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Leading to Thrive, with Klaus Kleinfeld – Episode 490 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On July 1, 2025
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  • Adam Outland, author, Business, CEO, data, entrepreneur, feedback, high performance, leadership, purpose, questions, success
Klaus Kleinfeld, the former CEO of Siemens and Alcoa and the only leader to have successfully served as CEO of two Fortune 500 companies on different continents, recalls going to work at age 12, and covers the perils of sign language in the business world, getting close to the source of an issue, why we should be talking about […]
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  • Klaus Kleinfeld, the former CEO of Siemens and Alcoa and the only leader to have successfully served as CEO of two Fortune 500 companies on different continents, recalls going to work at age 12, and covers the perils of sign language in the business world, getting close to the source of an issue, why we should be talking about energy instead of productivity, the 'rule of feedback', the 5 critical components of a high performance team, why purpose is a laser, and being a 'hypothesis generating machine'.

    About Klaus:

    Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld is the only leader to have successfully served as CEO of two Fortune 500 giants on different continents: Alcoa in the US and Siemens in Germany. With a nearly forty-year career spanning multiple industries, from established businesses to tech startups, he has advised US presidents and global leaders across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. As the founder of K2Elevation, he invests in North American and European tech and biotech firms. Actively engaged in private sector, public affairs, and cultural boards, Dr. Kleinfeld, a dual US and European citizen, enjoys work, life, and family near New York.

    Today, Klaus is an international manager, investor, and entrepreneur. He is the Founder and CEO of K2Elevation, a company that invests in and develops international enterprises in the technology and biotech segment. Currently his portfolio consists of activities in Germany, Austria, and the US. He is Chairman of KONUX and Chairman of FERNRIDE, a member of the supervisory boards of GreyOrange, Fero Labs and NEOM as well as an Advisory Partner at EMH Partners GmbH.

    Prior to this, Dr. Kleinfeld was the first CEO of NEOM. He is a member of the NEOM board and advises the Kingdom in matters of economic development. From 2008 to 2017, he served as Chairman and CEO of Alcoa/Arconic. He steered the company through one of the worst commodity crises in its history while building out high-value aerospace, jet engine, and automotive businesses and positioned the company in innovative high-tech sectors, finally allowing the company to be successfully split into Alcoa and Arconic.

    Previously, Dr. Kleinfeld had a twenty-year career with Siemens. He became CEO of Siemens AG in early 2005, and successfully led the company through a substantial transformation. Prior to this, he had been President and CEO responsible for the largest Siemens region, the Siemens U.S. Corporation. In this function, he successfully restructured the U.S. operations, and this resulted in a sustainable turnaround. During his tenure at Siemens, Dr. Kleinfeld held various positions in the medical, telecommunication, IT, automation, and power generation businesses. Before Siemens, he worked as a product manager in the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland. He began his career in consulting.

    Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld is an Honorary Senator of the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, an Honorary Trustee of the Brookings Institution, a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Board of Directors of The Metropolitan Opera. He was appointed advisor to several U.S. Presidents in various roles, was also a member of the Global CEO Advisory Council of Premier Li of the People’s Republic of China, a member of the Mayor of Shanghai’s International Business Leaders Advisory Council, and served as a member of the Foreign Investment Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of Russia, the Chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, and the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. He also served on the boards of the Center of Disease Control, Turner Construction, Bayer, Citibank, Hewlett Packard, and Morgan Stanley. Dr. Kleinfeld was born in Bremen, Germany, and holds both an MBA from the University of Göttingen and a PhD from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He holds a dual citizenship from the USA and Germany and lives in New York. 

    Learn more at Leading-To-Thrive.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Oh, Nashville, Tennessee. Okay, that's very nice.

    Adam Outland
    Where in Germany did you grow up again? Or was it G-

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    I was born in Bremen, but I left when I was 18 and my parents were refugees from East Germany. Currently, I'm outside of New York.

    Adam Outland
    Well, uh, ich bin ein actor Berliner. Um-

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Oh, wunderbar.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Wunderbar. Then let's, let's start with that. So how, how come you speak German?

    Adam Outland
    Um, both my parents were opera singers and, uh, they're, they're US, uh, born in the US, but they lived 14 years in Bonn and Cologne.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    And, and, uh, they performed there at the, um… Does, does Cologne… Cologne has an opera house, right?

    Adam Outland
    It does, yeah. Yeah, my dad performed locally at the Cologne Opera House. Bonn had an opera house, still does, uh, and my mom performed there. And then she, uh, she had an international career after that and performed all over.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    I love opera. I'm also on the Metropolitan Opera board, you know, so, so I lo- I just love it. Yeah, lovely. Absolutely lovely. And Bonn at the time, probably still was the capital of Germany, right? I mean-

    Adam Outland
    It was, yeah. My, my dad and mom would sometimes perform in Berlin during that period. And, uh, the way they were paid was… It was always interesting and you always wondered if your pay would, would make it back across to the other side.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    What were they paid with? Gold coins?

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I went to Nuremberg for my first place of work. Then from Nuremberg, I went to Switzerland, you know, worked there in the pharmaceutical industry. Back to Munich, uh, and there I started my career with Siemens, you know, and then Siemens moved me to, to Erlangen. And then from Erlangen, I was asked to go to New York. Then I was asked to come back to Munich. And then after that, I decided to leave Siemens and I came back to New York and joined Alcoa. Alcoa's headquarter was in New York, you know, so which most people don't know because the presence was usually in Pittsburgh, you know?

