EntreLeadership - How to Tell if You're Making the Right Decisions with Marc Polymeropoulos

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

The world is full of chaos, and a leader’s job is to plunge into that chaos and bring order to the situation—but how? In this episode of The EntreLeadership Podcast, we sit down with Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA operative and the author of Clarity in Crisis. Marc talks about a few of the leadership principles he developed during his 26 year career in covert operations that will help you bring order to your business. Later in the episode, you’ll hear George Kamel’s chat with the executive director of ramseysolutions.com, Kacy Maxwell. They discuss the tactical way we make decisions at Ramsey Solutions, and how you can use these tactics to grow your organization.   The EntreLeadership Podcast Clarity in Crisis by Marc Polymeropoulos Download the Decision-Making Framework from Kacy Maxwell. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman How to Decide by Annie Duke Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts by Rhiannon Beaubien and Shane Parrish Farnam Street's website Download the EveryDollar budget app. Download the How to Make Decisions the Easy Way checklist. Schedule a call with Tim, our producer.   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY  |  Gravy  |  Hite Digital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

decisions can be mundane or they can be high stakes. But as a leader, you're making decisions every single day. So how do you know you're making the right ones? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, George Camel. In today's episode, we've got two interviews around the topic of decision-making, around our business driver of plan.

Our first conversation is with Mark Polly Moropolis. He's a former senior intelligence officer in the CIA who oversaw clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia. He retired after 26 years of service as one of the CIA's most decorated field officers. He's got a new book, Clarity in Crisis, Leadership Lessons from the CIA, and that's exactly what we talked about. We talked about decision making in the CIA and how it can help you in your business. Our second conversation is with Ramsey leader Casey Maxwell as he walks us through and incredibly helped us decision-making matrix. So stick around for that. First up, we've got our conversation with Mark. Leadership is really high-stakes decision-making. And Mark made those types of decisions every single day

in the CIA. It was several years ago. I retired in 2019. So this happened in about 2015 or so. And I had returned from Afghanistan. I was a base chief along the PAC Afghan border. It was a CIA paramilitary base, but I came back to headquarters. And my old base was running. a counterterrorist operation, and it was against a high-value target. It was against a Taliban member who was responsible for the deaths of many Americans and was plotting to kill more. So someone we really cared about, whether, you know, and I'm careful how I say this, but, you know, we put someone on the X, either for a capture operation or perhaps to pass

on to the U.S. military. And it's really important, and it's what we're very good at. But I was back at our headquarters, and I get called on to, by the senior leadership, and they say, okay, this is what's happening. So there's a lack of situational awareness. Everything is going wrong in terms of communications. They are paralyzed at headquarters on whether or not to go ahead on this operation. And they said, Mark, what do you think?

Remember, I've been there for a year. I knew the individuals involved, the officers that I had trained that I had served with. I knew the Afghan partners we had. I knew the operation from, you know, cover to cover. And so, you know, there was nothing about it that I wasn't aware of. While headquarters didn't have that situational awareness, I really did. And so ultimately, they looked at them and they said, what should we do? we're not sure what to do? And I said, well, what are the people on the ground advocating?

And they said, you know, they say, let's do it. It's a go. And I said, well, absolutely do it. And they looked at me and they said, how can you make that decision? We don't know what's going on. And I said, well, actually, I actually do. And I'm comfortable in this area. You know, I'm comfortable in the gray in times of ambiguity. And so I recommended the operation go forward. A senior officer at CI looked at me and he said, if this goes wrong, it's your career on the line. And I said, sure, fine. And by the way, so the operation was a success. And so we took someone off the battlefield who was trying to kill Americans. and had killed my fellow colleagues and was going to certainly do so in the future. But afterwards, a colleague of mine said, how did you make that decision? I said it was easy.

Because, you know, there were several fundamental things that we had done that I know my team had done. You know, again, the team was well trained. They believed in each other. They were comfortable in decision making because I'd given them all opportunities on the ground to do so. So I love this story because it was so easy for me to operate in that gray. You know, that was my happy space. People at our headquarters couldn't understand it. I really could.

And it was really after that time where I was like, you know, I think I got really good at this leadership thing. And I wasn't a good leader in the beginning of my career. But I got good at it in the end. I said, I got to write about this because, you know, I think it really can be applicable to all walks of life. Wow. It's interesting. You said that phrase, comfortable in the gray. And I think of the business owners out there, and I feel like they live in the gray.

Very few times are things just black and white and the decisions are super easy. There's emotions. There's real people involved. How do you live comfortably in the gray? but also have those processes and those fundamentals that you talk about in place. Is that what allows you to make those decisions? This is not something that Harvard Business School is going to teach. But the reason why I think it's going to really resonate is because it just makes sense.

So it's fundamental ways you build your team, the fundamental ways you train your team, how you believe in each other. So ultimately, you know, when those times are tough, you have the confidence to make decision. Now, you're not always going to be right. That's okay. But you're not going to be paralyzed. And again, when I say it's the happy place, you know, you want to be the one when the times are tough.

You raise your hand. You say, send me. I mean, I know that sounds dramatic. I was, you know, in New York when 9-11 occurred. I will never forget watching firefighters and police officers run into the World Trade Center. That, to me, as I kind of, I geek out on leadership all the time. That was extraordinary moment. You want to be that person.

