Paul has a big idea: There’s a strong case to be made that Queen Elizabeth II was the best CEO of the last century. So he makes it to Rich, outlining what makes a great CEO in the process. Rich buys in to the theory, then changes the conversation to chocolate.
Paul Ford: Rich, how are you today?
Rich Ziade: I’m doing well. How are you?
Paul Ford: I’m doing good. You ready to do more podcasting?
Rich Ziade: Let’s do it.
Paul Ford: Oh my goodness. We’re here at the office working together, facing each other.
Rich Ziade: Good to see you.
Paul Ford: So look, I opened my newspaper, my paper newspaper. Imagine.
Rich Ziade: Uh-huh.
Paul Ford: I don’t, I opened my web browser.
Rich `Ziade: Exactly.
Paul Ford: And here’s an article in the New York Times and guess who’s in Boston?
Rich Ziade: Oprah?
Paul Ford: Yeah. No. Tom Brady [chuckles].
Rich Ziade: No. Tom Brady plays for Tampa Bay, but that was, okay.
Paul Ford: Yeah. I’m sorry I’m a little behind the times so I watch the World Cup-
Rich Ziade: Fine. You don’t get to the sports section in your newspaper, do you?
Paul Ford: Not in the Times, no.
Rich Ziade: Alright, fine. Who’s in Boston?
Paul Ford: You get the Post and just flip it over.
Rich Ziade: I can’t tell which side is the front.
Paul Ford: Me neither, they made that so easy [chuckles].
Rich Ziade: [laughter].
Paul Ford: It’s one of the great pieces of UX of all time. Just ” Hey, do you want to be outraged about something that liberals did or flip– do you want to be outraged about the Knicks?”.
Rich Ziade: Exactly [laughter].
Paul Ford: That’s truly great user experience, New York Post. No, so here I’m reading and the Prince and Princess of Wales are in Boston and–that’s William and Catherine, kind of the bald one and the [00:01:00] pretty one.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: They are giving away money for something called the “Earthshot Prize”, like a “moonshot.”
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And you know, nice stuff. It’s all–
Rich Ziade: Classic royal family move, right? Like just appearances and awards and medals are given out, sometimes money’s given out. Not a lot of apologies.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Mostly forward looking.
Paul Ford: Yeah. We’re here to help. We’re here to help.
Rich Ziade: Yeah…
Paul Ford: Those other things, certain things did happen with the family in the past, but, just like German banking.
Rich Ziade: I have to ask Paul. This is one of the least interesting things you’ve ever told me since we’ve been working together. I don’t care about this at all.
Paul Ford: Utterly fair, and that is my point, which is these new ones — so great. Did you ever though– have you ever found yourself running around Wikipedia looking at Royal Family webpages? Be honest.
Rich Ziade: I have. It’s a fascinating crew.
Paul Ford: Like human Pokemon.
Rich Ziade: It’s a little bananas, right? Just between the org charts or family trees, depending on how you wanna look at it. It’s a [00:02:00] bizarre remnant sort of, it’s still the line– it’s a through line to history, right? And it’s oh shit, the Russians were somehow in the mix at one point.
Paul Ford: Mm-hm.
Rich Ziade: Like it’s wild.
Paul Ford: Everybody is on Twitter talking about colonialism and– here are the people [chuckles]. It was, It was them.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: So, I’m gonna argue something that I have come to believe, and I think it’s an important point. I don’t love monarchy. I don’t like monarchy. I think that kings and queens are a bad old school retro idea.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: But I’m gonna give you something and I want you to push back. Okay…
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Here we go… the mom, Queen Elizabeth, recently passed away. She was, I’m going to argue the single greatest chief executive officer of any company in the last hundred years.
Rich Ziade: Woahh, okay. I’m gonna let that one sink in for a second. Okay. Interesting. I, there’s part of me that really agrees with you. There’s another part of me that doesn’t agree with you, but let me ask you a question [00:03:00] in response to this preposterous statement that you’ve made. What makes a great CEO?
