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Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
[REPLAY] Randall Stutman - Admired Leadership (EP.150)
01:04:43
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- [00:02]
Ted Seides
Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction, but today investors are asked to cover more companies and move faster with leaner teams. With AlphaSense's AI led expert calls, their TIGUS call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become searchable and comparable, so your primary insights plug directly into your earnings diligence and pitchbook workflows with no tool switching. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. Sounds like just the right mix to create a scalable institutional edge without growing headcount. For hedge funds, this means validating thesis assumptions before earnings across dozens of experts
- [00:57]
Interviewer
instead of a handful.
- [00:58]
Ted Seides
For private equity, it means faster pre IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence. And for asset managers, it means pulling real operators perspectives straight into models without disconnected tools or manual handoffs. All of this lives inside the AlphaSense platform, turning raw conversations into comparable auditable insight. The first to see wins the rest. Follow Learn more at alpha-sense.com Capital
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Interviewer
Capital
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Ted Seides
Allocators is also brought to you by Canoo Allocators. Exposure alternatives has never been higher and most of them will tell you the same thing. Their data hasn't kept up. Chasing documents, extracting performance and reconciling across dozens of funds is a real drag on the people doing serious investment work. Canoe intelligence purpose built AI to fix that problem. Over 500 institutional clients, including 40% of the top US endowments, trust Canoe to process more than a million documents a month across 44,000 funds. If your team is still doing this work manually, I strongly recommend you check out canoe@canoeintelligence.com. Hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital.
- [02:41]
Interviewer
You can keep up to date by
- [02:43]
Ted Seides
visiting capitalallocatorspodcast.com My guest on today's show is Randall Stuttman, the founder and co head of the Leadership Practice at CRA and the Admired Leadership Institute. Randall is probably the top executive coach that you've never heard of before. He spent 30 years coaching and learning about the behaviors and routines of extraordinary leaders. Just to give you a sense, he's worked in the White House and the Olympics with something like 2,000 senior executives and 400 CEOs. And in our world, with the most Senior executives at J.P. morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone. Randall's also well known among the titans in the hedge fund community, where he's worked with many of the industry's leading funds. And he's done all of this entirely by word of mouth referral. Randall was one of the first people I asked to come on the show three years ago, and he respectfully declined at that point in time, not wanting to share the uncovered behaviors that drive his work. But a few months ago, after three years in process, he and his partners launched Admired Leadership, an online course with short videos of 100 behaviors repeated by some of the most talented CEOs. The course is extraordinary. It's so ridiculously good that I started sharing a link to it in my email signature as a gift to those who don't already know about it. Our conversation covers Randall's path to coaching and the coaching process. We cover behaviors common among hedge fund managers and the Admired leadership course and examples across inspiring others, decision making, time management, and elevating performance. We close with Randall's thoughts on behaviors that allocators can identify in their manager research. Please enjoy my conversation with Randall Stuttman.
- [04:44]
Interviewer
Randall, thanks so much for doing this.
- [04:46]
Randall Stuttman
Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [04:48]
Interviewer
Yeah, now I know this goes back three years now because you were one of the very first people I asked to come on the show and you politely declined in large part because you didn't really want to spill your secrets. So we're going to get to some of that later. Why don't we start with just your personal background?
- [05:07]
Randall Stuttman
Okay. Pretty humble background, normal pathway into college and graduate school. Studied organizational behavior, conflict processes, and was teaching as a university professor for several years and got asked to do a lot of things while I was at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana. Got asked to do a lot of projects up in Chicago and one thing led to another, it started getting bigger and I started doing more things. Had to hire a few people to help me with all the projects and lo and behold, I had to make a choice. Came back to Philadelphia where I grew up, take care of an ailing parent like a lot of people do and I decided that I needed to do it in a real and full time way. So I slowly made my way to less teaching and more of our consulting work and lo and behold, that's where it all came about. Not a very interesting story. I mean, it's just a normal mother of necessity. Story of taking care of a parent and getting success around some people that were interested. And so nothing special.
- [06:06]
Interviewer
At what point in time did you start professionally coaching?
- [06:11]
Randall Stuttman
So when I was a professor at the University of Illinois, I started getting asked to do a lot of what became known as executive coaching. So nobody called it that back in the mid-80s to late 80s. And so I got asked to go in and understand executive presence and style and a variety of other things and help people move forward. I worked with some TV anchors. I worked with several very senior leaders who that was the thing that was in front of them. And then I got involved with all kinds of other coaching around how do I make better decisions, what do I do in order to build my team, how do I propel this change in our organization and the like. And so I became an advisor. And nobody knew what that was. It was before any of the coaching certifications existed. And so one thing led to another and I became an executive advisor coach. In the government, they call that a principled advisor, but in the modern parlance, it's just simply, you're an executive coach. So I kind of was doing it before anybody else knew what it was. There were a few other people that were doing the same thing, by the way. It wasn't like I was the pioneer or the only one being asked, but it didn't have any labels. There was no community of people. It was a very hard thing to explain what you were doing to other people. So everybody just called it process consulting, because that was the larger umbrella label. And it just evolved after that into a big practice for myself. And then I started teaching other people how to do the same thing.
- [07:34]
Interviewer
So when you were first getting going, when someone introduced to you something new, say, oh, we want to figure out how to accelerate change in an organization, how did you figure out what to share?
- [07:48]
Randall Stuttman
Well, so I have to be honest with you, Ted. When I was first starting to do this, I felt like a fraud. And because people asked me all kinds of great questions and I didn't have any good answers, I knew the literature cold. I read all the popular advice, but I was using bromides like lots of other people still use. And I didn't have any power, I didn't have any currency to actually make change. So it doesn't mean that I didn't know at that moment that there was some better way. I was doing what I thought was the best stuff out there, but it was very unsatisfying. And so it pushed me to work harder at finding really Great answers, which created this whole research program that our admired leadership work is based on. And that was a really lucky thing. It turned out, like a lot of other people, it seemed like my whole life converged to create what it is that I wound up creating. So a lot of my background all of a sudden made sense, and it started filling in the gaps and so forth. But for the large part, I started studying leaders and understanding what they did from a behavioral standpoint rather than a psychological or individual difference one. And I started finding really cool ideas, solutions, behaviors, routines, actions. And when I started sharing them with other people, they went, well, how come no one's told me that before? And my response was, because no one's kind of figured out the pattern. So that became a lifelong pursuit, you know, for my whole adult life, where in one sense, I was an executive coach, building relationships and training other people to be coaches and working with my clients. The other side of things, trying to find more behaviors and more actions. People always ask me, why do you do what you do? And my response is, I coach people for a living, and I have to give them good answers. And by the way, the majority of coaches that do this for a living don't have answers. And actually, some of them are very proud with the idea that they process people and the answers are in other people. I believe the answers in all of this. But at the same time, if you went to a tennis coach and you wanted to improve your backhand and that tennis coach says, well, tell me about how you would want to hit a backhand. You'd probably find another tennis coach. You want something specific to get better at. And so I was on the hunt and have been on the hunt for 35 plus years to try to figure out what do the best leaders do that other leaders don't do that I could teach to other people. Sometimes I actually look at the data that I have in front of me and I know there's something there, that some people have said something of the same sort, they're doing some of the same things, but I can't tell what the actual behavior or action is. That basically is the galvanization of that thing. And then I might look at it for years, and then all of a sudden it smacks me in the forehead and I go, why didn't I see that? And then I immediately go back to other data that I have and say, now that I can see it, can I see it expressed in other ways? And so forth. And then once I have something, face validity is the primary way That I know it's valuable because a, it makes sense to me. Makes sense to you if I'm coaching you. And then it's powerful. It actually produces differences in the way that we go about things. And it kind of has a triple wow. You know, it's a wow when I first figured out and it's a, it's a wow a week later and it's a wow three months later. I have some stuff, Ted, and I think you know this that I've had and uncovered. We don't discover this stuff, we uncover it. I've had some stuff that I've found 25 years ago that I'm as excited about now as I was 25 years ago. Not only because nobody else says it, but because it's that powerful and it's that meaningful.
