Dr. Jay Conger holds the Henry R. Kravis Chaired Professor of Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College. As an executive educator, coach, and program designer, he has worked with over five hundred organizations in his twenty-five year career. An outstanding teacher, Financial Times and other business periodicals ranked him as one of the world’s top management educators. He works with individuals and organizations to create unique learning environments that accelerate and celebrate the potential of leaders.
Quotes From This Episode
Books By Jay Conger
Books Mentioned in This Episode
Other Podcast Guests Mentioned In This Episode
Dr. Jay Conger holds the Henry R. Kravis Chaired Professor of Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College. As an executive educator, coach, and program designer, he has worked with over five hundred organizations in his twenty-five year career. An outstanding teacher, Financial Times and other business periodicals ranked him as one of the world’s top management educators. He works with individuals and organizations to create unique learning environments that accelerate and celebrate the potential of leaders.
Quotes From This Episode
Books By Jay Conger
Books Mentioned in This Episode
Other Podcast Guests Mentioned In This Episode
Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 85% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:00
Today on the program we have, we have a prolific scholar, he's a scholar, he works in organizations, he, for decades now, in fact, Jay Conger. Probably one of my first favorite leadership books, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold it up, it was learning to lead. And if I were able to show you the inside of this book, you would see a lot of dog gearing. And I didn't even highlight, I just kind of highlighted whole chunks of text. Because it was it was transformative and how I thought about leader development, which is a passion of mine, but your conceptualization of you know, some programs or going for personal growth, conceptual understanding, skill, building feedback, it was really transformational and how I thought about leader development. So I'm so excited to have the opportunity to chat with you today. And we're gonna, well, we started in 1992, we'll probably zoom forward to 2020. We got some ground to cover. But I do, I would love to hear a little bit about you, and how you got into the work that you do the consulting the writing, because I don't know that there's another scholar, you probably won't admit this. But I'm struggling to think of another scholar who has worked as closely as you have with corporate America, for as long as you have I mean, your from from boards, to high potentials, to everything in between senior leaders, you you have written the body of work is incredible. So what's been your path? How did you get into this thing called leadership?
Jay Conger 1:40
So, Scott, my path actually begins in my childhood. Without being Floridian. My dad had a really wonderful job. He, he started down in the US State Department, and he kind of climbed his way up to one day becoming the Deputy Chief of Protocol. Okay, so this is a super job, you get paid to host parties for dignitaries. When Nehru came down off his plane, Khrushchev came down this staircase from his airplane, all National Airport in those days is called Reagan Airport, my dad was usually the second or third person to greet them. And then he was their host for their visit in the United States. So he met every world leader of the 1960s 70s, 80s, and 90s, he would come home and tell us stories about these characters, and most of them were characters. And I also learned that some of them, we're definitely not leaders, that you could have the title, but actually not be an effective leader. And of course, somewhere on our side, and somewhere on the other side. And so at an early age, I would have been eight or nine or 10, at the most. I said, I want to be a leader. Now, I didn't really have any idea what that meant. But I decided to run for school office and good fortune I got elected. Now, it's a little bit like that saying, you know, dogs like to chase speeding cars. And the only problem is they actually catch the car, they're not sure what to do. So that kind of happened to me, it's like, Alright, well, now what do I do? As President of my class, you know, other than, you know, maybe host a few events. Yeah. But I think by that age, I really thought I was going to be a US Senator, or a Governor. That was my ambition. And so I got very involved in school leadership positions. And then I got extremely involved in politics, I ran campaigns, I have the largest youth organization for president for their election. And I had I held kind of statewide offices in the neck and one of the national parties. But by my early 20s, I'd grown very disillusioned because I saw that a lot. Politics was really about the pleasure of power. Well, and that there was really the shadows that we all know about. But I really went in to change the world. I had kind of pure intentions. And I didn't realize that you also needed to be a rugby player. And you really had to be thinking about how do you take out your opponent? And I didn't like that I did. So by my early 20s, I decided I wouldn't go into politics, which created the problem because that was my aspiration. And by chance, I thought I would go to law school to become a lawyer. So I went to the University of Virginia's law school, listen to a few classes. I was from Virginia's state, and they just built a new business school across the plaza, like about 100 yards away. I had sat in on three hours of law classes about oh, this is not me. So I was Closing another career door all at once. Wow, I went to the University of Virginia's Business School, just check it out. And I ended up getting an MBA because I was very excited by the programs. And I loved a lot of the things related to consumer behavior. I took a course there called group dynamics. Oh, wow. And that course was so powerful. It was a life changing course. And I decided that one day I wanted to teach, and I wanted to teach this subject called organizational behavior, I would go and work as a, I would run international marketing for, at the time, the largest solar cell company in the world. Okay. So I was actually a practicing manager, and I learned kind of firsthand how hard it is to lead. There are a lot of challenges. You know, I could see some of that in my earlier career, but I realized how hard it was to meet people. And around the fifth year, I decided, you know, my calling is to be a teacher. So I went back and got a doctorate and then began my teaching career. But I've always loved leadership, I've always been fascinated by how you and I can be influential.