Paul Ford: This is what we’re gonna get to. The British Royal family, I’m gonna say, just come out let’s set a baseline here. Some of the most average human beings who’ve ever existed, just deeply average. Not incredibly dumb or bad, not incredibly smart or talented.
Rich Ziade: Cause if you hear ’em talk, they’re, you know– by the way, we come from the consulting world, consultants with British accents. They’re like 30% more expensive than everyone else.
Paul Ford: Oh yeah, and they’re worth it.
Rich Ziade: Oh geez Paul, oh geez.
Paul Ford: [chuckles] No because what is the purpose of consulting? It’s to sell more services, and there’s just something about a British man telling you that he’s gonna solve it [chuckles].
Rich Ziade: [laughter] Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: They’re good. They’re good magazine editors too.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, totally. So you’ve got a situation here where once you [00:04:00] pierce through the accent– it’s pretty mediocre. Isn’t it? Nobody’s like, “holy moly, that’s a hell of an essay they wrote”. Like nobody’s saying-
Paul Ford: So here’s this woman, she’s like in her twenties and they give her the whole thing.
Rich Ziade: Okay, true. And so let me ask you this, do you think she’s brilliant?
Paul Ford: No, but I think she’s a good CEO. I don’t think you need to be brilliant to be a good CEO. I think you need a few incredibly critical qualities, and I think they’re so rare,
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: that we don’t, and because it’s the British royal family, nobody’s noticed it,
Rich Ziade: Yup.
Paul Ford: because it’s monarchy.
Rich `Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: So I’m gonna give you the first thing. She never said anything. She never said anything substantive in her entire life.
Rich Ziade: That makes a great CEO? [laughter].
Paul Ford: That’s a great CEO because [Incomprehensible British mumbling] “the british” and everybody’s like, Yeah. Mm-hmm. ,okay, I’m gonna, I know what I’m supposed to do.
Rich Ziade: Well, She said a lot. What you’re really saying is she never criticized anything.
Paul Ford: No. She took criticism. She took it right across the head and she went, Mmm Mmm Mmm [In a British Accent].
Rich Ziade: Right. Right.
Paul Ford: I mean, there must have been times where she turned to her corgis [00:05:00] and like, you know, just said, “I hate that son of a bitch”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: But, but never, never in public.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: Her job was to take it, just take the slap. And she never tried to convey having an inner life.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: No, no political interest professionally because whoever, if it’s labor or it’s, whoever shows up…
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah. She loved those dogs. There’s those dogs that like really should have been extinct. They’ve got these little legs. They look like-
Paul Ford: What’s weird, is that the whole family likes breeding animals and it’s hard to not think of them thinking of themselves.
Rich Ziade: Offf.
Paul Ford: No. Like she really, she and her sister–
Rich Ziade: Yeah, she loved her horses. She loved her dogs. There’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of that.
Paul Ford: Mm-hm. They’re into breeding in a– it’s not good, that part, I don’t like to talk about that.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Okay, fair. But okay, so sense of duty, I think, I think she was optimized to keep things stable. Like anything that, any word that came out of her mouth that would destabilize the monarchy…
Paul Ford: Nothing.
Rich Ziade: Nothing. It’s gotta go right off the list.
Paul Ford: Because her true job [00:06:00] is always to rep the brand.
Rich Ziade: Does that make a great CEO?
Paul Ford: What is a great CEO? A great CEO– what do they deliver? They deliver two things, growth and stability.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: That’s it.
Rich Ziade: This is true. This is true.
Paul Ford: That’s it.
Rich Ziade: And she’s, she’s like abandoned growth. She’s not gonna say, you know what, I want Halifax back.
Paul Ford: Well… she abandoned colonial growth because that wasn’t really on the table, right? She got an institution.
Rich Ziade: That ship has sailed, yeah.
Paul Ford: Institution’s in decline, you can’t keep Zimbabwe.
