EntreLeadership - #299: Our Best Podcasts of 2018

Starting point is 00:00:06 helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. And a big thank you for joining us all year long. Hard to believe another year in the books. And this is one of my favorite episodes of the year because the team gets together.

Starting point is 00:00:34 I had nothing to do with these choices. I want to put that out there. I think that's important because I do the interviews. And so picking my favorite interviews would be like picking a favorite among my three children. So I don't do it. The team, the production team, they look at the results and they look at what you listen to the most, what you shared the most. And so we've come up with our eight favorite interview guests for the year and we're pulling out excerpts.

Starting point is 00:01:02 So I want to tell you right out of the gate, this is a little bit long. episode, but you're going to love it. It's like a king-sized snicker bar. It'll satisfy you. You're talking about nine to 12-minute segments here on each one, so let's get to it. We're going to lead off with Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the most respected leadership coaches in the world, and specifically you're going to hear us talking about the importance of getting feedback. Here is Marshall Goldsmith. Let's jump into chapter three entitled The Success Delusion, or why we resist change. I think this is so helpful for all of us because we as human beings, if we can't figure out what you're writing in this book, there's not a whole lot of hope. So let's talk about it. Why do we

Starting point is 00:01:46 resist change? Well, again, my mission in life is helping successful leaders achieve positive long-term change in behavior, which is a little counterintuitive. So if you do a Google search helping successful leaders, the top 500 hits 450 or me, it's counterintuitive to focus on helping successful people get better. Now, why is it particularly hard for successful people to change? Any human or in fact any animal will replicate behavior that's followed by positive reinforcement. The more successful we are in life, the more positive reinforcement we get, and we fall into something called the superstition trap. Now, what's that sound like? I behave this way. I am successful. therefore I must be successful because I behave this way.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Wrong. Everyone I work with is mega successful. They're all either CEOs or could be CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies. And I always tell them this. You're a success. You behave this way. You're successful because you do a lot of things right in spite of doing some things that are stupid.

Starting point is 00:02:53 And you know what? I've never seen anybody that's so wonderful. We have nothing on that in stupid or nothing on that in spite of category. We all got a little in spite of. Boy, that's true. What is the mindset when you sit down, I want to take you back to your answer just a few moments ago, when you sit down with a client and these are wildly successful men and women,

Starting point is 00:03:13 and you say, all right, let's look at some stuff you need to work on. What is the mindset that you try to get them to so that they can truly receive the instruction and the coaching? Well, in my coaching, I have a unique billing system. I don't get paid one cent if my clients don't get better. And better is not judged by me or them. It's judged by everyone around them. So my motivation to work with people don't care is incredibly low.

Starting point is 00:03:37 They're not going to get better and I'm not going to get paid. So the first thing I learned is people don't care, don't waste your time. So I only work with people who care to start with. I'm not really in the motivational business. I'm in the help successful people get better business. And I give them feedback, confidential feedback on what everyone around them thinks. They're key stakeholders. What I say then is, look, here's the way they see you.

Starting point is 00:03:56 Now, you told me these people, were important. I didn't tell you they were important. You told me. You told me their opinions mattered. Well, okay, I interviewed them all. Here are their opinions. Is this that person you want to be? Now, if it is, fine. You don't need me. If you want to change, I can help you. It's up to you. It's not up to me. You see, what I tell my clients is, I don't get paid because I'm a good coach. I get paid because you're a good client. Don't make it all about me. Because the second, in a coaching relationship, the client makes it about the coach, well, it's all a coach critique. They're not trying to get better.

Starting point is 00:04:33 They're just judging the quality of your advice. That's good. Everyone has to reach out to their stakeholders, and I say, you know, I got feedback, for example. I want to be a better listener. Please give me ideas to help me. Now, the four commitments, let's take one at a time. The first one is let go of the past. After they've already got feedback, I tell their key stakeholders, don't talk about the past.

Starting point is 00:04:53 You can't change it anyway. Focus on the future, not the past. Focus on what they can do, not what they cannot do. Number two, be positive and supportive, not cynical or sarcastic. If I reach out to you and try to improve and you're my stakeholder, and you act cynical, sarcastic, negative, I'm going to quit. I'll say, to heck with this, it's not worth it. If you're positive and supportive, I'll continue. Then tell the truth.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Everyone around my clients, I say, look, tell the truth. Now, I make them all swear to tell the truth. I'm not naive. I know they're not all going to tell the truth, but improves the odds it will. And then finally, you pick something to do better. So, for example, if you reach out to me and say, you know, stakeholder Marshall, I want to be a better listener. Please give me ideas to help me. Then I also say, you know what, I can get better to.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Here's something I want to get better at. Please give me ideas to help me. The client I coached probably had the biggest improvement, needed to improve the least, by the way. 200 people got better. Why everyone started trying to help each other, not judge each other. Wow. Okay, staying in chapter 6, one big heading, you say you challenge the reader, stop asking for feedback and then expressing your opinion. It seems intuitive, yet it isn't. Why is that? It is so hard. The first thing that we want to do when we ask for input is the last thing we should do. What's that? Ask for input, then express my opinion. If I ask you for feedback or input and start expressing my opinion, what does that sound?

Starting point is 00:06:22 like almost invariably. Defensiveness, denial, rationalization, and making excuses. You know, I have feedback back at the office from thousands of people evaluating their bosses. Half of do I have feedback that sounds like this. You know, I think you're a great boss because I love the quality of your excuses.

Starting point is 00:06:43 Never read that before. Oh, wow. Fight that urge to make excuses and just shut up and listen. Now, I also teach people, never promise to do everything people say. Leadership's not a popularity contest. What I'd say is, look, thank you for your ideas. I can't promise to do everything. I'm going to listen to do what I can. Can't change the past. I can change your future. And you know what? I can't get better to everything. I can certainly get better at this. And I'm going to work hard and involve you and ask you to help me get

Starting point is 00:07:11 better. You also challenge us in this chapter number six on how to get good feedback on our own. You know, it's kind of like out in the field, the everyday office, get those radars up or those antennas up, rather. A couple of things you list on page 119, I want to just have you teach on. Solicit contrary opinions. Again, I think this is really hard for human beings in general, certainly strong personalities who have their own opinion. And then you've got to go solicit. Wait a second, Marshall. You're telling me I got to solicit, ask for contrary opinions?

Starting point is 00:07:47 I have two-part question there. Number one, what's the best way to do that? And then number two, what's the best way to receive the opinion? Well, okay, let me answer both. The first thing is, in terms of soliciting the opinions, you need to let people know where you are on the decision curve. So, for example, if the decision is already made, don't solicit a contrary opinion. Right. You know, if it's a done deal, don't sit there and say, what do you think?

Starting point is 00:08:16 Because it really doesn't matter what they think. On the other hand, there's a continuum. You might say to the person, you know, I'm probably going to do it this way. I've almost made up my mind, but I'd like to know everything that could possibly go wrong. That's fine. You may say, you know, I'm really not sure how I'm going to do it. There's my idea right now. I'm totally kind of confused.

Starting point is 00:08:36 What do you think? Or you might say, really, I want to know different opinions. I haven't really got any idea about this one. What do you think? So you see, there's a whole curve. The key is none of those are right or wrong. It's just which one fits the exact situation. And then when you get a different opinion, realize different people have different views and it's okay.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Fight that urge to judge the opinion, to prove their wrong, to prove their right, and learn to just shut up and listen and thank them and let them know you're going to think about it. Now, for example, I want to be a better listener, give me three ideas. What I teach people is you don't judge what they say, you listen, even in a positive way. Now, you might say, why not positive? You give me three ideas. First idea is a great idea. Second idea. Well, that's an interesting idea.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Third idea. Nothing. What message did I give you about your ideas? Excellent, fair, fail. You see, I'm not listening. I'm grading. I'm judging. And when especially leaders do that to people,

Starting point is 00:09:35 they learn to look in your eyes. You know what they're going to tell you? Exactly what they think you want to hear. They're just going to feed ideas to you that they think you want to hear. You're not going to learn anything. Boy, that is. Such a great point. Why do you call apologizing your magic move? And then what do we as leaders need to hear from you on this? We all make mistakes. It's okay. Now, what do I teach leaders to do when we make

Starting point is 00:09:59 a mistake? You apologize. You get up and say, for example, you know, in the past, I got a lot of feedback. I haven't been listening nearly as effectively as I should. The first thing I'd like to say is, I'm sorry. Please accept my apologies. There is absolutely not. no excuse. If I've not listened to you or the people around you, I'm sorry, please accept my apologies. Here's the key. We all make mistakes. It's okay. When we make a mistake, what should we do? Apologize. And by the way, here's what I teach leaders. If you want everyone else to take responsibility, you go first. Let them watch you take a little responsibility. Let them watch you responsible for your own behavior. When you make mistake, suck it up, stand there, admit you made

Starting point is 00:10:53 the mistake, apologize and move on. Don't make excuses. Don't blame others. Look in the mirror. Take responsibility. When you begin to model that, Marshall, what happens with the culture of not just the leaders or the direct reports that maybe you're apologizing to, but the culture of the entire organization? Everybody starts doing the same thing. It's all of a sudden it's okay. Yeah, one of my good coach at Clanchers ago was Steve Sanger. Steve was CEO of General Mills. And he got feedback on coaching.

