Bring Out the Talent: A Learning and Development Podcast
Tune into The Training Associates (TTA) “Bring Out the Talent” podcast to hear from learning and development talent and partners on their innovative approaches and industry insights. In each episode, TTA’s CEO, Maria Melfa, and Talent Manager, Jocelyn Allen will chat with subject matter experts and bring you casual, yet insightful conversations. Maria and Jocelyn use their unique blend of industry experience and humor to interview the L&D industry’s most influential people, latest topics, and powerful stories. Each episode has important takeaways that will help to create a culture of continuous learning within your organization. Tune in as we Bring Out The Talent!
Bring Out the Talent: A Learning and Development Podcast
Driving Innovation Through Strategic Leadership
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What do billion-dollar innovation, a global marketplace, and bold leadership have in common? They were all driven by one thing: strategic leadership.
In this episode of Bring Out the Talent, we’re joined by John Rossman, former Amazon executive and author of Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era. John led the launch of Amazon Marketplace, now responsible for over half of Amazon’s global sales, and has since guided high-impact transformation at organizations like T-Mobile, the Gates Foundation, and Walmart.
This conversation is all about what it really takes to drive innovation and transformation at scale. From identifying strategic opportunities to breaking through organizational inertia, John offers a behind-the-scenes look at how leaders can make bold moves without losing alignment, culture, or control. Tune in for a sharp, energizing conversation that’ll challenge the way you think about leadership.
Bring up the talent. Bring up the talent.
SPEAKER_05:Bring up the talent. Welcome to Bring Up the Talent, a podcast featuring learning and development experts discussing innovative approaches and industry insights. Tune in to hear our talent, help develop yours. Now here are your hosts, TTA CEO and President Maria Melfa, and talent manager Jocelyn Allen.
SPEAKER_06:Jocelyn, you brighten up my day whenever I see you. Because you and I get busy and we don't even see each other sometimes, even though we're in the same office. And I see you dancing, and it just makes me smile.
SPEAKER_08:You just lit up my whole life, Maria. I feel the same way. I get very energized when we come into this room together. So I'm very looking forward to being here with you today and bringing the sunshine that you were feeling to the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_06:Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of big shoes to fill, we have a big time guest here. Big time stuff. Oh, I thought you knew his shoe size.
SPEAKER_08:I was like, wow, this bio is really involved with other stuff.
SPEAKER_06:Yes. So, Jocelyn, what does billion-dollar innovation, a global marketplace, and bold leadership have in common?
SPEAKER_08:Got me. I'm usually pretty good at riddles.
SPEAKER_06:They were all driven by one thing: strategic leadership.
SPEAKER_08:I fully agree with that statement, definitely.
SPEAKER_06:In this episode of Bring Out the Talent, we are joined by John Rossman, former Amazon executive and author of Big Bet Leadership, your transformational playbook for winning in the hyper-digital era. John led the launch of Amazon Marketplace, how very cool, now responsible for over half of Amazon's global sales, and has since guided high impact transformation at organizations like T-Mobile, the Gates Foundation, and Walmart. This conversation is all about what it really takes to drive innovation and transformation at scale, from identifying strategic opportunities to breaking through organizational inertia. John offers a behind-the-scenes look at how leaders can make bold moves without losing alignment, culture, or control. Get ready for a sharp, energizing conversation that will challenge the way you think about leadership. Welcome, John.
SPEAKER_04:Hey, great to be here. I I don't know if I have the rhythm to keep up with this team, but I'll do my best.
SPEAKER_06:Yes, you do. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_08:I love that he thinks we have rhythm as a part of this. That's like another win for me today. I know.
SPEAKER_06:I had to I had to tone down my my dance moves now since we're we're doing more video now.
SPEAKER_08:So well, the trick is you don't accept the recording until after you're done. So technically we can't do that.