Rich Ziade: They did fuck with the Falkland Islands. They’re [Argentina is] like, “can we just have that one back?” And they’re like, “no, you can’t” [chuckles].
Paul Ford: Yeah [laughter].
Rich Ziade: And we’re gonna bring in naval blockade. Okay, so status quo.
Paul Ford: So what does she do? She keeps a laser focus on the firm, on the family, on the monarchy.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hm the stability of the firm.
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: The PR message.
Paul Ford: And they cut their losses. They’re like, okay, we’re losing the empire, we’re still gonna wear the hat.
Rich Ziade: You’re right. I think that is a great CEO. I compare it to look the CEO of [00:07:00] M&M Mars.
Paul Ford: Sure.
Rich Ziade: They can come up with new flavors once in a while– but don’t mess with the core recipes and just make sure the packaging doesn’t get too different.
Paul Ford: That’s right,if you give me pink M&Ms, those are Skittles. Don’t do that.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Yellow packaging for M&M peanuts has been the case for like– their job is to just maybe negotiate a little better with suppliers,
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: but they can’t really do much.
Paul Ford: Every now and then you need to take all those M&M characters and get them to stand up for gay rights. That is a part of the job.
Rich Ziade: That’s the thing, and there’s a lot of different colors of M&M, so you can work that out.
Paul Ford: That’s right, that’s right.
Rich Ziade: It’s not a big deal. 3% growth, no decline. She is a world class now that I’m seeing it through that lens–
Paul Ford: Mm-hm.
Rich Ziade: she is a world class, stabilizing mature CEO.
Paul Ford: And actually given this thing that is obviously in terrible trouble, it’s transitioning from extreme imperialism to imperialism lite.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: She said, “okay, I got it. I’m doubling down. Give me my red box. Let’s go”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And, [00:08:00] she accepted that power, that– she took that in and she said okay, “I’m gonna take the slaps, but I’m also gonna ride around in the helicopter”.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: I’m gonna be the– I’ll be the Queen.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And but always in the interest of the growth of the firm.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And there’s another thing I think that’s worth mentioning that she never did, which I think was part of her skill set. She never sought people’s approval and love. Can’t do it–
Paul Ford: You get a lot. You walk down the street and people go, “oh, your highness”, and they bow when they see you. So you get plenty of approval.
Rich Ziade: You get plenty of approval. But she never herself said, “My ratings are down, the polls are not great. Let me go put on a show of some sort”. Steady as she fucking goes.
Paul Ford: She delivers that Christmas message, it’s the most boring thing that’s ever happened. The only time that I know of that she truly broke was she gave a public address because the entire country melted down after Diana’s death.
Rich Ziade: She had to, right? Because, she tried the same [00:09:00] protocol, but that was an extraordinary moment.
Paul Ford: People were like “to hell with you, ma’am.”
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Yeah. So she had to step– that’s a type of CEO, the stabilizing steady as she goes CEO is a particular– that’s the CEO you want at M&M Mars. That’s the CEO you want at, like the company that makes the denture cleaning pills that you just need to sell 20 million of them every year and just sell it again next year. Don’t mess up a good thing [chuckles].
Paul Ford: And a great planner, right? Like even her own death was very orchestrated.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Succession planning, huge part of a monarchy.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: It turns out kind of a limited set of options. Like, I wonder if there were points where some very tall British guy on a horse rode by and she was like, “what about him instead”?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: “Nope nope. Gotta go with, gotta go with Charles”.
Rich Ziade: Yes. You’re right. As, as far as that, flavor of CEO, it’s about as good as it gets. There’s a ton to learn there.
[00:10:00]
Rich Ziade: I think we should talk about Elon Musk and him stepping back into Twitter. I’m sorry, because that is a turn– we’re in the middle of a turnaround CEO movie.
Paul Ford: The drunken elephant in the room.
Rich Ziade: The drunken elephant in the room that’s for some reason wearing a Green Bay Packers jersey, but we won’t get into that.
