Taste, tune & triumph: What our hobbies can teach us about our career success

“You’ve got to be quite deliberate. You have to overrule some of your automatic thinking to say, I need to deliberately step back here. I need to refresh this area.”
Karl Deitz

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Parallels between cooking, music & business: How lessons in one domain of your life or interests can often be applied to another, fostering cross-disciplinary insights in areas of strategy, adaptation and continuous improvement
• The importance of mastering the basics: Why investing in fundamental skills, whether in cooking, music, business or otherwise, is often the most important step in setting you up for accelerated growth and creativity
• Balancing consistency and experimentation: How to find a balance between committing to consistency and practise for continual improvement, and knowing when and where to push into experimentation to explore new possibilities
• Embracing discomfort and growth: Shifting your mindset to one of growth and a willingness to step into discomfort intentionally and mindfully and reaping the personal development rewards that brings
• The role of humour and engagement in education: Strategies to enhance learning and facilitation experiences by incorporating humour and cultivating lively and interactive environments

Key links
Nick Berman Company Road Podcast episode

Miles Davis

CrossFit

Karl’s cooking school 

Tall Bob

About our guest
Karl Deitz is an entrepreneur, advisory Board member and classically trained musician on both piano and trumpet – where the left and right brain work well together.

Having started his career as a professional musician with the Royal Australian Navy, Karl has gone on to raise millions for Charities, founded a cooking school for Crossfit athletes and now heads up Customer Success & Strategy for Australia’s fastest growing mobile communications company, Tall Bob.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript
Chris Hudson: All right. Hello and welcome to this next very special episode of the Company Road podcast. Before we jump in, I wanted to reflect on the journey that we’ve been on with this podcast so far, and just give you a bit of an insight. I originally set it up as a bit of a social experiment, really knowing that by taking a bit of a gargantuan challenge of unpacking what it takes to change a business or an organisation that some fairly obvious themes would probably come up around leadership and team empowerment and tech and data and innovation and gender and diversity and all sorts of things. And we’ve had that so far, which has been fantastic.

And in short, I knew we’d be getting under the skin of some of the pretty sizeable themes, but I really hope the episodes so far I’ve been useful and that they’re helping you in your work in one way or another. But that said, I wanted to kind of take the opportunity sometimes through this series to really drift a little bit and be a bit comfortable with some of the wider themes that we could bring into the world of business and really learn from in some way as well.

And I knew I’d need to stretch some of the classic business themes into new areas at some point and go off that conventional path and veer into some places that are a bit more rugged and a bit more free form. And I’m pretty sure today’s chat will be nothing short of that as we look to bring together the worlds of classical music, jazz, haute cuisine and business which may sound like a tricky combo to navigate, but we’ll see how we go.

And the question is, what can we draw from each of these areas that would help intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs simply do more cool stuff, really. So, my guest today is a classically trained musician on both piano and trumpet. And Karl, you’ve taught and performed as a professional musician for several years before founding a successful cooking school for CrossFitter and you were creating lean, clean cooking machines to use your phrase. And in the last 20 years, you’ve built an impressive career, but switched in from that world into consulting and financial services. You’re working for not for profits and your latest venture is in a SaaS area in the world of mobile comms SMS to some and in the US I believe they call that text.

So Karl Dietz, we met a few years back when your lovely wife said to me, hey you play music. You should meet Karl. He’s a bit of a muso too. And he plays piano and the flugelhorn and you’ve been known to create new sounds on his trumpet with a thong or a flip flop for our listeners further afield.

So Karl, a massive welcome to the show. How are you feeling this morning?

[00:02:13] Karl Deitz: Yeah, great, Chris. Glad that I got the opportunity to have a chat with you and yeah, I’m sure we’ll unpack what it means to put a flip flop or a phone over a musical instrument, but I guess that’s all part of creativity and we’ll get there.

Chris Hudson:

Yeah, awesome. We’ve shared many a random chat in the past, so I’m pretty sure we’re going to get into some interesting topics today. But before we go deep, what are some of the things that characterise you, do you believe? How would you describe yourself to somebody who doesn’t know you?

Karl Deitz: There’s definitely an element of creativity there. And whether that is across music side of things, whether that’s across the food and cooking side of things, but I think it also comes in across with close friends. I also had this I guess I shouldn’t say my nickname from my friends, but it’s Left Field Dietz. So I’ve always been able to think very left field and I think earlier university and earlier career has probably seen as a bit of a strange thoughts and strange angle of thinking but it was very much left field thinking, , just now it’s probably called, right?

Is the right side of the brain is creativity. So maybe I was right side, right side.

[00:03:14] Chris Hudson: Right side, left field. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Was that name given to you by your teachers when you were younger or how did that come about?

Karl Deitz: Not really. Earlier years it wasn’t as abundant or as creative.I may have approached things a little differently, but it wasn’t really something I identified. I wasn’t, I was shocking at drawing. I think I took out music and put the time into music because that was my way of expressing everything but creativity and drawing that was pretty terrible.

Chris Hudson: That’s interesting because I think, we often think about things that we have to try out and it feels like there’s some pressure sometimes to try things that we’re less comfortable with and there’s a string of thought these days, which is that, you should try everything. You should put yourself out of your comfort zone at least once a month. And one of the previous episodes with Nick Berman was all about that.

You’ve got to be uncomfortable to be progressing. What’s your take on some of that?

Karl Deitz: Absolutely agree. I think if I could have kept probably for most of us have kept the curiosity and creativity of kids. So we’ve got a 6 year old and a 10 month old and the creativity at the moment from our son at 6 years old is just extraordinary.

So I actually am very deliberate in watching what he’s doing. How does he come up with these things? And then I guess if you could keep that in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties. Not just in the business world, but everything you’re doing lay that level of curiosity and creativity across things.

I think a lot of new ideas would come up, a lot of new innovation would happen. So I won’t go in too much into the education system, but I think, yeah, because it’s, it does push us towards a certain way of thinking so people that can hang on to that creativity. They’re the leaders, listen to them. Listen to the kids in the room.

