← Confessions of an Implementer
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Welcome to Confessions of an Implementer, a podcast by Talent Harbor. We share unique stories of implementers and the companies they've transformed to give you a rare glimpse into the successes and the challenges of the system in action. I'm your host, Ryan Hogan. Let's jump in.
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Hey.
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Welcome back to Confessions of an EOS Implementer, brought to you by Talent Harbor. Talent. Today I'm so excited to welcome Mitchell York. Mitchell is a certified EOS implementer with a rich background in both entrepreneurship and business transformation. He started by working with his father in a renowned deli in Manhattan's Upper east side, expanding that business, going from there into a publishing company in which he single handedly transformed that company and brought it into the digital age. But we talk about everything today. We talk about hiring process and how important it is to hire for FIT and how experience is pretty easy to identify. You can look at a resume, you can ask a few questions, you can contact referrals, but at the end of the day, what you want to know is, will this person fit into the organization? Do they have the same values as the organization has? And that's really what makes a great hire. So I hope you enjoy the show and rate it if you haven't. So Mitchell, as a part of that, your background came from family run businesses. And so how did that all start for you in kind of the entrepreneurial way?
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It started with my dad's business and my mother's father had a delicatessen, Upper east side of Manhattan. And we were open seven days a week. So my dad was there seven days a week until I was about 13, then started closing on Sundays. So if I wanted to hang out with my dad, he wasn't going to be coming to little league games. I would go to the store. So I would drive into Manhattan. We lived in Queens, just over the bridge, so not a big deal. And he'd give me tasks to do. He opened, we'd open the store and he helped me put on an apron, which was. I still have very vivid memories of. And I mean, I could see this store as clear as day in my mind. No one ever thought to took a picture of it. No one had a camera or we should have had a photo because it was a gorgeous store. Is this beautiful? So those are my early childhood memories, this deli which became a catering business because my dad kind of had a nose for food trends. And then that followed me into other jobs after I was through school and I had one job, my first job out of college was with a book publishing company. In New York with the GP Putnam. So a big company and didn't like it at all. And I wound up gravitating toward family run entrepreneurial companies after that. They're all entrepreneurial and several of them were run by families or founders who just ran it differently from a big bureaucracy.
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What are some things, when you think back to working alongside of your father and putting on the apron and putting in the hours? What are some things that came from that that have kind of carried throughout your professional career?
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Some of the things are not good things. One time when my dad took the business over from my mother's father, and this is an early childhood memory of mine, it was a few years later, but one of the old guys, the countermen, was making like a bunch of sandwiches for an order. He had the whole probably a 12 foot counter, 15 foot counter, just all lined up with bread. And he said, hey, Jerry. My dad, Jerry said, come here, Jerry. He said, look at this. I used all of yesterday's bread. This is all yesterday's bread. So, you know, we didn't waste any money. And my dad took his arm and he ran it across this like 12ft of sandwiches onto the floor. And he said, if you ever do that again, you're fired. So he was a command and control type of boss, in a good way. And he was also a very kind person, sometimes too kind. But I learned that there's only one boss from him. And that was not necessarily always a great lesson. I mean, I always think, wow, if I had had EOs way back when, I would not have been as controlling leader as I was at times. And that just comes with maturity sometimes. But it also comes with understanding the process, which didn't exist. These sorts of things of organizational how to get the best out of people other than commanding them was not a thing years ago. I won't say how many, but it just wasn't. So I learned good things and I learned that some things don't work in the 21st century.
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I've experienced many leaders like that as well, specifically throughout my military career. And we see examples of this and we see examples where it's incredibly successful. So I think you and I both know, or you and I seen enough companies kind of behind the scenes where really it doesn't work all that well, but there's others where it does. It drives innovation. I'm just reading through the Elon Musk book right now and like, he is that type of leader. I read the same Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs and it was A very similar. Why does it work for some organizations and not others?
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B
Well, those are two extreme examples. And I think that when you have a. And I'm not really interested in big companies like that, I have no basis of even understanding what that could possibly be like. So with companies that are smaller so much, it's not just the image of the leader, it's the actual presence at a certain point that fairly rapidly, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs weren't available to 99% of their workforce for decades because they got so big. In smaller companies, entrepreneurial companies, it's really just more real, more of the actual person. So I just think that's a fundamental difference. In a company that's small, couple of hundred employees, you see the person who's in charge of it every day. And the core values of the company come from that person. People are definitely looking for clues and looking to follow that path with gigantic companies. I think, anyway, I don't know because I never worked for it, but it feels like it becomes an abstraction that people are trying to do something to imitate the leader. I just feel like small company dynamic is much different.
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I agree with you. I think where I had success in my life, it's always been about surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me and finding subject matter experts in different areas in which they can make the right decisions and make a better decision than I could if I were in that role. So I 100% agree with the philosophy. It's just always been interesting to me to think about, like there's other organizations where it's ruled by the iron fist and I don't know how that. How one person can be in all places at the same time. Maybe it just gets back to driving.