SPEAKER_06:Oh my goodness. I wasn't even thinking. No, but that's that's a very good point. John, your book is called Big Bet Leadership, your transformation playbook for winning in the hyper-digital era. How did you define Big Bet Leadership for today's leaders?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so a big bet is any strategy. They get called lots of things within a company, right? They get called a digital transformation, an AI strategy, a growth strategy, an acquisition, an operating model, a redesign. But a big bet is fundamentally any concept or plan or strategy that we think has high ambition and high potential, but it comes packed with lots of risks, lots of dependencies, lots of unknown unknowns to it. And so it has both of those attributes of high ambition but high risk to it. That is what a big bet is.
SPEAKER_08:Love that. Big bets are go home. No, that's not how the saying goes, but it's pretty close, right? So what I really like about your books and your approach, John, like for me, from a verbiage perspective, like I love the term playbook for something that gives you information as opposed to read this and learn something. Like here is your toolkit for doing things. It is it connects so much more to for me as a learner and a strategist overall. So I love that term. What let's add a little bit more appeal to it? Cause I know your approach is very different and has been wildly successful from the experience that we mentioned in so many areas. I mean, Amazon Marketplace, who hasn't heard of it or used it? So, what makes your approach different from other leadership andor change management frameworks and initiatives?
SPEAKER_04:Well, well, first it's designed specifically for this leadership job of leading a major transformation, right? Like, so if you think about what leadership is, leadership is a skill to lead or guide others for a specific mission. So different types of missions need different leadership skills. So like your day-to-day operating skills are not going to get the job done for a major change capability. And I think that's one of the first observations that and mistakes that really good operational leaders make, which is like, you need a separate playbook for transforming, reinventing an organization. Secondly, we wrote it specifically for senior level executives and the teams that serve senior leaders, right? There's a lot written, really good tool toolkits and methodologies about for the individual contributors and teams around agile capability and things like that. But tell me a book that's written specifically for senior leaders about what they need to do differently to be successful at this game called transformation. We we couldn't find anything, and that was kind of the market gap that we we observed and everything. So my co-author of this book, Kevin McCaffrey, Kevin was my client at T-Mobile. I got to be the senior innovation advisor at T-Mobile for three years. Kevin ran Enterprise Strategy and had the remit. One of his jobs was to build a new business incubation capability within T-Mobile. So we took a lot of the stuff from Amazon and some other perspectives, took it down to bare metal, built it back up specifically for T-Mobile to help a company build a new capacity, which is how do you change? How do you consider a high ambition, high-risk thing? How do you actually lead that through fundamentally an experimental-led process?
SPEAKER_08:I agree with the gap that you analyzed too, where sorry, I know that I'm echoing. I agree with the gap that you said that you analyzed and kind of identified and then proceeded with, which is this we have employees and then we have executives and who's taking care of the in-betweens. Because if we're not, then are we teaching everybody to manage up then? And are we teaching everybody to manage down then? And are we relying on those two things and then your seniors are okay? There's a lot of areas where we are not addressing what it takes to be somebody who is just as like very much an individual contributor in their role and guiding the success of an organization, but has direct reports and holds a very senior role that has a lot of stake tied to it too. So I I love that there that you've identified that in such a core area because the implementation of leadership of tech, like it it leads to substantial organizational growth, especially in today's day and age, where that's most of what we need to focus on is how can we change our dynamics and our leadership and stay up to date with everything and make sure that every audience within an organization is addressed.
