To receive the downloadable spreadsheet of the podcast list, please provide us with your name and email address below. We'll send you the list via email shortly after you submit your information.

Please select a valid form.
Subscribe to the Source!

A free monthly newsletter that's actually worth opening!

We bring you the latest ideas, concepts and strategies from our speakers, business thinkers and thought leaders. Stop relying on the algorithm to show you the content you need; The Source is your curated collection of the latest insights and inspirations from around the globe. 

DISCOVER THE SOURCE

In this episode of The Speaker Show, Maria Franzoni interviews Martin Lindstrom.

Martin is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand and culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries.

TIME Magazine has named him one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People”. And for five years running, Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking resource of business icons, has selected him to be among the world’s top 20 business thinkers.

Connect with Speakers Associates

Episode #208

Normal is far from Normal

Maria Franzoni (00:15): Hello and welcome back to The Speaker Show with me your host Maria Franzoni. In today’s show, we will be talking about business and culture transformation. Before we start, let me remind you that The Speaker Show is brought to you by Speakers Associates, the global speaker bureau of the world’s most successful organizations providing keynote speakers for events, conferences, and summits. My guest this week is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand and culture transformation group operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people and for five years running Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking resource of business icons has selected him to be among the world’s top 20 business thinkers. He challenges established thinking and drives business and culture transformation seen through the lens of the consumer. He identifies creates and implements a true point of differentiation. Please welcome my guest today, Martin Lindstrom. Martin, thank you so much for joining me and actually we started our questions before we’ve even come onto recording. Haven’t we, we got snattering straight away. So it’s gonna be fun.

Martin Lindstrom (01:30): It is. I can’t wait to hear your tough questions.

Maria Franzoni (01:34): My tough questions. Well, here’s the tough one because you asked me a question. As soon as we got on the call together, you asked me a really tough question, which made me reflect. And actually it’s a brilliant question. So I’m gonna throw it back at you. What three things did you learn in the last year?

Martin Lindstrom (01:51): Well, it’s a brilliant question. Thank you for asking that question. I mean, as COVID 19 hit the world for the first time in a very long period of time, I think I got interest where I had time to think, think about seeing the world from a different perspective and it enabled me to suddenly challenge myself. So here’s what I did. I was swimming in the sea every morning and I said to myself, what do I wanna reinvent today? And as a consequence, we basically went back to my company and reinvented everything. The first thing I said was during a crisis, you need to communicate much more because people are so susceptible for signals. If you go silence, people are saying, oh, the poor bloke. He went, broke doing the whole thing, right? So I learned one thing that is to communicate much more than anyone else.

Martin Lindstrom (02:44): I published a book. And the book I published was based on my previous book called biology BGY, which is the largest neuroscience study in the world. And what I did was to basically say, what is the biology of a coronavirus world? And we basically took that whole twist, gave it free of chance the whole world. Well guess what, within exactly. I would say three weeks about a million people have been downloading this particular book, which is really crazy when you think about it, because it gives you a sense of how much people are hungry for learning about things. And that really kick of my entire platform about saying, well, suddenly it’s all about re and quick. So we had all sorts of clients approaching us and saying, how are we going to navigate this whole thing? And we created rice plans for one. And within that period of about a year, we grew and we grew and we transformed the entire business model. And what I learned was very simple. Use the weakness to your strength, be extraordinary, nimble over, communicate through the whole process and be willing to change your business model. And once you change your business model and go back to basic, back to business, again, ask yourself, what did I learn and how do I have to change on a permanent basis? So for me, it was an amazing, as horrible as it was. It was amazing because it managed to kick me out of a routine with I’ve had for many years.

Maria Franzoni (04:07): Wow. I mean, it, we could stop the podcast now. And with the answer to that question, there’s so much amazing content in that answer is just absolutely fantastic. I wanna take you back a little bit though. Martin, tell me, how did you get interested in transformation and understanding it and, and, and helping businesses to, to, to transform.

Martin Lindstrom (04:28): I remember many years ago, I think it was about 22 years ago when Charlie Bell was with a former, former, former CEO of McDonald’s reached out to me and he said, Hey, Martin, I’d like you to rebrand a happy meal. I said, amazing and said, and he said, listen, you can do anything you want. I said, can I make it healthy? He said, he’s a good man. He said, absolutely. So we sat down with our innovation team. We started to do customer and consumer inside around the world. And I realized that storytelling is the key. So we created this crazy happy meal where the bushes in the forest were broccoli, where the cucumbers were the murder with, but the tomatoes were the blood. And then we created these crazy stories you can imagine. Right? And we lost this thing here. First in Germany, also huge hit the franchisees, loved it, the parents of the kids that thought it, they were eating healthy stuff.