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B
A culture of that, no, they can't be. And now you're making me think of my mistakes along the way. And I worked for this one phenomenal company that I worked for for 17 years. It was called CMP Media and was a technology publishing company. There was kind of a big three of technology publishers in the 80s and 90s. And I mean, it was like a runaway train. And so I started there as a entry level reporter on a newspaper and I very quickly became an editor and then an editor in chief and then a publisher, like super fast with no track record of management behind me. And I did always hire people who were smarter than me. The problem was I didn't listen to them. And there was one time where we put out a newspaper every week. In this one industry I was in for this company and paper would close on Friday morning. So on Thursday night, we'd have to put the paper to bed. So everybody would get a copy of the front page, get a Xerox copy of the front page, and everybody had to proofread everything on the front page. And then any typos or whatever got corrected and so on. And then Monday comes along, the paper comes out, and I had written all the headlines for the front page. And I was at a conference. It was in the travel industry, and I was at a conference. Huge, like thousands of people in an auditorium. I was sitting in the front row. And the president of Avis Renicar, guy named Joe Vittoria, holds up a copy of Monday's paper. It's called Business Travel News. And this is the first thing he says. He says, this headline is completely false. I'm sitting right there and I wrote a headline for a story that wasn't the story. It was the story. I wish it had been, but not the story. It was. I was like, so embarrassed. And I went back to my team and I said, why did you let me do that? The headline was clearly wasn't reflective of the story. And they said, well, you know, you're the boss. We thought that's what you wanted. It wasn't that they. So I had created a culture where they were afraid to tell me, hey, this headline is wrong. So, you know, I think that's a thing that happens to a lot of managers, is that they just feel like they don't trust their people. They have to second guess them. They don't let them make enough decisions. And I certainly learned from that. That was a really long time ago. And I certainly didn't manage like that through my whole career. But, boy, that was a tough one.
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Do you think it was like your style, like, let's assume you're not the big, bad, scary boss. Let's assume that I wasn't right. And so looking back on it, what do you think it was that kind of created that environment where it might have been collaborative and people weren't necessarily scared of you, but it wasn't driving. The needed pushback on some of your.
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Ideas gets back to my dad in the deli. I don't think he had great trust in anybody that he employed, and with good reason. There were employees that stole from him. There are employees that drank and sold drugs when they were out on the trucks. There are employees that just, like, didn't know how to do their job. And there were a couple that were good, but he knew that he didn't hire people smarter than him. He was the smartest guy. He was the only guy that was really smart, and that was his mistake or just the way things turned out? P.S. the business became very successful. My brother took it over. It developed and grew and grew and grew and sold it to private equity and all that stuff. Right. So happy ending. But my observation at the time was like, wow. He ruled with conviction, and he was very benevolent to his people. He would give them loans when they needed loans. I mean, all kinds of things that you do for people. But he never fully trusted them. And I think I carried that forward. It's just I thought I was smarter and better, and I knew better, and until I realized I didn't. I kind of do know where that happened, but I think that's where it came from.
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When your brother took over the company, was it already on the trajectory? Like, did your brother come in with a different culture, a different point of view, or was it successful in spite of some of those things that you've acknowledged?
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I think it was pretty much the same point of view. I think my brother was successful because, like my dad, he took good risks. He invested in the business, anything his customers wanted. Ultimately, the customer base became caterers and event planners and big organizations in New York like the Metropolitan Museum and Saks Fifth Avenue and those sorts of places, and whatever they wanted. We got into the party equipment rental business, and when they said, well, we want a thousand tablecloths for the Met Gala, and we want this fabric from Italy that looks like this. Go get it and make us a thousand tablecloths that you'll rent to us, because we don't want to buy it for whatever economic reasons they had. So, yes. So my brother knew to say yes to any important customer and figure it out later. And I think that improvisation is also what I took forward. Just like, figure it out later. If you know Eos at all and you know Colby. You may not know Colby, but it's the assessment. There's this thing called quick start, and I'm like a nine. Quick start. So I will dive into the pool. I'll look to see if it has water after. I can't do it.
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Just jump in with the hose.
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With the hose. And my brother did the same. So I think it was successful in spite of many things, not because we were great planners or Bostons.
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What's interesting is I'm thinking about the first story that you just told where one of the employees had said, we saved money because it's bread's from yesterday. And your dad came and knocked everything off the counter. And immediately what came to my mind was the customer, like the product, like your dad was fanatical about the product and satisfying the customer. And it sounds like your brother kind of carried that same yes, we'll figure it out. Yes, we'll make it happen. Yes, it'll be the best in what we do.
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So very true. And I don't know if it was a spake. The mistake that he made is, and a lot of I mentioned this because it happens to a lot of entrepreneurial companies is he merged with another company and the merger was successful and they built a bigger company that had more scale so that it could be sold like 10 years later. But the culture of the people that he sold to or that he merged with was completely different from his own culture. They didn't want to take risks and they didn't want to invest in the company and lots of things like that. So a good lesson. If your listeners are entrepreneurial business people, you gotta be careful who you take on as partners or who you who you're gonna sell to and have a management contract, which is what my brother wound up having. Interesting.
