Jennifer Vaughan Maanavi shares how to harness HQ, Jeff Desjardins outlines the power of data-driven storytelling, and it's about to get impactful

"I firmly believe that you have to make sure when you’re pivoting that it is more about going somewhere else versus leaving where you are." In You've Got This this week, CEO and Co-Founder of Physique 57 Jennifer Vaughan Maanavi shares her advice for those contemplating career pivots, why she thinks HQ is the next concept to join EQ and IQ, and what's coming up in the health and fitness space. Be sure to check out her answers below, along with a special guest interview with Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Visual Capitalist Jeff Desjardins and announcing our next guest, journalist and author Joann S. Lublin.

Victoria: "With an extensive background in finance, you made the switch to co-found Physique 57 when you heard that your favorite workout studio The Lotte Berk Method was closing, and decided to open up a new studio inspired by the best elements of what you'd learned alongside co-founder Tanya Becker. What advice would you have for those looking to make a pivot in their careers, and what are some signs that an opportunity might be the right fit?"

Jennifer: "This question has been asked to me many times from entrepreneurs I mentor and coach, but significantly more during our current state of the world. The current pandemic has led many people to self-reflect and shift their career path, and I firmly believe that you have to make sure when you’re pivoting that it is more about going somewhere else versus leaving where you are. You have a long runway and more opportunity if it’s more about going someplace new with more options that you’re interested in versus leaving where you are. As I self-reflect during my journey, I worked in Wall Street during the peak of my career, and The Lotte Berk Method was closing its studios, I saw this as a new trajectory for me to enter the fitness marketplace. Of course, this was a big step for me, but I was willing to learn and take a couple of steps backward. You don’t need to be 100% geared up and skilled to do the new role, but you need to have a baseline and be humble enough to learn along the way because each industry has idiosyncrasies that you won’t know until you’re there, so you have to have eyes wide open."

Victoria: "You've predicted that the next concept to be aware of as a leader beyond IQ or EQ is HQ, or "health quotient." Can you expand on that idea?"

Jennifer: "For the past hundred years, the typical business model has been executives being rewarded for pure performance —it was all about delivering results, followed by financial compensation. As we look forward, more recently, the value of how you treat your employees and the people around you is crucial, and that is the critical success to building the next generation of leaders —how you train, coach and mentor. If we look at Physique 57 as an example, delivering results is very important, but that does not overtake adhering to the company's core values, and when you do, there's more of a reward. While we are putting all the ingredients to set us up for success as we move forward, the key component that is missing is how you treat and reward yourself. At Physique 57, we have been prioritizing our mental and physical health. We have asked our employees to be smart, empathetic, and prioritize their health— so I think there needs to be a dialogue about this, along with financial reward, which is what you would expect in a business —your company wanting you to be healthy. Are you taking care of yourself? There should be a way to encourage employees to do that, and reward them for it."

Victoria: "What innovations are you most excited about in the health and fitness space?"

Jennifer: "Innovation is more about mindset than technological advancements. According to NPD retail data, the health and fitness equipment revenue more than doubled, to $2.3 billion, from March to October, as we see the revolution of at-home fitness to stay. There is much emphasis on connected fitness and wearables, but I don’t believe that’s what is needed to make our country a healthier place generally. Not a large number of people exercise that intensely, and you don’t need to spend much money to do that. What will make us a healthier nation is teaching people you can do 10-20 minutes of exercise a day in your living room - which would be leaps and bounds better than doing nothing. Suppose we can get into a mindset of doing a bit of movement every day - even if it’s just a stretch. If we can get people off the couch doing that, that’s an innovation. Connected fitness and other innovations are catering to (in a terrific way) those who already workout. People who already work out know a lot more about their bodies. This is fantastic, but I’m thinking about how we can help everyone think differently around exercise, dancing around their living room for 15 minutes every morning, and they would see a difference. So I’m thinking about ways to get in touch with those who aren’t active yet; that’s where change occurs. It’s about bridging the gap from intention to action. If a technological advancement was simply saying to Alexa, 'remind me to move from 6:00pm - 6:20 pm,' that’s an innovation, and that’s pretty simple. That’s all we need."

Follow Jennifer on LinkedIn.

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If you've heard of the website Visual Capitalist, then you've seen some of the work created by founder and editor-in-chief Jeff Desjardins. With a recently published book, SIGNALS, compiling some of their data-driven content about the global economy, I was excited to learn a bit more about Jeff's story and what's coming up next for the publication.

Victoria: "Can you tell us what inspired you to found Visual Capitalist in 2011?"

Jeff: "This all goes back to solving a problem. Which is at that time, and still today, companies and people in general have trouble communicating their message and getting information out to people. What we realized at that time was 65% of people, according to science, are visual learners, so they learn by looking at visual cues (in the case of what we do, charts, data, and infographics that standout visually). And so what we found was this basic way of absorbing information wasn’t really satisfied by the way the current media was. But our idea was to take data, either what’s happening in the world or if we’re working with an advertiser or client their proprietary data or message, and build that out through visuals, and disseminating that to the public. 

