MBS961- Hyper Learning: How to Adapt to the Speed of Change With Edward D. Hess

The Digital Age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can't.

Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways of being: seeking confirmation of what we believe, emotionally defending our beliefs and our ego, and seeking cohesiveness of our mental models.

Hyper-Learning requires a new way of being and a radical new way of working. In Part 1 of this how-to book, Hess takes a practical workbook approach and helps readers create their Hyper-Learning Mindset, choose and embrace their needed Hyper-Learning Behaviors, and adopt their daily Hyper-Learning Practices.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I mean, and so that's just an example of the impact you can have on people when you're self-absorbed, when you're an introvert, etc. And we all can be sort of more open. Open ourselves up to the possibilities. Every human being is a possibility. Now, every human being you hire won't be a good hire. But those that are good hires have unbelievable possibilities because they, if you're depending on the business you're in, and service businesses are going to be one of the key businesses that technology is not going to be able to deliver.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to yet another cracking instalment of the MapRound show. Thank you for pushing play. Today we are joined all the way from the U.S. by Edward Hess. He is the professor of business administration and executive in residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. He has spent more than 20 years in the business world, and he is the author of no less than 13 books. Yeah, that's right, 13 books, over 150 practitioner articles, and over 60 Darden cases dealing with growth, innovation, learning culture, systems and processes. And his work's been, well, it's just everywhere basically. He's appeared in over 400 media outlets. You can just imagine Bloomberg Radio, CNBC, Forbes Business Week, Business Daily, Chief Learning Officer, Washington Post, MSNBC, and many, many, many others. And today we're going to be talking about change and his book called Hyperlearning, How to Adapt to the Speed of Change. This is such an important subject because I don't think many of us would have said we would be living in a pandemic about two years ago. So change is something we have to deal with more and more these days. And on top of that, we have the digital age and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation that is raising some very serious questions of how we as humans will stay relevant in the workplace. And to stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can't. In this episode, guys, we're really going to get into the meat and the potatoes of hyperlearning and we're going to share some practical examples of how you can develop hyper learning mindsets and hyper learning behaviors that can really help you maximize the outcomes that you're looking for in your business. And pay careful attention to the part of the show where we talk about the five principles of the new smart, which can really help you as a CEO and business leader to humanize the workplace and culture that you're fostering and growing on a daily basis. And we also share an amazing process called Triangulation, which can help you solve problems in your business faster than ever before. And don't forget, guys, if you haven't yet done so, head on over to SMERocketfuel.com and register. It is free and join the community behind the Mapround show. Start accessing new markets, funding for your business, and a global community. And why not introduce yourself on the welcome wall? I'd love to meet you. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. And we're live. Hey guys, welcome back to yet another cracking instalment of the Map Around Show. Today I have the privilege of bringing to you uh an amazing thought leader in the space we're going to cover today. Uh, but lots and lots to get into. Uh, but his name is Professor Edward Hess or Ed Hess. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me. And hello, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Yeah, so um, so I've been reading up all about you, uh Ed, um, and uh, you've you've got an incredible background, um, pretty uh distinguished. You're a professor, obviously, uh, you're an author. And in fact, today we're gonna be talking about uh your book. I'm just gonna bring it up on uh screen for everybody. So here we go. It's called Hyperlearning, uh, How to Adapt to the Speed of Change. Um, and uh I think we can all agree that we're living in a world that's seemingly in a lot of flux at the moment. So this is a very poignant and timeless uh book. So um, Ed, why don't you kick us off though? What's the kind of elevator pitch uh for our audience around the world? Business owners trying to build things that matter to them. Um what do they need to know about you?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Well, what they need to know about hyperlearning is that it's a reality, that uh uh technology is going to transform how we work, how we live, and who works. And it's going to continue to transform at a pace that's just you know over in some ways overwhelming. And what that means is that human beings will be needed in the job market, and human entrepreneurs will be needed in order to create, if you will, services or products in ways that technology can't. So human beings are going to have a meaningful work and meaningful life if they can add value, all right, if they can add value in ways technology can't. And basically that is thinking differently than the technology. And the big thing is being able to emotionally connect and relate with other human beings in positive ways. And then lastly, to be able to do if you're in the trade service businesses or in these service business that serves plumbing, electrical, stuff like that, being able to train people that can they can go in and basically identify problems, iterate ways to solve them, and then physically with dexterity be able to fix the problem. So basically, we're all you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you've got to basically define what your market is and figure out what's going to differentiate from the technology, how you're going to use the technology, and what are you going to need people for, and what kind of people are you going to need. And all of that's going to come down ultimately to the emotional side of business. And business is money, business is process, but business is heavily emotional.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, it's an interesting uh point you you raised there because I I literally the name of my book is literally called your inner game. Because like that's the one thing you can control. Maybe not, you know, there's no absolutes in anything, but you can control your inner game and the way you respond, ideally, not react to things that are changing in front of you all the time. So um it's much harder to control the external variables as it is to control, well, am I going to care about this thing? And uh am I going to let that fire burn or am I going to put it out? Like that's all up to you and how you respond. So ultimately it comes, you know, for me at least, it comes down to decision making and you know, and having an operating system of your mind that can execute in a way that is congruent with your values, your higher self, but then also is uh uh congruent with the external variables and the paradigms and systems that inherent those that external world. And so I fully agree with you. It's it is about the the marriage of those two things together. And I think I love that point because uh so there's so much stuff written about just the external, uh, and not so much that says, well, hey, hang on a second, if you're being displaced through robotic process automation and a job in a bank, what do you now do? This where's that book, you know? Yes, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

