We got the chance to interview Dr. Phillippe Bouissou, the former CEO of G2i, Managing Partner at Blue Dots Partners, and the best-selling author of Aligning the Dots for the podcast where he shared insightful information for entrepreneurs to survive and succeed in the competitive market.

 

RASHAD THIRLKILL

I’m Recording! Ok, there it is

So, I’m going to go ahead and get started with the introduction and what I do is just kind of have a conversation and we can talk about your book and your time in Silicon Valley. It’s pretty much open discussion based on anything you want to speak about

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Ok

RASHAD THIRLKILL

I do have some prepared questions here, so I’ll mostly be asking you that.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Okay, that sounds good

RASHAD THIRLKILL

All right, so let’s just go ahead and jump into it.

All right, you guys out there. Entrepreneurs, business leaders, CEOs, General Managers, they all face one of the greatest and most vexing challenges which is how to grow the business faster and outpace their competition. Despite many attempts, there has not been a consistent methodology on which they can rely to generate real and sustainable revenue growth. That’s why they continue to struggle with the deceptively simple yet fundamental question, “What do I do on Monday morning at 8 o’clock to grow my business?”

Dr. Phillippe Bouissou has developed a new methodology to cut the Guardian growth knot and deliver sustained growth. It’s a universal data-driven and prescriptive approach to accelerate any business regardless of its size, location, or type of products and services it sells.

It is based on the profound insight that maximum growth can only be achieved when the business and its target market are perfectly aligned, just like fine gears between the two plates of a mechanical watch. Dr. Bouissou will tell us about this new approach, why it matters to you, and we’ll talk about his best-seller book, Aligning the Dots, and his television series, The Alignment Zone that was recently launched and that delivers a clear answer to the Monday morning question.

Why is Philippe Bouissou qualified to give these answers?

Well, a little bit about his background. Philippe was the founder and CEO of G2i, a Unix software company. He managed a milestone group for half a decade. He also founded and ran Apple’s worldwide Internet commerce group where he ran the online Apple Store and grew his revenue from zero to 350,000,000 under Steve Jobs. Today, it generates over $25 billion for Apple. Philippe was a general partner in two venture capital firms and has served on 21 Boards of directors, including three today.

During his management consulting career, Philippe led over 210 management consulting projects. Philippe is currently managing Blue Dots Partners, a firm focused on helping companies with over 10 million in revenue grow faster using a unique, universal, data-driven, and prescriptive methodology. Philippe graduated in Paris and holds a BS in mathematics (MS in Physics) and a Ph.D. in Non-Linear Physics and Chaos Theory. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Phillippe Bouissou, best-seller author of Aligning the Dots, host of the Alignment Zone television series, speaker, growth expert, venture capitalist, CEO, entrepreneur, board member. Phillippe Bouissou has been in Silicon Valley for 31 years; founding, growing, and running a number of businesses and learning a few lessons along the way.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Phillippe Bouissou.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Thank you, Rashad. It is a pleasure being with you this morning.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Thanks a lot, man. I see that you are well accomplished, and that’s why I wanted to reach out to you and conduct this interview. Maybe you can give some insight to my listeners. The Aligning the Dots book; it seems to be a type of blueprint. So, I would like to go a little bit into the book. What gave you the motivation to create this particular creative work?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Well, that’s a great question. You know, I have been in Silicon Valley for 31 years, as you mentioned. And growing a business has been, to me, you know the most frustrating and difficult challenge that I’ve seen as an entrepreneur myself, as a CEO myself, you know as a business leader. But also I’ve seen it through hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that I’ve met through my VC experience.

Planning the top-line revenue is critical. It’s a matter of survival. I mean, I met with Brecken Darrell a couple of years ago. He’s the CEO of Logitech. And Brecken told me, he said, look, there is only growth or death. And he’s absolutely right. If your business is not growing faster than your market, that means that your competition is and they are taking away market share from you. And you’re basically on a path to becoming irrelevant. They’re going to just own the player.

So, growth is critical to survive. But it’s also, in my opinion, the only way to generate real and sustainable value. If you want to create value for your shareholders or for your partners in a business, you have to grow that business. If you are declining, then nobody is going to reward you for that.

