The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 259: Shane Snow - How To Build A Dream Team

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Starting point is 00:01:21 That's G-U-S-T-O-com slash leader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text Learners to 4422 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world. Text learners to 44222. Now on to tonight's featured leader with the great Shane Snow.

Starting point is 00:01:51 The LA Times and Forbes call him the next Malcolm Gladwell. He's the bestselling author of one of my all-time favorite book. books called Smart Cuts. And his latest book is titled Dream Teams. It is so good. It was a topic of conversation. He's a dynamic storyteller, celebrated serial entrepreneur, has been declared a wonderkin by the New York Times, a Maverick by Details Magazine.

Starting point is 00:02:14 And his work, GQ, says, is insanely addicting. And I would agree. A few of the topics we got into, the power of cognitive diversity and how to get it on your team. Then the real reason business mergers and sometimes marriages don't work. The answer is not what you think. And then why it's beneficial for leaders to study the origin story of hip-hop music to help build effective teams. As always when you talk to Shane, he will make you think this one was so good.

Starting point is 00:02:50 I know you'll enjoy it. It's Shane, welcome back, man. And it's been almost exactly three years. You're on episode 10. And now you're back almost 250 episodes later. It's crazy. But I'm so happy to have you back, man. Welcome.

Starting point is 00:03:09 Thank you. Me too. You know, it's funny when you do, I was really grateful when you had me on your show. When you are episode number 10 on a podcast, you kind of wonder, will that podcast be around in three years? Yeah. And I'm really pleased to see how awesome this community has gotten and the caliber of people that, I managed to sneak into the group with just because you had me early.

Starting point is 00:03:31 So I'm super grateful and really excited to be back. Well, the timing was helpful too. I just read SmartCuts and I made my list of the first 100 people I wanted to talk to. And I told you this last time and it's obviously still true because I still have the list. And you and Adam Grant were the first two names I put on the list that I wanted to record with. And so I was so grateful that I was able to record with you so early and Adam a little bit later. and now that list has over 750 names on it. It's incredible to see what happens in a few years' time.

Starting point is 00:04:02 So it's really cool now that Dream Teams is coming out, and I love this book that we can talk more about leading teams. And I'm just excited to have you back, man. Thank you. My pleasure. So last time we were on, I didn't ask you this, and I really wanted to bring it up now that I've started regularly asking really smart, intelligent thinkers this question. And that's when you, when you think about leadership and people

Starting point is 00:04:28 who sustain excellence over an extended period of time, and I really, I'm intentional about both of those words of sustained and excellence. I'm curious from your perspective, what are some of the common themes you found in those people? So for a long time, I've been drawing this little two-by-two matrix chart on whiteboards when I talk about what I think makes for the best leaders. And what the chart is, is it has skepticism and credulity on one axis. So that's one thing. And on the other axis is optimism and pessimism. And you might think that skepticism and pessimism are kind of the same thing, but they're not.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And I think it's really interesting, one quadrant of this chart. So optimism is believing that the world can be better, that, you know, things can get better. pessimism is believing that the world can't or that whatever thing you are talking about is not going to get better. Skepticism is not taking things at face value, whereas credulity is. So a lot of people who are kind of wonderful, ambitious, maybe like me, slightly manic, tend to be optimists who also believe. And there's something really powerful about that. But I think for leaders, the most powerful quadrant is to be skeptical and optimistic. So you think that it can happen.

Starting point is 00:05:51 You believe that we can make this work, that we can make the future better, but you don't take things at face value. I find that to be really powerful. But when you ask sustained excellence, it makes me think of another one that I just started drawing on white boards. I'm workshopping this so we can see how this resonates, that if you have a leader who is completely supportive emotionally and sort of personally, and that's one axis, complete emotional support and the other side of it is complete independence. You can do what you want. You are free

Starting point is 00:06:22 from kind of my interference or grasp or whatever and including support. And on the other axis, if you have complete intellectual support and the other side of it is complete intellectual, this is the word that I'm trying to figure the right way to put this, but conflict, pushing. The most interesting part of that graph to me is complete personal and emotional support an entire pushback, that a leader that can do that, that can support their people and let them know that they are safe, that they are loved, they are trusted, but is always pushing back and pushing them to do more, that's the kind of leader that's going to take their team and make them better over and over and over.

Starting point is 00:07:05 I think of, what do you think? Well, I just love how deep you go like instantly. So I'm not surprised, but I wasn't certain what you're going to say. So sometimes that's the cool challenge of that. this of forced me to be a better conversationalist is to think of my feet. So I always think of parallels here and you're one of the people who make me think this way, but from reading what you write. But I think of Kim Malone Scott and Radical Candor her book. I'm not sure if you've read that or talked to her. Okay. Oh yes. Yes. So that that when I think of how they care personally,

Starting point is 00:07:35 but they're willing to push and the greatest coaches. So I relate to athletics. I know from reading Dream teams, you don't necessarily relate to that all that much. But I, I, I, I, I, I, I, relate to that because the greatest coaches I've ever had, I could tell they really truly cared about me. They really wanted me to get better, but they also weren't afraid for me to get to be very mad at them at times because they pushed me so hard. They were, they knew it was there, even when I didn't know it was there, and they were willing to push and push and push. But they, they also knew when it could go potentially too far. And I, and I think that's, that's what the best coaches I've had have done is that I knew they cared.

Starting point is 00:08:19 They were consciously competent. They were smart about what they were doing, but they also were willing to push, even to the point where there are days where while I love them now, there are days where I felt like I hated them. And that seems to be a commonality among the greatest coaches as they know how to figure that equation out. I think that's right. You know, you're connecting something to me that I haven't thought about in a few years.

Starting point is 00:08:39 And smart cuts four years ago, I wrote about how the best mentorship relationships are mentors who are there for your whole journey, not just to teach you one thing. And that's kind of the same thing, right? Like you see the bigger picture as a leader or as a mentor. And so you're not doing what, you know, we see some coaches doing where they're feeding their college athletes, you know, drugs that are in the long run are not going to be good for them or, you know, just giving them opiates so they can play through this game and not caring about them. They actually have that personal care. They know when it's going to go too far, when they're going to break. But they also push them past where the players think that they can go and help them become great.

Starting point is 00:09:16 I think that's a super cool kind of relationship to be in. Do you have people like that for you? I mean, I wasn't planning on asking that, but I'm curious, because you're leading a business. You've started a business. You're a prolific writer. People call you the next Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, there's a lot out there about you. How does it work in your life from a mentor perspective or people who push you or help you?

