The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mike Kuczkowski, the founder of Orangefiery, on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Building Better Companies

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Mike Kuczkowski, the founder of OrangeFiery, on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Building Better Companies Orangefiery.com About the Guest(s): Mike Kuczkowski is an experienced professional with over 25 years in communications, management, consulting, journalism, and politics. In 2014, he founded Orangefiery, a firm that focuses on strategic consulting and communications to assist clients in solving business problems and driving change. Episode Summary: In this episode, Chris Voss interviews Mike Kuczkowski, the founder of Orangefiery, discussing leadership, entrepreneurship, and building better companies. Mike shares insights on communication strategies, effective leadership, and aligning employees with corporate strategies. The conversation delves into the importance of listening, sense-making, and maintaining trust as a leader. Key points covered include the significance of active listening in the first 90 days of leadership, the need for leaders to see around corners by engaging with stakeholders, and aligning employees with corporate strategies to drive organizational success. Key Takeaways: Leaders should focus on being vulnerable, listening actively, and adapting to change in dynamic business environments. Developing a sense-making approach is crucial for making informed decisions as a leader and gaining trust from stakeholders. Building trust involves showcasing transparency, integrity, and aligning actions with the organization's core values. Effective leadership requires continuous communication, empathy, and a servant leader mentality to inspire and engage employees. Encouraging a culture of learning from failure, promoting innovation, and fostering a collaborative environment are key aspects of successful leadership. Notable Quotes: "Trust is about behaviors, doing the right thing, aligning actions with core values, and making decisions based on a sense of purpose." - Mike Kuczkowski "Leading from a place of vulnerability, listening actively, and maintaining empathy can drive organizational success and build strong relationships." - Mike Kuczkowski For more insights on leadership, communication strategies, and corporate alignment, tune in to the full episode and explore additional valuable content from the podcast.

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.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here As always the Chris Vaughn Show Is a big family that loves you But doesn't judge you At least not as harshly as

Maybe some other people in your family We're this family that's just loving Enjoy us and hugging Unless you're evil Then we might put you in the back And children's table for a little while So learn to be better But that's what's so great about our show

We have these amazing people on the show They come talk about their stories Their adventures Their journeys The things and lessons they've learned in life. To let you know that, number one, you're not alone. Number two, maybe they figured out how to figure out life so that you can figure out life too. And the stories, as we always say, are the onerous manual to life. We have another brilliant gentleman on the show with us today. Mike Koskowski is on the show with us today.

We're going to be talking to him about his experience, his insights, his company, what he does, how he founded it, and all that sort of great stuff. Leadership, entrepreneurism, how to build better companies, all that good stuff. Mike has more than 25 years experience in communications, management consulting, journalism, and politics. In 2014, he founded Orange Fiery, a firm that combines strategic consulting and communications to help clients solve business problems and drive change. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you?

Doing well, Chris. Thanks for having me. There you go. Do we get all the pronunciations of Orange Fiery and Mike right? Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a connection between the two. You wouldn't want to name a firm Koskowski Partners, so we chose to go a different direction. I just didn't anticipate that Fiery would be a stumbling block for folks either. You know, everyone's got a different way of pronouncing everything, as I found from all the guests we've had on the show. So give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs?

Just orange fiery dot com, which is, you know, like it sounds orange, the fruit F I E R Y dot com. There you go. Use that same place. Use that same name to find us on LinkedIn and Twitter and other places. There you go. So an imagery would be it's oranges on fire. Actually, it's kind of a funny story. So I literally did want to avoid Kaskowski Partners because I would never be found by anybody if I was doing business under my surname. And I'm a big fan of the James Joyce book, Ulysses.

And so I'm literally flipping through pages to find a word that hasn't been used. And I stumbled on orange fiery in a passage that had to do with communication. So that seemed to fit. And then the URL was available, which is a key thing in organizational naming, as I'll tell you, since we do naming. It's hard to get the names anymore because all the good names are taken. Exactly. It seems like every name is taken. You just have to make up a name. There's some broker anticipating that you're going to start Chris Voss Consulting 2024.

And they probably will charge you $5,000. Here, let me go on GoDaddy real quick. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you do there at your company. I mean, just to give, if I can, a little more background on me, I was a journalist for about six years and worked in politics for two. I often joke that the second part should count longer because it's like dog years being in politics. But the last 25 in PR agency life.