And and I saw I saw your book and it brought a big smile uh because I knew that uh we would we we would resonate because the found the two foundational points to being a hyper learner, and that is being able to go into the world, experience the world, make your input to the world, and constantly evolve. The two critical skills are what I call inner peace and otherness, and the inner peace is the mastery of self, the mastery of self, and it's it's a quiet ego, quiet mind, quiet body, and a positive emotional state, and we can control that as human beings, and a and a good part of the book is the story as to how does one devise or create the practices that one uses every day so that one manages one's inner self. And so, why is that so important in hyper learning? Why is that so important in being an entrepreneur? Why is that so important in environments where the speed of change is so fast? Because the science of learning is crystal clear. We human beings are suboptimal learners, period. End of story. And I know that some people will say, no way, man, I'm successful, I'm I know how to learn. Well, this is what the science says we go out in the world, I do this, Matt does this, and what we try to do internally is to manage it, all right? But we go out in the world, and if we were the normal person, we go out in the world seeking confirmation of what we believe. The neuroscience is clear. We go out and we see what we believe, and we only process less than one percent of the stimuli that's coming into our bodies, so we are confirmation-seeking machines. Secondly, we all got an ego. We seek affirmation of our ego. When people disagree with us, or we see and or we get information which disagrees with us, we tend to become emotionally defensive and reject that. And then lastly, the way our mind works, we seek cohesiveness of our stories of how the world works. So basically, we go out in the world and we we have a we think we know what we want to do with our business, we think we know what customers want. We go out in the world, and unless we train ourselves and we have others who have different views as part of our team, we go out and we go out in the world and basically are just seeking affirmation, confirmation, cohesiveness, and that does not lead to change, that does not lead to hyper learning, that does not lead to evolving a business. And so this you know, what goes on inside of you can be managed, and we can take ownership of it. And if you can have daily practices as to how to how you do that, then the second piece is otherness. The science is clear, nobody can achieve excellence by themselves. We need people who are different than us. Why? Because they see things that we don't see, they have different biases than us, everybody has biases, and otherness is that the ability to connect and relate to people in a way that builds trusting, caring teams which can have high quality making meaning conversations. Whether you're a small company or you're Google. What's clear about the coming of the digital age is the quality of the conversations you have at work will determine your strategic effectiveness. It's the quality, having high quality, making meaning conversations. And all of this comes from the inner work, as Matt said, that we do have choices. Most people don't know they have choices, they just sort of let whatever happens in their body just sort of happens, and they basically, I'm feeling this, and so they behave in a way that basically evidences that. You can control your emotions, you can generate positive emotions, and you can manage negative emotions. And so a lot of the book is is based on organizations that I've worked with putting in practices and training as to how to do this so you can optimize open-mindedness, you can optimize your ability to listen, you can optimize your ability to learn, and that's what entrepreneurship is about. But bottom line, in the world we're going into, the average average human being is going to basically have a different job, major job or profession or every five years. So it doesn't matter if you work for a big company, small company, or you're an entrepreneur. Everybody's gonna be an entrepreneur because you're gonna have to constantly reboot, rebuild, and learn. That's the beauty of what Matt is is is what he's all about. It's that ability to how do I build the inner skills, the inner skills which increase my ability to adapt, to not be rigid, to not have such a big ego, my way or the highway, to truly listen and explore, and to have the courage to go out there and try new things.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Hey there, I know being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely experience. You sometimes get stuck, don't you? Well, if you're like me, being stuck sucks. But what if you could access the minds of over 850 CEOs who have built companies generating billions of dollars in revenue and access all of that knowledge in a fraction of a second? Well, the good news is you can't literally do that today. What my team have built is Matt Brown AI. It is trained on all the interviews, over 850 of them that I've done to date, all my books, all the knowledge capital that's been generated over the last 10 years right here on the Matt Brown Show. And you can get access to all of that right now for free. So, how do you get access to this? Well, head on over to mapbrown show.com and at the top you'll see community. Hit that link, sign up, it's absolutely free, and you'll be given instant access to MacBrown AI and a community of over a hundred thousand subscribers. Yep, there's so much to get into there. I just want to pick up on something you said, which um is really important to maybe double down on, is that I think you know, entrepreneurs are all about spotting the gap. You know, where's the opportunity? Where's an underserved customer? Where is uh where is there an opportunity from for me to get some kind of scale and generate some revenue and dependence and so on and so forth? Um and when you're going