Chris Hudson:  I mean, the shackles are off with the kids. Obviously they’ve got a simpler life which is sort of like blissful but they relish in that environment and they’re able to express themselves and find new places, try out new things and find the boundaries, places and, where boundaries exist with people as well.

They’re trying to push to your limits the whole time. So I think there’s an interesting concept around the fact that you start life with more opportunity in a way from a creative standpoint.

And then things gradually narrow as parameters and social constructs and conditioning and the world of work and all of these things, the education system. There’s so many things that would kind of harness creativity. Have you found that to be the case or have you found ways, knowing that you’re now left field Karl, how have you found ways to kind of break out of that through, you know, if you see a construct, kind of break from it and still find creative-

Karl Deitz: Yes, it’s definitely hard. Like I said, as you get older, economic constraints business stresses, life stresses, children, all of that, it does bring you into a funnel of less thinking. I’ve taken deliberate steps and I think this is definitely where the music, the cooking and the creativity and the improvisations side of music, particularly whether I was conscious that I was doing this, but definitely having that outlet of improvisation on music does clear up the head, does exercise the right side of the brain a bit more. And I think that has to possibly by osmosis, why ever he’s coming across into the way that I think every day and the way we’re thinking business, creative ways you need to keep the kids occupied during holidays or whatever it is, but definitely having the music element there and thinking that way definitely would shook everything with how you’re going day to day.

Chris Hudson: You’re highly tuned into this art of improvisation and it can be applied to business and maybe we’ll come on to that, but I feel like, there’s probably brought a question around improvisation as to how you get good at it, at a very simple level, because it’s very freeform. It’s very up to you. So how do you do that?

Karl Deitz: The basics of it, you say it’s improv, people think it’s improvisation, it’s freeform, you’re making it up on the spot, which in a way is kind of polar opposite to what it is. So the first thing you must do, and I’m talking about music here, it applies to a lot of things, but in music first of all, you’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to master your craft. You’ve got to get your fingers across the instrument. You’ve got to learn the instrument. You’ve got to put the time into learn the scales. You’ve got to get all this technique under your control. And then, you learn the structure of songs because if you’re playing normally, you’re playing in a band, you’re all following the same structure, you’re all completely in sync outside of an orchestra who has a conductor, but in a trio or a quartet or a quintet, there is no conductor and you all know the structure, you all know the underlying chord progressions that then allows you to almost forget about everything that you’ve learned, forget about your technique.

You’ve got enough under your control and that allows you to improvise. It does allow you to play more free form, but you are pulling on things you’ve heard over the years. You are pulling in techniques, you’re pulling in licks and phrases that you’ve learned from artists. And I think there was a, I think it was Miles Davis.

I won’t get this right, but it was, once you’ve learned all the technique, yeah, then forget about it. Then you’re in that flow state. Then you’re thinking and creating music on the spot. But you’re also in this little community of a trio or a quartet where you’re closing out.

Everyone knows where you are in the form and you’re joining in and the next person might start improvising or you might all start playing from the head. From the top of the song again, so that then allows you to go deeper and how far you go away from melody. Obviously there’s a lot of modern jazz artists, you can’t hear the melody in there.

It’s there, but it’s so well disguised from their background and what they’ve learnt, but then they can bring it back and it’s the song and it’s one of the great things about jazz musicians is how far they can take songs, how complex they can make it. At the opposite side how beautiful they can make a standard song a classic song sound by adding elements of improvisation over the top but to bring it back yeah absolutely got to learn the craft got to master your instrument that technique so well learned that then you can forget about it To allow your brain to think creatively and then your technique then sort of supports you on well, how are you going to improvise?

What style, who do you copy? Who do you imitate? Once you’ve done all of that, then you can start to innovate and improvise in your language. That’s really helpful, I think, as an explainer for people that aren’t aware of jazz and the world of music to that extent. Because everyone has this impression of jazz being got your instrument and you’re just kind of making it up on the spot and it’s all it’s a bit like putting your paintbrush into a thing and just like splatting And there’s really no understanding of the, that might be the tip of the iceberg in the way that it’s presenting, but obviously underneath that, there’s a lot that goes into it fine tuning the craft. I think there’s an interesting angle in that narrative that you just gave around the fact that people think it’s loose and unstructured but if you’re playing in that group, if it’s trio quartet ensemble it’s kind of governed by some rules. So somebody’s leading in, from the head, as you were saying and then others know when it’s their turn to jump in solo.

So, how does that handover work best? It works best when, I’m not gonna say it’s a feeling, but there’s a lot of visual cues, there’s occasional nodding, you just get, when you’re in the right group, 3, 4, 5, let’s just talk about a trio for this stage, but you just have this connection with everyone in the band.

You can hear certain things, particularly say a drummer guiding you all the time, they could be doing specific things. We’re about to go to the top, about to repeat something might lead into another solo. So there’s these little guide points. There’s almost invisible guideposts that anyone outside of the band, who’s just listening without musical background, will just hear this song flowing through beautifully, and there’s a structure. But within the band there’s constantly these small cues. And if you play with the band long enough, you can just pick them up so, so subtly that, audience members, you’re just not gonna pick up on it. Other bands might make it really obvious, like you might scream out like the drummer might be saying let’s do it again. Again, that’s about knowing your audience, getting feedback from the audience. Do you play the tune as you’ve rehearsed it? Or have you got the flexibility and the knowledge when it’s going really well to say, let’s take this further. Let’s build this tune out, which might go for five, six, seven minutes.

It could easily turn into a 10 or 12 minute song. Which is just morphed into this new creation within the song based on what the audience is sort of expressing to the band. Yeah, it’s really interesting and I’m already thinking about the world of business and how that kind of transposes in a way to use another musical term.

Chris Hudson: I think it feels like you’re tuned into those cues but obviously, you know what you can do and what you can bring in that situation. So, have you found that you’ve been able to compare the two worlds of that situation where you’re improvising, that you’re going to be getting your time to basically play or, you know, in a business world, time to speak, time to present.

You’re ready to do something creative. You’re ready to do something that’s going to sound amazing. You’re reading the room. Have you been able to kind of translate the world of music to the world of business and where has that happened with you?

Karl Deitz: Yeah, again, it was kind of subconscious.

