The Leadership Exchange
Discussions on Real-World Leadership for professionals. We explore several topics about leadership and getting the best from your team to deliver amazing results while creating a great environment for them.
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The Leadership Exchange
S3E4: Leadership in the Hybrid Era with Steven Puri
Steven Puri brings a truly unique perspective to the conversation around hybrid and remote work. Drawing from his extraordinary career spanning visual effects for blockbusters like Independence Day (which won an Academy Award) to executive roles at 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks, Puri reveals how Hollywood has mastered distributed work models long before "remote work" became a buzzword.
The film industry, Puri explains, naturally transitions between individual creation, collaborative planning, intensive on-set work, and dispersed post-production—effectively practicing hybrid work for over a century. This framework offers valuable lessons for today's leaders struggling to balance in-office and remote work schedules. The key insight? Different work requires different environments, and smart leaders recognize when to bring people together versus when to create space for deep focus.
Puri's current venture, The Suka Company (named after the Sanskrit concept for "happiness from self-fulfillment"), applies these insights through productivity tools designed to help people achieve flow states—those magical periods of intense concentration where time disappears and creativity flourishes. His practical approaches include limiting visible tasks to just three achievable items, which increased completion rates by 77%, and incorporating binaural beats and focus music composed by film industry professionals.
What makes this conversation particularly compelling is Puri's personal motivation. Facing cancer treatment and preparing for fatherhood, he's driven to create tools that give people back precious time. As one user told him, "I pay you so I have memories of my kids now"—the difference between playing with his children at 3pm versus wondering where the day went at 6pm.
Whether you're leading a distributed team, managing hybrid schedules, or simply trying to regain focus in a distracted world, Puri's cross-industry perspective offers actionable wisdom for creating environments where both individuals and teams can thrive. His parting advice? Simply "Listen"—the fundamental leadership skill that transcends all working models.
Steven Puri's Company and LinkedIn profile links below.
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Hello everyone, this is Lupe Munoz.
Speaker 2:And this is Steve McKeon, and welcome to the Leadership Exchange, Steve we have a very unique guest today.
Speaker 1:Steven Puri is our guest today and he's going to tell us a little bit about his interesting company called the Suka Company. We'll leave that to the end. Even but very interesting. Start as a newscaster and interviewer for a DC Baltimore market station, ended up going into software engineering and is Thomas I Watson Scholar at IBM, Went to USC which I'm not a big fan of, since I'm an Arizona State fan. Go Devils. The truth comes out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, began working in the film industry. Did a lot of stuff producing computer-generated visual effects, which I'm a big fan of. Did 14 movies, which is very impressive, independence Day, which is one of my favorites, and it actually won an Academy Award for visual effects. So kudos to you, stephen. But then you started a tech company. The first one that you started was Centropolis Effects, which was working with CGI. Then you later moved into production of indie films, produced live action features as the VP of Development and Production at 20th Century Fox, eventually went to be executive VP at DreamWorks, which I'm a big fan of everything they do. And then you worked on movies like Star Trek, transformers more of my favorites you can see the type of theme of movies I like. Eventually, you went out to build this new tech company called the Suka Company, which you were telling us the translation. It's Sanskrit and it translates to happiness from self-fulfillment, and I find that very intriguing. So, stephen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I appreciate the intro. Let me set the table for a moment so your listeners I know I've heard a lot of interesting guests get a sense of why this episode, which is, I had a kind of crazy path so far in that my parents were both engineers at IBM. So my early years, 18 years, I was a code monkey, of course. Of course your mom is a systems programmer.
Speaker 3:You learn how to code right, so I did that when I was at USC I know your favorite school, we won't go into that now and I happened because you know USC has a great cinema TV school it does, we can all acknowledge that right. So a bunch of my friends in the dorm were aspiring Spielbergs and Lucases and that. So while I was there, luck of the draw, I happened to be in LA right when film went digital, when it was like, oh, we actually have the power now the compute, to digitize a feature film, manipulate it in the computer and put it back out right. And I sat at that intersection of the Venn diagram of I could talk engineering because I'd been an engineer and now I had a lot of friends that you know. You go out Friday night, you watch movies, you hear them all debate like cinema concepts, so I could kind of talk director.
Speaker 3:My career took off, spent 20 years going from being a digital guy in film to then just being a studio executive. You know, as you said, a executive vice president with curse from norris, he had dreamworks. A vice president at fox did that. Had a moment where I was like, oh shit, I'm gonna wake up be 40, 50 years old making diehard 14. Like, oh god, you know like at a certain point it's soap. You know it's like daddy's gotta go to work. Make diehard 9 so you can go to college Right.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't moving the needle. So I thought what can I do, or actually could do, something that's maybe meaningful, smaller, riskier, but I had more control. The only other skill I had was engineering. So it's like let's go to startups, let's go find things and build things Right, things right. So all of that to say some of the things that I learned in film happen to be strangely applicable to the world we live in now of hybrid work, remote work. How do you lead teams in all these different environments? Because here's the deal Film's been doing it for a hundred years. It's just not called that.