through that initial sort of sort of startup phase, what you're looking at are opportunities. But what you just said is interesting because if you if you really think about it, and I had um a neuroscientist on on the show not so long ago, I forget his name now, um but um but he was saying we're talking about reality, and he said, like, what is reality actually? Is there such a thing as reality? And uh because you said it, you know, we the mind generalizes, deletes, and and you know, it's it's not like your version of this conversation is not the same as mine, and it never will be because that's how the mind works, you know, and it's a fascinating thing. And if you take that principle forward and you say, okay, now I'm I'm a startup, I'm looking, I found I'm looking to find a gap in the market, and let's just say I'm looking at compet competitors in the market, I may say to myself that the market's saturated and that there's no gap. Because my inner game is is is I'm looking for that bias for whatever reason. It could be a belief that I have about my ability to build things at all. Like I remember when I found when I was young, I was 26, founding my first company. Like we we all like we all have this thing called imposter syndrome, and so that imposter syndrome is is like it's an undercurrent. We don't I don't feel like an imposter talking to you, but in there somewhere, it's there. Like, do you know what I mean? Like um uh and so that thing is and it's an undercurrent, and so your your mind is not it's not seeing reality in a way that's true. And what you said also is this is why you know mentors and speaking to people is so important. And in my book, I write about this process called triangulation. So, what you do is you go to you you go to three people, I'll phone you ed and I'll say, Listen, yeah, I'm thinking I'm thinking this is my hypothesis. What do you think? And then I'll run that same process with you, and then you know, three other people or two other people, and and then I'll look to see how does my model of reality uh stand up to theirs. And obviously, they need to be people you respect, more experienced, you understand, been there, done that sort of thing. They shouldn't be your mom, because your mom will like lie to you, you know. Uh but uh but you know, you you know you should and and so it the idea being is that if two of the three say this is true and it marries up with your philosophy, then that's probably more true than you know what I'm saying, like so you can use it to to stress stress test your what you think is actually going out there or on there.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Yes, yes, and that's and you're exactly right. Having good mentors, uh having people that have uh you know built companies that uh I mean what I found working with entrepreneurs over the the decades is is that successful entrepreneurs are the most generous people can be the most generous people. They don't view anybody, you know, that's trying to start a business as competition. They realize the mistakes they've made in everything and how hard it is, but the joy that can be there. And so, you know, you're you're you're exactly right. And and you know, the the concept of reality, reality is a fleeting thing. I mean, the if you go back to the Eastern philosophies and even the western philosophies, the concept of impermanence, everything is always changing, all right. And and and so what you've always got to do is is as you're saying is is to be aware that that that to make sure you're getting the best facts you can. And that's where the concept of building a team comes in and otherness. And and the the critical thing in growing and building a business is is quite frankly, the people you end up hiring and having process to do that, but also there's lots of times it's a hiring mistake and having the courage to basically move on once it you know the person is not performing or doesn't add what you thought they did. But if you think about it, all this stuff about entrepreneurship is so people dependent, so people dependent. You're starting yourself, you need customers. Customers are people. You're starting yourself, you maybe need a team. That's people. The critical things is how do you basically manage yourself so you can connect and relate to people and really get the truth? All right. How do you hire people and really get the truth and know you're hiring? How do you basically have people tell you this is my real problem? instead of basically coding it in a different way. If you think about it is it, and put quotes around truths, because since there is no reality, everything's always changing, it's always moving. But so it it's it's really, you know, it's really your emotional ability. Do people want to do business with you? Do they trust you? Do people want to work for you? Do they trust you? Can you do you treat people in a way that they feel comfortable with you? And that is a skill until itself, which most people are so, in many cases, so impressed with their idea and so motivated to be successful, the people stuff sort of gets sort of goes by too fast. And so the human side of entrepreneurship will even be more important than it is now because that's because so the opportunities for entrepreneurship, looking for your gap, is going to be highly dependent on the gaps that technology can't do. And service businesses, the one thing technology cannot do well yet, is emotionally connect and relate to other people. Service businesses are huge opportunities, and then getting the right people in your service business will will basically lead to either success or not success. Turnover will lead to problems. So keeping the right people, so this concept of how do I engage emotionally with people and meet their needs in a way that liberates them to bring their best self to my company, to my business, so we can achieve our purpose and our mission, which is a good mission. It's a mission more than just money.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

