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Conversations with business founders, leaders and experts, examining the changing landscape of leadership, purpose, business growth, Scaling Up, resilience and change with business leaders and owners in mind. We cover a mix of topics designed to ignite (or re-ignite) your spark one conversation at a time.
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Connect with your host Phil Rose on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachphilrose/
SPARKS BY IGNIUM — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Guest: Rich Mulholland | Founder, Missing Link & Too Many Robots | Author, Relentless Relevance
Topic: Relentless Relevance — Stop Doing What You Love and Fix What You Hate
Host: Phil Rose
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CHAPTER MARKERS
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Use these timestamps to navigate the episode in Transistor, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
00:00 Welcome & Introduction — Rich Mulholland Returns to Sparks by Ignium
01:00 Origin Story — From Rock-and-Roll Roadie to Presentation Powerhouse
03:15 Iron Maiden, Midnight Oil and Evergreen Work — How Missing Link Was Born
04:22 The Lie We've Been Sold — Do What You Hate and Fix It
05:24 What Is Relentless Relevance? — The State of Being Appropriate to the Matter at Hand
06:30 The Three Questions Every Business Must Ask — Is Your Problem Still Real?
08:52 Why Traditional Strategy Is No Longer Fit for Purpose
10:00 Replace BHAGs With SHAGs — Short-Term Hairy Audacious Goals
11:09 The Most Strategic Move Is to Ignore Traditional Strategy
13:15 The Red Team vs Blue Team Mindset — How to Disrupt Your Own Business
17:34 First Principles Thinking — Churchill, Roald Dahl and the SHAG Division
21:15 Strategic Destinations vs Strategy — Infinite Games and Finite Near-Term Plays
22:15 Fridays for Side Hustles — No Human Should Have a Single Source of Income
24:47 Reinventing the Legacy Business — Why Groundhog Day Strategy Kills Teams
27:47 Missing Link's Bait and Switch — Story Selling vs Pretty Slides
30:12 The Human Unfair Advantage in the Age of AI — Show Up as Yourself
34:24 Henry Ford's Five-Day Work Week and the AI Efficiency Argument
36:58 What's In It for the Employee? — Solving the AI Incentive Problem
38:56 Status, Utility and Identity — What Happens When AI Solves for Scarcity
42:21 The World Owes Retirees an Apology — Falling Off the Cliff of Utility
46:29 From Just-In-Case to Just-In-Time Education
52:31 Brain Computer Interfaces, Neuralink and the Next Human Disruption
53:29 Ideas Are Back — The Future Belongs to Makers
58:19 T-Shaped Thinking — The Intersection That Differentiates You
01:00:00 Closing — The Best Is Yet to Come
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KEY MOMENTS — EPISODE SUMMARY
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A curated summary of the most important insights from this conversation.
The Accidental Entrepreneur — How Rich Found His Problem (03:33)
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Rich Mulholland traces the origin of Missing Link to a simple frustration: having to sit at the back of conference rooms watching boring presenters day after day. He wasn't hunting for a business idea — he was just irritated enough to fix something. This origin story underpins the central thesis of Relentless Relevance: don't do what you love, do what annoys you and fix it. Rich's now-famous reframe — 'I like motorcycles; if I did what I loved, I'd be delivering your pizza' — makes the argument land with memorable precision. For any entrepreneur wondering where to start, Rich's answer is: start with the thing that pisses you off most.
Why Relevance Must Be Constant, Not Periodic (06:00)
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Relevance, Rich argues, is not a milestone to revisit every five years — it is a continuous operating posture. He defines it simply: the state of being appropriate to the matter at hand. The key question that flows from that definition is: what is the matter at hand? When strategy was modernised for business in the 1980s by thinkers like Peter Drucker and Michael Porter, five-year planning cycles made sense because the world changed slowly. That world is gone. Rich believes every business must now make relevance a core operating value, not a scheduled review. If it is not part of your constant conversation, he warns, relevance is coming for you tomorrow.
The Three Questions That Expose a Legacy Business (13:15)
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Rich offers a three-question diagnostic for any business that suspects it may be drifting into irrelevance. First: what problem were you solving when you started? Second: does that problem still exist? Third: if it does, is the way you solve it still the best available approach? The clincher is a follow-on provocation: if you sold your business today and started a new version tomorrow, would you solve the problem the same way? This exercise — thinking like the challenger rather than the incumbent — is what Rich calls adopting the red team mindset. It forces business owners to confront the gap between what they know and what the market actually needs.
The Red Team Mindset — Choose to Be the Threat, Not the Threatened (15:12)
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Drawing on the concept of ethical hacking, Rich explains that companies typically behave like a blue team: defending their existing business model against disruption. The red team, by contrast, exists to break in — and always wins eventually. His challenge to every business leader is to choose which side they want to be on. You can either be threatened by the future or be the threat to it. The question, Rich says, is how you can change the way your industry works rather than be changed by it. The starting point is always the same: return to the core problem you were originally solving and ask whether there is a better way to solve it now.
SHAGs, Churchill and the Roald Dahl Spy Network (17:34)
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Rich reframes long-term business planning through the lens of Winston Churchill's World War Two strategy. Churchill's B-HAG — beat the Axis powers — required a near-term SHAG: get America into the war. To achieve that, he needed an even shorter goal: change American public sentiment. The solution was a spy division led by Roald Dahl, whose job was to seduce the wives of major media owners and change the 'pillow talk' around the war effort. The story illustrates that behind every big aspiration is a chain of short, concrete, executable moves. For businesses, Rich argues, the SHAG — the Short-term Hairy Audacious Goal — is more strategically useful than the BHAG in a world that cannot be predicted five years out.
Why Employees Should Have Fridays Off — and Own Their Own Side Hustle (22:15)
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Rich has given Missing Link staff Fridays to build their own businesses. His argument is straightforward: no employee and no entrepreneur should rely on a single source of income. In a world where business models shift rapidly and AI compresses the value of existing skills, the old model of employer-as-safety-net is a dangerous illusion. Rich also makes a structural case: in an AI-efficient future, businesses might employ 100 people working two days a week rather than 50 working five — broadening experience, creativity, and resilience across the organisation. The Friday side-hustle is both a gift to employees and a competitive advantage for the employer.
The AI Efficiency Trap — What's In It for the Human? (36:58)
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Rich identifies what he sees as the central unsolved problem of the AI transition: businesses are telling employees to become more efficient, but passing none of the gain back to them. He draws a direct parallel with Henry Ford's decision to cut the work week from six days to five — a move driven partly by self-interest (Ford wanted workers to have time to drive cars) but one that genuinely benefited employees and normalised a new social contract. Rich argues that if AI creates time efficiency, the only meaningful benefit to give back to employees is that time. Anything else, he says, is asking people to work harder with no gain — and wondering why they don't care.
Status, Utility and the Future of Human Identity (39:35)
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Rich argues that humans are fundamentally status-seeking machines, and that every social era redefines what status looks like — from military glory to wealth accumulation. If AI solves for universal basic income, the next crisis will not be economic but existential: what does status look like when money is no longer the metric? And more urgently, what happens to the human need for utility — the sense of being useful? Rich points to the experience of retirees, who fall off a 'cliff of utility' with no preparation, as a preview of what mass technological unemployment could feel like for a generation not trained for it. The question 'who are you?' becomes the central challenge.
T-Shaped Thinking and the Human Unfair Advantage (58:19)
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The humans who will win the future, Rich argues, are those who are T-shaped: specialists in something, but able to connect meaningfully with the wider world through communication, storytelling and presence. In an era where almost everything is fakeable, the one irreplaceable skill is the ability to show up well in front of other human beings — no avatars, no safety nets. Rich's work through Missing Link and his new Voice of Authority programme is built around this belief. If you are one of three programmers and you are the one who can stand up and communicate well, you are the one who survives. Eloquence, he says, will always be in fashion — even in a post-economic world.
The Best Is Yet to Come — Rich's Own SHAG (01:01:17)
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Asked for his own short-term hairy audacious goal, Rich gives a personal and candid answer. He refuses to accept the cultural narrative that his best work is behind him or that this is 'Gen Z's time now'. He believes he is the smartest, most energetic version of himself he has ever been, and that his most significant contribution is still ahead. His near-term goal is to figure out what that contribution actually looks like — not to be constrained by the identity of a 29-year-old legacy service business owner. It is a reminder that relentless relevance is not just a business strategy. It is a personal one.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
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Lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts removed.