Speaker 3:Films begin with and I did not know. Yeah, writers writing alone or writing at their writing partner's house in the living room, going to coffee shops, working there right, trying to come up with something. Eventually one of it starts to hit. Someone puts a little money in. You set up a production office. One or two days a week. You go in. You meet with location scout who's like okay, so what is this? Can we shoot in romania? You meet with location scout who's like, okay, so what is this? Can we shoot in Romania? You meet with the production designer. What does it look like, the costume or what do they wear.
Speaker 3:Then the other three or four days a week, you know you're working from home doing rewrites, because Brad Pitt won't do it, unless characters more tall or masculine or something Right, so it's hybrid. And then it's on set. It's a hundred thousand dollars a day. Everyone's on set. It's a hundred thousand dollars a day. Everyone's on set all day, all night.
Speaker 3:Then you go back to editing. It's kind of hybrid and it's remote, but no one in film goes oh, we're in the hybrid stage of this movie. You know what I mean. It's like pre-production, post-production you have different words for it. And when zoom became a verb, when the whole world was like, oh, maybe we can't be five days a week, ten hours a day in the office, like how do we adjust to it?
Speaker 3:There were a bunch of things where I was like, actually, I've seen how good leaders lead in these kinds of situations and individual contributors also understand how to contribute, and that's a lot of what I share now is what did I learn there? Happy to share them here with your audience. You've had some great people talk about things here and that's really where I come from. I can talk about my company at the end. I'm happy to do that and happy to talk about just some tips and tricks. When we guys met it was interesting just the thought of what could we share, what could I share? That is novel for your audience and I'd love to do that.
Speaker 1:And I think that sets the stage beautifully for really telling our listeners Today's episodes we're really going to focus on. First of all, do you deal with a virtual team or a hybrid team or a work from home team differently or not? And if it is different, how is that going to be different? So today's episode is really going to be around that atmosphere, because not everyone leads teams that are physically around them all the time. And I agree with you that now, although I feel like we've taken a reduction since the pandemic, like after the pandemic, it's kind of bounced back a little bit but there's some, I guess residual there that people have gotten used to working from home or working that sort of hybrid schedule and they refuse so have organizations yeah you know that's the thing is.
Speaker 3:It's like it's true, the pendulum was forced all the way one way and now it's swinging back to a new normal, which is not the old normal and it's not pandemic, it's a new normal. And the way I liken it because a lot of people ask me about this is it's almost like if you, as a leader, had a color palette that you painted with, and it was a lot of reds and yellows, you could do oranges, things like that During the pandemic. Suddenly you had blue. There was a whole different thing to paint with. You could now do skies. You could now paint lakes. You're not going to paint everything as a sky, everything's lake, but now you have the ability to choose. Oh, this is what I need for this and this is what I need for that.
Speaker 3:I'll give you a very concrete example from the film world, which you know. You can see the parallels in technology. There are points in time where you, as a leader, which could be the producer, it could be the studio executive, you know that the person that you are leading, which might be a writer or a director, for them to do the thing they need to do right now, they need to concentrate. They need deep work, as Cal Newport would say. They need to be in a flow state, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would write, and if you give them the opportunity to do that, there's certain conditions. We'll talk about where you can make that more available to them. To do that, there's certain conditions. We'll talk about where you can make that more available to them. That's brilliant.
Speaker 3:There are other times when you need to sit in the room. There's no Zoom, call Google, meet Teams. That's the same as sometimes being in the room and being okay. The third act is not working. We know he's got the sword. We know the dragon's in the cave. We know the girl is missing somewhere but, we need to figure out a better way.
Speaker 3:That's not so obvious and there's just some electricity in the room. When you guys are all sitting there, it's not like we're on a Zoom call. Staring at the flat screen, you're like I don't know, he picks up the bow. I don't know what he's doing.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I've never had a good creative moment like that. Oh, it introduced, in a very violent way, another style of working and now it's just another sort of arrow in the quiver for a leader, for an organization.
Speaker 2:I was thinking about before the call Stephen, the trust. So you talked about the fact that the film industry has been doing remote work, hybrid work, for many years and when the pandemic hit, many managers had to trust that their teams were going to continue to work and, I think, gaining that courage and then, for those periods of time where it's, like you said, blackout, someone is in deep concentration, thought what are you doing to not lose your nerves, and so talk about that a little bit. I think our listeners will be interesting in your perspective.
Speaker 3:So let's say this a lot of the tips and techniques we're going to talk about and the fun stories is sort of illustrate them they are helpful and applicable, but they will never overcome bad hiring. If you fundamentally hire someone, and when they're at home you're pretty certain they're just doing their laundry and like planning their vacation, it's not going to be fixed with any tool, any technique, any leadership. You know moment where you stand on the soapbox and inspire them no man, you just got. You have to hire slowly and fire quickly, right, yeah, and I think that's really important and we can talk about that because in I have led, you know, one company to a successful exit which I was super excited about in my late 20s and I of course thought this is easy, I'm really good at this, right. Then I had two failures and I was like wow, it was not as easy as I thought it was.
Speaker 3:And all the truisms you learn more from failure than you do from success, and blah, blah, blah. Right, but the bottom line is, when you are a leader of an organization like that, you're really fooling yourself if you think you can do more than two things. Really, what you can do is you set an agenda. This is what is important to accomplish as our company. We are going to combat the climate crisis, we are going to help with the homeless, we are going to build better financial products for international people to have the ability to transfer, things like that. And the second thing is you set a style. This is how we do business, and that style can be hey, we screw people over, or it can be everything we do. You could publish in the paper and we'd be proud of it.
