The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 576: Scott Belsky - Adding Texture to Time, Feeling Unrushed, Pushing Yourself Physically, Narrating the Journey, Becoming an Excellent Writer, and Why You Should Never Outsource Your Story

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Buy our new book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3ToYckL My guest: Scott Belsky co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as its CEO for six years. Behance was acquired by Adobe in 2012. Since then he has had a variety of roles with the company and is currently Adobe's Chief Strategy Officer, and EVP of Design & Emerging Products. He's also the author of two best-selling books, The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen. Scott holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Hiking > Beach - You're only able to recollect experiences with enough friction to add texture to time as it passes. time spent doing the unexpected and/or being challenged is time with texture. Ultimately, in our dying breath, the more experiences in our lives with texture, the more of our lives we will actually remember and the longer we will feel we have lived. What adds texture to time? A challenge. Feeling unrushed - Feeling unrushed (so simple, yet so hard) is indeed such a luxury; one I still fail to achieve. Persona-Led Growth - People are more likely to share what people say than what companies say. Modern "PR strategy" should amplify the voice of actual builders, embrace personality rather than dull it out, and aspire for more real-time updates vs. major moments. How to raise kids to become great adults? "model hard work" Say, "This is the hard work." Manufacture hardship. Regulate emotions. Big feelings, little bodies. Why Scott enjoys working at Adobe... He's a mission-driven entrepreneur. Progress begets progress. Prototype = Show, not tell. A prototype is worth a hundred meetings, and almost all meetings that aren't grounded with a prototype are a waste of time (or worse). A prototype immediately surfaces gaps in logic or business concerns. It is the fastest way to drive alignment. "A prototype prompts decisiveness" "It's a hot knife through the butter of bureaucracy." Why Scott writes a Substack newsletter: "I want to be part of the creator platform." Writing clarifies thinking It's important to stay close to the action. Writing works as a forcing function to do that. Scott has benefited greatly from running every day. It's important to push yourself mentally and physically. "There's no option to stop." What's the most important element of leadership? "Empathy. It's a shortcut for overcoming challenges." "You're either part of the living or part of the dying."  Scott's aunt Arlis Aron. Fought stage 4 cancer for 15 years. She always focused on living, her garden, breakfast, and traveling. "Decide if you want to live less or live more." "Every day is a standalone canvas."

It's always been about people, mission, customers, and what I like being up at night thinking about. And to this day, it has been about the impact of creators on the world. Chief Strategy Officer now, EVP, design and emerging products at Adobe. What would be in the class Scott Belske's, the most important thing about leadership? I had to think of one word, it would probably be empathy. You have to always be narrating the journey. Progress begets progress. You should never outsource your story.

AI, how is it going to impact business models in the future? What I'm more interested in is the implications. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday,

morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how our new book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 666866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. It's a great one. Scott Belski is back. He co-founded Bihans in 2006 and served as its CEO for six years. Behance was acquired by Adobe in 2012. Since then, He has had a variety of roles with the company and is currently Adobe's chief strategy officer and EVP of design and emerging products. He's also the author of two bestselling books, The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen. During this conversation, we discuss why hiking trips are better than beach vacation. Then Scott shares the importance of a senior leader staying close to the front lines and how he does.

that in his role. Then he shares how becoming a runner has made him a better leader. Then we talked about why leaders must develop excellent communication skills, both written and verbally, and also why you should never outsource your story to anyone else but take full ownership of it. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott is one of the most thoughtful and intentional people I've ever met. Please enjoy my conversation with Scott Belski. Scott, it's awesome. to have you back here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome in. Thanks, Ryan. Good to be here. Five years, man. 2018, it's so fast. That's the last time we talked. You were in the back of a taxi cab.

Looks like you're a little bit more comfortable settings, which leads to my first question, because I want to hear from you why you prefer a trip and or a vacation that has adventure and friction more so than a vacation to the beach? Well, listen, I'm all for beach vacations where we can just let our minds simmer down and just relax and read a book. But I also have come to believe that it is the texture that is added to time

as it passes that helped us remember how the time was spent. And so if you think about what adds texture to time, it is challenge. It's adversity. It's surprise. It's once in a lifetime moments, experiences, new things, right? It's things that actually stand out, whereas 30 beach vacations all blend together and you can't differentiate between them. And then if you think about what makes you feel like you've lived long, I imagine that it is what you can remember. And as I think even now, as I approach my mid-40s, what do I feel?

