Heroes in Business - Keith Ferrazzi Chairman, Ferrazzi Greenlight, NYT #1 best-selling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

  Chasing the Vision of Tony Hsieh with The Tony Hseih Award. Keith Ferrazzi Chairman, Ferrazzi Greenlight, NYT #1 best-selling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone and his newest book Leading Without Authority is interviewed by David Cogan famous celebrity Host of the Eliances Heroes Radio Show and Founder of Eliances entrepreneur community broadcast am fm radio, internet syndication  www.eliances.com    

Welcome back to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. To be part of our super community and find out more about Alliances, visit www.alliances.com. All right, so welcome back to the show. Again, excited that you're all back. Make sure you continue to tune in. Remember, it's AM, FM, and all of the outlets, including Pandora, which, right, I had the co-founder of Pandora on. So make sure you check out the other episodes by going to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com. Why? Because it is the only place where entrepreneurs align. And also, too, is make

sure you check out the earlier interview we had today when we had the co-founder and CEO of Picasso on. That's a billion dollar valuation company. He is the world's fastest, the world's fastest unicorn company. And you'll be able to see him at the Alliance's grand table on September 14th. Well, welcome to the show. I'm so excited about our next hero. His name is Keith Ferrazzi. He is the chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, New York Times number one bestselling author of Who's Got Your Back, Never Eat Alone, and his newest book, Leading Without Authority. You can reach him at KeithFerrazzi.com, and we've got a number of things to cover with him. But first, Keith, I got to ask you, like, you're a genius. I see your videos everywhere, articles about you. I mean, you are the authority for this. How did that like come to be? How did you get so much knowledge? Well, look, I mean, first of all, I'm old. And so it's a lot of experience.

Look, the principle of the new book, by the way, is something that's an evolution of about 20 years of research. Lead without authority helps entrepreneurs better understand the kind of culture, the kind of organization, and the kind of leadership that will drive exponential change. In my business, we coach unicorn CEOs. I heard you talking about Picasso. We coach unicorn CEOs and we coach the executive teams of the Fortune 500, but only teams going through radical transformation. And what I can tell you is that if you're a leader who thinks you have to have a chokehold of all the decisions, of all the innovation, then you are going to be mediocre. You need to make sure that you make your

organization a fully interdependent network group of individuals that are committed to the mission and committed to each other. All of this came up originally when I wrote my first book, Never Eat Alone. It's been the leading book on the subject of networking for over 50 years. And that book, Le book leading without authority was a derivation of that because we are now working in networks how do you work when people don't report you how do you work across silos how do you bust down organization design to make extraordinary things happen so it's been a lot of experience a lot of research and that's how i got here to you david how long does it take you

to write these books? One of the things I know about authors and stuff, how do you get that concentration to be able to sit down and actually do it, given how busy you are? Well, two different things. I mean, first of all, the first book that I wrote, Never Eat Alone, took me 40 years to write, meaning it was the culmination of a lifetime of experiences. My second book and subsequent books took a little bit less. The most recent book, I actually wrote a book during the pandemic, one that will be coming out next year called Competing in the New Work World. What I have learned is that writing for me is not a solo sport, just like leadership isn't a solo sport. I now work with teams. I had over 2,000 leaders crowdsourcing best practices for the new work world, and it's called Competing in the New Work World, How Radical Adaptability is the Key to Your Success. And so the answer is I've learned to write and to work in teams as opposed to as a solo artist. And you mentioned that you work with a number of unicorns in that.

What have you seen is the secret sauce that makes somebody the mindset to be able to build such a large company? Well, I actually think it's not about the individual. Again, it's about the team. We have curated over 20 years the recognition that a leader who isn't just the hub and spoke of everything, but a leader who co-elevates, meaning creates a team that pushes each other higher. I mean, sure, Steve Jobs can stand up and say, here's what we're going to be delivering tomorrow. But Tim Cook and the team was actually the individual and the group that had to make it

happen. And so the key to great leadership is marshalling the forces of individuals. And as you scale, of course, and tonight I'm actually here in San Francisco. Excuse the background. I'm not my normal studio, but I'm here in San Francisco. I host a unicorn dinner every month where we have 15 to 20 unicorn CEOs sitting down together, breaking bread, sharing their struggles. And I'm a coach of that group. There's about 300 and so unicorns, and we have at least 60 unicorns in our team. And what I'm finding is every one of them, scale and success, is all about how they get out of the way of their own people.

Well, that's phenomenal. And the energy in that room must be amazing. Yeah. Well, you know what? It's actually quite vulnerable. My job when I coach is to open up authenticity, transparency, vulnerability. My intention is to get people to say the real shit that's going on and then solve each other's problems. And that's what we try to do with executive teams. Meeting without authority is the same principle. How can you as a leader help your team solve the problems and stop carrying the monkey only on your back? Now, something that you're doing too is your company Greenlight, right? They started the Tony Hsieh Award. And talk to us first a little bit about Tony Hsieh. I certainly know who he is, but I'd like you to share a little bit about the background of who he is and what the award is about and why you and your company started it. Well, I have to say, first of all, that I am humbly a servant of this particular initiative.