That's a little dramatic. But you want to be that person when times are tough. You're okay. Now, it doesn't mean you're happy about it. You know, I talked to an entrepreneur recently, and he said, after you read my book, And he said, you know what high pressure situation was for me? It was I couldn't make payroll. And I said, when?

The next day, the next week, he said, no, three hours. I had three hours to make payroll. I had a whole company looking at me. And so he got it. And so that's why I, you know, that's why I love talking about this book because it doesn't have to be the world of special operations and intelligence. It really can resonate, you know, through the private sector, especially with small business owners.

And what about now, you know, as we're coming out of, or still in the pandemic, when there was so much uncertainty. Yeah, that's fascinating. You talked about this mission that was a success, but a lot of your book stems from some of the mistakes and some of the failures. And I think, you know, that part is always going to be relatable for the business owners out there as they kind of stumble through this, especially in the early days. So I want to talk about a mission that went wrong. Can you share a story of something that went wrong and what you learned from that on the leadership side? Yeah, and, you know, these stories are, you know, emotional for me because these did, you know, entail loss of life.

So I like telling the story, and it's a sad one, because there's a happier ending down the line because it's what I learned from failure. And look, you know, and I tell this to people all the time. As a CIA officer, you know, I got my teeth kicked in a lot. We fail constantly. You got to learn from it. And you know, you have to embrace that and look for lessons learned. And that's the super fuel that you have. That adversity is the super fuel for later on when you're able to, you know, to make decisions under pressure.

So I'll tell you the story. So we were in Iraq. I was living up in the mountains with the Kurds before the war. And we had recruited an Iraq. Iraqi agent who was coming across enemy lines. You know, when I say enemy lines, Saddam Hussein's Iraq coming across giving us information on order of battle of the Iraqi military. Really important in Washington loved us as they were preparing. And we didn't really know it was going to happen, but they were, you know, preparing plans for a possible invasion.

Forget the whole political statement behind this. I never talk about that. I was a civil servant. When I say, you know, these are things that I did. I was in Iraq. I was in Afghanistan. So we're, you know, tens of thousands of others. But ultimately, the information that, that this agent was bringing us, this Iraqi, was so important that Washington pressured me to keep on meeting him, keep on meeting him. Now, ordinarily, we have to take these security precautions, but I was meeting him too often. And I knew it. But there was so much pressure from back home, and we increased the pace of the meetings, which means he has to find a way to cross enemy lines. And what ultimately happened is he got caught, he got tortured, and he was killed.

And that really weighed on me for a long time, because while, you know, was this my fault? Well, the answer, of course, yes. I have to take ownership. of it. But as I look back is what I should have done is I should have, you know, withstood that, you know, in essence, political pressure from back home and fundamentally said, you know, we can meet them only a certain amount of times and that's it. And this is something that's got away on me, you know, the rest of my life. I mean, this is someone whose life, you know, it was in my hands. One of the amazing things about being a CIA officer is that these are the misnomeries, these are the things that maybe the American people don't understand

is when we have people who work for us, you know, and it's incredible, I talk about it in the book, you know, their life is in our hands. If I make a mistake, someone who put his faith or her faith in me, they may die. and what an incredible responsibility. So, you know, you have to be perfect with your tradecraft, you know, with how I, you know, run an agent. And I'll never forget that story. And it really weighed on me very heavily, but it also caused me to get better.

Yeah. Wow. That's powerful. Thank you for sharing that, Mark. Sure. And the book is about crisis. And when I think about crisis, it's something that can feel hard to plan for. It feels like a crisis is something unexpected.

Is it possible to plan for the next crisis as a business owner? Are there things you can do to put in place, or is it just, hey, you just got to be ready to react when it comes? Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, you have to be prepared to react. And I think about my times. Now, I work in the Middle East. And so there's always some kind of upheaval in many of the countries where I was living and working. But I remember one specific time where, you know, there was some instability. We were getting a little worried about the terrorist threats. So in a U.S. government facility where I was the deputy station chief, you know, we, we, almost rigged the place, not for battle, but for something bad to happen. So everyone had things called go bags. You know, we had weapons in the office just in case we had MREs. We had meals

in case we had to hunker down in this place. I remember some of my colleagues from other U.S. government agencies coming to the office and they said, you know, what is this? The Alamo here. What happened, you know, two months later, the embassy, it was, the U.S. government facility was attacked. There was an al-Qaeda attack. We almost died there. We didn't. But we had really, we had prepared so well. And it was because the station chief and I, and this was in a Middle Eastern country, several years earlier, had been in Iraq together. And so we kind of had that same kind of mentality about preparation. But fundamentally to your question, and it goes, you know, I know we're talking about the book a lot, it goes to my principles. It's, you know, you can withstand a crisis

if you have a good team, if they're well trained, if they believe in each other. You know, there's one of my principles is family values. I talk about kind of having love and empathy for your employees and your peers and even your bosses. So there's fundamental things you can do, how you train and mentor your people. So when there is a crisis, you know, you are so much more, you know, well prepared to react. Yeah, that's good. And a lot of this comes down to making decisions. I mean, that's what a lot of leadership is. So what makes up the decision-making framework? What makes the, is the CIA any different when it comes to filtering through making a hard decision? Probably not, because ultimately it's risk versus gain. I mean, that's what you do in everything. So my whole life as an intelligence officer,

an operations officer was managing risk. You know, and things changed. You know, so sometimes if the stakes were really high, maybe you take a bigger risk, but you always, in everything you do, every step you make, you go through a risk versus gain calculus. And that's really smart.