Phil Rose:
Welcome back to the Sparks by Igneum podcast. I am Phil Rose, the host, and today I'm delighted to welcome back to the show Rich Marholland. Rich and I last talked in mid 2024, and since then he's been on to write yet another book. He's driving his business missing link, and he is out there creating havoc and driving successful businesses. Now, before I introduce him specifically, I want to go back into his backstory. and I was looking on his website about this to find out, you what is it about Rich that I don't know, bearing in mind we've only talked for a couple of times before. And the bit that really jumped on me is about his origin and where he came from. And I'm going to quote from his website. says, Rich kicked off his career as a rock and roll roadie, creating lights for bands such as Iron Maiden, Midnight Earl, Def Leppard. And in 1997, at the wee age of 22, Rich founded Presentation Powerhouse, Missing Link, full stop. Now I want to delve into that. and then introduce you back in. So Rich, welcome back to the Sparks Baking and Podcast.
Rich Mulholland:
Well, thanks, Phil. such fun last time. It's good to be back.
Phil Rose:
Thank you. And look, I wanted to read that intro there because I said to you just now, Iron Maiden, Midnought Oil and Def Leppard, amazing relevant bands. And if I think about Midnought Oil and Def Leppard, they're still hanging around there. I haven't seen either of those two bands for long time, but Iron Maiden is still out there, relevant. Tell me about that backstory for you and how that created the rich that we see here today.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, mean, it's, it's an unromantic story. was basically, I was touring with the bands. I'd wanted to actually see the band Def Leppard. I'd wanted to, sorry, I'd wanted to work with the band Depeche Mode. They were coming and to South Africa at the time. And I'd spoken to my dad who knew a lot of people in the industry and he got me a job as a stagehand. And I mean, I remember saying to him, I'll lick the stage clean for free. Like I'll do whatever it takes. Just get me that. And then I saw he picked up and, and
Rich Mulholland:
did a lot of stagehand work, then I got brought on a full lighting crew, then I became a lighting operator and a lighting designer. But what I realized is in South Africa, we only had work in summer. No bands came in winter because nobody would go to concerts in winter. Now, it's funny, I live in the Isle of Man now. We didn't go to events or didn't leave our homes when there was bad weather, but we'd never leave home. And I quickly realized that what I needed was... evergreen work. We had so much gear. And I recognized that the conference industry, they met all year round and I didn't know what to do. So I kind of was trying to convince these CEOs that I could make them look like rock stars at their conferences. And they all bought it up. But it was a bit of a lie because it didn't matter how much lighting, sound and AV I put in behind the person. If they got on stage and they were boring, they were boring. It's lipstick on a pig. And so I started moonlighting at the site and
Phil Rose:
Yeah?
Rich Mulholland:
occasionally trying to suss what I felt worked with some people versus others and then see if I could help some of these corporate people, these CEOs to be better when they're on stage. And before we knew it, we had like five employees, the company had grown. I quit my full-time job at Gearhouse and I started MissingLink that way. And that's now 29 years ago.
Phil Rose:
Wow. Wow, okay. And I love that story in terms of, you fall into something because of something going on in the environment. So that feeds around, you know, people not doing stuff during the winter, therefore you needed to create a new way of earning some money. And you also saw this piece about how to, you know, create the rock and roll CEO. I love that as a story.
Rich Mulholland:
Right. And you mentioned relevance, obviously, the last book I wrote is called Relentless Relevance, that relevance is the state of being appropriate to the matter at hand. And corporate CEOs, the matter of hand for them was to look good when they're standing in front of their people. That made sense, right? They don't want to stand up and be boring. So it was just a very, very simple problem to solve. And originally I thought I could solve it with lighting and sound and AV. And then I realized that I had to go closer to the source.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, that's interesting. So actually again, like most entrepreneurs, you just see an opportunity and you find a way of keeping yourself relevant by doing something else to help them as well. And going from the lighting and the AV to actually, as you say, going to the source and helping the CEO transform their presentation style or charisma on stage effectively.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, I always say that, you know, we've been sold a lie, that Confucius line, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Like, that doesn't make sense. I like motorcycles. If I did what I love, that'd be delivering your pizza. Right? What we need to do is do what you hate. Find shit that pisses you off and fix it. And so when I was running PSL Conference Services for GearHouse, I had to sit at the back of every one of these conference rooms, watch people bore their audience and me to tears, day in, day out. And eventually I just got frustrated enough and figured this feels like a problem we're solving. And if you can just find something that irritates you enough and fix it, you're off to a good start.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I love that. And I love that thing about finding something that irritates you enough and then go and fix it. Because actually a lot of entrepreneurs, that's what they do. Their passion is finding those pains that everyone else is just putting up with. And then they go and find another way of doing it. Or even it's a pain that people didn't know they were putting up with. They just haven't recognized that they're boring when it comes to CEOs presenting or standing up in front of the room.
Phil Rose:
So thinking forwards in that case, I'd love to come back and talk about Iron Maid and the Midnight Oil as well, but let's come forward into business terms. How do people stay relevant today? Because obviously that's what the premise of this book is. In the last 18 months since we last talked, relentless relevance has hit the shelves. And if I look at the reviews and the information I've read, it says here, know, relentless relevance challenges leaders, entrepreneurs and thinkers to stop. And I think that's interesting to stop viewing relevance as a milestone and start treating it as a continuous pursuit. So I want to delve into what that really means. What is reliance, relevance for people?
Rich Mulholland:
Well. Yeah, because I mean, guess you've addressed both parts there. So the relevance I covered already. Relevance is the state of being appropriate to the matter at hand. So this is a I really like that definition because it immediately begs a question. And the question it begs is what is the matter at hand? Right. So the number one question businesses need to be asking themselves is what problem are we solving here? Is the problem we were solving yesterday still the problem that exists today? And if it's not, is the solution we have still the relevant one we should be pushing?
Rich Mulholland:
for the relentless bit. That relevance used to be something we would do every four or five years. And that would make sense. That's why, you know, when strategy was modernized in the 1980s for business by Peter Drucker and Michael Porter, people like that, it made sense because 1985 was going to look a lot like 1980 and 1990 was going to look a lot like, you know, 1985. And so we could do these long prediction cycles, but we can't do that anymore. And relevance, so relevance used to be this milestone.
Rich Mulholland:
and that we would check every now and then. Now I believe that it has to be part of your constant narrative you're having. the line I make in some of my keynotes is that if being relentlessly relevant or being relevant is not one of the core values of your business or the behaviors of your business today, then relevance is coming for you tomorrow. We need to build a culture that people are constantly asking themselves, are we still appropriate to the matter at hand? Because again, it forces them to ask the more uncomfortable question, what is the
Rich Mulholland:
at hand.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, and it interests me, okay, so going back to the strategy, so I've worked in strategy since 2004 and I think there's a number of different takes on it. And if I look on my bookshelf over there, I've got a book somewhere called Strategy Safari and that was written sometime in, know, 25, 26 years ago. And what I loved about that book is that there's no such thing as a standard process for strategy. It's all about, know, people have different ways of doing it and creating that. But the bit I love in that is the creative process of building a strategy, which helps you look at, where do you want to go in the future? And be really creative about where are the gaps that you might see. But the bit you're making me think about there is that piece around the world's moving so quickly. We know that since the pandemic, you it's now 19th of February, 2026. Pandemic was six years ago, starting. That transformed people's ways of working into, you know, potentially doing more of a virtual world. But the thing that's come up in the last... two years specifically, and maybe in the last five months is this massive rise of AI. We're all using it. Well, if you're not using it, you're not relevant today would be my view, but there's a lot going on there. We couldn't predicted these things five years ago. So what's the things that CEOs, business leaders, entrepreneurs need to think about to help them see the future that probably wouldn't have existed in their mindset a few years ago?
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, so I think this is the big problem with strategy generally. And in the book, I kind of go to war with it. I say the strategy as a tool is no longer fit for purpose. It had two premises that it was based on was that we are relatively good at predicting what the next five years is going to look like. And second of all, we operate under command and control leadership. So we can tell our staff what to do and they'll generally behave and do it.
