bubble of it's not warmth, but it doesn't get colder
and colder. Once you can last about two minutes, five, ten minutes is easy.
So do you rush in and have a hot shower after that?
No, the trick is you're meant to wait until your body warms itself up.
So I come back inside, I make my wife coffee, empty the dishwasher, walk the dogs, just
do something for about half an hour.
And then I go have a warm shower.
And I enjoy the warm shower as much, if not more than the cold plunge.
Wow. OK, so what time do you get to the office, assuming you're going into the office?
Yeah, so it varies. I mean, I'm in the office two or three days a week, and it will
depend on when my first meeting is, is when I go in.
And we have a lot of people who work in the US.
I have a lot of customers in the US.
So my day will often start at seven or thereabouts.
So I may be in before seven.
I may not be in until the afternoon if I just have calls all morning and I take them
OK. And are you a breakfast type of person?
I love breakfast.
You know, in a perfect world, I would have that at sort of seven or thereabouts.
Sometimes it might not be till mid-morning if I've got a whole bunch of meetings to go
through. So I don't mind if I don't eat breakfast until almost lunchtime.
My next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that somehow
changed the trajectory of what you were doing.
In my previous life, I worked in film.
So I worked for a company called Rising Sun Pictures, and they made me the general
manager, CEO quite early, like I think I was 25 or 26 or something.
And we went into entrepreneur of the year and we ended up winning the South
Australian section for our for our part in service business.
And I went to the Nationals, met Mike and Scott, who were doing Atlassian and
started Atlassian, and they've both become good friends of mine.
And in many ways, watching Atlassian grow was part of the reason I stepped out of
RSP to start Culture Amp.
So you're referring to Scott Farqua and Mike Cannon-Brooks, I assume?
And did you just meet them by chance at the awards in Sydney?
They had won their section.
And there's a thing they have a masters where everyone who's won their section
comes together and you learn a bunch of stuff.
Everybody else had gone home and we were still out.
So we kind of got to know each other.
And then over the coming years, we became friends and kept track of each other.
And the rest is history, as they say.
And what did you learn from the two of them?
So I already was running a small software company with the founders of
RSP in the visual effects space.
But Rising Sun Pictures was a service business working for Hollywood.
And that's two very difficult things combined.
Like Hollywood is a very tough industry to be successful in.
Service businesses are hard to scale.
And so I was watching them build a software business with what is
essentially a monotonic revenue curve.
So every year you're likely to get a little more revenue than you had last
year, because you tend to keep the revenue you already have.
And so looking at their business model, I'm like, that is a much better business
model than the business model I have.
I often say to people, if you're smart and you've got experience, your chance
of building a service business to say a million dollars in revenue is pretty high.
Your chance of building a software business and getting it to a million is really low.
But once you get both of those businesses to a few million, the chance of scaling
that service business actually starts to drop off quite a lot, whereas the
software business can continue to grow.
And so that was kind of the insight for me, which was that that business
model was the right one for me.
So is that one of the reasons why you went on to set up Culture Amp?
Because you could see that would be a highly scalable business.
Like I'd been in at Rising Sun for 13 years.
I was the CEO for five.
I was hugely thankful for all the opportunities I'd had, but I got to this
point where I'm like, I think there's got to be more to it than this.
Like how do I make more of a difference in the world?
And I credit my wife, Greta Bradman.
She said, she said, look, you're young.
Why don't you try something else?
And so at that point I'm like, okay, I'm going to step out.
I'm going to push myself out of my comfort zone.
I'm going to build a software company.
And I wanted to build a software company because I'd seen other people like
Mike and Scott be successful doing it.
I'd already built another software company anyway.
And so then the question was just what software company?
And it took me a while to kind of realize that what I cared about more
than anything was people and culture.
So is there anything else that you learned from Mike Cannon Brooks about how
to set up a business and how to make it successful that you would point to?
I think, you know, there's lots of little lessons that you learn.
Like you ask about, oh, how did you deal with this situation or that situation?
But probably the biggest thing, and I think they've done this for a whole
generation of entrepreneurs, it's just made people believe.
Like if you go back 10, 10, 15 years ago, no one thought you could build a global
technology company like that from Australia.
I mean, we had some great technology businesses, but they were
largely locally orientated.
And Atlassima was one of the first to go build.
Like if you didn't know that they're Australian, you wouldn't assume they were.
That's really interesting.
They really were like a turning point for Australian grown global technology companies.
Didi, my next question is.
What is the best piece of career advice you've ever received?
Probably the best piece of career advice I actually got was from my dad.
I'd finished year 12.
I was about to start uni and I got offered a job at this colour pre-press place
where I'd done my year 12 art.
So I was talking to my parents about it and dad's like, well, look, you can
take the job or you can go to uni.
I think you should go to uni.
And one of the reasons is that at uni, you will learn to think.
