How Barnes & Noble made a comeback

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JAMES DAUNT: We really need to put in lots of filters to try to keep the AI rubbish out. There is going to come a time, perhaps, when these books come through and we would ask publishers, to the extent that they know, to indicate whether books are AI-assisted or written completely by AI. Then we can indicate that to customers. I think transparency is important, but we are booksellers. If customers want to read particular books, we will sell them. Everybody starts shouting at me when I say that, but that isn’t true. We feel a deep, natural suspicion of it.

JEFF BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

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I’m Jeff Berman, your host. Today, we have the leader who has taken on the daunting task of turning around Barnes & Noble and doing it with flying colors. I have been looking forward to this conversation for some time. Welcome to Masters of Scale, James Daunt.

DAUNT: Thank you very much.

Copy LinkThe origins of Daunt Books

BERMAN: I’m thrilled to have you for so many reasons, not least of which being that I happened to be in London this spring. We made a point of going to one bookstore, and one bookstore only. It bears your name. We probably spent 90 minutes there and walked out with far too many books to schlep back across the pond. But I’m an avid reader. I’ve got an Instagram just for my books, and I’d love to start with where this comes from. You had a burgeoning career in finance. You could obviously have gone and done any number of things, and you sort of tossed it all aside to go open a bookstore. What happened?

DAUNT: I think “burgeoning career” is quite flattering. I don’t suppose any of my then-colleagues will remember it quite that way. I was extremely young, and I wanted to do something that married with my interests, and I read a lot. So I settled on a bookstore, and there I got stuck, actually, quite early on.

BERMAN: What do you mean, you got stuck?

DAUNT: Well, you set up a business, and I think when you’re young, and I was extremely young, you think, “Well, I’ll try this, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll go back and do something else.” But actually, as soon as you’re embedded in something, you get all sorts of obligations. I had investors, so I then had the obligation of paying them back their investments or the embarrassment of losing their money. And you’re employing people quite quickly, so you have those obligations. In some ways, that is a trap. Certainly early on, I think I probably felt it to be a trap, because at the beginning we weren’t successful.

BERMAN: What do you mean, you weren’t successful in the beginning?

DAUNT: I opened the store in 1990. The first Gulf War happened. There was a recession. Our neighboring stores all closed down. We simply didn’t have enough business to pay the rent, and then you have to work all the hours God gives and scrimp and decide whose bill you’re going to pay and whose you’re not. All of that can become quite difficult.

BERMAN: What got you through it, and then what turned the corner for you?

DAUNT: Probably stubbornness and application. I think there are many people who’ve set up businesses who probably have had the same experience. Slowly, it began to work. In fact, our sales grew every single month I was open from the moment we opened, so we just got over the tipping point probably after about three or four years. We were underwater by 10 percent, and then we were underwater by 6 percent, and then we were flat, and then we were above, and then we could breathe.

BERMAN: Was there an insight that led you to believe you could maintain that or accelerate and get past that tipping point?

DAUNT: Bookselling is like most things in retail. It’s attention to detail, and it’s presentation. It’s service. It’s the assortment that you have. It’s the inventory backing. It’s the judgments you make. We were just able to steadily improve all of those things. Frankly, now, 35 years later, I still believe that every year we make it a bit better.

BERMAN: What allows you to make it a bit better every year?

DAUNT: You try to really analyze every part of the store, and then you’re responding to what’s going on in the world.

Reading tastes change. The makeup of your customer base slightly changes, and then how do you adapt the store to best optimize and really give the best experience to that customer base?

Copy LinkWhy retail can depend on judgment over data

BERMAN: When you think about how you merchandise a store, how much of that is gut instinct and feel, and how much of that is data?

DAUNT: I think a lot of it is gut instinct and feel, inasmuch as it’s a qualitative rather than a quantitative judgment, but you can teach it. In fact, most of the time, including now that we run a very large business, it’s about putting the data aside. The data can occasionally be an interesting reference point, but it’s the judgments you make almost in defiance of the data that will give you an inspiring store.

BERMAN: How do you know when to defy the data?

DAUNT: As booksellers, we are engaged in the process of curation. Quite often, it’s about having the right allocation of space. As a simple example, board books, little kids’ early reading for 2-year-olds, sell fantastically well. But 2-year-olds want to read the same board book again and again and again, and you really don’t need a big range of that. You can get enormous sales out of very small space.