Martin Lindstrom (05:24): And I had quite a lot of self confidence. I went to Oakbrook, which is the headquarter of McDonald’s outside Chicago. And I said, here’s the happy meal? And I said, it’s really interesting. Now that’s the first time I learned the word interesting when Americans say, oh, it’s interesting if they it’s screwed. Right. So I went back to you and said, yes, I think it’s interesting. Right? And there was silence silence for about two years. Then after two years, they came up with a brand new happy meal, the happy meal. This time had a little cupboard house. It had the French fries, it had the little burger with the sugar on, and then it had an apple as well. And that was the innovation. And that was the moment where I realized innovation is not necessarily about coming up with great ideas and ideating in, in a innovation.

Martin Lindstrom (06:18): It’s always about transforming the organization along with you. And that is the first time I met the immune system. The defense mechanism for change was really what’s holding organizations back. And obviously at McDonald’s, the immune system was very strong, so they didn’t want change. Yes, the, they wanted to change, but they didn’t want to change. That’s where I flipped everything on it, head and realized if I had to rebrand an organization, we had to transform it. And if I had to transform it, I had to change the culture. And once it changed, the culture I’ll build the brand. And then we rebranded. So really what I realized was branding is much small than just a nice logo and great ideas is all about getting the culture with you. And that was the moment I realized, Hey, I have to change my point of view of a company.

Maria Franzoni (07:05): That’s brilliant. So that that’s actually answered a question that I had for you, which was, you know, how does branding and company culture, how is it connected? You’ve answered it beautifully because that’s, you know, if you go to your website, that’s what you see, you see as two things together and you think, oh, how do they fit? That makes total sense to me. And what I love about your work is that you’ve always been completely an utterly customer-centric, it’s always about the customer. And in the same way with your happy meal here, it’s about the customer. It’s about having healthy children. So how do you become from a century? Because it seems easy, but actually is it easy to do?

Martin Lindstrom (07:43): Well, my story goes back many years ago when I was a huge fan of Lego and I loved playing around with my Lego bricks. And I decided to build up my own Lego land in the backyard of my mom and dad’s garden. And I was a serious kid. Don’t even smile. Now this is serious stuff. I was a leg years old, right? So I built up this Lego land. It took about a year and I opened the gates, this brand new theme part in the backyard of my mom and dad’s garden. And only two people showed up my mom and my dad, which really was the lowest point of my career. The did pay one though. So I decided to go down to a local print office and I created the owner of the print office to put an ad in the paper.

Martin Lindstrom (08:24): And guess what? Two days later I had 131 visitors visiting my Lego land. There was just one problem, visitor number 130 and visitor number 131 where the lawyers leg was suing me. They said it was their brand. I said, my brain, I bought the boxes 11 years of age. Right? So what happened was the owner of Leco heard about this story. And he was a very nice guy. He drew by in his car, think about this. This is a little kid, 11 years old. And now God is visiting you. Literally the owner of Lego. He cannot be no I’m from Denmark, right? So he came by and he said, listen, I heard the story. And he said, do you wanna intern in our company instead? And icy started to work at Lego when I was 11. And the story is very simple. Many years later, I asked the folks at Lego, I did you do it.

Martin Lindstrom (09:16): And they said to me, listen, the story is very simple. We were beginning to lose contact with the customers, with the consumers. We thought, why not employ the kids themselves so we can see it from their point of view. So it’s from that very moment, I understood the psychology of seeing the word from a customer’s point of view, I from outside in, rather than from inside arm, which really increasingly has become the danger in organizations around the world, we’re doing too much of our own. Kool-Aid blind as a consequence of that. We slowly drifting away from what the core of the vision should have been.

Maria Franzoni (09:52): Wow. That is absolutely incredible. What an amazing opportunity and also what an fantastic organization to learn from because yeah, Lego has, is, is, you know, considered one of the case studies to study. Isn’t it, when you’re studying business and, and marketing and management and all sorts of things. That’s fabulous. So, so sticking with the consumer, do you think that consumer behavior has changed during the pandemic? What have you seen?

