The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Leader’s Mind: How Great Leaders Prepare, Perform, and Prevail by Jim Afremow PhD, Phil White

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

The Leader's Mind: How Great Leaders Prepare, Perform, and Prevail by Jim Afremow PhD, Phil White Clear and concise steps to develop the confidence and mental edge that sets you apart as a trailblazing leader—the same approach thousands of professional athletes have used to become champions. TheLeader's Mind taps into the same tips and techniques honed by top-tier athletes, such as how to get in a "zone," thrive on a team, and stay humble, to become a champion at work and the ultimate team player at home. Based on high-performance psychology research and Dr. Jim Afremow’s two decades of experience providing mental training services across the globe to athletes and business leaders, TheLeader's Mind will help you master: Valuable leadership lessons through powerful parables and stories from well-known leaders. The actionable steps leaders must take to change their thinking and become the leader they want to be. The necessary mindset to push through the challenges you face and take control of the direction your career and home life are taking. Tips and techniques to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and challenges in order to excel. Stop struggling with the expectations you face at work and at home by fundamentally changing the way you process what’s happening in your life. The mental edge that sets elite athletes apart outlined in this book will help you become the champion leader you want to be.

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. 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 this is voss here from the chris voss show.com bet you didn't see that coming hey guys uh welcome to the show we certainly appreciate you uh coming to the show listening to the show except for that guy in the back way over there yeah that strange looking fellow i don't know

but he does have a chris voss shirt on so i don't know he's welcome anyway guys thanks for tuning in be sure to subscribe to the linkedin newsletter that thing is like killing it over there there's a big 132 000 group over there and And LinkedIn's is kind of becoming a thing. They're kind of becoming a thing. They're getting like an audio clubhouse type thing going on. There's a bunch of interesting stuff going on. So check that out. Probably because people are looking for more jobs as they quit their jobs. Anyway, go to youtube.com,

fortune is Chris Voss, goodreads.com, fortune is Chris Voss. See everything reading over there. And my books go to all my groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok,

all those places. The crazy kids are playing today. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it,

like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. We have two authors of the same book. They're not two authors of two books. They're two authors of the same book. I don't know why that's pertinent, but I just want to make sure I'm factual with my audience. They are both on the show to talk to us about their book that they put out on November 9th, 2021, The Leader's Mind, How Great Leaders Prepare, Perform, and Prevail, or Prevail, however you want to pronounce it, or it depends if you're Canadian or something. I

don't really know. Today, we have the two authors on the show, Jim Afrimo, and he's a PhD, I should mention, as well, and Phil White. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you? We're doing great. Thanks so much for having us on. We're really excited to talk about the book and all things leadership with you today. There you go. Leaders.

We've heard of those guys. So give us your plugs real quick for both of you, places, people you want to have go look you up on those inner tubes in the sky, the interwebs. Yep. I'm on Twitter at GoldMetal gold metal mine i spent a lot of time there and then jim afromo on instagram there you go there you go jim just pay attention to jim you don't need to hear my ramblings but if you wish to i'm reluctantly at phil white books on pretty much everything now reluctantly is that part of the ur, the word? No, but it'd be great if it was. Oh, I was going to say that's pretty cool. So give us just a real quick rundown of both your bios. Who the hell are you people? I'm just kidding. Well, I'll start. So yeah, well, I am a sports psychologist and a licensed professional counselor. So I get to work with athletes and performers for everything that's happening kind of in there with their craft, but then also in their personal life as well. So I'm kind of the 360 degree person. I worked at Arizona State University for about a decade in sports medicine and counseling services, then worked for the San Francisco Giants as the peak performance coordinator and work with a lot of athletes around the world, a lot of

performers. And Phil and I team up on a bunch of fun projects. And this is the first of many books together. So we're excited to be on your show. Phil, take it away. For sure. I should probably begin with the Dr. Evil. The details of my life are quite inconsequential. But as you asked, Chris, I guess they might be somewhat consequential so i'm an emmy nominated writer and obviously jim and i teamed up on this book i've teamed up with folks like kelly starrett on waterman 2.0 andy galpin and brian mckenzie on unplugged fergus conley on game changer so usually there's an expert like jim or the others i've mentioned on one side and an audience that can benefit from

them on the other side. And just the words guy in the middle, although in this case, Jim and I actually split the chapters and it was indeed a co-writing project rather than ghostwriting or something like that. So yeah, just words usually around human performance. Although I did write a couple of history books back in the day, one how churchill ended up in the middle of rural missouri in 1946 and the the speech about the cold war of the iron curtain speech he gave there and then another called whistle stop about how on earth harry truman came back from the dead some of the polls stopped in september of 1948 but somehow truman managed to come back and win that truman sounds pretty cool i like truman i've read a bunch of his stuff.