Speaker 1:Are you referring to basically the team or the company culture? Are you referring to basically the team or?
Speaker 3:the company culture? Yeah, exactly, and it's just those things you can do. Now, within that, you know, the thing that you and we've talked about is there are things as a leader you can do. Once you've said this is the agenda for the company, it's the style it should operate, this is how we treat each other, this is how we treat our clients, this is how we treat competitors. Right. Then you get down to you're directly managing individual contributors. There are some things you can do to get the best out of them, and I'll give you a funny example and I know you guys fly a lot.
Speaker 3:I had a flight where I was going from Austin, which is where I live now, with my wife and I was going to SF to see part of my team and I had to do some little designs in Figma or something, where I was like let me mock this up and sort of show you what I'm talking about. Right, plane took off, wi-fi was out. Plane landed, I was like something's wrong. We like that was like a 15 minute long flight, so we're landing in DFW or something Like. Wrong with the plane. Two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I had no conception of it. I didn't go to the bathroom. I'm not even sure if the drink cart came by, wow, and I was like what just happened. But I'll tell you this my designs were done and we got to sfo. There's this great like new england lobster place right by the airport where when I have time I go there and have my little connecticut lobster roll, and I was like I thought I'd be racing the hotel. Be like, let me try and finish this before I go to sleep for the morning meeting. And I was like I'm done, I'm going to have a lobster roll right In researching that, because a lot of smart people have written about this.
Speaker 3:The preeminent book on this, of course, is I was in a flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the book on flow and I'll take a second just for anyone who hasn't had the chance to read the book or really explored flow states. I'll just define that which is high performers can get into a highly concentrated state where the world sort of falls away, the clock falls away and you can do your best work. Michael Jordan has that famous quote about being in the zone where he's like, at a certain point, it's me in the ball, like there are no defenders, there's no scoreboard, there's no stands, it's just me in the ball right. And there's always a picasso quote that I mangle where he talks about I was up all night, I forgot to pee and I didn't eat. But hey, guernica, what do you think? Do you like it? It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:And if you can create those conditions for your team to do that like man, because that kind of deep work, that is what moves your company forward. It is not the hey. I have half hour between Zoom calls because we book Zoom calls every two hours in my company and we check in with each other. In those 30 minutes you're not going to do deep work. You're going to file your TPS report, return some emails, check your Slack and then you're onto the next Zoom call. And let me tell you what you're not going to beat your competitors just because you make sure everyone checks their Slack and returns their emails and does their TPS reports right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you hire. Well, you have that way of handling your company. You go hey, guys, you know what. I've hired the right people. I'm going to give you two hours in the morning. Let's have a deal. No one's going to slack each other, no one's going to bug each other. This is when you do that thing where you go into the staff meeting and you're like I think I built a feature, I prototype this that might change the course of the company. Not, hey, I emptied. I'm at inbox zero. I returned all my emails. Who cares?
Speaker 2:No, that's a great point. Sorry, long speech, david. I think creating that environment that you described is just really critical, and whether you're an in-person hybrid, I think that same lesson holds true for any leader in an organization, because if you're constantly interrupting people, whether you're in the same building or not, that the deep state of thought is not going to materialize right, and so I really like that. Are there other? When you talked about the virtual teams or hybrid teams, are there other conditions or what else do you kind of set up to help your teams succeed in that way? And I'm thinking a little bit more along the lines of how do you check in with them on a positive way, that it's not? Doesn't feel like, hey, steven, trust me, he's calling me again, you know, is there a script to use in that space?
Speaker 3:I love that you know flow states and respect that and deep work. Regarding the thing you're talking about, what I have found in and this has been true both of the tech companies that have run, as well as in the film, and also mistakes that I've made, where I've corrected and tried something different that didn't work so well as try something different. It's really come down to this one sentence I did not hire you to do work measured by how many hours it took. Where you did it. When you did it, it's the effect of what you did, and if the thing you did makes everyone in the staff meeting step and go, oh fuck, wow, if it took you 15 minutes or 14 hours, I kind of don't care.
Speaker 3:If you did it sitting in the office cubicle with a nightlight on your head and you're grinding online, or you were at the beach, beach, I don't care, I care. Then a staff meet, everyone goes. We should run that direction. Yeah, results. You measure work by results and you have to, as a leader, set up the organization to go. This is the way it works, because I'll tell you this, having worked in sf and having worked in film and I have not worked in banking, but I know this is true there too, and they've been beat up for it is. Sometimes it becomes this badge of honor of like I was the office all night and the servers were melting and I was.
Speaker 3:You know I haven't slept in nine days. If that is your way of getting into flow dues, I mean great, go for it.
Speaker 1:Have similar discussions with people that their job is full time at the office, you know, at the work site. Yeah, usually this discussion happens when I'm just joining a team as a leader. I talk about expectations, right, and I'm like look, I am not, you need to be here a certain number of hours. I said I really honestly don't care about that and very much like you put it, I'm like I'm about results. So if you can get your results in six hours and you've got something with your family you need to do, they go ahead and do it.
