← Confessions of an Implementer
Confessions of an Implementer
The Impact of Purpose-Driven Leadership with Dave Feidner, Certified Implementer
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- [00:01]
A
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. Welcome to another episode of Confessions of an EOS Implementer brought to you by Talent Harbor. Today I am stoked to welcome Dave Feidner, a seasoned EOS implementer and an expert in transforming businesses on an international stage. He started his career by helping a family owned business expand nationally. And Dave quickly realized his passion for entrepreneurship and leadership development. Over the years, he's been instrumental in building a network of companies around the world that culminated in international organization. And we talk all about this throughout the interview. What is it like to stand up entities as you have the demand and you have the clients, but you need to be able to stand up new entities all across the world. And we talked about his different strategies and his different tactics. In some areas they would go in and acquire companies that were doing similar things and they would put their process into the mix and help grow those organizations. There's other times where they would go out and they would hire and look for visionaries that were already local to that region to help stand it up. We talked about so many incredible things. Another thing was this idea of employment by convenience and how you want to get your organization to get to a level of employment for purpose or a contract for purpose and getting the entire organization aligned around that purpose instead of convenience where employee retention and other things might suffer. So it was a great conversation and I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks so much for listening. Dave, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it. I think you have a really, really interesting story and I am excited about today's conversation. And one of the things that's incredibly impressive is the work that you did at rgis. And let's talk about that a little bit. You spent almost two decades there. What were you hired to do? And then what did you wind up doing over almost 20 years?
- [02:23]
B
Yeah, it was more than 20 years. I'm Gus, run by my LinkedIn profile. So RGS was a family owned company and I got to know the family very well and so I helped them build what became the largest business of its kind in the US and then I convinced them to let me take them global. And so the final third of my time there was leaving the US and launching and building a dozen companies in Europe and Latin America into what became the world's largest provider. Of inventory accounting services for retail spread. It was really two separate entities. There was this US domestic organization and then there was this collection of companies who spread around the world. And that was the piece that I was focused on. And they ultimately separated, became two completely different organizations, and the US business was bought by another company. But the international business still exists to this day. And it's literally a collection of entrepreneurial companies spread around the world. Uk, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China. And it's full of entrepreneurs who are all guided and led by this gentleman named Assaf Cohen, who was my former partner and is now running that entity and doing really, really well with it.
- [03:52]
A
And when you say inventory counting, what's interesting is like I didn't even realize this was a thing until Hunt a killer. And it was probably too late because we were sitting on $4 million of inventory and then we had to do an audit. And they're like, well, we can't do a financial audit unless you've got a clear inventory count. So when you say inventory counts, are those the types of things that you're talking about, like sending bodies in and having a process to count and audit?
- [04:14]
B
Yeah, you're talking about platoons of people going out into retail stores any time of the day. So it was a 24 hour business, seven days a week. So at any given time we would have people. And still to this day, there are people out physically counting in stores and they've got technology and they do it in a much more efficient way than it was done in the past. So it's a relatively small number of people doing it with equipment that's designed to help them do it as efficiently as possible. And that was the nature of the business, collecting all that data and aggregating it and providing it primarily to retailers.
- [04:57]
A
So when you came into this organization, they had an existing business, it was domestic. It sounds like they had process, they had people, it was doing what it needed to do. You came in, we're doing some things over the years, and you were like, you know what, there's this other continent across the pond and I think we should start talking about taking this thing global. Where did that even come from?
- [05:17]
B
Well, it was a couple of US retailers that were tugging us in that direction. One particularly, which was Walmart. And so as some of those folks were expanding, Walmart had then reached the limits of its U.S. growth. But there were certainly opportunities for them in other places. They bought a company in Germany, they bought a company in the uk. They bought a big company called seafare in Mexico. So that was the catalyst that got us thinking in those directions. And initially my thought was, okay, there they go. All these US retailers were going, and they're going to establish stores and conquer the world, if you will. And so we could just ride that wave. Well, it didn't work out that way, not even close. And so what we actually had to do in each country was create an entire separate business that had in many ways, culture or style of our global culture that existed, but only in that one place and focus very, very locally on that particular market. So in some cases it was going into a country and it was finding an individual who could start it from scratch. So an entrepreneur. And we would fund them and we would resource them and they would go out and get the local clients. In some cases it meant going and buying an existing business and building from there. So it was a combination of different things. Some countries it was multiple acquisitions. I think in France, we ended up doing three or four different acquisitions. I started with just one business and a couple of guys, and then we built from there.