- [11:18]
Interviewer
Well, we'll go into this more later, but what's an example of something from 25 years ago that's still powerful today?
- [11:24]
Randall Stuttman
Well, like that whole idea of fanness that I use is something that I found very early on where you and I know that lots of different ways to think about motivation inspiration, overwhelmingly, because people are very, very different from one another. The leadership literature is looked at in motivation inspiration as well as almost every other area of leadership from an idea of, of differences. First thing is to understand what motivates yourself, you as a leader. And so like for example, I'm motivated by control, autonomy, responsibility. That's a big thing for me. I like to be able to make and create things that I'm in control of, responsible for, and that I've got the autonomy to win, lose or whatever else. That's a big driver for me. I know that I have some colleagues, for example, that are very motivated by incentives. So not just recognition and approval and praise, which is a pretty, pretty broad. But I have one colleague that's very coin operated that everything's about the dollar and what they get paid. Their language of respect is about compensation and I get that. And that's what motivates them. And so the traditional way of looking at motivation inspiration is to look at it and say who am I? And then who are other people and how do I adapt to other people? One person that you work with needs a swift kick in the butt, needs high challenge, high bar, needs expectation, needs a little fiery talk in their face in order to get motiv. Somebody else that demotivates them, that actually produces less performance, less willingness or desire. On the other side of things, you have somebody that is really in need of praise, recognition, approval. They really Sit on the edge of every single word. Somebody they respect gives to them and offers them and other people praise, bounces off them as if they're wearing a force field, doesn't mean very much. And so people are really, really different. So the literature and all the practical advice out there for years and years has been know who you are, know who they are, and adapt to those things. And start figuring out how you can motivate people differently based on their differences. And my response to that is, makes perfect theoretical sense. But what happens if you're a real leader and you operate with a team or you're a husband, wife, you're a father, mother, you're somebody that leads in a community organization? What you learn really quickly is that being able to size people up and adapt to them in an ongoing flow of interaction is almost impossible. So you've got your own goals, you've got other competing things going on, you've got the noise of the context. It's very, very difficult to do. So what most people do is they go to a go to, they basically focus on what motivates them and then they apply it to everybody else. They try to give, for my example would be I'd be giving everybody higher responsibility, more control, more autonomy over what they do and the like. With the idea that that motivates me, I hope it motivates you. And so you just do a go to. You kind of throw up your hands and say, I'm not very good at this inspiration motivation thing. You know, I'm not somebody that is very praise oriented. So if I'm with somebody on my team that likes a lot of praise, wow, I'm not perfect for them. I'll do my best. And so it becomes a very frustrating thing. So most people running around just aren't very inspirational motivational. So I started studying hundreds back then. Now we've got thousands of these people we call admired leaders. And let me be very clear, no optimal person, no optimal organization. We all have flaws. So admired leaders are admired by other people, but they're not without flaws. And, and so started studying them and started looking at how they inspire and motivate and found a very, very different approach to the whole problem, which I call fanness. Which is what they do, of course, is very different. It's not that they don't adapt and flex to other people's differences or they don't have their own go tos, but the thing that they've learned, which is really, really powerful, is how do you root for other people? How do you prove to them that you will do anything for them to succeed, that you're not just a cheerleader, you're somebody that has high conviction that you can get behind them, and that that's what leadership and motivation and inspiration is. And that by being a great fan of other people and showing your fanness and asking yourself the question in almost every context, what would a fan do here? What would somebody who's your fan do? That becomes a very different thing, because you can work on your fanness and be a better fan all the time. And now you don't have to think about the situation or the people involved. You. Your job is just to simply develop your skill base around the behaviors of fanness. So after 30 years, what we learn all the time is new behaviors of fanness, always uncovering some new behaviors, but we learned some initial ones a long time ago. And I'm as excited about fanness and the idea of fanness as I was three decades ago. So this idea of fanness as an example is something we found a long time ago that I just never get tired of talking about. I don't know anybody that's too good a fan of other people. Now, one thing to say is most people go, oh, I'm already a great fan. Yeah, you're a great fan when things are great, when everybody's happy and teams performing. But your job as a leader, inspirationally, motivationally, is to be a fan and show that fannus all the time. And it doesn't prevent you from having hard conversations or holding people accountable or propelling the change or making people uncomfortable at times. Because it's not an isolated act. It's an act that is integrated into all the other acts you engage as a leader, and your job is to be a better fan all the time. And the fanness idea is just a frame, if you will, or an idea that connects all these different behaviors together. But that's one that I've been around for a long time now, and it never gets old.
- [17:01]
Interviewer
When you start coaching a leader, what's the first thing you do in that interaction?
