EntreLeadership - #319: A Leadership Q&A from EntreLeadership Summit 2019

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

We’re continuing our bonus content from EntreLeadership Summit, this time with an outstanding panel discussion featuring Dave Ramsey, leadership expert Simon Sinek, and strengths expert Marcus Buckingham. Talk about a dream team! Join us as the powerhouse trio tackles questions from our attendees on topics ranging from pacing growth and surviving tough times to ways to spark creativity and innovation. Their answers are insightful and candid—and offer game-changing perspective for sure.   entreleadership.com/podcast EntreLeadership Summit 2020   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you think you can do leadership by yourself, you're insane. If you think you can build a company by yourself, you're nuts. If you think you can do this thing called life solo, it's not going to work out. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Entree Leadership. Now here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Entree Leadership Summit in Sunny San Diego, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thank you so much for joining us.

It's our third and final day, and boy, oh boy, did we finish strong. Great keynotes from Dave Ramsey and Jesse Itzler. We had fantastic interviews on stage that I got to do with Peyton Manny and Sarah Blakely. And we had a powerful lunch session on replacing yourself with our very own Entree leadership, Poubas, Daniel Tarty, our executive vice president of business and leadership. And Sarah Sloyan, our senior vice president of Entree leadership. ship. Here's what we got coming for you on the episode today. We're going to give you the panel discussion that I led on the stage with Dave Ramsey, Simon Seneca, and Marcus Buckingham. Every year, we kind of put an all-star panel together on the stage, and we hear that you love it. So as a man of the people, I give you what you want. Let's get right to it. Here is my conversation on stage with Dave, Simon, and Marcus. Dave is fired up. You see right now he's looking through the actual event program, and I see his notes. on it and he said he was going crazy back in the green room so I got to start off with you

Dave you got something to get started with y'all ought to just see we ought to just put like a live feed in the green room because it's like two English guys and a hillbilly it's a sesame street moment one of these things is not like the other right and yet it's a it's a mutual admiration society no doubt we just all traded contacts just to make sure we can personally stay in touch because I just admire these guys work so much so sometimes Simon asked me in the green room before his talk, which I later figure out was a setup. And I answered, you ever answer a question wrong? Yeah, I did.

Because I kind of just looked at him like, oh, I don't know. And his question was, what keeps you going? What keeps you wired up and fired up and so excited? And I'm like, I mean, I just love helping people. I mean, it's just like, oh, I don't know. And then he did his talk, and I thought, you know what? I know the answer. It's right here.

It's a just cause. It's a trusting team. It's a worthy rival. And if I can just say existential flexibility three times and click my heels together, and the courage to lead, yeah, I got the courage to lead. I ain't afraid of that. But this just-cause thing keeps me going. It just keeps me going.

The just-cause here is small business and family businesses, and you are the backbone of the economy. That's a just cause. And I don't have any reason to be working financially. But why would I quit? This is so freaking fun, you know? I remember a thousand years ago, and then I'll let you take this, Ken. I'm sorry, but Dr. Laura was brand new in talk radio. Dave Ramsey was brand new and talk radio at the exact same year.

Dr. Lara lived in L.A. and Clear Channel at that time, now known as I Heart Radio, picked her up and made her famous while I struggled in Nashville. I was beating Rush and mini-mey-me, Sean head-to-head, which was a big deal to beat Elvis at anything is a big deal. So we thought we had something we could syndicate, but it took me like a decade longer than it did Laura to go, you know, to the first hundred and something stations. So she skyrockets to 178 stations, sells the show to IHeart, now called IHeart, for 78 million. And I'm sitting in, I got like 80 stations or something, and we're making some money on it finally after paying all those satellite bills. But we're self-sindicated and we're the

little train that could and all this. And we're sitting with this stupid radio consultant, which consultants are valid. In some industries, consultants in radio means unemployed. And didn't make it on the air, wished I could, now I tell other people. And that's what it means in radio. They're a pain in the butt. And this guy goes, Sir Ramsey, you know, Laura sells for $78 million. You know, what's your end game? And I went, I didn't know about an infinite game. But I said, there's no end game. I'll always have a job. Me and Jenny Craig got a lot of. of work to do. You know? And he looked at me like I had three eyes. He's like, you mean you're not,

you're not going to go public, you're not got an IPO, you're not bringing in venture capital. You mean you don't have an end game? You're not going to sell? And I'm like, well, why would I sell? Then I'd have to work for people like you. No. I'm not going to sell. I'm just going to make it really big and own it. And he just, oh, well, we'll see. And of course he's gone and we're still here, but that's, you know, the just cause thing, right? I mean, you just got in the finite game, and that's so good. And your stuff, man, that was so solid. Thank you so much.

