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Entrusted to Lead Podcast
Welcome to Entrusted to Lead, the podcast that equips faith-driven founders, CEOs and mission-driven leaders align their strategy and values, so they can lead with clarity, peace and confidence! Hosted by Danita Cummins, a military veteran, and founder, who leverages decades of experience leading teams during her time in the U.S. Special Operations as well as founding businesses and nonprofits to help you develop the practical strategies to guide you from chaos to clarity.
Whether you're navigating growth in ministry, business, or the defense industry, here you’ll find encouragement, insight, and the roadmap to lead boldly and leave a legacy.
Tune in and take your leadership to the next level—because those you lead deserve your best, and so do you.
Entrusted to Lead Podcast
Take the Guesswork Out of Growth with Bill Flynn
In today’s episode of Entrusted to Lead, I sit down with Bill Flynn, a leadership coach, author, and expert in business growth. Bill has worked with hundreds of companies and was a VP of Sales eight times, a CMO twice, and a GM of a $100 million IT service company before transitioning to coaching in 2015.
We unpack the principles from his bestselling book, Further, Faster: The Vital Few Steps That Take the Guesswork Out of Growth. Bill shares insights on leadership, team development, and why courage and vision are essential for lasting business success. Whether you’re leading a company, church, or nonprofit, this conversation will equip you with actionable strategies to drive sustainable growth.
Key Takeaways:
✔️ Leadership isn’t about authority; it’s about gaining trust and influence.
✔️ Vision and courage are two of the most critical elements of effective leadership.
✔️ Teams, not individuals, drive business success—learn how to build high-performing ones.
✔️ Systems thinking is the key to scaling any organization.
✔️ Leaders must be both courageous and compassionate to sustain success
Bible Connection: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).
Resources & Links:
📖 Get Bill Flynn’s book: Further, Faster
📩 Join our Entrusted to Lead community
🔔 Follow us on Instagram: @EntrustedToLead
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✨ Thanks for Listening! ✨
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✅ Share this episode with your team, friends, or anyone who wants to lead with impact.
📩 Sign up for the Entrusted to Lead newsletter for exclusive updates and resources:
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💬 We’d love to hear from you! Share your thoughts on this episode by commenting or tagging us on social media.
Hey friends, welcome to today's episode of the Interested to Lead podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm joined by Bill Flynn. He embodies his core purpose, which is simplified servanthood. He's a coach and author and has worked and advised hundreds of companies, including startups, where he has a long track record of success spanning multiple industries. He was a VP of sales eight times, twice a CMO and once a GM of a division of a $100 million IT service company, before he pivoted to become a growth coach in 2015. So I'm excited today for you to get to hear his wealth of knowledge, and he's talking about his bestselling book Further Faster the Vital Few Steps that Take the Guesswork out of growth. So grab your cup of coffee and let's get started.
Speaker 1:Doing things alone is entirely overrated. We all need a community to thrive, and that's why I'm part of an online community of writers and speakers, podcasters and entrepreneurs called Cult Creatives, and I love it. In the years since I joined this community, I've launched new ideas and I finally executed the dreams that sat on the shelf for years, seriously, and I was able to do this because of the outstanding group of mentors, exceptional training and encouraging mastermind groups with my new friends who did, and continue to give me invaluable feedback. Oh, and not to mention all the fun, because we have had lots and lots of fun. Have you ever said I want to write a book or do you want to use your voice for the exciting world of podcasting? If so, cult Creatives is your best resource for up-to-the-minute industry training, expert advice, live coaching and peer support. Like no other Best-selling authors and speakers, allie Worthington and Lisa Whittle lead this community with a no-competition mission and it shows. So join my friends and I in the called creative community. Head to my show notes, danitacumminscom slash podcast and click the link to get all the details to join. I promise you won't regret it. I look forward to seeing you in the community and watching you grow.
Speaker 1:Hey friends, welcome to the Interested to Lead podcast. I'm Danita and today I'm joined by Bill Flynn. I get the privilege of sitting and learning from him today. I hope that you enjoy this conversation just as much as I do. I think saying that Bill has a wealth of experience in business coaching and startup culture and scaling and leadership is probably an understatement, and I don't typically say that very lightly. But I hope that you'll hear from him today just the wealth of information that he has and his heart for coaching and his passion to help organizations thrive. So, before we dive in, bill, thanks for joining me today. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great, Danita. Thanks for having me Looking forward to it. Hopefully I will deliver on the expectation you are set no pressure.
Speaker 1:No, that's so good. If you and I met at a dinner party, we'd never had a conversation before. How would you introduce yourself to me?
Speaker 2:Personally, professionally, all the above.
Speaker 1:Yes, all the above, because we're all whole people.
Speaker 2:If you were to ask me who, I am many things, but first of all, I am a father. That is how I mostly identify. And I have lots of other things. I'm an iconoclast, I'm a musician, I'm a friend, I'm a writer. I'm all these other things, but first and foremost to me, it's about my daughter and that relationship. If I were to answer it professionally, what I say is I help leaders take the guesswork out of growth by teaching them a framework that is based upon management science, which has been around for 100 years or so, that most people don't follow, which I think we're going to get into a little bit in a little while.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's very true. I love that Sometimes we go straight to the resume and we miss the human person standing in front of us, and I think that when we get into the topics of leadership and helping ourselves and others grow, that we bring all of ourselves to the world every day. So I love that you started with father, because that's my heart too. We have four kids and a big part of our life is spent in raising humans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, four kids. I had one, that was good. She's flown, she's 24. She's mostly on her own.
Speaker 1:I love. Being a parent of grownups is what I say. I love them.
Speaker 2:Problems are different.
Speaker 1:They are hard.
Speaker 2:They are harder.
