← Work For Humans
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- [00:04]
A
We don't have a CEO. We don't have a board, we don't have a boardroom, change management, managers, employees. None of those words exist at Vitsu. We do it so wholly differently because the system needs changing from the ground upwards.
- [00:25]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Most companies chase growth by selling more stuff to more people, faster. Mark Adams has spent nearly 40 years proving there's another way. As the senior director of Vitsu, he shuns the title of CEO. He runs the company with one to help people live better with less that lasts longer. That mission shows up everywhere in his management philosophy. In furniture designed as a modular system so that it can grow with families as they grow in a supply chain kept close to its factory. And even in recruiting, where Vitsu hires for character before skill. In our conversation, Mark explains why Vitsu resists conventional business rules. How principles like longevity and sufficiency get built into culture, how they achieved a 50% returning customer rate, how they and how they raised funds for their new factory from customers instead of strangers. And why customers so often write emails to Vitsu using the word love. We also talk about what Dita Ram's design philosophy means for how Vitsu approaches both its products and its work. All right, if you enjoy the show, follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, here's my conversation with Mark Adams. Mark Adams, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [01:54]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [01:55]
B
You are absolutely not the CEO of vitsu. And so I think we're going to take that into two parts. That's what you say on LinkedIn. First of all, I want to start with what is vitsu? And what we're going to do in this conversation is I'm going to tell you what I think of vitsu. When I think of vitsu, I think of it as absolutely one of the original design firms ever and one of the most venerable and one of the most renowned. But not everybody knows about it.
- [02:27]
A
I am regularly criticized for that fact, so thank you for pointing it out.
- [02:32]
B
And you have developed a philosophy of business. What I would say about the philosophy is that it is one of the most deeply principled that I've seen, and that's what we're going to talk about. So first of all, what is vitsu?
- [02:47]
A
Can we just deal with the fact that you picked up on the not CEO?
- [02:52]
B
Let me do this.
- [02:53]
A
Three letters there. Chief executive and officer. Well, I'm definitely not a chief. I have no idea what the word executive means. I'm not an Officer, I'm not in the British army or anything like that. So there are three letters there which just make no sense to me, which is why legally I'm a director, because the company has to be registered at Companies House, and then for that it needs a director. And that's as far as I can go.
- [03:20]
B
Made me rethink my own title. It's good to get that clarified. How do you describe Vitsu?
- [03:26]
A
When I read in the late 90s and the early Noughties in the order in which they were published, Jim Collins's Built to Last. And then what comes next is good to great because he was challenged. How do some turn out to be Built to Last and how do some not? When I read those two, they were seminal for me because there was so much in there that I was just slapping myself on the forehead and going, oh, my God, there's evidence for what we're doing here at Vitzu and the madness with which we're doing it and the instinct with which we have been doing it. And oh my God, he's been researching for years and he's got evidence that maybe we're not entirely insane. And in there, he explained to me why I have always instinctively hated mission statements. And Collins articulated that. And Collins explained how you work out what the purpose of your business is. And as I read, and I was in France when I was reading it, I can remember exactly where I was. And as I read, my brain was just turning over and I was going, oh, my God, this makes so much sense. And when I had finished reading the relevant bit, I just picked up my pen and wrote that vitsu's purpose was allowing more people to live better with less that lasts longer. And I was just able to do it like that once he had explained it to me. And then I twigged and I went, oh, that doesn't mention shelves, it doesn't mention chairs, it doesn't even mention furniture. Bingo. And that is why VITSU is on the planet. Thank you, Jim Collins.
- [05:18]
B
So to allow more people to live better with less, that lasts longer, on its surface, that sounds like a terrible business model.
- [05:27]
A
Agreed.
- [05:28]
B
Which is to say you could make more money by getting people to, okay, live better with more that last less.
- [05:37]
A
Long, which is the model for pretty well everybody else.
- [05:41]
B
How did you already know that that was the answer?
- [05:45]
A
Because by then, I think we were early noughties. So by then I was, what, 16, maybe 17 years into this little project? I first met Nils vitzu back in 1985. I was 24. But he was 73 years old. He was exactly the age of my grandfather and I had 10 years with him before he died. And therefore by that stage I'd had the 16 or 17 years with Rams as well. And I had been able to soak up enough. So much of it in those early years in Frankfurt was one to one with Niels. We'd be together in production spaces during the day in the showroom in Frankfurt, but often in the evenings we would find ourselves together. And to get cheaper flights in those days, I would stay over Saturday night. So I was often going back on a Sunday. So Niels and I would have the weekend together. And I had just, just absorbed enough of it as a young brain and been practicing it long enough that once I was taught beautifully how to do it. I could just do it so instinctively, and I'll never forget it, the ease with which it came. But I needed Collins to explain it to me.
- [07:12]
B
So a part of what you're saying is that the founders already had this philosophy. Perhaps not outspoken, but baked in.
- [07:21]
A
That's fascinating. Excuse me interrupting. You use the phrase baked in. The professor, Cambridge University, who has followed us and supported us for 20 years, one of the leading brains at Cambridge, he first used that about Vitsu, I can't remember how many years ago. And what he said is, so many people outside Vitsu can't understand it because it's baked in. And the fact you use that, I have to pick it up because it's rarely used about Vitsu, but it utterly goes to the core of what's going on here. It is baked in.
- [08:00]
B
Does it go all the way back to Bauhaus?