    Adam Outland
    When you were a young man though, did you d- did you already envision this, this path towards administrative leadership of, of major companies? Or were you in it for the details of the science and-

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Yeah, so no, I did not. I did not imagine that. In fact, um, I enjoyed learning. I mean, I've always been curious and wanted to, wanted to learn more. I enjoyed being in the outdoors doing stuff. I, I, I only re- later realized I was forced into working when I was, uh, 12, was my first paying job, you know, because my father died so… when I was so, so little, you know? But I enjoyed it. I mean, I enjoyed working in, 'business.' You know, for me, it was making money, but it's also something that I, I started to really like, you know, making things, doing things, you know? Started to be… L- I always enjoyed being with people. Um, and, um, I also enjoyed complicated problems, you know? So in the early days, I would have thought I'd stay in academia and, uh, and make an academic career because I saw what some of my, uh, friends, uh, who, who studied with me when… who went into business, what type of jobs they had. And I thought that, uh, I wasn't interested in that, you know?

    Adam Outland
    And so, I mean, 12, I just… I gotta spend a minute on this and then we can talk. What, what could a 12-year-old do?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Well, first of all, it's illegal to employ a 12-year-old. You know, but, but, uh, but the, the local supermarket… First of all, I, I was fortunately relatively tall at a young age already, so they never asked me for a passport, you know? So they, they needed somebody who refills the, the racks, you know, and, uh, ideally comes in early in the morning and changes, uh, also the fresh goods, milk and stuff, you know, before the supermarket opens. And be there on the weekends, you know, and, uh, where there was a lot of traffic, you know? So, so I did that and they paid me two Deutsche marks, uh, an hour. Made my first money. The motive was very simple. I wanted a new bike, for instance, you know ? So, so, so, so things like, things… Uh, what does a 12-year-old want, you know? He want a nice bike. And, uh, very early on then also I started to love music. So then it became records, you know? I was very intrigued by this thing that had just gotten started called software. As, as a, as a individual, there was no way, uh, you could have a computer. It didn't exist, you know? Even the, the thought of it was insane, you know? So I wanted to, I wanted to get my hands on a computer and do programming. And at, at Göttingen, there were only two locations where I could program. One was with the physics department and the other one was, was the economics department, you know? And I decided to start with the economics department, you know, and, and immediately got into software writing, which I enjoyed tremendously.

    Adam Outland
    You speak to this a little bit in your book, and then… and maybe this is a good opportunity to take, take a principle out of the story. Your ability to, or one's ability to untangle a problem. It's a good visual image because they're like knots in business. And the, the knots are sometimes created because of a communication issue. Sometimes they're communi- you know, created because of a strategy issue. But what, what was a procedure that you found most helped you untangle the knots in business?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Asking questions. I think, I think that, uh… I don't think I was, uh, shy, uh, asking questions and, and I… even today and I think friends who have worked with me and what… even those who are not friends who worked with me would say that Klaus is a hypothesis generating machine, you know, because I always, uh, try to verify or falsify and find, find a course. And, uh…And I'd like to drill down to the bottom, you know, to really understand how the mechanics work. Because that did, that did me also well already in school, you know, when you understand the principle, then you don't have to learn much, you know? You can deduct everything from the principle. And in a way, uh, that helped me a lot, you know, because I also had to be very efficient with my time because I had to do other things like work, you know, where other people could spend the time doing homework or whatever, you know? I use logic, you know, so that's the one thing that you can't f- fa- fault, you know? So I first of all, I, I don't think there is such a thing than a, than a wrong question, you know? So you also have to, um, uh, remind people that they should talk to you in non-expert language, because way too often have I seen, uh, that expert language, uh, is a way to hide behind. And very often, uh, certain terms that have been, uh, coined in, uh, in the expert world, uh, describe the phenome- phenomenon in a limiting way. I mean, language is a, is a limiting thing. That's one of the reasons why you see there are large differences in languages. Like, for instance, the Australian Aborigines when they describe the different kinds of red, you know, uh, because they live in an environment. If you've ever been to Australia and fly over it, it's red. The same with the Eskimos. Uh, they have gazillions of words for snow, whereas we say it's snowing and the snow is… There's snow there, yes, you know? So, so I always believe that you have to be careful in, in accepting the, this terminology because it, it, it might actually prevent you from ri- uh, finding the real issue. So, I asked them to explain it to me in plain language, and I would continue if they use terms, I would not be shy to say, 'Can you please explain how you use that term? What does that term mean?' And then you get it, you know? And very often people then say, 'Well, Klaus, this is complicated.' And because if somebody tells me it's complicated, I mean, at first I would say in a very friendly way, 'Yes, please explain. I, I have time, you know?' 'Cause that's the other thing that they would say, 'Oh, it takes too much time, you know?' I'd say, 'No, no, I have all the time. I wanna understand. What, what is this? You know, why don't you explain it?' You know, but very often you see very quickly that they can't explain it. Then you find then very often flaws in the logic. The moment you have flaws in the logic, you say, 'Why did that individual who's supposedly the expert not, not ask these questions? Maybe I have to get, um, some other people looking into this, or maybe I have to drill even further here, you know?'