Once you get up to young readers, 10-plus-year-olds, they read everything, and you just want to give that as much space as possible. But if you’re analyzing the data, and a lot of my predecessors did do that, they allocated space completely inappropriately. They had too many board books and too few young readers. Both groups became very unhappy because now the people who are after the board books don’t just have Goodnight Moon, they’ve got this enormous choice, so they’re now finding it quite stressful and difficult. And then the young readers don’t have enough.

BERMAN: I can appreciate that blindly following data, being data-driven, is deeply problematic for all the reasons you just laid out. But if there’s a meaningful variance in the data, are you looking at that and saying, “That really contradicts the gut that we have?”

DAUNT: Yes. It is worth also observing that we are dealing here with booksellers, and booksellers and data do not mix easily. Booksellers and numbers tend to be sitting in opposite corners of the room. We are the nerds who read all our books and, when we got to the math and science, just gave up.

BERMAN: You’re talking to one right here, so yes.

DAUNT: My other problem, always, with data is that it can be very tempting, particularly if you apply intelligence to it. Clearly, it’s hugely valuable. But it also unlocks this Pandora’s box, which is our danger: You then centrally control because you’ve got the data, and the data tends to be held centrally. Then we use the data to impose uniformity on the stores, and that really is the death knell for us. It works in almost every other branch of retail. It doesn’t work in books. So if you can drive out the data, that then empowers the local stores to really start interrogating how they’re engaging with their customer base and how they’re presenting their stores. If you do that long enough and inculcate that as a principle and as a culture, then you can reintroduce the data, and it gets used properly and without this sort of, I’m afraid, pernicious instinct to impose control, which a large corporate will always want to do.

Copy LinkHow James Daunt saw a path to save Waterstones

BERMAN: In the late aughts and the early 2010s, the large, iconic British bookstore chain Waterstones hit some financial skids, and as I understand it, you went looking for someone to finance your taking over that chain. Why?

DAUNT: One, an arrogance that I felt I could sort it out, that this was totally unnecessary. The sales in my own stores were going up. The sales in theirs were cratering. Every one of their stores I went into was really awful and getting worse. So I knew that I could really turn it around and make it so much better. I also knew if they disappeared, then I could open up more stores, but I was never going to open up 300 stores, and I was never going to open up the size and scale of the stores that Waterstones had. So if you could keep it all together, you got your 300 stores, and you would keep all these communities with bookstores, and that seemed worth doing.

BERMAN: And so you had courage of conviction, based on your experience with your chain of independent stores, that you could apply the same logic to a much bigger set of stores and turn them around, get growth back.

DAUNT: Yes, and the loss of confidence that was going on, largely in the face of Amazon, was misplaced. Bookstores are different from Amazon. Amazon will sell you a book extremely efficiently, and great, and all wonderful, and we all know how to do that. But at the end of the day, a book bought in a bookstore, discovered in a bookstore, is a better book. Same book, but it is a better book. And also, it’s just nice and enjoyable. These are places people will want to continue to come to, and the loss of confidence just needed to be reversed. We needed to get our booksellers to believe that they could run good bookstores, and then our customers would come back, and we’d be OK.

BERMAN: How did you go about finding an investor to put the money behind you to go make this happen?

DAUNT: I went around private equity firms and the like, and I said, “Here’s this great idea. Invest your money, and it will come back in multiples, and you will all be happy, and I’ll be happy, and you don’t have to put very much in. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?” And everybody said no. But one of them rang me up and said, “You know, I’ve just met a Russian. In fact, he’s having a cup of tea with me. Get on your cycle, put your helmet on, pedal over here, and meet him, because that’ll be fun anyway, but you can pitch to him.” And very sensibly and very agreeably, after about 40 minutes, maybe 35 minutes, this Russian entrepreneur said, “Yeah, OK, go ahead.”

BERMAN: Wow. Were you at all concerned that he might not be the right partner for you?

DAUNT: He wasn’t an oligarch as such, so we didn’t have those kinds of problems. He was an entrepreneur. He loved books. He very much identified with the purpose of bookstores and really got that, so that was all sort of big ticks. And he observed that Waterstones cost roughly half what a Premier League player had just been bought for by a London club, via another Russian. So it was a bargain as well.