So welcome to the show, guys. Congratulations on the book. What motivated you guys to get together and write this book? Yeah, so Phil and I work with, we consult with a bunch of teams and a bunch of individuals. And it just seems like it's becoming more and more clear that there's a lack of good leadership everywhere we look. And many performers that Phil and I have spoken with have said, we've asked, who's someone that you look up to or who's been a leader that really inspires you on your own leadership journey?

And we get a lengthy pause before we get some names. And so one of the things that we want to do with this book is almost look at each chapter as a case study on a leader that you might not be as familiar with and from different walks of life and how good leadership is good leadership, just like when we talk about high performance is high performance. So when we work more on the mental game, a lot of the skills and strategies translate to other domains and same thing with leadership. And so we profile a former Navy fighter pilot that flew for Southwest Airlines and had a heroic day landing a plane that blew out an engine. We look at a firefighter that fights some of those crazy wildfires in the forest.

And just a whole slew of really interesting people. But there's a lot of commonalities that we'll talk about that make them such good people. I've had the same problem. I've had people say to me, what leaders inspire you? My book was Beacons of Leadership when it came out in October. And I just include a lot of my stuff, but I've had a really hard time finding leaders that I really like. And so I've been perplexed at the same question. Is there a reason? Are there fewer leaders than there used to be? Or there's a reason? Is there dearth of them or the opposite?

Yeah, I think one thought on that is that it's becoming harder and harder also to be a good leader. Because I think back in the day, it was just, here's your marching orders. Let's go follow those marching orders. And that's not the way the world works anymore. And to get the best out of people, I think you need to have the X's and O's down, so to speak, using coach language. But then you also need to have high emotional intelligence. And also, we're a society now where we have short-termism on our mind. We want immediate results. And so new leaders don't get a chance to really grow into becoming great leaders. And so they need to know how to be a great leader right off the bat.

And then more senior leaders, I think, need to go back to the basics in terms of how to be a good person and how to treat people in such a way that it does inspire them to be their best. Yeah. Any thoughts you want to throw in here, Phil? Yeah, I think if we look at, there have been a few good books on this, but say in the startup world, the focus has become on either getting on Shark Tank or the VC model. And we're seeing more and more people not even having a minimum viable product sometimes.

So it's just an idea and they pitch it as the next Uber or the Facebook of dot, dot, dot. And so if we look at something like Dan Lyons is disrupted, which is a book about a 52 year old journalist misadventure in the startup bubble, I think is the subhead. And I've read it several times. He just talks about, he quotes some more old school folks from Silicon Valley about how, I mean, even Steve Ballmer, number two for a long time at Microsoft, and obviously famously the owner of the LA Clippers said, back in my business, a successful business actually had to have profits. And he was taking

a pot shot at Amazon at the time for all the years they lost money. But Dan Lyons in Disrupted goes into all these years that Dropbox and Box.com and all these Twitter has lost not just little money, but prodigious amounts of money. And yet the founders are still billionaires. And in fact, the net worth is just increasing. So I think that the consequences of not leading well have become somewhat tempered by the way organizations have changed. And also you see a lot of flatter organizations where the head of a company is so, divorce is the wrong word, but is so separated from the consequences of their actions, or there are so many layers in the bureaucracy below them, that they're somewhat insulated. And even we see golden parachute deals, as they're sometimes called for leaders that wash out in banking. Well,

if the president of Bank of America does a crappy job for three or four years, they get told to go away and they get 20 million in their pocket for their trouble. So almost bad leadership has become not incentivized, maybe, but the consequences aren't what they maybe used to be in smaller, flatter organizations. And back when, even in the first dot-com bubble, that was when the hype first started to overtake the reality. But when you can get away with raising millions of dollars and paying yourself a lot of money for a company that, in the old way of doing things, would have been viewed as either unsuccessful or maybe even a complete bust. Yeah. Dan Lyons is a great guy,, friend of mine on Facebook. And I remember

privately talking to him when he was trying to take over Valley wag from Sam, what's his face or whatever, and didn't like the experience. And then right then he got that book deal and it's a great book. You really expose the, just the craziness of, of especially during that.com era. The only person I really can think of is that I can ever think of is maybe Jack Welch, maybe Lee Iacocca. But today, they're so transparent and so much about them, there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, like, you can see the, okay, well, maybe the Google people or Eric Schmidt is a leader,

but then I have to hear about his open marriage or we don't do evil bullshit, which they finally gave up the hypocrisy of that. And so maybe it's just, it's harder to know them. There's a lot of people that still worship Steve jobs, but I've had friends that work for Steve and Steve was an asshole. And that finally came out after his death and what's his face, his book and all in a lot of documentaries. So I don't know, maybe it's the other thing I want to mention is I can't remember the name of the gentleman that we had on who was CEO of a company. And on the show, he just said, Chris, CEOs of major companies, you maybe have one to