- [06:56]
A
When you were searching, so let's say you weren't using the acquisition approach, but you were looking to stand up from scratch. And I'm assuming were you doing this because of local laws, regulations and just different cultures, instead of just like bringing your group and kind of saying, this is how we're going to do business, like letting this more startup in other countries.
- [07:16]
B
So in some cases it was we need to be there. So the UK was an example of that because Walmart was going to buy a large company there called Asda, one of the largest retailers in the uk and we knew that that was coming and so we wanted to get there ahead of it. In some cases it was very opportunistic. So really wanted to get a business going in France, but didn't have any leverage there whatsoever. Until we started working with the largest French retailer, was a company called Carrefour down in Brazil. And we took a relationship from there. The individual in question moved back to France, was running a region in the south of France. So set up a meeting with that guy, got an opportunity to present ourselves to that region, ended up doing some pilots for them, and then opened a business in Exo Provence and started building from there. So one contract with one retailer and then I think today that business on a standalone, it's probably like a 60 million euro business, but it's the aggregation of probably three or four different acquisitions, plus a lot of organic growth. But yeah, it started with an idea and One meeting, and then you just kept taking the next step after that.
- [08:40]
A
And if you're going into another country and you're going to start this from scratch, and maybe you did, or maybe you didn't have rocket fuel then, and understand visionary integrator, when you were looking for these people, were you looking more for visionaries to stand them up or were you looking more for integrators?
- [08:56]
B
All right, so I got it wrong a couple of times, I'll admit. And by trial and error, I found I needed visionaries who could at least execute. The visionary piece was important because it was good to establish a ground of good execution. It was critical for the business. But literally nobody else was going to drive this thing. So it wasn't going to be my vision. It wasn't going to be somebody else's vision. If you're setting somebody up in Italy, and I'll use Italy as an example, because we started with one employee, guy named Giovanni, who took that business from one person and built it into a very large organization that it is today, and he still leads it to this day. So he was a classic visionary. And if we had not had a visionary in him, it would not have become what it became.
- [09:47]
A
Wow. When you're searching for a visionary, and I understand you said a visionary that can execute. The thing with visionaries is like, generally they both understand where the market's going, they understand where the opportunities, they can help guide organization towards it. They also understand their value. And when you think about how you incentivize a visionary, how does that look? And how was that kind of different than employees that you start bringing on after that?
- [10:14]
B
Yeah, so it is difficult from the standpoint. So we sold our entity to the Blackstone Group. So then a good part about Grace was while we were under that umbrella, that private equity umbrella, so there were some opportunities available, particularly when we were buying a company and the former owner was coming on board to run that entity for us. So there was a way for them to share in the equity. But for the most part, it was a little harder to do than, for example, if I were a venture capital firm or something like that, and I was in the business of staking folks. So in many cases, you didn't always have the opportunities for equity sharing that existed in every single situation. But you're giving an individual a chance to build something of their own within the confines of their culture, their country. We're just providing the tools, the resources, whatever you need. And it was up to them to build it into whatever it is that they wanted to. So as long as it was an individual who wanted to create something, that was the bigger motivation for them than necessarily participation in any kind of equity framework, they usually did pretty well.
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A
When you're looking for someone like this, I'm assuming you're not posting in Craigslist or maybe LinkedIn, I don't know. Where did you find visionaries?
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B
So there was a lot of network and I employed search firms and I had at one point in time just a couple of in house people. That's all they did was search. But for me that was probably 50% of what I was doing, was just looking for talent because I'm a visionary as well, and I knew a visionary when I saw them. So given the ambition that I had around the enterprise, and then at a certain point I had a private equity backers as well that had to be satisfied. It was just a matter of constantly finding these people, taking swings at the back, getting it wrong, probably more often than I'm willing to admit, but then eventually finding gold and individuals who could do it really, really well.