It wasn’t until years into business that I realised there’s so many crossovers with what I’d learned in the world of music and probably one of the most important I’d learned. Again, this is a Miles Davis quote. it’s In music, silence sometimes is more important than sound. And as a bit of a talker I’ve had to overlay that on myself and in the environment where talk less.

The two ears and one mouth sort of saying people say and use it in that proportion, listen more, speak less. It’s the same in music. So the gaps, the space, sitting back having that silence then creates more tension or more excitement. something that’s coming next in the music.

So rather than talking constantly in presentations and just blasting out information and telling the same across in music is let’s say for the improvisation stage, don’t just lead in and as a trumpet player, don’t just come straight in and play high notes and play loud notes and then just do that for the whole minute or two.

There’s this whole sequence of building up the emotion again, bringing that tension and excitement up to a peak. Similar when people doing keynotes, speaking and all of that it’s that time of a gap, taking a space, sitting back. And yeah, I didn’t really make that crossover until years into the business and speaking to audiences and presentations and all of that, that there’s a huge amount of crossover.

And I think one of the other really good instant things that happens in music is playing in a band or you’re in a venue and whether you’re doing a solo or playing as a band, people have gone, unless it’s a paid event, well, they can still do it, but if they’re not enjoying the band, they just stand up and walk out.

So for myself in groups, it’s understanding if we’re putting a band together for an event or putting a band together for a venue, what’s the environment? Who’s going to be there? Demographic wise is it a restaurant? Is it a venue that holds 400 people? You’re going to be playing in the ballroom. So really understanding who’s going to be there.

What are they after? What are they expecting? Translating that across to business world, the old KYC, know your customer. Same sort of thing crosses over here is just cause we’ve got an amazing product. We’ve built it perfectly. And then we just push it straight out to an audience. We could push it directly onto the wrong audience.

So if I went into a, say an aged care facility and playing extremely modern jazz, it’s a six piece band and it’s loud, it’s complicated. There’s a lot happening there. That environment may have just wondered, oh can you play some beautiful old classic jazz tunes that they can sing along to? Same with going into business, you can make all the connections there.

But the more I’ve thought about it over the years, there’s all these crossovers and probably the best one I’ve got from early gigs was get some feedback from who booked you for the event, get some feedback from people that are there, interact with the audience, go in the audience and perform with the audience.

That’s kind of where the thong or the flip flop came on the end of my trumpet as a, it was a basically a version of a mute. It would change the tone of the trumpet and that allowed me to go into the audience and be with them and play within a meter or two, looking back at the band, but being amongst the audience.

I tried that out a few times. That was creative. I think it probably came from a mistake where I didn’t have my mute. I think I’ve used schooner glasses. So people that are overseas, it’s a schooner, a pint glass, whatever. I used that as a mute once because I’d lost my mute. That worked really well.

And then I think that led to me saying, well other elements that are near me I can use to change the effect of my trumpet other than just that sound of the trumpet and then that kept progressing and then I got a coffee cup, we had a flip flop, a pint glass or a schooner glass and all these creative elements started from my mistake of leaving it mute at home.

So it was in that instance, it’s nice to go with the flow thinking, well, what am I working with here? The best I’ve got here is that. What’s the worst that can happen? I can work around it and play well enough with this thing that I’m pretty sure this won’t be a failure. This could go somewhere.

And that led me to start playing within audiences and it was quite a buzz for them to have a musician with them going oh wow this is this it just added an additional element to that particular gig. So I don’t know if that answered the question but I think between you know knowing your audience, getting them most listening to them, getting some feedback, huge sort of crossovers there with presenting and being in business.

Chris Hudson: Yeah, absolutely right. And how powerful is improvisation? I mean, I’ve been in workshops that have been run in a business context with comedians that work with improvisation as well. And it’s following similar sort of rules to what you’re describing where there are, clear handover points and silence is respected.

And obviously I guess the measure of what you’re bringing to fill that silence is what’s important so you can use it to create impact and you know that if you’re going to step in, it can be very noticeable. So I think knowing what to do in those situations is a very powerful tool and also just for the fact correct me if I’m wrong, but there wouldn’t be too many situations in either a musical or business context where you’d feel uncomfortable or unprepared because, you know, you can always bring something to that situation.

Is that a fair assumption?

Karl Deitz: Yeah, I think the key words you said there is be prepared. So, music, gigs. The more work I put into performance, learning the charts, working with the band, knowing the song really, really, really well. Same as in business, the amount of confidence when you prepare for presentations or going into big meetings or catching up with clients, the more you know your material, the more you’re across their business, our business, the confidence there to improvise.

You’re certainly not making up things on the spot. It also gives you the power to say, I don’t know, I’ll get back to you. But the deeper and better you know your material, For me in music and business, but in music that gave me a huge amount of confidence and being a trumpet player. I needed that confidence because it calmed my nerves because if you’re nervous, particularly wind instruments and brass instruments and trumpet, it has an instant impact on the quality of your sound and your performance, your mouth dries up, your breathing changes, you’re shaking, you’ve got all this vibrato that you didn’t necessarily want.

But that preparation gives you the confidence and the calmness to go in and say, look, wherever this guy is, I’m comfortable if, and again, we used to muck around in a trio, had the drummer used to change things on us and throw out different rhythms and throw it. Cause he was a tabla player, an amazing tabla player.

The basics of it, you say it’s improv, people think it’s improvisation, it’s freeform, you’re making it up on the spot, which in a way is kind of polar opposite to what it is. So the first thing you must do, and I’m talking about music here, it applies to a lot of things, but in music first of all,

None of this was talked about. It’s just all happening on the fly in front of a live audience. Again, that was part of the excitement. What certainly wasn’t throwing you under the bus because everyone knew I could kind of attempt to throw under the bus, but you all know your instruments well enough.

Let’s see where this goes. It was a fun tactic rather than I’m going to catch you out here. I mean, there’s a really important distinction there, I think, which is around probably a controlled environment, which is more like you’re either writing music or you’re recording in the studio compared to a live performance, which, you know, particularly in, in the way you were just describing.