BERMAN: Turnarounds are hard. They are not easy, even if you have deep experience in the sector and if you have real vision and the experience to give you the confidence you’ve got the right playbook. When did you have a sense, beyond your faith and optimism, that this was really working at Waterstones?

DAUNT: I think I was reassured, on arriving at Waterstones, that the core of the people in the business were the same tribe as me. They were booksellers. So that was a plus. I had people I could work with. It was also really upside down in terms of the principles by which it was being run. So sorting out that side of it seemed fairly straightforward. It’s hard work. It’s a grind. You’re changing a culture at the end of the day, and changing cultures is like stretching a rubber band: the minute you relax, it just pops back. But again, as you know, I’d been through it once before at Daunt Books. You just knuckle down. You concentrate. You do the basics. You drive forward improvements across the piece and be confident that it will come back.

Copy LinkWhy demystifying the Kindle helped bookstores

BERMAN: There was a frenzy around e-books at the time, and obviously e-books are a meaningful category now, not suggesting otherwise. Barnes & Noble, which you now lead but didn’t at the time, launched a competitor. There, I have to imagine, were arguments to lean into that and try to ride that wave, and to run entirely counter to it. How did you handle that in that moment at Waterstones?

DAUNT: I did it perhaps a little counterintuitively. Yes, we sold the Kindle. And the reason I did that was you should always do whatever is in the best interest of your customer. But my main motivation was I wanted my booksellers to stop fearing Kindle. There was this sort of obsession that people were coming into our stores and photographing books and then ordering them on Amazon, or coming in and choosing books and then downloading them on their Kindles, which simply doesn’t happen except in the most vanishingly small percentage of cases. So I wanted them not to fear the Kindle and to realize that their store was where people should come to discover books. So if we could put the Kindle in the middle of it, then you could demystify this thing. So we put the Kindles in the middle of it, sold an improbable number of them, as it happened. So that was helpful from a financial perspective, but it also demystified it.

Copy LinkTurning around Barnes & Noble

BERMAN: The turnaround at Waterstones is underway. You are succeeding. What happens that all of a sudden you are in discussions to also turn around Barnes & Noble?

DAUNT: I think that was simply because Barnes & Noble, unfortunately, was a sort of mirror of Waterstones pre-2011. Sales were declining because the bookstores weren’t very good. It was having a really tough time, and as a public company, they determined to sell. And again, we had an answer. We clearly had a model. And by then we had changed our owner, and we had a new backer with the resources, and they bought the company.

BERMAN: Sometimes when you have directly applicable experience, it is of massive value, and that same playbook is just going to work. You can have a coach go from one team to another, rebuild that culture, keep stretching that rubber band, not letting it snap back. But sometimes the game has changed and the same playbook won’t work. Has it worked the same way? Have you been able to run the same playbook, or has the universe changed and you’ve had to really adjust?

DAUNT: The U.S. is obviously different from the UK. It’s rather larger. The stores are rather larger. There are some nuances within there, but essentially, no, it’s very much the same. The customer buys books in the same way, almost literally the same books. The booksellers are the same. I call them a tribe. We are a tribe. So that sort of vocational drive that you have among the people who run the stores was the same. I have to say, I thought it would be rather easier and faster the second time around, but in fact, the timelines are almost identical.

BERMAN: Why hasn’t it been easier and faster, given the experience you had?

DAUNT: I think culture changes slowly.

BERMAN: Yeah.

DAUNT: And you may want it to go faster, but it’s enduring. And you can say, well, to get from A to B, we really have to go this route, because when we were at Waterstones, we went via that route and it was really tough.

And everyone scratches their heads and goes the tough route because they’re booksellers. That’s how it works. Slowly, you get yourself into the right place.

BERMAN: Still ahead, I talk with James about how introverted leaders often have underappreciated superpowers.

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Copy LinkHow autonomy can rebuild culture

In the early part of my career, I was very lucky to work with leaders and in organizations that had a mindset of: We agree on goals, we agree on resources, and then we get the hell out of your way until you raise your hand and say you need help with something. It’s how I prefer to work. It’s how I prefer to lead. In the middle to latter part of my career, I have come into organizations that are very much command and control. There is as little autonomy as possible, here’s how we do things, etc. And I have found it very difficult. It takes, in a small organization, at least a year; in a larger organization, much longer, to get people to really embrace this idea that they do have autonomy, they do have decision-making power, that their opinion matters, and that we want to trust them. What has worked for you in helping people make that same transition?