two years that you're up there. And so you really don't want to invest in R&D. You really don't want to invest in the future because you don't really care. You're not going to be around to see it. You're kind of almost a substitute teacher for a short term. But people like Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca and other people, they had some really long runs. Maybe that's why there's not as many leaders. Yeah, I think that's important. Just the idea of who is a leader as well. And that's one of the, hopefully the themes that comes across in the book is that we should all look for more leadership opportunities in our everyday life, whether at home, at school, at work, on a sports team. And that's something that you don't see as much either in sports. We hear be a leader by example. Well, that's good,

but not enough. And so sometimes you also have to be an enforcer and an encourager. And with social media, the way it is these days, it's fascinating hanging around groups of people, teams, those kinds of things where everyone's on their phone when we go out to eat. And so that communication is really lacking and being a great communicator is one of the hallmarks of being a good leader. So I think most people think of Lee Iacocca or some of these big name people as, well, those are leaders. I'm not a leader, but I do think that we all can be more of a leader in our own life. And what's more rewarding than that as well? So that's exciting. What do you think, Phil? Yeah, I agree with that. I think to your point, Chris, that success leaves clues, right? So if you were to read an Iacocca biography, or even there are some clues there in re-watching Ford v Ferrari right now, which is a great portrayal of him in his early days when he was just running marketing at ford

and kind of butting heads with some of the higher ups kind of between him and henry ford the second but i think we what we tried to do in the book is there are at least a couple of leaders in there for organizations that have been immensely successful so one of them is our good friend nick gill who's been the strength and conditioning coach through multiple rugby wild cup cycles for the winningest national sports team in any sport over the past 150 years the new zealand all blacks and what is it about the all blacks that drives that culture of excellence so there is a book called legacy by james kerr's very good, but Nick was able to provide some more in the trenches type view of how that's evolved over time. And then also Paul Ratcliffe at Stanford is one of the most successful

coaches in men's or women's NCAA soccer. So what is it about those programs or those cultures, or as you mentioned, those companies back in their heyday that allows someone to leave a leadership legacy over 20, 30, 40 years? And so we tried to, as Jim said earlier, tie a red thread through or connect the dots, follow the trail of breadcrumbs into the forest and see where it led us in terms of what are some of those principles of not just occasionally winning a championship or trying to be excellent now and again, but just a persistent pursuit of excellence. Yeah. I talked about that in my book too. I said, everyone can be a leader. And I talked about the beacon on the hill and stuff. So yeah, I believe everyone can. And so you guys trying to get the mindset of whether you're a CEO or whether you're an everyday person, you can be a leader, I guess. Did you guys define leadership? What really makes leaders? I think that's my problem with leadership is like, like Mark Zuckerberg, okay, might be a

great leader, but if you're starting like, to me, I have moral hangups. If you're starting genocides in Miramar or you're Elon Musk and you're like an asshole half the time on social media, are you really truly a great leader? So did you guys define it at all? Aramar or you're Elon Musk and you're like an asshole half the time on social media. Are you really, truly a great leader? So did you guys define it at all? Yeah, well, it's exciting in terms of our first chapter. We get right into that. And we interviewed Nick Peters, who's a forest fire district manager that I mentioned earlier. And it's funny because he says being a good leader is being a good person first and foremost. And that's hopefully what we want people to take from reading the book is providing these examples, real life examples of good people doing good things for the right reasons. And what did he say, Phil? He said, like, you never look at someone that is a total jerk as a good leader.

You might think that they might accomplish certain things. But would you really want to follow that person or emulate that person? And that's what we wanted to do too, in terms of one of the sources of confidence is having role models that, hey, I could kind of model myself after them a little bit in certain ways. And we want readers to be able to pick different leaders in the book that, man, if I'm in this situation, who do I want to emulate from the book? And so versus just a bunch of tips and tools and techniques and those kind of things. And you guys put together actionable steps leaders can take to change their thinking, become a leader they want to be. Talk to us about some of those maybe steps or tease them out if you would.