And that, you know, one thing that I would really espouse is it's got to be dynamic. So a lot of times you see leaders make a decision. And as things evolve, the situation evolves, they still stick to that decision. When you know that they should have that maybe less of a sense of ego or a more open mind to actually change their mind once again. So, you know, what I would espouse is risk versus gain calculation and keep making it

over time. Don't get stuck in that one moment because if you're, you know, if you're 20 yards down the field, you know, you might have thought that decision you made was the right one. And maybe it was, but things have changed and you have to reevaluate once again. So just, it's having that open mind to just, you know, keep on evaluating the situation. You know, so much in my book, I talk about something called situational awareness. That's really important just to know what's going on around you. So it's gathering as much information as you can to make the most informed decision possible. And make sure it's got to be dynamic. It can't be static. You have to be able to change. You've got to adapt to whatever comes next. Yeah, I love that. And when we talk about decisions,

you mentioned this earlier. You mentioned this idea of being paralyzed. And I think a lot of business leaders out there listening, they feel this, you know, there's fight or flight, and then there's just freeze. And that feels like it's not an option. Because not, not making a decision is making a decision. So what do you do to avoid kind of caving under the pressure of a decision when you've got the team, there's maybe people above you, and there's the marketplace, and they're all reacting to whatever comes next. And you feel like you're frozen. So one of the things I always did was, again, it's so funny because you learn this, you know, later in life. So I'm 52 years old now. I spent 26 years at CIA. That's half my life. I was a

really good leader really towards the end of my career. But I'll tell you why. And it's applicable to the question is because I had an open mind. I had empathy. I was able to listen. You know, in the old day, CIA was a very rigid, hierarchical kind of militaristic organization. So nobody could question you. And you as a leader wouldn't, you'd be seen as weak and asking others for opinions. That's totally different now. So when I was, you know, faced with times of crisis, even when I was in the senior intelligence service, that's the equivalent of a general officer in the military, I would still gather my team together. Sometimes I'd gather junior officers and I say, here's the situation, here's what I think. What do you all think? And I want some

open mind. I want some creativity here because we got to solve this together. But you know why? Because I didn't have an ego anymore. You know, I wasn't worried about what I'd look like. You want to get to the right decision ultimately. And so I think it's having that, you know, communication is key, having that interactive relationship with your employees. And I'll just, you know, end this one piece is that, look, you know, a long time ago, 1993, when I joined CIA, the workforce is a lot different. Right now, the workforce and when I say youngsters, when when young men and women come into the workforce and they come into the CIA, they expect that. They expect to be able to tell their bosses what they think. And that's really good, because ultimately it's

going to lead to better decisions you make as a leader down the line. So having that open communication and removing all the ego. It feels like ego can get in the way when it comes to a decision because you start going, well, this is people's expectations of me? And how is this going to reflect people's perception of me as a leader if they don't like my decision? And so you start to use that filter, and that is a great path to a bad decision, it sounds like. And I think there's a lot of shortcuts that can be made when it comes to decision making because people want to solve problems quickly. They go, what is the fastest path to get this thing out of my life?

So do you have a time that you can remember where a shortcut was taken and there was a positive or negative outcome? Sure. And I talk about this. It's one of the leadership principles in my book. I call it the process monkey. And it's a really important kind of piece of my life because at CIA, we had some fundamental things we had to do, some processes that.

that are absolutely mandatory. You know, a Navy SEAL has to be able to shoot, obviously. CIA officer and operations officer, we have to do something called a surveillance detection route. And that's when we have to meet an agent on the street in XYZ country, we're obviously not going to drive right there. We would get caught. We have to take a circuitous route.

Maybe it's over several hours. Maybe I put a disguise on. Maybe I get out of a vehicle. You know, maybe it's even over a couple days if it's a really tough environment. But ultimately, that's the fundamental process to keep your agent alive. So, you know, where have I seen this go awry? Well, you know, there's a vignette in the book, but I'll change it up a little bit in that sometimes, you know, Murphy hits. Something, things go wrong on your surveillance detection route. Maybe you're going to miss your timing spots, but ultimately you say to yourself, hey, I'm not going to be able to do this fundamental precept of what I'm supposed to do. And there's a little thing in the back in your head going. And sometimes people will cave into this thing. Maybe I'll just drive straight to the meeting. Maybe I'll cut something off. Knowing full well, that's not the right thing to do. Your agent's life is that. risk. And so I have seen others take that, you know, unfortunate step. And what they're doing is

putting their agent at risk. I tell a story in the book how the right thing to do is I was in a Middle Eastern country. I was meeting an agent perishable critical information. Washington was going to change U.S. policy. They were waiting for me to get back. And I was stuck in traffic. And if anybody knows the Middle East, that's all they have is traffic. You know, wonderful people, great food and traffic. And so ultimately, I missed the meeting. But I had to, we call it aborting meeting. I didn't go to the meeting. I couldn't do that fundamental piece. And I got back to the office. And my boss, the station chief, he said, hey, start writing. You know, Washington wants this. We got to get this information to the White House. I said, I didn't go. I'd abort the meeting.