And I saw an opportunity. Everybody in communications is often trying to change what companies are doing, right? I don't want to do the PR thing. I want to tell them how to organize themselves. And that's actually a pretty hard thing to do is to span that gap. So we started up a management consulting approach to help companies do both, right? Figure out what's the thing. If you're, I mean, communications is such a dominant part of having a successful company nowadays. And so if you're, you know, in touch with people, you have insights from stakeholders and you can weave that into your corporate brand, your corporate strategy.

That's a good starting point. And then the execution becomes that much more straightforward and you don't have a bunch of PR people second guessing you later. Oh, that's always good to have those PR people second guessing you. Give them something to do. All that good stuff. Let me ask you this. What got you, what prompted you to launch this company?

What was your life journey like that you were going through in life? And what motivated you to want to do that? It's kind of funny. I mean, I had been a senior executive at a big PR firm and watched it grow. And I had a particular point of view about this connection between consulting and really doing research-based work on messaging and branding and stuff like that. And having that be the centerpiece of a business. So I started up a business within that bigger PR firm. And, you know, I thought we were doing great work, but we weren't profitable. We had a three-year runway to be profitable.

And the bosses of me at that time were like, no, we really can't have red on our ledger. We want to make sure that we're profitable right away. And so there was a decision to abandon that. But I really liked the business. I thought, good conversation with clients. People seemed to get it. People seemed to understand how important communication strategy, public affairs strategy, all these different, you know, sort of silos of communications within their organization were to shaping their future. I did a couple more years at that place and ran one of their offices on the West Coast. And we sort of both decided it was

time for me to go try the thing I really wanted. There you go. And you founded the company and off you go. What was the hardest thing you found when you started your company to try and do? Was it getting clients or learn entrepreneurism? I think I'd gotten a really good schooling in a number of aspects of this where I worked previously. So I'm grateful for that part. I think understanding how to get enough clients to make the business work and how to kind of, you know, balance talent, having the right people and enough of them to get the work done. There's a lot of ups and downs in this business. So cyclicality.

And when I have a tendency to be a little bit more, I would say, you know, a serial monogamist, I'll go and get a client and get very deep in with them and really take them on a journey and from strategy to execution. And then, you know, at some point they won't either they won't need that anymore or something will change. And, you know, then I'll have to go find another piece of business to work on. And that's kind of that's the way it's been working. I need to get better about lining up a pipeline, but we're not big on client churn, really the value of those relationships. And so that's kind of the, you know, the biggest learning and struggle is it's really good to be getting new business while

you're doing business and growing in that way. And it's not always easiest to do. Yeah, it can be a challenge. I mean, the scalability of the business, as it were. Yeah, it's human capital, right? So that's hard to scale. You need really smart people, and you need to be able to kind of, know bring them in and move move move quickly and then being able to juggle task and and demand and you know it's it's it's the fun game of it's the fun part of being an entrepreneur absolutely but yeah there's a lot of entrepreneurs that make the mistake where they they you know what what is it 80 percent of this 80 20 rule 20 of your clients will bring in 80% of your revenue. And so you can end up very quickly relying on your top revenue things. And if somebody dips out,

that's in that 20%, it can be quite painful if you don't have a replacement lined up or in development. And so a lot of people don't know, you know, the whole process of developing a new person to another thing. So your company deals with a lot of things don't know the whole process of developing a new person to another thing. So your company deals with a lot of things. It looks like you work with leaders and teach leadership. Let's get into some of that, if you don't mind. What are you seeing some of the issues are that leaders are facing or that leaders maybe need to face? Yeah, I mean, I think leadership, know, leadership, it's something that's very

easy to critique from a distance. And it's always been a fascinating subject for me over the years. I think, you know, getting closer and working more closely with people in the C-suite of organizations, you get a sense of exactly, you know, how high pressure their jobs are and how complex their jobs are. I think, you know, it's said, and I don't have data to disagree with it, that it probably is volatile and complex an environment for business executives as we've ever seen. Change is constant. There's a fair amount of turnover in the CEO suite and lots of others.