- [08:05]
A
If you want to get data on this subject, he would be very clear with you because some people try to make a complete, unbroken causal link for him back to Bauhausen. And he will say, no, of course it's not that. Absolutely not. And remember when was Dieter born? 1932. What was going on in Germany? 1932, 33, 34. And then of course, the destruction of World War II. And only about a year or two ago, Dieter said to me, really passionately, when we were sitting together having supper about the atmosphere Post World War II, the Marshall Plan. Come on, let's remember the importance of the Marshall Plan, especially in the context of what's going on in American politics today. Utterly vital to the rebuilding of Europe. Not just Germany, the rebuilding of Europe, the American GIs over the jazz, the influence of jazz in Frankfurt. Dieter talks always about the musical influence of the Americans. And Then of course, Dieter ends up working for German architects who are partnering with a firm called Skidmore Owings Merrill, S O M rebuilding Germany as well. So you get this complete rebuilding process going on. Look what's going on in Gaza right now. And so in the context of that atmosphere, the way your mind has to work to rebuild, what Dieter said to me a couple of years ago was, Mark, you have to remember we were against everything because they were youngsters who had been brought up within the Third Reich and there they were, daring defeat had happened, they'd been queuing for food, etc. And now they were trying to rebuild the world. So the deepness of feeling that they had for rebuilding that world. So if you take that back to the Bauhaus, the closing of the Bauhaus, the destruction of World War II and then the rebuilding and then Ulm coming from that, where did Ulm get its money from? The Marshall Plan? Yes, you can join all those bits together, but Dieter wasn't necessarily there to join them all together. But spiritually, I would say there's a continuous line there.
- [10:30]
B
Now, I need to tell listeners who may not know Dieter Rams a little bit, which is that his design principles are an absolute touchstone for people in the design world. And I'm just going to say what they are and then I'm going to go on to say, I think VITSU has a philosophy that is underneath these somehow. But here's what they are. Every single one starts off good design. I'm not going to read that every time. Good design is innovative, makes a product useful, is aesthetic, makes a product understandable, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long lasting, is thorough down to the last detail, is environmentally friendly, and is as little to design as possible. I want to talk particularly about those last two, unless there's ones that you want to pull out. In particular, has this list gotten longer since it was originally published? Was environmentally friendly added or has it always been there?
- [11:32]
A
This list started in the late 70s, Dieter working with one of the communications guys at Braun, Rudolf Schoenvant. And it started as about four or five, slight debate, like so many of these things, it started for internal debate at Brown. Remember that Brown had been bought in 1968 by the Americans, Gillette. Okay. And so this is during the 70s, lots of corporate communications going on. And so they're trying to articulate this. And so it first takes shape in a lecture Dieter is giving in America in the late 70s, and then it gradually solidifies into the early 80s. And by the time about 83, 84, that it has solidified as 10. It is pretty well as it is now. And as it solidified as 10, it was mainly in German that Rams and Schoenbrunk were working on it. And then they translated it to English. The English had always been a little bit clunky. And then I sat with Dieter maybe 18, 15, 18 years ago now, with him in his home and went through the English version with him to absolutely interrogate every last word in it. Now, Dieter, what do you really mean by this? And we tweaked it only ever so slightly because I wanted the English to be as pure as possible, rather than a feeling that it had been translated from German. But in straight answer to your question, good design, environmentally friendly there back in.
- [13:11]
B
About 1984, how do these principles manifest, both in the products that you make but in how you run your company? That's a big question, by the way. Let me just say you're hesitating.
- [13:23]
A
I was hesitating only because I was going to be really flip and just go, it's baked in. I'm sorry, we have to go for it again because we never ever. There's a poster on the wall just around the corner here from where I'm sitting, where it's on the wall. You never ever. Nobody at VITSU ever has to go and look at this in any way, shape or form. It's the most visited page on our website, has been for donkey's years. So you don't get a job at vitsu and we may well come into spending quite some time in this discussion about Vitsu's recruitment process, honed as a product over the last 30 years. But you don't get a job at VITSU unless that just is baked into your nature, who you are, how you were brought up, what has influenced you.
- [14:14]
B
Not.
- [14:15]
A
Can you recite it? Of course not. I can't recite it. Not in the slightest bit interested. But do you live your life with that at the core of who you are? You just can't get a job here. And once you get that job, then it's bleeding, obviously what we're doing every day.
- [14:31]
B
Let me rephrase the question. You're introducing sort of a regular business, MBA person. They've been running a company for a while. You're introducing them to how VITSU runs. What are they going to be surprised by?
- [14:44]
A
You mean apart from everything?
- [14:46]
B
Well, we might go through everything in the background.
- [14:50]
A
You asking me to give this talk? I told you very briefly about more than a Year ago now, the CEO of a multi billion Austrian plastics company reached out to me. She had discovered us, was particularly intrigued and we had some sessions together last year and then she came back this year and asked me whether I would then present to her C suite team, all 12 of them, each of them with a C in front of their name. And she said to me, mark, will you please tell them what you do differently and why you do it differently at vitsu? And I did quite a lot of preparation for that. It was about an hour and a half session in the end. And once I'd given my background as to who I am, where I come from, why I and we think in the way we do, I then proceeded to tell them all of the things that we do not do at vitsu and why we do not do those things at vitsu. Not to be deliberately provocative, but for them, for their away session. They were away two days up in the mountains in Austria. They wanted to be provoked and I thought I could provoke them most by telling, as we touched on why we don't have a CEO, why we don't have a board, why we don't have a boardroom, why we don't have hr, why we don't have an HR department, the kind of presumptioning your background and what you present is that HR exists. We challenge that fundamentally at vitsu. That hr, who on earth coined that, Human Resources hr, as to why that exists, et cetera. And that was what I took them through, to point out to them. What is so different about VITSU is that it's just so much of what others take for granted. Don't even think about it. Again, in background for this, some of the things I was seeing change. Management, managers, employees, none of those words exist at vitsu. We do it so wholly, wholly differently that it is just rethinking the process from the ground up. My placard on the climate marches says system change, not climate change. Because so much of what we are talking about is here. The system needs changing from the ground upwards. It is not tweaking it from the top downwards. It's not redesigning a product to make it a slightly different color and maybe styling some of it a bit differently. It is totally rethinking what the product is and what it might be built from.