Martin Lindstrom (10:20): Well, what I’ve certainly seen is that we have been through a shock. So if you go back to proton gamble, back in the days, they had something called an entry point, an entry point is, is basically something so profound that it will change your entire behavior. An entry point is when I’m move away from home, right? Suddenly I get new friends, I get new neighbors, I see the world in a different light, or when I expect a newborn baby, suddenly there’s baby strollers, everywhere, baby equipment, everywhere. And this changed everything. And it’s strange because it wasn’t there before and now suddenly it’s there, they an entry point. What I would claim has happened through this whole process is that the concept of COVID 19, probably for the first time in human history has created what I call an eighth entry point, something so dramatic that you’ll never forget about it. And at least back to some of our NA neuroscience work because Antonio D makos a professor out of Portugal once invented a term called somatic marker, something so dramatic. You’ll never forget about it. Nine 11 was that, I’m pretty sure you remember where you were, what you were doing, even you together with right on that very second, right? I do. Yeah, you do. Well. Where were you? Tell me,

Maria Franzoni (11:41): Actually, I was on a day off sick. I wasn’t well, and I was watching daytime television when suddenly the news came on and I was sitting on my sofa and I thought I had to turn channels. Cause I thought this is obviously some drama I’ve fallen asleep and I’ve just woken up. I could not believe what I was seeing.

Martin Lindstrom (11:58): So this is fascinating because do you remember what you had for lunch at your last birthday party?

Maria Franzoni (12:04): No.

Martin Lindstrom (12:05): And that’s a no offensive, but that’s a difference between a somatic Margaret and not, and a somatic. Margaret is like an emotional book. It’s so profound that it changes our behavior. Well, what I’d call the eighth point is a global synchronized behavioral change. And with that, we actually will change kind of forever. Many generations to come will be different. So what will change what one of the things was have happened because of nine 11 is really the idea of that. We are not touching each other anymore. Think about it until recently we’re not hugging each other. We’re not tossing things. And I realized that when I was walking down the street in Sydney, just when the breakthrough happened about a year ago, and there was this old lady touching a dog, a strangers jock, and I never really thought about it. But for two years, two days later were exactly the same happened somewhere else in the city.

Martin Lindstrom (12:58): And what I realized was we are craving for touch. In fact, the number of pets sold through the pandemic has tripled pet food has doubled. We want to touch things. Prices for pets has nearly tripled as well. What we saw is that suddenly we wanna touch things. When I get a dog, suddenly I changed my entire lifestyle, right? We noticed that that is coming into how products are designed. Now there’s much more tactile stuff going on with it. All this is happening. Now another element of the eighth entry point is for example, the fact that young kids, let’s say kids from the age of 15 to 25 years of age, in fact has never gotten this old as they have right now. Now this sounds crazy. I claim an average teen in fact had become 30 years older. Now, what does it mean? Well, when we are doing ethnographic visits across the world was we’re doing all the time.

Martin Lindstrom (13:57): What we realizing now is when we ask young people about what they wanna do in the future, the first thing they’re saying is I wanna have my own bucket list. These are the things I wanna do before I die. Now, I’ve never in my entire life, asked a 19 year old kid about that Christian and that answer five years ago, this means that they’ve been sitting in a time capsule. It’s almost like they’re realized I’m not invincible. And that means that they’re seeing the world in a different light. And with that means that consumption will change. When you go back to business, it means I’m not going to collect the car and materialistic goods actually going to collect my memories. When you sell a car to that generation, you’re selling a vehicle to experience. You’re not selling a vehicle to show off anymore. And these are profound different positionings, which we learn out of the eighth entry point. So really what has changed because the pandemic is pretty profound.

Maria Franzoni (14:53): It is I’ve made notes really profound, the more tactile that’s really interesting. And it’d be interesting to see what products we, you know, are appearing that have that tactile element to it. The teens asking, I mean, I don’t have a bucket list and I’m a lot older than 19, but let’s not go into that. And the whole experie you’re absolutely right. That, that is fascinating. So do you think the future will bring some more change post pandemic?

Martin Lindstrom (15:19): Yeah, I do think so. I, I think if we should be realistic the, the virus will never disappear. Most likely we will be in on and off mode for this entire generation a little bit. Like, you know, when I was a kid, we always Wednesday at noon had these syringes going on saying, now it’s time to rehearse. If there will be a nuclear bomb or there’ll be a attack. And that was running, you know, as a standup thing during my childhood, I’m sure you remember it as well. Well, now we will have a, a COVID type of sound well on all our phones telling us either to put on the mask right now, or to do something like that, basically to behave differently. And it will become part of our daily lives, as much as we hate it, as much as we don’t wanna admit it, this is going to be the reality.