SPEAKER_04:Hey, Jocelyn, if I can just interrupt please. That kind of gets me. I'll ramble the the the heart of the subtitle, right? So the subtitle of the book is your transformation playbook for winning in the hyper-digital era. What's the hyperdigital era? So we start off the book with I would say a slightly provocative perspective of like, why do these things have such a high failure rate, these transformations? They all tend to have an 80 to 90% failure rate. One expert in large transformation, Burke Fleiberg, studied 2,500 large-scale projects, and his studies reached that only 8% are on time on budget. But more importantly, only half of 1% deliver the expected impact, right? And that's why we do these things. We do these things for impact. But that's the first thing that teams let go of is like, hey, I got to be on time on budget, so they pull back on ambition, right? And so it's that it's that tension of actually delivering game-changing capability while also managing and recognizing and truly like grokking the unpredictable nature that these things take. We built the book. Well, our our inspirations from for this book are from four big bet legends, like people that we worked for and studied pretty closely, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, John Ledger, longtime CEO of T-Mobile, and Satya Nadala, CEO of Microsoft. And what our hypothesis is, what our position is, is that these leaders have three fundamental habits that other really good operational leaders need to adopt in order to be successful at driving this type of change. And those three habits are they create clarity. They do not suffer from vague notions of transformation or improvement or we have to change. Like, no, they get zeroed in quickly up front on the problem and their hypothesis of the future state. Secondly, they maintain velocity. They don't let these strategies or plans just become another thing that the business does. Like they keep priority and they keep focus. And the third is, and this is the hardest one, is they actually accelerate risk and value testing, deferring out big commitments. And so they fundamentally get at the heart of the challenge early. They hold off on actually making the large-scale investments until they've de-risked it. That's what you do. And the rest of the book is how do you actually put that playbook, that those habits into action as a senior leader?
SPEAKER_06:I love that. We've worked on close to a hundred large-scale projects, mainly system implementations. And I would say, and I know looking at this the stats, you typically read like 70% of large-scale implementations fail. You were saying like close to 80, 90%, which is crazy from our position, because we usually come in and we provide the talent, a lot of the training talent or learning strategists. So we typically partner with some of the large consulting companies, such as like Accenture and IBM, and they they do all the work behind the scenes and then they bring us in to help quickly scale. From what we know, the majority of these projects have have gone well. We do know last year we worked on a large-scale project that did not go well at all. And it was not on our end, it was on the technology implementation, which again is not like our part. And it just seems like there was like exactly what you're saying, there was just there was no clarity really on on the on the mission and what they needed to do. We're speaking.
SPEAKER_04:So Maria, I I get invited in to do a lot of kind of QA reviews or I call them pressure test tests of an AI strategy or digital transformation. And I I essentially asked three questions, but I ask in I ask them individually to a set of 10 to 15 people working on the project. I ask, what problem are you solving? I ask, what's your what's your hypothesis for what the future state, like, what's it going to feel like when we're done here? And then I ask, like, point me to the full-time dedicated team on this, right? And here's what happens across that set of 10 to 15 people. A, a third of them won't even answer my questions because they realize the trap that I've set, which is I can't answer a basic set of questions. The two-thirds that do answer it, you you would think that like one's attending a soccer match and the other's at a baseball game, and the and the and the third's fishing, like they don't even sound similar in nature and everything, right? And it's that fundamental lack of clarity as to what problem are we solving? What do we think it's going to be like in the future? And show me a focused team that's working on this. If if if I can get a group centered on those three things, we're we're putting the building blocks in place on this. Like that's not a guarantee, but we're we're starting to put the building blocks to be successful at these. It takes clarity, it takes focus, and it and it and it takes a a will to drive fast, hard, failure, failure-oriented testing in order to prove these these things out.
SPEAKER_06:How do you do that?
SPEAKER_04:Trying to hard fit like well, it's not it's not one thing, right? That's why especially the third, yes. That's that that's why it is a playbook, right? There's lots of things to do. But one answer to that question is is that as as you've read, this book is is highly leverages and built off of Amazon's kind of working backwards techniques, which is about thinking things through. The way, the best way I know of to think things through is to actually write them out as a narrative memo and then debate them. That is at the heart of Amazon's working backwards and narrative-driven processes. We design a very specific set of memos and debates to have that are that are for this. What's the problem? We call it the what sucks, what's the outcome? Is the juice worth the squeeze? All of those things. And and encouraging to have those honest, devil's advocate-oriented debates about the situation. That's actually the best and cheapest type of testing you can do is writing it out and debating. People, people think that like you're you're being critical or or you're you're you're analyzing too much. Like, no, we're actually testing this concept by by doing these simulations that we can do as people and everything. And so that's one of the things that you need to do to create clarity in what you're going to focus on.