Scott Allen 6:11
Going to business school, especially after some of the experiences you'd had and taking that course. And I think you said it was called organizational dynamics. That had to have been so powerful, and so eye-opening after everything you'd experienced that it happened to you whether that was in politics. Then, make sense of some of that and start learning about concepts around power and influence. That had to be transformational.
Jay Conger 6:36
Yes. And I really picked up this idea that psychology was very, very important. And you and I began to, I had never taken a psychology course. Yeah, it's a little bit of a paradox. I'm in the psychology department. I'm the only person without a single undergraduate like ology course, yeah, it really gave me a deeper appreciation for being perceptive. And seeing behind what you're presented within an interpersonal situations are so much more complexity that we don't see. Yeah.
Scott Allen 7:11
Well, and there's always been at least j, the majority of what I've read, it seems to me that even maybe some of your experience as a practicing manager, would have really helped inform some of your future work, because at least your work that I've read that I know, well, it's, it's practitioner-focused, it's that tends to be at least from the books, that tends to be the setting. And it's so incredibly helpful because there's this beautiful balance of that theory. And the practice, would you agree that that's been somewhat of your, your area of focus.
Jay Conger 7:49
So I really have two streams, the academic stream is around charismatic leadership. And I spent more than a decade doing much more traditional, true academic research around what is charisma, and then with a very good friend and colleague, Robindra Kanungo recreated a scale of charismatic leadership scale. And that scale and one other kind of the two dominant scales that are used today to measure somebody, whether they're a charismatic leader or not. Yeah, but early on, and it's interesting, you reference learning to the right after I was tenured. I said, I want to do something that's more grounded in, in the world of practice. Yeah. And so that book was the beginning of my practitioner focus. Well, I'd already established myself kind of as an academic, yeah, and academic research. And a lot of it goes back to my origins as an anthropology major, where I originally thought of becoming an anthropology professor. And as you know, up until recently, almost all anthropologists field-based research. Yeah. And that's what I love. I love to do field-based research. And so that side of me has always informed the practice side. And while I love my academic community, I feel that much of the time, our very insightful work, gets trapped. Yeah, in academic journals, and it doesn't migrate out into the world. Yep. And so, after getting tenure, I said, you know, I'm on a mission, I'm, I'm going to cut a release. And I learned early on you, you had to use different language, and you had to structure your thinking in different ways to reach a larger practitioner audience. Yeah. I've always thought of myself as attempting to bridge and again because I feel that the practitioner world doesn't understand how many insights you and I can create that are really wonderful, but they don't migrate.
