The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation by Mark Graban

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation by Mark Graban https://amzn.to/419X8EO https://www.markgraban.com/ Winner! 2023 Goody Business Book Awards, Business Problem-Solving Category The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an engaging, inspiring, and practical book by Mark Graban that presents an alternative approach to mistakes. Rather than punishing individuals for human error and bad decisions, Graban encourages us to embrace and learn from them, fostering a culture of learning and innovation. Sharing stories and insights from his popular podcast, “My Favorite Mistake,” along with his own work and career experiences, Graban shows how leaders can cultivate a culture of learning from mistakes. Including examples from manufacturing, healthcare, software, and two whiskey distillers, the book explores how organizations of all sizes and industries can benefit from this approach. In the book, you'll find practical guidance on adopting a positive mindset towards mistakes. It teaches you to acknowledge and appreciate them and take necessary measures to avoid them while gaining knowledge from the ones that occur. Additionally, it emphasizes creating a safe environment to express mistakes and encourages responding constructively by emphasizing learning over punishment. Developing a culture of learning from mistakes through psychological safety is essential in effective leadership and organizational success. Leaders must lead by example and demonstrate kindness to themselves and others by accepting their own blunders instead of solely pushing for more courage from their team. This approach, as Graban highlights, fosters a positive and productive work environment. The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. Whether a startup founder or an aspiring leader in a larger company, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility and show you how mistakes can make things right.

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. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by.

Thanks for tuning in. As always, we bring you the smartest people, the brightest minds, the people who have lived amazing lives and told amazing stories and lived to tell them, I guess, maybe some to fall back there on. And they bring their stories to you, which, as I always say, are the stories, are the owner's manual to life. The CEOs, the billionaires, the white house, presidential advisors. We've got another one on later today. Governors, Congress members, us ambassadors, astronauts, TV, and Pulitzer prize

winners in print. You know, just all the smartest people are on this damn show, except for me, of course, because clearly I just, I don don't know i i'm in the idiot who bought the mic and called it a show and now it's a thing after 15 years anyway guys please support the show realize that we deliver that wonderful concise syrupy data we call the chris fosh show that can change your life and give you the chris fosh show glow it rhymes it's like a lyric so i don't know i don't know where i'm going on a Monday. But we have an amazing author on the show today. But before we get to him,

we're further showing your family, friends, and relatives. Goodreads.com, Forrest S. Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, Forrest S. Chris Voss. Subscribe to that big, crazy LinkedIn newsletter and the 130,000 group on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is killing it over there. Go to, what is there? Chris Voss YouTube.

There's Chris Voss 1 on TikTok and chrisfossfacebook.com to find all the wonderful stuff we do over there go to what is there chris voss youtube there's chris voss one on tiktok and chris voss facebook.com to find all the wonderful stuff we do over there i was excited to talk to this gentleman because he's has a brilliant mind he's a multi-book author his latest book came out june 30th 2023 called the mistakes that make usivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. Mark Rabin is on the phone. He's on the show, live on the show. He's not even on the phone.

He's on the show, and he's on with us today. And I think this book, The Mistakes That Make Us, I think it was written by my father. No, I'm just kidding. It's a joke. I had to get in there. Mark is an author, speaker, and consultant whose latest book is available right now. He is the author of the award-winning book, Lean Hospitals, Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement, and others, including Measures of Success, React Less, Lead Better, improve more. He serves as a consultant through his company, Constancy Inc., and is a senior advisor for the technology company, Kynexus. He hosts podcasts including lean blog interviews

and My Favorite Mistake, which is, I think, what my dad also refers me to. There you go. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. It's great to be on with you. I can tell you've been doing this a long time when you fell back into on the phone with us today, right? Yeah, on the phone with us today. And caller number 15 gets tickets to Leonard Skinner. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Give us your dot coms. How can people find you on the interweb, sir? Yeah, they can find the book, mistakesbook.com. My personal website, a little harder to spell, markgraben.com, G-R-A-B-A-N. And I can also be found on LinkedIn. Thankfully, my name's unique enough. There's one other Mark Graben, I believe, in the US. Ah, you might have the same issue I have, but I'm the cool one. So Mark, give us a 30,000 overview of your book. Well, it's a book that was born out of and inspired by the podcast that you mentioned, my favorite mistake. And after hosting that, you know, it was a pandemic project. And after

