In today’s episode, I chat with Cole Napper, the Vice President of People Analytics & Product Evangelist for Orgnostic, an innovative people analytics, generative AI, data orchestration, & employee listening platform.
Cole Napper is also the Co-Host of Directionally Correct, a People Analytics Podcast that leverages his 12+ years of rapidly escalating experience building HR centers of excellence from the ground up to scale — with an expert focus on People Analytics.
From analyst to business executive, to podcaster, Cole has looked at people analytics from a number of vantage points. And so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on how far we’ve come and what we can expect from the likes of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
And we had an opportunity to pick up a conversation - how we transform HR from cost center to profit center - in the latest installment of this theoretical exercise. Longtime listeners of the show know this is dangerous ground for me.
It was far-reaching conversation that covered a number of topics relevant to today’s leaders. And I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did recording it.
Cole Napper
Cole Napper is the Co-Host of Directionally Correct, A People Analytics Podcast with Cole & Scott and owner of Directionally Correct LLC. He is also the Vice President of People Analytics & Product Evangelist for Orgnostic, an innovative people analytics, generative AI, data orchestration, & employee listening platform.
Cole has 12+ years of rapidly escalating experience building HR centers of excellence from the ground up to scale — with an expert focus on People Analytics. He creates competitive advantage using People Analytics for companies big (Texas Instruments, Toyota, PepsiCo) & not-so-big (Orgnostic, Motive, Booster).
Directionally Correct Substack
Thinking Inside the Box
Constraints drive innovation. We tackle the most complex issues related to work & culture. And if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, consider giving us a 5-star rating, leaving a comment & subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content & really helps amplify our message.
Matt
Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.
In today’s episode, I chat with Cole Napper, the Vice President of People Analytics & Product Evangelist for Orgnostic, an innovative people analytics, generative AI, data orchestration, & employee listening platform.
Cole Napper is also the Co-Host of Directionally Correct, a People Analytics Podcast that leverages his 12+ years of rapidly escalating experience building HR centers of excellence from the ground up to scale — with an expert focus on People Analytics.
From analyst to business executive, to podcaster, Cole has looked at people analytics from a number of vantage points. And so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on how far we’ve come and what we can expect from the likes of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
And we had an opportunity to pick up a conversation - how we transform HR from cost center to profit center - in the latest installment of this theoretical exercise. Longtime listeners of the show know this is dangerous ground for me.
It was far-reaching conversation that covered a number of topics relevant to today’s leaders. And I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did recording it.
Cole Napper
Cole Napper is the Co-Host of Directionally Correct, A People Analytics Podcast with Cole & Scott and owner of Directionally Correct LLC. He is also the Vice President of People Analytics & Product Evangelist for Orgnostic, an innovative people analytics, generative AI, data orchestration, & employee listening platform.
Cole has 12+ years of rapidly escalating experience building HR centers of excellence from the ground up to scale — with an expert focus on People Analytics. He creates competitive advantage using People Analytics for companies big (Texas Instruments, Toyota, PepsiCo) & not-so-big (Orgnostic, Motive, Booster).
Directionally Correct Substack
Thinking Inside the Box
Constraints drive innovation. We tackle the most complex issues related to work & culture. And if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, consider giving us a 5-star rating, leaving a comment & subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content & really helps amplify our message.
Matt
Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.
Cole Napper: Boop. Well, we got to give people what is the next iteration of how we operate going to look like? How do we educate? How do we be progressive? How do we give people future that's worth looking forward to as a part of that? And so we decided to title it as a lean uh, people Analytics Operating model. And what it means is, how do you kind of do more of less? Because those are the questions that organizations are being asked to do right now. Unfortunately.
Matt Burns: Constraints drive innovation. Hey everyone, it's Matt, here for another episode of Thinking Inside The Box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out our other content, you can find us at our shiny new website, insidetheboxpodcast.com and on all of your favorite podcast platforms by searching Thinking Inside the Box. And if you enjoy the work we're doing here, consider leaving us a five star rating, a comment and subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, I chat with Cole Napper, vice President of uh, people analytics and Product evangelist for Organnostic, an innovative people analytics generative, AI data orchestration, and employee listening platform. Cole is also the cohost of Directionally Correct, a uh, people analytics podcast that leverages his twelve plus years of experience building HR centers of excellence from the ground up all the way through scale. With an expert focus on people analytics. From an analyst to a business executive to a podcaster, cole has looked at people analytics from a number of vantage points, and so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on how far we've come and what we can expect in the future from the likes of, uh, big data machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we had an opportunity to pick up a conversation that I enjoy having no matter what the day. How we transform HR from a cost center into a profit center in the latest installment of what has been a years long theoretical exercise. Longtime listeners of the show know this is dangerous ground for me and this was no exception. It was a far reaching conversation that covered a number of topics relevant to today's leaders. And I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did recording it. And now I bring you Cole napper. I feel like I owed you a better introduction to this conversation, Cole, but I also feel like you're a seasoned podcaster, so you kind of know the drill by now. How are you doing my friend?