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There are many considerations that's been a common theme. I was talking to Bill Huether a few weeks ago and he was talking about the importance of your clients sharing the same core values. Like maybe they don't have a list of the same three or the same five. But generally speaking, having some sort of blended core values is a good indicator of the success of whatever service that you're providing or the relationship that you're going to have. And you hear that all the time in acquisitions as well, where acquisitions go wrong mainly because, like, trying to get two different cultures disjointed and bring them together is like, it's frankly impossible. If you have a culture that's operating in a certain way and another one that's operating in the opposite way, both can be successful. But if they're different, like, how are you going to bring those two things together?
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Yeah, I had a lot of that interaction before EOs and a little bit during I was an executive coach for financial advisors for wealth management firms. And there is a big consolidation in that industry. So lots of folks are taking their practices and putting them together. And I worked with, I mean, scores many, many of these companies that went through these mergers of practices, which can be like merging two small businesses. One has a dozen people, one has another dozen. And all of a sudden you've got pretty Significant size, small business. And there was way more than one where they wound up splitting up after a couple of years. And part of the reason was they didn't have shared values, number one. But also they didn't think through the beginning who's going to do what here. They basically said you have a book, you have a book of business, we can save money. The typical stuff that people who don't think through mergers very well get to. Yeah, this looks good on paper, let's do this. And they don't think about who is going to be in charge of what seat. And we got someone that does that. Yeah, well so do we. Well, who's going to get it, who's going to do it and how do we deploy the other resources. And in more than one case it was this kind of civil war took place. They were together, but not together. Well, we're going to keep doing it our way and they're going to keep doing it their way. And all of the potential. My least favorite word in the world, synergies didn't come to pass. That doesn't always happen. But I think it's in the, I think successful mergers like that are in the minority. I think most times it's just really hard and often from what I observe, more difficult than it's often worth. Some people don't see any alternative. But if, when I have companies that are faking or verging, I present to them the ask them if they thought about all the other alternatives. I said why don't you just, you know, maybe just sell the business or maybe just keep going, why do you have to do this? And I tell them what I've seen and they usually do it anyway. But at least that told it's interesting.
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And I forget somebody just told me this like a month or two ago but what you just said is spot on. Like there is a statistic out there and it's like 80% of M& A, like actually doesn't work from like emerging standpoint.
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That works for the lawyers, works for the bankers, but not so much the participants.
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Yeah, it blew my mind because like that's a major growth strategy of many organizations and like all we see are the headlines and we don't or at least I don't necessarily follow up on that headline five years later to see how good that merger was. And it was a mind blowing statistic. I'll have to find it. The other interesting thing you talk about is like a lot of the things we do are kind of backwards and we're Seeing this a lot in the recruiting industry where, like, for us, like, when I was recruiting for Hunt a Killer or Run for your Lives, we would recruit based upon performance and experience and expertise. And we would put these candidates through the ringer to understand who they were as an individual. And we would contact references to make sure that all of these stories aligned. And like, hiring for FIT was always kind of an afterthought. Like, even in our interview process. Like, we had one interview and it was probably the third or fourth where we brought a few people together and said, like, is this person going to be the good fit? And the other thing, like, when you talk about M and A, like when you're out there in investment bankers and you're looking at sims, like, you're looking at performance of the business and, like, where you think the business is going to go, and generally the management meetings and the understanding of the organizational structure and the culture and things like that happen later in the stages. And so it's just interesting because it's like the predicator of success, whether it's a candidate or a new hire that you're going to bring on the team or of a business that you're going to go purchase has so much to do with fit, but it seems to be an afterthought in most processes out there.
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Yeah, I was always surprised by that. And in the course of doing EOs, I've become much more sensitized to what the order of things should be in hiring, to the point where when anybody asks me, what can we do to assure ourselves the best that people will work out? What I will tell them is that if you have a resume that looks like they have the right experience, okay, that's good. And you meet that person however you meet them. And in that first interview, I tell them, turn the resume over and let the person know I'm accepting at a face value that everything is on the resume is exactly as you've articulated it or better. And I don't care about that at all. Now, who are you? And the conversation is about who are you? And yeah, you want to talk about the things that you value and try and get to what do they value? However, there are many ways of trying to get to that. And then if there's a second meeting, then you can talk about experience. But if you just think to yourself, I don't know if I'm really going to enjoy working with this person. That's clue number one. And the second thing is that when you do talk about core values and if you're going to run the business seriously according to your core values, then you're going to tell that person, if these don't really resonate with you, you're not going to enjoy being here. Which is a backwards way of saying, we're not going to enjoy having you here if they really take these things seriously. So if there's some flavor of teamwork or collaboration as a core value, which you often see, and. Well, I really prefer to just like, I like to do my work by myself and not have people bother me. And sometimes I'll work from home. Even if everybody else in the office, you're not going to enjoy working for us. In that case, thanks for letting me know. That should be more of the conversations. Who is this person? I have one client wealth management firm. And before they make a hire, they'll go through a process, but several of their leadership team will go out to dinner, take this person out to dinner with their spouse, and if they're like a finalist to see what they do, to see what they eat, drink, say. And if everybody doesn't feel great, then they just don't do it. And I also advocate. I don't know how you feel about this, but I advocate, like, anybody who's in the interview process has a veto pen over every candidate. So one person says, this person looks good. Let me, you know, go see what Ryan thinks of them. If Ryan says no, then it ends there. Even if I could be the hiring manager. But if I'm the hiring manager and I don't love what I'm seeing, I should say no. If I say I'm not sure I should say no if I'm not sure that it should be no, it shouldn't be. Let me see if Ryan. Because then Ryan will come along and say, yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. Oh, okay, I'm glad you like him. Let's hire him or her. And that's just not the way to make good hires. If you don't love the person, if anybody doesn't love them, why just keep looking? You get the job done. That's the big fallacy. People think, oh, we have to hire. We have to hire. Who's going to do it? Well, someone did it before you hired that person. And there's nothing wrong, by the way, with the owner picking up a mop. There's nothing wrong with that. I kicked him off in the broom.
