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00:01:34.640 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks.

00:01:41.200 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to help you upgrade your

00:01:43.720 | life, money, travel, and more.

00:01:45.680 | Now, I'm sure we all have that favorite article or video that we've all read

00:01:49.520 | and we've watched a dozen times and shared to countless people.

00:01:52.320 | I can't remember how I came across mine first, but for me, it's a talk

00:01:56.080 | from David Marquet about leadership.

00:01:58.400 | And when I was running my last startup, I watched it every few months and sent

00:02:01.360 | it to so many friends and colleagues in leadership roles.

00:02:03.880 | So if you sense a bit of excitement in my voice, it's because I'm

00:02:07.040 | joined by David himself today.

00:02:08.560 | And for those of you who don't know him, David Marquet is a distinguished

00:02:12.320 | submarine captain who, as commander of the USS Santa Fe, took the ship and

00:02:16.840 | its crew from being one of the worst performing in the Navy to the most

00:02:19.800 | combat effective ship in the squadron.

00:02:21.560 | He documented that journey in an incredible bestselling book, Turn

00:02:25.080 | the Ship Around, which was listed as one of the 12 best business books

00:02:28.720 | of all time, and he followed that up in 2020 with another bestselling

00:02:32.360 | book, Leadership is Language.

00:02:34.000 | In our conversation, we'll dive into the unique perspective he has on

00:02:37.560 | leadership and break down the tactics you can apply to your own lives,

00:02:40.920 | whether you're at the top or bottom of your organization.

00:02:43.640 | All right, we have a lot to cover, so let's jump in.

00:02:46.640 | David, thank you for being here.

00:02:50.960 | How are you?

00:02:51.480 | Good, Chris.

00:02:52.920 | Thanks for having me on your show.

00:02:54.160 | Welcome all listeners.

00:02:55.600 | So I would just love to start by hearing how your definition of

00:02:59.640 | leadership has evolved since you first started thinking about it.

00:03:02.600 | My definition of leadership was handed to me, like in the Navy, if they want

00:03:08.480 | you to have something, they're going to give it to you.

00:03:09.960 | If they haven't given it to you, you don't need it.

00:03:12.040 | So my definition of leadership started like this.

00:03:15.840 | Leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of

00:03:21.680 | others so as to command their obedience, confidence, and thorough respect.

00:03:28.000 | Basically something like that.

00:03:30.040 | But it was about this, it was in this model of the leader is the decision

00:03:35.000 | maker, the leader is the brains of the organization, and the team is the body.

00:03:38.920 | The team executes what the leader wants.

00:03:41.240 | And it's a model that got the human race a long way.

00:03:45.040 | It was a model that was alive during the Industrial Revolution.

00:03:49.160 | It was a model that a lot of people cling to because there's psychological

00:03:53.280 | seductions in the model when you're the leader and everyone thinks you're

00:03:56.640 | important and they got to stand and wait for your word and that kind of thing.

00:04:01.400 | But it's not the best model for the highest performing teams

00:04:05.560 | on the planet today, in my opinion.

00:04:07.840 | I had to learn the hard way that the model didn't work when the Navy signed

00:04:12.400 | me as a submarine commander to a submarine I'd never been on before.

00:04:16.440 | I'd finished this 12-month course for the submarine I was supposed to go to,

00:04:20.120 | but at the last minute, through some circumstances, I ended up going to

00:04:23.000 | Santa Fe, and I'd never been on this kind of submarine, and so now it was a

00:04:28.400 | life-and-death thing, like every time I gave an order, it was an X probability

00:04:32.760 | we were going to die because it could be right, it could be wrong.

00:04:35.800 | The team was going to do it anyway.

00:04:37.920 | And I had to unlearn all my leadership behavior.

00:04:41.680 | So leadership to me now is much more like creating the environment where

00:04:46.920 | people can be at their best just the way they are, not changing people, not

00:04:52.680 | saying, well, you need to be more proactive and you need to have more

00:04:56.400 | assertiveness, but just you want to change someone, change yourself, work on that.

00:05:00.960 | So it's about, it's always about other people and it's

00:05:03.600 | about creating the environment.

00:05:05.960 | So the question is like, under what conditions are humans at our best?

00:05:10.440 | Under what conditions are you at your best?

00:05:12.160 | And that's what you want to do in your company, because then

00:05:16.360 | everyone will be at their best.

00:05:17.760 | They'll be at their best human, which I think means using our brains a lot.

00:05:22.600 | And it'll be awesome for everybody.

00:05:25.160 | I want to talk about some of those tactics, but was there a moment on the

00:05:28.320 | Santa Fe that you said, wow, this has to change?

00:05:31.160 | Yeah.

00:05:31.400 | Well, yeah, there was, of course I knew that I hadn't been on the submarine

00:05:36.840 | and the crew knew that I was trained for a different, I mean, because the

00:05:40.560 | captain quit before me, they got airdropped in with basically no notice.

00:05:44.960 | But I was standing in the control room.

00:05:47.080 | We were starting a drill.

00:05:49.240 | This was our first day at sea and the submarine had a bad reputation.

00:05:53.760 | So my mindset was, oh, we're going to train hard.

00:05:56.040 | We're going to run all these hard drills on ourselves and we're

00:05:59.440 | going to beat performance into the ship.

00:06:02.680 | And then maybe people will be happier because there was two

00:06:05.000 | problems, horrible morale, horrible performance.

00:06:08.000 | So we start the first exercises.

00:06:09.800 | We shut down the reactor, it's called reactor scram and reactor scram.

00:06:15.160 | And then you don't have power.

00:06:16.600 | You're depleting your battery.

00:06:18.960 | Guys are running around and I want to make it harder.

00:06:22.120 | So I say, hey, let's speed up on the backup electric motor.

00:06:24.720 | And the officer orders it.

00:06:26.720 | Well, it turns out there was only one, it was only one speed

00:06:29.000 | motor on the Santa Fe, the Navy was always moves towards simpler equipment.

00:06:34.360 | So instead of a two speed motor, like having two gear, two

00:06:37.320 | gears on your car is just one.

00:06:38.600 | It's like a fixie for a bicyclist.

00:06:41.000 | And I didn't know that.

00:06:42.920 | But the scary thing is the officer who I suggested it to ordered it.

00:06:46.840 | And then the sailor just looked stupefied and he said, there's no second gear.

00:06:54.320 | And this is like not knowing what the color of your car is or something like

00:07:02.560 | one of the most basic things like you need to know as a submarine commander.

00:07:06.280 | And I had made this horrendous mistake.

00:07:08.640 | I was embarrassed and I was sad.

00:07:11.240 | And I had this light bulb moment.

00:07:12.640 | Number one, I didn't order it.

00:07:14.280 | He did.

00:07:14.680 | Number two, all my leadership training was irrelevant because all my leadership

00:07:18.880 | training was about making decisions and getting people to do it, but

00:07:21.280 | it's all predicated in being right.

00:07:22.920 | And then, oh, in the unlikely event that I'm not correct, I'm going to

00:07:26.480 | harangue the team and say, oh, it's your obligation to speak up and tell me I'm

00:07:29.360 | wrong. Problem is, as long as you make it harder for people to do something,

00:07:33.280 | they're going to do it less.

00:07:34.160 | So step one, the first tactic is shut up.

00:07:38.280 | Stop telling people what to do.

00:07:40.320 | There's so many negative things that happen from telling people what to do.

00:07:44.040 | You give them permission to shut your brains off.

00:07:45.880 | You absolve them of responsibility for their behaviors, on and on and on.

00:07:49.960 | So you just don't tell them what to do.

00:07:51.440 | Say, well, you tell me, if you were me, what would you do?

00:07:54.280 | If you were the captain, what would you do?

00:07:55.520 | And so we just embed this language.

00:07:57.680 | And it was, for us, the magic word was intent.

00:08:00.080 | I said, just stop saying, I would like permission to.

00:08:03.560 | Stop saying, I hope to.

00:08:05.760 | Stop saying, would you approve it for me to do this?

00:08:07.960 | Just say, this is what I intend to do.

00:08:09.520 | And now the bias is the answer is yes, unless you hear no, as opposed to the

00:08:15.280 | answer is no, unless you hear yes.

00:08:16.880 | And this has a huge impact.

00:08:18.600 | The second thing is, it puts you in the role of evaluating decisions rather than

00:08:23.240 | making decisions, which is much more powerful.

00:08:26.040 | I tried this at my company.

00:08:27.320 | I just said, you know, someone's saying, Oh, what should we do here?

00:08:29.200 | I said, what do you, what do you think we should do here?

00:08:31.000 | And I think it went well.

00:08:32.040 | It's easier, I guess, when you don't have an answer.

00:08:33.960 | When you don't know the answer, you genuinely have to ask.

00:08:36.400 | A lot of times people do have an answer or do have an opinion.

00:08:39.280 | And it's a little harder and it takes some reinforcement.

00:08:41.320 | But when you told the team, Hey, I'm not going to make any decisions.

00:08:44.480 | It's on you.

00:08:45.240 | Did everyone get it?

00:08:46.440 | No, I got the officers together and I was shaken because this was visceral.

00:08:53.880 | This was life and death.

00:08:55.240 | We know teams where the leader will make a decision.

00:08:58.320 | It'll be a terrible decision, but everyone does it.

00:09:00.400 | Winter corn CEO, Volkswagen.

00:09:03.680 | We're going to do this thing with the diesel engines.

00:09:06.080 | It's a, we, you can't.

00:09:08.120 | So the team goes through all these things, cheat of a horrible reputation,

00:09:12.960 | but they're absolved of the responsibility because they were told to.

