MBS963-How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying Around with David Burkus

Why are some people and teams more motivated, more innovative, and more successful than others? Why do some teams of talented and seemingly compatible people fall short against lesser teams with less suitable members? Why do some leaders cast bold inspiring visions that fail to materialize, while other, seemingly inconsequential leaders rally their teams to victory? Join in as Matt chats to David Burkus author of 'pick a fight' to talk about vivid visions, rallying around something to fight for, and leadership.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the big things that I push for is we can talk about what your vision is. First, tell me what you're fighting for, and then we'll talk about what the world looks like when you win. I guess you could do it in the reverse too. You could talk about what you want the world to look like when you win, the vivid vision, and then you can tell me how you're fighting to get there. Um, but you're I don't think you're complete until you've done both.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Hi guys, today we are joined all the way from Oklahoma in the US by David Burkis. He is the author of Pick a Fight, How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying Around. Now, David is not just an author, he is probably one of the world's leading business thinkers in the areas of leadership and business, specifically all around this idea of purpose-led brands and businesses and how they translate to bottom line economic value. He is the best-selling author of not one book, but in fact four books about business and leadership. Uh, they've won multiple awards, they've been translated into dozens of languages. And his insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAI Today, Fast Company, Financial Times, Bloomberg Business Week, CNN, and many, many, many others. He's also a sought-after international speaker, and his TED Talk has been viewed over two million times on YouTube. So go have a look at that. So he is a former business school professor, and uh we do get into all different aspects of organizational psychology and strategic leadership and what it really means to lead today in distributed workforces. We talk about this idea of purpose-led brands and pay careful attention to uh the part of that particular conversation where we talk about Tom's shoes and the and the idea that customers buy the cause first and then the product. Uh, we really do double down on so many important concepts, guys, that I really do feel are worthy of your time and attention. So without further ado, let's get your attention on the awesome David Burkes. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to another cracking instalment of the MapRound show. Today I'm joined by the great and powerful David Burkes, all the way from the US. Welcome to the show, dude.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Oh, thank you so much for having me. That makes me sound like the Wizard of Oz, uh, who we all know is not actually all that great and powerful.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

So put your cape down. Put your cape down. So, Ohio, what's happening over there, eh?

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Uh oh, I'm in Oklahoma, which is fairly, I mean, fairly close, midwest of the US. Um, we are this part of the country is in a very interesting COVID response compared to like everywhere else, right? The the coast of the country feels a lot like how we describe Europe right now with heading back into lockdowns and all that sort of stuff. We're in the middle of the country. I don't know how it is in in um in Jayburg, but we're we're just sort of done, right? Like, yeah, we take precautions, we're masks, extra hand hygiene, et cetera. But we're like, put our kids back in school and let's just go. So that's been interesting, it's been an interesting development because the the interesting thing about the United States in any situation, but in particular national crises, et cetera, is that as a country, we're a lot more like the European Union than we are one country. Like every state has a different response.

SPEAKER_04 3:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Um, and the way that the system of government works, like those states have that sort of power. So it's hard to get a handle on how anything is going on at countrywide. So um so yeah, I'm glad you asked it specific to a state.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Yeah, no, exactly. Well, I mean, I'm still learning as I go. So, as I mentioned um uh before uh we went live, I'm moving to the US, and it's it's so fascinating for me because for when you're sitting on the periphery um as a kind of a global citizen, you know, exposed heavily to US media because it's just the world media is so dominated by what's going on over there, US elections is a case in point. Uh it's very hard, unless you've lived there, um, to fully appreciate that it is in fact, you know, 50 different countries that form part of this United States, is exactly like Europe. So you can't treat them all the same. Like New York is different to like New Jersey and whatever.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

So yeah, exact exactly right. Right, and you and and uh yeah, Texas and New York are two very different countries, right? They I mean I actually heard it once said, so so if you look at our history of our country, um, the Civil War, which happened in the mid-1800s, was was uh post-Civil War was when we stopped using United States as a plural and started using it singular, right? So in all of the documentation before that, you would hear the United States R, as in like the multiple United States as a plural. And then after the Civil War, it became a singular. Um, but I sometimes wonder if that was a mistake, right? Because then that sends the message that there really is this unified sort of thing. But as you start to travel around and you'll find this when you come here, and then you start taking road trips. Culturally, there's like seven or eight different countries inside this country. And then legally, like you said, it's almost like 50 with a rough federalist unification system, but it's very different as you go from state to state on a lot of different issues.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, guys, today we're not going to talk about states in America.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Oh no, I thought that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

I thought that not today, pal. Not to but not today, pal. Um, so uh David, you read this cool book here called Pick a Fight. Um, and it's uh basically the the whole premise here is how great teams find a purpose worth rallying around. Um, there's a hell of a lot to get into um here today. Uh so uh David, could you maybe hit our audience around the world with a elevator pitch like who are you, what are you about, what gets you up, you know, keeps you up at night. What's happening?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, well, let me go backwards. What gets me uh up in the morning and keeps me up at night is uh really trying to make work not suck. We're trying to make the experience of people's work lives uh a whole lot more enjoyable. I think that that work is too important and too central to most people's lives to just be this drain on them, right? Um and that starts by trying to change companies. So the bulk of my work uses organizational psychology to try and make companies and teams a lot better, a lot smarter, a lot more creative, a lot more engaging, etc. And and Pickaphyte serves that angle. Pickaphyte really targets this disconnect between what we know about the importance of having a purpose and a founding story and all of this exciting stuff that we give lip service to, and the fact that most people are still actively disengaged in their job. Most people don't make the connection between whatever flowery words are on the plaque in the lobby and what their day-to-day job actually is, right? So we know that this purpose thing is important. Every company has a mission statement, a vision statement, and she every entrepreneur is like after you figure out that you're Uber for X, the next thing you're supposed to do is write your mission statement, right? And yet what most people do is end up writing one that's really sort of terrible. So over time, working with a lot of organizations and then looking into the research on what bonds and motivates teams, I kind of came to the conclusion that when you're talking about top performers, when you're talking about the most engaged people, people don't want to join a company. They want to join a crusade or they want to join a cause. And so the mission statements, the purpose statements that are actually most inspiring and help people make the connection between their work, their team, and their larger organizational goal are the ones that answer the question, what are we fighting for? Um and hence that sort of turns into this idea of pick a fight. Yeah, you need to pick a fight with something. Usually it's not a competitive company, usually it's some other injustice or inconvenience or something else in the world. We can dive into the different types of fights. Um, but you have to choose it wisely, right? Because if you just decide we're gonna knock off these competitors, you're not gonna motivate people. If you can appeal to the higher thing about society that you're trying to change or about the world that you're trying to save, then you can really engage people and recruit them to join that cause much more effectively.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Yeah, absolutely. Um I wanted to maybe uh pose a point for us to springboard off in that this whole um you know idea of a purpose-led mission and vision statements and you know, all this kind of stuff. It it's it there's so much lip service that's been applied to it um you know over the years. Simon Cinex made a lot of the of this sort of he took like an old you know organizational mission, vision thing and articulated it in this what, why, how kind of three concentric circles. And so now we all need to know what our why is uh all of a sudden. And so I wanted to maybe just get your your objective view is I mean, how much lip service is there actually in this? And you know, if you think about founders, they often, in many cases, they don't do this kind of thinking until their the business is actually quite a long way in. Does it make sense?