Starting point is 00:09:39 I think it starts with I have simultaneous. I have this weird kind of thing in my brain where I think like a lot of people who are ambitious, I have a lot of faith in myself. And with that comes a bit of ego that I try to work on. But I also have this paranoia that I have blind spots, just from growing up in a small town and moving to a big town and having said enough things that have put my foot in my mouth. And also, I think traveling a lot of places and realizing

Starting point is 00:10:09 There's more than one way to do things right. I have this a bit of a catch-22 there. I don't know if that's the right way to put it, where I want to learn so much and I want to change and I want to adapt. So I've kind of framed a lot of my enemies in life as collaborators. And I talk about this a little bit in Dreamteams. In my own process for work or developing, say, a story or a book

Starting point is 00:10:35 or a creative project or even in business, I do tend to collect people, collect inputs that are critical. And I invite them so that I can get past my ego. If I say, hey, tell me what's wrong with this, then I feel less bad when they point out something that's wrong. That's important to me. But one of my business partners, his name's Dave Goldberg, he is the best at being the guy in the room who says,

Starting point is 00:11:00 I don't think so, even if he probably thinks so. And I think this has been super important when we were growing our business. I stepped aside last year and the business is growing great, but one of the key things over the seven years that I was there helping run it was Dave doing that. And I think that's super crucial. Another thing that I have started doing more and more lately in my writing is rather than I used to kind of rush to get the post out, you know, rush to get the article out and then I'd be annoyed when, you know, my editor at some magazine says, now you should change all these things. I used to be annoyed by that. Now I, I, I, I, I think maybe just because I'm getting a little older and I'm a little more patient, I actually look for people who can kind of make the job harder in that article process. And you have to kind of balance taking all the advice or process the advice versus the problems they spot. But I have in particular a couple of people who have really criticized my work in the past, including one person who I think might personally hate me,

Starting point is 00:12:02 who I sort of in my effort to, not feel terrible about that have looked into my writing process once in a while. When I'm writing something controversial, I'll hit this guy up and I'll say, hey, would you tell me what you hate about this before I publish it so that then I can take that and use it to push myself to make it better or shore up my arguments? But that is part of what I try to do in my process. And I think the next project that I work on, the next thing that I build, I want to bring people in either, you know, as sort of permanent collaborators or as temporary collaborators who feel very, very comfortable telling me what I don't want to hear.

Starting point is 00:12:42 I think that's really important. The disagreeable givers, right? They're disagreeing, but that's how they show their givers because they're willing to speak up. I think it's critical to have those members on the team. And so that leads me into dream teams. which is your latest work. I've been waiting for you to put out of books and smart cuts. I still give smart cuts as much as any book to other people.

Starting point is 00:13:09 And now I think Dream Teams will probably be alongside it. What fascinated you about wanting to devote years of your life to collaboration, to leading teams, to putting teams together, to why some mergers work and some don't? I'm fascinated by that, that you decided to devote so much time to this? Well, first of all, thank you. That's super flattering.

Starting point is 00:13:35 Part of it is this very thing that I was just talking about, realizing that my work got better the more that I was pushed by other people. And then also realizing that everything that I do is building off of other people's work in some way, even if I'm doing original studies or I'm doing new interviews, I'm introducing something new. It's all based on other people's work.

Starting point is 00:13:56 And it's all built off the shoulders of whoever built the technology or whoever, you know, came up with the concept that I'm now pushing forward. And so thinking about that, you know, and that's interesting. But then at the same time, I went from this role in the company that I started in 20. I went from the guy who was setting the vision and helping, you know, develop things and actually building stuff to the guy whose job was to pick the right people to do all those things for me. And that was really uncomfortable. And I had all this kind of anxiety around doing a good job at that. And also, part of it was looking at the culture of our company, realizing that there was something special about the place. People would walk in

Starting point is 00:14:39 the building and they'd say, wow, this feels great. And people would show up to work smiling, which, you know, I feel like is rare. And so trying to distill what about our little company was special? What made it that way? And how do we keep that as we grow? And the thing is that I tend to do when I have a question like that or something that's sort of been tickling my brain for a while is I'll use journalism as an excuse to learn. So I went and I interviewed people who had great companies that I admired, took a tour of history of, you know, of great organizations and great cultures, started really digging into what culture means. And then eventually, as I was starting to take these things that I was learning and apply them to our company and seeing the

Starting point is 00:15:22 patterns in what we were doing right, what we were doing wrong, I kind of couldn't stop thinking about this, what's the right way to put it, paradox of humanity that I saw in my company, but you also see in the world around us, which is that when human beings come together, we can do so much, we can do incredible things, we can become more than the sum of us. And yet, most of the time that doesn't happen. And, you know, the bigger our company got the slower we moved. To the, they use the analogy of trying to turn a battleship, right? big ship turns more slowly.

Starting point is 00:15:58 And I wonder, does it have to be that way? And then also just looking around it, I think honestly the state of the world and American politics and all these things in the news, it all revolves around different people with different ways of seeing the world, different ideas, different opinions, not being able to get along. And instead of kind of harnessing the potential in those differences, using it to slow things down or to turn on each other, there's a period where I got really kind of worked up about my father is a nuclear scientist and engineer. And I grew up learning about how this amazing

Starting point is 00:16:37 technology is going to make energy cheap. And there's a point when I started getting obsessed with the idea that that same technology that put food on the table for us growing up is also the number one thing that might destroy all of human life, which is a huge bummer. the reason is the same thing. It's people not getting along. Different scientists from these same countries that want to blow each other up collaborated to make the technology. So I got kind of obsessed with that and then realized that this is an analogy for everything. And that set me down this path. All of these things kind of converged at once. And it's like a lot of, I think, things where the mythology in hindsight sounds so clear, but it's sort of a muddy process. I was looking at things

Starting point is 00:17:20 like the advantage of bringing outsiders into a community. I was looking at patterns of immigrants flooding into certain cities and that causing both more fear in the city, but also more patents being developed and things like that that kind of all end up crystallizing around this theme. And it was about a four-year process of trying to whittle down what these things meant and see what could I introduce to the world that's new, ended up doing a bunch of original stuff.

Starting point is 00:17:50 studies and research and traveling around the world to see things for myself. And it turns out that scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists have a lot to say about human collaboration and about teamwork that we're not talking about in business. And I think part of this is because this research is new. And part of this is because they speak science and not business. And so I wanted to write a book that could translate those things and the other patterns that I was seeing into something that business people could apply, but then also something that isn't a chore so that normal people who are interested in teams

Starting point is 00:18:26 and history can actually enjoy this and use this as something to talk about that also introduces more topics around working together better, making the world better. So there's a lot to get to here. No, there really is because I, like I said, I didn't, I don't script questions, but I have a ton of highlights and notes written. So I love to dive in. If you're cool with it, we can take our own kind of leadership slant on some of this,

Starting point is 00:18:57 specifically when it comes to, well, really a number of different topics. So as I mentioned before, your writing is compelling to me because you do an incredible job of story science, story science, story science, as well as leaving cliffhangers, which is very rare. and these types of business books that some would say. And as I mentioned to you prior to when we were recording, I meet with my writing coach and I tell her, hey, read Shane Snow's work in Smart Cuts. And she did. And she's like, and she's a professional writer, you know.