So you've got to figure out how to operate on a pretty short timeframe to get things done. And I've certainly seen that more as I've worked with more of those types of leaders. And it just, it feels like, you know, you have to hit the ground with a sense of vision and really kind of forge that vision. If you're, particularly if you're coming in new to a company, you know, there's an existing history, you got to get your brain around that. And then you've got to figure out what am I going to do that's going to make an impact. And if I'm honest, like the biggest thing is don't wait. Like you have a chance to make an impact probably more in your first three, four months than you ever will in the span of your

time with a company. And so working on that basis with people and trying to figure out what are the right moves? How do I, you know, find some early wins, but keep my eye on the things I really think are important over time. You know, those things are essential. You've got to do that. Most definitely. The, you know, when you do come into leadership, you know, there's so much you kind of have to address. And I don't know, I imagine you consult with people to tell them this, but, you know, you've got to address what the old culture was,

what maybe new culture you want to establish under your reign of power. That's a narcissist in me. And dark triad traits are fun. I love them. But, you know, what you want to establish, maybe you want to, you know, maybe you have to do a reset because you're coming into a disabled situation

that, you know, things haven't been working well and you're the guy that they bring in to save everything. So, you know, you've got a hard reset that you've got to somehow try and do or signal to things that there's definitely new leadership. It's not the same old, same old. What are some other factors that you advise people in coming to those positions for?

I think it's important. And, you know, we work with a lot of folks who are, you know, new in either like a chief commercial role or chief corporate affairs role or a CEO. I think listening in the first 90 days is a really critical piece. It's kind of underweighted in our culture. What? Yeah, exactly. No, but I mean, there is the demand for people to come in and have the answers. And that's kind of impossible. Going around and trying to talk with people inside a company and outside of a company, very often we can help with that as consultants if we get in on the early front just to really, you know, hear what's being said and synthesize that and try to turn it into something that can be discussed with a leadership team.

I don't think any, you know, there's this mythology about business decision making. And I think a bit of a mythology about leaders that they just come in clear-cut things or have some pearls of received wisdom and off they go you got to really you know spend some time understanding a place in order to change it definitely yeah and you know technically you need to set change from the get-go but you've got to also ascertain do you think that people before they officially take a position or it's announced they need to do that study and try and figure out what really needs to be changed. Maybe that's part of the discussion they're having with the board before they come in. Yeah, I think it's definitely part of the interview process is what are you going to do if you take the reins of this company? But sometimes those can be internal candidates, and they have to figure out how do they show up differently on the day when they've taken the mantle. And sometimes they're coming in from the outside and they also have to, you know, tread somewhat carefully being perceived as an outsider

who's going to shift, change everything around. You know, there's usually, I mean, you talk about 80-20 rules. There's usually quite a bit going right in a company, even if it's not necessarily apparent. And figuring out how do you amplify those things and how do you address the things that are standing in the way of success? You know, it's much more nuanced than you might think of, okay, here's my strategic plan, plop it down on a table, follow that roadmap, and I'll check in in three months. You know, that's not really the way leadership works these days. Yeah, it's, you know, I liken it to where sometimes people use leadership, just they come into power and they put out a pr notice we're changing we're going to be moral and ethical and trustworthy and upstanding from here on out and then you know three months

later the you know there's all sorts of unethical stuff happening at the ceo maybe boardroom level or something and you're like wait i thought i thought i thought we were going to be ethical that or maybe maybe it's the whole thing we're going to support our employees we love our employees they're our number one thing now we have layoffs of 10 000 people coming next week yeah you know that's sort of pr bs that you're just like whatever one thing you talk about is a common mythology of what good leadership looks like tell us what that means i think we have a mythology around the type a leader that we kind of what we've been discussing a little bit that somebody comes in with the answers and just leads from the front, and that's kind of the way it is. attributes like listening, attributes like trying to figure out, you know, win-win situations, attributes like being able to show empathy to people when you're laying off however many people you may need to lay off. I mean, you know, these are business realities. Not every business is

right-sized for its market. And sometimes those are things that you actually do have to do, and it doesn't represent sort of the, you know, black corporate soul at work. But it, you know, it can be done in ways where you're able to bring empathy to that you're able to explain things in a way why they're happening, and you're actually able to do it in a way that's supportive. You know, we had one of our clients had to do around the layoffs. And, you know, we were talking with them about that decision. And I can't remember whose idea was it might have been theirs. But you know, we activated sort of a LinkedIn resume book that anybody who was being let go by