Martin Lindstrom (16:07): So I do think what we are going to see now is that we will have a new norm and the, a new norm also means there would be new products and new services. People increasingly would buy anything and everything would have something to do with your home, where you can become productive in your home lawn. No, if you want to cut your grass in your lawns, or if you wanna fix your garden, if you wanna have a distance between your bedroom and your office and isolated, all these materials are going through the roof right now, and it will continue doing that because we’ll have that alarm be that somatic marker in our brains. So what will happen is a new norm and the new norm will be based on this. So do me a favor. Don’t believe this is going away. If you do believe this is a way it’s a nice stream, but it won’t because then will be COVID 22 coming out.

Martin Lindstrom (16:56): And COVID 23. And, and, and, and all that fear, which I sadly wrote about in the book for many years ago and predicted this stuff right now is kind of happening, not COVID 19, but a similar behavior in the world is, is going to define our ability to always be an alert. And so in our brains, we have an area called the nuclear CCUs, but we also have next to that, this is the craving spot, which we’re really addicted to right now. Another one is called the Adela, the fear spot, and the fear spot is on alert. We are afraid of everything. We are afraid of cyber attack. Increasingly in companies, we are afraid of a crime. We’re afraid of the virus, we’re of toting. We’re afraid of this. And we have all these things. What we are seeing now is that their micd is on an overdrive and it’s actually a cumulative.

Martin Lindstrom (17:43): It means the more I’m affected with fear, the more I’m addicted to fear, the more I crave for fear, and that is coming across every touch point we see in our lives. So what I’m trying to tell you right now is really that fear is going to play a very prominent role in our lives and those companies, those organizations, those individuals, which can help to minimize the sense of fear are going to be the winners. Those which will not recognize it, or admit that this is going to be the new norm is going to struggle for quite some time. I clean.

Maria Franzoni (18:16): Wow. I agree with you. It’s not going away. We’re gonna have to learn to live with it. And I do remember because I’m old enough, the things you were talking about. So that’s really interesting addicted to fear. That’s quite scary to be addicted to fear, but I, I understand what you’re saying so that the companies that will succeed, minimize fear. Now you said something earlier on actually, and I wrote it down because somebody told me you don’t have a phone. So is that right? How will you be alerted? How do you live without a phone Martin?

Martin Lindstrom (18:44): Well I love it. I have to say, I mean, I did a bet with Arian a Huffington many years ago where it was actually four and a half year ago where we sort of said, can we live without this device? Which is increasingly of course and centerpiece of our life. So I did that and it was pretty extraordinary in the beginning. I thought it was the biggest idiot on planet earth. I remember I was walking down, sh she say in Paris, I wanted to show it to my friends and I couldn’t share anything. I didn’t have a phone. And I felt really as looser, I felt like an, an idiot. I felt like, what am I doing, Martin? This is just to show off. What’s the idea. But increasingly as I detox from the addiction to a phone, I started to see some, some insights, which I never discovered before.

Martin Lindstrom (19:34): There’s three things coming to mind. I mean, when you and I sitting in a bar waiting for someone, what’s the first thing we do, we grab our phone and do anything with the phone. So we don’t look like a loser, right? And so we certainly are not meeting people. We think we are meeting people through the phones as it opposite. And the second thing I realized is that we don’t see things when we have a phone, it becomes a screen between you and the reality. So I don’t even see my newborn walking for the first time, my lens, my camera computer seeing, and I see it through a computer screen. But the third thing is really profound. I realized will never get bored anymore. And its boredom was just the foundation for creativity. It is that pause in your life. It makes you think makes you reflect and makes you put things into your new perspective.