Starting point is 00:19:30 And she said, that gives me writing envy. And I said, well, what do you think it makes me feel? So. It's nice. No, but it's true. And I, just all to say, I just love the method in which. you use because that's how I personally learn. So let me dive into one of them.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So the power of cognitive diversity, this is a big phrase that comes up a lot. And I'd love for you to briefly explain it. And if you want to use a story, whatever is best. But why that actually, I just want to tee that up and then have you take it from there, cognitive diversity. So the adage, two heads are better than one is not true. Let's start there. It's not true.

Starting point is 00:20:12 cognitive diversity is the principle that says two heads will only be better than one if those heads think differently. And even then, it's not a sure thing. So if you have a group of people that all think the same, they're only going to be as smart as the smartest person, which is mathematically impossible for that not to be the case. However, if you have a group of people that think differently than each other, there's the potential for that group to come up with something that's bigger than all of them, that's smarter than all of them. And this is the way breakthroughs tend to happen.

Starting point is 00:20:43 Even if it's one person that makes a breakthrough, it's because they're drawing on the cognitive diversity of other people when they work on this thing. So Einstein talked about how the difference between him and most people is most people, when they find the needle in the haystack, he'll keep searching through the whole haystack. And that's because he was really keen on finding the different ways of looking at things that other people didn't and that other people miss.

Starting point is 00:21:08 And that's how we put the different perspective. together that led us to think of gravity and motion differently in the theory of relativity. So that's what cognitive diversity is about. The thing that I got obsessed with that kind of led me to this is when you look at teams in history that are incredible, incredible teams in history that kind of beat insane odds, you'll notice that it actually is the thing that's worked its way into all of the Hollywood tropes of rag-tag groups of misfits. So any super show where there's a bunch of superheroes, they're all different, and that's what makes them beat the giant army of villains or whatever.

Starting point is 00:21:48 I got particularly obsessed with buddy cops. I love buddy cop shows like everyone else does, and I loved rush hour. And you notice when you dig in, and I actually made a spreadsheet about this, and I made a spreadsheet of every buddy cop movie that I could find on IMDB, and the traits of each of the cops and kind of the general plot. It turns out that the plot of most buddy cop movies goes something like this, that you have two police or detectives or FBI agents or someone who's supposed to solve crimes, and they get put together and they're very different. And initially, they are not happy about this because they don't get along. And usually there's one who's the straight-laced by the book,

Starting point is 00:22:29 you know, in the heat, this is Sandra Bullock, do things correctly, really strict on their way to the top. And then the other partner is the kind of street smart cop. or agent who they don't do things by the book. They can't be sort of held back and they get themselves in trouble. So initially these two will fight or they'll disagree and they'll be like, oh, why do we have to do this? And then there will be some sort of rallying event where there's a case that they need to come together and work on.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And then they do and sometimes antics ensue. But whatever happens by the end of the buddy cop movie or show, what almost always happens is the straight-laced cop that does things by the book, takes a page. from their partner's rulebook and does something out of character, does something that kind of bends the rules. And the crazy cop, instead of shooting the bad guy when the bad guy is down on the ground, they handcuff them. You know, they kind of make the appropriate decision. And it's always the combination of these two things that makes these two cops, you know, overcome these crazy odds and put the mobsters in jail. So I made a spreadsheet. Almost everybody cop film and show follows this

Starting point is 00:23:39 formula and it was super fun to do and kind of obnoxious for me to spend all these hours doing it. But it illustrates perfectly this point of cognitive diversity that the two cops that think exactly the same that are both, you know, that I'm not suggesting the cops shouldn't break through, shouldn't obey rules. But two cops that operate the same are at a disadvantage to, you know, in solving cases. And this led me to something really cool, which is research that shows that in America, women cops are, first of all, six times less likely to shoot someone, which is really interesting, than male cops. They're many times less likely to be accused of aggressive force or, you know, too much sort of inappropriate behavior. But police partnerships

Starting point is 00:24:27 and detective partnerships that have a man and a woman, despite what everyone would sort of claim that there would be problems because of this, they solve crimes better. And it's not the male-male partnership. It's not the female-female partnership that does the best in solving problems. It's the male-female partnership. And of course, gender is, you know, is more of a spectrum than we often talk about. And there's more to it than that. But in the general research that they do on police departments and FBI work, they find that partnerships that just have two people who look different, who've lived different lives, who've been looked at different, they tend to be better, more critical thinkers at solving problems, and being there pushes each other to think

Starting point is 00:25:13 differently. This, by the way, also, as I dug into it, applies to police partnerships where you have one elderly cop and one brand new cop. It applies when you have a gay cop and a straight cop. It applies with cops of different races. And so I was fascinated by this and said, oh, my God, this is a, you know, this is a case for demographic diversity, right? This is a case for including people who are not like you, which I think is a good moral choice. But when you dig into it, it's because someone who looks different, who's grown up different,

Starting point is 00:25:43 who is different, identity-wise, is likely to think differently about certain situations. And also likely to push you to think a little bit differently subconsciously than you would before. And so naturally, these partnerships, while they can't have more conflict, you can't have more turnover if the cops can't get along, if they can't harness these differences, they have the potential to be the best partnerships ever, which is why all of our TV shows about cops are about, you know, the police department that has all these different people, and then they bring in the one expert who really knows bones or who does mental tricks or whatever. Those shows are all about cognitive diversity, about including someone different into your process so you can do a better

Starting point is 00:26:21 job. So if I am a vice president in charge of leading 280 people right now at a big company, and I reach dream teams and I learn about cognitive diversity, I didn't previously fully understand it and now I do, how would I apply this to my team or my hiring practices or the people I lead? This is Shane, as you know, I love to, I love the stories and certainly the science. even more so how someone, whether it's myself or those listening, could actually implement and execute on what they're learning here. So there's two parts of this, two ways that I would think of it. The first is the who's on the team.