like my life has been long or not. What I can remember are the things that stand out and what I can't remember is everything else. And so I've come to believe that you want to remember as much as you possibly can and feel like you have lived. And by adding texture to time as it passes, you can. So I do try to aspire for more adventures these days. What are some of your favorite adventures you've taken recently? Recently, I think that I try to do, first of all, I try to go and take some unique speaking engagements or meetings or conferences and places that I've never been, whether it be in somewhere random in Arizona or somewhere random in Europe or somewhere that just takes me out of my comfort zone. With my family, we did an incredible trip to Japan and had all

kinds of fun experiences that none of us will ever forget. But even when I'm in places I like to go a lot like Colorado, just going on new hikes and new places with different people. These are the things that stand out. Do you think it's an age thing, Scott? Because I am 100% with you when it comes to I used to really enjoy the beach vacations. But now, especially in my wife and I are in perfect alignment with this. And that's a good thing. If we get a chance to go away together, the only thing we want to do is hike. We're just looking for beautiful locations in the world to hike. We just did a Sedona trip when it was a little bit cold. It was it was a little bit perfect. Like it was perfect. Beautiful hikes. And I don't know if there's a better way to, to, to,

take a trip together. But I didn't feel that way 15, 20, I didn't care at all about that. Do you think it's an age thing? What is that? I mean, perhaps you don't know what you're really missing until you miss it and you also have the juxtaposition of the, you know, of the beach experience or the, you know, the, whatever the equivalent is for all of the listeners. But I do, you know, I think that there's something to be said about being pushed in some way that feels enriching afterwards. I mean, listen, I used to hate running and now I run every day. And part of it is just because of the ritual of pushing myself and the residual impact, you know, on the rest of my day as a result of doing

so. But these are just things you have to kind of learn, right? I have found that to be a commonality among leaders who have sustained excellence, Scott, is that they push themselves, both physically and mentally oftentimes. It seems that you've found this with running. Can you share more about your thoughts of leaders, excellence, and pushing yourself? Running to me is a metaphor for so many parts of my life as a leader and as a builder, and not the things you might expect. For example, we have the tendency to judge ourselves and to judge others and

constantly be distracted by the people around us as you're building or founding something or leading something. What you learn in running is that just because you pass someone, you know, it doesn't mean that you're a better runner. In fact, you could be expending your energy too fast and they could be the world's greatest runner or you could be on your first mile and they could be on their seventh mile. You just have no context, right? And I always remind myself of that in my daily life whenever I by myself pacing with others as opposed to myself. So, I mean, and that's just one, right, of many, of many, you know, lessons learned. I also believe that you just genuinely have to feel like you deserve the good moments by pushing yourself through the tough

moments. And that is truly, you know, realize while running. Everyone knows that and that runner's high that you get afterwards has to be earned. But I also have started to feel like that maps to a lot of other parts of life. How has pushing yourself physically made you better at dealing with the adverse situations that inevitably come up with being a senior leader at a company like Adobe? Well, the mentality of being earlier mid run and being tired and saying there's no option we're going to get through this and I'm going to push myself. You know, that is a reflex that you develop in one place and it's transferable to another.

This is why I actually also believe now as a father, I don't care what my kids' passions are as long as they have them. And part of the reason is because I want them to build the reflex or the muscle memory of taking initiative in something that is interesting to them. because I believe that whether it's hockey or horseback riding or whatever the kids interested in earlier on in life, if they develop that reflex, it will be something that they come back to and that it becomes a muscle memory that's important to them. In running, there are a lot of muscles that you develop along those lines that I find myself

using the proxy of in another part of my life. It's oftentimes when things get hard or when you start to, your mind starts to, your mind starts to hurt, play against you as opposed to help you. And I think those are just things you have to learn in practice. As a dad, this is a question I ask all dad, especially ones of means like you are, because I constantly worry about messing this up. You have the means to give them whatever they want and need, but you don't want to raise, I'm assuming, but you don't want to raise spoiled and titled kids.

I know I don't, and I'm trying, I think about this every single day. How do you manufacture, hardship in their lives because we know that develops grit, tenacity, and resilience, the qualities that you have and that we want our kids to have. Yet, they're growing up with a life that could be easy because you have all of the means to make it that way for them. And you love them. So it's hard to see them struggle, but we know how important is. So how do you manufacture hardship for your kids so that they grow up to be great, productive, I think it's a great question, something I think about very often.