SPEAKER_04 8:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

So why is that the case? Why do we ignore this stuff if it's so important?

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Yeah. So I think I think one of the biggest problems is isn't that nobody believes we shouldn't start with why. I think the big problem now is nobody's explained what, as in what does a good why look like, right? Um we know that we need to have this sort of important purpose thing, and then we we phrase it out there, usually to a founder, right? It's what's important to him or her. Um, and that works, especially with a charismatic founder. That works as long as you're connected to four or five employees. But as soon as their organization has such a number of employees that there are levels and not everyone is interacting with the founder on a day-to-day basis, now people can't just sort of see that founder's vision, that founder's drive doesn't rub off on them and they don't absorb it sort of through osmosis. So now we need to start kind of phrasing it. And uh the problem is if you if you Google it, you end up finding like terrible examples of mission statements. I have a it's somewhere on that shelf. I have a book called 101 mission statements. And I swear to you, 95 of them are terrible, right? They're blah, blah, blah, shareholder value, or they're or they're so vague they that they try and be sort of all-encompassing. Like what I think happens for a lot of large organizations or even small, you know, entrepreneurial organizations, when they get to the size they realize they need to put this thing in writing, um, is that it it ends up being this sort of thing by committee, right? So it ends up being like we sit down and we have the original kind of founder's intent. Maybe we talk about the founder's story, and then we realize I need to, I need to change this and put it into um a paragraph long document. And so we invite people from a cross-section of the company, which is good, that's a good intent. But then as soon as we start talking about the actual words, everyone turns into like politicians and parliamentarians and starts debating for why their little thing needs to be included. And and they then they start acting like you know, university English professors trying to change this word has too many connotations, and let's use this one and blah, blah, blah. And we end up with this sort of vague document that was kind of written by committee, right? Because nobody, A, nobody explained to us what a good what sort of looks like. And then B, we wrote it by committee and had all of these people we had to satisfy. And as a result, everybody's sort of equally miserable, right? But the best ones, the most compelling ones, even the ones that are in Start with Why that Simon Sinek, you know, uses, are usually sort of super clear and super concise. And so what I did, it's sort of I look at the thing them as complementary. In pick a fight, what we look at is people want an answer to the question, what are we fighting for? And here's three templates, or here's three mad libs you can use to see if your existing mission purpose or why people would say they work actually fits into one of these templates. And if you do, then use that template because it's much clearer, it's much more concise, it sends that message much easier. And we know from the research that it's proven to motivate people.