Starting point is 00:11:24 It was pretty abysmal he talks about as like 10 percentile. And he got feedback. He talks to everyone. He says, look, I got this feedback. I need to be a better coach. Help me. He did everything I taught him. A year later, he got ranked 90.

Starting point is 00:11:37 He gets up in front of the group and says, you know what? I got feedback on being a good coach, and it was pretty bad. I worked real hard, and now it's real good. I just want to say thank you. I couldn't have done this without you. You gave me the feedback in the first place, tell me what I needed to improve. You gave me the ideas to help me improve. Now I'm getting better.

Starting point is 00:11:55 And you know what? I'm going to try to get better yet. First thing I want to do is thank you because I'm only getting better because you helped me. Now, he's the CEO. He didn't have to say that. He did. Does his credibility go down or up when he does that? Oh, way off the charts.

Starting point is 00:12:10 Way up. The biggest challenge for the entrepreneur is, you know, you were the expert. You're the authority. It's you, you, you. And then all of a sudden you got to let go and it's them, them, them. A lot of entrepreneurs can't do it. And ultimately, if you can't delegate and you can't let go, you don't get scale. You can only do so much and the business just stops.

Starting point is 00:12:30 I don't know if it's number one, but it's got to be close to the number one problem of entrepreneurial leaders. All right, here we go. Up next, Pat Lynch-Joni. No surprise that he's in our favorite. He's just absolutely one of our favorite guests of all time. We had him on to talk about effective meetings. Like, why do you meet? How should you meet?

Starting point is 00:12:50 What should it look like? How do you make sure that it is not a colossal waste of time? Here is Pat Lynch-eony. There's a big misconception that leadership is a reward as opposed to what? The responsibility. And one of the things I've looked at in my career is like, why do some leaders just, are they not willing to do the basic tasks of their job? They abdicate their role. And I realized, in a funny way, it's because they're being leaders for the wrong reason.

Starting point is 00:13:22 They do it because they see it as the end of the road lifetime award for working really hard. And so they think, well, now that I've arrived and I'm the leader, I'm the CEO, why should I have to do anything I don't want to do? Whereas other people realize, oh, now that I'm the CEO or the leader of the organization, now the responsibility and the burden is greater than ever for me to deliver for the good of these other people. And if you have a motivation that this is a reward and I've arrived, you're not going to do all the hard stuff. And if you have the idea that this is a huge burden and a responsibility, then you're going to be willing to do whatever is necessary. So that's very interesting. So how do we as humans balance this reality that if you ascend into leadership, usually that's got some more money attached to it.

Starting point is 00:14:07 Obviously it's got more responsibility, which you're talking about. But it also has a little bit of status. and all those things are good if kept in check. And so how do you make sure that you don't make it about, all right, in order for me to advance financially, in order for me to advance and influence, I got to go higher up the ladder, how do you keep yourself in check

Starting point is 00:14:26 when it brings obviously some value to it? You know, I think the main thing is, I don't know if we can ask the people who are going through that process. I mean, what I'd like to say is, if you want to be a leader, but you really want to do it because you want to be personally glorified

Starting point is 00:14:40 or look like you're successful, Don't do it. Right. Like I say, when we give graduation speeches, we shouldn't be telling people, go out and be a leader, go change the world. Because if their reason they want to do that is because they want to be rich, famous, or powerful, then that's a bad reason to be a leader. But what I'd say is let's stop promoting people.

Starting point is 00:14:57 Let's stop allowing people into positions of leadership that is really only about them. And from now on, when people talk about servant leadership, we should stop talking about servant leadership because it's the only kind of leadership there is. It implies that there's another kind that's. valid and there is no other valid kind of leadership. So I think that what we need to do is make it unacceptable for people to be leaders if they think it's about them. Remember that if you're not doing the hardest things in your organization and the things that only you as the leader can do, then you're not doing your job. If you see another leader who is abdicating their job,

Starting point is 00:15:36 and I'll talk about what those activities are, call them out on it. For their sake and for the sake of the organization, humbly and kindly say, you know something? You have to embrace this part of your job. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you want to be a leader. We have to take that risk if we want our organizations to be healthy and successful, and we want our employees to be well led. And those activities, Ken, you've got to take an interest in meetings and making them great. You can't say, I hate meetings and I don't like to go to them and I'll let somebody else handle them. No, the leader of an organization has to be the chief meeting officer. They have to be the person that makes meetings great, intense, good conflict, and driving

Starting point is 00:16:19 toward the right outcomes. The other thing is you have to manage people. Too many CEOs say, I don't want to manage people anymore. You know, I hire adults, and I shouldn't have to manage them. The CEO, more than anyone in an organization, has to manage his or her direct reports, or no one else in the organization is going to do that well. Another one is you have to repeat yourself constantly. Like I say that the CEO is also the CRO, the chief reminding officer.

Starting point is 00:16:47 And if they're not constantly repeating themselves, if they get tired of that and say, you know, I'm bored with that message, the people in the organization are not going to hear it. The other thing is they have to confront people and have difficult conversations. They have to really be into messy conversations. And if they avoid them like so many leaders I meet do and say, oh, I don't want to get into that. I don't have the time and the energy for that,

Starting point is 00:17:09 then nobody else will. If leaders aren't willing to do those messy things, they shouldn't be leaders in the first place. So we've got a CEO, we've got leaders that are listening in here, and they're going, what does that mean, Pat? Tell me specifically, how am I supposed to take an interest?

Starting point is 00:17:26 And then once I'm taking an interest, what captain role am I playing in these meetings? Well, one of the things we've just discovered, Ken, it sounds weird to say we've discovered. because you said I wrote a book about this. Meetings are even more important than we had ever thought. If a leader does not have great meetings, he or she is not an effective leader. The most important moment in a leader's day, week, month is when they're leading people in meetings.

Starting point is 00:17:57 Because if you think about it, what is leadership? Where does it occur? Is it walking down the hall and saying inspiring things? Is it giving a speech at a conference or something like that? those are anomalies. Most of leadership is when you're sitting with your team in a room and either holding them accountable, challenging them around decisions, being vulnerable, making difficult decisions, and moving the organization forward. And if a leader says, I don't really like going to meetings, they are saying, I don't like leading. And what that means is,

Starting point is 00:18:29 if their meetings are boring, that's on them. If their meetings are unfocused and they want to that's on them. If nobody is really engaging and pushing on each other in a meeting, that's on them. If they're not driving to closure and clarity, that's on them. And so what leaders have to do is say, this is my number one job. And I have to learn everything I can about how to make this meeting, focused, compelling, honest, and driving to closure. And so it really is about saying, this is my job. If you're a surgeon, you better be reading books about how to do surgery well. If you're a football player, you should be studying other people that are good at football and learning about how to do that. If you're a leader in an organization, you should be reading

Starting point is 00:19:18 about how to make my meetings great because that is where you lead. I can't emphasize that enough, Ken. Yeah, I agree. So let's stay here for a minute. So what would you say to somebody, let's just say they're sitting here with us. They go, Pat. okay, you're stepping all over my toes. My meetings are all over the place. I can't even describe the last five meetings we had because maybe I was half asleep. I was just there. I contributed a little bit. They're admitting, okay, my meetings, I'm not doing a good job leading them at all. How do they start? Those little attributes that you just listed out, do they look at that and go, okay, I got to make sure every meeting's got a little bit of that? Is that how they start? Here's what they have to

Starting point is 00:19:58 realize first, Ken, and that is this. You can't have meeting stew. Meeting stew. is when we take every different kind of meeting and throw it in the same one and wonder why it doesn't turn out good. They have to realize there's actually four different reasons for having a meeting and you have to separate these. One purpose to have meetings

Starting point is 00:20:14 is just to catch up with people on what's going on. You should do that for five minutes every day. If you work in the same location, just get together in a room and go, what are you doing? What are you doing? How was the game last night? What did you think about this? Hey, where's Fred?