I'll always kick with my left foot from now on. And, I mean, I will. I mean, I'm just okay. You've got to get comfortable on your own skin. And, you know, this is what I do, and I don't do that. And if it's not okay with you, then we're not going to be okay because this is what I do. And you've got to kind of get there in what you're doing with your business, because

some customers aren't even supposed to be your customers. Because they don't deal with left foot of kickers and we're left foot of kickers, so you can't be my customer even. I have to fire you. Because, I mean, there's one thing to fire the butthole that's on your team, but there's another one to fire the butthole that's a customer, right? You know, that left foot thing, I remember before I went on the path that I'm on, I had a little marketing consultancy.

And in the marketing industry, everybody's good at everything. That's what they sell. Oh, yeah. I'm good at everything. And I remember I would go see. Including lying. Exactly, yeah. And I remember I'd go see clients.

and they'd offer me a suite of business. And I'd say, I'm really good at this. I'm pretty good at that. And that's manageable. Don't hire me for that. Don't hire me for that. I'm like, I'm happy to partner with another company. Whoever you want to hire is fine,

but just hire me for these three things and not those things. And they always wanted to do business with me for everything. And I told them, no, I won't do those things because I was the only one who was honest. But it's this thing, which is like if you're good at the left foot, tell everybody you're good at the left foot. You get hired to use your left foot. It's like you get hired for your strengths. I mean, that's the whole, what did Denzel Washington say?

Because if I needed an Ivy League educational, I'll hire someone who's got one. Yeah, just like that. And the other one was the personal balance. I always get the personal balance question. How do I balance between I'm trying to run a business and trying to raise my kids and them not be juvenile delinquents and be able to feed them at the same time? And how do I have this personal balance? And I always just say, there's no such thing.

So I love the whole thing of, you got it all perfect, nobody move. That's the best picture ever. The image there is our categories are wrong. It's not like work and life and you balance them. By the way, work is a part of life, so that feels like an odd category anyway. We were to have love and loath as the categories and then intentionally imbalance toward the love bit, whether it's love as a family member or as a community member or in terms of your business. The world is set up so that you can find love in it, and your job is to intentionally imbalance your entire life toward that.

So if you get the categories right, now you can start prescribing right. Our category, work life, those are the wrong two categories to start noodling about. Hey, the red thread thing is golden. I just said red's golden. But anyway, yeah, it's solid. I mean, that's right down, that's really good. That's good material. The wonderful thing about life is that it is set up for us to draw strength from it.

I mean, life is there with moments and contexts and situations and people. And if we could but just teach our kids to start at 11, 12, 13 years old, which bits of learning do you love? When are you at your best in class? That's a discipline for life. What you've got, you've built a life for yourself from which you draw strength and out of that comes contribution.

Whether the metaphor is red threads or whatever your metaphor is, life is set up to do that. We just don't teach people how to do that. A better way of saying is that'll preach. All right, you're up. Well, you know, I think we need stay here for a second because what Marcus is saying is right.

Marcus, let's keep going. Everybody weigh in on this. It's great for parents to say that, But the problem is these parents and the kids are getting a different message from the school systems, which is you're not doing well in this class. We've got to work really hard on this because the standardized test is coming up at the end of the year. And if you don't do well on the standardized test, I don't get your age. And I'm getting teachers calling my show every day, Marcus, they're going, I'm burned out because I don't get to teach anymore.

So if we are going to do this as parents, what is the message? How do we tell Johnny and Susie what you're saying, which is true, but also they're living in a alternate reality every day at school. And there's no such thing as winning education. Well, that's, I mean, Simon's point about infinite. Like, how do you keep going if the way in which you go through life burns you up? Like, if you're going to stay in there forever, the process itself has got to be invigorating to you, which means you've got to start with 11 and 12 year old kids and go,

how do you draw strength from school? That's a really interesting question. Hey, here's a question. Every child knows. When was the last time a day flew by? Why, when you dive into? When was the last time a day flew by? You're 11. You have the right answer to that question. What a great question to start with. Because they've got the right answer. You've got three kids. You have three different answers. It's beautiful. How do you change education? I wish I knew. I'm sure you find this too. When you get done with the presentation, how many people come up to you and go, you should move away from business and focus on education. Because if you get that wrong, we start hiring people who've been, I don't know, they've been massaged the wrong way. somehow to fit into a standard.

What an awful word combination, standardized test. I have two kids. I don't want either one of them to be shoved through in standardized test. But yeah, I'm afraid I don't have a, I don't have a get some quick pill, a Jenny Craig pill for education. Our friend Seth Godin would say the whole model is broken because it was designed for an industrialized Henry Ford mass production factory and which you need everything to be. before. Yes, although we were talking about this downstairs, that that's not efficient. Anymore? Maybe you could argue it never was. Today, we certainly live in a world of a knowledge

economy where an awful lot of jobs are requiring the intelligence, the judgment, the perception, the empathy. You'll know an example. I mean, he's, that's a knowledge worker job, right? And the apex human technology for making sense of the fact that each person is different is called a team. We talked about this over lunch. We don't think about it that way. We think about series of machine sort of factory sequencing and we don't go wait a minute people are different humans are different we that isn't an idea that we can like well is your belief system that we're different or not we are different you can either choose to try to fight against that or you can use it I would suggest it's not terribly efficient to try to fight against it because the fact is is that

we're unique in our drives and our relationships Jim Collins said it get the bright players on the bus and get them on the right seats. Heck yeah. On the bus. Yes. Or get them off the bus. But whatever. But for God's sake to get them on the right seats.