Paul Ford: I’m gonna make a suggestion, let’s compare him to the Queen of England.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: Okay so-
Rich Ziade: Different project out of fairness.
Paul Ford: Okay. But this could be illuminating.
Rich Ziade: It could.
Paul Ford: I’m gonna, why was she a great CEO? She said nothing ever.
Rich Ziade: He says a lot.
Paul Ford: All the time.
Rich Ziade: All the time.
Paul Ford: A lot of it is Pepe the frog alt-right nonsense.
Rich Ziade: Yes. Yes. I think here’s my maybe slightly controversial take on this. I think Twitter’s a rough business period. I think it’s a phenomenal social invention, but a pretty rough business, right.
Paul Ford: It may not be a business.
Rich Ziade: No, it’s plenty. There’s plenty to [00:11:00] make money off of. Did it need to be a publicly traded grow, 30% a year business? That’s impossible. But it’s a phenomenal, like a true social phenomena, right? Like to this day. And you have someone that came in, and I don’t and I think it was, I think they were, they didn’t know how to make Twitter better or more profitable.
Paul Ford: Sure.
Rich Ziade: They just didn’t know. And there’s thousands of people in this place and a lot of people are like, “oh my God, he fired all these people”. But I’m like, but honestly, like Twitter has not changed in like 10 years. I’m just gonna say it as a user, it hasn’t changed a whole lot.
Paul Ford: Hey, pin tweets and co-tweeting, you can–
Rich Ziade: There’s some stuff. There’s some stuff, but it hasn’t changed in a long time.
Paul Ford: I, I know…
Rich Ziade: But this guy comes in and I think there’s a couple of things that, that are worth highlighting. I don’t think he has a vision. I don’t think there’s a vision here. I think he, he reads like that dude snacks on pull quotes. Like it’s just the most delicious caramel popcorn you’ve ever seen.
Paul Ford: Thats right.
Rich Ziade: So I don’t think, I don’t think he’s– if you told me [00:12:00] that person is chasing a vision, then everything they do is either supportive of heading towards that vision or damaging to it, and clearly by his behavior, there’s no vision because it’s all over the map. He seems to be thin-skinned, which has thrown me off like the whole, like I think the whole woke thing is 2019 now, and it’s behind us. But God, he’s a delicate executive.
Paul Ford: He’s a snowflake.
Rich Ziade: He’s a snowflake. Let me tell you something about a turnaround CEO. What they cannot be.
Paul Ford: A snowflake.
Rich Ziade: A snowflake. They cannot be a snowflake. Steve Jobs was a lot of things, not a very kind, warm person, but he was laser focused on that end goal, and he just didn’t see, he saw everybody’s a means to an end.
Paul Ford: Listen as you look back on these things, you can say and be correct. Steve Jobs shouldn’t have been such a dick.
Rich Ziade: Shouldn’t have been such a dick.
Paul Ford: But here we are and I’m touching an iPhone as I talk to you.
Rich Ziade: You’re stroking it from what I can see here.
Paul Ford: [chuckles] That’s the world in which we live.[00:13:00]
Rich Ziade: That’s the world in which we live. So everyone, look, I’m not gonna sit here armchair, quarterback Elon Musk who’s built spaceships and electric cars and has seen incredible astronomical success as-
Paul Ford: Literally.
Rich Ziade: But I do think that what you have here is someone that is not thinking about, I think he got addicted to the actual platform that he bought.
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: I think that’s all it is [laughter].
Paul Ford: Many signs are pointing to this being a very nerdy, chaotic human being who had a little talent at putting structures around him that he could go out, wave his arms, get the market interested, do all kinds of things to bootstrap the organization. Obviously, he should never execute on anything.
Rich Ziade: I think that’s right.
Paul Ford: He’s not an operator. He’s a– something else, he’s a weather system.