Speaker 1:That is exactly when I talk to parents with younger littles. I'm like littles are hard and then they get big and their problems get bigger. So yeah, that's so good. Okay, so we'll dive into all the work stuff now. So you've worked with some of the biggest names in business, like Steve Jobs and others, but what lessons did you learn from those experiences that have shaped your approach to leadership and business growth? And you can start with either side first, which I assume they're connected but what have you learned?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I know Alan Mulally personally, or did not know Steve Jobs. I have met Steve Jobs, but I was in a work-related situation and I'm glad you picked those two people, because there are so many different ways to come at this. But those that know each would say that they are great leaders. Yet they are very different people. Alan Mulally is extremely humble. Steve Jobs was not. Alan Mulally has tremendous integrity where Steve Jobs didn't have this, you know he had his moments. Alan Mulally is all about his family. I know about his five kids. I've only met him three or four times, but I know his kids and what he did and his growing up with his parents. I know these stories where we've seen through movies and other things where Steve Jobs didn't necessarily pay a lot of attention to Lisa, except to name a computer after her. Yet if you say, are they great leaders? Yes to those who decide right.
Speaker 2:So what I learned is that leadership is something that you become because others decide that. You can't say I'm a leader. You could say I'm a boss, I'm authority, I'm in charge. That doesn't mean you're a leader. A leader has followers. Followers choose their leaders based upon whatever criteria they have. Right Could be force of personality, could be vision, could be whatever, but we choose our leaders and we choose differently, depending on whatever strikes us as the thing that is important to us. So that's a main thing that I've learned is that and I steal this from someone else but leadership isn't a thing, it's not.
Speaker 2:You can say, hey, if you do these things, you'll be a leader, because there's so many different types of folks. Like I said, you can be humble or not, which is Malali. Bill Gates was not very humble. You can be charismatic, which is Herb Kelleher from Southwest, or not, which is Warren Buffett. You can have empathy, like Jacinda Ardern out of New Zealand, or not Jeff Bezos. There's all these people that are considered tremendous leaders, but they're so different.
Speaker 2:The only thing that I've seen that I would say they have in common, there are two things. They have one attribute in common and one other thing in common. The thing they have in common is there's something about them either their vision or whatever it is that people say, yeah, I want to help you do that Right. And the other attribute they have is courage. They all seem to have some form of courage, and the courage comes out in multiple ways If you're a really good leader.
Speaker 2:Your courage is to give away the business. Your job isn't to run the business. Eventually it's to have other people run the business, and that takes courage because, especially if it's your baby, you have to have the courage to be vulnerable. You have to have courage to give autonomy to people to allow them to do that. You have to be patient. You have to realize that your job is to help others be much better versions of themselves. Right, it no longer becomes about you and sort of to be a leader that people will follow and continue to follow and move in that direction. Those are sort of the key lessons I've learned. There are other certain lessons as well, but that's the top thing that leaders are all very different and that's okay.
Speaker 1:And I think the thing that I really love that you said about that and the connection to business growth, scaling organizations we start with vision, right? We say without a vision then people won't get energized. I work in bivocational ministry, so half my time is spent in the corporate defense sector, helping businesses grow, and then the other side of my life is spent in a volunteer based. But the vision requirement is the same. Over the years I've seen that as I work with different companies or founders or business leaders and they're trying to grow or scale or start new things, you have to have vision first, like you said, so you can accelerate, ignite, energize people to come alongside you. But there's also that other piece about the courage. I just love that. Vision and courage. I think those are great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people, when asked what do you want from your leader, they want lots of things, but the same two things often come up as the two big things that they want. They want to know whatever you tell them is true. They know that sometimes you can't tell them everything. Right, there are certain things that you have to keep to yourself, especially if you're a public company or whatever, because trust arrives on foot and leaves in a Ferrari. So as soon as you lose that trust, then it's really hard to get it back. So you have to say things that are true, and if you're caught in saying things that aren't true, then it becomes more and more difficult to have them continue to follow you. The second thing is what you alluded to, which is they want to know where are we going and what does it look like when we get there.
Speaker 2:Your vision it's not a statement, it is a picture. It is so vivid that they can see it in their mind. When you describe it in words, as if it's already done, that's a vision. It's not one sentence that we've watered down and said this is our vision to help people and be better people and have their lives be better and whatever. Most visions are these watered down statements that could be any company. A vivid picture is something you really want to do, and if you could do that, they're like, yeah, I want you. They can see that. And they're like oh, now that I know what it is, guess what. They will help you in ways that you couldn't even imagine had you not shared it in that level of detail.
Speaker 1:And I love the part that you said about the courage, because I see that on both sides too, we get founder syndrome. Right, you've started something and it is your baby, creation, your heart, all poured out into the world in this unique thing. But then there is this legacy place where we struggle because we're all human and, at the end of the day, everything comes to an end. There's a lot of insecurity, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of doubt, but I love that you said that, knowing what the end is, where you're going, but then also knowing that you might not always be the person that gets it to the end. And how can you create a sustainable organization that outlives you as a person, which is hard as an identity thing, right, because we're all struggling with our own legacies as we're going through life. So in your book, further Faster, you emphasize this importance of focusing on the vital few steps that take the guesswork out of growth. First question is what are those steps? And then how can leaders implement them to drive business success?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there are three main areas that I've come to believe are the most important, and those revolve around not doing everything within those three areas, but figuring out what the vital few things are that matter the most, because most things don't matter, but those that do matter tremendously, and that's in life or in business, right, and your job as a leader is to figure out what those things are. So the three areas that I talk about in my book and that I take from my learning and other thought, leaders is so. People are important, but out of people, individual people, teams and culture, which is everybody. Team is the most important because most things get done by a team. You have a sales team, a marketing team, an operations team, whatever. It's rarely one person that is having a significant impact on the business. It can happen, but it's rare. So understanding those few things of how to attract, create, build and then develop a team if you can have that skill, that is an amazing thing to have.
Speaker 2:Most people are not good at it. We are not good at being leaders of teams, again, because we don't really know what it means to lead a team and what your job is. Often and we see this in especially in Western culture. We see people leading teams by telling them is Often and we see this in, especially in Western culture we see people leading teams by telling them what to do. Right, they get together, you do this, you do that, you do that, and they make these decisions as quick and as deliberate and whatever. That's actually not a great team leader. That's called the genius with a thousand helpers.
