The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Big Bet Leadership: Your Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era by John Rossman, Kevin McCaffery

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Big Bet Leadership: Your Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era by John Rossman, Kevin McCaffery https://amzn.to/3ZhLve7 Bigbetleadership.com In today’s business landscape of mega threats coming from AI, an aging workforce, intense competition, and rapid digital transformations, leaders need a new playbook, one that gives a structured collection of guidelines, strategies, and tactics to assist organizations and executives in achieving goals and solving “wicked” problems. Big Bet Leadership’s mission is to help business executives and leaders mitigate the risks of engaging in high-stakes gambles while maintaining the ambitious goals which motivate all of us to grow. What is Big Bet Leadership? It is an assertive approach to digital transformations, innovation programs, investments in technology platforms, model transitions, and mergers and acquisitions. To be a Big Bet Leader you need to be a shark. Being successful in today’s hyper-digital landscape requires bold moves that avoid “analysis paralysis,” which strikes when everything becomes a priority, resulting in ambiguity and ultimately failure. And most Big Bets do fail. The stakeholders disagree on the nature of the problem in the first place, with fuzzy perspectives of where the company is heading. Big Bet Leadership puts in place the sharp thinking, the nurturing environment, and the low-friction management techniques to clearly define, value, and validate the real problem or customer pain; a precise, smart, and shared definition of the hypotheses for the critical components of the future state; and a set of leadership techniques forcing speed, focus, and alignment throughout. Drawing from first-hand executive experience at Amazon, Google, The Gates Foundation, and T-Mobile, and having advised hundreds of companies, John Rossman and Kevin McCaffrey present us with a compelling framework with concepts, rules, techniques, and resources, equipping business executives to become Big Bet Legends.About the Author John Rossman is the author of Big Bet Leadership and The Amazon Way book series, a former Amazon leader and Managing Partner at Rossman Partners, an advisory firm helping clients compete in the digital era. Mr. Rossman is an expert at crafting and implementing innovative and digital business models and capabilities. He is a sought after speaker on leadership, innovation and company culture. John was an early executive at Amazon.com where he played a key role in launching the Amazon marketplace business as the Director of Merchant Integration, and went on to have responsibilities for the enterprise business at Amazon.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. As always, the Chris Voss Show, the family loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because she's seen you and she has thoughts. So I don't know what that means, but it sounded funny in the time in my head. So there you go, folks. Welcome to the Chris Fosh Show. As always, we have the most amazing, brilliant minds, billionaires, CEOs, the hottest authors, and newest people.

People that will make you think more or better. And some of you just need to think for goddamn sakes. Maybe you need to think more and we'll all be better for it because that's how it works, people. The world goes round. I don't know what I am. I'm just rambling at this point. Anyway, guys, we have a returning guest on the show. We're excited to have him. He was here for one of his books. John Rossman is on the show with us today. His new book, his hot new book is coming out.

You're going to want to pre-order this thing. It's coming out February 27th, 2024. That's 2024. Can you believe it? It's almost here. His new book is called Big Bet Leadership, Your Playbook for Winning in the Hyper Digital Era. John Rossman, once again, is on the show with us today. And you can check out his previous interview on The Chris Foss Show.

Just go search over the dot com. He is the author of the latest book and the Amazon Waybook series, a former Amazon leader and managing partner at Rossman Partners, an advisory firm to helping clients compete in the digital era. Mr. Rossman is an expert in crafting and implementing innovative and digital business models and capabilities. He is a sought-after speaker on leadership, innovation, and company culture, and he was an early executive at Amazon.com. You may have heard of it. It's been around for a little while, a few years now, I think, or something, where he played a key role of launching the Amazon marketplace business

as the director of merchant integration and went on to have responsibilities for the enterprise business at Amazon. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? Chris, great to be back. I'm doing great. Glad to talk to your audience again and catch up with you. There you go. I mean, that's really why you came on, right? Just to catch up with us. Oh, yeah.