hosting that for a while, I realized there are some amazing stories from some incredible people. And there's a lot of overlap, you know, types of people you were describing, you know, come on your show, Chris, to sitting members of Congress, entrepreneurs, business owners, pro athletes, like people who have really reached like the top of their fields and their professions. And guess what? They make mistakes too. And the ones who are cool enough and humble, strong enough to come and admit that they've made a mistake and to share their story. And the theme of the podcast and the book is really about celebrating learning from mistakes,

realizing we all make them. People aren't successful, I think, because they've avoided mistakes. If anything, they've made I think, because they've avoided mistakes. If anything, they've made more mistakes, but they've learned from them and they've avoided repeating them. And the book is a guide for leaders, business owners, managers who want to create that kind of environment in their company. There you go.

You know, learning from mistakes is so important because the, you know, fool me once, what was the great George Bush quote? Fool me twice, fool me once what was the great george bush quote fool me twice fool me once but anyway just same on me yeah yeah he really botched it but the fool me once thing you know shame on shame on me but yeah what i hate is making him twice in an error because you're like how did i i knew not to do that, but I did that again. I did that wrong. So there you go. So what, what for you, you said this was born out of the podcast and COVID is there a backstory there as to why you created that other, that podcast name per se and COVID had something to

do with it? Well, the name and looking back at it, I think it was a mistake to call the podcast My Favorite Mistake because I'm a big Sheryl Crow fan. And that song is, you know, one that I know really well. It's a great song by her. Not a mistake to call it My Favorite Mistake because I could get sued for it. Like, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain you can't copyright or trademark a song title. So I'm okay using the title, but it created a search and SEO nightmare because if someone were to go to Spotify and type in the words, my favorite mistake, they're going to find the Sheryl Crow song and it's harder to find my podcast.

So maybe, you know, it should have been our favorite mistakes or something like that. I outsmarted myself. maybe. There you go. And did you start it under the dense cloud of COVID then? Yes. So, you know, I, working as a consultant, I worked, worked mostly with healthcare organizations. So I was traveling a lot, visiting and working with the health system in North Carolina. And, you know, we knew the pandemic was coming. And then that week hit where nobody was traveling anymore except idiots like me. And the airport was empty. And, you know, we thought, well, we'll see you in a couple of months.

Well, you know, it was longer than that. But so I was home and trying to do what I could remotely. And I've been podcasting since 2006. And it's a pretty niche podcast. But you podcast long enough PR people, you get on these lists, and they start pitching all sorts of guests to you. And one of them was Kevin Harrington, who was one of the sharks on season one of the show Shark Tank. And I thought, Oh, my God, I would love to meet him. I would love to interview him. My podcast, you know, a theme of Lean Blog interviews is too niche.

And so I went back and forth with a couple of PR people. What do you think about a show focused on learning from mistakes? And they thought that sounds great. Kevin Harrington thought that sounded great. And he led the way by being the very first guest. And he told the story that, you know that was a mistake that could have put his infomercial business completely under. In fact, he was willing to share that, really set, I thought, a great example and a great tone for the whole series.

That is awesome. So you've had the other podcasts for longer, Lean Interviews, and I think a few others I see here. Yeah. 2006, I started one called Lean Blog Interviews back when I was interviewing people over the phone or through Skype. People were having to download MP3 files to their MP3 player. But yeah, I started doing that podcast.

It's focused on, like my professional background is rooted in something called lean manufacturing or lean management. That's basically an offshoot of Toyota business practices. So manufacturing companies, startups, hospitals use those methods. And there's this culture of learning from mistakes at companies like Toyota. That's kind of the overlap and the bridge to the focus here on learning from mistakes. It's not a new topic for me.