00:09:16.840 | Now he'll say, I didn't actually tell him that.

00:09:19.640 | Yeah, but you've set up, set it up.

00:09:21.080 | So that was the only way we think anyway, you know, you know, the story we got

00:09:24.480 | together, I was looking at my shoes.

00:09:26.040 | They were looking at their shoes.

00:09:27.360 | I said, we've got a problem.

00:09:28.520 | And I hit on this idea where I'm going to be this commanding officer of the

00:09:33.960 | submarine and never give any commands.

00:09:35.840 | I said, because as soon as I start telling you guys what I think there's going to,

00:09:39.600 | it's just, it's not going to be binary, but it's just going to be harder for you

00:09:43.800 | to speak up and tell me what you think.

00:09:45.720 | So how about this?

00:09:46.400 | You tell me what you think first, and then I'll tell you yes or no.

00:09:52.280 | And the majority of people wanted it right away, even I, but I know no one

00:09:59.800 | really understood the implications.

00:10:01.240 | You, I can't say, watch this movie and you'll get a sense of what it was like.

00:10:06.440 | Every movie.

00:10:08.120 | I just finished watching this thing that BBC, I don't know if it's it, but it's

00:10:11.800 | a UK thing gone vigil is whore.

00:10:14.400 | It's hideous.

00:10:15.080 | It's horrible.

00:10:15.640 | Like the way they portray the Navy is just the worst, the most horrible,

00:10:18.840 | like nonsensical, this would never happen.

00:10:21.600 | But one thing that they portray, which is correct is the captain's going

00:10:27.120 | around giving all these orders.

00:10:28.080 | Like he's always telling people he never wants to see someone come to the

00:10:31.600 | cab and say, captain, this is what I intended to do.

00:10:33.320 | The cat, we really need to do this.

00:10:35.000 | And why?

00:10:37.120 | Cause it's a drama.

00:10:38.040 | The camera has to go someplace, but that's not the right way to run a company

00:10:42.080 | because it's, you just get thinking of one versus the thinking of everyone.

00:10:48.320 | But one of the things we say is don't convince me, commit behaviors, not action.

00:10:54.000 | So I was talking to two owners, two, two company founders for the show.

00:10:58.920 | And they said, Hey, we've got a situation where one of the guys on the team, like

00:11:04.880 | it's coming up with the wrong answer for how to manage a technology product.

00:11:10.000 | And they're reluctant to just tell them what to do, which I can't sense that, but

00:11:15.040 | it's okay to sometimes, sometimes do that.

00:11:18.400 | They say, well, how much do we explain?

00:11:21.640 | And so they said, I want to tell them this when I tell them to do it this way.

00:11:25.800 | And like everything that the person cited, if we're going to use this other

00:11:29.040 | plat, this platform, which is bigger.

00:11:30.640 | Okay.

00:11:30.960 | If you get the person to test and you said, is this platform bigger?

00:11:34.960 | And every question would be right.

00:11:36.280 | So none of those reasons are the reasons why the person's not doing it.

00:11:39.960 | There's some other reason, but in the end, don't, you don't need

00:11:44.320 | to convince them they're wrong.

00:11:46.160 | That's really derogatory.

00:11:48.640 | So, you know what, you might be right, but we're going to do it this way.

00:11:52.120 | Now you leave as much open decision space as possible.

00:11:56.080 | So I'm not adverse to leaders quote, making decisions, but there's two things.

00:12:00.440 | Number one, you focus that your decision should be on building ownership and

00:12:05.200 | creating the structure, not tweaking the decisions.

00:12:08.800 | If you think about it like a car, let's say we're making cars.

00:12:11.720 | We start a car company.

00:12:13.360 | The old way was we put an inspector at the end of the assembly line.

00:12:16.360 | We say, Hey, car defect, refit, car, good, sell car, car, sell, sell, sell defect.

00:12:22.640 | And that's how we view ourselves as leaders making decisions.

00:12:27.360 | Oh, I'm going to be the guy who's the quality inspector for decisions as

00:12:31.440 | opposed to baking in an assembly line.

00:12:34.720 | So the processes in my company just inherently result in better, more

00:12:39.440 | resilient, adaptive decisions.

00:12:41.000 | And I can get out of the business of being that quality inspector.

00:12:46.320 | But the cost is I don't get the psychological juice of everyone.

00:12:50.160 | I'm bend at knee trying to understand, Oh, what's what's Jack

00:12:53.880 | Welch telling us to do today?

00:12:55.480 | If people are empowered to make the decisions, but management overrides them,

00:13:00.640 | does it make it harder or how do you resolve situations where you're giving

00:13:05.400 | the team the kind of length of rope to run with it, but they're coming up with

00:13:09.840 | the wrong answer, obviously you can coach them, but, but how do you handle that?

00:13:13.160 | Almost all the decisions that we make are reversible or tweakable.

00:13:18.600 | So we have in our heads, we have this unspoken structure that we make decisions

00:13:29.200 | for all time and they're either work or don't work and it's very binary.

00:13:34.800 | And it's not, it's not like that.

00:13:37.440 | In my opinion, every decision is really a hypothesis.

00:13:40.840 | If we do this, then that.

00:13:42.880 | And then, so what you do is say, okay, so this decision is, we are going to try

00:13:48.680 | this, whatever for a month or try it this way for a month, see what we learn.

00:13:53.520 | Then we'll tweak it.

00:13:54.280 | Which may possibly mean scrapping it, but generally it means like

00:13:58.320 | tweaking it and improving it.

00:13:59.480 | But it puts people, number one, it's not so heavy.

00:14:03.080 | We're not saying, Oh, we're having initiative from now on.

00:14:06.760 | We're going to use Slack and nothing.

00:14:08.760 | Everyone goes, Oh my gosh.

00:14:11.840 | So we say, Hey, we're going to, let's try this.

00:14:13.800 | We're going to run Slack for a month.

00:14:15.080 | Let's see what we learn.

00:14:15.960 | And then it puts people in a learning mindset, which allow, and then, then

00:14:19.080 | they also have a sense that they can control their outcome because I'm going

00:14:22.440 | to be interested in what you've learned so that we can tweak how we use Slack.

00:14:26.880 | Whatever happens to be.

00:14:28.760 | I mean, sometimes it, as a leader, it's, it's worth letting someone do something

00:14:33.320 | that you think might be wrong just to go through the process of learning.

00:14:36.880 | Yeah.

00:14:37.080 | I mean, I think that's depends on how I wouldn't let the engineer comes up and

00:14:42.680 | says, Hey, I have a new idea for starting the reactor.

00:14:44.960 | You're like, yeah, no things that involve the laws of physics.

00:14:48.600 | I would not do a lot of experimentation on if they involve humans.

00:14:54.000 | Then yeah, I, I like to think how we manage vacation or who's on the project

00:15:02.400 | team or how we select a project teams or how often do they meet or what's the.

00:15:06.760 | Things like that.

00:15:08.160 | There's no laws of physics are going to be violated if we say, okay, everyone's

00:15:11.120 | just working at home or everyone working in the office or has people working in

00:15:14.480 | the office, fine, let's just try it.

00:15:16.200 | See what happens.

00:15:16.880 | It's not like deciding.

00:15:18.120 | For example, the software on an airplane where people die, if it's wrong, for

00:15:25.320 | example, and you talk a bit in, in your first book about needing competence and

00:15:30.560 | clarity within the org.

00:15:32.360 | So a couple of things that, that I took away are, are making sure everyone's

00:15:35.960 | hearing the same message, repeating the message, specifying goals, not methods.

00:15:40.480 | Are there other kind of big takeaways there of things that kind of can

00:15:44.000 | reinforce a new model of control?

00:15:46.400 | Yeah.

00:15:47.480 | So one of the things I learned was, is you're giving people the

00:15:50.040 | authority to make decisions.

00:15:51.320 | They're not always going to make the right decision and there's limits to it.

00:15:55.080 | There's a right and a wrong way to do it.

00:15:57.600 | For me, the two input variables, since you're a fellow mathlete, you'll get

00:16:01.600 | this, the two input variables for me were technical competence and organizational

00:16:06.640 | clarity.

00:16:06.960 | So in other words, the function of how much control I'm going to give you is a

00:16:13.280 | function of how much technical competence you have, how much understanding of what

00:16:17.600 | we're trying to do you have.

00:16:18.680 | And then plus this tiny, I call it the Z factor, which is like a growth factor plus

00:16:22.120 | Z.

00:16:22.640 | So in other words, if I can perfectly tune your decision-making authority to

00:16:27.640 | your skills, that's not what you want.

00:16:30.160 | You actually want to do a little bit more because that's where the growth

00:16:32.880 | happens and you want people to be excited.

00:16:35.720 | Oh, look, I'm learning new things.

00:16:37.080 | Oh, look, I'm making bigger decisions.

00:16:38.680 | You want that sense of progress.

00:16:41.040 | Otherwise it becomes static and no one wants to play there.

00:16:44.120 | Which seems a little counter to a common idea of give this person control once

00:16:49.440 | they, once they've earned it and demonstrated that they can handle it, is

00:16:53.480 | that turning it on the table and say, no, give them more control and see if they

00:16:57.200 | can handle it.

00:16:57.800 | Yeah.

00:16:58.880 | So when my daughter was growing up, for example, she wanted a later bedtime.

00:17:03.240 | So her bedtime is at nine and she wants to stay up to midnight.

00:17:06.600 | So I said, okay, once you demonstrate the ability to stay up to midnight, I'll then

00:17:10.640 | extend your bedtime to midnight.