SPEAKER_02 11:31

Yeah, absolutely. So that almost is a great uh premise to the next question that I wanted to get into, which is all about actually getting a team to take action after that vision. So, but for our audience here is like I don't really know like 101, 95 of them are bad. Maybe what we could do, um David, is maybe we could give what good looks like. Yeah, and then we can use that to kind of frame the conversation from there.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yeah, yeah, let's do it. So let me let me tell you what I call them the three fights or what could call them the three templates, the three ways to frame a purpose that's that bonds and motivates people. Um and then I'll give you an example for each, right? So the first one, and probably the one that's really familiar for a lot of entrepreneurs, is what I would call the revolutionary fight, which is not about overthrowing a government or anything like that, but it's not that far off. The revolutionary fight is quite simply points to a societal norm or something in the status quo or something that the industry says is acceptable and says we refuse to accept that, right? That's the core of the revolutionary fight. They say this is acceptable, we refuse to accept that. And then by doing business, we're working to sort of change that status quo, right? So I'll give you, I'll give you one from my two buddies of mine that started this company that's one of my favorites. This is the case that I have on my phone. Um, it's a wonderful, awesome case. It looks a little weird. And I show it to people and they usually go, Oh, it's made from recycled plastic, so it's sort of eco-friendly. No, this is actually made from leftover farming materials. It's fully organic materials that have been melted down into an injectable, moldable plastic. And if you throw it in a compost, it biodegrades in 10 years, right? So the company's called Pila, and what they're working for, you ask anybody what they're fighting for, they'll tell you they're fighting for a waste-free future. They're tired of an industry that just says, you know what, little accessories like cell phone cases, et cetera, they're made from petroleum. They're gonna last for 10,000 years, but we need to get the cost down so it's an acceptable trade-off of doing business. Well, we refuse to accept that. And we're not gonna change consumerism, so let's just change what gets consumed and find a new way to make plastic and make it in a way that biodegrades. And what I love about this company in particular, the reason I use them as an example is they had a lot of success with just cell phone cases and a variety of for a variety of different phones. And then you would think they got they got a five million dollar investment from Jay-Z's uh in the venture fund, which I think is awesome. And then they started using that money to go, okay, what product are we gonna go after next? And instead of thinking like, oh, let's do tablet cases or laptop cases or whatever, they didn't think about computer peripherals. They they asked, what's the next most sort of consumed plastic material? And they started making sunglasses. So now they have sunglasses that you take them to the beach for the summer, you accidentally lose them, it's okay, right? They're biodegradable. Um, it's it's this next sort of level that what they're trying to do is look at every product that is consumed, that's made of plastic, that's consumed too frequently and then just discarded and change what gets consumed, right? You ask anybody in the company, what are we fighting for, they say we're fighting for a waste-free future. That's a revolution, right? That's to me is amazing. The second type of fight is what I would call the underdog fight. Now, this is this is actually true to me. I know we're not going to talk about geography and cultural differences, but I have to tell you, I live in the middle of the U.S. now, but I'm originally from Philadelphia, which is the underdog city, right? Gets out of Rocky, right? Exactly. Um I mean, Rocky's a great example. If you most Philadelphians, their greatest sports hero is a fictional character who loses a boxing match, right? But he's the underdog. And what is he trying to do? He's trying to prove himself. In fact, he, you know, the very first Rocky, he loses. But what he says midway through the movie is I'm not trying to win, I'm trying to go the distance because no one's ever gone the distance with Apollo Creed. If I do that, I'll prove that I'm not a bum. So the underdog fight is about that. It's not about being small, it's about proving critics wrong, right? Corporate example of this. I mean, people love over talking about this. I feel bad because now every founder of Netflix has their own book, so they're not as an exciting company to talk about. But a lot of people know Netflix, now it's the dominant player. At the time, it was the upstart taking on Blockbuster and other rental companies. Blockbuster actually had the opportunity to purchase it before they went bankrupt at the hands of Netflix. And they passed. And when you look at the financials of both companies at the time, Blockbuster actually made the right call. Netflix was hemorrhaging cash. They were about six weeks from going out of business. They went to Blockbuster hoping for basically a bailout. Like, if you buy us, we can keep our people employed. And Blockbuster was like, why would we buy out a failing company? Right. But what they got in that rejection was a way to go back to their employees and go, look, Blockbuster doesn't see the future, right? They're discounting us. They don't understand it. They got this whole underdog narrative out of that rejection that they leveraged. And you can see it, Reed Hastings and the other founders, they still leverage it because after they dominated in movies, what do they do? They started taking on television in Hollywood film studios. And now they're taking on cable as a whole. And basically, I don't know what it is that the situation is in South Africa, but here every major cable company is basically flailing to try and now come direct through the internet, which was something that Blockbuster started. And when they win there, they'll take on some other established player and try and prove the critics wrong, right? So that's the underdog fight. It's not about just being small, it's about being discounted and being able to prove why they're wrong. And then the very last fight, probably my favorite fight, actually, is the ally fight, which says that it's not actually about us at all. It's about the ability to point to somebody else and say they're fighting for this, and here's how we help them, right? So uh I'll throw another Pennsylvania one in there just for fun, uh, but it's a global company. But in central Pennsylvania, there's a place I used to go to all the time, Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Hershey Foods Company is based, right? Hershey's chocolate. They make a lot of other, you know, non-candy products, et cetera, now. Um, and they were actually one of those companies in that book of 101 mission statements that were just terrible. Um, it was something about undisputed marketplace leadership. Like their mission statement that they were saying in their 10K was just our mission is to be the market leader. Super boring, right? But it turned out it didn't actually have a negative effect on their employees because their fight was something totally different. Not a lot of people know this, but everybody who works at headquarters knows this. When Milton uh Hershey, the original founder of the company, was preparing his estate, in essence, when he was getting ready to die, he and his wife had been investing in uh a school that they had started for orphans, biological and societal orphans, people who parents died or parents were too poor to even send them to school, kids who are experienced, now it'd be kids experiencing high levels of truancy because their parents just aren't caring about getting them an education. This school would take them, move them into a house with house parents, and educate them. Before he died, Milton gifted all of his ownership in the company to a trust that runs the school. So the Hershey Foods Company's main shareholder, their primary owner, is a school for orphans, a nonprofit school that educates biological and societal orphans. And most people in the home office know that. Most people who work for Hershey know that. Most of us who just buy a candy bar every once in a while don't know that. But like 55% of what you're buying goes to that, those kids and that orphan. So what are we fighting for? It's the ally fight. We're by operating in our main business, which has nothing to do with education. We're helping fund education for those kids. They're the people that we're actually fighting for by working, right? So you see in all three of these different examples, right? What you see is something much more clear and much more concise, and that fits a template that I could get super nerdy about the motivational research behind why each of these works. But the big thing I think for most founders and most leaders is just can you fit what you're doing now into one of those three templates? Is it a revolution? Is it an underdog attempt to prove critics wrong and prove that your different way of doing things is better? Or is it an ally fight? Is it actually helping a specific group of people, even if it doesn't seem like it at first? You doing business helps other people win what they're fighting for.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Yeah, there's so much to go in there and we're happy for you to go super nerdy on us around the motivation stuff. Because like the data's interesting, right? Because it either removes egos from a room or it creates them. Uh but but uh I wanted to um actually just stay here for a so for a second and talk about these three fights because you kind of you now we have to go into the detail, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Because Right, yeah, that was a super top line I probably.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

Yeah, don't ask me about that, man. But I have data, I can get nerdy about it. But so um, but uh but seriously though, I mean I I think it's interesting that you have these three options, and I think as a founder, you should choose one, but I think in some cases, if you're not if you don't have the data, you may be on the fence, or maybe you're just not empowered to make a decision around which is the right type of fight for me to adopt as a company. Um, and there's so much that goes into it. So um I'll ask you about the data thing in a second, but like I have a point to maybe throw in there on top of the data, which is about this idea of legacy. So um, and I'll send you a copy of my book for all the guests, but um, I write about this idea of of legacy and regret, and and you know, talk about the moment of your death and how you use the moment of your death to figure out well, what is the right sort of thing to stand up for as a as a as a founder first? Because that's actually what this is about. Because and then I also wanted to get I want to get into around founder values versus organizational values and how they all kind of blend together. Um, but maybe this is one big conversation we need to get into. Um, but how do you decide what's right for you? What does the data say? What is the role of legacy, if any? Um, how do we figure this stuff out?

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Yeah, so this one really depends. Um, and I would say the number one thing it depends on is size. So if you are, if it's just you or it's you and a co-founder, uh, or maybe it's you and two employees or something like that, then you could probably just pick, right? And you probably already have one. Like most of the founders that I work with, uh, as soon as I outlay the three templates, they're like, yeah, I've never thought of it as a revolution, but this is why we're a revolution, right? Um if you've got more than that, and especially if you have an organization that's the size that's such a size that some of your employees are outside your span of control. They report to a different manager, for example. Then I think it's not actually about what you want, it's about what people, what would most resonate with people, right? In other words, the people that you already hired, what fight do they most want to be a part of, or how do they already see their organization as that, but they've never put it to words? Like there's this misconception. Leadership as a whole. And maybe this goes back to the Simon Cynics or before him. Simon's sort of a Gen X John Maxwell. So if you want to go back into the baby boomer generation, you had John Maxwell, and then I don't know who came before him, right? Um, but there's this there's this misconception, I think, for a lot of them, that that great leaders cast a vision and get buy-in from all of their people, right? And that's just quite simply not true. What great leaders did to build a following was put to words the vision that was already in the hearts of those people, right? But they didn't realize they were aching for that change, or they didn't realize that that this was the solution to a problem they all agreed they had, right? You look at everybody from history, you're like somebody like Martin Luther King in the I Have a Dream speech. Martin Luther King didn't need to sell half a million people who came to listen to him speak on the idea of racial equality. They already believed it. What the I Have a Dream speech did was put to words and something concisely what people were already feeling. And they went, yes, I have that exact same dream. This is exactly what I'm going for too, right? So that's what we're we're looking to do, you know, on a smaller scale, because most of us are probably not pushing for something that amazing when we think about legacy, but it still matters. So what I encourage a lot of people to do, if you've got, let's say, more than uh a dozen people in your organization, what I encourage you to do is have a one-to-one with each person and ask them two really simple questions. Ask them, I mean tell them they're not in trouble. This isn't a quiz, like their employment doesn't rest on this. Um, but ask them two questions. What do we do here? Like in your own words, what do we do in this organization? And then the second question is, how does what you do help us do that? And that'll tell you a bunch of different things, right? First of all, it'll tell you whether or not they really actually have any sense of higher ambition in the organization or have any sense of what your desire for legacy is. Um, but it'll also tell you whether or not they feel like their job aligns with those things. But then depending on, let's say, the nouns and the and the verbs that they use to describe what you do, you'll get a pretty good sense of where they lean in one of these fights, right? So if they talk about the industry and how much they're this company is different from the industry and trying to change things in the industry, which fight do you think that aligns with? The revolutionary fight, right? Because they're trying to change that status quo. If they talk about customers and here's how customers are helped by this, et cetera, then they're probably more motivated by that ally fight idea, right? And if they talk about critics and how they're trying to overcome this and that, which is the rarest of the three, I'll admit, then they're probably more that underdog um style fight, right? So you survey them, you just take note of it, right? Write it down, or or even better, record their answers so you can look at them all later and then move on to the next person. And then when you get answers from everybody, you can kind of zoom out and go, yeah, most of us are talking about how this organization is different from industry norms. So that's what we should probably emphasize when we start writing out what our fight is and what we decide so that we should probably use that revolutionary fight framework. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 24:50