Yeah, Bill, you want to grab that one? Yeah, I think a lot of them were related to the case study. So the point of this format, and we're following this up with our next book, which we can't say too much about, but it seems to be a good format. So it's kind of like this, Chris, like you ask a question and then get out of the way and let the guest talk,

which is why your show's great. And so instead of us trying to be like the coach of coaches, we tried to ask, we prepared really well and tried to ask original questions, but we tried to ask, we prepared really well and tried to ask original questions, but we tried to ask open-ended questions and just get to the heart of the matter through the person's eyes, through their experiences, rather than us trying to put words in their mouth or us having a hypothesis and then just trying to get them to confirm it. So, for example, with the Steve Kerr chapter, which we unfortunately weren't able to get the Steve

to interview him. So this was one of the two, along with Daniel Labetsky from Kind. We kind of observed Kerr's leadership style from afar and did our research. And with him, it came down to him seeking mentorship from both inside and outside the game of basketball. And one of those mentors was Pete Carroll from the Seahawks and carol really challenged her to come up with these core four values as he calls them and so joy is one mindfulness is another etc and then to work with everyone from the assistant coaches to the star players like draymond green steph so with curry he arguably plays the game more joyfully than anyone before so that's the the joy

value that he is able to instill in his teammates and then the even of some newer things that leaders that we mentioned earlier like ayakoka may not have even entertained in terms of this level of statistical analysis in the nba so they work with their stats guys and figured when he took over they were near the bottom of the league at the Warriors in assists so they said we want to lead the lead the league in assists and we also want to have over 300 touches per game across passes per game across every single game across the four quarters and so how did they come up with that well Well, talking to Carol, talking to other coaches and leaders, they realized the more involved everyone is on a team, the more invested they are, the more responsibility they're given, the more joyful they're likely to become. nebulous it's not so nebulous when you have a defender the caliber of a Draymond Green and really one of the last true enforcers in the game maybe not quite in that Charles Oakley style because you can't get away with that anymore but Draymond Green isn't going to take crap from

anyone so who was a leader a little bit lower down the chain but not much that could embody that competition value that they could bring into every single practice. Well, there's a Draymond Green. And so it's a great case study of Kerr looking outside of the game of basketball for mentors in other sports, other disciplines, doing what they say, and then finding a way to make it personal to him. And really, it's around value-based leadership and principle-based leadership. And Jim, maybe you could give an example of how Nick Peters does that when they have disciplinary area issues with some of the firefighters. Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point that you're making, Phil, in terms of each of the leaders that we interviewed and profile in the book, they create this authentic culture. And a lot of

leaders might not be aware of their core values, what are our core values, or they might just slap them on the wall and slogans and posters and they don't really come to life. And so they're not really, they don't really mean anything. And that's the thing about what Phil's just mentioned about Steve Kerr. It's like, we need to bring these to life in everything we do. How can we, the competitiveness part, we're going to keep score at everything that we do in practice. Joy, who's going to have more fun than us playing this great game of basketball? Mindfulness, let's be present. more fun than us playing this great game of basketball. Mindfulness, let's be present. Let's be with each other. There's too much noise out there. Let's separate the signal from the noise. And then compassion. We're not just productivity machines.

We're human beings with real things going on in our life. And so I really like that. And exact same thing with Nick Peters with the U.S. Forest Service. He talks about duty, integrity, and respect and how he tries to bring those to life every day in every interaction and everything that they're doing. And so if someone's getting a little bit out of line, instead of just cracking them over the head with a hammer, his response is, respect is one of our core values. How does that behavior relate to the core value of respect? And then it's not kind of like a power struggle between him and that coworker or that person below the chain or lower down the chain.

It's a discussion about values and what's most important. And so it just feels a lot healthier when you do it that way. Yeah, when you see companies or leaders that put up, here's our values and here's what we're doing. And the Ten Commandments, like you say, put them on the wall. And then they just overtly do everything the opposite of those. And you just sit there as employees and look at them and go, seriously?

Like this is the biggest bunch of blow, hard stuff, whatever. The one person I think was a great leader i didn't do enough study on john but i got to know john laguerre from t-mobile on clubhouse and was on some panels talked to him but i think he was a good he was a very fun guy and he really was kind of interesting how he embraced the brand and kind of made it more at&t we love at&t phones and our friends at at&t but at&t was kind of stuffy. Verizon's kind of stuffy when you really kind of look at their corporate thing and they're very ultra professional, I guess, maybe. I don't know. But John was always really fun and he seemed to really have fun with

his employees and stuff. I might count him in there. I haven't done enough study or known John well enough in his past, but it seemed like he, employees really liked him, I think. I don't know. Yeah. I love the quote from the San Francisco 49ers football coach from back in the day. Who was the one – well, this was – who was their super with Montana? He said – Bill Walsh. Bill Walsh, yeah.

He had a great quote along these lines, which is, your enthusiasm becomes their enthusiasm, and your lukewarm presentation becomes their lukewarm presentation. So that's another, you know, key thing is leaders really do set the tone. What tone are you going to set? It's one of those things I think in the workplace, it's serious business. But on the other hand, the more fun you have with something, and it's not goofing off on, it's more intense fun or fun with a purpose, the better you do. And then, and then the better you do, the more fun you'll have. So I like leaders

that bring out some of that joy in the work. And in Steve Kerr and all of the leaders that we mentioned, I think people feel better. And so it brings out the best in them instead of just feeling like uptight and too serious all the time. Yeah. I remember my friend Andy Grignon talking about Steve Jobs. And Steve, if you came in and had a bad presentation or you bumped into him on a bad day, he could just make you want to go to your room and hang yourself. He could destroy you.