Rich Ziade: I think his superpower is he just gathers the team and says, “you can do anything. You could pretty much do anything. And I will, I’m behind you”. And that’s magical. That is incredible. The power-
Paul Ford: No, that is what he does. It’s, they’re afraid of [00:14:00] him, but boy does he get the rockets up in the sky.
Rich Ziade: He’s also fucking annoying. I’m just gonna say it just as an outsider, it’s just shut up. I don’t care.
Paul Ford: I’m so tired of this guy.
Rich Ziade: I don’t care. Like I see now he’s upset at Apple, the largest company in the world, as we record this podcast, he’s like yelling at Apple. I’m like, dude, just shut up. Like just, it’s just exhausting.
Paul Ford: Well, you know who is like the Queen of England? Tim Cook.
Rich Ziade: Very much, very much.
Paul Ford: He is that school now.
Rich Ziade: It’s like his number one criticism too, it’s like you’re not an inventor, innovator type, and meanwhile, that dude has created trillions in value [laughter].
Paul Ford: Satya Nadella as well, right?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Like over at Microsoft, there is a narrative for taking these giant organizations and making them more giant and repping the brand. Repping the brand. Repping the brand. Okay, so Queen, Queen of England takes her criticism, doesn’t convey her inner life, has no political interest [chuckles]. Elon Musk, polar opposite in every way. I don’t think it’s going well, I think he should shut his mouth.
Rich Ziade: It’s, you know what it is? I think you have this [00:15:00] platform that blasts a press release to the entire earth many times a day, and he can’t get enough of it. He just can’t- [laughter]
Paul Ford: If you are a true narcissist, you’re the source of news.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And so this is what’s exciting. This is why Trump loved it, because he was the source of news and this was the newspaper about him.
Rich Ziade: It’s fucking exciting. It’s incredible like for someone that’s seen all the money he will ever need, he can’t consume enough to eat into all his wealth and is just sitting around and the whole world seems to react to every subtle gesture he makes. That’s incredibly addictive, for someone that’s seen that kind of success, that’s just not a CEO. I just don’t think that’s what that is.
Paul Ford: No. He’s not repping the brand.
Rich Ziade: That’s another great– who repped the brand better than Queen Elizabeth?
Paul Ford: Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, like there are people, I think Satya Nadella is repping the Microsoft brand, right?
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: But it’s, it is a quiet, long term grind,
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: in which you convey through diplomacy.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: What you [00:16:00] stand for over and over again.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And he’s in there instead, he’s just yelling at Apple, [laughter] telling them, if you don’t advertise with me, I will bully you.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. And in many ways there is no dotted line between that and some vision, like you need to pause. Actually make a five minute YouTube video and tell people, here is my vision for Twitter. Look, he keeps talking about free speech, which is by the way, slight of hand bullshit, as an attorney, like just speaking to that like it’s a fucking company.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: That’s me yelling at McDonald’s for not having certain flavors of something.
Paul Ford: [laughter].
Rich Ziade: It’s kind of comical. But if that is your vision, if that is your vision, then you have to use that as the way to interrogate every decision you make, but it’s clearly reactive, it’s clearly a shit show. Also, my God, what a perfect storm of just absolute human nonsense in all directions on Twitter. Like to see Twitter do this to itself is a fascinating thing [laughter].
Paul Ford: It really, the–
Rich Ziade: Twitter trending [00:17:00] on Twitter is just the dumbest thing [laughter].
Paul Ford: It’s bad. It’s just him. It’s his show. And then he’s also got this fantasy of something called the X App, which will be the Do Everything for everyone application. Which I love because–
Rich Ziade: Mm-hm. Like WeChat.
Paul Ford: Yeah, or maybe they need to make their own phone and people are already saying it might work on Mars. Like it’s woo.
Rich Ziade: Let me tell you, I know it’– you gotta have patience and you have to be resilient through the turbulence, to chase a vision like it took Apple 10 years to figure out how to put their own chips in their own devices.
Paul Ford: I don’t know everything about Elon Musk, Richard, but I don’t think he’s gonna wait 10 years.
