Chapter 1: Why is emotional connection crucial for leadership success?
If you actually look at the science, we're wired to feel first, think second, and act third. The part of your brain that feels moves faster than the part of your brain that thinks.
Chapter 2: How does the brain's wiring influence decision-making in leadership?
Whatever the brand, whatever the industry, you cannot give what you've never received. You want people to deliver an experience, but if you want those things to happen externally and you don't actually create them internally, people can't reflect what they've never seen. Brands tend to leapfrog over the internal customer, the employee, to focus on the external customer.
If you actually build a team of committed individuals, of people who want to be there, they will go above and beyond, and oh, by the way, they will do it on their own.
Chapter 3: What is the 'heart, head, hands' model and why does it matter?
Where we're seeing the challenge with AI is when it's trying to outsource meaning and purpose. AI is great with efficiency, and Gray, as a co-pilot, the challenge is when it replaces the experience.
Chapter 4: Why do startups struggle to maintain belief as they scale?
People who lead based on head, which is, I'll do what you say as long as you're on top of me, versus people who take ownership to say, I see myself in this, I want to be there, I feel this, I'm with you, that comes from the heart. When you're leading organizations, you have to get people actually interested in why before they're actually interested in understanding what and how.
Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Peace.
Chapter 5: What are the 3 C's of leadership: Clarity, Curiosity, Connection?
And today I'm joined by Matt Marcotte, author of Built on Belief and founder of M2 Collaborative. Matt has spent more than three decades building, scaling, and advising brands, including working across 200 plus companies during his time at Salesforce. What I love about Matt's work is that he doesn't just talk about experience in theory. He's obsessed with how humans actually behave.
how belief, emotion, and culture drive what customers and employees do when no one's watching.
Chapter 6: How does employee experience impact customer experience?
Today, we're learning a mental model you can reuse immediately to elevate your CX, EX, and frankly, all your human-to-human relationships. So Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's so great to be here, Lacey. Before we dive into all the stuff that I know we're going to be covering today, Matt, I kind of wanted to take you down a memory lane with me for a second.
So imagine me, young, like 19-year-old, in my first Econ 101 class, and I'm learning about what we call the rational consumer. as we've probably all experienced in business courses, right? And it's this idea that there is this human that's perfectly logical who makes decisions based purely on price signals and incentives.
And while I loved economics and I really enjoyed that class, I never thought that that made sense to me. Like, oh, humans are just rational beings that act in this way. So I'm curious for you, was there a moment either in education or in business where you're like, this is kind of a weird assumption that we're making? I was actually an econ major. Wow, perfect. So I know that theory very well.
But you know, it's interesting. There's another theory in econ that is actually very specifically based on financials. And it's the curse of the middle class, they call it.
Chapter 7: What role does AI play in the future of business and creativity?
And so essentially the theory is... it's about risk being risk averse. And people who have no money are not as risk averse because they have nothing to lose. People who have tons of money are not as risk averse because they have tons of money.
And people in the middle are very risk averse because 10% change in their salary affects how they can support their families and all those different things. And so to me, I've used that for years because I think it speaks to, even though it was a financial model, the risk part of it was emotional. And you realize that people really do make decisions emotionally first and intellectually second.
So even in a quote-unquote science that was very much based on supply and demand and all the different formulas that, as you said, would be rational, so much of what we do is based on how we either feel or how we see ourselves in a way that is not rational first.
So I think for me, those were the early forming kind of like ideas in my head that really helped me to kind of find my way into what I do today. So give me a little bit more scope of kind of your career from there. Like what was the career arc and how did you end up? I know you ended up at Salesforce and then obviously writing this book.
Chapter 8: How can companies operationalize belief to drive results?
Yep. So I spent 30 years in the retail world. And the great thing was I was able to see different parts of the business. Meaning I did department store. I went to Gap and did specialty. I was at Apple to do technology. I went to Tory Burch, which was aspirational luxury. I then ended up at Bergdorf Goodman, which was obviously luxury.
But the idea was for me, as I kind of look backwards in my career, I was really fascinated with why people behave the way they do. So I refer to myself as a consumer anthropologist. Oh, that's such a cool title. I know, right? I've given it to myself. I really try to understand why people behave. in the ways that they do.
And from a brand perspective, how do you find ways to connect better with the customers that you want to be connected with to create relationships where they become the advocates for your brand? Apple obviously is probably the best example of a culturally relevant brand. where people, they were obsessed with Apple in so many ways that were just emotional, right?
So how do you scale culture when we have explosive growth? And then when I went to Tori, I'd never worked for a privately held company that was small. So how do you actually take a founder-led company and help to build that company without losing the DNA of the founder's kind of belief system? And, you know, there was explosive growth as well. And then at Bergdorf,
It was how do you take this venerable, probably one of the most valuable luxury assets in the US, if not the world, and how do you reinvent a stale brand in a way that doesn't alienate the core customer, but brings it into the world in a modern way so it can actually continue to be relevant for years to come.
The reason I moved to Salesforce was because the world, as we all know, was going technology. And really, it was becoming a bigger and bigger conversation. And one of the things about retail is they have champagne taste and beer budget. So there's a lot of talk about technology, but not a lot of investment or hadn't been. And I was like, if this is the way the world is going, I need to learn.
And I need to become more fluent in what it means to be a technology player. And so I was able to move over there and lead what they call the industry advisor team, which is a bunch of people like myself who came from owning P&Ls. And we served in this kind of consultative role where we helped to make the case for change to the partners across different industries. Yeah.
And then I kind of decided that I really wanted to do what I'm doing now, which is how do you unleash human potential? So I really help leaders, teams, brands find their voice, get super clear on their North Star. And then how do you scale culture in a way that actually gives you repeatable and profitable results? What I love about the through line of your career is this call back to the core.
Like, what do humans care about? You know, where does this emotional pull, the belief culture come from? But then you don't leave it there. You're like, OK, but how do I scale that? Which is sort of the business function of how do I take that and go with it? A lot of people like to talk about. emotions and human psychology and talk about how they fold that into their business.
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