June 21, 2024 • 39 mins
Adi and Rudi Dassler made sports shoes together - until a feud erupted between them. They set up competing companies, Adidas and Puma, and their bitter rivalry divided the sporting world, their family and even the inhabitants of their home town.
The Dassler clan turned bickering into an art form - even drawing the likes of soccer legend Pele into their dispute. But did the brilliant fires of hatred produce two world-class companies, or was it a needless distraction from the Dasslers' love for their craft?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The mayor of Hertzogenarak is going to watch a
game of soccer. On one foot, he wears a shoe
made by Adidas. On the other foot, a shoe made
by Puma. If you didn't know anything about Hurtzegenarak, you
(00:36):
might assume that the mayor must be unobservant, disorganized, a
little absent minded, not a bit of it. The mayor
of Hrzegenarak chose his footwear carefully. He's a diplomat. He
has to be. Hertzegenarak is a small town on the
(00:58):
Arak River in Bavaria, Germany, with a history that traces
back a thousand years. Its population just twenty four thousand.
The old town is picture postcard perfect. Cobbled streets and
medieval half timbered buildings are restored thirteenth century castle, a
(01:18):
barock church, ivy climbing up the clock tower, and a fountain.
A fountain with a modern statue depicting two groups of
children playing a childhood game tug of war. Look closely
and you'll see the children on one end of the
rope are in Puma shoes, the other team Adidas. This
(01:43):
small town in Bavaria is home to the headquarters of
not one, but two global behemoths of sports apparel, Adidas
and Puma, between them sell over thirty billion dollars worth
of clothes and shoes and equipment every year. For decades,
Herzogenarach has had a Puma side of the river and
(02:07):
an Adidas side, a Puma sponsored local soccer team and
an Adidas team, Puma families and Adidas families. The town
of the Lowered Games, it was called because people then
Hurtzognarach would glance down to check the brand of your
footwear before deciding how to greet you. The mayor grew
(02:36):
up in a Puma family. As a kid, he says,
I had only Puma clothes. Wearing Adidas would have been unthinkable. Now,
as a politician, he wears both brands, admittedly not usually
one on either foot. But today is a special day
September twenty first, two thousand and nine United Nations World
(03:01):
Peace Day, to mark the occasion workers from Adidas and
Puma are going to play a game of soccer. It
would have been impossible thirty years ago, says the mayor.
It's not Puma versus added as that might be pushing
the tentative datantes too far. Instead, each team has players
(03:24):
from both companies. One team wears white, the other black.
The specially made shirts have the three stripes of Addedas
on one sleeve Puma's Leaping Cat on the other. We
play for peace, the CEO of Puma tells assembled journalists.
It's a historical moment, adds the CEO of Adidas. It's
(03:50):
the kind of rhetoric usually reserved for peace talks in
the Middle East. How did the choice of leisure wear
in a small town in Bavaria becomes such a serious affair.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. This
(04:34):
is a tale about motivation at work, what it can achieve,
and the strange places it can take us when it
goes too far. The story starts in nineteen eighteen with
a young man coming home from the First World War,
Adolph Dassler Addie to his friends. ADDIE's dad was a weaver.
(04:58):
His mum washed people's linens in the shed in their yard,
but in the hardship of war, not many people could
afford to outsource their laundry. Returned to Herzegenauach to find
his mother's laundry shed shuttered and he decided to start
his own business there, making shoes. There was plenty of
(05:21):
leather to be scavenged from old army kits, helmets and
bags no longer needed. Addie collected them, cut them up
into strips, and stitched them into boots. The electricity kept
cutting out, so Addie invented a bicycle powered device to
work the leather. He got a friend to pedal. Addie
(05:42):
had never been trained as a cobbler, but he was
a keen athlete, a runner, a high jumper, and he
understood how hard it was to find good footwear for sports.
The state of the art in running spikes was simply
leather soles with nails banged through them. Addie was sure
he could do better. He spent hour after hour experimenting
(06:05):
with different kinds of spike and studs for soccer. His
shoes started to sell and he moved from the shed
into a factory. His older brother joined the business. Rudy
Dassler was a sportsman too, nicknamed the Puma, but in
other ways he wasn't like Addie at all. Addie liked
(06:28):
to tinker alone at his work bench. Rudy was suave
and loud and confident, a natural salesman. By nineteen thirty three,
when Hitler came to power in Germany, the Dassler brothers
were employing seventy people, and the Nazis seemed like they
might be good for the sports shoe business. In Maine,
(06:52):
camp Hitler dreamed of six million supremely fit athletes, all
suffused with the supreme love of the fatherland. Addie and
Rudy joined the Nazi Party. They put out an advert
showing a blonde haired runner. Dassler sports shoes praised by
(07:13):
all who try them. Sales started to boom, and the
Olympics were coming to Berlin in nineteen thirty six. Hitler
hoped the games would show the superiority of Aryan athletes.
But there was a problem with that hope, and his
name was Jesse Owens, a twenty two year old black
(07:37):
man born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, and
the fastest sprinter the world had ever seen. Some in
America wanted to boycott the Nazi Games, but Jesse was
keen to compete. I wanted no part of politics, Jesse
later explained. Addie Dassler felt much the same. Sport is
(08:02):
my politics, he said. As for the rest, I've really
got no interest in it at all. Addie couldn't care
less about arians winning gold medals. He just wanted to
see what the world's fastest runner thought of his shoes.
So Addie finds his way into the Olympic village and
(08:23):
seeks out Jesse Owens. He produces a pair of his
latest design. They have cushioned heels and angled spikes, and
their light just six ounces. The shoemaker from Bavaria can't
easily communicate with the athlete from Alabama, but with smiles
(08:44):
and gestures, Addie persuades Jesse to try the shoes and
keep them if he likes them. In a stadium clad
with swastikas, Jesse Owens lines up for the one hundred
meter final. He's in the inside lane. In just a
few strides, he powers clear. The runners behind him grimace
(09:06):
and strain, but they can't get close. Jesse Owens wins
the one hundred meters, then he wins the two hundred meters,
and the relay and the long jump. A black man
is the star of the Nazi Olympics, and the television
(09:29):
pictures showed Jesse wearing his Dassler brother's shoes with the
two distinctive strips of leather down the side. For the brothers,
it's great publicity, but at home not all is well.