Starting point is 00:27:08 And the second is the how you kind of deal with it afterwards to unlock the potential rather than let it be counterproductive. So on the who's on the team front, I think we need to reframe the way that we think about that question. So if you're a VP at a 280-person company, chances are you have a marketing team, you have a product team, you have a sales team, you have a customer success team, whatever. You have all these teams that are there and they've been hired for whatever reason, and you're probably in charge of helping bring new people onto those teams. So what you want to do is you want to set up from now on the pool so that you have as much cognitive diversity potential

Starting point is 00:27:49 as possible. And there's a bunch of things that are sort of proxies for this, you know, as you're hiring and this is where we get into kind of common wisdom in business, which is you have a bunch of people who all look the same and went to the same school and are really good buddies. The next person you hire shouldn't be one of those. This is risky because that person will feel out of place and people will be uncomfortable. So it's easier if you start early and you make, you know, you build this sort of ragged head group where very few people are exactly the same. But this is what you should do. You should start building the pool, and there's two dimensions along which you should look for this cognitive diversity. One is perspective, which is how you view the world. And this is shaped by

Starting point is 00:28:26 kind of those things I was talking about, who you are, your identity, how you grew up, how people have treated you your whole life, whether you've been included, excluded, those kinds of things. That shapes the way that you just see the world. The second dimension is heuristics. Heuristics is the way that you approach solving problems. So this often has to do with your training, your your job experience, and I think crucially, having experience in different areas. So say you're hiring the next person on your team, everyone on your team has Ivy League degrees, they're great at, you know, whatever they do, it might pay off. You will certainly get cognitive diversity to hire the person that comes from a Midwestern school rather than Ivy League school,

Starting point is 00:29:08 someone who's qualified for the checklist of things you need them to do, but came from a different place. In fact, I would choose that person over the person from Harvard. You might all hire the person who at one point did a stint as a piano tuner because that person has some different techniques in their arsenal of thinking of things that could be useful that someone who's just gone down a linear career path might not have. And so that's the first thing, is building the pool. The second thing is that we should think about solving problems and teamwork like a movie director thinks about making movies. Movie director doesn't say, all right, it's time for the next movie.

Starting point is 00:29:49 Let's get everyone the same cast and put them in this one too. With the same, you know, everyone exactly the same. There's some directors that do that, that they bring their gang of friends. Wes Anderson is an example of this, but there's always new people. And those people are always playing very different roles, and they kind of come in and out. A director doesn't just put the same people in every time. You're telling a different story.

Starting point is 00:30:11 So if you're solving a different problem, why do we default to the same people that worked on the problem last time? If we frame problem solving as casting, then the question becomes, well, what's the set of people with the perspectives and heuristics and experience that can maximize our chance of coming up with something better than anyone's thought of? And you cast those people in the group and you don't invite the other people. So you don't ever want to have a room of people coming up with a solution to a problem where someone is not talking. Because guess what? You're not getting any use out of that. So you need to be deliberate about who goes in that room. So that's the first thing. The second thing is what you do with those people who are different to unlock that. We can talk about that a little bit if you want. But I think the key thing is to reframe team building and not think about it as just who are the 10 people. We're hiring 10 people who are the 10 people with the best GPA and who are the 10 people who are going to get along the best with everyone here.

Starting point is 00:31:17 We need to think of it as how do we fill all of the different kinds of boxes in this matrix of perspectives and heuristics so we can maximize our chance of becoming more clever together than the other company that's doing the 10 people who are all the same. It's interesting, Shane, when I first became a manager, so I worked in sales first job after getting done playing football after college and after playing a little bit after college. And did pretty well selling. And like most companies, I was fortunate to get an opportunity to interview. And I earned a position to then manage my own team. And I remember meeting with a mentor at the time who looking back that this advice was not good advice, but you live and you learn. But anyway, the advice that he gave me was when I was going to hire. I had four open positions when I started.

Starting point is 00:32:02 It was not the nicest way to start. Never hire anybody in my life, never done an interview in my life. I was 26-ish, I believe. So anyway, I go to do it and I said, well, what are we looking for? And he goes, well, and this guy did not lack for ego. And he said, you know, I'm the best and you're the best. So let's just hire people that do it exactly like we do it. And so he goes, if I could hire 12 people and he used his own name that are, you know, me, we would crush it.

Starting point is 00:32:33 And I remember thinking, well, okay, I guess that sounds logical enough, you know, not being that deep of a thinker at that age. I wasn't as mature. And I made mistakes, you know, and I think that's the interesting thing. I guess sometimes you do live and you learn, but the purpose of this podcast is hopefully that you could learn from the mistakes of whether they're mine or others or the research that's done by people like you, that why that is not the optimal approach when building any sort of team. Yeah, you know, that team that he described probably would get along pretty well, unless there's too much ego, in which case. you know, that would become a problem.

Starting point is 00:33:09 They probably get along really well, which is why we tend to do that. I mean, it's common advice, culture fit, right? Yeah. And this actually comes from studies that they did in the 70s that showed that if you're hired into a company where your personality is very close to, very similar to the other people, you're happier at work.

Starting point is 00:33:30 And so we took that research and we extrapolated and people wrote books about making like cultures where people feel like they're all the same. And we extrapolated that sort of comfort to mean that that team will do better. But it turns out that being comfortable is not how you make progress, right? That's how learning works. And so that's a problem. I'm sorry, there's a siren in the background.

Starting point is 00:33:56 I'm in New York City. Can you hear that? Is that getting kicked up? It is the familiar sound of my New York City gas chain and it's all good. It happens from time to time. No worries. Someone's getting rescued. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:34:08 Another thing that's interesting to me is when, let's talk about mergers, or not necessarily mergers, but there's this interesting dynamic that you've studied that I'm fascinated by, specifically when working as part of a business that is growing and will potentially acquire other businesses. And I am curious as to how the leader of a business can acquire another one that has maybe a completely different set of a culture. And then you bring that in. And there's a couple examples.

Starting point is 00:34:37 One, the Daimler Chrysler was a huge one that was a miserable failure. And you write about. And then there are some others that were successful. But let's first talk about the one that was bad and maybe why it did not go well and how those of us who were potentially in that situation could learn from it to not make the same mistakes. So this question was on my mind because we bought a company at Contently, the company that I started. And it was a three-person company, you know, with some cool technology.

Starting point is 00:35:03 So it was sort of an easy one. But I had seen research before. I've seen articles in Harvard Business Review about how most mergers don't go well. So like 70 to 90% of company mergers fail to achieve synergy, right, from Harvard? Right. That means they don't equal a, they're not worth more than the two companies added together. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:35:25 Okay. And a professor of mine in journalism school actually wrote a book about media mergers called The Curse of the Mogul, which is basically says that. that moguls who try to buy lots of media companies make their companies suck more. And so this is sort of a well-established thing. And yet we all believe that we will beat the odds. And there are examples when it works out. So I was interested in that question.

Starting point is 00:35:48 And it turns out that the dynamic of why mergers usually don't work and why they sometimes do is an analogy that we can apply to partnerships. It's something that actually there's research in marriages about this that I think is really fascinating. And the long story short is, well, let's talk about Daimler Chrysler. Diamondler, two huge car companies that made different cars. They had actually quite a bit of cognitive diversity at their disposal. You know, they're the Germans that made Mercedes-Benz, they made these really great, innovative quality cars, but they were expensive and it was hard to get big margins. And then you had Chrysler in Detroit. It's a scrappy American can-do cowboy culture that made family vehicles that were very profitable.