Starting point is 00:20:26 Oh, he's traveling. Great. Enough. Don't sit down. Don't have an agenda. It's just shooting the stuff and get it on the same page and kind of getting in touch with each other. Five minutes a day, no more.

Starting point is 00:20:37 Don't do that at your other meetings and waste time. If you're doing that every day, when you get together for meetings that need to be more focused, you're going to go there. The second kind is to move the ball forward, if you will. It's to make tactical decisions

Starting point is 00:20:50 to keep moving the ball down the field using a football analogy. This is what we call a weekly staff meeting. You and your leadership team are getting together saying, how are we doing? What's going on right now? what do we need to be doing this week to make sure that things are getting better?

Starting point is 00:21:06 You're not there to go over administrative details. That's what you do for five minutes a day. You're not there to talk about the strategy and whether or not it should be changed or what's going on in the industry and all these other things. That's for a different meeting. Have a focused, tactical meeting that's all about the priorities we have, how are we doing against those priorities, and what adjustments do we need to make this week?

Starting point is 00:21:29 Okay? That has to be completely tight. If we're letting administrivia and strategic issues and brainstorming and other things leak into that meeting, that's how it gets unfocused. And that meeting right there, that weekly staff meeting is by far our most important one. We need to limit it to tactical subjects. We need to have a very limited number of things we're going to talk about. We need to go there and assess how we're doing first before we put together an agenda. Then we need to say, now we know what we have to talk about.

Starting point is 00:22:01 Let's talk about the right thing. So that's a whole bunch of stuff. And before we get into that, the next kind of meeting we need to have is occasionally, and maybe it's once a month, maybe it's a couple times a month. It really depends on what's going on. We need to have these bigger picture,

Starting point is 00:22:16 strategic, thematic meetings where we're talking about one big, hairy topic, a competitive threat, a big change in the market, a need for a new strategy. Instead of talking about that for 15 minutes during our weekly meetings, we need to go off, create enough space,

Starting point is 00:22:36 a couple hours, to roll up our sleeves, do a little bit of pre-reading and research, and come to that meeting, ready to have wonderful arguments and brainstorm and push on each other and solve that problem. But too many leaders

Starting point is 00:22:51 try to include strategic topics because they're the most interesting, and they mix them in with tactical topics and administrative ones, and it just, doesn't work. And then there's the fourth kind of meeting we need to have. And that is sometimes we need to step back and breathe and just check in.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Are we doing the right things as a team? Is the culture right? This is something we probably have to do once a quarter. We have to get out of the office, go across the street to a hotel, get a room for four hours, and sit there as a team, and just take a breath and evaluate. Now, everybody's like, man, that sounds like a lot of meetings. first of all, if you do those meetings correctly, every one of them will be enjoyable, compelling, and productive.

Starting point is 00:23:39 Nobody will complain about them. What they complain about is mixing it all up together and wondering if anything is really getting done. Secondly, if you have all of those meetings, it's going to add up to about 15% of your time. Now, if a leader complains about spending 15% of his or her time with his or her team in working, meetings, getting things done, then I think they've probably lost sight of what their job is about.

Starting point is 00:24:06 So that's a long conversation. But if we don't separate out those four different kinds of reasons for getting together in meetings, it's never going to work. Okay, now I got to tell you, I was really excited to see that Dan Heath made the list. This book about the power of moments in our lives personally and professionally absolutely touched my soul. I enjoyed the interview as much as anybody I talked to this entire year. You're going to hear us talking about people. moments here and how they can literally shift massive decisions in our lives. Here is Dan Heath. This is fundamentally a book about experience. You know, we live in a world where there are people trying to figure out how to craft the experience of other people. So in the business world,

Starting point is 00:24:52 we think about the customer experience and in healthcare. We obsess about the patient experience. I mean, these days there are chief patient experience officers in most health systems. And there are HR folks and managers thinking about the employee experience and in academia, the student experience. And what we're asking in the book is what are great experiences made of? And if I may, I think there's a kind of puzzle that provides a starting place for this. And we might think of it as the Disney paradox. And I think anybody that's listening right now that's been to Disney World or another theme park, I think, can relate to this.

Starting point is 00:25:28 And the paradox is, imagine that we put around your wrist some kind of post. modern device that could monitor and log your happiness levels at every minute of the day. And then at the end of the day, we could look back at the data and see how happy or unhappy you were at various times. My prediction is that for the majority of those moments, you would have actually been happier sitting on your couch at home and binging on Netflix or something. And it's less humid in your living room. It's less crowded. Your kids don't act like maniacs. There's a lot to be said for the couch. And yet, in memory, that experience at Disney World might be one of the highlights of our year.

Starting point is 00:26:10 And I don't think we're crazy to think that, despite the quote-unquote data. And what's going on is that psychologists know a couple of things about the way we remember experiences. One is the length of our experiences tends to wash out with time. It's called duration neglect. And we're left with snippets or scenes or fragments. of our experiences. I think this is easy enough for anybody to test. Just think about your last family vacation or your last big project at work or a semester of college. And you'll notice, you can't remember the whole thing. You can't just load it up in memory and kind of watch it

Starting point is 00:26:48 end to end. You're left with moments. And furthermore, there are two kinds of moments that we disproportionately recall. One of them that's really in many ways, the core message of the book, is the peak of the experience. You know, the most positive moment or moment. moments in a positive experience. And the other is transition points like beginnings and endings. In fact, one study of people's memories from college found that 40% of the things they recalled happened in the month of September. Why September? Because that's the beginning. You know, there's so much novelty and new people, new experiences. And so anyway, to circle back to the Disney paradox, this helps us make sense of this thing where in the moment we might have been

Starting point is 00:27:31 happier on our couch for most of the day. And yet, we remember it as a great source of joy and delight. And the reason is because Disney World is providing the kinds of peak moments that our couch never does. And what we realize is that great experiences, employee experiences, customer experiences, patient experiences hinge on these peak moments. And these moments are under our control. So give us an example of how we can build a peak out of maybe one or all of these. We're going to break down several of these, or all four actually, but what does that look like to build a peak moment, to be so intentional that you can actually build it for somebody? Great question. And let me tell you one of my favorite stories I think captures this. So there's

Starting point is 00:28:16 this hotel in Los Angeles called the Magic Castle Hotel. Yes, I know. And if you've been there. Yeah. No kidding. Okay, so I suspect most of your listeners have not. And so I just want to ask you, If you haven't been there, just picture in your mind the magic castle hotel and just conjure up that mental image. And now let me tell you, and I think Ken will agree, that it looks nothing like that. It is not a castle. It is not particularly magical. It is a very average looking place. So picture an apartment complex, two-story, built in the 1950s.

Starting point is 00:28:53 At some point, it was painted bright yellow and kind of converted into what's really a motel, more than a hotel. hotel's a little bit of a stretch. The rooms are pretty mediocre. I stayed there, and it's kind of maybe a holiday and express level of luxury. The amenities are pretty average. The lobby looks like maybe the waiting area

Starting point is 00:29:13 of a place you might get your oil changed. So why do I bring this up, this very average looking place? Well, there's a fact that is a bit mind-blowing. The Magic Castle is rated the number two hotel in Los Angeles on-trip advisor,

Starting point is 00:29:29 according to thousands of reviews. It outranks the Ritz Carlton, the Four Seasons. And so you just ask yourself, how could this possibly be true? And it's not like 12 bucks a night either. It's kind of Hilton Marriott-level pricing. And the answer has to do with moments, that what they figured out at this hotel is that the right moment can outweigh a lot of creature comforts.

Starting point is 00:29:52 So one of my favorite moments that they've created is installed by the pool. They have this average looking pool in the courtyard. And on the wall near the pool, there's a cherry red phone. And just above the phone, there's a sign that says, Popsicle Hotline. And if you go up to the phone, you pick it up, hold it to your ear. They'll say Popsicle Hotline, we'll be right out. And somebody comes out moments later, carrying a silver tray loaded with cherry and grape and orange popsicles. The person themselves, they're wearing a suit and wearing white gloves like an English butler.