Rich Mulholland:
The world we live in right now, we've lost the ability to predict. I don't think anybody is reasonably going to make a prediction of what the of work looks like in 2031. I mean, it's insane to imagine what it would look like. And second of all, heck, I don't even know what humans look like at that stage. And second of all,
Rich Mulholland:
In all the work, funnily enough, kicked off around the same time by these two researchers, Ryan and Deshi, they were looking into self-determination theory, and they basically unequivocally showed that human beings who have agency, self-determination, operate better than those that don't. So command and control leadership just doesn't make sense as an operating model anymore. So what we now have to do is to replace this with something that's more fit for purpose.
Rich Mulholland:
I think the disruptive world we have, one, think we need to move from BHAGS, the big hairy audacious goal, to short hairy audacious goals. Like what do we need to do in the next year? And I think that we need to recognise that the number will never get us there. If the only thing that you're pushing for is more revenue, then all you'll ever get is more sales or marketing the old way that you've done it. What we need to be doing is moving our thinking to
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I think.
Rich Mulholland:
say what do we actually need to do and then we've got to hope that the output of that is going to be more revenue.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, love it, love it. And it's interesting to see it, because a lot of people treat strategy as being, look, how do we build the budget? How do we think about, you know, what's our next budget? And they just add on 10 % to last year. But the bit you mentioned there is, you know, come back and the revenues, the output of buying, thinking about it, but think about that, as you said, small hag, but as in short term rather than small, and thinking about what is it we need to be doing in the next year's time? And then revenue will flow beyond that effectively.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, you mentioned strategic coach and it's funny because I think that more than ever before, we need to be strategic.
Rich Mulholland:
Ironically, the most strategic thing we can do is to ignore the traditional models of strategy. Right. And right now it is strategic to become somewhat tactical. Look, I still think we can have aspirations for a business, but our ability to course correct them needs to be better. I had very, very big goals for what I thought, you know, how I thought my business would operate even a year and a half ago. But the world has changed. Our business model has changed. Our go to market strategy needs to change. Missing Link, one of my companies,
Rich Mulholland:
at the moment is under threat and it's under threat by the fact that we can do work quicker. Our clients know that and they expect us to be able to do work for cheaper. And I don't think that's unreasonable. I do think that being able to do things, you know, if you're charging by the hour and you can do work in fewer hours, you should be charging less. However, the problem is that we've not yet figured out the business model to support this new amount of work that we can do in this extra time that that we have. And so even though that we were somewhat ahead of the curve and I've got another business called Too Many Robots, an AI firm, and so we felt that we were well educated for it. The changes required by business leaders are not easy, especially for me. I'm 29 years into a legacy business. It's very, hard to unsee everything that you've seen going forward. And I like to this, but it's easier said than done.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, and sorry, I'll cut you off there, but I love that bit when you said about 29 years into a legacy business, because this is the key thing, isn't it? 29 years ago, the world was very different. When you left that roadie circuit and you set up on your own doing what you did, you had a team of people creating that and you're helping people stand out differently. The world's moved on in that time, but it's moved on so quick now in terms of that exponential growth. So the point you're entering there is that you're in a legacy business. I wonder... thinking about the entrepreneurs that I know today and people who listen to this podcast, what's the thing they need to be looking at to help them get out of their legacy business and effectively kill what they've got and move forward into the new business, that new thinking? What do they need to do?
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, the first question I always ask is what problem were we solving when we started? The second question is, does this problem still exist?
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, OK.
Rich Mulholland:
The third question is, if it does still exist, is the way we solve it still the best way? And the other way to think about that question is, if I sold my business today and started a new version of the same company tomorrow, would I solve the problem in the same way that my legacy business is solving it? If the answer to all of those questions is, you know... Yes, like I would still keep doing things the same way. It's all perfect. Then more power to you. But if the answer is no, find a better way. How would you behave if you were not the incumbent? Because in the book I talk about the I don't know if you're familiar, with the idea in hacking of the blue versus red teams.
Phil Rose:
Tell me more about it.
Rich Mulholland:
Okay, so in hacking, often will happen is you have these big corporations, these banks, and they need to make sure that our money is safe. So what they'll do is their IT team, the blue team, they will hire professional ethical hackers to try and break in and test their systems. These often refer to as tiger teams. These tiger teams or the red team do everything they can to try and break into the company. Now on the inside, the blue team's job is to try and keep them out. Here's the problem.
Phil Rose:
Okay, okay.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, okay.
Rich Mulholland:
It's not necessarily the problem, but here's the reality. The red team always wins. Ultimately, the red team, and in fact, the red team's job is to win. The red team always ends up getting in somehow, and then they phone the blue team and say, hey, guys, here's how we got in. Here's how we broke the system. Because, you know, it's like that old line that the assassin only has to win once, but the Secret Service has to stop the 100 bullets.
Phil Rose:
Every time, love it, love it. I love that story, that point around it. So effectively, their point is to get in and then show how they did it, because then you can find the holes in the business armory to get yourself fixed for next time. But they're always going to find new ways of getting in.
Rich Mulholland:
Bye. Now here's what's happening in business today. There's a lot of the businesses we consult with when we do strategic work with, or we're often trying to take people's strategies and turn them into something alive that their staff members can associate with and really internalize. And one of the big problems that we often see is that these businesses are trying to play the blue team. So their entire strategy is based on defending the status quo of their business model. They're trying to say, how do I stop these new mischievous ideas from breaking through and coming in and making us irrelevant. But actually that's the wrong approach. If I'm speaking to a business leader tomorrow, I'm saying, you've got a choice. You can either be threatened by the future or you can be the threat to it. And I would always want to choose to be the red team. The question is, how can I?
Phil Rose:
and.
Rich Mulholland:
How can I change if I'm looking at my old legacy business model, what changes can I make to it to try and change the way the world works rather than to be changed by it? And again, you've got to go back to the core problem you were solving. What's the best way to solve that problem if in fact it still exists?
Phil Rose:
Yeah, and I love that point there. You said that right at the beginning, wasn't it? know, does the problem I set out to solve still exist for people in the past, in now, because it did in the past? And if it does still exist, how do we do it differently? So taking that red and blue team example, you've got some people there who trying to defend the current way of thinking. And if that's you as an entrepreneur, you're defending your way of doing things because that's what you know. You've grown up in this way of doing it. You've got 29 years experience and you may not have opened your mind out to these other ways of thinking. that the young whippersnappers are coming up at your heels to do. And the thought that's going through my head as you're talking about that is, know, think about how Elon Musk has transformed the world of electric vehicles, transformed the world of battery power in houses, transformed the world of space flight, looking at what SpaceX is doing, and coming up there and thinking differently. And some people may not like Elon Musk's ways of doing it, but we can't argue about one thing. He's just transformed the world. He's made a difference from what he did. And even if you go back to the PayPal world of thinking right at the beginning, it's transformed things. So what's the key mindset that people would have to have to get like that to get on that red team?
Rich Mulholland:
Well, Musk famously always talks about going back to the first principles. He starts with the most interesting problem to solve and then he works back from there. There's a great story I heard recently. It's a nice example of this, of how to think about the world. And I guess it's the relationship between b-hags and shags, short hair issues goals. And the...
Rich Mulholland:
Let's go back to World War Two. Winston Churchill had a B-Hag and the B-Hag was to beat Hitler, know, beat the Germans, right? That's what he wanted to do. That seemed like a very, very big problem. But he had a much shorter term problem in hand. And his shorter term problem was get America to join the war. Like he knew if he wanted to beat the Axis powers, he needed to have a stronger allied set. And core to that was the American war machine. So how can you get the American war machine to join? As you know, they were, you know, two years late to the party.
Rich Mulholland:
And we often romantically just think about it as, well, Pearl Harbor happened and then America was forced in. But of course, was other things happening. Going back to that kind of first principle is he realized he had an even shorter term thing, is he had to change American sentiment with regards to the war effort. And so the problem was that the American media was relatively against America joining the war. In fact, you were against the war in Europe as a whole. that it wasn't necessary and certainly wasn't something American soldiers should be involved in. So Churchill...
