The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 399: Josh Kaufman - How To Master The Art Of Business

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com IG/Twitter: @RyanHawk12 Notes: Sustaining Excellence = Learn constantly Experiment constantly Obsessive about learning the details, not a cookie cutter approach Rapid Skill Acquisition: Must be specific Break it down: don't try to do it all at once Do research Practice Deconstruct the skill to its smallest parts Make a pre-commitment - "I'm going to practice this skill for 20 hours no matter what." Create fast feedback loops for yourself: Keep a daily log of what you do... Meetings, interactions, what was discussed, how you feel, etc. This helps reinforce the importance of paying attention to the small details of what you're trying to learn If something happens, you can review your notes later Josh has always had "a desire to understand the world around me" Teaching is one of the greatest tools in the world for learning "Management is the act of coordinating a group of people to achieve a goal. Management is not business. Management is not leadership. Management is a supporting function, not a decision making function." "Leadership = define the goal, account for change." "Good management = Recruiting - must get good people Communicating well between teams and decision making parts of the business Must create environment of psychological safety Create a productive working environment Planning - Estimating time lines and schedules Measurement Commander's Intent - "When you are a leader, decision making authority, the least effective thing is for you to make all the ground level decisions." Push decision making power to the people closest to the action. More quotes from Josh's work: "You can't make positive discoveries that make your life better if you never try anything new." "Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser's needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation. "If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time." "The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears." "Every time your customers purchase from you, they're deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment." "The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill acquisition. If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn't replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough." "Be positive, force yourself to smile." "Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you're twice as good." "Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality, which is much more difficult than recognizing a good idea." "Fear of the unknown will always be with you, no matter what you do. That's comforting in a way: if there's nothing you can do to change it, there's no reason to let it stop you."

Commander's intent is the idea that when you are a leader or a decision-making authority, someone who has the ability to say, this is what we're going to do and this is why we're going to do it, the least effective thing that you can do is make all of the decisions, the ground-level decisions, on the way to getting to that end objective. That's called micromanagement, and everybody universally hates. micromanagement. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Rixian Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. In order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world receive mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, writing, watching.

Thinking about also give you more details about how my book, Welcome to Management will help you become a more effective leader. Text learners to 4-4-222. Now on to tonight's featured leader, it's Josh Kaufman, author of three best-selling books, including the personal MBA. Josh has been featured as the number one best-selling author and business and money as ranked by Amazon, and his books have sold over a million copies worldwide. Josh, TEDx talk on the first 20 hours is one of the top 25 most view TED Talks published to date with over 22 million views on YouTube. Wow. A few of the topics we discussed. He shares the keys to rapid skill acquisition and why this is so useful for you as a leader. And then why it's so important to experiment constantly followed up by his definition.

of the difference between great management and leadership. And then we close with how to always be a value-added resource and why having this framework for behavior and how you work with clients and colleagues is so beneficial. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Josh Kaufman. All right, Josh, it's great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome, man. Ryan, thanks for the invitation.

So to get us started, you know I love studying those who sustain excellence over an extended period of time and specifically pulling out and deconstructing the behaviors and virtues of those types of people. And from your perspective, Josh, what have you found to be some of the common characteristics of people who have sustained excellence? Yeah. Yeah. People who are excellent at what they do learn constantly and experiment constantly. So I think one of the things that you'll very often see in top performers of all kinds is that they are obsessive about learning all of the details, the nuances, the tricky bits about what they do. and then when they're in the process of doing it, it's not a cookie cutter approach. They don't do the same thing over and over again.

They'll tweak it a little bit. They'll try something just to see what happens. And if you do that over a long enough period of time, you become one of the best in the world of what you do. This is certainly something that you've done. You've written a book called The First 20 Hours, How to Learn Anything Fast. and on your website you talk about how you help people with rapid skill acquisition. What are a few of the keys to learning something rapidly?

Yeah. So there's, I love this topic because it applies to everything that we do, both in our personal and our professional careers. And so I think we can, maybe a more interesting way to look at this topic is invert it. So let's examine what it looks like to not do this very well. First, don't be specific about what you want. Just say like, I want to get good at fill in the blank, where fill in the blank is some large amorphous blob of a skill or area.

and try to do it all at once. Like, don't try to break it down. Don't try to pick off a piece that looks like it might be approachable. Just like try to do everything. And then don't do any research, make it very difficult to practice, and only practice as long as you're not frustrated at all. And I think if you do those things, that is an absolute guarantee that you will not get good at whatever it is you're trying to do.