SPEAKER_06:So critically important. And I can look at what you're saying. Yeah, it I'm sure it absolutely. So, this particular client, multi-billion dollar client, they went through a lot of acquisitions trying to get a lot of these separate corporations on the same system. And I just think that I mean, they didn't get the buy-in. A lot of people were just very much against what they needed to do. And I think they were trying to push quick, but they they there was just a lot of things that I think they could have used to help on. So, but very good organization, had a lot of things that were going well, but it was absolutely absolutely a big task to to take. And as you mentioned, I mean, unfortunately, it's it's fairly common to do that.
SPEAKER_08:In your experience, what are maybe some of my key key identifiers that separate these bold ideas from being something worth betting on and something that you would consider more of just like a very risky distraction?
SPEAKER_04:Are there existing things you see? So if you think of a about a matrix, right? And and on one axis is kind of size of the prize, right? Like so benefit. And on the other axis is risk from low risk to high risk, right? So you've got a two by two matrix. And the the quadrant that you like don't want things in is that high risk, low benefit quadrant. That's the quadrant you're talking about. And funny enough, everybody would say, like, oh, of course we don't put initiatives there, we don't focus there, but like actually you do. And so there's actually a ton of like collaboration things, things that actually don't matter to your customers or have a business case to them go into that bucket. And and they tend to just bleed an organization out from both the resources, budget, to actually do things that are meaningful, as well as they fatigue the organization from this, from more change that's coming and everything. And so one of the things I work with my clients all on is like, hey, you need a portfolio, you want to have contrast, optionality. We we companies rarely die of starvation. They die of indigestion from too many things that they can go do. And so you have to be very thoughtful about the good ideas that you need to say no to. And that that ability to actually keep the main thing, the main thing, that gets at the heart of the second of the of the critical habits, which is maintain velocity. If you take on too many things all at once, the or that you can't maintain that focus. You can't maintain velocity. So you have to be the of all the high-stakes decisions to make kind of that portfolio allocation design that we we built this at T Mobile, like we had a portfolio, and we were very thoughtful about how many things we could take on at once as a as an organization, because you have to maintain the tempo. Now you sequence things out, but you have to be very careful. And so don't get distracted by those things that that sound good, they sound cozy, of course we'd want that and everything, but they actually don't move the business but business forward.
SPEAKER_08:Were any of those good ideas that are considered like more of a distraction right now? Do those become big bets eventually?
SPEAKER_04:Rarely. Rarely, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08:If they're not good right now, they're not usually good later. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Typically, you want to really focus early on in on like so so we have kind of three core memos we recommend, right? The the the what sucks memo, like that's the problem statement that you need to solve and everything. The outcome definition memo, that's where you have a killer feature and you start identifying the key things that must be true. But the third memo, the outcome financial memo, also called the juice memo, is the juice worth the squeeze? That's where you really identify not just the business case, but the things that must be true to deliver this ambitious um PL that you want to deliver out of this. And you identify the risks there and pull that into your testing log. Rarely done within innovation or or transformations, is really recognizing the business case behind it. And things rarely go from like, oh, this is a great concept. Oh, yeah. And guess what? We found out that we found we stumbled into this incredible PL. You have to design that from the start. And again, like you got to be very careful about the things you pick. So you want to have a very good perspective as to what the both the upside and the downside relative to the the business case can be for an initiative from the get-go.
SPEAKER_06:So when you have a a big bet in business, how much of it involves market research and actually surveying, speaking to your clients? I assume all of it. Is it always that case?
SPEAKER_04:It's not always that case. So like an operating model redo might not have a ton of market research. Sure. But but most product service improvement, service reinvention, expansion definitely has the voice of the customer at the heart of it. And again, coming from Amazon where customer obsession is the first of the 16 leadership principles. I wrote the book, The Amazon Way on the Amazon Leadership Principles. And so that is at the heart of kind of really getting at both the problem and the value proposition you want to get to. Sometimes you need to do customer research. Oftentimes you're really pretty well equipped on that. But one of the little secrets of this is how do you test it by actually dissecting like what either what your competitors are doing or have done and how they went about it and how that directly applies to the concept that you have. In order to do that well, you have to really have dissected and broken down like the key elements of what you want to do so that you can pinpoint the points at what they did and what the market told them about their value proposition or their go-to-market or their marketing or their their customer acquisition costs, like whatever it is. And so, again, another way of doing experimentation up front that can be market focused.