Rich Mulholland:
created a spy division and the spy division was to change the intent of the American people. And he sent spies to go into the US to do that. And his strategy was quite nefarious. His strategy was to have spies seduce the wives of the large media conglomerate owners. Now, I only heard this recently because I heard of a there's a brand new podcast. not even complete yet. It's only four episodes out and it's called, I think, The Secret Life of Roald Dahl. And the reason I
Phil Rose:
I
Rich Mulholland:
mention Roald Dahl here is Roald Dahl was the original spy. His job was to go into America and seduce the CEO of magazine's wife or Newsweek's wife to try and change the pillow talk around the war effort, to try and change the narratives that these magazines put out to change American sentiment. So you have to go back to those original problems. We have to go back to say what are worthwhile problems to solve today?
Phil Rose:
Wow.
Rich Mulholland:
or what do I care enough about? And the easiest place to start is what frustrates me the most? Where am I the most frustrated and how do I fix it?
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess there's two things come out of there. First of all, you've got to that long-term vision. So Churchill had the vision of defeating the Germans. That was the key bit there. But then coming back in time, if that's our goal, what do need to do? And actually what I need to do is get the Americans on side at this stage and then come back to them. How do I do that? I create the Shag Division, which I'm coming back to that because I love that as an acronym now. Short Hairy Audacious Goals, Short-Term Hairy Audacious Goals.
Phil Rose:
And Roald Dahl got in there as the first shagger to do it, effectively. So I love it. And I love that as a brinsel. So thinking about that, there's a story there. We all know Roald Dahl for the storytelling ability he had. So he was the ideal person to do that based on what we know of him before, from now. But actually, if you think about what you've just said there, there's a story and a narrative that had to be built around that because what he was trying to do is change the pillow talk, which would change the media moguls, which would change the sentiment of the American people.
Rich Mulholland:
Right, that was it.
Phil Rose:
because that was the way they could see as subterfuge to get the Americans into the war. So there's a real journey there of start with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey would say, but come back and then say, what's the first step we need to take?
Rich Mulholland:
Right. And this is strategic destination or victory condition versus strategy. So your victory condition is, think if you think about your world as there multiple game levels you can play. of course, to in James Carson, Simon Sinek, I actually would only quote Sinek here because he was the only one talking about business. Business, he says, is an infinite game. The only job is to stay and play. Now, I call bullshit on that. mean, fine, it could be an infinite game, but it's stackeringly uninteresting to consider it that way. And in fact, I don't even think I think one of the biggest problems that we have is that we think the business
Rich Mulholland:
should be infinite. I believe that businesses, and I mentioned this in the book, businesses should be fit for purpose vehicles. And I think the future of work is that we will bring together swarms of individuals that will solve problems for a period of time until the problem is gone and then those swarms will dissipate. And I think that human beings, I believe the greatest right to your future is having a single source of income.
Rich Mulholland:
I think that nobody, no entrepreneur and no employee should have a single source of income. At Missing Link, we've given our staff Fridays off to start their own businesses. Because I say you shouldn't trust me. The world changes and I can no longer employ you. You should have some other irons in the fire to get yourself going. And also we live in a world now where you can actually launch something quite meaningful in one day a week. So you should be going for it. But even for me, in the future of employment, I imagine a world in which
Rich Mulholland:
We are working four days a week. It's crazy to me that if AI... In fact, I'm going to hang this up and you can decide if you want to come back to it. The AI efficiency argument. Let's let's choose if we want to come back to that. However, I imagine a world in which instead of having 50 employees, you have 100 employees. So it was 50 employees four days a week or 100 employees two days a week each. And I would argue that's better for the employee and better for you and better for the business and better for your customers.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to argue with that as well, because I agree with you actually, just on that face value. 100 employees, you've got 100 people with different inputs coming into your story as well. So you've not just got 50 people's story, you've got lots of other people working on it. The creativity will drive there and you've got an opportunity there because those people are now going out to do other work as well where they're going to bring in to develop it. So I love your word about the swarm.
Rich Mulholland:
in many businesses anyway.
Phil Rose:
And actually, when you talk about the infinite game, it's actually for us individuals to play that game because make sure we're still in play in the future. And the business is what you're suggesting. The business might disappear, but actually the people are the ones who pull it together. So you've got this portfolio of people working together to make sure they're relentlessly relevant as individuals.
Rich Mulholland:
That's, I mean, a brilliant frame that I hadn't considered and you're absolutely right. The key to doing that, though, is to play lots of short games. So for me to think about, I just want Missing Link to stay around forever, staggeringly uninteresting. But to think, OK, we have to reinvent our business model in the next year or I won't make 30 years old. Right. We've got to figure out what is the future of our business model because the world has changed. Now, I'm very lucky in that I think the problem that we solve, I would argue, has never been more important. We've just got to make sure that the world buys into that same thing. So I have to evangelize what we call story selling, sell the world a new story in which they need us.
Rich Mulholland:
And I've got to do that more effectively than perhaps I have been doing right now. But that's the idea. This very finite near-term game means there is something for us to play as a business and something for us to celebrate when we win.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
Right? Whereas just having this, this, this horizon chasing stay in business every year, groundhog day bullshit is never going to excite your staff. And I think it actually turns most traditional entrepreneurs, problem solving entrepreneurs off to the point that we get very bored with our companies. And that's a bad place to be.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. And do you know what I love about that? You know, I've been running my business now for 22 years in two months time. And I think about that in terms of, you we often used to joke about the seven year itch in marriage. I think I have a seven year itch in business because I want to do something different. Whether it's seven years or five years, I don't know, but there's something that gives me the itch and I want to scratch it and do something different. And there's been lots of things I've done differently over the years, but maybe I'm still stuck in that legacy way of doing it is what I'm thinking as we're talking now. because actually, you I still use some of the stuff I created in 2004, five, six, seven, because I think it still works. But there's something there about, you know, what is it we need to be doing going forwards and actually thinking about 30 years down the line. The bit I was gonna come to with that little story thought there is my parents started their business in 1982. My dad was a marine engineer. He loved tinkering with boats. He loved taking engines apart and was amazing at doing it. They closed the business in 2010, having done it for whatever that is, 30 plus years or whatever. The key is that I think they kept doing the same thing because boats were there and people wanted their boat serviced. And I'm wondering, if you're a young person setting up a business now, or even old person, age is irrelevant actually, if you're a person setting up a business now, having your short-term goal, actually what is it? What's the beehive? As you said about for Churchill, it was about defeating the Germans, winning the war. But actually as an entrepreneur, is your BHAG just about making some money, getting your itch scratched for the next five years, then going on to the next thing? So you become that portfolio entrepreneur as well. You just keep on moving to the next thing. Or should we have some way, you know, we talk about sticking to the knitting. So for you, missing link, you know, that's about, you know, people's typical presentations or shit, therefore go and do something better. What's the relevance of your business today? And should you go and do something different?
Rich Mulholland:
So I do think the answer to the question, think sticking to your knitting is, you know, if you're an electrician, by all means do it. You know, I can't fix a plug over the internet. But if you're solving a knowledge based problem and you used to solve it a certain way, you have to go back and ask yourself.
Rich Mulholland:
Because I think some of the stuff that you came up with in 2004 is going to still be right if it's principle based. So is this principle or is this kind of reactionary? Is this something we came up with because it made sense for a specific element of a problem? So for Messing Link, we've thought about this a lot. So when I'll tell you what's changed, nothing that we actually think has changed has changed, but our go to market has changed. And let me explain to you what happened here.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
When missing, we've always done a bait and switch.
Rich Mulholland:
Okay, so when people came to Missing Link, nobody wanted to come to this group of like tattooed hooligans as a bank thinking that they were going to get strategic advice on how they should communicate their strategy to a thousand business leaders. What they thought they were getting was pretty good looking slides that would look really cool behind them. And we were very happy to sell them that. you know, I remember going to my I read the book Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. I read it for the third time last year. And I remember going to my staff and saying to them, Guys, I don't care what you do in the business if you're a designer or video editor or anything if somebody asks you what you do You are a presentation strategist. That's the term. We help you strategize your presentation our point of difference Was that everybody else is trying to sell you pretty slides. We don't think you have a pretty slight problem But here's the thing they came to us for a pretty slight problem
Rich Mulholland:
Only once they were in the door did we say, well, hold on a second. You can either buy us or the best of the other four because we're actually don't think you have a pretty slight problem. We think you have a content messaging strategy problem. So two things have changed now. Thing that's changed number one is that they're not coming to us for the slides anymore because there are wonderful tools like Canva and AI tools that can create really like Kimi blows me away, really fantastic slide, beautiful decks straight out off the bat.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
So now what happens is the reason they came to us in the first place has disappeared. Now we've got to convince them to come for the second bit. That is a problem that they don't know they have until they speak to us. Because most people think that they're very, very smart and eloquent and it's just that their slides are shit. That's why it's called Yes by PowerPoint. But blaming PowerPoint for a bad presentation is like blaming a pan for a bad meal. Right? It was never about PowerPoint. It was always about the words coming out of your mouth.