I couldn't run the SDR properly. And you know what he said? Got it. Good, good call. So, you know, those are critical, you know, lessons that you have to learn. And because ultimately, in times of crisis, if you have people who understand those processes, when everyone else is confused and and nervous, you're okay. And that's the gray, but you're okay in that. And I love that story because it happened a lot. I mean, you know, a lot of times we miss meetings. But then, as you kind of alluded to before, sometimes case officers would, you know, make a mistake and take a shortcut. And that could end in, you know, disastrously. Yeah. And you're talking about processes and how well-developed, consistently refined processes are crucial to any CIA endeavor. What do those refined processes look like,

you know, for the business owner, how can they start to develop those to use that for a decision-making framework? We can think of different sectors, you know, so for example, if with a business owner, it would be things that, you know, you'd want to do that you have to adhere to the right morals, you have to hear to how you want to conduct yourself. So if you're in sales and so you're trying to sell a piece of equipment, machinery, a product, it's the same type of thing. Is that product going to be well-developed? You know, have you gone through the cycle of making sure this is a piece of quality product? and what you're saying to the customer, are you telling the truth? I mean, there's so many different examples on this. I think of a police officer.

Police officer has to give Miranda rights to a suspect. If they don't do that, everything falls apart. What if you go into an operating room? You know, that nurse is going to have to prep you for surgery. I hope they did the right thing. So I think it's certainly sector business dependent. But one of the things I do in the book, and I call it the mad minute checklist is I actually challenge everybody is, hey, in your sector, tell me what is, you know, I call it

the process monkey. Tell me the three or four things that you have to do every day to make sure that what you're doing is the right thing. And one of the greatest officers I ever work with, and she is a legend in the U.S. counterterrorism community, but she told me the same thing over and over again. She said, just do the right thing. You know, you have to adhere to your ethics and morals. And that's what the process monkey is all about. Find those processes that are absolutely critical and stick to it. And maybe we can talk about it for a second now is that doesn't mean you can't be creative. You know, you still have to have room for ingenuity. You still have to have to have room for adaptation, but remember those processes. Yeah, it's interesting. You talk in the book about, you know,

innovating and taking risks, and it feels like those fly in the face of a well-defined process. And so how do you kind of marry those two things when you go, hey, take risks, but also follow the rules. And so, so again, you have to have your fundamentals. One of the things, I love this example, so I've talked to you about the surveillance detection route in the past. So I'm in the Middle East. I'm having trouble making my agent meetings because I keep getting caught in traffic. So what do you do? So again, remember, I have to do something three or four hours. I have to be on the street.

I have to clean myself off, meaning I have to make sure nobody's following me, however which techniques I use, as I told you, maybe I'm changing clothes, me changing cars, you know, going to a subway. But with traffic, what did I do? It's a real world story. And I said, you know what? I can't make it through in a car. I'm going to get a bike, literally a bicycle.

That way I could weave in and out of traffic. So what did I do? I adapted a little bit of innovation there. You know, it's not, this is, again, this is not rocket science. I got to get to points A, B, C, and D. I can't get there using a car. I can get there using a bike. I still adhere to the fundamental principle that I have to be free of surveillance.

I love it. It's a really simple example. It's a real world example. And I love talking about it because it's just a way of thinking about, again, marrying up that creativity, ingenuity, need to adapt with, you know, something that you've got to get right every time. Yeah. So it's not about breaking the rules, but it's finding those creative ways to get it done.

based on your situation. I love that. I want to talk about the team. We've talked a lot about the leader, but you know, you say the leader's only really as good as their team. And I love this concept of glue guys and glue gals. So what does that mean? This is my favorite principle. It's the first principle in the book. It is just fundamentally the indispensable people that you have in a business unit and organization. And there's going to be those, and they're not going to be necessarily your sales leaders. It's not going to be if you're a Navy SEAL, the one who's kicking the door down or for a CIA case officer. It's identifying fundamental, indispensable members of your team very likely behind the scenes. And what do you do with them? And I learned this later on in my

career. I wasn't good at this at first. But what you do, you do a couple things. One is, you know, you certainly celebrate them. When there is a success of your business unit of a CIA team, you reward them. They're just as important, in fact, as the one who, you know, kicked down the door or, you know, sold several million dollars worth of hardware to someone. But the key part is that you use them in your planning processes. And that's something that I learned very late. I remember we used to have leadership team meetings at the CI station. I'd want my operations officers there. These are my door kickers. But by the end of my career, who else would be there with me would be the support personnel? Because nothing happens if you don't have the logistics equipment or, you know, or satellite imagery or,

disguise kits or, you know, things I'm talking about in my world, but it's so applicable in other places too. And so I love that concept of the glue guy and the glue guy. I once, I gave this speech to a high school football team one time. There was a, there was a quarterback. He was the resident kind of, you know, stud quarterback and a high school team was going off to play Division I football. And I asked him, I said, who's your glue guys? And he said, my offensive lineman, he pointed to their table and they all started cheering. And he got it. It's exactly right. Now, this was a star football player. You know, he's going off to big time football, but he doesn't get any of this if his offensive line isn't good. And so what I love challenging, you know, listeners, readers, you know, people I talk to