00:17:12.120 | And that is the stupid, this is a, well, how can I demonstrate the ability if I

00:17:16.320 | don't, but you don't also say, fine, stay up to midnight for all ever.

00:17:20.640 | What, what you say to me as a parent is great.

00:17:23.960 | Let's run an experiment for the next two weeks.

00:17:25.520 | You can stay up to midnight.

00:17:26.640 | We'll see how you do.

00:17:28.160 | And then in two weeks, we're going to have a meeting and we're talking about it.

00:17:31.800 | And you're going to tell me what you learn.

00:17:33.240 | I'll tell you what I learned.

00:17:34.080 | And we're going to tweak the experiment, which including maybe going back to nine

00:17:38.480 | o'clock, but you don't pump up a balloon inside a box.

00:17:43.560 | And then when the balloons pumped up, make a bigger box.

00:17:45.960 | That's not, you make a bigger box and then the balloon can grow into that bigger

00:17:49.560 | box.

00:17:49.920 | And then you, that's, that's what you do.

00:17:51.520 | You got to make the box bigger so that the person can grow into it.

00:17:54.800 | And if, if you let people make decisions in an org and you're no longer the one

00:17:58.720 | making decisions, does it abdicate the leader of ever being wrong or, or what

00:18:04.200 | happens there?

00:18:04.840 | No, because you're still responsible.

00:18:07.800 | You still have a chance to veto it.

00:18:09.440 | So for example, someone says, cause something happened in my company recently

00:18:13.680 | where someone said, Hey, I want to try this.

00:18:15.200 | Oh, this is going to, I was on travel in a faraway place and an overwater

00:18:20.960 | bungalow and a significant client wanted an event.

00:18:24.880 | And we contacted the place and said, what kind of bandwidth you have?

00:18:29.120 | Oh great.

00:18:30.160 | You can do all kinds of, you can do an online zoom event from wherever.

00:18:33.880 | Bottom line was it didn't work because they didn't have the bandwidth and the

00:18:39.560 | internet was not stable enough.

00:18:41.880 | Now I technically didn't make this decision.

00:18:45.040 | My team said, Hey, we think you can do it.

00:18:46.720 | We think it'll work.

00:18:47.560 | So we tend to go forward, but I had a chance to veto it.

00:18:50.520 | So I'm still wrong.

00:18:51.680 | It was, it was a harebrained idea in retrospect, but what I liked was the

00:18:57.800 | team had a bias for action, the bias for doing stuff as opposed to like, Oh no,

00:19:01.840 | we can't like this.

00:19:02.640 | There's just too much of that in my mind.

00:19:04.200 | So I think every once in a while you got to push it.

00:19:05.760 | So I didn't feel bad, but Hey, it's, it's still your fault.

00:19:10.920 | I do think you should know your job, but it's like you said, it's when you know

00:19:16.760 | the decision or you quote, think, you know, that it's so hard not to tell

00:19:22.120 | people what to do because there's a sense of urgency.

00:19:24.520 | So I always try and say, just tell me more, buy myself some time.

00:19:29.320 | Oh, tell me more, especially when what you hear sounds wrong or odd to you.

00:19:33.200 | It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and

00:19:38.120 | the cracks start to emerge.

00:19:39.960 | Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many

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00:22:39.880 | The next question I wanted to ask was about that sense of urgency.

00:22:43.240 | And it's something I always struggled with was, you put all the responsibility

00:22:47.120 | on other people and you have these important deadlines, how do you create a

00:22:51.280 | sense of urgency within that organization when it's not already there?

00:22:54.920 | Obviously a team of more than one person can come up with more actions and more

00:22:59.200 | things and more ideas than you as one single person can keep up with.

00:23:02.760 | So when you've got a team of a hundred, 150 people, a hundred thousand

00:23:06.720 | people, you can't keep up.

00:23:08.280 | You don't want that.

00:23:08.880 | You want them pushing on you so hard that you can't keep up.

00:23:12.440 | And it happens by you leaning back.

00:23:14.800 | Not by leaning in and controlling, like Chris, run more, lose more weight.

00:23:23.120 | Oh yeah.

00:23:23.640 | That, Oh shit.

00:23:25.360 | Thanks.

00:23:26.320 | Now I got it.

00:23:28.040 | Does that ever work for anybody?

00:23:30.240 | I don't think so.

00:23:31.120 | It's not about that.

00:23:32.880 | Like, it's gotta come from within.

00:23:34.120 | You gotta be intrinsically motivated.

00:23:35.600 | Your team's gotta be intrinsic.

00:23:37.040 | You tap the intrinsic motivation.

00:23:38.680 | And then you get all these people that are intrinsically pushing

00:23:42.560 | you so hard, you can't even keep up.

00:23:44.480 | When you're feeling that sense of discomfort, like imagine like you're

00:23:47.160 | sitting in a go-kart and you got like all these people pushing you.

00:23:49.400 | It's like, ah, you guys are going too fast.

00:23:50.880 | That's the feeling you want.

00:23:53.120 | And so obviously the way to create that feeling is not to

00:23:56.800 | tell everyone to drive faster.

00:23:58.840 | Uh, tactics I've tried in the past are things like making sure everyone

00:24:03.320 | understands why we're doing what we're doing, talking about the vision,

00:24:07.440 | talking about what purpose we have, what the goals are, what's

00:24:10.760 | going on in the environment.

00:24:11.840 | Are there other things that can build and create that intrinsic motivation?

00:24:15.440 | Sense of agency, a sense of purpose.

00:24:18.920 | Like you're talking about a hundred percent sense of agency.

00:24:22.800 | And a sense of connectedness.

00:24:24.360 | So agency is, okay, I get to make decisions.

00:24:27.960 | I have authority over my life.

00:24:29.760 | I can control, and my decisions are linked to outcomes.

00:24:33.400 | I make these decisions.

00:24:35.040 | I'm going to have this kind of, I made those other decisions,

00:24:37.040 | make that kind of a life.

00:24:37.840 | And a sense of connection with other human beings.

00:24:41.120 | That was one that was hard for me because I tended to be

00:24:45.640 | a person who didn't need, I didn't feel like I needed a lot

00:24:49.200 | of connection as a human.

00:24:51.680 | And like have this book, Blue Zones of Happiness on the shelf behind me.

00:24:55.800 | So I'm reading about these people who live longer and has big network

00:25:01.200 | of community and like, you know, I don't feel that way.

00:25:03.120 | I'm just perfectly happy doing my own, my own thing.

00:25:06.440 | But studies show that it's true.

00:25:09.960 | And there's a sense of connection.

00:25:11.080 | Now, maybe the way I connect is different than the way someone else

00:25:13.800 | connects, but you want the team to connect.

00:25:16.680 | One way we did that was we outlawed the word "they."

00:25:19.960 | On a submarine, you have a pretty tight team because

00:25:23.000 | everyone dies or we all live, but there's no, it's not like a company

00:25:26.680 | where three people can exit and then the rest of the company goes under.

00:25:29.880 | It's not like that.

00:25:30.960 | But we had a lot of they's.

00:25:32.840 | We had rank, we had enlisted guys, we had officers, we had crew,

00:25:36.640 | we had the engineering officer.

00:25:38.240 | We had they, they, they, they.

00:25:39.440 | Who made this mistake?

00:25:40.440 | It was always they.

00:25:41.280 | So I got pissed off one day.

00:25:43.760 | I said, "There's no they on Santa Fe!"

00:25:45.280 | And it rhymed.

00:25:45.880 | So they loved it.

00:25:46.600 | They remembered it and they believed it.

00:25:48.640 | So he said, "We ordered the wrong parts," or "We didn't set

00:25:54.080 | the equipment up correctly," or "We misread the signals,"

00:25:57.560 | whatever it happened to be.

00:25:58.480 | And then our brains rewired and it felt like a team.

00:26:03.840 | The action came first.

00:26:05.760 | We activated new thinking.

00:26:07.120 | So we use the word "we."

00:26:08.960 | When I go into companies, I just listen.

00:26:11.520 | I say, "Hey, tell me about these guys."

00:26:13.000 | "Oh, yeah, we're the marketing team."

00:26:14.680 | "What about these guys?"

00:26:15.720 | "Oh, they're engineering."

00:26:18.200 | "Ah, that's the team boundary."

00:26:20.200 | "Not what the org chart says."

00:26:22.000 | Or, "Who made this decision?"

00:26:24.160 | "They did, not we."

00:26:26.080 | Very clear.

00:26:27.480 | So I get, I have fun when I check into hotels sometimes and I'm talking

00:26:32.520 | to the person at the front desk and there's something wrong or whatever.

00:26:37.800 | And they'll say, "They, blah, blah, blah."

00:26:39.440 | I was like, "Who's they?"

00:26:40.240 | Like, "You have a Marriott jersey on."

00:26:42.840 | Not me.

00:26:47.080 | Is that a simple tactic that companies can experiment with?

00:26:49.880 | And I hear the, "I intend to."

00:26:51.960 | Obviously there's some big things, step away, resist the

00:26:54.640 | urge to jump in as a leader.

00:26:56.120 | But little kind of like, I'll call them hacks because this is the show.

00:26:59.680 | It's tell people to tell you what they intend to do.

00:27:02.200 | To start using "we" instead of "they."

00:27:04.040 | Are there others like that, that are things that you can quickly implement

00:27:07.240 | and see if they have big effects?

00:27:08.480 | For sure.

00:27:09.840 | Stop asking binary questions.

00:27:13.720 | So when someone comes to you and says, "I want to try this," or, "Here's a new idea,"

00:27:19.960 | your instinct's going to be, "Is it safe?