So, I wanted and I’ve been struggling with this challenge for many years about what do I do on Monday morning at 08:00 to grow the business? And it’s a simple question. And I’m thinking of this question like, what do I do on Monday morning at 08:00 to be a good parent? Everybody wants to be a good parent. There are thousands of books about parenting, but there is no way to do it – there is no single way. You cannot go to a class and become a good parent. And the reason is because every child is different in the same way businesses are different.

I wanted to find new nuances through which to address that problem. And that’s what I have been doing. And that’s why I wrote the book because I wanted to share this very new way of thinking about that problem and that challenge.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay, definitely. I really like the way that you break it down to just one simple question. What do you do Monday morning to outgrow the competition? I think that’s just, you know, if you want to sustain in business, that’s just the one question that needs to be answered.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

That’s right.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

So, with all of the business books that are out there now, that are published every year, what’s the importance of your book? Why should people talk about your book?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Well, I don’t think you should talk about it, but I think they should read it. And the reason is because it brings a new way to solve that problem and I’m going to tell you what it is at a high level.

The big insight I had back in 2014 was that business can only grow as much as possible within a target. Again, the growth is always relative to the market, right? The market is growing at a certain pace, and you have to compare your growth rate to that market growth rate. What happens is if you want to grow as much as you can within your target market, you have to perfectly align your business with that target market.

So, the lack of growth is fundamentally a problem of misalignment. As you said, it’s like gears in a mechanical watch. If you misalign them, the watch may be working for a while, but then it will start to slow down and eventually stop ticking. It’s the same with the business. So you understand that it’s all about alignment.

The second epiphany I had back in 2014 was that there are four universal axes of alignment between any business and its target market. And the stunning fact and stunning discovery I made is that those universal axes of alignment are truly universal – they apply to any business. So, I can take a cafe on the left bank of Paris, I can take an American Airline, I can take your own business for shadow, and I can take Blue Dots Partners, the business I’m running – they apply exactly the same way.

Let me describe very quickly what they are. The first one is that the pain of the customer and the claim that the business makes to address that pain has to be aligned. So, if you come to me and you have a headache, Rashad, and I said, Well, here’s a stomach pill, you’re going to say, wait a minute, my head is hurting. That’s my pain. Your claim, which is to give my stomach pill, I don’t really care because it’s not my stomach. So, you will never buy my pill.

The second axis is the way the claim is expressed, which is the messaging and the positioning and the way that claim is understood, they have to be aligned. So, let’s assume I have a pill for your headache that costs 99 cents. It will cure your headache in ten minutes, but I described it to you in Korean, and I’m assuming you don’t speak Korean, you will look at me and you can say, what the heck is this guy talking about? And there is no way you’re going to buy the pill because you don’t understand, even for your headache. That’s the second axis.

The third one is the way customers want to buy the product or acquire the product or the service and the way the business sells the product in the marketplace have to be aligned. So, if I said, Rashad! I’m here in Palo Alto in the Bay Area. You want my pill, you can get it, but you have to fly here. You can say, wait a minute, I’m in Fort Worth in Texas. Why can’t I walk to the next pharmacy and buy it over there? That’s the third axis of alignment.

And then the fourth one is my favorite one. I actually stole it out of the Apple playbook. As you said, I worked directly for Steve Jobs for about a year. And in fact, if you ever wonder how I lost my hair, now, you know the answer. But there are a few lessons I learned from Steve and one of them which, Interestingly enough, I learned after I left Apple, I came to the realization that there is one unique business on this entire planet. There is no more than one. We are all in the exact same business. Whether you’re a dentist, whether you’re selling to people, whether you’re selling cars, it’s the same business. And that unique business is the manufacturing and delivery of delight.

Let me say that again, because this is really profound. The unique business there is on this planet, we’re all in the same business, which is we have to manufacture and we have to deliver delight. Now, when you buy a product, you have a certain delight expectation in your head before you use and consume that product. As you go through that consumption cycle with that product, that expectation has to be met. There has to be an alignment between what you expect and what is delivered to you. And that’s the fourth axis.