Martin Lindstrom (20:25): And that’s exactly the reason why I was so energized during the pandemic, because it helped me to truly be bored. And that helped me to see things through a new lens, to combine two ordinary things in a new way. So I’ve become addicted to not have a phone. And I will never get a phone again. That’s for sure. But it also had meant that my relationship with family members with my friends has changed whenever we have dinners. There’s no phones. When we go on a holiday with friends and whatever, there’s no phones and it means we’re present. And one of the most precious moment we have today is to be present. We never present. We’re constantly thinking about that little Phantom vibration, simple, simple in, in our brain or in our pockets telling us there is a message to tell that we have to be somewhere else. We’re always living in a cloud and I’m living on ground. And for that, I cannot be more grateful, I would say,

Maria Franzoni (21:23): Wow, that’s amazing. I’m not sure I could do that actually. Especially I’ve got elderly per parents. I want to know if they need me. I want them to be able to contact me anytime, but I there’s

Martin Lindstrom (21:31): Excuse by the way, I know

Martin Lindstrom (21:34): Ways an excuse, but I had to inform you about some really scary insight here. I’ll give you two stories. The first story is super simple. There was a time with phones were not around now. I know you are super young, so you would not remember that time. Do I remember that time? Right. The second thing I’ll tell you is this. There was a Norwegian author coming up to me some time ago. He’d written a book about the danger of the phone. And I said to him, why did you write this book? And he said, I decided to write the book when my six year old daughter came out to me and she said, look at me in the eyes. He said, dad, who do you love the most me or your phone?

Maria Franzoni (22:14): Ah, wow. Wow. That’s profound. That’s profound. Martin. I wanna talk to you about common sense. You’ve actually written a book about common sense the ministry of common sense. I believe’s. And are we lacking common sense? Have you got crazy examples for us to share where we, we are where we not, you know, using it? Have we got long enough?

Martin Lindstrom (22:41): I would claim that you could write a whole book about leg of common sense, right? And yeah, I miss now I’ll give you the other day. I was jumping on a plane and, and the first announcement was ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board. On Scandin airlines. We regret to inform you that the laboratories in front of the cabin has been suspended for public use. It can only be used exclusively for the staff. So here was with 131 other passengers lining up to the laboratory in the back. And, and as you got closer to the laboratory in the back, you could sort of smell that freshly bred smell of toilet mixed up with a sense of COVID 19, right? And then I took a seat, right? And the first thing was happening when I took the seat was that there was a new type of entertainment system installed on Aircrafts.

Martin Lindstrom (23:31): Have you seen it? It’s brilliant. I mean, I’ve never seen it before. It’s called a contact tracing form meeting. What you do is that you ask a couple of questions. The first question was, have you been in close proximity with anyone over the last 24 hours? You don’t know? And the only thing I had to do was to look to my right and get her phone number and name and put it on the contact TRAC form. Of course. Right. And the second question was, and remember, we live in a, in an age where very few people don’t have a phone. So most of us have a virtual pen of some kind. So no one has a physical pen that can fill up the forms with, so this brilliant passengers at row one ask the cabin crew, if you could borrow a pen and she’s very nice.

Martin Lindstrom (24:14): And this pen now walks down the entire plane to passenger number 111, which is me. And the second question is, have you touch anything? Anyone else have touch over the last 12 hours? And I think, yes, of course I’m a good citizen here. Common sense is really disappearing and it’s disappearing because common sense remember is also to set a standard for how you see the world from one point of view, but because the society is so de fragmented in our world today because of bubbles and social media, we all see the world from different points of views. And as we see the world from different point of view, common sense with the word, common, it disappearing, but it is another factor to this, which I thought was really thought provoking. There’s a direct C and listen to, this is crazy. There’s a direct C correlation between common sense and empathy.

Martin Lindstrom (25:12): Mm. Common sense. And empathy, common sense is seeing the world from a different point of view, empathy’s ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person and feel what that person is feeling. That means the more common sense you have an organization, the more in empathy you have. And that’s really interesting because companies increasingly don’t have common sense. What is that? That’s the opposite was called nonsense. It means there’s a lot of bureaucracy going on in the organization. It means that the less, no empathy you have an organization, the more bureaucracy you have, and that’s why you have to focus on. So the reason why I, the ministry of common sense inspired by the way, by a major bank in the UK, where we started to remove lack of common sense was really to say, is it possible to clean up this mess and create more productive and more thrilling environment for, for the company’s employee.

Martin Lindstrom (26:06): And this bank called or standard charter bank, we worked on systematically removing nonsense. And the birth of a ministry took place called the ministry of common sense and is still exceeding today in this very bank around the world and has removed thousands of stupidities and turned them into common sense. So the ministry of common sense is a way for me to infuse oxygen into a corporate toxic environment where productivity is down the drain and where we slowly losing contact with the customers because we see the world from inside out and not outside in.