Starting point is 00:30:27 They bring the popsicles to you at poolside. Just amazing, right? You should have seen the smiles on the kids' faces when this happens. They have dozens of these kinds of things. They have a snack menu where you can go to the front desk and ask for Cheetos and Cracker Jacks and a cream soda all for free, just for asking. You can check out board games. You can check out movies for free. You can drop off your laundry in the morning.

Starting point is 00:30:50 They'll wash and fold it over the course of the day and have it for you by the time you get back from the amusement park. They have magicians doing tricks in the life. lobby several times a week. And when I paint that picture, all the sudden you can start to understand why, you know, if you were taking your family on a vacation to Southern California, you might actually rather be at the Magic Castle than the Ritz Carlton because they're paying attention to those peak moments. And, you know, back to that Disney paradox that we started with, a year down the line, you're not going to remember that the bedspread wasn't that fancy and, you know, that the sheets weren't a thousand thread count. What you're going to remember,

Starting point is 00:31:27 is, you won't believe this, but there was a pool by the phone that was called the popsicle hotline and blah, blah, blah. That's right. And that's what it means to say that experiences hinge on peak moments, that much of what the magic castle does is unremarkable, but they get the moments right. Wow. Dan, that really is, it's almost to the nth degree of elevation, being lifted out of the ordinary.

Starting point is 00:31:51 Everything about that place is ordinary except for those experiences. So it makes it, if we go to a nice hotel, how quick. we expect the finest things. And so there's really nothing out of the ordinary at the Ritz if you think about it based on your expectation. I love that. If you're listening right now and you run a service business, I think it's instructive to go and listen to what people say about it in their own words. And it's kind of one of those forehead-slapping moments where you realize no one ever writes a frothing, enthusiastic review because things basically met their expectations. You know, nobody ever said, you know, the bed was reasonably comfortable and the shower was reasonably powerful and the view was reasonably good.

Starting point is 00:32:36 You know, what people rave about, what they talk about, what they remember are the exceptional things. And notice that not everything at the Magic Castle Hotel is exceptional. It's not that we have to be perfect. It's that, in fact, what we say in the book is a lot of great service experiences are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable. And I think that's a great kind of mantra to keep in mind. Yeah, it is. And it really takes the pressure off. You know, it's not about every moment.

Starting point is 00:33:02 It's the right moments. Getting people to trip over the truth, meaning that, you know, there's an insight you're trying to communicate. And you find a way to condense it in time and get the people in the room to experience it for themselves. It becomes their insight. The aha moment happens in their brain. And I think people who have led change efforts can empathize with this, that so often we try to rally people to our side by just sharing information with them. And what Scott Guthrie from Microsoft and what this factory owner figured out is it's so much more powerful when that insight happens in the audience of the people that we're trying to rally to our side.

Starting point is 00:33:44 It's not often you get to talk to a billionaire. That's be billionaire. And to be honest with you, I'd never had the chance. interview a billionaire before Charles Koch was such a gracious guest. And this entire interview was like sitting at the foot of a sage. Specifically in this excerpt, you're going to hear him talking about the importance and the value of leaders making sure that there is habitual change, always changing for the purpose of growing. Here's Charles Koch. I want you to speak to what you've learned over time and your leadership has learned when it comes to assessing opportunities. As you're looking at capabilities. What has worked for you as it relates to saying, all right, we might have the

Starting point is 00:34:29 capabilities to get into this and this does present an opportunity, but it may not be the right opportunity. Everybody has a capability to do something, but you need to be able to differentiate yourself. You need to know or not know you don't know until you get in it. It's all starts with an experiment, but to believe that you can create superior value for your customers. And unless you can create more value than their alternatives for them, you're not going to succeed in that business. And then you need to believe that it's sustainable, that it's not just you get in and they'll immediately copy you or somebody will come up with a better way of doing it and you'll be out of business. So those are some of the things we look at.

Starting point is 00:35:22 then another piece of it is to when we're entering a new business is to do it at an experimental level that is a small enough level that if it fails it's not going to cripple us or destroy us another thing even before we start the experiment to have an internal challenge process where we don't say okay we got this vision and we don't want to hear any naysaying no we want to hear naysay not for people to prove they're smart or just stop us, but we want people to point out the flaws in our strategy and in our theory that we can create superior value because you're much better off to learn the flaws in your thinking

Starting point is 00:36:09 before you plunge into it than afterward. And I've never understood people who want to protect their ideas and not have them criticized, like any decision. I make, when I think we ought to make an acquisition or implement a strategy, I look for, okay, what are the key drivers in success or failure in this venture and who is really good at each one, each aspect, whether that's operations, marketing, distribution, whatever it is, I want challenges. I want people who are going to come in and say, okay, what's wrong with this? How can this go wrong? I want to understand all the pitfalls. And every time we go through that, we come up with a better answer than I had to start with.

Starting point is 00:37:01 You really do embrace change. And to the words in talking about change that you mentioned that you and your leadership have been intentional about is embracing and driving change. And I spend some time thinking about that. And I think that a blind spot for many leaders is to drive change. because it sounds good, we know it is good, but they themselves don't embrace it, or they haven't created a culture where once we say this is the change and we start driving it, the act of embracing it is a whole other enchilada. I want you to speak to that because I was really, really moved by that. And I think that that's something you've been great at is not just driving change, but embracing it yourself and therefore creating a culture where the company embraces it.

Starting point is 00:37:49 It's a reality. And once we make a decision to move forward with this change and we need to make these changes, we have to embrace it. Talk about that. Our philosophy is that however well we're doing as individuals in our roles and our jobs, or we as a business or capability are doing, it can be done better differently, much better. So that's the state of mind, all of us in leadership and we try to inculcate in all of our people, is that you need to be constantly striving to improve and find better ways.

Starting point is 00:38:32 I mean, we all like to rest on our laurels and become complacent. And this is one of my theories that success is the, and they're not just mine, but through history, success is one of the biggest enemies of success. It happens in nations. It happens in people, and it happens in companies. And so we constantly need to remind ourselves that whatever we're doing is not going to be good enough. And if that's been true through history, the urgency is in an order or magnitude greater today with the pace of technology. That's exactly right. What percentage of the workforce is working on products that existed 100 years ago? It's minute.

Starting point is 00:39:18 They're all working on new products. And that's what I believe artificial intelligence and the electronics and all these, this new technology, data analytics, predictive analytics, all of this will lead to new products that will make people's lives better in not a hundred years. because time is being compressed, but 10 years from now, maybe the majority of people will be working on products that don't exist today. Wow. We're just starting to see this.

Starting point is 00:39:54 This is the beginning of a new frontier. And in a decade or two, our lives, well, all of us will be completely different. This is why any protectionism, whether protecting against foreign competition or trying to rig the system to keep innovations out from competing with you. All this stuff is so self-destructive. What we all need to be is lifelong learners and see what's going on. And it's like shooting a bird. You don't aim at the bird. You'll be 10 feet behind them by the time the buckshot gets there. You need to aim ahead of them. That's right. And that's what we all need to be doing in our careers, both as employees, and ask companies and think, okay, where is this going?

Starting point is 00:40:44 What capabilities do I have? What do I need to learn that can create value in this new future? All right. Up next is Carmine Gallo, a repeat guest on the show. This time he joined us to talk about a new book. And in this piece of conversation you're going to hear, we're going to talk about how to persuade. At the end of the day, if I could give myself extra doses of superpower

Starting point is 00:41:08 in one area that would not be a traditional superhero power, it would be to persuade anybody I talk to, I just want to persuade them. You might want to fly, you might want to be able to walk through a wall. Not me. I want to persuade everybody. I think that is a superpower. Here's Carmine Gallo talking about it. I started looking into the history of ideas.

Starting point is 00:41:31 I've talked to scientists and historians and economists. And what they've told me, and this is the theme of five stars, Ken, What they told me is that mastering the ancient art of persuasion and communication is no longer a soft skill. It is the fundamental skill to get from good to great in the age of ideas. Mastering communication and you'll be irreplaceable and irresistible. I like that. And here's some data. According to a recent survey, 94% of hiring managers say an employee with stronger communication skills has a better chance of being.