There you go. So tell us a little bit about your upbringing. How did you grow up? How did you get into the business you're in, et cetera, et cetera? So I grew up in the Midwest, born in Ohio, but really raised in the Detroit suburbs. My dad worked 40 years at General Motors as an electrical engineer. So growing up know, growing up, especially like in the 80s, the question was generally, where's your dad work? Nowadays, it can be either parent, but you know, is your dad work at GM, Chrysler, or Ford's, as people in Michigan put an S on the end of Ford. My dad was a GM. So I was really influenced by being around the auto industry. And that's where I started my career as an industrial engineer at a greasy grimy General Motors plant in my hometown it probably took a couple years

off my life both physically and mentally working in that environment to start my career. There you go and so you you how did you get to where you are today you you've got a basically some other things you do. You do speaking, consulting, articles. Tell us about some of the services you do for people there. Yeah. So as things evolved, I had an opportunity to do consulting independently. So I started off doing consulting through other firms.

First book was published in 2008 called Lean Hospitals, as you mentioned. And that opened up doors to do consulting and speaking and coaching really as an individual in an organization. So really, you know, it's management consulting focused on quality improvement, process improvement, just helping the hospital be a better hospital using lessons from disciplines like industrial engineering, my MBA education, my experience in manufacturing companies. That sounds weird to the people in hospitals. We're going to learn something from Toyota, but there's a lot to learn. So being able to apply that has been, it was a bit of a surprise. That wasn't my intent for my career, but I was able to take advantage of some opportunities to go in a new direction and try to help people in healthcare. There you go. So give us some more tease-outs

of what's inside your book and what it entails, maybe some of the stories that you had in it that you liked. Yeah. So there's a lot of stories from podcast guests. There's stories from my own work and career. So at first, the book I thought was just going to be a collection of stories from my guests. But then as I was writing and my editor really encouraged me to weave in some of my own experiences. And in particular, the technology company, software company, Kinexus, that I've been involved with for over a decade, where that's an example of a company that's really small, really tech focused. It's not like Toyota, but Kinexus has very intentionally built a culture of learning from mistakes, a culture where it's safe to speak up and admit

a mistake where leaders, including the CEO co-founder lead by example they admit mistakes that gives permission for others to admit mistakes and when it happens the the the response is never punitive or to mock or embarrass or belittle people there's this really constructive focus on yeah it sucks to make a mistake but like you said Chris let's not make that same mistake again. Let's learn from it. So the book really shares a lot of those practical stories and some of those practical tips for how people can build that culture of what a lot of people call psychological safety of basically, do you feel safe to speak up at work or not? And what are some of the key tips to help people feel safe? It really comes back to those two key things.

As a leader, demonstrate and model those behaviors, including saying, I was wrong, I made a mistake, and encourage others to do the same, and then reward your employees when they follow your lead. It's kind of simple, but it's still, I think, pretty rare to see that. But it's a solvable problem for sure. Building that culture. Cause people are going to make mistakes. People are going to miss things. And, you know, as long as they correct, as long as you've got an organization that's a learning organization, you know, you, you learn from mistakes and that's one of the things that people do, especially as entrepreneurs and as companies, you know, as you're trying to resolve a problem or create a thing like the iPhone, you're going to, you know, it's complex.

You're going to make mistakes. You're going to hit dead ends. You're going to have all sorts of issues. And, you know, you just can't fire everybody every time that they make a mistake or you have an empty office probably. There's an old story. I remember, I think Tom Peters told it. I can't remember if it was from IBM or HP, but it was one of those big top companies at the time. And the vice president or someone under the CEO had done a deal and done some sort of kerfuffle that had lost like $11 million or $12 million or something.

