Bull Riding, Dog Chews & Ethical Leadership

Dallin Cooper, founder, author, and keynote speaker that focuses on trust, leadership, ethics, and loyalty. Dallin is a natural born entrepreneur—started his first business at age 16. Has grown and operated many different types of businesses. But he's always focused on the ethics of things. He strives to subvert the bad reputation ethics receives by crafting speeches and trainings that don’t feel like “ethics training.”  Instead, he focuses on impacting relationships with others, as well as one's self, in ways that make them yearn to behave more ethically—not because of compliance, but because of the benefits that ethical behavior brings to their lives.
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 29 | Bull Riding, Dog Chews & Ethical Leadership

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:01] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today's business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. We have Dallin Cooper on today. He's a founder, an author, a keynote speaker that focuses on trust, leadership, ethics, and loyalty. I got to say, how he got here is a crazy story. He came from the middle of nowhere Wyoming as a shepherd and alpaca rehabilitator. I'm going to stop right there, because it doesn't stop getting crazy there. It just keeps getting more and more interesting, but I will not do it full justice. Dallin, pick up where I left off, and tell our listeners about you, your history, and how you evolved to where you are now. 

Dallin Cooper
[00:53] Like you said, I grew up raising sheep in the literal dead center of Wyoming, which most people don't really think of as a real place. It's on the way to Yellowstone. Grew up middle of nowhere raising sheep – had some rescue alpacas, did that. I just always really struggled with being an employee. I wanted to do my own stuff. I wanted to do my own thing. I started selling baked goods out of my backpack at school from the time I was 16. That's just who I was as a person. It was very much part of my family. I spent some years traveling. When I was in college, I learned Chinese. I lived in China for a while. 

I came back, I got married, for some reason moved back to the middle of nowhere, even though I swore I would never do that. I think a lot of people do that. They're like, "I'm never going back to my tiny podunk hometown." Then there you are, right back in the same tiny podunk hometown. That's where I live now, still middle of Wyoming, with my wife and two kids. I started a digital marketing agency along the way. I sold the digital marketing agency, then just really thought I was going to chill out for a second, just hang out, settle down, work at my now very normal digital marketing job. Then I started public speaking. I wrote a book. I somehow founded a dog chew company, even though I don't own a dog. That's where I am now. 

Taylor Martin 
[02:28] That's awesome.

Dallin Cooper
[02:30] Now I'm trying to balance all those things. It's an adventure. 

Taylor Martin 
[02:36] You went from baked goods to learning Chinese, going to China, living in China for a while, opening up a marketing agency, growing that, selling that. Then you were going to take a breather for a while. All of a sudden, you started a dog chew business. Now, I do want to emphasize that your dog chew business was something that was born out of something that you just saw from your vantage point as, we have this waste product and we have this other need over here, and we can make it in a sustainable fashion. Can you elaborate on that?

Dallin Cooper 
[03:10] It was a collaborative effort between me and my dad, actually. My dad is a leather guy. He spent years making cowboy chaps for people working on ranches and rodeos. He was a leather worker. If you don't know a lot about Wyoming, we have cows, so many cows – many, many more cows than people – so lots of cows in our little farming town. My dad mentioned that it always made him so sad that all of the hides from the cows, all that good leather, just got thrown away, because it doesn't make economic sense if you're a local butcher that butchers three cows a week for families to put in their freezer. You can't ship those across the country and send them to a tanner. It's not worth it. They aren't worth anything, at least not unless you have massive quantities. 

One day we actually saw there's an animal rescue across the street from a butcher shop. We saw the butcher just dumping all of the leftovers, the byproducts into the dumpster, while all of these dogs are lined along the fence just watching. We were like, okay, this just feels dumb. There has to be an option here. The butchers are paying. They're paying to dump the hides and the other byproducts, and then there's all of these dogs. We started talking to the butchers about taking different parts, taking the hides, taking the tracheas, organs, things like that. We haven't figured out how to use absolutely everything yet, because dear goodness, one thing at a time. The more we got into it, the more we realized that the zero-waste vision of let's take a waste product and turn it into not waste is actually really, really hard. We started talking about retailers or ways that we could sell these, shipping them places. It felt really dumb to say hey, we're going to save the hides from the landfill just to triple wrap them in single-use plastic so that that can get opened and dumped in a landfill. 

Taylor Martin 
[05:14] Absolutely.