- [22:19]
A
I guess I did. Yeah. Take out the trash. I mean, that's. It's interesting because whether it was me at any of my Former companies or us talking to clients. Like never has there been a time where we approach a client or even in my history of hiring and we think to ourselves, like, hey, when do you want to hire this person? Like, oh, six months from now. Like no. Like the response we get is yesterday. And like what that does is it rushes the entire process and it forces bad decisions. And I've made many terrible decisions with hiring and I loved your point with like the veto pen. And this is one of the things, this is going to be a pretty terrible self critique because we had the same sort of philosophy. And the problem is that we put the culture and the values interview as three or four in the process. Which means the hiring manager, myself, whoever did the screening call, like they've already gone through a bunch of steps by that point. And so like if I was bullish on a certain candidate and they got to that final interview and two out of three people were yes, but there was one person that was like, no, we would still do it. And so although we had like anybody could veto. Like I would veto to vetoes because we just ran a six week process.
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There's a term in psychology for that that eludes me right now. But it's basically the human nature of compounding a bad decision. And that is an aspect of human nature, is that when you make a decision and you've invested in, it's a little bit related to sunk costs. But you don't see it as sunk cost. You just see it as, I've done this and have invested enough time in it, therefore I have to see it through. And boy, it takes more effort to bail in the short run. But hiring managers have doubts. They should just like no matter how much time they've invested, obviously they should when they. As soon as a doubt emerges, the world is full of people. Even though it sometimes seems like it's not, but it always is.
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It's always somebody and we always did the math. And you're always thinking about that math of a bad hire. And a lot of times what people throw around, like let's say it's six months and they'll say, okay, well the overhead and the operate like all the things in six months that was a hundred thousand dollar mistake. That's actually usually not the reality either because there were decisions that that individual made and there are actions that they took that either one, like missed opportunity or wrong decisions or two, if you had the right person in that seat, like would have been making better decisions. And so it's interesting when people Put together this magical number of like that was a hundred thousand dollar mistake. It's like that might have been a million dollar mistake, you just don't know it. The other thing that you said that I absolutely love because this is something that we're like preaching now, which is like assume everything is true in the resume. And so we made mistakes with that in the past as well with Hunt a Killer, where we were like, well, we're going to be a $200 million company. So we need someone from corporate America that's been at a $200 million company and they'll know the way to get from 50 million to 200 million. Big mistake. But like assuming that the organization understands exactly what they're looking for, like that stuff is very easy. And I don't mean to like diminish the value in like does someone have the experience? But it's on paper and you can call other people to understand what their performance was at that organization and those things. And so your whole notion of like turning the resume over. We start now after the screening interview. We don't get into a performance interview. Like if they screened well and all of those things were checks, then like we go right into a cultural fit interview. So I love what you say there because these books out there, like we used to use who the a method to hiring and there's like this five step program and process and it's got it all laid out and it's done by an organization that does a lot of private equity work, placement in private equity. But it just seems like so many times that the fit is the afterthought and it should be front and center and everything else can be verified.
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Yeah, a lot of things given certain parameters, you can teach, you can't teach what makes a really decent, good person according to your culture. It's hard to teach that.
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I hate to take us all the way back, but one of the things that I was interested in when you were talking about, you wrote the headline and nobody inside of your organization pushed back on that headline and you were talking through some of the things of like why you think that happened. Like knowing what you know today, either how would you change, how would you not gotten to that environment, or if you would have recognized it, which you did with the knowledge you have now, then like what would you have done immediately after to try and shift those type of behaviors?