It does, it does. Um it could also, but I want to kind of re-paraphrase what you said um in the context of a of a brand I'm sure you know called Tom's. Tom's shoes. So it's kind of like a cause. So so um, which was the word you used earlier in the show, um, in that you, you know, you pick a cause, and that cause is what attracts your people, it galvanizes your people around this mission, right? Um, or this cause. But it can also apply externally to the to the to the business, so internally for your people, but externally in terms of your customer bets, which is what Tom's did so well, uh, in the sense of you know, you buy one of our shoes, we'll gift one to a child in need. Um, and it was the cause, the idea, the mission for the brand, which is what the customers also bought at the same time. Um, and so um, and I and from I mean, I haven't been in the space for quite some time or covered it or spoken about it for quite some time. But what is actually happening out there in this cause-driven, you know, sort of brand, this purpose-led brand um space at the moment. What are some other practical brands that people may encounter in their daily lives that go, okay, I can connect the dots now to what Dave's saying?

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

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SPEAKER_00 27:06

Yeah, so there's so there in terms of the revolution, there's actually a lot, right? And and a lot of it is that you could there's throw people throw out buzzwords like cause-driven marketing and that sort of stuff, but there really is solid data that customer loyalty is higher, people are willing to pay a slight premium on products that actually, you know, save the world, for example. Um, I mean, the case with Pila, so these are like US dollars, like$39, which is maybe 10-15% more than your average case, not exorbitant, right? But people are willing to pay that because they understand this the story, right? Um, in the same capacity, you look at a company like Method, the soap company, right, that uses simple, non-harsh chemicals stuff that doesn't really harm the environment all of that much. And then, and then I think the thing that you've got to do in a um when you're really trying to go at this from a cause-driven marketing standpoint, the thing that you've got to do is have some visual element of the brand also represent it. Like it has to actually be different, right? Tom's Tom's shoes are ugly, dude. They are ugly, ugly shoes, right? But because they're ugly, they catch attention and then they let people share the story. So a lot of people feel like just by buying it, I'm buying into the campaign, I'm buying into the crusade, I'm joining the cause. And then when people ask me about my shoes, I mean, now pretty much everybody recognizes Tom's, but in the early days, when people ask me about my shoes, I can tell them that whole story. The method bottle is very, very uh uniquely shaped compared to a lot of soap bottles. This case, I'll be honest, is really ugly. It's got little flecks of soy husk in there because that's what it was made from, right? But it gives me an opportunity to sort of tell that story, right? My friend Clay would call these portable stories. What are the stories about the brand that you can really easily tell? Um, and if you can do that to your consumers and connect it back to the fight, then you make it easier for your consumers to tell it to other people, which I'll be honest with you, I go back and forth on this, right? The organizational psychologist, the purpose-driven guy loves this idea of recruiting even consumers to join the fight. Um, the marketing guy in me is like, this is a really cool trick for getting increased conversions, right? Like it really sort of varies. I'm sometimes cynical about it, um, but it definitely works if you can make that story sort of easier to tell. This is probably an area where, to use the example in the ally fight, where it comes like Hershey food struggles, most people have no idea. When I tell them the story of the school for orphans, et cetera, they're like, that's the first I've ever heard of that. It actually is on at least the Hershey chocolate bar. If you flip it over on the back, there's a little thing about the story, but that's it. They don't do a lot in the way that they package and market to recruit other people to share the story. There might be a bunch of different reasons than that. And I haven't spoken to any senior leaders in Hershey in like four or five years, so I can't really comment on what they're doing right now. Um, but I can tell you that they tell the story frequently among employees, right? And that they know it. In fact, some of those employees gave me a tour of the school about five years ago. It was amazing. Um, so that's what I think. That's what I think is the difference when we're talking about consumers. You still need to make it clear and concise what you're doing, but then there's something in the product packaging and branding that also sort of helps them tell the story to other people, increases that word of mouth, and maybe even makes them more likely to just want to join just so that they can join some sort of cause. Just by buying a cell phone case, I can tell people that I'm doing my part to save the planet. That's that's pretty cool, right? Why wouldn't I pay the extra$19 on the case or whatever?

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I love what you're saying because I think what you all I I was like years ago when I was still trying to figure out what it means to be an entrepreneur. I always remember this line uh that you know, people buy you first and then they buy the product or the service that you're offering. Um, and I think that's that's almost evolved now into what you're describing, right? Which is people buy the cause first and then the product and service, which is kind of exactly what you said with Tom's, right? And that they openly say, like the CEO of Tom's, I mean he does this, he openly goes out there and says, our product is not that great. There are better shoes out there. I mean, yeah, you know what I'm saying, and then they still shoot the lights out from a customer perspective. So it's actually it's so true, it's more true today than ever before. Why do you think this is now? What do you think has led to this evolution in terms of consumerism?