Cole Napper: I'm doing good. And for my podcast, we don't give people any heads up of what we're going to talk about. So I'm working with house Money right now in terms of your preparation, everything. So I'm doing great. It's good talking to you today, Matt.
Matt Burns: I'm looking forward to the conversation we had a really good chat the first time we connected, and I'm looking forward to this one ever since. Before we get into that, and for the folks who don't know, Cole napper a bit about your background, your experiences, and what's led you to today.
Cole Napper: Yeah, so background, which probably pretty uncommon amongst your guests. So, I have a PhD in industrial organizational psychology that led me into the HR function, where I was primarily working early in my career on workforce planning. And that's because the concept of people analytics didn't really exist then, and so it really only existed how do you use data to influence organizational decision making? Was really only in a few pockets here and there, and primarily reside in workforce planning. But as my career progressed, I moved from workforce planning to workforce analytics, to HR analytics, to people analytics. And now I just kind of have ridden that train, uh, forward to where I've moved from being an internal people analytics practitioner to being, uh, working for a people analytics vendor. So I work for a company called Orgnostic. I'm their vice president of people analytics, and I also kind of have my own side thing going on where I lead a podcast called Directionally Correct, a company I own called Directionally Correct, and also publish a lot of content through substac about people analytics. I'm sort of a one trick pony, but, uh, yeah, I enjoy doing it. It is my passion area. I'd like to think that people like and respect what I do in this space.
Matt Burns: I like to think that too, but I often get reminded with the comment section of the podcast that may not always be true. Um, jokes aside, I appreciate the story arc because it very much mirrors my own lived experience. I've started in HR when people analytics was just that it was strategic workforce planning, it was turnover, and it was wage cost.
Cole Napper: Yes, it could still be that, and it'd probably be pretty effective at most places.
Matt Burns: Yeah. Or they'll manage like, completion numbers on compliance training and volume of hiring. Maybe it was dark days and at the same time, other functions of the corporate world, notably marketing, which was equally and I have banged this drum for five years now, marketing tasked with similar objectives in that outside the four walls of an organization mind you influencing, trying to influence a decision or an action or a behavior. Segmenting of data, preparing of messages really consistent in terms of HR and marketing, except that one's a cost center. HR and is constantly justifying its own existence. And there's marketing, which is the profit center, and therefore generates and attracts more investment and more optimism and more things of that nature. All that aside, people analytics is something that has, to your point, matured to a place now where organizations like yours are supporting other organizations in standing up their practices. Maybe a bit about who the types of companies that you work with? Are these large organizations looking for a bit of a boost? Are these less mature organizations looking to stand up their practice for the first time? What is some of the profile of the people that you're working with?
Cole Napper: If you've got 40 person people analytics function, you're probably not working with us, right? And so that's like the mega multinational companies, but we like to say big company, small team, that's kind of our sweet spot. So if you've been in an organization that has sort of underinvested in this area, but you're looking to get good really fast, that is probably our ideal state. Also kind of the small to medium sized companies that are trying to be really innovative and that want to kind of have a plug and play approach. We function really well with those organizations.
Matt Burns: You've seen this from a number of different vantage points. So you mentioned before you were a corporate employee, and you and I could riff for hours, I'm sure, about our experiences leading people analytics practices in large organizations and the politics associated with that.
Cole Napper: We could you want to maybe if.
Matt Burns: We run out of time. I've done it so much on this podcast, and I just got back from Greece, where I did it again. And spoiler alert, people from Greece love any questions and stories about politics. So that played really well with the audience.
Cole Napper: There you go.
Matt Burns: Jokes aside, you've seen it from that vantage point. You've seen it as a consultant, you've seen it as a podcaster talking to people in the space from all different vantage points. When you look back at your time in the profession, is there a particular project or story that resonates with you?
Cole Napper: I'm kind of like, uh, always a forward looking person. So it's like, what's the last thing I did and then what's the next thing I'm going to do, right? Uh, the thing I'm thinking about right now, and frankly, I'm pretty proud of it, but I'm pretty proud of a lot of things I've done in my career is I actually led a webinar earlier today about it that had about 200 people on there about introducing a lean operating model of people analytics with generative AI at its core. I have been a big student of, uh, people analytics and some really thoughtful people who I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, right, who built kind of the predecessors of how do you build an operating model of people analytics? And basically we're saying a lot of what Generative AI is going to do in this space, and we're already seeing it done at our organization because, uh, we've kind of gone full stop on doing that type of work. It's going to disrupt a lot of the core traditional things that people analytics used to do and how it used to operate. So what we are running into kind of on these customer conversations is we give people this new shiny object that's like, hey, this is going to be amazing. And they're like, yeah, but it's doing what I already do right now. What am I supposed to do? And so we realized that, well, we got to give people what is the next iteration of how we operate going to look like? How do we educate? How do we be progressive? How do we give people future that's worth looking forward to as a part of that? And we decided to title it as, uh, a Lean People Analytics Operating model. What it means is, how do you kind of do more with less? Because those are the questions that organizations are being asked to do right now.
Matt Burns: Unfortunately, even in those 40 person teams, they're being asked to do more with less.
Cole Napper: Exactly. And so introduced that earlier today. It's being published in about two weeks. I wrote up literally a 50 page white paper. It's the longest thing I've ever written, so I'm pretty proud of it. And, uh, I'm excited about its launch coming here pretty soon.
Matt Burns: I look forward to having Chat GPT review your article and send me a summary of that.
Cole Napper: And Chat GPT did not write, I'll say the majority of it. How about that?
Matt Burns: Hey, that is an honest answer that I appreciate. Uh, to me, artificial intelligence creates a shorter path to an answer.
Cole Napper: Yep.
Matt Burns: It doesn't give you the answer. And I think that's where we have to as a human species, as a workforce, as a group of professionals, need to understand how we're going to operate within artificial intelligence today and in the future. I get really excited about this space because I think it does create opportunities for us to work differently. And you talk about doing more with less. Generative AI at the center of a strategy to do more for less is a really good head start. Large language models in particular allow AI to ingest and synthesize and analyze and develop recommendations with large sums of information. So you can take needing to have a row of analysts and data scientists to now being able to have somebody with a Microsoft Note with prompts in it that they can drop into Chat GBT and then copy and paste URLs for Google Sheets. Like, it's getting to a place now where literally anybody can act and think like a data scientist and have that level of analysis. How do you support organizations in being able to, with that level of power now at their fingertips, stand that up in a way that's sustainable and is not just necessarily used to chase the curiosity of the moment, which tends to happen a little bit with analytics programs? How do you help them build that sustainable practice?
Cole Napper: So I'm a really practical person, and, uh, in some ways I'm very cynical about a new shiny object. And so I'm going to be the first person to be skeptical about these things. And so here's a really practical example. When I started my career and I was giving an executive presentation about a particular topic that we had done analytics and research into, and let's say they asked me a question that wasn't in my deck, first of all, I started sweating profusely. But second of all, I'd say, oh, uh, I'll get back to you in two weeks. Because that's really how long it would have taken to answer the question, because if it wasn't readily available, well, as my career progressed and kind of there was this business intelligence revolution, maybe that same presentation, I don't have it in my deck, but I say, oh, let me get back to you in 2 hours. Right? I just need to go do some queries really quick. I need to find cut some data some different ways. And I'll get you the data right now with the way that we're using generative AI. Uh, we can talk about this if you want, but we have a very narrow back end. So we don't want to ingest all data in existence. We want to just ingest our organization's data about their employees. You literally ask it a question, and it answers the question in the meeting for the executive. And here's a step even beyond that. What if we didn't even have to have the meeting? What if the executive just got to ask the question to the LLM themselves? That's the evolution that we're to right now. And frankly, I think that's a really practical way of going about doing it. I've been asking this big question of like, what if we never built another dashboard? Anybody who's doing people analytics a lot of people even think dashboards and people analytics are synonymous terms. They're not. But what if we'd never built another dashboard? That's kind of not the future of people analytics. That's actually the present of people analytics when you're using a firm like Orgnostic.
Matt Burns: Hey, everyone, it's Matt here. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation. And before we continue, I, uh, want to update you on my latest creative project this week at Work. Every Friday at 07:00 a.m Pacific Standard Time. That's 10:00 a.m. Eastern and 03:00. P.m GMT. My good friend Chris Rainey of HR leaders and I discuss the latest trending topics on the minds of executives globally. From organizational culture to technology and the future of work, we cover it all, and we invite some of our favorite colleagues to join us, from Dave Ulrich to Whitney Johnson, um, and executives from iconic brands such as NASA, Krispy Kreme, and WebMD. What can I say? We like to keep things interesting. And if you've been following us for a while, you'll no doubt recognize the fun partnership chris and I have developed over years podcasting together. We're not afraid to be real, share our own challenges, and ask the tough questions.
Cole Napper: Joining?
Matt Burns: Well, that part's easy. Follow me on LinkedIn, click the bell icon on the top right of my profile, and you'll get notified when we go live. And now back to our discussion. It translates analytics into actions, and that's something that's always been lacking. And now we can segue back into our long awaited chat about politics. When I oversaw the aforementioned analytics suite in this large organization, you'll identify with the fact that I was pretty excited. I was sitting on millions of data points and thinking to myself, wow, I actually care, and I'm going to really try to use the data to infer trends that can make work life better for people. That was my goal. Went into it with that mandate, and that was how it was kind of sold to me in a lot of ways. It was like, hey, Matt, this is a cross functional opportunity. You've been a journalist. Let's put you into a center of Excellence role and really work on some of these skills, including stakeholder relations, and in this case, managing HR technology and analytics for a large organization. Imagine my surprise, Cole, when I released the first report of analytics and the aforementioned people analytics practices that spent the majority of that day and the next managing emails from stakeholders and leaders, asking me questions about the recency, relevancy, and accuracy of the data. Nobody ever got to what's the analysis?
Cole Napper: Right?
Matt Burns: And the sad thing was, over the coming months that I was in that role, I was never really able to graduate beyond that conversation. We just got better at playing KPI whacka mole such that when I moved to my next organization, I actually negotiated my contract with the CEO at the time and said, if I'm going to come in and be the CHRO, you have to promise me that we will not discipline people in this organization for a people analytics metric, but we will discipline people for integrity issues. We'll discipline people for other conduct issues. But if it comes to you as a store manager, have turnover that's increased month over month, that may not necessarily be attributed to your lack of performance, and we're not going to discipline you for that. We'd rather work with you on the action plan to reverse the trend. And that was a consequence of just learning the hard way that oftentimes analytics may not be used, the intentions might be good, but the outcomes may be actually misaligned with the expectations. You're talking to organizations that, to your point, are in some cases, really leveling up their practice. How much of your time do you spend talking about the strategy of what they're trying to achieve and how, yes, the mechanisms and the sources of data and the outputs, but really the strategy behind what they're trying to get with their, uh, investment.
Cole Napper: Well, can I dig into one thing you were saying before I get into the strategy component?
Matt Burns: Yeah, please.
Cole Napper: Because there is this misconception in the people analytics space that I think you ran into that I wish would kind of go away, which is that the nirvana or the pinnacle of the best type of ways that analytics could be used is to incorporate them into some kind of, like, scorecarding mechanisms to hold leaders accountable. Right. And what that does is it just leads to a bunch of unsavory behaviors. I don't know if you ever heard of the term Goodard's law, but, uh, essentially what it means is if the outcome that you're measuring or the proxy for the outcome becomes the outcome that you're measuring, you're going to get a lot of unsavory behaviors as a consequence. And so if you really want to reduce turnover, my prescription has always been let's do diagnosis. Let's try to figure out why it's happening and let's ask a bunch of why related questions and then really try to address it rather than if we just incentivize a leader to lower their turnover rates. First, they're going to try to game the number. Second of all, they're probably going to start really forcing some things that we don't want leaders to be doing to do instead. And last of all, they're going to push back at every turn to kind of your point earlier, because they're going to want to question your integrity and your data because they know that they're managing their outcomes kind of beholden to your data as a consequence of that. And so I wish we would get out of that kind of hamster wheel. But to your actual question about how do you stay strategic, that's where I always start when I'm talking to anybody. I talk to people for usually about four to 5 hours a day that are practicing people analytics all over the globe. The first thing I want to talk about is what business problems are you tackling? Right. Uh, it's a really simple question. A lot of people actually struggle to answer it. And I'd say, well, therein lies the problem, most likely. But if somebody has a really good answer to that question, we can go to town. We can get down to business really quickly. Because now it's not an issue of knowledge or understanding. Now it's an issue of execution. And now, uh, if we can move into execution mode, we can move really quickly to solving some problems. And I can be a helpful thought partner. Or perhaps our tool can even be a helpful tool for augmenting the speed and the adoption of what they're trying to do.
Matt Burns: Makes sense. And I think that's the context that you need to set up in advance to your point to establish what people are trying to achieve, but also how it fits in with their broader organizational view around things like talent, around things like leadership, because it all plays part and parcel into it. One of the articles that I read as I was preparing for this conversation was one that spoke to a transition that I'm really passionate about myself and that's this shift from moving HR from a cost center into a profit center, and we alluded to it earlier in an example that I gave around marketing and HR.
Cole Napper: Is this where you hold my feet to the fire? Matt?
Matt Burns: No, I'm not going to hold your feet to the fire, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. So, first off, where'd you stumble upon that idea, why does it resonate with you? And maybe talk to me a bit about how if you've seen it work in practice, it's taken shape, may take.
Cole Napper: Us a little bit in the way back machine. I'm not actually sure where I stumbled across it, but I have a lot of leaders who I look up to, who I've definitely have shaped my thinking in this space, for sure. But when I think about this space, I kind of start from a basis of if you're doing people analytics effectively, I think you can do a lot of good for an organization, and I think you can do a lot of good for their employees of that organization. And I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive, and I don't think that they're necessarily two ends of a spectrum or a pole. And if you have that belief, then the secondary belief I have is it's probably not a good thing then. If people analytics functions don't have the resources to do what they need to do, or they're getting laid off, or they're not being invested in, or they're not respected, nobody's listening to them, whatever it may be, that's not a good thing. And so what are the surefire ways that we can make sure that people analytics exists, stays relevant and doesn't get laid off? Well, it needs to be contributing to the business, and I think it can do that effectively. I have something I, uh, call the Ten X Rule, which means that a, uh, people analytics team should always be paying for itself ten times over every year. And if you go in with that as sort of your mandate, and you know it, and then you go back and it actually forces what I think is a really strong behavior, which is to go in and validate that the work that you did actually had the impact you intended it to have. Because if you're doing after action reviews and audits of all of your work to show the ROI of what you're doing, that's a really healthy practice. It wins you a lot of credibility with the business. One of the things you figure out really quickly is if you want to pay for yourself ten times over, you got to keep really strong tabs on your denominator of that equation, which is, how much does my team cost? Because if I can keep my team cost low, it makes it so much easier to pay for ourselves in multiple. In that sense, it's not about being like just another extension of operations or It, or finance, and just trying to squeeze the last little bit of it out of a business or something along those lines. What I think it's about creating humane experiences for our employees that leading to them being more productive. And because they're more productive on an individual basis, in aggregate, the whole organization is more productive, and they make more money, and everybody wins. And the rising tide lifts all the boats. We all flourish as a society. If all businesses are kind of working under those practices. And I know that sounds kind of Pollyanna ish, but that's really what I believe. And so I don't know that's what motivates me to keep doing people analytics effectively.
Matt Burns: Well, I think it's the same vision that I share in large part because that is the potential of the technology and the usage of the data so that it can affect that kind of positive change. It really comes down to to your point, what are we doing with the information? I've sat in many organizations where we had lots of availability of data, but we didn't have a lot of horsepower around how to solve for it. I think. To your earlier point, Generative AI is a democratizer insofar as teams that are not blessed with data scientists and analysts and data managers and things of that nature can now access harness significant capabilities. Not perfect, not guaranteed, but can shorten the path to a better answer than before and can then take those quantum leaps that would generally be reserved for more upmarket organizations. There are leaders I talk to every day, Cole, as I'm sure you do, that are trying to wrap their heads around AI.
Cole Napper: Yeah.
Matt Burns: So there's very much, uh you show me your hands, I'll show you mine. How much do you know about Chat GPT? There's a level of, uh are you a believer? Are you not a believer? Show me the tattoo. There's a bit of that kind of cloak and dagger stuff. Jokes aside, this is a very interesting time. We've seen the largest adoption of one software technology over the course of the first was it one day, seven days, one month, one year? Is this technology. How do you help leaders that are struggling to come to grips with artificial intelligence in today's world? How do you help explain to them the imperative behind it? How do you help them make sense of what's a lot of information in a very short period of time?
Cole Napper: That's a really good question. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I bit off that much. When I try to do this again, I'm a really practical person, and I try to compartmentalize things and make them as simple as possible. One of the ways I do that is I kind of try to create, even if they're overly simplistic, like little decision trees. And so one of the things that first branch of the decision tree that I always talk about with people is are we doing this for creepy uses? Right, or are we doing this for augmentation uses? The best way I kind of branch that tree is, is it for decision making or evaluatory reasons or is this for automation reasons? I've gone heavy on the automation side of things and very, very light on the decision making side of things because I think as just a human being interacting with society in 2023, I think we already know that there's plenty of decision making going on without our knowledge that we're probably not crazy about. And so why add to that, right? But uh, also kind of maybe the next branch of the tree is are we going narrow? Are we going broad? And what I mean by that is Chat GPT is a broad AI. It says I can know everything about everything and fix every problem. Whereas I am very much in the camp of kind of the open source narrow AI, saying if I'm an organization, I care a lot about the privacy of my data and my employees data. I want to have my AI, but I want to have it in a corned off lockbox that no one else, including my competitors, can't touch, right? So that's going to be a much more narrow AI algorithm because it's not going to be able to train its whole model on everything in the Internet that's ever existed like Chat GBT does. But it's going to be quicker to implement and it's going to be highly tailored to the narrow use cases that my organization cares about. And then the last thing, and this gets to the point you asked earlier about strategy, it's like, what do we really want it to do, right? And I think a lot of people are taking kind of the inverse look at this, where they're trying to say, well, we just want it to do magic. Can it do everything? What if it could do everything? It's like, well, no, let's try to think about this from a prioritization lens like we would with any kind of lean, uh, Six Sigma effort and say, what's the pareto here? What are the 20% of things that are causing us 80% of the heartache that are manual that maybe we could automate and then let's work our way down that list again, I think this is a really practical way of talking about AI and not talking about it in the sense that one quote I find very motivating. And we've taken to heart at our organization. I hope more people take to heart is don't create the future you don't want to live in. And so if you know you're on the bleeding edge, you know you're at one of these organizations who's literally creating the future, just don't create the future you don't want to live in because chances are other people aren't going to want to live in that either. And maybe, just maybe, our. Society will become a little bit more humane in the process, not less so.
Matt Burns: I look forward to that challenge. It's an interesting one, and I do think there's an opportunity to find that balance. The historical misnomer that you have to choose between profitability and treating people well has, I think, been proven time and time again that's not the case. It just requires a bit more intentionality. And you can absolutely have both.
Cole Napper: It does.
Matt Burns: Cole, you mentioned earlier directionally correct podcast substack. I'm a subscriber to both. I would encourage folks check that out. I will link it in the podcast show notes of this show. Where did the idea come for the show? And may ask, frankly, how did it end up the way it ended up today? It's been a journey.
Cole Napper: Yeah, it definitely has. I was a wuss for a long time. It's really what it came down to. I wanted to have a public voice. And before directionally corrected, I was just publishing articles. But before I was publishing articles, I was, uh, a wussy who was afraid to share their thoughts with the world. And so what really took is getting bravery. I originally started publishing. I was going to write one article. One article turned into eight articles about the same topic. And because that just sort of blew up that series of eight articles, I got invited to be on a few other people's podcasts as guests. What happened is, as I was a guest on one of these podcasts, one of my old friends reached out to me because they listened and they said, hey, we should start a podcast together. You were excellent on here. I was like all, uh, I i really don't want to do any of the editing and all the unsavory stuff that I know you go through. Matt and I go through to do these podcasts behind the scenes. But I don't mind getting guests. I don't mind having fun conversations. And they were like, oh, cool, because I don't want to have to get guests, and I don't want to have to think about the marketing of all this. And I was like, oh, this is a match made in heaven. We started doing the podcast. It started out really small. I think everybody who's been down this road knows that in the beginning, you're on the friends and family plan, right? Nobody's listening, and you're kind of talking into a vacuum sometimes. But we started to have some guests on. We started to get some traction. And I think the difficulty but also because, um, I don't know if you run into us, but one of the things that we do that's a little different is we get into what I call the idiosyncratic parts of our guests. And so it's really important to me that even if we have a guest on our podcast that's been on 20 other podcasts, that we have a different kind of conversation. And you get to know them as an authentic human being. Well, the only way that we can do that is if we ask our guests in advance to say, like, hey, what are some idiosyncratic stuff about you? Like, do you have eleven Toes? Are you a twin? Were you abducted by aliens? Uh, we want to know, and if so, we want to talk about it because that's going to be fun and it's going to bring a new layer to understanding our guests. And I promise you, people turn us down because they don't want to talk about that stuff publicly. But the thing is, I try to eat my own dog food. I overshare too much on the podcast. My New Year's resolution this year and this was probably one of the most uncomfortable things for me is I said I want to decrease the delta between my private persona and my public persona, which, first of all, as an analytical guy, that's a very difficult thing to, um, track and have data to understand. How actually have you met your goal? But the other thing is, it forced me to be vulnerable and it forced me to be uncomfortable in a very public way. And I think people are craving that, to be honest with you, because I just assumed that I was going to get fired or people are going to quit being my friend or so I don't know. All the woodsy stuff that goes through my mind when I think about this and I have kind of the impostor syndrome moments. But the reality is I think it's made people like me more. And I'm not a very likable guy, so that's huge for me. I'm glad to be talking to people like you. I'm actually really glad that you're going to be coming and joining the podcast eventually because I'd like to put you in that chair and see if you've got eleven Toes because that's going to be a really cool conversation.
Matt Burns: Matt well, I, uh, looking forward to the conversation. All myself and Ten Toes are excited for the conversation. Yeah, I think to your point, adding that level of personality to the show, I think it makes it stand out. And I think people are craving something that is more authentic and more real. And kudos to you for approaching it from that perspective. It's not easy, and I struggle with it to this day, trying to find that balance between how much of yourself do you pour into your persona, how much of it do you keep for yourself? And the world is increasingly asking us to blur those lines. It's uncomfortable for those of us who grew up in a world where that wasn't the expectation. That standard has been set. It will become easier over time and I hope that future generations find, um, more ease in that. The amount of things changing right now, understatement would say that lots changing. I mean, it's absolutely insane what's happening in the broader market, whether it's AI, whether it's digital transformation, whether it's big data machine learning. How do you stay on top of things? Where do you go to stay plugged into what's happening? Is it LinkedIn? Are you on substack? Are you on X? Where are you going for information?
Cole Napper: So I made a personal decision a few years ago. Other than LinkedIn, I've gotten completely off social media. So the only things that I find from other social media is stuff that people send to me. I don't actively seek it out, but LinkedIn is kind of my and I do have a substac. That's where I publish all the directionally correct articles, um, in the newsletter about the podcast. But I don't actively get information through substac. It's more of a one way. I'm sending stuff out rather than receiving. LinkedIn is everything. The way I talk about it sometimes on the podcast is if something's really going on, really interesting out there, it's going to find me. And if it doesn't find me, it's not very interesting because I'm actively looking right and I'm really keeping and obviously, the algorithms like Google News and stuff like that, they can keep you up to date on a lot of things, but the cream really does rise to the top. Most of the time. If you're following to the right people, you're having the right conversations again, much like you, Matt, I'm out there talking at conferences, hosting live events. The stuff that's important, the stuff that is controversial, it's going to get brought to my attention and we're going to talk about it, and we're going to try to do that through a scientific lens.
Matt Burns: I guess the answer to my next question is probably something similar. If folks want to get a hold of you, want to reach out, have a chat, want to geek out on any number of either multiple digits or, uh, analytics, where do they find you?
Cole Napper: Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, but you should also just be listening to your podcast because that's where I am right now. Let's do that.
Matt Burns: Well, we'll make sure we promote your appearance on the podcast. It's been a great conversation, Cole. I always enjoy our chats and looking forward to continuing this one offline. Take care and we'll talk soon.
Cole Napper: Absolutely, man. Thanks, man. This is awesome.
Matt Burns: Vento HR is a digital transformation consultancy working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and people operations. We partner with organizations, private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, M implementation, and integration, along with organizational design, process reengineering, and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex, high growth organizations, we provide a uh lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness, resilience, and value. For more information, check us out. Bentohr.com.