the company could voluntarily, right, because you can't mandate it, but contribute to this. And the company, because it was right-sizing for its operations, again, a layoff being nothing bad happened from the employee standpoint. Let's get the word out about these great employees. Let's make sure people know the talent's available. Let's put them out in our networks. Because we can do that in a unique way nowadays and take advantage of it. You really can. It's quite nice. I think it's exemplary when companies try and get people hired or filled, you know, call up your competitors and I don't know, would you want

your companies to go to employees to go to your competitors you laid off? Maybe not. I mean, I think you probably would if there's an opportunity there. The notion of competition has got, if you're not succeeding at something, you've got to do some soul searching. If your competitors are beating you, you have to figure that out. They're probably going to go to your competitors anyways. Yeah, this gives me a Trojan horse idea. So instead of doing layoffs, you pretend like you're laying them off,

but you keep them on some sort of subsistent salaries, and then you send them to your competitors so they'll just go sabotage them with the poor work they were doing at your company. There might be some SEC violations in there, but sure. Yeah, there might be. I mean, Steve Jobs pulled that one cool trick where he got everybody in Silicon Valley to limit people's hiring and pay they did get sued but you know he was gone by then he seems to survived it with with his reputation but no

yeah there's probably some sort of i have some machiavellian problems can you tell i can tell yeah yeah yeah yeah but they're they're healthy in some ways unhealthy and others so how you one of the thing you talk about is how leaders can see better around corners. You know, that's the thing I think as leaders we're always trying to do. We're trying to see the future. We're trying to see new innovations. We're trying to see, you know, we know there's usually a limited run of whatever we built is going to, you know, run profitably for a short while. And then there's going to be market changes or

politics changes sometimes. There's going to be personnel changes, financial changes. There's any one number of things that can hit you, crisis, PR, failures. There's a million ways to die in this business now. So how can leaders see better around corners? How do you define that too in seeing around corners? I give you my definition. I mean, I think it is about sort of, you know, an active listening mindset and really kind of thinking about the horizon line and who in your organization has a touchpoint with stakeholders out in the world. If you spend most of your time in the hallways of corporate offices, you're unlikely to see where the future is coming from, you know, and to be able to see around corners. It's just not, you're not getting that info. So I think some frequent touch points, some frequent interchange with stakeholders that you may not see in boardrooms or in your corporate offices is really essential. And then trying to aggregate that, you know, I wrote a

lengthy piece a couple of years ago about Disney under Bob Iger and how much it changed its business in sort of the 2018, 2017 era around customers and really thinking about the customer experience. I think Bob Iger saw some massive changes and started to think about a different org design. And it was really critical to kind of navigating some of the things like streaming that were happening, launching the Disney channel, investing in the MLB.TV so that they had some real technology chops when it came to streaming and the like. And it set them up for success, but it wasn't something that he was getting from his direct reports who were running the business. It was something that he was able to see, I think in part because he was really tuned into what was

changing in technology that impacted his business. Oh, wow. So the technology aspect of it. I think technology is seriously disruptive. I mean, you know, we talk a lot about AI, right? And, you know, pretty soon you'll be able to replace me with some, but the degree to which we are still in the very early stages of what that's going to look like and, you know, how much of a market there's going to be around the hardware, software, and services related to AI, it's going to be pretty transformative for our economy. And so that'll disrupt a lot of things. Probably not in the ways we expect it to, but it'll definitely make a lot of change happen. Yep. I don't think, I don't know, it'll be interesting what AI replaces me. I mean, it's going to have to be something that smells bad

and has a really poor attitude. I don't know what that is. I'm sure they're working on that in some robotics. They probably is probably are. Any week now. The other thing you talk about is how leaders can and need to align employees on corporate strategy. What's that look like in trying to get that alignment done and get that vision out there? I've always been a vision guy, so I've always been out soapboxing for vision and strategy and getting employees and vendors and boardroom and investors and everybody aligned on, this is where we're going with the ship. Yeah. It's a bit of a dance to be honest with you, but I think alignment is one of the most critical things that a leader can bring to an organization, right? Getting people on the same page, you have to sort of start with defining the problem

that you're facing and that was another thing Iger did really well he got his team together and said you know I think we have this problem you know we're very invested in the traditional model streaming's coming it's changing we're not going to get the revenue from cable we used to you know we got to get we got to get ahead of this thing and I do think that you know if you can define a problem and it's usually we find it's very useful to do it with a narrative thrust, right? Here's what we see. And ask a team of, you know, pretty well-informed folks to kick the tires on that, break it down, reconstruct it, you know, really put their own stamp on their definition of the problem. A lot of alignment will follow.