So it's very hard to learn to think on the job.
There's a bunch of other reasons too.
Louis said it's a social experience.
You can't go back and repeat, but I think that's really true.
So I often give that advice to people, which is what you study at uni doesn't
matter so much, but there is value in going deep on anything.
And so if you push, push yourself in on history and engineering and commerce
and medicine, all of those things will teach you to think in a powerful way.
So what did you study at university?
I did computer science, maths and computer science, but I did exactly half
my points outside the department.
So philosophy, anthropology, politics, et cetera.
Yeah, that's great advice.
So what's the piece of advice that you like to pass on to others?
So Robbie Kwok, who was the chief people officer at Slack, said something to me,
which is as a company, you want to be an inflection point in someone's career.
So you want them to come in on one trajectory and leave on another trajectory.
And so I think the first thing is just to acknowledge that you will leave at
some point, any company you're working at, or most companies that you work at,
at some point you're going to leave to go take another position and you want
that to be a good thing.
So what's the journey you can make here?
I think people tend to over worry about whether this next choice is the absolute
best choice for them right now.
And I often think it's interesting to go, well, put yourself five years forward
and considering you're doing something different in another place, what's the
right choice now to move you in that direction, rather than trying to make
this the absolute best, I'd always optimise for the next one, not for this one.
Not in a kind of like ambitious career climbing way, but more in terms of where
am I going to learn the most?
Like, who am I going to learn the most from?
It's way better to work for a great leader or a great manager in a problem
domain you don't know, than it is to get a fancy title or, you know, tick a box
off on your career resume, you'll learn so much more in the, in the first.
Yeah, that's so true.
Okay, Didier, on that note, that is the end of our first section, but don't go away.
We're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, we're going to open the divine chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Didier Eltsinger, the chief executive of Culture Amp.
Now Didier, this is our section as flagged called the chatterbox, which is
this incredibly lo-fi, low tech box when talking to a tech company founder.
Inside this lovely lo-fi box are about, I'd say 15 questions today.
All wrapped up on pieces of paper.
You are going to have to rely on me to be honest, play fair, and choose
questions on your behalf, which I will of course then ask you to answer.
So say when are you ready for me to start fishing in the chatterbox?
Name three people you would like to have dinner with and why.
Umberto Eco, who wrote Foucault's Pendulum.
He's a Italian professor of semiotics.
I've read a bunch of his books.
He's written fiction, um, was it called the name of the road?
No, I think it's the name of the road, something like that.
And he's just one of those ridiculously smart people that you read his stuff.
And you're kind of like, wow, I would love to meet the person, meet the brain behind that.
I'd love to have the Dalai Lama around, because once again, um, someone who I think
would be just a profound person to learn from.
The third person I would choose would be Brene Brown.
So she's the sociologist who wrote a whole range of books, but dead elite is
probably the one I liked the most.
And the reason I pick her is, I think she is the person that really captured
the power of vulnerability and how that plays out.
And so just to hear her be able to talk directly to those
experiences would be incredible.
So do you read a lot of books about psychology?
Always been a fascination.
And now you've got me thinking about Joseph Campbell, who wrote
a hero with a thousand faces.
So he's the guy that the whole of Hollywood is built on.
If you've ever heard of the hero's journey, he's the guy that kind of popularised that.
So Campbell was a comparative mythologist.
So what he did is he looked at all the myths around the world and tried to
understand what are the common patterns in those myths.
And so he wrote a whole bunch of books called a hero with a thousand faces,
the power of one, where he explored sort of universal myth archetypes.
And so Hollywood draws very heavily from his work.
And so Star Wars, for example, was him working with George
Lucas to tell a universal myth.
So what are the sorts of stereotypes that he distills or what are the,
what conclusions does he come to?
So the concept of the hero's journey is this idea that, so this is a kind of
universal narrative for a story that is also what goes on in all of our lives.
It's why it's so compelling as entertainment, but also a tool
that you can use yourself.
And so the first part is someone who's ordinary and normal in their life and
wants to be special, but isn't in any way, shape or form.
So think Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings, and then something happens where
they get discovered or found or thrust into a situation where they have to go on
an adventure and they go on that adventure and they get tested.
And there's always a point where everything goes wrong and you find
yourself at the absolute lowest and somehow you make it through that.
There's an overlay about finding a teacher that takes you through it.
And then there's the redemption at the end.
And so it's that classic format of somebody being called to arms, taking
the call, almost failing, but through the belief of themselves and others,
making it to the other side.
And how do you think that we can use that in our own lives?
So I think there's two ways.
One is certainly as a leader, a lot of what you're trying to do is help people
understand the narrative that they find themselves in.
And so being able to understand that journey that we're all going on at
different times, whether it's a company or a product or a particular person's
individual journey, it's a very powerful framing tool.
