Read the full transcript of Episode 57 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Bob Moesta, author, professor, innovator, and founder of The Re-Wired Group. He joins host Tim Fish to outline how reframing our thinking about the jobs to be done by independent schools can transform the way we approach hiring, retention, admissions, and student engagement.
Tim Fish: Not long after I started my work at NAIS seven years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Grosse Pointe, Michigan to spend a week participating in a Jobs to Be Done research study at The Re-Wired Group office, nestled on the second floor in a little office building on Main Street.
That was the first of many trips to Grosse Pointe to conduct research and plan for the future. While there, I had the opportunity to work with and learn from Bob Moesta and his colleagues. No joke, friends. I am not kidding when I say that the stuff I learned from Bob was some of the most impactful learning of my career. I use what Bob taught me every week—no, I probably use what Bob taught me every day, when I work with schools. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce you, the New View EDU family, to Bob Moesta today.
Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker, an author, and now a professor. He is the president and founder of The Re-Wired Group, as well as an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.
He is the author of the book Choosing College along with his co-author Michael Horn, and he also wrote Demand-Side Sales 101: Learning to Build—5 Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs. And he’s going to help us today apply that Jobs to be Done thinking to our schools, now and in the future. I’m so excited to welcome Bob, my teacher, to the podcast today and can’t wait to hear his insights once again. Let’s get to it!
Bob, thank you so much for joining us today. It is such a pleasure to see you again, and we are honored to have you in our studio.
Bob Moesta: Tim, it's been too long. It's been too long. Like there's days where I'm like in the airport traveling somewhere, I'm like, oh, I should call Tim, but he's busy.
Tim Fish: Oh, so I think the same thing. So the place to start is we are a podcast for educators who are thinking about the future of education. And I thought, I'd love to hear just a little introduce yourself to our listeners with a little bit about your journey and a little bit about how you think about education today, because I know you've been, it's something that's incredibly important to you.
Bob Moesta: I'm very passionate about education. I'm always learning, I'm a sponge, but I grew up in an era where it's not like it is today.
I grew up in 19, I was born in '64. I basically had three close head brain injuries before I was seven years old. In third grade, they kind of, they labeled me as special needs. They'd grab my hand and say, come on, you're special. Let's go to the special room.
Tim Fish: Mm. I had my own journey to that room, Bob. I had my own journeys to that room.
Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, and so my own journey, well, I think that's part of this, is the struggling moments are the things that drive us later in life. And so you start to realize like, like this was very formative for me. And my mom was a school teacher in Detroit for over 30 years. And she taught first grade. And one of the things that I learned is that those injuries basically made me more or less dyslexic. And the school system that I was in at the time, when they labeled me that way, I didn't, I wasn't able to fit into the mainstream anymore.
And so, and instead of being acceptable to have Cs and Ds and Bs, it was literally like, you don't belong here. And I was in public school. And so there was no, and there was really, they didn't know, they thought dyslexia was, at that time was just about spinning letters and seeing words upside down and kind of, that kind of stuff. And I have a, it's more of an inner ear problem that when I say it, I can't actually figure it out because there's such an auditory delay in my head because of the brain injuries that I could never say the word, I had to decipher the word.
But it built a superpower in me. And so the other thing we did is, is because I was caught in that situation, we moved. And when we moved, we moved to a different district, but we didn't tell them. And so, what we did for a long time is just basically learn how to hack school so I could, like, how did I learn? So for example, when there was a book report, my mom would bake cookies and we'd have everybody come over and everybody would talk about the book. I could memorize what everybody said in the room and talk about that book. And I could literally cheat my way through basically, I get “cheat” in quotes, but I could cheat my way through basically thinking that I read the book because everybody was there. And every time I had a book report, it was always about a book there was a movie of, because I'd watch the movie and then I'd try to read the book.
And the other part is that I have a, like a ridiculous, uncanny, like my memory is pretty eidetic, but I have to have like three—I have to have an object or a person, a place, and a time. if I don't have those three elements, I can't actually remember it, but if I do have those three hooks I can remember everything. I can go back to interviews that we did for you, I don't know, ten years ago, and go Oh, yeah, I remember that interview and tell you all the details, and you're looking at me like did you re-listen to it? I'm like, nope. It's just right here in my head
It's a very interesting aspect of like, I had to learn how to learn a different way. And so ultimately this gift that I got, I consider dyslexia a gift so great, but I would never give it to my children. I never would wish it upon my children because it was just so hard.
Tim Fish: And it was such a gift for you. And I've heard that from so many folks that learn the way you learn. And I'm curious about if you were to just give, and I, and I agree with you, we have come so far in our schools in terms of how we are able to work with kids. I was just working with a school in New York city that works with kids who have language-based learning differences like dyslexia and others. And the work they're doing with kids and the way they approach it is just remarkable. But I'm curious just, from your emotional experience, if there's one piece of advice you might give for a teacher who has a kid who learns differently in their room.