Dallin Cooper 
[05:15] Every step led to more questions of, great, so we're preventing waste, but how do we prevent waste without creating way more waste. I was shocked at how difficult it was to keep that vision. It impacted every single business decision and continues to as we keep trying to make it better.

Taylor Martin 
[05:39] I think that's something that a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs have. You have this idea and you want to make it sustainable. Our system is just not currently set up that way. You have to really go out and find solutions that you never thought you were going to need. You might even invent some.

Dallin Cooper 
[05:57] We've had to be very careful about what businesses we work with, so that they're okay with having a box out with just a sign over it instead of individual wrapping. We probably aren't ever going to be in PetSmart or whatever. That's fine with us. That's not necessarily our target anyway. Your packaging, we try to use recyclable or compostable boxes, but then you're like, what about the labels, the shipping labels that you're sticking on the box? What about the tape that you're using to tape the box closed? That's every single level. You're using your rubber gloves because you're working with blood and awful on these different things. You're like, if I'm going through a bunch of rubber gloves every day, that's not great either. How can we make it so we aren't throwing away all these rubber gloves? It has been an adventure. I'm really pleased with how many solutions we've found. I don't think that we are 100% zero waste, but we are dang close. There are some stray dogs out by our shop that if there are any pieces of the hide or the meat that we can't turn into a chew, we just toss it and let the stray dogs or the birds or whatever eat it, because it's like at least someone's getting some benefit from it and it's not ending up in a garbage can.

Taylor Martin 
[07:14] That's awesome. Did you ever take any of the hides over to the dogs across the street and just say, "You guys were wanting this. Now here you go."

Dallin Cooper 
[07:22] Yes, I actually delivered a box of about 30 chews to that rescue just last week. We've started donating some to them. We say on our website that your purchases help support local shelters and rescues. We hope that one day we can support more and do so with more than just donating them free products. It got to come full circle. We got to bring those to them last week, which was really exciting.

Taylor Martin 
[07:50] I commend you, man. I'm doing some air clapping here so everybody knows. That's really great, man. That's a great success story. It really spawns from observation. You and your dad observed something that you knew wasn't right. It was literally right in front of your face across the street, from one side to the other you realized it, which is quite hilarious. You had that business. It's another business of yours you started off. Then you started to get into leadership, because you've always wanted to be an – you've always been an entrepreneur. I don't think you've ever wanted to be. I think you were just born one. You moved on to focusing on trust, leadership, ethics, and loyalty, more ethical leadership, if you will. How have you evolved into that space, coming from all the different things you've done so far?

Dallin Cooper 
[08:32] Ugly Chews, which is the name of the dog chew business – called Ugly Chews because if you make an all-natural product out of dead cow, it probably won't be attractive. Ugly Chews started accidentally. I did not want to start another company. The opportunity was too cool. The public speaking, the consulting, the authoring, that kind of thought leader type concept, that is something that I've always been interested in. I have always loved public speaking. I've loved telling stories. I like interacting with people and getting to know them. That is something that has always called to me. That was a much more intentional decision and one that was a lot harder. Ugly Chews just fell into my lap. It's taken a lot more effort to break into the public speaking space and do things like that. That's a pretty competitive space. It's one of those ones where getting your first big break can be pretty tough. That was something that I just always wanted to do. 

I ended up moving towards the topics of things like leadership and trust and ethics because those are the things that I think even just outside of business, I have always wanted to try to be the best person I can. That idea of iterative improvement always becoming a little bit better is something that calls to me, the idea of progression in whatever area of life. Those are topics that when you boil them down, that's what it is. That's why I like them. I ended up getting into ethics because I had an amazing ethics professor when I was going to college who just made me understand that ethics isn't just follow the rules, don't go to jail, don't get fined, don't get sued, which is how ethics is often presented. It's more of a compliance thing in a lot of businesses. It's like make sure you don't cross this line. Really, ethics is become better. It's more about morality and personal morality and carrying that into your business life. 

When I talk about leadership or relationships or things like that, it's the same principles as a presentation about ethics, because if you want good relationships, you need to be honest. You need to be humble. You need to develop these attributes that make you a good person. The things that make you a good person are the things that make you a good leader. The things that make you a good leader are the things that make you a good friend. They all tie in. Those all just naturally came together. 