It's uh it's a difficult thing to get right there. I mean, if you think about it, it's I mean also at scale, things become much harder. So, like if you if you're a if you're a founder and you have ten people and they're working out of your cottage, like like it's easier to connect with people uh empathetically and kind of get the Best out of them, and you know, I've been there, and then you know, you reach a level of scale. And I went through a period recently, like where I didn't speak to like my staff, one individuals of my staff for like six months, you know, and it's like, what does that say about my leadership uh style? Do you understand? So, and I think there's you know, I what I'm trying to get across is there's different leadership styles, and some people are alphas, they just don't care, they don't have the internal capacity to care in the way that you're articulating. But then you've got someone like my wife who's just like a you know amazing and empathetically driven woman, you know, she's easy to she connects with people far better than I do. Like, I'm another one is like um, you know, um is uh what's the word I'm looking for when you're not like outgoing, you're not not conservative. Introvert. Introvert, thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. So like I'm an introvert as well. So it's it's it for me, naturally, it doesn't come easy to go, hey, I want to connect with you in a way that gets the best out of you and that kind of stuff, because I'm I'm an introvert, it just doesn't, it's not part of my my general operate operators, you know, day to day. So um, so how does one develop the skill? Like if you talk, if you're thinking if someone's listening to us right now going, This I can't do that, you know, or I think that sucks. I must actually get someone else to do it. I'll hire from my blind spots, you know. Um, how do you develop the skill to do that? Stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey there, I know being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely experience. You sometimes get stuck, don't you? Well, if you're like me, being stuck sucks. But what if you could access the minds of over 850 CEOs who have built companies generating billions of dollars in revenue and access all of that knowledge in a fraction of a second? Well, the good news is you can't literally do that today. What my team have built is MathBrown AI. It is trained on all the interviews, over 850 of them that I've done to date, all my books, all the knowledge capital that's been generated over the last 10 years right here on the Map Brown show. And you can get access to all of that right now for free. So, how do you get access to this? Well, head on over to mapbrown show.com and at the top you'll see community. Hit that link, sign up, it's absolutely free, and you'll be given instant access to MacBrown AI and a community of over a hundred thousand subscribers.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Well, first you have to do what you said. You have to realize that that I'm not naturally um you know, I say just I'll use a people person, but you still are a person, and the skills that you need are pretty are the same skills that you would need if you were a people person. So if you think about it, how do I connect and relate to somebody? Okay, how do I emotionally connect? Well, first I have to have a calm mind, I have to smile at people, I have to ask for their input, I have to ask if you will treat them in certain ways, it all comes down to the questions you ask, it all comes down to how many times you smile at people, it all comes down to how you react to that, and so instead of giving directions, you know, first starting out, how are you doing? You know, how's it going for you with this? Okay, how can I make it better for you in this job to ask questions? And you can have three, four questions. And I have companies, I have you know, a lot of people that are very successful or introverts, but they have learned that they have their questions, and every day they use those questions, and it opens them up, and then you can ask questions, but you truly have to listen. So most people are making up their answers or they're listening for what they want to hear. So when someone says, Well, I'm having trouble with this, well, your response shouldn't be, Well, this is how you fix it. No, your response should be, let me make sure I understand what you're saying. This is what I heard. Is this what you're saying? And they'll say, Yes or no. But what did that small thing that only took 10 seconds to say to somebody? It says, I care about you, I want to understand you. And that's how people buy into entrepreneurs that are introverts, and and you learn sort of the it's not an it's not a it's not a bifurcated thing. Introverts can develop emotional connection skills, they may not be as um yippy-dippy skippy as extroverts, all right, but the fact is human connection in the digital age, in the technology era, all right, is mission critical if you want to be an entrepreneur. And so you got to, you know, there's a an entrepreneur that is an introvert should go home every night and he or she do a practice called a gratitude practice. What happened during the day that was really good? Why did that