- [17:37]
B
And I'll tell you some things that I see when I come in from the outside that surprise me. And I'm going to say these are symptoms. In other words, these are surface aspects. They're the things I can See, but they're not necessarily the deeper thing that's driving it, the systemic differences. One is you have two products. I know that that's probably an oversimplification. You have shelving systems and you have a chair system.
- [18:04]
A
And are you going to tell me that Lego has one product?
- [18:08]
B
Yeah. Well, okay. But it's an important difference, which is it's incredibly tempting for companies to expand their product line to grow their bottom line.
- [18:21]
A
Every MBA sitting in the crowd, whenever I rarely speak in public comes back with exactly that point.
- [18:28]
B
And instead of doing that, the pattern that I see has emerged is you're going to create a small handful of products which are incredibly adaptable and customizable by your customers and that can grow with them over time. It's a different dimension of growth. It's a different idea of how you satisfy customers. So live better with less. That lasts longer. It lasts longer in part because it's durable, but also because it's adaptable.
- [19:04]
A
Utterly, utterly. Yep.
- [19:06]
B
All your sales are direct.
- [19:08]
A
Correct. Long before I read in an article in the economist the phrase D2C, and when I first read it, I don't know, 10 years ago, something 11 years ago, I can remember just chortling to myself and going, whew. That's what we've been doing since the late 90s. Because I had been out in Germany in the mid-90s who had been in financial trouble, bless him, poor Niels hadn't sorted out succession. I went around all the dealers in Germany, was walking into these enormous dealers and saying, oh, hello, we're from vitsu. Can you show us your displays, please, of our furniture? And they go, ah, vitsu. And then take us through enormous showroom all the way to the back, and we'd find some dirty, dusty set of shelves at the back with all their files on it, and they'd say, oh, yeah, here are your shelves. And I'd look at my piece of paper and go, these guys are getting a 47.5% discount and going, hang on, this was mid-90s. The thing called the Internet was all of the excitement. Just like today. Here we are with AI as all of the excitement. Precisely 30 years later. We had 120 dealers in Germany then. And I was just looking around and going, hang on, surely if we took that 47.5% discount back into Vitsu, surely we could sell this directly. And that took us 15 years until in 2011, I went to the Mac dealer grouping in Germany, which was then 85 dealers across Germany, to tell them from 1 January 2013, they would no longer be able to sell our product. And so we became 100% direct worldwide from the 1st of January 2013. And that was probably a 15 year project to get the company to that point.
- [20:59]
B
And you don't consider yourself a furniture company, you consider yourself a customer service company. Do I have that right?
- [21:08]
A
Yeah, because the LEGO bricks that we make, lego from the 1950s, lego a Danish company, Vitsu a Danish name. The parallels are uncanny. From those LEGO bricks, you can create pretty much whatever takes your fancy. I'm a LEGO child, as so many people at VITSU are. And still on a weekly basis I see how our customers use Vitsu in. There was one last week under a weird curving staircase and I just looked at it, I went, wow, I never thought of that one. And it happens. So the mental approach, approach that you need is way beyond what the static word furniture might imply. And that's why we have very intelligent human beings dealing directly with our customers all around the world. Because every single order we send out is different.
- [22:12]
B
Everyone.
- [22:13]
A
And I'm not making that up just for the sake of over dramatization, it is true, every order is different. And therefore I don't see how that can be furniture if the customer in partnership with us, in collaboration with us, is able to think of so much breadth of what they can do with it.
- [22:37]
B
How has your background in zoology informed how you think about your business in.
- [22:43]
A
Every way, shape and form? I'm a product of Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Peter Scott, the naturalist. He happened to have been educated at the same school where I was, and that school had a fantastic biology department, really, really good teachers. And Richard Dawkins, Selfish Gene, et cetera, the blind watchmaker, and many others besides, he had been educated at the same school. Selfish Gene was published while I was there. So I was not only fascinated with the way the natural world worked, but with this understanding of what was going on at the microscopic level, DNA up to the macro level. And then you get to James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis and how our existence on this planet is all interrelated. The way in which the gases in the atmosphere, the waters in the ocean, the growth in the Amazon rainforest, the animals on all the surfaces, that we are all interrelated. And so that's what I was learning at school and university. And then you get the increasingly stated over the last few years, the reminder that we as human beings and our activities on this planet, we are a wholly owned subsidiary of nature. We have been behaving for the last couple of hundred years, as though we are superior to nature. And you hear that articulated so often. But nature is fighting back big time. Whatever news channel we subscribe to turn on, look at here, it is going on multiple times a day with nature biting back. So what I have gradually been realizing is that we have been building a business that is as closely allied to the natural world, the natural order, as it possibly can be, therefore, being utterly respectful to us human beings, being a subsidiary of the natural world.
- [25:00]
B
I have an example right here in front of me of the difference between a design philosophy and what you're talking about. I am sitting at a really quite lovely Danish modern sit stand desk. It's made with very nice materials. It's very well made. I bought it at Scandinavian Design. It doesn't move up and down anymore. I don't know why. And I can't find the manufacturer. It's basically broken. And there's no way that I've been able to figure out how to fix it, because that's what I would do if I could. And instead I'm going to have to probably give it away. I don't know what I'm going to do. But from a design perspective, you could look at this and you could say that is a beautifully designed piece of modern furniture that might actually have been designed with many of dieters Ram's ideas in mind, but the system behind it doesn't reflect the kind of philosophy or responsibility that you're talking about.
- [26:00]
A
Yeah, I think, please correct me if I'm wrong. I think you are using the word design in terms of what it looks like, what its shape and form. Yes, I am. Is that correct?
- [26:11]
B
I am at this moment, because I.
- [26:12]
A
Use the word design in a very, very different way.