I mean, a lot of people would just have their set down and they just play it as they rehearsed it and that’s it. But if you’ve got a drummer that’s going rogue And he bought a lot of those techniques across into his drumming. So he’d throw these rhythms in rather than throw us out and add an additional element. And when we’d improvise, we’d try and match those rhythms. And then that changed the melodies that we were playing because we introduced this new colour.

We’ve been used to all of these traditional and standing drumming patterns. When he brought this in, it’s kind of like

and this could happen in work too, where the conversation goes like that and you’re two hours talking about something else that you hadn’t foreseen.

So all the time but you’ve got to be ready for that. And, in some cases it works, some cases it doesn’t work. I wonder what you think and how you respond to the situation where what you hear from somebody else in a group that either within your musical setting or in business is totally out of your control.

But you’ve just got to see where it’s going and then bring it back on track. How does that work? Yeah, and I think we’ve all been in that scenario where you’ve, let’s say you’re going in for meeting with a client or a potential new business. And someone may say, look, before we kick things off.

Chris Hudson:  I just want to ask you this question. So again, and that’s from the other side, sometimes that can throw you. I think that does come down to preparation. So whether it’s just yourself there or you’ve got your team with you. Before you go in you are assessing the fringes of this saying, look have we covered everything?

Karl Deitz: What’s the agenda? Have we agreed on this? Is there something potentially that could be, who else is coming? Again, knowing your audience and knowing who’s there. Is the CTA going to come straight out and say, bang, we haven’t covered this? We need to talk about this first. I think having that prior preparation, like I said, have the team with you in case you need to say, look that’s a great question so hopefully someone you’ve got with you can sort of dive into that then before you actually get to the agreed performance of what you were going to talk about. And it’s the same flipping that to the music. I compare that to equipment failure, equipment malfunction, I’ve had so many times where something’s gone wrong.

So audience doesn’t care. They don’t want to know about it. You’ve got to adapt on the fly. So the equivalent there, trumpet player, it could be microphones not working, so you’ve got to play live without a microphone, but blow harder. Could be a valve is stuck. Something’s gone wrong in the last minute.

One of the main leads is missing. So that level of improvising is a whole lot scarier than musical improvising because people are there to, it’s a set time. They’ve come to hear you, things aren’t working. So I guess tying that in with business things that could happen straight up. Yeah. I think that level of thinking is staying calm.

What are our options? What can we do? And can you take it offline? Can you do something else? In that instance, it can the sax player and the piano player just do the first two songs, something a little bit different. They’re not expecting it. So you’re blending that something new.

Chris Hudson:  In the business world it could be certainly not going off topic, but it could be a process of delving deeper in more questions, diving deeper into that and using that to get back into the reason why you’re there to cover bigger issues, but certainly not turning your back on it, but using elements of curiosity to find out what’s behind that question. You know, we all feel like somebody else might be in a meeting, they’re not sure why they’re there. In a musical sense, it feels like it’d be much more deliberate, who was coming to that be playing part of it, and they would know the rules of engagement maybe you can draw from other areas. The comparison that sprung to mind is a very simple board game. Board games are very easy example of showing how the rules of engagement are set.

You open up the box, you can see the parts, you can read rules and then you know how to play the game. Whereas in a social context or in a business context, those things aren’t always known. And so how that environment is created is incredibly important. Is it the start of the meeting?

Is there an agenda? Is there somebody who introduces it? It’s around expectation setting. What are some of the tricks that you use in that sense? I think also in some meetings, there’s people that love sitting on the outside of that to throw it off a little bit. Again it’s personality wise or what they’re trying to uncover is sometimes a huge amount of joy to throw something in the mix there.

Karl Deitz: So I think like you were talking about the clarity, the structure, the focus, all of that, I think you’ve always just got to be prepared that whether it’s subject matter expert or having people with you that can cover areas in the business side, music and knowing that you’ve got a team with the depth of knowledge around these songs on music that then allows you to cover things.

You may not be able to anticipate things, but just think particularly in the business world, you can’t anticipate someone’s morning, what they’ve got afterwards, their week, there’s so much going on, even though the agenda has been agreed on and all of that sort of stuff, there’s so many other factors, and you’ve been in a lot of meetings where things don’t always go how you’d planned, or you may have known exactly what the agreed desired outcome is, but all these personal factors, business factors, mental factor, everything that you mostly don’t know about that’s coming to the meeting with both of you or both teams coming together.

So I think it’s having an awareness of that. Particularly the business world early on in meetings, not jumping to conclusions, not maybe going straight down their path. It may trigger some things with yourself or the team. But yeah, having that awareness that there’s other factors at play here. So I think that’s a good point to stick with people as you- yeah, letting people help you out, let them carry you a little bit and also be aware of who’s going into the meeting and think about the conditions if you can a little bit beforehand. Often your head is, 10 minutes into the meeting, you’re still think about the last thing that happened or the next thing that you have to prepare for or the next presentation. There’s a lot in being disciplined in your head, your mindset and knowing that if you’re in that meeting, be present. Yeah, exactly. Even though you’ve got business objectives, everyone’s got their own priorities, what’s in thinking of, again, I’m talking not particularly a one on one, yes, but when you’ve got multiple people in the meeting, what does each person need to get out of this?

What do they want to understand? And they’re all going to be, you’re not going to have four CFOs in a room, you’re going to have a mix of all the different levels in there. So, spend the extra time prior to the meeting saying, okay, what do they really want to know here, understand, what do we need to uncover in the meeting?

Chris Hudson:  I think that helps a lot. Absolutely right. Hey, there’s a point I just want to build on that you were making before around playing the trumpet and around the way in which you would project that sound. If you weren’t feeling comfortable, then you would almost hear it, the pitch, the trumpeters also have a bit of a reputation for swagger and for being pretty confident, outgoing people. Some would say arrogant at times, I’m just wondering, whether in a business sense is that something to be aware of in yourself? How do you use it to best effects?

And when do you know where to draw back from that kind of lead role, in a way?

Karl Deitz: I like that. I think because the trumpet, you’ve got the power to be louder than anyone in the band, unless the guitarists and the trumpet have a trade off with you can go louder. But let’s say trumpet, you can be playing pianissimo, you can be playing very softly, but you’ve also got the ability to almost overrule and play over the top of anyone in that band and we’ve all come across this in business is the over talk of it. So I think there it’s being it’s respectful. It’s conscious of what you have the tools that you have access to. But also having an awareness of, in the band, the awareness of the band, the other musicians it’s a team sport in the band, let’s say the trio example again, you’re all blending you know your time to shine, you know your time to speak up, you know your slot.

Other times you might speak up because particularly in trumpet, it’s not always playing with the band and then you’ve got a solo and then you’re coming back and playing. You’ve got the freedom to throw in five notes, three notes, two notes here and there just, again, it’s just adding little- I’m gonna say the little touches of colour you can do that there. I guess the same might be in business, occasionally someone might pipe up and add in a little bit of an input there. But I think business wise, yeah, it comes down to the respect of listening. I think mostly the person that speaks last in meetings, they’re the one you’re listening to.

Sometimes the one that’s talking the most. It’s like potentially extremely good information. Again, I’m making a huge generalisation here but the quieter introverts, all that sort of stuff. That’s a lot of the knowledge is held there. They’re thinking and they give themselves time to think it through rather than think, talk.

It’s like, think, wait. Absorb, get everyone’s input and then talk. So yeah, I think that the version of a loud trumpet playing speaker personality in the business world, I think they identify themselves very quickly in a room or in an event or something like that. Yeah, I think that time there with music it’s almost keeping your powder dry, but sometimes it’s a tricky one for that personality. The meeting setting is an interesting one, in business we often think about- and this is talked about a lot as well, but it’s around strategy and action and the fact that strategy needs to be actionable and the fact that there needs to be a bias towards action in that sort of thing, if in a musical setting, strategy action is coming at you at once in the sound that you’re projecting and in the sound is hearing. In a meeting in business, obviously your strategy usually is just being talked about in the room. So you’re thinking that’s just a conversation.

In fact, that then needs to translate into action usually afterwards and outside of the room. And the congregation is really just the chat and the figuring it’s almost like the rehearsal space and then the action happens somewhere else, somebody then or a team of people have to come together to then deliver something. So it’s pretty different in that sense, because in a musician sense you’re much more on the spot to deliver the thing in that moment right there, so you’re putting in the notes very deliberately and I just want to emphasise that because I we can’t understate the craft that you’re describing right at the start of the chat in helping you prepare for that moment in creating the action and making that, and I think actually the best meetings that I’ve been and maybe you think the same are the ones where everyone walks away knowing that for one, they enjoyed it. Expectations were set and those expectations were met. But that everyone has walked away from it. Maybe it was something more that they were not expecting. And they feel like something has happened by sitting around and eating sandwiches for two hours. Something’s happened and actually the combination of people, the combination of inputs has made it worthwhile So that isn’t coincidence when it works. I completely agree. And I think that like you said before, the music, you’ve done the work, you’ve come together, you’re performing, it’s real time, it’s live.

So if mistakes happen, if things go wrong, it’s happening now. You can’t stop. You gotta push through it. End of the meeting, yeah, absolutely. You’re having your debrief post meetings. How did they go? Did we cover this? It’s good, bad, it’s ugly.

You forgot to say things, or you covered everything, or you’re walking outside high-fiving. You try and control as much as that as you can. But occasionally in meetings and in the business world, someone may something which is, they’ll say something which is controversial.

Something that may stump everyone, all of that. But again, you’ve gotta sort of roll with it, address it then, or agree on coming back to it later. A lot of the times in the music space, like you are in it. I remember I had, this is a long time ago I performed at the graduation ceremony at high school on piano.

And I played this classical play piece. It was from memory 1200 kids whatever it was. And I’d forgotten a big chunk. I think I was playing and I went to a different section. I don’t know. I just had a complete brain fart and went straight into another section, which dropped about a third of the whole piece out.

And it kind of went through seamlessly and I finished, it was all good. And there was one other kid at the school who was sort of at that level and to perform that piece before for their, or their musical exams. And they just came up and said, Oh, so that was an interesting uh, transition you did in the middle.

And again, no one knew, but just this one person that knew you had missed that. But at the time, it was like, there’s nothing else I could do. It was, you better perform. And 99. 9 percent of people don’t know that in my mind, I made a huge mistake. That was terrible because classical music it’s so precise.

It’s perfection. It’s delivering exactly what’s on the music. Playing from memory you’re just replicating that but for me it was catastrophe, but I just had to block it instantly, keep playing, finish. Well done. So I guess business side that’s kind of keeping faith, staying confident, not being too, someone trying to ruffle your feathers, keeping composure, all those sorts of things has a huge number of sort of crossovers in the music world with performing.

Everything’s fine. It’s all good. I’m here for you. We’re doing this concert. There’s definitely the transition that can happen there. Keep your cool. Oh yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, the fact that if you’re playing that sort of piece, hundreds movements are going on in every split second, it just feels like everything’s moving at speed.

And if you’ve transitioned to another part of the song then you can’t go back. You can’t start again. And you wouldn’t want to do that, because then you’d draw attention to it. That’s it. That’s it. People would still have no idea, but if you stopped and started again, then they would know.

That was, yeah, exactly. It’s a bit of keep calm, carry on. The thing that’s kind of popping up in my head as you were describing that story and you’re telling it so wonderfully, it was really around the fact that it’s about adaptability for sure.

And knowing your craft, but it’s also about the discipline and I suppose judgment, on yourself and the standards to which you hold yourself within any situation so that can be in preparation, but also in a live environment, because to everybody else that was probably the most wonderful thing that they ever heard, right?

Or for a long time. But to that one kid that you pointed out, obviously, there was some judgment there and you yourself knew that you’d made the So how have you come to terms with with judgment of yourself and your own ability over the years and how has that changed? Look, I think I’ve become slightly more comfortable with it, but it’s still completely there. And I think coming back to the preparation and knowing your material, having that confidence, certainly not arrogance, but having that confidence of your subject goes a huge way to not preventing, but minimising that judgment, knowing that I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, or I’ve been a musician for 30 years.