And I can't tell you many times in our organization, we just moved a player to a different seat. And all of the sudden, what you said, blossoms. Yeah. Cherry trees happen. Everybody has talent. The question is whether or not you can find a job with someone's prepared to pay you to use it. And you can be like a C player on the wrong seat, a player, right seat.

But we, yeah, in education, we so don't think. that way. We think well-rounded really early, and then all the messages inculcate that. I think the only thing I would suggest as parents is look at your child, see your child, ask your questions about where they lean in, ask your questions about where they learn most,

and as much as you can be a force for honoring and cherishing the uniqueness of your child, because school will pull you the other way. Sometimes it's okay to learn some stuff, some knowledge, some things that you don't know that you need to know, and we need to test you to see if you know them. That's okay. It's not terrible in every situation.

but the best bulwark against the homogeneity of kids in school is parents. So what was that quote? Yeah, amen. It's the problem with the schools, too. Helicopter. You hear the sound. What was the quote from your talk? It was, we teach people how to pass tests.

Oh, well, we're no longer. The American education system or the Western education system is not creating, they're creating test takers instead of pathfinders. We're conditioning our kids how to memorize the answer and then answer it as opposed to teaching curiosity. It's wrote, repeat, rather than critical thinking skills. You cannot come up to a problem and go, I've got to apply critical thinking skills to this. And so consequently, we're binary and we either love somebody on Twitter or we detest them and we're disappointed by them. You know, give me a break.

All right, so we now have gone way down that rabbit hole. We'll get to the questions you submitted. Now that we used up our time. It was a good drive at a hole, yeah. Wondering what unhealthy growth of a company looks like. Very interesting. What's unhealthy growth look like? Dave, I hear you say a lot of times you want to be on the pages of or the cover of slow company, not fast company.

Unhealthy growth. What do you guys think about that? I think, you know, there's this strange obsession with fast growth in this country. And very often you look at fast. growth companies, even some of the unicorns that we celebrate, and as they were driving the hockey stick, they forgot about their cultures, and they weren't nursing the people. And so they're big and they're rich, and then they're like, have to backtrack and actually go develop leadership training and things like that. You know, growth should be treated as a dial. A family manages its growth based on

its needs, and companies should do the same. I mean, for example, you know, a retail establishment, for example, that's fast growth is trying to open as many stores as possible. but they're not training their frontline staff, that is going to be a bad operation. So sometimes you may have a schedule to open X many stores, you know, in X many years, but to purposely slow down the growth in order to ensure that you're hiring the right people

and you're training the right people. That, too, I think, is a healthy growth mindset. This whole idea of fast, to what end, for what reason? Just so you can prove that you have a high score? I don't know what it is. I think to use growth as a dial rather than this ridiculous notion that we have to have a hockey stick all the time is a healthy way to build a company. I think somebody wrote a book once called Start with Why.

I can't remember exactly here. But to your point, you know, if you've got meaning, like you've got a lot if you've got meaning, growth for growth sakes, the ideology of a cancer cell for crying out loud. Like that's not productive for its own sake. I'm totally stealing that. If you say it three times it's yours. You'll hear me say at a conference.

I'll be like, growth for growth sake is a cancer cell. It's the ideology, but it is. It's like we need the meaning. Otherwise, our lives can get pretty empty, pretty fine. It's really good. So I'll go tactical. I love the military analogy that you never let your fighting men and women, the battle lines, proceed faster than the supply lines.

Because if the soldiers get on the front line and you can't get fuel to them, you can't get bullets to them, and you can't get food to them, they get killed. And so supply lines are more important than battle lines, actually. And in business, what we've experienced, as we've grown from a card table in my living room to 857 of us this week, is if we grow faster than our technology, if we grow faster than our human resources, or we grow faster than our money,

if we stretch any one of those to the nth degree or go past them and leave them behind, that's when we get killed, same as the soldiers on the front lines. You know, sometimes it depends on bandwidth of those things, and so we're waiting on the hire, or we're waiting on the hire that we've made to get trained so that we're not putting them out there before they're ready. That's a human resource, so they have to get the talent in place, the technology in place, and the money in place.

Because if you run out of any one of those, if you outgrow any one of those, it's not sustainable. It's not infinite game. You know, it'll just smack you. The marketplace will smack you and go, you're stupid. And it will just stop you. And you'll go, man, now I've got to clean up a mess because I went too fast, which was the question, right? Don't go too fast. All right.