- [26:16]
B
How do you use the word design? That's going to be super interesting.
- [26:19]
A
Over the last 25 years, we have honed the Vitsu way. It's never ever been published in public. I prefer to keep it that way. It is still a work in progress. But I thought I could, because in the background to speaking to you now and seeing how you and some of your other guests were addressing the word design, I thought it was relevant. A definition of design could be. Design is a problem solving thinking process which achieves a solution that works well, number one, and looks good, number two. The discipline of design sits precisely at the confluence of the worlds of art and science. At Vitsu, everyone is designing, confronting problems to think about carefully, responsibly and intelligently, how to solve them elegantly. Good Design is difficult to achieve and rare to discover, but it has immense power. At vitsu, we try to harness that power in each and every one of us. If you would like me just to add to that, I sometimes get asked something like, how many designers are there at Vitsu? How much do you spend on design people trying to categorize how important the word design is to vitsu, to which I would say we're all designing all of the time. We're back at that baked in phrase. It is necessary for any of us to join this company and contribute to it, that we are natural problem solvers. And if you hear Dieter Rams talking to students, he will first and foremost say to them, design is a thinking process. And that's why he's critical of the way computer power has allowed us to design so incredibly quickly and realize products incredibly quickly, because that means we don't do sufficient thinking during the design process.
- [28:42]
B
There's some important ideas, I think, underlying the things you just said. One is that design is a problem solving approach that combines art and science. And so that to me, is a very whole human approach to problem solving. I get to use my whole self to solve this problem, not just my economics degree. It's distributed where everyone in the organization is agentic in their ability to do design. And it doesn't necessarily manifest in material objects. It is the way that the company is constantly knitting itself together. And it really makes me feel like, again, the physical objects are the tip of the iceberg.
- [29:31]
A
Agreed. Which is why, Donnys, I don't know the reason why you should have noticed, but for the last about nine months now, we. And you touched on it at the beginning. The major criticism of Mr. Adams is that VITSU is not better known. Guilty as charged. We have been running a global advertising campaign in print. Remember that stuff? The Financial Times, New York Review of Books, Louisiana Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, others. Besides, where we have lifted. Nobody will be aware of it. We have lifted an advertisement from DDB's famous VW beetle campaign of the 1960s in America. And in 1968, they ran one ad which was a handwritten letter from a VW Beetle customer saying how wonderful the experience had been. We have now been running for nine months across all of those publications and more, where every single ad is a different email from a customer, a different genuine email from a customer. And in words I don't think AI could come up with because so many of them are so lovely and quirky of what our customers spontaneously write to us about the experience and virtually all of those emails are referring to their relationship with Vitsu. The service that has been delivered manifested in a product that went up and fitted well and worked well and da da da da da. And there's then a QR code. And if you scan that QR code, you go to the page where the people are that are being referred to. So where I'm coming from is that that essence of what is going on at Vitsu is the relationship of us as human beings to our customers. And that product is just almost a vector, a medium for us to do that.
- [31:57]
B
On Work for Humans we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice.
- [32:11]
A
So.
- [32:12]
B
So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull so you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com Two things about your customers. What percentage of your sales are repeat sales to existing customers?
- [32:45]
A
At any one time it's of the order of 50 to 60% repeat orders. And not only are they repeat orders, which you might think it's the second or the fourth time, but it can be the 8th, 10th, 12th, 15th time because and why we were so very busy during COVID for example, is because every time your life changes and normally your life changes in a way that you had never conceived your life was going to change, somehow Vitsu manages to accommodate it and the customer goes oh. And sometimes the customer will work it out for themselves, but sometimes they will ask us and go oh, this has happened. Could you think of what and how and why and whereby with us and them we can change it. So the way in which customers changing lives can be accommodated by Vitsu's and often the phrase has been used intellectual rigor to allow it to accommodate that changing life is why we have that such strong loyalty. Because as one journalist said many years ago, it's just one aspect of your life that you never have to think about again. Because once you find Vitsu, you just utterly accept that it is going to do that job for you. Once you find that a Le Creuset saucepan is pretty good and going to last all of your life and you can hand it on to your grandchildren as well, well, you might as well just stick with a Le Creuset saucepan. And that is probably where we fit in.
- [34:22]
B
Yeah. Just a note. I grew up with Vitsu products in our house and they're still in our house that we inherited from my parents.
- [34:31]
A
What discerning parents you had?
- [34:33]
B
Yes, as a matter of fact, yes. And so another point on your customer. When you set out to raise money for investment, what role did your customers play in raising that money? I'm thinking of the bond our customers.