Scott Allen 9:55
I couldn't agree with you more. That that a lot of that work. It stays, it stays in a certain place. And I think that's unfortunate. I had a really fun conversation with John Dugan. I don't know if you've ever come across john, he's at the Aspen Institute. Yes. And he's doing some really incredible work around bridging those two worlds as well, right, using all of the scholarship that he was at the University of Maryland and all of that work. But then now actually putting that into practice, and fascinating conversation that we had. And I learned a lot in that conversation. But I couldn't agree with you more. There's so many wonderful insights, but because it hasn't been translated, or it hasn't been, I don't even like to point the language hasn't changed so that it's comprehensible. You know, what average CEO picks up the Academy of Management Journal and says, well, the wow, you know, and then
Jay Conger 10:56
I sit at the, when I graduated from my, you know, doctoral program, that was the beginning of the end, the qualitative era of organizational behavior. So I kind of saw the tail end, and when you would actually read books as part of your doctoral program. Yeah. And you have people like March, James March, and then you had Paul Lawrence, who had written seminal books. And today, that era is pretty much gone. I mean, it's increasingly you, you read seminal, I can, you know, Academy of Management Journal articles? Yes. And then it was also the beginning, in a heavy way of the arrival, quantitative methodology, or regression analysis started to take over the field. Yep. So I, again, I'm thrilled to sit in that kind of crossroad, and began to appreciate the fact that quantum quantitative methodologies were less appealing to your practitioner audience. Hmm. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Scott Allen 11:58
Well, let's, let's fast forward a little bit to your most recent work. And I know that a number of listeners will be very interested in this topic of, of high potentials. So let's let's start with where the focus on high potentials came from your latest work.
Jay Conger 12:17
When I was at a place called the London Business School. And increasingly, the people I was seeing in my classrooms were this pool of people who've been designated in a corporation as high potential talent. And you know, that can the lower end of the pyramid that can be 15% of the population. But as you get to the top, it shrinks to two or 3%. Yeah, so these are people who have been designated as very special, they get so many opportunities that their peers don't get. So because I was teaching so many of them, I became really intrigued by what sets these people apart.
Scott Allen 12:54
Yeah.
Jay Conger 12:55
How did you get that designation?
Scott Allen 12:56
Why this person? Why were they tapped?
Jay Conger 12:58
Yeah. So it generated a lot of curiosity, in my mind. And then my good friend, Doug Ready, approached me and Linda Hill, who's a Harvard Business School, if we would have an interest in looking at high potential talent and a couple of dozen companies to figure out how they get into that designation. We wrote a Harvard Business Review article, Are You a High Potential? And a book agent reached out to me and said, Jay, would you ever write a book on that? And I kind of turned her down because I had too much at the time to work on. And then about a year and a half later, I said, that's great idea. So a good friend of mine, Allan Church who oversees AI potential assessment and talent at PepsiCo, I reached out to him because I like to partner on books. And he said, he'd helped you we work together. Yeah. What we were trying to do is answer the question of what keeps somebody in that designation over a career? And then how do you how do you initially get in? But then also, how do you fall out? Yeah, most companies today is they try to be dynamic. So you might be high potential for five years and fall out, but you're sixth year?
Scott Allen 14:14
Well, and I and I loved that your description of there's, you know, two different general schools of thought, do we let folks know that they're a high potential? Or do we kind of keep that? And I and I believe it was, was it 60 upwards of 60% of corporations, don't tell the individuals that they're high potentials, but in the book, you do a great job of saying, here's how you might know if you are kind of one you know,
Jay Conger 14:39
it's fairly obvious, you know, you'll you'll notice you've been invited to breakfast with the CEO. And your good friend Mary was not be well, somebody is already anointed. You are you'll be invited to an executive program. Yeah. And you know, you'll notice that jack was not one was not So, yeah, this, but yes, it's a it's a really age-old dilemma since like categorization came about, do we tell them or not?
Scott Allen 15:08
Yeah. Well, and in the book, you identify these five x factors. And so maybe we could start by just talking about a couple of them. I loved this first one, the situation sensing. Would you talk a little bit about that, that these high potentials, they excelled at this concept of situation sensing?
Jay Conger 15:30
Yeah, so situation setting really is your ability to be very observant and read your boss quickly. Yeah. In the early days of your career, the boss's day Keystone decision-maker. Yep, there are fewer data points and your boss, you know, at the beginning of your career, you tend to work more visibly with your boss. As you become more and more senior, you might actually located physically away from the boss, you're off often in the field, your boss might be traveling the globe, but in the early days, your career, they're the single best vantage point of Scott's potential. Yeah, so they get an enormous amount of weight in that decision. We found that people who got into the pool really understood their boss, but they understood them around two core dimensions. So they understood that their boss was probably like them going to be promoted on two or three things that they accomplished. So a lot of other things that the boss had to do, just like you and I, there's a lot of administrative work and routine tasks, there are going to be two or three high visibility projects that the boss will be assessed on. So the subordinate, ie the potentially high potential, makes certain may contribute in a significant way to those two or three outcomes. Yeah. And the more you are a major contributor to your boss's success around those small number priorities, the more likely the boss will attribute tremendous potential to Yep. The other dimension is stylistic imperatives. This is kind of fun, but it's also kind of disheartening.
