Trillions of dollars are invested every year chasing metrics customers don't notice, while no money goes to the small easy wins that would make a huge difference — so the play is 'reverse benchmarking': find the metric everyone in the category neglects and double down on it.

11:13magnificently malleable. And so, that's the thing that really interests me because we spend a lot of time effectively trying to uh work within the laws of physics, which are immutable. When it would be a lot easier just to say, "Actually, you know, why don't we Why don't we take this undesirable thing and make it cool?" Right? [laughter] >> You know, this is the uh elevators need to go faster. No, no, no, just put a

11:37mirror in the elevator. >> a mirror. Just put a mirror. People will be happy looking at themselves. And it's actually, by the way, it gets quite philosophical this because you suddenly realize that literally trillions of dollars of effort are invested by businesses every year in pursuit of metrics which the customer may not notice or care about, whereas at the same time no money is spent on things which would actually make a

12:06huge difference. There are relatively easy wins here for both government and the private sector in saying I'll give you an example of this. So, I call this reverse benchmarking. In other words, you look at all the metrics that everybody cares about in the category. You find a metric that's been completely and ridiculously neglected, and you double down on that thing. Now, I first came across this in Will

12:30Guidara's fantastic book Unreasonable Hospitality. He goes to the number one restaurant in the world. All of his team say we ought to copy this, we ought to do that thing with the napkins. I really like what they do in the bathrooms with the scented chopsticks. Let's copy that. And Guidara goes, "Not going to copy any of that because two One, we can't afford to, and two, they're already doing it.

12:50What I want to know from you is what out of this evening at the world's best restaurant, Michelin three-star restaurant, something like that. What was a bit disappointing? What was a bit meh?" And they said, "The coffee was a bit average. You know, it was nothing special. And the beer drinkers, probably the chefs who'd gone along, got treated really crappily, shabbily compared to the wine drinkers." So, he goes back to his own restaurant

13:13and he appoints a coffee sommelier and a beer sommelier. And he says, "Your job is not just to benchmark against these people, it's to hit it out of the park." Now, if you think about it, taking something that's bad about the category, not not saying we need to raise our level to the category average, but instead doing it spectacularly well, something that nobody's expecting. That was what Apple did, I would argue, okay?

13:40That's what Buc-ee's did. I don't know if you're Buc-ee's Where Where are you in the US? [clears throat] >> Yeah, I live in Texas. We We We're big Buc-ee's guys. >> Yeah, okay. Basically started with an insight around women's restrooms. Now, you could have just had averagely clean women's restrooms. You would have benchmarked Never mind that. They're like the bloody Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, right? I

13:59mean, I haven't been in them, but I The men's restrooms are pretty good, but the women's ones are apparently sensational. And my argument is that, you know, if you Let's say you're a hotel, okay? Everybody will focus on the rack rate and the this and the size of the room and, you know, and so on and so forth. Have you ever had a ho- even a really