One of the reasons I really dove into ethics in particular, when most people don't like diving into ethics, is that I wanted to try to redeem ethics from the bad reputation it gets. When I tell people I speak about ethics, you don't get like, oh yay, ethics. You're like, that sounds boring. I am on a crusade to make ethics fun and make people realize that ethics isn't boring, it's life, it's every day, it's being the kind of person you want, and that that can be exciting and cool.

Taylor Martin 
[11:47] You had a book that you wrote. What is it called?

Dallin Cooper 
[11:50] It's called Get on the Bull: Developing Attitudes and Behaviors for Effective Leadership.

Taylor Martin 
[11:56] Get on the Bull.

Dallin Cooper
[11:58] Yeah, Get on the Bull. It is very much a callback to my rural upbringing – again very much ties into my father, who was a professional bull rider.

Taylor Martin 
[12:10] Wow.

Dallin Cooper 
[12:11] It's taking his stories, his buddies' stories, other bull riders that I've interviewed stories, and learning leadership lessons from bull riding. I think a lot of people have made sports analogies for leadership before. I think quarterbacks are very often used for leadership analogies. You have to be cool under pressure and direct your team and all of the things. I was like, let's do something different. Let's do a different sports analogy. You know what nobody's talking about? Bull riding. I've got some great bull riding stories, because that's what I grew up hearing from my dad.

Taylor Martin 
[12:48] Now, is this book on bull riding or is it on ethical leadership?

Dallin Cooper 
[12:53] It is on leadership. It's got some tie-ins to the ethical leadership in particular. It's actually born out of what is a keynote speech that was originally a keynote speech about ethical leadership that is also titled Get on the Bull. The speech is quite different from the book, but the principles and the idea remains the same. It started out as a speech and then expanded to become a book.

Taylor Martin 
[13:21] Can you help break down the book for us in terms of how you divide it up, chapter by chapter?

Dallin Cooper 
[13:26] It has two major chunks, the first one being the attitudes of effective leaders, and the second one being behaviors of effective leaders. There's four attitudes. There's four behaviors. The tie-in is that these are four attitudes and behaviors that we can learn about from bull riders. They're attitudes and behaviors that bull riders have and that effective leaders need to have. 

Taylor Martin 
[13:52] Wow. Now that's fascinating. Please dig in when you're ready. 

Dallin Cooper 
[13:57] The attitudes are things like humility, gratitude, perspective, and determined optimism. They don't come in that order, but those are the four attitudes. Then the behaviors are definitely related. The behaviors are service, grit, authenticity, and honesty. That's what they are. Honesty, authenticity, grit, and service are the behaviors. Then there's some in-between parts, some beginnings, endings, in-betweens. It's a short book. It is supposed to – just like my crusade for ethics, it's supposed to make the ideas fun. It's supposed to make them memorable. I'm a big believer that stories are memorable.

We all know that honesty's good. I'm not reinventing leadership by saying that honesty is good. That's been established for a while now. I'm hoping that by putting a ridiculous story that most people don't think of to principles of honesty, when they're in those moments where they have to make a call, where they have to make a decision about honesty in their life or about humility or grit or whatever, it will jump out at them because they remember that ridiculous story, because how could they forget the ridiculous story? The big focus of the book is not that these principles are new, because they aren't. It's taking them and making them applicable. We focus a lot on implementation intentions. I don't know if you're familiar with implementation intentions.

Taylor Martin 
[15:43] No, I'm not.

Dallin Cooper
[15:44] They're a behavioral psychology thing where you use if-then statements in goal setting. We'll all set a goal, but then implementation intentions help us reach the goal. Let's take the most stereotypical goal ever and say it's New Years and you're going to go to the gym or you're going to lose weight. We'll just say that the goal is that you're going to lose weight as you set your New Year’s resolution. Maybe an implementation intention is any time I see an elevator, I'm going to look for stairs. If I find stairs, I will take them. 

What you're doing is you're giving yourself a trigger, some kind of stimulus that will make you think about your goal and then an action that you will take when that stimulus triggers. You're going to get in the elevator, and your brain is like, hey you, you see the elevator. You told yourself you were going to do something when you saw an elevator. Then you're like, oh shoot, I told myself I was going to look for stairs. Then you find the stairs. You're like, I said I was going to take the stairs. Then you do it, because most people want to keep their goals. When they don't go to the gym, it isn't because they don't want to go to the gym. It's because they get busy, and they forget, and they fall out of a routine. 