00:27:23.920 | Will it work?

00:27:25.160 | Are you sure?"

00:27:26.320 | Those are all binary questions.

00:27:27.880 | COVID vaccine.

00:27:29.560 | Is it safe?

00:27:30.280 | Stupid question.

00:27:31.680 | Meaningless question.

00:27:32.640 | Doesn't, if you say yes or no, it really means you think

00:27:36.560 | you're going to get it or not.

00:27:37.600 | It doesn't really tell us much about the safety of it.

00:27:40.240 | How safe is it?

00:27:42.200 | So my trick is start the question with the word, "How?"

00:27:44.520 | How safe is, how sure are you?

00:27:47.440 | How likely is this assumption to come true?

00:27:49.960 | Now someone can say, "Ah, I'm 99% confident," or, "I'm 51%, but we should try it anyway."

00:27:58.040 | Now you're learning something.

00:28:00.200 | And it all starts with the word, "How?"

00:28:02.720 | The second thing is, next, in meetings, pay attention to what we call share of voice.

00:28:10.840 | Share of voice is, if you were to count the number of words that each person in the meeting said,

00:28:15.880 | it would be that word, it would be that histogram of the distribution of words.

00:28:20.680 | Traditionally, unless you've been thinking about this, the higher-paid people will say

00:28:27.280 | more words than the lower-paid people.

00:28:29.080 | The more skewed that is, the more fragile your decision-making structure is.

00:28:34.680 | The extreme case, the leader just tells people what to do.

00:28:37.280 | Everyone shuts up and walks out the door.

00:28:39.920 | So you can imagine how extreme and how fragile that is.

00:28:43.480 | So you've got six people, you're in a decision meeting, the share of voice should be about

00:28:50.200 | a sixth per person, because then you're hearing what everyone sees, you know what

00:28:55.600 | everyone knows, and the group benefits.

00:28:58.240 | And science shows that those are more resilient and adaptive teams.

00:29:03.600 | So when you're, if you're leading the meeting, the point of leading the meeting is not to

00:29:09.640 | get your quote point across.

00:29:11.160 | That's just coercion and with the hope of compliance.

00:29:15.880 | The point of leading a meeting is to pay attention to the structure of the meeting so that you

00:29:21.640 | can even the share of voice, which means if someone's talking too much, you've got to

00:29:26.760 | control them.

00:29:27.760 | And if someone's not speaking, well, you have to make it safer than speak up.

00:29:33.000 | And how do you do that?

00:29:33.880 | I think it's easier to know how to tell someone, hey, you've said a lot.

00:29:38.440 | Chris, I think we know what you, yeah, well, first of all, it starts from the structure

00:29:43.440 | of the meeting. Most meetings are run, discuss, then vote.

00:29:47.960 | Hey, we have to make a decision.

00:29:50.560 | Are we going to put our new plant in Seattle or North Carolina?

00:29:55.520 | Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

00:29:57.520 | blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:57.520 | OK, so what's everyone think?

00:29:58.680 | And then it's this binary vote, Seattle versus North Carolina.

00:30:01.640 | So the problem with that is because the discussion is a series discussion, the initial,

00:30:11.280 | the very first people to speak have an overweighted importance in the discussion in terms

00:30:16.400 | of anchoring the group, which which makes the people who think differently than them less

00:30:22.040 | and less likely to contribute.

00:30:23.720 | So what you want to do is vote first, then discuss.

00:30:26.360 | So we would say, OK, let's take a vote on this.

00:30:29.760 | We could use cards.

00:30:31.080 | We could use our hands.

00:30:32.200 | We say, OK, five, let's use our hands.

00:30:35.960 | Five fingers means I'm one hundred percent or ninety nine percent.

00:30:40.280 | We don't like to say one hundred percent because that assumes an arrogance for the future

00:30:44.560 | that you is unfounded.

00:30:46.200 | But I'm ninety nine percent sure Seattle's the right place.

00:30:49.120 | Zero means I'm ninety nine percent sure Raleigh's the right place or any number in between.

00:30:54.040 | Two or three means you basically don't know or don't care.

00:30:56.320 | Ready one, two, three, pop up your hands.

00:30:58.480 | Now I'm looking for the fives and the zeros.

00:31:00.960 | I'm looking for the extremes.

00:31:02.280 | And then we say, OK, let's hear from.

00:31:04.440 | And I got a whole bunch of fives, but not too many zeros.

00:31:07.720 | So now I say, OK, great.

00:31:08.960 | Let's hear from zeros.

00:31:10.040 | Let's hear from the people who voted zero, not the zeros, but people voted zero.

00:31:14.080 | Why? The fives are going to want to talk.

00:31:18.040 | The fives, there's a majority of them.

00:31:19.800 | But we already know, like if that's the majority opinion, we already know the majority

00:31:23.880 | opinion. We don't need to spend more time on it.

00:31:25.840 | Let's end. And the more we talk about the majority opinion, harder it is for the minority

00:31:30.160 | opinion to say what they really think.

00:31:32.960 | They may say, oh, yeah, you're right, but I was thinking something different.

00:31:37.760 | But that's the kind of thing you want to do.

00:31:40.240 | Vote first and discuss and then spotlight the dissenting and outlying opinions by letting

00:31:46.080 | those people speak.

00:31:47.920 | It's always hard to get people to speak up.

00:31:50.200 | Are there tactics if you notice the person who's a zero is like, well, you know, I just

00:31:54.560 | don't like is there encouraging things?

00:31:56.400 | Is it best done offline?

00:31:58.160 | Have you tried doing it asynchronously with written communication for those who don't

00:32:03.040 | love talking? Yeah, that's all good stuff.

00:32:05.840 | One of the things. So it's always about safety.

00:32:08.520 | People are speaking up because it's not it doesn't feel safe to speak up.

00:32:11.960 | So choice and small makes it safe.

00:32:15.760 | The other thing that makes it safe is the level of cognitive involvement, description,

00:32:22.560 | assessment, action.

00:32:25.800 | It goes in that order.

00:32:27.000 | So description is the safest thing.

00:32:29.400 | If I just said, tell me about the Riverside platform that we're using to make the show,

00:32:36.400 | it's fine. You're just like, well, here it is that it costs this much, whatever.

00:32:41.520 | Then I say, well, give me an assessment, like on a scale of one to nine.

00:32:46.240 | How effective is it?

00:32:48.000 | OK, now. But now it requires more vulnerability.

00:32:51.320 | But and then finally, if I say, give me take action.

00:32:54.600 | Well, what platform should we use for our podcast show?

00:32:58.480 | Now I can be wrong. So we always invite people on this.

00:33:04.000 | There's two sequences you want to follow.

00:33:05.960 | Number one is description, assessment, action, because it it moves from safe to vulnerable.

00:33:12.000 | The second one is we call it one sum all.

00:33:15.280 | So imagine you have a group of people, five groups of you have twenty five people, five

00:33:22.280 | tables of five. If you just said to the group, hey, what does everyone think about this?

00:33:26.800 | Raise your hand. You might not get any hands.

00:33:30.480 | So what you say is at your everyone right down on a card, three, three things about

00:33:38.640 | ABC. This let's say let's go back to the seat.

00:33:41.600 | Where's the new plan going to be?

00:33:43.120 | Write down which of the two places you want the plan to go in three reasons.

00:33:49.840 | And one reason why you it might be a bad idea.

00:33:52.920 | You have two minutes. And so that's the one.

00:33:57.960 | It's safe, right?

00:33:58.960 | I just it's me and it's my car.

00:34:00.760 | Like, why wouldn't I write anything down?

00:34:02.120 | So people write things down and they say, OK, now at your table, share what's on your

00:34:06.800 | card. Now, the key there is don't share what you could say that will share what you

00:34:11.120 | think. That would be what you might say.

00:34:13.640 | But you say share what's on your card because now you sort of distance it from you.

00:34:17.920 | I'm just reading what's on my card.

00:34:19.480 | Yeah, of course it is like what you think, but just even these little things help a

00:34:24.680 | little bit. OK, let's just share what's on your card.

00:34:28.280 | And then as a table, you could give them another thing, OK, come up with the top five

00:34:33.280 | and bottom, whatever, something like that.

00:34:34.880 | And you give them more time.

00:34:36.800 | So if you give them two minutes by themselves, you might give them five minutes at a

00:34:41.160 | table. You say, OK, now who would like to share or does it which table has something

00:34:46.040 | that they'd like to share with the group?

00:34:48.320 | Now you get a bunch of hands pop right off the bat.

00:34:50.920 | So it's one sum, S-O-M-E, sum all is the progression.

00:34:56.520 | And then it's description, assessment, action.

00:35:00.400 | The other way to think about it is description is pause, like VCR buttons pause.

00:35:05.440 | I'm just here's what it is.

00:35:07.320 | Here's what I see. Assessment where that's rewind, where does it come from?

00:35:11.880 | That feels more that pause is the most certain thing.

00:35:15.360 | I feel most certain about it because I'm just looking at it right here.

00:35:18.080 | And then, well, how does that like what does this happen?

00:35:21.040 | It's from the past, so it's knowable, but I might not have seen everything, but it

00:35:25.880 | feels relatively knowable.

00:35:27.080 | Then finally, we go to the future.

00:35:28.520 | So it's pause, rewind, future, pause, rewind, future.

00:35:32.160 | And then when we trained our team, so the sailors would call me, the officers would

00:35:35.760 | call me in the middle of night, three in the morning.

00:35:37.360 | We have a situation, the tankers bearing down on us, whatever it happens to be.