There’s always a music world. There’s always someone better than you. There’s always a style that someone might play better than all that sort of stuff. So you can go down that avenue of comparison. Isn’t it that comparisons the thief of joy? God that sits across everything. But I think with the business hat on, it’s knowing your stuff, confident in, you know, in your material, but also being open to that person back at school, they’re an extraordinary musician and the whole family were extraordinary musicians. I respected that. I laughed at it at the time, but I thought, Oh God, there’s one person, just that one person. But they came, they said that this is year 12. So what are we, 17, 18 years old?

They said it cheekily. They said it respectfully. It wasn’t a dig, which is great. And I think as we get older, that changes with people, some do it in a supporting way. You may have got a fact wrong, so it’s up to you to say okay yeah, absolutely. Let me fact check myself. I am across everything, but I may have got this one wrong.

Let me get back to you. So I think it’s the modesty as you get older and also accepting that you won’t know it all, you could get it wrong. And there might be other subject matter experts that are across different things and just trying to accept it a bit better. Yeah, fair enough.

I mean, you can hold yourself to those standards, but ultimately the conditions and something might happen it comes down to how we adapt. Really? Yes, I think people are becoming or do become more judgmental with age as well. So you’re going to come across, you’re going to have your own. craft in your own skill set.

And obviously you’re coming up against people that have got that in another area or in the same area and they want to offer an opinion. So you’re up against not only your own standards, but their standards. And you’re trying to balance that through a lot of these interactions within the business world for it to work. You have incredibly outspoken leaders that really know their stuff you have to almost take a step back from your own point to let that come through and think about how the two skill sets or points of view really blends to make even better. It’s like an open innovation mindset in a way where you’ll think, I go I know what I can bring and I’m confident in that, but I also know that the magic can happen by bringing in and welcoming the points of view and the inputs of other people too.

Karl Deitz: Agree, absolutely. Because you’re only 1 person. 1 person in business. I saw a great music recently, I don’t know, let’s just say Instagram or something, a sax player, And he built a huge following just as a single sax player.

He’s not in a band. He just loops. He plays the other loops playing that he’s doing, or he goes into churches and environments where the acoustics are just amazing. And because the echo is half a second or a second behind, he’s then playing against his original motive that he played just before it.

So in that instance, yes, sorry to take that there, but it was, yeah, there’s, that’s what exists. He’s up against himself.

Chris Hudson:  All right, let’s take a bit of a shift into the world of food because we’ve talked about music a little bit, but I don’t know if the world of food is any different and maybe just let’s introduce the section by maybe describing some of the things you were doing and then we can jump into some chats about that too.

Karl Deitz: Yeah. So the world of food and cooking, I guess came about a long time ago cause I was a shocking cook and went to make a valentine’s meal for a girlfriend and burnt the hell out of it and thought it was char grilled. So I kind of just scraped it all off and had that as part of the meal thinking that’s delicious.

And it was disgusting. So we got to take away. And I was just, I was very embarrassed and thought I’ve got to learn. how to cook. And it happened to be right at the same time Jamie Oliver kicked off The Naked Chef. So just when that hit television, just at the time of my great foodie failure, and that started me on the journey to learn how to cook, have an interest in cooking.

And then that sort of kept growing over the years. You’re at University and you’re living with friends and that it was, if no one can cook you eat rubbish all the time, or if someone sort of steps up a bit and can cook a couple of dishes well, or then your life’s a little bit better. You’re eating better food and having more fun with it.

And then fast forward, one of my best mates also loved to cook. And we started CrossFit. I’m going to go back. This is going back. 10, 11 years ago, the earlier days of when CrossFit kicked off and we loved cooking. And one day we said to our gym owner, do you mind if we come in and everyone’s spending all this money on getting fit and lifting weights and doing AMRAPs and all this crazy stuff.

Can we come in and cook for everyone and just show them some basics that we’ve learned over the years? We’re not trained chefs just home cooks. So we came in. Set up some tables, some fresh produce, cut food up in front of them, fed them three or four dishes, gave them recipes, and showed them how we did it.

And then another friend who had a gym said, can you come to my gym and do that? And then it just sort of grew from there, where other people reached out that owned gyms and said, can you come and show our members how to cook? So that was a whole lot of fun. But what it highlighted was that people were so focused on getting fit and staying fit in the gym with this particular style of fitness.

But we worked out that, what are you eating at home? What are you cooking at home? Do you have a sharp knife? Do you know what? So, so we just stuck to the basics, but we kept it pretty healthy and just created a bit of a template for these two hour classes that we did. We came up with this thing called we’re creating lean clean cooking machines but part of that was you know these top 10 tips basic tips. Have a sharp knife.

Have certain pantry items, have certain things in your freezer, have styles of food where you could substitute ingredients or if you’re buying a little jar of pesto. What are three different ways you could use a jar or things like that or what can you grow at home? So it was just a really nice I guess point in life of chasing something.

Oh, we were both working full time jobs at the same time. But this was just a nice interest didn’t enter it to earn money, make money, and do all that sort of stuff. We just saw that the community we were in, we had some skills and some fun. And again, we brought humour into it. We entertained them because we saw that as an element of education, that having humour and fun is going to almost help them consume that information better and they’re gonna hang onto it.

So we made it highly interactive. We got them involved in the class. And the best thing I mentioned before, you know your customer and get feedback. We got feedback after the first couple of classes and people said, you need to be charging at least double what you currently charge us. Because food was amazing.

We learned a lot. So that was a key thing early on. Always nice when they come back and say, we’ll pay more. So yeah, that was a period in life we ran out for a couple of years and it started to grow and we got to the point like, oh what do we do now?

So we retired that business, but we’ve kept the love of cooking and a creativity. And it’s the same as music. It’s the same as business. Learn the basics, master the craft, learn how to cook in different styles. And that just grows and changes, I guess, as we get older and you have kids midweek cooking is now not a three course meal four times a week.

It’s very, very different. So you learn new techniques, new hacks and new tricks. That’s it.

Chris Hudson:  I mean that was revolutionary back then I remember the time quite well where Jamie Oliver was sliding down his spiral staircase and cooking and playing some drums in between remember it well getting around on his Vespa the grimy streets of London, it was kind of interesting because he did sort of bring it back to basics.