- [12:34]
A
When you think about this expansion, it's an incredible story and it sounds like it was seeds planted by existing clients and then those would blossom and then you would get another account in another location and then that would expand internationally. There's a secret sauce in here somewhere because that doesn't happen to all companies. Like some companies get fired as consultants or advisors or contractors, whatever the case may be. Some just stay in a certain region. But your relationships not only grew and expanded kind of regionally, but they grew and expanded internationally. And so there was obviously an incredible amount of trust of the enterprise and the business that you had built. Like what was the secret sauce there?
- [13:15]
B
So I would have to attribute some of this to one of the earliest ventures and that was in Brazil, had a joint venture partner guy named Ricardo Semmler, had an organization called Rubosenko. And Ricardo wrote a book called Maverick that ended up being a New York Times bestseller, but really exposed us to the level of transparency and trust that you can build in an organization. And his ideas were very radical at the time, but were practiced in our company in Brazil. And we adopted some of those practices and other companies or countries as well. So it was a revelation for me later on when I learned of eos, because baked into it were the same founding principles that had existed in that they're essentially timeless concepts, if you will, about human behavior. And somehow along the way of building organizations, we lose track of these things and what EOS has done is enabled me to bring that into the work that I do with the clients that I work with now. But yeah, for me, a lot of it started with in Brazil 25, 26 years ago.
- [14:30]
A
And when we talk about transparency and trust, for some reason, as soon as you said that, what it made me think about was the conversations in my Vistage group and a lot of the conversations that we've had. And there was a hundred million dollar family owned business in my Vistage group and they were rolling out the sharing of financials and they showed, I think the P and L, but they withheld the balance sheet and they were trying to find balance. Where is there a line? So when you think about this idea of like trust and transparency, like what is transparency? Is it sharing financials, is it sharing the scorecard, Is it sharing bank accounts? I don't know. But what does that mean to be transparent? And then is there a line or, or. No, there isn't a line. We're all on the same team, we're all heading downfield together.
- [15:19]
B
Yeah. So this is difficult for every single client that I work with. Some of them get there sooner, some of them take a lot longer. And it is, it's stories and beliefs that we have about numbers and financials and what's going to happen if we share this information with people and how are they going to think and what are they going to want in the return. So what I've learned, and it really started in Brazil with Ricardo and more specifically Ricardo's lieutenant Marcio Batoni, who was essentially my mentor in that business, was you can go really far with transparency. And they went all the way towards employees setting their own salaries. And for an employee to set their own salary, they needed to know essentially three things. They needed to know what was the state of the company, so you had to share the financials with them. What was that position likely to pay in other organizations and then what is the general state of the economy? So they gave the people that information and said, okay, here you go, you decide what your pay needs to be. So that was radical transparency. When I run into resistance to sharing financials with employees, there's essentially two concepts that I share with my clients. Concept number one is if you don't share, then there is still an understanding or a belief about your finances that already exists within the employee base and I guarantee you it's not charitable. So they're making up their own stories about this stuff and sometimes it's your behavior that leads to them making up those stories. So the Founder or owner of a company who likes to share her new toy, which might be a boat or house or whatever, from that, employees will make up all kinds of stories. But the other is, do you want them to trust you? And if you want your employees to trust you, you have to take the first step because there's a status imbalance. You cannot expect them to trust you until first you extend trust to them. And what's a more powerful way of extending trust than sharing with them the financials and then dealing with the repercussions and dealing with the issue of lack of understanding of financials, et cetera, make them partners in the organization. Most companies don't do that. And that's a really powerful way to build trust with people.