Starting point is 00:36:36 But both companies were losing to Ford, and they were worried about Toyota. So they said, you know, if we put our companies together, we'll complement our weaknesses, and we can make the greatest car company ever known to a man. So they did. And then they said, you know, also we have so many similarities that this is going to go great. We have these different ways of thinking about cars, but, you know, at Germany, in America. A lot of Americans are of German descent. We're kind of like all nerdy car people. It's mostly men. No problems. And they did some superficial trainings too. They did German

Starting point is 00:37:08 dining etiquette classes for the Americans and they did sexual harassment in the American workplace classes for the Germans. So no one, you know, did anything offensive. And then it became the biggest merger disaster in history. It's the case study that you use when you're talking about terrible business decisions. And it's not for lack of wanting it to go well. And it's not for lack of smart people and lack of potential. And so the thing that when you read the case studies about this, they all kind of conclude that the problem was twofold. One was that there was a little bit of a kind of miscalculation on how much the two companies actually complemented each other, which doesn't mean that the company will lose as much value as it did.

Starting point is 00:37:58 It went from two companies combined and $100-whatever billion down to being worth less than either of the companies have been worth in the beginning. And that doesn't happen just because you underestimated how great this is going to be. That happens because something goes really wrong. And the other thing they concluded is the thing that all of the, the Harvard Business Review articles talk about,

Starting point is 00:38:21 which is that culture is what kills me. most mergers. So they say people not getting along. And they knew this research, which is why they did those etiquette trainings and all that. But the thing that happened, the thing that you don't see until you really look for the patterns here is that it's not actually the clash of culture that led to the downfall of this company. It's the fact that they didn't speak to each other. They didn't merge their cultures at all. They had this thing that psychologists call organizational silence, which is where you have a group of people who all they ever talk about is superficial. They never get into the meat or they avoid each other. Some scientists actually put trackers on people from different companies

Starting point is 00:39:02 when their companies merged. They did this in a few cases. So you have two companies that merge and they put little tracking devices to see where in the building you go after, you know, the merger for a few months. And what they found is that mergers that don't end up going very well, people don't mix. They don't go over to the other side of the building with the, you know, the new folks. and mergers that do go well, they have more mixing. It's pretty interesting. So when you dig into it, you see the same thing that happens, that's a leading indicator that a marriage is going to fall apart is the thing that indicates that a merger is going to fall apart.

Starting point is 00:39:34 And that is not fighting. Fighting is not the thing that means your marriage is going to fall apart. If you keep fighting, unless things go too far and get violent, if you keep fighting, you're still talking. And hopefully you'll eventually work things out, but you're still together. and what happens, the leading indicator that their marriage is going to fall apart is when you stop talking, when you give up on the argument. And not when you compromise, but when you say, fine, I'm sleeping in another room or fine, I'm going on a walk, or we're never talking about this again. And that's what happened with Daimler-Kreisler in the most extreme way in kind of business history. But it's what happens in any company when we import new people or we smush two companies together is that we are afraid of the conflict of our different ways of seeing things.

Starting point is 00:40:20 And we're afraid of, you know, the competition of one group winning out of the other. And so we stick to our groups and we put ourselves in these categories and then we don't speak. And we don't speak as much as we ought to. And so we don't argue. And so therefore we don't have arguments that turn into solutions and things fall apart. So silence is the enemy of innovation. It's the enemy of progress. Fighting is not.

Starting point is 00:40:47 fighting bad is also an enemy, but silence is the bigger villain. Somehow I'm trying to weave this together because I love this part. The year is 1901. It's a sunny summer day, and you're walking down 3rd Street in Dayton, Ohio. That is, by the way, where I live, I live in Dayton, Ohio, Shane. All right? Yeah. So as you can imagine, I'm a big fan of the guys.

Starting point is 00:41:12 I'm about to mention. As you stroll by, you hear shouting. And the two people shouting happened to be a couple guys that owned a bicycle shop here in my hometown, Dayton, Ohio, named Orville and Wilbur Wright. And it's amazing to hear that you dove deep on their story and why they were able to defy the odds, be severely underfunded, especially in relation to others who were trying to create flying machines as well and why their method worked. Yeah, so I love this story too. you know, they're two brothers, so you can imagine, you know, they're very similar in a lot of ways. They grew up the same way. So they might not have as much cognitive diversity as you would want in a group of people working on inventing the airplane. They were different personality-wise. You know, one was more impetuous and brash than the other. The other was more sort of quiet and cerebral.

Starting point is 00:42:07 But they were brothers. And so they had this method that was really clever. Because they were brothers, they were used to fighting that grew up fighting, you know. but they had this method which was when they had a hard problem that they were working on that they couldn't figure out they would often be very opinionated about the way to approach the problem and they gave themselves permission to have these awful arguments about it shouting they got really heated one of their shop assistants said uh you know that they worried that the staff kind of worried about these arguments and you know that they never actually punched each other but they sure got awfully hot and they'd have these big arguments and then they'd they'd stop for lunch. And so if you're the neighbors, you suddenly hear the arguments die down.

Starting point is 00:42:48 They eat their sandwiches, and then they go back to yelling again. But what they would do is they would actually switch sides of the argument after this little halftime. So Orville would argue what Wilbur was arguing and vice versa. They'd take the other side of the argument and this forced them to expand the way that they thought about things. It forced them to take different perspectives and to let go of their attachment to their own opinion. And so this friction actually helped them to get smarter together. There's a really cool study that, I don't know if I included it in the book, there's a study where they asked people to write down arguments for something political that was controversial, like abortion, write down arguments for why it should be legal. And then they

Starting point is 00:43:33 ask these same people to write down arguments for why it should not be legal. And everyone could come up with reasons on both sides. And then what they found is that when they asked people, when they pushed people on the arguments against the thing that they believed, they said, no, there's fewer things on this column of arguments against your opinion. So write down more. And when they did that, everyone was able to think harder and write down more arguments. So we have this capacity to think on both sides of a thing, of an equation. Our brains are really good at that actually, but it's hard to unlock it sometimes. So the Wright brothers, knowing that they might get trapped in a similar perspective and knowing that they might get attached to the thing that they

Starting point is 00:44:19 wanted because ego is sort of pernicious. And knowing that they had inside them the ability together to come up with something that no one had ever come up with, they use these arguments, this debate and switch tactic as their method of doing that. And I would say that we shouldn't do it in a yelling way they could get away with that because they're brothers. They love each other. But we can still do this in our regular lives. We can do the debate and switch. I've actually done it at work. And it's very powerful. So I'm just going to tell you, now is the point in the conversation people are saying, hang on a second, dude, like, I don't see how this would work. You know, and I, and so at times I'm sensitive to people who are

Starting point is 00:45:00 skeptics because we talked about that earlier, why that can be healthy. How would this actually work? I'm talking again, let's get practical again. So great story. I love it. I'm a huge Wright Brothers fan, read all the stuff, David McCullough's book, everything. It's great, great stuff. But if I am putting this into practice at wherever I work for anybody listening,

Starting point is 00:45:19 and I believe in something and I truly, truly believe that I'm right or I have the solution and the other person feels the exact same way, there could be a number of different topics, how could this really go into practice? Like, how could we really do this? Maybe you share your example that you mentioned that you've tried. it, but I'm curious because this is one that I could see skeptical people saying, cool story, dude, but not happening. So I think there's ways to apply this at varying levels.