the approach that works is the polar opposite of that. So it's becoming very, being very specific in deciding what it is exactly you want to be able to do. Deconstructing that skill into smaller parts so you can practice the most important ones first. Doing some research. So you know what skill looks like. And while you're practicing, you can notice when you make a mistake or when something doesn't go the way expect. Make it easy for yourself to practice. So remove those barriers, the distractions, the things that keep you from sitting down and doing whatever it is you want to do. And then where the title,

the first 20 hours, comes from, is what's called a pre-commitment. So before you even begin, you say to yourself, I am going to practice this skill for a certain amount of time. And I recommend 20 hours as a sane default. So you're pre-committing. If I'm going to going to learn this at all, I'm going to invest 20 hours in this particular thing. And crucially, I am not going to stop until I either get what I want or I've invested at least 20 hours into the skill. And just the process of doing that helps you push through those early hours of frustration and persist long enough to see some very noticeable substantial improvement in whatever it is you're trying to do. Can you give me an example of when you've put this into practice that is exciting

for you to talk about? Yeah. So the back half of the first 20 hours as a book, my work is very research-based. I'll go into the literature. I'll read a bunch of books. I'll read academic journals and papers. And then the goal is to extract some either insight or concept or some method or technique that is helpful. And so for the first 20 hours, I did that. I went into the cognitive and behavioral psychology literature about how we learn, how we how we become good at things over time. And then I made a method out of it. And the entire back half of the book is me trying this technique on a bunch of different, wildly different skills, some for work, some for personal interests, some cognitive skills, and some motor skills. And so I learned everything from windsurfing

to computer programming to typing on a different keyboard. I field tested this on me. A more recent example is I've actually, I've been practicing a certain kind of martial art called Iketo for a number of years now. And just in terms of, you know, if you, if, if you're, if you're you think natural talent or inclination, physical coordination is not a strong suit for me. It's very difficult. And I talk about the process of learning windsurfing in the first 20 hours. It was brutal for me. And so learning the keto, or so think like arms length judo, trying to redirect your opponent's

energy, trying to put them in specific positions without using a lot. lot of your own energy. Very small changes in movement or balance or momentum have enormous impacts on your ability to do the particular skill. And when you start doing it, you're watching a senior student or the teacher do this technique that looks very simple. And then you try to do the technique and it's an absolute disaster. And so if I had not been applying this particular approach to learning in the process of learning this martial art, I would have quit after the first day. It would have been, I'm not good at this. I'm not cut out for this. Other people might be able to do this, sure, but this is not for me. And it took really a good three

months of solid practice before I felt even even somewhat like I could follow what was going on and it really was it was the pre-commitment it's like it's okay if I'm terrible at this at the beginning it's okay if I don't know what's going on it's okay if I'm frustrated it's okay if I want to quit and I'm not going to do any of those things until I at least put this amount of time into the skill and when I got to that amount of time invested like this is great it's fascinating I'm seeing myself improving. And once you get to that point where you're seeing some skill, you're feeling better about your performance, you're seeing yourself improve versus where you were when you started, that's where the intrinsic motivation takes over. That's where you're really

like, okay, this is something I can do. This is fascinating. I want to keep doing this. But until you reach that point, it's a slog. It's a struggle. And so having an approach to get through those early hours is the best thing that you can do to make sure you get to the point. The pre-commitment. You're talking about the pre-commitment. So, okay, this stuff fascinates me, Josh, and I want to try to relate it to the area where I work. When it comes to leading a team or managing a business, some would say that those are soft skills. skills at times are hard to measure. It's like how do you measure you being a good listener? Or how do you

measure your level of compassion? And I'm describing topics that are necessary to be a great leader, right? How do you measure your level of courage? How do you measure your level of living up to your values and helping other people? And so how can we take what you've learned, whether it's about learning or from the personal MBA, which we're going to touch on here a second. But how do you take from that and apply it to something that is not like, okay, for example, I have learned to win-surf. I have learned to play the guitar relatively well. I haven't, but that could be a harder skill that someone's trying to learn versus this soft skill of becoming a better manager, becoming a better leader, being a better listener, more compassionate, more thoughtful, more courageous. How would you relate it to that?

Yeah. One of the ideas in the first 20 hours is something called a fast feedback loop. And so the types of skills, like, and we can use windsurfing as an example here. If you make a mistake in windsurfing, you fall off the board into the water and you have to get back up again and pull the sail out of the water. It's a big ordeal. You know when you've made a mistake. Some skills like management and communication, you might not know that you've made a mistake

until much, much later. And so anything in the process of practicing a skill that can give you faster or more consistent feedback about what's working and what's not is helpful. And so one thing that I recommend and for lots of different reasons, but it works particularly well on this context, is keeping a daily log of what you do.

