Hello, Red Queen Podcast

You're launching a podcast?!

When my friends Eeke and Brie started a little book club around big company biographies, I said yes primarily for the vibes. They’re the coolest, and I wanted any excuse to hang out with them.

But after we started reading our first business biography about the story of Lego, I become obsessed with the content, too. Lego is an incredible company that is run like no other. It is widely under discussed as a company relative to the popularity of its products. Every engineer that uses Lego to describe their ideal API, or every designer that uses it to talk about a block-based product design doesn’t realize that the company itself is equally as fascinating.

Lego’s story has everything — three literal fires, a dreamy founder, a fall, a renaissance, Harry Potter, pirates, manufacturing precision, and the largest cluster of supercomputers in Europe. The former CEO of Lego (now on Starbucks’s board with Satya Nadella) is one of the people I think of as a real career role model. I kept bookmarking practices to try in my own work — for example, Mads Nipper (Lego SVP of Product) asks some amazing questions in their product reviews.

We became so obsessed with the company that we had to tell people about it. While there are lots of business podcasts that tell stories about companies, there are very few podcasts of that kind that are lead by operators, that don’t take themselves so seriously, and are…women. We wanted to explore these stories while adding practices to our operator’s playbooks.

Also, I personally wanted yet another platform to try out my stand-up material.

We named the podcast the “Red Queen” after Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, specifically after the moment when Alice meets the Red Queen. 

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’

Eventually, the Queen stops running and props Alice up against a tree, telling her to rest.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

Businesses are in competitive environments. These environments are so competitive that it takes moving at the rate of the market to simply stay in place. Those who want to compete must run twice as fast to get anywhere. 

As Charles Darwin says, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

The businesses that manage to stay in the game are the ones who can respond to change. We’re fascinated by their stories of moving at that pace — whether they end in victory or defeat. Those are the stories we tell in our podcast, and we’re excited for you to join us on that journey. 

I would love for you to listen to the podcast if you have the time. And if you’d like, rate it on iTunes or Spotify (“like and subscribe!”) First week downloads and ratings are huge for your presence on the podcast charts, and in particular there’s a podcast about Red Queen fanfiction with the same name that we’re trying to, ahem, beat. I know your time is precious, and I am so grateful to you for all of your support of Working Assumptions. Thank you.

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