My background is in marketing and media. I graduated from the Bachelor of Commerce program with a specialization in marketing, worked for an ad agency for a few years, traveled extensively after that to 30 different countries. And when I came back, I wanted to work on the client side, not the agency side. And when I was doing that, some of the clients I was working with were struggling. They were looking to reach investors online, but they really couldn’t get any exposure. So we came up with the idea of starting to do things visually and it morphed from there over time. It changed organically. We were doing it with companies, and then we realized it was getting a ton of traction and views online. I partnered with a graphic designer early on, and he became our creative director, now our managing editor. So we started working with clients, then doing our own stuff, and now we do every imaginable topic and industry. But it started out very specific early on. "

Victoria: "Visual Capitalist's focus on translating some of the 2.5 exabytes of data generated each day has helped create a unique content destination for millions of people around the world. What advice would you have for other entrepreneurs looking to find and harness their own unique opportunities?"

Jeff: "I have two points around this that I’ve learned through my career and listening to other smart people. The first one is if you’re working on an idea and you want it to be successful, it has to be non-consensus and right. So the basic premise has to be correct, but the hard part is it has to be non-consensus. This is based on the phraseology of Mike Maples Jr. who has a 2x2 diagram that talks about this, but I think it makes a lot of sense: the non-consensus part is the hard part. If you have an idea that everyone has thought about and tried, it won’t make a huge impact, so you have to try something new in some way. 

"The other idea is something we experienced in our journey, based on a Jeff Bezos quote, 'we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.' Similar to Mike Maples, what you’re doing has to be different or completely new if you want to make an impact. And if you’re doing something that’s highly differentiated or new, you have to be willing to be misunderstood by people, or people will have misconceptions about what you do."

Because we focus so highly on visuals, people keep thinking we are a design agency of some sort, but we reach many millions of people through our work, and most of our revenue is from reaching our audience thanks to advertisers. We’re starting to get over this now, but for the first 6 or 7 years, people were asking us to design their slide decks for them, which is not really what we do."

Victoria: "What do you hope people learn from your new book Signals: Charting the New Direction of the Global Economy?"

Jeff: "So Signals, the idea behind it is there’s so much noise that is out there. A massive amount of data being created every day. And that total amount of data doubles every 2 years. We will have more data created in the next 2 years than in all of our past history combined. So people trying to comprehend what’s going on in the world of business, in future trends, there are so many sources and conflicting information out there and opinions. You can find analysts saying one thing or another thing. The information can be confusing and conflicting. Because we have a ton of experience in pouring through the data, finding different trends, we want to find the 20 or 30 trends that we think are ones that are indisputable —most data sources align to show you what is happening. As an example of that, aging in the global demographic. The median age of the world has been rising since 1970, and it’s going to continue rising until the year 2100 according to almost every projection. This is a trend that is indisputable. But as the median age rises, it has these impactful effects that will trickle down to every aspect of society, trade relationships, businesses operating… so many profound effects in all these other areas. The goal of the book is to summarize things happening around the world that are indisputable through data, visualize those trends, and show the effects of those trends, so that people can understand the mega-trends that will be impacting the world at any given time. 

Like anything, interpreting data is a skill that you learn. The way I think about it is humans evolved over a very long period of time and our brains have been forming but this data boom has only happened in the last 10-20 years. So we don’t naturally have the intuition of dealing with large amounts of data. This is something we have to learn. And as the world has more and more data and information we have to sift through, we have different techniques like algorithms sorting data for us, but being able to comprehend this data is a skill you can learn. With this book, my initial idea was 'here are the 20 or 30 things that create a foundation of what’s happening in this world.' And as you read this, you can learn to pick up more trends, perhaps specific to your life or your industry that build off of these foundational trends. And you can use these same techniques to analyze the data that’s more specific to you. The challenge comes when you’re trying to compare and contrast data sources that are conflicting. People might gravitate to one particular angle of what’s happening and ignore the other side. Being able to put that aside is a skill in and of itself, but it’s something that has to be learned. You have to be humble and willing to be wrong and to learn from those experiences."

Follow Jeff on LinkedIn.

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Next week's guest: Joann Lublin

I'm thrilled to share that our guest for next week's interview will be Joann Lublin. As management news editor for The Wall Street Journal from 2002-2018 as well as creator of the Wall Street Journal's careers column and ongoing contributor, Joann is also the author of the books Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World and Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life. With that in mind, here's what I'll be asking Joann:

• Can you share with us what's guided your extraordinary professional journey across nearly five decades?
• For your recently-released book Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life you interviewed 86 executives who also happened to be moms to gather and share their insights. This book has become more timely than ever due to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on mothers in the workforce. What do you hope readers take away from your book?
• What advice would you have for other aspiring authors and journalists?

If you'd like to join in the conversation, share your question for Joann in the comments below, and thank you for reading and being a part of You've Got This.