And so if you're a manager and you have direct reports, keeping a log every day, what are the meetings that you had, what are the interactions that you've had, what was discussed, what did you recommend or how did you approach it, how were you feeling, how did it seem the other person was feeling or reacting,

that does a couple of very important things. The first is that it helps to reinforce the idea that this is something that you're practicing, right? It's not something that you're just doing. It's not something that you forget about as soon as it happens. This is something that is important to you. So you're going to notice and pay attention to the details and capture them in as much detail as you can. So just the process of doing that is going to increase the amount of things. you notice above the baseline of what you would notice if you weren't applying that level of

of diligence to it. The other thing that it allows you to do, which is very rare and valuable, is if something happens later. So let's say one of your direct reports is having a specific issue. You can go back and review all of the interactions that you've had. prior to that point. And you can learn some of those sometimes very difficult things that wouldn't necessarily pop up unless you had the immediate context

of all of the interactions that you've had with this person. And so having an additional level of detail to look at, and then also having the contrast of what has happened before, what is happening now, allows you to learn some of those more subtle things that otherwise would go completely over your head.

I read in your acknowledgement section of personal MBA that you owe your curiosity about the world and open heart to your parents. Yeah. I, in the times we've talked, Josh, I sense you to be a very aggressively curious person. Do you feel this was something that was fostered by your parents or perhaps, I guess I'm asking a nature versus nurture question.

How much of it for those people who are currently listening, they're like, Josh is kind of intimidating to me. I think he thinks, and I think there are people thinking that because I feel that way. I think, I think there are people thinking, I just don't have time to think that way or into that depth of things about windsurfing or karate or Akita or whatever it may be. Sure. Yeah. So it's really, there's multiple questions here.

but I want to talk about your curiosity and your aggressive pursuit of being curious and how that could be fostered in others. And the reason, that's part of the reason why I brought up your parents of how we could do that for other people. Because I think that skill is your superpower. That's what creates all the magic in your life is your aggressive pursuit of learning, of being curious about a variety of topics. What do you think? Yeah, I think on the nature versus nurture side of things, I think it's always a combination of both. And so for me, one of the defining aspects of my mind or my personality is a desire to understand what's happening, to understand the world around me and how it works and why it works that way. I think that's a thing that as far as something can be baked in, that's baked in there pretty deep.

I think the nurture side of things is a consistent encouragement from my parents to examine all of that and to read and to learn and to explore and to try things. I don't know if I've told this story before. I get the story by way of my mom. I went fishing with my uncle one day. I think I was four. And we went to the local rock quarry that was stocked with fish. And we caught a bass. And I was so excited.

And I kept telling my uncle, we need to go home. We need to go home right now. There's something that I need to get. And, you know, little four-year-old hyperactive me. He's like, all right, you know, we'll drive home. And I ran straight to my room and I got a science, a sixth grade science biology textbook that my dad, who was a sixth grade science teacher, had brought home to evaluate. And I flipped to the table of contents. I found F for Fish and opened the book to a, you know those like, uh, plightonial.

overlays where you can see like the multiple layers of an animal, there was one of those for a fish. And so when I caught one and we were going to prepare it for dinner, I wanted to go look at this picture that I had seen in a book and compare it to this real fish that we were about to cook for dinner. And I think I was four, yeah. that is both I think an illustration of how how I wanted to understand and how I wanted to learn and apply the things that I was learning to the things that I was experiencing in my life. It's also a testament to my parents because I had a lot of books on the shelf and I was encouraged to spend time with them.

I was encouraged to read them and ask questions about them. And having that opportunity was really defining in a lot of ways. And now your dad, and you've chosen to homeschool your kids this year. Yeah. And we briefly talked about this, but I would love to know what was your process to prepare to be a homeschool teacher for a year. Yeah. Yeah, that was, so there is, my children right now are 10 years old and 7 years old.

So, so early to mid-elementary age. And so I think, and this kind of dovetails with our discussion of skill acquisition, having a set of skills that you use in combination is extraordinarily valuable. And I think, you know, it's easy to see in elementary school because, you're teaching kids how to read. You're teaching them how to do arithmetic. You are helping them write letters for the first time. So shapes and fine motor skill coordination types of things.

You're encouraging them to notice what's going on in the world around them and ask questions about it. And so one of the things that Kelsey, my wife and I were really trying to do with this year of homeschool is make sure they're getting both the core skills that are going to be applicable for the rest of their lives, right? The reading and the mathematical thinking. But then also the asking questions and the curiosity part. And so, yeah, we do a couple of things. I help them with the core skills in the morning, which for us are. reading, math, handwriting, and language arts.