- [34:48]
A
Have always been central to of what we do. Vizu obviously wouldn't exist without our customers. But equally, if our customers woke up one day and found out that Vizu didn't exist anymore, they'd be mighty pissed off, I can tell you. Really pissed off. And so many times over the years and for those early 15 years, almost up to 20 years, I was face to face with customers in their homes, planning for them sitting their lovely libraries of books. I so miss it now that I'm not in art. Customers, homes, seeing their libraries of books and just discovering who they are because you can see all of the aspects of their life. And so often customers would say, mark, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. And that might have been an accountant, an ad person, a lawyer, a copywriter, whatever. They were all saying, look, I'm here if I can help in any way. And in the early days, once we rebuilt vitsu from the 90s of it disappearing in Germany and really rebuilding from scratch, the first thing I did then was ask customers if we could photograph them in their homes. And so we put real human beings in the photograph with their shelves and printed brochures. And that helped tremendously in the late 90s and the early noughties. And then as we were outgrowing London, our production was outgrowing London. And we were then thinking, right, how are we going to take Vitsu to the next step? Somebody had pointed out to me that Vitsu ticked all of the boxes of a traditional German Mittelstand business. Many family owned medium to large businesses across Germany are often making really nondescript but very important products. It was a German friend who pointed out to me, he said, mark, the one box that Vitsu doesn't tick in there is being in a medium sized provincial town. And that's where most German Mittelstand businesses are so that they can give to the town in the same way as they can take from the town and the people who work for them and much more besides. So we knew we were outgrowing London. We started looking, where do we go? Eventually we were Introduced to this place where I'm sitting talking to you now. Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, in the center of England, not far from Stratford upon Avon, Shakespeare and all of that. And we were introduced to it. And once I had established that actually most of our suppliers were within a 90 minute radius of here and went, okay, that's interesting. And then we're shown sites and a plan was taking shape, was potentially a site or two, our good collaborations with Cambridge University, Imperial College, that was thinking as to what type of building could we design and build. And then we thought, but hey, how the heck are we going to do this? We're a pretty small business. And then it was those customers saying, if you ever need any help, let us know. So we issued a mini bond invitation to all of our customers where they could lend from £5,000 upwards in return for an interest payment of 6.06% interest per year. They did smile. It's the 606 Universal Shelving System that we are best known for. And we raised £8.7 million directly from our customers from £5,000 upwards. That allowed us to buy a three and a half acre site, design a building and construct that building. And only once we had done that and we then had an asset with value that we then paid off our largest couple of bondholders and then refinanced that with a bank, we did it entirely with our customers.
- [38:57]
B
It's so different from raising money from people who are primarily focused on money back. These are customers who love your products and see the value of the products that you're producing and the relationship that they have with your company. And so their incentives, it seems to me, are just so much better aligned and give you more freedom to continue to satisfy what they really want.
- [39:25]
A
Utterly. They want to keep us going. As I said, they'd be very unhappy to find that we no longer existed. And any number of those would have said, well, how much money did you need at that point? And you say an amount. They say, well, we could have got that money together for you. That's what happened.
- [39:42]
B
Let's start to get into what it's like to work there. And it's funny because I can hardly come forward with any terms to even ask the question because I suspect you're going to doubt all the terms that I might use. Let's start with just hiring. How do you pick who works there?
- [39:57]
A
I hinted earlier, it's a process we've honed over about 30 years now, late 90s. It's really starting to take shape and I'm sorry, some of it will sound very obvious, but utterly. At vitsu, we recruit for character, not skills. Funnily enough, in coming into this call now, we've had a very difficult one over the last couple of weeks where we've had a hard, highly skilled person potentially to work for us, but whose character failed sufficiently. And I can talk you through the process by which that happened. We have, and we still continue to ask for a written letter that may well be an email. And we even now say on our website, preferably not done with AI assistance, because we can see pretty quickly when it's done with AI assistance. We get that first and foremost for all roles in the business, and we know video calls exist, but we then speak to you on the telephone or a method by which we cannot see you, so that we cannot see your age, your beauty, your color, whatever. At any point that might in some way be subliminally distracting. We just want you to get yourself in a place where you can talk in an organized way to us for 25 minutes, half an hour, and that's normal. And then it takes the least amount of your time and our time. And if we get through that point, then we ask to see you face to face. And at that face to face, we will ask you to bring something that you have made. We won't specify in any way, shape or form what it is that you have made, but just that act of you bringing something that you have created and then being able to describe and talk to us is vital. If you get through that stage, we then ask you for a Discovery Day. That word is carefully picked, discovery. And it's a whole day, six, seven hours of the day, during which time you will probably see a dozen or 15 people and you will be on the move all day. You will be going from morning coffee, tea break and through to lunch with us drink in the afternoon. And what we are trying to show you in that day is absolutely us, red in tooth and claw. We're not trying to hide anything from you, but equally we are wanting to see the real you. And we want to see the real you at that stage, not in three months time when we've recruited you. And then we get to it and go, oh, okay. And at the end of that Discovery Day, where you often people leave from that day with their brain thoroughly cooked, because it's a pretty full on experience. And at the end of that Discovery Day, everybody who has seen that person during that day, that maybe 10, 12, 15 people stand in a circle, we stand In a circle, we are absolutely equal in that circle. And in probably 15 to 20 minutes the whole experience is discussed and everybody bounces their observations off each other. And in those 20 minutes we Vitsu are able to make a decision on whether that person should join us. There are lots of other subtleties in there which I'll spare you and your audience and the time involved, but that is broadly the process that we've honed over 30 odd years. And when Greg McCown essentialism looked in on it, whatever it was 2014 that he published, Essentialism and I think he termed it, was higher slow and fire fast. We had never looked at it like that. But yeah, if we make a mistake, then we own up quickly and say, whoa, okay, VITSU ain't the place for you. Really Sorry, we got it wrong. On you go. And it's like the decision making process at vitsu, we take a long time over it so that when a decision is taken, when a recruitment decision is taken, then we have put as much effort into it as possible by the time of that decision.
- [44:23]
B
And it sounds to me like you're listening for the same level of baked in values in each person that you bring on board.
- [44:34]
A
Utterly natural. Natural, yeah.
- [44:37]
B
That there's something there. And I'm going to talk about a few just little tidbits about management practice. You mentioned hierarchy. Is there a hierarchy at vitsu?