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B
That particular mistake shouldn't have happened because I shouldn't have been writing the headlines. Why was I writing? Anybody can write headlines. Someone could write the Headlines. And I might take a look at them and say, oh, let me make this a little snappier or whatever. Because I thought I was the best headline writer and I thought I was the best writer and reporter, period. But I was the editor in chief of this thing. I wasn't the reporter, the headline writer, the copy editor. In my mind, I did everybody's job better than they did. And that may or may not have been true. If it was true, then I hired the wrong people. If it wasn't true, I was just being arrogant. Or maybe it was both. So I would, if I had it to do over again. And that was kind of one instance of a pattern that carried on in other ways. But I think the lesson is, and it's this idea of hiring people smarter than you. It's not always smarter than you. It's hiring people and recognizing that they have to have a destination. They got to be able to grow quickly if it's a growth oriented company. And you know, we've got this like nice little model that we do in the EOS on delegate and elevate with the four quadrants. I know if you've seen that. But the lower left quadrant is here are things that you don't like to do but you're good at in old. Old. And conversely, the top part of it is things that you like to do and are good at or you love to do and you're great at. And then there's a box for things that you hate to do and you're bad at. So hopefully the hate to do bad at stuff you've given up to somebody else by now. But most leaders get a little bit bogged down with don't like but good at. And that was me. I didn't particularly like these things, but I was really good at it, faster at it, and not trustful of people, which I got from my dad. And knowing that I was responsible for the end result, well, until the end result failed, I didn't really take stock. And it wasn't instantaneous. It took a while for me to realize that. Took a few jobs for me to realize that. And then some of the most successful people I worked with at this company that I mentioned, there was one guy who was a master at just like teaching people what to do. His name was Bob, we'll give his last name. But he was really good at hiring people. Young ambitious, hungry people, teaching them what to do. And Bob was usually down the corner at a bar called Fishtails. If you wanted Bob, you could just like he's probably at the bar and we all spend a lot of time at the bar. But the point was that he didn't need to be hovering. He was reachable. Although this was the days before cell phones, but they had a pay phone so you could find him if he needed to ask a question. But mostly he just let people do their thing and nothing bad happened. Just put the right people there, they just do it. And that's a great lesson. The visionary or the head, whatever sets the course and have the faith to not be arrogant and to get out of the way and to let some things happen. And yeah, even if you could have done better, like in a material way, does it really make a difference? A lot of decisions. Doesn't matter what the decision is, as long as there is one. They're not. Every decision is life or death. Why'd you pick this fender instead of that fender? Well, if it works out, then it works out. So I think there's a lesson in that. It's not always about letting people fail. That's a big thing. Oh, make mistakes and fail? No, it's just like letting people do stuff until they say I can't. And the other big thing is there's this misconception. I see this all the time with integrators, visionaries, but integrators especially, I can't delegate anymore to that person because they're at capacity. And I always say, like, don't kid yourself. Busy people get the most done and let them tell you that they can't and then help them reorganize their work. If they're the best person to do it, then why are you holding onto it? Just because you think that they're at capacity, you don't know what their capacity is. They want to. Maybe they'll just work harder, smarter, differently and figure out a way to get it done. If you hire people that can innovate, you're going to be a lot better off than if you make those decisions for people. Oh, can't possibly give them more. So what does that mean? It means I'm going to do it.
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A
We talk a lot about one way doors and two way doors and most of the time this came up during technology meetings. But we were very careful when it was a one way door. Meaning like if somebody was making a decision in which we couldn't go back, then we had to have not necessarily a meeting, but there had to be like more people involved in that decision, but two way doors, like anything that could be reversed because I mean People don't like to admit this, but like, we make wrong decisions all day long. And at least to me personally, it's less about the decision and more about the action and then taking action from there. Because every decision, you're going to learn something, whether it was the right decision or wrong decision, which allows you to make another decision, to get closer to where you want to be. Or you nailed it out of the gate, you were lucky, or you waited to have enough information to make the right decision.
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B
Agreed. One of my mentors once said to me, and I've repeated it probably a thousand times, is if you can't make the right decision, make the decision right. You ever hear that one?
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No, but that's good.
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I love that one. Because I can remind myself that first of all, most decisions are two way doors. And if you make the wrong one. All right, so what are we going to do with this cake that we just baked that we forgot to put the chocolate in it or whatever? So it could be vanilla cake. No, it's going to die. So this is true for certain things. The one way door things are ginormous mistakes in engineering companies that, you know, I mean, there are mistakes and there are mistakes, but for the vast majority of entrepreneurial companies, nothing is dire. No, one thing is dire. If there's one thing that pushes you off the edge, then you were already taking a running start off the edge.
