The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift by Geoff Tuff, Steven Goldbach

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift by Geoff Tuff, Steven Goldbach https://www.amazon.com/Hone-Purposeful-Leaders-Defy-Drift/dp/1394304536 A clarion call to business leaders to recast their conception of leadership and strategy execution to meet the demands of the modern world Have a problem with your organization's strategy in an era of accelerating, exponential change? Modern business orthodoxy has an easy answer: transform it. Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift argues this thinking is itself in need of an overhaul. Rather than devote time to expensive, long, and often unsuccessful transformations, leaders should instead focus on holistically designing and honing the management systems that are the nervous systems of their businesses. They can take a cue from chefs and other artisans and hone their organizations. After all, honing doesn't sharpen knives; it realigns a knife's steel to its original position. Choosing and honing the set of management systems that promote an organization's desired outcomes (and uninstalling them when they are past their prime) is one of the most important things a business leader can do―and is just as much art as science. The third in a trilogy of business strategy books written by renowned strategists and two-time Thinkers50–nominated authors Steven Goldbach and Geoff Tuff, this book explains why and how to optimally hone your organization's execution of its strategy, with highlights including: The importance of recognizing and taking action to defy the drift that often afflicts organizations undergoing massive transformation Guidelines on how to design and continually reshape effective management systems to influence organizational and individual behaviors Reframing the job of CEOs to be Chief System Designers for their organizations Reflections on how honing principles within organizations can be used on broader societal challenges such as addressing climate change via the energy transition Engaging, pragmatic, and inspiring, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of all private, public, and nonprofit sector professionals seeking to bring new sources of advantage to their organizations in a time of accelerating uncertainty and exponential change.About the author Geoff Tuff is a globally recognized thought leader and widely sought-after speaker and writer on the subjects of strategy, growth, innovation, and adapting business models to deal with change. He and his co-author, Steve Goldbach, have written two bestselling books – Detonate (Wiley 2018), and Provoke (Wiley 2021). Their latest book, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift, will be released on September 30, 2025. Both Detonate and Provoke were recognized by Thinkers50, the leading authority on management thinking, with award nominations for strategy and leadership. Geoff's writing has also appeared in journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and as a regular contribution to HuffPost. Finally, he and Steve are two of the hosts of "The Provocateurs", a monthly leadership podcast based on the book Provoke. About the author Steven Goldbach is a globally recognized strategist and executive advisor, combining creativity and rigor to help organizations create their own future. Together with Geoff Tuff, Steve has co-authored two bestselling books – Detonate (Wiley 2018), and, Provoke (Wiley 2021). Their latest collaboration, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift, will be released in late September, 2025. Both Detonate and Provoke were recognized by Thinkers50, the leading authority on management thinking, with award nominations for strategy and leadership. Steve is one of many rotating hosts of "The Provocateurs", a monthly podcast based on the book Provoke. It features leadership lessons from leaders from all a variety of disciplines.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss, here from thecrisVos Show.com. There you go, ladies down on there, ladies, things that makes official, welcome the big show. As always, Chris not show for 16 years, 24 and episodes of bringing in the most brightest minds, the wonderful people, people that share with you their journeys, their stories, their lessons in life. Don't make your lives better.

In the meantime, go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Facebook.com. on Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of the Ticotocity. Oh, it's a crazy place to the internet. Today we have two gracious young men on the show with us today. Their book is entitled, Hone. How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbock are on the show with us today.

We're going to be talking to them. And their book is available for pre-year September 30th, 2025. It will be coming out. Stephen is a globally recognized strategist and executive advisor combining creativity and rigor to help organizations create their own future with Jeff. He is a globally recognized thought leader and widely sought after speaker and writer on the subjects of strategy, growth, innovation, adapting business models to deal with change. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you? Doing all right. Yeah, thanks for having a song, Chris. The introduction to your show really gets a little.

blood pumping so we're ready to go here i think it's the juice baby it's the juice so give us each your dot coms uh where can people find out more about you guys on the interwebs we are easy to find on lincoln both of us are available and interactive there deaf tough is g-e-o-fff or g-off as my daughter likes to call him t uff and you can find me at stephen with a v goldback g-l-d-b-a-c-c h both on get are the easiest place to grab us. There you go. So I'll throw it to whichever who wants to take the first question first. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's your book new book? And I'll give each of you guys a shot at that. Steve, why don't you go for it this time? And I'll take us back on the journey after you talk about Hone. How's that? Sounds, sounds awesome, Jeff. So I'll tell