    Adam Outland
    This brings to, to mind another question where I, I feel that this strength of yours played out, which is that there's, there's really only been, I think, yourself, that's, that's captained multiple companies at the CEO level on different continents that are in the Fortune 500, right? There's two companies that you've led as a CEO on two different continents. And that really hasn't been done before. And one was US based and one was German. Uh, so, you know, I, I think about the cultural and language differences between two different countries. What did you find from a leadership standpoint as how you had to adapt?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Yeah, I think, uh, that, yes, there are a lot of differences, but the fundamentals are similar, you know, because we all, as human beings, have some fundamental principles that we live by. How we interpret certain things is different, you know, but get… The fundamentals is everybody wants respect. And, uh, I mean, respect comes to simple things. Listening to somebody, you know, asking, you know, their opinion, you know, uh, being thankful when, when they do something. So the- these type of behaviors are, uh, I think unilateral all around the world. You have to learn, you know, what, what exactly what means, you know? Certainly, the most tricky thing is sign language. Very… I would advise everybody to be very, very cautious on this. You know, very careful. That can get you into real trouble, uh, if you think that you know the sign language and suddenly realize it means something not so nice to-

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    … their, their sign world, you know? But those are little things. Those are little things, you know, that, that you learn. And overall, I think the commonalities, uh, particularly when it comes to leading people, are, are bigger than the differences. One other principle is that I always try to go as close to the source where the issue originated, because, uh, you very often you have filter processes. I mean, the higher you get, the more filter, theoretical filter processes you have. And to really understand what is going on, you know, I mean, I, I would always go to the source, you know, and re- literally to the person who is standing at w- at the machine, you know, where something is going wrong and l- understanding what exactly are you observing that gets lost in translation. You know, uh, I mean, at, at a certain level, you, I mean, you don't even talk to the head of the, to the head of the, uh, uh, factory anymore. You talk to the division head. You wanna make sure that you really, really go down to the core.

    Adam Outland
    It very rarely is, is someone's life just pure accelerated growth. There's plateaus, there's down curves. Klaus, you've had such extraordinary success, not just in arriving in leadership at a company, but helping companies really scale and grow. What would've been some of those plateau moments that presented real challenges for you personally?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    The first kind of wake-up call shock was when my father died and, and I was 10, you know, and basically, life, uh, our life, my life became a very different life then, because it made me ask a lot of very fundamental questions, you know? The next one, the next biggest one was when after 20 years, you know, 20 plus years, I decided to leave Siemens. Because I mean, obviously, I mean, after 20 years you have a lot of friends there, you have a lot of memories, you know, you feel at home. Uh, but I decided to… that's not… that the environment was just not, uh, worth for me to stay on, you know, and I, I moved…. very difficult, very, very difficult, you know. And then there's a ton of others, you know, when you, when you have to restructure a cert- and you, you know that, that how many families are affected by it. And, you know, at the same time, if you don't do it, you will risk that everybody will get affected by it. I mean, so, uh, by, by making that, we can at least save the core. I hope that you can save the core. And you can never be certain, you know, whether it works out or not. So you, you, you've done the best you can. You've got all the facts together, and you hope that it will work out after you've done y- your, your best. And, uh, there's n- really nobody who… As a leader, there's really nobody who, uh, carries the burden other than you. Uh, at least that's my… That's been my view of leadership. You know, when I, when I take it on, I'm accountable, and I live with the consequences, and I stand up for it.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Uh, you know, you, you mentioned quite a bit around energy, you know, where it stems from, but also how you can recognize which quadrant you're in in that moment. One of those quadrants, I think you, you've labeled as, as the burnout quadrant. It's um, l- what is it? Low energy and what was the other, uh, variable?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Low energy and negative. You know?

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    So, so burnout is basically you're toast.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Yeah. Well, that's an interesting one. Le- let me take a step back. You know, I've always, uh, driven for efficiency, you know, because I also never had time, had to do stuff, you know, so I was always driving for efficiency. I always thought it's willpower. Good German, willpower, boom, boom, boom, plow through, you know.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    So until one day, I realized it's all about energy and, uh, why did… How did I realize that? I realized it very straight. It came relatively late in my leadership life, you know. So wh- when I realized the following phenomenon, I saw around me people really getting burned out, you know. I also saw that not only older people, but younger people got burned out, you know. And I thought, 'Wow, what is this?' And then… I, I love playing tennis. Wish I could, could play better, but I love it, you know. And in the tennis world, I saw another phenomenon. They got older and older and older, the top performers. So I was thinking, 'What on earth is going on there?' You know, uh, in the end, it's all about performance, whether you're in business or whether you're in tennis, you know, all about performance. How come that there's this dichotomy, you know? So I started looking into it, you know, as a curious person, you know, I want to learn more about it. You know, how can a tennis player, you know, who has no time to recover, really, you know, just 20 seconds between the serves, how can they do that and how can they do it at such a late age? And I realized that in this whole high performance scene, the concept of energy had been introduced, and that they were not talking about time management or whatever on the court. They were talking about, how do you recharge? How do you keep your energy? How do you get resilience? And then I started my own journey in trying to fi- figure out, what is energy? What gives me energy? And I realized it's the old thing of body, mind and soul. The body I understand, you know, but then on the mind, it's basically mental and emotional. And then on the spiritual side, nobody even talks about the spiritual sides, but those are the things they are no more. Those are the things that give us energy, and they can also drain energy. There's a flow in this because you burn. In the morning, you get up, you have a full tank of energy typically if you have slept relatively well, you know, and then you burn it through. So… And the… And, and there are a lot of tricks, you know, that the high performance players have learned, and leaders can learn the same thing. Leaders can learn absolutely the same thing. So in the end, we are even more high performance athletes, you know, than, than a tennis player is because a tennis player after the g- game or after a tournament, they have a time where they can go somewhere else. We are on 24 hours or 25 hours, eight days a week, I, I, it feels almost, you know. So that got me into this. And, and in regards to the zones, it's relatively simple. You know, you wanna be in performance zone. You know, performance zone is where you have high energy, positive. But then life happens-