The two things that come to mind, number one, are just talking about what hard work looks like, modeling it, and when they are facing something that they are struggling with, reminding them that this is the hard work. And when they're enjoying some luxury, you know, this is what we get with hard work. kind of reinforcing, like, how this works is important. But there are in many instances where, you know, my kids are struggling with having to do something. And I just remind them, like, this is the hard work. This is what you want to do, right?

I would, the other thing is, listen, no matter the degree of privilege, like every kid's going to face hard times, whether it is a health issue or a bowling issue in school or a subject they're struggling with or whatever. And as parents, we have a choice. We can either try to resolve it for them and protect them from it, inoculate them from the anguish, the pain, the suffering. Or we can say this is their opportunity to learn resilience, you know, and to learn to regulate their response, their suffering in this moment. And so that's been our approach to parenting is like, listen, when they come,

let's not try to protect them from it. Like they need these challenges. and they might not get it in other parts of their life. Like they're fortunately able to eat whatever meal they want when they want and, you know, some of these other things that are luxuries for many people. But when they face the suffering, like let's, you know, partner with them in it. But let's not shield them from it. Let's not insulate them from feeling the pain because it's real, right?

And this is life. And this is how we build, you know, the resilience to be ready for it. How did your parents help you develop those skills? Yeah, it's interesting. And this is also like a common conversation in my household because my wife is the co-founder of a company called Good Inside, which is all about parenting and building a generation of resilient self-regulating kids. And so we're always sort of dissecting our own childhoods and figuring out what we want to do that's different. I would say my parents are pretty like hippie-ish and pretty hands off. And that worked for me. Would it work for every kid?

I don't know, right? I think as we think, as we think about being parents, some things we don't subscribe to that are traditionally used in parenting are things like punishing kids and having them be alone when they can't regulate their own feelings and emotions. Like we happen to believe that when a child struggles to regulate their response to something, it's actually when they need you to be with them to just like partner with them through figuring out that. I love this notion of, you know, big feelings and little bodies, right? And how they just don't have the tools yet. And you want to help the develop them so they can be regulating adults.

I feel like a lot of problems in this world are due to adults that can't regulate their own emotional response or feelings to something. And then they do something, act out in some way, sabotage themselves. You know, and I, you know, so how do we build them? How do we build that as parents is always a question for us? I could go on the parenting thing all day. But it's funny that we got off on this little tangent. But it's it's because it's top of mind.

I'm sure it is for you too, right? Like it's the most important thing in our life. So it's hard, even though you're an expert of like 90 other things, we get back to like, hey, this is another dad who seems really thoughtful and intentional. I just got to ask. I'm sorry, you know. And by the way, you know, parenting is also about leadership, right? And a lot of what you learn as a parent, you apply as a leader and vice versa.

And also, we're all trying to figure out how we were parented. Because by the way, that influences the type of colleague and leader we are. So it's, you know, in some ways it has nothing to do with kids. It also has to do with us. Yeah. Can you talk to me about the luxury of feeling unrushed? Well, yeah, I have thought about what I'm working towards. You know, and you get to a point in your career where you're starting to reexamine

exactly why you are doing what you're doing. It's easier early on because you're just trying to find a passion that can make enough money to support yourself or family eventually. And then if you're fortunate enough to get that box checked, then it's like, okay, you know, what, what am I working for? Am I keeping myself occupied? Is it because I have loyalty towards my team? Is it because I haven't achieved my mission yet and I have more work to do there? Is it because I want a better lifestyle? And if it's not as much about buying more things. You know, I kind of want fewer things these days.

Like, what is it about? And all those things, by the way, are drivers for me these days. I do have loyalty towards my team. I care about the creative industry. I feel my DNA is part of this company that I'm a part of now that acquired my company many years ago. But I also think increasingly I am, I'm working for the sensation of being able to be where I am.

and to not always feel like I'm living at the mercy of so many other people's schedules and clocks, but that I have a little bit more ability to focus on the things that matter most to me. And as I've been able to influence my own role in my day job, I've always been trying to get closer and closer to the things that I am genuinely interested in, that leave me with more energy after every meeting than at the beginning of the meeting. and when it's the opposite, if you have the luxury to have less of that stuff in your life, you should do so because then you will feel less rushed. You'll feel more present.