And then my wife in the afternoon does art projects and science projects and going outside and looking at bugs and playing the piano and doing all of that. And I think the best thing that homeschooling, we're about a month and some change in right now. The best thing that we have the opportunity now is to tailor what it is we're doing, the approach we're taking, the projects that we do to the interests and the inclinations of our children. So my son, super curious about how things work, wants to take things apart, wants to build them back up again. And so I had an old phone that wasn't working anymore. I was going to try to fix it, replace the battery, didn't work. but it's a great, great thing to give to my son.

It's like, here you go, buddy. Let's learn about the parts of a computer and what connects to what and how things work. And that sort of experience, the exploratory part, the curiosity part, I think is one of the best things that you can give to kids at this age. I think teaching is one of the greatest learning tools in the world. What have you learned from putting yourself in the position of being a teacher, whether it's your kids or others that you work with? I think it's, you forget what it was like to be a kid that age. I think one of the, the frustrating parts is that, you know, like, so my, my son is almost seven

and the attention span sometimes is not exactly what I as an adult would prefer it to be. Sometimes things take longer. And the reason that that happens is because focusing and paying attention and figuring things out when you don't know the answer is a skill that needs to be learned as much or more than the academic skills that we're working on right now. One thing that's a phrase that stuck with me for years. I think I came across it on less wrong. There's an essayist, Eliasir Yodkowski, who's written on that site for years. And he had a post on education, and he used the phrase, he was distinguishing learning versus guessing the teacher's password.

And I've never forgotten that phrase because it's so illustrative of the way many of us approach learning in general. It's like we're not fully understanding what's going on. We are picking up a phrase that we can use in a conversation to get approval from another person. And those two things are not the same. And so even this morning, my son was doing a handwriting project that was requiring looking at something and answering a question. And he would answer it. and then he would look over at me

to try to gauge my facial reaction to see if he was on the right track or not. And so one of the things that I'm really trying to encourage with both of my kids is don't try to guess my password, try to figure out what the answer is, write it down, be confident in that assessment for yourself,

and then we'll go back and we'll talk about the things that you get right and the things that you get wrong or we need to practice more or whatever. But don't try to use social cues as a way to get around the work of understanding what's going on. Gotcha. So speaking of going to school, I want to take us back to a moment earlier in your life. That is, we're both Ohio guys, by the way, which I love.

But your sophomore year, you're at the University of Cincinnati. Maddie. You got a job at Procter and Gamble, which is common at UC for students to do that. I think you're in an honors, honors plus program, right? The Carl H. Linder Honors Plus program at UC. And at one point, you met with a mentor, I believe his name is Andy Walter. Yep. And Andy gave you advice. Do you remember right now what that advice is? And if so, can you share? Oh, absolutely. So we were having a discussion over lunch.

And I was at the time, I was looking at going into marketing. So I was in the IT part of the organization at the time, working with some of the marketing folks. And for those of you who aren't familiar, Procter & Gamble is a consumer packaged goods company. They invented the word branding. everything that happens at at PNG is marketing centric. Even, you know, the launching of new products, consumer research to figure out what you should launch, marketing is as much a leadership and project management part of the organization as it is, you know, what you would think of like advertising or promotion.

And so I was looking at continuing my career at PNG and going into the marketing organization. organization. And everybody in the marketing organization, by and large, had a MBA degree. And so I was thinking, like, if I want to do well in this career, is this something that I need, is this something that I really need to do in order to succeed here? And Andy, who at that point was my, I think he was an associate director. and in the course of his career would be promoted up very far. So he ended his career as one of the company's top global IT managers. This is what he said. He said, this is not something that is essential to your career.

If you invest the same amount of time and energy that you would put into completing an MBA, into doing good work and improving your skills, here, you will do just as well. And I really took that to heart. At that point in my career, I did not have a tremendous amount of business experience. I didn't know. Andy had a tremendous amount of business experience.

And so for him to tell me, it's like, no, this is something that sounds good, but in the long run, it's not going to help you as much as doing good work, getting better at skills that are important in the practice of business and using those skills to better the business, that's what's going to make you successful. That had a big impact on me. What role did that play in you writing the personal MBA?

The personal MBA came after that conversation and it was, I would say it was definitely an inspiration in an indirect way. and so I wanted to make sure I was good at my job I wanted to make sure that it was and I ended up getting a role in the the marketing organization starting with new product development which I loved I loved everything about new product development so I was working with a bunch of people who had MBAs I wanted to make sure that I could hold my own in that organization I was convinced I didn't need to go back to school to do that. But I still felt that there was an enormous amount that I didn't know, didn't understand that I needed to. And so I decided to essentially take up reading business

books as a second part-time job. And I read and researched and tried to really deeply understand what makes successful businesses work. One of the things that stuck out to me in my time at the University of Cincinnati, it's a great business school. The professors are awesome, the programs are well designed. And yet, I was struck, there was never an attempt to define

what a business is at a fundamental level, what a business does, what it means to do it well versus not do well. And in terms of personal background, I had started and worked in some very small businesses of my own, mowing lawns on the side, building websites for people, like, you know, very small time projects. And I was working at one of the largest corporations in the world. And a big question for me was like, what makes me? What makes this behemoth of a global organization and this mowing lawns in my spare time for cash?