    Adam Outland
    Yeah.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    … you know? So what do you do? Panic. You know, so you immediately go into what I call survival zone. Uh, but high energy, but, but negative, you know? So what do you do now? What do you do now? You know, you have to find a mechanism how you quickly get back into performance zone. The first thing when you go into survival zone, it's very good, and the human body is made for this because it's a flight or fight response. We get adrenaline. Our focus goes like this. We get superpowers. The only thing is that the superpower lasts for an hour, for two hours maximum, and then you drop into burnout zone. So you have to very quickly get back into performance zone. And what's the trick of this? You know, there's a ton of tricks, mental training, you know, figuring out the situation, but you have to be aware of it. You get back into it. So life is not… I, I used to think… I thought life is an ultra-marathon. But it's reality, life is sprints of var- of various distances and recharge, sprints and recharge. And recharge time and the sprint time is not equa- equal time. You know, it's, it can be much, much less time. Today, there, there is a really simple way how you can figure it out for yourself, you know. So, so I, I mean, many of us have some type of tracker, you know. So… And, and this tracker shows me my, uh, heart, heart rate. The heart rate for me is a super good indicator of whether you're stressed or not, you know? One. The second one is breathing. If your breathing gets very shallow very fast, you know, then something is going on emotionally with you. The third one is vision. You know, if your vision becomes a tunnel vision, you know, you know where you only see one thing, you know, uh, then you know something is going on that is not healthy over a longer period of time, you know. So, so, so there are things that you can learn how to observe yourself, and I, I would think that it's very easy to learn, you know. I don't even have to look at the watch and I know exactly, roughly exactly where, where, where my heart rate is, you know.

    Adam Outland
    Mm-hmm.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    So, um, because somehow you, you know your body, uh, what… How the body feels, you know, when, when the heart rate is outside of the, the zone that you want it to be in. It also requires a, a certain will to change, I mean, certain will to first be confronted with the realities…. uh, which unfortunately very often, I mean, we kind of know that something is not right. But in the end, we don't want to hear it because it inflicts stress on us, you know? But at the same time then, if you are not brutally honest with yourself, how often have you seen that people have certain strange habits, you know?

    Adam Outland
    That feedback loop. I've interviewed numbers of executives and leaders, and it's, uh, kind of a common feedback, uh, when you arrive at a higher level of leadership, is that the, the honesty from your team can diminish because there's less of an incentive, uh, to, directly to the person, to, to be direct and honest with their superior, right? How would you go about moderating that risk for those around you or how would you go about making sure the feedback was honest, even if it's not always what you wanna hear?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    By the way, this is one of the big differences. When I was asked, uh, to move into a leadership role, uh, here in the US for the first time, and it's one of the big differences between a German environment and a US environment. In the US, I mean, if you, as a CEO, start a conversation and wanted, wanted feedback from your team, um, it's very interesting. The, the team very often does not offer, offer feedback. They ask you questions. And, uh, I, I realized that the reason why in the US you have that situation is simply because in the US if you wanna fire somebody, you know, the person is gone literally in a minute. Uh, and whereas in Europe and in Germany particularly, you know, you can fire the person, you know? You know, go through a process, you know, because otherwise they sue you, you know, and then talk with the unions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so in a way, the perceived se- job security is, in this case, is a positive, a positive enforcer of… Uh, they are not, they are not afraid of giving you feedback, even if the feedback is against what they think you want to hear, you know? Whereas here, uh, there's more an inclination to please, please the boss. So it, it's, it's, it's, it requires a little bit more of an effort. Uh, and I would always do it in a one-on-one and say, 'May I ask you to give me feedback?' You know? And, uh, and the, and learn the rule of feedback, and the rule of feedback is you, you do not respond to what the person says. Your response is simply, 'Thank you for the feedback,' and that's it. If you draw a four by f- uh, a two by two, you know, you basically, you say what do you know about yourself and what do you not know about yourself. And you have the second one, what do others know about you and what do others not know about you? And the interesting thing, there is a, an element there of something that others know about you that you don't know. So what you do with feedback, you open that window. And very often, it's these things that y- you don't even, uh, y- you don't even realize, you know? You've adopted some practices. You've adopted some language. You've adopted some, some habits. You know that… Or dress, you know, so that people interpret it in a certain way, which was not your intention. A- a- and that's why it's so important for learning. Just look at the Navy SEALs. I mean, they, after a mission was done, they would criticize what didn't go well, you know, and then they separate the, the, the feedback from the person. They don't say, 'You are an idiot. You didn't do. You didn't do.' They would say, 'This went wrong. This went wrong.' It's clear whose accountability it is, you know? But it's a neutral description of how can we get to better performance. So brutal honest feedback cultures are the fastest learning organizations, as long as it comes with an understanding this is not about you, this is about performance.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. So many good things here. Accountability seems to be invited by top performers. S- so for, uh, you know, an executive that might be listening, wha- you know, where they find there's sometimes accountability gaps for themselves, right, how, how would you advise them to seek accountability for themselves?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Yeah. I think in general, I believe, uh, as, as we just talked about feedback, I mean, you, even in larger organizations, I would highly recommend that. And you can run this multiple times over the year. It costs you nothing if you want to have it, have a real finger on the pulse. If, particularly if you're going through transition phases, if you have made an acquisition, you know, or you have a major transformation going through, you know, so I would highly recommend that. On a personal level, I think very often people also don't understand why this is so important and it comes down to what makes a great team. You know, will you be able… How will you be able to make a great team? And accountability is one of those five things that are essential. You know, if you want a high performance team, they are essential and it starts with trust. You know, that's, that's the core. That's the core. You have to have trust among your core team, you know? Secondly, we talked about this, what I call conflict. You know, is you have to be willing to, to live with conflict. By conflict here, I mean it's also, uh, very critical feedback, you know? So, which many people interpret that as conflict, you know, but people have to have the, the capability of that. Commitment is, is big thing, you know? And then accountability, you know, if something goes wrong and you are committed and it's yours, it was your work stream, you basically say, 'Hey, look, I mean, I did not do well in that moment. I will correct that.' And last one is basically the results, and that's also interesting to me, something that very often is not clear. Uh, you would not believe how often I see when I ask, uh, I m- uh, I, I mentor c- CEOs, you know, and when I ask CEOs who complain about that their team is not doing, uh, what they think they're doing. And I ask them, 'Explain to me what exactly do you want, do you want from them?' You know? And interestingly, I mean, then they go into a rant. You know, it has to be crystal clear what is, what does winning look like. The moment you know what winning looks like, uh, and you will, you can align the team around, that's what winning looks like.

