Spencer Lodge is nothing if not restless – in mind and body – and living in Dubai feeds both.
“I’ve lived in 10 countries. I’ve lived in Amsterdam, in Brazil, in Holland, Italy, Egypt, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. My dad was in the oil industry when I was a kid, so I lived in West Africa – Nigeria, then Venezuela as a kid. Living in different countries has never been something that scared me.”
But the experience has grown him.
“When I was young and I left London to work in Hong Kong, and all of my mates were like, ‘Why are you leaving the city? We love it here! We have such a good time.’ Well, I was getting paid a lot more in Hong Kong for starters. And when I returned, I discovered that London hadn’t changed – but I had. I'd become this new person, more worldly. I had more experience of life, knew new kinds of people in my life, new tastes, new flavors. It was exciting for me.”
Dubai, which has become a crossroads of the world for the monied international set, has been a bonanza for this international provocateur and deal-maker. In fact, he’s become a veritable institution in Dubai with his breakout hit podcast Unscripted, one of the most popular podcasts in this region.
Lodge has featured many of the business and social leaders in the Middle East, among them content creator Khalid Al Ameri, business psychologist Ghenwa Habal, F1 mechanic Marc Priestly, and HR leader Emma Davies. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve met over 300 people on the podcast now. I'm just fascinated by why people do what they do.”
Watch Spencer Lodge at METAL
He pins his curiosity to a moment, years ago, when his mind opened.
“In my early years, I thought that everyone who made big money worked in money. But one day I was walking down the street with my wife where we live, and she said to me, ‘How many people from our [finance] industry live on our street?’ and I was like, ‘No one.’ She asked, ‘What do you think everybody else does?’ It made me stop and think. There's a whole load of people making a whole load of money, being really successful, doing a whole myriad of different things. I decided then and there that I wanted to meet them.”
Lodge grows animated talking about the variety of people he’s been discovering.
“One of one of my closest friends here in Dubai makes ten million dollars a week. He started as a poor guy from India, got a job moving freight, got himself to Rotterdam, saw a way to cut costs, set up an office in his two bedroom flat and put himself in the middle of the global freight trade! Ten million a week in frozen fish! Hilarious!”
Lodge made his initial money in insurance. “I saw how much it cost businesses to lose employees and have to rehire. It’s a nightmare for them. I analyzed that data and asked what could I do to reduce people's leaving? What can we do to make it so employees want to stay at their companies? Can we implement new training programs? Can we understand what their problems are? Turns out the number one problem people have at work is stress. So we created a piece of software that allowed companies to redo their HR to help people manage their stress.”
He points out that most of us were told “to roll our sleeves up, suck it up, and get on with it. You’re lucky to have a job! Man up! Deal with your problems! It can't be that bad! You should be grateful! For goodness’ sake, what's wrong with you?!”
That attitude doesn’t help, he discovered. Keeping it positive does.
ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE
“In Dubai,” Lodge says, “we're a city with hundreds of different cultures and mindsets. But in my company, no negativity is allowed – period – in any way, shape, or form, period. If you come into the company, you’ve got every opportunity to work hard, develop yourself, and grow. But if you were downstairs, out the back door of the office, smoking, bitching about who you work for?”
Negativity, he preaches, “is poison. You must be optimistic, and you must be positive and can-do when it comes to working. By doing that, we’ve built a business with 750 salespeople, the largest real estate brokerage in town, and that business ... is literally on fire because of that one strict rule.”
Lodge doubles down on the disruptive power of negativity.
“It's a cancer. It's evil. If you've got someone sitting next to you in an office and they're bitching and moaning, how does it impact your work? It will rub off on you, and when you are in business development or sales, you don't need that. You’ve got enough challenges! You’ve got enough people saying ‘no’ to you! You’ve got enough people yelling at you on the phone. So we’ve created an environment where positivity is a required constant. You’re given one warning, and then you’re gone.””
He brings this positive energy to several companies he works with. “We get HR and finance departments to stop resenting each other, stop being scared of each other. We show finance how HR’s positive ideas can actually save money. We put it in dollars and cents terms so they get it. And guess what? The relationship utterly changes. Instead of having competing goals, they feel that they’ve got each others' backs, that they are working together. That just changes everything for every employee.”
The choice is simple, to Lodge.
“If you've got a choice between being an optimist or a realist, of working together toward goals or against each other, what would you choose? I'd much rather be optimistic. I'd much rather be happy about the future… than grumbling and complaining. So if I have one message, I suppose it’s be as optimistic as you like, and get other people to be optimistic around you, because then, you'll be a joy to work with – and everybody wins.”
Written by Adam Gilad
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