You guys did a lot of different things where you talked about, you studied and talked about top-tier athletes, how to get in the zone and thrive on a team. Talk to us about that sort of mentality. Yeah, well, as we all know, if you want to lead others, you have to lead yourself first. And so one of the things that we ask all these leaders is how do you take good care of yourself? And so a lot of them have these really good routines in terms of how to get their mind right. And a good question, I guess, for all of us is what I want to, if you're a leader in a position of power, what I want to work for me today or what I want to play for me today when you're

walking in. And so a lot of the leaders that we talked about, they really ask themselves that question at the beginning of the day and make sure that they take care of themselves so that they can walk in and be present and be available. So that's a big thing. Breathing techniques, visualization exercises, positive self-talk, all these things that help athletes to perform their best definitely work equally as well, if not more importantly, for leaders. So is character a big part of it then, would you say? Yeah, I think that the book is, I think that the leaders that we do profile, it's all about character. It's all about integrity. It's all about, is this someone that I would want to emulate?

And if I do, then I'm going to probably be a lot more successful. I do think that character kind of leads to your destiny. Character is destiny in a lot of ways. And bad character under pressure tends to make everything worse. Yeah, it brings out the worst. I mean, I remember everyone was like, when you get money and success, right? I think that was my own delusion. When you get money and success, right? I think that was my own delusion. When you get money and successful, all your problems are fixed.

And really all it does is amplify what a horrible person you are if you have issues and stuff. So I was probably a bad boss. And it just makes everything worse. And if anything, if you're not self-aware, it makes you just become worse because you're just like, wow, I'm horrible and people like this. Follow me. You guys talked about different tricks and techniques to overcome insurmountable odds and challenges in order to excel. There was a question I had for you that slipped my mind,

but what are some other things you want to tease out about the book that can help people? And I guess a lot of these tips can be used at any level. Yeah, well, you mentioned character and then also kind of having power and what that does if you don't have the right character. And what's fascinating is in one of the chapters, we profile Marcus Aurelius. And so when you think about it, Stoicism's gotten really big these days. And so we talk about Stoicism, and that's what Marcus Aurelius really leaned on in terms of being a good person first and foremost. And then controlling the controllables, those kinds of things that he drew from Stoicism. But here's a guy that was the most

powerful person maybe of all time. And he didn't use that position of power to his own advantage where a lot of other Roman emperors, they just had a field day with that. And so he's just, I think, a great role model for someone that not only walked the talk, but he not only talked the talk, but he walked the talk in terms of he could have done whatever he wanted. And yet he always tried to do the right thing. And I think that's something that we should all try to live up to as well. Do you want to jump in here, Phil? Yeah, I think another one is not being afraid of giving your subordinates more control than you think they should have or fearing that they're going to leave. Because you mentioned it earlier, like if you look at the stats of how often people job hop, and it's not just CEOs, it's every level. And also those that

do it strategically that think, okay, within two years here, I'll get promoted to marketing manager or whatever. And then it will be marketing director. And then it will be chief marketing officer. And these are the stops along the way I'm going to need to make. There's just a lot more mobility physically around the country and around the world, particularly with the work from home movement, obviously gathering steam the last couple of years.

But there's also a lot more of transience within roles like people aren't satisfied with just getting to x and being the best at that they have to think oh okay well if i'm going to do this for this long well that if i'm not advancing beyond that in terms of my title or my pay grade then i'm failing so i think that the new zealand all blacks is a great example where right before a pivotal world cup match you would expect the head coach to be giving the cheesy sports movie talk or whatever. We're going to go like full Remember the Titans or full Braveheart, whatever. And that's just a cliche.

But with the All Blacks, they let the captains lead practice. And arguably the greatest leader in world rugby, Richie McCaw, the only captain in that sport to lead a team to two rugby world cup victories he told the coaches like get out at a pivotal moment before a game all the coach and support staff had to get up and leave the room including the head coach and they're still not really sure what he said behind closed doors. But they got it. And then on the field, when they were in danger, it was a pivotal moment, against France on their home turf in New Zealand. And typically the All Blacks, they're a really high-scoring, potent offense. But this was a drag it out in the mud, very low-scoring affair.