People will be, you know, agreed that we've done a good job of running this to ground, of characterizing this. We can sort of put it down in a three-page memo or something like that, you know, something everybody can kind of look at. And then, you know, from there you can drive the right kind of action because it's well-informed. It's well-constructed. It kind of reflects the reality people feel instead of that, you know, that sort of boiler-plated strategy that you're like, oh, this is the

same thing we saw last year. You know, oh, it's rinse, wash, repeat, you know, kind of thing. When you can do that, I think people get energized, right? When they think their leadership is really kind of dealing with reality and the stuff we need to run the ground. I think that has a lot of power. And so that's what we kind of encourage people to do. It's a really gratifying process.

You know, sometimes it's the person in the room who's kind of the most cantankerous and has a really difficult view of things. We can get them around to, oh, this is actually real. We're going to talk about this stuff we don't always talk about and try to tackle it. I think it really can be very productive. There you go. What about building trust and maintaining trust? I mean, how do we do that? You kind of alluded to a little bit of that, but what's the key've been up to or how you've been doing it. You know, we're in kind of a deeply transparent era, whether you like it or not. Right. So people are going to find out what you said at the Kiwanis Club and they're going to find out what you did with, you know, some industry coalition and they're going to find out what you said in an employee town hall meeting. And so the degree

to which that's all sort of like, you know that and then you can kind of lead with that in mind. But really, trust is about behaviors, I think. It's about doing the right thing, doing things that are aligned with your core purpose, and making sure that you're playing that back to people. That they know, you know, if I stand for X, that I'm actually going to make decisions based on that instead of that being a nice shiny thing on the front of the building. There you go. That really hits it on the head. I tried talking about this in my book where, you know, you've got to walk the talk and you can't just put up PR memos of we're ethical now and then behave unethically.

You know, they're like, why is the CEO in Vegas with cocaine and blow and blow and hookers? I thought we were being ethical this week. You know, that sort of thing. And, you know, it's walking the talk and being that vision. What do you think about servant leadership? I'm writing about servant leadership in my new book, interviewing CEOs. It seems like a lot of that building trust with people comes from having that servant leader sort of mentality. Yeah, I mean, I think that's consistent with what we talk about when we talk about, you know, vulnerability as a new model for leadership as well. I, you know, I think there's

great stuff in the servant leader model. I really do. I don't know, you know, I'd be curious how people are reacting to it now. I know that was sort of a thing that we were talking about, you know, several years ago. And it seemed like there's always a little bit of a backlash. I don't know what you're, you know, hearing from folks, but on the one hand, we want to put this face forward. And then sometimes, you know, the pressure from investors or the pressure from different stakeholders can be, no, you got to stand up. You got to, you know, you got to take a stand. You got to do the X, Y, or Z. And, you know, I feel like that stuff, it just has to be super consistent, right? Yeah. To me, what I see a lot of it is, is like listening and walking the floor, listening.

You know, like I watched, I watched Hewlett Packard's CEO and what he does with his day. And he does a lot of walking and listening. I think Bob Iger does too. Just touching with people and basically checking in with them, you know, and letting them know that you care, that you listen. I think people, I think people get a sense, regardless of how authoritarian or Machiavellian you are, like someone like me, people still get somewhat of a sense that I care, which amazes me because I don't know. I'm just kidding. You know, it's, it's interesting because I come at things, at least historically, I started my career. I'm like, Oh, if you build the perfect

communication system, you know, Chris Voss won't refer to it as bad PR. It'll be, it'll really work, right? And it'll help organizations be more effective and just generally better. And every time you look at this, different researchers have looked at this, the role of a leader plays such a critical, is such a critical component in all this. Like they tried to separate this out. If we have a strong internal communication system, we have a leader and they're kind of this. They tried to separate this out. If we have a strong internal communication system, we have a leader and they're kind of unrelated. They're not. So having a leader that sort of participates in the kind of leadership by walking around, but also in some of the internal communications activities, town hall meetings, other things, whether it's an employee

newsletter and the rest of it, that you can kind of see where's their thinking, what's their action that supports it and the rest of it. Am I on track? That internal communication system kind of, it's only as good as the leaders involved in running the company. Yeah, and I like running my own internal communication system. And I find what I have to communicate is not an I, I, I, company, company, company message. It's like, yeah, yeah, I'm leading and here's what I'm doing.