SPEAKER_06:And your work at Amazon, and you mentioned in your book that what really escalated Amazon is when you when Prime was released.
SPEAKER_04:Well, it was the combination of Of so the marketplace business launched in 2002, Prime launched in 2005, closely followed up by FBA, fulfillment by Amazon. When we launched the marketplace business in 2002, we it wasn't like, okay, Prime's next up, then comes FBA, like like that concept didn't exist. But it was because we were in the game and we were always thinking about like what's next. It then took that flywheel, that triangulation between those three things, plus strategic patience. Everyday urgency with coupled with strategic patience, it really took six years for that combination for customers to learn to come to Amazon, for for all the enough selection to come on board, so that we were authoritative in our selection and to get the network figured out. That guess what? In 2009, that it really took off. Guess what else took off at that point and hasn't relented since then, which is Amazon stock. So the stock was largely flat for about eight years. And I think that's part of the story that gets lost about Amazon was even when we were being called Amazon.con, Amazon.toast, and Amazon.org, because we obviously didn't know how to make money, like we were still thinking big, but we were finding clever, savvy, frugal ways to get to market so much faster and so much more efficiently than most major enterprises to do. And I think it's that scrappiness that Amazon is trying to get back to to some degree. Like I think that's what Jassy is wrestling with. It's like, ah, we've become a little bureaucratic in everything. And that's what I think is driving so much CEO attention right now. It's not AI, it's the fact like we've got to be far less bureaucratic. Everybody has to be a builder. You have to be either be operating at a world-class level or you need to have a plan on how we're going to get here. That's where big bets come in. And that's what I think is driving so much urgency at the C-suite right now is like bureaucracy doesn't work anymore.
SPEAKER_08:Big bets require quite a bit as far as action and dedication and the scalability.
SPEAKER_04:Elements to put in play.
SPEAKER_08:Elements, right? Great. Love that. Love that. And a lot of the things that your book addresses is taking risks and making sure that you're aligned on those risks as like an organization and the process forward. So what is a how do leaders ensure that they are maintaining both? What's the steps that you encourage them to take?
SPEAKER_04:Well, that's the whole book right there. But I I think I think one of them is that's underplayed a lot is how to do actual helpful strategic communication. And what tends to happen in these is there's an announcement about a big transformation we're doing. We're vague about the problem we're solving, like we have to change, we have to do better for our customers, kind of like this. I refer to it as empty calorie, like, yeah, no duh. Like we have to do these things. And then we might say, like, we're implementing a new system or we're making this change. Like, really? That's that's the communication that we're that we're doing. And what we encourage is, and we base this off of a really good book about change in strategic communication called Switch, How to Change When Change It's Hard, which is you have to appeal to both the intellect and the emotional part of this journey that everybody is going through, right? And then you have to, so and so guess what? But we've done the hard work because we actually understand the problem we're solving and our provocative emotional future state and why we're doing this. And we can tell the story of the journey that we're gonna go on. That we're not, it's a bet. We think this is a good idea, but we're not sure. So we're gonna be testing this out. Guess what we're doing? We're setting expectations, we're bringing everybody along, both their intellectual side, the writer, as well as their emotional side, the elephant, relative to this. And then you have to repeat, repeat, repeat. You have to be the chief repeating officer. Simple stories, time and time again, is the the simplistic but powerful framework of communication that's needed to get there because we are all overburdened with so many communication signals coming. That's what senior leaders need to do, but to be successful, to create and maintain that alignment that I think you're referring to.
SPEAKER_06:I love the chief repeating officer. We're actually dealing with um right now a we have a platform and we had a major release a few weeks ago, and talking to our product team, and we're we're not talking enough about it.
