Elliot Moss
Welcome to this Mishcon Academy Digital Session. I’m Elliot Moss, I’m a Partner and Director of Business Development at Mishcon de Reya. You will see two lovely people who have joined me today. We have John Vincent, Co-founder of Leon and he’s also the co-author of this book here which I have in front of me. If you haven’t read it I suggest you do, it’s called Winning Not Fighting and it was co-written with Si-Fu Julian Hitch. And there is Julian in his…
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
Hi everyone.
Elliot Moss
You’ve got the aspirational study, you’ve actually put books there, it’s a green screen. I’m in one of my kids’ bedrooms at the top of the house. Originally we were going to say, ‘What’s going to happen to the high-street after Covid-19?’ and frankly if, like me, you have read anything then you have read a lot about just how hard this is for everybody but rather than talk about that, I want to actually focus on the book and I want to focus on what this book is about and why like anything good it is useful. And useful, it was written before this pandemic happened and the reason it’s useful is because it goes back a long way in time to the ancient principles of a martial art called Wing Chun. So, let me just start at the beginning. Can you, John and Julian - you can decide who goes first – just give me a quick overview of what this book is about and why you decided to write it?
John Vincent
There was, there was a certain irony which is that this book is about the martial art practised by Bruce Lee. And the martial art actually came from the Shaolin Temple in the southern area of China and one of its principal philosophies is Daoism as well as, as well as in Buddhism. And if anyone has read the Dao de Jing they’ll know that it’s, one of the verses in the Dao de Jing is once you’ve understood this, try not to wang on about it, right? Try not to kind of… you don’t need to kind of preach, it’s not like you know, Evangelical Christianity. Just, just maybe keep it to yourself. So, in a, in a bid to keep it to ourselves we wrote this book and you know, I’m hoping that it doesn’t sell very well so it can be true to Daoism and remain a secret.
Elliot Moss
And just before asking Julian about the martial art itself, to reassure those people who think they’ve entered into a conversation about Buddhism and Daoism today, in isolation from anything to do with the world of commerce, John, how many restaurants are you responsible for? How many are there in the Leon family now?
John Vincent
We have 75 restaurants and we have about £140 million of, of revenue, including the revenue of our franchisees. It’s still I would say a small business you know, I’m sure there are people that run much bigger businesses. But you know it’s been, it’s been fun building it.
Elliot Moss
And I only mention that just to contextualise the fact that this isn’t written by someone who has no experience of business. If you read the book you’ll realise that John, along with Henry his partner, has this business, has sold other businesses and I just say that to make the point that the cynical and there will be many although we’re all probably becoming less cynical as this thing goes on, the cynical will say, ‘Well, how does it relate?’ Let’s go now to Julian and let’s just talk about briefly those four doors and talk about why… how Wing Chun found you.
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
Thanks. Thank you everyone for inviting me. Yeah I’ll just… It’s an interesting one. So, the first thing about Wing Chun is it’s the only martial art that’s created by females. Now, that’s quite an important point because it brings a paradigm to that most people don’t think. So, I’m sure we’ll talk about the sort of militaristic language and why we talk about winning and not fighting. But Wing Chun came about in 495 AD in the founding of the Shaolin Temple. That’s a long time ago and I think what’s really interesting for – particularly now is it came about at a time of mass trouble. So, they’d had centuries of warfare, plagues, economic disasters. They really understood what suffering was. So, it hadn’t gone through 04:25 warfare, they 04:26 suffering and they kind of worked out. They worked out a system for how do you create something that’s beyond that in a way that you can thrive despite the environment and that’s where the martial art came in. So, it’s unusual because the martial art was twinned with physical movements to bring this alive. And what makes that important is, particularly in the west, what we’re so fascinated with is the mind that we’ve become so disassociated with anything else that we think particularly our rational brain is the only thing that counts. But that really skews us from understanding how the human works, understanding our natural nature, it makes us suffer quite a lot. So, what the martial art did is it said, ‘Actually, if you can understand how to move it can create a solution to many other things’.
Elliot Moss
If we’d have done this in our, in our lovely office and we’d had everyone in the room, at this stage we probably would have had a bit of an example of what you mean. Can you just take us through a one minute, or 35 seconds or whatever it takes to do the breathing exercises and just talk to us about breathing and as you said, being in the moment?
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
Right all you are going to do to start off with is you’re just going to have your feet shoulder width apart.
Elliot Moss
Yep.
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
And we’re going to have our hands on our stomach. So, from here. We breathe in through the nose. We hold. And then we breathe out through the mouth. And then breathe out and relax.
Elliot Moss
And there we go, right, good. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Right I mean I just… it occurred to me, I’ve never done it before except with John possibly after a dinner when he was showing me this stuff but I think it’s, it’s really important. Can, can I ask something which is very pertinent right now? There’s these contradictions right the way through about, stay relaxed but expect, expect to be punched. Focus on the next move. What is the thing that we need to change next? In terms of that mantra, talk to me a little bit John about that sense of contradiction and why that is at the centre of Wing Chun and how it relates to life and to business.