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Randall Stuttman
So the first thing that I'm doing is, first of all, I'm presuming that you're holographic to a degree and that the way that I'm feeling about you is the way that other people feel about you. So if I feel as if you're very curious and intentive, then my guess is you can be curious, attentive with other people. And if you're somebody that's intimidating or shuts down and stifles conversation with me. My guess is you stifle conversation with other people. And so I'm looking for all the signs and the inferences as to who you are behaviorally and the kinds of outcomes you get with other people. On the basis of how I'm interacting with you, I'm drawing all kinds of inferences around wherever we're meeting. Who made that choice? Did I make that choice? Did you make that choice? What's around you? Am I walking to an office that's a shrine to you, that's got all these memorabilia so it makes it so that you're not approachable. I mean, I'm drawing tons and tons of inferences even before we start this conversation because I'm trying to size up what am I dealing with and a lot of things that you're not even going to be conscious of, but that I'm going to be focused on, which is how do you come across to people and who are you as a leader and what are you passionate about and so forth. And then I want to have a brief dive into the history. But what I'm really doing in that history, what I'm really after, is the self assessment of what your strengths and weaknesses are. That's one of the most important things that I can learn is from your own personal view as leader, as person, as contributor, as to every aspect, every role you play in your life. What are your signature strengths and what are the challenges, weaknesses, deficiencies that you have from your point of view? You. I normally in the process ask who you report to or who knows you best as a leader. And I invariably ask, so what would they say is your greatest strength? What would they say is your greatest weakness? I'm amazed at how many people that lack the awareness to even know somebody that's been around them all their lives or somebody that's the most important professional person and they don't know in their own view as to what that strength or weakness might be. That that's eye opening to me. And then I explore the gap because what I want to do when I first start a conversation is I want the gap between who you are and who you want to be. So aspirationally, I don't mean from a standpoint of roles or careers, I want to learn that too. But aspirationally, who are you and who do you want to be? And obviously if you like yourself a lot and you really don't want to be other than outcomes that unconnected to you in terms of business success, well then I don't have any reason to coach you. I'm a busy guy. I've got no reason if I can't help you close this gap. I also want to know if the things you want to work on, are they coachable? Because there's a lot of things that aren't coachable. If you tell me that you've got some, you know, stress, anxiety, trait anxiety, I can't coach for that. If you tell me that you have bad judgment, I probably change your judgment. Time, take me 20 years. If you've got poor judgment, that is not a coachable thing. If you have poor judgment about talent, for example, oh, I can coach that, but because I can give you a different perspective or lens as to what makes up talent. How do you select talent? What are the questions you should ask, what you should be looking for, things like that. So I want to know what's coachable, what's not coachable, and what you want to work on. So now, after the initial interaction, I know a couple things. I know a brief bit of your history. I know what you do for fun, I know about your family. But what I really know is what are your strengths, weaknesses. I know what your aspirations are, but in particular, I know what the gap is between who you are and who you want to be and what you really would change if you could change. Now I've got the platform foundation to design, like a set of conversations going forward that could actually move you. Now, something else is sometimes I know what the person they report to their manager, their board of directors, whatever else, what they would like to see differently. And sometimes that's the second conversation. But I always start with where people want to be first. If I can add value and create a better outcome for you around what you're passionate about, then you'll be willing to listen to anything that your manager wants or sees and so forth. So I'm about building that level of trust and foundation. It's such a seminal piece of work. That first conversation is so critical.
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Interviewer
You've done lots of work with lots of CEOs, but you've also done a lot of work with investment managers, hedge fund managers, private equity managers. And I'm curious, in the discovery of that gap, are there particular consistent gaps you see, let's just say among your hedge fund manager clients that are more prevalent than others, you're talking about some
- [21:32]
Randall Stuttman
really super smart people. And most of them are smart enough to know that as they grow their organizations, a lot of the things that they didn't formalize early on are starting to become a problem. So there's a difference between running an organization of 4 people versus 40 people. And now all of a sudden you've got real team. You have communication challenges, you have decision structures that don't satisfy quality outcomes anymore. You have to orient people. You have to select new people. Most hedge funds, private equity firms, small ones that start to grow, recognize that they have growing pains and that their expertise is limited to investment. And they really don't know how to create an organization, how to create team culture, how to both select people, but most importantly, how to engage the organization in a way that is a positive and a contributor to their investment process. And so it's a cottage industry for me to, and has been for years and years just to simply talk to really smart people and say, you know, you know, investing really well. And they say, you're darn right I do. And I say, well, I know leadership really well and organizational and behavior and teams really well. So we'll make a great combo. So I'll show you and help you grow your team and grow your enterprise in a way that's accretive to the outcomes you want. And so that's how those conversations go. And if you're valuable to those people, then that's where it goes. There's so many things that get in the way of hedge fund managers, but that's true of all leaders, CEOs, and the like. The biggest issues for hedge fund managers, as far as I'm concerned, is a couple things. Number one, many of them like themselves way too much. And so they really need somebody that's willing to be honest with them. They're very powerful people, both financially and personally, and so the ability to speak truth to them. They don't have any, anybody in their lives that are willing to do that. Even some of their closest partners are going to filter a lot of their information. That's true for CEOs, too, by the way, but for hedge fund managers, it's really acute. So the idea to establish a relationship where you can actually hold up a mirror and say to this billionaire, like, what you're doing is really silly and stupid. They don't get that very much. And the really good ones value that. So that's something that's in the way for a lot of them. They like themselves way too much, and they don't make the changes they should make. But the second piece is they would like to have a great and positive culture, one that embraces the investment philosophy and processes and the like, but they really don't know how to create a team. They have some good things in their head, but the majority of things are fragmented and they just don't know understand the ingredients of what teamness is and how to create team and how to resolve conflicts in team and, and how to operate from values. And so that seems to be a lot of senior leaders in large group, publicly traded corporations, organizations. They generally have had a lot of team level experience. They've had teams for years and years and they've rose up the food chain of that organization so they can get a whole lot better. Some of them are not great, but they have a better context for creating team than do most like hedge fund managers and the like investment professionals. They generally just don't have a sense of team. And so that's a big gap.
- [24:33]
Interviewer
Is there anything different with private equity managers in that they're really involved with leaders of their own businesses?
- [24:42]
Randall Stuttman
I don't see them as a whole lot different. Usually when I'm working with them, I'm not helping them with their businesses. For the most part they feel like they're expert at that and they don't have enough time for me to get involved with that. I'm helping them grow their own organizations, that's my focus and deal with their own team members and the like. So it's very similar to everything else that I face. I, I have no doubt that they have unique challenges relative to the industry, but I don't see them because of where I go and how I go. Generally speaking.
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Interviewer
I want to get into this admired
- [25:11]
Ted Seides
leadership and to do that a quick step back and I was wondering if
- [25:14]
Interviewer
you could talk a little bit about your business today.
- [25:18]
Randall Stuttman
Our business today is largely two big businesses. We have a large group, team based approach group that focuses on internal communication inside large organizations. Everything from the design, the build, the run of communication processes that pushes basically strategy down inside organizations. And how well do people know that strategy? Can they act on that strategy? Is that strategy articulated in a way that they can engage in and so forth. So that's one business inside our firm and then the other business is a leadership development business, which is largely a coaching business. And unlike most coaching practices, we're all employees. We're all tied together as colleagues and full time employees. We only have a handful of independent contractors and that's because they're old standing relationships of mine that they couldn't become inside the firm. They already have a different job like a professorship or something like that. But most coaching firms, large ones like ours, are made up of independent contractors that basically are mercenaries, come in and out of client basis. And that's just not how we operate. We don't think you get a whole lot better that way. We've been around each other a long time and that enables us to really come together and share best practices and get a whole lot better. And everybody's getting better all the time. I certainly am.