SPEAKER_04:We we have we have meetings and uh and it's like what do you actually repeat whenever they were made? And so it's like it's like like my recommendation is like don't talk about the it, talk about the why we're doing it, or like what's it gonna feel for me, or why does it matter to a customer? Simon Senek, like start with why, like, why are we doing this? You have to repeat, repeat, repeat. And the more specific you are, the more memorable it is, of course, right? So when we launched the marketplace business, like literally the whole strategy came down to this one line. Like we so we wrote these future press release, right? That's in the book, future press release. And it didn't come to us immediately, but the the one line was a third-party seller in the middle of the night will be able to register, list an item, fulfill an order, and delight a customer as though Amazon, the retailer, didn't it? Pretty simple sentence, but it captures the heart and soul of a completely different strategy relative to at that point, eBay was three times our size, the market leader, and kind of this marketplace-driven business. We had a completely different point of view as to like what we thought the winning customer value proposition would be. And it was that one sentence that then allowed me to like, hey, this is what we have to do operationally. Hey, this is what we have to do with with all of our third-party sellers. Hey, this is what we need our contracts to look like. Hey, this is what we need the website to look like, like that one sentence. And that's what you have to get at. And and and when Bezos would come down the hall on his segue, and he he he he he he wouldn't ask me, he go, he wouldn't ask me a question like, John, how's the marketplace going? No, he would he would ask, John, can a third-party seller in the middle of the night register, right? So he was repeating the killer feature of the marketplace. That's an example of strategic communication that wins.
SPEAKER_07:I hope we can pull out the quote when Bezos is coming down the hallway on a segue that just like brought a smile to the case. I can I can picture it right now.
SPEAKER_04:I bet you can within the memory link.
SPEAKER_08:That's so funny. I love that. Well, that's a good segue, uh huh. Um, into a little bit more because a part another big part of this, as with all organizations, and needs to keep being talked about is the culture around initiatives and just your organization at a whole. So beyond risk and alignment and the repetition and the whys, culture is the biggest thing that can make or bake break the a big bet, right? So, what what characteristics do organizations really need to make these big decisions and transformations successful?
SPEAKER_04:Uh well, they they have to fundamentally recognize the calculated risk that they're that they're taking, and that calculated risk is good. People think that taking risks are bad. Like, no, no, no, no, no. That's that's where you make a difference is by taking calculated risks. You need to, this is all about high-stakes decision making. So that's why you need a different playbook in order to do this, because your typical incremental business, your operational business, like it's a completely different decision-making framework that that that you're that you're taking on. It's high predictability. These are low predictability, but high ambition situations. You need to have a different decision-making framework relative to it. So, so the culture that you're talking about, I think is primarily the culture within the strategy-setting environment wherever that happens, with which is understanding like we need to take smart, calculated risk. That's actually how you win, is by taking bold moves. You need you need to be operational excellence and have incremental innovation. But you you're you're probably not going to create new competitive gap and moats just with that, right? It comes by doing something different, something orthogonal, something non-traditional. So I think that's the number one cultural thing. And so you need a different set of language around it. For example, the term the term bet is a very important word because it signals this is an idea, but I it comes loaded with calculated risk. So I think it's a good idea, but I'm not sure. Oh, okay, now, okay, we're using a different playbook. We're using now we're going to be talking about that calculated risk experimentation led. Don't and one of the problems companies make is they use the term project or initiative for everything. Well, which which side of this playbook am I playing now? And everything, the high predictable playbook where I should be able to give you a plan and commit to hitting it, or am I in this calculated risk playbook? So you need different language, different terms relative to it. And that's kind of the leadership development and the culture that's needed on this. One of the things I avoid is using that term. A lot of people talk about failure, fail fast, encourage failure, blah, blah, blah. It it the problem with it is it's it's an overloaded term, right? And it gets used to create low accountability within an organization. I've I've I've seen and participated in way too many innovation teams, lab teams, and everything where where because there wasn't constraints relative to that team, like they're just failing fast and everything, like it actually was just, as we call in the book, kind of all hat, no cattle, right? Like they're just trying to show that they're being innovative versus actually trying to be innovative. So I use the word experimentation or bets or things like that, because uh all of your organization should be have a high sense of urgency of getting stuff done today, the right things done today. And you you don't want this transformation or or innovation lab or AI lab, whatever it is, to become a low accountability organization. And that happens all the time in these types of setup setups.