- [32:30]
A
I don't want to brush over what you did at this organization because it wasn't just the writing of headlines. You guys were ahead of a lot of other publication companies out there. So if we've got some time, I'd love to talk about that a little bit.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah, well, the most valuable piece of it was it was a true entrepreneurial company. Husband and wife refugees from Nazi Germany came to this country. They were both engineers and they had a few different businesses. And then one day they were there in the electronics business and they started this company in their living room and they started a newspaper because they perceived there was a need among electronic component buyers to have a newspaper. So they started. Never done this before, but they started in a newspaper and they hired a guy who was their first editor. He worked in their living room. And then two years later, another newspaper, another, another, another and a. It never stopped until it got from startup to 500 million in sales. Now that took 30 years to get to 500 million. Sounds like a very long time these days when you hear about these crazy unicorn things. But we had, we call it a gee whiz chart so you walk into the lobby and there's a revenue chart and it just goes on this nice line like this. And we didn't have core values then, but what we had was what we called principles. Not core values, but same thing. But one of the principles was be a good company to work for, be a good company to do business with, give back to the community, support the community, grow 20% a year to create opportunities for everyone. And I can't remember the other three, but that in itself, that established the culture. Be a good company to work for, be a good company to do business with. And things would happen and we would say to each other, as leaders, as employees, and like totally not facetiously, if we do that, we're going to be a good company to work for. And then they did things that were being great companies to work for. They started, they were the first company in New York and I think on Long island or both to have on site daycare for infants and little children. And this is like in 1987, I mean, didn't exist. But they realized that lots of their female employees were leaving the company having babies. In fact, my wife, who I met at the company, she was like very instrumental person in the company. She had tremendous amount of technical knowledge. And then she had a baby and she was gone. And the next year they started this daycare program and she would have probably continued for a while. It was a real mad dash to get all this knowledge transferred. So they established this culture. They were really good to people. If you excelled, there was nothing holding you back. I was a reporter. I'd never written a news article in my life and for some reason they hired me. So then after like a year, I became a senior editor at another, different, bigger newspaper in the company. And after another year, maybe a year and a half, they were starting a new division and starting their first newspaper in a new industry. And my boss said, I hate to lose you, but you need to take this opportunity. Like I'm recommending you for it. It's going to be a big loss for my newspaper, but you deserve this opportunity. So I became an editor in chief. So entry level reporter to editor in chief of what became a really, it still exists of a big industry newspaper and then three years later a publisher in charge of the whole P and L. Like that doesn't happen. It was a total, if you could hang on to the end of the jet plane and not fall off, like, amazing opportunity. And that's the kind of company it was right until the end when it was sold for a billion dollars in cash. And the very end. We were also the first technology media company to have all of our publications available online on the web. And that was the last business that I started there. So ridiculous. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did find people smarter than me for that because I really needed to. And wow, that became a big part of when the company was sold. A big part of its value, the perceived value of having this operating Internet presence with different brands all available to people on the web. That was a huge deal. So yeah, unique culture at a unique time. Some of it was timing, some of it was just the way everybody just carried themselves. Company did go public toward the end and that obviously changes things, changes the culture. But even then it was still very much freewheeling. You could pretty much say anything to anybody and open door type of company. We certainly had our share of frustrations. I did with career and all of that stuff, but I can't imagine that I could have gone any farther, any faster, anyplace else. So it was quite a. It went fast.
- [37:45]
A
And when you tell that story for someone that doesn't know you, they might think, oh well, he's just very lucky. But I remember one of the stories that you shared with me of like how you got the job and how was that again? Like did you do?
- [37:56]
B
I was working for a PR firm and one of the reporters that I was assigned to try to pitch stories to was with an insurance trade magazine. And I said, you know, I really want to do what you do. This is so much more interesting than my end of it. And he pointed me to this company out on Long Island. I was living in Brooklyn, but it's out on Long Island. I'm going to have to get to Long Island. But I said, okay. So I sent in a resume and I really don't know why they even called me because I did not have any relevant experience. They were looking for journalists and I didn't have anything. It was an English major. So I had an interview and they said, okay, here are a couple of assignments for you. Like here are two stories. Go and make phone calls from your house, from your unair conditioned department in Brooklyn in August and when you're done let us know. So I drive back to Brooklyn and I get on the phone. I'm sitting literally like for two days in my BVD's. That's underwear. I don't know if they still move them and just dialing and calling people on the phone and reporting on these two assignments. They gave me. And then two days later, I drove back out there to Manhasset, Long island, and I walked into the managing editor's office and I said. And he said. He looked at me like, why are you here? What's going on? And he said, you know, said, you didn't understand or where? And I said, no, I'm done. Here it is. Here are the stories. So he walks into the editor in chief's office and they close the door and they come back five or 10 minutes later and say, okay, you're hired. That wasn't hard. And I took significant pay cut to take that job because I was working at pr, which paid relatively. Which paid better. But I really wanted to be in the media business and I really wanted to be a journalist at that time. So they gave me a shot to their unending credit.
- [39:54]
A
That's awesome. And, Juan, thank you for sharing that story. I mean, the point there, as people are listening to you talk about your trajectory and how you navigated, and it sounds like the company was great. And so I would say it was probably a blend of the company and also you, because not knowing you that well, but understanding, like, some of these stories, like, not too many people are going to drive all the way across New York or New York City, get an assignment, go back home. And then I believe you were typing it on a typewriter.
- [40:21]
B
This wasn't a yes, my Andy Smith Corona plugging in. And it works. Yeah.
- [40:26]
A
When you were growing these other businesses, and this was now into the future. So after the headline ordeal, did you start evolving or start changing to help kind of accelerate these other businesses, or were you operating in a similar mode? Not necessarily where you know best? I don't want to say that, but were you evolving? Yeah.