Scott Allen 17:14
The mirroring concept. Is that where you're headed, okay. Interesting, right?
Jay Conger 17:19
It's, and it's very important. Bosses have a couple of stylistic imperatives which they may not articulate to you. So one of the things if you've seen the Iger book, the CEO of Disney, in that book, he talks about always arriving five minutes early to every meeting. Yeah. So can you imagine if you arrive two minutes early to every meeting?
Scott Allen 17:43
Yeah. It's all these clues that that, again, that situation sensing all these clues are you paying? Whether that's in some cases for right or wrong? dress, communication style, speed at which we're communicating? Imagine all of those were ingredients that that that came across?
Jay Conger 18:00
Oh, and even silly things like fonts? Did you use Times New Roman, you know, and by the way, they haven't told you to do science, they kind of figured they figured you'd look at their font and get it. And then one of my favorites was this bright, very senior person who would text you. And his expectations is you would respond in 15 minutes to every text. So you could be having dinner at home with your family, and the text comes through. And Scott, if you don't respond in 15 minutes, he's already said, you're a bit of a slacker.
Scott Allen 18:34
Yeah. And you're psychologically a little bit out, right? You're gonna have to dig out from that that hole so to speak, right?
Jay Conger 18:43
Here's the kind of the downside: it really is this principle, first impressions become lasting impression? So in the first 30 to 90 days, your new boss has already assessed you on, you know, are you meeting my style? And parrot is you mirror me? And then what's what, how will this person contribute to my designation of being high potential talent?
Scott Allen 19:10
Yeah, and especially to your point, those really high profile projects that will help them move forward. I think that the terminology, that unexpected and exceptional initiative and those couple areas that help them achieve and advance and move forward as well, right.
Jay Conger 19:27
Yeah. So one of my favorite stories is a young man in India who demonstrated exceptional initiative. He was invited to the US he worked for a Swiss Medical Products Company. And he ran sales and marketing for India, which was one of their they were trying to grow in India. But there were some headwinds. And so he went to a conference in New York City where they brought all the sales and marketing people from around the globe, a couple hundred people, but he was unusual. The conference last two days, and everybody else went home. He stayed For five more days, now, was it to sightsee, check out the Statue of Liberty, go to the Metropolitan watch a Yankees game? No. He had heard that the New York sales force was one of the best in the world. And so every morning he would go on sales calls with the salesman. And he would take copious notes. And he found out who was the best sale and who are the top salespeople. And he made certain to go on sales calls without and you've watched them, he interviewed them five days, and he's got this incredible notebook full of information on the flight back to Delhi, you know, it's good 20 hours or so, yes, synthesize everything. And like a good high potential leader. When you arrive back in Delhi. He didn't say, here's what I want all of you to do, because this is what I've learned from the Americans. He said, here's some insights I've gleaned. And here's some thoughts and potential plans. What do you think? And so then he engaged them around how they could really transform the sales and marketing in India. And it worked. I mean, a year later, they were like a hockey stick in terms of performance. But again, nobody asked him to stay for five days, nobody said, Hey, why don't you hang out with the Salesforce? He just had this extra level initiative.
Scott Allen 21:23
Well, it almost at least a part of that story brings me to and we'll leave everybody in suspense, we won't get to every x factor. But this next one of talent accelerating. What I loved about that, is that, as I'm reading it, as I understand it, Jay, it's about developing others. It's about accelerating the talent on your team. Your story right there even made me think of intellectual stimulation from transformational leadership when he comes back, puts some content at the teams, puts it on the table, and then says, What do you all think? Let's create this, and let's build and go. And in that process, he's probably starting to engage in this talent accelerating as well, would you agree?