Bob Moesta: So the first thing is, to be honest, I have to think about that for a second, but to fill the time, I'm going to talk about the parents, because the parents are the ones who are panicked the most. So when the parents find out, the first thing they want to do is make the kid normal. How do we make my kid normal? What can I do to fix this? And what I will tell you is, when you fix it, you destroy their ability to have a superpower. Dyslexia creates superpowers.
And ultimately to realize like at some point, when they have these different things, every struggling moment creates you to innovate, to do something different. And so the aspect here is to actually promote the ability for that. So the one question I would always say is, let's learn how they learn, because everybody has the ability to learn, but we just don't learn the way school teaches. So this is where the, from the teacher perspective, I would say the hard part is the teacher is not just a teacher. The teacher is a manager. A teacher is a leader. A teacher is a whole bunch of things. And they're responsible for 20 to, or 15 to 30 kids, right? And so you can't, it's very hard to find the time to figure out to do it.
But the biggest piece of advice I could give you was, can you make them or enable them to have a set of tools to help them understand? Like when I say, so my little test, so I help children all the time where the parents will go like, oh, my kid is dyslexic, they've been—And the first thing I try to do is empower them to realize like, this is a gift more than it is a disability. I just don't see it as a disability. Every disability creates a unique new ability. And so to realize that like…
Like one of the things I'm doing right now is I'm writing a book about employment and the workspace. And what we don't realize is people have natural abilities that they're really, really good at, and they actually have things they (aren’t good) at. And nine times out of 10, they tell people, oh, you got to get better at this thing because you (aren’t good) at it. But when you make somebody better at creativity, you actually ruin them for the structure, which they're really good at. They're actually interdependent.
And so this aspect of understanding how to nurture their secret powers or their unique powers is what, the angle I always take is to say like, you have to realize there's a majority of entrepreneurs who are dyslexic, and we're dyslexic because we can't fit in.
Tim Fish: Wow. You know, Bob, I also know that you've had in your incredible journey, which we'll hear more about today. You've had mentors in your life. And I think one of the things that you were getting at with teachers is, they’re mentors. And, and I think I, what I'd love to know is sort of how did your mentors impact you and what, and you are a mentor and have been a mentor to so many, including me, I'm wondering, what is it about a mentor? What, What are the gifts? What are the things that a mentor does, and does really well?
Bob Moesta: The first thing about a mentor is, there's different categories of mentors. There's inspirational mentors. There's people who you read and you never meet, but their thinking influences you, right? And then there's like the mentors who really changed your whole being. And typically you worked with or for those mentors. So, you know, I had a mentor, who is Dr. Deming. And the gift I created, or that was created out of, I didn't create it, what was created out of all this was this aspect of asking questions.
I was at an event and I sat down, I'm very introverted, I'm like, I'm trying to, in most cases I'm trying to hide the fact that I don't know what I don't know, kind of thing. And I sit down next to this guy who looks like somebody's grandfather. And I just start talking to him, and I ask him questions. And it turns out I asked him 52, I wasn't keeping track, he was. I asked him 52 questions in 22 minutes. And he turns to me and goes, you are literally one of the most curious kids I've ever met, and there's something about you. How would you like to be my intern? And my aspect was yes. Like I'm never going to turn that down.
Tim Fish: Then you didn't know who he was?
Bob Moesta: I had no idea who it was. I thought it was like, to be honest, I thought it was some guy, like I live in Detroit. So as somebody who owned a tool and die company or, you know, somebody who was in a supplier or something like that, it turns out it was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming is the guru of qualities. He's the person who invented quality management in Japan. He's the father of the Toyota production system. He's the father of Six Sigma and Lean.
He's the one who built all these methods and tools with the Japanese and then we brought it back. And ultimately my job was to go learn all his methods and tools and bring it back to Ford Motor Company. And so that was my very first job and internship, was literally working for somebody who I thought was a grandpa.
I believe that the role of the mentor is to inject thinking, a thinking thing, to enable you to be the best version of you. So when we were working together, my whole thing was how do I help Tim think differently about these things? And how do I help him go off and be able to do this by himself? It's about passing my knowledge on, but it's more than the knowledge, it's the behaviors, it's the other things.
But part of it takes a long time to actually understand who Tim is and what Tim wants to do and what Tim doesn't want to do. And so what you didn't realize is half the time we were talking, I'm literally, I'm gathering all the understanding of who you are, what you're about, and what does progress mean to you, and then how can I help you? And so the empathy that it taught me to have is just off the charts, because at some point I learned how to almost like, jump out of my body and try to play you as a role, and say like, all right, what is Tim worried about? What is Tim thinking about? How is Tim thinking about these things?