Speaker 1:I said I don't need you to ask for permission every time and and I think that that really gives that trust and focus around. Okay, it's not about the hours, it's about the result. And number two, I trust that you're going to get that result.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Steve, you touched upon something and I don't want to ignore that is you talked about the human aspect of like the team being together and how you create that sense of unity, cohesion on a team that could be distributed, remote, whatever term you want to use. There's a lot of terms right now with async, distributed teams, remote teams all right, when you consider that you were leading a team of humans at least now. I know by Christmas it's all going to be AI.
Speaker 1:No, no, we've read everyone. No, don't say that, it scares me All podcast hosts will be AI.
Speaker 3:Did you see the Google VO? Thing? Wow, wow, that was like okay. So, that said, when you consider that your team is human, the most human thing you can do is listen.
Speaker 2:Yes, amen.
Speaker 3:And it's hard. It's easy to talk. I'm talking a lot here. I recognize I'm the guest. I have to bring some value to this. So your listeners are like oh man, I got a lot out of that. So I'm talking more than I would normally talk.
Speaker 3:But when you listen you not only hear what's said, but you hear what wasn't said. And when you pick up, it's like oh, you know, steve's doing great, but something's up. I gotta I need to talk to him one-on-one, just be like hey, man, let's hang out. And sometimes it is you know what. Let's go on a walk, man. Let's like get out of the office and just I want to talk to you. And you get the thing where it's like I feel disconnected because of this. Dude, thank you for telling me that is a gift for you to actually give me a user's manual to you. Now we can fix it, now we can address it. Or sometimes it's not addressable. Sometimes it's just you're having issues, I spotted them, and you're like this is not something that's solved through work, but at least it's human now, until the robots come.
Speaker 2:Until the robots come.
Speaker 1:Terminator Stephen, do you have routines that are successful with you, that are effective with kind of keeping that connection? Heck yeah. And if you could share that with our listeners, I think they would probably value that.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about that. And let me interject a little bit of context here, which is in my exploration of, like, how does this work? And I am by no means the end all be all guru who's got to be the final say but I am someone who did a lot of work and research on this so I can bring things, take what's interesting and leave what's not Okay. So in the moment of wow, there are some real parallels, now that I'm running startups, to things I experienced in film and those are applicable. Next thing to do is go. Well, a lot of smart people have encountered this. We are not the first generation of humans on earth to work, to have distraction, to have folk to want focus, to have teams. Right, let's go read what they wrote.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, we talked about you know Mihaly's book on flow, cal's book. You know deep work. You know James clear, near a bunch of people. I read about a dozen of those and I'll be super blunt when you read all dozen and you reflect back on what they said. It's about the same five, six things. They have their own lexicon. They've got to sell you their book for 24.95. They have their own acronym for their framework that they call the smart for you know what I mean.
Speaker 3:It's all like well, you boil it down, man, and it's like here are the things that help, and I'm gonna lay some of those out with some fun illustration. I will give you one. This I've seen true in both of my careers you can build a very positive, powerful association between where you do something and what you do. And I will give you two creative examples. When we were doing Independence Day, we were leading up to that Independence Day period Roland, who's the director producer, and Dean, who's a writer producer. They'd worked together on Stargate and some other stuff they had rented for those movies to write them. This beautiful villa I've never been there, but it's apparently a white marble villa in Pueblo Vallarta and they talked about in the morning like the light comes in over the pool and it just spires the nerd right. So, getting ready to do this, roland is talking to his assistant, says, okay, go rent the house, rent the villa In Roland's German accent, which I can't do. Well, and.
Speaker 3:Joey comes back and she's like it's rented and it was like around the office. Everyone's like Roland called his attorney John Diemer, who's a fantastic smart guy. And he's like John, you must buy the house by Monday. Roland owned that villa. I do not know where the renters went, but I'm sure they were handsomely paid to go somewhere else. They went down there in that room where they write with the morning sun. They wrote the third highest grossing movie in history at the time, wow, right, but it's not like it always has to be.
Speaker 3:I need to go to, you know, the hotel bel air and, like when I was working with alex kurtz and bob worthy were fantastic guys, right, they met like college. You know high school college sort of thing. Transformers one and two, star trek like a bunch written. You know they're in the million dollar writers club, right, when they had the crunch, oh, we have to go buckle down and write transformers because michael needs to shoot it. Steven's producing it, you know, not me, steven, big steven. Right, they would rent a room at the universal hilton, across the street from dreamworks, across the street from the universal. That I'm just gonna say. It is not a glamorous property, this is not a luxury property, like spas. But I think for them it evoked their creative feeling because they met, remember, back when it was like dorm rooms and it was like I think alex sitting on the edge of a bed with the laptop out and but bob sitting at the little desk with laptop. It evoked that feeling like we're scrappy writers back in college, dreaming of being you know like we would write it this way, and that was how they wrote transformers and transformers 2 and that sort of thing. It was their thing. So it was such an interesting lesson to learn in film. Going like you can kind of train your brain like hey, I need to do this kind of activity. Here's a space where my brain just sort of clicks and goes, oh okay, we're in this mode, got it? That's something to consider. It's been implemented also. I'm sure you know like to consider. It's been implemented also. I'm sure you know like Google spent a lot of time in sort of behavioral psychology. Like they've done that right or wrongly. I'm not sure about the nap rooms but the nap pods, but they've spent a bunch of time looking at exactly this. Like how do we create spaces that encourage a certain kind of thing light, space, sound so that's one thing.