Jay Conger 22:07
Very much so. And that was one of that's why he matched across all five x factors. But that story illustrates particular that first one and this idea of catalytic learning, but he very focused on, they understand that their potential is tied up in their team's potential. Yeah. And it's only through elevating the potential of their team that they will elevate their own potential. And I'm always reminded Martin Luther King who wrote at one point, I had no idea who I could become. My followers saw my potential well, and they were the ones who lifted me up and encouraged me to do what I do. And I think in some ways, that powerful story illustrates what's happening with high potential talent, they kind of get in the fast track because they're doers. Yeah. But at a certain point, they realize they can't do it all themselves that actually leads to micromanaging and really hyper control. Yeah, he just empowers people. And so they learn within the first decade, this idea of accelerating their, their own the talent of their own people. But it's not all kind of Pollyanna that these individuals are also they're holding people accountable. And it's, there's high expectations, right. And Scott, one of the I think most challenging things for leaders in organizations to do is hold people accountable and have difficult conversations to get around. You know, we call them "C" players, but your people problems are your poor performers. And what we're pressed is the vast majority of high potential leaders, if they're going to persist over a career, bravely go or no one goes there bravely go and confront and in constructive ways, yeah, they realize that if they allow poor performers or bad behavior, it undermines their credibility as a leader. And so they tend to be extremely attentive to that. Whereas I think for most of us, we really like to be liked. We really want to get along with people. We don't want people to dislike us. So we tend to put that off.
Scott Allen 24:18
Yep. But that also then demotivates your other A players, right? If you if you're letting these "C" players kind of rumble around and they're not being held accountable, it's damaging. It's toxic to the culture, wouldn't you agree?
Jay Conger 24:31
Very much so. And you and I have probably worked in a couple of those situations.
Scott Allen 24:45
We will leave there's there's five we will leave the other three for folks to go and explore on their own. But were there any other insights that as you wrote this book, just really stand out for you as you reflect
Jay Conger 24:59
Yeah, you know, what I most love about them is that they were constantly focused on their development. The best of them were never completely satisfied. Yeah, they remind me of world-class athletes who always have this sense that I could do better at this. And I couldn't be better at this. The best of them never lost kind of a grounding of humility. Now, also, the other thing that we know a lot about, and I'm sure describes both of us is that high achievers have a basic insecurity, which is, you remember the term the imposter syndrome? Yeah. Yeah. You know, not as good as people been down? Yeah, I don't, they don't discover that. They have a lot of that. But they're able to turn it into a very constructive outlet. Mm hmm. Where they're constantly figuring out, okay, I need to grow in this area, I need to hone my skills. It's very appealing. And I know, when I was doing the fieldwork with this, I constantly go back and ask myself, alright, where do I need to push myself? Where, where am I not? Where am I satisfied? And I need to really get out of that mindset. So for me, that was very inspiring the kind of continual quest to be their best.
Scott Allen 26:20
Yeah, I think it was maybe in the expertise literature, that I came across something. It suggested that most humans get to a place where they're competent in their role. And then to your point, they plateau. They don't spend necessarily decades working on skills outside of their current ability level. And whether it was Anders Ericsson or others, that it was a fairly consistent finding that these individuals constantly kept the next level in mind. And it's fun to know that that's something you found here, right?
Jay Conger 26:56
Yes. Remind me of a Heifetz who's a great violinist who said, I don't practice for one day. I know I'm no longer one of the world's great violinists. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows that I am no longer one of the great violinist, if I don't practice for three days, the whole world medicine, and it's kind of relentless, you know, gotta keep being my best. Yeah.
Scott Allen 27:22
Well, one other thought that comes to mind for you or insight from writing the book?
Jay Conger 27:27
Well, I think, you know, again, it's really interesting, because when I was at London School I did, I literally taught thousands and thousands of managers. And one of the paradoxes is that very few people are very effective at coaching. Hmm, and very few organizations spend money to teach their managers how to coach. And yet it's one of the most important activities of a good leader. And so what I was impressed by is how many of these individuals either through bosses, or through their own initiative, learn how to be coaches? Hmm. And if we go back to that second dimension, you're asking about talent accelerating? Yeah. And that foundational skill allowed them to do that? Well. The other thing is, I always think of coaching in two kinds of buckets. There's the expertise coaching, where you just have far more experience and expertise. And you give advice. Yeah. And that's how 90% of managers think about coaching, which is advice given, it's not joint problem-solving. It's the boss telling you how to solve the problem. Yeah. What many of the high potentials is not all but certainly a large number. I had more what I call developmental coaching: let's figure out how you, with my help and resources, can come to a solution that helps you grow and develop and own? Yep. I was very impressed by how many of them are really strong at coaching. It reminded me also, and by the way, I will often ask them, you know, were you a natural coach and school, you know, you're coaching your fellow teammates on the football team, and almost to a person they sit now that all those skills they had learned in their work career. Wow. So it didn't didn't appear to be a disposition. It is something they really acquired and became very appreciative of that's a skill set.