Have a coffee, say hello, and plug a book. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs, please. I'm sorry, say that again? Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. I'm sorry, say that again. Give us your dot coms so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah. John Rossman dot com. And for the new book, it's Big Bet Leadership dot com or LinkedIn. John Rossman is maybe the easiest of all.

There you go. And I think you had a plug out you wanted to do or some sort of special thing. Yeah. So the new book, Big Bet Leadership, is releasing February 27th. And you can preorder it at all the usual book big bet leadership is releasing february 27th and you can pre-order it at all the usual bookstores and everything or or if you'd like a free kindle edition of the book go to bigbetleadership.com put in your information and i will send you the Kindle version of the book when it releases the week of February 27th, 2024. And all I ask, and it's a request, write a customer review. It's very much appreciated.

It's a request to please write a customer review. But anyway, I'd be happy to send you a Kindle copy of the book for U.S. listeners. There you go. I just signed up myself. I like free stuff. So there you go. I just signed up myself. I like free stuff. So there you go. And so it's kind of like an arc a little bit, only it's probably going to be a final copy then? Well, a final copy, it is an arc right now, but yeah, you'll get the final copy when it's released in February of 2024. There you go. So give us an overview of this book. What motivated you to want to write it?

Well, I work with my clients on solving really hard, complex business problems like why are our products becoming commoditized or why aren't we having the growth that we want? Why aren't we becoming more efficient with our scale. And everybody is undertaking, whether it's a digital transformation or some type of growth strategy. And what we know is that 85% of all of these big bets fail, right? They fail to deliver the promise of why we undertook them to begin with. Have you been hanging out with me in Las Vegas? I'm just kidding. Those are different big bets. Exactly.

And that's my business, which is helping my clients win at these big bets. And so I had one client in particular. I got to be the senior innovation advisor at T-Mobile for a couple of years. And my client at T-Mobile, a couple of years and my client at T-Mobile, a gentleman by the name of Kevin McCaffrey. And so I was writing some different versions of what this book could be. And I finally came upon this framing of attacking the specific failure points of why these big bets fail. And I sent it to Kevin. He immediately called me back. He's like, man, I've been waiting for you to do something like this. So I talked him into being my co-author

for the book. So the book builds upon everything that I've kind of done since Amazon from the Amazon way, but it's specifically for senior leaders to help avoid the failure points for why all of these transformation strategies, operating model transformations, why all of these things fail. And it gives tactical principles and tactics in order to avoid these big failure points. There you go. And you break it down into three different sections. Tell us about how that works. Yeah. So the way we framed the book was really from the introduction, which is that big bet leaders. So people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Ledger from T-Mobile, they tend to have a set of critical habits that they do to

be these consistent big bet legends, right? People who consistently win at big bets. They do three things. They create clarity, they maintain velocity, and they accelerate risk and value. Now, there's other things you need to do, but those were the three most differentiated habits that these legends of big bets make. And so we start off with that insight of like, hey, there's three habits. What you need to create is what we call the big bet vector. If you think about how these situations tend to start is, hey, we noticed some problem in our business, some problem from our customers, some competitive problem, and we become centered on that, then we create some fuzzy notion of what this future is going to be, right?

Here's what it's going to be like when we're done with this journey, with this strategy. But both of these things are fairly fuzzy in nature. We kind of agree on what the problem is, and we kind of agree on exactly where we're going and that's where the problem starts is because we have a fuzzy notion of the problem set and we have an even fuzzier notion of where we're going then the journey is by nature circuitous complex everybody thinks we're working together but we're actually talking past each other. And it's super hard to be efficient. And that just starts the cycle, the failure points of cycle for these big bets. There's not one reason why these big bets failed. There's a combination of reasons, but it starts

with the lack of a well-defined problem that we're trying to solve and a specific hypothesis. This is the bet, right? I think this is going to be the future. And if we can get alignment on that, then we're able to sprint between those two points to truly be agile in our testing. So the framing of the book, as you said, there's three sections to the book. And the first section is big bet thinking.