Shoemaker Addie and salesman Rudy and their spouses and children
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all live in the same big house, and as the
nineteen thirties draw to a close, it seems that Rudy
is not getting on with ADDIE's much younger wife. She's
sticking her nose into business decisions, he complains. One night,
early in the Second World War, the air raid siren sounds.
(10:12):
Rudy and his family are already in the bunker when
ADDIE's family arrive. Rudy hears Addie mutter to his wife
those bastards to hear again the British bombers. Addie insists
that he meant, but Rudy won't be persuaded. He's sure
Addie meant him an unforgivable insult. At least, that's one
(10:36):
story that later gets told about the origins of the
brothers falling out. There is another. ADDIE's away for three
months on military service. Rumor has it that Rudy and
ADDIE's wife start an affair a misunderstanding or a marital infidelity.
(10:58):
Whatever the reason, the brothers now can't stand each other,
and each becomes convinced that the other is trying to
get them off the scene. As the author Barbara Smit
describes in her book Sneaker Wars, Addie soon gets discharged
from the army. He persuades the Nazi bosses that his
(11:19):
factory can make useful goods for the war instead of
just sports shoes, and the factory can't run without him. Now,
Rudy gets called up, and try as he might, he
can't talk his way out of it. He's convinced that
Addie is pulling some strings to keep him away from
their business. In nineteen forty five, with the Allies closing in,
(11:44):
Rudy tries to slip away in the chaos, but no
sooner has he got back home than the Gestapo come
and arrest him. After the war finally ends, he turns
up again. My brother and his wife were unpleasantly surprised.
He said they had not thought I would return. The
(12:05):
war is over, but the recriminations are not. Soon Rudy
is arrested again, this time by the Americans. They seem
to think Rudy might have committed war crimes. Rudy is
sure he knows who gave them that idea. He spends
a year in an internment camp before the Americans decide
(12:28):
there's not enough evidence and let him go. Addie is
in danger too. A local de nazification committee has to
decide how enthusiastic a Nazi he was. He stands to
lose his business. Addie protests, I wasn't that enthusiastic. He
(12:49):
joined the party, he says, only because it might help
him to sell sports shoes. He didn't sack workers who
opposed the Nazis. He even sheltered the half Jewish mayor
of a nearby town. No, no, no, Rudy apparently tells
the committee Addie was a much nazier Nazi than that.
He had our factory producing parts for pans and tanks.
(13:12):
That wouldn't have happened with me in charge. The committee
deliver their verdict. They believe Addie. They class him as
a midlifer literally with Walker as opposed to a front runner,
a sufficiently unenthusiastic Nazi, that they'll allow him to stay
(13:35):
in business. But it's painfully clear that Addie and Rudy
can't run that business together anymore. Rudy sets up shop
on the other side of the river. The Dassler family
splits in two. Their mum goes with Rudy, their sister
stays with Addie. Their children stop seeing their cousins. The
(13:57):
employees are caught up in this family drama. They have
to choose a brother. Most of the sales team go
with the salesman Rudy. Most of the factory workers stay
with the technical Addie. They need names for their new ventures.
Adie decides to portmanteau his name Adidasler Addas. But there's
(14:20):
another shoe company called Adas, so Adie has to think
again Adidas. Rudy has the same idea, Rudolph Asler Ruda.
He soon decides that Ruda's too boring and his nickname
would be much cooler. Puma. The town of Herzogenaurach will
(14:42):
never be the same. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.
Adidas and Puma are both huge global brands. They're so
famous that it's easy to lose sight of how astonishing
(15:04):
it is that anyone has heard of either of them.
Think about the challenge that faced Rudy Asler and adid
Assler in nineteen forty eight. Rudy had just turned fifty,
Adie was only a couple of years younger. They'd spent
much of the last decade either producing things other than
sports shoes, such as parts for Panzer tanks, or justifying
(15:29):
what they'd done in the war. Rudy had a loyal
group of salespeople, but nobody making products for them to sell.
Adie had the makers, but nobody to sell what they made.
They were in a small town in Bavaria. In the
wake of the war. Germany was a pariah state, still
banned from international sporting events. Plenty of other companies in
(15:53):
other countries were making sports shoes too. With all these challenges,
what were the odds that either one of added ass
or Puma would turn into a multi billion dollar global
business empire. How did they both do it? Academics and
management consultants, of course, take a keen interest in this
(16:14):
question of why some companies succeed and others don't. One
answer has to do with motivated employees. For example, here's
the consultancy firm McKinsey. People who find their individual purpose
congruent with their jobs tend to get more meaning from
their role, making them more productive and more likely to
(16:37):
outperform their peers. Purpose and meaning make us more productive.
But where do we get that sense of purpose and
meaning in our work? In twenty sixteen, researchers from UK
universities decided to try to find out. They interviewed over
one hundred people in diverse occupations, from nurses to lawyers
(17:01):
to garbage collectors. First, they asked about demotivation. What are
some times at work when you found yourself thinking, what's
the point? People mention things like endless form filling, penny
pinching bosses, and a simple lack of recognition and respect.
(17:22):
A stonemason said that's how he feels when his manager
can't be bothered to say good morning. Then they asked
what are some times when you felt a sense of meaning.
Some of the workers talked about moments when they'd put
their work in a wider context, pausing to reflect on
what it's really all about and how it affects the
(17:44):
people around them. The stonemason recalled the end of a
project to restore a cathedral, when the scaffolding came down
and everyone said it looks amazing. The Stonemason is a
real life example of the parable of the three bricklayers,
(18:06):
which you'll often find trotted out in articles on finding
purpose at work. The parable goes like this. An architect
asks three bricklayers, what are you doing? Laying bricks, says
the first bricklayer, Putting up a wall, says the second.