Let's go to this question. What does leading yourself before leading others look like to you? Well, for me, what's the job of a leader? The job of a leader is to rally people to a better future. You've got to see where your future is and understand what that is. You know, it's funny, I built a company, got to about 100 people. I didn't love it. And yet my mission around what my better future was, I really deeply believe.

The sort of stuff that we were talking about, Ken, around you got 15% of people go to work every day, fully engaged. That's crap. Like, it's just not good enough. If I've got my kids and they go to work, 40% of the time that they spend alive in the world is at work. So what an awful place to feel as though you're alienated or disconnected from yourself. That's bad. For whatever stupid reason, I get up every day believing my why.

My why is for whatever doctor, I hate that idea that we've built work in a machine kind of way. And it destroys me. But I just feel like, that wakes me up. I got to 100 people and I'm like, I'm not enjoying my red threads were afraid. I asked you that question earlier about you got 900 people now. You love it. I wish I was you. I actually could.

Somebody came to me, ADP came to me and said, we have 68,000 people. We'd like to buy your company and scale your impact. And then have you run our institute? And I went, huh, I'm a researcher. I am my red thready best when I'm asking a lot of rigorous methodologically sound questions and writing it up. And I enjoy making change in the world through customers. If you don't have a customer, you don't have a company. So I liked having customers.

But if I really wanted to make change in the world, having 68,000 friends, ADP has 720,000 customers. So it was kind of an inch, I probably should have called you. It was an interesting time to go, how do I lead myself when I actually don't want to lead 900 people like Dave? Like, that's a moment. Like, you'll have moments like that. For me, the moment was I want to extend scale.

and work there in this role, even though I've really enjoyed getting to 100, I gradually becoming more of a B player, frankly. So I think for me it means if you want to rally people to a better future, do you know what their future is? And do you know your place within that future? For me, weirdly, that place was getting out of the CEO role that I was in. I don't know if that was the right decision. But it sure felt like in terms of my why,

it felt like a mechanism to get to, in my definition, of a better world. It wasn't without Sturm and Drang and soul searching. Because you work really hard to build a business, as you all know. And the growth of this economy comes through entrepreneurial behavior and family companies and entrepreneurs doing their thing. But at some point, you've got to know where your biggest, highest, and best impact is as a leader. Even in this case, it meant almost sidestepping out of the leader role.

Dave, look at you, Simon. I don't think of myself that way. I see myself as a follower, to be honest. I am in service to a cause that's bigger than myself. And it keeps me humble because it's not about me and I'm not at the top. And any success that I've enjoyed, I've said this from the day I started and I say this now 13 years in,

any success that I've enjoyed is still the tip of the iceberg. I'm profoundly trying to shift the way that the working world works. I want to live in a world and help contribute to a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work, and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. And that is not the world we live in. And so however much we get, it still is so much more under the water. So those that come with me, this whole idea of leader and follower, I think the best leaders are the best followers. And some of the best followers are the best leaders, because when they

sign up to say, I'm going to pursue that, other people want to join them. And the best leaders go to the pointy end of the spear, which is why we call them leader. It's not because they're at the top or because they're smarter or better. It's because they chose to rush first towards the unknown and towards the danger. And the rest of us went with them. So, like, the question makes me uncomfortable. Lynn Gianni said to be vulnerable, so there you go. I think that should change with the seasons. If the answer to the question is one answer,

it indicates that there's no progression in your process over time. So the answer to the question when I was 34 and leading or bossing in those days, a team of 10 people, would be a different answer of how I lead myself than it would be today, how I lead myself. And so, ever so often, you just need to stop and ask yourself that question. What does it mean right now? In this season, what does it mean? In this season, at Ramsey Solutions, I'm less the product than I've ever been.

It's been less of my time being a product than I ever have. I spend more of my time working on new things and broken things, which I'm good at both of those. Operational stuff is, I can't do it, and I don't want to do it. I'll just read the reports where somebody did a good job on it. And the fourth thing that is more and more and more giving me energy is this whole succession idea, this infinite game, where it's sustainable beyond me. And so Ramsey personalities like a Ken Coleman and a Chris Hogan up here this morning. Based on those two, the future looks bright. But that wouldn't have been the same answer 10 years ago,

and it shouldn't be the same answer 10 years from now. And so I need to reset ever so often and go, at this season of my life, there was a season of life for you were running 100 people. Then there's a season of your life where you went, I want to do that. And so I'm going to do this. And that's the cool thing. It's like, I tell our folks all the time, if we're doing something that I do that makes us a lot of money,

you better hope I keep enjoying it. because the day I quit liking it, I'm just going to quit doing it. And you're going to figure out another way to create that revenue. Because I'm just don't do crap I don't like on an extended period of time. I mean, I'll do it for a little while. I'll pay it, I just to get something moving. But, you know, I'm not going to go for 10 years. I'm going to do something I hate.