you a story, Chris. So there is a, I have had the pleasure of working with this amazing chef, Flannery Klett Colton, for a long time. My family got to know her and her business partner, Lauren Gary, in the early 2000s when she was starting her career in the East Village. And one night, she's been doing like special parties for us for 15 years now. We've seen her grow up, and she's this amazing accomplished chef. and one night she was in my kitchen and she was getting ready to prepare a meal and she started taking out her knives and all chefs carry their own knives and she took out a what I now know as a honing rod and I said to her flannery why do all chefs sharpen their knives before they cook right and she's like I'm not sharpening my knife I'm honing my knife. And she made an important distinction. I'm like, what do you, what's the

difference? And she's like, well, and she used a lot more swear words that I won't repeat here. Yeah, she is. She's a colorful speaker, that's for sure. She's a color. She's both a sailor and a chef. And so you can imagine that that that sort of bleeds in it. But she said very succinctly, honing is realigning the steel in a knife to cut the way it needs to cut. sharpening you're actually removing steel from a blade. And that resonated with me, and I shared that with Jeff, and we thought that the metaphor was really appropriate for what we see in the world of business today. There's a lot of businesses who are addicted to transformation, but transformation is costly, risky, and fails a lot.

And the reason that you need to transform or sharpen your knife is because you've waited too long and you've let the knife get rusty, you've let the knife get all gnarly, and you have no choice but to sharpen it. And the reason why chefs hone is because the knife is their most important tool. They could literally injure themselves every time they cut. actually a dull knife is far more dangerous than a sharp knife because it doesn't act as it should. And so what the chef is doing is just almost is always saying, I need the knife to perform as expected so that I don't have to sharpen it every time I'm doing it. And we saw this need in the

world of business that businesses were going from one transformation to another. And between that transformation, they were drifting away far too, you know, too far from where they had intended to go. And so we view honing as the solution to a big business problem. That's like the 30,000 foot view. I'm sure we'll dive into it. But I know Jeff has wanted to talk about the journey. Well, no, I'm happy to talk about the journey because, Chris, this is the third in what we declare to be right now a trilogy of strategy books. And we can talk about those.

But I am actually, instead of taking us on the journey, Steve, I'm going to steal one of your metaphors because I really liked it when I heard you talk about it. But, Chris, the metaphor that I will attribute to Steve now, but we'll. forever now claim to be my own, is of someone who's trying to stay in shape or get in shape. And, you know, if let's say we have an individual who wakes up one day and says, I am going to absolutely do my best, to be healthier, to get in shape, to exercise as much as I can and to live a better lifestyle, that person goes out for a 10-mile run, and they say, that's great. I've done a great job.

I'm feeling a lot better now. But then they don't do anything the day after or the day after. and six months or seven months or eight months go on and they say, oh, man, I forgot about that pledge. I better go and overhaul myself now and go out and do whatever extreme version of exercise or extreme version of if there's some sort of cosmetic intervention in order to get back on the track that I wanted to. That's akin to a business suddenly waking up one day and saying, oh, man, I didn't do all the stuff I needed to do to stay in shape.

I now need to transform. And so what Steve and I are arguing in Hone is it's just the same as a company that is honing is just the same as a person who is trying to stay in shape day and day out by paying attention to how they're feeling, to doing small acts of exercise to stay in shape, to monitoring some of their vital signs, to understanding where they may be off track and making those micro adjustments along the way so they don't have to wake up one day and say, oh, man, I'm totally off track. I need to do something drastic. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So Hone is the big thing. Now you mentioned you guys have written a lot of books together and you said this is a trilogy. Tell us, tell us where this state is it, where this is in the trilogy? Is this book one, two, or three? And then how many books do you guys have total together? So this is the third book and we would characterize it as an unplanned trilogy. We got together and wrote our first book detonate in, we wrote it in 2017. it came out in 2018. Detnate was all about blowing up best practices that businesses are, you know, seem to rely on. And the reason is because best practices don't get you to high degrees of success by definition if every company does the same best practice. They're all average. Provoke was about, provoke is about, which came out in 21.

Yeah, provoke is a second book in 21. And that's about shaping the future to be, be what you want it to be rather than waiting for it to arrive to take action. And Hone is about, you know, once you've blown up the playbooks and saved your future, how do you keep it going in perpetuity? There you go. And so people can take advantage of the book and order it up. What do you see is the big problem with the organization's strategy where everything's changing?

