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Tell me about your vision.

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Well, my vision is very simple, which is to address and find a new way to solve a very vexing problem that

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every entrepreneur and business leader and CEO has, which is what do I do on Monday morning at 8 o'clock to grow my business?

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And the reason I am focusing on growth is because that's the only way to create value.

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If your business is not growing faster than your competition, then you're losing market share and you're on the path to become irrelevant.

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And so you have to grow faster than your competition. That's the only way that I know of to create real sustainable value.

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And then the question is, well, what do I do on Monday morning at 8 o'clock to grow my business?

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Very simple question, but really hard to answer.

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That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that.

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Philippe, where did this vision and the question like, hey, what do I do on Monday morning to grow my business come from?

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Well, I mean, it came from my experience being in Silicon Valley for 35 years.

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I've been studying a few businesses, some of them very successful, some of them very didn't work out.

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And I've been on 23 boards and I always watched the same movie, which is why isn't the business growing faster?

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And I realized that there was no real scientific answer to that question.

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It was all about, oh, we need to fire the sales guys and hire new salespeople.

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Or we need to change our logo. We need to change our tagline.

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Or we need to give discounts. And I'm like, well, why?

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I mean, how do we know whether those techniques work?

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And it turns out that most of them never really work.

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And the reason is because they are not fundamentally addressing the core issue which is responsible for the lack of growth.

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And that issue is always the same thing and can be summarized in one single word, which is alignment.

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Is the business somewhere is misaligned with this target market?

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That misalignment creates friction and slows down the business.

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And the question then is, where is the misalignment coming from and how do we address it?

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But it's not about hiring more salespeople, discounting more or doing a new cute advertising campaign.

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Those, they don't work.

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I am so glad that you mentioned because there are so many business owners that come on my show.

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They got approached by some bro marketer, some marketing guy.

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They said, hey, implement our LinkedIn strategy.

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Implement our email marketing strategy. Implement our sales strategy.

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And you'll see a growth and they don't.

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Right.

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They don't see it.

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And if LeBron James implemented or Patrick Mahomes implemented those strategies,

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it might work for them because they're LeBron James.

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If Steve Jobs, if he was alive, if he implemented that sales strategy,

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it might work for him because he's Steve Jobs.

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Will it work for the mom and pop store on the corner?

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I don't think so. Maybe not.

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Maybe.

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Most likely, no.

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And I'm glad that you mentioned something like that because most people are looking for quick fix solutions

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instead of looking at the whole picture and backing out that I'm building a brand when it comes to,

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I need to be consistent. I need to be reliable. I need to be patient. I need to be loving.

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I need to be persistent in my growth. I need to create a brand around that.

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I need to have people inside my company build on core values.

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There's so much more to it that people miss.

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And I'm glad someone came on my show today that mentioned that.

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You know, it makes me think of those marketing people you were talking about.

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It makes me think of somebody coming to me and saying, oh, you want to learn French.

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Why don't you learn those 150 words and you'll be fine.

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And it's like, you don't learn French by learning or any language by learning 150 words.

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It's a lot deeper than that, a lot more complicated.

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And as you said, you have to commit to doing it in the long run.

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And it's a lot of hard work and it takes patience and discipline.

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It is. Going along your French story, I took French in high school.

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So I parlié au français a little bit.

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And I know more than 150 words, but I don't speak French.

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Right. Right.

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So, yeah, my god, I'm so glad you shared something like that.

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So, Philippe, what would you say is your why?

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I know 35 years that you studied all that and you found out the way

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to help businesses grow, scale and much more.

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But why do you do it?

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I do it because growth is everything.

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In fact, I was talking to Brock and Darrell, the CEO of Logitech.

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He's no longer a Logitech, but when he was a few years ago, and he looked at me and he said,

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look, you know, we either grow or we die.

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And so growth is really the only way to create value, as I mentioned earlier.

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And a business that's not growing cannot raise any money.

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I don't know any. I was a VC for many years.

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I would never put money in a company that says, you know what?

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We're going to grow slower than the market.

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Like, well, you're going to lose market share.

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Why should I invest? You're not creating value.

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I'd rather put my money in the one who's going to win market share.

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So growth is essential.

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In fact, if as an investor, I was allowed to ask for only one number to a CEO and I cannot ask for anything else.

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And then I would never be able to do that.

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I would never do anything else.

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And then I would need to make an addition to invest or not based on that number.

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Again, it's a hypothetical case.

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I would never do that.

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But that number would be how much what is the ratio between the growth rate of your business divided by the growth rate of the market you're in.

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And if that ratio is much, much larger than one, then it means you're outpacing the market by a huge factor.

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Then I'm interested in potentially investing.

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If the ratio is less than one, I don't even want to talk to you.

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I want to invest.

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So growth is everything.

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And that's why that's why we're doing it.

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That's why we're obsessed about it.

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That's why we really wanted to find a good way to solve that problem of how do I grow.

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And it's again, as I said, it's a simple question, but really hard to answer.

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Yep, it is.

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Now let's get into the nitty gritty of that.

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How did you get started?

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So like, what was the first step you took in Silicon Valley deciding talking to people like, hey, this is this might be the right path out?

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That's the early story I want to hear.

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Well, I think the big insight was, and I got it from working at Apple and working directly for Steve Jobs, which is, by the way, how I lost my hair in case you ever wondered.

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But I think the big insight was that I realized that growth can only happen when the business and its target market are perfectly aligned.

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So I realized that the answer to the question of growth led in the fundamental notion of alignment.

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And then I went to the next step, which is, OK, well, what does it mean to align my business with my target market?

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And that's when I realized there are four universal axes of alignment between any business.

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Doesn't matter what the business does and its target market.