What makes those the same class of thing? Like, that doesn't make sense. And so what I really wanted to do was figure out for myself. Like, what are the fundamentals of business? What makes a good business? What makes them work? How do you understand how businesses work well enough to walk into one or to start?

one and make it better or to make it work at all. And so that that's what became the personal MBA as a project. Ten years ago, that book got published. It sold about a million copies. I don't know how many books have sold a million copies. Probably like, do you know that? Do you know the percentage? The percentage is obviously like 0.000 or whatever, but even the total number is It's got to be very low. When you published it, what was going through your mind? Like, man, I'm going to sell a million of these suckers. Like what were you thinking when that book got published?

Not at all. Actually, Bunny Story, my daughter was born 10 days before the book came out. And so I was squarely in the middle of new dad mode and sleep deprivation. And I don't think I even went to go see the book. on a shelf like at Barnes & Noble. It was probably eight weeks after the book was published. It was a weird experience. It was,

so the book, I never expected or planned or had a goal of becoming an author, writing a book. I originally, when I was putting together these notes from all of my reading for myself, I kind of had it in the back of my head like yeah maybe I'll

create a course out of this you know teach it do do something with it and through a series of very fortunate circumstances happened to to meet the head publisher of the business imprint of Penguin

Random House he's like get we should talk about this this would make an interesting book and so for an accidental career, this has gone extraordinarily well. And I think the thing that's most gratifying about it is in the process of writing the book, it was really like, okay, if I had to read hundreds and hundreds of books, thousands of books in total, in order to learn the fundamentals of what businesses are,

how they work, how to make them better. and when you read that amount of material, the same idea is just keep coming up over and over again. And so the genesis of the book, in terms of how it's organized, is what if you just took all of those most important parts and put them all into one book and explain them in very clear,

very simple, very straightforward language? And the defining factor on whether a concept made it into the book or not, is does this apply to one of the largest businesses in the world like PNG? And does this apply to the person who is mowing lawns for spare change? And if it's universal in that way, if it applies to the largest of the large and the smallest of the small, that's a really good litmus test for there's something important to understand here.

And the gratifying part of it, like, it's always great when the things, thing that you're thinking like the way you're organizing things in theory actually works in practice because I've seen the the gratifying part of this project has been it's helped a lot of people and it's helped a lot of people all over the world in different industries and in different markets doing wildly different things and the universality of it is still there I've written down a few concepts that I'd love to ask you to go deeper on if you're cool with that. Yeah, totally cool. So the word management, okay, let's just talk about the word management.

It's a bad word to some. It's part of the reason why I put it in the book title that my book, Welcome to Management and Not Leadership is because I don't want it to be a bad word. I don't want people to think like, oh, managers or micro-managers. can you can you can you from your perspective and your definition of writing one of the the seminal books on a business and managers are a part of a business can you share a couple things one the purpose of management and what it looks like when done well sure yeah so management really is just the act of coordinating a group of people to achieve a goal.

That's it. It's not any more complicated than that. It's complicated in practice because people are different. Moving parts are different. Projects are different. But really, when you're doing management, you are trying to get a group of people to all put their effort in one particular direction to achieve a specific thing. And I think where people get a little bit caught up around it, management is not business.

So I think particularly, you know, the business school conversation, a lot of times those two ideas are conflated. If you're a good manager, you're a good business person, not necessarily. Management is also not leadership. So leadership in terms of defining what the goal is, trying to be. to account for change in uncertainty and all of those things. Management is really just the process of trying to get the right things done. And for managers, I think it's really important to understand that management is a support function. It's not necessarily a decision-making function.

And so there's this great quote that I put in the personal MBA. by Joel Spolsky, who has started a number of successful businesses, including Fog Creek and Stack Overflow and Trello, things like that. And the way that he puts this is the management team isn't the decision-making team. It's a support function. So you might, and this is a direct quote from him, you may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their breaches.

And he says, like, the goal is not to have the manager be the smartest, most experienced, biggest brain person on the team and everybody else just follows their direction. You want to have a bunch of people who are good at doing whatever it is they do. And then management is the support that keeps most of their time and energy focused on the thing that needs to be done without distractions. And so I think when you see good management, you see a couple of things. Part of management oftentimes is recruiting, getting the right people on your team in the first place. So you want the smallest group of people who can do the job well and quickly and effectively.