    Adam Outland
    … wow, such a simple question to remember to ask your team members- … to, to test.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    By the way, we didn't talk about purpose on the energy side. I, I missed that. I mean, purpose is this thing on the energy… Uh, it's, it's a very interesting thing because purpose does to energy what la- a laser does to light. You know, it basically focuses the energy around one point. And as you see, light is diffused, you know, it's very nice, you know. The moment it becomes a laser, it can cut through large walls, it can do anything, and that's like… That's what purpose does to energy. The moment you know what you want to achieve, what mission you wanna do, you know, all of your energy goes to this one point. Visioning is a, is a great ex- exercise and, uh, in my book, I have a long chapter on, on purpose because a simple concept, yet a complicated concept. You know, it's a concept that the mankind has struggled with as long as we exist.

    Adam Outland
    What was your purpose? What was the purpose that you landed on?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    That's the other thing, I mean, my purpose also changed, you know. My, my purpose changed and, and, um… I mean, and it's not just one purpose, it can be multiple purposes, you know. So my, my purpose clearly has always been around I wanna raise a lovely family and have a great relationships with my children, you know, and wanna have children and wanna have a great relationship with my childrens and also the, the, the family of my, my wife, you know, I'd wanna be a great husband. At the same time, I mean, when, uh, I've been running large organizations or, or even small ones, you know, the purpose was I want to make this successful and I wanna help people excel in here. The people element also was always there. Uh, those have been constant elements of, of the pur- of the purpose, you know? I mean, I love it, I change it or I leave it, you know? So I, I… Yes, I, I needed work originally, you know, for, for making money, you know, but I… Even then I lived by the principles. Even then I believed, you know, I want to get energy from it and I want to feel that it serves a, a, a, a good purpose for me.

    Adam Outland
    So, uh, I love what you said. And, and this may… It's kind of a great wrap-up point, and if you've… Uh, you've probably seen this quote, but it's called The Master and the Art of Living. In this description he says, 'The master in the art of living is the person that makes it so hard to tell if he's working or, or playing, because at the end of the day, he's always doing both.'

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    I like that.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, wonderful.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Mm-hmm.

    Adam Outland
    So many good lessons in here, Klaus. I know we could probably go for another hour, um, but I'll, I'll, I'll stay to our time. The book was wonderful to, to do an initial read through, um, and I'd recommend it. Wh- where can people find and follow your, your future wisdom outside of what you've authored?

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    I don't do much, uh, on social media. I do LinkedIn. I mean, so my LinkedIn, LinkedIn profile, you find me under Klaus Kleinfeld. And I do write these things myself and I do comment , recommend also. And, uh, yeah, so… And the book can be found on Amazon, you know, and, uh, and on many other platforms. There's also an audiobook around it, you know, which I really like. I mean, I didn't read it myself, uh, but I like the guy who, who, who read it and he has a wonderful voice. I love it. I really love it, you know .

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Uh, so good. Great knowledge today. And, and coming from someone who grew up in the land of Haribo gummy bears and Beethoven, uh, really glad to spend time with.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Well, Adam, wonderful, pleasure.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Thank you so much, Klaus.

    Klaus Kleinfeld
    Thank you very much.

    " target="_blank">

Think Big, Buy Small, with Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff – Episode 488 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On June 3, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • acquisition, Adam Outland, author, Business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Harvard, leadership, Podcast, risk, success
Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, Harvard Business School professors and co-hosts of the Think Big, Buy Small podcast, explore the growing trend of “acquisition entrepreneurship”, including the type of person who might be right for it, the type of opportunity to look for and how to find them, the relative LACK of risk involved, and […]
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  • Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, Harvard Business School professors and co-hosts of the Think Big, Buy Small podcast, explore the growing trend of 'acquisition entrepreneurship', including the type of person who might be right for it, the type of opportunity to look for and how to find them, the relative LACK of risk involved, and a deep dive into the economics of pie.

    About Richard:

    Richard S. Ruback is a Baker Foundation Professor and the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He is currently focusing his research in applied corporate finance, especially on corporate-control transactions and valuation. His course development work parallels his research interests. He has taught a variety of corporate finance courses throughout his career.  Over the last few years, he and Royce Yudkoff have been developing and teaching a new second year case course titled “The Financial Management of Smaller Firms” and a field course called “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition”.  Recently, Ruback and Yudkoff published their book, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business.  Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is a practical roadmap through the steps required to find, evaluate, negotiate and finance the acquisition of a smaller firm.