00:35:41.680 | They always they always reported these things in this exact sequence, which was

00:35:46.520 | description, assessment, action.

00:35:49.680 | Captain, we're on we're at this location.

00:35:51.800 | We're on this course. We're heading north at five knots, 400 feet.

00:35:55.800 | We have a sonar contact assessment.

00:35:58.640 | I think it's a tanker coming straight at us.

00:36:01.360 | Action. I intend to turn right and go deeper, something like that.

00:36:06.360 | Always in the exact same sequence.

00:36:08.320 | And sometimes they wouldn't get the whole way.

00:36:09.920 | They would say assessment, description, assessment.

00:36:13.640 | I don't and then then action.

00:36:14.960 | I have no idea what to do.

00:36:16.120 | Come to the control room.

00:36:17.280 | But it's OK because I move through.

00:36:19.600 | But if I started with what you want to do about it, I get nothing.

00:36:23.920 | Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest impact.

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00:37:33.080 | Do you all remember Episode 122 when I spoke to Chef David Chang about leveling

00:37:40.000 | up your cooking at home?

00:37:41.120 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen.

00:37:43.640 | But one of his top hacks was using the microwave more.

00:37:47.240 | I'll admit I was a skeptic at first, but after getting a full set of microwave

00:37:51.880 | cookware from Anyday, I'm a total convert and I'm excited to partner with them for

00:37:56.200 | this episode. Anyday is glass cookware specifically designed to make delicious

00:38:00.720 | food from scratch in the microwave.

00:38:02.640 | And honestly, using it feels like a kitchen cheat code because it speeds up and

00:38:07.360 | simplifies the process so much.

00:38:09.400 | The cookware is 100% plastic free and you can cook, serve, store and reheat all in

00:38:15.400 | the same dish that happens to be dishwasher, freezer and oven safe too.

00:38:19.920 | And if you need a recipe suggestion to kick off your Anyday adventure, I highly

00:38:24.160 | recommend David Chang's Salmon Rice.

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00:38:46.360 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

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00:39:05.680 | You're going back to your submarine example, so I feel like I want to ask

00:39:09.120 | something that I think I mentioned in the intro, but you started this whole

00:39:12.640 | project with the Santa Fe with a pretty low team morale and low performance, and

00:39:18.440 | you took over this whole new model of control and communication.

00:39:21.760 | And can you just share a little bit about the impact and the result that

00:39:25.320 | happened during your tenure?

00:39:26.800 | Yeah, I had less stress in my life.

00:39:29.040 | Now, we set records for performance.

00:39:35.520 | We set records for morale.

00:39:38.120 | 100% of our sailors signed up to stay in the Navy, which is a record.

00:39:42.240 | Can't go higher than that.

00:39:44.040 | And over the next 10 years, more officers on the Santa Fe became submarine

00:39:49.720 | commanders than any other submarine anyone has ever heard of.

00:39:51.880 | 10 from just that one group over that three-year period.

00:39:55.480 | But the key is I was always, as a leader, so exhausted and nervous about being

00:40:04.520 | wrong.

00:40:05.880 | I don't know how some of these command and control leaders do it.

00:40:08.840 | They run around telling people what to do.

00:40:10.120 | It's like, "Aren't you afraid you're going to be wrong?"

00:40:12.240 | I was like, "What am I missing?"

00:40:14.280 | And if I was wrong, people would die and companies go out of business and we

00:40:19.240 | pollute the environment, whatever it happens to be.

00:40:21.280 | And now I had this rich network, this sort of spider web safety net of people

00:40:29.280 | telling me what they thought all the time.

00:40:32.360 | And we weren't always perfect, we weren't always right, but I just had so much

00:40:37.480 | less stress.

00:40:38.440 | I always had felt like I'm always putting energy into the system as the leader.

00:40:42.840 | I'm running around, making it happen.

00:40:45.240 | I'm exhausted.

00:40:46.440 | I'm checking on people.

00:40:48.040 | I always see more.

00:40:49.560 | I know more.

00:40:50.360 | I could do it better.

00:40:51.240 | I could do it faster.

00:40:52.200 | It was exhausting and it all flipped on its head.

00:40:55.720 | And it felt like the energy was coming to me all day long.

00:40:58.600 | At the end of the day, I had more energy than when I started.

00:41:01.720 | And I stopped going to all these silly meetings that were just theater.

00:41:07.480 | We didn't need them.

00:41:08.520 | We had meetings, but they were real.

00:41:12.680 | And it was great.

00:41:14.440 | Just to touch on the meetings, do you have any rules for how to get rid of the silly

00:41:19.720 | meetings or identify which ones are a waste of time?

00:41:22.600 | Because I think most of the people listening here would probably tell you that a good

00:41:26.680 | portion of their day is spent in meetings that seem like a waste.

00:41:30.120 | So I guess the follow-up then is how do you convince people that?

00:41:32.760 | I never convince anyone of anything.

00:41:35.240 | They already know it.

00:41:36.760 | And we help people do the stuff they already believe in doing.

00:41:43.320 | But I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't need a lot of convincing to say, "Hey,

00:41:46.360 | can we do it with fewer meetings?"

00:41:48.600 | I think vote first.

00:41:50.920 | So they think, "Oh, this is going to take longer because I have to hear all these

00:41:53.800 | different opinions."

00:41:54.520 | No.

00:41:55.480 | It actually is faster because you get to the actual issues way quicker.

00:42:03.000 | And then the other thing is decisions aren't unilateral, and they're not forever.

00:42:09.960 | So we always say, "Okay, a decision on this."

00:42:13.480 | Again, for some reason, this is the submarine decisions.

00:42:15.640 | We work with all kinds of businesses now.

00:42:17.640 | But let's say we're in a submarine again, and we're arguing about turning north or

00:42:24.280 | south, we could argue about that all day long.

00:42:27.000 | Or we could just pick, "Let's go north and see how it works."

00:42:31.320 | But knowing that we can turn around and go back south, it's not irreversible.

00:42:35.400 | Now, we lost the time that we went north.

00:42:37.480 | We could have been going south.

00:42:38.600 | But we always keep a little bit in the back of our mind that we're going to revisit this

00:42:42.520 | decision.

00:42:42.920 | We put an expiration date on the decision, like cheese, and we're going to revisit it.

00:42:48.440 | And it minimizes the barriers to transitioning from the decision to the action.

00:42:58.840 | You want to minimize the barriers from decision to action, and you want to minimize the barriers

00:43:04.360 | from action back to decision, because that will create an agility in your business where

00:43:09.400 | you say, "Think about it.

00:43:10.680 | All in.

00:43:11.720 | Work, work, work, work, work.

00:43:13.080 | Wait a minute.

00:43:13.720 | Time out.

00:43:14.280 | Out.

00:43:15.160 | Think broad perspective, and then commit in."

00:43:17.800 | And you want to have super focus.

00:43:21.560 | You don't want to have, "Oh, we're in with just two toes and half my brain is thinking

00:43:26.120 | about, 'Is this really the right thing to do?'"

00:43:27.720 | That's not what you want.

00:43:28.920 | And I love the approach of realizing that a reversible decision should be made faster.

00:43:34.600 | I remember so many decisions we debated in the early days of my company where we were

00:43:39.160 | like, "What microwave should we buy in the office?"

00:43:41.720 | It's like, "We should just literally just bought the first microwave."

00:43:44.840 | You have these decisions that feel like you could get stuck in analysis paralysis.

00:43:48.440 | And this constant reminder, for me, actually, was like a sticky note on my computer.

00:43:53.080 | It was just like, "Is this reversible?"

00:43:54.760 | And if this is an easy, reversible decision, and it's low impact on the business, just

00:43:58.680 | make it.

00:43:59.000 | It doesn't matter.

00:43:59.640 | And then the other one, I haven't always adhered to vote first.

00:44:03.000 | "Buy two microwaves.

00:44:04.200 | Who cares?"

00:44:06.120 | And I haven't always adhered to vote first.

00:44:09.320 | But sometimes, I've done kind of vote in the middle, which is you're in the middle of a

00:44:13.720 | discussion, you didn't vote at first, you haven't listened to this episode yet.

00:44:17.480 | And you realize like, "Maybe we're all just on the same page."

00:44:20.040 | And we've done a...

00:44:21.160 | Hey, quick pause here.

00:44:22.280 | Does anyone...

00:44:23.720 | And obviously, it needs to be a small group where people feel comfortable speaking up.

00:44:27.640 | Yeah.

00:44:28.120 | But if it's...

00:44:29.000 | Is anyone opposed to just doing this thing?

00:44:31.400 | And I can't tell you the number of meetings I've been in where people were just going

00:44:35.000 | around the room discussing something that we all agreed on.

00:44:37.400 | And I think one of the other advantages of voting first,

00:44:41.880 | aside from just getting out opinions that you might not know, is that you might all

00:44:45.560 | agree.

00:44:46.440 | And you could have just wasted 45 minutes on a meeting talking about why everyone thinks

00:44:50.200 | we should do something that we all agree on.

00:44:51.800 | And we could just do it.

00:44:52.600 | And you could end the meeting in two minutes.

00:44:54.280 | Right.

00:44:54.680 | So that's another one that...

00:44:55.960 | Another benefit that I found of voting first.

00:44:58.600 | If everyone agrees, I would be still a little worried.

00:45:01.880 | I would say, "Okay, great."

00:45:03.720 | It's like that scene in World War Z where they have like the 13th person has to disagree

00:45:08.760 | deal.

00:45:09.480 | It's like, "Okay, now let's make up five reasons why this is not a good...

00:45:13.240 | We're still...