Starting point is 00:42:10 promoted to a leadership position than an employee with more years of experience but weaker verbal skills. And it really is true. It starts though, Carmine, as you know, all so well, with just communication ability. If you've got good communication ability, that's the building block by which you now become persuasive. But if you can't communicate well, you certainly aren't going to be able to be persuasive. Why do you think, again, this is kind of an intro here before we dive into some of the content of the book. Why is it that we're seeing that data from hiring managers? You know, why such a big number? This is what's so counterintuitive about the theme of my book and what I found so fascinating. As globalization, artificial intelligence, automation combined

Starting point is 00:42:56 to disrupt every career and every industry, your value is no longer locked up in just how quickly, you can retrieve information. It's no longer locked up in our hands or on the farm. It's in our ideas. But ideas don't sell themselves. If you cannot advocate and champion your ideas persuasively, they're not going to matter. You're not going to get promoted. You're not going to build that company, attract stakeholders, rally investors, attract and motivate employees and teams and partners. It all comes down to communication. I actually started writing and researching five stars when I talked to an economist at the University of Illinois and Chicago. Her name is Diedra McCloskey. And there's a number of economists who study this. But she was the first person to tell me something that kind of blew my mind. She said, Carmine, do you understand that persuasion? Good old sweet talk. That's what she calls it. Good old sweet talk. Persuasion is now 30% of the U.S. economy. I thought, well, that. 30% of the economy. What do you mean by that? And she actually showed me a lot of research, which demonstrates that if you take all of the job categories in America today, and you start

Starting point is 00:44:13 multiplying and dividing up how much of those particular careers are based on one person, convincing another person to buy something, to change their mind, whether that's management, leadership, entrepreneurship. You take all of the categories. Some have to be more persuasive than others, plumbers may not be that persuasive, but if they have their own business, they need to be, but still not as persuasive as, say, a salesperson. So when you start combining all of these, and you do the research on it, an entire 30% of the U.S. economy is now based on persuasion, and it's only going to go higher. And that's actually been peer-reviewed and replicated in different countries. And here's why, Ken, if I could just tell you this in about 20 seconds,

Starting point is 00:44:56 this is what's fascinating, and why we're in a completely different environment today. historically, in the ag economy, in the agricultural age, if you could plow a field a little faster than the farmer next door, you wouldn't see a big increase in your wealth. During the industrial age, if you could assemble a widget faster than the person standing next to you on the factory floor, you wouldn't see a big increase in a wealth. It was the factory owners who owned the wealth. Today, for the first time, anyone who is a little better, and we're talking about trying to be a lot better, today, anyone who's just a little better at expressing their ideas can see sudden massive increases in wealth, unprecedented in human history.

Starting point is 00:45:40 That's not my idea. This isn't my original idea. I'm the messenger. This is what historians, economists, and scientists are telling me. I think that's incredible, and it's a very empowering time to be an entrepreneur today. So that's a bold statement because we've got this colloquialism that we've all heard. No one is irreplaceable. Here comes bestselling author, Carmine Gow.

Starting point is 00:46:00 and he says, great communicators are irreplaceable. I'm going to let you expound on that bold thought. I love it. I'm going to give you one example that I know recently. A salesperson at a major technology company contacted me not too long ago and gave me a little of his history. Two years ago, he was a sales engineer. And his career was pretty capped off. It was limited. He wanted to become an evangelist, which is much higher salary, much more visibility, and you get to travel the world. At the time, his boss said, Steve, you're just an engineer. Why don't you just stick to what you know? And he stuck to what he did best, but he started reading books, started reading some of my books,

Starting point is 00:46:44 like Talk Like Ted and some others, started reading other books, watch TED Talks, started working on his presentation skills. Within two years, not only is he now an evangelist, he was recognized by the CEO in front of 500, 800 other salespeople at this year's conference, and the CEO said, we need another 10 steves. His position was about to be eliminated about a year ago, and that's when they gave him the evangelist position, because another competitor said, that guy is the best communicator we've got. We want him, because nobody can explain the technology as well as that guy at company XYZ. They made him a bigger offer, and so his current company said, not only are we going to match and elevate that offer, we're going to give you the title that you originally wanted.

Starting point is 00:47:33 They cannot afford to lose him. He's irreplaceable to them. You can have the greatest product in the world. If you cannot explain that product in a way that gets your customers excited about the product, connects with people emotionally, then that product may not be as successful, nearly as successful, as it could be. So yeah, in every company I've ever worked for or with in terms of a communication consultant, the people who are the better persuaders, the better communicators, they're the ones who get promoted. They're the ones who get the leadership positions. And even if that particular position might be cut, there's always another company that's willing to jump for that person.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Great persuaders are irresistible and irreplaceable. Both LinkedIn and McKenzie have come out with major surveys, global surveys. They both found exactly the same thing. The number one skill in highest demand and lowest supply is communication and leadership combined, right? Those two put together. But let me give you an ROI. Because a lot of people ask me,

Starting point is 00:48:39 well, what's the ROI on improving communication skills? This isn't me. I didn't say this. This is Warren Buffett, who repeatedly has told people publicly that we all have to invest in our skills, in our skill development. We have to be learned-at-alls and not know-it-alls, especially in these times. He says the number one skill that will increase your value by 50% instantly

Starting point is 00:49:07 is becoming a better public speaker. Warren Buffett publicly acknowledges that he was terrified of public speaking early in his career. But he said in order for him to attract him. more clients, he had to become better at it. So we took at that time a Dale Carnegie course, a public speaking course, learned to be a better public speaker, volunteered to teach at a local community college, became a better presenter, a better speaker, which he says was the number one skill that got him from where he was as a stock investor and a financial advisor to growing to where he is today. In fact, he thinks so highly of that skill, it's the only degree that

Starting point is 00:49:49 that he has in his office, in his internal office, and this is on CNBC, Warren Buffett was the most proud, not of the MBA degree, not of the business school degree, but of the public speaking certificate. So if you want to raise your value by 50% instantly, public speaking and communication skills are the fundamental skills that you need to go from average to great. That's the point. You can't be average. You know this. We can't be average anymore. Average only be. guarantees below average results. There's so much here. I'll just throw it to you with a basic question and let you teach. What are some practical things? People that are listening in, they're watching right now, that they can do to begin to see growth in this area.

Starting point is 00:50:35 Well, I'm glad you mentioned that. You're right. Part three, after I developed the argument, part three is very actionable, tangible, specific tips that you can use today to become a better persuader and a better communicator. I'm going to give you a few that over the last few weeks, my book has been out, people have been asking me about because they sound a little counterintuitive, but they're absolutely fundamental. The first tip, and again, sounds counterintuitive, if you want to sound smart, use short, simple words. Third grade language is preferable. Third grade language. There is a high-tech startup in the health insurance space in Silicon Valley. It's called Collective Health, and they were named by the Wall Street Journal as being

Starting point is 00:51:19 one of the startups to watch. This was in 2017. So I contacted them while I was writing the book, and I noticed something. All of their health insurance material is very simple, like incredibly simple. And I said, what's going on here, guys? The founders are surgeons, professors, economists, and they said, well, Carmine, we've done all the research. And we have found that most people do not know nearly as much as they say they do about any topic, especially. especially health care. So when you ask people a simple question, like what's a deductible, which is the simplest term, by the way, in health insurance, the simplest. Most people still can't give you an accurate answer. And then when you get even more complicated, as health insurance

Starting point is 00:52:04 jargon tends to be, you've lost everybody, including people who work in health care. So according to their research, they have reduced all of their language, not just their marketing material, but on the material that they send to employers for health insurance, they have actually reduced their language to third grade language. And you can measure that with certain tools that are used to measure the readability of textbooks. Educators use it. I use it myself. It's based on the Flesh Kincaid model. What is that tool? So if I'm writing something, a blog post, and I want to third grade it up, how would I do that? First, Ken, do you know how hard it is to reduce content to third grade language? I know. It's a good. It's a third grade language. It's a

Starting point is 00:52:54 It is very hard to do. The chapter where I wrote that about third grade language, I tried my hardest to reduce it to third grade language. And I think the best I did was to get it to like sixth grade language or something like that. You know, I acknowledge that. It's very hard to do. I use an app called Hemingway, which is a paid-for app, but it's not that expensive. But there are other apps.

Starting point is 00:53:17 They're all based on what's called Flesh-Kincade models. So these are like readability apps. And they're used for textbooks. So you can actually put in text, and they look at sentence structure, how simple sentences are. They look at words. Are your words being written for a Ph.D. level? Or are your words being written for more of a grade school language? Third grade, by the way, is probably a little low.