So again, the four axes of alignment, the four universal axes of alignment are that the pain of the customer and the claim the business makes have to be aligned. The messaging, which is the expression of the claim and the way it’s understood have to be aligned. The way customers want to buy and to purchase and the way the business sells have to be aligned. And then finally, the expected delight of a customer and what the business delivers to that customer have to be aligned. If you perfectly align your business along those four axes, pull as much as you can within your target market and that’s really all what the book is about. And there are 20 case studies that really illustrate everyone and examples and measurements of those axes.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay, that’s what the book is about. That’s excellent because it basically has pillars that people can actually put into action and do marketing research based on it.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yes.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

So definitely, I’m glad it’s on podcast. That way you can rewind it as much as possible and listen to – the listeners out there. So, alignment is key. That’s awesome. That’s the secret. The secret sauce. Okay, so with the alignment and we’re discussing growth, what was the reasoning or why did you choose to focus on growth specifically?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

As I said earlier, if you don’t grow, you’re dead. You’re dying. And if you want to create value, which I assume is what most business people want to do with their own business, you have to grow. That’s the only way. And in fact, if you look at the top companies, you can take any market segments, any market. So, for example, you can take the crane industry where people sell cranes for construction.

The top three players of any market are tremendously rewarded from a share perspective. In other words, their share of value as publicly traded companies is much higher than their market share. So, they may have a combined market share of 30%, but they may take 80% of the value of the equity value of their market value. And so now if you want to be one of those top three, it means you have to grow faster than the 97 companies below you. You have to beat all those companies. That’s the only way you cannot get into that position. You cannot grow it faster. So, that’s an extreme example where in a given industry, whatever the industry is, the top three players are extremely rewarded from a value perspective. The only way they can get there is by outpacing everybody else. And that’s why growth is so critical.

And that’s true for a restaurant as well. If you’re a restaurant and you’re not growing as fast as your restaurant next door, then that restaurant is taking market share from you. A customer will eat over there and not at your place, and you don’t want that. So that’s why growth is really fundamental to success. There cannot be any success without growth.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Ok. Is there a specific time period that you’re allowed to grow before you become stale or stall out?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah, it’s a great question. So, every market has its natural growth rate. Okay. So, if you look at the electric vehicle market, for example, it’s growing at a certain pace. The entire market has its growth rate within electric vehicles. You want to measure your growth rate compared to that market growth rate. So, the pace at which you decide to grow or can grow has to be controlled. So, I talked about this in the book.

I said growth is like drinking. It has to be done responsibly. In other words, you can’t just grow for the sake of growth, which is a very Silicon Valley mentality. By the way, I’ve arranged millions of dollars from VCs and private equity firms so that I can grow and I don’t really see profit. I don’t have a line of sight to profitability. That’s an afterthought. And I think that could be dangerous in some cases. So, the market has its own growth rate, and then you as a business, you have your own growth rate.

For example, if you say the only way I can grow is by hiring more salespeople. Well, it’s not that easy to hire a lot of salespeople in a short period of time. So, you have a constraint that’s dictated by your inability to hire fast enough. So, I think your question is great and you have to be very thoughtful of how am I going to pace my growth within the constraints of my business? It could be financial constraints, it could be geographic constraints, it could be an inability to hire fast. There are always a lot of constraints. So, you have to understand what constraints your growth and then try to address that first and say, okay, I need to solve that problem first and then I can only assume growth rate.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Got it. I’ve heard a lot of stories where companies grew too fast. That was the reason for their downfall. So, once you get these aligned, and I’m pretty sure it takes time and marketing research – things of that nature. But once you know your target market and you kind of get things aligned, what are the traditional methods needed to grow a business?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yes. In order to align your business with your target market along the four axes, you have to understand where I find and to do that. I’m a very data guy. I’m a scientist by background, I’m a physicist by background and I do want to measure things. This is part of what I described in the book. We at Blue Dots, the firm I’m managing, we developed a methodology to measure the coefficient of alignment from 0% to 100% along each of those four axes. And there are tools and methods to do that, as I explained in the book. But the advantage of that, if you know your coefficient of alignment along the first axis, for example, the pain and the claim is 53%, you know you have a long way to get to 100%, which is the target.