Rich Mulholland:
Now we've got a second layer of the problem. The second layer of the problem is even the content strategy. Everyone thinks that they can just put their content into chat GBT and then just get this beautiful presentation out. We saw this with some of the speakers we were just working with, and you can see the second, this is what they give you. And it's not to say it's not good and we don't use it. Of course we use it as well. It's to say that it's not going to get you where you need to be yet.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
But our job is to convince the world, because I do believe in the future, the ability to communicate live to actual humans is the biggest unfair advantage you could have. Everything is fakeable. You know, maybe when we meet two years from now, I send my avatar and your avatar and they record a podcast independently based on questions we set up. Both of us have created enough content for this to happen. The only time humans will know if they're really, really getting the real person is when they're standing in front of the person and they can see them in front of them. So the human beings who are able to show up well as themselves in front of the other human beings with no dongles and no safety nets, they're the ones that will win the future. However,
Phil Rose:
Lovely.
Rich Mulholland:
We're not at the point yet where the world has realized this and I've got to try and fast forward that belief. And that's the challenge that we have to solve. That's the story that I have to sell to the world so that they realize that they do actually need us.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I love that and interesting actually. I'm thinking about a story you told me back in 2024 about, know, peanut, putting the pill in the peanut butter. And I'm thinking there about, you know, we've got to be able to do that, to create that easy to swallow piece of information. And if you're casting your mind forward to what you've just said there about, you know, two human beings having a conversation where you're getting up on stage or in front of each other.
Rich Mulholland:
You better in the field.
Phil Rose:
and maintaining relevance like that because our avatars could talk and at the moment, you we could have an AI conversation. We could set up this and it could just work. We could use Heygen or any other piece of material and it would just have that conversation. So the key there is how do we help people see the story of what the future might be? Because as an entrepreneur, that's what we're trying to do. We're casting our mind out to the future. Musk always talks about science fiction as being one of the guiding things he created when he was in South Africa originally, he would be playing the Space Invaders games and things like that. And that was what he could see this future vision. So we've got to try and translate that because not everybody in the world is able to cast their mind to the future because they're in the here and now and they don't see a better way of doing it. So that's going to be one of the problems that people like me and people like you are going to have to do is how do we how do we keep people see that relevance of what could be rather than what is today? And I wonder what mindset shift people have to go on to do that.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, I think you have to start from where you're at. You can't go, you must be prognostic in your thinking. You've to take big leaps in your thinking about what the world could look like. And I think that's a really fun exercise as a business owner is to sit there and say, OK, what are five possibilities about the world?
Rich Mulholland:
If we get prognostic about that, like if we were to write a science fiction novel about the world, what are five different output novels that we could write about how the world is going to look if different things happen? If this and that? And it'd be really interesting. Right now, everyone's only thinking about AGI, but I think AGI...
Rich Mulholland:
I talked about recursive disruptive technology. So recursive in that because something came before it, we can now do something else. It's infrastructure inversion. And the idea is depending on if we're only thinking of AI, then then we're only going one path. But what if we're thinking about the intersection of AI and humans? Now, you mentioned Musk, of course, the thing that excites me the most the Musk is working on is Neuralink. The work he's done with Nolan Darbo and people like that.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
Brain computer interfaces. Now brain computer interfaces, a guy like a month and a half ago showed that he's like patient six or something, showed that he's been able to program an Arduino chip to allow him to fly airplanes, model airplanes with his brain, and just by thinking about it. And so this exists. This exists today and we're only six patients in. This is like we're the sixth user of chat GPT in. Now if you imagine what's happened with chat GPT in the three years that it's exist, you you imagine Will Smith eating spaghetti to now creating Hollywood style movies. Imagine what's gonna happen with BCI, Brain Computer Interface. So that's a whole other deviation we need to be thinking about is where will it get to? In fact, I wanna come back to that thing I mentioned earlier is the big thing that we have to figure out with
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
our teams with these disruptive technologies is what is the incentive for them to care? Because here's my problem. So I don't know if you know the story of why we, do you know why we only have a five day work week?
Phil Rose:
Tell me the story. think I might do, but you carry on.
Rich Mulholland:
You probably have heard it before, but it's just one we don't think about because it's almost taken for granted now, is that Henry Ford, he created this incredible efficiency of production. So he realized, obviously, he popularized the production line. Mercedes invented the car, but he just made it easier to make. But now he has this problem, he's capable of making more cars cheaper, but nobody wants to buy them. And the reason nobody wants to buy them is nobody has time to drive because they got church on Sunday, which they live close to and they can walk to the local
Rich Mulholland:
church and they don't have any time off to do anything interesting. What he wants is you get into your car in Manhattan and drive to Staten Island to go to the funfair or whatever, or Kearney Island, whatever it is, to do whatever you want to do. And so what he did is he decided, okay, well, hold on a second. I'm going to increase the salary of my workers and decrease the amount of time they work. They only now have to work five days a week. And he changed it. Up until then, it was six days a week. And do you know, for the rest of his life,
Rich Mulholland:
Henry Ford had to go around with a bodyguard because other industrialists wanted to take him out because they basically lost one sixth of production. He'd normalize something different. Now he did it slightly selfishly because he wanted to sell cars to his employees, but you could definitely make the case that there was a good incentive now for his employees because, man, work harder on this production line. You'll make more money. You'll have more time off and you'll have a car that you can drive to far off places. How cool is that?
Phil Rose:
Love it. Love it.
Rich Mulholland:
Now here's what we're not solving for with AI. Everyone's turning around and saying to their teams, know, when we do with too many robots, we do a lot of AI training. And a lot of the training basically says, here's how you can do certain things more efficiently. So what? So what does that mean? What are you saying to me? Are you saying, you're saying what exactly? You're saying to me that I can, I used to make five widgets and now I can make eight widgets, but you're not paying me anymore.
Phil Rose:
Yeah
Rich Mulholland:
So why do I care? Now I understand I should care because, you know, because I've got to keep my job, but we're now basically saying that people should do more work, but there's no gain for them. It's only efficiency. It's only a tool that forwards human efficiency if humans get the benefit. And the only benefit that I can see is time.
Rich Mulholland:
At the moment, that is the one commodity we should be giving people. So if we're saying that we have a tool that makes time more efficient, then why are we not giving that back to our staff? Because if we don't give it back to our staff, we're saying we want you to be more efficient and we want all the benefit. That's a problematic statement. and if you embrace it too well, you may not even have a job in the future. So wait a minute. If I do this job really, really well, you win and I get nothing.
Phil Rose:
That's a great.
Rich Mulholland:
And if I don't do it well, or if I do it really, really well, there's also a chance that I lose my job forever. Right. Yeah. I'm finding it difficult to give a shit about this. Yeah. What's in it for me? We've got to solve that problem. What's in it for the humans? If it's great efficiency tool, why do I not have an extra day off?
Phil Rose:
What's in it for me? Yeah. So, so just, I'm going to. Yeah. So, it's interesting. I was reading an article the other day by P.T.D. Amanda's and he was talking about a conversation Musk could have, we'll come back to Musk again, talking about how we could provide that universal basic income. And his view was if we get the AI working well enough, it then produce everything we need to do. And therefore we should be able to now, each business should be able to produce enough money that actually could support the population with a high standard living. The worry I've got there is, you know, you're going to have people out of work doing nothing and making money on the back of it. So you've got this conundrum here and it comes back to Ford's thing there is I can work five days, I can produce enough money in my business in five days and I've got customers to buy my cars because they're in my factories as well. So you're changing the mindset. There's a whole load of social issues in that I think. And if you come back to that word strategy, people do pestle analysis and understand what's going on politically and environmentally and socially. There's a whole load of technological changes there which might impact us down the line 10, 20 years or even two years down the line. which we don't have the power to deal with at the moment. Because as you say, what's in it for me for employees is, hey, why the fuck should I do this for you when I'm going to be the one out of work in the future? Whereas Musk's view was, if you get it working better, you can produce more money and you don't need to go to work.