    Ruback earned his Ph.D. in business administration at the University of Rochester in 1980 and taught at MIT's Sloan School before joining the HBS faculty as a visiting professor in 1987. He was appointed associate professor in 1988 and full professor in 1989. Ruback has served as an editor for the Journal of Financial Economics and is the author of numerous articles on corporate finance and valuation.

    Ruback has served as a consultant to corporations on corporate finance issues and has acted as an independent advisor to outside directors. He also served as an expert witness on valuation and security issues.

    About Royce:

    Royce Yudkoff is the MBA Class of 1975 Professor of Management Practice of Entrepreneurial Management at the Harvard Business School and a General Partner and co-founder of ABRY Partners, LLC in Boston, MA. Alongside Professor Richard Ruback, Royce currently co-teaches a second year case course titled “The Financial Management of Smaller Firms” and a field course called “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition”. These courses focus on how to acquire, finance and operate your own smaller firm. Recently, Ruback and Yudkoff published their book, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business.  Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is a practical roadmap through the steps required to find, evaluate, negotiate and finance the acquisition of a smaller firm.

    In 1989, Royce co-founded ABRY Partners, a private equity firm focused on the media, communications and business and information services markets. Since 1989 the firm has completed over $27 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity investments involving approximately 450 properties. Over this period Royce has also served on numerous private and public corporate boards.

    Royce graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1980 as a Baker Scholar and is an honors graduate of Dartmouth College.

    Learn more at HBS.edu.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Adam Outland
    Today's guests are Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, Harvard Business School professors and co-hosts of the Think, Big Buy Small podcast from Harvard Business School, which explores a growing trend in business leadership, which is entrepreneurship through acquisition. Richard, Royce, great meeting both of you. I really enjoyed your book.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Thank you. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, and it's fun for Rick and me to be here.

    Adam Outland
    You know, I know there's so much to unpack in your recent work I would love from both of you just a quick quip on the early years.

    Richard Ruback
    My dad was a caterpillar mechanic. Worked on heavy machinery. He worked with his hands a lot. I worked at a fruit stand from junior high on, and didn't want it to be my life's work, and so I discovered economics, actually, by happenstance. I discovered it in high school, we had a teacher mentor who was big on getting our students, her students to go to National Science Foundation summer camps. So I was not very good at natural sciences. I took a two week summer camp because it was so much better than working in the fruit store. And it was an economics department, and when it came time to come to college, you know, we didn't have a lot of money as a family. And St Olaf, as you might get a sense of, is not a Jewish school. I am Jewish, and so they invited me to come there and gave me a great financial package, I think because I was one of the five Jews on campus. And so I went to St Olaf college and studied economics because it was so interesting. And so I decided that maybe I should go get an MBA, and as fate would have it, got my PhD in Business Administration instead of economics, and then went to MIT, and then Harvard. So that's, that is my backstory.

    Adam Outland
    And Royce, you kind of took a little bit of a different path.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Sure, I did. Yes, you're right. I grew up in New York City. My mom was a full time mom. My dad was actually a writer and a filmmaker. He was a very independent, professionally independent person, and he loved his independence. He was determined to do work that he found interesting. And also he was in a field where, you know, while we were like Rick, while we were never poor, you know, the economic vicissitudes were a little scary to a kid. Nothing bad happened. But, you know, it definitely had my attention. And these three factors sort of shaped my life. I think I came away from that upbringing with a desire to sort of be my own boss, to have work that I found truly interesting and that I wanted to sort of insulate myself against some of the sort of economic faci tubes that life just naturally brings. Went to college, worked a couple of years for a large bank in New York City, and then came to Harvard Business School, which I found a transformative experience in my life. The school really I joined a consulting firm called bait and company. I ended up staying longer than I ever thought, because it always in my mind was to be an entrepreneur. I just didn't know how. I didn't feel quite ready. Became a partner co heading their media and telecom group, and then my co head and I left to form a private equity fund which focused on that space. And for the next quarter century, we ran that. And after 25 years, you know, we actually, my co founder and I looked at each other and felt like, this is great. We're really happy, but, but as we look ahead, do we really want to do this for the next 15 years? And the answer was that feels like a lot. We stepped aside in a very carefully coordinated plan, and I came back to Harvard Business School to work with Rick, who had we had known each other through some case writing Rick had done, and Rick had originated an idea of doing something in small firms, and wanted a partner to build this out. And together, the last 15 years have been spent building a small firms program at HBS and beyond, and it's been a joyous experience in my life, both working together and doing what we've done.

    Richard Ruback
    At the time, it seemed something where we could make some headway. We could learn something about the market. We could learn something about the opportunities.

    Royce Yudkoff
    This didn't exist when we started. There was nothing.

    Richard Ruback
    When we started. I went to my then unit head and said, I want to teach this course on small business. I want Royce to come join me. And he looked at me, and he said, there's going to be no student at the Harvard Business School wants to take that class. You're going to have to give that up and go back and probably teach in the first year, because you got to meet productivity requirements. And I said, Well, I'm willing to take that risk. But it turned out that we had, what did we have, 17 students in our first class, and then by the next year, we were sold out of one section, had offer two. And since then, I believe we've basically sold out every seat we've offered for the last 13 years. What is interesting? And so at HBS standard room, a. That I teach in, that we teach in, has about 102 seats. So you need to have two seats for the instructors couple seats for gas. So that says the maximum number of people you can have by fire code in the room is 98, 97 students. That's the maximum number. If it's 90 or 85 it's viewed as full in our classes, we've had literally 97 or 98 every year, and students who don't get in our courses sit in for a week or two in the back. Waiting for somebody to drop out is quite remarkable.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Yeah, we get people contacting us from beyond Harvard Business School who have either read the book or heard about us through their friends, and it's one reason why, you know Rick and I have launched the podcast, think big, buy small, because, you know, the school's mission isn't just to teach people who are on our campus, but to reach out to lots and lots of people who are not MBAs, but maybe mid career executives and want to be entrepreneurs, but don't know how So, and that has further increased the number of people we meet.

