Mick (3:55)
Sure. I think that the way that my brain works, and hopefully some people will relate to it, is look. I look for patterns, and scaling is all about patterns. Right. Can you figure out the pattern of what's not working? Can you figure out the pattern, what is working? And then can you double down? Test, test, test, adjust, adjust, adjust. So one of the things I have come to realize, and I'm not sure I realized this early in my career, is that when I look back, I've done two types of companies. I've never been an entrepreneur. I've always partnered with entrepreneurs, which I think, to me is kind of interesting because that's what I did when I was growing up. You know, my parents were entrepreneurs. I didn't start the companies, but I was trying to help them. And in doing that, I've had two different types of challenges. One has been turnarounds, and the other has been growth companies. Right. So, you know, why turnarounds? Because when you know you come from the rough and tumble side, what you have to realize is you can't change the way people look at you. You have to leverage the way they looked at you. And when you came from the rough and tumble side, they said, okay, we'll throw you into that. You'll be able to handle it. So turnarounds were easier for me because they said, this kid will. He'll figure it out. Growth companies are kind of the Elite, right. Once you've made your reputation, people say, oh, this guy's done it before. Let me put him in there. What's really fascinating is they're exactly the same. They're exactly the same. In a turnaround, I'm going to replace 60% of my staff, and I'm probably going to, in some way or another, impact at least 50% of the people in the company to a large extent. Whether you get rid of them or you upgrade them or you train them or things like that. It turns out in a growth company, over the first three years, you took a grow a company, you're going to change 60% of your staff and you're going to impact 80% of the people because you're growing so quickly, right? So they're exactly the same thing. I think people think, think they're different because you actually, in one case are saving a company. In other case, you're saving a company that can't, that needs to figure out a different way to grow. So for me, when you ask me, how do I do strategy, it may be a slightly different way of looking at it, and I hope it resonates with some people, is, look, brainstorming is about saying yes. Strategy is about saying no. Strategy is about saying no. Anyone can come up with ideas. Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad. People like to talk about this all the time, but, you know, really it's deciding where to focus. And so when I decide where to focus, my first step, whether it's meeting, you know, a person who asked me to coach them or it's taking over a company, is to stop thinking about what I know and start listening to what other people know. Right? Because, you know, when you look at a company that hasn't been able to grow as fast as people wanted it to, or they haven't, or they're struggling, there's probably 30% of the people in there that are really talented but don't know what to do to actually get that talent out or aren't allowed to do it. There's another 30% of the people in there that are very talented, but they're not going to help you get to where you need to go. They're not bad people. And then the most important part is there's, you know, somewhere between, you know, 15 to 20% of those people are people that will actually be culture carriers and that will actually drive other people. And then there's 10 to 15% who you got to get rid of. There's just, you got to get rid of them. But if you assume everybody is stupid when you come in, then they will assume that you're stupid and that you don't see them. So the first thing I do when I go to talk to person or I go to talk to a company is signal to them, I see you. I want to hear from you. Right? I want to learn from you. Now, again, they may not, you know, they may teach me something that they're wrong and I can see it, or they may teach me they're right. And I never would have seen that. But remember, when I come back to that top 15 to 20%, who are going to be the leaders to make the change, if I show them that I know something about the company not bringing it from the outside, how smart I am, that increases my probability that they will realize that when someone treats the people who they're going to let go with respect, they're going to treat the people they're going to promote with respect. And it's basic, and I know it sounds simple, but the reality is we get too intellectual. We need to, when we enter a problem to make sure that we understand it. You know, there's a. There's a thing that we learned from the Israeli military when we were training, which was they had the power of seven. And so they talked about strategy. And when they went in to make a major change, they would take seven people and three would argue the proactive and four would argue the negative. Now, they wanted to make this change. They had an understanding and they wanted to make it. Why did they do that? Because either they were going to find out that they hadn't really thought it through, which happened 20% of the time, 80% of the time, the change, they were going to go forward with it. But even if they were going to go forward with it, they now understood where they may need to mitigate risk, where on the edges they may be wrong, where they would need to actually figure out how to stop the negativity. And so going through the process opens up your mind, repurposes your neurons. We're designed with quick twitch. Neurons are designed to be frozen into place so that we can make decisions faster. Why do we do that? Because, dude, we're not the prettiest, we're not the fastest, we're not the strongest animal, and we were afraid of getting eaten. So a lot of what we do, which has been an advantage in survival, turns out to be not an advantage when you're leading complex organizations. And we are the only animals that actually organize across continents, across cultures, in masses. When you look at tribes and especially look at tribes of animals, they do it on a very intimate level. So when we start to get too full of ourselves and realize that we have all this power, we have to go back to what is our challenge. Our challenge is your biggest strength often becomes your biggest weakness.