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yeah, so to be candid, I don't know. Um, I don't know that it was never there, right? I mean, I or that it that it just now popped up and and it was never there before. I think it was always there. I think we uh to get into kind of some of the ideas that I actually talked about in a prior book in Friend of a Friend, there's this phenomenon known as social capital, sort of the thing that bonds communities of people together. And one of the phenomenons in sociology and in network studies, et cetera, is that social capital as a whole has sort of been declining, right? So uh the most famous book, there's a book by Robert Putnam called Bowling Alone, which is all about how in America, at least, and in probably probably Canada, they seem to like bowling too. Um, there were there were every every like Thursday night you could count on most middle class American men going to a bowling league and hanging out with their four buddies. Like if you ever watch The Simpsons, right? Uh, 20 years ago, now that it's like a 40-year running show, there was all of these jokes about Homer and the bowling league that he would go out with and that sort of thing. And and if it wasn't bowling, it was a community group. It was Knights of Columbus, right? It was um it was the Masons, uh, which is the world's worst secret society because it's really just a drinking club for middle-aged men, right? There were there were there were community groups around activities for for women, et cetera. Like we had these things, and then gradually in the industrialization and the commoditization of society, a lot of those things fell away. Now people go bowling alone. They don't do these leagues. Now people are much less likely to go to things like church or synagogue or temple, right? And so what happens there is a void is left, a sense of community that used to be filled by um elements of your social life is sort of gone. And it's no surprise that we look to fill that in a variety of different ways. It's interesting to me that we're looking to fill that by joining alongside sort of companies, right? Um, and in fact, part of me, and like I said, the cynic in me doesn't even know that I want to advocate for this, right? Um, this is this isn't like a prescription. I'm glad this is where society is going. It's just where it's going. Um, and so I think we become more aware of that. I think the other thing that happens at a broader trend is as we get into like, so that's the negative side of globalization and commoditization. The positive side of that is that now we we've been in a global age for a hundred years, but it's much easier to see the global impact of all of our decisions as well, which means it's easier to see the global impact of the companies that we're supporting, et cetera, which means we want to see it, right? Um, so the couple different sort of sociological reasons why I think it's heightened right now, but I also don't, I I don't, I'm not convinced that it was lacking. I think it just shifted where we're looking for that purpose and meaning because we as a global society are shifting where we draw that purpose and meaning from. It used to be, uh, and I think candidly, I think a thousand years ago it actually was work. And then we shifted it, especially in the industrial revolution, it became family and community, and work was just that thing you did to pay the bills for a lot of people. And then now it's sort of shifting back to where it was before, right? To where I mean, if you talk to a lot of boomers and beyond generationally, you talk to people who could really sort of compartmentalize the work that they did with the rest of their family. Xers, millennials, gen Z, um, they don't do that, right? So, and I think I think there's that shift as well. I I hesitate to get into the generational stuff. My friend Jason Dorsey is gonna kill me on this because he's like the Gen Z expert. And if he watches this, he's gonna be like, You got this wrong, you got this wrong, you got this wrong. So maybe what I'll tell you, Matt, is that you should probably just have him on your show.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

Yeah, you do that. Yeah, let's get him on. I mean, uh, we'll do that. Yeah, let's let's let's defer that discussion to him. Let's put him in the hot seat. Hospital past that one.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Cool. I do want to say, I do want to say something though, you said earlier, please, which was that idea that as a founder, people buy you before they buy your company, your product, et cetera. I think that's dead on, right? What pick a fight addresses is in that moment where they're no longer buying you because there's too big of a business. Even people don't have a personal relationship with you, right? When you're looking for funding, when you're hustling to get that first couple of employees, when you're hustling to get those first couple retail outlets in the store or first couple users, et cetera. Yeah, people buy you and they buy that founder, et cetera. After that, like you can't scale human interaction. A founder can only interact with so many people. So it's about how you capture that same purpose, that same story, right? Most people don't really know Blake, but they know Blake's story around Tom's, right? And so that's the shift that I think a lot of organizations struggle with. Is now people have bought into me in my vision, but now there's so many people that I don't get to interact with them every day. So how do I develop that same portable story to use Clay Aber's term, but for my employees as well, so that they understand why I started this company. And it might mean rephrasing that original purpose in one of these three lenses of a fight as the one that's going to resonate the most with those employees. But the goal is the same. The goal is to find a way to connect people back to that founder purpose, founder mission, founder legacy to use your term, without having to have constant one-on-one interactions with the founder.

SPEAKER_02 36:28

Yeah, I want to add um some more rocker fuel into that founder discussion. Because I think one of the things I've learned recently as a founder is that, and I founded quite a few companies at this stage, over 10 at least. And um, I think one of the overlooked insights for me, maybe other people recognize it, such as yourself, but for me, I didn't recognize that in all of these businesses that I have founded, I am automatically baking my DNA as the founder into that company. Um, and what happens is that the the paradigm is, well, no, you must have a company vision. You know what I'm saying? And it's all organizational stuff. It's well, you know, own your shit or uh ruthless accountability or you know, care uh or whatever the case is. And to your point, it's like they become labels and it becomes a political discussion around what's the right word to use to label the feeling that we want to create as a company, you know. Um, and so the whole idea of the founder value and the role of the founder DNA gets completely overlooked in many cases. And um, there's a book I forget the name now. I'll I'll have a look when I after I answer the question, but it was all around um oh, it's called The Vivid Vision, and it talks about the idea. Yeah, Cameron Harold, yeah. Great, cool, Ren. Fantastic, great, fantastic. So it's you know, it's all about this idea of articulating a vision, but baking your DNA into what this company is about, actually, and its cause and its purpose, and the way that it treats his people, the way that it treats its customer, uh, and where it's going on a three-year trajectory. Do you know what I'm saying? Um, and so do you agree with this idea of recognizing what are your founder values actually, and then from there expressing the organizational outfit?

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

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 has 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 mattbrown 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_00 39:15