Rich Mulholland:
Okay, but now you see, and I do agree with this and I've in 2017 I did a talk. going to war with the fourth industrial revolution. And my one biggest argument is, one of the big word problems in that phrase is industrial. Like this is the least interesting thing we're dealing with right now is the new world of work. Like we're changing what it means to be human with chips in our brains and we're talking about, what will it mean to our salaries? Let me tell what the problem is the way I see it, Phil. I was actually having a good debate and discussion with my friends in Australia last week on this. Here's the deal. If... Human beings of all, we're status seekers. Right. That's all we are. are status seeking machines. And our job is that humans always want to be better than the other humans. This is the reason that that all the billionaires are trying to go to space right now, because that is that's what makes your dick look the biggest. Right. This is this is this is the thing that we have decided is the ultimate form of status. And so because that's yardstick, once once once you're all billionaires, like that's useless to compare with. And so for the most part, what we do is we all pay play in divisions
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phil Rose:
You
Rich Mulholland:
and leagues. So in the I live in a kind of middle class life in Douglas on the Isle of Man. And so my job is to make sure that of other players in the division of Douglas Isle of Man, that I look slightly better than them or at least of a high enough tier there. If I was to move to what's that Mar-a-Lago or whatever, I mean, they wouldn't let me clean their swimming pools. Right. So I'd be entering a new loop. So status, all everything is, is how do I accumulate status? Now, multiple generations ago, the way that we did that was
Phil Rose:
Ha
Rich Mulholland:
war. And for the most part, most of us were expected to go into fight and fight was the way that we gained status, honor and glory. If you were the king of a country 500 years ago, the expectation you didn't like apologize for going to war. You apologized if you didn't go to war. Your expectation was to take our young men and to send them off. You know, if you saw the Tolkien movie, I don't know if you ever saw the Tolkien movie came out like, I don't know, four or five years ago, whatever. And it was the scene at the beginning where they announced that Britain is going
Rich Mulholland:
into war, that they are entering and World War One and all the young boys at college were like cheering and fist pumping the air because they were going to go fight because that was status, that was glory. Then we entered this peak capitalist era where the distribution of wealth, where we weren't just factory workers, this American dream idea. For these last few generations, status has been about wealth up to a certain point. So here's my problem.
Phil Rose:
you
Rich Mulholland:
Let's say we solve through AI for universal basic income. Well, now it's going to land us in a new place in the world where what is the future of status? And the second thing is what is the future of utility? Because the two things that are very, important to humans is, am I useful? And do I have status?
Rich Mulholland:
And these two things are very, very linked. So so just giving somebody enough money to survive might sound interesting, but we need to start being prognostic. There's a word again about what the future of status would look like and where do I get my utility? Because the more I see it in old people, I think the world I think the world owes an apology to every retiree on the planet because you are trained for every single life stage except for retirement.
Rich Mulholland:
Nobody teaches you how to fall off the cliff of utility, of usefulness to society, to go from being a maker to a taker. Nobody teaches you how to do that. And you see people fall apart when they lose their utility. So imagine this happens if you're a 30 year old with universal basic income.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, you lost it. Yeah. So I've just written down a few words, actually. One of those words is identity, because I think it comes back to, you we talk about, you talked about the word agency earlier and status and utility. It's about that change of identity for people. So there's a big issue people are wrestling with. And it made me think last night I went to theatre up in London. I went to a traditional theatre to see a play called I'm Sorry Prime Minister. And basically it's a follow on from, in the UK there was a programme back in the 1970s called Yes, Minister. And then this became Yes, Prime Minister. And this is now, I'm sorry, Prime Minister, because the Prime Minister now is in a, he's 85 years old. He's the master of a college at Oxford, and the college wants to kick him out because he's made some gaffes in his conversation. He's talked about how the road statues shouldn't be pulled down. He talks about how the world hasn't moved on and Britain was this great country. And he talks about how colonialism helped India.
Rich Mulholland:
Yes, Prime Minister.
Phil Rose:
And it's the fascinating piece there and he's got his carer in, he keeps calling her a carer, which he says, I'm a care worker. And she keeps challenging him around, you're not relevant anymore. And he said, yes, but I changed the world and I did these things like that. And she keeps coming back to him and saying, but no, you're 85 years old. He's now incontinent, he needs his carer. And the point that this play brings home to me is he's lost his identity because the world's moved on for him. what he needs to do...
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, who is he? Yeah.
Phil Rose:
Who is he? Exactly, who is he? And I think there's something there. When I link that now to things like the Make America Great Again statement, it's about what do we need to do to stay relevant and be more relevant? And in the past, it was going to war. Now we've got to come up with something else. And that's, think, the big issue that most people have to wrestle with because, you you said, retirement is one thing, but when a country is moving towards that retirement and their influence is declining and, you know, typical S curve of product life cycle, we're reaching the end of that. We need to reinvent ourselves again. And that's the bit that now I'm struggling with from our conversation is because countries remaining relevant, individuals remaining relevant, businesses mainly relevant, it's all the same thing. And I don't know the answer to it, but it just, it just goes to my mind now, it's just saying that how do we all remain relevant?
Rich Mulholland:
We basically we solve things in shorter term. It's going to be a much rougher world and that the world is going to be less predictable for all of us. And the idea is to go every single day and to try and solve a meaningful problem for other humans. And as long as you're the person who can solve problems that matter. So if you're a country, you're solving problems for your citizens. If you're a company, you're solving problems for your customers and your employees. And if you're an employee, you're solving a problem for your business. And as long as you can be out there making sure that you're always the best.
Rich Mulholland:
solution or, you know, in in Here We Dragons, I talk about our job is to be the, know, to to sell a unique problem that only we can solve. As long as I can convince you you've got a problem that only I can solve or only my way of thinking can solve, we'll win. And that's we have to do.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. So there's something about capability in that case, isn't it? If I go back to my strategy work from 2005 onwards, we often talk about, what's the capability we need in the business? And there's two things that come to drive that. One is what's my positioning in the marketplace? So as a business, I need to position myself so I'm still relevant. I need to position my product, but also as individuals need to position myself so that my positioning, my brand positioning, the bit that becomes full marketing is out there. And to do that, I might need to change my capability or upgrade my skills. So going back to your point about, you know, the 30 year old when they're now thinking that they're becoming irrelevant, they need to change their skillset and their mindset positioning so they've got something the world needs.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, and the way that we have to do this first, if we're going to go with first principles, is we really, really, really have to change what it means, how we educate people. Because before we were educated for just in case education, here, I'm going to fill your brain with five years of content, and it's going to solve two problems. One, it's going to help you think. We're going to teach you how to think. Great. And then what we're going to do is that degree is going to last you for the rest of your career. And this made sense, right? When my dad graduated in the 60s and got into audio engineering, his degree that he got in audio engineering was still relevant until the day he retired. But he said he visited a sound van about five years later and he didn't know where to start. Like the whole thing was completely different. The world that we're going to is we need to move from just in case education to just
Rich Mulholland:
just in time education to education that arrives at the point that we need it. And so if it was me at the level that you get your GCSEs at this point, I think we've got to start our university grade level. And I guess that's what is what an A levels is, is technically your first two years of university. Theoretically already, I think that we've got to get kids into the world at 20.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, okay.
Rich Mulholland:
As you know, that's good. Unless you want to be a doctor or something very specific. For the most part, we've got to get you into the working place, into the world of work as quickly as possible. And thereafter, we've got to have a model that basically says that your degree, because your degree only serves one purpose, right? It gets you your first job. Your first job gets you your second job. Your second job gets you a third job. By the time you're on your third job, nobody gives a shit where you studied. They only give a shit about what you did last. And so the idea that we're putting people into debt for something for a decade and a half
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
for something that will get them literally one job for lazy HR, it's nonsensical. What we need to move, though, and this is good news for the universities, is universities need to shift a model that give me my degree quickly and then make me re-earn it every year for the rest of my life. I should have to go back. We've already figured out maternity leave. If we're getting more efficient, cool. Give every single human being a month, a year off to learn.