And so upon the discovery of it, and he decided to go into the CEO's office and tender his resignation. He's like, I just cost the company a bunch of money. Here's my resignation. You probably want me to go now. And the CEO said, no, we don't want you to go. We just spent $11 or $12 million educating you on what not to do. So we've invested heavily in your education we're not you'll lose you after all this and that might have been ibm or there's a version of that story

that traces back and i included this in the book back to ibm founder thomas watson that's who it is of whatever sum of money probably adjusted for inflation it was 11 billion dollars in today's dollars but that was But the quote was something like, why would I fire that person? We've just spent all this money educating them. Why give that education to a competitor? Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So is there a personal experience where you made a mistake that led to an unexpected learning opportunity or innovation? Yeah, I mean, that happens a lot, especially when you're trying to innovate or when you're trying to do new things or even making a career decision. I mean, there's a lot of guests on My Favorite Mistake who've told a story where their favorite

mistake was a career choice. That's kind of true for me. One of my favorite mistakes, I took a job coming out of MBA engineering program at MIT in 1999. I took a job at Dell Computer. If you remember then, I mean, Michael Dell was on the cover of every business magazine. Nobody would have said that's a mistake. Kind of like the old story, no one ever gets fired for choosing IBM. Nobody would have accused me of making a mistake to go work at Dell Computer. But after some time there, I did start thinking maybe this was a mistake just in terms of cultural fit. It was a smaller company than General Motors. It was like one-tenth the employees, but it was still a big company. And, you know, so I started thinking about, you know, moving on. And, you know, I had a great experience there, but that opened a couple of key doors. So one, that brought me to Austin, Texas, that gave me an opportunity then to meet the founder of

a software company that was the first tech company that I ever worked for. So I left Dell to join that startup. And, you know, I don't regret taking the Dell job, but I was able to turn that mistake into a newer, better opportunity that I wouldn't have had if I'd gone back to Michigan. And then secondly, and most importantly, in a professional, in a personal side, I met my wife because I took that job to go to Austin, Texas. And 22 years later, she still puts up with me. There you go. See how that whole one mistake led to another. As long as she doesn't look at you as her mistake, you'll be fine.

So there you go. Yeah, it's interesting how these things play out and how we recover from them. You know, when you're building something, whether it's a company, teams, everything else, there's a million mistakes you're going to make technically when you really think about it. You know, it was the old story of Edison making what, like 10,000 tries to make the light bulb or something. He said, I haven't failed.

I've learned 10,000 ways that didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. He even had a shop burned down one time. So the question I had for you was, how can an organization measure the impact or success of fostering a culture that embraces mistakes? How do you measure that? You just have a pile of mistakes on the floor.

Well, I mean, there's a couple of things you can do. One is you can use different tech platforms to like literally create a log and a database of mistakes and lessons learned. Like if you wanted to, you could keep track. Now, I think being mindful of mistakes that you make is, I think, a healthy habit. It takes some of the edge off of, you know, feeling bad about making mistakes. I'm like, not to be flipping about it, but I think it's just good to be aware of, you know, I call this out. I was wrong. I made a mistake. I was wrong about that. It's just, that's a fact, right? And I think

trying to figure out how do we move forward with the learning helps us not dwell on the past. So I think logging mistakes can be really a positive thing. You could literally count them. I think there's other indirect ways of coming about it where, again, a key contributor to a culture of learning from mistakes is a culture of psychological safety. There are some really well-designed and validated surveys that you could administer across different teams and sort of like gauge a level and compare that against benchmark companies like yours this is something that as a consultant i can take organizations through like you can survey people and and look for trends or patterns in different parts of the company of where is that culture of psychological safety strongest that

would probably point to a good culture of mistakes. And there's a lot of research, and it's my own experience. Teams with a higher level of psychological safety will outperform other teams, end of story. It's not a nice-to-have. It's just a critical core piece of an organization's culture. Nice, nice. And so that's probably some way where they can use learning from mistakes to foster innovation, I guess. Absolutely. Because if you think of the alternative of people feeling safe to admit

mistakes or to say they were wrong and that we tried something and it didn't work out, that happens if you're being a scientist or an experimenter or an entrepreneur. If you punish that, if you stifle that, all kinds of dysfunctional things happen. People will hide and cover up their mistakes, which means we don't learn, or they will, you know, drag a company down by, you know, continually just rationalizing and justifying their bad decisions. So the alternative of a culture of blame and shame and punishment, you can probably survive that for a little while, but that's really not the path to becoming a great world-class company.