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And I can tell you very quickly what they are.

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The first one is that the pain of the customer and the claim that the business makes to address that pain have to be aligned.

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So, Harry, if you come to me with a headache and I show you a stomach ache pill, you're going to say, well, I have a headache, not a stomach ache.

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Your pain and my claim are not aligned.

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You will never buy my product and nor should you.

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The second axis of alignment is between the perception and then the messaging.

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And the messaging is how I express my claim, how I describe my claim to you.

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And the perception is how you understand it.

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So if I have the right pill for your headache and I describe it in Korean, I'm assuming you're not speaking Korean because I know you have good notion of French,

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then you would never buy the pill because you're like, what the heck is this guy talking about, even though it would be the perfect pill for your headache.

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That's the second axis.

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The third one is the way customers want to buy the product and the way the product is sold in the marketplace have to be aligned.

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So if I said, Harry, I've got I've got the exact pill for your headache.

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It will cost 99 cents. You'll be gone in 20 minutes, but you have to fly to San Francisco Bay Area to get it.

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You're like, well, wait a minute. I'm in Texas. I'm not too far from Austin or San Antonio.

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Why can't I just walk to the pharmacy there and buy the pill?

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So that's the frictionless process by which the product or the service is acquired.

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Once I made the decision, I want to buy it. And what do I need to do to actually buy it?

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And then the last axis of alignment, which is my favorite one called again, I sold it out of the Apple Playbook,

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is that I realized being at Apple that there is only one business on this planet.

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I realized that everybody is in the exact same unique business.

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There's no dozens or hundreds of thousands of businesses.

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There is only one. And that unique business is the manufacturing and delivery of Delight.

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Your job, my job, everybody's job is to delight our customer.

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And so the alignment has to be between what is expected, the expected delight,

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and what is actually delivered to that customer. Those two things must be aligned.

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So now imagine you take the pill and then after a while, you know, you get dizzy and you have a rash on your skin and your headache is still there.

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Well, obviously, that's not what you expected. You expected it would be gone in 20 minutes.

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So that's the last axis of alignment.

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So if you align your business perfectly along those four axis, you will grow as much as you can within your target market.

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And again, the four axis is that the claim that you're making and the pain of your customer is the same, that your message,

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which is how you express your claim and the perception, which is how it's understood, have to be aligned.

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And then your way to sell your product or services in the marketplace is aligned with the way your customers want to buy.

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And then finally, that what you deliver to them is actually aligned with the expected delight.

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And that was, you know, and those four axis of alignment are universal.

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They apply to any business, regardless of its size, its location or what it does.

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They are truly universal. Thank you for sharing that with us.

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That was very, very impactful to me.

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Pain perception, need of buy, way of buying and delight.

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I took notes on that and I'm sure when I read your book, it'll be more I'll gain from it.

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I want to shift gears a little bit on this and I want to go towards the other aspect of of a business is.

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Not what you do, but who you are, and that's the leader part.

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I'm sure you're working for Steve Jobs and other market leaders that you have come across.

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You've learned or seen some things that most people probably lack.

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So according to you, Philippe, what defines a great leader?

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Well, I think it's the it's two things.

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One is having a clear why, you know, as Simon Sinek says, a clear mission, a clear purpose.

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Like I wake up in the morning because I'm going to do this and this is actually matters to me and it's impactful.

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That's the number one. And then the number two thing is to make people do things that they think is almost impossible.

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And the the question is, well, how far do you push that envelope?

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And Steve was extremely good at figuring out.

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A way to push it far, but not so far that it's truly impossible, like if I were to tell to you,

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I would tell you, well, you're going to fly to the moon on Friday, but you can't.

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All right, so I know that's physically impossible.

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And but at the same time, when you tell them to do something, they think it's impossible, but at the same time it is it is doable.

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And somehow Steve was very good at finding that limit, that edge.

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And and that's why Apple was so innovative, because people thought there's no way we can do that.

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And sure enough, somehow, some way, somebody finds a solution and actually does it.

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And so to me, leadership is just two things.

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One is having a vision and a why that you can clearly communicate.

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And then some people will believe in it and subscribe and they should join the company and others won't.

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And they shouldn't be in the company. And that's perfectly fine.

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And then the second thing is, how do you make people do and act in a way that they thought they couldn't do it for the purpose and for the success of the company?

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And I think to me, leadership is those two things.

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Thank you for sharing that.

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How I this is a very, very, very hard question, I think, and I've never asked this before to someone.

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But how does someone improve in those areas?

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You know, the short answer is, I don't know.

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It's a bit like asking, how does somebody improve being a good parent?

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There are so many styles and so many different ways of parenting.

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And without judging which one is better, they are just different.

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And I think it's the same with leadership.

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I mean, if you look at Steve Jobs and compared to Bill Gates or Elon Musk or anybody else, they all have their own style, their own personality.

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The way they engage, the way they motivate people is so different.

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So I don't think there is an archetype, you know, kinds of leaders.

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I think it's all about motivation and having this vision and this why, as I mentioned earlier.

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Now, can you become a better leader?

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Yes, I think you do.

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And the first thing is to listen and then to have a point of view and then make people align behind that point of view.

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And you can learn those skills.

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But I don't think there's a school. I mean, it's like parenting.

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I don't think there's a school you can go and you can have a diplomat that says, well, you know, you want to that school, you're a good leader.

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That doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because there is no simple answer to that question.

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So you're right. Your question is definitely a difficult question to answer.

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And I don't know.

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I think you answered it perfectly. You answered it like great leadership.

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I don't know. I don't.

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I mean, and if somebody knows, I would love to hear because I'm always interested in learning.

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But I haven't seen it in my 35 years here in Silicon Valley.

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Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun.

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We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.