- [40:44]
B
Another good thing about this company was that they really believed in sending their senior people to further education. So we spent a number of us, maybe a dozen of us, spent, gosh, a week attending a leadership symposium just for us through Columbia University. And then they sent us another time to MIT for a week to study with this guy named Michael Hammer, who wrote a book called RE Engineering the Corporation. It was about what we used to call operations research, but it was about process management and RE engineering processes. They were always doing stuff like that. And then they sent me on their dime to Columbia Business School and paid for an mba, which. Which they'd never done. So, really, that was spectacular. So I evolved because, look, 17 years is a long time. I think I was 26 when I started and 42 when I left. I don't know if that's 17 years, but something like that. And I learned to become a better listener and to treat people differently.
- [41:53]
A
1.
- [41:53]
B
One story that stands out in my mind is I was publishing a very successful magazine in technology at that point. And I had an associate publisher, a woman, very, very smart salesperson, and very highly respected. And we were at a sales meeting. We had our sales meetings like in Vail and Aspen. And it was crazy. I can't ski. But we had these great meetings. And she was saying something, and I just said, no, you're wrong. I remember this. And when that particular segment of the meeting broke up, we walked out in the hallway and she said, don't ever do that to me again. And without even realizing it was. I completely cut her legs out from under her. Cut her authority out by saying, you're wrong. Like, what kind of thing is that to say you're wrong about whatever. A good leader doesn't belittle people in a meeting or even take the risk that they might feel that way. And that stuck with me. Among many other things that stuck with me. That was a hard lesson. Like, whoa, I really don't want to do that. Maybe you know the acronym W A I T Y M I talking. Like, I learned that was a moment for me. Like, maybe I should shut up until someone asked me a direct question or until there's a tie to be broken or it's really necessary. Maybe I should talk less. And as you can tell from talking to me, I'm never at a loss for words. So that's a hard thing for me to do, just to be quiet.
- [43:15]
A
How do you practice that? Is that just practicing and not for you? Or maybe you did have ways to practice it, but for the leader that's sitting in their weekly L10s that just won't shut up, are there things that they can do to get out of.
- [43:27]
B
The way a little bit more? Just read. Read books that are about subjects like emotional intelligence. I don't have an extensive bookshelf, but basically everything there deals with how you deal with other people. And I think the most powerful thing that leaders can do is just to, like, count to three or 10 when they want to say something, especially if it's like, in the form of a decision. There's a great coaching technique is always just ask another question. Like, you just ask another question. And don't make it like a trick question where you're leading them to say, oh, I'm wrong. I'll be quiet now, where you're asking A question, because they have something good that's there. So I think that's very important. And there was another guy I worked with who was really good at this. His name was Jeff. And he did a great job of acknowledging people where if someone had an idea, he would say, mitch, what you were saying about X, Y and Z, I think that's a really interesting idea or a good idea. And what about. What about? What about? And being able to build the bridge of saying, that's interesting. Have you thought about this approach or that approach? Or that's good. Just positive reinforcement that gets you so much farther, so much faster than shooting people down because you think you know better, which you probably in many cases don't. And there are lots of companies that they run that way. Fortunately, I don't have too many clients. I had one in eos. It was like that. They're not working with me now. And I'm sort of glad because it was a little bit too much of a heavy hand, too much of one person. Just like commandeering and not fun for anybody. And I could tell other people were sort of, you know, before they said anything, they were looking around. What's going to be the reaction? Let me read the boss before I say this. It's sad in a way. So I'm not often happy to lose a client, but I was happy to lose this client.
- [45:34]
A
I love those ideas someone else had talked about. Like, they write wait on the board. And people are like, oh, wait, wait to talk. And no, it was, why am I talking? It was an acronym. And for some reason, like, we're predisposed that we have to fill in dead air. Like, we can't let silence. But counting to three or counting to 10, or taking a step back and thinking through questions. I love the what about? As well, which is a great way of not saying, but, like, this is a great idea. But no, like, this is a great idea and this is a great idea. Have you thought about these approaches?
- [46:05]
B
And by the way, you don't always think it's a great idea. You don't have to say it's a great idea. If someone says something, you think it's off the wall. Like, I've been in meetings where I said, wow, that's an outrageous idea. Keep going, tell me more. And I love working with clients where we have a thorny issue, we're trying to decide. And what I always encourage them to do is I say think of the most extreme. Like, if this is your parameters, like, just go off way over there. What would be the most ridiculous, extreme thing you can think of that could be a solution and let's go crazy with it. And now let's start to work our way back toward some reality. There's a great TV show on now, I don't know if you're familiar, it's called For All Mankind. It's on Apple tv. It's about space travels. We're binge watching through four seasons. My wife and I just, someone turned us onto it. It's about space travel. But the Russians were the first ones to the moon and it became like this big race and they always had these catastrophic cataclysmic problems to solve and it's not always the same people that solve it. And what I find myself keying into is their ideas come from weird places and sometimes they seem ridiculous and, and of course they are because this thing is totally insane. They go to Mars, it's crazy. But they come up with these ideas that are far fetched and then they make those ideas happen. And there's a lesson there like that might be a good management symposium is to watch for all mankind and think about how you could solve what's the most difficult problem you have to solve. And look at the way they solve problems and can you get anything from their process?