Rich Ziade: No, exactly. What is that? But Nadella is brilliant at that, he will tell you, here is our goal for five years from now, and off we go. And we have to keep ourselves honest about whether we’ve stayed on that track or not. He’s actually amazing that way. As a leader, I, you could argue that Nadella and Cook are truly great CEOs. The thing that Queen didn’t have to, she needed to not break it, but she didn’t have to grow it. [00:18:00] And what Nadella and Cook did, they’re not innovator CEOs, they’re not entrepreneur like, I’m gonna invent something out of thin air. But they– boy, did they take brands that there’s way more paths to failure than there are to growth and success.
Paul Ford: True. The Queen of England, the Queen of England, did not have to create an R&D lab in order to figure out what Queening is gonna be 15 years from now.
Rich Ziade: God [laughter]. That would be an interesting laboratory,
Paul Ford: See now-
Rich Ziade: Just tea cups and- [laughter]
Paul Ford: I would go work for that. Although, I will say they were heavy adopters of social tech, like always a good Instagram presence, good websites,
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: nice standards compliance, partnered with the government. So there is that. But yeah, no, not an innovative organization by design.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah. I mean-
Paul Ford: Very heavy investment in horses.
Rich Ziade: So Paul, this is Ziade and Ford Advisors.
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: I wanna thank you for bringing Queen [00:19:00] Elizabeth to the forefront.
Paul Ford: She doesn’t get enough attention, in my opinion.
Rich Ziade: She doesn’t get enough attention.
Paul Ford: She’s very under attentioned.
Rich Ziade: So let’s share a piece of advice, and this is a good piece of advice, whether you’re a manager in a small company, middle manager, or you’re the CEO of a company.
When you are managing and interacting with people. People can’t help but rope in personal friction and personal conflict to everything you’re doing. That is human nature, and it’s not to pick a fight, it’s just humans diverging.
Paul Ford: They’re not robots. They tell stories in order to understand what they’re supposed to do.
Rich Ziade: That’s right. And the number one thing, one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to pick a path. Share the path with your team or with your company, and then not let those conflicts and that friction tangle it up. And it is literally the opposite of what’s happening at Twitter right now, but the thing you want to [00:20:00] do is not get caught up because they will try to rope you into camps and positions and whatnot.
If you do get roped into all the conflict and gossip and backstabbing and all the games that go on, you have to pause and say you’re hurting the vision. You’re hurting where we’re going by– with this behavior, and a lot of times you can’t get in the fray. You just ignore it. You just keep going. You just, it’s turbulence, but you know what? The airport’s 48 miles away and you’re– then steady as she goes,
Paul Ford: Here we go, we’re about to land.
Rich Ziade: We’re gonna land this thing,
Paul Ford: And then we’re gonna take the plane out again.
Rich Ziade: Yes, we’re gonna land this thing.
Paul Ford: So there it is. Queen Elizabeth II. If you’re wondering what to do, if you’re suddenly in management, think of the queen.
Rich Ziade: Think of the queen. Long, live the queen [In a British Accent].
Paul Ford: Oh boy-
Rich Ziade: That was my British imitation.
Paul Ford: That was something. That’s something else.
Rich Ziade: Ziade and Ford Advisors, I’m enjoying podcasting with you again, Paul.
Paul Ford: It’s good to be back on the wagon.
Rich Ziade: Always fun.
Paul Ford: [00:21:00] Rich, do you have something good for me.
Rich Ziade: I have two good things for you.
Paul Ford: Alright, I like good things.
Rich Ziade: The first is if you happen to be in New York City, which is where we are recording this podcast you should go to a shop called Coco.
Paul Ford: Coco… what do they sell there?
Rich Ziade: Chocolate.
Paul Ford: Oh wow, okay.
Rich Ziade: They’re not a chocolate maker. They sell chocolate bars and they are at 873 Broadway.