Really, trained how do you make that concept It’s probably about ease of motivation, but how do you make seems far away, you don’t eat in a restaurant, bring that into understandable for people.

So it sounds like you’re doing the same thing with a bit of flair thrown in as well. If you’re making it funny, maybe stand up comedy was another thing that you were adding to your repertoire. Musician, cook- I think because it was with my best mate, the banter was unplanned.

Karl Deitz: It just happened and that level of comedy and fun. That’s a nice environment to learn in and taking that in the corporate space. You’ve again, you’ve bought comedians, you’ve bought different styles. I know fun, laughter and comedy, corporate sense. It’s huge results and much like people go.

Hey, let’s do a three day retreat. Let’s go hiking for three days or three nights. Get your head space out of your current head space, put you somewhere else and just your environment means you’re going to think differently. Watch what happens so I think comedy and humour and all of that can really open some compartmentalised parts of the brain that you get a door opened and people can go in there and explore things that they’re kind of already there they don’t let themselves in there very often.

Chris Hudson:  And there’s something about a chef’s table which is incredibly calming, in a way, to me anyway. I always find the most stressful part of cooking is where you have to, for one, figure out what you’re going to do. But then you’re grabbing from, 27 parts of the room to kind of get the things together that you need and assemble all of that.

But if you go to a cookery school if you’ve done a class like you’re describing, usually you have a bench top, all of the things that you might need. It’s a bit like a MasterChef scene. is kind of laid out and it looks like somebody’s Instagram. It’s all neatly laid out like Apple designed it and it’s kind of, it’s all ready to go and that’s just kind of comforting.

It’s a bit like the board game. What’s there in front of you. There are some things on the table that you might not understand conceptually. You’ve never tried anchovies or whatever it is. Gentleman’s relish or something that’s a bit obscure as an ingredient you see a vegetable all of these things popping up in business as well. Yeah, and I think going prepared, business world, knowing everything, music, knowing your material, knowing the chords, all of that, and I’m guilty of exactly what you just described two nights ago, this is how I cook, I have everything organised, I have everything in stainless steel bowls, I’ve made a Pad Thai.

The other night I think I had seven different bowls each with a different ingredient because for me, that’s comfort for me, that’s organisation, but also on the fly when it comes to cook, pretty cool to have everything cooked the right way, the right temperature, adding in things, not over cooking things.

Cause I’m in the pantry trying to look for some Kaffir lime leaves or something. Everything’s there. So then I’m controlling the outcome. I’m controlling the quality of the meal at the end because I’ve got everything there. So yeah it’s hugely satisfying having a bit of work up front, but then during the process and the success of that dish I’m controlling, it’s going to keep it high because I’ve done those prior steps.

And a bit like trumpeters, head chefs they get a bit of a rep, for being a certain way. But I’m also thinking that based on the type of cooking that you enjoy or anyone enjoys doing, it can say something a little bit about you as a person, some people prefer a slow cook.

That’s me. I love doing all the prep. And I know the end result is going to be pretty much guaranteed and there’s going to be a kind of warm, comforting feeling from that. Other people love the prep and then the kind of quick wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, Asian style cooking. We’re going to get the high heat going on.

Five minutes later, you’re eating the thing and it’s scalding hot. I wonder whether that sort of preference for cooking or for temperament, through that is different for different people. And I think in the world of work, that’s also the case.

[00:43:28] Chris Hudson: Some people have a very tuned appetite for almost the slow burn, the observation, of calculating, the configuring around getting the right result within a business context, but also some people just love to come into the boardroom and smash it out.

Karl Deitz: Yeah, and I think there’s some nice crossover with cooking there because the slow cooker thinker food brain, if they also are like that in the business world, it’s kind of nice to shake things up a bit. So everything you described in cooking, I’m going through a transition at the moment where, because of the, how hectic the weeks are and with the kids and that the slow cooker, the prepped meals and the pressure cooker during the week, just amazing.

Whereas on the weekend where I can, I like to try and cook over charcoal. I like to put the smoker on or like to do those sorts of things. It could be cooking some prawns over high heat like that’s a very different style of cooking. So business wise, the all energy high talking person in the business world in meetings and even in the office for them to observe or to learn or to see that other person who’s a introvert, a thinker, sits back, comes back, doesn’t answer instantly, all of that.

Chris Hudson: I think there’s something. Definitely something that both sides of the party can take away from that. Techniques, ways of thinking, different thought processes, the good old school saying, I’ll sleep on this. Many times I should have done that. I think everyone, if you’re responding in the heat at the moment, or you’ve got the thought, the first thought that comes to mind, sometimes that’s right.

Sometimes it’s maybe not the best solution or response but I think taking from the kitchen, taking from other people’s recipes, or taking from other people’s plates, saying, Chris really loves the slow cooker style meals. What do you love about that? What sort of foods do you cook? By understanding why you’re doing those things, I can absolutely learn from you on okay, I didn’t think about that.

Karl Deitz:  I think a month ago, I was with a friend and they got a couple of kids and they did a pressure cooker meal. It took 20 minutes and it was delicious. So three nights later, I cooked the same dish and I’m like, this is great. So I think learning from both sides cooking side analogies with the business side of things, you can definitely take away some great thinking from your, almost your polar opposites.

A sharp knife is a great analogy. It can be used just brutally in both environments Yeah, there are all sorts of things there but if you boil it right down to pardon the pun, it feels like you’ve got basically what you know And what, you know, well, in one sort of circle of the Venn diagram on what you don’t know to find out in and it feels like agility through those different states is incredibly important in terms of manoeuvrability, so you’ve got to be open enough to see that there’s something out there that you don’t know very much about experimentation. You know what you have to work with, but you’re also looking to reach out into new areas and you know, the world of works the same thing.

Otherwise, if you did the same thing and you’re eating scrambled eggs and toast every day, you’d get bored of that too. When do you know when to stay with what you know, and when do you think, okay, I need to branch out and what characterises some of those situations? I think it is getting older.

I think it’s been a bit harder, again, might be a bit of a generic statement there, you rise to a certain level. You come to 40 years old or 50 years old with a certain level of knowledge. It’s got you there. I think it’s gotta be quite deliberate. You’ve gotta overrule some of your automatic thinking.