- [44:50]
A
Absolutely. It's a dynamic hierarchy. It is constantly changing. Again, many years back, because outsiders asked for it, we created an organization chart. And we only had it for a few years and it was only ever used because outsiders were asking for it. And then we realized all the problems it created. So we've long since been the organization chart that way in which you somehow calcify a business. And we don't need to spend all the time debating what's wrong with an organization chart. For vitsu it is a dynamic hierarchy. We are cliche team of teams. Teams at VITSU form when they are needed because somebody sees a need to do something to achieve something and they will pull together the 3, 4, 5 people necessary for that. That team will exist for the few days, few weeks, few months needed to carry out that large task or small project or maybe large project. And so it is utterly the dynamism of it. And some people then come in and assume you're flat, no hierarchy. No, we're not flat. And it's not no hierarchy. It's changing. And there are many places in the business where I will find myself listening in present, but being very quiet. And as my role, as we said, definitely not a CEO, but I am just providing the context and offering a little catalysis to how things happen at Vitsu. And so in those situations, whether as a team gathered and I might be present, I would have been invited to be present. I don't just barge in. I would have been invited to be present. I might just chip in with, oh, well, 14 years ago we tried that with X and it didn't work because of Y. And I'm just telling you because there'll be plenty of people in the room who weren't necessarily around when we did that 14 years ago. So I'm just giving them the context and then the catalysis, I might just say, oh, and have you spoken to them about this? And have you considered the others about this? Just a little attempt to catalyze the process. But the process is utterly not mine. It is those who pulled that team together.
- [47:10]
B
Yes. You know, a little while ago we had David Obstfeld on the show talking about social networks. And the balance of that discussion was about brokers. And brokers have a catalytic role of bringing together for greater value. And so it's not a controlling role, it's a catalytic role. And that's very much what you're describing. Yep. Can we talk about how you pay?
- [47:35]
A
Sure.
- [47:35]
B
Do you have a pay for performance structure like so many companies? I've never heard you talk about it.
- [47:41]
A
Of course not, but thank you for asking.
- [47:44]
B
Why not?
- [47:45]
A
Earlier on you were seeing if you could brand us as a furniture company and I was resisting that. And one of the absolute prerequisites of a furniture company is everybody's paid on commission. Okay. Which is why every showroom you go into, you can feel very quickly how the commission culture is dictating how you are being looked after. So we don't have commission. In January, in all of our shops, there will be signs in our window explaining why we don't have sales. I was being interviewed only recently because for about 15 years we have actively stood against Black Friday and indeed closed our shops on Black Friday. And how do you get away with that? And what reaction does that cause? And. And therefore we are looking with our customers to build a long term relationship. The lecture that I have given annually at Cambridge university for about 20 years now is centered around a five letter word that I ask the MPhil students to guess about halfway through of everything that I've been talking about. And this all boils down to this one five letter word. And now can you tell me what this one five letter word is. And then I more often than not get it. And that word is trust. T, R, U, S, T. And that so much of what we are doing with our colleagues in the business, with our customers, with our suppliers, are we going to get to suppliers with society at large, but with those who have not yet been born, and we take very seriously those who have not yet been born, we are trying to build trust. And that, I think comes back to the root of your question and the level of education and persuasion that we need to go through, especially in today's 21st century, is that actually we can be trusted because pretty well everybody else is coming from the presumption that we cannot trust those around us. And we honestly put as much effort into that as we possibly can.
- [49:59]
B
I'd like to ask you about a four letter word, love. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember something about love in your space. If you have no recollection of talking about that, I won't bring that up.
- [50:12]
A
Back in the days of faxes, before email became a thing, I started to cotton onto, and I had cotton onto the need to follow up customers. And so often by following them up, I would get the most tiny, little insignificant thing out of them, which would. I would then go, oh, bingo, great, we can add that. But when I started getting fax replies, I started to note that the word love kept appearing in these faxes. And I was going, hang on, this is a bit strange. And you can see when the date is, that it was on faxes, okay, that the word love was appearing. And then as we gradually get to an email world and love continuing to appear. And I was touching on earlier, the current advertising campaign we've had running for nine months now because we're criticized that people don't know who we are. So it's our attempt to get people to know who we are. And you want to see how many of those ads have the word love in. We're not drawing attention to the fact that the word love is in there, but probably every second or third one of those ads has the word love in. And we're not discriminating to positively pull out the word love. We sell, you can see it on the wall behind me here. We sell bent bits of metal, extruded bits of metal, assembled aluminium and wood boxes that we can call a cabinet. And yet people end up saying the word love. There's something deeper going on here and I think it is fundamentally important. You touched on how did we fund the building in which I am sitting. Well, a very strong commitment. But maybe it moves over into the word love. And academics have looked at product connection, the whole repair world. If people have a love towards a product, they're much more likely to repair it. It's why customers repeatedly point out to us how strong second hand market is for bitsy furniture. How often people get 80, 90% of their original new price when they sell it in the secondhand market. And that's because there are other people out there who sufficiently love, respect the product that they will pay and 80 or 90% of the price of a new item to buy a secondhand item.
- [52:43]
B
As you'll hear at the end of the show, and maybe you've heard in my other episodes that I ask what people want from their work. I ask what job do you hire your job to do for you? And one of the answers that comes back to me sometimes is I hire my job to repair broken things. And when I dig into that, I get answers like this. Essentially I like to commune with the quality intentions of the builder. One person said, you know what, I just rebuilt this Triumph in my garage and when I opened up the clutch casing, I found that this one bit had been polished. It's a bit that nobody's ever, ever going to see.
- [53:23]
A
Here you are with the medieval stonemasons. Yep. The bit on the roof of the cathedral that nobody's going to see. Well, God's going to see it. Absolutely right.
- [53:32]
B
Right, exactly. And nobody repairs. Well, first of all, the unrepairable. But nobody repairs things where no love was put into them. Not much. You repair things almost as a kind of communication with the original builder.
- [53:48]
A
It's an act of respect, isn't it?
- [53:51]
B
Yeah, it is.