Speaker 2:Right, you want to create autonomy within a team. You want to give direction, not instruction. You want to say hey, our contribution to the company, our team, is this. This is what it looks like. Again, back to vision. You can have a vision that's smaller than the overall vision. Right, the vision of our team when we're doing this is the impact we're making. This is how we're helping whatever other teams that you're helping, or the company in general, and then your job is to then understand the components of the team and then put the right people in there that have the best chance of being successful with those and those that will work together well.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, that's not easy, because often you want different kinds of personalities, different skills and knowledge, et cetera, and you want conflict is good, healthy conflict is good. Right, you want people to disagree, you want people with different perspectives, so then the best ideas win, as opposed to the loudest or the first to speak, and that's what we often see. It's like whoever speaks up first they're good, they're leading. No, they're in front and I guess that's a form of leading, but that's not really leading a team, right, and I see these things on linkedin or whatever, and you have to do things first. You have to fill the water bottle. I'm like no, that's yes, you could do. No, that's yes, you could do that, but that's not really being a leader.
Speaker 2:Being a leader is understanding how the team affects the overall system that they're in, and then how to put together the pieces and have them work well together so they don't need you. Right? It's very much being like a parent, like we talked about before, right. A really great parent is not someone that their child calls up and says I'm in trouble, fix, talked about before, right. A really great parent is not someone that the child calls up and says I'm in trouble, fix this for me, right? That's not great parenthood, right? Because eventually, as you said, we're all gone at some point. And if they're reliant upon you, what happens when you die or you're sick or whatever. You want a child to be able to be autonomous, to be able to they can learn from you and learn from their environment, but create it so they're their own person, they're thinking for themselves, they have those muscles and things to do that, and we don't see that as the example.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons I like about Alan Mulally and Steve Jobs is almost everyone knows who Steve Jobs is. Even now he's been dead for whatever 10 or 15 years. Hardly anyone knows who Alan Mulally is. I ask people all the time do you know who Alan Mulally is? I ask people all the time do you know who Alan Mulally is? And, like I don't really know, he's a Ford guy and to me he is the epitome of.
Speaker 2:If I were to say if you want to be a leader, it's Alan Mulally, because he did two things that were amazingly different than anyone else. He turned around Boeing commercial aircraft in the middle of 9-11, where they came out of 9-11 better than they went in. Then he did the exact same thing at Ford through 2008 and the Great Recession. No leader that I know of has done that twice in a lifetime. I don't know many people who've done it once in a lifetime. Yet no one knows who he is because he's super humble, he doesn't want to be well-known, he's not on magazine covers, it's not important to him. I've talked to Alan and he's been asked by two presidents to be in their cabinet and he turned it down. He wanted to spend more time with his family. He's in his seventies now he's. I don't want to. I don't want to do that. I want to hang out with my grandchildren and do these things. So, understanding how to do that he team.
Speaker 2:The next thing is understanding your business as this one big system. If you think of your business in terms of systems, one big system that's really satisfying a client, creating a consumer or a customer, and that's your ultimate job as a company is to create customers. But you also have subsystems underneath. You have subsystems of strategy and execution and culture and all these things, and you have to understand that those things all fit together and there are components in each of those. But if you think of it as a system, like in any system, not everything has to work perfectly. Some things may work better than others which will compensate for that. So, for instance, I do it in the terms of metaphor of a house right In a house, the biggest system in a house is what's called the envelope, meaning the heating and air conditioning right, so keeping the climate in a house.
Speaker 2:That's one big system right, and there are components of the system which are windows and there's insulation in the walls and there's floor and there's ceiling and there's all this stuff. If you have a lot of windows, then that has a lot of heat and cooling leaving the house versus walls, so you have to have a better heating and cooling system. But if you have fewer windows and a lot more what's called R factor in the walls, which is the thickness of the insulation, then you need not as good as an air conditioning and heating and ventilation system. So you have to think of that as your business. Some parts of your business might be really great. You might have a killer strategy right which are just so much better than everyone else. So if you execute okay, you could still do pretty well. Or if you have really excellent execution and okay strategy, you can still kick people's butts.
Speaker 2:Microsoft is an example of that, especially when Bill Gates. They're not known for their strategy. They were always behind, right. There was always a joke. You have to wait for version three of whatever they make to actually have it make work. But their execution was good. They dominated their industry, but they didn't have a great strategy right, it was like just be a laggard and figure it out quickly.
Speaker 2:So understanding that and lastly, is if you're going to really understand your business by a financial metric, it should be by cash, not revenue, not profit. Cash should be the financial metric by which you judge your business, because if you're going to grow your business, you have to invest in it. You generally have to invest in front of it, and that costs money. So understanding how you're going to generate the cash you need to do, the things you want to do, is super important, and most businesses don't do that. A lot of them brag about revenue. Even profit is fine, but you can make up profit or you can have gross profit but not a lot of net profit in cash, because you're paying a lot of loans or whatever it might be, and then you're not able to pay people. You're not able to hire better people, which are generally more expensive. You're not able to do the wonderful things to keep people happy in terms of healthcare and other things, mental care all that stuff. You just can't afford it, so you just don't do it. So those are three things.
Speaker 1:Team business as a system and then cash as your financial metric. That's the essence of that. Yeah, that's so good. I love the systems engineering part because I gravitate to systems thinking and I love that when you say systems aren't linear, even though we would like them to be, especially if you get a complex system. We in our mind try to lay everything flat and then they're too complex at times for us to lay them on a piece of paper and see where all the levers are. I'm pulling a marketing lever, but my culture lever over here is stuck, or vice versa. It's really hard to zoom out as an organizational leader regardless of your skill sets, I think and be able to see all that. It's almost impossible. So you talked a little bit about the things that we do wrong. Why do you think that they struggle? So why do you think that businesses struggle in those areas?