And here's why this is important to you. And this is why this serves the community or the company. And I'm not just being an authoritarian person stomping out this or that. There's a reason behind it. And here's why. And I've always kind of done that where I explain things to people so they understand the reasoning behind it. So I'm just not barking orders at people or correcting people. It's, here's why we don't do this. Does this make sense to you? And I find that works a little bit better for me. 100%. I mean, it's the power of we versus the power of me. Right. And the piece of that, that is key is, you know, and we have some other things that we

do to try to help with this, but can you really understand, do I have a good narrative or do I have a good foundation for understanding why my boss is making those decisions or why my leader is leading in this way? You know, if I have a good mental model of that, it's called sense-making, right? And we're always using sensemaking. Like people are smart. I'm a big believer in that. You might find a lot of contrary evidence to that claim. But like I grew up in a work class family.

You know, the conversation around the dinner table was not so unsophisticated as all that. And, you know, give people credit for not being foolish about the things that they see and how they interpret it. And I think we're all kind of endowed with a certain amount of sensemaking behavior whenever an organization changes. And we'll test it out. Is it legit or is it selfish behavior on the part of leadership? If I saw that the CEO got a big pay raise or cashed in a bunch of stock right before he did something that was, you know, or she did something that was problematic, I'm not

going to sit idly by and think, oh, what a wonderful coincidence. I'm probably going to critically look at that, you know, or she did something that was problematic. I'm not going to sit idly by and think, oh, what a wonderful coincidence. I'm probably going to critically look at that, you know? Yeah. Maybe he'll invite me on the boat. You know, part of this too, it's kind of an interesting psychology that I have behind it that I really should sit down and define more. But part of it is communicating that why what I'm doing is important for the community. And it's just not about me

you know because it's people can read that into stuff they can be like he's doing this to help the company be more profitable and the bigger product the bigger thing of it is we can ensure the success of the corporation we can secure the long-term employment if you know we make these changes that sometimes may be painful but you know this is for the good of the community and and then part of it is too i think it's always been important to me showing that i'm a good judge or and i think some of that is signaling that i'm a good leader and i think i do a lot of that signaling when i talk about what i'm interested in because if people know that you're a good judge that you're fair you might be strong you might fair, you might be strong, you might be, you know, when it comes time, you got to whack something, you're going to whack it. But they know that you're fair, that you have a, and I think of myself sometimes as just a judge sitting on a bench.

I like kind of watching judges in courtrooms on TikTok. And they see someone who's going to be measured, who's going to try and make good decisions. And they know that if they get in front of that firing line by accident, that there's a good chance they're going to get a fair hearing. And some of that is built into my psychology of what I try and signal. Basically, I think what I'm doing overall, you're getting me to think about this more than I have recently, but more than anything, I'm trying to signal that I'm a good leader. And then I have all the different aspects of a good leader. And I think that embodies trust and emboldens trust. You know, I think the notion of signaling is really important, right?

And I think it has an effect. We talk a little bit about the fallacy of business decision-making. And again, the notion of that, like when I was coming up, I kept waiting because I didn't grow up in a world of business. So I kept waiting for someone to say, all right, so you just got promoted. Here's a key to the secret conference room where we all figure out what's going on and make decisions. And you sort of wait for that moment. You wait to be like let in on how things go. And in fact, decision making is messy and there's a lot of inputs and there's a lot of, you know, lack of clarity. And ultimately I think business decision-making is best framed when it's kind of looked at as an

experiment. We think X is true. We think this is the problem. We're going to try this to deal with the problem or capitalize on the opportunity that problem creates. We're going to watch how it goes. And if we are wrong, we're going to course correct, you know, this is how we do it. But we're good leaders are often, you know, checking that with the, you know, the people who are cleaning the conference room, as well as the people who are participating in that, check it, checking it out, testing their hypotheses, you know, doing some signaling. And if you get feedback while you're signaling something, a decision you're about to make, I know you're going to think more about it, right? Oh yeah.