I think the score was like 8-7. So each team had scored a try, the equivalent of a touchdown. Maybe they had a penalty or two each, and it was going down to the wire. And in world rugby, the coach is up in a box. He's not on the sideline like a basketball coach would be. And he actually radios down to support staff, including our man Nick Gill, who we focus the chapter on. And he had some instructions for Nick

to pass on to Richie and the vice captains and Nick ran onto the field and this was during I think it was either a water or an injury break and he's about to deliver it and he sees Richie huddling up with the two vice captains and he didn't even deliver the message because he knew he looked in their eyes and knew I'm just going to complicate matters they know what they got to do they know how to rally the troops and they end up winning their second world cup and if he had intervened even if the advice from the coach was correct from steve hansen up in the box what if it had gone wrong what if it was the wrong advice what if there was something down on the field that that coach couldn't see from the sky box and so sometimes with with the walk, with allowing your captain to clear the room,

with not delivering the message you think because you trust your senior leaders, I think there's a lot that we can all pull from that. Didn't Phil Jackson do some stuff where he would do like meditation stuff where he would have really simple pregame speeches? I don't know. I'm just pulling from memory. But it's something that wasn't over complicated. Like you say, that wasn't the Braveheart speech. Maybe, I don't know. There was something, there's something more Zen, I think, in, in what he was trying to do and putting people in that feeling state and stuff.

So this is really interesting. And maybe, I don't know, maybe we just have leaders, but we're just not looking for them in all the right places or something. I don't know. Yeah, I think if you haven't had David Sachs, last name spelled S-A-X, you wrote the book The Revenge of Analog and then followed it up with a book called The Soul of an Entrepreneur. And his contention is that the startup myth circulates around some of those folks you mentioned earlier. So Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk being

prime examples. But 98% of entrepreneurs, it's a lifestyle business. So it could be something just for them. It could be them plus an assistant. It could be them and a couple of high school or college buddies, or maybe it's a family business. And so these case studies that we hold up and that are taught in books and at business school are largely useless outside of the world of VC capital and that model of these outliers. And we're taught that if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to follow the model of one of these. And as you say, you make that mean, I think he gave the example of

you rewatch the social network and you think, man, Zuckerberg was an asshole. And then you think, I want to be just like him. You go out and recreate that, but that's not actually your personality. And you really, in your heart of hearts, don't want to create a company on that scale. And obviously, as you said, maybe there are some ethical and moral concerns there. But sometimes, to Jim's point earlier, the people we pattern ourselves after, whether it be in business, in sports or whatever, are not the right role model for our personality. They don't align with our goals. They don't align with our goals. They don't align with our principles. And so why the heck are you looking at this person and also recognizing that they're,

from a financial standpoint, they're a total outlier. And that is the 0.001%. And so the path for you is, in all likelihood, that's completely the wrong path. And those are the wrong character traits to aspire to. And they may make you compromise along the way and end up on a path that you didn't expect, don't want, and end up looking back years later with regret thinking, man, why didn't we just stick to what we had wanted at the beginning? Or why did I pattern myself after this person who I don't even admire, and it sent me down the wrong path? Well, to piggyback really

quickly on that, we do quote Jim Collins, the famous author of Good to Great. And I love what he says. He says, kind of reinforce what Phil said, is he said that good to great leaders never wanted to become larger than life heroes. They never be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results. And that was definitely something that we saw with the people that we spoke to for the book. They just wanted to do the right thing and just so impressive. And it also took a lot of courage too. That's something that we're not seeing a lot of in leadership these days. We're trying to please everyone and then you please no one. But it takes courage to really speak the truth and stand up for the right things at the right time. Yeah. You've given me epiphany because

you've been talking about the tech scene and how that works with technology stuff. And there's a lot of people on the show or those in the show show, those are my whole audiences almost at one time was probably Silicon Valley. And I have a lot of friends that are in that chase of the, you know, they're on with whoever with their VCs and they're in that chase to try and do the thing. And I've talked to them and there's a real, there's that real thing that Dan Lyons talked about with the toxic masculinity. And sometimes they really admire Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. And you're like, holy shit. Like those, I mean, Steve Jobs, one thing I looked at Steve Jobs, I don't think anyone's ever asked this question. Maybe this is a book, butve jobs was incredible like i mean

his attachment to workmanship and craftsmanship detail i mean the guy was like super anal but a super monster narcissist incredible asshole to everybody somehow he wasn't able to inspire a cult-like following of people that were willing to move mountains for him and that was cool but then i asked people i go what what if Steve Jobs had been a better person? Like maybe donated charity every now and then, or not done a secret deals to limit the poaching of employees and capping everyone's income in Silicon Valley. What if he'd been a better person? How much bigger would Steve Jobs have been and more respected instead of we just all kind of thinking, well, he's, he made some phones and he's an asshole.