happen? Well, it usually happened because your people did something or you did something with someone else. It rarely happened because you did something by yourself with no other human being. All right. And see, and the gratitude practice makes opens one up to the fact that, wow, you know, I'm achieving all of this because you know, other people are are are helping. Yeah. And how many times today did I say thank you to somebody? You know, you count your thank yous. Oh, did I leave anybody in a bad place? Was I too stern? Did I insult, could I insult somebody? Well, if so, and you really want them to work for you, when I say work, I mean give you everything they've got. Well, you better go make amends. And so it's this managing self part of how you basically granularly do you make eye contact? All right. I mean, I've been in sh your shoes. I mean, I I build businesses, and I I can remember one exact story. Um, very, very successful, and I was an early bird, I always was in early. And I'm walking down the hall, and um um one of my employees who's was much younger than me and everything, is sort of also there early, and I just noticed a body. I was into my planning for the day. This is my agenda today, this is what I'm doing at this, this is what I'm doing, this, this is what I'm doing this, and I sort of see something going past me. I get back into my office, and the vice president that is in charge of his division reports to me, calls me up and says, I gotta come see you. I said, What do you got to come see me about? He says, I want to come see you. I said, just tell me what's going on. He says, I'm coming to see you. You have ruined my day and maybe my week and maybe my year. So he comes up and he says, My best junior person is sitting there writing his resume. I says, Why? He says, Because you walked past him this morning and didn't even look at him or say hello. And he knows that he will never make partner unless he has your vote. So he's gonna leave. And he said, He's my biggest contributor. And if he leaves, I leave. Now, what are you gonna do about it, Ed? I mean, and so that's just an example of the impact you can have on people when you're self-absorbed, when you're an introvert, etc. And we all can be sort of more open. Open ourselves up to the possibilities. Every human being is a possibility. Now, every human being you hire won't be a good hire. But those that are good hires have unbelievable possibilities because they, if you're depending on the business you're in, and service businesses are going to be one of the key businesses that technology is not going to be able to deliver. It's how those people relate to each other and how they relate to the customer. Because customers want the same thing employees be. I can remember Herb Kelleher, who was the founder of Southwest Airlines in the United States, one of the most successful airlines ever. Um did a lot of work with Herb, and and I remember having a conversation with me. He says, Ed, you've written all these books. All this is good stuff, that's why I hired you and everything. He says, but I'm not sure you get it. I says, Well, Herb, what do you mean? He says, it's just all about love. And he says, I'm not talking about sex, it's just all about platonic love in the workplace. He says, That's how I built the most profitable, highest performing airline in the United States. And he says, Come take a walk with me. So we you know, we go, he's on the top floor of a building, his building. We go down two or three floors and we get out the elevator, walk in. And every person he sees, he speaks first by first name. How are you doing? How are the children? And we did that for an hour. Walk through two floors, and people hugged him, men, women. And I said, I've never seen anything like this. He says, We're the Love Airline, platonic love. He says, This is why we are the best. Horace Schilty, who was the founder of the Rich Carleton Corporation, another service organization, same exact philosophy, same exact philosophy. And so I've I've worked with entrepreneurs who built multi-billion dollar companies, all on the fact that it's how you take care of your people and how your people react with your customers. And your people will act with your customers in high degree, dependent upon how they feel about the company and how they feel they're treated.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Yeah, there's lots to get into there. Um I fully agree though. I think it's it's it is something that's missing. This idea of humanizing the workplace, which I think you write about quite extensively in your book, right? Which is, you know, and also I've picked up twice that you've mentioned this idea that services businesses are less, you know, risky in terms of having technology come and like automate the thing end-to-end, you know. Uh so that's quite interesting that uh we're we're focusing quite a lot on services businesses. Um, maybe we could double down there. So on the services business side of things, if we're talking about uh this idea of hyper learning and the premise of it, um uh what are some of the uh hyper learning uh mindset and behaviors that are that you recognize in these entrepreneurs who have built incredibly huge successful businesses or service businesses?