- [18:02]
A
By the way, I agree with you on this. And it's something that we did. Some of the struggles that we would have is the explanation. And so it took me a decade to understand how to read a P and L and what a balance sheet and the interconnectivity between that, those two documents and then cash flow statements and everything else. And the thing that I think we struggled with more often than not is if we're going to be transparent in how the company's doing and what it's doing. Like, we also have to educate the folks on like how to assess and how to analyze this stuff. Do you find that it's easier to. I don't want to say withhold because that sounds evil, but is there a way to kind of flash the information that needs to be flashed in order to still get that transparency?
- [18:46]
B
Yes, you can flash it because you have a vto. So the ultimate means, the one that we recommend is that once a quarter you have an all hands meeting state of the company and you share with everybody everything that's on the bto. And if you have your financials on the bto, which most of them do, you're sharing those and you're having that conversation with them and it's scary the first time that they do it, but overwhelmingly it has worked out well. I can't think of a single time when a client of mine has switched to doing that and has not seen the benefit of it.
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A
It's interesting too. And we struggled too before we started to enter that level of transparency. And this was before we had self implemented on eos initially for a couple years. And then we went out and we found a brilliant expert implementer and she was like, what the hell are you guys doing? So the business went through a whole nother transformation which Was great, but we were showing the stuff before we had a VTO in place. And I agree, it's a weird thing. It's scary. And the other part here is publicly traded companies already do this. I was watching a congressional hearing a few weeks ago, or at least the highlights. And everybody knows how much the Boeing CEO made, and they're grilling him on it because it's public information. I don't understand why we were challenged with that.
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B
In private businesses, yes, we compartmentalize things as human beings. What applies to us personally? All of a sudden the rules that apply elsewhere don't apply.
- [20:18]
A
And did you read Traction or were you guys operating on EOS while you were at rgis, or did you later discover once you moved on?
- [20:26]
B
My exposure was not eos. My exposure was to burn harnishes. It was the Rockefeller habits. And the way I got exposed to that was through my talent search. I was looking for people to run these various entities. And I ended up hiring a couple of really sharp individuals who happened to be YPO members. And through their YPO forums, they had learned the Rockefeller habits and they introduced it to me. And we implemented, we did reused firms, one page strategic plan. And we attempted as best as we could within those various organizations to use those tools to drive the businesses. And then to a certain extent, we kind of left it up to the country managers who really were the ones who were leading those individual businesses to do things the way it made sense for them to do it. I mean, our only needs were the financial reporting. And obviously we had shared services and things like that that we provided. County, hr, finance, stuff like that, but left it up to them to figure out, okay, what do you want to make of this thing? How big can it be? How big is the market? Which clients can we penetrate, et cetera, and let them figure it out. So that was my introduction. When I got exposed to eos. It was probably about, I don't know, six months after I left rgis. I was still running the advisory board. And I happened on it because one of the companies I had looked at buying came looking for help from me. And I started working with them on a consulting basis. And somebody gave me traction at that time. And I read it. I'm like, oh, okay, this is what you need. And then we implemented that with them. And then I said, oh, there's this whole community of folks who does this kind of work all the time. Sign me up.
- [22:27]
A
You were talking about strategy a little bit. When we think about culture, we think about core values and we think about this. Intentionality. Intentionality behind who are you bringing on the team? Who are you retaining on the team? Intentionality with the core values and making sure that the entire organization understands them. When it comes to strategy, some of the things that we talk about are where do we want to be in 10 years? And then what does that three year picture look like? And how do we turn that three year picture into a one year plan? And then what are those 90 day rocks? Is strategy also intentional? Or is strategy a byproduct of putting the mechanics in place, having the right people and the research and the businesses that we're going to go chase, that stuff happens as a byproduct of setting the future or setting the vision, setting the course and having people help with that.
- [23:19]
B
That was a rather long question. I'm not really sure I fully understand what it was that you just asked. I heard the word strategy and it almost immediately shut my mind out because it means so many different things. I probably should look it up in the dictionary at some point. But strategy for a small company ultimately comes down to what is our superpower? What are we great at, what are we uniquely designed and put on this earth? To do that requires some self reflection, some organizational self reflection to understand. And core values are part of it because core values represent the existing virtuous behaviors that are there when we show up at our best. This is what it looks like. So understanding what that organizational superpower is and then what one can do with it, where one can go, how that positions itself amongst all the other folks that are out there doing exactly that same thing. And that is embodied in the vto. So as far as strategy is concerned these days, it is the VTO. The VTO is the simplest VAT means by which a small company, 10 to 250 employees, if they operate within that framework, then they don't need to go out and create a complex strategic plan.