Implementation intentions are a way of saying every day when I get my coffee or before I get my coffee, I will go to the gym or I will do 10 push-ups or whatever. They don't obviously have to be fitness things. That's just a very stereotypical one – so that then you're going to get your coffee, and then when you do it, it triggers your brain to say I was going to do something. Oh yeah, I said I was going to do those push-ups. I don't want to do the push-ups, but I said I was going to, so now I'm going to. It's a way to keep yourself accountable to behavioral changes. Every section of the book has an example implementation intention you can use and then space to write your own, because it's fine to say, yeah, I'm going to have more humility. Then it's like, okay, so what do you do once you've decided that? What does that mean? That's so vague and nebulous and meaningless unless you put some sort of action to it. 

Taylor Martin 
[17:50] What are some of the actions that you have in the book for people to do?

Dallin Cooper 
[17:53] This is just the first one that I pulled up. The first section is on determined optimism. I'm a big fan of optimism. There's a lot of specific things that are in the book about what makes determined optimism different. The example implementation intention is every morning when I walk into work, when I sit at my desk or whatever, I will actively and specifically envision one thing that I have scheduled today going well in detail. Most of the time, most people, when they get to work, there's some kind of routine, starting up the computer, opening up your programs, getting a drink, whatever, the idea being that every morning when you're starting that routine, part of that routine becomes look at your day, pick the important thing that you're excited about, and imagine it going well. Maybe today for me, I get here and I say, oh look, I'm going to be on a podcast today. I'm going to think through how that podcast is going to go, and I'm going to imagine it going well.

Taylor Martin 
[18:54] Which it is. You're doing perfect. Thank you.

Dallin Cooper 
[18:58] Thanks. There's a lot of story in the chapter of determined optimism as to why that implementation intention is one that I'm specifically using. I'm not going to read the whole book here. It makes more sense in the context of that chapter.

Taylor Martin 
[19:18] I like how you're taking something as far-flung from ethics as bull riding and smashing that together with ethical leadership in this regard, because I really agree with you. I think when you take something that's outlandish for a certain talking subject and mash them together some way successfully, it really does help resonate something in the brain. 

I remember years ago that I was trying to learn how to remember people's names. One of these techniques was to, when you see the person, try to find three ways you can remember their name based on how they look, how they make you remember something, something they said, and then say their name in the first couple of instances of talking to them. All you're doing is you're creating memory hooks for yourself to latch onto later when you try to recall their name. I see this is the same thing. You're using these stories to help people remember them. I think it's great.

Dallin Cooper 
[20:16] That came from the fact that, dang it, I grew up raising sheep, and so anything I did, I was the sheep guy. I could relate sheep to everything. I quickly learned that people remembered all of these random things I said because I told them in the frame of a sheep story. Now, I didn't use the sheep stories for any of these because all of the sheep stories end in just wildly depressing ways because the sheep always dies at the end – so not the best for uplifting leadership books.

Taylor Martin 
[20:47] What made you decide to write the book? As you stated earlier, ethics isn't a thing everybody gravitates to, and they might think it's boring. What drove you to do it? Was it just because you saw something in a marketplace that we need to level up our ethics in terms of business, business leadership, environment, all of the above?

Dallin Cooper 
[21:10] There's a few reasons. If we're being honest, it's nice that there is demand for compelling ethics speakers. Just from a marketing perspective, there are a ton of people speaking about leadership. There are a ton of people speaking about trust. Those are really big topics with really big names behind them. There aren't a ton of people speaking about ethics. There are even less people speaking about ethics in a way that people want to listen to. Most of the time when people talk about ethics, they end up talking about philosophy or really weird, out there things to grasp. There was a market opening in the speaking space there, which was nice. Originally, there's actually two other books that I am working on in different stages right now that I was going to write before this one. You know how sometimes things just live in your brain and you can't get them out and it just seems like it's their time?

Taylor Martin 
[22:09] Yep.

Dallin Cooper 
[22:10] I think anyone who's created anything has had that feeling where you might say I'm trying to create this thing, and it's like, no, you're doing this other one instead, because it's time for that one. I had no intention of writing this book right now. Like I said, it was a keynote speech, and I was just working on the speech one day. I was interviewing somebody, a bull rider, for the speech. I just kept asking questions and getting all these things. I was like, wow, this could just be a really fun book if I had more than 45 minutes to explore it. It all just kept falling into place. 