To say, okay, I need to deliberately step back here. I need to refresh this area. I need to dive into, let’s say I got to dive into AI more. I listened to one of your episodes, two or three episodes ago. There’s new tech, there’s new knowledge. There’s new ways of doing business. Let’s look outside the industry.

What are people doing? Be interested in friends and peers. Who do they follow? Who do they listen to? Who have they met? What are they sharing in their side of business? And even our business, we’ve done that. We’ve taken things we’ve learned in the retail space, and we’re bringing that into the not for profit space.

So having that level of tech, which is so advanced in one industry and so lacking in another, which now is improving enormously. It’s deliberately grabbing yourself saying, yeah, I’ve got to go into these new areas and learn and find the right people. And also with that comes a level of skepticism because the people that, especially new tech that say they are leaders and they’re the shining light in that space.

They might not be. But they perform and speak and everything’s spot on or you think it is. So it’s good to have that balance across industry, other industry leading experts, whatever that industry is. So, yeah, I think it’s personally for me, yeah, it’s tricky because you do, it’s not complacency, you just get in your zone.

And I think if you, whether you set yourself some patterns on learning, bringing in new knowledge, I’ve got a couple of friends that exec levels of learning instruments. They’re so busy with their families and their business and one’s learned guitar and sings and another one’s learned drums, quite competent on drums.

Like again, I know that’s just a music example but in the business space it’s getting new knowledge, aligning with people that are really pushing the envelope and hang on a little bit and learn from them. Or hang on a little bit, hang on a lot for the right ones. Your aperture kind of opens and closes, depending on the circumstances in these cases a lot of the time because sometimes I’m in the mood for bringing the stimulus in, you invite that external stimulus. In other cases it’s very much, I can’t, I don’t have the space for that right now so you’ve got to know when to control that and how to control that and what feels right. If you’re playing a jazz, there is going to be Latin music, drum and bass, there might be some jungle in the world of cooking, you might be cooking, Aussie classics or European food, but you may not have considered, an Indian dish there are so many things that exist out there, both in the way of, trying those to taste or to but also experiment.

So if you can learn something about how another team or, a person does something and they’re a skilled practitioner what can you learn from them? it can be as profound as that, where you’re in front of somebody who’s incredibly skilled, or you can just be picking up on a very subtle nuance in how they’ve handled.

I turn a phrase in a conversation or in a meeting or in a presentation and you’re trying to pick up, what can you learn from this is probably question the broad. Do you feel like you’re always in that learning environment? I’d love to say I’m always that open, my aperture’s always open.

It’s not because it gets closed by life scenarios, business scenarios. But I think the always learning huge, huge intersection there with jazz. Like no jazz player ever gets to the point they just never get there whatever there is like you’re always learning again using musicians in an example like there’s always different styles that you can absorb. And then that becomes part of your language when you’re composing or performing again, if I look at my Spotify list in the last, this episode’s not sponsored by Spotify, but if I look at my last five playlists they’re all completely different and depending on how I’m working determines what music I’m listening to, does it have lyrics?

Is it just instrumental? Some of it’s more say techno sort of music. Some of it’s pure classical. Again, bringing that across into the business world. Yeah. Like you said, always be listening to others. Picking up ways that they’re thinking almost then picking up ways that they’re approaching conversation or how do they approach the problem or how do they approach the growth or the strategy, all of that.

Like how do they commence that conversation? Cause a lot of time you come in and have a starting point here and then you expand from there when you’re working on this well what if we started over here? Would we then expand that way? So always intrigued to see how people sort of into that conversation point starting point. In your career, I mean obviously you’ve moved from a highly creative performance space to a business space where other things are going on as well.

But a lot of time people that sort of starting the other way around where it’s very much business at the start and then they’re trying to find themselves and express themselves later in their career. I know I probably sit in that camp myself where, I’m trying new things a bit more than I probably did to begin with, so what advice would you give to people that are looking to branch out? Yeah, dive into it. Be super, super comfortable with being really bad at it. The thing with music and sports and art, everything, like, when you start, you’re pretty crap. But the consistent work and the diligent work.

All of that laid across anything, you become better at it. If you get to your 10,000 hours in something, obviously you’re very good at it, but with anything, yeah, lean into it and just be comfortable with the tiny little steps in the journey. But the consistency, for music, that’s what got me to where I got to it was the practice.

I used to get told practice makes perfect, but as I got older, a bit wiser, I suppose, it was perfect practice makes perfect. Just going and playing piano for an hour and a half and practicing your scales and your pieces, and I didn’t necessarily mean I was any better at the end of that period but me being more precise with my practice over the years meant that I could do less practice because I was more zoned in and drilled down into the key elements that I needed to work on rather than just doing practice as a block and just going through the process of yeah, I did an hour’s practice today tick. You can easily just go 18 20.

So again with sports, everyone’s older. You can be a whole lot more efficient times a bit more I think precious you got older anyone that’s listening you’ve got kids, business. Sometimes your windows are much smaller. So make that count. But just, yeah you absolutely everyone, you do get better with the right consistent level of practice.

You will improve and always important to look back. So if you’ve started to say Chris, who now plays guitar quite well, looking back at the first three months at a year today, where you’re at now is amazing. You add another year on because you put in the consistent practice and you’re diligent when you do it, that gets you the results.

So that’s my advice is, yeah lean in, your ears aren’t going to always like what as music wise, you’re going to produce to start with, but with that consistent practice, you’ll see improvement. Brilliant. And then throw in a random object from time to time. It feels like the learning that we get from this is a coffee cup, schooner, flip flop, whatever you can find but yeah bring something random in of that.

Chris Hudson: Exactly. I think we’ve had a really good chat. I want to bring it to a close now. But yeah, some very interesting turns through that conversation in terms of the different areas your life and the expertise accumulated and thankfully have been able to share with us today so I really appreciate your time and coming onto the show and just being generous with your thought and free thinking and left field as always so thanks very much.

Karl Deitz:  Yeah. Thanks mate It’s been an absolute pleasure. I hope some people got some things out of it.

Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Thank you.

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