The second section is big bet environment. And the third section is big bet management. And in each section, there's two or three chapters to address some specific failure points and habits, techniques that you need to put in place to address different aspects of failure points. But they tend to be in like how we think, the environment in which we operate in, and then kind of our management technique through the life cycle of a big bet there you go uh so uh let's we'll dig into it here but let's get a uh let's get talk about your origin story and your journey uh so that people can get familiar

with that you you've done different things with amazon google the gates foundation t-mobile etc etc advising hundreds of companies give us a bit of your history that people aren't aware of it so they can kind of hear some of your background and we'll cut you down this road. Yeah, so I'd say it's been a curious and fascinating and joyful career, but it wasn't planned. You didn't plan Amazon? I didn't see this path coming.

So what I've always been is interested in efficiency and like, how do we get things to work better, right? And so I'm in nature, a problem solver. I think about integration. I think about how to create momentum and leverage in order to create a great outcome for business. And I was an early leader at Amazon. So I launched the marketplace business in 2002. I left in 2005. I was then a partner at a great management consulting firm called Alvarez and Marcel for 12 years, had lots of tremendous client engagements there, including I got to serve the Gates Foundation

for over eight years there. We did a ton of projects with them. And it was one of my clients at the Gates Foundation who actually came to me one day, like this is several years after I left Amazon. And he's like, you know, you do a nice job of taking the delicate strategies and techniques and putting them into our business. And I think you ought to write a book about it. And so I listened to him and something I'd never thought about doing. And so released the first edition of the Amazon Way in 2014. I've done three books plus the fourth one coming out now. And then these things called keynote speaking started coming along. It's like, oh, what a great opportunity to impact leaders in a different way. So I started keynote speaking.

So today, my business is a third keynote speaking, a third advisory work where I work with advisors and their teams over a long period of time. And then a third consulting work. And the books are kind of my hobby. And it's just been, you know, what I love doing is helping business leaders solve complex problems in their business and develop the leadership and the culture so that they can do this going forward. So that becomes part of their system for how they perform. There you go. So let's break it down a little bit.

Let's tease out some of the things here. In the first of the three sections, big bet thinking, I think in that section is the one you were talking about where everyone's got to kind of get on the same playbook of what the goal is or the end result is that people are searching for. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. And so the first chapter is called Thinking and Outcomes. And what it does is it kind of builds on the working backwards innovation technique from Amazon. And so this was something Kevin and I did at T-Mobile was kind of like we kind of systematized

for a non-Amazon company, this narrative writing approach. And so the techniques are about getting super clear about what the problem is, who the customer is, what their pain point is. We call this what sucks, right? To really know like what truly sucks for the customer. Because what happens is you tend when you do these exercises with companies, what they tend to do is they tend to list lots of things as the problem or versus like, well, this is the thing that is really the problem. And if and so if you can get clarity, remember, create clarity, right? That's one of the habits. If you can create clarity around, well, this is my customer, and this is what sucks for them, then you can create clarity around, well, this is my customer and this is what sucks

for them, then you can, and this could be an operational problem for yourself, right? So your customer can be a variety of different types. Then you can really start setting in motion like, okay, what are the options for how we are going to solve this? Then the next thing is about this thinking and outcome concept of what people tend to do, the natural inclination is to start trying to figure out the path for solving the problem. And what's a much more effective way is to actually specify what's the future state in a very specific notion, and what are the high critical capabilities that are required for that future state? And, or teams don't tend to think in that kind of specific targeted notion.

They start to list lots of requirements and they start focusing on the journey versus the clarity of where we're going to even more. And so this is the nature. And then it's kind of by writing these things out and debating. People always forget the debating part of the Amazon working backwards approach. They just think it's about the writing. No, no, no, no. It's about the debating.