The third bricklayer says, I'm building a cathedral. No prizes
(18:31):
for guessing which bricklayer the management gurus tell us will
be most motivated and doing the best job. People feel
purpose at work, it seems, when they're reminded of how
their work contributes to a cause that means something to
the people they care about. I wonder how much that
helps to explain why two companies from a tiny town
(18:55):
both did so well. When Rudy and Addie split, every
worker had to choose a brother, and the split was
so acrimonious they must have felt sure that the other
brother would never forgive them all give them a job
in future if they needed one. In a small town
with two big employers who loathed each other, every single
(19:19):
worker at Puma and Adidas must have been desperate to
prove they'd made the right choice. It's hard to imagine
a workforce more deeply invested in their company's success. In
his new base across the Arak River, Rudy Dassler's new
(19:43):
employees are soon putting in fourteen hour days even on
a Sunday. They call him father. His wife is Depuma Mutter,
the Puma Mother. We are one family. Rudy booms. He's
larger than life and full of bonomee. Sometimes he gets angry, too,
(20:05):
as Rolf Herbert Peters describes in his book The Puma Story,
in one meeting with staff to discuss a wage rise,
he takes off his jacket and snaps, do you want
the coat off my back? As well? In nineteen fifty,
West Germany's soccer team is allowed back into international competition.
(20:27):
The players wear whatever boots they want. The team's trainer
realizes that he's in a position to change that and
have them all play in the same boot that he
thinks could be worth something. He approaches Rudy with a proposition,
how about you pay me one thousand marks a month
(20:49):
for my services in today's terms a few thousand dollars.
Rudy is appalled by the idea. That's not how things
are done. I am deeply disappointed in you, he says.
The soccer team's trainer shrugs and goes to see Addie,
who sees that he's getting a bargain. At the next
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Soccer World Cup, West Germany get to the final. As
the match time approaches, the heavens open the pitch will
become a quagmire. But Adidas have just introduced a new
model of soccer boot with different types of screwing studs.
The team's trainer calls him over, Addie studs on. Addie
(21:34):
gets the players to unscrew the shorter studs from their
boots and put in longer ones. They'll give more grip
in the muddy conditions. As the opposing teams slid and
slide around, West Germany score the winner three roles to two,
the trainer insists on bringing Addie into the team's victory photo.
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The newspapers hail him as the nation's cobbler. Rudy is incensed.
Don't people know that Puma have also so just introduced
boots with screw on studs. Rudy and Addie are constantly
taking each other to court over who's copied whose idea.
(22:18):
Addie jokes that Rudy must look like a Swiss cheese,
because he keeps poking him to say that was my invention.
There's espionage. Rudy commissions a new machine for working leather,
but he's messed up the specifications. There's no good for
sports shoes. He's later amused to find out that Addie
(22:39):
ordered an identical machine and also discovered it didn't work.
There are dirty tricks. When Germany's star runner wins a
big race wearing Puma spikes, the next day's newspapers somehow
choose to print an old photo where he's wearing Adidas
at the nineteen fifty six Olympics in Melbourne. The consignment
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of Puma shoes somehow gets held up in customs, while
the Adidas shoe whose don't at the Puma headquarters in Hurtzogenaurach.
You'd better not even say Adidas. They're called enng or
nicht genant, They who must not be named. Rudy quickly
(23:27):
understands that he can't afford to be disappointed in people
who ask for money to publicize his shoes. It's clearly
worth paying for celebrity endorsement, and that now opens up
a whole new front in the feud. At this point,
the Olympics is still supposed to be strictly amateur, no
(23:48):
commercial deals at all. Still, by nineteen sixty there's talk
of bonuses for winners with the right shoe on. One
gold medalist tries to collect twice by running his race
in Puma, then changing into Adidas for the podium. By
the nineteen sixty four Olympics, things have moved on. Here's
(24:10):
an American athlete describing how it works. Like in James
Bond movies, a shoe agent goes into the bathroom and
leaves an envelope at the stall. I go in the
stall after him. You get an envelope that had six
seven hundred or a couple of thousand dollars in fives
and tens. You thought you're rich. In soccer, the industry
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takes another step towards the modern day. The star of
the nineteen sixty six World Cup is a Portuguese player
called Usebo. Puma sign him up and launch a range
of boots with his name on them, the Eusebio King.
It's the first time their marketing has switched from buy
(24:54):
these boots because they're better to buy these boots because
someone famous wears them. By now Rudy and Addie are
getting old, the Dassler family feud has passed down a
generation to ADDIE's son Horst and Rudy's son Armin. ADDIE's
(25:17):
son Horst is brilliant, charming, and a workaholic. He calls
his executives at any hour of the night. One time
it's a spouse who answers the phone, Horst comes the voice.
You are interfering with my sex life. Rudy's son, Armin
wanted to study electronics. No way, said Rudy, you're getting
(25:41):
into sports shoes. Horst and Armine are barely on speaking terms,
but they do meet to make a gentleman's agreement that
neither will compete to sign up Pele, the most famous
soccer player of all. A bidding war for Pele would
break both companies. At the nineteen seventy Soccer World Cup,
(26:06):
Pele is about to kick off a match when he
tells the referee, wait a moment, I need to tie
my laces. All around the world, television screens zoom in
on Pla bending over to spend several seconds fiddling with
his boot, a brand new Pelee branded Huma boot. Puma
(26:30):
put them on sale for twenty percent more than the
exact same boot without Plas signature. The Pelle boot flies
off the shelves. Rudy's son Amin has pulled off a coup.
ADDIE's son Horse is fuman. Cautionary tales will be back
(26:52):
in a moment. As Rudy and Addie fought tooth and
nail to build their sportshoe empires, the little town of
Herzogenaurach became more more and more divided. Every family had
(27:12):
someone who worked for one brother or the other. As
they came home with tales about dirty tricks from the enemy,
their families became just as invested in their company's success.
Remember the mayor of Herzogenaurach, the one who later turned
up to watch soccer in diplomatically mismatched shoes as a kid.
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He says, I had only Puma clothes. Wearing Adidas would
have been unthinkable. He's not exaggerating. Someone who moved from
another town to join one of the companies recalls he
had a restaurant. There was a Puma restaurant, an Adidas restaurant.