Scott Allen 29:21
Well, and, Jay, what are you working on next? what's something that's hot on the burner that you're excited about? Because I imagine there's a deep pipeline at work.
Jay Conger 29:33
Probably to be very broad, actually. I'm going back to a subject which I wrote about in the late 90s persuasion.
Scott Allen 29:44
Ahhhh.
Jay Conger 29:45
I, I've always been really interested in communications. And the work I did on charismatic leadership. One of the large components was the ability to communicate and inspirational. Yeah, and by the way, charismatic leaders are world-class persuasion. So I wrote a book called winning him over. And then I wrote a Harvard Business Review article called the necessary art of persuasion. I just keep seeing that nobody's working on that subject. People have a kind of negative association with it, I think of it as manipulation. And yet, most of what a person does in their work day is to persuade their colleagues. Yep. So I'm looking at very constructive forms of persuasion, as deployed by change agents and innovation agents in organizations to how you can make things happen, how you can make an adaptive organization to the power of your words.
Scott Allen 30:39
Any early insights, when especially when you look back at the work that you did, then does it hold? Or are there? I imagine those contextual shifts that you're coming across anything stand out, that you can share?
Jay Conger 30:53
Yeah, no, I don't want to give it away! Yes, I mean, I think one of the great myths of persuasion that a lot of people stumble on is they assume it's this very well-rehearsed pitch. Hmm. And there are a few unusual places where it is, but they're relatively few. And if you go into persuading your colleagues with a monologue, the odds are nine times out of 10. You're going to fail? Well, you really have to go in and see it as a set of dialogues you're going to hold with your colleagues over a period of time. Okay, so most people have these stereotypes of persuasion that actually harm their ability to be influential. The other thing is, because of these kind of stereotypes, they tend to grossly under prepare, you need a framework to think about preparing. The analogy would be as if you had you know, you're growing a tree in your backyard, and the leaves turn yellow. And you said, you said, well, the secret here is just to remove all the yellow leaves. That's all I need to do to look great. Well, that's how a lot of people approach for switch.
Scott Allen 31:56
Yeah. I love what you're saying, I love the mindset comment there that it's gonna be a series of dialogues. Because I think another thing, and maybe I'm just repeating what you just said, I think I for sure have had this mindset that I just need to have the conversation once, and then when it doesn't go, Well, well, I can walk away, and it's real easy to blame them. But to your point, it probably wasn't well crafted, it wasn't well designed. I didn't view it as a series of dialogues. And, you know, I could have been better, I think at times people, whether it's a subordinate trying to influence their, their peers or their superior, I think a lot of them are not designed well. And they expect that it's going to be a one-time conversation. And then when they don't get their way. Their mindset goes south.
Jay Conger 32:43
Right. But you're you're spot on, Scott, you're spot on. And so they because of that, you know, they give up too early. But they also don't do enough homework usually. And one of my favorite stories is the minivan. There was a young man at General Motors who actually came up with the idea for the minivan. He was fired by the Volkswagen camper. And he said, I wonder if we could turn that into a car where people could pile their kids and their softball and you know, the badminton and go off. And he went to see the head designer GM and because he wasn't very effective as a persuader. And champion. The idea was killed in that one meeting. Yes, like he said, but there was another man named Fergus Pollack, who is in his middle 30s. And he worked at Chrysler. And paradoxically, he too, was inspired by the VW camper. But he was a much more savvy agent of change. And he did his homework. And he held his first meeting with the president of Chrysler, not the head designer. And he had done a lot of work on demographics on why this was a really powerful idea. And at the end of that meeting, the president said, Let's, let's see, Lee Iacocca is available. And let's talk to him about your idea. Later that day, they got into, I took out a cancellation in his care schedule. So they went in and at the end of the meeting at Lee looked at Ferguson, he said, Look, I'm going to give you, and it was in the 10s of millions of dollars. I'm gonna steal it from my most profitable division, so you better be right. Wow, I'm gonna make a bet on you. And the minivan was the most profitable car category for almost two decades. And it saved Chrysler.