Starting point is 00:53:40 The apps that I use tend to be okay with eighth grade, ninth grade language. They said, that's good. That's good. Remember that famous ad, or certainly your viewers have heard about it. the crazy ones ad. Remember that famous Apple ad? Sure, sure. Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the square pegs, and the round holes. I took the content from that entire ad campaign, put it into the readability app and it was third grade language. Here's the point. If you want to reach a wider group of people who might be somewhat unfamiliar with your

Starting point is 00:54:17 product or service, make sure that your language and the words you use, are in grade school language. If you are speaking with verbiage that only a PhD or another peer would understand, then you're making it too complicated for your audience. Up next is Bobby Greenwald, one of the most innovative people that you had never met until he joined us on the program. Bobby Greenwald is the creator of U-Version, now reaching over 340 million people around the globe. I felt like this excerpt may have been one of the most valuable excerpts of any interview all year long, maybe over the last five years. I really believe this.

Starting point is 00:55:02 This idea that constraints are necessary. Embrace constraints so that you can truly innovate. It's an absolute mind-blowing thought. Here's Bobby talking about it. We've got a lot of entrepreneurs, small businessmen and women who think like you think. And I want to know what were some of those early. steps to take vision and really hone it, make sure it's the right vision, how did you polish it? What were those next steps early on before you ever got to launch?

Starting point is 00:55:34 You know, when I come up with an idea and this idea was no exception to it, I have kind of a group of people I trust that are willing to be honest with me and give me feedback. And that's super important for me. I'm an idea person, so I'm not usually short on new ideas. but what is a process for me is to kind of take those ideas, go with it. It's just a handful of people. I like to bounce the idea off of them. I like them to kind of pick it apart.

Starting point is 00:56:01 I actually challenge them to kind of challenge the idea. And the way the process works for me is like I actually want to try to defend it. And if I can't defend it well, it becomes pretty obvious that this idea may not have enough merit or it needs more thought or it needs more time, you know, to bake. And so I try not to get too married to these ideas or to, you know, hold on to them too tightly, but rather really trust the process of getting feedback on them. So that's an early on thing. It's before we're just discovering some of the problems with it or we're certainly don't know all the challenges of what it would take to implement it. We're not getting down too deep into the weeds of what's involved in implementing it.

Starting point is 00:56:40 But simply the feedback on, is this an idea that they think would work? Is this an idea that people might want to use or buy if? if it's a product that we're selling, you know, just the basic kind of reactions that they get in the response to it. It's not a formal focus group. I'm just not kind of wired that way. These are kind of informal conversations where I sort of test it, sort of pitch it almost. And each time I do that, I find that either I get better at pitching it, I refine it, you know, in some way,

Starting point is 00:57:10 or the idea falls apart, or it's clear that it's just not the right time or not ready yet. So for me, that's the very first step for me is to just kind of get some feedback from people that I trust. All right. So you did this, right, in this process, and you had some people go, okay, I think there's something here. And one of the things I want to lead you into just kind of let you take us along these next steps is you have a great statement that I want you to have some fun with, and that's innovation happens within constraints. So I love that. Let's first talk about the back half of that sentence. What were the constraints after you came out of that initial idea filter, if you will, what were the constraints? You had a good idea. People were giving you, okay, yep, this is doable.

Starting point is 00:57:53 What were the constraints you were dealing with? So the constraints that we started with were, it seemed like everything was a constraint. So the first we, even though I was on staff at the church and there was a sense of permission on behalf of the rest of our leaders to say, we're willing to try this, that permission didn't come with the budget. So it really was sort of like if you can figure out how to build a prototype or build something, find some people that can do that, then that would be, let's do it, but we don't really have a budget for it. So that's, I mean, not like we have a budget of $50,000 and that's not enough, like as in like we have no budget, zero budget, zero dollars.

Starting point is 00:58:35 There's no contractor that can be hired. So then, you know, as an entrepreneur, I felt like my job is to take this vision and really try to sell it to people that have the capacity to contribute to it. If we could figure out how to build something that worked, it could really change how we engage in scripture. So for me, it was kind of a missional thing that I was trying to create a compelling vision for. And I found some people on our team that had the capacity. I'm not a developer. Most people don't realize it, but I've never written a line of code in U version, not a single line. I don't know how to do that.

Starting point is 00:59:08 I'm just a person that could bring vision ideas and find those people that know how to do that. So we found some people on our team that had some extra capacity outside of their normal jobs, something that they were willing to do in the evening. And then I'm just making the case, you know, just trying to say, I need you to give your time, to volunteer your time, to build this. But it was just sort of a step-by-step kind of process of, I just need to get a design for a website. So let's find somebody that can help us build that design. We can help contribute to that, but somebody can actually draw it up on, you know,

Starting point is 00:59:41 a computer and make it look like it's supposed to look. And then the second probably most significant constraint is that we realized that we actually couldn't get the Bible for free that people actually own the Bible. And we were so ignorant that we really had no idea that people translate the Bible. They have a license to it. You have to get a license to use it. I had to go and figure out how to get a hold of publishers and people that own the rights to license us this, and my budget for licensing was $0 as well.

Starting point is 01:00:15 And so that was kind of obviously another constraint that we faced. And I didn't have any of these relationships, by the way. That was another constraint. I didn't know any of these people. And so it basically, I mean, every turn I made, there was a constraint that we were facing. But just the persistence of saying, okay, how do we overcome each of these problems sort of one at a time, not get overwhelmed by all of them, but just sort of take them one at a time was the way we approached it.

Starting point is 01:00:38 Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point. What can you tell us about knowing the difference between a constraint and a sign that we need to be observing? You know, sometimes there are those sort of roadblocks that are sort of ending points, you know, like where this is just simply not working. For me, I usually am always sort of stepping back from the problem and making sure that we're making progress is one thing I'm looking at. Like, are we able to kind of move this forward? It is a bit of discernment that's involved in your question because there's things we try. that fail, the fact that they failed is the answer that we should probably learn what we can learn

Starting point is 01:01:14 from and move on and do something different, as opposed to just continue and to press forward. I think probably the key for me is I'm willing to let go of something, you know, when it becomes apparent that it's failed. So I'm not just hanging on to something that's obvious that it's failed or where everyone around me sees that it's failed or I can objectively measure it. It's more of a willingness to acknowledge that something's fail, I think, is sort of the key variable there. and if you have that willingness, I think you'll kind of know when that right time comes.

Starting point is 01:01:43 But when it comes to trying to prove a concept, you know, if we can't get to the place where we can even just prove the concept or get to the demo phase, those were all obstacles that I felt like were overcomable, like things that took some creativity to get through.

Starting point is 01:01:57 But I was just trying to get to that proof of concept. If I've not even achieved the proof of concept, then I'm probably going to be fairly persistent at trying to get to that point at least, you know, to see if it works. Once I've reached that proof of concept, which in our case we did in 2007, we did get this website launched. Then it became apparent a few months in, though, that no one was using it.

Starting point is 01:02:21 I mean, we've got audience to go to it, but even ourselves, we were only using it because we created it. That's when we realized we had kind of a fairly significant problem that we achieved what we were wanting to achieve, but it didn't actually work. constraints are an actual ingredient for innovation. If you embrace those constraints, you know, you actually come up with better ways of doing things. And innovation at the core is solving a problem.

Starting point is 01:02:45 And sometimes innovation solves a problem that people didn't even know existed. It's like a new opportunity where when you see the solution, you realize you had the problem and you never even knew you had the problem, you know, all at one setting. But at the core, it's still solving a problem. And I think a lot of times people think, if I just had more money, if I just could put more behind R&D. If I could just do this, I would have more innovation. I've just found that that's simply not true. I mean, I think that limited resources oftentimes are the crucible in which innovation happens, because if you had more resources, you would just buy a solution. You wouldn't

Starting point is 01:03:21 actually innovate. You really don't need to innovate. In fact, it's a plague that many organizations have if they have too much resources, they usually don't have innovation unless they place artificial constraints on things, a constraint on time. You know, I do this with our creative team all the time. You know, everyone always feels like if I could just have more time to work on that project, I could get a better result. I was like, no, that's just a trade. You know, you're just trading time for whatever might be quality or something. That's just moving up a normal curve. That's not actually innovative. That's just sort of an exchange, you know, of one thing for another thing. And I say, no, real innovation comes if you can say, I get the same amount of time to work

Starting point is 01:04:02 with or in fact, what if we could take less time and try to achieve the same result? So those are like might be artificial constraints. They may not be real. They're just artificial, but their constraints nonetheless. So definitely, even when I mentioned the publishers and the Bible texts that we were working with, I mean, we had to figure out an innovative way that we could bring value to them while remaining non-commercial, which we felt was really important. So they have a free product that they otherwise sell that we needed for free, but yet we needed to keep them sustained and provide value to them. So we had to come up with like an innovative way to achieve that. And we're able to do that. And we have great relationships with the publishers today.