Managers are communicators. And so communicating with the team members, communicating with the people in the organization who, for example, supply budget or are deciding on priorities, resource allocation, things like that. The manager is the communication function between the team that's doing the work and those decision-making parts of the organization. There's an idea in psychology that people can't communicate well unless they are experiencing the psychological and emotional state of safety.

if somebody is feeling threatened, if somebody is feeling overwhelmed, effective communication shuts down very quickly. And so the job of a manager is to keep that communication flowing, but do it in a way that encourages people to feel respected, to feel heard, to feel valued. And this is kind of where you see managers in larger organizations being the shield in some of the junk that's happening up, hire in the organization.

The manager deals with that so the people who are doing the work don't have to or don't need to spend their limited time and energy dealing with things that are not pushing the ball forward. Part of management is creating a productive work environment. And so that goes towards the eliminating distractions, making sure you have the resources needed, making sure that there aren't artificial barriers to the team getting things done. doing some planning.

So this is where the management function of estimating timelines and schedules, there's a fine line between having an aggressive schedule that can help organize the efforts of the team around getting things done as quickly as they can. And then also applying unrealistic expectations that create stress and actually make things worse. And then the other part is management or measurement. So you're looking at what's working. You're looking at what's not working. And you're tweaking the schedule. You're tweaking the people.

You're tweaking the environment to help the team work better and better and better over time. So Josh, just brings up a fascinating point. So I'll just use myself as an example. My first job, I'm working as an inside sales rep, pound in the, pound in the phones, making 60, 70 calls a day. and the real only progression to get promoted is to go into management. And all of the things, you just listed five different keys to being a good manager.

None of them had anything to do with being an excellent sales professional at my job. Yet, the only path for a bigger salary or a bigger title or what looks like progression in your career is to go do something that is essentially completely different than what I had proven to be really good at. This is the case at a lot of most places, probably a lot of places. What can we do about that? If you were brought in, they backed up the Brinks truck for you to be the consultant for company X, who has a history of promoting the top sales performers to be managers, even if they haven't really shown any skill for being good at all of what.

what good managers do, how would you fix that? Yeah, so that's the origin of what's often called the Peter principle. Yes. So people are promoted to their level of incompetence. And competent performers in one domain are shifted out of that domain into something that they might not be as good at. I think there is, there's an inherent status in leadership and decision making, being the person in charge, being the person responsible that other people report to. I think in the context of business practice, that's a good example of status malfunction, that this inbuilt way that our brains think about this does not

serve us well in this particular domain. I think as a matter of professional practice, management is a skill in the same way that engineering is a skill or sales is a skill or design as a skill or programming is a skill, whatever. It's a discrete set of things. And what's fascinating is that oftentimes management done well, you should have a background in what your team is doing, what the demands are, what the time requirements, the mental and emotional requirements, all of that. You should have a background in it. But you don't need to be an expert in doing the thing that your team is doing because your job as a manager is coordination and communication. It's completely different.

And so I would, I think organizations that understand the reality of that can treat management not as a level up, not as a way to promote people, not as a way of rewarding top performers with higher pay, better benefits, whatever. it's a completely separate career track within the company. And you specifically recruit for people who like and understand and are good at that work just in the same way that you would hire a programmer because they're good at programming or you would hire a salesperson because they're good at sales. It's a different thing.

And in the same way, I read this a great article the other day that was about this. It was specifically in the context of software. But if being, if you're a computer programmer or an engineer and you are promoted to management, if that's not a promotion, really, it's just a change in responsibility, then it's also not a demotion to go back to doing the thing that you were originally good at. I think one of the things good organizations that do well over a long period of time are particularly good at is, allowing people to do some exploration or do some experimentation within the organization, right? So you may be in sales for a long time and you look at the manager job. Like, yeah,

that looks good to me. Let me give that a try for a while. The best organizations will, A, let you do that, like have the experience. Sometimes it's a permanent thing. Sometimes it's called a broadening assignment or, you know, a test run, something like that. Maybe you just spend a few weeks there to get a feel for what it looks like. But then there's also no shame, no downside, no loss of pay or benefits or status. If that's not your thing, you should be free to go back to doing that thing that you are particularly good at. Go ahead. I was going to say too, and I don't know the exact example, but particularly for people who are great individual contributors, individual performers. I think it behooves a company to build

a growth plan for those individuals where they don't have to feel like the only route to promotion is to manage a team so that they don't feel like they're stuck or they're doing the exact same thing for a really long time while their friends are getting promoted and it can feel like it can be a bad feeling for them, but it doesn't have to be that way. There could be a way for a company to build to say, look at your growth and progression in your career. You're still utilizing what you want to do, what you're skilled at, what you're valuable to the company and figure out different ways to make sure that that person still feels valued, still feels progression, still feels growth in their own career and not like they're getting

passed by by all of their friends. Yeah. I think this is going back to the PNG example. PNG is one of the classic organizational structures that are often called up or out. You're either promoted to progressively greater levels of management and or leadership, or you leave the organization and you go to something else. I don't think that's a good way to do things long term, particularly in the sense of if you are recruiting great people, if you are building their skills over a very long period of time, being good in specific domains is an asset to an organization.