- [26:32]
Interviewer
You talk a lot about values based leadership. And I'm curious, what are the values at your firm?
- [26:38]
Randall Stuttman
Our firm, again, not without flaws, but we have some really strong values that have evolved over time. One of them is this whole idea of excellence and how we display excellence. So details really matter to us in documents and in all kinds of forms, how we follow up and the like. Responsiveness, because relationships really matter to us. But for us, being client centric is about being responsive. So we're responsive to each other and. And we're responsive to clients and we're speedy to engage. Our firm is not a place where you would leave a message and you wouldn't hear back from somebody for a long period of time. So it's a highly responsive culture. That's a really key value. And another piece is we're not contrarian in the fullest sense, but people like really smart, innovative ideas in our place. And so they generally look for the unusual, the novel, the thing that isn't fully embraced yet, the idea that people don't know about. And so there's a high value for not just being excellent, but being somewhat avant garde and having new answers. Another value that really matters to us is the nature or the notion of how we're colleagues with one another. And so it's a place where people have been around each other a long time. So it's a very honest place. There's a lot of feedback, a lot of information that comes back and forth. People don't hold back punches in our place, which of course younger people, they must think we're just the most evil place in the whole world. We were interviewing somebody a few months ago, before COVID and while we were still in Face to Face and they had raised some issues, and then we started engaging in dialogue as a group. There's about 30 people in the room. And afterwards he said, you guys must not like each other. And I said, well, what do you mean? He goes, that debate was really testing. I go, that debate is what we are, right? And it's what makes us good. We really like each other. You can't debate like that and not like each other and still work Together. And by the way, nothing inflammatory or anything like that, but people really go out and say, like, oh, you know, like that's crazy what you just said and like, I don't agree. And, and that's the nature of our firm. So we have several other values, but those are the core.
- [28:41]
Interviewer
How have you gone about building this business when so few people really know externally who you are?
- [28:51]
Randall Stuttman
Oh, that's the most wonderful question. And that's such a great, great asset that we have. So I'm a big believer that our firm and leadership in general is in the background, not in the foreground. And so Bob Dylan was right when he said, you're on top, you're really on the bottom. The idea that it's not about us. And when we study the best leaders, they have good reputations. And people in your industry, certainly people in their firm, know them, their organizations know them, but, but they're not that well known unless their seat is so high profile that they can't avoid it. The object is not just put your head down and hope for good things, but to do great work. And we're a referral based company, so we're a very large relative to what people do in our space. You know, not certainly by publicly traded companies, but we're a rather large firm and it's an entirely referral based firm. We don't advertise, we don't market, we don't do seminars, we don't do presentations. We don't even have a base organizational presentation that we would go out and say, here's who we are. So it's all referral. And we try to do really good work and create deep relationships. And then people take us from spot to spot, organization to organization, push this down inside their organizations and the like. And the thing that I'm most proud of is not just that we're not known, because I like that a lot, but I'm most proud of that a good portion of our clients, over 80%, are people that we've worked with for years and years, rather than that we've had for six months, nine months, or whatever else as a client. So a lot of our clients stay with us because we stay with them. And one of the reasons they do is because they don't have to worry about somebody saying, oh, I work with this person, I'm the coach of that person. We're just always in the background and I much prefer not to get the external credit, but to get the internal credit. People know what kind of value we add and that's the most important piece. And this idea of profile and vanity, it makes you feel good, but it's actually not good for most businesses. Definitely not good for ours. Now, that's contrary in view. We have young people come in our firm and they go, you guys are crazy that you don't promote yourself given what you are and your client base and everything else. And my response is, and I keep smiling, right, for more success, because it's not about pounding our chest. We also, we don't want to be compared against those people that pound their chest and that make it about themselves and so forth and so on. I just don't respect those people nearly as much as I respect the people that do quality work and go along their way. So that's kind of who we are. People don't write a lot of things in our firm. We don't get quoted by magazines. We don't talk to the Journal and other kinds of places. And they call us all the time and they want to know about X. You know, they learned that we're working with Y client or X CEO. And my response is, I don't even know what you're talking about. And we go along our way, and that seems to be the right call for us. I'm not saying it's our call for everybody, but it's definitely the right call for us. I gotta tell you this. So I had leaders say to me, ted, you're only truly famous when somebody who's crazy thinks they're you. And there's no upside to that. And I've always believed that that. Profile is your enemy. It makes you a target for litigation. It makes you target for media scrutiny. It makes you a target for peer jealousy. Profile for all great leaders, unless they can't avoid it, is your enemy. And your job is not to covet profile. Your job is to covet the outcomes that really great work produces, the self satisfaction it produces, the relationships it produces, and the differences in people's lives that it produces. And that's what it should be about, rather than your picture on some magazine.
- [32:15]
Interviewer
So that notion, of course, was the original impetus of when I had first asked you to come on the show and you respectfully declined. And part of that was this incredible knowledge that you've developed with your team of what these behaviors are of these great coaches. Now you have developed an online course called Admired Leadership. And I'm just going to flat out vouch for this because I've dove into it over the last week and gotten through a good chunk of it and it's amazing. The Nuggets are just amazing. I'm going to be telling people about it. So what was the impetus for sharing this more broadly than just within your coaching clients?