corporate clients is ultimately tell me who you're a glue guy or glue gals are. And I love when people kind of sit back and they think, well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense because these people in the back, 100%. Nothing happens without them. I mean, the first thing people always say is the IT staff. Well, of course. That's right. The IT staff and a company is always getting yelled at because the computers don't work or the systems down. You know what? Just think about that. Any success of that unit is because of the IST staff. So I love this concept and I think it really resonates. And if you're a smart leader, you're going to really promote these people. And and then you're going to have a lot of success down the line.

And ultimately, when times are tough, that unit you have, you know, when there's ambiguity, lack of situational awareness, they're going to perform better because you have that kind of cohesive unit, including the support personnel in the back. Yeah, I think of the people, you know, in the booth to my right, you're making all this happen, the technology, the production, the editing, all of that stuff. And, you know, makes me think about this. The leader feels like it's all on their shoulders.

They've got to make all the decisions. How do you actually start to involve the glue guys, the glue guys, the glue gals in the process and the decision making and the planning. What does that look like? So you bring them in. So, okay, so we have an operation. Our job is to penetrate, you know, this would be a good thing. You know, penetrate the inner circle of Vladimir Putin, his office in the Kremlin.

So you get people together and you say, all right, how are we going to do this? Clearly you have your operations officers, maybe you have your targeters. They're trying to figure out who the right person is that the U.S. government wants to recruit. But who are the glue guys and the glue gals? Well, they're the ones who are going to have to procure the disguise case. for our officers to go overseas or perhaps false passports, you know, things like that. And so it's involving them in the planning process from the beginning.

And everybody is always surprised because so often that glue guy or the glue guy all has the actual the key to everything that we just haven't even thought of. And so it's involving them. The other piece I would always talk about is when we'd run an operation. I bring the finance people in. Money doesn't just grow on trees. You know, we want to do, we want to run an operation. I think it's the greatest thing in the world.

I've forgotten to include the finance chief who's like, hey, we don't have any money for that. So bring them in at the very beginning, too. It's such an easy concept, but it's all about kind of planning. So it's rewarding them, but even more important, it's involving them with the entire planning process. So bring them in early on, make them feel like they're a part of it because they are. They are. And reward them as well. So let's not forget that, too, because, you know, everyone that, you know, your sales leader,

you're a case officer who recruited the target, your Navy SEAL, who grew up, grabbed a high value target, you know, they're always going to get the accolades. Hold on a second. You better remember all the people in the rear just as important. And great leaders, and I say this over and over again, understand that. And guess what? They also treat everybody the same. You know, you might have your superstars. You better, as you're walking around your office, how you greet people, how you talk to and who you spend time with, it better be equitable.

If you're a smart leader, that's what you do. Yeah, that's so true. And you have this concept of employing the daggers. We're talking about recognizing your team, making sure that you're rewarding them, You talk about having healthy competition. What is employing the dagger mean? It sounds very aggressive. It doesn't sound like something I want to be far off.

This is really important because when I wrote this book, a friend of mine in my world, in the Special Operations Intelligence World, said, okay, this is great. We're all going to love this thing. But you have to make this applicable to other subsets of people. I said, oh, he said librarians. And I said, I'll never forget this. As I wrote the book, as I talked about the principles, I never forgot that idea that this can't be this kind of book only designed for kind of type A alpha male alpha female you know

extroverts not at all and so so when I talk about employing the dagger it's encouraging healthy competition because everybody does rise so what did I mean by that so in the CI station if we had a successful operation I would literally I would go out in the street and buy like a little ten dollar dagger I call employing the dagger because it was in the Middle East and I would give it to individuals who succeeded I did so of course to everybody not just the case officers you know the kind of of door kickers, but I would do support personnel, everything we just talked about. But what happened is it fostered, it's a $10 dagger. This is not a bonus.

This is not a fancy certificate. It's a deck. But it fostered this incredible, healthy sense of competition where everyone was vying for these things. They talked about it all the time. They would hang it on their desks and stuff like that. You see this in the sports world all the time as well. And there's so many different examples of teams and they have something.

So, you know, I live in the Washington, D.C. area. And so, you know, when the Washington capitals won the Stanley Cup, the Washington Nationals, the resident, you know, the baseball team here, too, gave him a little baseball helmet. So every time at the end of a playoff game that the Capitol's won, someone would get a baseball helmet and they'd be wearing it in the locker room. And everyone was vying for these things. So it's, you know, this is small. It sounds silly. It's not. It's a wonderful way to breed healthy competition. And so, you know, the dagger maybe is, you know, it sounds a little intimidating, but you can use anything, you know, just in terms of something to foster this.