I mean, AI is changing so fast right now. That's pretty crazy. So the big problem is that everyone recognizes that everything is changing quickly, whether on account of AI or any number of other exponential trends that have started to hit the world in the last five, six, even 10 years. But they're not doing anything differently. You know, we as a gentleman in their 50s have grown up in the business world for a few decades now.

We learned all the lessons at business school. We paid attention to all the way that we're supposed to run things, as do most of our colleagues who are out in the market running big organizations today. And the reality is what will work and win today is fundamentally different from what has led organizations to be successful up until this point. But the problem is we've got built into organizations, either written playbooks or written rules about the way the business operates or even more pervasive unwritten rules, what Steve and I call orthodoxies about the way things should be that stop people from actually understanding how they need to act in the face of

exponentials. And so if I had to sum it up very simply, we are missing opportunities because we are linear beings living in an exponential age. Yeah, there you go. In some of the thing you talk about is stop transforming and start honing and how how leaders can make small and continuous adjustments to keep the organization on course. What are some of the ways that they can apply that? What are some of the ways they can lead that as leaders? Well, let's take a very specific example that is current and not everyone's mind right now, and that's AI. We're kind of amazed at how slow the AI rollout has been. When we think back to the chat GPT moment that came out was 2023 and we're now midway through 25 and businesses are just starting to wrap their

heads around it and what we're what we're seeing is a good demonstration of the way in which businesses tend to take action against things that are as we wrote and provoke obviously matters of when it will come to fruition rather than if it will come to fruition So we had that chap gpti moment. The honing leader would have said, let's, you know, start to trial this in a really small way in parts of our organization so that we can learn about it. And so that we can continually expand this to our advantage over time as that became more apparent. And frankly, AI has been around for a lot before, you know, the so-called chat GPT moment in 23. So leaders should have been playing around with this a lot earlier.

But what we saw the initial reaction to be was, oh, my goodness, I got to figure this out before I deployed. In fact, the first instinctual move was to shut everything down, right, and not let your employees use it until you figured out that. And that sometimes makes sense in certain regulated businesses. But in oftentimes cases, that's the wrong response. We should be purposefully trying things in a small way. so that we can learn because you know the but what what we tend to do is say like we've got to figure everything out and then deploy it in a really big way and that's the transformation approach and that's just it's just hard it's just there are so many moving parts it makes such a

big deal of it our view is that on issues like this that are continuously disrupting your customers experiences your costs your employees you've got to just keep learning and actually admitting that you're not going to have it all perfect, but just deployed in your organization in some way. That applies not just to AI, but all kinds of other changes that might take place. But I think it's certainly very pervasive today in the world of AI. And I think the problem, Steve, that you're describing here,

and Chris, I hope this makes sense, but we have an orthodoxy, let's go back to the term orthodox, we have an orthodoxy in the business world, that when there's an opportunity, to change, to do something different, to adopt a technology, to launch a new product or what have you. There's a binary model. You can either be a first mover where you do something aggressively and you move first in the market and you assume you're going to get all the advantages from doing something big and bold and out in front, or you can be a fast follower, where you let others

pave the way for you by taking on the risk and then you try to adopt the technologies quickly and catch up with them in some way. Both of them presume, both of those models, at least in the common conception of them, presume that you have to do something big in order to shift your organization. What Steve and I are arguing actually is that there's a model where you don't have to choose between those two. And you don't have to take the big, bold step and do something as the first mover. You don't have to wait for others to do it. What you can do instead is immediately start to make what we call minimally viable moves. And so that's been a central thesis to all three of our books at this point. The notion behind a minimally viable move is very similar to,

I'm sure you and all your listeners have heard of minimally viable products in the product development domain. What those are, let's say you're working in a lab. You develop something that is minimally viable for its purpose. You put it out to the market. You get some feedback. And if the feedback's good, then you continue on down that development path. If it's bad, you go a slightly different direction. That same concept can be applied to any sort of management decision to how we adopt AI, to how we think about combating a competitor, how we think about entering a new category or what have you. So what we're arguing in Hone is that what you can do, and we should come back and talk about what the mechanisms are to hone and what the purpose is.

But what we're doing is saying, just take small steps forward every single day, test hypotheses, every move you want to make, turn it into the smallest testable hypothesis and then go take action quickly and course correct as you need to. And I'll, I'll, I'll stop this diatribe with just one metaphor. I think we raise it and detonate first. But it's the whole notion, if you're trying to conceive of what it means to make a minimally viable move, imagine walking through a deeply wooded forest with a lot of overgrowth and what have you,

late at night, no flashlight, pitch blackout. If you're trying to get to the edge of the forest and get out of the forest, what you don't do is run as fast as you can because you're going to trip over something because you can't see it, or you don't take huge steps forward because you may trip over a log or run into a tree or what have you. What you do is you edge your foot forward. You feel for whether there's something in the way. And if there isn't, you continue on down the path.