- [32:56]
Randall Stuttman
So understand that I went here kicking and screaming. Absolutely, kicking and screaming because I've been a big proponent that the stuff that we've been able to uncover and that we use in our coaching practice, tremendously powerful stuff, things that we can teach people, things that I can summarize in just a handful of minutes. There's a lot of leadership wisdom there. We focus on the stuff that people don't know rather than what they do know. Or at least that's what our goal is. We could have written 50 books and we chose not to ever write a book. And every once in a while I'll make a presentation for a client organization and that's self satisfying to a degree. But we've kept this stuff under wraps. We've lost a few behaviors over the years by being out and about in public forums. One of which became a very, very popular book that sold millions of copies, is based on one idea that's no longer in the course because it's somebody else's attributed to them now when I know they were in the room when I spoke at one point. So I was not a big fan of the idea of doing this. And I've been railed on by lots of my colleagues over the years, sometimes for vanity's sake of they just want to be known for this stuff. But usually, and the arguments go like this, number one is more people should benefit from our work. We can make anybody a better parent, a better teacher, a better coach, a better leader, a better spouse. Shouldn't we put this in the hands of more people? And my response is, yeah, that's nice, but I'm not sure how we do that in a way that's humble enough. And then the next piece is you're not going to be here forever. And a lot of this knowledge resides with you. Even though we have the outlines and things, it's hard to know all the nuances that you know, shouldn't we get some of this down in a different way? And my response is, yeah, maybe. And then the biggest argument that was made and I created a relationship with a very special person who came into our organization because he believes in admired leadership and, and his whole goal, unbeknownst to me at the time, was to get me to do this. And his response is, you're going to lose all this content over time that it's now you've been out there, you got so many coaches and so many other people talking about this stuff and you're out there speaking in different things. You think you've lost one great behavior to a book, you're going to lose dozens. Because the only way to keep things in this time of social media and so forth is to be out there with it and to own it and have people attribute it to you. And so he made that argument, he made it over a period of months to me and I said, okay, what would we have to do? And he said, well, what about a leadership course where we took 10 mocks modules or something like that, took a bunch of behaviors in each module and kind of videotaped them and articulated them and created some outlines and examples. What do you think about that? And my first reaction is that sounds absolutely horrible. Do I have to be in them? And he said, of course you do. And I said, well, it's already a non starter for me. Right. And so we worked on it, we worked on it and finally he convinced me that we needed to do this. And like everything else, once I go in, I'm all in. Although I have to to tell you, I had major doubts all the way through. I still have doubts about it all. I just don't like being out there like that. I've trained myself not to be. So it's kind of hard to see it when all of a sudden I'm on a YouTube video. That's a really big departure for me. But anyway, that's where it came about. And so about a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago now, we started the process and we started doing the outlines and deciding how we were going to go about it and everything else. And this last March we launched the digital course and weren't sure if it was going to get much reception or anything else. And it's been overwhelming so far. So it's early days, but it looks like it's going to have a big impact on people, which is what I want it to have. And we'll get our critics, the haters will come out eventually and all that kind of stuff. But we haven't seen much of that yet. And we've seen nothing but like your reaction, which is, wow, where has this stuff been? And your notion of nuggets, I like that those nuggets are just real behaviors. And, and as you know, we take a big difference between technique and routine and we don't want people to use these things as techniques, which is an Easy thing to do. And so we make a big push for that. But so far it's been fun, but that's where it came from. And every once in a while I wake up in the middle of night with cold sweats going, why the heck did I do this? But for the most part, I'm very pleased with the outcome and I know our organization is happy that we finally did this. And they're right. I'm not going to be around forever. And so this is a good thing. Great.
- [37:13]
Interviewer
Well, we got to get a little taste of these. There are 10 modules, 10 behaviors in each. So there's a hundred of these on the course. I plucked out a few ones that I thought were just sort of most eye opening.
- [37:26]
Ted Seides
The first is in this area of
- [37:27]
Interviewer
decision making because I've done a lot on the process of decision making, the new science of decision making. But this is really about the behaviors and would love you to kind of pick on one. The weigh in consensus was the one that I kind of grabbed onto.
- [37:43]
Randall Stuttman
It's interesting. You start on the one that maybe is one of the more complex ones in the whole set. So it's actually weighing consensus making is. And by the way, the title is basically what it is. But it's a series of routines, not just a single routine. So it has a variety of different parts to it. Almost none of the other behaviors have that many parts or parts at all. So you took a complex one. But decision making is complex. So over a long period of time, we studied the particular kinds of leaders who make great decisions. And what we realized is that they were operating in different expressions of the same pattern. So the bias has been, especially in the last 30 years or so, to benefit from the diversity of the group and to try to create better execution of decisions. Because let's separate the idea of actually making a decision versus getting it executed. So the idea is to get everybody heard, to build as much as consensus as possible. So the bias is toward a consensus orientation to making great decisions. So rather than one smart person sitting in a corner by themselves generating a decision and then unilaterally deciding and then asking people to execute, the bias here is that getting everybody to contribute and having everybody's views thought and trying to get as close to everybody being able to live with the decision, which is what consensus. Consensus is an agreement. It's having a few strong champions and everybody else can go with the wisdom of the group. So that's the bias. And it seems to be that a lot of the best decision makers do it in a particular way. And so one of the things that they do is they rely on a target proposal decision that basically they put out there. But they go out of their way to say here's the target. And now they get people to weigh in against that target. And that saves tremendous amounts of time. People can respond much more quickly and clarify their thoughts against a target. The act of leadership then comes to play, and that is once you get people to respond to a target, now you know who the dissidents are, the people that are not in support of that decision. You can now start to work consensus is what we call it, by having multiple conversations, getting them to either reshape that decision with you, that is compromise on that decision, or influence persuade them as to what's the benefits of this are, and so forth until you reach a place where you have near or close to consensus. And then what you do in course of group settings is rather than waste time in group settings trying to make decisions in group process, what you do is you do it away from the table. After a target position's made, you create consensus or near consensus that you come to the table and then you validate the decision. You say, all you hear is the argument, arguments. And we're very close to this. Let's have a last discussion on this. And now we basically make the decision together. And now we spend our time in execution. It's so much more efficient than other ways of doing it. It is the natural way that we see lots of leaders do it. So this is all about major decisions. If you spent some time in that module in that particular behavior, you get more of it and you can figure out how to start doing. Weighing consensus making. Right. Again, only major decisions. I don't want you to do it around everyday decisions or minor decisions. Maybe the biggest part of that routine is that every major decision has a decision maker owner who drive the process and either work toward consensus and if they can't reach it, they have to make it. I can't tell you how many CEOs that I deal with who try to make all their decisions in group meetings. They don't get anything done. There's never any consensus. They wind up having to make all their decisions unilaterally. Everybody thinks of them as an autocrat. They don't want to be an autocrat and they don't what else to do and what weighing consensus making is the way that the best leaders do it in a way where they don't have to make all these unilateral decisions and Also, it sets up execution in a better way. So that's what weighing consensus making is about.
- [41:25]
Interviewer
One of my favorite modules has been the one on managing your time and thought maybe we could pick out one of the behaviors in that module that related to technology.