Tim Fish: But you forced me right to unpack and repack and unpack and repack my own thinking. And it's through that, that I was able to build and you've helped so many build this stickiness, this sort of concepts that are now deep within me because you helped me sort of build it the right way.
So one of the things as we talk about this notion of that sort of journey and that progress that you're making and so on, it really does lead me into some ways in the jobs thinking and around what jobs is. And one of the things for me that I find so interesting about jobs, and I would love to hear you talk about it, is this idea that we don't actually buy something, right? We hire it.
That's the core foundational concept of a job. And so if you could unpack that, because as you know, we've been talking about Jobs to Be Done in independent schools and the four jobs that parents hire schools for a long time, but people haven't had the pleasure of really getting what is a job from you.
Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the first thing, the very fundamental premise is this, is nobody randomly does anything. I think the other thing is, we've moved from, what I would call from product orientation to experience orientation.
And so the reason why I talk about that people don't buy products is because at the end of the day, if the product doesn't do anything for them, it adds no value. The product by itself does not add value. And that we need to understand the progress they're trying to make. Nobody randomly shows up at a school and says, oh yeah, I want to join. I want to be part of your school. There's a set of causes behind it. But what happens is we ask them at a very pablum level, a very, oh, it's because of the facilities you have, your facilities are great. Or Oh my gosh, the teachers are so pedigree. It's like, but that's not why they're doing it.
They're doing it because their child is falling behind. They're doing it because their child is literally not ready for the next level. They're doing it because they want their kids to have broader experiences. And so you start to realize, it's about their child and their relationship with their child that they're actually buying your school for.
Tim Fish: And they're not doing it because they drive a Volvo or because they went to an Ivy league school or because they read the New York Times. That's correlated, that might be correlated, but that's not the cause.
Bob Moesta: Why they hired the school and why they stay at the school might be completely different, because the context changes.
A job is based on two fundamental principles. The context adds as much value as the product. So if I get you in the right context, you will actually then understand like, oh my God, this is the perfect school for me. But if you literally don't have pressure, you don't have a struggling moment, you can't actually extract the right criteria. And so it's like when you don't struggle, it's like you look at all these schools like, yeah, they all look the same. They're all kind of this way. You know, we'll just kind of pick one or…
And you start to realize, like, ultimately, it's the struggling moment that helps. If you really take a moment to look at your student body and understand the kids' individual struggling moments, the ones who aren't really struggling are typically the ones, the ones and the parents are least satisfied. And the ones who are struggling a ton are so grateful. So part of this is to realize you have to, you have to see this because the struggling moment is the seed for change.
People don't change unless they struggle. We are by very nature a creature of habit. And it has to be something that doesn't work, something that we feel inadequate about, something that we are worried about, that literally then causes us to say, we can do better. And it's that better part that causes, the gap is what causes the struggle. And most people want to fill the gap, but the reality is, is they don't think about the progress, they think about the end goal.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, a couple of weeks ago, I was working with a board of trustees and we were doing the, we were talking about Jobs to Be Done. And we were talking about the four parent jobs. And one of the things that a trustee was saying to me over a cup of coffee after our presentation was, you know, well I imagine that these jobs thing, it's really just around the big things in life, buying a car, sending your child to school, choosing a college. And I said, actually, no, it's, it can be really tiny.
And I know, Bob, that you, one of the best examples I've ever heard of sort of what is a Job to Be Done and how, what it, how does it sort of factor into our life, is your work around Snickers and Milky Way and how you helped to, to define and find the job to be done for a Snickers bar.
And how the job to be done for a Snickers bar is not the same job to be done for a Milky Way, even though they're both candy.
Bob Moesta: I got asked to talk to some people about Snickers at the time. It was in the mid-90s somewhere. And they were basically trying to say, we need to grow Snickers, can you help us? They kept talking about like, well, we need to beat Milky Way. And so in their minds, Milky Way and Snickers compete to each other.
Tim Fish: Now aren't they in the same company?
Bob Moesta: They are the same company, but they're the guys down the hall. And my bonus comes from if I need to take it from them, it's a different way. Right. So then what happens is you start to go through this and, and you start to realize like the, and then to be honest, their logic is right. Like they're both candy bars that are actually made on the same line. They're made with almost the similar ingredients. One has peanuts, one doesn't. And, and you start to realize they're, they sit next to each other in the shelf. I mean, they're, they compete with each other.
Tim Fish: They're the same thing, just like some of our schools look like the same thing.
Bob Moesta: They look like each other, but the thing is, they don't compete at all. So when you actually start to talk about the last time somebody ate a Snickers bar, you get very simple, simple answers. Here's the condition. It's not one cause, it's root causes, I mean is it's root, not root cause. It's root causes, because it's sets of things that have to happen.