Our foundation is where it's housed, but it's a real, it takes a village to do something like this. So Tony Hsieh was not only a great friend, Tony Hsieh was an inspiration to me, a great entrepreneur. Many people know him for having started Zappos Shoes, which totally turned everything on its head relative to e-commerce, call centers, et cetera. I mean, he did some crazy practices, but at the core of everything he did was the focus on the elevation of humans in the workplace. And he believed that if you truly found ways to elevate humans in the workplace, that your organization would thrive. And it was proven.

I mean, he was a, get a great exit with Amazon. I was talking to the CEO of Amazon not long after that, who told me that one of the things they were excited about with Zappos was studying the practices that Tony had implemented in order to expand to be able to scale great culture in organizations. So we took that same principle in mind. Tony's tragic death last year left us all without a movement leader in this regard. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to find leaders who were implementing practices that were elevating human capital in the marketplace. And what we've done is we had the first thing, you go to the TonySheaAward.com, and you can apply to this.

But we're actually debuting the winners. We've closed off applications for the next three weeks and you can apply as of the week, week and a half from now. But we're going to be announcing this on the stage of TED at the TED conference in the first week of August. So if you tune into thetonysheaward.com, you'll see of all of the applicants. And we have applicants from, we have a restaurateur from Vietnam, we have a 23-year-old startup kid in San Francisco, and we have several of those unicorn CEOs also applying. So it's going to be quite a group of individuals with incredible practices committed to elevating humans in the workplace. We're going to announce the three finalists on the TED stage. And then over a 24 to 48 hour period, we're going to allow voting to occur.

And then the individual who wins will be rising out of that vote at TED. What's going to be fun about that is that person's going to get a seat at TED, just like Tony had. That person's going to get a seat at five or six major conferences that they wouldn't normally be invited into. And they'll be celebrated on the stage of those conferences for the remaining year. So this is gonna be a great opportunity.

Let me just say this, the big opportunity for all of us is to go to that website in the second week of August and read all of the applications. You will be able to be inspired by your peers and the data and the practices so that we're all sharing those peers and practices. I don't think anybody can really fill Tony's shoes, but maybe the

thousands of us who are applying for this award collectively might do so. Wow. That's phenomenal. Amazing. You know, you mentioned too a little bit earlier how you do these things with the unicorns and stuff. What has surprised you most? Has there been anything that's just kind of been that just that wow, aha? Given the amount of experience you have, the amount of unicorns that you've met, what has been that? Something that surprises me and pisses me off.

What surprises me and pisses me off is that these organizations who had a founder ethic, their executive teams, usually a founder team or a set of co-founders, they were busting each other's chops. They didn't give a damn about org design. They were getting shit done.

They were moving things forward. They had an incredible, credible culture. And then as they begin to scale, they go hire somebody from a large organization as the head of HR to come in and help them scale. And you know what they do? They make these damn companies exactly the same kind of companies that they were disrupting. And then they become disruptible. So they lose the culture from the beginning and they re-engineer

their cultures to meet these large organizations that are being disrupted. That's the thing that surprises me the most. And that's one of the things that I'm helping them fight against. We've had a number of people submit questions. We've only got time for a couple of them, but one of them is from one of our listeners and watchers and fans, JP Taxman. And his question is, what type of advice do you have for those that want to go ahead and work for a company and or possibly start a company that recently have graduated from college, maybe three to four years out to given the current environment of everything going on, how things are not the way that they were a year ago.

Yeah, I think the, the, the, what I would say is congratulations. As a part of my foundation, I also started something called go forward to work, meaning let's not go back to work. Let's use this time as an inflection point to reinvent the future of work. Young man, you have an opportunity to redefine the future. You're not beholden to the past. And the fact that all of this change is happening is an opportunity and an inflection point that you can capitalize on. What I would do is I would say, go get your co-founders. Go find the individuals that you trust. Go find the individuals that are going to complement your skill sets so that as a collective, you're a better whole that will approach these new market opportunities that

you're talking about. Find the right product. Always put the customer at the center and build your business for them. Keith, another question that came in from another listener too was in regards to parents, what can they do to help teach their children to grow up and be a quarter, 10% as successful and knowledgeable as you are? Well, not me, but let's use Tony. I was just talking to his father, Richard, the other day, of course, suffered a horrible loss. So here's what I would say, and there's a wonderful book, Elliot Bisnau's mother, who Elliot Bisnau started the Summit series. His there's a wonderful book, Elliot Bisnow's mother, who Elliot Bisnow started the Summit series. His mother wrote a wonderful book called Raising Entrepreneurs. I think it's called,

I'm going to be embarrassed, but not even remember. But if you look up Bisnow and this question, it's there. But I think at the end of the day, the key for great entrepreneurship is curiosity and humility. The willingness to always be looking around the corner and looking for opportunity. I think that instead of having a tight control of these individuals, foster their curiosity and celebrate the heck out of their victories. That's what I'd focus on. Well, this is just truly incredible. Keith Farazi, chairman, Farazi Greenlight, New York Times bestselling author of Who's Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone and his newest book, Leading Without Authority. You could, again, go to his website at KeithFrazeeAlso.com and also to make sure you go to the TonySheaAward.com, the TonySheaAward.com.

We'll also have it on our website at Alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliances Hero Show. Keith, thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.