Do I have that right? Did I hear that? Yeah. That angle, you know, and it's sort of this active dynamic process that is not, you know, kind of like typey typey.

I made my decision. I'm going to issue the, here's the edict and everyone will go forth in the same March right off the cliff. Sometimes the, you know, I, I like that because that is what i'm doing

sometimes when i'm signaling is i'm doing basically a small scale um focus groups exactly right and i'm surprised that sometimes i'll be pushing id and i'll be about 75 sold on it and i'll be signaling that this is the turn we may make and i'll get feedback and i'm like i'm off the i'm off the i'm in my own private idaho and when i think this is a feedback and i'm like i'm off the i'm off the i'm in my own private idaho and when i think this is a great idea i'm like whoa wait wait what and then from then i'll get other data that makes me go oh okay that's not a good idea at all then but yeah doing that pre-signaling and stuff but yeah to me a lot of what i do is i'm always if there's a chance for me to to wave a little flag that says here's what we're doing we're doing this because i'm i'm always if there's a chance for me to to wave a little flag that says here's what we're

doing we're doing this because i'm i'm a good leader without coming off as you know completely narcissistic and machiavellian it is but just explaining things to people you know like i said i always explain stuff to people the reason why part of what we did is we we explained to people the reason why we do things is so that if they could find an innovation that we hadn't overseen they can understand the process that we developed to make it and how to go from there yeah so let's move over to your company let's talk about it actually could i pause one second please you reminded me of a study we once did that was i thought kind of eye-opening because we were asked to help redo the intranet for the you know like the internal website for a major pharmaceutical company. And we did a bit of a,

we did focus groups, we did some research, we did some benchmarking against other companies, but we wanted to check and see what was the information people wanted most out of the, you know, intranet and what was the people, what did they get? And of course, people wanted to know, how am I doing against my own goals? Am I going to get a bonus? You know, what, what did they get? And of course, people wanted to know, how am I doing against my own goals? Am I going to get a bonus? What's my gap? That sort of thing. Absolutely, they do want that information. And if you can engineer it to get it to them quickly, readily, that's awesome. But what surprised us was actually the top piece of information they most wanted was about corporate strategy. How is the organization doing? What are we doing broadly, not just in the sales organization, but broadly? What's our strategy for capitalizing what we got, thinking about the

future, all that stuff? And they felt like what they got most of the time from their organization didn't really deliver on that. And that just speaks to what you said, right? It's like people are more curious than you might think about the overall health of their organization, about how leaders are thinking about the future, how they're dealing with it, what kind of innovation they're trying to drive. And so there's real value in thinking about those things, even though some people might be like, no, we got to narrow the frame, just give them the info that they need, send them the bulletin on what to sell, right? That sort of thing is actually counter to effective leadership when it comes to the

communication side. It's interesting to me how people seek out leaders. I mean, I still think everyone can be a leader. I certainly grew up an introvert and wasn't very leaderly when I was young. And so most of the skills I developed, I kind of had to, and I kind of learned. I read Harvard Business Review when I was 18 and started taking some of their courses and manuals and stuff. And so I prepare myself, but still, I mean, there's a lot you just experiencing going through it and become a leader trial by fire if you would. But it's interesting to me, there's a lot of people who look for leaders and there's more of that than there are people who want to lead or

feel comfortable leading, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, I, I I mean, it's very funny because I talk a lot about failure, which is not a topic that a lot of leaders, some leaders do not like talking about failure at all. But I feel like most have learned more from it than you would expect or that you might think from the outside looking in. And I remember internally in an organization, I was asked, so you talk about this so much, Mike, why don't you lead a panel discussion about failure and its upside, right? What's the upside of failure? And I had, I think I had three people from the organization. One of them simply could not say the word out loud, right? It was just beyond her interest in doing that. It always had to turn it around into a win. And I think there's, you know, look, we all try to do the best we can when things go south or when we experience failure. But, you know, some of the stuff that I'm sure forged your abilities as a leader was the things you tried that didn't work out, you know, either for things having to do with how you came up with it or things. There's a few of those.