This is actually the cheapest experimentation you can do. Writing and debating as a team is actually experimentation, and they forget that it's the best experimentation they can do. Everybody just starts, wants to start buying technology and, and doing MVPs. These are true MVPs. And then this, the second chapter in, in this section talks about benchmarking really. And, and benchmarking again, great concept, go out and learn from others is essentially what benchmarking is about, right? Like what can we learn with others? But what they don't do is they don't get specific, like, well, what's the specific attribute or capability about my competitor that I should bring back to influence the concept that I'm building? So for example, let's imagine you were going, you're a grocery store

operator and you're trying to figure out how would I make a much better buy online pickup and store capability? Chris, do you do that today? Do you buy online and pick up at stores or do anything like that? I have from time to time, especially during COVID. Yeah, they tend to be a pretty rudimentary customer experience. And they don't tend to be great operational endeavors within these organizations. So let's imagine the problem you're trying to solve is to create this completely differentiated buy online, pick up in store. Well, what we would suggest is that you're going to go benchmark the three best buy online, pick up in store operators. Find one that is a direct competitor and then find two that are in adjacent industries where you think you can learn something. So in the book, talk about like hey if you're a grocery store operator like the one that i know does a really good job at this

is a fashion retailer by the name of nordstrom nordstrom does a great job at buy online pickup and store so now that we're focused on well here's the scenario then you could go be a mystery shopper you could go do these things and and you'd have a directed eye towards understanding exactly what the customer experience is. And you could probably gain a little insight into, well, how does the operations actually work? How's it working for them, right? Again, you're experimenting by doing this and by writing it out, you get to share it with your team. So that's really the essence of the first section of thinking, uh, thinking and outcomes there. So, uh, and, and to that point, it's really interesting, you know, to go and check out

your competitors. I'll never forget one of the famous, uh, lessons in, in, uh, phone sales was when the Palm pilot CEO launched the Palm pilot and it wasn't anywhere near as good as the iphone and he admitted that he had never used or tested using an iphone before they developed what was supposed to be an iphone killer and this is this is what i continually find is that you know people people are are lazy um they are fundamentally lazy in their willingness to go out and kind of do directed homework. And so if you can incorporate these little habits, you're going to be so much better at the experimentation. And essentially, yes, a big bet is a big concept. It's something that we think has high promise, but we know fails.

But if you can go about in this direction, you're going to win big, but you're actually going to be decreasing your risks before you substantially lay the bet down. And that's the whole notion of the principles behind the book, which is a big bet is different than something we understand well, right? A big bet is a strategy where we think it has high potential for impacting our business, but we know it has material and substantial risk to it. Okay, now I need to operate differently in how I do this. And everything essentially needs to be an experiment. And the best experiments you can do are the kind of big bet thinking experiments that we were just talking about.

There you go. In the 90s, we used to do oppo research by dumpster diving. Exactly. Yes. Yes. There's ways to get to it. You know, we talk about there's a ton of these expert interview services that allow you to go talk to competitors, customers of competitors, former competitors, all of that. specific directed way you are accelerating the experimentation process to make these big bets both hit the value propositions like why you're doing these things so keeping your ambitions big

but capping your risk your downside relative to these things there you go uh you know you're mentioning debating earlier what we have in my office is we take debating the next level we have a cage math cage match to the death uh matches and that you know that helps keep the that helps keep the employees thinned out too so you know management one of the um techniques we talk about uh in the book is around this concept called uh rude qA. And so in so many companies, they're uncomfortable in having these direct types of challenging conversations. And so there's this concept called rude Q&A. And the whole key to it is that you announce that we're going to have rude Q&A, you know, to talk about this specific project, this idea that we have and everything, right? And so if you let everybody know, like, Hey, we are going to be playing devil's

advocate. Our job is to pressure test by, by pushing against this concept and asking the hard questions. Well, then, then everybody knows like, Hey, don't take this personally. You know, don't let your feelings be upset about it. We're going, we're going to specifically attack the concept. Again, this is the best experimentation you can do. You just need to facilitate it correctly, right? You got to get people comfortable with the concept of like,

our job is to understand these concepts so much better with better clarity upfront so that we can actually accelerate testing and getting to that value there you go i'm just gonna have rudy giuliani uh show up and scream out trial by combat no i don't know can you can you get this to go by hr with you know this this whole micro micro uh what was that bullshit they're doing now the micro uh aggression aggression yeah shit like come on man i i agree i don't know if you can get away with the rudeness well good transition to the second section so the second section of the book is about big bet environment right and one of one of the things you have to do is not play by the common rules of an organization.