- [24:43]
A
Got it. I think that that makes sense. The VTO tells you what you're going to chase. You could create an issue, whether short term or long term, and something to process, business to chase. But the VTO will always be that compass that helps, kind of yes or no, if that's the right opportunity or if that's the right direction for the organization.
- [25:02]
B
Yeah. So I mean, the simplest way to think about it is as an individual, if you want to become something or do something, or make a difference at all in the world, it requires that you understand yourself. You must know yourself, and the better you are able to understand and Know yourself the better. You will know how to deal with all the various obstacles that are going to be thrown at you along the way. It is exactly the same thing with an organization. We want to know our organization very, very well. We want to understand it at the level of its DNA. Because by doing that, that gives us the means to pivot, to deal with the obstacles, to face a pandemic, for example, and all of a sudden have revenue go to zero because our doors are shut. What do we do? Well, we understand ourselves well enough, we can do this and then you proceed accordingly. That to me is ultimately the value of having a clear strategy. It's knowing yourself very, very well and then taking the tools to then go and put together a plan and execute against it.
- [26:15]
A
Got it. And while we're talking about self real quick, I forget where I've read it, but I think you're either a part of or you're in the peripherals of EO and you're doing things with Vistage. You mentioned ypo. When you meet business leaders or if it's your clients, do you talk about or what has that impact been for you to be a part of communities like that?
- [26:36]
B
So what has it been? For me, it's been transformational for me. Something that I did not realize and that I neglected in my own growth as a leader. When I was younger was having a peer group. And now when I'm working particularly with visionary entrepreneurs, I'm looking for one or they're missing typically one or all of three things. The piece that I can help with them the most is optimizing their company with an operating system. But they're often missing the network piece. Optimizing their network by having a group of trusted peers that they can go to and have conversations that they wouldn't have at home and that they would not have with their employees. And therefore they've got nobody else to have these conversations with. That's what EO does very well. That's what Vistage does well. YPO does it very well, et cetera. And then the third is, are they a visionary who truly wants to achieve self actualization? I wouldn't say, I say visionary. It could be any member of the leadership team because I only work for leadership teams. But what are they trying to accomplish in their life? And do they want to go pro in achieving that? Because if they want to go pro, get yourself a coach.
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A
When you think about Vistage and you think about the chair is sort of the coach. Is your perspective on that, like find a peer Group, whether it's ypo, eo, Vistage, and to also get a personal kind of business coach, accountability coach in addition to those networks.
- [28:10]
B
Yeah, so Vistage has the virtue of providing both. Pretty much all those chairs act as one on one coaches for the members as well as facilitators for the group. With an eo, it's more of a self moderated forum and you don't get that one on one coaching that you would get otherwise. You do get exposed to your blind spots. It's very, very powerful stuff. You do get a lot of help from your colleagues, but it's not the same thing as having a relationship with a coach. One on one.
- [28:45]
A
You said this word, self actualization. I did 10 months at the Naval War College, just got back to Seattle about six weeks ago, and I went through this leadership program as like this kind of side quest while I was there. And we did all the assessments, we did the Hogan's, we did mbti, we did, you name it, we took it. And then we had to both get the results on ourselves, but we also had a crash course and what those results meant, why it asked the questions it asked, and how to kind of evaluate people that you're speaking to that haven't taken the test. I forget which test it was, but there was one that we took that was all about self actualization and it was all about these levels and kind of what level, like where are you at in your mindset to achieve the things that you want to achieve? What does self actualization mean to you?