SPEAKER_02 33:54

Even though they have strong personalities, they are very open-minded. They they do have some humility and so they are paranoid about what they may be missing, and so they seek outside advice or they seek input from their their customers. The second thing is they're really good listeners, they truly listen and they ask questions. The third thing is they make time for people. There's there's in companies that that have put in these processes before each meeting, they have a check-in process, and that's a process of making human connection. How have people come to the table? How is this meeting? And this is being done with entrepreneurial companies I'm working with that are ten people all the way up to thousands, all right? And it's a check-in process. Where's your head? How are things going? How are you feeling today? All right. Takes you know, a minute or two minutes to understand where the other person is, because that will gauge how you respond to them instead of come in, Jim, sit down. We got something to talk about. This is what I want to talk about now. What do you think of this? Da-da-da-da-da. Wait a minute. Come in, Jim. Sit down. How are you doing? How's it going today? Family okay? You doing okay? I want to explore with you this. That's a very different thing. So it's that making the never sort of losing the person side of it and becoming machine-like, which is very easy for high performance people. I used to be that way. Very easy to get caught up in. Okay, more and more, more, faster, faster, faster. I gotta be more efficient, more efficient, more efficient. You're gonna be more efficient when your people perform at the highest level. So it's those practices. Having even when you have a team meeting, all right? Team meeting. Do a three-minute exercise. Everybody sort of checks in, where's your head and everything? Then either do a deep breathing exercise for one or two minutes, or a three-minute meditation app. Let everybody calm down, they're gonna be fearful. You're the boss. Calm down, you calm down. Now, then we move on to the meeting, the end of the meeting, a checkout. How was it? Everybody on a good place, everybody, you know, any questions. You run these things where you bring emotions to the table. All right. When I was coming up through the business world, my first big job I remember, the first day, my day of orientation, my manager says, You see that door? Emotions never come through that door. And when you come into the door in the downstairs, this was in New York City, downstairs, leave your emotions outside. Well, that is the biggest mistake.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

All right. How do you do that?

SPEAKER_00 37:09

How the hell do you do that?

SPEAKER_02 37:11

One, one, you don't do it, but what he is saying and what organization is saying, you're gonna have all your emotional stuff, but we're not going there, and we don't really care about emotions. We care about performance. So it's all bottled up, all right, and it basically impacts performance. And I'm saying you got to sort of not become a shrink, but you gotta basically unbottle it enough that you can know where your people are at. Because if you think about it, an entrepreneurial business in the digital age is gonna have to continually evolve and get better, all right? Find new gaps, right? There's gonna be time limits to any gap to find new gaps. How do you do that? Who finds those gaps? Maybe you as the entrepreneur, but if you've got a bigger team and they're working with customers, wouldn't it be really cool to train them how to basically ask questions to find gaps? Well, those questions are questions which emotionally are laden, because the person, the customer is going to tell them the truth if they trust the person, if they feel good about the person. So finding your gaps, finding new opportunities from customers and getting ideas from customers is highly dependent upon what they feel about you, what they feel about you. That's another level where emotions come in. How you behave with people and how you relate to people will be the number one determining factor long term. And I'm going outside of the the uh it even occurs in the technology space, but I'm gonna leave technology to the side writing code. That's gonna be the key thing that that that impacts your success going forward, no matter whether you're a big company, small company, entrepreneur. An introvert, extrovert doesn't matter. There's a certain level of humanness that has to occur for excellence to occur.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