That's why I own the freaking thing. So I don't have to do that, you know? How as a leader can I encourage my team to come up with new ideas? Do you want to go? Mm-mm. Like we can't force people to be creative, like we can't force people to be happy, you know, innovate. And so the most innovative organizations,

the ones where creativity thrives, is when we give them a very, very large ideal or idea and tell them, figure out how to get there. It's your left foot thing. Like, you know, it's be dangerous. So our team is, we have some guidelines. They're called values. They all know the vision to create the world

that's inspired, safe, and fulfilled, right? And you have to just, as long as you stay within the values, use your responsible freedom and do what needs to be done. And one of the things we like to do is called surprise and delight someone. Like, anybody can do anything if it'll surprise and delight someone. And go solve the problem. So here's the equivalent, right? We so often tell people the plan, we tell people the strategy, and then we tell them to stick to the strategy. That's like saying, I want you to go in a straight line through this room to the other side, right? That's what I want you to do. and somebody starts walking down, following the plan, following the strategy, straight line, I got it, and then you put a chair in front of them, and they stop. And you go, come on, there's a chair. They literally stuck, right?

Because we told them to stick to the plan, to stick to the strategy. If we tell them the destination and leave it totally agnostic how they get there, I want you to go to that point on the other side of the room. I don't care how you get there, just get there the most efficient way possible go. They're going to start in a straight line. I put a chair in front of them. They're going to go around it. It's not even a thought.

you know and so I think if we give people distant visions of the future and ask to use their talents to contribute to it I think people are creative we give them an opportunity to solve problems rather than do tasks why is creativity like why make a god of that make a god of service and then people will be creative to Simon's point they'll figure out a way around the chair because you've made a god of where we're going or who we're serving creativity is in service of an effort to make a contribution to somebody you're trying to serve and when you do that people going to come up new and fun and interesting ways to surprise or delight or just get around something that's gotten in the way. Creativity isn't the point, service is the point, contribution is the point. We did the study of highly effective entrepreneurs versus less effective entrepreneurs and one of the questions that separated the best from the rest was this question, what one ingredient is both necessary and sufficient for building a business. And you can imagine all the answers that they came up with. What one ingredient is necessary and sufficient for building a business and money, effort, ideas, but the best entrepreneurs,

by which I mean the most successful ones, had the same answer, which was, and you know this, a customer. If you don't have a customer, you have a business. Now, sometimes you have to maybe fire a customer, but if you don't serve anyone, then you just don't have a business. You have an idea. Maybe you have capital. We have a business.

And so I think your point, across there, across town, as it were, is a person you're serving. And you go stoplight to stoplight. You don't wait until the stoplight to green. You go stop light to stoplight, and that, by any definition, is creativity. So if you keep talking about who you're serving, you will get people coming up with new and fun ways to serve.

That's good. That's really good. That'll preach. Yeah, if you get the just cause right and the why, right in front of them, over and over and over again, you go, this is where we're going. This is the cause. This is where we're going. This is where we're going. And then just don't kill people for non-fatal failure. Matter of fact, encourage non-fatal failure because you're not going to go in a straight line there, what you were saying. And so to turn means that the initial approach was a failure. It was a non-fatal failure, but turn.

Now that means, oh, we're off course. Now we've got to turn again. You know, the problem is we're like, as soon as they stop at the chair, we're like, no, that's it. You don't follow instruction. You're not coachable. And we start just hammering them. And it's like you kill people for non-fail.

fatal failure instead of going, way to go. You actually used critical thought. You walked around the freaking chair. Awesomeness. And make that the thing you reward and affirm and recognize in front of the whole team and, you know, ran into the barricade and climbed over it, dug under it or blew a hole through it. I don't know how you got through it, baby, but you are a barricade destroyer, man. And, you know, that's the, these are the guys and gals you want to pump them up. And then everybody else goes, oh, that makes leadership excited. Maybe I should try that. You're encouraging non-fatal failure.

And out of that comes creativity and innovation. It has to, if they know why they're doing it, the just cost. Well, you just mentioned the why. This question came in for Simon, but for all three of you, explain how a why aligns vision and strategy within a company. So let me tell you how I came to the concept of why, the physical word. right, which is there's this debate that I kept finding myself in, what comes first, vision or mission? Who cares? Right? And we would have the semantic debate. It was literally a semantic debate.

And the problem is it's not that those things, that there isn't an answer, it's that those words lack standard definitions. And to one person, vision means the same thing as mission and it's brand or its purpose. And there's no standard definitions. So I got tired of having the discussions. And I asked people who believe vision came first. I said, what's vision? It's why we get out of bed in the morning. I said, great. And I asked people who believe mission came first. I said, what's mission? They said, it's why our company exists. I said, great. And I went down the line, brand, purpose,

all the rest of them. And they all gave me the same definition. So I said, great, let's call it the why. Now we can all agree. Now we can all get somewhere, right? But if we want to be pure about it, I thought you were going to ask, what's the difference is in why and just cause. Why comes from your past? It's an origin story.