- [29:32]
B
It's on Maslow's hierarchy. So it's at the top. And there are those who believe that all human beings are on a path to self actualization, should they choose to accept that path. And Joseph Campbell wrote about this. It's the hero's journey. And it is why the story of the hero's journey shows up in pretty much every piece of literature and media that's ever been created. It's because that is what we all, as humans are aiming for, is to be whatever that best version is of ourselves. Now a whole bunch of people choose not to go on that journey because it's scary and they've learned through other means that perhaps there's something else going on in life, like I'm a victim and life is stacked against me, or I don't know, there's a whole number of different mind frames that you can fall into that prevents you from doing it. But pretty much any successful individual is at some point in time chosen to enter the danger and go off and do something that scared them. And that is the path to self actualization. It is literally taking the steps and doing those things and entering the forest and defeating the beasts that are there. So that's essentially what it means. And you never actually achieve your optimum version. It's always a journey that you're on towards it. And as long as your mind is wired to think and act that way, you probably live longer.
- [31:09]
A
It's interesting when you talk about the journey and the path and like going into the danger zone. I feel like I've been a lifelong entrepreneur. Started selling creepy crawlers in third grade and then mowing lawns and shoveling snow and then just kind of kept graduating. But there was probably about a five year period right after I enlisted in the Navy where I still had like those ambitions, but I didn't take it to the next step. I kind of got stuck at mowing to people's lawn for 20 bucks and like trying to really break through with an original idea. And essentially I think the way that I was thinking about it was like, next step was a grand idea, but what it really took was selling stuff on ebay. And then that naturally evolved into creating my own website. That naturally evolved into something else. And I think that my path to self actualization has been these smaller milestones where I've been able to validate and demonstrate and build that confidence to be able to get to the next one. When you think about self actualization, is this going out and reading a whole bunch of self help books and really getting to understand who we are? Is it going out and getting a coach like we were talking about? What do you see that really has worked for people as they're on this journey?
- [32:14]
B
Ryan, starting with creepy crawlers and then eventually having your own podcast and spending six months with the table work, I think that's what it is. And now that you've done all those things, what is the next step? You just take the obvious next step. It's not always so obvious. So it does require thinking. And this is where coaches can be particularly helpful because, I mean, I take clarity breaks, you know, on a regular basis where I sit down and I've got this and I've got this, then I write and I compose and I think. But what I need is somebody to ask me questions. And a good coach knows the questions to ask to bring out and challenge my beliefs. So that's where the coach comes in. And it's no surprise. I mean, you can't be a professional athlete Without a coach, you can't be a performer in front of audiences. Without a coach, you need somebody who can observe you and give you objective feedback.
- [33:26]
A
If you're not joining Vistage, where there's kind of this built in kind of coach mechanism, not necessarily where do you go? Because everybody's got access to Google. But what do you ask the coaches? Like, what are some good steps to, like, vet coaches as you're seeking for that person that's going to push you? I think I've heard from mostly in the Navy, weirdly, but they've struggled to find kind of mentors or coaches because they said they don't respect them. So I don't know what happened during those conversations or why they went in a different direction, but there is something kind of psychological there. Like if I'm listening to someone, they had to have gone through it, because if they haven't experienced it and gone through it, then my question is, how do they know how to guide me? And maybe it's like, well, they just ask great questions and they've gotten really good over the last 20, 30 years of just asking incredible questions. But what are some of the things that you used to look for? You're still vetting for coaches. What are some of those things?
- [34:19]
B
I used to look for people who were at least my age, and I learned, particularly from one that was about half my age, that it is possible to have a lifetime's worth of experiences in a very short period of time. And I have met young people who are way wiser than me and have experienced more stuff. And I was coached by an individual 30 years younger than me once, and I learned some brutal realities about myself that made a huge difference for me in terms of how I started showing up in my life. So as far as coaches are concerned, there isn't a decent coach out there that won't give you an hour or two of their time to have a discovery conversation. And that's pretty much all that you need to tell. I mean, if they open something up within you in that conversation and you can see something in yourself perhaps that you had not seen before, sign me up. Yep.
- [35:32]
A
You have so much incredible experience, and the idea of scaling an organization internationally is incredible. And so the value that you bring into these session rooms and the perspective and the experience and the expertise, where do you find that one superpower? What's that one thing that when you walk into a session room, it's like, we're going to do this right? We're going to do it by the Book we're going to get you guys on the right path. But like, what's that one thing when you come in, they're like, this is it.