I learned, I think, some of this from my father, who was a surgeon and was a very busy, hardworking doctor. I think I learned a lot of work ethic from him. And he had a packed day every day. But he always was with every patient, like fully. And he was notoriously always behind schedule. People in his waiting room might complain. Yet when they were in there with him, they cherished the fact that he was like there and present.

So that is another thing I think about. You can still be a professional. You can still be busy and still aspire to not feel rush. We spoke five years ago. You had been acquired your company behance by Adobe. You had, I believe your role at the time was like SVP of product, maybe something like that. And I thought, well, you know, you'll kind of do your time at Adobe. Maybe there's an earn out period, whatever, however those things go through acquisition.

And then you'll go on to your next thing. But that's not the case. Now, you're doing other things. You invest. You work with other people. But you have been promoted now at Adobe, maybe multiple times since we last spoke. I don't think this is normal where somebody gets acquired. And now you're like a senior leader at this large company that acquired your business.

I love to learn a little bit about your mindset of why you've decided to stay and not only stay, but take on bigger roles within Adobe since your company was acquired. Yeah. I even left and came back. I'm one of the boomerangs, as we like to call them at Adobe. For me, it's always been about people, mission, customers, and what I like being up at night thinking about. And to this day, it has been about the impact of creators on the world.

and outfitting creative people. It's always been a mission for me, a passion for me. And when I started Beance back in 2007, 2006, I didn't know at that time whether I was a serial entrepreneur where it would just be like I get passionate about something, build it, but then jump to something entirely different and build it and then move on again, versus a mission-driven entrepreneur,

where I'd be so driven by a mission that I would do it whatever which way I could. Big company, small company, public company, private company, I ended up realizing I very much was the latter. And that doesn't mean that I'll never get passionate about something different again. And I have had some side passions that were different along the way. But I'm pretty motivated by what we're doing and how we're doing it. And each time I feel like, okay, I might be done now.

There's like a new challenge presented, you know, a new dynamic that shifts in the world of technology and creativity and design that just reengages me again. Most recently, it has just been the advent of AI. And the entire set of contradictions and questions and assumptions that this whole world opens. And I just felt like, wow, like I want to be there. I want to be part of this as we figured out. So we'll see. But it's exciting to lead a large organization to be part of a senior team. I really respect.

It's really just the seven of us at the top of the company that work together every week to make some of these decisions that I think really impact our industry. It's super exciting still. One of the roles of a senior leader like you are chief strategy officer now, an EVP design and emerging products at Adobe. So how many people actually report up to you? Oh my goodness. Well, let's see. And the chief product officer role, which I played formally for the last five years, was,

you know, five to seven thousand. Now it's probably a lot less than that, but still a lot more than I was used to as a CEO of a private company. Wow. thousands of people. So we talked about this a little bit last time, but I think it's important to bring up and also to get your thoughts now that five years have passed. But you've, you seem to always be really good at understanding the role of communication as a leader and how important that is. In fact, you said you have to always be narrating the journey. It's something I've repeated probably a thousand times since we talked about how important it is to narrate the journey.

Can you share more and maybe an updated thoughts on the importance of effective communication, as a senior leader or as a leader in general and why you feel part of your role is to narrate the journey for the team? Well, the metaphor I always use is that all of us that are leading a bold new venture, a startup or a turnaround in a big company, anything volatile and long term,

we are essentially driving our team across country in a car with the windows blacked out in the backseat and they have no idea where they're going, whether they're making progress, and how much further they have to go. And that is a really bad state for any team to be in. And it's the default state for any team that's embarking on something bold. And so we, as the driver, right, we need to narrate the journey, the ups and downs,

the progress that we're making. Remember, a lot of the research is that progress begets progress. People feel making, they're like they're making progress and then they make more progress. And so that's really important. That's about storytelling. It's about honesty. It's about directness. And it's about constantly weaving the narrative.

So the people are carried along with us. So you're asking you about updated thoughts on this topic. First of all, I think that very few leaders in big companies do this because they feel like they're being repetitive or they feel like they're sharing too much. And in fact, yet when people hear the story and they hear it again and again and they hear from their leader, that keeps them engaged. But also for customers, customers want story. You know, they want to hear from the people, not the company. They don't want press releases and polished, you know, old, antiquated messages that were completely, you know, removed of any, of any emotion

or boldness or edge. You know, they want the real deal. And so I've started to use this term persona-led growth as opposed to product-led growth. Product-led growth is when you have teams building in features that help people feel successful more quickly in the product so that they share it and the product grows without any marketing spend. Persona-led growth to me is when the people behind the product start sharing how the product works and what their true unvarnished views are, when things change or get launched, what the stats are, what the data is,

such that the product ends up growing itself without marketing spend. So it's the same concept. And when you see people like Mark Zuckerberg do a review of the Vision Pro versus the meta-quest, when you see Elon Musk going out and taking a poll on what features should be added, when you see Toby from Shopify commenting on the ecosystem in real time, where, you know, PR departments are probably feeling blindsided, right and left. Everyone feels like their leaders are taking risk. And yet this is persona-led growth at its best.