Speaker 2:It's insidious, right, it happens over time. It happens typically out of our notice. We do things wrong, but we don't do them completely wrong. We do nothing completely wrong, we just do it a little wrong, but then it adds up. It's like it's the whole metaphor of those little grain of sand in your shoe right. It just starts to wear and eventually becomes more and more painful. So you don't hire very well, especially at management level, and then they hire badly. That becomes worse. You haven't quite thought through your strategy and you haven't continued to hone strategy and make it better and better. That's an issue. There are so many things. There's innovation, there's.
Speaker 2:We do meetings badly. As a world, we don't know how to run a meeting right. Most meetings are done badly. Most people in meetings say that they're not very good. There was some stat I read that in the US in one year we waste $37 billion because of unproductive meetings.
Speaker 2:I ask all the time with my clients I said how do you run a meeting? And first they look at me like what do you mean? Do you have a framework for a meeting? Here's how we do meetings. If you walked into Intel and you still walk into Intel now and I've been there, so I've seen it. In every meeting room there is a piece of paper on the wall that says this is how we do a meeting, and there are like instructions right, do you have an agenda? Are the right people in the room, whatever all these things right? So, whatever that is that you know runs a really good meeting for you, then you should have that, but we don't do that, and so we have a lot of really bad meetings. People hate meetings, they don't want to go to meetings, et cetera. We do change wrong. We just do so many things wrong.
Speaker 2:One of the things that really bothers me and I've been in arguments with well-known people for this is we have this wonderful desire that you must give people feedback and in order for them to grow, they must be told when they're doing something wrong. Right, because typically feedback is a negative thing. Right? There is a joke that says the five most feared words in business are can I give you some feedback? And I'm a bit of a neuroscience geek and I've learned that feedback actually gathers a threat response in the brain, which means that you get nervous, you start sweating. Even if you ask for it, you don't want to hear it because it's going to be something bad. Right, it's almost always going to be something bad, and I've had.
Speaker 2:There are people who have written radical books about feedback and such, shall we say, that I've argued with, and it's because we don't understand that the basic thing is that feedback isn't the goal. The goal is growth. There are lots of ways to help people grow. Now I will put a disclaimer. So feedback for a skill is important, right? Teaching someone how to do something, you have to say try it this way, do it that way, don't do it this way, whatever. That's different. But typically we're giving feedback on behavior and such, and one of the stories I heard once is in a book that I will not name is, but it was about Sheryl Sandberg and this author of the book and she worked for Sheryl and this woman was in a meeting and at the end of the meeting, sheryl said to this woman hey, did you know that you say in a lot? And she was like no, and he said do you know that you sound stupid when you do that? And, by the way, she was touting that this is good, because there was. It was said with love. One of the best definitions I've heard of feedback is most often you talking about you in the presence of me, and I have a story myself.
Speaker 2:I used to be a speaker to a group called Vistage, which is a peer-to-peer advisory, their worldwide company, worldwide organization and I did about 40 or 50 of these things and I was doing something with some of the Vistage chairs who run these meetings. It was a sort of a consolidated understanding of what I would do in a workshop and at the end one of the gentlemen who I know came up to me and said hey, do you know that you say right a lot when you speak? And I didn't, and it's a nervous verbal tick that I would do. And he said can I give you some feedback on that? I said sure. He said do you know why? That's not a good idea? And I said to me it would be. I wouldn't want people to be paying attention to me. When is he going to say right next, so they're not hearing what I'm saying, which is hopefully of some value? And he said well, do you know what else? I said no, I said what could that be? He said you sound condescending when you say right, like you're saying I'm smart and you should be paying attention to me and I said that's not my intent, so I would hate for that to happen.
Speaker 2:And the magical thing happened was about two months later I was doing another visage talk and someone came up to me and said do you know that you say right a lot when you speak? And I said you know what I do and I'm working on it, but thank you for pointing it out. And then he said of course, do you know why that's not a good thing? And I said I've heard. Why do you think? He says because you sound stupid. So in one case I'm a genius who's condescending the other one, I'm an idiot.
Speaker 2:So which one is right? That's typically how feedback goes right. So we do these things wrong and then they just add up and the business becomes harder and harder to run. So if we can just do some of them a little closer to right and not the way Bill says it, I'm saying most of what I teach is not me. It's Peter Drucker or Edgar Schein or Michael Porter or Amy Edmondson or these thought leaders who have done science to say here's what typically turns out to be the best version of doing this particular thing. And that's really all I'm teaching. I'm just teaching management science, right, I'm just a professor, basically, of these things. So that's what I think happens is that we just do a whole bunch of things wrong, just a little, and they add up and just as you get bigger they become more and more problematic.
Speaker 1:I love that and I think it gives a lot of grace or a lot of hope for the organizational leader who might feel that it makes things harder.
Speaker 1:I imagine this like walking through mud because you're right, you get all this stuff and then you're trying to be agile and flexible and innovative and all these things like we like to say in the world and iterate and minimum viable product and bring it to the world and iterate fast and fail fast and all the things that we seem to hear every time we turn around today. But then it's really hard for you to do that when you're holding on to all these other things. We don't have to do everything and I think that's really hard to compartmentalize for lack of a better word, but I guess the better word would probably be prioritize. You don't need to have 10 piles all equally the same size. What are the three main things that you have to do today when you do coaching? Do you have tools for leaders to try to get clarity on that? I would assume that a startup company these are the three things you need to do versus an established organization, you might have a lot of boxes to sort through, right, so those approaches might be different.
Speaker 2:So I've done 10 startups already and I help people scale non-startups. I have experience from scale-up to startup. Right, a scale-up is a very different company than a startup. Actually, a startup is not a company. The best definition I've heard of a startup is by this gentleman. His name is Steve Blank. He's considered the godfather of startups. He's written a bunch of books Four Steps to Epiphany and whatever. His definition of a startup is a temporary organization in search of a business model.
Speaker 2:Until you have a business model, you are not a real company. Almost everything I teach to scale-ups I would never teach to a startup. You don't need to worry about culture and strategy. You don't need strategy. If you don't have a business model, strategy will come right. And, by the way, you only need to do two things as a startup you need to solve a problem worth solving in a way that people will pay you real money for it and don't run out of money. And more than one person? Yeah, more than one.