- [36:01]
B
So it's our core value. Number one, be humbly confident. So that is the mind frame going in. It is being well practiced but also establishing to the best of my ability, a perspective of neutrality. So what is there is what's there. And just understanding that what emerges are facts and not creating stories in my mind about the facts and trying as much as possible to just be very humble and neutral because the shit does hit the fan in the session room, stuff does come up. And being in a place of confidence and having done the inner work on myself to put myself in that position is essentially what I do when I enter into that session. Now, once the shit hits the fan, that's another matter entirely.
- [37:02]
A
What's your secret sauce there? How do you navigate once shit hits the fan?
- [37:06]
B
So occasionally you have to say yourself to yourself, today is a good day to get fired and you enter the danger and you tell them what you're seeing and you do it with all as much love and courage as you can possibly muster and share back to them what is actually going on or what you're seeing is going on. We refer to that as entering the danger, which is essentially a grow or die attribute of ours which also doing the right thing. Also all core values being in the US implementor.
- [37:43]
A
Yeah, I find that the best leaders in the Navy, I guess I can say all the forces now because I just spent quite a bit of time with everybody, including the space force with an asterisk. But the best leaders that I've experienced, they care more about what is right. They care more about enterprise success than they do about self or self career. And that's always been kind of the standout to me. And there's a lot of company people, company men, company women, yes, people. And just like these are the orders, this is instruction, this is what I'm going to do. The ones that make significant impact in the Navy and obviously in the entrepreneur world are the ones that read between the lines, interpret maybe for what the intent was rather than what's actually on the page and do what's right when it's all on the line. So anyhow, long winded. I respect that type of mentality because it's not that you don't care, because I was going to say like when people don't care, that's when you get the best. Like you do care. It's almost you Care so much that you don't care about yourself or what's going to happen. You care more about the success of what's the situation that you're dealing with.
- [38:50]
B
Well, you've had some incredible training, right? I would imagine that you've been trained by some of the best of the best. What you are up against in any organization is what is the contract with the people. And in the world of private enterprise, it's largely a contract of convenience. People go to jobs every single day because it's convenient. I've got employment, I've got a paycheck, I've got benefits or what's convenient to get there. There's some level of convenience that is fitting into their lives. The problem with that is it doesn't take much of an improvement in convenience for people to leave and go someplace else. So that's what I see more than anything else is people employed on the basis of convenience. And it works out for a period of time. And then when there's slightly better convenience, they go someplace else. What leaders who are great do is they have a contract on the basis of purpose. And when you can create that kind of a contract, then you're tapping into an individual's higher needs, their self actualizing needs. And that is to be part of something that's bigger than themselves, that is in all of us, this desire for meaning in our lives, to be attached to a purpose that is greater than ourselves. And you can do that in a business. You can create that in a business. Many organizations have done that very well. That's what I aspire to do with my leadership teams is to bring that out of them so that they can create that kind of a contract with their employees. And the ones that do it, and the ones that do it very well have no problems with people. They've got plenty of great people in the organization. They got plenty of people lining up at the door trying to get in. They've created that kind of an organization that it's no longer on the basis of convenience. We're all on a mission to create this thing, this greater thing. And everybody is happy to be part of that journey. And sometimes they leave, they come off of that journey and they go off to do something else. But they were participant for a period of time in something that was meaningful to them. And you created that. That's a wonderful thing.
- [41:17]
A
By the way, we just found our number one teaser for this episode, which is the contract for purpose versus a contract for convenience. When you think about the contract for convenience is that something that's observable and do you think that that's something that organizations should hire and fire based upon or do you think it's just a natural part of it? Natural part of having running a company as the reality of the environment?