Starting point is 00:45:45 So the smallest level as a leader is get in the habit of asking people when they're making a case for something, when they're arguing for something, just throw out there, okay, now make the argument for the other case and see what they do. Leave it at that and see what they do. And, you know, if they make the argument for their own case again, push them and say, no, I want to hear, take the other side. Tell me what you would say if you really believed in the other side of this and push them. And when they do that, then push them a little harder to go a little further with that and see what happens.

Starting point is 00:46:16 I've done this at work. And it's funny how quickly, it doesn't happen every time, but it's funny how quickly both of you will get to this, oh shit. I just thought of something when you do that. So that's, like, I don't know if you can share, but what would be a real example of this? I mean, like a real problem. Is there a story you could share that's like, yeah, this person thought this about this. And this other one thought, I mean, I'm really curious here. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what an example off the top of my head.

Starting point is 00:46:48 If you can't, we can move on. But I just, I'm thinking of it now because I really wanted to be to be this to be implemented. Because I do believe in it. I believe it could be helpful, but I also know there's skeptics. and I like to prove them wrong in order to benefit them if you get what I'm saying. Yeah. Let me think about this as we go on and maybe we'll come back around. And if we don't, maybe I'll write a blog post about this.

Starting point is 00:47:13 We can link it to the show notes. Perfect. Okay. So there's another part of your story that I am fascinated by, whether it's because, I don't know, like I've really liked Eminem at one point in my life and rap battles. Maybe it's because when I was in college, my teammates would do. this. They would, they would, they would, I played football in college and they would like have literal rap battles. And I was fascinated by, I, I, I never participated because I don't know if I just

Starting point is 00:47:40 don't have that talent or that ability or I haven't really nurtured that in myself. But anyways, I would be fascinated in one of the quotes though that I do believe in where it does come from rap battles is that competition breeds excellence. And the early, you, you study the early DJs and their battles and how that laboratory that was created, um, you, um, you, you've studied. Um, you, you're, you've studied, um, um, um, really helped musical innovation, specifically with Wutang Clan and others. But I'd love for you to go whatever way you want to take it when it comes to competition, when it comes to rap battles, when it comes to how musical innovation or whether how the Wutane clan became successful because if you look at it, you could see how, no, there's no way

Starting point is 00:48:22 that would work. And then it did. So I'm always fascinated by those questions and those stories. Yeah. So this one was a really fun one for me because I grew up in. in Idaho, small town near this nuclear plant that my dad worked at in the middle of the desert. I listened to country music and punk rock. And it wasn't until I was around 30 years old that I started to listen to hip hop.

Starting point is 00:48:45 And so I knew nothing about hip hop. I knew nothing about the origin, but I love history. I love stories. And I kind of caught wind of some of these stories of how hip hop developed. And then I went really deep and even made some new friends and got obsessed with hip hop. And so the story of hip hop. of how it developed is really one of, it's one that could have gone very differently.

Starting point is 00:49:07 I think there's two kinds of competition. And we can see this in anything, whether it's music or sports. I think sports is a really interesting one actually for this. There's competition that elevates the players, that elevates the game, and there's competition that is intended to destroy the other players. And, you know, that kind of competition

Starting point is 00:49:26 is kind of what you see in Congress now, versus, you know, say the Hamiltonian ideal where the competition between the different ideas in early American politics was to elevate the game, was to find third options, right? And so we see this in sports, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, they were fiercely competitive,

Starting point is 00:49:50 but they forced each other to get more clever, to work harder, to figure out ways to get better, to the point that when Magic Johnson had to drop out of play, because of his health, Larry Bird, I think it was months later, he said, I can't play anymore. I'm done. I'm retiring. So there's that kind of competition, but it's kind of rare because so often competition turns into, you know, this goal of getting rid of them, of destroying them. So hip-hop is really interesting because how it started is these DJs in the Bronx started throwing these parties that is sort of this fun style of party where you have two DJs on different sides of the

Starting point is 00:50:27 dance hall or the gym or whatever. And the party was in the middle and whichever DJ was playing the best music, the party would move to that side. And so it was this war back and forth to kind of drag the crowd to your side. And so what they did in the beginning is they bought better speakers, they tried to have crisper sound, and then they tried to find the best music. And so every week you came back to this party and everyone danced and had a good time. Well, the DJs started having master of ceremonies, emcees, who would kind of

Starting point is 00:50:59 get the crowd excited to come over to their sides. They would say, hey, everybody, put your hands in the air. This guy's going to play this great song. And they do that. And soon they start

Starting point is 00:51:11 becoming part of the entertainment. You know, they do these kind of, you know, ba with the bar, the bang the bang, diggy, diggy. Come on, put your hands up,

Starting point is 00:51:20 say ho. Like that sort of thing. And one day, this guy named Bissy B, who was everyone's favorite, he was playing, and this other guy named Kulmody showed up, and Bizzy did his whole bha with the Ba'a thing,

Starting point is 00:51:37 and Kul Modi comes out, and he says, I'm trying to remember exactly how it goes, but he says, put that ba-di-di-ba bullshit on hold, and then he starts tearing into him. He starts making fun of the guy in rhyme, and everyone goes nuts. They're like, wow, our favorite guy just got taken down insulted by this other guy.

Starting point is 00:51:57 And so the next week, they both came back ready to war. And it turned into this thing that every week, everyone came to the party to have fun, but the DJs and the MCs, they came with a new bag of tricks to try and beat the other guy. And the cool thing about it is it, in this time period, it didn't escalate into sort of getting personal, even though the insults were highly specific and personally targeted. It was all about getting that party to come to your side of the dance floor. And it's about getting more people to show up and everyone makes money if everyone has a good time. So this is how we got hip hop is people started recording on tape recorders these lyric battles.