If you want to truly win at these big bets, you have to be ready and you can forecast where these tripwires are going to come in. So for example, one of them is around your typical types of policies. And this is something that kind of happened with Kevin and I, which is, you know, we're running this new business incubation program, and we needed to hire an expert. And we were moving along fast, but then all of a sudden, we had to get HR and procurement involved. And now all of a sudden, we're running, we're playing by the common rules of how HR and procurement work. Well, that works for a scaled business, right? Where you're trying to optimize for

kind of risk and cost per unit and scalability, right? But that's different than the game we're playing. We're playing speed to experimentation, speed to learning game. We're playing a big bet game. So what you can do is you can forecast this. You have to get your stakeholders. You're a senior leader. You have to get your stakeholders aligned like, hey, I respect your policies, your approaches, but we're playing a different game here. So we're going to have to have some different rules in which we play, but you need to bring them on board. You need to prepare them for these moments so that when you come saying, hey, I need to hire this AI expert and I need him here next week and I know the person and it's going to be an egregious rate per hour, but this is the right thing to do. They go, oh, okay. I understand why you're doing that and everything, right?

Here's the escape valve in order to go do that. But that's the sort of thing in big bet environment that we tackle in this section is all about setting the environment so that you can play to win the game. There you go. And the timing, right? So you can advance the timing because you're always running on a time clock. Your competitors are going to beat you to market with whatever the new big thing is right not only that but internally one of the reasons why these big bets fail is because they lose momentum right so remember the second critical habit is maintain velocity right why did i pick the word maintain well because all of these things always start off with yes we're all in we're going fast you know and it moves but then it quickly decays into just standard business as usual business as usual

right it's treated like every other type of thing in your business you can't allow that to happen you have to maintain the velocity so all of this big bet environment stuff really helps maintain velocity. The other big, you know, one of the big inhibitors that comes in is, you know, your IT partners and your technology environment. You have to find ways to create a separate environment where you can quickly, truly quickly test the relevant technology concepts without having to get in line with your IT organization, with their roadmap and everything. If you can't solve for that problem, you are really unlikely to have success at these big bets. So we come equipped with a bunch of little tricks

and approaches in order to help avoid these well-known, well-understood tripwires that happen within big bets. And, you know, only read this book if you actually want to win at these big bets, right? If you just want to kind of say you're playing the game and everything, like, great, go ahead, go use the normal techniques and everything. But call me if you actually want to win. I'm going to have some cold water medicine for you. Like, these are true changes that you need to make. But if you want to win at these major transformations, you got to be willing to do some different things. you you definitely and as you mentioned the title of the book or the subtitle of the book

for winning in the hyper digital era i mean it's just getting crazier especially with ai it's really the speed of everything is moving. Even now, I'm starting to go, hey, can we just slow down for a bit, man? Right. Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to be the case. And so the preface of the book kind of sets up this hyper digital environment. And essentially, the premise of the book is, if you think the past, call it 25, 30 years of digital transformation has created change, has created disruption, has been hard,

has been tiring for companies, the next 30 years are going to be exponential to that. And that's because of a combination of forces, including the disruptive technology, but it's not solely that as the force. And so companies and leaders who want to win through this coming hyper digital era, instead of just maybe make do or lose in this coming era, well, you need a different playbook. You need to create transformation as a core capability. And that's what Big Bet Leadership does, is it helps you create transformation, the ability to fundamentally change as a core capability, as a company, as a leader, and as a leadership team. And that's what I'm trying to prepare my clients and the reading audience for. There you go.

