Why you should be watching (and re-watching) Jules Goddard give the best business lecture you'll find on the internet.

Why businesses succeed by focusing less on discovering new strategies and more on unlearning outdated ideas and eliminating failure points.

There’s no shortage of business lectures online, but every so often, one stands out. This one, in particular, is a rare gem I find myself revisiting twice a year. It challenges the conventional wisdom and orthodoxies about why so many businesses are lost doing things because that’s the way they and their peers have always done them.

Maybe we need to start in the ‘wrong’ place?

"There might be more to gain from studying failure than success. Start with what doesn’t work, remove it, and what’s left might just be the key to outperforming everyone else."

Professors, executives, consultants and students for close to a hundred years have explored why some businesses consistently outperform others. Almost everyone starts by looking for the secrets of success by studying what worked, but as Warren Buffett wisely points out, we may be looking in the wrong place. Instead of chasing victories, perhaps we should start by removing the failures.

Buffett’s principle of inversion—starting with what doesn’t work and engineering its removal—offers a compelling shift in perspective. While we may not always be able to prove what drives success, we can certainly prove what leads to failure. Bad ideas tend to collapse much faster than good ideas turn into triumphs. If businesses spent more time identifying and discarding what holds them back, they might stumble upon success faster than they expect.

The acts of Discovery, Discarding, Stealing, and Marooning.

“Corporate performance is strongly related to the pace at which we can unlearn falsehoods and illusions… Strategy is just as much about removing misconceptions and falsehoods as it is about discovering new insights.”

A brilliant framework for thinking about business is to view it as a process of discovery, discarding, stealing, and marooning.

Discovery is about finding new things that work, always hunting for a new edge that other people haven’t cottoned onto yet.

Equally important is discarding what Jules Goddard called the ‘common nonsense’, those widely accepted aspects that many may believe to be true, but actually turn out to not be.

Then there’s stealing the best bits so you can minimise any edge your competitors create through their own discovery endeavours. Finally, marooning, where you aim to leave your competitors stranded upon islands of their own falsehood.

Too many leaders are obsessed about benchmarking with the competition when the key to winning in business is focussing on how to be different, what you can learn that others haven’t yet, and what you can unlearn that isn’t value creating.

Moving beyond managerialism

“Too many decisions in business are made by quite a small coterie at the top of the organization. There are perhaps more things than we’re inclined to admit that are better judged by a majority.”

The lecture highlights a crucial flaw in many organisations; the concentration of decision-making in the hands of a small group of out-of-touch executives. This managerialism, where a tiny ‘elite’ controls the major decisions stifles innovation and disconnects companies from the wisdom of their own employees.

We’ve all been part of organisations where vital decisions were made behind closed doors by a few senior leaders, while everyone else was left to execute orders. But in an age where flexibility and rapid adaptation are critical, the wisdom of the crowd could be a far more powerful tool for creating value. After all, businesses succeed not just because of a leader who thinks he knows best, but because they harness the collective intelligence of their people.

Speaking of people, how often do we hear employees referred to as “human resources”? That mechanistic view turns individuals into little more than means of production like we’re in a Taylorist car factory in 1950s Detroit. The reality is that we’re dealing with resourceful humans, who know things, think things, challenge things and given some agency can make better decisions in the real world of experience than management can seeing the world from a spreadsheet.

‘Best Practice’ is the single most destructive principle in business today

“Best practice is the most toxic idea that business schools have injected into the world… It inevitably means we converge upon a common way of working and commoditise our own thoughts.”

One of the most provocative points raised in the video is about best practice. And it’s possibly the best bit of the whole thing. Best practice sounds good in theory, who wouldn’t want to follow the practices that are proven to work? Consultants adore this phrase. It’s their number one crutch, often allowing the slides for the blue bank to be sold to the green bank.

But this is precisely where the problem lies. Best practices are, in essence, second-hand thoughts. We’re not paid in business to repeat what others have done. We’re paid to think, to innovate, to do things differently.

Business as chess: Played, not planned.

“Business is a game, not a formula… Winning at chess cannot be planned, it’s played. We learn chess by playing it, not by pre-planning every move.”

Business isn’t a formula where success comes from following a predefined path. It’s a game. Much like chess, it’s played, not planned. Success emerges from the decisions made during play, not from following a rigid plan. Goddard shares a revealing example of UBS’s budgeting process costing the company millions, requiring vast amounts of new business to simply break even on the act of running a budgeting process. At the point when your budgeting process is so costly, that you need to add vast amounts of new customers to pay for it, then what is the actual point of it? Just say 10%! 😂!

This taps into a larger critique of modern corporations—their continued reliance on planning, which mirrors the failed models of socialism most thought was cast aside around 1989. Planned economies didn’t work for nations, and they don’t work for businesses either. As Hayek argued, chaos often brings better results than rigid control. In our current corporate world, indecisiveness is possibly the greatest single definition, companies hesitate, leaders worry, overanalyze, and wait for certainty (that often never comes!) before acting. Usually, inaction is the worst decision of all.

The Only Way Forward is to Act

“We bump into success as a result of trying more things than our competitors… We remove the fear by acting more, not by overanalyzing.”

The antidote to fear and indecision is action. Businesses must act more, experiment more and be prepared to explore what they learn when things don’t work if they’re to bump into the truth. Amazon’s success isn’t a result of meticulous planning, it’s a result of running thousands of experiments simultaneously. At any one time, Amazon is likely running 10,000 experiments, for which only a very select few will turn into big scalable initiatives, while a few more will turn into ongoing improvements. The same is true of The New Yorker, where Goddard gives the example of cartoonists developing hundreds of ideas, to get to ten they can submit, just to get a handful, or maybe even one published in each issue. To produce a single great idea, you often need to generate dozens, if not hundreds, of bad ones.

Action breeds clarity, and in a world where perfection is impossible, it’s better to try and fail than to do nothing at all. If businesses could embrace this mindset of acting more and analysing less, they’d increase their chances of success exponentially.

Space for Ambition

“There’s no shortage of ambition in the younger generations, but they grow frustrated with how little responsibility and challenge is given to them.”

The lecture also calls for more space for ambition in business, and interestingly, this ambition often comes from younger generations. While older leaders may be more risk-averse, younger employees are hungry to make an impact. Yet, corporate structures often fail to provide them with the responsibility and opportunity to realise their ambitions. It’s always interesting when you look at history, how much more responsibility was handed you people earlier in their career than it is today.

We live in a generation time where youth has all the ambition, but limited responsibility to unleash it. Instead of stifling this energy, businesses should channel it, allowing the next generation of leaders to push boundaries and drive innovation.

Breaking Orthodoxies: Better, Not Cheaper

"The art of business is to find differentiators other than price. Winning isn’t about being cheaper—it’s about being better, charging more, and staying one step ahead of the need to be efficient."

One of the most refreshing points raised is the need to break certain orthodoxies, particularly the obsession with cutting costs. Businesses that spend 90% of their time focusing on costs are missing the point. Costs are easy to measure, and that’s why we love to obsess over them. But the real focus should be on generating more revenue by creating better, more valuable products.

The most successful companies, Goddard argues, aren’t necessarily the most efficient. They’re the ones that stay one step ahead of the need for efficiency by constantly creating something better. Instead of racing to the bottom by selling more for less, companies should be figuring out how to sell better for more.

That leads us to a closing call for creativity, for it is creativity that will help us find new sources of value, and often in somewhat trivial, irrational means. The world’s greatest creatives, whether in business or in the arts, tend to get there through having some form of constraint placed upon them.

So rather than being heads down in the data, analysis and push to be efficient, the thing that can set us apart from the competition, create the most value and be most meaningful is the creative act. And the creative act is how we find the uncommon sense, which is the subject of Goddard’s wonderful business book. So if you liked this reflection on the lecture, go read that next.

“The future belongs to those who cultivate uncommon sense—the proprietary ideas and creative strategies that set them apart. In business, it’s not about following formulas; it’s about thinking differently, taking risks, and trusting in the power of your own imagination.”