Starting point is 00:52:40 And they started distributing the tapes and people started to listen to those at home because they were so cool. And then the record companies got in and we got hip hop. And the DJs and the MCs would do anything to not get beat. So you get beat one week, you come back with new lyrics, with new tracks, and the DJs would actually hack their equipment. They'd solder switches on their equipment so that they could do cool things with the records. They cracked open, you know, the memory cards when they started having electronic samples so they could add more memory and have better samples than the other guy. So they did this, and this actually helped develop some aspects of the computer industry, which is super cool. But the idea that this competition every week elevated the entire.

Starting point is 00:53:22 game was super interesting. And at a certain point, it did get personal and people did get shot. And, you know, there's a sad part of that music history, which is the thing that actually leads to organizational silence. We're all afraid at that part where it goes too far, where the rubber band snaps, where, you know, someone gets shot because it got too personal. And that's why we don't engage in the battle. But it turns out that the battle is what makes all of us better. So I really love that story. And Luotin Clan is a specific example of, you know, they orchestrated that in sort of miniature among themselves, that idea of competing for who gets on the record.

Starting point is 00:53:59 And I think that in a lot of sports, this is actually pretty cool that in practice, you're trying to, you're using that other person as the sort of talisman that you have to beat for your own progress, right? And it's easier, I think, to figure out how to win a race, to get better at racing when you have a nemesis

Starting point is 00:54:20 that you're back and forth. with than if you're just timing yourself by yourself. It's a lot mentally more difficult to do that than if you have that other person that's pushing you. Well, it's interesting. I just thought of this, Shane. So when I went to college, I went to Miami University out of high school here, I played quarterback.

Starting point is 00:54:38 And the other, there was two incoming quarterbacks alongside with me. One was Mr. football in the state of Indiana. He was big, tall, six foot five guy. And the other guy, you may have heard of even if you don't follow sports, has been. Rothlisberger he's the Super Bowl winning quarterback from the Pittsburgh Steelers oh yeah and so Ben and I came in together and we competed against one another one another for two years every single day and while I won't say that I thoroughly enjoyed it or that I loved every day I improved so

Starting point is 00:55:13 much every single day because I was going I was competing against somebody who was just flat out more talented than me, who was better than me, who had a stronger arm than me, who was just better at just about everything when it comes to playing the position of quarterback than me. And it made me better. And so I think that stress, that daily stress, whether it was in the film room getting ready, whether it was on the practice field, playing games. And it's an interesting place to be in for a couple years. And I tell kids when I give these talks for high schools and colleges that find a way to manufacture

Starting point is 00:55:48 those events for your life, you'll be better for it even if you don't love it as it's happening. Yeah, I love it. You know, I think about, I put myself in the shoes of that 28-year-old VP of 280 people. Maybe they're 28. That'd be awesome. But, you know, I put myself in the shoes of that person and I'll hear this and I'll say, yeah, but I don't want to show up to work today with this group of people who are constantly in conflict.

Starting point is 00:56:17 that, you know, that just has so much potential for boiling over for being just really awful. You know, we want to be happy when we go to work. This time is back to what I observed at Contently in, you know, when I started obsessing over this, how do you have this element of sort of game elevating competition of, you know, healthy friction and still feel good and still like each other? And I think that's the thing that, you know, in sports maybe you don't need as much because you, well, you don't need to like each other as much. You actually don't need to, anyway.

Starting point is 00:56:51 But it's more comfortable to show up to work if you like people. Yeah, like you're, I think you're, you're hitting on what I was thinking as well, in addition to the sports thing because I wasn't planning going there, but it just reminded me so much of the daily stress and how it made me better. But like if I am the leader of a business and I do want to create, like I do believe that competition can breed excellence, but I don't want it to get to the Biggie Tupac point, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:57:16 Like, how do I, how do I bottle up as the leader of a business, the beginning parts of the MCs and the DJs and the creation of hip-hop? How do I take that, put it in my business, and then not have the rubber band snap as you put it in Dream Teams? I think there's a couple of things that, and I think with the, with the DJs, they have this overriding cause that they cared about more than they cared about, you know, winning or destroying each other, that was worth the discomfort of losing once in a while in that party. The overriding cause was the music and it was the party itself.

Starting point is 00:57:57 That's what they loved. That was their passion. That was their purpose. I think, you know, in a sports team, you have that as well. You have a very strong overriding cause, which is winning the game and becoming champions. You'll endure a lot in order to get that if that's the thing that you care the most. in the book I talk about it as superordinate goals, you know, which is the psychologist term for that. You know, when the aliens show up to blow up the earth, we forget about the things that we've done to each other that are awful that we hate each other for, and we band together to try and save the earth, right?

Starting point is 00:58:32 You know, Independence Day is that you have that overriding cause and purpose that's extremely powerful. And that makes it okay to have these things. The other thing I would say, though, too, is the thing that I get at the very end of the book that's personally very important to me, which is getting to know people, getting to building empathy with people so that even if you disagree, even if you have a problem with the ideas and you have those wars that you care about them personally. This actually comes back to that chart. I mentioned that I'm workshopping, having the intense, full personal and emotional support. for your team members. You have that, then you can have that conflict. And I think one of the best ways that you can develop that is to learn people's story.

Starting point is 00:59:20 There's companies that are starting to do these personal, emotional narrative interventions, which I find really fascinating to describe it that way. But what they do is when, and there's one big financial company that does this called BlackRock, one of the biggest financial companies. What they do is when they form a new team or they have a new project, they have everyone get together and tell their personal stories. And they train them to do this in a way that is emotional and vulnerable. And what it does is it develops this sense of connectedness between people. So you learn someone's story, how they grew up, what they care about, you learn about their top 10 reel, their bottom 10 reel, the things that have shaped who they are and what they can.

Starting point is 01:00:10 about and it's really hard to want to destroy that person afterwards just because they disagree with you and you know i've done this at my company where well personal story actually of how this this happened to me so we had a VP who was really good at what she did and drove me up the wall i did not agree with her on anything and that was because i didn't agree with her on some key things and that meant I was just going to disagree with her on everything. And we had a problem with each other. And it was not pleasant. And I think that I was, I regret the way that I treated her. And we had this constant conflict and it was a problem. It hadn't boiled over yet, but I didn't like her. I would have been happy if she left. And we actually didn't talk to each other that much

Starting point is 01:01:02 after a while and kind of did the organizational silence thing. But one year, I didn't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. I wasn't able to make it back home to Idaho. And she invited me to Thanksgiving at her house. And for whatever reason, being the boss or whatever, I felt it would be rude not to or something. And I had no place to go. So fine. I went. And I met her sister. And I met her mother. And I met her friends and had it a great time. And I learned about her. You know, her sister told me stories about her growing up. I saw pictures of her. You know, and after, that, I went back to work and I just remember having her back. I remember being able to smile and laugh when we were arguing about something and just thinking that she was cool. And this changed