Obviously, nobody is at 100%, but you need a benchmark which is a set of action, set of place that will rectify those misalignments. So, the measurement is really for understanding and then after that, you develop a set of actions and that playbook, that growth playbook is really the answer to the Monday morning at 08:00 question because you know exactly what you need to do because you understand where you misaligned. And you know what, how you’re going to get better aligned and rectify those misalignments. That’s really the whole way of approaching how do I do it now that I understand that I need to get into fine.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay. What is counterintuitive about your new paradigm? What would you say is counterintuitive about your new paradigm?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Well, I think that this idea that you can measure, you know, I think it’s surprising people. It’s like, okay, I know I’m not quite aligned, but it’s like I don’t know what to do about it. And I didn’t know that you can actually measure scientifically the coefficient of alignment. And so, I think it’s adding a data layer and understanding on the top of the problem, that makes it very innovative.

In fact, as you said, I’ve been on 21 boards and I always observe the same movie at the board meetings, which is the CEO comes and he says, well, I’m not going to hit my numbers this quarter myself, my revenue number. He brings his VP of sales, the guy running sales says, well, I didn’t do my quota and my numbers because the leads are cold. And so, then the VP of Marketing comes and this is well, the leads are not good quality because the product doesn’t have exactly the attributes or the functionality that we need and our competition is billing us. And then the poor product guy comes and he says, well, I couldn’t build that feature because you didn’t give me the budget I asked for. I didn’t have the time. You gave me a timeline. I was crazy.

So, there is a secular finger-pointing attitude that says the CEO goes to VP of Sales, goes to Marketing, goes to Product, and goes to Finance. And then the Board gives the direction of the CEO to grow faster to do something. And I always ask, I said, well, show me the data. Why did you make that decision? Why do you think that’s the problem? And show me the data, which what I call the market truth. I want to know what the market is truly thinking. It’s not your expertises, it’s not what you think, it might happen. It’s not a guess. I want to look at the number and the traditional methods, again, of hiring more salespeople, which is the typical natural reaction.

We need to hire more salespeople, we need to keep your sales. That, in my experience, very rarely works. And the reason is because it’s emotional and sales may not be the fundamental reason you’re not growing. You may be at a misalignment where your messaging is up and you can have the best sales force in the world. They are still not going to sell as much because the messaging is off. And so the counterintuitiveness comes from the fact that you can rationally look at it, take the emotion out of the discussion, measure, and then put an action plan based on the data and that’s what has worked before, as far as I know.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Wow. Okay, so this is very interesting. Based on being a data guy, you can still operate the messaging. You can measure and then be able to change your messaging. I’m looking at it from a social media perspective. Right. So like Facebook, you can take all of the data and all of the analytics and run AB testing and kind of come up with different strategies or different creatives and things of that nature. Is that basically what you’re saying?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah, but it’s a bit different. It’s a bit more sophisticated. The problem with Facebook is that if somebody expressed his or her voice on Facebook, you don’t even know if that person is truly a customer or not. Right. You don’t know the level of tracking between that person and your product really is. And so you may make decisions thinking that they’re all customers, but they may not all be customers. They may all have a hidden agenda. And the reason that they’re going to they may actually belong to your competitors and criticize your product.

Well, that’s dangerous because you’re going to make decisions based on that. And that person is not a customer. In fact, it’s their best in interest to protect your product. So, the way we do it is we actually have cold customers, lost customers, prospects, and lost prospects – those are the four categories. And I call you as a customer and I said, I know you’re using my product, Rashad. How would you describe what my product does in one sentence?

Just one sentence. If you meet a friend and you describe what my product does, which is the product you bought, again, how would you describe that? So if you ask that to 40 or 50 people and you analyze those sentences, you can actually see how much they converge into the sentence that’s on that discovered product. Right. You can measure how far that description, the average description of those 50 customers and your description on your website, which is your message. So, you can compare the perception and your message and you can measure the alignment.

I’m simplifying a little bit. It’s a bit more complicated than that. But that’s how we measure, for example, the alignment between the message and the perception. You have to talk to the customers, you have to get the market truth. And by the way, we Blue Dots are talking to the customers, not the company, because first of all, the company doesn’t really want to hear if it’s bad news. And secondly, the customer never likes to talk to the company because it’s like, well, I don’t really like your product, but I don’t really like telling you I don’t like your products.