Yeah, it's this idea, I suppose, that people always remember how you made them feel, right? But they won't remember the words that you said three months ago, you know. But then your name will come up and it'll be like, yeah, yeah, that guy's a dick. Why is he a dick? No, he made me feel like it. Okay, why? You know what I mean? So it is it is a true thing. And you know, one of the things that we do as a team is we in our we have a vision statement working towards a 2024 vision, and what we're doing is we have like a five-minute uh uh well, it's not like an exercise, but it's like you it's just a thing where people send an email to someone in the company uh that they that did something for them or that helped them with something or whatever the case is and just thanks them for it and just doesn't thanks so much for that thing. Yeah, so and it's uh it's like a it's email-based gratitude or chat-based gratitude and things like that. We have a singing praises board on Teams where you know people have over like closed three proposals, you know, when we really needed it, whatever the case is, it's like you know, thinks these guys are really amazing, or you know, so I think it is right. I mean, we I think one of the things that's interesting from from my perspective is that uh we have I like I actually said to my ex go last week Friday, I said to them, Listen, I've I haven't actually spoken to the to the company for like three months, which is very unusual for me. I'm an over-communicator, I like to inspire and lead and things like that. And for me, it gives me anxiety because to your point, I don't actually know what's going on. I don't actually know how people are feeling. Are they feeling positive? Are they feeling this? But then I hear something from uh because my wife works within the business and she's she's telling me, listen, we had this scrum this morning and the guys are like chomping at the bit. Or they or they they they you know they closed out like half of the campaigns in three weeks, you know, and it's just like the team of motivatedness, like for me that's so interesting because it's the greatest, it's the greatest compliment you can get because that means that the culture that you built survives without you being involved in it all the time. Do you know what I mean? Because it's exhausting, because the the the bigger the business, the harder the work is to keep maintaining that level of motivation in your team, and you know, you've got COVID and pandemics and all stuff, uh, and riots down here in South Africa and things like that. So it's tough. People take it hard, and then there's you know, mental health weeks everywhere, and it's just like it's a tough time. And so you think as a leader that you must like over-communicate, and maybe in the beginning you should, but if you can build the culture through these practices, like you know, the gratitude stuff to your point, uh, it it eventually creates um a bond, a connection between people that does human humanize the workplace and that can survive without you. And I think that's a really important point because you know, you as a founder entrepreneur, like I'm not the type of guy who's gonna sit in a business for 10, 15 years. Like I have a three, four-year max window, and then I'm a sell and get out and try something else. Um, and you know, if you if you haven't got that culture dynamic right to sell it, when you leave, if you're not at scale, and by scale I mean a hundred plus employees, and you're like 50 employees or 20 or 30, and you leave, what happens? You see, because it creates a vacuum. Um, but it the but the culture will fill that vacuum because you built it as such through these principles that you're describing. So I can attest that it does work. Can I change gears for a second and talk about this idea of the five principles of the new smart? It's something that you write about in your book.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

So what are they? Walk us through it.

SPEAKER_02 43:12

Okay, I'm sorry. Uh new new new New Smart. The purpose of New Smart is to help people, if you will, operationalize the science of learning, which says we're suboptimal learners, and also to manage their ego. All right. As people go and advance and everything, people get pretty full of themselves. And everybody has an ego. It's just the degree in how it's managed. And New Smart says in the digital age, the pace of change is going to be so fast that the reality is going to be continuously changing, and there's going to be new data. Data, more data, faster data. And so how you approach work depends on how you define yourself. Most of us grew up in going to school, and we basically learned we were smart because we got to highest grades. We got to highest grades. So we identified with if I know more, if I know more than Matt, I'm smarter than Matt, I'm gonna be more successful than Matt, and I'm gonna get more A's. All right. If Matt thinks he's smarter than I am, the same thing's gonna motivate him. All right. And so we grew up, it's in effect, succeeding because we were smarter than other people, and that meant we knew more. All right, that we answered questions better, we get better tests. Well, in the digital age, no human's gonna know, there's no way any human's gonna know more than a smart machine. All right. So this identifying with what you know, all right, which gets in the way of collaboration, which gets in the way of listening, which gets in the way of good decision making because your ego's involved. This is what I think I've been successful, I must be right. All right. I'm not open-minded, okay. I'll listen to you, but you know, I'm gonna do what I think is the best thing, and usually that's cut that's why I'm here. That's why I'm the CEO. All right. And New Smart is designed, it's a mindset. It's designed to help people overcome that big ego that I'm right, I know, etc. I'm defined not by what I know or how much I know, but by the quality, quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating. Those, it's a quality. My mental models, my story of the world, and this is science. My mental models are not reality. They're only my generalized story of how my world works. Well, Matt's got different stories about the world than I do. He may think he's right. I used to think I'm right, okay. I know I'm not right. All right. So, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna basically ask Matt, how does he view this? What's going on? What data do you have? Where'd you get that? What's that based on? Wow, all right, that's something I gotta think about. Number three, I'm not my ideas, I must decouple my ideas from my ego. Why? Because listening and learning are critical skills for the digital age. If I identify with my idea, that's gonna mean I'm gonna be closed-minded. If I identify with my idea and Matt's talking to me, and Matt's saying stuff that doesn't fit with my idea, and I start thinking about something else, I'm not a good listener. I will definitely not be a good collaborator because I will view collaboration as a competition. And unfortunately, many men view collaboration as a competition. You know, I've been in the meetings. When the person, you know, gets the answer they want, that meeting's over. Okay, even though four people haven't talked, that meeting's over, done. I'm not my ideas. I must be open-minded and treat my ideas, my beliefs, and I'm not talking about uh values, my beliefs is hypothesis to be constantly stress tested by others. All right, and then my mistakes and failures are opportunities to learn. Everybody's gonna make mistakes and failures. The key is not to make the same mistake over and over again. The key is to say, all right, I missed on this. Now, what did I learn? What am I gonna change? And so the five components of New Smart were designed to enable people to embrace humility, the psychological definition of humility, not the dictionary definition, which is meekness. Okay, the psychological definition of humility, because humility that means quieting one's mind in the sense that it's not all about me, allows you to listen better and to collaborate better. And the best teams, you just said you've built a company and you've got all these teams, and you haven't talked to them in months, and things are are still happening and going. Why? Because you've created an environment that enables that, all right? And that in that environment, and you may have your own way of creating the teams, and you may have the right principles, but you're clearly open-minded enough and secure enough that you trust those people that they can go a month or so without checking in. You're looking at other data, you know if something's going wrong, but you're looking at data. So all of this comes back to the new smart. What is new smart in the digital age? It's not how much you know, because you're never gonna know more than technology. An individual's biggest competition in the digital age is gonna be him or herself. My biggest competition going forward is me. It's not Matt. And I'm not Matt's competition because how I manage what's going on inside of myself, how I liberate myself to be the best learner and to be adaptive, to explore, to discover, to go into the unknown and figure things out. The people that are really gonna be do well in the digital age are the people that can go into the unknown and figure it out and figure out a way to solve a problem. And what is that called? Entrepreneurship. It doesn't matter whether you're gonna be in a big company or a small company, everybody's gonna have to have that skill.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