Yes. Um, I think I think we gotta define a couple terms here too. Perfect, right? Um, and and I hate doing this because then the message that a lot of people get is like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to pay a consultant 10 grand to come in and run a day-long workshop to figure these all out, right? Um I love I love Cameron. I'm I'm a huge fan of Cameron's, I've I've known him for a couple years now. We go to an annual entrepreneurship conference every year together. And the vivid vision is a great template for developing a vision. But a vision is sort of one of three pieces for that founder's DNA piece, right? Maybe even one of four, right? So there's there's there's um there's purpose, there's mission, and there's vision. And they're three different things that sort of nest inside each other, right? The purpose is that broader, I would say the purpose is the fight, right? Is the what are we fighting for? What are we trying to change? I'm pila case and we're trying to fight for a waste-free future. Great. The mission is how we're going to win that fight, right? So I'm pila case, we're fighting for a waste free future. Uh, what's our mission? Our mission is to change most consumerable items that are made with plastic into something that is more biodegradable and that is actually waste-free, right? So that's how we're gonna do it. And then our vision is what the world looks like when we've achieved that, right? The the great Pacific garbage patch is gone, right? Um, people die, the consumerism levels don't change, but what gets consumed is now part of a cycle that is um that is tied off and is waste free, right? So Cameron's stuff is really great on that vivid vision part about here, I started this company because I want to make this a reality. But I think we also need to take the time to define the other two elements of that, which are that purpose. Why do I want this to be a reality? Which vivid vision sort of does. And then the mission piece, which is literally how are we gonna achieve that? Not everybody gets, you don't get to be in every sort of domain, right? In fact, Tom Tom Shoes is a great example. They've done a couple different um brand extensions, for example, but they've been harder to sell people on than just the shoes thing, right? They do I they do sunglasses now, but it's in fact a company like Warby Parker, which does the same BOGO model but with eyeglasses, does better in the sunglasses market, right? Um, a company like Pila doesn't have to worry about that because they're trying to change consumables so they can pick anything made of plastic and extend where they're operating, right? Um, so I think we got to do those, those kind of three elements. And then the the fourth, if you want to talk about it, would be that core values thing. Um, and this is where a ton of organizations struggle for exactly what you were talking about, which is this is the best place to embed that founder's DNA. And instead, what most people do is they come up with a list of the what they think their core values should be instead of what they think they like, what they actually are, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say, what are our core values? Oh, were they innovation? Like, well, are they really innovation? Or because we've never talked about that before. You just it's like you're you're picking from a list of 30 buzzwords and you think you they need to be, right? Um vivid vision process um for all those reasons. But I think there's there's more to that. And that's why one of the big things that I push for is we can talk about what your vision is. First, tell me what you're fighting for, and then we'll talk about what the world looks like when you win. I guess you could do it in the reverse too. You could talk about what you want the world to look like when you win, the vivid vision, and then you can tell me how you're fighting to get there. Um, but you're I don't think you're complete until you've done both.

SPEAKER_02 42:35

It's amazing. Every time you think you you know the space, there's a different point of view. Yeah. That's fair. No, but it's great. It's good because you know, as it's it's about finding the the truth that works for you. Like you said, you could either go from like the fight to like the the final outcome, right? Or backwards. It's entirely up to you. It's entirely up to you. Um, I want to maybe shift gears here and talk about something you touched on earlier when you mentioned the place of work. And I think you know, with the pandemic um that uh you know we're kind of still going through, I think the whole idea of work is changing. Um and is constantly going to change, I would say, um, because now everything's open for renegotiation. Like Dropbox now, um, you know, uh is everybody can work from home. Microsoft also yesterday, um, one of my um my people gave me a link to Microsoft now, they're making all of their staff work from home permanently. Twitter, another one. Um, and so the whole idea of work um is changing. Um, my view is to maybe throw this in as the springboard, is that work should not be a place where you go just to work, it's a place where you go to live your work. And I think to what you're saying, it's this idea of the fight, it's it's it's the cause, right? That gives you the this the kind of stepping stones to transform yourself in the process of pursuing that outcome, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

How how is the the the transformational agenda of your staff changing now?

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Yeah. So you know what's you know what's interesting is we talked about how the the pandemic sort of changed all these things. And in in reality, and I was hinting at this a bit earlier, um, in a lot of cases they brought it back. Like, do you know, do you know who worked from home before the industrial revolution? Everyone.

unknown 44:24

Right?

SPEAKER_00 44:25

You were a merchant, you were, you know, you were you you made shoes, you you uh were a blacksmith, like you lived above the stable in your farm. Like everybody worked from home, right? Um, then we had this industrial revolution where we needed to get, I mean, you can't build an automobile without, well, you can build an automobile without the assembly line, but it takes forever and it's not very cost effective, right? So we suddenly had to build these factories and lure people into them. And then when we shifted from industrial work to knowledge work, we just assumed like, let's use that old school model, right? So this trend towards getting back to what humans have done for the bulk of their time, which is most of us, and I wouldn't even use the term work from home, um, but let's say work from anywhere. Like people have the freedom to decide where is the best place to do what things they're being asked to do. Um, we're really just sort of getting back to that. And we were always in that trend. This just sort of heightened it. Like what COVID really did, uh, well, first it scared everybody into we need to work from home or we're all gonna die. And then a couple months later, it made most leaders who would have told you that work from home would have never worked. It made most of them go, ah, this isn't actually that bad, right? Right? Like there's some, there's some shifts, there's some adjustments we have to make. We got to remember when we're on mute and when we're not, right? But other than that, this isn't that bad. And when it becomes safe to get back, people aren't gonna want to go back full time, right? Um, which makes things like mission and vision, by the way, even more important because you've now got to make it so internalized that people can get up and walk downstairs and go to work, um, which is harder to do. It's actually easier to get up and go commute in somewhere where you think there's a Michael Scott boss man waiting to make sure that you got there by 9 a.m., right? Like for a lot of people, that's actually easier. So um, so that makes the mission vision thing more important. But this has actually been a subject area uh of research for me for the last several months, obviously influenced by the pandemic. And there's a whole sort of new book coming out about what does it mean to lead from anywhere? Because I don't think the future is working from home. Like I think people are still gonna come back to the office, even at Microsoft and Twitter and all of those places. But the office will be a place where we gather, where we collaborate, um, where we go through, we hold meetings when everybody can get together. But they're not gonna be a place where we can just expect everyone to be there all of the time. Which means that two, the two big shifts that leaders are gonna have to do is one, do a better job making sure that everybody's internalized this mission, which is everything that we've talked about. And then two, do a better job trusting people to get the work done, giving them autonomy over how and when they do it. We had this assumption that presence equaled productivity, right? And and to be honest with you, like founders are the worst at this, right? Some of some of them, as they were growing their business, employed VAs and that went through this hard lesson of it. But but in reality, you used to do everything until you couldn't do everything anymore. Then you hired somebody to do some of it. But really, you're still looking over that person's shoulder, making sure they're doing it exactly like you did. And that's like the big struggle uh when you have those first two or three employees, is letting go of control and realizing that even if you would do it differently, or even if you would do it better, someone else doing 85% of a job is good enough because it frees you up to think of a to spend your mental energy on a higher value um ticket. So it's almost, you know, it's better that they're not doing it as good as you would do it, as long as they're getting it done good enough. And now you can focus on something higher. And that's that autonomy piece. So those two things, that purpose and that autonomy are gonna be huge as we move back to the office and then realize we don't have to be there all the time.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

David, you I have to ask you now then how do we lead in a distributed workforce environment? Because I mean, the vision thing obviously helps. Um, you're obviously uh I'll assume there's a book coming out, um, if not already, on this. Uh you're doing a whole bunch of research in there, and this is such an acute thing. I think about this all the time. Uh, motivating staff, you know, because it's it's your even though back in the industrial age everybody kind of worked from home, you know. Uh now it's all it's almost like even though we've gone back, it's still feeling very new. Um, and working in isolation, especially in pressurized, you know, uh roles, etc. Sometimes it's hard being in isolation and the environment's not conducive to work. I mean, I've got you know people asking for specific like ergonomic chairs and desks and things like this. So there's lots to kind of consider as a as a CEO founder about the environment of your people, um, because especially here in Africa, we have very unique problems, right? So a lot of uh my staff, uh fair portion of them anyway, live in township. So they've got infrastructure problems, they you know, like they're living in in like I'm in the leafy suburbs of Santin, Johannesburg, you know, but they they're definitely not, and so I think about that. Um, I think about um, you know, when the power goes out, how they're going to execute it on the vision, you know. Um and so um while Africa may have some very unique problems, I'd love to get your view. What has your research revealed, or where is your head at around leadership today and for the foreseeable future when it comes to distributed teams?