And so I've tried to do that, you know, and I've always been doing it, you know, in a respectful way, but in a candid and real-time way, because I think that's what customers want. How do you manage that now being a part of a big company? I feel like I've been very lucky for work some of the big companies I have. However, it feels like a lot of the corporate communication got passed through lawyers and PR people.

and by the time it finally got to even us, the internal people, let alone the external, it was like, are you serious? You know, can you talk like a human? Can you talk like an actual person? I've actually talked to you before, the person writing the email. Can you just talk like that guy, not the email that I'm seeing? And it's surprising. Are people just scared?

Are they nervous? Why is this so common? Well, I think there, I think that we live in a world where anything, everything, everything, can be dissected and taken out of context and what have you. Ironically, the more polished and vague and hand-wavy a press release is, the more skeptical people are of it, where if you come out and just answer things directly head on, people respect that. Whenever there is a controversy online about something in one of our tools or one of our

decisions or whatever else, and I come in and I'm just like, like, I hear you. And first of all, you're not wrong. This part of what you're saying, we should have done that better. But let me just tell you, this is what we're trying to do, this is why, and we're not done yet. It oftentimes ends the conversation because people got what they wanted, which was the leader, to come out and hear them, take responsibility, and be straight with them. Instead, you have these like polished press releases, just as like defensive and vague and skirting and reiterating our mission as a company, which no one needed to hear. You know, it's like, so I think that that's what every company does by default because it's

someone's job. And I think as a company scales and everyone has a job to do, sometimes the problem in the company is that you're letting everyone do their job so they can say they did, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, wait, how should we evaluate or, you know, respond to this situation? Is that hard, though, for you? I think it's, I think that a company needs to identify the few people. And again, also, remember, every big business tries to scale every function. Everything needs a process.

Everything needs to be a well-oiled machine. If one person's sick that day, the next person should be able to do it. What we're talking about right now, though, defies that a little bit, right? It's not scalable. It's not normal. To find a few people in an organization that you empower to speak in real time on behalf of the brand is hard. I think that every company, though, should identify, you know, empower, promote if necessary,

you know, some of the people that are their outward facing narrative building people. Because this is the world we live in. Like, this is what customers want. They want direct connection with people, you know, not, you know, not official anonymous spokespeople from brands. How did this happen at Adobe and you? Did it just kind of like gradually earn their trust? and you just did it and they're like, oh, Scott's, you know, he's smart. This looks good. Or do you actually have conversations? I'd be like, Scott's going to be one of the few guys that's going to be

out there kind of just sharing his thoughts. Yeah, well, I think, listen, Adobe has a number of people around the company, including some of our evangelists who even powered to be out there, engaging with customers day to day. And I think over recent years, we've gotten even better at this. Listen, I've been in this industry for, you know, 15 years, I guess. And I've been Adobe for many of those years, at least 10 of them. And I think that over time, I was able to develop an exercise my own voice on behalf of the products we were building and how we were building them. And my colleagues at the company have been really supportive of it. So I feel fortunate. And I now try to convince friends of mine at other companies, especially those who are leading

other companies, to find their own voice or find someone with a voice and empower them to start to tell the company's story in real time. This is from, it might be your pent, tweet or pin tweet thread, but you should never outsource your story or any core component of your competitive advantage. And I feel like that that flows with this. And I think Scott, though, goes beyond just a company. I think people need to think about this. Don't outsource your story or try to hire somebody else to tell it for you. You're probably in most cases or all cases, the best person to tell whether it's your individual story as a leader or even the story of your company. It's best to get good at that and get reps at that, maybe through writing,

through speaking, however, podcasts, it's worth it to get good at that versus outsourcing that to somebody else. Well, if you think about how you win really, really hard to hire employees, how you retain anxious employees when you go through the volatile, messy middle of a journey. how you woo investors, how you convince customers to take a risk on you when you're a new company with a new unknown brand, all of these things you have to do are about narrative and communications

and telling that story. So when startups hire PR firms out of the gate or marketing agencies to tell their story for them, it's a massive red flag for me as an investor because I'm like, wow, If you can't do that yourself and iterate it and tell it over time naturally, like good luck on all these things that you're going to have to do going forward to be a successful business.