It's who you are. It's why your company was founded. A just cause is where you're going. Why is the foundation of your house? You only have one Y your entire life. It will never ever change you are who you are. But you imagine building a house and you're going to add things and take away things and change things to advance the building of house. But that foundation will remain solid for the rest of your life. You start with Y. That's the foundation. And now you go forwards and you build your just cause from the Y. Like if you want to call it just cause a vision, that's fine. You know, that's fine. But really, really technically, the

strategy is the how and the tactics are the what. The strategy is how we're going to get an advance, and the tactics are all the little rinky-dink things that we have to do, that we can measure, so we can measure how we're progressing towards it. My little riff on that would be, if you call the just cause, if you frame it as a question,

or as a... Just because? Yeah, just cause. I love that. Why are you doing it? Just because. Just because. Yeah.

It's English humor, right? Yeah. Okay. That was funny. Anyway, so why, like, because wouldn't it be great if? Wouldn't it be great if? Wouldn't it be great if?

Hey, wouldn't it be great if? People are going to be following you for the, wouldn't it be great if? So whatever you're honest, so wouldn't it be great if, what? Like, wouldn't it be creative? Play it out, man, because I want to follow that. And then the strategy is what if, what if, well, what if, well, what if, your strategies will be

contingency planning, a lot of contingency planning. What if that? Well, what if that? Well, what if that? Well, what if that? And of course, your what if will be changing all the time. The wouldn't it be great if is why we follow you probably. And then how effective you are is driven to some extent by how effectively you do that.

Some of you are really good at this. By the way, I suck at this. But wouldn't it be contingency planning of what if, what if, what if? Some of you are probably amazingly good at visualizing the what-ifs, and you do it all the time, and you sort of love it, and others of us probably are much better, there wouldn't it be great if? And we keep bumping into the chair, because we should have been able to see the darn chair. But anyway, there's a way around the chair. That's the way I would draw a distinction between the vision, if you like, and the strategy. We are growing quickly, but we're struggling to find the balance between the identity we had as a smaller company.

with fewer people, and now the cultural evolution required for a larger and broader company. What advice would you offer to us managing through this change? The people that you thought you were going to end your story with, you're not going to end your story with, and it's going to hurt. Because as you grow, if they haven't personally grown to keep up with, that, they can no longer do their job. And these are people that were there when we started. And you're going to be saying to yourself, I don't want to get to the top of the ladder and not have brought anybody with me. It's going to hurt. Because some people that you love are going to be

hurt. They're going to sometimes be angry. As much as you wanted it for them, they didn't want it as bad as you wanted it for them. And they could not get the tools in their belt to work in a hundred-person company. They did fine in a ten-person company. But they could not seem to get the tool belt on. And so you have to choose. Are we going to stay small with the lowest common denominator because we love them so deeply, like she's my sister or he's my brother and my heart hurts, or are we going to get larger and serve more customers and admit that more sophistication is required? I had no idea, 27, 28 years later, how many times I was going to cry in order to grow.

And it wasn't that I was cold-hearted and it wasn't that I was mean and it wasn't that I kicked people off the ladder or I climbed over their bodies to get to the top. It was that we were going places they didn't care to go or couldn't get to. And sometimes they self-selected and sometimes we move them. But every time it hurt if you love people. And if you don't love people, I can't really help you. It's so true. It's so true.

What would your advice be for seeing and then dealing with blind spots? Seeing a blind spot. What? I'm reading the question. How do you see a blind spot? It's not a blonde spot. Wow. Okay, great. Dude, you go like this.

Well, you can't turn like this. You just have to be careful. Come on. One of the interesting things when you grow up is, by the way, just to riff one on, if some of you want to stay as a boutique, I mean, Dave's point is if you want to grow, grow, grow in order to serve, serve, serve, you're going to get to places where you're going to have to ask people to specialize. Fall in love with.

If you want to grow, fall in love with specialization. You find your brother and you go, you know what? You were running everything. Now, I actually just want you to run this tiny thing. Because that's really where you are your highest and best. So if you want to grow, fall in love with specialization, and sometimes, not always, to your point, but sometimes you can actually find a person going,

I look, I really just need this from you. We saved a lot of people that way. Yeah, that work too, yeah. And sometimes you might just say, I want to be boutique. That's okay. I mean, you can serve and be boutique. But in terms of blinds, you have to ask yourself, what are you the source of truth of?

Are you the source of truth of somebody else's blind spot? Like that's tricky. I started off my presentation today talking about people not being reliable raters of other people. The flip of that is the only thing we're reliable raters of is our own experience, which is why when my two kids had their deviated septum fixed last October, one day after another, same doctor, when the doctor came in and said to my son, after the surgery,

on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 high rate your pain, and my son said five, and the next day my daughter said two, the doctor didn't say to my son, you're wrong, it's not five. I check with the people down the hall, those patients, your five isn't a real five, man, it's a four.