DAUNT: Whether rightly or wrongly, I’m always trying to flatten hierarchies, and you tend to inherit, particularly in this business, quite established hierarchies, not least of which is you have a store manager and then an assistant store manager and so on. It’s a hierarchy. Almost everything I do is about flattening those hierarchies and then trying to introduce collective responsibility among the team once you’ve done that. And it’s a much nicer way to work, much more engaging and much more empowering and all of those good things. But it’s so much more difficult that often people resist it. We’d rather have the hierarchy. Just tell me what to do, please. But I think ultimately, if you can get to a point of reasonable collective responsibility among a team, it’s a much healthier environment and much more responsive, and much more durable. We’re a retailer. People come and go, but it’s also a tough business. It’s seven days a week. You’ve got to open it at 9. You’ve got to close it at 9. It’s really hard work. And for that, you do need other compensations. The money is poor as well, so you really need other compensations.

BERMAN: The hours are long, but you won’t make much money.

DAUNT: Yeah.

BERMAN: So, right.

DAUNT: It’s not a great sell, is it?

BERMAN: Yeah.

DAUNT: So you better have a nice team and a sense of vocational fulfillment from what we do. It’s upon us to make that really true for them.

BERMAN: I have to imagine that switch from that command-and-control structure to more distributed decision-making culture also brings fear.

Because in a command-and-control structure, if you make a wrong move, you’ll probably get your head taken off, get fired, whatever it is. Have you found ways to model for team members that decisions that look good at the outset but turn out to be bad are actually to be celebrated and embraced, to encourage this kind of autonomy?

DAUNT: Yeah, I’m not very cuddly, so the celebration side of things—

BERMAN: All evidence to the contrary, sir.

DAUNT: I’m not very good at that. But what I am good at is not looking in the rearview mirror and quickly recognizing anything that we’re doing wrong, with no consequence to that and no reflection upon it. So I’m not one for saying, “Why did we make that idiotic decision, and who made it, and why did we make it?” Mine is just, “OK, it was idiotic. Move on. What are we doing now?” And I think if you continuously do that, it becomes easier and easier for people newer, younger, and less exalted in the hierarchy to acknowledge mistakes and say, “Are you sure, guys?” And for the people above to say, “Uh-oh, let’s switch.”

Copy LinkThe key to engaging with all demographics

BERMAN: Particularly in a moment, not just in the U.S. but globally, where it’s not just anti-intellectualism, it’s anti-fact, it’s anti-truth. It seems to be in vogue. Is that a trend you worry about, or is that actually something where you can be countertrend and that helps accelerate you?

DAUNT: I think the latter. We obviously live in the societies in which we live, with all of the concerns and tribulations that are there. But remember, as a bookseller, we serve every age and most demographics. I think there’s a feeling that bookstores are for educated, more affluent folk, but it isn’t. We appeal to everybody within our communities. But at the core of our market, and this has been true since I started bookselling 36 years ago, have been these young adults, so teenagers up through people in their early 20s. That’s when people really engage with bookstores and with reading, and that’s where a lot of the bestsellers come from. We read constantly that now it’s all about BookTok, or it’s all about romantasy, as though these are new things, and they’re not. It’s just a constant cycle of this demographic reading books like stink, and that’s why Harry Potter was a great thing, and now it’s Sarah J. Maas or whatever it might be. We sell books, and then everyone’s going, “Oh, nobody’s reading anymore.” Of course they’re reading.

You can see it even in the cycle of our day in a bookstore. We start off the day with lots and lots of buggies in our store, and the people pushing them. That can be the carer, the young mom, or whoever, but it’s noisy, and it’s full of kids running around because they’ve dropped off their sibling at school. That’s who comes in. They then leave because they’re getting tired and hungry. Then the old people are in our stores because they’re not working, they’re retired, and they like it because it’s quiet and they can come and natter. Then the lunchtime crowd comes in, and they want to get out of the way before all the kids who’ve left school come into town. Then it’s full of teenagers. Then the teenagers go back because they’ve got to do their work and get their school things out of the way. Then all the young people who are introverts courting come in because you don’t want to be in a bar, and you can do it here. And so it goes on. Everybody’s coming into our store, and they’re all engaging with the store in different ways, buying different things.