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Yeah. So the the role of a leader in a distributed team, it's funny. It shifts a lot, but it shifts to what it probably should have been in a co-located team anyway, right? And here's what I mean. Um, the the first role of a leader in a distributed team is that your job is less about telling people what to do and more about actually doing the exact things you were talking about, which is figuring out what's blocking them from doing their work and then helping to remove it. Like your job is to check in frequently enough to have people tell you this is where I'm struggling. And then your it becomes your job to solve that problem, not them. That way they can sort of focus on it, right? Um, now that's a flip from what happened in most offices and in most corporations in most of the world, which is I'm the boss and I tell you what to do. And then I come back a month later and find out that you're not actually doing it. And now I scold you, right? And I give you a performance improvement plan and all of that sort of thing. Um, so that so that's first. The other thing, and this is the this is the way harder thing, is that the leader of a team becomes the linchpin that helps the team work out loud. And what I mean by that is like when we were all in the same office, it was really easy for your individual people to walk down the hall to that other person because they're the ones that are great at Photoshop and I need this box cover redesigned or something real, like those little quick tasks, those little quick questions in a co-located office, they happen easily because you can just sort of walk down. And there's a ton of research actually before COVID, right? BC, before COVID, and then COVID era, C E. There's a ton of research that showed that proximity was the number one predictor of collaborations in organizations, right? In other words, the closer I sit to you, the more likely I am to collaborate with you, right? That wasn't actually optimal then, right? Because the person who might be the best person to collaborate with you is on a different floor and you don't know them all that well. So the team leader's job in that sense, it didn't really change. But now, as you're doing those check-ins and as you are realizing that the barriers that people are having to getting that work done, it's also your job to bring that back to the team and inform the team so that people are like, I use the term work out loud, so that people are aware of what everybody else is working on, what they struggle on, and can then opt in to helping them. That used to happen organically, right? It would happen in that all hands meeting or in the conversation that would happen right before the all hands meeting or right afterwards. And now it doesn't happen. There's not room on the Zoom agenda for that. We could build that in, right? And a lot of organizations that have been distributed from the start usually have some project management system that includes a way to ask for help, that includes a way to update on a day-to-day level where I am on this certain project, et cetera, right? So those I would say are the two big things. Um there's a there's a lot we can get into about ergonomic chairs and all of that sort of stuff. But those are, I think, the two big things to focus on right now, getting into the rhythm of, right? Am I spending more time when I talk to my individual people? Am I spending more time um telling them what to do and when to do it by, or by figuring out what's blocking them from doing those things? And am I reporting that back to the team so that people on their team are aware of what everybody else is working on, who needs help and how?

SPEAKER_02 52:36

Yeah. You you're echoing probably a key point. I had Rourke Denver on the show not too long ago. I don't know if you know him, he's a former Navy SEAL, trained pretty much like five generations of SEALs. Um, and so he's like a leadership guy. And so he one of the things of many, many great things he said, he said different words, but he said the same thing you've kind of said now, which is the role of a leader is to provide a service to his or her team. It's not the other way around. The the team is not there to provide a service to me or you, or you know, or any of the founders. Um, and that really resonated with me because I think about their environments, I think about the fact that they have to take sometimes two, three taxis just to get to the office if they can't, if they don't have connectivity or power or whatever the case is. And then I also think about the two or three taxis that they have to catch to get to go back. I've got I've got but I give people shots all the time. I'm looking for talent because my business needs talent. And like I've got another one, I like I get I may I I offer people the opportunity to learn, but then they work at risk. So I pay them on performance of certain things or delivery of certain things. And it's so I have so much empathy for so many people who are less privileged than me, younger than me, who don't have the the luxury of experience, you know, the QBE, they're qualified by experience. Um, and you know, and they come in every single day without getting paid, and they're there early and they stay late because they're hungry for to succeed. And that for me, it's like as a leader, that is what matters to me. It's about recognizing that intrinsic value in a human being and saying, right, what is the best way that I can provide a service to that person?

SPEAKER_00 54:16

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. So the the way that I always used to phrase it is I would um I would remind people that we really we really screwed up the way we talk about certain things, and and those labels matter. And my biggest example that I would always talk about is that so many bosses, so many entrepreneurs, so many, so many leaders use the phrase, so-and-so works for me. People don't work for you, right? People work with you, right? Um, I've the better mindset be might might be that as a leader, you work for them, but like people work with you, they're volunteering. Some of them are literally volunteering, sort of in your case, right? But even in an in a knowledge work economy, people are volunteering to trade um their time for your money, right? That's a voluntary exchange. That's not forced, right? Military service, different animal. But everywhere else, people are essentially volunteers, which means they're working with you, which means your job, right, is to sort of honor that and understand the reasons why they want to do that. Some of that is that cause piece that we talked about for a large portion of it, is what they want out of their work is that that sense of cause. But that smaller scale is exactly what you're worried about, which is I also need to make sure that their day-to-day experience of work is enjoyable enough and engaging enough that they want to come back and keep doing it. If my boss doesn't care about the connectivity issues that I'm having, et cetera, then I don't want to keep working there, even if it is a great mission, because it's just too frustrating. And there's probably somewhere else that'll make this exchange easier for me, and I'll go volunteer to do that, right? So people don't work for you, people work with you. That's a huge, I mean it's a little language shift, but it's a massive mindset shift.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

Yeah, it's so huge, Dave, at that point for me, for me. I couldn't really couldn't agree with you more. Probably the big one for the show so far. Um, I don't know whether in America you had this, but last week, Friday, we had, I don't know, I think it was National Bosses Day or something. So I they put a meeting, how's this? They put a meeting in my diary and it was like resourcing something, something. So I click on the link, it's a teams meeting, and the whole company's there. And they all went on as like National Bosses Day, and they all said like some really, really amazing things and so on and so forth. But I hated the idea of that National Bosses Day. It's another label that's wrong. You know what I'm saying? Like, and I said to you, I said to you, I said to them, don't call I'm not your boss. I'm not your boss, you are your boss, right? That's it, that's it. I'm your sensei, whatever, I'm your mentor, I'm whatever you want to use, but I'm not your boss. You are in control of your own destiny. You don't you you don't work for me to your point, you work with me on this. You choose to be here every single day, and for that, I'll provide us the best service possible to you. You know what I'm saying? Uh, but yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Like National Boss's Day. Do you get that over there?