- [53:52]
A
And that's why it's such an act of disrespect that we no longer design and build things in such a way that they can be repaired. Only two weekends ago, you may have heard me refer to it elsewhere, but one of my wedding presents Now, 37 years ago, sorry, my dew lit toaster, German emigre, we're back at World War II again, setting up a business immediately after the Second World War in Britain to make toasters. And so mine I have had for 37 years now. And it's a four slot toaster. And now that my children have left home, my wife and I are tending to only use the two slots on the left hand side. And one of the things I know is that once you're only using the two slots is every now and again you should swap the heating elements from the 2 slot over to the 4 slot side and back because then you're going to increase their length. So one Saturday morning I just turned it upside down, got my screwdriver and spanner out, took the four elements out, swap them around and put it all back together again. And know that that's probably going to keep it going for the next 10 or 15 years. Just swapping the elements out. I can do that. I didn't need an instruction book to do it because it's so obvious and self explanatory. But my God, there are a few products that now offer that to us.
- [55:11]
B
That's very true. It's part of the reason why we have to. So often if you're going to repair things, you repair old things and it's because they're reparable. They didn't squeeze every last penny out of production and create something that that was obsolete almost immediately.
- [55:27]
A
And you know, dart that the naive people will go, oh yeah, well that's more expensive that toaster. That's why I didn't buy it. What do you mean? It's 140 pound toaster as opposed to a 40 pound toaster. And there it is still going after 37, 38 years. It was many years ago that I was introduced at an event and somebody turned around and said hello, and here's Mark Adams and he's the director of vitsu. They're the makers of the world's cheapest shelving system. And he was somebody who knew us very well and he was being deliberately provocative. But I think there is an argument that we make the world's cheapest shelving system not on day one. Absolutely. We do not make the world's cheapest shelving system on day one. But maybe year five, maybe year 10, certainly by year 15 when you've just moved three times and your life has changed and this happened and that changed, it rapidly becomes cheap. But it's a mindset we no longer have, sadly.
- [56:28]
B
I'm going to get back to employees, but I want to just tell you a quick story about how VITSU is fitting into my home now because I think it's an interesting connected story. When our kids moved out, we ended up with a large house that had more space. And you know, there's a need in Santa Cruz for infill in our town to bring people closer to the center of town. But there's also just. It's this giant heated box of air and there was an opportunity for reuse. And so we converted the upstairs to an apartment, we filled it with interesting people. That's what we asked the rental agent to do, is could you fill it with interesting people? So we have. This will be interesting to you, but we have a postdoc in the genetics of vision, a toxicologist, a photographer.
- [57:09]
A
You're making me jealous.
- [57:11]
B
It's great. It's great. And so, well, that's resulted in a book problem because I have a lot of books, as anybody who listens to the podcast will know. I must have a lot of books.
- [57:23]
A
We love you, Mr. Lindsley. Let's be absolutely official. We love you.
- [57:28]
B
So we're looking at all these different ways to fill in and to put more shelving in and things like that. And I said to my wife, Elizabeth, I want the this company in our house. And it's because companies have personalities and when you invite them into your house, you are inviting that personality into your house. And Vitsu has the personality that I would like to have present. And no, I'm not going to see it. It's going to be behind the books. I mean, we don't have space for one of your chairs, so we won't have a chair. But I don't want to be surrounded with mercenaries.
- [58:08]
A
Vitsu's virtue and Vitsu's vice for the last 66 years, since 1959, our virtue is we sell invisible furniture, okay? Our huge vice is we sell invisible furniture, okay? You touched on it at the beginning of this talk today. The trouble is Vitsu is not sufficiently well known. I am constantly criticized by that mark. Why the hell didn't I know about you 15 years ago? Because I've used so many cheap solutions that failed broke, blah, blah, blah in the meantime. And I will often say that that invisibility that we sell invisible furniture, but that we provide the blank canvas on which you can paint your life. And again, what we see in our daily feedback emails and the snap pictures we get from our customers is the unbelievable variety of characters and lives that is going on on this very simple substrate. And so what we have got is something paired back to just what is necessary to do the job. But a really important but here, with all of the function built in, and those who copy our world, copy Aditaram's world, think that it is just about making things look plain and simple. But what they do in that reductive process is have almost no function involved. All right? They strip it away so that function is gone. And the utter surprise to people who live with their Vitsu for 5, 10, 15 20, 25 years is time and again they go, oh, my God, I didn't realize it could do that. Because we then say, oh, we'll just add this one bit or subtract the other bit and it can be rearranged in this way. So the real trick is having that deeply, deeply inbred function in something that looks like it is doing nothing.
- [60:22]
B
A few more questions about work. I don't know how to phrase this question. I'm going to phrase it this way and we can test that phrasing. You owe something to your community. You've mentioned that you want to create something for your community. What do you owe your employees?
- [60:35]
A
Well, my colleagues.
- [60:37]
B
Colleagues. Okay?
- [60:38]
A
And let's be clear. I am an employee of vitsu. Everybody is an employee of vitsu, okay? There is no distinction between us whatsoever. For Companies House to register legally a company, you have to have a director or two. We have two directors at vitsu, me and my co director. But we are all employees. We are all workers. I have major problem with this attempt to distinguish between the word worker and somebody else. And I have explained to you how leadership moves around at VITSU all the time according to the need. And as you and I know, a leader is just someone that you decide to follow. That's the only reason that somebody becomes a leader in a certain situation is because others just say, hey, don't. What do we think? How should we go about that? And if they think that DART is the most useful person to address that to, rather than Andrew, then you become the leader. Back to your question. Dart. It was.
- [61:49]
B
First of all, I phrased it and I knew I was phrasing it wrong even as I said it. What does VITSU owe you and your colleagues? So I've rephrased it to say, is there a responsibility there? And how do you articulate it?