So speaking from my own experience, if there was a product development track at PNG, where that's a discrete job that you can get good at, and maybe you go between industries or you go between sectors, like you still have a broad range of experience so you're not selling the same product or thinking about the same thing for 20 or 30 years. Great. But if there was an opportunity to do that over a longer period of time, that would have been very enticing for me. And because progression looked like moving up to greater and greater levels of management, and that was something

having had the experience and being okay at it. but not enjoying it, finding it relatively stressful, finding it not the kind of thing, like sitting in meetings, not my favorite thing to do, frankly speaking. And so having a career of meeting after meeting after meeting, not for me. But understanding that people can progress in certain skills that are valuable to the organization. And it's in your interest as a business owner as a business person to develop and retain high levels of skill in areas that are critical to your business over a very long period of time. Just thinking about management as one of those skills, but not the master skill, not the most important skill, one of a series of things that

you need to have. That's the most useful way to think about it. One more topic, Josh. What does commanders' intent mean to you? Commanders' intent. Commanders' intent is an idea that comes from the military, as you might expect from the title. And Commander's Intent is the idea that when you are a leader or a decision-making authority, someone who has the ability to say, this is what we're going to do, and this is why we're going to do, and this is why we're going to do it. The least effective thing that you can do is make all of the decisions, the ground-level decisions, on the way to getting to that end objective. That's called micromanagement, and everybody universally hates micromanagement. It's also extremely ineffective and inefficient, and here's why.

And this is an example that comes from the military usage of the term. Let's say you are a battlefield Field Commander. And you say, all right, our objective is to take this hill or this location. Well, let's say that the opposing army has a tank or 500 soldiers on that particular location, and the objective is impossible. If you're micromanaging, there's only one thing for the squad to do, and it's to come back to you, the commander, and say, sorry, boss, that's not possible. us what we should do next. And so you get a lot of ping ponging back and forth instead of what would be most effective. That squad is a bunch of people who have brains and eyes and experience. And instead of being forced to come back to you, by explaining exactly why it is that this

objective is important, how it fits into the bigger picture, how it supports the overall omission. When things change in the field, supplying the intent allows them to say, all right, this way of doing it might not be the smartest way to do it right now. But here's this other thing. There's another opportunity we're seeing right now that gets us closer to the objective. We're going to do that instead. And it prevents them from coming back to you, prevents the micromanagement cycle from happening in the first place. I remember General Stanley McChrystal talking about this on my show here. We've had

him on a few times when he mentioned that if the order we gave you before you got there turns out to not be right, then perform the order we should have given you that you've learned in the moment. And also back to, and there's a lot of people who have written about this, the phrase

I've written about it too in my book, the map is not the territory, which is, which comes in battle and comes in actually building sales territories, just putting together a bunch of zip codes is not necessarily what the way it is. And I would encourage people to Google the map is not the territory if you want to learn more about this because there's a lot of really good articles written about it. But I think it flows well with commander's intent and understand and pushing power or I'm sorry, pushing decision making closer to the action.

Yes. In your business, in battle, whatever it may be. But first of all, hire, trained, and develop the type of people that you want to empower, that you can push that responsibility of making very important, sometimes life and death decisions to those people because they're the ones who are most capable of making an informed decision, whereas you may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. and they're right there, they can see it with their own eyes. They probably are going on average,

are going to make better decisions than you being far away. Yeah, and this goes back to the idea that uncertainty and change are inherent parts of the reality we're all living in. There's no such thing as creating the perfect plan and then executing it step by step with no deviations, with no surprises, with no necessity to, take another look at what you plan to do and change your strategy.

And so the more autonomous units you have, and this is another bit of research that has been replicated across all sorts of different industries, but is particularly true in the military, if you look at elite military forces, you'll see a small autonomous squad of somewhere between six and ten people, usually around seven to eight. is the sweet spot. If you look at surgical teams, if you look at firefighters, if you look at any group of people that are responsible for working together towards a specific goal,

you'll very often find the range, six to eight people is as an autonomous unit that can make their own decisions, that can change their own strategies, adapt as necessary. That's the sweet spot. And the reason it's the sweet spot is this idea called communication overhead. So the more people that you are responsible for communicating with as you're doing your work, the more time you are communicating and not actually doing the work.