And if you get your team involved in this, it can be fun, it can be healthy. I had tremendous success with this and it doesn't cost anything yeah i've seen that happen uh on the entree leadership team and many other teams here at ramsie uh i can think of award ceremonies they do that are really fun where they just celebrate the the every we call it you know excellence in the ordinary it's showing up every day consistently doing the work going above and beyond all those things and it really goes a long way because people feel that pride in their work when you recognize that in front of their peers it lights people up even more sometimes than you know a raise would and so i love that idea of employing the dagger. All of the stuff we've talked about, the leadership of the team,

it really comes down to gaining that confidence as you make your decisions and creating that quality team that can generate those results. But we can't do all of these at once. You've got the nine principles, but starting tomorrow, I can't go and employ all nine principles. So what is the most important thing you think a leader needs to go do tomorrow to have more clarity in their decision? So first of all, in the principles itself, they build on each other. So I agree with you 100%. I don't want someone to take this book and to think they have to do this all overnight. So each principle actually builds on the next one. And it's a progressive path. And this is not going to happen overnight. It can take, you know, weeks and months. It's not difficult, but it is something you build on.

But ultimately, I think that in my world, there was something that was really important and that was a concept of humility. And I say that, and it's really important because it's also ties into something else, I believe, is that, you know, you have to dare to fail. You're going to fail. And so the one thing that a CIA officer understands is, while, you know, I always talk about, you know, with some maybe dramatic flare, we're the ones standing on the ramparts protecting, you know, our fellow Americans. And I really do believe that. But we're going to fail sometimes. So it's actually accepting that. But understanding you have to learn from that, you have to, you know, take lessons learn from each one of your failures. Adversity is a good thing. You know, one of my principles was

adversity is the performance enhancing drug to success. You have to learn from adversity. But ultimately, you know, you have to be able to make those kind of smart measured risk versus game. game calls. And so daring to fail is something that you see that a lot in special operations and intelligence world, but I think it's something that can be applicable to everybody else. And you can be confident understanding that, hey, it's not always going to work out. If I do all these things right and I feel good about it, sometimes not going to work out. And that's okay too. And then, of course, don't get paralyzed, you know, something we talked about before. Yeah, man, Mark, there's so much good stuff here. So much in the book, Clarity and Crisis,

pump for you in that book. And we're grateful for your 26 years of service to our country and the CIA protecting us from all kinds of danger. Most of it you probably still can't talk about. But thankful for you, thankful for your wisdom that you've brought to our Entree leadership listeners. I know it's going to help them no matter what their crisis is, no matter what they're going through. You're going to help them in that decision-making process so that they can continue to help the marketplace out there. Thanks for having me. It's great.

Thank you. The principles in Mark's book, Clarity and Crisis, Leadership Lessons from the CIA will help you gain confidence in your decision making. But how long you take on a decision and which ones to delegate, that can be tough. And we're going to have a conversation about that right after this.

So in our second conversation, I talked to Ramsey leader, Casey Maxwell, who's the executive director of Ramsey Solutions.com. And in the conversation, he shares an incredibly helpful framework that he uses to make decisions every single day.

You can download the graphic to follow along with us using the link in the show notes. And Casey came across this framework while he was studying how to make better decisions as a leader. I've been at Ramsey for about five years, and I've been leading during that time. Before that, I was at other companies

where I was leading different teams and doing different things, different titles. But there was something that was consistent across all of those jobs, and that was making decisions. I have to make a lot of decisions. Now, everybody in life makes a lot of decisions every day, right? We wake up in the morning,

do we need to get a shower? Decision, yes. Do we need to get some breakfast? Maybe, maybe not. How are we going to get to work? What are we going to do when get to work? Life is full of decisions. But when you're a leader, right, or you have your own business, those decisions take on a lot more weight. So we focus on leadership a lot here around Ramsey. And one of the areas that I really have been wanting to grow in is, how do I make better decisions? How do I think better? I don't want to just rely on my gut. I don't want to just rely on what worked in the past. So I started doing some research. Is there anything out there that I can pull on to make better decisions? And I found a lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff out there about how to make good decisions. People like Daniel Connman, he's kind of like the godfather of thinking.

He has written so many things and his research is really foundational to everything around making decisions and decision making. Like his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that should be required reading for everybody. Also read things from Annie Duke. She was a former champion poker player, which poker players make a lot of decisions with very little info. And high stakes. High stakes, always. And that's their career. And so she's moved on to start writing some books, writing her book, how to decide or thinking in bets.

But my favorite, my absolute favorite, is Farnham Street. Farnham Street is a company that all they do is talk about decision making and thinking. They've published books around mental models and frameworks. And they actually, this is where I found this framework and where I started using it. Now, the framework is called the decision-making framework. And what that is is it's not actually a framework for how to make decisions. It's a framework for how to prioritize the decisions that you need to make. So it's a filter.

Yes, exactly. So we are bombarded with tons of problems and decisions that we need to make every day. And what happens is when we're not figuring out how to prioritize those, What we end up doing is we approach them all the same way, which means we're spending too much time on the ones that don't matter and not enough time on the ones that do. So as we walk through this, you know, we hear words like quadrants and axes, and it sounds really nerdy, but the way you explain it is a lot more simple. There's really four options for any task, any decision to be made. So walk us through what this framework looks like. Yeah, the framework is very simple. You can download a copy or you can print out, get out a sheet of paper, and draw a big plus, right?