Speaker 2:So a startup, you don't know how big the market is, right, we say the market and we go to the VCs and we say there's a total market. I forget what the three acronyms are the TMO and the SMO and whatever viable market and whatever. We have no idea how big the market is because we don't really know what problem we're solving yet. And once we figure out our problem then we can say okay, how big is this market? How many people need this thing? If someone tells you they know the size of the market at the beginning, then they're totally smoking their own stuff right, they're just diluting themselves. Now I know you have to say that to get money and all this stuff, but if you look at people when so I work for 10 startups, I would say only one or two of them actually ended up being in the market that they started in. So they raised money for one thing and then they actually did something else in another way. So it's really hard to figure that out. But we don't spend the time to do that.
Speaker 2:We have an idea and we want everyone to love our idea. You call it the founder something. I call it founderitis. Right, as you fall in love with your idea. You shouldn't fall in love with your idea, because your idea is very likely wrong. But if you fall in love with the problem, you'll have all sorts of ideas on how to fix the problem and you'll go from there. If you hear the origin stories of most startups, the founders will tell you that, yeah, we're doing something completely different than what we thought we were going to do. The guys at Airbnb used to sell seat cushions. That was their first business. And then we did Airbnb. It was a slightly different business model than it was now. It was based upon conferences. It was an air mattress, now the replacement for hotels. That was not the original business model. It was have people live with you, share your knowledge of the area so they can enjoy themselves. It's a completely different model now.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. That's your two things for startups. What about the scaling? We go back to those three pieces that you had before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, team systems, which is really mostly strategy and execution, and then cash. Those are the three main things that you need to get. If you got good at those three things, you would be in a much better shape than almost everybody else.
Speaker 1:This good to great. Jim Collins has put the right person on the bus. We say that a lot, but I always struggled with that as a leader in organizational growth and just thinking like there is the good to great model just get the right people on the bus first. But then how do I know who the right people are if I don't know what skills I need or if I don't?
Speaker 2:know where we're going. That's an iceberg statement, right? He's telling you the tip of the iceberg, but there's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't see, that you have to have in place to do that. Right? And, by the way, I think there's no one model to success. There are people that are like-minded, who don't really know what to do, but they know they want to do something, and then they work together to try to figure out. Then they say, okay, which one should we pick? And then you go there. But often a startup team is very rarely the team that then scales the business, because their interests and motivations are completely different. Right, some people just get a charge out of starting something new and getting it going. They like the hard problem to solve. And some people are like I don't want to do that at all, let someone else figure that out, I'll make it better. I'll be what's called the BASF, which used to be a commercial right. We don't make the carpet, we make it softer. We don't make this, we make you know you're making it better, which is typically what I do, right? I'm more of a operations guy who comes in and makes something better. I don't have very few original ideas and such.
Speaker 2:The Jim Collins thing is love good to great. I read it in the nineties. I thought it was wonderful. It was one of the reasons why I started to really start to do what I love to do was I'm like oh yeah, there's like a, there's a reason for stuff, right. If you look, why are they successful? As opposed to looking forward, having a hypothesis and proving a hypothesis. It's a wholly different model, right? His statement is you get the right people on the bus doing the right things, right. So you have to have a lot of those things underneath to do that. But I said to Jim, you never explained how do you know which seat is the right seat? And he never said it and it was funny so he never answered me. Someone on staff answered me and he wrote a book really a long time ago with another guy, james, something called BBE, beyond Entrepreneurship, and then he came out with B2.0. And in that he finally says here's, at least in his opinion, how you know what a right seat is, which I thought was funny, which was 20 something years later, which is a pretty important component to miss in the equation of put the right people in the right seats doing the right things right, if you don't know what the right seat is.
Speaker 2:So it's what you said. This is what I mean. We do things just a little bit wrong. Like you said, fail fast that in and of itself is a little too glib, right? It's not fail fast, it's first understand what you're trying to do, do it, fail and learn and then iterate again. It's not just fail fast. You got to do a little review. What's your after action review? What are we trying to do? What did we miss? Whatever? Okay, now we do it again.
Speaker 2:And yes, I totally agree with that experimentation, especially these days. These days, it's more things move too fast, it's less routinized, it's more resilience and things as opposed to a plan or a map, right, or it's really more of a plan. I think a map is relatively good because a map can then give you. But if you just do one route on the map, which is what a plan is, there's nine ways to get from here to there and, depending on the weather or if an earthquake happens or whatever, you got to be able to figure out what you're doing. We used to be able to do that right, because things would take forever to happen.
Speaker 2:And what is interesting, I think, is that if you look at the data, I think like the Fortune 500 up until 1955 or whatever. At the data, I think, like the Fortune 500 up until 1955 or whatever it was about 60 to 75 years was the lifespan of a company on the Fortune 500. Now, 2017, it's 15 years. Things just move too fast because we're not building resilient companies, we're building too rigid of businesses and then they get squashed like Blockbuster and Xerox and Polaroid, and you have to build companies that can move and work within a framework of what's called. It used to be VUCA. There's also one TUNA I like, which is Turbulent, Uncertainty, novelty which I think is more important than I forget what AA was, because things are much more novel these days and the only way to handle novel is to build resilience into your business, because you don't know what's coming, but you can build something that can quickly adjust and that's what great companies do now.
Speaker 1:I think so too. I worked for the majority of my life in the military complex, the defense ecosystem, which is not inherently innovative and agile, but certain elements of it right it is. Now We've learned a lot of stuff from them. We have learned a lot, that's very true. I had the beauty of, later in my career, working in the special operations community and really seeing what that looks like. Crisis hits here and in four hours we're doing X, y, z. So the military components build in all of that agility and flexibility and they're designed for complexity and unknown variables and they adjust on the fly.