Besides, you run out of fives, so you've only got a four. We need to be super humble. I'm the source of truth of my own experience. Like, I could say to you, I feel like you care about me. I can rate that. I just can't rate you on empathy.

I can rate whether I feel like you listen to me. It's like one of the best things, how do you know if you're doing a good job of listening? That's a good question. Turns out the best, most empathetic people all say the same thing. They all say, if the other person keeps talking, that's my best clue. And so in this case, we need to be careful with blind spots because we're not the judge of really our own or someone else's. We're the judge of our own reactions. I was fascinated by that presentation you gave.

I can say that. I can also say, I fell asleep during it. What I can't say is you're a crap communicator. We need to stop rating other people and telling other people who they are and simply, honestly and humbly reflect our own experience. So if we can do that, well, that's probably the greatest contribution we can make to the people that we love or work with. Yeah.

So in World War I with biplanes, the kill zone, as it is today, with fighter jets, except they're over the curvature of the earth, probably somewhere. But in World War I, it was in line of sight. with Snoopy and the Red Baron, the kill zone was to drop in behind someone and just tear them up with that 50-KL that was sitting on the hood of the thing. And in military terms, that's your 6 o'clock,

12 o'clock straight above you. Use a clock to communicate. And so that's where the saying, I've got your 6 came from. It was from World War I biplane fighters, Atlanta site fighting. They said, I got your back. I got your 6.

I got your blind spot. And in that case, if you don't trust the guy who says he's got your blind spot, you're dead, like Kerry was talking about. These are not metaphors at this point. Got your six means you're going to get to live because I'm here. I got your back. Otherwise, you're dead. And so when we take that and we put it into some of the stuff that was talked about over the last two or three days about being vulnerable with leaders and executive teams, classic lynchioni lines that he was rattling off here yesterday like a machine gun.

But that vulnerability to get with your leadership team and create conflict that is healthy conflict based and rooted in extreme levels of trust and love. I love you so much. I am going to call you out when you are a butt. I love you so much. I'm going to say for the good of this organization, that is a blind spot. And that is the opposite, a little bit of what you're saying.

I am judging. You're saying don't judge, but I am judging. I'm going, you know, that behavior, when you did that, and this happened with our operating board, we got about 15 of us in there that love each other deeply, and they will look at me occasionally, like not as much now, but three years ago more often, and say, you know, when you do that, when you roar, it shuts down everybody in the room.

I think I'm being passionate and arguing efficiently but it's a finite game. It's a finite game. And so I need that feedback to say, that's my blind spot and go, you know, you need to reframe that argument. We like teacher Dave better than we do pissed off and kill everything, Dave. Well, there's that. I think the only comeback to that would be whoever this person is who's saying that. It's like 14 of them.

Okay. Then each one of them should be said. In one room at one time. each one of them should be going when you do that Dave you shut me down oh they did yeah it's when we say our reaction is everyone you shut everyone down Dave yeah it's like

the person who's saying that you got to go I'm so sorry you do not speak for everyone else but if someone says to you Dave when you come across that way you intimidate the crap out of me you know that's so legit because that's just me reporting to you my reaction you can then say you don't feel intimidated Marcus I go no I do but you can't say you can say you don't speak for the other 13 people

Now, the other 30 people are taking them aside and saying the same thing. Yeah, it's like, hello, take a hint. Yeah. Not that I suggest and advocate that. That's great. We had several of these questions. I'm going to wrap them up real quick here as we finish our time. Advice to leaders that are going through a tough time.

Things aren't turning out the way that they planned, and they're dealing with the reality of that. What would each of you say to encourage? them. Winters never quit. Yes, they do. They quit doing stupid stuff that doesn't work. And so, you know, we have a saying around our place, and I got asked the other day if it offended somebody, and it's the first time I ever thought of that. It's not politically correct. I never thought about it, but we shoot our sacred cows. I mean, I'm a carnivore. You know, we shoot our sacred cows. If there's somebody says something like, well, the reason we do that is we've always done it that way,

and if that's the only reason to do it, that's a dumb reason to do it. So stop doing it. And if you're standing there at the chair, it's not working. Winners quit. They quit standing there. They redirect, they pivot, they vacillate, they use critical thinking skills. They find a path rather than a test. Okay, we can't go through the wall.

We've got to go over it. Well, that's not working. We've got to go under it. Well, maybe the wall is not the problem. Maybe we shouldn't even be here. Maybe we ought to go that way. And, you know, all these different things, you know, there's the marketplace is talking to you if you're failing. And it is a great problem.