I had some really cool connections, the chance to talk with the CEO of the PRCA, which is the big rodeo organization, the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. All of these things were just lining up. It's like, okay, the other books can wait. I've actually got a book that is much more focused on ethics and ethics in our everyday lives and in business in particular that I think is going to be the next one. I put all of those on hold, because this one was just calling to be written. Like I said, it's short. I figured, okay, you can get this done. You can get it out there and get it out of your head and onto paper where it can start being a real thing.

Taylor Martin 
[23:29] What do you see as the biggest – I don't know if I want to say problem – but biggest issues that companies or business leaders, thought leaders are not seeing through the ethics lens?

Dallin Cooper 
[23:44] I do think that one of the largest issues with businesses as a whole across many companies and many positions – the coupling of ethics and compliance is a really big issue. We have ethics and compliance officers. We have ethics and compliance initiatives. We have ethics and compliance trainings. Ethics and compliance in my mind, there's some intersection between them, but they are different topics. We need to be talking about them differently. 

When you end up lumping them together, what you end up getting is don't get fined, don't get sued, don't go to prison. You end up hitting all of the compliance, because you have to hit the compliance legally in order for your business to stay functioning. You miss the opportunities to have the ethics conversations, to have the ethics officer, to have meaningful moral development, because you're so focused on compliance and you've lumped them together. You create a culture of people who don't want to think about ethics because they think of it as compliance. They think about it as toe the line, follow the rules, don't do anything fun, and so they stop thinking about ethics. They turn off when they hear ethics. I think that that's when you have really broad-reaching consequences, until we get it fixed, of people who are not only not studying or thinking about ethics a lot, but don't even want to engage with the topic. 

Taylor Martin 
[25:23] From my perspective, when I hear that, I think about companies' annual reports or branding guidelines where they talk about the mission, the vision, the values of the organization. I feel like what you're saying is that ethics needs to probably be woven into the story of the company, as well as the branding-ness of the business, so that it's not seen as a compliance thing, it's seen as it's who we are thing.

Dallin Cooper
[25:54] Yes. It is affected by who each individual employee is. You can have an ethical sales culture and then unethical salesmen. That is going to influence your sales culture and your company's reputation and all of those things. It isn't just enough for your company to say we do these ethical things. It has to be that everybody needs to be incentivized to do the ethical thing. I wouldn't say it's the biggest, but another really important topic in ethics is incentivization, people being incentivized to do the right thing, because most major scandals are – I guess that aren't like fraud – but a lot of the big scandals, Wells Fargo, Amazon, different things like that that we've seen in the last few years, are because from the top down, leaders in companies were incentivizing employees in a way that essentially required the employees to do something unethical if they wanted to keep their job or hit their quotas or get their bonus or whatever. You have to be really careful about how you're incentivizing people, that you're incentivizing them to behave well and not incentivizing unethical conduct, which is wildly easy to do, super easy to do.

Taylor Martin 
[27:18] What are some ways you can do that for – if your employees – you want them to hit a budget quota or you're moving the business in a different direction. It's a lot of new hurdles they have to jump over. What are some of the things you can put out there to incentivize them?

Dallin Cooper 
[27:34] That's really hard to do without a specific example. It's a lot easier to come up with negative examples than positive ones, because –

Taylor Martin 
[27:43] We have negative examples. Just open the paper.

Dallin Cooper 
[27:45] Yeah, we have plenty of those. Let me think of a good example that I can be specific with. I'll take one that I've talked about quite a bit on different social media platforms, which is Amazon's warehouse fulfillment. Amazon isn't going to do this, because they actually just had a vote, and they literally voted down their ethics guidelines. That's a good sign. When the company's managers are trying to propose more ethics guidelines and the shareholder's saying no, there's a bigger problem. 

Amazon has some big warehouse issues with people being pushed to really, really far extremes in order to meet numbers and time on task and different things like that – understandable. Amazon has a business model of going fast and getting stuff out there and doing volume. You have to be efficient and effective so that you can keep your prices low, so that you can be the cheapest thing in the world, which is Amazon's thing right now. 