- [41:37]
Randall Stuttman
So think about the idea that like the old expression, technology lets you be in touch with everybody but yourself. And the reason I like that expression is because it's probably a little bit true, but mostly because technology is totally coercive if you allow it to be. So what happens with technology is unless you have strong and hard rules to technology, it controls you and you don't control it. And then after a time you're not as productive as you could be because it's the technology driving your productivity rather than you driving the technology. Remember, technology is just a tool. So think about telephones, which is a great example, right? Telephones diffused over, over a really long period of time. Some people argue as long as 60 years. It took in the US took almost 60 years for everybody to have access to a telephone. So as a result, there were all kinds of rules that evolved over that really long period of time around the use of telephones, traditional use of telephones. So you probably had some in your family as you were growing up, when we still had landlines and there were telephones. Like example, the rule was you probably didn't have a telephone in your bathroom, right? That was only reserved for hotels because that was really weird, right? Because you're not supposed to talk to somebody while you're, you're having a bowel movement. But there were times where you could interrupt people, how late you could call. Then voicemail became and call waiting. You know, there's rules like if you're at the dry cleaner in line and somebody makes a phone call, they're not supposed to be ahead of the line because the phone call isn't separate then waiting just like you are. There's all kinds of rules to when things diffuse slowly over time. The problem with most, most, the new media of course, is they diffuse so quickly that there are no social rules. So what that means is I can email, text you, I can tweet at you, I can do it 24 7. And the expectation is that you're going to respond and engage just like I am and so forth. And so the rules make it so. The technology basically is the powerful piece of your productivity. So shackling meat is just a metaphor that when you get into that behavior basically says this, you should create your own rules around these mediums. Now there's no right rules, but there are lots of interesting ones and we give some on the module and lots of examples. But a rule might be, when do you process emails? You might have a rule that says I process emails first thing in the morning and then I don't look at emails again until the end of the day. Now, I'm not saying you can live with that rule, I'm just saying that some people have that rule. And what it does is it shackle constrains. That's all the shackle method metaphor is, constrains that medium. So it saves you time. You might have a rule that says, when conflict occurs, I immediately go to voice to voice conversation because I don't do conflict vis a vis texts or emails because those are inflammatory mediums. Because we get to hide behind the words and not the face and the voice, we will often say things we normally don't do. So as soon as it's clear we disagree or that there's some level of tension, struggle in our conversation, we immediately go live. At least voice to voice. That's just a rule that constrains that medium. I'll give you more of a software one. So most people's phones, when you leave a voicemail, if you're still in one of those cultures where you have voicemail, we're still voicemail. People in our firm, you have several defaults in your phone. You have a 30 second default, a 45 second default, 122nd default and a 3 minute default. You can set that default anything you want. I always set my default to the lowest number so that you have to be succinct in the way that you leave me messages because after 45 seconds it's done right. And then you're gonna have to re erase and redo your message to me, which means I don't listen to three minute messages. That's just a shackling, it's just a constraint. And so to sit down over a long period of time, a couple weekends, and really think, what are the rules that I can live by that I should live by based on my values and based on who I want to be in terms of these things. So I'll give you an example of one of those rules that I have lots of clients, they have a room in their house where there's no screens, just no screens. So the only thing that happens in those rooms is people read, they converse, they play games, they do all kinds of stuff, but there's no screens. What I have found from most of my clients is Those become the most unpopular rooms for the first three months and then the most popular room in the house because people enjoy that. When we talk about screens, for example, in my marriage, I have a rule that. That says when we eat, there are no phones. Wherever we eat, whether we go to restaurants, whether we're at home, the rule is no. That's a shackling of the media. Okay? So while I don't argue for a set of right rules, there's no right rules. When we study the best leaders who are really productive, they have very specific and lots of them rules to almost all the mediums. And those rules allow them to be more productive, and they change the relationship we have with that technology. Technology. The technology now again becomes a tool by which I'm productive rather than the whip master. That creates my productivity, and that changes the game. So that's what shackling the media is. And the best leaders, all shackle media, every one of them, where most of us are just. We're subject to other people's rules, if they have any at all.
- [46:28]
Ted Seides
One of the things that people always
- [46:30]
Interviewer
struggle with is how to handle and manage around weak performance.
- [46:36]
Randall Stuttman
Yeah, and weak performance is just an anathema to organizations. Maybe by watching it, you already convinced you that it's about weak performance rather than weak performers. So all of us have weak performance, but very few of us are truly weak performers around everything. If we're known as weak performers in organizations generally because we're weak at the most critical thing. If I'm a salesperson and I don't. I'm not very good at selling, then then it's easy to label me as a weak performer. But in fact, I have lots of other strengths. So the first thing is, which I think you've just now intuitively done, maybe you did it before you listened to us or you didn't, is that whole notion of we all have weak performance. There are things in our lives and the way that we engage and the way that we do our work and so forth and so on, where we're just not as good as we should be. So the question becomes, then what do we do in order to get that performance up? What there's a lot of controversy around is a lot of very strong leaders, powerful leaders, but leaders that are simply to like to control things, which is a lot of leaders. They do what we call micromanage. They hover over people, they second guess people, they nudge people, they bother people, and they constantly point out to them that they're underperforming. They sometimes Give them tools or strategies to go forward, but for the most part, they're seen as being oppressive in the level of detail and the weeds they get into. And it's considered micromanagement. And most consultants that operate in the leadership world would say micromanagement kind of demotivates people, doesn't make them better, and so forth and so on. So I was fascinated by this whole micromanagement piece because there's a reason that the leaders, like, tend to do it. And the reason is they don't want to give up on that performance. They want that performance to increase, but they don't know what else to do other than to create a shroud over these people and kind of sit above them and sit on top of them and so forth. So when we study the best leaders, people are really good at elevating performance and. And getting the most out of teams. We were interested in finding is there something that they do differently? And the answer is, yeah, they do. And they basically confront those people with information. So what does that mean, confronting with information? It's the idea of that anytime there's low performance, there's usually a piece of information that is the recipe for people's success by information. That is, there's an action and that I can gain information about this. So let's just take the sales example, which is just a simple one. Say I'm somebody that is a salesperson on your team, and my performance is low. I'm not reaching my milestones, and I'm not engaged in the way that I should. And so after doing a little due diligence as your leader, I learned that your call volume is down. You're just not talking to enough people. So the amount of conversations you're having is not very high. So rather than simply asking you to have more conversations, what instead I do is I simply ask you to say on an everyday basis, give me a call log. Send me your call log every day as to who you've been calling and what that conversation was about. And by asking for that information, I'm basically requiring you to engage or to do that thing. And so the information itself is highly impactful, influential. So when I confront over information, it's how much information do I want, how frequently? And that's how draconian we become if we're really dealing with low performance. So, for example, in that instance where I'm asking a salesperson for a call, I could ask for that every day, I could ask for that every week, or in fact, I could say every hours, text, Me. Wow, that's pretty impressive. But it depends on how bad your performance is. And it's not busy work. It's the recipe for your success. So anytime you see low performance, there is an action which ties itself to a piece of information that I can ask of you. And depending on how influential I need to be at this moment, how much of the performance I need to save at this moment because of whatever salient and the issue here, I can ask for it more frequently. So that's the goal and that's the behavior of really making people better from performance. What do I ask of you? How often? And it's never busy work. It's always things that are or ideas that are connected to your success. So there's so many different examples. But I mean, that's the essence of confronting people with the questions related to the information that they need to provide. And by the way, when you ask somebody salesperson to say, give me your call log every day, the first thing they say to you is, well, nobody else on the team has to do that. Why do I have to do it? And the answer, of course, is because your performance is below par. And as soon as your performance is up, I'm not comfortable yet that you're doing everything I want. So I want to see the call lock. And so what you'll find is either people get better because you've hit on the recipe for their success, or they'll leave. They just feel as if they're singled out on that basis of that performance, which is not a bad thing in a lot of cases. Right. I remember when my son was in high school and he was having problems with a particular subject matter, and I simply asked for his homework to be on the kitchen table every afternoon. And what I learned was just by that request, that piece of information, everything got a whole lot better because now it required him to know where the homework was, what the homework was, and at least he had to put it in the spot where he could have actually do it. And that was all I had to ask. I didn't have to sit over him with the problems or talk to the teacher or anything else. So I was lucky enough to land on that request for information. And then I required that that's what has existed. And all of a sudden a lot of the problems that were happening in that particular course went away. That's the magic of confronting people, confronting with the idea of their own accountability to the information that is the recipe for their success. That's what that behavior is about. It's not hard to do. It takes a lot of practice and sometimes you'll miss the mark and you will ask them for something that doesn't create a difference, but that's about leadership, the art of leadership. But that's what that behavior is. And it's really consistent with people that are admired leaders. I mean, they do it constantly. They're always asking for information from people, in many cases at the same time, multiple different people. They're always managing the weaker performance, not the weaker performers, but the weaker performance.