Copy LinkWhy Barnes & Noble doesn’t have a marketing department

BERMAN: BookTok does feel like a new thing. When a trend like BookTok begins to emerge, how do you determine when you should start investing marketing time in that?

DAUNT: We have the great benefit of not having a marketing department, so we have zero marketing dollars to spend. That makes it easy. So that’s never happening.

BERMAN: None whatsoever.

DAUNT: None whatsoever. Literally zero. But what we do have is young booksellers. And again, this model of leaving stores to do what they want turns out to be fantastically adapted for the social media age.

The media sees things on a national scale, but most of it isn’t happening on a national scale. It’s happening on a very local scale. It’s the BookTok in the local schools, in the local area, and what’s going on there. And if you’re employing them at the weekend, you’re going to be really locked into that, and we are. If you give them time and let them do what they want, and when they make mistakes you say, “OK, well, stop being so silly. Please use common sense. Be nice. Use common sense. Otherwise, get on with it,” you’re very attuned to these social media waves, and BookTok has been absolutely fantastic for us. A lot of it is taking place in our stores and quite a lot of it by our booksellers as well. I make this rather facetious joke that, “As long as we leave it to the kids with the blue hair, we’ll be fine,” and it is true.

BERMAN: I have to imagine if I were on your board or working at Barnes & Noble, I would be asking, as a former boss of mine was fond of saying, “It’s easier to catch a wave than create a wave.” You’re catching this wave using the younger people in your stores who are native to TikTok and are creators of BookTok. But James, what an opportunity to take the best of these BookToks from Barnes & Noble local booksellers and put a little bit of money behind them, turn them into ads, et cetera. Why not have a really thin marketing department to amplify the incredible marketing being done organically by your teams?

DAUNT: I’m sure we would be a much better and richer business were we to do that. But if you’re almost literally allergic to central control, and you know that if you ever impose central control, you could break this rather fabulous thing that we have going, you don’t need to.

Keep it small. We have a small home office that sits above each of our flagship stores. We have a New York office that sits on the floor above the Union Square store. Our Waterstones office is above the Piccadilly store. So you’ve got to walk through the store, see the books all the time, to get to work, and it’s a small number of people. Yes, you could do all of those things, but then the kid with the blue hair is going to be told what to do, and the kid with the blue hair doesn’t want to be told what to do. They just want to get on with it.

BERMAN: But the kid with the blue hair doesn’t have to be told what to do. It’s just a question of, oh, kid with blue hair in Omaha, Nebraska, or Santa Monica, California, hit the TikTok algorithm with this great post. We can just push some weight behind it to amplify it further.

DAUNT: They do it themselves. The booksellers are fantastically good at communicating store to store. Books that start taking off in one store just sort of spread like a rash through the business. So you don’t need to, and it keeps it authentic. I think one of the things about BookTok, or at least I’m told, because I have absolutely no idea about BookTok at all, is that authenticity is what resonates. And if you really do keep your hands off the whole thing, it does remain authentic. It is authentic. I also think if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it. We follow that principle with most things, other than if I can make my booksellers’ lives easier in the center, then I should invest in that. So I need to invest in IT. I need to invest in distribution centers. I need to invest in kit that makes their lives easier. That’s where I spend the dollars.

Copy LinkHow introverts can lead from the back seat

BERMAN: Not only are you not on BookTok, you are somewhat famously one of the more open about being an introvert among CEOs of large companies out there. What is a lesson about leading a large organization and a public-facing organization as an introvert that other introverts who are building and leading companies could take from your experience?

DAUNT: I’m sure I would be much better at it if I wasn’t, but at least it keeps me humble. I am of my tribe. I know I am genuinely a bookseller. I put in 21 years on the shop floor, and therefore I recognize booksellers. I know who they are. I’ve literally done every single piece of work that they do for very much longer than most of them have been alive, and I feel very connected to them. I may not express that, perhaps, but I definitely feel it. I think many introverts are quite confident in themselves, and if you can create a team that is assured in its direction, assured of its culture, assured of its strategy, things will be OK. I think you can lead from the back seat. You don’t have to always be in the front. I know there are wonderful flag-waving, rallying leaders, but I’m not one of those.