So one is you had to miss the previous meal. Your stomach had to be growling. You had a lot of work in front of you. You didn't have a whole bunch of time. And at the same time, the fact is you didn't want to spoil the next meal, but it's like, just almost like, give me food so I can just get this done. And you started to realize the competitive set was an apple, a Red Bull, a coffee, a power bar, some things that you could drink, a set of things that were not necessarily in the category, but nobody ever looked at a Milky Way.
When you talked about a Milky Way, it literally was, I just had an emotional experience. Could have been bad, could have been good. It did, it really, that was, but it had to be a pretty emotional experience. You usually ate it alone. It was about a moment of feeling better or celebrating. And ultimately the fact is, it gave you a moment by yourself, a me moment, right?
Tim Fish: Mmm. I deserve this, kind of thing.
Bob Moesta: I deserve this or I need this right now because I just had something bad happen to me, right? There's different deserves. But the competitive set there is, you know, a brownie, Ben and Jerry's, a glass of wine, and it turns out, a run. I talked to somebody who was literally like, yeah, I was going to go on a run and I decided, you know what, screw it, I'm just going to have a Milky Way. And I'm like, wait, what?
And you start to realize it's all about endorphins. It's all about basically giving you serotonin and dopamine to help you basically feel better about yourself. And so you start to realize that the fact is, but nobody thought of a Snickers bar. And so the moment we actually understood that, we just changed the layering to make it hard when you bite. So the first bite is literally like, you know, it's hard, you chew it, and we changed the melting temperature of the caramel to make it stickier. So you swallow it like it's a ball. And once you swallow it, like it absorbs the acid and does what it's supposed to do. And it actually, the chocolate gives you the caffeine hit you need, as well as basically gives you the sugar, gives you then the glucose boost, right?
And then the second thing is we turned that information, I didn't do this, but the agencies did it, and they turned it into the Betty White commercial, right? You're not you when you're hungry. And everybody knows that that's the case. And it's like, oh, and so it literally grew almost, almost 20X in sales in 10 years.
Tim Fish: Wow. Because, so here's the part I think is really interesting. Once you understood the Job to Be Done for Snickers Bar, help me when I'm feeling down, when I'm up against a deadline, when I'm out of energy.
Bob Moesta: When I'm in a busy, draining moment and my stomach's growling and I need some fuel, fuel me up so I can get the work done as fast as I can.
Tim Fish: As fast as I can and get onto my next thing. That's the job. Once you understand the job, it's not like you just stop there. Once you understand the job, then you go innovate on how do we make this candy bar do that job even better? And that's key, right? If you just kind of like, oh, we know it, well, that's nothing. We know it and we're going to help, we're going to improve what we do to help meet the job.
Bob Moesta: This is why I call it Jobs to Be Done, because it's not just jobs, jobs is what you do now. But if you think about the future, the future is about what's the job to be done, and what do I have to change? And so to me, I've only studied for the last 40 years what causes people to change. It's when I am in this situation and I struggle with these things, help me with this part of it, so I can get to this outcome.
That is the critical part. And most people always want to shortcut it to, oh, this is a save money job, and this is a convenience job, and this is a do my best job. It's like, no, no, no. It's very, very specific. It's the specificity that actually matters. And most people don't want the specificity because they think they're limiting themselves. But the reality is the more you're specific about it, the more people resonate with it. When it's too high, literally people go like, kinda. Kinda, but not all of it.
Tim Fish: Yes, yes, yes. Well, this is the thing I hear schools say all the time. We're trying to be all things to all people.
Bob Moesta: Can't, impossible. The things they have to be all, one thing that has to be the same to all people is healthcare. We have to treat everybody who walks in the door. That's a hard system. And to be honest, they have to treat everybody exactly the same, though everybody's different. And so we don't, and so one of the things, I worked in hospitals, I basically said, they had all these different departments and they were struggling and they're like, we need to cut this department, that department, that department. I'm like, OK.
Tell me which department you suck at the most. And they go like, none of them. I'm like, OK, which patients do you have the least of? And they go, well, we have the least of the neurology department. I'm like, who's the best neurology people in the world that's close to you? It's like, oh, it's this other hospital. I suggest you shut down your neurology department, move it over there, and get better at the things you're good at. And they actually doubled in size. When we try to invest in everything, we literally are good at nothing.
Tim Fish: Yes, yes, yes. All right, so here's the thing. The other part about jobs I find fascinating, right, is that you don't discover what the job to be done for Snickers Bar is by doing a focus group with 60 people that say they like Snickers, and you certainly don't do it with some survey that you send out to 44,000 people that says what Snickers Bar do you like best? You do it through interviews, you do it through, and those interviews are not, well, not short. They go on for like an hour.
And what I find so interesting about them is that in them, what you've taught me is that in the context of those interviews, you're looking for four forces. You're looking for what are the pushes? What are the pulls? What are the anxieties? What are the habits? Tell us about how those forces help you understand the progress and the struggle and the context that somebody was in.