So when you use that framing tool, you can help people understand where it's
going and why it's a good thing to get to the other side, much more powerful
than saying to somebody, let's increase profits by 20%.
So one is just a straight communication tool.
And the second thing is also understanding in yourself that suffering
and setback and difficulty is not always taking you in the wrong direction.
That sometimes that's a necessary part of the journey and it doesn't make it any
better, but it gives you the equanimity that you need to make it through and out
the other side and to not stop believing.
And that ending, that happy ending is always possible.
Let's go to the next question.
Here I go rumbling through.
What keeps you up at night?
Generally speaking, I'm pretty good at going to sleep, but I mean, the things
that keep me up at night, it's always people challenges.
So, you know, you know, that you and someone else have drifted apart or don't
have, aren't seeing the same thing at the same time and you need to bring that
back together and you don't know how that's going to turn out.
And so that tends to keep me up more than anything.
So it's having a hard conversation.
Or knowing that someone wants to have a hard conversation with you and you
don't yet know what that is.
And do you rehearse hard conversations in your head?
I mean, I work with a coach, Ben Crow, who's a mindset coach that works with
Ash Barty and a whole heap of others.
And he's really good at doing the meta comms piece.
So he'll sort of talk through like, here's how you might say this or say that.
But one thing that I've found very valuable, I got this from Ben Crow is to
sit down and list a list of all the things I can control.
So I can control how I show up.
I can control how I'm prepared.
I can control what I want to get out of the outcome or out of the conversation.
And then on the other side, I write down all the things I can't control.
I can't control how they're going to feel.
I can't control the outcome.
I can't control if they're going to cry or if I'm going to cry.
Like, you know, all of these things are things I can't control.
And as Ben says, you have to accept everything on the right and then you
have to focus on the left and that itself, just that process is actually
quite a clarifying and valuable thing.
So for a big enough conversation, I will do that before I start.
So I guess that's something that you could do before you go into every
difficult decision or every difficult meeting or conversation, right at what
you can control and what you can't.
And you just realise how few things you can actually control.
One other powerful technique that I learnt, I learnt from Dr.
Leanne Renninger.
So she is the founder of LifeLabs, which we've done quite a bit of work with
at Culture Amp, and it's this concept of an idea storm.
So you pick an object, let's say a pen, and you say, come up with 20
questions about the object and just force yourself to write down 20 questions.
And what happens is that about six or seven questions in, you run out of
questions because you've got all the easy ones, and so then you have to get
into this kind of curious mind where you're like, oh, well, I wonder who
invented this pen or, you know, who was the first person to write with it or
some, you know, crazy thing.
And what it does is it shifts you into a curious mind.
So it shifts you away from threat and away from fear and into a more open
And that can be very powerful when you're going into a difficult
conversation too.
Ah, so you're more likely to ask better questions and approach questions
from a different point of view.
When we're under threat and in a fear-based mindset, it's very hard for
us to get an optimal outcome.
On that note, congratulations.
You have made it to the end of the lo-fi chatterbox section.
Didier, I now have one last question, which we ask all our guests, and that
is, if we were the holiday gods and we could grant you a year off,
unencumbered, you could do anything you liked, what would you do?
I've always wanted to travel, Tibet and Bhutan.
To Tibet and Bhutan.
Spending a year going through the different temples through there and just
seeing that part of the world would be incredible.
So would you do lots of hiking?
Cause they're quite high and quite mountainous and I think quite muddy,
aren't they, in parts?
Yeah, they can be.
I actually worked on a film that was shot in Bhutan.
So we got a whole bunch, I didn't get to go to Bhutan, but we got to see a
whole bunch of the foot, the skies are incredible.
So yes, the hiking, you know, being in the temples, they're just seeing a
very different part of the world.
And also I think I have an idealized version of what that part of the world's
like, so I'm going to my idealized version.
So do you think everyone's going to be sort of really happy and self-content?
Is that part of the attraction, what you'd like to have rub off on you?
No, I think, I mean, I would love to see that and Bhutan's obviously famous for
their, you know, national happiness quotient, but I think for me it's more
the, just the history and the connection there, you know, those temples have been
around for a very long time and the practices of, of the Buddhism and all of
that sort of stuff is something, there's a wisdom there that I'd love to learn from.
And that is our time up, Didier, thanks so much.
I really love the way you frame having a hard conversation and as horrible
as that is, it is the thing sometimes that is sitting in between you now
and where you want to be.
I love the way you say that failing is not always going to take you in the
wrong direction, like sometimes it can be the thing that you need.
I love the way you say that perhaps before you go into a meeting, look at
a pen, ask 20 questions, because it just might open up your mind to be asking
different questions of the person to whom you're about to speak.
So thank you, that's all really valuable advice.
Thanks again for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thank you, Sally.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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The Australian Financial Review.