    Richard Ruback
    You know, a funny story that I find just emblematic of this is, my oldest son went to high school with a guy and who's on our podcast, Jeff Duckworth, and about four years ago, five years ago, just soon after the book came out, my son and Jeff happened to be at some gathering, you know, they said, What are you doing? And Sam said, you know, I'm a salesman, and what are you doing? Jeff? And he said, Well, I read this really great book from two guys at Harvard, and it's really changed my career. I've decided to buy a business, and I just bought I just finished closing on this business. And Jeff said to Sam, my son usually should read the book. And Sam said, you know who wrote it? And of course, Jeff says, I don't remember what the guy's last name was.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Really hilarious, full circle, isn't it? Full circle.

    Adam Outland
    So how do you determine who's right to take the risk of entrepreneurship and what's your what's your take on the risk of getting into this small business acquisition part of entrepreneurship?

    Royce Yudkoff
    Both Rick and I, after careful examination, feel that entrepreneurship through acquisition is dramatically different from entrepreneurship through startup with respect to risk, and the reason that is is because when you buy a small firm, you're buying a company that has been around for 1020, 30 years. You can look at its historic financials and see what its revenues are, its profits. It has a team of people that know how to do the work. It has a collection of satisfied customers. You can measure their pattern of recurringly buying the company's product, and so you know a great deal about the business, not only how it operates, but how stable and predictable it is. And this is just a complete world of difference from starting a business up where you know almost none of those facts. And so even though they're both linked together as entrepreneurship, this type of entrepreneurship, while it's surely not without risk, is dramatically lower risk than starting starting a small business. And almost always, when you buy these companies, part of the purchase is a transition agreement with the seller so that you sort of have a smooth onboarding. So, you know, when Rick and I look at this, we do think there are a couple of risks. You know, one risk is, you could spend some time looking for a business to buy and not succeeding. That's a risk. But to us, it's a very controlled risk, right? It's, you're missing out on some salary. You're delaying career alternatives for a while, but it's, it's a, hardly a dramatic risk. And the other risk is that you buy a company that's been successful in the past and ceases to be successful under your management and while that is certainly a risk that happens very few times in entrepreneurship through acquisition, and we can talk about that in more detail. So the first thing I'd say is the risks are really very controlled in this space.

    Richard Ruback
    You know, those people who get a lot of social value out of their careers, you know, they want to be able to meet interesting co workers. Maybe they're single and they're interested in having a life mate, and they're going to find that by somebody who they're going to meet through a work experience. You know, the social side of work. They want to work with people who are like them. They want to work in highly resourced organizations. Those combinations of people probably are not terrific, at least when they're coming right out of school for this path. But if you tend to get your social interests elsewhere, your work can be separate from your social you don't feel that you need some affiliation to feel fulfilled, and you love the idea of having executive control, taking this blank page every morning and figuring out what's important to do for those people. This is a great path, and by the way, that's what. I think draws a lot of our veterans into this path. Veterans, particularly as an officer, you're given, you're given lots of control over how you execute your mission, whatever that mission happens to be. In big companies, that's not the case, and so they miss that autonomy. They miss that that's what I meant by executive control.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, that does make a lot of sense, yeah. And so you're not the one making the pie. If that's your business, you know you're, you're the one building the business that makes a lot of pies. And you've got to be really interested in the widgets, the behind the scenes, and the systems and the people more, almost more than the product that's delivered itself in some ways. I mean, is that a fair…..

    Royce Yudkoff
    That's a very good insight that you've just communicated because you're right. People who are drawn to entrepreneurship through acquisition are drawn by that challenge of being a manager, managing people and creating marketing strategies and overseeing product. They're less focused on what the particular product or service is they're a little bit more agnostic and more interested in managing, and that can be a dividing line between people who choose startup and people who choose entrepreneurship through acquisition.

    Richard Ruback
    To use your analogy, most people, most people who start bakeries, are really good at baking and are fascinated by the idea of, you know, cutting up apples and how to make the right crust and making that delicious apple pie, they may not have that skill at actually making the pie in a cost effective way, and pricing it properly, and distributing it properly and alike, and marketing it properly. So those are, those are the skills that are often required to take that bakery the next level, I think about entrepreneurship. You know, startup is, you know, you might not have ever seen a pie before, and you're now inventing this idea that you could put these interesting ingredients with some crispy crust on top and and you don't have a recipe, and you don't have pricing, and you don't have a model, and you don't know if it's going to work. And so for most of these you finally do the equivalent of baking a pie, and you're very excited about your prototype pie. You don't know how to price it, and you don't know what the competition's like. You don't know what other pies are out there. So this is a lot easier you buy a business that people have proven that it has an effective model. You can improve the model, but it begins with a with a starting point where you know that that the company under its previous management can produce the product and sell the product at a profit.

    Royce Yudkoff
    That happens all the time. It's one of the sort of catalysts of success in entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is that Baker, to keep using this analogy, that knowledge of baking was hugely important when he, he or she started the business 20 years later, when they have 35 people in the plant, that person has become a manager. They're not baking pies anymore. They're dealing with payroll and staffing and regulation and customers, and so maybe what the business really needs is someone who's been trained as a manager, not trained as a baker. And the second thing is that that person who founded the company has been really successful, and now at age 65 they have more money than time, and they're acting accordingly, and they don't want to work on Fridays to figure out how to expand into a neighboring territory, but that hungry young entrepreneur, they're willing to work on Fridays and Saturdays to figure out how to expand the territory. And those are catalysts. What are the reasons we see so much success in this.