And each end of that plus is one end of the axes. And we've linked it in the show notes as well. So if you guys want to follow along as you listen, it's really easy to grasp it when it's visual. But you're going to make it easy. If you're just listening, you're on a run, you don't have time to look at this thing right now. You're going to make it simple for these nice folks.

Yes. So when you have a decision that you need to make, you need to ask yourself these two questions. Is this decision consequential or inconsequential to my business or my life? The second question is, is this reversible or irreversible? Once you answer those questions, you're able to take this framework and plot where that decision lands on this framework. Then we'll talk about, as we unpack this, how do you approach these, once you've plotted them, how do you approach them? So it's kind of, how big of a deal is this long term, and can I undo the decision?

Yeah, exactly. And that helps you really filter out, okay, this is a priority, this is where I need to spend my time, my energy, my focus. Yeah, the consequential and consequential is really one of the biggest pieces of this. Because when you're either a small business owner or you're a leader in a company, you think every decision that comes to you, you feel responsible for it. And it feels consequential. And so you just give all of your time. But time is finite.

You only have a set amount of time. And so this matrix helps you say, where should I not be focusing and where should I be focusing? Okay, so what is the first thing we need to start looking at on this framework? Yeah, so let's start on the left side. So that is the inconsequential decisions. So some of those are reversible. Some of those are irreversible. These are things that when you look down the road, one week, two weeks, a month, a year, when you look back, you say, that really had no impact on my life. Those are things like, what are we going to have for lunch at a team meeting? What type of paper should we put in the printer? What type of pens should we use? A lot of thought is actually, actually given to these type of decisions when they really don't have any major impact. And if you get them wrong, you just shift it up and do it differently the next time. You can buy different pens when you run out of ink in the pens that you bought. Now, these decisions are very, very interesting because I think a lot of people think that

they don't spend a lot of time on these. They say, oh, we talk a lot about budgeting here at Ramsey. We've got an app called Every Dollar where we say, we need you to look at every transaction that you have. And the reason we say that is when we ask, how does this impact your budget? You'll say something like, Starbucks doesn't impact my budget. It's $5. That's not a big deal. But when you start looking at all of your transactions and realize you've had that same $5 transaction 20 times in a week, all of a sudden, all of those add up to something that's actually really impactful to your budget. It's the same thing with your time. If you are constantly

making five-minute decisions, you'll realize that you'll wake up and you've used your entire day using these inconsequential decisions, using your time on those. So one thing that you should do, if you can, delegate these decisions. Get these decisions off your plate. And if you can't spend as little time as possible on them. Don't overthink it. No, absolutely not. And if you can, make the decision not to make a decision. Just say, that's not even worth my time. I'm not going to do that. We're going to move on. Yeah. So that's kind of the left side.

You're inconsequential but reversible. And now some of these are irreversible. So it feels like, oh gosh, this has a little bit more impact in my life because I can't undo it. But what's an example if it's inconsequential and irreversible? Something we brought it up, the lunch. So you're not going to be able to reverse what you ate for lunch. But it's inconsequential because even if you didn't like it, you're going to have another team meeting and you're going to have another lunch.

It's those type of things that even if you get it wrong, it's not going to have a major impact. Delegate that. Get somebody else to take that off your plate because you don't want to use any of your mind space for that. I mean, Steve Jobs is one of the ones that, you know, he wore the same thing every day. And he made the statement that he didn't want to waste time

any of his mental energy on choosing what he was going to wear because he wanted to spend all of his time solving the big problems to help the Apple community. I love that. So as we move to the right side, this is where the leader comes into play. This is where they should be focusing on our time because these are consequential decisions, whether they're reversible or irreversible. So let's start in maybe the bottom right, which is it's reversible, but it's consequential.

Well, actually, can we jump up and start with the big ones? Happy to. This is your show. Perfect. The ones that you really need to spend all the time on are the consequential and irreversible decisions. These are the big ones. These are things like, should I quit my job? Should I take a promotion?

Should I hire someone? Should I fire someone? Should we launch this new product? These are where you should spend the majority of your time. But I would argue that most business owners, most leaders, don't spend enough time as they should on these decisions. They're the ones that say, oh, that's really important. I should spend more time on that.

But I've got to do all of these other things. Is it taken up by the other three quadrants where they're going, I'm spending my time in the wrong places? I don't have time to think strategically about the really important stuff. Yeah, they're spending all of their time in those quadrants, and they're not giving the time they need to these really, really important ones. These should never be delegated. They should absolutely not be delegated.

You should be spending time and setting time on your calendar to make these decisions. Now, when something is irreversible and inconsequential, we talk about can we break that down? instead of doing this big thing, can we break it down smaller? And the phrase that we use here is, can we fire a musket ball versus a cannon ball? Yeah, break that up because we use that term a lot around here now, musket ball versus cannonball.

And you can visually, you get the picture, right? The musket ball is a lot smaller. The cannon ball has a lot more weight to it. Yeah, in Jim Collins monograph, he talked about the concept, the turning the flywheel was the monograph. And he talks about this concept of when ships used to battle at sea, their main weapon was the cannon. And the cannon ball was what was shot out of a cannon, obviously. And cannonballs are heavy. And ships want to float. So they can only put so many cannonballs in a ship. Cannonballs were life. That's how you would defeat the other ships. But if you started firing cannonballs and they were missing and you run out of cannon balls, you lose. So they had to figure out a way, how do we make sure that when we fire a cannonball, it's actually going to hit?