Speaker 3:Another thing that's interesting is the, the oral environment. By oral I mean au oral, like sound environment, right, and there's a bunch of research. When we talk about like flow states, it points to for most people there's a certain kind of music that helps them get into that almost like trance state. And we all have the friend who's the outlier, who like listens to heavy metal or like 90s gangster rap, and that's their way to get. Okay, they're the outlier. Middle of the road is 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, non-vocal, ambient, rhythmic kind of music. It just lulls you into that, right.
Speaker 3:So I will now actually mention my platform, which is I have a bunch of friends who are film composers, who have a lot of time on their hands, right. So we did this research. I was like, hey, could you write some stuff? We have like a thousand hours of original music like this in a platform just to be there when it's like I want to make this available to people to say, ah, this helps me like get into that state. And both you guys have headphones on, right? Yes, I actually don't, but we offer binaural beats. Have you guys messed with that?
Speaker 2:No, I have not no.
Speaker 3:Okay. So binaural is where each channel is offset a certain number of cycles per second and there are different, and this is sort of in that half woo, half science kind of world where there's some research that, like 40 Hertz delta between your ears stimulates your brain creatively because your brain is trying, it's spending part of its time trying to reconcile something where it's slightly out of space but you can almost barely sense it and it stimulates your brain. Just interesting. We uploaded a few playlists from friends. They're like I can create binaural beats, you know. So things like that I think are super interesting. And again, these are things you can offer if you're like hey, I want to encourage this sort of thing with my team. This is very different than hey, do your TPS report. There are different tools when you just need to get through your Google Sheet or your accounting software or whatever. This is more deep work, the kind of stuff that changes your career or the organization that you're contributing to.
Speaker 2:So you talked about people coming together and the vibe that's created when they're. You know, lupe and I do a lot of work virtually now and we've kind of learned. There's a time of day sometimes when we're going to be more creative together online. There's the environment as well, and I'm curious what you've learned in that space.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about chronotype you brought it up, but I will jump on that one which is as you get to know yourself and as you get to recognize different team members. Like, there are some engineers. They're famous for that midnight hour. I am like in the zone, right, yep, give me midnight to 4 am. Everyone's asleep. I'm writing the mobile app that everyone's going to download tomorrow and love, right, that sort of thing. I used to be that guy. I am now a 7 am to 11 am kind of guy. My chronotype has actually evolved, god knows.
Speaker 1:You guys know I'm having a baby this year it's probably gonna evolve again after I'm sleep deprived totally, totally different part of your life's gonna blow up now yeah yeah, in a good way times right, most amazing and hardest thing I've ever done.
Speaker 3:I yeah, all my friends told me excited about it. But back on track. Something that's interesting is, as you start to understand that about yourself, you can optimize your day for saying to your assistant or your ai assistant your emotion I mean there's some great apps out there that help you schedule stuff say, you know what, know what I'm most creative If I need to come up with, like the plan for this book, that at 8 or 9 am, if I need to pull a team together, I'm better doing that at 2, 3 in the afternoon. Right, my wife is different than I am. Like my mornings are sacred. I have my calendar blocked. You can't book a meeting in the morning with me unless you know it's emergency and something like if it were you guys, I'd make time. But that is something that then, as a leader, you start recognizing your team, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:And it's it is. I think a lot of leadership is listening. It is just being open to the signals, because people will tell you who they are if you shut up and listen with you before or not, but I've got a friend that's a was in human resources.
Speaker 2:We worked together for many years and she went on to work for a company that's recruiting talent, primarily IT based talent. They had a. Surprisingly enough, they had a office in Austin and when the pandemic hit, everybody was told to go home and so she had a team of, she said, between 24 and 32-year-old folks and she told them hey, disperse, We'll call in, We'll do the call-ins, remote, that kind of stuff. So they got on the tech pretty quick and as one meeting's taken place, she happens to see someone else pass behind the person that is on the call and she found out they were all going to Mexico together and they were working remote in Mexico and I asked her.
Speaker 2:I said, hey, well, what'd you do about that? And she goes I didn't do anything. They were more productive than they've ever been in the entire time because of the environment they created.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a good story Because she was about the results.
Speaker 1:Some of those points you made, Stephen, are proved out in that story that Steve just shared for the first time with me. Thanks a lot, Steve.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great story.
Speaker 1:It's a great story.
Speaker 3:Can I be on that team?
Speaker 2:I like Mexico? Yeah, I said the same thing. I said are you hiring? Yeah, I like.
Speaker 3:Mexico.
Speaker 1:Right, Stephen, to recap some of the main points that I think I heard you mention definitely think about those moments when people come together. Think of the vibe, think of the environment. Sounds like there's as far as routines, right. So hey, if I'm bringing my team together, I'm going to be very thoughtful, as a leader, about the meaning behind the location that we're coming together, especially if there's like big Right spaces are important, yeah, Big events, especially like if you're doing like a quarterly thing or an annual routine.