- [52:31]
Interviewer
I know I could go on and on and on, but we're going to have to leave some of this for people to sign up for the course. So I want to turn to a couple fun closing questions, but I have one question for you before we do that, which is I know you've worked with a lot of investment managers and you've worked with a bunch of allocators. And I'm curious, from an allocator perspective, someone investing in funds, what are the ways they might take some of the behaviors that they could learn by taking the course to help them think better about their evaluations of investment managers?
- [53:04]
Randall Stuttman
The modules are broken into different functions of leadership, but basically, I'm not so sure you couldn't use every one of the modules and all the behaviors to say, what's the quality of this leadership? Like, what's the quality of this fund that I'm about ready to invest and allocate money to? In particular, I would want to look at the team module. So listen, independent of admired leadership. But I would tell you the trifecta of teams is trust, respect and recognition. And so where's the trust in this team? Does this team have high levels of respect across it? And is this a high recognition place where people want to do their best work? And if you go through the team module, while it doesn't say those three things, and I'm not even sure I use that in the introduction, that basically what all those behaviors produce. And by the way, it's a little more complex than you think, because here's the issue of trust is largely a function of experience and dialogue and conversation. That's how we come to predict people and find certainty and the like. And so I would want them to look at some of those team behaviors and say, do I see anything like those team behaviors in this, in this management group? But the respect thing becomes really interesting because remember that I can respect you on two different categories. I can respect your competence, your skill, or I can respect your character. And in many cases inside places like hedge funds or private equity firms or other places where allocators would invest. There's a high degree of respect on skill and a low degree of respect on character. And that creates division inside those teams. So we have to think through what are the character issues and how do they manifest themselves within that team as well as what are the skill issues. Because every once in a while you'll have somebody that's gotten complacent over a long period of time as the original partner isn't carrying their weight anymore and that sows the seeds of dissatisfaction and fraction and fragments that team and so forth. And then recognition. We know unequivocally not our research, that high recognition teams outperform everybody else. That is those people that feel like they're recognized for great work. They feel as if that somebody above them is willing to say thank you and say excellence when they do excellent things. That irrespective of whether you're a high need appraised person and the like, you want to be a part of a team that holds the best performers up and that creates a value around acknowledging the best performance and so you want to produce that. So I would go through that team module probably and say what do I see of those things inside the organizations that I'm looking at? And in particular that module focuses on value based leadership and we talked a little bit about that earlier. I would want to know if I can articulate for you the values by which I created this culture that aren't mom and apple pie, that aren't just about integrity and respect, but really get granular, then I probably don't know them and I'm certainly not operating by them. I would always suggest to allocators you're going to do better and they're going to do better. As those organizations, if they can articulate those values and be strong about how they about apply them every day, that's a big deal. And, and by the way, I'm going to tell you, I'm always going to have a lot of work because most organizations just haven't figured that out. So they value good stuff. They don't know how to use values in a way that produces leadership and creates team. So that would be my off the cuff response. Look at the team module and really spend your time there and evaluate people against that team module. That would be one the second piece, then the module on why should anyone follow you, which is really about credibility. There's a lot of features there around character that you can instantly size up. Any investment manager and say, are you credible to the other people around you, or are you just simply so good at what you do that everybody respects you? On that one, one dimension, high character really matters a lot. I think that would be another instructive area to spend some time if I was an allocator.
- [57:01]
Interviewer
All right, here we go. Randall, what is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?
- [57:07]
Randall Stuttman
So I played golf in college when I was younger, and while I can't hit it very far anymore, I can still compress a golf ball and I can still putt. And so I enjoy the heck out of gol I for fun. I work with quite a few college golf teams. I'm a performance coach for a couple. And I like to think about the mental side of the game and strategy to it and so forth. And I'm amazed at how these kids hit the ball now. So impressive. And so golf's still a big thing for me, probably will be for the rest of my life. I just love the game. I love everything about the game. I love the people it attracts, and so golf's it. I still play a lot of golf, but less play golf. I like to talk about golf, especially with college kids and people that are up and coming. Been a lot of fun, and that's where I spend a lot of time.
- [57:48]
Interviewer
What's your most important daily habit?
- [57:52]
Randall Stuttman
So my most important daily habit, I read a tremendous amount. Some people would actually say to you, because of my travel schedule prior to this pandemic, I just read a tremendous amount, maybe more than anyone that most people know. And reading doesn't mean anything unless you're able to capture. And the capture is about grabbing the insights and then being able to put it in someplace where you can review it and see it over and over again. So my most important daily habit is at the end of every day of the things that I've read, I now distill it down into capsulized insights or conversations the same way. And those insights then become put into places where I can review them on an ongoing basis and either cull them out and get rid of them or make more of them or decide that I need to be refreshed by them all the time. That's my most important daily routine more than anything else.
- [58:42]
Interviewer
How do you curate the. What do you use to curate those insights?
- [58:46]
Randall Stuttman
I use journals. And so I have about 35 different journals that I use topics. And it's capricious as to how I decide what goes in what topic. But, you know, if it's something around in my leadership, behavior goes in one set of journals. And if it's something about marriage or it's something about this, and then, by the way, I collect jokes and stories that I think are powerful and things of that nature. And so I'm constantly curating that stuff and then reviewing that stuff and capturing that stuff. And I do that at the beginning and ending of days, sometimes in the middle of the day, but usually always at the end of the day. That's a really important routine for me.
- [59:18]
Interviewer
And so do you do that electronically?