Phil Rose:
Love you.
Rich Mulholland:
a month a year off to go back to university to figure out how to be relevant going forward. This has to happen. And in fact, that must include that must stay even after retirement, because now we have people that are retiring and we're losing wisdom. We're losing wisdom and we're trading it for intelligence. But we need both. Yeah.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, I love that. You're making me think about a few different things. So let me get back to that play I saw last night. I'm sorry, Prime Minister. the story there, you should. It was a great show and interesting. So Griffreese Jones is the main character. He's the Prime Minister. And he's got a black lesbian female care worker. And there's a key to that because he doesn't get on. That's a really different story. And she plays a great role in it.
Rich Mulholland:
trying to watch that, because I love Yes, Mr. and Yes, Prime Minister.
Phil Rose:
but she has got an English degree from Oxford as a first and she said it was irrelevant to me, that's why I'm doing what I do now because the world moved on. So there's a whole conversation around the relevance of an English degree from a top English education establishment, which is great storyline and it's...
Rich Mulholland:
You know, is, but I would argue that a degree from Oxford means that you're very, very smart and you're capable of thinking. If you get a first from Oxford, it means that you can demonstrate to the world that you're the type of person who can listen to things, process and do it. I just don't think that we should be taking four years of a young person's life and put them into crippling debt to let them realize that. think we should. The fact that we're not changing our education system dramatically is crazy to me.
Phil Rose:
No, I agree. Interestingly, actually, my other daughter is doing a degree at the Vogue College of Fashion. It's a two year degree. It's all aimed at building fashion businesses and she's loving it. And the point is she's only got it for two years. She wants to get into the world of work first, but she realizes she needs a step up. So the name Vogue is working for her and the fact it's two years. And that's what she's trying to do to get into business in a different way. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
And that's brilliant. That's how it should be. And then throughout her career, she has to realize that she has to level up constantly. It's crazy. son, my daughter is wanting to study. She's going to finish her A levels. She wants to go and study biomedical sciences. And my son is a policeman. And I'm less worried about my son than I am about my daughter.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
Like I feel like it's tricky, just from a future of work, longevity of career choice. I imagine that, know, the trades and police and things, this feels like there'll always be crimes we're solving and always be people that are needed to do that. But you know, going to study for four years.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Phil Rose:
Amen.
Rich Mulholland:
biomedical science, where is the world? Is the syllabus that she learns on month one still going to be relevant by the time she finishes? I don't know the answer to that question.
Phil Rose:
And I think the point of that, know, we're getting on a lot of stories here is actually AI will take over that because actually AI is generating the new AI's. AI will generate the new biomedical. Therefore you don't need the human in that. You just need the AI person who understands it to create the next biomedical device intervention, whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah. So.
Rich Mulholland:
So we need some humans, but potentially less. I do think, though, I said to her, if she can get involved in the neuroscience side of things, if they, and my bet is that brain computer interfaces are going to be the biggest, instead of having phones in the future, like BCIs is what we're going to have, I think it's inconceivable that my children will not have brain computer interfaces, inconceivable. And if that is the case, then
Phil Rose:
Think of it as well.
Rich Mulholland:
understanding that technology and that those things feels like, you know, you could still be an early adopter in that space.
Phil Rose:
I love that. So the whole load of things that going through my head here in terms of wrapping this round a bit. So we're talking about relentless relevance and what we found out just in this conversation is you know people in the past had these long-term visions but actually it's come back to the short term, short term hairy audacious goal whatever that might be. It's about updating your capability and it's actually about being comfortable, recognise that things might move quickly. But there's also a thought going through my head is there are some businesses that we'll still be needing. You mentioned electricians earlier. I talked about my father being a boat builder or engineer. We're still going to need those skills. We might have to change our way of how we do it so we can do it better as well. But there's a thought that that knowledge process, when you talked about the industrial revolution, this is about knowledge revolution. So BCI is the bit we've talked about a few times there, giving people the ability to think differently about how knowledge will be gained and used. is the key transformation in terms of remaining relevant is what I'm hearing. And it's about storytelling.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, I was thinking one other little aside for the world we live in today is ideas or. are worthwhile again. Good ideas are back in fashion. You know, for years in our career, we've been told, are nothing, execution is everything. Everybody has ideas, but nobody does them. The gap between ideas and execution now is tiny. know, especially, I guess, in the digital space, but even in the maker space is that, you you can get prototypes made and things done and you can launch Kickstarter campaigns for businesses.
Rich Mulholland:
I think that that's really, I think everybody in the world needs to be a maker of some sort. I think we all have to figure out, I think these straight service businesses, like if you're not creating something, if you're not making assets, it's why I still write books. It's not much, but it's something and write new keynotes and things. It's like I'm creating something and I'm trying to create new services and apps and tools and things. But I do think that we have to get there.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, It's interesting idea because we talked about missing link and how you're having to upgrade your thinking on that to make sure you're still relevant and how over the last 29 years that business has had to continue to evolve and you're currently sitting in a 29 year old legacy business. So that's the key, isn't it? You're creating assets, whether it's a book, whether it's a new bit of thinking tool, but that's the power. The thinking tool is the creation process, but actually the... The asset you're creating is that thing, that tangible thing that people walk away with and pin it on you to say, hey, Richmore Holland, this is what you created. And that's actually the bit that sells your story. And it's that story again that comes back to me again. It's, when we talked last time about hippie dragons, actually, that's about storytelling, but it's about storytelling. And we're doing the same again. We're storytelling so people can maintain that relevance for the future through a different way of thinking about what we would have talked about. two, three years ago.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, you have to take a bet on what the world needs and then you got to convince that, you know, that that's your shape and you got to convince the world that they need you, that they need it.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Mulholland:
That's the job. There's a supply and demand problem. We've got to create the demand. If we are the supplier, we've got to make sure the demand exists. And the one way is to go and fulfill an existing easy demand. And if you can, brilliant. The other is to find a way that separates you from everybody else and allows you to to to fulfill that demand a little bit easier. And if you want to do that, you've got to sell some new stories. And I think the first person that we have to sell a story to
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I love that.
Rich Mulholland:
as ourselves. That's the biggest problem.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, and I think it's interesting, I like we use that word positioning earlier. I think that positioning piece is also key because actually we've got to sell the story of who we now are because what we were before actually isn't relevant in society but we mustn't forget the past. know, I always think about Marshall Goldsmith uses the phrase, what got you here won't get you there. Well, actually there's a whole load of skills which will help you in the future. You just need to understand how they now become relevant for today because they're still a great skill set.
Rich Mulholland:
Yes, some, you know, again, there's nothing new in my industry in human to human communication. You know, we're not we're all we're doing is we're taking what Aristotle said and trying to apply it to today. This the skill of being able to be eloquent and persuasive. That's always been in fashion. And luckily for me is I think it always will be in fashion. Even if we go post economic.
Rich Mulholland:
the ability to communicate in front of other people will be the status. So we might get back to those types of things. And so I feel very excited about it in that regard. I'm just not convinced. that it's easy to do. But I do think if you can invest in one skill going forward, being eloquent, being able to communicate well, you'll always have an unfair advantage over people in your field. If there are three programmers and one of you can communicate well and stand up in a meeting and present yourself well, and the other two can just write slightly better code, they're the ones who are on the chopping block. You're the one who wins.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I love it. I've just read Angus Fletcher's book, Primal Intelligence, and it's worth reading it because it goes back to that storytelling ability. It goes back to the fact that we've we've moved into the in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s. It was all about logical intelligence. But what he premises that we need to go back to that 2000, 60,000 year old storytelling ability to sit around the campfire and think about that and use our intuition, our storytelling. And when you talked about, know, the aristocle way of doing things, know, the logos and the pathos has to come out there to really get that story. But it's the ethos around that and why we do it as well, I think is key. So that's just a wrap up, I think, in terms of actually, we still have to have that storytelling because you can be a great coder, but to make you stand out, you've to position yourself slightly differently. And that's the story.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, you have to be T-shaped.
Phil Rose:
T-shape.
Rich Mulholland:
T-shaped, you've got to like it's in the past we were told to be specialists, right? You now have to be you have to be at the intersection of two things. A great coder that can communicate or a great coder that can play the piano. doesn't matter. But I think we have to be multidimensional. And what makes you interesting, your intersection point, even as businesses, it's figuring out your intersection that I am like this, but that.