Speaker 1:You said, hey, I really try to respect their time and it sounds like you block off your time, that sacred time in the morning. I'm guessing you do the same, for you reciprocate for those people that are part of the team you're leading as far as like, hey, I'm guessing you do the same for you reciprocate for those people that are part of the team you're leading as far as like, hey, I'm going to respect certain blocks of time for them to be able to give them that, that moment, to be able to go into that flow state.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, as much as possible, try to get those like we try to get those to align. So it's not like at no time of day is everyone available because everyone has these staggered sort of like focus spots.
Speaker 3:You know, you got to kind of like, collaborate and be like how about we do this? I'll give you a concrete example from you know, the platform I built which is one of the things we heard a lot from the UIX designers and engineers in the platform was I'll be in my focus time. But I know my Slack's kind of going off and I don't want to be non-responsive and people think I'm ignoring them. We built the simplest thing. You're going to laugh how stupid simple this is In the platform. When you hit play, you know the focus music starts and your computer's like and you know, do not disturb so focus mode. We simply use the Slack API to set you to a way and if anyone hovers over you, they get a little message saying I'm in a focus session, I'll get back to you.
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting. And it relieves that burden of oh God, if I'm not responsive, they think I'm not working or I'm ignoring them. No, it's just dude, I respect your focus time, this is my focus time and now you know, and that has made so many people more relaxed it was just like I know, as soon as I press play here, my Slack's in a way I don't hear notifications and anyone wants to reach me goes. Oh, that's right. Yeah, period's not available until 11.
Speaker 1:How do you stay personally connected to the individual people on the team? Are there routines around that? I know I love the example that you gave around. Hey, I really have to. I don't know that I like that you use loop as the poor performer and Steve as a as the good performer. But we'll go with that. But, but I love the example you said.
Speaker 3:Hey, I'm a little sensitive there.
Speaker 1:Hey, I'm insecure, okay, but so you said, hey, let's go take a walk, right, we really do. We're going to get away from the familiar and go to a neutral place, and outdoors probably is a positive thing, right, unless it's a bad neighborhood. What else do you do to connect in that environment of virtual teams? What are those routines that you have for that? Because I would think that that's something that you value a lot also.
Speaker 3:I will tell you something Right now, the company I run is truly distributed. There is only one. My co-founder is the only person where I could get in a car and actually see him in real life. And I'll tell you when I went into the startup space after I left Fox, I was really happy about oh wow, global talent. I can hire this great designer in Dubai right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a software engineer in Montreal. He's amazing. That was global talent, things, great. No commute, no one's wasting time commuting. There's no two hours of brain energy just dealing with the freeway, right. All of those things were fantastic.
Speaker 3:But I'll tell you this I am a fan of being able to come together to offer people spaces. So it's not that I am one of those absolutists where it's like you must be remote, you must be in Costa Rica at the beach, you must be in Alaska, thou shalt be in Buenos Aires. I'm not actually that I think you can make it work, but I am a big fan that there is some cadence at which you do get to see each other, and you picked up on what I said about there's. Sometimes you just want to go for a walk with someone and different things come out when you're out of the office and you're walking around. I'll tell you something that I like to do when I'm interviewing, and this sounds kind of kooky, but I'm going to tell you. It's revealing.
Speaker 3:Yes, you can do the Google elevator test. Yeah, you can do all sorts of things and personnel. Try doing something with them that they don't do. I invite people to yoga. Hey, man, you know what It'd be really fun just to get to know each other. On Saturday, want to go to yoga with me and we'll have coffee afterwards. It is revealing when someone's doing something that they're not accustomed to doing what they're actually going to be like to work with, because so much of like the work interview process is like Kabuki theater. You know I wear this mask. I will say these things.
Speaker 3:I know my role. I must say these things, and it's kind of like how well did you learn the Kabuki theater of interviewing?
Speaker 3:As opposed to like oh, you know what you want to go. I don't know bowling or whatever the thing. Find your thing and invite them. Hey man, let's do this together. Do they get pissed if they haven't had a strike in five? You know frames, whatever it's called? Are they the guy who's just like I hate this, I'm grumpy? Or do they have a great attitude? They're like hey man, give me some tips. How can I be better? Oh yeah, I'd like you on my team.
Speaker 1:I think the other thing that's really part of that environment change is that allows you to see the person better than what you would in just an interview in the office is because I've experienced something similar to that. It didn't work out very well for the candidates. The simple thing of, hey, let's go have a meal right Outside. It's almost like you don't say this, but in essence, the interview's done at the work site and they're like hey, we'd like to take you for dinner, and I found that to be incredibly revealing.
Speaker 1:It's almost like a switch turns on and they all of a sudden become a different person in that setting and I got to tell you this was a horrible, horrible experience for me with these two candidates. These two, they were supervisor candidates. We went out to dinner I think it was three of us and two of the the two candidates. They started hitting on the waitress and I, okay, and in a very unprofessional and uncomfortable way, the things they were like telling us and I'm like the like am I, am I getting punked here? Is there, where's, where's aston kutcher, you know? Like blown away. Needless to say, they were given that feedback like, hey, we felt you guys were extremely unprofessional and the character of your person is not the type that we want to lead our teams, much less be part of our company. See, you already know what I'm talking about. Well, I just know that particular piece.
Speaker 3:But I love that you're doing other things besides a meal A meal is good, though it is true, it's more revealing how someone treats a valet or a server than how they treat the guy that they're trying to get hired by.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah a lot of truth. There You're definitely a master.
Speaker 3:Jedi there. Steven, you know what I've learned through mistakes and through reading what the smart people have written. I was like okay.
Speaker 2:Steve, you've learned along the way.
Speaker 1:You did share your personal story and your inspiration around. I want to pay it forward. I want to help society, I want to help leaders out there. If you don't mind, share a little bit of that with our listeners, because I think that'll inspire them quite a bit.
Speaker 3:I would be happy to share that and share a little bit of that with our listeners, because I think that'll inspire them quite a bit. I would be happy to share that. I think there are two big life things happening for me right now. One is I'm thinking a lot about what is the world that I'm giving to my kids. My first child is coming in a few months. I've never contemplated this idea of what are they going to inherit and I recognize I'm not a multi-billionaire where I can buy an election and change the course of the country. I'm not negotiating foreign deals In my own little way. What could I do so that maybe the world is slightly more connected, slightly less divided and there's less hatred and there's more understanding of we're in it together? That's been really important for me and thinking about you know, my child grows up. He's like this is what my dad did. You know it's really cool and I don't know that. You know diehard Wolverine 2 is things like that. We're really moving the needle. So I want to create something that actually people could use and made their lives better, and I'll talk about that in a moment. Another one is I found out that I'm wrestling with cancer and it's something that I'm in treatment for and it's being managed, but it definitely made me contemplate is the road ahead of me as long as I thought it was, and have I passed along? The stuff that I have learned, like, why take this sadly, with me, and I'm not saying these are pearls of wisdom or nuggets of gold, but there are some things that have served me to get where I am, and there are some people that I have mentored and some of this is something that I want to share. It's made manifest in the product that I built, and I'll tell you a lot of how I built. What I built was working backwards from pain. A lot of how I built, what I built was working backwards from pain, and I'll give you a couple of concrete examples.
Speaker 3:I procrastinate and I get overwhelmed, and one way that manifests, I call, is the cold start thing in the morning, where I'm like tomorrow at nine, I'm going to get going, I'm going to do this thing, blah, blah, and I would find myself at 9 am not really getting started. Maybe at 9.30 I would, but I decided I needed to scroll through the news or gone through Twitter or had to return some emails in my inbox that sort of thing. It was procrastination full stop, why? And I dug down into that and I talked to other people about it and read the books and really that thing.
Speaker 3:That problem came from two kinds of overwhelm. There was looking at my task list, which was too long, and saying I'm never going to get through these 17 things, and it's paralyzing, like you get through fewer things. Just looking at your entire task list, you're like this is nuts, it all needs to get done. I don't know how I'm going to do it right. And it's paralysis. Or the overwhelm of the first thing on there is build this entire new feature or write my book or something like that, where you're like I haven't told my 11 am stand up or my zoom, that's not going to happen. Why even start? And that really got me. I solved that for myself and this is something that we make available now through the app and people can use it, which is when I start my day.
Speaker 3:I have a smart assistant that, before I hit play, greets me and says hey here are three things that seems like on your task list are accomplishable Are these the right three.
Speaker 3:Or which three do you want to do? Okay, and then when I start, those three are visible. The rest of my to-do list is hidden, so I can just look up and go oh yeah, that's one. Yeah, I can do those three, and I focused on those.
Speaker 3:Do you know something in our platform, when we went from having your entire list of visible all the time to just these three things, it's 77% more probable that our members do all three things than when they saw everything. Because it's just that paralysis, like how am I get it done right? It just seems achievable and when it seems achievable, you'll achieve it. Same thing like your assistant would be like steven, you're not going to finish your book today, but how do we make a task called like outline, chapter three? Because I know you already did chapters one and two and it seems like you take about 35 minutes to do that. So why don't we time box it? Throw on your task list and let's get going, and your assistant, like halfway through, chimes in, is like you're 25 minutes out of a 50 minute task. Are you halfway through? How you doing right? And it's just that check-in where you're going like, okay, I need to need to get this done and it's weird the way time boxing works right when you actually give yourself a period of time. It's strange the way it fits in there. It doesn't sprawl right.
Speaker 3:So that's something where we have a bunch of engineering managers that use this with their teams and just make it available to them, saying like hey, man, here's a tool works. Usually it's because a couple of devs have found it and they talk to their EM or the VP or something and be like hey, we kind of dig this thing and you know, do you want to pay for it for us? And then I get the email from the engineering manager going hey, man, a couple of guys use this. Can I get 10 seats? Or whatever that sort of thing In terms of team productivity, whether it is the tool I built or it's another tool that works, well for you spending a little bit of time saying what are the problems that we have, what are the tools that solve that problem.
Speaker 3:And it may be that none of your people procrastinate or they have an easy time getting going in the morning, or it may be another problem that I have is that, end of the day, like I ain't get this all done. I'll get up early in the morning and I'll get this done by getting up earlier and then I'll start my actual work at nine and it's a lie that you tell yourself and it just dominoes, because tomorrow then you don't finish either and it just goes through the whole week and like that's the thing that really bothered me. So it was like how do you get over that? And I'll tell you the name my, my weird name of my company that you brought up at the beginning of our little chat today. Right, yeah, people ask me all the time like what is what does that mean? That is sucka, you sucka, I sucka. You know? Like what is that? And it's suka, by the way. Yeah, that comes from a conversation when I was in bali, laura, I met my wife.
Speaker 3:I married the girl who's on the yoga mat to my left because I do yoga every day. I'd seen her in class, we chatted, we met. Yoga is part of life. We have a daily yoga practice. It's great way we connect. For our honeymoon a couple years ago, we went to bali because there's a great yoga culture. It was super chill, unplugged. We're going there and I knew we had to name this app. Right, we needed a real name for it, not like a working title sort of thing. And I'll be very honest with you guys, I had done that brainstorming thing of like write down all the words that are related to this. I had every bad name on a sheet of paper. It was like Focus App Flow State Distraction Blocker 3.
Speaker 2:It was laughably bad, right All of them and I was blocked.
Speaker 3:And I told Laura you know what? Maybe this is a great thing. We're going away because the universe is giving me a gift. No one's going to ask me to prove a PO for a week and a half. No one's going to like bug me to change the AWS credentials Easy, something's going to bubble up right, magic's going to happen. So she's like okay, cool, that's a great intention. Like I wish that for you.
Speaker 3:I said I think what would be helpful is what if on the first day, if you don't mind, let me do a quick zoom with like three of our current members and just ask them like, what do you love about the platform? Like seed my imagination with. Like do you love the music or the smart assistant or the timers or the whatever? Right? So she's like cool, go for it. I'm going to the pool. I will see you at dinner, my friend. So I did.
Speaker 3:Three of them asked a whole bunch of usual questions. You can imagine the third one. I was going into the wrap up. I was literally at the place of Lupe. Thank you so much, you know. I said we'll take 10 minutes. I want to respect that. Thank you for this.
Speaker 3:And the guy said to me he's still a member. The guy said to me, steven, you asked the wrong questions. Okay, like, uh, what was the right question? He said you should have asked me why I pay you. And I was like, okay, I mean, it's 30 cents a day. I didn't think it was a big deal, like we all make money here, you know. Like, okay, why, why do you pay me 30 cents a day for this? He said at three o'clock I can be playing with my kids. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. At six o'clock I can be down on myself and be like where the hell did the day go? So the difference is did I open your app in the morning? My kids are not gonna be two and four forever. I pay you. So I have those memories of them now.
Speaker 3:Power pay you. So I have those memories of them, now powerful and I was like, yeah, that was it. I go to dinner with laura and I was like I talked to this guy who's more articulate about what I do than I am. Told her what he said. She was like that's great, we're brushing our teeth.
Speaker 3:Going to bed and she says you know what that is? In yoga? We hear all these sanskrit terms satya and karma and dharma. You know they're always lecturing us and like things. She's like that's the talk about Suka, about that feeling of happiness, of self-fulfillment. When you're in your lane you're doing the thing that you're meant to do, you're good at it, you get it, you like, you can feel you're in the group. She's like that's what the universe is telling you through this dude. Just the path you make for people to walk on, where you're trying to get them is to Suka. And I, laid in bed, pulled up little network solutions or whatever on my phone, found that the Suka company was available, bought the domain. That was it. That's how we named our company.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a story. Man Love that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really cool guy. Wow, yeah, that brings it home right there. I really appreciate you sharing that, because to me I mean, that's why Luke and I started this podcast is our feeling of a need to give back for various reasons, and definitely admire your courage and just your background experience. You've given our guests a lot today and just want to thank you for that. Hopefully we get you back on in the near future as well. It's been a great episode and I really enjoyed getting to know you as a person and the opportunity to chat today.
Speaker 1:We're just going to finish this off with one last question. It's a customary question that we have for our guest, Steven, and then we're going to wrap up. I'm ready. The question is if you could go back in time and talk to yourself, what advice would you give yourself, and why would that advice be so?
Speaker 3:Listen, that's it. That's it Listen.
Speaker 1:I'm in a few words.
Speaker 3:That's it, and it is true. When you're young, you think you know everything, you think you're invincible, you know what I mean and as you age you realize how much you don't know. I would go back to my I don't know 15-year-old, 20-year-old, 25-year-old self and I would just go listen, just listen, good advice.
Speaker 1:All right, stephen, thank you. Appreciate all of the time that you spent with us. Appreciate you sharing some very meaningful stories about yourself and the courage that it takes to do what you do, which is work to make people's lives better and more productive, so I appreciate you for that.
Speaker 3:I appreciate we could have this time together and I know in preparation for this, you guys put a lot of thought toward it. I remember the emails and the way you wanted to craft this and that is very meaningful that you took it so seriously. So thank you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely For our listeners. We're going to put some information into our notes, as we typically do for this episode. If you want to know more about Stephen's app, we will put all that information there and a way to contact Stephen if you'd like. But for now, this is Luca Munoz and I'm Steve.
Speaker 2:McKeon, thank you for joining us on the Leadership Exchange. Have a great evening.