- [59:20]
Randall Stuttman
I do that physically. I carry one book, usually with me, one notebook, and then review it while I'm in travel as part of my reading, and then put it away and then review another one and so forth. I'm an old fashioned. I believe if you don't articulate, write it down, it's too easy to lose it because what happens electronically, of course, is it disappears. You have to actually call it up. Whereas when I have physical things, just like physical books, it requires me to engage the physicality of it. I understand I'm old fashioned, but this is the way I prefer to learn. And so I have young people in our firm all the time that look at me and go, like, how do you do that? And my response, I don't know how you do what you do. But yeah, this electronic reliance is somewhat dangerous to me because it disappears. You don't know that it's there. You're not forced to engage it. You're not forced to confront it. I see my journals are right on my desk every single night. I see all the wisdom that's inside them. I can pick them up at any time. I don't have to open anything up and remember where the file is or see an icon or anything like that. So it's just different. But again, it's just my preference doesn't make it right.
- [60:17]
Interviewer
What's your biggest pet peeve?
- [60:19]
Randall Stuttman
Gosh, I have so many pet peeves, Ted, I'm not even sure where to start with that one. I'm confused, and I have a lot of consternation around people whose aspiration and skills don't match up. I can tell you that inside. When you interview as many people as I do and so forth, and people inspired at these grand and lofty things, and they've got no skills and foundation to ever get there, that frustrates me for them. But pet peeve. I guess my pet peeve is that there's such a large subscription to Bromides and Platitudes in the Leadership Space where there are people out there that sell things and that are very, very popular, that you learned in third grade and that are not very insightful and just don't have any power to them and yet people seem to find them as amazing. That's a pet peeve of mine because that's just a strange outcome for me. I'm vested as far as that goes. Pet peeve? Yeah. I'll tell you a pet peeve for me. So I believe everybody should respect their psychology. I believe we have deep traits and tendencies and preferences. It's not how I focus. I don't think you get better by focusing on them. I think you should understand yourself. I think you should understand other people. No question about that. But I'm always amazed at how many people take one of the self diagnostic tests, whether that be Disc or Myers, Briggs or Hogan or whatever it might be. They'll sit down with me and they'll, they'll say, randall, that really nailed me. I can't even believe how good that diagnostic was. It just grabbed me and just nailed me right on. And my response always is, you're the one who gave it the answers. How couldn't it have nailed you? Like, you're the one that told it all the things that it basically used their simple algorithm to tell you who you are. Like if it didn't nail you, like, you got a big problem. Okay. And it's a pet peeve. Like I don't understand how people can't see that and go, this diagnostic, it just grabbed me like it nailed me square. I'm like, of course it did. It drives me wild when people tell me that stuff. But if that's my biggest pet peeve, I'm in pretty good shape.
- [62:17]
Interviewer
What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?
- [62:19]
Randall Stuttman
My parents lived a very different life. My father flew bombers in World War II. My mother was somebody that had to go to work when I was young because my father was sick. These were people who worked really hard. We came from a very modest place. We didn't have a lot of the advantages a lot of other people had. So I learned about hard work, I learned about sacrifice. But my parents always believed in an expression that I still use. And that expression was, you're only as good as you're willing to be bad. And to them that means try everything, expose yourself to everything, take the risks. The fact that you're not going to be good at something or that, that you're going to fail at something, that's okay because you're never going to be good unless you're willing to be bad at stuff. And that doesn't mean you have to stay there. You don't have to continue doing that, but give yourself the widest exposure. Don't close off relationships or conversations or new experiences. Go out and do it all and then take the risk to try it. And you might stink at it, and that's okay. But you're never going to be good. So you're only as good as you're willing to be bad. That was something that never left me. So while my parents believed that talents came in many different forms and none of us have all of them, and the one thing that nobody can do unless you let them is outwork you, they believe deeply in that. They believed in sacrifice. They believed in all kinds of things. But that idea of being exposed and having all the experiences in life and being willing to try things and not necessarily be good at them. And by the way, I find that so many young people today have just the opposite philosophy. They won't try anything they're going to be bad at instantly they don't like things they're bad at, when in fact I've lived the opposite view, which is to try everything and in many cases embarrass myself. But that's okay. It's such a deep learning in all of that. You're only as good as you're only be bad. That was the big lesson from my parents.
- [64:09]
Interviewer
All right, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
- [64:14]
Randall Stuttman
That's an easy one for me. Who knew that every single thing you own in life owns you first? I didn't know that. I didn't know that every car, every house, every animal, like whatever you own, it owns you more than you own it. Okay? It's you're responsible, you've got the maintenance. You've got to, like, think about it all the time. This idea of collecting material, material goods and assets and real estate and everything else. I wish somebody had said to me, like before, you own that. I want you to think through how it owns you. And took me a long time in life to get to that spot to understand it. I'm not any better at preventing it, by the way, but I now know it. So every time I buy something or invest in something, I now know it owns me also. And I think through it a little bit. I usually don't. Doesn't stop me from owning it, but I'll go, okay, I'm going to do that again. But that's one of those things I wish I had learned really young. I don't think you have to eschew material goods or possessions or investments, but you got to know that they own you and they own you. They just literally own you. And I can see you smiling, so I know it resonates with you. Right. But everything you own owns you first, and that's something I wish I'd learned early on.
- [65:27]
Interviewer
So, Randall, how can people find you both if they're interested in minor leadership and potentially coaching with you and your colleagues?
- [65:34]
Randall Stuttman
First of all, we put out a video that I did around fanness that's on YouTube. It's about 20 minutes and it's worth everybody's watch. Like, if you like the idea of fanness, it'll give you a better and a bigger picture than what we even covered today. So that's out there. If you're interested in admired leadership, there's also a YouTube video called In Search of Admired Leadership, which kind of gives people the background of where our work came from and what it is and so forth. So I think that match. And then if you're interested even further than that, go to admiredleadership.com and the landing page is actually pretty interesting. There's five foundational videos in that landing page that give people the essence of what's a behavior and why is this stuff leadership wisdom and are leaders made or born and what does it really mean to be authentic? And then the big one that I'm a big believer in is difference between technique and routine. And then that's their choice if they want to dive into more deeply and invest in the course. But even going through that will change a lot of things for people. And then the course is the course and get through myredleadership.com that's how they get there.
- [66:35]
Interviewer
Great, Randall, really appreciate it. Thanks so much for the wisdom.
- [66:39]
Randall Stuttman
My pleasure.
- [66:41]
Ted Seides
Thanks for listening to this episode.
- [66:43]
Interviewer
I hope you found a nugget or
- [66:44]
Ted Seides
two to take away and apply in your investing and your life. If you'd like what you heard, please tell a friend and maybe write a review on itunes.
- [66:52]
Interviewer
You'll help others discover the show and
- [66:54]
Ted Seides
I thank you for it.
- [66:56]
Interviewer
Have a good one and see you next time.