Paul Ford: Okay, just North of Union Square. The thing about Coco, you ever go downtown and there’s that store that has six shoes in it, and that’s it.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: And each shoe is a fancy–
Rich Ziade: Oh very spare boutiques.
Paul Ford: That’s what this is for chocolate.
Rich Ziade: It’s really cool. Not everything is wildly priced.
Paul Ford: You’re gonna spend $80 on chocolate if you go in there.
Rich Ziade: You might.
Paul Ford: It is what it is. It’s a great place to buy gifts.
Rich Ziade: Great place to buy gifts. Here’s the rub though, you might walk right by it. It’s on the sixth floor. You’re taking a fucking elevator to buy chocolate.
Paul Ford: But if you take somebody with you, you seem [00:22:00] really cool. You have some inside knowledge.
Rich Ziade: It’s very cool.
Paul Ford: Oh, here, hold on. We just gotta go upstairs.
Rich Ziade: Absolutely, second tip.
Paul Ford: Okay. Wow, two tips.
Rich Ziade: Small aside– we once came out of Coco and watched a guy stuff like a $30 chocolate bar into his face in the elevator as if he was eating like Halloween Kit Kat.
Paul Ford: I never saw anything like it. You spent $35 on a chocolate bar, he rips the wrapper open, jams it in his mouth.
Rich Ziade: [laughter].
Paul Ford: You’re not supposed to chew this chocolate. You’re supposed to put it on your mouth like– turn.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, it’s like wine.
Paul Ford: Like you sniff wine, you eat the chocolate, you listen to jazz. No, this guy just feasted like a wild animal.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, it was something.
Paul Ford: And then he got on the elevator with us and he looked at us like we were despicable.
Rich Ziade: [laughter].
Paul Ford: It was, it was a wild feeling. Anyway, second tip-
Rich Ziade: Second tip, Cadbury chocolates, ever heard of them?
Paul Ford: Go to the drugstore $2.29 Fruit and Nut.
Rich Ziade: Beautiful purple foil.
Paul Ford: Yeah, it’s a classic.
Rich Ziade: Classy. Slightly above average chocolate.
Paul Ford: Cadbury part of Mondelez International or Mandalay? I don’t know, I don’t know how you pronounce [00:23:00] that.
Rich Ziade: Don’t buy it in America.
Paul Ford: Okay… why not?
Rich Ziade: They jam it with sugar because we’re animals In the United States.
Paul Ford: America puts sugar in things. That’s what we do.
Rich Ziade: That’s what we do.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: If you buy it in the UK or like a duty free store at the airport, there’s more, there’s less sugar in it, there’s more fat and cocoa butter in it, and it’s much, much better.
Paul Ford: That’s– see there’s a scene in The Simpsons where they go to England and the kids eat British chocolate and then they run around as and riot as “Lust for Life” plays in the background.
Rich Ziade: Okay, pretty great.
Paul Ford: Go for the British chocolate.
Rich Ziade: Chocolate tips on this week’s Ziade Ford, Ziade and Ford Advisors.
Paul Ford: I bet there’ll be more chocolate tips in the future.
Rich Ziade: Boy there sure will be.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Learned a lot here, I think your read is right about how to be and how not to be.
Paul Ford: I’m not saying you should be a monarchist Rich. I really am not.
Rich Ziade: Uh-huh, okay.
Paul Ford: I’m not saying that you should be excited about the royal family. I’m just saying when we talk about what makes a effective leader, we gloss over this person,
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: because of the role that she [00:24:00] had, but she really, she ran that firm.
Rich Ziade: She ran the firm. No doubt.
Rich Ziade: Hit us up Hello@ZiadeFord.com topic, ideas, questions, things you want advice on. We’re glad to help. Also, we’re on Twitter snicker @ZiadeFord. And give us five stars everywhere on your favorite podcast platform. We’re a brand new, young little podcast trying to make it in the world.
Paul Ford: Just two guys doing the best they can.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, have a lovely day.
Paul Ford: Bye. [00:25:00]