EP 1- Bruce Daisley talks about building great culture in businesses

Building Great Businesses Podcast - Hosted by Jon Ratcliffe

In this Episode I speak to Bruce Daisley, the Head of Twitter in Europe, Middle East and Africa about work place happiness and culture.Work Place Happiness and culture is super interesting to me and I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the space. The most exciting resource to learn about this in my view is a podcast called Eat Sleep Work Repeat. Its run by the Head of Twitter in Europe, Bruce Daisley. Bruce has worked for years at epic culture companies, Google, YouTube and Twitter which has given him great experience in this space. Bruce has also been fortunate enough to interview people behind cultures at companies like Innocent Smoothies, Netflix, Twitter as well as authors like Dan Pink and nurosicentists, doctors etc.I think his experience and these interviews have given Bruce an unmatched practical view of what works in this space and so I'm delighted to be kicking off this podcast with this video.Thanks so much for taking the time. I thought it a really good place to start would be to get a little bit of your background, and what your current role is, and how you came to be in your current role.Yeah, so let's start from today, so I work at Twitter now; I’ve worked at Twitter for the last six years. I run Europe Middle East and Africa for Twitter. Prior to that, I worked for Google, so I worked really helping to build the YouTube business from scratch cross the UK and so I’ve probably spent the last 10 years in those two tech firms. Before that, I worked in various different jobs, largely in digital but across traditional publishers and traditional radio companies, so I guess from where I am today, I've spent quite a while in digital but the last 10 years specifically, just in pure-play digital.BizcommunityAwesome. One of the things which I picked up over the last year is your amazing podcast – I’m not just saying that, it really is quite something. I'm in the process of building a business, and one of the things which is so clear to me as how getting your culture right has so much impact. So, for those who don't know, Eat, Sleep Work Repeat is definitely worth checking out. Do you want to tell me how you came to start that podcast and what your combination of interests is? So obviously, you have a bit of a radio background, and working and such ‘amazing culture’ businesses, but I'd love to hear your journey to start. The interesting thing for me, the way I got into it, was that I was always complimented, whether it was by my teammate YouTube or by the team here at Twitter. People always come to me and say ‘Wow, there’s such a good buzz to these teams, such good energy’. And so, that led me to make the mistake of thinking that I was an expert. I think it's fair to say, and I say this quite often, but I don't think there's any easy jobs anymore, so I don't think there are any jobs where people go to work and they think ‘Wow, that was that was a breeze,’ and then they go home at the end of the day with no stresses or anxieties. But about a year-and-a-half ago, I found myself in this situation where I was thinking, ‘People around me don't seem to be as happy as they used to be,’ and I actually challenged myself and thought, ‘You’ve told yourself you're good at culture, but you don't know what you're doing!’ So I found myself looking for a book on it and searching Amazon for a book on work culture, and I couldn't find anything that seemed suitable.So it was a big logistical jump, but from there, I decided to do a podcast on it and I think specifically, I’ll give you an example: I spent the last week thinking a lot about the research about creativity, and the interesting thing is that if you look into the research on creativity, there’s a lot of evidence for what situations provoke creativity. There’s some wonderful work by a lot of very prominent female researchers, like Alice Isen, Teresa Amabile, and Barbara Fredrickson.