- [41:40]
B
It is the default condition. And part of the problem is when you're in the midst of it as a leader, when you've been doing it for a while in the same organization, you can very quickly lose perspective. And then you're wondering why your people aren't engaged. And there's a Gallup poll that's done every year on this subject. And it's shocking when you see the results. People who are not engaged at work, people who don't understand how their job contributes to the greater good, people who don't really understand their role to play in whatever that thing is, the statistics are massive on this. So it is the default condition that exists in most organizations. When you create the opposite of that, when you create that clarity of purpose, it's of such a powerful thing. People will stick around and they will grow and they will flourish and the organization will flourish as well. But it does require intentionality to do it. You have to be very, very intentional and disciplined about it to create that.
- [42:46]
A
Would you say that the two kind of foundational things there is. I'll stop short of saying the 10 year target, because I think it's less to do with the 10 year target, which is. Can be a metric. Is this a matter of painting the picture of the future and making sure that everybody understands and is aligned with the core values? Like is that the secret sauce? Is that what builds that contract of purpose versus convenience?
- [43:10]
B
That is the starting point of it. And that's where it shows up. Because you begin with the behaviors of the people. Those are core values. What does it look like when we're showing up as our best and we're not looking for perfection here, but what are those common traits that already exist? Because that is something that is wholesome and good. And then what is that superpower that we have? You take this group of individuals and they'll have a set of skills and there'll be some capabilities and there'll be some intellectual property and things like that that you bring together. What does that all combined create in terms of a superpower? And to what purpose are we now deploying that? So these are the first two questions on the bto. Question number one, about us. Question number two, about our purpose and our niche or superpower. When you get those things really Dialed in and clear. It's like an aha moment. Okay, given this, then to what end can we manifest that purpose? How big can we make this thing? The 10 year target is the answer to that question. And the timeframe is not entirely arbitrary. It's 10 years because it is beyond the point most people think. It's also validated by the research that Jim Collins and his team did in good to great. And as Gino would say, there is this 10 year cycle that exists in business that he learned from his mentor and has proven to be over time, pretty darn true. So thinking in 10 year terms is a great way of compartmentalizing the future and giving an organization a reasonable time frame to aim at.
- [45:01]
A
It answered the question and it was brilliant because for some reason I got trapped in the core values and kind of painting that vision, you brought it back to where it truly lies, which is the core values, the purpose, the niche, and then being able to take those things, build the 10 year target, understand the 3 year picture and kind of back that all the way in.
- [45:21]
B
Yeah, there's a logic to the sequencing of these questions and I could jam.
- [45:26]
A
With you for like another hour on Good to Great. It's absolutely one of my favorite books, Dave. So someone's been listening to this and they're like, I need Dave as our implementer. He has the experience, the expertise and he's going to come and when shit hits the fan, he's going to lean into that. How would they get ahold of you?
- [45:41]
B
Well, they can call me. That usually works pretty well. They can pick up the phone and call me 248-8819-4 903. They can also email me, they can go to my LinkedIn page. They can do all those kinds of things. But mainly, here's the thing, they should ask themselves who they are. Because within this community and there's 800 of us around the world, we have this demographic that we work within. It's around 10 to 250 employees. That sort of second stage entrepreneurial company is what EOS is uniquely designed for. But each of us has, through discovery, figured out who our ideal clients are. So the people who might be interested in working with me would be people who would be very purpose driven. They would be individuals who want to go on that hero's journey. They would fit the demographic criteria, but they would have that level of ambition and willingness to, to learn and grow and build an organization with a great culture and just let the journey happen and aspire to be their very, very best be creative in the process of doing that. Those are the folks that are going to be the ones that are going to work the best with me because they're going to be people who are similar to me because I have the same aspirations for myself.
- [47:05]
A
Awesome. Dave. Thanks for spending extra time with me today. I appreciate it. I've got two pages of notes, so I don't even know how I'm going to consolidate this into a quick teaser, but thank you so much for coming on and it was an incredible conversation.
- [47:19]
B
Thank you for inviting me, Ryan, and congratulations on completing the Naval War College. And with that as a background, I'm sure there's incredible things for you and your own hero's journey, so good luck with that.
- [47:34]
A
Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave.
- [47:36]
B
All right, take care.
- [47:39]
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.