There you go. I saw that sort of corporate blame and shame mentality with when we launched our first multimillion dollar company my business partner had been working for a big blood lab firm and and so he he knew how to get it in with them for our first contract and he the the company lived in that blame sort of culture in fact they would write reports and email every meeting you would ever have or interaction you would have with someone you would go write a report or some sort of email to try and devolve any sort of blame that could possibly come from whatever

that was you know it's constantly covering your ass basically and yeah literally it reached a point where people that's all they were doing like 75 percent of their day or something was just writing you know documenting things and spin stuff to to if they wouldn't get blamed for stuff you know they even had at one point i remember their their company at one point had a they had a timer and a and a and a and a punching card, swipe card for their bathrooms so they could know how long you were in the bathroom for. It was just like the most militant freaking office space ever. Everyone's backbiting. Everyone's gossiping.

And it was like who could write the note the fastest after a meeting that would dissuade them from any sort of responsibility. So in that vein, is it important to try and figure out how to hire people that are self-accountable? There are some people that aren't into self-accountability and self-awareness. Do you have to take that into account in your HR department? I think, yeah, that's an important point. I would think of, you know, we kind of could brainstorm some behavioral interviewing questions that start with that famous phrase. Tell me about a time when I think a powerful question is tell me about a time you made a mistake and what happened next.

Right. So the thing I admire about my podcast guests, Kevin Harrington in episode one. Episode two was then US Representative Will Hurd from Texas in this line. Will Hurd, he was on our show. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, brilliant people,

incredibly successful people. Neither of them, just to focus on the two, Kevin and Will, neither of them blamed others. They completely took ownership of what they did. You know, Will's story was one where he lost his first primary runoff because he said basically that he didn't listen to his political consultants who told him from their experience, and that's why he hired them, that, hey, a runoff is different than the initial election. So Will didn't blame them for not being more convincing or something. I appreciate it. So I think if you're interviewing people and they tell a story where they admit a mistake, now, look, you don't want to hire people who are doing reckless things. But if they had a reasonable business idea or product idea or a reasonable hypothesis, if you will, of, okay, if I do this, something positive will happen.

And it turns out to be a mistake. I think taking ownership of that is key. They may have stories about how their colleagues or leaders reacted to the mistake. And if their leaders reacted badly, that might be part of why they're looking to change jobs and say, look, you could come here and be part of a culture where, and I think there's two sides to this coin, right? We want to do things to prevent mistakes.

There's an old chapter in the book about preventing mistakes and what Toyota calls mistake proofing. And then as you're doing something new or being an entrepreneur, there's a chapter in the book also titled iterate your way to success. So here's the thing, like we're not, we're not being flippant. We're not being reckless. The way to avoid big catastrophes is to make little mistakes early on and then have a culture of learning from that mistake instead of feeling pressured to double down

on the mistake, right? So I think you can kind of draw this out whether people have been individual contributors. If someone, if I were hiring a leader, I would ask that question in a different way. Tell me about a time one of your employees made a mistake and how did you handle that? You know, I think answers to those questions would be really telling. Because, you know, you don't want to hire people who have maybe developed bad habits from other companies. I think that's why Southwest Airlines famously never wanted to hire people who worked at a different airline. And I think we, you know, could be careful that we don't hire someone who has developed bad habits of even in, you know,

hospitals, not too different than medical laboratories, perhaps, you know, there's this culture, this default sad culture, they call it naming, blaming,

and shaming. And the fact that it rhymes doesn't make it any better or any better. So, you know, we don't want people who've spent too much time learning some of those bad habits. Well, it's so much lost productivity too, isn't it? And you're misfiring and you're going down the wrong direction and road because you haven't fixed what the true problem is.

Absolutely. So, yes. I mean, it'll drag down our ability to improve or to innovate when, like you said, as you were saying, Chris, a culture of CYA, a culture of blaming others. I mean, I think deflecting responsibility, I think, is a good evolutionary survival trait that we've probably, as humans, built up over 100,000 years. The people who survived were the ones who were able to effectively blame somebody else.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. If you can blame, if you survive and blame, you're able to blame somebody else. You know, if you're,

if you're doing parachute jumping, your parachute doesn't open. It's a little hard to blame anybody after that, but I don't know what that means. But that's a great example where people are accountable for their own shoots. Yeah. There you go. Darwinism. but that's a great example where people are accountable for their own shoots yeah there you go darwinism they are doing a lot of things to prevent a mistake you don't want to if you die in a skydiving accident there's no opportunity to learn from that and avoid repeating it so there

are certain things again we're like parachute jumping which i've never done but giving medications to people in a hospital like you need need to work really, really hard to design systems that make it really difficult to make mistakes that might harm or kill a patient, for example. That's true. That's true. You go in for a surgery and you come out with something missing that wasn't supposed to be missing. Yeah.