I think it's one of the absolute core capabilities that differentiates most companies. I also, and therefore I don't think that you should outsource it. I don't think you should outsource anything that is truly differentiating of your business. Outsource the stuff that is not differentiating, the stuff that is commoditized, accounting, You don't need your own accountant for many, many years, right? So don't hire one and don't become best in class at accounting. Get an accounting firm to do it for you, right? But when it comes to, if you're a customer or consumer-facing interface,

don't outsource design. That's going to differentiate you. If you're an AI company and you're billing yourself as one, don't outsource your model development because then you're just wrapping something that someone else is making that anyone else can get. So, you know, same with communications. I just think it's more true for most than people realize. You've written that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings.

And almost all product meetings that aren't grounded with a prototype are a waste of time or worse. A prototype immediately services gaps in logic or business concerns. It's the fastest way to drive alignment. I view this, Scott, is have a bias for action. As a former football player, I learned the most when I was under the bright lights with 11 other guys trying to kill me. That's when you really learn. And I did learn in the meeting rooms and it practiced a little bit and from watching others some. But nothing is quite like the pressure of the guys in your face as a quarterback when everyone's watching and they're there and you've got to step in and make the shot.

And I feel like that's what this your prototype versus tons of meetings mentality is. And I think, again, this is a portable lesson beyond someone making a product. This is just life in general bias for action versus thinking and meeting too much. Yeah. I love the connection between that idea of prototyping worth 100 meetings, which I can talk about and operating with a bias towards action. You know, usually people don't make that connection, but it's true. I mean, what a prototype is intended to do is show not tell.

When people are pontificating around a room talking about what something should and shouldn't do and what something should include and not include and whatever, you know, you can have endless meetings like that and never get anywhere. For me, a really well-thought-out prototype is like a hot knife through the butter of bureaucracy. It just gets everyone aligned instantly. Now, they may disagree, and it may be the wrong solution, but at least it's something to react to. Like, you're seeing something real, as opposed to pontificating and having endless meetings

about the specs of something before a designer has even touched it. So in some ways, a prototype prompts decisiveness. And to your point, decisiveness is a key towards operating with a bias towards action, right? Just give me a decision, even if it's that we have to start from scratch again. Like, that's more helpful than endless meetings. What people want, by the way, that work for us is decisiveness. They just want us to be able to make a decision.

Otherwise, we are blocking them, right? And when people feel like they're not getting great work done, they leave, right? Or they become demotivated, which is even worse because then they stay and they don't care. I have always empowered designers and made changes. sure that they were driving the discussion and part of those brainstorms and and really overly empowered in the process across product engineering and design and product marketing to come up with a solution. And even if the product leader or someone else takes responsibility for it, it doesn't matter. You know, it just matters that we get it done. And I think that is a,

you know, part of working with a bias for its action. One of the things I learned from General Stanley McChrystal, Scott, was that he would, he's four-star general, and he would regularly go to the front lines because he said there's so many things happening in between the front lines and where I am as a four-star general away from it, trying to be safe is obviously why he's not there. But you've got to get on the front lines. You have to. Kat Cole, I believe as a friend of yours, she told me the exact same thing. I want to record with her a few times that she has to get close to the customer.

She's got to get close for the people who are with the customers. And that's crucial. It feels like you have to do that. And I'm curious, you now in a very senior role, how do you intentionally stay close to the action? Well, there are a few things I do. And first of all, you have to ingratiate yourself in what customers are going through, not just like actually using the tool, but doing the things that they're doing with the tool. One of the things that I pushed myself to do a couple years ago was.

start a sub-stack newsletter and become part of the creator economy and actually start using our tools to make promotional ads and banners and all that stuff, thinking about conversion. And by the way, being in that, even though it's once a month and it's usually in a plane somewhere, right? But forcing myself to build this newsletter called Implications was a great way of being a part of the creator economy that we're always talking about with our customers. And I don't think any other executive that I'm working with is actually also part of the creator economy. So I just think it gives me a great vantage point. And yes, I learned how to use Adobe Express better and how to schedule posts on social platforms and what have you.