Bob Moesta: So the first thing is to realize that most people don't know why they do something. And so the first 10 minutes of an interview, if you ask the question is like, so why'd you come to our school? They're literally going to recite everything from your marketing brochure. They're going to recite everything from it. Like, oh, yep, check. And I've been in places where people go like, all right, like in practicing. They're like, OK, 10 minutes in, like, I think we got everything. We're good.
I'm like, OK, let me ask a few. Let me ask, the Colombo move. Let me ask one more question. What was going on with your child at the time of why you even needed to consider a new school? Oh, let me tell you. And you start, they start to go in it. So pushes are all about the context and the struggling moments that they have that's irrelevant of the solution that literally are making them almost conditioned, ready to hear your story, ready to hear your school.
Like most people are not ready to—so Clay has a great quote, who's another one of my mentors. He goes, questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And the reason why that became so important to me as I realized what question does somebody have to ask themselves to say today's like, you know, I think it's time to pull our kids out of public school. Like it's not random. And so what are those conditions that are around them, those contexts, that struggle? And ultimately irrelevant of what they want out of it, but why move? Because if there's no push, they can't even see you.
You can advertise till you're blue in the face and they're a little like, yep, I know that school. Yep. I know that school. But it's like when my kid is falling behind, like think of COVID. COVID was a godsend, I think, to independent schools, because they ended up, you know, being the beneficiary of, of realizing they had a system that was actually better. And most people had no idea the experience of what an independent school was like. And when they got there, where they're like, wow. This is amazing, right?
Tim Fish: Yes. So one of the things that schools should be doing is thinking about what are the pushes that are sending people to our school?
Bob Moesta: So we worked with one independent school. We did very simple advertising in September. And it was a kid, this is funny because it was very hard to do because the board didn't want to do it and the community really didn't like it. But it literally helped us gain almost 20% in students, which was, it's like between September 15th and let's say the first week in October, we ran a simple ad that was a kid sitting at a table crying, trying to do the homework for the night, the parent getting crazy and trying to help, and saying like, it doesn't have to be like this. That's all we said. People call them like, like coming, like, wait a second, that's my life. I don't know, I don't know what I want, but I know that this is, this is what I don't want. So help me, help me get this out of my life.
Tim Fish: But Bob, why did the school not want to run an ad like that? And it's, I think I know why, but why do you think they didn't want to run the ad?
Bob Moesta: It doesn't represent the history of our school. We don't talk about the negative things. This is the wrong message we should be giving. That's not what we stand for. And my whole thing is, I really don't care what you stand for. I want to go help these kids. Help me go find kids that I can go help.
Tim Fish: So then, if we know that everybody who walks in the door, who is looking at our schools, think about switching, they've got pushes, they've got these contexts. And they also, then the other force that helps them get to change is the pulls. What's the difference between a push and a pull?
Bob Moesta: A pull is the outcome that they're seeking. They can see their kid, oh gosh, if they go here, they could do this, they could do this, they could do that. You know what? They can actually get to college and do these things. Or they can get to do, you know, they'll be, so for example, one of them is, you know, my kid's a little immature and I'm just not ready to send him to middle school. And like what they'll learn here is they're going to, because it's a smaller— so everyone would say they want a smaller classroom. They don't want a smaller classroom. They believe a smaller classroom builds confidence. And it's the confidence that's the output, not the small classroom. And to be honest, I've learned to help schools talk about bigger classrooms, but how to build confidence that compete with small classrooms.
Tim Fish: So that, yeah, so we always say, but if you look at our, a lot of our websites, we say one of our advantages is small class size or average teacher to student ratio or whatever. And what you're suggesting is turf fields, small class size, beautiful library. These are not pushes, or pulls.
Bob Moesta: They're not, they're reasons to believe that you can get me to my outcome that is implicit still.
Tim Fish: So the pushes are that stuff that's in my mind that's making me think what I've got now is not working.
Bob Moesta: I can't, today I can't keep doing what I'm doing, it's not going to work.
Tim Fish: I can't keep doing what I'm doing. The pulls are the outcomes I seek. And the, and when I look at you based on whether your program, your teachers, your facility or whatever, I believe that those conditions, they will lead me to the outcome that I seek. So the pull is not what you have. It's what I seek.
Bob Moesta: It's what I seek. It's the outcome. My kid will be better here than they’ll be back there. And so features and benefits are actually the wrong way to think about it. We gotta think about context and outcome and then ladder it to features and benefits. But without the outcomes being explicit, this is where parents who are very, very upset come from, because they see all the features, but they actually see a very different outcome than you can deliver or that you can assure.