00:45:13.640 | Okay, we're going to do it.

00:45:14.520 | But let's just come up with five reasons why this would go bad."

00:45:17.160 | Imagine we're sitting here in six months, and this has been a giant shit show.

00:45:22.280 | What would be the top five reasons?

00:45:25.080 | And just game through that a little bit, maybe, if you want.

00:45:28.840 | But yeah, you save a lot of time.

00:45:31.080 | Bill Marris, who used to run Google Ventures where I worked, if ever the entire team voted

00:45:36.440 | yes on an investment, and we moved to blind voting so that we didn't have groups involved.

00:45:42.200 | We actually built a piece of software where you could vote on deals and add feedback.

00:45:46.040 | And he wouldn't tell people the results of the vote.

00:45:47.880 | He would just come in and disagree vehemently if everyone...

00:45:50.360 | And you'd all be...

00:45:51.880 | Take the counter perspective.

00:45:53.320 | And he felt like his role as a leader was to take the counter if everyone was supportive.

00:45:58.760 | Yeah, yeah.

00:46:00.120 | I think at least to discuss it and then, "Okay, great.

00:46:04.280 | We're going to make the investment."

00:46:05.240 | But you want to explore that.

00:46:07.160 | If this is such a no-brainer, why didn't someone else...

00:46:10.600 | Why hasn't someone else already bought the company?

00:46:12.440 | It should be for sale.

00:46:14.440 | So without even mentioning it, we moved from the story you first wrote in your first book

00:46:20.520 | about your experience on the Santa Fe to your most recent book, where you talk about

00:46:26.040 | six leadership plays that you've used revolving around the language of how you operate.

00:46:32.680 | But what, after writing a bestselling book about leadership,

00:46:35.560 | led you to feel the need to write another book on leadership?

00:46:39.800 | I don't know about other writers, but all my stuff starts with self-help.

00:46:44.200 | I just felt...

00:46:46.200 | Even at the end of the experience on the submarine, the very next day, the next year,

00:46:54.360 | five years later...

00:46:55.480 | And now I was running my company and we were interacting with these companies around the

00:46:58.440 | world, helping them change their cultures.

00:47:00.440 | But it all started with me.

00:47:02.360 | I kept feeling like my language was programmed by some other...

00:47:06.280 | Some evil thing in my head that made me say, "Right?

00:47:11.880 | Does that make sense?

00:47:12.840 | We good?"

00:47:13.480 | Like these kind of things, phrases that I actually didn't want to say, but I was still

00:47:17.720 | saying them.

00:47:18.280 | And so I was trying to analyze the structure and the patterns in the language and why they

00:47:26.520 | held so much sway over me and why they were so powerful and what I wanted to say instead.

00:47:36.440 | We say we act our way to new thinking, but if you don't see the words that you can say...

00:47:43.960 | So if you don't realize that you could say, "How sure are you?"

00:47:47.800 | as opposed to, "Are you sure?"

00:47:49.480 | then you're just going to keep asking, "Are you sure?"

00:47:51.240 | If you don't realize that you could ask something simple like, "Just tell me more," as opposed

00:47:59.080 | to, "Well, let me explain," then you won't do that.

00:48:02.440 | And so I feel like basically it's just a whole book of "don't say this, say that."

00:48:08.280 | It's a bunch of book of sentence starters, which is how it started.

00:48:12.040 | But it turns out there's a very interesting structure behind why the language is the way

00:48:17.400 | we use it, is the way we say now, and what we've inherited, what we're programmed to

00:48:22.600 | say.

00:48:23.080 | And I think there's a coherent structure in the solar system as we knew it, where the

00:48:30.600 | sun revolved around the earth, and the solar system as we want it, where the earth revolves

00:48:35.400 | around the sun.

00:48:36.360 | I don't want to jump into all six leadership plays because you wrote a book and anyone

00:48:41.320 | listening can go read this book.

00:48:43.080 | And I've done it and I encourage you.

00:48:45.000 | But there's a couple I wanted to hit on.

00:48:46.760 | So one is that my wife loves baking.

00:48:50.120 | And I, unfortunately, also love baked goods, which is a terrible combination.

00:48:54.920 | (laughs)

00:48:55.720 | We call that enabling behavior.

00:48:57.480 | I know.

00:48:58.840 | And my recommendation is always, "Hey, why don't you just not bake?"

00:49:01.800 | And she's like, "No, why don't you learn to not eat all the cookies in one sitting?"

00:49:05.240 | Just because I bake it doesn't mean you have to eat it.

00:49:07.160 | I've heard that countless times.

00:49:09.400 | Right.

00:49:09.880 | And in 2021, I had bouts where I said, "You know what?

00:49:12.920 | I'm just not allowed to eat the cookies."

00:49:15.640 | And this year, thanks to reading your book, I've decided I am not the kind of person that

00:49:21.560 | overindulges on baked goods.

00:49:23.480 | And I haven't put that to the test.

00:49:25.080 | We're only a few days into the year.

00:49:26.920 | But can you talk about why that distinction is so important and why commitment can actually

00:49:32.600 | be more effective than compliance?

00:49:34.200 | Yeah.

00:49:35.640 | This came from work where we looked at the language of teams that were fragile and made

00:49:39.720 | mistakes versus ones that were more resilient.

00:49:42.200 | And it's called "Leadership is Language."

00:49:44.920 | So here's a simple example.

00:49:46.600 | You could say, let's say you have this self-talk about this baked good thing.

00:49:51.640 | You could say, "I can't eat baked goods."

00:49:53.480 | You're sitting there, the baked goods are sitting on the table, you've already had a

00:49:56.120 | slice of bread, you don't want to eat more.

00:49:57.880 | "Oh, I can't eat that."

00:49:59.080 | Versus, "I don't eat that."

00:50:01.160 | And you want to say, "I don't eat baked goods."

00:50:05.640 | For me, I don't think it's binary.

00:50:08.120 | It's not like you're never going to eat a baked good.

00:50:09.720 | But I don't eat a lot.

00:50:11.160 | So it's just a subliminal thing.

00:50:12.600 | But the reason why I don't eat it—studies show when people say, "I don't do something,"

00:50:18.360 | they have a higher rate of sticking with their commitment than when they say, "I can't."

00:50:23.400 | Why?

00:50:23.640 | Because when they say, "I can't," it's this outside force that's imposing on me

00:50:27.320 | that you can't, you shouldn't do it, you can't do it.

00:50:29.960 | Versus when you say, "You don't do it," you're giving yourself agency over your life.

00:50:36.120 | You're tapping into your own intrinsic desire to control your life and say, "I don't eat.

00:50:43.480 | I don't go to those kind of meetings.

00:50:45.400 | I don't eat baked.

00:50:46.360 | I don't eat that," or that kind of thing.

00:50:48.760 | Now—and no one can argue with you.

00:50:52.200 | If I go to my mom and I say, "Mom, oh, I can't eat.

00:50:56.600 | Oh, no, you look fine.

00:50:57.800 | You're not going to—oh, just a little bit."

00:50:59.240 | Like, she's arguing with me when I say, "No, I don't eat that."

00:51:02.840 | There's nothing to say.

00:51:04.280 | Okay, so you want to use language as much as possible that makes you powerful as opposed

00:51:12.680 | to powerless.

00:51:13.480 | And that's why you want to say to yourself, "I don't do whatever it is that you're trying

00:51:19.240 | not to do," as opposed to, "I can't do it."

00:51:22.920 | I'm just now realizing how much more effective "don't" is in a peer pressure situation

00:51:28.520 | of, "Gosh, I just—I can't have another drink tonight.

00:51:30.680 | I've been drinking this week."

00:51:31.720 | And it's like, your friends are like, "Nah, nah, you can't."

00:51:34.120 | And then if you have a friend who doesn't drink, they're at the table, they're like,

00:51:36.920 | "I don't drink."

00:51:37.560 | And no one's pushing them.

00:51:39.160 | They're just sitting there totally fine with whatever.

00:51:41.720 | Yeah, imagine that.

00:51:43.080 | Like, the person—that's what they say.

00:51:45.320 | They don't say, "Oh, I can't drink."

00:51:47.160 | They say, "I don't drink."

00:51:48.200 | And that's like, boom, shut down.

00:51:50.280 | Great, I respect that.

00:51:51.240 | You have a code.

00:51:51.800 | Exactly.

00:51:53.180 | I don't drink more than—or whatever it is.

00:51:55.560 | I don't drink after 11.

00:51:56.680 | I don't drink after two drinks.

00:51:57.960 | I don't drink.

00:51:58.360 | Or I don't drink and drive—like, I don't drink and drive.

00:52:00.360 | Not, "I can't drink and drive," because obviously you could drink and drive, but—

00:52:03.000 | I've had situations where I'm like, "You know what?

00:52:04.760 | I just don't want to drink tonight."

00:52:05.880 | And instead of just being more, you know, a sort of having—saying, "I don't do that,"

00:52:10.120 | I would just drive intentionally.

00:52:11.720 | So I could say, "Oh, I drove here.

00:52:12.920 | I can't drink."

00:52:13.480 | You know, like, "I don't drink and drive."

00:52:15.320 | That was my, like, out, was if I just drove, then I could absolve myself of any peer pressure.

00:52:20.760 | Because it's socially—that's okay.

00:52:23.000 | Like, it's, "Oh, well, you have an excuse not to drink."

00:52:26.760 | So we all respect—we understand and respect that.

00:52:28.840 | Versus, "I'm not drinking tonight," or whatever it happens to be.

00:52:32.360 | - Yeah.