But I also learned how the economics work and who are the readers and how do people, how do these subsects grow and all that sort of stuff. And so it's so important to put yourself in it. And, you know, in some people, I'm working with a public, why does Scott spend time writing a newsletter? Like, you know, but it's just, it's being the patient, right? And every doctor talks about their experience being a patient as transformative in terms of being a medical professional. Yet no one wants to be a patient, of course. So, you know, I think that that's part of it. The other part of it is just making time every day to hear from customers.

Now, easier said than done, right? it's not like I'm going every day to some marketing agency or some design team or something and sitting with them. But what I do do every day is I search on social media and see what the people I'm following are saying and I engage in the discussions that people are having on our products. And in some ways, that's like hitting 10 to 20 customers a day if you're really engaging with them, asking questions, seeing what their responses are. So I also think that using tools like social is really helpful.

And the writing element is, I'll beat the drum forever, from a leadership perspective, and you've written books, you write a substax, you regularly have written and are writing. How does writing help you as a leader? Well, like you write and others who have done a lot of writing, you'll know that this is how we synthesize our thoughts. And it's a creative discipline, by the way, in and of itself. Like it's where it's my equivalent of being in the art studio. I'm always writing little things down that either mean more or less to me later down the line. I love tending to these things and feeding them with little things I've learned and then eventually debuting them and sharing them and getting feedback on them.

It's just such an amazing cycle. And it has introduced me to founders that I now work with. It has refined my thinking in many ways. this writing has also had a great influence on the strategy narrative at Adobe and the work that I've done to help develop the company's strategy. And I think it's a great practice, but it takes focus. It takes unplugging from this attention-seeking machine that we're a part of in our everyday lives.

And it's rewarding, you know, to put something out there, you know, and then see other people build on it. You feel like you're adding to the vernacular. You've like committed something to open source. that is, you know, advancing thinking, you know, in your industry, which is just a great sensation and everyone should take some time to do it. What made you call your substack implications? Well, I've personally grown tired of all of the newsletters and everything that's just

chronicling what's new. It's relatively easy to write about press releases and new advancements in anything. What I'm more interested in is the implications of this stuff. and getting creative about what could happen as a result of what's happening. So whether it's AI, how is it going to impact business models in the future? What will the new business models be if people are buying fewer seats of something, but they're buying more virtual workers that are essentially virtual seats of something? How do you capture that?

I mean, these are all sorts of nuances, right, that are fun to brainstorm about. And what I like is that it's untethered. I'm not a journalist that needs to be fact-checked. I'm writing about the potential implications of things that may or may not be right. And I just find it to be a super creative exercise. So it's implications of stuff. I love that you do it. I remember I was one of the I signed up immediately.

And so I love reading it every time you publish. Scott, if I was running Harvard Business School, one of the first calls I would make would be to you. And I would say, Scott, would you please teach a class for me? And you can teach, you can do whatever you want, but I do want to title the class. Okay. And the class is going to be called the most important thing. And this is going to be about leadership. What would be in that class that you're teaching? What would be in the class, Scott Belski's, the most important thing about leadership class? Wow. That's a tricky question because I think that there's, there's, you know, obviously so much to cover. But if I had to think of one word, it would probably be empathy.

And I think the reason is because empathy is always a shortcut for building great products. Empathy is a shortcut for overcoming any challenge in teams. It's a shortcut for effective marketing to customers. It's also a shortcut for self-awareness. You know, when you start to feel what people are going through, You become more aware of your own impact on that and where you're at fault. And I just think that these are the capabilities that advance you the most. And it comes down to empathy.

I think that a lot of the mistakes people make in business are because of a lack of empathy. When you're 30 degrees off of product market fit and you ship something that no one actually ended up wanting, it's not because it was a bad idea. Oftentimes it may have been a great idea. but you weren't empathetic with the customer suffering the problem, created out of your passion for a solution, as opposed to your empathy with the customers that are actually suffering every day.

And you would have figured out a better go to market or a more effective interface or the right feature set if you had had that empathy. So I think that would be my answer. That's interesting because if you ask a general number of people about what are the qualities in an excellent leader, What do you need to lead? I wonder how quickly that would come up on the list of qualities about vision and drive and discipline and focus and work ethic and resilience.

I mean, I'm just randomly. I wonder. And it seems though for you, it's number one. That's fascinating. Why is empathy number one for you? It's probably because whenever I'm stuck with a product or a customer or an issue or a person on my team, it's what helps me get unstuck. And so you asked about a leadership class.