Phil Rose:
I see. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Rich Mulholland:
And if we can figure out what the but that is, we've got a much better chance of differentiating ourselves from everybody else.
Phil Rose:
I love that. And to me that fits in with your thing about the four day work week for your team to give them that extra day to go run their own business because that gives you breadth. And actually what it does for missing link, I'm sitting there, it's a better story. It's a different way of positioning yourself. Cause you're going to attract good people because of that. Cause they're going to feel free to do their own thing and you're going to wish them well to go and do their one day thing because it might come back and help you as well. So that T-shaped piece in the business is working out. You've got depth of ability and breadth because of the way you're operating with your teams and not constraining them to do the five-day traditional work week.
Rich Mulholland:
Yeah, and you know what? It frees me up as well, right? Because I'm working on a new program. We have a storage stage program that we run for professional speakers, but a lot of non-professional speakers want to speak professionally. So in that extra time, it's not just my team that get time to work. I'm working on this thing called voice of authority, whereas helping people become voices of authority, even if they don't want to be full-time speakers, how do they become that voice of authority? And I would never have had the time to do that if I was stuck in the daily grind as well. So remember that gift you're giving to your team, you're giving to yourself as well.
Phil Rose:
Yeah. Perfect, perfect. Rich, I love this. Great conversation. We've meandered around the world of relentless relevance. And I think to me, it's actually about you just got to keep doing it, keep repositioning, keep making sure you're relevant. And come back to that question you asked right at the beginning there, know, if I went back in time and looked at what I'm doing now, would the problems did exist? Would I solve it this way? And what would I do to re-engineer it if that problem still did exist? There's a whole picture that are coming out. So thank you. Let me ask you one final question in that case. And thinking about Missing Link and thinking about Richmile Holland, what's the story you're telling yourself now that is going to be your short-term hairy audacious girl, your shag yourself? guess it's strange. Do want to talk about that one? Let's rephrase that.
Rich Mulholland:
Well, the story I'm definitely telling myself is that the best is yet to come. The world is trying to tell me that I'm, that, know, I... I should pay attention to Gen Z and that's their time now. I don't believe that at all. I believe I'm the smartest version of myself that I've ever been. I am fit with energy and I still believe that the best work of my career has yet to come. And I'm focused on trying to figure out what that looks like without being held back by my old way of thinking, service business owner, things like this. But...
Rich Mulholland:
If I work under the belief that the best is yet to come, I've got to figure out what that best looks like. My short term, hereditary goal, my shag, is to really figure out what is that? What is that thing that I'm going to be remembered for? And I just want to believe that it's still in front of me, not that it's something behind me.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I love that. And I think there's a bit there. If I think about the strategy work I do, I think strategy is relevant, but we've just got to have a change of focus on how we do it. Because there's a whole load of things that you need to be taking into account there about your capabilities and your positioning to enable you to do that. But it's the thinking piece, that creative piece up front, which has changed. But the story of how to get there is now the bit that's still in place. We've still got to have those abilities to plan and execute, as you say, and create the assets that you need. And you're the asset in that case.
Rich Mulholland:
soon.
Phil Rose:
Richmore Holland, thank you. Just for sake of it, how do people go and find Richmore Holland and think about missing Link?
Rich Mulholland:
I need missing link.com we'll get you to missing link. tmr.wtf will get you to too many robots and getrich.af will get you to my personal website. If you want to engage though, definitely suggest, I mean, jump onto my newsletter at getrich.af. But I'd love to chat you on LinkedIn. It's definitely the place where I play the most and where I have the most fun. I know a lot of people don't love it, but I find it to be one of the most engaging networks. I'm on there finding information all the time and sharing information too. So definitely reach out and let me know that Phil sent you here.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, I them.
Phil Rose:
Yeah, perfect. Let me know. Yeah, exactly. Rich, I really enjoyed it in that case. We've talked about the last book. Is there another book coming out in the future? Yet?
Rich Mulholland:
There is a few, I'm trying to decide which one. There's one book I want to write that's more of a social commentary. It's called Inclusion. And it speaks to the idea that in pursuit of inclusion, we've become one of the most exclusive societies ever. And it's working against ourselves and we're creating a bigger divide. I want to write that one, but I'm not sure I have the desire to deal with the fallout of it. that would be that. And there's several other little fiction works that I'm playing.
Rich Mulholland:
with at the moment. Let's do it for sure. Yeah.
Phil Rose:
Oh, I like, we should put a date in for 2027 to have the follow up in that case and see which one those comes together. So, Rich Moholland, thank you. Really loved the conversation. We've had a meander through the world of relevance and I hope that people listening to this will just pick up a few things about what they need to do to question their relevance and do something different about it. And your final point there about, you know, the best is yet to come and you're the best version. I think that's an amazing way for people to think as well because actually, why wouldn't we think like that? If we want to move ourselves forward, what a great piece of thinking.
Rich Mulholland:
Thank you so much, Phil. Loved it.
Phil Rose:
Rich, thank you, really enjoyed it. Take care and have a great week.
Phil Rose:
Wow, what a meander through the world of relentless relevance. What I loved about this conversation with Rich is we had such a rich conversation talking about what is it you do now and how relevant that is to the world. And Rich used that phrase, if he looked back on his business from 29 years ago, would he be doing the same thing? And I think that's a really key message for most, if not all entrepreneurs, thinking about what their relevance is. But as an entrepreneur, you're there to be disruptive. And the first person you need to be disruptive to is yourself. How would you challenge your own business? How do you challenge your thinking? How do you challenge your team? How can you be a bit like Henry Ford and give people that day extra day off because you know it's going to sell more cars in the future, even though you're going to face the wrath of the other industrialists in the world at the time? Think about what Rich said as well. There's some key bits around the type of business you're in today and how you maintain your capability. So have a think about that. I love the conversation. Let me know what you think. I'd love to know your thinking about how you're remaining relevant and what you need to do about it. You know where to go and contact Rich. You know where to contact me. It's Phil at igneumconsult.com. me a note, connect with me on LinkedIn. Check out our Sparks Growth Instagram page. And if you have guests that you think can be as good and exciting as Rich, let me know who they are because we'd love to dig into what they're doing that's helping them change the world so you too can remain relevant. I always say this, I can't hold you to account for what you're doing, but what I can do is ask you the right questions. And those questions here are, what do need to stop doing? What do need to start doing? What do I need to continue doing to help me maintain my business and grow forward? And what's my short-term hairy audacious goal? Enjoy the show. Let me know what you think. Take care. Have a relentlessly relevant day.
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SEO & DISCOVERABILITY
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For use in episode pages, blog posts, show notes, and publishing platforms.
Keywords
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Rich Mulholland
Richard Mulholland
Relentless Relevance
Here Be Dragons
Missing Link
Too Many Robots
Sparks by Ignium podcast
Phil Rose podcast
business relevance
entrepreneurship and AI
T-shaped thinking
short-term hairy audacious goals
future of work
AI efficiency workforce
command and control leadership
AI-Optimised Semantic Keywords
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- staying relevant in a rapidly changing business landscape
- why traditional strategy is no longer fit for purpose
- replacing BHAGs with short-term hairy audacious goals
- do what you hate — find problems that frustrate you and fix them
- red team vs blue team thinking for business disruption
- AI efficiency and giving time back to employees
- T-shaped professionals and multidimensional skill sets
- human communication as the last unfair advantage over AI
- status, utility and identity in a post-economic world
- just-in-time education vs just-in-case education
- legacy business reinvention and first principles thinking
- brain computer interfaces and the future of human relevance
Long-Tail Keywords (Great for Blog Posts, Episode Pages, and Social)
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- how do entrepreneurs stay relevant in a world of constant change
- why doing what you love is bad business advice
- what should replace long-term business strategy in 2026
- how to use AI efficiency to benefit your team not just your bottom line
- what is T-shaped thinking and why does it matter for modern business
- why no employee or entrepreneur should have a single source of income
- how Henry Ford's five-day work week can inspire AI adoption today
- what makes human communication an unfair advantage over AI
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END OF TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENT
Sparks by Ignium Podcast | sparksbyignium.transistor.fm
Host: Phil Rose | igniumconsult.com
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