If you focused on maybe instead of just incentivizing the employees, or in their case not disincentivizing, because they don't really give bonuses so much as they get punishments if you don't hit the quotas – but instead of saying, okay, if you're off task for too long, you're in trouble, maybe you say if you can hit this different minimum with no accidents, then you get a bonus or an incentive. Instead of just saying hit the quota no matter what, it becomes, okay, our new focus is actually going to be on minimizing workplace accidents, because those are also a cost. Those are also something that take time. They take people away from their station. They minimize productivity and cause bad PR. Those are also things that you want to minimize. Instead of just saying shove the most boxes in the most places, it can be, okay, maybe don't do the most boxes, but if you can do at least this many boxes, which is a lower number, without any accidents over X period of time or whatever, that's way better than just shove the boxes. 

Wells Fargo's big issue was open as many new accounts as possible. Every customer needs to have at least eight products. It's like, okay, that's so many banking products for one person to have. That's what they were pressured to do. Maybe instead, you should be focusing on retaining customers or customer satisfaction with the accounts that they did have. I don't know what those different companies' metrics for success are. That's a little bit harder. 

In my businesses, both with the marketing agency when I was there and with Ugly Chews, the life of the customer is really important. I want someone who buys the dog chews to come back in two months and buy more dog chews because they had such a great experience. I want someone who hires my agency to do search engine optimization to keep hiring them to do that for years. The focus isn't just get the sale. It's make sure that the customer's a good fit. 

I think that for salespeople in particular, focusing on something other than just closing sales, but instead, acquiring target customers, customers that meet a certain – not portfolio, a certain demographic or description – because there are some people that if they buy my dog chews, I know that they aren't going to like my dog chews, because my dog chews are gross and ugly looking. If you're the kind of person that wants a cute, little cupcake-looking dog treat, I know that that isn't what you're going to get. I don't want to spend my time or have a salesperson spend their time trying to get that person to buy the dog chew, because it's going to be wasted time, and they're going to be unhappy – so just lining up what you actually want done with what you are asking people to do. None of those examples were as specific as I wanted, but off the cuff, it's the best my brain's doing for me.

Taylor Martin 
[31:58] I think about the Amazon one. I know there's a bunch of numbers guys at Amazon. What you just laid out, I could see someone running the math on that and saying we have this many accommodations at this facility, and if we implement this program you're talking about, I'm sure they could come up with a way to balance it out. If we can reduce this amount of accidents, and then if we can do this amount of boxes, that'll offset that and we'll have a safer environment in which to work, and we'll still be just as productive. We'll be safer. Morale and all that stuff like you talked about would be part of the picture now.

Dallin Cooper 
[32:35] I think with the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, even if they aren't as productive, even if profit goes down by a small percentage in exchange for people not dying of strokes and heart attacks in your warehouses, that feels like it's probably worth it to lose a little profit in exchange for the people. Fundamentally, I think that that is a pretty big part of ethics is being able to say, okay, every cent of profit isn't worth squeezing the literal life out of people like they are disposable things. 

Taylor Martin 
[33:12] I totally agree. We're running up on time here, but there's something else I've been wanting to ask you. With this podcast, I always like providing people with information and stories and experiences so they can learn from all our guests that we have on. What can you give our listeners as a tool or something they can go through and process to clean up their ethical lens for their own business or their own life maybe? I don't know.

Dallin Cooper 
[33:40] I think one of the most universal and useful skills that is talked about in the book I just wrote – it will be talked about in probably every book I ever write. That section actually gets really rambly because I'm very passionate about this topic, which is getting outside of perspectives that are just your own. If you are owning the company, really taking time to get into the perspective of your employees, the perspective of your suppliers, of your customers, of everybody – because most of the time when we do things that are, quote unquote, bad or unethical or wrong, usually it's because we're being selfish or careless. If it's not intentional selfishness, it's just we're thoughtlessly going through life. 

Taking a minute to think about what other people are thinking, what other people are feeling, and how our behavior impacts them will solve most of your problems, honestly, in business, in life. Almost every attribute that you want to develop that's a positive one, honesty, humility, any of those things – if you can understand where the people that are around you are coming from, say, "Oh wow, I sure hate feeling lied to. They probably feel betrayed when they feel lied to." Wow, no duh. When you take that second to get outside of your own perspective and think, how is this impacting people around me, it really changes how you view the world. It changes how you view yourself. That exercise of consistently and conscientiously getting outside of yourself and trying to understand other people's perspectives can do more for you than probably any other single thing. 

Obviously, it's a lot of things go together to make your life good, to make you a good person, to make your business ethical. That one will be a catalyst for so many changes when you start saying, okay, what are the long-term impacts of this on all of the people, and how are they feeling about it?