If there is, then you change course a little bit. Doing that type of thing in the course of making business decisions is what we're trying to argue for actually in all of our books, but especially in home. There you go. You talk about identifying your organization's elemental purpose and using it as a North Star. Tell us about how that works. Yeah. So an elemental purpose is, you know, effectively why, you know, what at its core this business was, you know, put on earth to do.

It's not, it's not necessarily the purpose statement that is, that is usually ascribed, you know, or ordained in a wall on a plaque in the organization. But it's at its core, what does an organization do? So you can't see an organization's elemental purpose per se. And so you have to hypothesize about what that might be. So we thought about a company like Apple in the book. And we said, well, it seems like its elemental purpose might be to bring a touch of high design to every and user-centric design to every, every technology and everything it does because if you look at what it really does is like elevate the user experience in all in all capacities. The reason why elemental purpose as a concept is so

important is because when a company has a tendency to drift off course, it's because it's gotten weighed down by things like things that have taken it away from its elemental purpose, whether it's competitive actions or whether it's new technologies that it's getting enamored with or as, and this is a metaphor that I'll attribute to Jeff, given he's the sailor of the two of us, you know, all the barnacles that get accumulated on a ship's haul and prevent it from actually feeling the water as you as you go. I'm not sure, Jeff, if that's, you know, if I've completely run with it. I'll keep running with it. My sailing friends won't bust you on that. Yeah. So you've got to get this accumulation of crap that prevents you from really seeing and performing against your elemental purpose. And what we would argue that you have to strip away some of that to get back to the, get back to basics. You see that in lots of different companies today going quote unquote back to basics. And that's what, you know, that's what we mean. But you have to have a sense of what that is. And very rarely in an in an organization.

lifespan should an elemental purpose change. It can, and technology can be a forcing mechanism in that, but really if you have a sense of what you're put on this earth to do, you should be able to adapt to the surroundings that you have. There you go. One example you guys give is Patagonia is we're in business to save our home planet. It serves as an internal compass. Kind of interesting sort of thing. We make a lot of clothes to go in the land. So we can see the planet. But I mean, Patagon is a good company. Is there anything you get, do we get everybody jumped in on that question? Well, so that's a good example, Chris. And it's a good example of actually a company that did

declare a purpose and a mission statement that's pretty well aligned with its elemental purpose. But the purpose of an elemental purpose, if we bring it back to the book, is to give you that path forward that allows you then to make those day-to-day management decisions that we were talking about before. So when we talk about honing, we're talking about the most senior executives, we should talk about the role of who does what in this system, but the most senior executives of any organization paying attention day in, day out to the things that they have in their control that drive behavior in their system. And when I say behavior here, I'm talking about the behavior of employees. I'm talking about the behavior of customers, of suppliers.

of partners or what have you, because ultimately, nothing changes. You don't stay on track. You don't course correct. Nothing allows you to stay on track unless someone somewhere changes a behavior. So at the heart of honing is understanding your elemental purpose, understanding the behaviors that you need to be able to impact as a senior executive throughout your entire system amongst all those audiences that I talked about before that will help you achieve that elemental purpose.

And then identifying the tools that you have at your disposal. to drive those behaviors. And those tools that we talk about in the book are management systems. They're all the things that you have at your disposal running a company that will allow you to impact the behavior of others. And we're happy to dig into what those management systems are if you're interested. Let me jump in for a sec, Chris. So no CEO sets out and expects to drift, right?

CEOs are all really busy individuals. they spend tons of time, you know, with investors, with their boards, with their customers. But because they're really busy, they don't always have attention to every single aspect of how the system of that organization is working. And oftentimes they make major decisions. And then those decisions get delegated to lots of different parts of the organization. And they either don't get implemented in the way that they were intended or the, the, the decision sort of becomes stale because competitors do different things.

So the organization naturally drifts off course. When Jeff talks about designing the system, you need to make sure that the organization as a whole is being steered. But when CEOs go from one big challenge to another big challenge, it's kind of hard to continue to navigate the system. And what we're saying is they've got to be the chief system designer of that organization. and constantly making small changes to the management systems of the organization to get people to behave differently in order to get that organization back on course pointed directly at that elemental purpose.