If you were working for the wrong company, you wouldn't
be served any food, so it was kind of an
(27:57):
odd experience. It wasn't just restauranteurs. There were bakers and
butchers who would serve you only if you had the
right brand of shoes on With Adidas, says one worker,
it simply didn't cross your mind to go into a
shop that you knew Puma workers frequented. Another longtime resident
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recalls there was a time when you'd have risked the
wrath of colleagues and family if as an employee of
one company you married an employee of the other, still
he reckons. Without that intense local rivalry, neither company would
have reached such heights. If this is what motivation at
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work can achieve, no wonder management consultants tell corporate clients
that it matters. When I was at college in the
mid nineteen nineties, recruiters from big companies like Unilever or
(29:02):
Procter and Gamble would invite undergraduates to presentations about what
it's like to work for their company, how to apply
for a job in their graduate training program. I went
to some of those presentations. At one, a recent graduate
explained the project they'd been working on developing a new
brand of ice Pop. They'd studied the market to understand
(29:25):
the brand positioning of existing ice pops. They'd talked to
focus groups of ice pop consumers to find out what
kind of adverts influenced them to buy one ice pop
or another, and they'd launched a new ice pop much
the same as all the other ice pops as a product,
but cleverly marketed. They did well. A good percentage of
(29:46):
ice pop buyers switched from competitors ice pops to their
ice Pop. The story was clearly meant to inspire. Apply
for a job with our company, and you too can
get to work on similar projects. The final PowerPoint slide
said you can make a visible difference. A cynical friend
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leaned over and whispered in my ear. Surely, he said,
there's a typo that should read you can make a
risible difference. Remember the parable of the three bricklayers. We're
supposed to frown at the first bricklayer, the one who
said I'm laying bricks, not I'm building a cathedral. But
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the whole parable is built on a line, which is
that everyone gets to work on a cathedral. Put yourself
in the position of a bricklayer who isn't building a cathedral,
but can only find work building a wall around a
parking lot in a nature reserve. What would you say
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if someone asked you what you were doing. Maybe the
best response is to shrug and say, I'm laying bricks.
I do this job for the money. I look for
meaning and purpose elsewhere. The alternative is to persuade yourself
that what the world desperately needs is a parking lot
in a nature reserve. We can find meaning in almost
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anything if we try hard enough. We can care deeply
that people buy one ice pop not another. We can
feel personally fulfilled when we charge twenty percent more for
a soccer boot because we put Peli's name on it.
The consultants McKinsey tell us that when we see our
individual purpose in our work, will be more productive and
(31:40):
outperform our peers. Perhaps so, but if we take our
corporate jobs too much to heart, we might end up
metaphorically living in Hurtzoegenawak. And I put it to you
that Hurtzogenawak is not only a visible place, but a
dark and disturbing one too. Addie and Rudy Dassler both
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died in their seventies. They're both buried in Herzegenawak's small
graveyard at opposite ends. Their sons, Horst and Armin never
buried the hatchet. ADDIE's son Horst once met Armin's son
Frank at a business event. There was no warmly avuncular greeting.
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The German language has both formal and familiar ways of
saying you. Horst used the formal sea with me. Frank
Dasler remembers, I found that a little strange. Horst and
Armin both died young cancer. The workaholic Horst tried to
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hide how ill he was. One colleague was stunned to
get a letter from Horst after he'd died. He'd still
been firing off business correspondence on his deathbed. In the end,
each branch of the family decided to sell up. Puma
became a publicly traded company in the nineteen eighties Adidas
(33:15):
a decade later. They outsourced production to countries where labor
was cheap. The two company's headquarters stayed in Herzogenaurach, but
the high powered employees often moved in from elsewhere. They
hadn't grown up with. This bitter divide slowly the animosity
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in this small Bavarian town began to fade. In two
thousand and four, Rudy's grandson, Frank Dassler, took a job
as the head legal counsel for Adidas. A lot of
waters flowed under the bridge, said Frank. Others were appalled.
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Rudy will be spinning in his grave, they said. One
longtime Puma employee with a Puma tattoo on his neck
told a journalist that Frank's new job was a capital sin.
Then in two thousand and nine, the CEO of Puma
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picked up the phone to the CEO of Adidas. It's
peace day coming up, he said, I think it's about time,
after sixty years, to end this feud. How about doing
something together? And so two soccer teams emerged from the tunnel,
one in black, one in white, each kit with a
(34:40):
Puma logo on one side and Adidas on the other,
with the mare of Herzogenarak watching on, wearing a Puma
shoe on one foot and addied as on the other.
It wasn't humor versus Adidas to avoid a symbolic result.
Instead it was bosses versus workers. That perhaps the result
(35:01):
was symbolic anyway of what happens when employees get their
purpose from their work. The bosses one, it's easy to
find corporate life depressing all the time and energy and
ingenuity that goes into pushing one brand of ice pop
or sports shoe over another. But sometimes, just sometimes, our
(35:28):
work presents a chance to set the cynicism aside. In
the late nineteen sixties, Addie Dassler heard about an American
high jumper called Dick Fosbury. He'd invented a new technique
for doing the high jump, twisting in the air and
arching his back over the bar, the Fosbury flop. People
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called it dismissively at first, until they realized that it worked. Addie,
by now was an old man and a wealthy man,
the head of a business empire. But back in his youth,
remember he'd been a keen high jumper himself. He hadn't
(36:12):
forgotten what it meant to soar over the bar wearing
a good pair of shoes. Dick Fosbury had done something
which seemed totally original to Addie Dassler. He was captivated.
Addie phoned Dick Fosbury up. He wanted to know everything
(36:33):
about Fosbury's new technique, so he could think about exactly
what design of shoe and spikes might help him to
get the best run up and lift off. Then he
went into his workshop and made the shoes. He sent
them to Fosbury, who wore them at the nineteen sixty
eight Olympics and one. It was just amazing, said Fosbury,
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that this German cobbler would spend hours on spikes just
for me. I was extremely grateful and certainly wouldn't dream
of accepting cash to wear them. It was a throwback
to a more innocent age, the young Addie after the
First World War, inventing shoes that would help him to
(37:19):
be a better athlete. Approaching Jesse Owens in the Olympic
village not to slip him and envelope stuff with cash,
but simply to say, you're the best. Please try my shoes.
I hope you like them. As sixty seven year old
Addie Dassler sat in front of the television watching Dick
(37:44):
Fosbury leap his way to Olympic gold, he must have
felt like a Stonemason admiring a cathedral. Two wonderful histories
(38:09):
of Adidas and Puma are the Puma story by Rolf
Herbert Peters and sneaker Wars by Barbara Schmitt. For a
full list of our sources, please see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
(38:32):
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The
show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Liteal Mollard, John Schnaz,
(38:57):
Eric's handler Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios
in London by Tom. If you like the show, please
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(39:18):
up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple
Podcasts or at Pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Pushkin. The mayor of Hertzogenarak is going to watch a
game of soccer. On one foot, he wears a shoe
made by Adidas. On the other foot, a shoe made
by Puma. If you didn't know anything about Hurtzegenarak, you
(00:36):
might assume that the mayor must be unobservant, disorganized, a
little absent minded, not a bit of it. The mayor
of Hrzegenarak chose his footwear carefully. He's a diplomat. He
has to be. Hertzegenarak is a small town on the
(00:58):
Arak River in Bavaria, Germany, with a history that traces
back a thousand years. Its population just twenty four thousand.
The old town is picture postcard perfect. Cobbled streets and
medieval half timbered buildings are restored thirteenth century castle, a
(01:18):
barock church, ivy climbing up the clock tower, and a fountain.
A fountain with a modern statue depicting two groups of
children playing a childhood game tug of war. Look closely
and you'll see the children on one end of the
rope are in Puma shoes, the other team Adidas. This
(01:43):
small town in Bavaria is home to the headquarters of
not one, but two global behemoths of sports apparel, Adidas
and Puma, between them sell over thirty billion dollars worth
of clothes and shoes and equipment every year. For decades,
Herzogenarach has had a Puma side of the river and
(02:07):
an Adidas side, a Puma sponsored local soccer team and
an Adidas team, Puma families and Adidas families. The town
of the Lowered Games, it was called because people then
Hurtzognarach would glance down to check the brand of your
footwear before deciding how to greet you. The mayor grew
(02:36):
up in a Puma family. As a kid, he says,
I had only Puma clothes. Wearing Adidas would have been unthinkable. Now,
as a politician, he wears both brands, admittedly not usually
one on either foot. But today is a special day
September twenty first, two thousand and nine United Nations World
(03:01):
Peace Day, to mark the occasion workers from Adidas and
Puma are going to play a game of soccer. It
would have been impossible thirty years ago, says the mayor.
It's not Puma versus added as that might be pushing
the tentative datantes too far. Instead, each team has players
(03:24):
from both companies. One team wears white, the other black.
The specially made shirts have the three stripes of Addedas
on one sleeve Puma's Leaping Cat on the other. We
play for peace, the CEO of Puma tells assembled journalists.
It's a historical moment, adds the CEO of Adidas. It's
(03:50):
the kind of rhetoric usually reserved for peace talks in
the Middle East. How did the choice of leisure wear
in a small town in Bavaria becomes such a serious affair.
I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. This
(04:34):
is a tale about motivation at work, what it can achieve,
and the strange places it can take us when it
goes too far. The story starts in nineteen eighteen with
a young man coming home from the First World War,
Adolph Dassler Addie to his friends. ADDIE's dad was a weaver.
(04:58):
His mum washed people's linens in the shed in their yard,
but in the hardship of war, not many people could
afford to outsource their laundry. Returned to Herzegenauach to find
his mother's laundry shed shuttered and he decided to start
his own business there, making shoes. There was plenty of
(05:21):
leather to be scavenged from old army kits, helmets and
bags no longer needed. Addie collected them, cut them up
into strips, and stitched them into boots. The electricity kept
cutting out, so Addie invented a bicycle powered device to
work the leather. He got a friend to pedal. Addie
(05:42):
had never been trained as a cobbler, but he was
a keen athlete, a runner, a high jumper, and he
understood how hard it was to find good footwear for sports.
The state of the art in running spikes was simply
leather soles with nails banged through them. Addie was sure
he could do better. He spent hour after hour experimenting
(06:05):
with different kinds of spike and studs for soccer. His
shoes started to sell and he moved from the shed
into a factory. His older brother joined the business. Rudy
Dassler was a sportsman too, nicknamed the Puma, but in
other ways he wasn't like Addie at all. Addie liked
(06:28):
to tinker alone at his work bench. Rudy was suave
and loud and confident, a natural salesman. By nineteen thirty three,
when Hitler came to power in Germany, the Dassler brothers
were employing seventy people, and the Nazis seemed like they
might be good for the sports shoe business. In Maine,
(06:52):
camp Hitler dreamed of six million supremely fit athletes, all
suffused with the supreme love of the fatherland. Addie and
Rudy joined the Nazi Party. They put out an advert
showing a blonde haired runner. Dassler sports shoes praised by
(07:13):
all who try them. Sales started to boom, and the
Olympics were coming to Berlin in nineteen thirty six. Hitler
hoped the games would show the superiority of Aryan athletes.
But there was a problem with that hope, and his
name was Jesse Owens, a twenty two year old black
(07:37):
man born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, and
the fastest sprinter the world had ever seen. Some in
America wanted to boycott the Nazi Games, but Jesse was
keen to compete. I wanted no part of politics, Jesse
later explained. Addie Dassler felt much the same. Sport is
(08:02):
my politics, he said. As for the rest, I've really
got no interest in it at all. Addie couldn't care
less about arians winning gold medals. He just wanted to
see what the world's fastest runner thought of his shoes.
So Addie finds his way into the Olympic village and
(08:23):
seeks out Jesse Owens. He produces a pair of his
latest design. They have cushioned heels and angled spikes, and
their light just six ounces. The shoemaker from Bavaria can't
easily communicate with the athlete from Alabama, but with smiles
(08:44):
and gestures, Addie persuades Jesse to try the shoes and
keep them if he likes them. In a stadium clad
with swastikas, Jesse Owens lines up for the one hundred
meter final. He's in the inside lane. In just a
few strides, he powers clear. The runners behind him grimace
(09:06):
and strain, but they can't get close. Jesse Owens wins
the one hundred meters, then he wins the two hundred meters,
and the relay and the long jump. A black man
is the star of the Nazi Olympics, and the television
(09:29):
pictures showed Jesse wearing his Dassler brother's shoes with the
two distinctive strips of leather down the side. For the brothers,
it's great publicity, but at home not all is well.
Shoemaker Addie and salesman Rudy and their spouses and children
(09:50):
all live in the same big house, and as the
nineteen thirties draw to a close, it seems that Rudy
is not getting on with ADDIE's much younger wife. She's
sticking her nose into business decisions, he complains. One night,
early in the Second World War, the air raid siren sounds.
(10:12):
Rudy and his family are already in the bunker when
ADDIE's family arrive. Rudy hears Addie mutter to his wife
those bastards to hear again the British bombers. Addie insists
that he meant, but Rudy won't be persuaded. He's sure
Addie meant him an unforgivable insult. At least, that's one
(10:36):
story that later gets told about the origins of the
brothers falling out. There is another. ADDIE's away for three
months on military service. Rumor has it that Rudy and
ADDIE's wife start an affair a misunderstanding or a marital infidelity.
(10:58):
Whatever the reason, the brothers now can't stand each other,
and each becomes convinced that the other is trying to
get them off the scene. As the author Barbara Smit
describes in her book Sneaker Wars, Addie soon gets discharged
from the army. He persuades the Nazi bosses that his
(11:19):
factory can make useful goods for the war instead of
just sports shoes, and the factory can't run without him. Now,
Rudy gets called up, and try as he might, he
can't talk his way out of it. He's convinced that
Addie is pulling some strings to keep him away from
their business. In nineteen forty five, with the Allies closing in,
(11:44):
Rudy tries to slip away in the chaos, but no
sooner has he got back home than the Gestapo come
and arrest him. After the war finally ends, he turns
up again. My brother and his wife were unpleasantly surprised.
He said they had not thought I would return. The
(12:05):
war is over, but the recriminations are not. Soon Rudy
is arrested again, this time by the Americans. They seem
to think Rudy might have committed war crimes. Rudy is
sure he knows who gave them that idea. He spends
a year in an internment camp before the Americans decide
(12:28):
there's not enough evidence and let him go. Addie is
in danger too. A local de nazification committee has to
decide how enthusiastic a Nazi he was. He stands to
lose his business. Addie protests, I wasn't that enthusiastic. He
(12:49):
joined the party, he says, only because it might help
him to sell sports shoes. He didn't sack workers who
opposed the Nazis. He even sheltered the half Jewish mayor
of a nearby town. No, no, no, Rudy apparently tells
the committee Addie was a much nazier Nazi than that.
He had our factory producing parts for pans and tanks.
(13:12):
That wouldn't have happened with me in charge. The committee
deliver their verdict. They believe Addie. They class him as
a midlifer literally with Walker as opposed to a front runner,
a sufficiently unenthusiastic Nazi, that they'll allow him to stay
(13:35):
in business. But it's painfully clear that Addie and Rudy
can't run that business together anymore. Rudy sets up shop
on the other side of the river. The Dassler family
splits in two. Their mum goes with Rudy, their sister
stays with Addie. Their children stop seeing their cousins. The
(13:57):
employees are caught up in this family drama. They have
to choose a brother. Most of the sales team go
with the salesman Rudy. Most of the factory workers stay
with the technical Addie. They need names for their new ventures.
Adie decides to portmanteau his name Adidasler Addas. But there's
(14:20):
another shoe company called Adas, so Adie has to think
again Adidas. Rudy has the same idea, Rudolph Asler Ruda.
He soon decides that Ruda's too boring and his nickname
would be much cooler. Puma. The town of Herzogenaurach will
(14:42):
never be the same. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.
Adidas and Puma are both huge global brands. They're so
famous that it's easy to lose sight of how astonishing
(15:04):
it is that anyone has heard of either of them.
Think about the challenge that faced Rudy Asler and adid
Assler in nineteen forty eight. Rudy had just turned fifty,
Adie was only a couple of years younger. They'd spent
much of the last decade either producing things other than
sports shoes, such as parts for Panzer tanks, or justifying
(15:29):
what they'd done in the war. Rudy had a loyal
group of salespeople, but nobody making products for them to sell.
Adie had the makers, but nobody to sell what they made.
They were in a small town in Bavaria. In the
wake of the war. Germany was a pariah state, still
banned from international sporting events. Plenty of other companies in
(15:53):
other countries were making sports shoes too. With all these challenges,
what were the odds that either one of added ass
or Puma would turn into a multi billion dollar global
business empire. How did they both do it? Academics and
management consultants, of course, take a keen interest in this
(16:14):
question of why some companies succeed and others don't. One
answer has to do with motivated employees. For example, here's
the consultancy firm McKinsey. People who find their individual purpose
congruent with their jobs tend to get more meaning from
their role, making them more productive and more likely to
(16:37):
outperform their peers. Purpose and meaning make us more productive.
But where do we get that sense of purpose and
meaning in our work? In twenty sixteen, researchers from UK
universities decided to try to find out. They interviewed over
one hundred people in diverse occupations, from nurses to lawyers
(17:01):
to garbage collectors. First, they asked about demotivation. What are
some times at work when you found yourself thinking, what's
the point? People mention things like endless form filling, penny
pinching bosses, and a simple lack of recognition and respect.
(17:22):
A stonemason said that's how he feels when his manager
can't be bothered to say good morning. Then they asked
what are some times when you felt a sense of meaning.
Some of the workers talked about moments when they'd put
their work in a wider context, pausing to reflect on
what it's really all about and how it affects the
(17:44):
people around them. The stonemason recalled the end of a
project to restore a cathedral, when the scaffolding came down
and everyone said it looks amazing. The Stonemason is a
real life example of the parable of the three bricklayers,
(18:06):
which you'll often find trotted out in articles on finding
purpose at work. The parable goes like this. An architect
asks three bricklayers, what are you doing? Laying bricks, says
the first bricklayer, Putting up a wall, says the second.
The third bricklayer says, I'm building a cathedral. No prizes
(18:31):
for guessing which bricklayer the management gurus tell us will
be most motivated and doing the best job. People feel
purpose at work, it seems, when they're reminded of how
their work contributes to a cause that means something to
the people they care about. I wonder how much that
helps to explain why two companies from a tiny town
(18:55):
both did so well. When Rudy and Addie split, every
worker had to choose a brother, and the split was
so acrimonious they must have felt sure that the other
brother would never forgive them all give them a job
in future if they needed one. In a small town
with two big employers who loathed each other, every single
(19:19):
worker at Puma and Adidas must have been desperate to
prove they'd made the right choice. It's hard to imagine
a workforce more deeply invested in their company's success. In
his new base across the Arak River, Rudy Dassler's new
(19:43):
employees are soon putting in fourteen hour days even on
a Sunday. They call him father. His wife is Depuma Mutter,
the Puma Mother. We are one family. Rudy booms. He's
larger than life and full of bonomee. Sometimes he gets angry, too,
(20:05):
as Rolf Herbert Peters describes in his book The Puma Story,
in one meeting with staff to discuss a wage rise,
he takes off his jacket and snaps, do you want
the coat off my back? As well? In nineteen fifty,
West Germany's soccer team is allowed back into international competition.
(20:27):
The players wear whatever boots they want. The team's trainer
realizes that he's in a position to change that and
have them all play in the same boot that he
thinks could be worth something. He approaches Rudy with a proposition,
how about you pay me one thousand marks a month
(20:49):
for my services in today's terms a few thousand dollars.
Rudy is appalled by the idea. That's not how things
are done. I am deeply disappointed in you, he says.
The soccer team's trainer shrugs and goes to see Addie,
who sees that he's getting a bargain. At the next
(21:09):
Soccer World Cup, West Germany get to the final. As
the match time approaches, the heavens open the pitch will
become a quagmire. But Adidas have just introduced a new
model of soccer boot with different types of screwing studs.
The team's trainer calls him over, Addie studs on. Addie
(21:34):
gets the players to unscrew the shorter studs from their
boots and put in longer ones. They'll give more grip
in the muddy conditions. As the opposing teams slid and
slide around, West Germany score the winner three roles to two,
the trainer insists on bringing Addie into the team's victory photo.
(21:57):
The newspapers hail him as the nation's cobbler. Rudy is incensed.
Don't people know that Puma have also so just introduced
boots with screw on studs. Rudy and Addie are constantly
taking each other to court over who's copied whose idea.
(22:18):
Addie jokes that Rudy must look like a Swiss cheese,
because he keeps poking him to say that was my invention.
There's espionage. Rudy commissions a new machine for working leather,
but he's messed up the specifications. There's no good for
sports shoes. He's later amused to find out that Addie
(22:39):
ordered an identical machine and also discovered it didn't work.
There are dirty tricks. When Germany's star runner wins a
big race wearing Puma spikes, the next day's newspapers somehow
choose to print an old photo where he's wearing Adidas
at the nineteen fifty six Olympics in Melbourne. The consignment
(23:03):
of Puma shoes somehow gets held up in customs, while
the Adidas shoe whose don't at the Puma headquarters in Hurtzogenaurach.
You'd better not even say Adidas. They're called enng or
nicht genant, They who must not be named. Rudy quickly
(23:27):
understands that he can't afford to be disappointed in people
who ask for money to publicize his shoes. It's clearly
worth paying for celebrity endorsement, and that now opens up
a whole new front in the feud. At this point,
the Olympics is still supposed to be strictly amateur, no
(23:48):
commercial deals at all. Still, by nineteen sixty there's talk
of bonuses for winners with the right shoe on. One
gold medalist tries to collect twice by running his race
in Puma, then changing into Adidas for the podium. By
the nineteen sixty four Olympics, things have moved on. Here's
(24:10):
an American athlete describing how it works. Like in James
Bond movies, a shoe agent goes into the bathroom and
leaves an envelope at the stall. I go in the
stall after him. You get an envelope that had six
seven hundred or a couple of thousand dollars in fives
and tens. You thought you're rich. In soccer, the industry
(24:33):
takes another step towards the modern day. The star of
the nineteen sixty six World Cup is a Portuguese player
called Usebo. Puma sign him up and launch a range
of boots with his name on them, the Eusebio King.
It's the first time their marketing has switched from buy
(24:54):
these boots because they're better to buy these boots because
someone famous wears them. By now Rudy and Addie are
getting old, the Dassler family feud has passed down a
generation to ADDIE's son Horst and Rudy's son Armin. ADDIE's
(25:17):
son Horst is brilliant, charming, and a workaholic. He calls
his executives at any hour of the night. One time
it's a spouse who answers the phone, Horst comes the voice.
You are interfering with my sex life. Rudy's son, Armin
wanted to study electronics. No way, said Rudy, you're getting
(25:41):
into sports shoes. Horst and Armine are barely on speaking terms,
but they do meet to make a gentleman's agreement that
neither will compete to sign up Pele, the most famous
soccer player of all. A bidding war for Pele would
break both companies. At the nineteen seventy Soccer World Cup,
(26:06):
Pele is about to kick off a match when he
tells the referee, wait a moment, I need to tie
my laces. All around the world, television screens zoom in
on Pla bending over to spend several seconds fiddling with
his boot, a brand new Pelee branded Huma boot. Puma
(26:30):
put them on sale for twenty percent more than the
exact same boot without Plas signature. The Pelle boot flies
off the shelves. Rudy's son Amin has pulled off a coup.
ADDIE's son Horse is fuman. Cautionary tales will be back
(26:52):
in a moment. As Rudy and Addie fought tooth and
nail to build their sportshoe empires, the little town of
Herzogenaurach became more more and more divided. Every family had
(27:12):
someone who worked for one brother or the other. As
they came home with tales about dirty tricks from the enemy,
their families became just as invested in their company's success.
Remember the mayor of Herzogenaurach, the one who later turned
up to watch soccer in diplomatically mismatched shoes as a kid.
(27:34):
He says, I had only Puma clothes. Wearing Adidas would
have been unthinkable. He's not exaggerating. Someone who moved from
another town to join one of the companies recalls he
had a restaurant. There was a Puma restaurant, an Adidas restaurant.
If you were working for the wrong company, you wouldn't
be served any food, so it was kind of an
(27:57):
odd experience. It wasn't just restauranteurs. There were bakers and
butchers who would serve you only if you had the
right brand of shoes on With Adidas, says one worker,
it simply didn't cross your mind to go into a
shop that you knew Puma workers frequented. Another longtime resident
(28:18):
recalls there was a time when you'd have risked the
wrath of colleagues and family if as an employee of
one company you married an employee of the other, still
he reckons. Without that intense local rivalry, neither company would
have reached such heights. If this is what motivation at
(28:39):
work can achieve, no wonder management consultants tell corporate clients
that it matters. When I was at college in the
mid nineteen nineties, recruiters from big companies like Unilever or
(29:02):
Procter and Gamble would invite undergraduates to presentations about what
it's like to work for their company, how to apply
for a job in their graduate training program. I went
to some of those presentations. At one, a recent graduate
explained the project they'd been working on developing a new
brand of ice Pop. They'd studied the market to understand
(29:25):
the brand positioning of existing ice pops. They'd talked to
focus groups of ice pop consumers to find out what
kind of adverts influenced them to buy one ice pop
or another, and they'd launched a new ice pop much
the same as all the other ice pops as a product,
but cleverly marketed. They did well. A good percentage of
(29:46):
ice pop buyers switched from competitors ice pops to their
ice Pop. The story was clearly meant to inspire. Apply
for a job with our company, and you too can
get to work on similar projects. The final PowerPoint slide
said you can make a visible difference. A cynical friend
(30:08):
leaned over and whispered in my ear. Surely, he said,
there's a typo that should read you can make a
risible difference. Remember the parable of the three bricklayers. We're
supposed to frown at the first bricklayer, the one who
said I'm laying bricks, not I'm building a cathedral. But
(30:31):
the whole parable is built on a line, which is
that everyone gets to work on a cathedral. Put yourself
in the position of a bricklayer who isn't building a cathedral,
but can only find work building a wall around a
parking lot in a nature reserve. What would you say
(30:53):
if someone asked you what you were doing. Maybe the
best response is to shrug and say, I'm laying bricks.
I do this job for the money. I look for
meaning and purpose elsewhere. The alternative is to persuade yourself
that what the world desperately needs is a parking lot
in a nature reserve. We can find meaning in almost
(31:17):
anything if we try hard enough. We can care deeply
that people buy one ice pop not another. We can
feel personally fulfilled when we charge twenty percent more for
a soccer boot because we put Peli's name on it.
The consultants McKinsey tell us that when we see our
individual purpose in our work, will be more productive and
(31:40):
outperform our peers. Perhaps so, but if we take our
corporate jobs too much to heart, we might end up
metaphorically living in Hurtzoegenawak. And I put it to you
that Hurtzogenawak is not only a visible place, but a
dark and disturbing one too. Addie and Rudy Dassler both
(32:07):
died in their seventies. They're both buried in Herzegenawak's small
graveyard at opposite ends. Their sons, Horst and Armin never
buried the hatchet. ADDIE's son Horst once met Armin's son
Frank at a business event. There was no warmly avuncular greeting.
(32:30):
The German language has both formal and familiar ways of
saying you. Horst used the formal sea with me. Frank
Dasler remembers, I found that a little strange. Horst and
Armin both died young cancer. The workaholic Horst tried to
(32:52):
hide how ill he was. One colleague was stunned to
get a letter from Horst after he'd died. He'd still
been firing off business correspondence on his deathbed. In the end,
each branch of the family decided to sell up. Puma
became a publicly traded company in the nineteen eighties Adidas
(33:15):
a decade later. They outsourced production to countries where labor
was cheap. The two company's headquarters stayed in Herzogenaurach, but
the high powered employees often moved in from elsewhere. They
hadn't grown up with. This bitter divide slowly the animosity
(33:36):
in this small Bavarian town began to fade. In two
thousand and four, Rudy's grandson, Frank Dassler, took a job
as the head legal counsel for Adidas. A lot of
waters flowed under the bridge, said Frank. Others were appalled.
(33:57):
Rudy will be spinning in his grave, they said. One
longtime Puma employee with a Puma tattoo on his neck
told a journalist that Frank's new job was a capital sin.
Then in two thousand and nine, the CEO of Puma
(34:18):
picked up the phone to the CEO of Adidas. It's
peace day coming up, he said, I think it's about time,
after sixty years, to end this feud. How about doing
something together? And so two soccer teams emerged from the tunnel,
one in black, one in white, each kit with a
(34:40):
Puma logo on one side and Adidas on the other,
with the mare of Herzogenarak watching on, wearing a Puma
shoe on one foot and addied as on the other.
It wasn't humor versus Adidas to avoid a symbolic result.
Instead it was bosses versus workers. That perhaps the result
(35:01):
was symbolic anyway of what happens when employees get their
purpose from their work. The bosses one, it's easy to
find corporate life depressing all the time and energy and
ingenuity that goes into pushing one brand of ice pop
or sports shoe over another. But sometimes, just sometimes, our
(35:28):
work presents a chance to set the cynicism aside. In
the late nineteen sixties, Addie Dassler heard about an American
high jumper called Dick Fosbury. He'd invented a new technique
for doing the high jump, twisting in the air and
arching his back over the bar, the Fosbury flop. People
(35:52):
called it dismissively at first, until they realized that it worked. Addie,
by now was an old man and a wealthy man,
the head of a business empire. But back in his youth,
remember he'd been a keen high jumper himself. He hadn't
(36:12):
forgotten what it meant to soar over the bar wearing
a good pair of shoes. Dick Fosbury had done something
which seemed totally original to Addie Dassler. He was captivated.
Addie phoned Dick Fosbury up. He wanted to know everything
(36:33):
about Fosbury's new technique, so he could think about exactly
what design of shoe and spikes might help him to
get the best run up and lift off. Then he
went into his workshop and made the shoes. He sent
them to Fosbury, who wore them at the nineteen sixty
eight Olympics and one. It was just amazing, said Fosbury,
(36:58):
that this German cobbler would spend hours on spikes just
for me. I was extremely grateful and certainly wouldn't dream
of accepting cash to wear them. It was a throwback
to a more innocent age, the young Addie after the
First World War, inventing shoes that would help him to
(37:19):
be a better athlete. Approaching Jesse Owens in the Olympic
village not to slip him and envelope stuff with cash,
but simply to say, you're the best. Please try my shoes.
I hope you like them. As sixty seven year old
Addie Dassler sat in front of the television watching Dick
(37:44):
Fosbury leap his way to Olympic gold, he must have
felt like a Stonemason admiring a cathedral. Two wonderful histories
(38:09):
of Adidas and Puma are the Puma story by Rolf
Herbert Peters and sneaker Wars by Barbara Schmitt. For a
full list of our sources, please see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
(38:32):
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The
show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Liteal Mollard, John Schnaz,
(38:57):
Eric's handler Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios
in London by Tom. If you like the show, please
remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends, and
if you want to hear the show ad free, sign
(39:18):
up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple
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Host
Tim Harford
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