Speaker 1:But what I've learned about that is those people, even those teams, those special teams. They practice without fail. They're always training, they're always practicing and every single person on the team knows his or her position. They can do it in their sleep. So even if they don't know what's on the other side of that door, they know that the guy or girl standing next to them is going turn left and they're gonna turn right. And it's a dance, it's a beautiful, it's just amazing to watch it when it happens. So I think there's that balance there between it too. You can't have one without the other. So there is that planning for unknowns and having that built in and being able to react. But it's with intention and it takes a lot of time in the right people.
Speaker 2:Mortality focuses your mind. The military is a life and death profession and you're always trying to make sure that you're coming out ahead. There's a lot of stuff that I teach my clients that started in the military. One of the best people who runs teams or teams of teams is Stanley McChrystal, and he's got a book right and he talked about how they had to completely change JSOC in order to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq, because it wasn't an enemy like before.
Speaker 2:It was this dispersed, distributed thing and you can't do command and control because by the time the information got to you, the thing changed. So we had to flip it on its head, right, and that's generally how you run really great teams is you flip it on its head. Your job isn't to be the decision maker and all the things. Your job is to push decisions down to where the information is. Give them autonomy, give them the ability to be wrong, so they're okay, but give them enough so they're wrong very few times, and then, when they are wrong, teach them and get them better. I think the after action review is one of the simplest and best things you can do after you make a big decision or do something, and that's a military thing right. So I think there's a lot of stuff we can learn from folks like that.
Speaker 1:That's very true. I did work at the command for years. There are some beautiful lessons to learn. I see a lot of those individuals that came from the command who served under Mark Crystal during his days in McRaven, and a good portion of those military leaders are in industry today and I have the chance to see them work in innovation in defense tech. They went into that space and they are working really hard to bring those lessons into the marketplace, which I love, and so it is like you're saying it's a beautiful kind of thing to watch, but they are, they're bringing that in. There's a lot of stuff with MIT, different lessons and leadership, technology, design thinking all those kinds of things that the military, at least at the Special Operations Command, has taken and they put it in part of their just standard training, design methodologies in the Army and stuff. So yeah, I was thinking about that Jim Collins thing today for some reason and that came up while you were talking.
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan of Jim Collins and I think he's helped a lot of companies get better Because again, he uses science right. Science is what happened, and studying, looking at the outcomes and then figuring out why, versus most businesses. A hypothesis that then you prove, which we have so many unconscious biases and cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning, all these things that when you do it from a hypothesis forward, you miss stuff. You just ignore things that don't go along with the hypothesis and especially if you're creating a product or a company, your customer will let you know, unfortunately well after the fact, that you are wrong, because they don't care what you make. They only care what you make does for them, and if you're not making their lives better or simpler or whatever, then they'll find something else.
Speaker 2:Mike Tyson says a plan is great until you get punched in the face. And your customer will punch you in the face. They just won't buy from you and you'll hate it. But it happened, right. It's happened to music, it happened to photography, it happened to Blockbuster, it just happens right. We're not doing it on purpose, we're just like, oh, this is better, I'm going to go do this, this is wonderful, I'm going to try this new thing and then, all of a sudden, you're out of business because you haven't paid attention to your customer and the problem that they're trying to solve and all the different ways you can solve it, which is again, as I say, it's a shame because it's totally preventable. No-transcript your business, but I can tell you how the best businesses are run and there is a continuity across them. You're going to do your version of it or whatever, and that's cool. Like, for instance, I say your version of it or whatever, and that's cool. Like, for instance, I say, your version of decision making is your version of decision making, as long as you have one. Here's how we make decisions here. Here's the framework, here's the five steps we do to make decisions. That's yours. It works great. Someone else might have seven steps. You've thought it through, you've done those important things, those foundational things, and you've done them well. So then again, you can build that resiliency into your business.
Speaker 2:The example that I'd like to give is neuroscience Create a brain-friendly company. Most people do not do this. The brain does not do what we think it does. It is working against us all the time. Why? Because it was not designed to do what we're asking it to do and it's making all your decisions for you. How is it doing? It's using information outside you and inside you to make decisions. It uses 20% of your resources and it's only 3% of your body. It's a very highly intensive resource. It's very smart but tries to use very few resources. It doesn't want you to do anything new. This is why feedback sucks. It doesn't like change right. Status quo is good. It's easier to do status quo. Your brain doesn't like when you first learn how to ride a bike. So it changes and it chunks things together so you can ride a bike without thinking about it. But when you first started riding a bike, it was super hard.
Speaker 2:Our brain is designed to predict threat or reward, because reward is good.
Speaker 2:Calories, safety, whatever.
Speaker 2:Threat is bad. Saber-toothed tiger, whatever. That is supposedly, according to some neuroscientists, what it does on a regular basis, Supposedly five times a second. Our brain is saying threat or reward, friend or foe, safe or not safe, and it doesn't know the difference between a social threat and a physical threat. The same parts of our brain light up when you're in physical danger versus just social danger, so it acts the same exact way.
Speaker 2:Which is run right. You start sweating, your heart starts beating, all those things start happening to you, and it's because you're in the outgroup. Because, guess what, when you were in the outgroup you were dead when you were on the savannah right, because without the tribe you couldn't survive. So we don't create a brain-friendly environment, and the example I like to give is the same one, because it's perfect and it happens to almost all of us, or we've done it is. So we're in a meeting, danita, you're my boss, I'm running the meeting for one of the teams that you're responsible for, and the meeting went OK and you want to help me, right? You want to give me some feedback. Now, one of the ways you could do it, which is what most people do, is they'll tap me on the shoulder and say hey, bill, can you walk me back to my office? And I want to talk about this meeting, what, what happens to me as soon as you do that.
Speaker 1:I just hold my breath.
Speaker 2:I am now in threat mode. I'm like, oh my God One, you put me in the out group because not everyone left and you said follow me back, you're in trouble. Come to the principal's office. That's bad. I'm walking next to you and I'm catastrophizing. I'm like what did I do wrong? Am I going to get fired? What your job?