- [47:54]
A
I mean that sounds like putting a magazine on this strange thing called the Internet back in the 80s.
- [47:59]
B
Yeah.
- [48:00]
A
So I love the correlations with like I'm a big fan of the Martian and of Apollo 13. So in Apollo 13 I always think to the scene where they dump all the stuff in front of all the engineers, they dump all the equipment out and they said we got to make this fit into this using nothing but this. I think about that a lot and I think about the Martian. And we used to run an exercise called what will Kill Us Next? And in startups that's a little bit more like prevalent. Like I wouldn't suggest that a normal company with normal profitability like always thinking about what's going to kill them, but in a startup environment, like there's a lot of threats that, that can take you out. And so we would run just like the Martians or just like in the Martian movie, we would run an exercise once a quarter called what will Kill us next. And it would help us understand like what were the top problems that we had to solve or we perish.
- [48:46]
B
I mean one of the greatest business books ever was Andy Grove, the founder of intel and the name of his book tells Julian you to know it was called Only the Paranoid Survive and this was intel in its heyday. I mean, it's still pretty big company now, but that was the message is that, yeah, what is going to kill us next is a really important thing. And then another great book. God, this is from a really long time ago. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Tracy Kidder, I think he wrote for the New Yorker. And you are too young, Ryan, to have heard of a company called Data General. Okay, this is truth. But Data General was a minicomputer manufacturer up in the Boston area in the 70s. And they were competing with a company called Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC for short. And DEC had these machines they called Vaxes vax. And there are mini computers. So it was started in mainframe to mini computers. It was before microcomputers. And P.S. that was my first computer newspaper that I was a reporter for. So when this book came out, Solving the Machine, well, they called it the Skunk Works. It was about a bunch of engineers that had to go from working within the bureaucracy of Data General because it was a sizable company, to basically finding a place in the basement where no one bothered them for like a year in this race to build a new machine that was going to kill their competitor. And that taught me a lot also. And we use that at cmp. We use that principle of you take a group of people from different parts of the company, you put a SWAT team together and they are the new product team on the new thing. And you take your best people. And it was always very political and there are like fights about it. You can't take that person. They're too important. And like, yeah, we can, and we're going to and going to give them a big raise. And yeah, we're going to do this and put those resources on the next thing. And that's how we kept growing. And that's what made it worth staying at for. And I wasn't the only one. There are people stayed there for 20, 30 years if they could, if they were good enough.
- [50:55]
A
In the Navy we call it tiger teams. But just getting a group of people together, I mean, in Disney they call it imagineers. And I always thought had this notion of like, imagineers were like, I don't want to say just. But they're engineers. But their job was to think bigger and innovate. But really it's been a separate cell that's been funded to do those things, to bring the smartest people together and think of things that normal people would not think of creating. So there's a lot of Value in that. Okay, so if someone has listened to this podcast and this episode and they're like, I need Mitchell York, like, there's no other implementer out there that I would rather have, how would they find you?
- [51:33]
B
They would find me on email. Mitchell yorkosworldwide.com or they could Google me, but those would be the best ways to find me. And I will say for my fellow gosh, 800 implementers, there are a lot of us out there, and they're pretty good. They're pretty good. I'm one of the old guys. I haven't been around as long as some of the really old guys, but I will say that it has been the best part. I wish I had discovered this sooner, but it's been the best part of a long career to work with companies, and there's nothing better than at the end of spending a day with a leadership team where they don't just feel pumped up, but they have clear direction and know what to do. And then if I had had the tools way back when, lots of different wonderful things could have happened better than they did. But no looking back, and I'm just happy to be doing it, happy to be doing the work.
- [52:30]
A
Well, Mitchell, we covered so much today. I have so many notes, everything from, like, tiger teams to how we see hiring and the philosophies to how important culture is. Because some of the things we talked about earlier is, like, whether it's M and A activity or hiring an incredible new leader or new candidate, having that alignment. But before you can have that alignment, you need to understand what your culture is, which obviously EOS companies do, which is why we prefer EOS companies. But thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. This has been the longest recording yet. And I mean that as a compliment because this was a fun one.
- [53:03]
B
I appreciate it. Yeah, it was fun for me, too. And keep me posted on your business. And, you know, if you do any outreach or emails, put me on your mailing list so I can track what you do. And sometime apart from this, let's just have a chat about your business so I can understand what you do.
- [53:19]
A
Yeah. Thanks so much, Mitchell. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on and thanks for everything.
- [53:22]
B
It's my pleasure, Ryan. Take care.
- [53:25]
A
Confessions of an Implementer is brought to you by Talent Harbor. To find out more about Talent harbor and our fractional services and talent search solutions for businesses, visit talentharbor.com and then make sure to search for Confessions of an Implementer in Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And on behalf of the team here at Talent harbor, thanks for listening.