My case, they added something on. I don't know what that was. It sounded funny in my head at the time. A little off kilter today. So what do you see as the, based on your research and experience, what future trends do you foresee in business innovation and learning cultures? Well, it's kind of you to call what I do research, but I guess I'll take that. I mean, you've learned it. You've studied it. I've studied it. I've studied it.

I mean, I'm not an academic, but I think as a practitioner and I've interviewed 250 people on the My Favorite Mistake podcast and I've reflected on my own education experiences. What I would hope to see is more organizations realizing the importance of psychological safety and learning from mistakes that that they can learn from positive examples not just coyota but you know some of the best health systems have figured this out when you create a culture where you replace the naming and blaming and shaming with something more constructive. Performance is better. So this isn't just this kind of woo-woo, touchy-feely, this is a nice thing to do.

It drives business results. And some of the other academics and people who are doing more formal studies that I've interviewed and read and learned from, I mean, the connections are clear. Again, like it's just good business. And, you know, I think over time, the competitive nature of markets, going back to Darwin, I guess, in survival, the companies that figure this out are going to not just survive, but thrive. Yeah. He had his finger on the pulse. He should wrote your book but he didn't so that's his problem yeah the uh yeah it's it's so important you know i learned a long time ago i didn't have all the answers as a ceo in a company and but you know being able to make mistakes quick

you know what is facebook's mantra break things fast i think they they call it themselves oh right yeah oh and that kind of spreads through silicon valley break move fast break fast yeah yeah which they've done a lot there you go talk to the folks in marimar the so yeah it's it's something people need to do and i would agree with you people need to hire for it they need to pay attention to people are self-accountable one of the problems we we seem to live in is this world of victimhood competition and i'm not going to point fingers at millennials and gen z's but i am and you know it seems like it seems like everybody's just not only going for the victimhood narrative like i'm not responsible and self-aware to control my destiny the world is taking advantage of me in every sense and purpose

but it's interesting that i created most of these scenarios and it seems like that just is so popular right now and you've got i i would think you really need to spend some extra time watching for those people coming through the the thing the the victimhood narrative people they're always trying to hang on somebody else. Well, I'm not going to take offense at any of that. I'm Gen X, so I don't know. Maybe I'll punch up- Did they say Gen X or Gen Y? No, no. You were saying Gen Z and millennials. So I'm saying I'm not- Gen X is the greatest. Yeah, we're the greatest generation.

I'll punch up at the boomers for a minute because sometimes there are boomers out there that will say all kinds of ridiculous things and not want to take responsibility for what they've said or what they've done. So some of that is maybe more human nature than it is generational. I would agree with you. There are certain aspects of our human nature that don't take self-responsibility.

So our self-accountability, I suppose, which I think is the same. I don't know, maybe. I don't know, maybe. I don't know. I'm not a wordsmith, evidently, on a Monday. So final thoughts I'd pitch out to the audience as we go out on what you do there, your services, how people can onboard with you and work with you, consult with you, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Well, thank you, Chris. So again, people can go to markgraven.com if they want to learn about kind of the broader range

of things I do as a podcaster and an author, but then more directly with organizations as a coach, a trainer, a speaker, and a consultant. I would love to talk to people about ways I might be able to help them around a culture of learning from mistakes and a culture of improvement. If people are interested in the book, they can go to mistakesbook.com. If they think buying the book might be a mistake, they can download a free chapter