You know, I like the big idea concept of focusing people onto what everything is doing. It might have been you who was on the show, but somebody had talked about and given me an impression about how a lot of teams, you know, they go off. You know, there's a million different goals and different ways they can go. And, you know, they can have their own little goals for what they do. But trying to get the ship to sail as a whole with everyone focused on a few giant goals or whatever your main goals are is so important because otherwise it gets lost in all that minutia. You know, it's like trying to say, hey, we want to take our ship and go to london and people are like well where's london at and i'm like a big continent over there somewhere on the side of the on the other side of the atlantic you know well it gets to one of the the topics in

the book which is a chapter called championship habits and so the two the two habits that we talk about there of like like that make champions, not winning teams, but championship teams, right, is the ability to create culture and the ability to communicate. And so we really hone in on the communication challenge for senior leaders on these big bets. And we, of course, give a set of remedies and a set of tactics and help do this. But the overall key is being specific, on point, and repeatable about where we're going. Right? And what happens is leaders, they talk too much about essentially what sucks about the current state. Right?

Like what's not good about today um it's interesting it helps create an appetite but it actually doesn't help people understand where we're going or they talk in this vague notion about where we're going right back to the big bet vector you need to be specific about where we're going and so what most leaders do is they'll talk about like you know we're having a supply chain transformation or we're gonna you know radically improve the customer experience well you know to some degree like great but on the other hand it's like man that is as vanilla as vanilla can get here what does that mean be exactly be specific so for example maybe maybe what you want to do is is uh if we're talking about like a supply chain transformation, it's, you know, we want to be able to deliver any package within two days on X cost basis, right? Oh, man, if you

were able to be specific like that, and you were repeated about it, it would keep everybody focused on that North Star, this is where we're going. Everybody can kind of internalize, oh, that's going to create some change. Here's what's coming, you know, and everything. Everybody can gain alignment relative to it. And you as a leader, you're going to be able to test it like, hey, are we achieving this or not? And you're going to be able to substantiate the business case, like all this goodness of just the difference between we're going to make our supply chain faster versus being able to state a specific operational objective relative to it there you go cable companies do that they say hey we want to spend more time with our customers understanding

them so they make it so you stay on hold for two hours really make make the v put a few more branches in the vru right yeah and then play the same five second loop of uh the worst music you can yeah you know i still think on one last week, and I was five layers deep into the menuing system, right? And so I finally hit zero. Great. We're glad to connect you into an operator. But then they actually sent me to another menu structure where I had to select it and everything. It was just horrible.

And once I finally got to an operator, I had to completely reintroduce myself, whereas I had already validated myself and the whole issue through all of this menu and stuff. And so it's just horrible. They should force more people, board of directors and stuff, to go through the front of their front of their, you know, their entry point and experience what people experience. Well, you know what they do for all the senior leaders and important people is they have VIP lines for them. And so they get treated better than any other customer does. It's the exact opposite of what you should do as a senior leadership team. You

should say, well, actually, I'd like to experience what's the worst customer experiencing today, right? Not what the average is experiencing. Ask what the worst customer experience is. I want to go experience that. That's going to change your perspective. That was the type of move we would do at Amazon is we would design metrics and do surveys about the worst customer experiences, not the average customer experience. It gives you a whole new level of insight into what's going on and where's my operational capability at. There you go.

I had an experience, and this is kind of a more basic model than a big business model, but an experience this weekend where I went to a really nice fine dining lodge on the lake and uh and it's beautiful it's one of the few places here in Utah where you can eat on the lake and it's it abuts the lake and and it was just a beautiful day and you can be on the patio they they play incredibly well like fine dining does and the prices are there but the uh wait the waiter experience was awful like i don't know where they got these people but i've got better service at the counter at mcdonald's and uh you know they they didn't have a clue what they're doing multiple things bung i ordered fries

the fries didn't come and so i asked one of the other helper people that does backup for the waitress i'm like hey uh you know this fries coming or what and i'll check on them so like two people just fucking blew it off uh a couple people around me were having problems too getting the drinks and and so i end up leaving early for dessert and going up to sundance and spending some more money at sundance for dessert and uh uh so i did the equations for them i said here's what i spent at sundance here's what uh you lost at the thing because you just haven't trained your weight staff and i had a friend say to me he goes he goes well you know chris it's hard to hire people now i'm like it's not hard to train people right and and uh basically they lost about 40% of upsells.