Yeah. That is so wide. I mean, it's, it goes to if you, if the marketplace is speaking to you and you're not hearing it, then, yeah, open those ears up. Because if you're failing, it is because somebody's going, that doesn't serve me. I don't find the value in it. If you've got your why clear about where you're going, if you're down in the dumps about something, it's just because you're, iterating through it, we do have to realize that anybody who leads well in this room, you are all of you, optimists. If there's one characteristic you would say every leader has it,

it would be that they do genuinely believe that things could be better. I mean, Simon, you don't think you're there yet, but you do genuinely believe things could be better. No one's faking that, and you can't do mouth-to-optimism resuscitation. I mean, some of you are pessimists, and the beautiful thing for all of you as pessimists is that you're right, way more when an optimist are. But for going to sake, if you're a pessimist, don't lead. Don't lead. Go find another job. It's valuable. We want you to be. But as a leader, there's going to be times when it doesn't work and you've got to listen to the market. But we do follow you because you seem to believe, crazily, that things could get better. And we love that about you. So I would say,

hold on to that. That image of wouldn't it be great if is there. We want that from you. The world can be a tough place. We want your authentic optimism. That's a very. beautiful thing at the same time how you make it happen with that sometimes that works sometimes that doesn't keep your ears peeled when I was writing leaders eat last it became an insanely difficult book to write I couldn't understand why no one had written the book before me take the biology of human decision making and overlap it on a corporate culture and it turns out every single chapter could have been its own book it just was a it was just a disaster and to organize and it just was so difficult.

And I wrote it so many times. I just kept writing and writing and writing. And I couldn't make it work. And so one evening I gave up. And I got up from my desk and I went for a walk. And I was planning the exit. I was planning how I was going to deal with me quitting. I couldn't solve this unsolvable problem.

You know, I would be humiliated, but I'll get over it. it. I would have to give my advance back to the publisher, because technically I'm in violation of a contract. And I was literally going through the steps of quitting to prepare myself for all of the pieces of it. And I called a friend of mine after I had sort of gone through it all, and he used to be in the Air Force Special Forces. And I called him up. I'm not even sure I said hello. He picked up the phone, and I asked, what do you do when you can't complete the mission? as is his nature, he just started telling me a story. He used to fly pavloes.

He used to fly helicopters. And he said they had a mission in Afghanistan that all of the intelligence said that it was a suicide mission. Like there was too much defense. They were all going to get shot down and the mission would fail. So this was not like,

we're all going to die, but we're going to kill Hitler. Like we're all going to die and the mission's going to fail. This is what all of the intelligence overwhelmingly told them. And they were preparing their heliolos, helicopters to go on the mission. And his co-pilot says to him, what do we do? Like they've got wives, they've got kids. They know what they're flying into. He says, what do we do? And my friend

turned to him and said, this is what we signed up for. We go. And my friend said to me, this book that you're writing, is it more or less powerful than start with why? I said, it's affected me more. The research has changed me more. He said, well, before I met you, I was going to quit the Air Force. And I read this little book called Star with Wine. It reinvigorated me and decided to stay. So if you were telling me that this book is more powerful, then we need this book. He says, this is what you signed up for.

You have to finish this book. The mission was scrapped. The last minute the mission was scrapped, and so they never flew. And it was that. He didn't sugarcoat anything. And I went back and I finished it. But the lesson is I asked for help. And I think any leader that runs into a brick wall,

if you think you can do leadership by yourself, you're insane. If you think you can build a company by yourself, you're nuts. If you think you can do this thing called life, you know, solo. You're, you're, it's not going to work out. So I think the courage to ask for help when the chips are down is the only thing that gets you through. All right. Hope you enjoyed that panel. That's the type of interview, by the way, where you should pause, take note,

pick up, pause, take notes. It just keep on pausing and taking notes. Wow, hard to believe that Summit 2019 is in the books, as in Summit 2019, gone. It's unbelievable. Here we are. Last day. I'm sad. I'm going to become emotional.

So I better think about something positive. And that would be Entree Leadership Summit, 2020. We just launched it in the room today. I don't know how many tickets we sold, but they were going like crazy. People like to come back to this thing. We're going to be heading back to sunny Orlando, Florida, for our 2020 event, May 17 through 20. And it's going to be unbelievable. Here's who's already confirmed that I'm allowed to share.

Damon John from the Shark Tank, Mike Rowe, who is the well-known reality TV host and all-around just good American work guy. Kat Cole, C-O-O- and President, North America of Focus Brands, Carly Fiorina, the former We're CEO of Hewlett Packard, Craig Groshell, the founder and senior pastor of Life Church, one of the largest churches in America, and then Benjamin Zander, the founder and conductor of the Boston Phil Harmonic. Now, this event sells out faster and faster because of what happened in the room today is people sign up for next year's events. So as you're hearing about this, you better get with it. If you decide to register by Tuesday, May the 7th at 5 p.m., that's Tuesday, May 7 at 5 p.m. central, you'll save $200.

So who wouldn't want to save $200? You can get in touch and lock in your seat with one of our sales advisors. Text Summit 2020, no space, Summit 2020 to 33444. 33444 is the number. Text Summit 2020 to 334444 or click the link in this episode's show notes. Well, I hate to say Summit 2019 is over, but that just means we're that much closer to Summit 2020. On behalf of our entire Entree leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again tomorrow because we got another Summit 2019 episode.