Yeah, that's such a great uh bombshell, that one. It's truth bomb, it's truth bomb, people. Uh, I think one of the things you mentioned there around failure, I think uh for entrepreneurs, I don't know how you feel about it, Ed, but it's in many cases um we don't fully understand why we have failed. Um and I think in many cases we're ignorant of why we actually succeed. It's interesting, right? It's like we isn't it weird that it's like we found success. How'd you get there? I'm not really sure. But how many times you felt, no, this is you know what I mean? We're ignorant about our own success. And I think we it's easy, it's it's difficult to your point because you can point to the external stuff as we touched on right up front. But really, as you pointed out, it's this this inner game, it's this ability to compete with yourself. Because isn't there a a there's a line from a from a song, I think it was Baz Lehman's always wear sunscreen, and he and he narrates there and he says, uh in the end the the race is long, but the the race in the end is only with yourself. And it's it's true, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:06

It's exactly true. It's it's it's the and I I tell people, I s I ask people, you know, how many of you do physical training every day? And a lot of people raise their hand. So how many of you do mind training? No hands. How many of you do heart training? No hands. And I say, You have to do mind training and heart training every day, just like you have to do your PT. So it's M T, H T and P T. You do that every day. You will be a human a human being that has the potential to succeed in the environment that we're in and going into much deeper because it's that inner self. And you'll be more in touch with yourself, you'll be more open, etc. And so, yeah, I mean the it's and if you can create the culture where people help each other because it's that otherness concept, all right. Um, you know, one of the one of the you know most renowned uh psychologists in the United States, you know, have made a great statement. She says, no one really succeeds at the highest at the highest level by themselves.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

No one. Um let's wrap this up. You've written 13 books. Why do you do what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

SPEAKER_02 52:41

That's a good question. To make a difference, to learn. I'm a very curious person. Um I enjoy learning to connect. Um it's it all comes down to what's you know, what's the meaning? Why am I here? And trying to figure that out. And um, and I enjoy going, I'm I'm I'm I've been very fortunate. I got to where I am because of other people. Um my my life is a very um unusual life. I've had in effect three careers, um, and most of it not planned. And so it's it's been opportunistic. And so it's to basically why I get up in the morning now, it's to give back. To give back. I've been very, very fortunate, and I got to where I was because of other people. And it took me, you know, some time to learn that, and I had to make that transformation to the otherness. And so I get up to basically just try to help people so other people can have meaningful work, meaningful life, to have some joy in whatever way I can. And that can be have nothing to do with business. You know, it's how I look and how I behave with, you know, in the grow, you know, with the grocery checkout person. When I see somebody walking down the street, what do I do? Uh when I see a neighbor, what do I do? And so it's just a trying to basically I wake up every morning, I do all my practices and processes, trying to be a better person and a better contributor. That's the game.

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Awesome stuff. Thank you for your time, Professor Edward Hess. Everybody go and check out either any of his 13 books. But this one we're covering today, Hyper Learning, How to Adapt to the Speed of Change. I think there's a lot of amazing insights and principles there that uh we should all be applying more of in our own businesses and even in our personal lives. I think a lot of this stuff accounts. So, Ed, thank you so much for your time. It's been great to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_02 54:54

Thank you very much. Thank you, all the best.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

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