Starting point is 01:04:43 But it was that type of forcing that issue, not just trying to figure out, well, we just need more money and we could solve this problem. No, no, no, no. We had to figure out how to do it by embracing the constraints that we had. And I want you to speak to that. So to keep that nimbleness You said, I fight for it. That was your phrase. How do you and your leaders create a culture in which, let's go speed, let's go speed, let's not worry about mistakes. That's countercultural to us as human beings.

Starting point is 01:05:15 I mean, certainly in the American workforce, right? Oh, I'm worried about mistakes. I'm worried about screwing up. And we're not talking about character here. We're talking about functionality. So how do you create a culture where the team goes, oh, okay, I guess Bobby really means this. I don't need to worry about screwing up. I just want to try to quickly come up with the best solution. Then we'll sit back and reflect. Yeah, I think it's how you handle the screw ups as part of it,

Starting point is 01:05:39 because you can send a message as a leader when someone makes a mistake that the team, whether you told them to do this or not, is setting up a system, a policy, a process to ensure that never, ever happens again. And the cost of that policy or that procedure is speed or even the willingness to try. And so how you handle mistakes as a leader, how you emotionally, you know, handle it, how you handle it in your communication, I think is key. I try. I'm not perfect at this. I'm as human as anybody. I get frustrated when things don't go well, when things don't work out. But I try to make sure that we are encouraging the team members that are involved, that we're trying to learn from what we can learn from it. I don't like repeat mistakes. That's not part of the

Starting point is 01:06:24 process. We don't make the same mistake multiple times. We're willing to make mistakes, but just making the same dumb mistake over and over again isn't acceptable, but that shows that we're not learning anything. So we focus on what we learn, but then we have to kind of, in some ways, just disconnect ourselves from the mistake and emotionally move forward, like just get past the emotion of it and just say, we've got to press on. Now, when it comes to fighting for it, that looks like in conversation and in meeting, you know, there is a tension. There's always going to be kind of operational systems that are required. It cannot just be chaos. It's and we don't have an organization that's full of chaos.

Starting point is 01:07:00 There's a difference because you could kind of tip one side of the pendulum and be completely chaotic and have no structure, no system, so that's not what it looks like. We hire people that are good at building structure and systems. I just view me as the other side of that tension. You know, my job is to kind of constantly be pressing into our systems, you know, to value the fact that they're there, but to kind of always be asking the question, is it necessary? Is there a way we can do this fast? Is there a way we can eliminate an unnecessary layer?

Starting point is 01:07:30 You know, we were super efficient with what we were doing when we had like three or four people. As you add in team, you add, added have to leadership structure, you just have to add in certain things that tend to create tension, tend to create friction. There's no way to avoid it. There's no way to avoid systems.

Starting point is 01:07:46 There's no way to avoid these things that are necessary operationally. You just have to manage the tension. And as a leader, I feel like my responsibility is to always just make sure that there's an appropriate tension, towards speed because if it's not there, then it will naturally sort of swing to complexity. It will swing to things that slow things down and you lose that nimbleness. You can still have a great organization.

Starting point is 01:08:09 You can still have great support. It can still be a great place to work. It can still be all those things. But what you'll stop doing is innovating. You'll stop leading. At some point, you know, you'll kind of lose your position because you haven't had that nimbleness to the ability to kind of move things forward. All right, from Bobby Grunwald to one of the great thinkers in the world today, Charles Duhigg.

Starting point is 01:08:31 Charles is a repeat guest, love Charles, always makes me think, and he gives us tremendous freedom to act and think differently with this excerpt as we talk about ignoring conventional wisdom. Listen in to Charles Duhigg. I want to talk about this other term, creative desperation. What does that mean to you? There's this really interesting science behind who gets to be creative, right? Because we tend to think of creativity as something that you're born with or you have some temperament for, right? There are creative artists in this world and there's folks who aren't creative. And what we found is that science tells us that's exactly wrong.

Starting point is 01:09:11 Anyone can be creative. Anyone can be incredibly innovative. It's about learning these kind of mental habits, these tricks that allow you to tap into your creativity. And the first one, as you mentioned, is creative desperation. One of the things that we know is that many people tend to become much more creative, not necessarily when they're feeling calm and relaxed, but rather when they're feeling like their back is against the wall, when the deadline is coming up.

Starting point is 01:09:37 Sometimes, in fact, a number of studies have shown that when we're angry, we tend to become more creative. We tend to see more solutions. And I think what it comes from is that oftentimes when we're facing a deadline, when we're feeling upset, when we're feeling kind of all riled up, we feel this need to ignore convention, right? We give ourselves permission to take risks because we don't have any other options because we're either P-O'd or the deadlines coming up, we've got to do something. And it's when we give ourselves permission to take risks, to ignore convention, to kind of do the crazy thing.

Starting point is 01:10:13 That's when oftentimes we have our most creative ideas. Interesting. Okay. So the anger angle, that's interesting. We're not telling you leaders to go get angry and then walk into a brainstorming meeting. But I'm taking notes. Is emotion overriding the brain at that point with anger? What we know about anger, anger is really interesting.

Starting point is 01:10:32 I'm actually writing an article right now about anger for the Atlantic Monthly. And what we know about it is that when you are angry, we tend to think of anger as an antisocial behavior, right? Something that's negative. But what we know about anger is that it's actually pro-social. Anger makes us feel energized. It makes us optimistic about the future. It prompts us to take matters into our own hands and to take more risks, as I mentioned, but also to be able to say, look, there's an obstacle there. I'm going to go overcome it because I'm just so pissed that it's in my way.

Starting point is 01:11:06 One of the things that we know about anger, in fact, is that if you look at brain scans of people who are angry, the closest corollary to that is people who are happy. Now, it's not necessarily that anger is a good thing. It's exactly right. Business leaders shouldn't go out there and spend their time being angry. If we're no other reason, then we want to save their hearts and their marriages, right? But we can learn something from this, which is the more you put yourself in a position where you feel like you're in control, the more where you give yourself permission to ignore convention to say, look, this is how it's been done a thousand times. But you know what? I'm just going to try it a different way, even if that feels risky, if it feels scary, if it feels kind of mad. then oftentimes that's where something successful comes from. Okay, that I wrote down folks, permission to ignore convention. Charles, that's worth the entire conversation. I'm telling you, that's huge because now we've got to go from some. Anger does that for us. I'll tell you what else does that for us is fear, that fight or flight.

Starting point is 01:12:07 You know, you think about creativity is when your life is on the line, we read these amazing heroic stories. You talk about creative and innovative. I mean, you know, the brain takes over and you're going, I've got to survive. I've got to come up with something. My back is against the wall. Now, what's interesting, though, is that it raises this next question, which is, okay, so if I'm going to give myself permission to ignore convention, then how should I use convention?

Starting point is 01:12:31 Like, what is the wrong convention in my life? And that actually gets us to the thing you'd asked about before, which is these innovation brokers. Yes. So why do some people seem more creative than others? What do we know about people who are judged by their peers to be innovative? What we know about them is not necessarily that they have an artistic sensibility or that they enjoyed building Legos more as a kid. What we do know is that people who are most creative, they tend to things.

Starting point is 01:12:59 First of all, not necessarily to see themselves as creative people, but they tend to see creativity not as an active expression, but as an import-export business, taking ideas from one realm and bringing them into a new setting. And this is where convention comes up. Because what is convention? What is a conventional idea? A conventional idea is an idea that is almost a cliche because every time there's one

Starting point is 01:13:25 kind of problem, someone brings out an old idea to solve it. But what innovation brokers do is they take that old idea and they say, look, I'm not going to use it to solve the same problem that's always solved. Instead, I'm going to drag it into a new setting. Now, the reason I'm asking you this, Charles, is because we've got to, people listening going, okay, great, I get all this. This is exciting. How do I find these people? And here's what you say. Innovation brokers are the people most skilled at taking existing information, answers, and resources, and applying them as solutions to new problems. How do our small business

Starting point is 01:13:58 leaders, these owners, CEOs, how do they best identify those skills? What are they looking for beyond those skills? Or just walk us through what these people might be looking like. acting like in their professional role right there under our noses? There's kind of two characteristics. And the interesting thing is that I'm sure small business owners listening to this, that they're innovation brokers themselves. They probably have that ability to take conventional ideas and see them in new ways. But there's two things that we have found that innovation brokers do exceptionally well,

Starting point is 01:14:31 habits, if you will. The first is that they tend to be curious. They tend to just indulge their curiosity about learning about things that are outside their main wheelhouse, right? They read history books. They go into the accounting department. They ask the accountants to explain what's going on. When they meet someone on the bus, they ask them questions about their job.