Speaker 2:So by the time I sit down in your office, which is a status symbol and you sit behind your desk, which is another status symbol, and I'm sitting in a chair open, my brain is on fire, right. And so, no matter what you say next, I probably won't remember, because all of the resources from the front of my brain are going to the save the body part of the brain. I'm in amygdala hijack, as they call it. I probably can feel the beat of sweat floating down my shirt right. I can feel my part racing. I probably can't even hear you. This actually happened to me once and I can tell you later if you want. So that's one way to do that right. The other way to do that is wait till everybody leaves, sit down next to me and say hey, bill, how do you think that meeting went? And if I'm not delusional, I'm going to say it was okay, there was some really good parts and whatever. And you say I think so too.
Speaker 2:So let's do this. Let's meet next week before the next meeting and you bring two or three things that you thought went really well in the meeting. Maybe we can brainstorm on how to make them even better. Bring one or two things that you thought could be better. I'll do the same thing and we're going to work together every week until you and I decide this is the best version of this meeting.
Speaker 2:Outcome is supposedly the same, right? All we're trying to do is make the meeting better. Completely different approach. No status certainty. I have autonomy, I'm not in the out group, and that sounds fair to me. Our brain may not be in reward mode, but it is not in threat mode, right? We don't do that as leaders. We are constantly unwittingly and unknowingly right. We don't do that as leaders. We are constantly unwittingly and unknowingly putting people in threat mode on a regular basis, and you can't do that. You will not get the best out of someone if they're constantly in threat mode. So that's science, right? I say if you don't understand a little bit about the brain, then you're always at a deficit as a leader.
Speaker 1:It's like 21st century things you need to know, and that's one of the things how the brain works. I feel the same way about emotional intelligence. It's so much a part of who we are and why we feel the way we feel. How do we feel? We don't even know. We don't even know how to identify how we feel. Half the time, we can't even name a feeling right. It doesn't even get a label. We don't even know how to define it, and so then how am I even supposed to unwrap it or figure out why I felt that way or what was the cause? Like you're saying, all I know is I'm breathing heavy and I'm in the office and I feel irritated and I'm frustrated and I go home frustrated, but I don't even know why. And that's a intentional journey, I think, as we go through life.
Speaker 2:And that's great science is there's science of emotion. There's a wonderful author I can't remember her last name, it's Feldman and she's been studying emotions for 20 years and she wrote a whole book on how emotions are made and she basically says look, emotions are a construct of a human. There are some folks that say that some emotions inside us are inherent, they're just hardwired. But most of them are not. Most of them we make up.
Speaker 2:In science, especially in psychology, is we used to say oh, you need to talk about that thing a lot, right, if you're struggling with emotion. Actually that's wrong because, again, your brain doesn't know anything. So it thinks, when you think about it or talk about it, that it's happening. So if you continue to talk about the thing, it actually strengthens that particular thing for the brain. So you will do it again.
Speaker 2:If you're having a bad emotion, then you probably want to try to avoid it. So, for instance, the science says the best thing to do is name the emotion. So having a vocabulary is really good, right? If you just know anger and you don't know irked or bothered or all these other versions of it, that's not good because there are gradations of being angry and whatever, right. So name it and then say okay, how can I avoid doing that next time? Work on how to fix it. If you keep doing that, then you're teaching your brain to do the new thing and you're creating a channel for that thing Next time it happens and you automatically respond, you respond in the new way instead of the old way. This is cognitive behavioral science and other things, but we didn't know that for the last 10 years or so. We thought you need to talk about it all the time and we actually found out that talking about it makes it worse, believe it or not.
Speaker 1:I have a friend. She is a therapist and she taught me every feeling is valid. So I teach this a lot at the center and even when I do work coaching. Emotions and feelings we just let them walk around, we're not judging them.
Speaker 2:And sometimes that works right. I'm pretty even keeled and I learned about belief systems 30 years ago and I understood that my beliefs are mine and I could change them when I want. The action of that person says more about them than it does about me. I can respond any way I want to almost any situation. Right, that's the stoicism, which is almost stoic. And once you understand that you have this power, I have no power over your emotions, I only have power over mine. No one can make me feel anything other than physical. That's my choice. If you slowly do that, then you can observe yourself and that's why I reacted that way, and then you say, okay, the likelihood of that happening again doesn't happen, so you can change that, so you don't get upset. That's what leaders need to understand. So you need to understand they're in charge of creating an environment that people are at their best and that involves the whole person, as you said. And if you don't understand a little bit about the brain, you're not able to do that as well as you possibly could.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. That's so good. I think that goes to. The last question I had was how can leaders cultivate a culture of compassionate productivity in your organizations? That's pretty much right along the same line, right? Do you have anything else that you would think?
Speaker 2:That's a super easy answer. You have to model it first. So whenever I work with my clients and we're doing vulnerability or whatever, the leader always goes first. You have to get comfortable with. I don't know, I was wrong and I need help.
Speaker 2:When you model that you're a human being and you're flawed, then it gives permission to everyone else to be the same way. It's okay to be a flawed human being. It's not okay to treat people badly and whatever. But if you do something and you follow the values of the business and you're trying to get to help the business be better and your intentions were good but you failed, then that is a way to help them grow and be better. Right and say, yep, that was a screw up and whatever, but good thing you failed, you tried. Now let's fix it, let's celebrate the failure and then get better at it.
Speaker 2:There's this thing that Simon Sinek says most people have the second job at work, which is the lying, hiding and faking, because they don't want to be seen as difficult or that they don't know something. So they're constantly trying to find ways. That's a lot of energy spent on something that could be going to something more productive. So you have the leader. As Amy Emerson says, you have to create a psychologically safe environment where people can feel like they can screw up or say crazy things and not get laughed at, because, by the way, if you say something nutty, someone might say we can't do that.