So they would take muskets and musket balls, which are much smaller, much lighter. They could put more of those on the ship, and they would stand where the cannon is, and they'd fire at the other ship. If it went into the water, they would reload and fire again. If it missed, they would reload and fire again. And they would do it until it hit the ship, and then they'd fire the cannonball. And they did that because they knew that their cannonball was going to find its mark. It was going to hit.

We've got to do that in business, and we've got to do that with decisions. So how can we take these big cannonball decisions that we need to make? and break them down into these smaller, probably still consequential, but reversible decisions that we need to make. For example, are we going to fire someone? Now, that's a consequential and irreversible decision. It's really hard to hire someone back after you fired them, right? And there's going to be a lot of time that you're going to have to spend either looking for somebody new or picking up their work or doing something like that. Before you jump in and make that decision, is there a consequential and reversible decision that you could make? maybe it's something like a 90-day plan. We've talked about that before, where that is you're going to sit with somebody and say,

okay, for the next 90 days, I'm going to dig in with you. We're going to set some specific goals to see if you can start moving where you need to be. Now, that's consequential because it's going to take a lot of your time, but it's reversible because you may get 30 days in and go, it doesn't matter if they have 90 days or 90 years. They're never going to get where we need them to go. And so I'm going to make that consequential and irreversible decision to let them go. Yeah.

Man, that's a big one, especially the emotional toll. You don't think about that part. And we do a lot of musket balls around here, whether it's, you know, testing things with customers or A, B, splits, all kinds of things, a soft launch where we go, hey, we're not going to let the world know. We're going to let the tribe know, our closest customers.

And so there's a lot of things you can do as the business owner before, you know, making that big, scary decision in that right upper hand column. So, does that cover it? Exactly. If you're thinking about, hey, I want to launch a new product or service, what is a way that you can do? test that first. Can you take a small group? Can you launch one specific piece of it and see if your, if your customers are saying, hey, that's what I want. Give me more of that. Then once you feel good

about that, then invest the time and the resources and the energy to do that because all of that stuff is finite as well. Yeah. So you're talking about owning these decisions as the leader, but let's say, you know, it's not just you. It's not a mom and pop shop. You've got maybe a team. Maybe you can even delegate to leaders. What is the level of involvement of, you know, versus your leadership team or other people on your team. Yeah, that's good. If you are beyond that and you have other people on your team, those that fall on the left side,

you should be delegating that to them all the time. On the right side, you should be bringing them in and having them be part of this decision. You don't need to make every decision on your own. You need to be able to bring those people in, have them help you gather the information that you need to make the right decisions. Yeah.

And then on that bottom side where it is reversible, you talk about running experiments and gathering information. Is that really where those musket balls come into play? Yeah, exactly. Those are the small things that you can do to say, oh, maybe that's not right. So if you want to go into a new service and you test it with a small group and you find nobody buys, nobody bites on it. Then instead of saying, well, I've already wasted all of this time in energy and this cannonball and it missed, you've done a small test to say, wait, no, no, no, we need to go do that again. So let's, instead of going back up to the top quadrant, stay down there, make another small decision, test it, get more info so that when you make that big cannonball, you have all the information you need to know it's going to be a success.

So I love this framework. What is the right thing for a leader to do if they go, hey, Casey, this is all good and well. I love a good framework. But how do I actually use this in my day-to-day to make a decision? Yeah, the way that you want to start with this, either, like I said, print it out, use the link in the show notes to print out this framework or draw one of your own. and then just start writing down every decision that you make. And once you write them down, plot them on here and see where they fall and then start using what we've recommended for each of these quadrants. And then in a week, two weeks, three weeks, go back and look at where you plotted those decisions.

Because I think what you're going to find is once you get a couple weeks out, you're going to look back and see something that you plotted and consequential and spent a lot of time on, that actually wasn't really important to your business. And so over time, you'll get better at figuring out what are actually the right things that I need to decide and what are the things that I can delegate or ignore. That's super helpful. And over time, I think these leaders are going to go, oh, I kind of have a gut for where this falls now. And this is really consequential. So let's take our time with this. And I'm going to delegate this because the printer paper, that can go over here and someone else can make that decision for me and really free up some brain space, free up some time, some energy, some resources to focus on those things that are going to move your business forward, that are really going to carry the team to another level. So I love this framework, Casey. I love the work you're doing here at Ramsey.

Thank you for taking the time to think about this stuff and sharing it with our listeners today. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. Big thanks to Casey for taking the time to share that super helpful framework with us. You know, decisions are part of being a small business owner. And once you use Casey's framework, you still have to go make the decisions.

An indecision can paralyze you and your business if you're not careful. So we've created a decision-making checklist that you can get by texting the word decision to 33-444. Again, text decision to 33-444 or click the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And if you're a small business owner with 2-200 team members, we'd love to hear your feedback on the show and ask you a few questions.

Just click the link in the show notes to fill out a brief survey to schedule a call with Tim, our producer. You can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison, and mixed and mastered by Will Rudder. I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.