00:52:33.080 | How does this kind of play in the role of work and organizations?

00:52:37.640 | - So much of the language we use has subtle markers of the industrial age structure,

00:52:47.400 | where leaders made decisions and got the team to do it.

00:52:51.400 | In the industrial age, you want people to comply and keep moving forward.

00:52:56.120 | We want the assembly line to run as long as possible, because any stoppages are lost output.

00:53:05.160 | When Ford was building Model T, the assembly line essentially ran—it ran for almost 15 years,

00:53:12.440 | into the '20s, by which time the country had changed.

00:53:16.440 | There was a lot more wealth, and it was an old, tired thing.

00:53:21.000 | And then they had to shut down for, like, three months.

00:53:23.800 | And GM, at this point, was building flashier cars, which were in vogue.

00:53:27.320 | And then GM—GM should have never caught up.

00:53:30.280 | They should have never—they should never be in business, if Ford had done it right.

00:53:34.280 | But it was because of this opening, and so now it's been neck-and-neck ever since.

00:53:39.320 | So one of the things I hear a lot are people say things—they say some version of,

00:53:47.240 | "Does that make sense? Are we good? We're all good here? Everyone happy?"

00:53:52.280 | Something like that.

00:53:53.560 | And we say it more times than we even realize we were saying it.

00:53:59.400 | I say it.

00:54:00.840 | And then you say, "Well, why did we say that? Why did I say, 'Oh, so we're going to turn north,

00:54:06.600 | right? We all look good to launch the product, okay?

00:54:09.320 | So the product launch will happen as scheduled next Wednesday. Everybody happy?'"

00:54:14.440 | It's because it's a vestige of this coercion and compliance.

00:54:19.080 | It just makes it a little bit harder for someone to say, "No, I'm not happy,"

00:54:22.920 | and to get compliance from the team, as opposed to what I'm trying—what I try to say is,

00:54:31.640 | "How could this be wrong? Hey, next month we have this scheduled launch of this product.

00:54:39.160 | This is kind of what I wish Boeing had done. Hey, how could this go wrong?

00:54:43.800 | How are we feeling about the project?" as opposed to this inevitability towards making it happen.

00:54:49.960 | So you want to listen to those little language markers for you and remove them,

00:54:54.920 | and actually go the opposite.

00:54:56.440 | Every time your instinct is to say, "Is that wrong? No." Or, "How could that be wrong?"

00:55:02.120 | Ask it in a neutral way, which invites the other opinion.

00:55:09.400 | It's already hard to disagree—to be the person who disagrees with the group for the box.

00:55:13.880 | That's hard. So rather than making that harder, let me make that easier.

00:55:19.560 | I also want to talk about one of the other leadership plays about

00:55:23.320 | taking time to pause and reflect and fixing that into a project.

00:55:27.560 | And you talk about it in saying, "Complete, not just continue."

00:55:31.720 | Why is this important? And how do you determine when to schedule those kind of completions?

00:55:37.320 | If we never complete, then you never celebrate.

00:55:41.640 | If you never celebrate, you never reinforce fun and the reasons why we do things.

00:55:49.480 | And it just becomes—in the Navy we say, "SSDD," which means "same stuff, different day."

00:55:55.800 | And everything just runs into the next day.

00:55:59.000 | The problem with that is we're trying to do two different things with our brains.

00:56:05.320 | One is we're trying to be focused on tasks.

00:56:09.080 | I'm coding. I'm swimming. I'm bringing a SEAL team onto the submarine.

00:56:17.000 | It requires focus. It requires excluding distractors.

00:56:22.120 | The other thing we're trying to do with our brain is to make decisions.

00:56:27.000 | How should we bring the SEAL team on the submarine?

00:56:29.960 | How are we going to do that? And what did we learn from the last time we did it?

00:56:34.520 | We complete this period of activity and then we want to pause and reflect.

00:56:37.960 | This requires an expansive view.

00:56:40.520 | It requires raising our head up, looking left and right, broadening our perspective,

00:56:44.920 | bringing in those things which otherwise we would find, quote, "distraction."

00:56:48.520 | In short, it's about avoiding variability and being allergic to variability when we

00:56:55.480 | want to be focused and on tasks.

00:56:57.000 | And then it's about embracing variability when we're in the thinking space.

00:57:02.040 | If you don't make it clear, are we in one side or the other,

00:57:07.320 | then you're always in the middle and you're neither optimized for focused work and you're

00:57:12.200 | not optimized for thinking work and you get muddled thinking and half-committed action.

00:57:17.720 | So what we think is really important to make it clear, okay, we're thinking,

00:57:24.600 | we're broadening our perspective, and you have to release the pressure of the clock

00:57:29.800 | because it's that time pressure that shrinks our perspective and our prefrontal cortex ability to

00:57:36.680 | take in all these inputs and we just see what's in front of us.

00:57:39.800 | And we've all done these activities where, like, the gorilla walks across the basketball

00:57:44.040 | court and you don't even see it because you're counting the number of balls, those kind of

00:57:47.000 | things.

00:57:47.500 | So we have to release the pressure of the time.

00:57:50.440 | The leader is the person who has to do that.

00:57:52.440 | The team is going to want to commit, they're going to want to persist in their actions

00:57:58.120 | because that's what they're paid to do and deliver something.

00:58:00.600 | The leader is going to say, "Time out, everyone put your pencils down, I want to make sure

00:58:05.560 | we're on track, see how everyone's doing, how do we think about what we've done, what

00:58:10.840 | we want to make decisions about the future."

00:58:12.440 | Now, you can do that, you can just call an audible on that, but we think it's probably

00:58:17.320 | better to schedule those.

00:58:18.520 | Agile, for example, Agile software development kind of has this baked in with these sprint

00:58:23.960 | cycles and then allows you, also, you can celebrate, pause, reflect on what you've

00:58:29.320 | done, you celebrate, make commitments about the future and move on.

00:58:33.400 | And are there situations where, or I guess, what is the downside of not doing this?

00:58:38.440 | Are there companies or projects that never took the time to pause and complete and just

00:58:43.720 | kept continuing that kind of probably regret it based on the outcomes?

00:58:47.320 | Yeah, sure.

00:58:48.040 | Kodak kept making print film, Blockbuster kept running DVDs, as opposed to, like, there's

00:58:55.080 | a story Andy Grove tells in "Only the Paranoid Survived" during the Intel.

00:59:01.400 | Now, this is after he and Gordon Moore, they'd founded this company, it was going very, very

00:59:08.120 | well, they were rich, and they were making storage, basically memory storage.

00:59:16.440 | And memory storage, at this point, was becoming a commodity because the Japanese and Koreans

00:59:20.760 | were getting into it, and it was just becoming a commoditized product.

00:59:24.600 | And they ran an experiment, they said, "Imagine we got fired and a new team, CEO, president,

00:59:33.480 | was brought in.

00:59:34.680 | The decision they needed to make was do a shift out of storage and go to microprocessors.

00:59:40.520 | What would they do?"

00:59:43.080 | And they said, "Well, that'd be easy.

00:59:44.200 | We'd get out of storage and go to microprocessors."

00:59:46.680 | But storage is why they were rich, why they were successful, why Intel was the company

00:59:53.160 | it was.

00:59:53.640 | But because they had made the decision, their psyches were connected to those decisions,

00:59:59.240 | and they had to distance themselves.

01:00:00.760 | And they did it through this thought experiment, which was genius.

01:00:04.520 | And they said, "Well, that's obvious."

01:00:06.680 | And then so that's when they made the shift, and they came out with the 8088, the processors,

01:00:11.320 | and that's the Intel you know today.

01:00:13.640 | Yeah.

01:00:14.600 | And is it possible to make those completions too frequent?

01:00:18.280 | Oh, yeah.

01:00:19.960 | We can overdrive the process.

01:00:21.240 | So for example, if I say, "Hey, let's run an experiment."

01:00:24.200 | So for example, so here's what happened to my company.

01:00:27.240 | Okay, we're going to redesign the website, for example.

01:00:30.520 | And then we're going to make a commitment.

01:00:35.640 | New design, we're going to watch it for two months, take data, blah, blah, blah.

01:00:39.800 | We're going to make another redesign.

01:00:41.800 | Redesign the website, we launch it.

01:00:43.480 | Now we're in the data.

01:00:45.240 | Two weeks goes by.

01:00:46.200 | I go to an event, a conference, I give a speech, but there's other speakers there.

01:00:51.720 | And so I'm here sitting in the room, and one guy's talking about website design.

01:00:55.880 | And I have all these ideas I write down, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:00:58.600 | I go back.

01:00:59.560 | Now it's only been two weeks, but I have all these ideas.

01:01:03.160 | And I start telling him, "No, no, we need to do this.

01:01:06.280 | I can see.

01:01:06.840 | Oh, no, we may have got to make this happen.

01:01:09.400 | Oh, it's overdriving the process."

01:01:11.320 | So on the one hand, we want to deliberately inject points for changing course.

01:01:18.200 | But on the other hand, we also deliberately protect against changing course while we're

01:01:22.600 | in the decision-making process.

01:01:24.200 | And I'm not going to say never do it.

01:01:25.880 | It might be time to change.

01:01:29.080 | Don't look up.

01:01:31.800 | All of a sudden, there's a comet coming to hit the earth.

01:01:34.280 | Yeah, maybe we should reevaluate.

01:01:35.960 | Let's not wait for the next two weeks.

01:01:38.520 | But I call that the good idea, Ferry.

01:01:41.160 | So A, you protect the team from being whipsawing, because then you never stabilize the experiment.