Speaker 2:But you know what? That sparked an idea in me what if we did it this way? And that might spark a whole great place that solves something way better than we thought we could If you hadn't said the crazy thing, because you were safe and you felt okay. So this is really nutty, but let me just throw it out there. It's amazing how many great ideas are spawned from other things. Right, that's one wonderful thing about our brain it can make connections, it can have insights because it gets information and allows it to be insightful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think all that goes back to trust. When you go back to the beginning, where we started, it's like you have to trust the people standing next to you. You have to trust that they have the organization's best interests at heart. And then there is that personal vulnerability piece that you do genuinely care. Do genuinely care, bill, if you had a bad day. Or I do genuinely care if you have an ailing parent or got stuff going on with your. Whatever it is, we do genuinely care because we are humans and we are carrying all that stuff either way. I think it's that olive branch, or, like you said, the leader goes first. I love that, I'm going to write that down and then the fact that it's OK to say you don't know.
Speaker 1:In my experience, that's what I found too, like the best leaders that I worked with and for in the military space, mostly the ones that were the humble, I say, but they were really. It wasn't even humility, it was more, more so, vulnerability. I just remember sitting across the table from these phenomenal warriors, heroes and legends. I call them, but they would never call themselves that, but I do. I know all the things that they were a part of and they would still sit there at that side of the table with their kind of head in I do, I know all the things that they were a part of and they would still sit there at that side of the table with their kind of head in their hands. I don't know how to do this. I can't, I don't know, and that was just such an amazing opportunity for me to see. It is really hard, and it's okay that it's hard and it's okay that the answers are not clearly mapped out, because we're trying to do things people have never done before.
Speaker 2:A good leader describes the outcome, Say for A good leader describes the outcome, Say I don't know how to get there. I would like it to be this way I have no idea how to get there and we get to do it together. Because, if you again, that's about leadership, right, that's creating a vision and helping people say oh, follow me to this thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please help me. Help me get to this thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I need help. Right, we could do this together as a team. You don't have to have all the answers, but you said something really important, which is trust. So there's three kinds of trust, according to some. One is ability, the other is integrity and the third is benevolence. We've been talking about benevolence. So ability is will they get the job done? Do they have skills and knowledge? Can they? I trust they have competency. Integrity is I trust that what they mean is what they say and they'll do what they say and they say what they mean, right. And then the other is benevolence. Right, and we have to understand that there's three different ways of creating that trusting environment.
Speaker 2:As a leader, right, you want to help the people to get the skills and knowledge so they are trusted for ability. And if you hire for fit and not skill, then your job is to fill them with the skills. Right, teach them, train them, whatever it might be. Integrity is more of an internal thing. Right, that's more of a value. Right, it's hard to teach someone integrity. Their parents did it, their friends did it, whatever. Right, integrity is generally is a trait. Traits are hard to teach. You can teach them. It's usually expensive. You can't make someone honest. They are the only ones who can do that right. So that's the other. And then the benevolence, because what you said is two things. One is the lead. So when it comes to showing vulnerability and creating a psychological environment, leaders go first, but they speak last, and you didn't ask me this, but I'll add it.
Speaker 2:So the best leaders, I think, also have curiosity and compassion right. So they're not trying to give the compassionate, they're always trying to think about well, where's he coming from? What did she? What might she have meant by that? Let me see if I can play back what I thought I heard to make sure that we're on the same page, as opposed to we can't do it that way because da-da-da-da, and then the person says but I didn't mean it that way, now they're also. Those are traits that make you an even better leader. There are gradations of leadership that are better. In the early part of the conversation I was doing just the basics, right. Leaders are just vision and courage, but I think better and better leaders have curiosity and compassion, right.
Speaker 2:Alan Mulally was the most compassionate leader I've ever heard of and he would tell stories that when he came into Ford there was one guy who said I don't want to do what you're saying we want to do, alan. And he said that's okay, you don't have to, but we're doing it. So I'm going to help find you a company where you can do what you want to do, but it's not here. And he actually helped the guy find a job. That's compassion, right? That's really. That's empathy with action. He didn't just say then fine, leave, I don put his arm around the guy and said let's help you do you right. And it's just not here.
Speaker 2:And he did that all the time, right? He was all about we get rid of people. We do it with compassion. They're human beings, they have lives, they have people that rely on them, et cetera. Just because they don't believe what we believe and want to do what we want to do, doesn't mean we treat them any differently than if they were in our tribe. If you can have those two things, you're well on your way of being a tremendous leader, but we're not taught that, by the way. That's the problem. We're not taught that those things are valued. We're taught about having answers. The people who have the answers are the best.
Speaker 1:That's so good. And results answers and results right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to have results Eventually. You'll get fewer and lesser results Eventually because you can't have all the answers and you can't do everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't do everything. Yeah, you can't do everything. That's so true. What are some of the big things that you're working on right now? If you want to share anything that's new or anything that you're excited about what's coming up?
Speaker 2:I'm mostly fine with what I do. I'm not out to save the world or whatever at least not in a big way. So to me it's about clients or being able to help someone. So I have a couple of new clients coming on, I'm doing some giving away of my time and whatever to help other people as well. So those are the things that I'm really focused on. I'm not really a writer. I'm not going to write another book. I might, but it's expensive to write a book. I have to pay other people to write it because I suck at it and I don't really enjoy it. So that's expensive. I have other things I want to do, but that's pretty much it. I think it's a shame that really good ideas, really good people and really good businesses fail or struggle for completely preventable reasons and I want to spend until I can't do it anymore helping whoever would like my help to do that.
Speaker 1:That's so good. Okay, we'll link the book and your websites in the show notes so everybody can reach out to you. It was such a blessing and I go back to the beginning Like I learned so much. I'll probably have to listen to this episode three times because I didn't get to take all my notes, but for me personally, bill, it was a huge blessing to meet you and thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 1:Hey friends, thanks for listening to the conversation with Bill. I hope that he provided you some really great information. Jump over to catalystgrowthadvisorscom, which is his website, and you can find additional information to take the guesswork out of growth. His executive coaching from startup to scale up services should help you find clarity, alignment and competence in your organization or team success, so make sure you check out those resources. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the Entrusted to Lead newsletter, if you haven't already. Jump over to dannydecommonscom slash podcast so that you can get the latest updates on our new episodes. Have an amazing day. Don't forget to keep showing up every day, even when it hurts, because you matter. All right, friend, I'll see you later. Bye.