And I'm like, you have 50 people in the room. Your place is largely half empty because probably this is an ongoing problem. And, you know, I added up how much they were probably losing on an hourly basis. And I'm like, and all you got to do is just train these people, man. Like, and give a shit. And think through the incentive systems, right? Like, so training, absolutely critical, right? Doing the math, doing the business case like you were doing,

absolutely critical. Well, then how do you gain alignment between your staff and what you want to accomplish? So think incentives are always such an important part of creating any type of change. And so bringing it back to big bet leadership, of course, one of the stories we talk about is how to gain internal alignment. So this is in the big bet management section, and it's about truly gaining alignment at the executive team level. Because typically what happens is all the executives look around the room and they go, all right, I'm reading the

tea leaves. I'm on board with this for now, and everything. But really what typically happens is we're asking them to agree to something that they don't fully understand, right? You come in with this big rehearsed PowerPoint presentation, maybe a compelling video of what you're doing. And the question that they get asked is, what don't you agree with out of this? Well, that's an unfair homework assignment that you're asking somebody to do, play the what's missing game or like, what don't you agree with? So a much better way of gaining broad senior shareholder alignment is what we call the three futures memo. And so what you do is instead of creating this highly produced video or PowerPoint, you write three different versions of a simple memo

of what the future is, right? And they all have to be viable options and aligned on kind of, hey, we're going in this direction, but here's three different versions of what that direction could be. You give it to your stakeholders to read beforehand. It's a simple read. Then you get together and you ask a different set of questions. The types of questions you ask are, well, which of these three versions would you agree to? What would have to be true about the other two versions for you to agree that that's the correct version? By having that type of what we call homework assignment, that type of environment to gain alignment, what you're truly doing is you're getting much deeper, much better comprehension by your environment. And it

surfaces all of the under the waterline tensions, alignment issues, incentive issues, competing interest issues, so that an executive team can truly align on this is the big bet we're making and we are all truly on board and understand the subtle nature of where we're going with this there you go incentives to get people want to do better and do more and be better etc etc that's right yeah i mean that's that's definitely a way to get them motivated because yeah they're all those people who are like yeah yeah whatever you know the pr bs whatever i'm gonna go back and just do whatever i want or there's some people that are sabotagers they're saboteurs you know they're like i'm not gonna do this i'm gonna i'm gonna hedge my bets and

try and screw this up like that guy in parks and recreation anytime something new comes around he's like yeah we're not doing that well we we have a term for that which is a gf-er uh so a gf-er is a grin effer right um so it it's somebody who smiles and goes hmm i understand you know it's typically like you you think you have agreement with them you think you have like yeah you know we're on board but but really they're just gf in you wow there you go i'm gonna have to write that one down and and i'll hand out shirts or give hats out to whoever they are and they can i'm like you have to wear a hat that says you're a gfr you're a gfr and uh that way it'll be like the mark of the beast or Scarlet Letter or you know we'll be like you're the GF-er or the thing so this is a great vision thing and I like how you give a lot of tips

and tricks for people to utilize it and implement it because you've you've done what you've done what you know a lot of people make the mistake of doing it's not defining it I like the clarification part that's really important as well what have we touched on or teased on about the book? Well, here's the last thing, which is the book is way more than a book. So the book tells a nice story. You don't want to ask a book to do too much and everything. But when you buy the book or get the free version of the Kindle version, you'll get access to a set of templates and tools that will actually help you put this into practice and everything. Right. So we kept the book very readable, didn't make it too long. But the book comes with a bunch of tools, templates and some AI prompts to help you actually do these things in your job.

So buying the book is more than just buying a book. There you go. And so much more you can learn from it. Give us the dot com and what people can do to get a free copy of the book there on the Kindle version. Yeah. So go to BigBetLeadership.com, fill in your information, and you'll get the Kindle version of the book when it releases next february there you go there you go well it's been wonderful to have you on the show thank you very much john for coming on i really appreciate it chris always great uh thank you again for inviting me there

you go and thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas youtube.com for just christmas and tiktok christmas1 thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time