Taylor Martin 
[35:57] That makes me think of – and I'm not trying to dilute the quality of what you just said. There's a TV show where the CEO of the business goes undercover and he works as an employee because it's a big corporation. I can't think of the name of that. Anyway, most of the time, he always comes away with understanding. At least the minimum is they always get down to the level of understanding some employees that are in that circle they put them in. Sometimes it's more profound, where they see the problems the company's creating for their employees. Then that CEO can go back and make some really groundbreaking changes. I think that perfectly aligns with that. Now, that show is kind of tongue-in-cheek, theatrical, but it brings home the same message. It comes back to observation, because we are observing from a different vantage point, through a different lens, which I think is great. I think there's a lot of value in that.

Dallin Cooper 
[36:55] I want to go a step beyond just observing, because while that's a great mental exercise to do, it's also one that we tend to be really bad at. When we try to understand other people's perspectives, most of the time we get it wrong. We think, oh, this is what we're thinking. It's like, that's not what they're thinking. Beyond just observing, ask. Get the feedback. Ask them what they're thinking. Ask them what they're feeling. That loops us back to things like leadership and trust, which is – to get legitimate, sincere, helpful feedback from employees, from suppliers, anywhere along the supply chain, customers, etc, you have to have a relationship with them where they trust you enough to tell you the bad things. If every time the employee gives feedback that is negative, they get punished, guess what. You aren't going to get good feedback. Everyone's going to tell you that the thing is great. That comes back to that incentivizing what you want. 

If you reward people for suggesting changes that are going to make the company better, even if it comes at a high cost or criticizing their superiors or whatever, if that's what you want and you reward them for giving you that feedback, then you're going to get feedback. People are going to be wracking their brains with, yeah, what is going wrong? Suddenly, they're going to be thinking about all the ways the company can be more ethical, because they want the incentive – but so often that people exterminate the negative feedback. Anyone who's saying, oh, you're doing something bad or something wrong, it's like, oh, we don't want to listen to them anyway because they don't know what they're talking about. Then you aren't going to get – you aren't going to get that feedback. 

Taylor Martin 
[38:35] We had a corporate anthropologist on, many, many moons ago. One of the things that she talked about was setting up a way in which your employees can provide this type of information, even anonymously if necessary. I thought that was really smart, because it allowed them to hear from the front lines or from any aspect of the business on ways to improve without being punished or called out on. It reminds me of the time when that UPS driver decided that to make things more efficient, we just need to remove all left-hand turns and just do right-hand turns. What a simple little thing, but wow, did it have profound effects for the business and for the environment.

Dallin Cooper 
[39:21] That's a suggestion that if somebody just tossed it out might feel really stupid at first. Hey, what if we just never turned left? What if you need to go left? They didn't dismiss that. Because of that, you were able to make a huge impact.

Taylor Martin 
[39:41] Exactly. Dallin, your book is called Get on the Bull. I know it's coming out in about a month or so. The podcast will be out after that, so people, it'll probably already be in stores. You can go ahead and check it out. It's a quick read. Dallin, is there any other way that people can follow you or buy some Ugly Chews?

Dallin Cooper 
[40:00] You can buy Ugly Chews at uglychews.com. You can't buy one Ugly Chew at uglychew.com, because once again, makes no sense to pay the packaging and the cost of shipping and the impact on the environment and shipping to get you one dog chew. You can buy a few Ugly Chews, or you can find a store that sells them. We've lost a lot of customers because of that, but same thing, got to do that. Uglychews.com, you can get the Ugly Chews. I am on LinkedIn a lot, because that's just where I've decided to put my time. I make silly, little, lighthearted YouTube videos about ethics – so Dallin Cooper on YouTube if you want. I don't know if they're life-changing by any means or particularly profound, but I think they're fun. They're just a little hobby.

Taylor Martin 
[40:53] Great. That's Dallin, D-A-L-L-I-N, Cooper, C-O-O-P-E-R. Dallin, thank you for being on today's show and telling us about your story, your life, and how you're trying to tackle ethical leadership. I think we need more of that. Thank you for being on today's show. 

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Dallin Cooper 
[41:09] Thank you for having me.

Taylor Martin 
[41:11] Over and out, everybody. 

Female Voice Over 
[41:13] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today's podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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