01:01:48.520 | I'm a little bit allergic to the phrase "continuous improvement," because it implies

01:01:55.560 | I'm just continually tweaking the process, which I don't think is the right way to do it.

01:01:59.160 | I think you want to do some batch tweaks, and then measure performance, and then batch

01:02:05.000 | tweaks, and measure performance.

01:02:06.840 | And so it's "continue us," or it's incremental in that way, and it doesn't ever end.

01:02:13.400 | So in that sense, it's continuous or continual, but we're not always tweaking things.

01:02:20.760 | The last leadership play I want to touch on, and there are a few we didn't hit that you

01:02:25.560 | all should check out, was all about connecting with the team.

01:02:29.000 | And it reminded me a bit of the book "Radical Candor."

01:02:32.280 | And I just want to know what role you think emotions have in decision-making and leadership.

01:02:37.640 | All decisions are emotional.

01:02:41.320 | If we didn't have emotion, we would be unable to make a decision.

01:02:45.080 | We wouldn't make a decision.

01:02:47.880 | We would do things, they might look like decisions, but they're not decisions.

01:02:52.360 | So if I'm looking at an ant, and it runs three inches that way, and turns left and

01:02:57.880 | runs four inches that way, it didn't decide to do that.

01:03:01.560 | It just did it through its innate programming.

01:03:04.040 | When people have suffered brain damage, which removes their ability to feel emotions, it's

01:03:15.560 | linked with an inability to make decisions.

01:03:17.560 | And I tell a story about a patient that Dr. Demasio, who's a neurosurgeon, had where

01:03:27.320 | they did—and this is exactly what happened.

01:03:30.120 | We know that all decision-making, basically the wiring for your decision-making calculus

01:03:36.760 | in your brain passes through an emotional part of your brain.

01:03:39.320 | That's why we move from description to assessment, then action, because action involves

01:03:44.840 | decision-making.

01:03:45.800 | Let's say I'm trying to buy a new house.

01:03:47.320 | One of the things that my wife and I like to do is watch these house-hunting shows,

01:03:51.160 | and we try and guess which house they're going to buy.

01:03:53.080 | I spend more time than you—I've watched a lot of these.

01:03:59.160 | Never once does someone say, "Well, I've run the numbers, and this house has this

01:04:03.480 | square footage, and this, and this, and this, and this, so it's the right house to buy."

01:04:07.560 | Okay, let's get it.

01:04:08.760 | It's never like that.

01:04:10.760 | I have 100% prediction ability because I ignore whatever the man says.

01:04:15.320 | And this irritates my wife, but it's always whatever the woman says, that's what they're

01:04:20.600 | going to get.

01:04:21.000 | And it's always something like, "Hey, I can see our family."

01:04:23.720 | It's an emotional thing.

01:04:25.400 | So all decisions at the end of the day, because they involve the future, are emotional.

01:04:30.040 | And yeah, you want data.

01:04:32.600 | And so if we don't have a healthy emotional environment at work, we can't make healthy

01:04:37.560 | decisions.

01:04:38.200 | And if we don't have an emotional environment at work for 80% of the people who work there,

01:04:43.960 | then 80% of the people are not going to contribute to the decision-making ability of the

01:04:48.280 | organization.

01:04:49.400 | And I like to ask leaders, "What did it cost for you to make this decision?"

01:04:54.040 | Like, I hold up, "What do you make?"

01:04:55.480 | I make pens, like the one I'm holding in my hand.

01:04:57.400 | "What did it cost for this, this, this, this?"

01:04:59.000 | "Oh, I can tell you.

01:04:59.720 | It's a .01 penny."

01:05:01.000 | "But what did it cost for you to make the decision that you're going to make this pen?"

01:05:07.320 | "No idea."

01:05:08.760 | "That you're going to market in the following ways?"

01:05:10.360 | "No idea."

01:05:10.920 | "That you're selling it on Amazon, but not on whatever?"

01:05:13.880 | No, we don't know to orders of magnitude what it costs to make decisions in our company,

01:05:19.160 | but as a product, as an output, we should know.

01:05:22.280 | And once you start thinking about it, you're like, "Well, the higher the decision is made

01:05:26.680 | in the company, the more it costs me, because I'm paying a senior vice president who makes

01:05:30.600 | 500 grand to make a decision, whereas the guy across the street is paying the floor

01:05:37.000 | manager who makes 120 grand to make that decision.

01:05:40.840 | They're going to win."

01:05:41.560 | So think about the cost of your decisions.

01:05:45.160 | Get them as low as possible.

01:05:46.360 | All right.

01:05:47.720 | So I feel like everything else, definitely check out the book.

01:05:51.960 | But I do want to say, if someone's listening and they're not in the leadership role to

01:05:56.280 | make a lot of these changes themselves, what can they do to help push an organization towards

01:06:01.480 | a more healthy set of languages and a more productive team?

01:06:05.000 | The cool thing is you can just start doing stuff.

01:06:08.680 | You just stop asking people, "Are you sure?"

01:06:11.480 | You just start asking, "Hey, how sure are you?"

01:06:13.720 | You start using probabilistic language.

01:06:15.720 | You start with your team at your level.

01:06:18.680 | Now, one of the questions I get is, "What if my boss is this way, and it's very stressful

01:06:26.520 | for me because they keep telling me what to do.

01:06:28.600 | They don't really care what I think."

01:06:30.440 | And if I'm in a bad mood, I'll say, "Well, you should quit, because the toll on your

01:06:35.880 | life and your health is not worth whatever it is you're making from this job."

01:06:40.440 | It might feel like it is.

01:06:42.280 | "Well, my kid's about to go to college."

01:06:44.440 | You'll be dead.

01:06:47.880 | But a more helpful answer is it's always about safety.

01:06:52.680 | Safety for you, but safety for them.

01:06:54.120 | When you go to your boss and you say, "Hey, I have an idea about how to do this thing

01:07:00.840 | you told us to do a little bit better," or maybe not even do it at all, it becomes a

01:07:05.880 | contest of authority, which immediately provokes their defense mechanisms.

01:07:09.640 | So what we would advise is to say, "Hey, this is your call.

01:07:13.960 | You want us to do this?

01:07:14.680 | We're going to do it."

01:07:15.240 | And then what's the sequence?

01:07:18.360 | Description, assessment, action.

01:07:20.360 | Would you like to know—choice—how we see it?

01:07:23.320 | Description.

01:07:24.600 | Don't jump to action, because that's too far.

01:07:28.120 | That's too much vulnerability for you and them.

01:07:29.960 | So we start with description, safe.

01:07:32.760 | And again, remember, also one, some, all.

01:07:36.280 | So it's just you and me in this room.

01:07:37.720 | So you can tell me to pack sand, no one's losing face, that kind of thing.

01:07:41.000 | Then, once you earn the right to be heard, then you can have influence.

01:07:47.320 | And I did this wrong so many times.

01:07:48.920 | That's why I'm such an expert on pissing my boss off.

01:07:53.080 | But it sounds like the playbook for someone not in the leadership role is to just do the

01:07:59.320 | same things from beneath.

01:08:01.320 | And you mentioned earlier that it takes a lot of mental stress out of your head to be

01:08:05.320 | in a leadership role like this.

01:08:07.160 | By starting to do that, maybe you can encourage someone to feel that and perpetuate it.

01:08:11.880 | Yeah, but I don't want to take quitting off the table.

01:08:17.080 | That's always got to be on the table.

01:08:18.600 | I'm not in the Navy anymore.

01:08:21.960 | At some point, it was great for me for a while, but at some point it became not a good environment

01:08:27.400 | for me, so I'm not there.

01:08:29.640 | The leader's job is to create the environment where people can be at their best just the

01:08:35.400 | way they are.

01:08:36.280 | It might mean putting someone in a different environment, and it might mean you.

01:08:41.080 | You're not good in this environment.

01:08:42.920 | Be in a different environment.

01:08:44.120 | Don't say, "What do I need to do to be great here?"

01:08:48.280 | Say, "Where do I need to be so that I'll be great the way I am?"

01:08:51.160 | I agree a lot of people don't put quitting on the table.

01:08:54.680 | Well, it's happening a lot more now.

01:08:56.760 | Yeah.

01:08:58.120 | This has been fantastic.

01:08:59.480 | Aside from the books, where can people find out what you're working on and get in touch?

01:09:03.640 | Yeah, YouTube channel, Leadership Nudges.

01:09:06.920 | I put these little one to two minute things out.

01:09:09.880 | Give me your comments.

01:09:10.680 | Give me your thoughts.

01:09:11.720 | The little tidbits, a lot of things that we've talked about, One Sum All or Describe, Assess,

01:09:17.480 | Act, those kinds of things.

01:09:19.320 | And then companies called Intempus Leadership International.

01:09:23.000 | That's our movement.

01:09:23.880 | And you can go on LinkedIn.

01:09:25.000 | We have a website.

01:09:25.960 | You can go on LinkedIn and let us know what you think.

01:09:28.600 | Tell us your story.

01:09:29.400 | I will also post a link in the show notes to the original video that I've shared dozens

01:09:34.360 | of times.

01:09:34.760 | David, thank you for being here.

01:09:37.880 | Yeah, thanks so much.

01:09:39.240 | And thank you, listeners, for what you guys do.

01:09:41.400 | Leadership is hard.

01:09:42.280 | It's often about going against your innate wiring.

01:09:46.520 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

01:09:49.720 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:09:51.400 | If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

01:09:56.360 | I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings.

01:10:02.040 | And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi,

01:10:05.960 | I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

01:10:10.200 | That's it for this week.

01:10:11.240 | I'll see you next week.

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