and they can try it out and they can see. Mistakes are good though. So they should, they should just, they just buy the book. It's not that expensive, but here's, here's a pro tip because on one of my previous books and i think this is someone who with an agenda they wrote a one-star review that said you know i there was nothing for me to learn from this book so i threw it in the trash and i'm like that is not normal human behavior that is not and my pro tip is if you buy a book and you don't like it amazon will very easily give your money back even if if it's an electronic book. But mistakesbook.com slash chapter is a way for people to try that out. Or if they go

to Amazon, you can click and scroll through and sample the book there as well. And the podcast, if people want more free stuff for their ears, in addition to listening to the Chris Voss show, mistakespodcast.com is where they can learn more about that. You can find it wherever you're listening to or watching Chris's fun show here. There you go. The mistakes that make us or what my father calls his favorite mistake. Me.

I don't know. He did that mistake. He made, no, I mean, he literally made you, you and your mom. Pretty much.

Yeah. But I don't know. It's a, I don't know. It just sounded good as a joke in my head today. I mean, he literally made you, you and your mom. Pretty much, yeah. But I don't know. It's a, I don't know. It just sounded like the best joke in my head today. I mean, it might've been my mistake if you were adopted. So I hope I didn't step in up there. You know, it is kind of funny. My, I took years ago, one of those first early DNA tests.

And my mother took another one years later. And I don't know if I got a bad test or maybe they got the wrong saliva. I don't know if something happened. it was in the early days of it and my mother's had a test done that's completely different than mine and she's very angry about it and she wants me to redo my test it could be a lab mistake so i i could i could have been switched at birth you know i was born in 68 when all the weird stuff was going in the hospitals and you know it was in california too it was a weird time so but i mean i don't see being adopted as a downside i have a lovely family but right you know there's a few siblings that i'd rather not be related to that sadly they do look like me so i'm pretty sure they're but evidently

as the first child it's i i took all the most best parts of the womb out, the smartest and the best looking. And I just left behind salvage for my, the rest of my siblings. That's what I tell them. So they hate me anyway on that, on that side note. No, this is really important. People need to learn mistakes, have, have self accountability. The one of the things we always had around my office

i'll throw this story in for fun at the end was one of our mantras of culture was the only the only the only stupid question is the unasked question so everyone needs to ask questions and making a culture where if you ask the question that you weren't sure about, that might make you look stupid. Hey, Chris, I know I went through training,

but I still didn't get the part about which button blows up the machine. You know, that, that's an important question to have asked because I've had people blow up a $30,000 machine. And go ahead. Yeah, that is a critically important part of that culture of psychological safety. Do people feel safe asking questions and not get yelled at? Well, we trained you.

Figure it out. You know, that's when people get blown up. You know, like, you just can't retell me that. And so that, that really helped our culture where we, the only unasked question was the, the only stupid question was the unasked question. So please ask questions.

Are you clear on everything? One of the things I would do too, is I would, uh, when we would teach people how to do something like work a machine or whatever, let's just put it in a widget sense. We would explain to them how we came to decisions on how we decided to do something like work a machine or whatever let's just put it in a widget sense we would explain to them how we came to decisions on how we decided to do their job for them or

how the machine worked etc etc or how we innovated a certain process or service or whatever and by explaining them the thought process behind it they actually sometimes would come back go you know i thought of a better way to do this and the way you're doing it is well a mistake as you put it so you know those are some different techniques we use in culture to make those things happen and final thoughts right when when my mistake for interrupting but i get excited about these things another important thing is feeling safe to disagree with the boss in a constructive and respectful way you know yeah i mean you can you can do that in a disrespectful way you just might get thrown out the second story window but that's another thing that's a it's a callback joke for the show no it's it's

you you and as a leader you have to make sure that your people know that you have that healthy judgmental style where you can allow them to make mistakes and you can allow them to grow because they've got to grow. Your organization has got to grow. And that's so important. So, Mark, it's been wonderful having you on the show today. Give us your dot coms where we want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah. So, again, markgraben.com, mistakesbook.com. I invite people to connect or follow me on LinkedIn.

You can just go search Mark Graben. That's the main social media place on the interwebs where I tend to be. There you go. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 group on LinkedIn. Chris Voss won on the TikTok.

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