Whereas if they talk to me as Blue Dots, I said, look, I work for Blue Dots. I don’t care about the company, I don’t really care if you tell me you hate the product or hate the CEO’s haircut, it’s fine with me. And I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just want to ask you, can you describe in one sentence what the company does?

And so it gives us the integrity and the objectivity that is critical to be able to get to the market truth that the Executive team or the CEO cannot get by calling directly the customer. It just doesn’t work. So it’s very subtle. You have to do it in the right way. Otherwise, you’re not measuring correctly.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Right. So, you said they’re basically old customers or someone who’s purchased before or people that you know is a direct customer?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Right. You have to know that they are a customer indeed. Or they are a lost customer. Somebody who just decided to stop using a product six months ago. And that’s a very interesting thing as well, because you can ask them and say, I know you stopped using the product of that company. You have good reasons. I’m not trying to convince you otherwise. I’m sure you might decide for you. Tell me, why did you stop using that product? We’ve done this many times for our clients. And when we bring that back to the client, they are very surprised that, oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that they stopped using it for that reason. And there’s always lots of key insights and eye-opening market truth that we’re bringing back to those companies that we’re helping to grow.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Yeah. I can see how they would tell your company the truth as opposed to the actual company that let them down. So, you’re saying that this can be done in any industry?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

That’s correct. As long as there’s a transaction means somebody is buying something and as long as you have enough transactions. Right. So if you have a business and you have eight customers, you should know that a customer is cold you don’t need to do this analysis. So, there has to be at least 50 to 100 customers. But it applies to pretty much any business. If your business is less than 100 customers, it probably doesn’t need that and there are not that many businesses that have a handful of customers.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay. So from the business perspective, they would need a way to keep up with customers, lead generation, or email campaigns just to keep up with these.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Well, they should be able to talk to their customers. Right. I mean, if you have customers and you don’t know who they are, then the first thing you need to do is you need to acquire that data and that information. You need to know who your customers are, because otherwise you cannot do anything. You just know that somebody bought that product, you have no database, you have no view on who they are. Is it a woman? Is it a man? What age? I mean, there are many questions that you need to understand. You need to segment your market and understand those segments for sure.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay. So what was it in your background that was critical to invent this new paradigm?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Well, I think it’s my Physics background. I’ve done research in Physics, in Chaos Theory, which I use every day with all those entries. It’s really interesting. I think that Physics helps you understand the world based on what the world truly is. And what I mean by that is that there are four fundamental forces in the world that govern the behavior of the entire universe. And that’s it, there are no more than four. When you understand Physics and you put together those models, those theories, then you test those theories against an experiment. And the experiments will either validate or invalidate the theory. It’s very black and white.

I think there is no reason to not think that businesses are like that. So, the understanding of why customers truly buy, there’s a reason they bought, always. It may be emotional, it may not be emotional, but there is a reason. And the understanding of the forces behind those is really important. And the way I’m thinking about it is those four universal axes of alignment or the equivalent of the four fundamental universal forces. That’s the way the business is driven and there are no other ones. There are no other forces, although it’s not completely true. There is a fifth alignment. And I actually dedicate the last chapter of the book on it because this is actually really important as well.

The fifth alignment is the internal alignment. If the organization is not internally aligned, then they will not be able to execute the external alignment. So, you start with understanding and having a growth table and you have to have a team who is behind the execution of that growth table. And they have to be internally aligned. If it’s not internally aligned then you will not go as fast because there is no execution of the growth table.

So, I’m thinking always as four plus one, the four external alignments with the market equivalent to the four forces of the universe. And then there is one more alignment, which is the internal alignment that has to be there for the execution of the growth table. Just to answer your question quickly, I mean, Physics and the way I look at the world through my Physicist eyes really gave me this new idea of looking at it from a business perspective. I think that’s why I was able to come up with those ideas.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

When you were in school and studying for Physics and everything, did you ever think that it would translate to business?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

No. In fact, no. I mean, I have no idea that I would apply any Physics in a business, but it just gives me a way to look at the world that most people don’t have because they don’t necessarily have an interest or a background in Physics. And I knew that when I was studying Physics, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing research because it’s a very lonely job. You’re working very deep on a field in Physics, as many fields. And there is only a few handful of teams in the world that understand and that are working on the same problem.