And leadership is not about finding and leading through the happy path. The happy path in product is when everything goes exactly as you'd expect. The customer clicked the right button at the right time and had 100% undivided attention while they're using your product. That's called the happy path. And whenever you design for the happy path, you get screwed, right? So leadership is about everything off. the happy path, right? And that is about tuning in to people. I think that the best products in the

world and businesses tune into our natural human tendencies as customers. And I think that, again, all comes down to empathy. You're either part of the living or part of the dying. Can you tell me what you learned from your aunt Arlis? I had an aunt who passed away from cancer and lived for 15 years with it. And it's one of those classic stories of being told, you've got six months to live for 15 years. That is certainly one of the things that she epitomized, which was, listen, she never complained.

She also never ceased finding the joy in the day. I remind myself these days, I like to say that every day is a canvas. And I started to say every day is sort of a standalone canvas because I get frustrated with myself and I'm always thinking about something I'm doing now that will be important years from now. Like I kind of want to live a little bit more for the day

so I can feel that sense of accomplishment and focus. And this was Arles, right? She would, to her last days, focus on a garden project. She very much decided to be part of the living as opposed to spending everyday thinking about, well, they gave me six months, let's tidy up the will, let's leave everything as it should be. She was always living every day.

And that was a great example for me. I want to be able to live my life in a similar fashion. I appreciate you sharing. I know those things can be emotional, but it seems like you have a twinkle in your eye talking about her, which is really cool. I appreciate that. One more question. We were talking last time about the messy middle. You said there was just a bunch of notes, Evernote, notes, hundreds and hundreds.

And you had to kind of scale back and take the best of the best. And a certain number of them got published after you structured a thing. do you still have a bunch of Evernotes now that could turn into another book or does those Evernote notes go into implications? What's next from a writing perspective beyond implications? Yeah. Well, I'm a notion person now. Okay. I really rather crazy database these days.

I still am always trying to kick the dots with all the things that I've written. I write lots and lots of little things, right? And then I'm always trying to piece them together. some of the stuff that was left in the cutting room floor for the messy middle, I'm still determined to do something with. So occasionally I'll find a way of inserting it into something. But I think the discipline of writing again for me is like the real creative discipline that I like to immerse myself in for at least a few minutes every day.

And I also, after every run, I kind of jot a few things down. But I like the database nature of notion because I can sort of link to things from things. and that's really been a benefit for me. I would love to see some of those notes. I'm sure some of them come out on Twitter and in Implications, but Scott, I really appreciate you coming back and this is absolutely flew by. I know we've got to run right now,

but I highly recommend people check out Implications, your substack. Where else would you send my viewers, listeners to learn more about you online? Yeah, well, I'm just out Scott Belski on whatever platform is your choice in the social world. Implications.com is the newsletter. And then the last book was the messy middle.

And folks who are at least navigating any bold journey and some volatility that comes with it, you might find it useful. I feel like a lot of people now use that phrase. I'm in the messy middle. I'm in the messy middle. I'm like, I'm sure you got that from Scott. So it's so true, man. But thank you again for being here, man.

I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Every five years if not sooner. Let's do it sooner next time. Okay. Maybe in person. That would be fun to do it in New York. All right, man. Thank you.

the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Scott Belski. A few takeaways from my notes. Why hiking trips are better than beach vacations. You're only able to recollect experiences with enough friction to add texture to time as it passes. Time spent doing the unexpected and or being challenged is time with texture. I love that phrase time with texture. The more experiences in our lives with texture, the more of our lives we will actually remember and the longer we will feel we have lived. Then persona led growth. People are more likely to share what people say than what

companies say. Modern PR strategy should amplify the voice of actual builders, embrace persons, rather than dull it out and aspire for more real-time updates versus major moments. Scott shared how he does this. He's one of the voices, one of the few voices for Adobe and shares real-time updates from his actual voice. It's not run through lawyers or PR. It's Scott's actual voice. I think we all would be better served if we did this. And then life advice from Scott's Aunt Arliss. You're either part of the living or part of the dying. She was told she had six months to live for 15 years. She always focused on living. She would start a new garden project. She would travel, plan trips. She said, you need to decide if you want to live less or live more.

And I think that is awesome advice for all of us to decide to live more. And, be part of the living. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Scott Belski. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you continue to go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show. And then you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show, hopefully five stars. By doing that, you continually give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.