Scott Allen 34:30
Well, we've got a Chrysler Pacifica literally above me right now!
Jay Conger 34:35
And that was the product of an effective persuader. Yeah, the General Motors could have had that they actually had the idea for another story Intel. You had an engineer doing engineering had the idea for the personal computer, well, but he couldn't persuade anybody. And so, you know, apple, and same as Xerox. He knows their ex parte kid, the mouse and all those things. But they couldn't persuade the folks at corporate? Yeah, to turn it into a viable product. So persuasion is really one of the trademarks of great change agents. Mm hmm.
Scott Allen 35:09
I'm excited. I'm excited. Well, Jay, I always close this out with a little bit of a lightning round. And I'm reading your colleagues. Well, I'm not going to go into what they've been reading and watching, but it's kind of all across the board. It's it's Scandinavian Noir. And it's Ozark. Yeah. So you've got a wide range. But what have you been reading, streaming or listening to that stood out for you lately? And it could have to do with leadership. It doesn't have to.
Jay Conger 35:40
Yeah, so one book that I'm currently reading that I really like, it's called Entangled Life. Okay. It's by a scientist who looks at the role of fungus in our lives. And that's why it's entangled. Because fungus is literally entangled in in all of us and in all of life. Wow. And he's a really wonderful writer, and you learn about truffles, and you learn about fungus that the size of football fields, and you learn about lichens, and it's really this global view on the central role that mushrooms and fungus play in our world that we complete codependent on
Scott Allen 36:17
which I have no clue that's even a thing. That's fascinating.
Jay Conger 36:21
Yeah. And his I love his name. His name is Merlin Sheldrake. I'm convinced to the stage name. Merlin Sheldrake? All right, come on.
Scott Allen 36:32
Of course, he's into fungi!
Jay Conger 36:36
Another one that I really love that I finished recently...more of leadership book is Rubicon, which is by Tom Holland and it's the final days of the Roman Republic.
Scott Allen 36:47
Wow.
Jay Conger 36:48
It chronicles how the republic collapsed. It's very, very compelling. It's, it's it's really great read. It's all about leadership and the failure of leadership. And it's all about the dark side about politics. People manipulating and stabbing one another great book later on. I just finished a great book called Atomic Habits (James Clear). Okay, which from our standpoint, leadership development, people it looks it's probably the best book on habits and how you need to think about changing your habits. It's very pragmatic guide. Okay, it's great book,
Scott Allen 37:23
Atomic Habits,
Jay Conger 37:25
Atomic Habits, okay. Streaming...My wife and I finished Game of Thrones recently that we'd love
Scott Allen 37:32
speaking of politics and backstabbing
Jay Conger 37:34
and we, we've, we've fought not to see that we, you know because everybody should know that. We don't want to watch it. And then we start watching it. This is really special. Yeah, we did start Ozark....A little too Noir for me...
Scott Allen 37:54
Well, Jason Bateman. I mean, he well, and Laura Linney deserve award after award. I mean, they're so good at being bad.
Jay Conger 38:05
Aren't they? Oh, my gosh. It's incredible.
Scott Allen 38:08
Well, Jay, you are Episode 25. Before we started, I told you that I can't think of a better way to celebrate Episode 25. I so appreciate your work. Yeah, at least this guy, your work has informed my work and how I think about our work. And I'm so appreciative of that. And as I said, when we were starting, that body of work is just absolutely incredible. It's it's second to none, in my opinion. And so thanks for the work that you do. excited to read everything that's coming down the pike. I think you need to go ahead and buy the high potential advantage for those who are listening. There's three others if you want to, if you want to make that happen. It's a great guide, and it's a great insight into how to orient your career. So, Jay, Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.
Jay Conger 39:00
You're very welcome, Scott. My pleasure.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai