Coburn Ventures Podcast

In the last in our series on Leadership, Pip and I apply the concept of collective consciousness to leadership and especially, our new workplaces and habits of work. The upshot? The more collectiveness consciousness an organization has, the more options the organization has.  As workplaces are now “blended” between offices and home and other spaces, it might be helpful to step back and consid...

How is it that value is actually added to a company? We sometimes assume we have the playbook to answer a question like that, and, well, for many of us this is the goal of our jobs as investors or leaders. But of course, like everything, it's quite dynamic.  In this deep dive on leadership with Jennifer Salopek, we explore “value” much more...what might be next beyond the pyramid structure of...

Matthias Hollwich, founder of the architecture firm HWKN, is back with us today to offer another perspective in this series in our podcast on leadership. Now, Matthias lives at the intersection of the future of work and leadership and he does this with his toolset of architecture and design. So his perspective lives a few years ahead of us, because by nature, he is designing buildings and spaces t...

It's Thanksgiving today in the United States, so this is a special edition of our Coburn Ventures Podcast, which will also be an inaugural edition of a new monthly series over at the Change Makers podcast coming in 2022. That podcast is for the Coburn Ventures Community for Change and the over 300 members who contribute to that community.  In this special edition, we knew we wanted to present...

As a midpoint in our series on leadership, we are dropping in a short but simple concept that I think could be valuable just because it's a valid candidate for a real blind spot for us, the lens we see through as investors and business leaders, and for the management teams we interface with and depend on to have a strategy that syncs up with reality. So, this podcast is about growing our awareness...

Today we kickoff a series on leadership, and what better way to do that than to visit with Lisa Baird, our friend and leader of Heidrick & Struggles Global Human Resources Practice. We dive right in, and start with hiring: What are corporations looking for in their leadership and more importantly, why? What attributes are required to meet the moment?  We end with Lisa's own questions for managemen...

What does it take to identify a company that is a true guardian of an increasingly valuable, durable brand? Now that we have learned more about brand character with Veta, we will focus on assessing if the company is actually acting consistently with brand character as one of the key ways to preserve and build brand value.  If we, as investors, are going to purport that a company has “a great...

Today we get to dive in on the topic of brand with a day-to-day practitioner, advisor, and creator of brand value, Veta Bates.  Veta gives real-life examples of products and then helpfully pairs them with analysis behind what each company is doing with their brand development that is or isn’t adding value.  As we start,  Veta is recounting a conversation she and Gavin Ivester had ab...

After our intro to assessing brands, we now add a new dimension: values-based branding, that attempt that can hit or miss that aims to tightly tie brand and behavior to value signaling and an offer of being “values-aligned” with a product, service, or company. Why does this seem to be fertile ground, and is it, really? That question is why we brought in Irwin Kula for his perspective on how we bel...

Today we start a new series on branding, and especially how to consider the value of brands in assessing the broader corporation and its competitive advantages.  We start with one idea that I want to highlight because I think it's not the standard idea of what a brand is to a corporation: it is that the brand resides in the buyers' mind. It is NOT owned by the corporation and DEFINITELY NOT c...

The G is in ESG, which stands for Governance, is often seen as the point of relief for our clients. It’s the part where they tell us: we know we have a lot to learn on Environment and Social, but Governance, we’ve got it. We’ve been doing that really well for a long time. But what if the G in ESG is different from the G of the past 3-4 decades? When we step back, I don’t think anyone would think i...

One of our goals in this series of ESG podcasts is to take the abstract idea of ESG and bring it to life with concrete examples. There are leaders out there in both the investing world and of course, the business operators, who are defining and iterating on the standards of ESG, and we want to hear more about it. That’s why today we’re speaking with Jasper Van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance. Ja...

Today we are talking about the history of the money management industry, and how values that were "baked in" in the 1980s when this industry really took off are dictating a lot of what we think is possible and right in the industry, and why the emergence of ESG and ESG related investment philosophies can seem so incongruent. But to do this, to go through unearthing the founding values of an indust...

We are in a time in which ESG or multi-stakeholder investing, the real process of it, the real ‘how to” is actively being defined. Its defined by doing it. And though the marketers already have great tag lines out in the market and Regulators are having their say in what they want to highlight,   investors will also create the market by putting their stake in the ground, by having their...

As investors, we are outsiders, so when we hear from management that the company has an interesting opportunity in a new market or a plan to improve its market share, it can be tempting to think that company can make that strategic move effectively.   But whether or not that company can succeed is largely due to the weakness or the strength of the culture. Because here’s the important part: e...

We’re back with Gavin Ivester, who we got to talk to last month about caring and what companies are asked to do to become a truly modern company. Today, we dive in on Gavin’s most recent thoughts on emerging marketplaces of a very distinct flavor: these communities are springing up organically around the world, and fix themselves around an extremely personalized or customized preference, like flyi...

Our thoughts and mental models determine how we see the world, so as change investors, we like to make sure we have a few different ways of seeing. It's one of the neatest things humans can do -- intelligence plus empathy = vast possibilities. We use change frameworks to do this, and today, I suppose we’re introducing a new change framework. I found this one in the work of Robert A. Johnson, so it...

Today's conversation is our chance to go even further below the surface on one of our 11 Unavoidable Changes: Empowering the End Nodes. JP Rangaswami wrote the piece that grounded this idea, and we are happy to be together today to go deeper on the topic. At about minute 15 there are a few ideas that are so striking to me that I want to call them out for you. The ideas are about engineering intera...

The 11 unavoidable ideas are one of the oldest components of our process. For those of you who have been around for a while, the Unavoidable Ideas are a variation of what we used to call our Node 1 Societal Shifts. These shifts were the starting point for every company we would analyze for our portfolio. At the very top of our funnel, the first filter was this question: Is this company benefiting...

There’s a big difference between believing you understand a concept and really internalizing it. If I know anything about the community surrounding Coburn Ventures, I know that we always want tools to adapt, change and learn new things in our work and life. But more than that, we don't want to create new blind spots by thinking we understand something that we really don't. Pip and I have developed...

ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) presents pressure to go from one mindset to another about what investing is and to whom all of the benefits accrue and why. A change like this leaves open a lot of opportunities for confusion, and for jumping to conclusions…both enemies of a strong and clear investment process on a high-functioning team. Today, we are aiming to bring awareness up around com...

Jennifer Brown helps organizations understand what Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means in real life. What kinds of listening needs to happen, what programs work, how to go beyond the surface level… so that employees can come to work as their full selves. Jennifer acts as a guide in this sometimes rough terrain. Today we start with some knowledge-building, and basic definitions like equity vs. eq...

As I listened back to this recording, I was shaking my head most of the time. This is about the least summery summer book list that has ever been released. I mean, my best "beach read" is a study of Old New York and Pip has a recommendation that profiles families in North Korea. That being said, the goal is to take in some new inputs this summer...and especially uncommon or unconventional inputs,...

We're here for Part Two of our conversation with Mike Lee of The Future Market and Alpha Food Labs.  This week we'll get deeper into a systems-level approach to understanding our current food system to have a better view of where it may be going next. We start at the layer of culture, observing how our regional preferences create regional bonds and identity, and that this is ever more present...

What's more fundamental than food? This week and next, we have two discussions with our friend Mike Lee, founder of The Future Market and Alpha Food Labs. Mike and his team help large corporations see into a future where everything from how we get our food to what it consists of, is different, and he helps young brands navigate a very established food industry. In today's conversation, Mike helps...