Maria Franzoni (26:43): Wow. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And thank goodness somebody’s helping bring common sense back and remove bureaucracy. Martin, you have such a huge range of knowledge. There’s so many topics it’s so obvious just from our short time together. And so listeners will be thinking, my goodness, where would I start? If I, if I wanted to bring Martin in to speak, what would I be asking him to speak about? Because obviously it’s such great breadth. What are clients needing your help with now? What are the speech topics, the areas they’re needing you to come and talk about?

Martin Lindstrom (27:13): I think one of the, the most important thing going on right now is as we go back to business, we all talk about a hybrid business model. How do you create a hybrid business model? But with that, my question is also how do you create an amazing culture where people wanna stay with you? The issue is that people don’t wanna stay in your organization no more, most likely, because think about it until today. I have been used to one link, one, click, one screen with my employer. Well, in the future, I have multiple links. In fact, I can just click on one link and I’m working at the competitors. It’s not further away. Then they click away. So we are all becoming personal brands and you will see increasing that employees, which are really smart and good. They will start to work from themself and have a small guts book of companies that are working for instead that is going to cost.

Martin Lindstrom (28:03): You use dilemmas for companies which want to retain their staff. And my question to you of course, is how do you retain staff and build a powerful culture when it’s happening through a screen through a hybrid model and how do you rebuild your culture around it? So that’s one topic I’m talking a lot about. And what I’m talking about is not based on theory then, I mean, throughout the entire transformation, we worked with the, the biggest companies in the world, the me of the world, the Googles of the world in order to get things on track. So we learned enormous amount of knowledge about how do you make this in a concrete way? What’s the practical steps you wanna do? Another topic, of course, for me is always transformation transformation to get closer to the customer, how to develop an amazing customer journey, which is not just a PowerPoint show, which is very sexy, but really what is real.

Martin Lindstrom (28:54): Since I wrote the book called small data, seemingly insignificant observations made in people’s lives I, I really decided to spend time in consumer homes. So over the years, I’ve spent time in more than 3000 consumer homes across 70 to seven countries living and briefing what the consumer is, feeling companies have lost that. And one of the things I tend to bring into organizations is a complete different point of view, where we actually put on the customer’s point of view, and I challenge the organization from a different angle and P saying, my gosh, I never thought about how we look like through seen through that pair of eyes. So it’s transformation through a customer journey. And the last thing for me is of course, to look at the classic branding stuff. I back in the days introduced brands to the internet in 1994 and, and have ever since helped to get Lego online and all this stuff. So, so I’m very close to branding this what kicked me off, but branding today is just a sidetrack to creating a purpose in the organization, which people really desperately want. Why should I not just earn money? I also wanna change the world. And then it’ll elevate that whole brand purpose into a culture, into transformation and into getting closer to the customer. So really that’s the space. What I love to talk about, love to learn about and love to make real right.

Maria Franzoni (30:14): Fantastic, very important areas, really important points for, for clients. Fantastic. Is there a, you would like to leave us with today?

Martin Lindstrom (30:23): Oh wow. I thought, yeah, I, I do actually think there’s a little thought and, and the thought is, is very simple. What we are going through right now can see, can be seen as very overwhelming. I think for a lot of people, I’ve always decided to see it for another lens. What is that? Everything you experience every day is an opportunity. No matter how bad news it is. I think if you choose to see through that lens, guess what it becomes an opportunity. I think increasingly we believe things are negative because we’ve been, we’ve been seeing it through that lens, through the media for so long time. I think you can, if you can infuse a positive mindset into an organization and help people break down these huge barriers of excuses for not doing things like you, not getting rid of your phone to small micro steps, which can slowly take you in the hand and change your behavior. Then I think we are getting further. And I think I’ve that nothing is impossible. As long as you break it down to small steps. And by the way, that was a quote from Henry Ford.

Maria Franzoni (31:29): Wonderful. Truly, truly inspiring. Martin, thank you so much for your time. I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.

Martin Lindstrom (31:36): Me too. I hope you too.

Maria Franzoni (31:37): Fantastic. So thank you for listening to The Speaker Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating on apple podcasts. You can keep up with future episodes on Speakers Associates website, speakersassociates.com, where you can also book Martin Lindstrom to come and speak for you or you can listen in on apple podcast, google podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. See you next week. Bye bye for now. Thank you.

Live interview

Maria Franzoni is an established and recognised speaking industry expert and one of the most experienced speaker bookers in Europe.

As well as working with speakers, Maria also hosts live shows and podcasts. She currently hosts The Speaker Show podcast for Speakers Associates.

Related podcasts