But, you know, you made me realize this epiphany that we live with the Silicon Valley VC thing in a new term of what I grew up in. The greed is good. And I grew up in the era of Wall Street moving, taking over from Main Street and the destruction of the 40-hour years or 40 years you work for a company and you get the gold watch. And I remember the greed is good era of that, the junk bonds, Michael Milliken. And really, we're in that same sort of thing where it's still basically greed is good. And you look at, who's the other person I was thinking of? The Uber CEO who built Uber. I mean, just an incredible asshole.

The guy who built WeWork. Look at that mess. So it's really interesting. You guys may really, that kind of just popped in my head. Shit, we're in a whole new greed is good era. Yeah, I think long-term greed is good. I think everyone wins with long-term greed. Like, let's say Nick Saban with Alabama football.

We want to win every title we can, but we're more focused on long-term success than short-term fixes. I think short-term greed is where everything goes wrong, which is we're going to try to take advantage of everyone and rip out as much money as we can from whatever we can. And so long-term greed wouldn't be the correct word there, but it's kind of memorable, I think, in terms of long-term success is always more important than short-term success. And so let's get addicted to, stop being so addicted to today and be addicted more toward the future, I think, is important. And more people are coming around to that in terms of Daniel Lubezki with Kind Bars. It's not just a sign on the wall, be kind.

It's something that they try to live and enact in every business decision that they make. And think about how powerful that would be if more companies were like that. Yeah. Yeah. And is it maybe because boards don't care about leadership so much anymore, maybe? There's a quote again from Disrupted where Lyons talks off the record to a buddy who owned a company that was actually successful and profitable. I think it was an engineering company nearby to where he lived. And they had lunch when he's throwing up his hands at working at this HubSpot, this marketing automation, a bro fest that he spent a couple of years with and the focus of the book. But the guy said, here's the thing with my board.

They're like mushrooms. I keep them in the dark and I feed them shit. I remember that quote. I remember that quote. It's hilarious. We need to get Dan on the show. I think I've invited him a couple of times to come on the podcast, but the only people who come on are the people who are doing the book tour.

And I think he was working on a second book. I think he's put it out. There was another one that came after where he kind of it was the one with the the hamster wheel but i think a human inside it and so he just instead of it being his own story he talked about what you were saying the transition kind of from you know main street to wall street and some of the stuff that is it pack it goes over in the book the unw Unwinding, kind of the loss of that social contract where if you were a leader, you had a moral obligation to take care of your employees and their families versus now they hide, as you alluded to earlier, they hide behind these PowerPoint decks of like

the culture deck from Netflix or from these other companies. And it's just filled with 140 slides of platitudes, buzzwords. And as you said earlier, Chris, we say not as we do, but it sounds good. Or the Google thing, don't be evil. And it's like, okay, well, that's nice. That just seems such a cliche. Yeah, I mean, it's just sloganism, right? It's the difference between a narrator being a cicero or a churchill and

somebody who's driven by focus groups a team of 10 speech writers and then still can't get it right whether it's on on the teleprompter or they try to go off the cuff and that's not a partisan thing it's both parties it's all parties in all countries. Like we just don't have like go back and watch the darkest hour and learn about Churchill's speech writing, which he really based on Cicero. Look at how Cicero formulated rhetoric. And it is sure you've got to move with the times. But I think there are still fundamental principles. And as you mentioned with Lubezki, his family were Holocaust survivors, and that is where the name Kindbar comes from. Like the light in the darkness, the milk of human kindness, when it appears to be, as Ben Harper wrote in a song a couple of years ago with Charlie Musselwhite, No Mercy in This Land, the purpose-driven, the servant leadership-driven entrepreneur. And now that's just baked into, again, marketing campaigns. And it's great if somebody gives back 1% for the planet, or they give 5% to charity, 10% to charity. And that's really coming out of this collective

leadership at the company's desire to do good. If they start there, fantastic. If you're just doing that for PR, that's a problem. So look to the Daniel Lubezki example and see what this guy was all about and what his family story was. And then you'll understand like true mission driven or purpose driven leadership. I think it was Jay Samet who was on the show on his book, Future Proofing You. And he talked about how he's like, I'll tell you the dirty secret with CEOs. He goes, you don't need to be there for me one, two, maybe if you're lucky, three years. He goes, you got a golden parachute to get the hell out of there. And whether you're good or bad, you're going to hit the button and end up with a buttload

of money. And it just doesn't inspire any sort of real sort of long-term leadership. And if corporations are running that way, they're not, I mean, you don't really even have time to establish yourself as a leader, I think. No, but it's when I started doing sports psychology, a mentor of mine said, be really careful, like be honest, be real with athletes because they could smell bullshit a mile away. And so you need to be authentic. You need to be a real person.