Copy LinkFiction recommendations for leaders

BERMAN: When we ask business leaders for books that have informed leadership for themselves or that they recommend to others, there’s a set of authors and books that you get pretty regularly: Jim Collins’ Good to Great, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. There’s a long list of nonfiction authors who show up regularly. We hear about fiction less when it comes to leadership lessons. What is a piece of fiction that you recommend emerging leaders, or leaders who are looking to grow as leaders, should read?

DAUNT: Really good fiction delves into the nature of humans and how humans are: relationships, rivalries, jealousy, all of those things. Most of the great novels are doing that one way or another, and I think if you’re reading them, you’re probably going to be better able to interpret and understand that and be responsive to it. Start with Middlemarch and sort of move on from there. You’re going to understand people perhaps a lot better if you’re doing that. I think that’s true generally of reading, if you’re reading widely and properly. Books are a civilizing force. They invite you to question, invite you to reflect, invite you to be more understanding, and all of those things are very necessary for leaders. Arrogance is a natural bedfellow of leadership, and one that needs to be resisted. But also, you’re constantly, or should be constantly, trying to think of how you are best equipped to help the people that you have working for you, how you make the team stitch together, how you recognize when egos are being either overinflated or challenged. How do you work through all of those internal jealousies, fears, or insecurities? You can sit down and just get a few plays out and read your Shakespeare. It’s all going to be in there.

Copy LinkWhy booksellers remain wary of AI-written books

BERMAN: One final question for you before we wrap, James. I have to believe that you are increasingly seeing books that are at least in part written by AI. How is bookselling and reading going to change, and what role will you all play in it, with this AI revolution in writing and publishing coming?

DAUNT: It’s going to be very interesting. We are fortunate in not being the first line of defense, if that’s what it is. Publishers publish the books, they edit the books, they choose what to publish or not to publish, and we then curate from among those. We have a deep, natural antipathy to anything that isn’t by a real author, and definitely at the moment exclude, and go to great effort to exclude, both from our online catalog. That probably happens, we think, with what’s in our stores naturally because we’re selecting and curating. But online, we really need to put in lots of filters to try and keep the AI rubbish out.

Will there be a world — and I have said there is going to come a time, perhaps, when these books come through — when we would ask publishers, to the extent that they know, to indicate whether books are AI-assisted or written completely by AI, and then we can indicate that to customers. I think transparency is important. But we are booksellers. If customers want to read particular books, we will sell them. Everybody starts shouting at me when I say that: “You’ll sell AI books, and that’s all I want.” But that isn’t true. We feel a deep, natural suspicion of it.

One of the things that we believe we do as booksellers is support authors, create the careers of authors. Of course, some of that is self-serving because you need these great books to come. But I think there’s a deep, natural respect and bond between booksellers and authors, and we really do believe that the author is important and necessary. Many of us, particularly those in our metropolitan stores, have always felt as booksellers that one of our roles is to bring authors to readers, to be a place in which they can meet and they can discuss and the like. The idea that that isn’t real is really counter to everything in which we believe. Is AI going to write the next great books? I very much doubt it, but it will take categories of books out quite clearly.

BERMAN: Such as?

DAUNT: Home study guides. That’s an easy thing. You can just see it: you sort of press a button and, voomph, it’s out. It’s going to come. It used to say Dr. Somebody or another at the bottom, and it won’t. It’ll say AI. So we’re not going to be able to be completely pure around this, I suspect. But for editors and publishers, how much they use AI is going to be a massive challenge for them.

BERMAN: Is it your theory of the case that there will be a meaningful market of buyers who want artisanal books?

DAUNT: Well, that is the case now. Going back to why it is that we sell so many new novels, so many things published now, it’s because people are responding to authors.

You know, otherwise you’d just read Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy — he wrote quite good books. You can go read all of those all you like. But people want the author. They listen to them. They hear about them. They read about them. They want the connection too. And we get these great swathes, whether it’s Sarah J. Maas or whatever it might be. Again, that’s all very, very focused on the author. So I think people really connect, and I don’t see that changing.

BERMAN: James, such a delight being in conversation with you. Thank you for being on Masters of Scale.

DAUNT: Great pleasure. Thank you.