There you go. There you go. Now, one of the things you talk about as well in the book is CEOs must become chief system designers. Why CEOs and how does chief system designer work? Well, I think for some many ways, it comes back to the direction Steve was just going. And I'm going to create a juxtaposition here that is probably greater than it typically is. But if you think about the average CEO or even the above average CEO, the great CEOs, often the way most of us think about them is they are the bold visionary leaders who spend their time, understanding where they want to be competing in the world, making commitments on behalf of the company to their investors, to their stakeholders, leading with the grand vision statements.

And then they expect, rightly so, perhaps, that the rest of the organization then achieves what they're setting out to do. We're actually arguing that while that has a time and a place, most CEOs have completely overplayed that part of their job and underinvested in the more important part of their job, which is acting as chief system designers, which is, which is, which is where your question was anchored. What it means to be a chief system designer is not to be the big, bold visionary. It means to be the person in, in the weeds, day in, day out, understanding what mechanisms they have at their disposal to drive the behaviors that will allow the organization to stay on path, not to drift,

to achieve its elemental purpose. It doesn't mean they have to do every single one and control every single management system. But our argument is that the average CEO needs to be spending a lot more attention and a lot more time in the mechanics of how the business is operating and really understanding the impact of behaviors through the system than they are typically today. Oh, there you go. Did you want to jump on in this?

No, I'm good. Yeah, go ahead. All right. So as we go out, guys, what are some offers that you guys are doing? Do you guys do speaking engagements with consulting, working with corporations and teams? What are some of the things you guys offer on your website? People wouldn't take advantage of it. So we do speaking engagements.

We are open for business in that way. We would love to come speak to your organizations. We do that both virtually and in person. If you're running a conference, Jeff and I can be very entertaining. If you're a company, you can have us do both speaking events. but also workshops where we help you work through some of your challenges and can adjust some of those management systems or challenge some of your orthodoxies. There you go.

And I will say, Chris, the main thing, I hope your listeners take away is that while we can be entertaining, we can do stuff up on the stage and people generally seem to like it, at the end of the day, what we care about is engaging in a way that drives a change in behavior. It would be completely antithetical for a couple of guys to come along and write a book about the importance of changing behaviors and then not commit to do that ourselves. And so what we hold ourselves accountable for whenever we engage with any sort of company, whether it's in the traditional client service work we do or in some of the speaking events that we're involved in, is making sure that behavioral change actually results from it.

And what drives that change is going to differ by the organization, by the setting, by the challenge, what have you. But that's our commitment to anyone that does give us a call. And Chris, there's one other message that I think it would be important for, us to share with your listeners. So we took inspiration throughout the book from the world of artisans. And we watched and profiled four different artisans in Hone. We had Flannery, who's our chef. We had Anna, who is a famous photographer, and we had Sam Pollard, the famous documentary filmmaker and editor, particularly known for his editing in the 1990s of Spike Lee's films.

and then the rock band our lady piece and we said that if you're what artisans do naturally because they love and they're passionate about their subject is that they are constantly looking for ways that they can improve their artistry whether it's on it in how he captures an image or in our lady piece and how they've evolved to be much less more than just a rock band and more of a business enterprise to take advantage of the new reality that we live in, or in the way that Sam has changed how he directs and how he captures subjects and the subjects he looks at. When you're an artisan at the top of your game, you are constantly looking for the next way to improve. And we think that that curiosity, that day-to-day, that day-to-day,

constantly slightly dissatisfied with how things are going to try to make. make it better, is a mindset that business leaders can bring to constantly be looking for ways that they can improve their customer experiences, improve their employee engagement, and have greater impact. And so we just think that there's a, there's learning that business leaders can have from that community. There you go. There you go. Well, guys, this should be fun. You guys will have the book coming out September 30th, 2025. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. Once again, I'll say, just head to LinkedIn. You can find me, Jeff Tuff, G-E-O-F-F-F-U-F-F, or Stephen Goldback, S-T-E-V-E-E-N, G-O-D-B-A-C-H.

Where that LinkedIn is the best way to find us, and you'll find us both responsive and I hope helpful. And also ways to buy the book, get in touch. You can reach us at our, at our sites. You can find all the information there. There you go. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming the show, we really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. That was fun. Thank you. And thanks to our audience for tuning in.

Order up the book where refined books are sold. It is entitled, Hone, How Purposeful Leaders Defy, Drift. There you go. It's something where, you know, you got to, I like the analogy of the, of honing the knife instead of destroying it where it loses steel. I like the concept of that you mentioned at the beginning of the show. Thanks for us for tuning in. Goodreason.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortezs, Chris Foss, one, the TikTok, and all those crazy places in it.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, guys.