And the same is true now in everything. And unfortunately, a lot of times these gimmicky kind of approaches and inauthentic slogans and whatnot, they just create this culture of saying, like, here we go again. Now these are our core values for this year. Yeah. That's a new guy today. All right. Cool. It's like substitute teacher day.

Exactly. And everything. And so all of that is just wasted energy that backfires. But really being able to tell, I think that the three things that employees want to know is, can I trust this person, my boss or whoever? Can they make me better at my job? And then do they actually care about me as a person, not just a productivity machine? And I think if you could answer yes to those three, you're going to get more out of those people and you're going to go through a brick wall for them. And as one athlete once said, I would go through a brick wall for my coach, come around, patch it up and then go through it again because I know my coach really cares about us and wants the best for us.

Wow. That's really important. Anything more you guys want to tease out on this before we go? I think just again again the servant leadership so tammy joe schultz the pilot who should really have a sully style movie the scenario of this southwest airlines flight was one of the engines blew out it blew out a window and then partially sucked that lady out of it and the crew and fellow passengers managed to get her back inside the cabin but she ended up passing away you know while they were still midair the cabin's partially depressurized, and yet she has to land this thing. So even just beyond how to deal with pressure in the real world, there's a lot of lessons there. But one of the things that struck me about Tammy Jo, and her husband Dean was part of it,

they were both former naval, basically top gun aviators that then went to work for Southwest, as a lot of former military pilots do. And she will go back with the cabin crew between flights. If it's one of these, they land, they have a couple hours and then they have to run it back the other direction, that kind of situation. And she'll, if somebody's left a seatbelt fastened, she'll unfasten it for the next person that's going to sit there. She'll help pick up trash. She'll go back and help the staff check out the kitchen and if the coffee pot is rattling in a weird way in the previous flight help try to figure these things out so

there are less problems in the air and also just as an example the younger uh folks on the crew that yes i'm up here with my co-pilot in the cabin but that isn't a literal division of this wall between us this is all we're all meant to serve each other we're meant to serve our passengers and she'll bring lemonade or chocolates or whatever particularly if it's a newer crew that she doesn't know to break the ice get to know everyone by name and these things seem like the things or like basics or well how could that impact well when you're relying on that crew to hold down their end of the bargain, which is the engine just interest of small acts of kindness, small acts of respect, and small acts of servant leadership really start to pay their dividends. And you never

know when that crisis may unfold. Now, hopefully a lot of us are not going to be listening and not going to be in that scenario, and the three of us today. But I think it still holds water that if you do build up those little deposits with people over time, that eventually you'll reap what you sow. Yeah. She made a really powerful statement. She said, you don't trust people you don't know. And so we all know that communication is a huge part of leadership and just her emphasizing the importance of personal interaction with the people that you work with. I think it was just one of those little gold nuggets from her chapter, how important that is. And like Phil said, when, when everything is, when the shit's hitting the fan, you know, do you, can you trust

people? And how are you going to trust people that you don't know? So I really liked that she drove that point home for us. That just hit with me, man. I just, I don't know if you saw my head. I was like, holy crap. That's brilliant. You don't trust people you don't know. Yeah. Did I get that right? Yeah. That's brilliant. That totally makes sense.

And trust is a big factor in character and everything else. So this has been wonderful. Great discussion, gentlemen. Awesome sauce. Give us your guys's plugs before we go out so that people can get to know you guys better on the interwebs. Yep. So check out Equal Mental Mind Twitter for me and jim aframo on instagram yeah i guess um look at jim's stuff first or maybe only but then if if

you want to start a conversation philwhitebooks.com and when i can bear the inanity of instagram at phil white books all right phil uh thank you very much both of you guys for being on the show we really appreciate it thanks chris we appreciate you thank you yeah great questions chris really appreciate it thank you very much guys good go uh order up the book you want to check it out the leader's mind how great leaders prepare perform and prevail we need to have more leaders in this world and more good leaders let's put it that way with a good moral compass and i remember with the question i got lost on now the emotional the emotional awareness what's the word i'm looking for emotional intelligence

that's something i started looking into for me emotional intelligence because i have known i'm dead that's the first step that's the first step yeah so we'll have to talk about that on the next book or the next time we're together but But I think that's a definite good point. I've got to I've got to take that emotional intelligence test. So I need to take that and find out more about what that's about and what this emotion thing is about. Anyway, guys, it's a week. Just ignore it. A week. I'm kind of an alpha male. So I just kind of like emotional intelligence.

We have some people that have talked about on the show and and I'm like, yeah, we should dig into that and see. And, hey, if it makes you a better person. But order up the book, guys, because then you can learn so much more about how to be a great leader. Also go to YouTube.com for us as Chris Voss. Goodreads.com for us as Chris Voss. All of their groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those places. You guys know the drill. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.