SPEAKER_06:That's very interesting. And so much that you're saying right now is making my mind spin in a very, very good way. How how do you tell the difference though? Oh, because it's just not enough plan.
SPEAKER_04:Like, let's just let's just sit, let's just sit down and you tell me what's going on and and like what are the tests you're running, what's your decision-making criteria, what's your portfolio, who's doing what, in a pretty quick conversation. Just asking a bunch of questions are you can you can tune in to like, is this a team that's wired for success on this, or is this kind of a a show pony that's just there to say we're we we have an AI strategy or we're being innovative?
SPEAKER_06:Just like what you wrote in your book and like thinking in memos, like you need to be able to clearly back it up in less than five pages. Yep. Otherwise, it's it's just kind of all fluff. I love that. As a matter of fact, we are having a meeting next week with the whole management team, which we like to have every quarter or so. Like and I it's just I probably have it too generic. It's like a strategy meeting, and we're talking about thinking big. But I like what you're saying as far as the the big bets. And I will have to finish your book so I can be more on my game to help structure this meeting. No better.
SPEAKER_04:Depending upon the the nature of kind of the meeting and everything, we we we built big bet leadership off of three three books in our own experience and everything, right? The the the the the first book is uh I think the best strategy book out there, which is good strategy, bad strategy by Richard Rumult, right? And that book will fundamentally change the way that you think about what what strategy is. And and Rumult talks about that strategy identifies a problem, gets at the crux of that problem with a a philosophy for how to solve it and a set of tactics. We built off of that notion in Big Bet leadership and really A, showed you how to do that, and B, included this element of experimentation in order to do it for high-risk things. But that that book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, might be a really good insert into a planning meeting. I do that a lot of times with my clients, is is I'll have them read good strategy, bad strategy, and then the tactics of big bet leadership complimenting it.
SPEAKER_06:So, John, how do you so I know you are working in many different ways with organizations? You also do a lot of like keynote speaking. So for our clients that are listening to this today and they are going through a big bet transformation, how do you work with them? Is it you, is it a team? How do you who do you work with within the organization?
SPEAKER_04:Yes, I I I have potentially the most flexible value ladder of any service provider I've ever I've I've ever seen. Like A, you can you can read the book, you can listen to a great podcast, you can have me as a keynote speaker, or to do a QA, a pressure test, or we can help you lead a big bet. I go up and down that value stream all the time. We have a small team, and I like it that way because I get to be deeply involved in all of my client work. I was a partner at a really good firm for 12 years after Amazon. I was a partner at Alvarez and Marcel. And when you grow this big team and big organization, you can't help but kind of like get separated a little bit from the from the from the details. And honestly, I am a builder. I like solving hard problems. That's what lights me up. And so I like where I'm at today, which is like I take on a limited few clients where I really work with them on not just building a plan and strategy, but how do you actually change the leadership tone and tempo and their and how they work together in a way that's probably aligned with big bet leadership to actually create a consistent culture or approach for how we do this as a team. So I strive to have kind of a both a short-term benefit, which is the plan or the strategy, as well as a long-lasting impact was just like, man, we have completely different types of conversations now and and we work together in a different way. And it it it has at its core, truth seeking, instead of kind of like being too careful about other people's perspectives. Like you gotta, that is important, but it is not the most important thing. The most important thing is solving hard problems for your customers so that you're a more valuable company. That is the most important thing, and we have to have the willingness to have those truth-seeking conversations.
SPEAKER_08:So now we're gonna move on to the next set of questions, which is the TTA 10.
SPEAKER_05:Okay. It's the TTA 10, 10 final questions for our guest.