Tim Fish: And you may have, you may have the most beautiful campus in the world, but if I don't believe that you could deliver the outcome based on what I see, the outcome I seek, it does, none of that stuff matters if I don't think you can help my kid overcome his anxiety.
Bob Moesta: That's right. And the other part is to realize that part of this is, the role of this, is the student. What does the student actually have to be able to do in your system to enable them to get to those outcomes? The outcomes are only achieved by the student. The teachers provide input, the coaches provide input, the student body provides them, like there's a lot of inputs that enable them to be better.
And what you have to do is understand that it's a blending of all those things that come together as opposed to, ooh, this is what we got to do in curriculum, and this is what we got to do in physical ed, and this is what we got to do in sports. But ultimately we have to realize the student has to flow through all of those things. The student is the unit, and the student is the progress, and ultimately the parents judge us on the progress we help them with their student in.
Tim Fish: Well, it's this, it's so for me, the other piece is if you've got, you've got people who have these pushes, they believe that you can help them deliver their outcome, their pulls. They then worry though, they don't all come. There's the other side of the equation. Right? And so if they've got pushes and they believe you can deliver, why don't they all just enroll? What holds them back?
Bob Moesta: So this is the other part, is that there's fuel to help them come to you, which is pushes and pulls. If I have this push and I have these pulls, I can come to you. But below the water line, in the subconscious or in the implicit are two other forces. One is the anxiety of the new. How am I going to pay for this? What am I going to tell the old school? What about all their friends?
Tim Fish: Yeah, will they really like my kid? Will my kid make friends?
Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, then there's, so that's the anxiety is about the new. So we call it anxiety of the new. And then there's the habit of the present. It's the things they love. It's about where they're at. And so you start to realize, like, my kid has such a great group of friends. They're doing all these great things. Like, boy, this, you know, I hate everything else, but the swimming coach is fabulous.
Tim Fish: They're trade-offs I'm going to have to make, right?
Bob Moesta: Yeah, so ultimately it helps them frame the trade-offs they have to make. Every sense of progress, every decision we make involves a trade-off. We never get the perfect solution, ever. It's never cheap enough, it's never fast enough, it's never good enough, but ultimately we have to work, we live in the reality of a world where there are constraints and there are trade-offs.
But this is where people are saying, like, I can't afford it. It's like, OK, well, let me try to get a scholarship. OK, let me, can I get a second loan? There's things people do to figure those things out if the push and pull are big enough. And so these are the things you need to be able to understand, is it's not just the push and pull, but it's the anxieties and habits. And nine times out of 10, I can reduce anxieties and there's, let's say, a thousand people who want to come, but the anxieties are so great that I only get 20 people to convert.
But if I reduce the anxieties, like, so for example, I like, how am I going to travel like this? We're going to add buses. It's like, oh, that's fabulous.
Tim Fish: And, and the, and that reducing anxiety innovation, adding buses or whatever, might be more powerful than adding pull or adding pull like if we just had a turf field or we just had the new swimming pool or we just had the new whatever center. Like that, we think, is going to create a lot of pull and that's going to make a lot more people want to choose us, but that again, pull’s about outcomes, not features, but the thing that gets me is like I think we miss opportunities to do anxiety reducing innovation.
Bob Moesta: That's right. So my best example of anxiety reducing innovation is the house story. Is, is I built house, I built a thousand homes here up and it's one of the, one of my side gigs or one of my, you know, uh—
Tim Fish: —That's not a side gig, Bob. A thousand homes, not a side gig. But you've done a lot in your life.
Bob Moesta: But what the thing I realized is, for example, like there were many people who looked at the condo and had all the reasons downsizers, like they're going from 3,500 square feet to let's say 1500 square feet. And the anxiety was, what am I going to do with all my stuff?
Tim Fish: But didn't they tell you, Bob, that they wanted the marble countertops and the, you know, all the granite, the hardwood, the da-da-da, they told you that was all what they wanted.
Bob Moesta: They told me, everything they told me they wanted. But literally when it came down to it, it was like, when you talk to people who want to buy a house, and then you talk to people who bought a house, the requirements are completely different. This is why you don't talk to prospect parents of who want to come because, oh, what do they want? Because if we do that, they're going to come. It's all lies.
Tim Fish: And they don't even know it's lies.
Bob Moesta: This is, the thing is, we can't predict the future without actually understanding the past. And so what happens is, we're literally asking them questions like, so what would you like in a new school? And it's like, they're just making it up. They don't know.
And so part of this is why we talk, we start by talking to parents who already came, because they had to have the push, they had to have the pull, they had the anxieties, they made the trade-offs. Now I have a frame to understand, because for every one parent who made it, there's 10, 100, 1000 behind them who want to make it, but haven't figured it out.