Yeah. Look, you're not alone. I mean, that's what most people say. And then we don't, that doesn't make it into the autobiography. But although in some cases it does, but that's, you know, really, that's something very meaningful for, for people to see as a leader is someone who kind of picks himself up after failure, learns what you can learn from it, district discards the stuff that you can't really take forward and keeps chugging. There you go. There you go. So let's talk about your company and what you guys do. What sort of clients can look to onboard with you guys? Do you

guys have some minimums of people you want to work with? Not really minimums. I mean, we do have kind of – there's a point at which if you don't have the budget, it doesn't work. I got $5. No, I'm sorry. You can subscribe to one of our newsletters, I'm sure. There you go. I'll do that.

But, no, in point of fact, we work with companies that are small and even starting up, companies looking for seed money, which is kind of hard to do because they don't have a lot of cash. But once they've got a little bit, we'll help them with an early stage website, a brand, an investor presentation to go get more funding, that sort of thing. We'll work a lot with companies who don't yet have commercial products, but who are kind of seeing the pathway to that lots of times in the pharmaceutical industry, but also could be elsewhere where they've got several rounds of funding, proof of concept, things are moving in the right directions. And, you know, they're like, oh, I see the goal, but the goal actually means that I got to get to know patients and caregivers, or I've got to understand my markets better. You know, I've got the, I've got the widget really figured out, but I have to figure out now what's my commercial strategy going to be, and we help them.

And then larger companies, very often, whether it's corporate social impact and some of the sense of how am I living my sort of corporate purpose and mission today, and how do I think about that from a philanthropic standpoint or from a stakeholder engagement standpoint, we often come in to very mature companies that can help them on things like that or things that they're doing that require a little bit of different thinking about you know marketing or or communications and how to build the right system there you go now you guys have a lot of capabilities listed on your guys's website you guys do a lot yeah yeah i need you to list them off the top of your head no i'm just kidding i'd probably fail that test yeah i i'm looking i'd probably fail just reading it it's a lot so there's corporate brand strategy market development services strategic planning i'm just going to skip

through the things i like optimizing communication functions crisis management disease awareness have you guys seen twitter lately product communications thought leadership there's my favorite right there thought leadership communication programs lots of different corporate and and developmental stuff there what else might we know like how can people onboard with you how do they work with you or find out if they're a good fit they can just reach out to us i mean the contact info is on the website and as of last week we've managed to get all that stuff so it doesn't get stuck in our spam filters. So that's a good thing. And look, you know, Chris, I want to explain how can, you know, we're a kind of, we're a small, we're a pretty lean organization. Let me put it that way, right? I think we've got a theory on

communications that allows us and strategy that allows us to do to kind of take this approach. And if you've got a problem with brand strategy, we do branding. That's great. But if you've got a problem with your go to market, we have a market development approach. You know, if you've got a organizational change initiative that you've got to get done, you're reorganizing around new business units, you got to get people on board with that, like the similar problem definition, what are we doing? What's our vision? What's our goal? And how are we getting it done? We can sort of point that approach to a number of different problem sets and have success

with that. When I was just starting the company, I had this big flip chart paper. And I said, you know, here, we could do this. We could do this. Most of the things you listed off were on that list. And then by about year four, we'd actually done many of them. And I was like, okay, so the theory holds. and it's been really productive work okay cool the so it's like you guys customize stuff really well you can you can hone down to just about whatever a company might need that is

one thing that you should know anybody who wants to work with us should know it's like we're gonna want to make sure that we're involved in figuring out what we're doing why it's not something off the shelf we don't have a stable of people smiling and dialing media relations wise, like you might expect at certain PR firms. And that's all good. But we definitely are trying to do something that, you know, let's say we want to work on the toughest problems our clients have. So let's put it that way. There you go. And fix them. So thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. There you go. Give us the. So thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

There you go. Give us the.com one more time as we go out. Yeah, it's orangefiery.com. Orange, O-R-A-N-G-E-F-I-E-R-Y.com. There you go. I think you should have an orange mascot who runs around and it says fire shooting at the back of the orange. That would be like Otto, the mascot of Syracuse University, where I got my undergraduate and graduate degree.

He just follows you everywhere. Exactly. When you go places. We welcome it. Thank you very much for coming to the show, Mike. Thanks for watching and for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss. ChrisFoss, one of the TikTokity. You can buy me a cup of coffee at buymeacupofcoffee.com, 4chesschrisfoss.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good, that's Chris Foss. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.