SPEAKER_00 56:58

I think we do. I think we do. We do we have a lot of these national days that I don't actually understand. Um, but I'll tell you, you know what we don't have, and this is this is maybe which I don't know that we have a national founders' day, right? Like, I don't think we have, I mean, we have a we have like a president's day for the founding fathers, right? But we don't have like a founders of companies day. Like, hey, let's honor the vision of why this organization doesn't even have to be for-profit, but like why this organization started. We don't have that. That probably would have been a better day for for for you off, right? Because what you did, I mean, there's it's worth taking the time to celebrate what you did by bringing everybody together, but you're right, it's not worth doing it under this mentality of you're the boss and you control us and you tell us what to do, et cetera. It's more like we're grateful that you created this cause and this organization to give us the opportunity to come work with you, right? That's worth celebrating.

SPEAKER_02 57:48

Absolutely. Um, David, um, let's let's wrap this up. Um, why do you do what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Why does this matter to you so much?

SPEAKER_00 57:58

Yeah, so um how much time do we have? I'll tell you, I'll tell you a fun story first, and then it'll make it all make sense.

SPEAKER_02 58:04

As much time as you need.

SPEAKER_00 58:06

So my wife is an ER doctor, right? Which means that during this whole COVID pandemic thing, she's been on the front lines of it, right? I have these really fun selfie photos of her now, decked out in like Dart Vader gear, uh personal protective equipment and that sort of stuff. And when the pandemic started, we had to shift a couple things about how she went to and from work, right? So that now there's a dedicated space in the garage for her car to pull in. There's a way to sort of disinfect everything. She comes in and has to disinfect all the clothes that she was wearing and get them right into the washer. So, like my kids can't run up and hug her when she gets home from work anymore, right? There's got to be this separation between it and disinfect that whole thing, right? She's got to take all of the crap that could have gotten on her while she was at the hospital and block it from coming home, right? And about three weeks into doing this new rhythm, I had this revelation that everybody does that, right? Just for most of us, it's not a virus. It's some emotional crap in their work, right? All of us, whatever negativity or positivity, but like whatever the emotional experience of work is for you, whatever it's like to be a part of your team, to work for your boss, right, or your founder, whomever, like all of the stuff that we do at work bleeds over into the rest of our life. There is no work-life balance because there's no work-life separation, right? And for a lot of people, they drag all of that crap home with them and then they infect their own family, right? And there, there's actually a lot of research on this, that, for example, kids, like the thing that kids care about isn't necessarily how many hours you're working. It's whether or not you're working in front of them and whether or not what you're you're dragging emotional contagion from work back to them. In other words, if your office sucks, they don't care that you're only there 35 hours a week if you're also still frustrated at them at dinner because of something that happened, right? So we all have to do this disinfect thing. Or we can make the experience of work better, right? If there's positivity there and you're bringing that home. If you're coming home more energized because you had a fulfilling day at work, you'll drag that home with you too. And that's a positive, right? That's that's actually sort of a positive emotional contagion. And so that's why I do what I do, right? My my wife is concerned with disinfecting the world from this current pandemic, and I'm concerned with disinfecting people's work experience so that it doesn't bleed over into those other areas as well. Right? We're both fighting to heal stuff. She's healing real people, which by the way is way more important. I'm not equating the two. I'm trying to heal organizations so that we can have better lives.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:32

That is such a cool answer to that question. I love that. I love that. That's amazing. Uh, David, I've got your website up on screen here, davidberkes.com. You're doing a lot of speaking, or I suppose you were doing a lot of speaking, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:52

No reflection value.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:54

So we yeah, we did a lot of speeches before they turned into virtual. What I'm finding is more exciting actually is to have a small conversation with everyone and then teach managers how to have these purpose conversations or how to have these conversations with your team about where and how we're gonna work remotely so that we work better. Like speaking's fun, but this combination of speaking and then guiding people through these conversations is fun too.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

You've I'm just on your website, still you've actually you mentioned you've written your other books. So you've got friend of a friend, you've got under new management, how leading organizations are up-ending business as usual. You've got the mystical creativity. Geez, you're a machine. There you go. How do you where do you find the time between changing, disinfecting work environments to write four books? Where does this time come from?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

Well, I'll tell you, I didn't have a lot of it when I was uh running my kids' elementary school for them um during the pandemic, but I have a whole lot more now now that they're in school. Um, I mean, I candidly, my story, I I was an undergrad English major uh in university, and then I was organizational psychology in in graduate school. Um, so being a writer's always been a part of it. Like I like I even even the little shifts of people don't work you know for you, they work with you. That's a writer shift. That's a realization that language shapes our lives. And so um that's just always been something I've been fascinated with. So it's something I make time for.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:13

Well, uh exactly. There's it's not that you don't have enough time, it's that you're just not creating the time to do the thing that you need to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:22

I mean, exactly right, right? I also don't do a lot of things. I have I have you could you could quiz me on whatever popular Netflix show is right now, and I haven't seen it. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:30

So mate, I've got a great one for you. Speaking of everything we've discussed, and for everybody listening as well, thanks for sticking around. Uh, but one last thing just to go have a look at. I came across this um this uh um this Netflix series, speaking of Netflix. It's called Blue. Sorry, Maverick sent it to me. Brave Blue World on Netflix. Uh it's all about the water crisis, funnily enough, uh, that human beings have. And it's a short documentary, it's narrated by um that guy from Taken, who's the actor. Can you recall?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:06

William Nielsen, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

Um Matt Damon's on there, there's quite a few cool dudes and whatever. Anyway, but it was all around these companies that are going out there and fixing and doing just incredible innovations around water, like that stuff matters for us. It's the most important uh you know resource that we have on the planet. So brave new, brave blue world on Netflix. Go and check that out.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:27

Cool, yeah, I'll check it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:29

Yeah, cool. Uh right, David. Thank you for your time today on the show. It's been really a lot of fun. And uh, guys, we'll see you all again very soon, right here on the Math Round Show. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the Math Round Show, guys. Don't forget, you can catch me on all social media platforms for the latest updates, news, and a show history. So if you've been catching this on the podcast, please head on over to our YouTube channel and pound that subscribe button. It would be great to catch the video version there. And if you want a free copy of my number one Amazon best-selling book, You're in a game for free right now today. You can grab that on mapbrownshow.com forward slash ebook. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, sought-after speaker and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, Haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, sought after speaker and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com.