And so ultimately your job in admissions is to help people, one, understand why they want to come and what are the outcomes. And if you can actually create the pushes and help understand the outcomes better, nine times out of 10, they're going to be way more understanding what it is. But like, I think you said this is like, the number one thing that most people were worried about in the open, what is it? The open house? Is like, what kind of cookies do we get this week?
Tim Fish: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know, I did admissions and we sat around and we talked about, OK, how did the cookies work this year?
Bob Moesta: And what we talked about is how do we ask the right set of questions so we know which job they're in, so we know what features to talk about? Because if you talk about, for example, so for example, in job two, there's this one about my, I want my kid to get a little more attention and a little more help, because I want them to mature in a smaller environment. And then job four was I want my kid to be the best and I want you to push them hard. Right?
If you talk about how rigorous it is, it might be very attractive to job four parents, but it literally turns off job two parents. And you start to realize like, it's the same feature, but just not talk about those features that way, because at some point in time, you might have it, but the reality is like, as you bring it up, the fact is it makes them create anxiety.
Tim Fish: Let's imagine that you're in admissions and you're interviewing a parent. How could you interview a parent to help you understand what job, what context they're in? What kind of questions might you ask?
Bob Moesta: So look, our school isn't for everybody. That's the first way I'd start it, which nobody will start it that way, right?
Tim Fish: Why would you start that way?
Bob Moesta: Because at some point in time, what we're trying to do is help you make the best decision. And so part of this is that if we're not a fit, I know every other school here, and I'd be happy to point you in the direction of the school that will be best for your child. But let's start talking about why you're here. What's going on that makes it today? What is going on about everything?
I can tell you for two hours about this school, but what I want to do is because I'm very focused on your child, and I'm very focused on understanding how we can help. I know how, the ways we help our current faculty or our current student body, but at the same time, I just want to make sure there's a fit because I know if it's not a fit, it's not going to be good for either one of us. So do you mind if I ask you a few questions? And that's how it's done.
And so it's literally the first half hour of me asking questions. And then me, started going like, oh, that's a really good—So let's say, you know, I want my kid to be more worldly. Like, I feel like they're just going through and taking the tests and following the things they're memorizing with, but they're not becoming a human. So let me tell you how we handle that one. Because that's exactly what we do. And here's…
Let me tell you, this class, and I'm going to show you to this class and this class and this class where those things are happening. And so every tour becomes actually customized to what is, what is their context and what is the outcome they're seeking.
Tim Fish: I even love it when you talk about how you start an interview, you often would say to people, imagine we're filming a documentary. And sometimes I'm going to ask you to describe everything about a particular scene, because it's in that detail, right, where if you just said something like, I don't think my teachers really understood my child, some people would just skip over that, not you. You would go, what do you mean didn't understand your child? And you would just go down and down and down.
Bob Moesta: So this is the thing, is my belief is that you got to think of these causes as either dominoes or snowballs. And the snowballs that they talk about are so big, but they actually root back to something very, some very, very specific event that just started to compound. Or it's, the domino effect is that a domino half its size can actually topple something that's twice its size. So a lot of times it's, there's a big problem. But when you, when you follow the chain of things that happened back, it came back to these underlying things that happened that caused them to do that. And it's important to know what those root causes are.
Tim Fish: So this notion of, and the part I think is really interesting about it is that what you're trying to do is discover those underlying snowballs, the snowball that started it all.
Bob Moesta: The first snowball or the first dominoes.
Tim Fish: Right. And you're doing it because you want to know how you can serve that child. This is not about a sales technique. This is not about tricking them into buying into your school. This is about how might I truly understand this child, so I understand how we can serve that family and help that family.
Bob Moesta: Well, and child, parent, I'll say mom and dad, it's the child and the parents, because the parents have different jobs than the kid. And this is where we don't separate the two, and we mostly sell them to parents, but we actually have to think about the children as well. And again, we think about them, but the reality is like, how do we make sure they're going to thrive here? What are the struggles they have? How are they wired? What do they think of this change? Because most of the time, the child has no say in any of this.
What's so interesting is people say, oh yeah, kids have choice all the time. And then when you actually frame it and they say it, it's like, no, the parents picked three schools, right? And they picked two inferior schools to compare to the third one. So it made the kid believe he had a choice to go. That's not choice. That's picking. Picking is very different than choosing.
Tim Fish: You know, Bob, so many of our schools have heard about the four parent jobs, which we talked about, we've talked a lot about our donor jobs and our teacher jobs. I'm fascinated by the new work you're doing on employment. And I'm fascinated on what you are learning, because as you know, education is really facing a, a pretty dire situation in terms of young people or anyone really wanting to go into teaching.
And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that situation, and how schools might think about their own innovation and design moving forward to help them address this sort of looming teacher shortage.
Bob Moesta: So the book isn't out until November of this year, and I think it's called Job Moves. Right, and it's this aspect of understanding what causes you to say, today's the day I'm going to leave this school and go teach at that school, or I'm going to leave this job and go to that job. And we did everything from people who worked at McDonald's to Chipotle to CEOs who basically went to retirement, and everything in between.