I’m a people’s guy. I like people. And it’s like if I keep doing this the rest of my life, I’m going to interact with a few teams in the US and Japan and wherever they are. Very early, I decided that I will not be a Research Physicist for the rest of my life, that I wanted to go into business. And the other thing that’s really interesting about business, which is completely opposite to Physics, is that physics is extremely rational. It’s very binary. When you have a law in Physics, the world follows that law. And if it doesn’t, then you need to find another law that will replace the first one. That’s how we went from traditional mechanics to Quantum Physics.

But the business is, actually in the vast majority of the case, people are making decisions based on emotions, not really rational. They buy a product for emotions. So, once you rationalize that argument that they make irrational decisions, and once you understand that, then you can start to go to the next level, which is this alignment thing. But people is really the key. That’s the thing that makes me think and trying to help entrepreneurs, because I’ve been an entrepreneur. I know how hard it is. It’s really difficult. It’s a lonely job. You can’t talk to your wife, you can’t talk to your Board, you can’t talk to your Executive team because they would freak out. You have to carry on and you have to figure it out. And it’s really hard, and it’s very tedious.

Silicon Valley has the tendency to emphasize the glamorous aspect of entrepreneurship and those great entrepreneurs that build billions of dollars. Well, I tell you, those are exceptional people. There’s not that many companies that reach a billion dollars in market cap. And the reality is that it’s very grinding. It’s very difficult. It’s very lonely. And I have full empathy with any entrepreneurs, whether you’re selling ice cream on the corner of the street or building the next test. I know how hard it is, and I want to help because I’ve been through it and I know how hard it is and I want to help. That’s also why I wrote the book.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Awesome. There are a lot of people out here that need an actual step-by-step guide. At this moment in time, things are changing really fast as far as technology is concerned.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah, in innovation, right.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Right. Will you be writing a book? Because I would definitely read it about the way that Physics is basically evolved into business or how they relate. Have you ever thought about it?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yes, when I wrote the book Aligning the Dots, I sent the manuscript to my editor, and she called me back and she said, Philippe, you send me a manuscript that’s 80,000 words. A book is typically between 30 and 35,000 words. So, she said to me, send me two books. And are you writing two books? I said, no, I’m just writing one book. And then she said, okay, you need to cut half of the book. And I told her, I said, Look, I am not going to cut my own finger. You have to cut it. I mean, you’re the editor that’s what you do. That’s your job. I think everything I wrote is important. Otherwise, I would not have written it. And so, then she said, you know, your book is very confusing because there is a lot of Physics and Math in your book.

She looked at me and said, what kind of book do you want to write? Do you want to write an academic book or do you want to write a business book? And I said, with no hesitation, I want to write a business book to help entrepreneurs. But the reason I’m putting all this Physics and Math is that I want them to understand this measurement methodology and how to look at the data. And she said, you’re going to lose everybody within five minutes.

She said, you cannot put all those things. With Quantum Physics, there’s all kinds of things, analogies, and thermodynamics. So she said, okay, if you want to write a book, I’m going to take out all the Physics and the Math stuff. I’m going to keep very little of it. Then if you want to write another book about how Physics applies to business, then that could be your next book. And it’s exactly the idea that you’re suggesting.

So, I don’t know. I’m interested in the idea of writing that book. I just don’t have the time right now. It takes a lot of time to write a book. But I think it’s a really interesting concept because there’s a lot of analogy of Physics that can be applied to business and to life in general.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

I definitely agree. That’s basically the name of my brand and what I teach people is kind of if you can get aligned with yourself through just meditation and motivation. To me, it’s all universal. So, that’s a little bit about what I teach or what I try to show people.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah. And I think being aligned internally with yourself and with the world and being in harmony is really critical. And that’s what Physics is all about, by the way. All the stars are perfectly aligned according to the laws, according to universal laws. But there is a very clear and fascinating order and alignment that makes this universe be what it is today. And it evolves. It’s changing a lot. In the same way, markets and innovation are changing. And the way people think about dealing and living is also changed. And so, I think you’re absolutely right. To me, alignment, I mean I use this word several times a day. It’s all about alignment. And you can look at any facets of life and universe and things around us. And you will find alignment everywhere.