John Vincent
What Chinese thinking does very differently from Western thinking, is it understands dualities. It understands that things that we see as opposites and potentially things which shouldn’t be entwined together, the Chinese see as inherent. So, they see everything as, ‘You cannot understand the idea of up without down or indeed the idea of good without evil’.
Elliot Moss
And that theme, how does that manifest itself in the strategies and the ideas and the actions that you’ve taken in Leon over the years?
John Vincent
I mean, the first door of Wing Chun is around, is the way of the little idea. Let’s take the first door for example. The way of the little idea and the way of the little idea is when you first stop the form is very… you don’t turn, you face yourself and so the very idea of knowing yourself is inherent in the first form, first form and the idea of staying relaxed and the idea of knowing yourself and staying relaxed then come together. So, I think that what was evident at the start of the Coronavirus crisis for example, was if your purpose is to make money and you have built your business on that purpose, then when you hit a crisis you have to do PowerPoint presentations, you have to have board meetings, you have to have steering group meetings, you have to have task forces. You probably start a war room, because actually if you’ve got a war room it reassures everyone that there’s really serious stuff going on. Right? But actually, if you know yourself… I mean, inherent within mastery is giving up the fruits of money, fame, ego etcetera. Right? If the business knows what it is, it doesn’t have to pause for a second to know what is right to do in a crisis. So, you know, at the start of this crisis we always knew we were serious about making it easier for everyone to eat and live well. So, as the context changed, what we had to do given that objective or given that purpose, it became obvious, right? Which was, there are tons of doctors and nurses working in the critical care wards, unable to change their PPE kit. There were… not PE kit, Elliot, PPE. And so, and so basically, they couldn’t change their PPE kit and so you know, we knew they needed feeding. We had letters from 82 year olds saying, ‘I’ve gone to the silver hour at Tesco. It’s full of young people and I cannot get any deliveries’. So, we knew we had to start an e-commerce platform to link up the ailing food service industry, all the suppliers who were going under, with those people and so literally the, the, the decisions took seconds not weeks to make.
Elliot Moss
How does the juxtaposition between strategy of £140 million business and the happenstance of John Vincent of his teams walking into opportunities, how does it reconcile itself?
John Vincent
The attraction of Wing Chun is it, it places a lot of emphasis on defining winning, recognising winning is the opposite of fighting and then allowing people the freedom and responsibility to be in-flow together as a group to achieve something. I was you know. at P&G and Bain. Even when I was running Whyte and Mackay, where I was running it with and for Vivien Immerman, a lot of the metaphors that we used were military. You know, we would talk about killing the enemy, targeting the customer. We would talk about strategies that took place in as I said before, the war room. And one of the things that we do at Leon when people join is we try and replace those military metaphors with animal metaphors or water metaphors or tree and garden metaphors and so what we were able to do you know, through this crisis, in inverted commas, what we were able to do is to trust the team, especially when we’re not in contact with each other all the time, to do the right thing. Based on a single outcome.
Elliot Moss
Julian, just tell me how do you take a John Vincent or anybody through a journey of the four doors? Of stopping thinking. You know. I know John well. He thinks a lot. How do you disable his thinking mechanism, the rational mind, to enable the body to just take over? How have you done that?
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
This is where the physical is so important. Because if you’re interested in changing the mindset and changing the training, changing the strategy, changing the outcome, you have to move and then think. Is what John was saying, rather than think and then move. Because if you have a problem that you’re trying to solve, you keep thinking on it all the time. It doesn’t actually solve that problem.
Elliot Moss
You say somewhere in the book and – and Julian you reference it. Something will always go wrong. You are always going to get hit. Right now, what would be your – for both of you – your kind of key bit of advice for anyone who’s listening to this in terms of how you deal with being hit and you deal with the fact that something has gone wrong, something way beyond our control on many levels?
John Vincent
Life is neither ship nor good. It is literally the lens through which we see everything. So, so two CEOs in very similar businesses, two team members in restaurants could take this exact ‘crisis’ and have exactly the opposite responses to it. And I think that, so Julian’s point earlier it’s not the crisis which is affecting us, it’s our response to it.
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
I think one of our biggest challenges is the judgements that we put out there and as I say that definition of something as a crisis and so on and does it help us? So, I would say firstly as John was saying – given yourself – I would say just giving yourself a pause to take that breath; to understand where you are right now; to calm yourself down; to see yourself where are the opportunities? I think it’s much more about understanding yourself, understanding your fears and using that breath and that movement to create some more flow in your life. So, I’d say now once you’ve – in battles you can get it out more – is actually the more stressed you are the more you need to move, the more you need to breath, actually the more of a pause you need to take. Because that is when that kind of inspiration comes, that opportunity comes, those thoughts come where you can, you can feel something different.
Elliot Moss
Thank you both. Lots to take from this but the basic thing to me, if I only had one phrase is ‘Move first, think second’ and how you get to that point – well, that’s a long journey! We’re not going answer that in the next 30 seconds. But John Vincent, Julian Hitch, thank you so much for your time. I hope you’ve all enjoyed it and everyone keep well. Take it easy.
Si-Fu Julian Hitch
Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate it.
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