Starting point is 01:14:51 They're curious and they allow themselves to indulge their curiosity. But that on its own is not enough because lots of people are curious. The second thing that innovation brokers do is they tend to have daily or weekly routines, rituals almost, that allow them to think more deeply about what they've been exposed to. So for some people, this means that they keep a diary and they write down sort of what they saw that day and how to make sense of it. Or they write letters or emails to their friends. Or they pull in their assistant and they say, hey, let me tell you about this thing I learned today. Or they say, hey, I read this interesting article. Let me tell you what it said. And the reason

Starting point is 01:15:29 they're doing that is not to educate the person that they're speaking to, right? It's to force themselves to think more deeply about the ideas that they were just exposed to. I do this myself every day. When I come home from work, I tell my wife about my day in excruciating detail, not because she is interested. She is bored to tears hearing about my day. But I'm not telling her for her benefit. I'm making her listen to me for my benefit.

Starting point is 01:15:55 Because as I tell her what I did that day and sort of how to make sense of it, did I do this right or did I do it wrong, as I go through that process, it forces me to think more deeply. about my day and whether I used my time wisely, what ideas I was exposed to that I could use in other settings. Now, hopefully she's not totally bored by it because hopefully she's at least a little bit interested in what happens to me in my life. But this is the point, is that the people who are most successful, the people who are most innovative, and we know this from productivity studies, are the people who build habits into their life that allow them to think more deeply.

Starting point is 01:16:29 Think more deeply about the choices they're making, think more deeply about the ideas they're getting exposed to. That's how you succeed. Productivity is not about being busy. It's about in some respects, slowing down so you can think more deeply. All right, I was a little bit surprised. I thought it might have been a practical joke to see my name pop up on the list. I tried to be humble. The guy said it was one of the most popular episodes, so I'm deeply touched by this and also fired up because we know from recent survey that you all care deeply about personal growth strategy so you can move up the career ladder. So Daniel Tarty flipped the script on me, put me in the chair, and in this excerpt you're going to hear us talking about this idea of remaining curious, keeping that personal antenna up, and never,

Starting point is 01:17:18 ever, ever stop asking. In the book, one question I cite some research from the University of Michigan that we used to drive this importance of curiosity home. By the time we reached the eighth grade, the average American Daniels asking two to three questions a day. That's not everybody, the average. But you juxtapose two to three questions a day as an eighth grader. Yeah. With being a toddler, something has happened.

Starting point is 01:17:43 And what has happened is life and our educational format in America. Certainly Western education is we're turning kids into answer givers, test takers, instead of pathfinders. And I'm all about pathfinders. The secret to finding your path is questions. The great businessmen and women, the great coaches, whoever it is, I don't care what industry, they are always learning. You cannot learn if you yourself are not the source of your questions. But if somebody else is saying, hey, I think you should take this test.

Starting point is 01:18:15 You're regurgitating. It's too much. My questions come from me. That's how I grow. We got everybody out there. We're saying you need to ask questions, have your kids ask questions, get your team to ask questions. But talk specifically to leaders who feel like. they're in leadership, the spotlight's on them, and they should know a lot of the answers.

Starting point is 01:18:34 And if they're exposed as not knowing the answers, there's some vulnerability there. And will people really follow me if I don't know? Of course, you and I know the best leaders are always asking questions, but speak to that leader who's maybe not sure. Yeah, if you're not sure and you're worried about, you know, and you've seen a pattern, maybe you've been in some meetings, or maybe there's some bigger philosophical questions that you know some leaders besides you or under you're pushing you on and you're not there yet. First thing you've got to do is you've got to step into the confidence of the unknown. It's very, very easy to do this. But say that again, the confidence?

Starting point is 01:19:04 Of the unknown. Of the unknown. First of, and what I mean by that is everybody, if I go down the list and the leader could do this. So just for a moment, if you're feeling this, think about all the people in your company and think about what they don't know and all the unknowns that they have. It changes the game. Then you go, wait a second. They don't have all the answers.

Starting point is 01:19:22 They're just looking to me for some guidance and leadership. It's not so much that they need the answer. they just want my leadership. So the confidence of the unknown is the ability to look at them and go, I'm glad you asked that question. That's a great question. And quite frankly, I've thought about it and I haven't dove into the answer like I should. Or haven't thought about that.

Starting point is 01:19:43 I don't know the answer to that. But let me tell you what I am going to know soon. I'm going to know the answer to that. We're going to walk through that. That's the confidence the unknown. It's looking at them right in the eye and going, hey, I don't know the answer to that. But I'm tell you what, it's the right question. it's a question I need to ponder and I'm going to go get it.

Starting point is 01:19:57 And then we're going to discuss it. And then we're going to execute against it. And we're going to lead with it. That's confidence. Who is not going to go, man. See, here's what they're doing. When people ask you questions, you've got to remember, it's like your sweet little daughter.

Starting point is 01:20:11 She wasn't just randomly letting her brain go schizo and think of anything she could think to ask a question. She really was trying to get to the bottom of something. And she was trying to connect, right? She wants to have that connection to what we're talking about. So when our followers ask us questions, remember first and foremost, they're probably truly just trying to get to the bottom of something. And I've talked about this before. I think the number one question that all of our team are asking us is, are we there yet?

Starting point is 01:20:36 Yeah. Like I feel like I can break every question down that a leader gets and go, the question they're asking is, are we there yet? They're like the kid on the 12-hour ride to Disneyland, right? Every five minutes, they're checking, are we there yet? I've taught on this before. Are we there yet? Here's what's going on. I screwed this up with my daughter once and crushed your spirit.

Starting point is 01:20:52 And then I was begging for her to ask the question, and I couldn't wait for her to ask it because I spent 45 minutes behind the wheel of car going, I broke her spirit because I just was like, Josie, we're not there. Play your game. When she asked me again, I went, no, that's clarity. This is leadership right here. When they ask a question, are we there yet? You're going, you're going to give them clarity. So in this situation for Josie, it was no, we're not there yet, Josie, but we're getting closer. That's progress.

Starting point is 01:21:20 They want clarity. they want to know we're making some progress and then recalibrate the vision. So true. No, Josie, we're not there yet. We're getting closer. We're going to be there in six hours. So then when she asks me the next time, no, but we're getting closer, we'll be there four hours.

Starting point is 01:21:35 Let me tell you something, folks. You get that and figure that out? Yeah, for the whole team. For the whole team. That's what they need. Because they're asking, are we there yet, whether they're sitting in your office or not. So it's a little construct that constantly communicate to your team.

Starting point is 01:21:47 Hey, guys, this is the vision we said at the start of 2018. This is where we said we're going. We're not there yet. But we're getting closer. And we're going to get there. And if it changes, they're still okay with that. All right, folks. I hope you've got some mental whiplash,

Starting point is 01:22:05 because that means we've done our job on this episode. Thank you so much for being a part of this tribe. And we hope you get even more out of that content we just shared with you the second time around. Speaking of continual growth, I want to make sure you take the opportunity to opt into our 2018 book list. The team put together 100 books that they believe every business owners should read. Fantastic stuff. Topics like communication, effective leadership, personal development, and on and on it goes. So why wouldn't you want to get a free recommendation list like this? Text 100 books. That's 100 books. Text 100 books to 33444. That's 33444. Or you can click

Starting point is 01:22:49 link in this episode's show notes. And I want to make sure that you take Infusionsoft up on their fantastic offers every episode bringing you incredible stuff. Harness your inner genius e-book. This is an e-book that will include worksheets to help you manage around your constraints and create a personalized plan to take your leadership and your team to the next level. This is a great way to get prepared for 2019. The link is in the show notes of this episode or you can go to entreleadership.com, click on podcast and go to episode 299. Well, I can't believe I'm doing this, folks, but for the last time in 2018, on behalf of the entire entree leadership team, specifically Eric, Courtney, Zach, Becky, Tim, Will, Cheryl, Jennifer, Hunter, Lewis, McKenzie,

Starting point is 01:23:40 and Little Old Me. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses. If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart and you've ever wondered if you

Starting point is 01:24:20 could make money doing it, I'm here to help. Join us on the Business Boutique podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique in iTunes or go to businessboutique.com.

EntreLeadership - #299: Our Best Podcasts of 2018

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