It’s certain that separating a brain is all about alignment. If you miss alignment, it’s a big deal. Docking into the International Space Station is all about alignment. I mean, it’s pretty crazy finding gravity waves. I think in 2017, I talked about this in my book. With those devices, they built two of those devices, they measure those alignments at the precision. That’s unbelievable. And even Einstein said we will never be able to measure them, and we did. And so you look at the Blue Angels flying together, 18 inches apart. It’s all about alignment. I mean, if you put that alignment lens on top of your eyes, you’ll see that the whole world is all about alignment, everything is.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Wow. I never looked at it like that. That’s something to open your eyes and begin to see. Absolutely interesting. Yeah. So careers, and I guess entanglements, relationships, and all of that, you always hear the word alignment when someone is talking about those things. Yeah. So moving on in life, that’s the key.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

That’s right. And if you’re going to marry somebody, you plan for a long time. And by the way, that person will change. You will change. So, the alignment is a constant struggle. I mean, it changes all the time. When I align my business with the market. Well, guess what? Two years from now, the market has changed because as you said earlier, there is new innovation, new technology, new business models, new markets that we never thought would be existing. And now you have to realign, because if you’re not realigning dynamically. So, it’s a never-ending quest. The alignment is not one thing you do and then you’re done. That’s not the way it works. You have to realign constantly.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Oh, wow.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

It’s a battle.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

So, with that being not aligned, can you give an example of a bad and a good alignment?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah. The prime example of a bad alignment, I’m assuming you’re asking in business is Theranos. Theranos was put together by Elizabeth Holmes. She dropped out of Stanford. She was 19. And the idea was you could run dozens of blood tests of one single drop of blood. No need to have needles in your arm anymore. And she raised a lot of money. The problem is that the tests were inaccurate and didn’t work.

So, what happens is that the A-4, if you look at the expected delight, the delivery was completely misaligned. I’m giving blood, and the tests are just not correct and not accurate. The company was a disaster. John Carew, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, wrote a fantastic book called Bad Blood about this particular story of Theranos. And she went to a trial and she was convicted just like four or five weeks ago, not too long ago, and the company completely shut down. So, that’s a massive misalignment where what she promised didn’t really happen.

A good alignment would be Apple, because when you interact with the product, the level of delight you have interacting with that product is very high. There is a very good alignment between what you expect and what’s delivered. So, Apple is probably one of the best-aligned companies that I know of and that’s the reason they are so successful today and they are worth over $2 trillion in the marketplace. So, tremendously aligned they are. And in all kinds of details, not just the experience of the product but in many aspects of what they do. They are truly well-designed.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Yeah, you can tell. You can definitely tell that there’s a company that communicates with their customers and stay aligned with what it is that they want.

Well, Dr. Philippe Bouissou, I would like to thank you for being here with us today.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Thank you so much for having me on the show. Rashad, I really enjoyed our discussion and your thoughtful questions. Thank you so much.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay, no problem at all. I’ll circle back. I haven’t read it yet but after I read it, I’d like to speak a little more. So, I’ll reach out and get in touch.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

That sounds good. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

No problem. Have a great day.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah. And Rashad can you send me your address I want to send you a signed copy of the book. I want to sign a copy and I want to send it to you.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Oh definitely. Would you like for me to send it to your Blue Dots?

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Yeah, you have my email address, right on Blue Dots?

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Yes, I do. Yeah.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

If you could just put your address and I will I’m actually in LA today. I’m driving back on Saturday but I will put it. I will prepare a copy and I will send it to you.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Okay. Awesome. Alright.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

Thanks a lot. Thanks again for having me and enjoy the rest of the show. Sorry, enjoy the rest of the day and thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it.

RASHAD THIRLKILL

Alright. No problem. You have a great day.

PHILLIPPE BOUISSOU

You too. Bye.