So, you know, if you're responsible for coordinating a group of 100 people, and all 100 people have to understand what's going on and agree to whatever it is that you're doing before it happens, that project is never going to get done. because you're spending close to 100% of your time on the communication. And so having these small elite autonomous teams, that small group allows you to, so every person in that team adds capacity, like real capacity to push the objective forward, but they're not adding so much communication overhead that it detracts from the group's ability to get things done. great stuff josh uh pages and pages of notes we could talk for talk for hours and i'd love to

record another one with you but i just want to say thank you so much uh the 10th anniversary second edition can you share more about the personal MBA and all of the updates and how different it is from the first one yeah so so the 10th anniversary edition it's the third full edition of the book and uh every time i do a new edition it's a complete edit. So I go back through all of the other material. I'm a much, I'm happy to report, I'm a better writer now than I was when I wrote the first edition. So there's a lot of, I killed a lot of adverbs. Let me put it that way. The other thing that I, that I always do when I do a new edition is look at the book as a whole and try to make sure that it is the best representation that I know

of the essentials as I understand them at this point. And so the 10th anniversary edition has 25 new concepts. It's effectively additional chapters worth of new material spread across all of the existing chapters. So I have new things to say about how businesses work, working with yourself and other people, and understanding and improving systems. And so yeah, my hope is that

This continues to be the best introduction to business knowledge and practice that exists for the next 10 years. And then in 10 years, I'll do another edition and update it with whatever needs to be added at that point. Love it. Where would you send people to learn more about you online in addition to buying the book on Amazon? Yeah, the best place to go for all of my work is Josh Kaufman.net. which has links to all of my books. If you're interested in specifically the 10th anniversary edition of the Personal MBA, you can find that at personal MBA.com.

Perfect. Josh, thanks again for investing your time with me today. And I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks so much for having me on. Awesome. Thanks, fans. Okay, I'm going to answer another question that I recently received.

I did a Zoom session with a leadership team for a company called Mondo. Mondo's president, Stephanie Wernick Barker, is a member of one of my leadership circles. And so we did a Q&A Zoom session with her team, a fantastic company with a number of phenomenal leaders. And so here's one of the questions I received. That's from Jen Haley, Director of Sales at Mondo. She says, you work with so many organizations across all verticals. Are you seeing any trends within sales organizations that are growing out of stagnation? What traits, qualities, habits do you recognize in the leaders who are able to pull their teams out of these tough times?

Jen, it's a great question and certainly timely given what we're going through. It made me initially think, again, of a mentor of mine that I've mentioned before. named Tom Ogburn. Tom told me that leadership is about making something better than it was when you found it. And doing so by developing people along the way. And most important, leaders cannot be energy neutral. They are either adding energy or taking energy. Reminds me of a picture of a sign I saw hanging up at a hospital within Indiana University

health system. This is what the sign said hanging up leading into the entrance. Please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space. Your words matter. Your behaviors matter. Our patients and our teams matter. Take a slow, deep breath and make sure your energy is in check before entering. Thank you. A great reminder that as leaders, it is our responsibility to be energy givers. What is your team thinking about you as you enter a room, whether it's in Zoom or in person? Are you the type of leader who brings optimism and positive energy to the group? Those are the type of people that I want to work for.

Those are the type of people that I want to follow. It doesn't mean you're not realistic or you don't understand the tough situations we're dealing with. Certainly you can be real, but that you attack it aggressively with optimism and belief that things are going to go well. You believe in pro-noia, right? That's that the world is conspiring to help you succeed. That's the type of leader that I want to follow. That's the type of leader that I want to be. That's the type of leader that I hope you want to be.

Scott Belski told me as the leader, you are the emotional thermostat of your team. Your team's always watching, noticing, judging, judging, seeing how do you respond when times are tough? They're going to follow your lead. My dad told me that as the leader, it is your job to be in a good mood for your people every day. Again, doesn't mean being fake or inauthentic. It means being intentional and personal. purposeful with your attitude and your effort and the energy you bring to a room.

So think about that the next time you're getting ready for a meeting or an interaction with a one-on-one or a team setting of what type of energy are you bringing to that person and to your team. Once again, thanks for the question, Jen, and thank all of you, the loyal listeners of the Learning Leader Show for spreading the message, telling us. a friend or two that this episode of the Learning Leader show could be helpful. Because you continue to do that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so much. Talk with you soon. Can't wait.