- [62:04]
A
VITSU is a living organism, okay? VITSU is its own entity, and we now are the custodians of it. But we are, in strictly Frederic Laloux terms, we are listening to vitsu, we are sensing what VITU needs and we are responding. That's why there are no strategy documents around vitsu. Because as the world changes, how is VITSU going to change in an AI world? We could have another hour on that. I think it's going to be utterly fascinating what could happen there. And therefore, all of us who are working in the business as technically employees of IT as much as our customers, who are the people who are paying the bills? There's our suppliers. Who are the people making so much effort to make all of the widgets and supply them to us in a timely way. We are all beholden to looking after that sentient organism that is Vitsu, so that Vitsu can provide in a way in the future. Antford, I've mentioned earlier for the unborn, so that Vitsu is there to continue it. And that is why VITSU is the fulcrum around which all of that happens is for me, so deeply powerful.
- [63:36]
B
I completely agree with this distinction between workers and leadership. A, it's classist and B it's not like leaders don't work. Everybody's working. People work.
- [63:47]
A
That's right.
- [63:48]
B
Right.
- [63:49]
A
Yeah.
- [63:49]
B
I think a kid whittling a stick in his backyard is working. And I think the chairman of the board is working. And it's all work.
- [63:57]
A
But leaders change. It's not somebody is a leader all of the time. They are not necessarily. There are situations where they should absolutely not be leading. They should be using these two things to listen and these two things to look. And that is where it demands you not being a leader, just in case it's of any use. There was one other, and I think because of some of the bits you've touched on. There's one other I had pulled out here from the vitsu way, and Mr. Hamill touched on it as well. And the heading in the paragraph in the Vitsu way is system thinking. Okay. Nature is a system. All parts are interdependent. And interconnecting an ecosystem describes how living organisms, including human beings, thrive, but without holding power over one another. The tree is not mightier than the mushroom. Each needs the other. System thinking ensures that we consider the consequence of every action. How a change to the design of a product or a service will affect a life, the environment, another product, or some far reaching unconsidered corner. VITSU is itself a system in which self disciplined people are given freedom to work. But with freedom comes its demanding partner, responsibility. And obviously you can then understand that we go on to discuss responsibility, but that absolute battle between freedom and responsibility and is so often misunderstood, and one you haven't touched on is people who come to VITSU from a corporate world, from a traditionally corporate world, having learned the corporate ways. Some can unlearn it, but very often they cannot unlearn it. In coming into a place like VITSU where they now have to take responsibility for themselves. They cannot lay it off on an HR department to do the dirty work. They actually have to take responsibility and further their careers themselves and those who are ingrained in the corporate world find that the most difficult aspect about potentially working at a place like Vitsu, it.
- [66:42]
B
Continues to remind me that companies like Vitsu may need to be born, that it's not a transformation path to become like Vitsu necessarily.
- [66:52]
A
Utterly, you're back at baked in.
- [66:53]
B
And so what's going to need to happen is for more companies like Vitsu to exist, they're going to need to displace incumbents essentially by doing great work.
- [67:02]
A
Which is why Dart the only time I spend talking to the outside world is almost exclusively to students, mainly master's students we have here at VITSU schools and universities coming. But when I give a lecture, it is to master students. And I justify that if only one a year of that cohort that I nudge in a slightly different direction than just going to a highly paid consultancy. Because pretty well all of those animals are being vacuumed up by the consultancy businesses and paid an absolute fortune. If I can nudge one, maybe two, in a different direction, and I can say it in that time of I spend a couple of three hours with that cohort, I can see when somebody lights up, when you can see their cogs turn. And that is why I do it, is to just try and make the best brains in this world look at the world through a different lens.
- [68:07]
B
So I'm going to ask my closing question, which is Vitsu asks something of you. What do you ask of Vitsu? And the way I normally ask it is what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [68:20]
A
In Peter Koenig terms, I am the source of it. Su and I was completely unknowingly entrusted that by Niels Vitsu he didn't know. I didn't know in those 10 years that I knew him. So I am the connection to the source of vitsu. And as that connection, I then provide, as I've described to you, the context and offer a little catalysis to help make things happen at vitsu. And what I am very actively working on is the way in which VITSU will own itself. We sit absolutely between a nonprofit and a for profit. You could look at the way we behave as frankly as a charity rather than a for profit business. So what I am doing for VITSU is ensuring that it is in the shape, the legal shape, the ownership shape, the governance shape, that VITSU can carry itself forward without the need for an individual like me, just as Niels didn't know what I was going to do to carry it forward. So that is what I can do for Vitsu so that in turn, VITSU can continue doing what is potentially very important. And when those MBAs ask, well, your business model is absolute rubbish. You're making good quality stuff. You're encouraging people to buy as little of it as possible, to hand it on to their underlings to repair it and do a little. It's an absolutely ridiculous business model. Well, yeah, that business model only works because more people value what we do and will come into our world and therefore not be conducting their lives in frankly a more wasteful way that they might otherwise be. And there are 8 billion people on this planet and if more people will come and value what we do at vitsu, then of course VITSU can grow. But VITSU could grow even in a world where frankly de growth has to become the thing. If we are valued sufficiently by enough other people, then VITSU can utterly survive and prosperity and flourish within this, what I think is going to be a dramatically changing world over the next 50 to 100 years. As we go through the tipping points that we are seeing manifesting around us right now as we talk, where can.
- [71:18]
B
People learn more about vitsu?
- [71:20]
A
People can learn more about VITSU at the normal channels, but Vitsu.com is probably a good enough place to start.
- [71:27]
B
It's not that easy to spell. It's V I T S O E right?
- [71:33]
A
I do v I tango sierra oscarecho.com thank you.
- [71:39]
B
That's a good way to say it. Thank you very much. Well, it was great, great having you on the show. I really appreciate your time today. It's inspiring and I know founders right now who can use what you talked about. So thank you.
- [71:55]
A
I think as you have hinted many times in this conversation, dart start from the right place. It is not later on. Try and change it when you're asking for directions and the answer is if I were you, I wouldn't start from here. That probably applies in this situation. Thank you kindly for having me. I sincerely appreciate the invitation.
- [72:20]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quite quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.