Like a lawyer who basically gave up 75% of his salary to become a judge. Like why would, it just makes no sense. And you start to, because everybody thinks jobs is about money. But when you start to realize that choosing a new job is about making progress in your life, you start to realize that at some point, that he basically said, I have enough money. I want to give back. Here's how I'm going to give back. I'm going to actually be, so in his mind, going to a judge was more of a, like a not-for-profit move than it is about a promotion to being a judge and trying to get power and influence. Right?
But some people go to a judge to be power and influence. So you start to realize there's variables involved, there's context and there's outcome and it's all the same thing. And the one myth that actually comes in is, and you can truly relate to this, is that when you start it, on the surface level, almost everybody says money. I got to make more money. But in the pushes and pulls, there's no money.
It's because when you say, well, what do you mean by money? It's like, well, I want more money because I want respect. I need more money because my family requirements are growing. I need more money because I want to go do these other things. And so you start to realize that it's not about money. Money is a surrogate. It's a stand-in for what they really want to do.
Tim Fish: It's for the outcome they seek, right?
Bob Moesta: Right. And so you start to realize like this whole recruiting thing of resumes and—resumes are just lies we tell, we'll say, oh, we accomplished this and this and this. Nobody accomplishes anything by themselves. Right? And so when you say, and so when I say like I was part of something, it's like most of the time I want to make sure it's like, there are lots of people involved to help me do these different projects. It's not just me. I was part of these equations, but I wasn't the full thing.
And so ultimately, what we realize is it’s a two-sided problem, is that most people just run from their previous job because they hate it so much and anything's going to be better. And so part of it is like, well, how do you describe the progress you're really trying to make? And so we built a process to help people do that. If you look at how job descriptions are made, they're literally copied from the internet. And then there are wish lists of all the things we want that person to do, which ends up being unrealistic. And then we never actually think about how to match the job to the person. We think about how to make the person fit the job.
And if you actually take the time to actually carve out the things that person sucks at, they will stay there almost 10 times longer. But if you actually say they're good at these five things, but they suck at these two things, and you make them do that and then you put them on a PIP within three years because they're not good at it and they gotta get better at it and you end up firing them because they're not good at the two things you knew upfront they weren't good at. It's crazy.
Tim Fish: It's crazy. And boy, I cannot wait to read it when it comes out. You know, Bob, my last question for you is around the idea of, as you look at education, you look at where we're headed, and any hopes for teachers?
Bob Moesta: Yeah, I actually have, the hard part is when I see public schools, I think it's a very hard thing to change because they have so many systems wrapped around them. And the reality is, is teaching is way more dynamic and trying to actually figure it out is actually enabling them to have some freedom.
And to be honest, once you lock it in, it's very hard to add or change or innovate. So one of the reasons why the public schools are falling behind is because they cannot innovate at all. And so I have the most hope for the independent schools because they have the ability to change. They, I've seen it, I've worked with them. They have the ability to actually see different things. They have the ability to actually, uh, adjust the resources in the right places.
Tim Fish: This has been such a great conversation. And I'll tell you, I've heard you talk about different things, different push pulls and other things. And yet each time I hear it, I learn something a little bit different. I get, I explore the, the dynamic and you would think push-pull anxiety habit, for example, is so sort of like clear, and it is so deep. And each time we talk about it, you help me get a little farther in my understanding of it and the nuance of it.
Bob Moesta: So let me put it this way, is there a book that you read every year or two, over and over again?
Tim Fish: Yeah, there's a few. Yeah, I mean, one book I've read, I've actually read three times is Competing Against Luck.
Bob Moesta: Right. And so here's the reason why, is that most people think when you've read the book, you know the book, but the book is actually context dependent. So you, the first time you read it, you knew this and you were so blown away with the notion of the forces that you missed the timeline. Cause your mind is just rolling with it. And then what happens is the second time you read it, you find the timeline, like, Oh my God, where was that? Cause you just didn't see it.
Tim Fish: Yep, yep, totally. It happened when I read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, that rereading it opened it up in a completely different way.
Bob Moesta: And so I listen to books mostly, but I listen to books over and over again until I don't get anything new from it. Because it's not that the book changes, it's that I change, and that my context changes, that lets me see these words from a new perspective and cause me to think differently.
And that's what I, my goal is to every time I meet with you, like I might, it might seem like I'm saying the same things over and over again, but the reality is when you hear it another time, you now are in a, we're, I mean, it's been a couple of years. And so now all of a sudden it's like, it's just like, oh, all these new things. And it's like, they're not new things. They're just things you couldn't actually wrap your head around before when we had it, 'cause you're so full.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's so true. Thank you, my friend. Until next time.