SPEAKER_08:All right, John. So I gave you the lowdown on the TTA 10. So we're gonna, I'm gonna ask 10 questions. Be ready for them. I know you are, and we are going to put a 90-second timer on. Well, David will count us down, we'll get rocking and rolling, and then we get the outcome. So are you ready? I'm ready. Oh, he's so ready, guys. He's so ready. All right, David. What oh yeah, the clock, please.
SPEAKER_05:This is your this is your first rodeo here, Jocelyn. Yes, let's go here. 90 seconds on the TTA 10 clock starting now.
SPEAKER_08:Okay, John. What's the most unusual job you've ever had?
SPEAKER_04:I was a bus boy.
SPEAKER_08:Okay. If you could instantly master any new skill today, what would it be?
SPEAKER_04:Surfing.
SPEAKER_08:What book or TV show or movie do you re-watch or you read more times than you want to admit?
SPEAKER_04:Good strategy, bad strategy.
SPEAKER_08:Do you work best early in the morning or late at night?
SPEAKER_04:Early in the morning.
SPEAKER_08:If you had to give a TED talk tomorrow, but not about anything in your career, what would the topic be?
SPEAKER_04:About my French bulldog, Bossman Rossman.
SPEAKER_08:Need to meet him immediately. What's a small daily ritual or ritual that sets you up for success?
SPEAKER_04:I get up early, I stretch out, and I have I exercise every morning.
SPEAKER_08:Who was your favorite childhood superhero?
SPEAKER_04:Batman.
SPEAKER_08:If you had an extra hour in the day, how would you spend it?
SPEAKER_04:I go for a walk.
SPEAKER_08:Dogs or cats?
SPEAKER_04:Dogs.
SPEAKER_08:And what's a food you could eat every single day and you'd never get sick of it?
SPEAKER_04:Carnitas. Oh good job.
SPEAKER_08:Alright, David. That is it. Excellent, John. I'm gonna say right away. You put it on me and slowly. Place a big bet on John on the DTA. Yes. David, give us the verdict, please.
SPEAKER_05:He deserves a little bit of fitting for you for the 58 seconds. 58 seconds.
SPEAKER_06:Will you so he's so how old is he? He's 10.
SPEAKER_08:Oh my god. Oh my god, he still looks like a puppy. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I do what is his face? Oh my goodness, I wear big dog lovers. I guess. Yes, we would have picked dog two if you could tell. Absolutely. Sorry, David has something to do that was beautifully distracting.
SPEAKER_05:Well, will a dog appear in the salute we have prepared? Perhaps. Let's find out. This is for you, John. Here we go.
SPEAKER_02:There's a home in the boardroom on a Friday night. The suits are all nursing their plans. The digital charts flow in flickering light. Waiting for a dude to understand. He strides through the doorway a spark in his eyes. A strategist born to believe my lighter. An Oregon State Beaver has some magic tucked up in his sleep. Sing us a tune. Marketplacem.
SPEAKER_01:You're a machine.
SPEAKER_02:You turn into the street. In the billions of streams.
SPEAKER_00:You're as big as the finest of the business people.
SPEAKER_02:You just made the day of T T. Hope you love this nonsensical song.
SPEAKER_03:There you go.
SPEAKER_04:That was amazing. Thank you. That took some some effort.
SPEAKER_08:He was debating all show if it was a big bet or just a risky distraction, and he went big beta on it.
SPEAKER_04:That's brilliant.
SPEAKER_06:It was brilliant. So that will that can be your new theme song when you're walking into some of these keynote events. Yeah. You just need a smoke machine in your placement.
SPEAKER_08:It's gonna be your t-shirt. Slow walk, you know. You have to work, you gotta work out the whole intro.
SPEAKER_06:When you're walking in your neighborhood, you just have to blast that as you're walking.
SPEAKER_08:John, this was a really informative and fun episode. Thank you for being so transparent with all of your information. I know that we enjoyed it and our audience will too.
SPEAKER_06:Absolutely great information, and I'm excited to learn more and read your books.
SPEAKER_04:Awesome.
SPEAKER_06:Thank you for having me. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_08:If you're interested in making a transformational change in your organization through Big Bet Leadership, visit us at the TrainingAssociates.com. We'll see you later.