Starting point is 01:01:52 everything for me and she went on to be very successful as she would have anyway, but now with my help and support, even though we were intellectual rivals. And that's super cool. I think that you could add that to any sports team. You could add that to any sports team. You could add that to any team. There's this thing that the New York Times put out that was really popular a couple years. It just occurred to me that this is connected called

Starting point is 01:02:17 if you want to fall in love with anyone, do this. And it was a list of 30 questions that if two strangers answered these questions to each other, then they would be much more likely to fall in love. And basically all the questions are having you tell increasingly personal and vulnerable

Starting point is 01:02:33 stories about yourself. Do you have the length of that story? I can find it for you send it to me yeah I'd love to link link it in the show notes that'd be cool I love that story about you with the VP that you you strongly disliked and you went to her house I as a leader of a team when I when I'd always take over or I would do the exercise every six to 12 months is just a simple it's called get to know you a document and I'd pass it out to each team I had to make it optional because of HR for HR reasons because I was asking personal questions which is a whole other story but it was one of my favorite

Starting point is 01:03:06 exercise is to do. And I found that to people on my team enjoyed it quite a bit too, but it was, it was asking somewhat personal questions about them. I wanted to get to another spouse's name and their kid's name and other details about their life. And for a couple of reasons, one, to show that I truly care about them as a person, not just as a number. And two, then, for other reasons, such as if they did great things, I like to, one of the ways I learned to really properly thank somebody is to love on people that they love. So if so in that case, it's there's spouse and kids. I would usually give gifts to the spouse and kids and say your mom or dad absolutely is crushing it because they're doing

Starting point is 01:03:47 another than this, this isn't this. And it's a, it's a cool way because who as a, I'm a dad and I'm married and there I love nothing more than someone sent, uh, gifts or a note to my wife or my kids said, you know, your dad's crushing it. And here's why. You know, it would make you kind of famous within your house, which is the most important place to be famous is within your own house. And so I think to get to know you document, it serves a number of purposes. And my team's always, even if some people rolled their eyes initially, when they got done, they seem to like it.

Starting point is 01:04:16 And I love it. And I still have a lot of these saved from people I've worked with many years ago that I could still think years later, even though we haven't worked together for a while. And I think it's a good thing for leaders to implement. I actually put a copy of it on my website and my blog at learning leader.com. And I'll link to that as well in the show notes. but it's been really helpful for me. And it's not, it's changed too.

Starting point is 01:04:36 You know, some of the questions get better. That's why when I hear these 30 questions, like, oh, maybe I can update this thing with some good questions because I find those to really one show that you truly care because you do as the leader and be informative. You can really learn a lot. Just like it's not quite as powerful spending Thanksgiving with them, but it is one of the next best things I think you could do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:56 I mean, I think if you think about that, if you have, gotten to know someone's spouse and how they met and, you know, and met their kids, it's a lot harder to be a jerk to them. It's a lot harder to make it personal. And then that unlocks the opportunity for you to have that cognitive friction that can help you be innovative like we've been talking about. Yeah. Shane, uh, I know we went over. This is so good. I, I still have a ton of notes, but I, I'm really appreciative of you investing your time with me, man. And I know we'll talk in. Let's, let's just make it a deal not to let's as much time pass. before the next one.

Starting point is 01:05:32 This is so much fun. I always learn a ton from you. I know my audience where as well. Likewise. And the next time, I got to get a time. I love to record the next time in person when I'm up in New York.

Starting point is 01:05:43 We could work that out, I'm sure. Let's do it. Yeah, great. Awesome. Where would you send my listeners to learn more online? ShaneSnow.com. And that has links to everything.

Starting point is 01:05:54 Perfect. ShaneSnow.com. The book's Dream Teams working together without falling apart. this is one of those books. I read a lot of books, but I don't endorse all of them. And this is one, whether it's Smart Cuts by Shane or Dream Teams. You'll thank me later.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Buy the book, by 10 copies of the book. Give it to your friends. I promise you will not regret it. I know, and I definitely, people who listen to the show know I don't say this about almost any books, but this is one that I am. So pick it up, not only to support Shane, but because it'll make you better. And Shane, thanks again for being here, man. I really enjoyed it.

Starting point is 01:06:29 Thank you so much. Yeah, man. Okay. See you. All right. Wow, as always, I love talking with Shane Snow. He truly makes me think and approach business differently. So thanks Shane for being here. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed it, I'd love it. If you would write a review, subscribe to the show, and rate it in iTunes Apple Podcasts. That's write a review. Rate it. Hopefully, five stars and subscribe in iTunes Apple Podcasts. It really helps spread the message all over the world. Thank you again for being here. I truly appreciate the fact that you, loyal listeners, help support my effort to continue doing this because I love doing it more than anything other than spending time with my family.

Starting point is 01:07:11 So thank you so much. I will see you next week. Can't wait. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right. MAG and fit small business have called Gusto the best payroll for small businesses. Gusto saves you time.

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Starting point is 01:08:07 Sign up today and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash leader. That's G-U-S-T-O.com slash leader. All right. You so there? Yep. Man. Thank you, man.

Starting point is 01:08:26 I really appreciate it. I just love the stories and how you know your stuff cold. and that's um it's a it's a treat it really is i and i appreciate it i know i'm this makes me really happy and and thank you for the opportunity and for i mean putting me in front of your fans again that's really nice of you yeah yeah well uh let's definitely jam when you're in new york by the way we should definitely get dinner and and we can do one of these too um but yeah it'd be great to meet in person definitely definitely i'll make sure i uh shoot you know i'm sure you're getting ready to go into crazy uh book promotion

Starting point is 01:09:00 Mobo. Next time I'm there, I'll give you a heads up before. I just got to meet with, do you by chance to know Neil Pezrecha? I don't know if I do. He wrote a book called The Book of Awesome. He's written like three or four books. It was awesome. It's funny. I say it was awesome. It's so like literally a million copies, which I know, you know as a writer is pretty tough to do. Anyway, I was

Starting point is 01:09:20 just passing through Toronto at a workshop. I had one free night. I happened to send him a quick text and he's like, where are you staying? And I told him And he met me up at a restaurant right across from where I was staying. And it was so cool to have the kind of the follow up from the podcast conversation to then have it. We had like a three-hour dinner. And it was just an absolute blast.

Starting point is 01:09:39 So I love when I'm in New York to do something similar. That'd be great, man, to catch up. Cool. All right. I'll let you know, you and your team know when this one we're going to hang on to it right around book lunch time. And then we'll get it out and I'll be certain to send you guys everything. Thank you so much. All right, man.

Starting point is 01:09:55 Thanks, Shane. All right, dude. All right, man. Yeah, take care. See it.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 259: Shane Snow - How To Build A Dream Team

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