    Adam Outland
    So just as a little bit of a switching gears, once you've decided that you're right for this approach of acquiring small business, you begin to search and find them. And I know there's brokers and websites, and how would you advise someone go about finding the companies that might be worth acquiring?

    Royce Yudkoff
    A number of paths, but I think a good starter path is to reach out to the brokers who deal in small firms. There are about 3000 of them, just in the United States, who broker a large chunk of the roughly 250 300,000 companies that come up for sale every year and start to get in the flow of just looking at small businesses for sale, you're going to learn a lot about what small companies look like. And then Rick and I teach our students a set of criteria that they ought to be filtering for that tend to tend to lead to high returns and safety of principal and but that allows you to sort of screen through this and look at a population of companies that have good prospects. That would be the way I would suggest starting.

    Adam Outland
    Let me just… a question occurred to me here. I've something I toy around with is what do people optimize for in life? You know, in this Instagram world of business acquisition, you know, it can seem that the optimization a lot of people have is like, how do I just get reoccurring revenue? And, you know, sit on the beach, let all my businesses do the work for me. Maybe. That's what someone wants to optimize for by buying businesses others might want to optimize for purpose or optimize for impact. Do you kind of factor that in, I guess?

    Richard Ruback
    I think that couldn't be more wrong. I don't know anybody who works 40 hours a week. I am waiting for the person who is 40 years old, successful, and hanging out in the ski slope or the beach or the golf course or the weight room, but I don't think they really exist, because I think it's always a lot of hard, hard work. It is not the case that if you have a business with lots of recurring revenue that you can go hang out in the beach, because the reason you have that recurring revenue is because you have some kind of barrier, and usually that barrier is that the company delivers this service really, really well, and that as soon as customers get unhappy with the service, they're going to move on. We often hear stories where sellers say, I'm unhappy with the price I can sell my business for. I've been getting a million dollars of cash flow out of my business a year in which I'm working 60 or 70 hours a week on I'm gonna take my number two, who I'm paying 75 or 80 or $100,000 a year, and I'm gonna make them CEO, and I'm gonna move to wherever they go to retire, and what they see is that their million dollar business very quickly becomes a $500,000 business, and very quickly becomes a $200,000 business, and then it's really not saleable because it's had three bad years. It really does take the energy and creativity of an entrepreneur, of a CEO, to keep the business successful.

    Royce Yudkoff
    This is not a career to go into because you don't want to work. It's a career you should go into for professional independence, for the opportunity to build wealth, because you like making decisions, even though some of them can be anxiety provoking. You like being at the center of a team. Those are reasons to go into this.

    Richard Ruback
    One of the great things about entrepreneurship through acquisition is that you the entrepreneur, are going to pick the company you're going to acquire. If you're allergic to fur, don't buy a pet shop. Don't buy handguns. If you're a gun control don't buy a handgun manufactured and similarly, if you really want to live in a particular part of the world, only search in that part of the world and buy a business in that part of the world.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Understood, yeah. Talk to me about focus too, because there's another thing that I think is maybe, maybe a myth that's propagated, but maybe not, is the idea that the acquisition of many companies is always a wonderful thing, that you're not just buying one small business. You know, your your goal is to have 20 small businesses.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Over the 15 years, Rick and I have been doing this. We've seen all sorts of experiments by, uh, entrepreneurs through acquisition in different ways of using this field. You know, if you go back a decade, virtually everyone who went down this path, their vision was to buy a business and run it as the full time CEO and the major owner of the business, I would say, Rick. Over the last half decade, there's been a stream of people in the group who really want to assemble a portfolio of companies, not be the person running them every day, but sort of be supervising and guiding that person. So you can almost think of them as a little more investorly in their careers. They raise capital, they find the company, they diligence it, they buy it, they recruit in a CEO, or promote someone the CEO, and guide that person. And while that's a minority of the population, we see it's another interesting way of of utilizing entrepreneurship through acquisition to fulfill their lives. And the two things I'd say about that are one that's like so many other ways of using this to fit your life, like having a geographic focus or an Industry Focus, as opposed to being having a generalist focus on your acquisitions, things that Rick was talking about earlier. But the other is it's not just sort of spreading your opportunity or spreading your risk across multiple companies. If you choose that sub path of entrepreneurship through acquisition, you're leading a very different life from what a CEO does. Right? You're not really the center of a team. You're not really making lots of decisions every day. You're not dealing with all different kinds of people, like customers and regulators and lenders and employees. It's a good life, but when you closely examine the career, it's a very different type of work you're doing every day. And I think, I think it's what Rick and I try to do, is sort of hold up a microscope to that and say, Your days look very different. It's not better or worse, it's just who are you? It's an important thing to remember about small companies is good. Small companies aren't small because no one wants to buy their product, or because their customers keep getting snatched away by competitors. Good. Small companies are small because the market niche they focus on is small, but within that niche they are devastating effects. Competitors or for some reason or another, customers are reluctant to switch. They see value in sticking to this supplier, and perhaps their costs to switching. And so you can have a great business that's still a small business. I think one of the early moments of realization for Rick and me was a trip we took to Dallas Fort Worth in the early years of our teaching. And we met these two sisters who were selling their business. It was a high rise window washing business, and they were taking down about two and a half million dollars a year, which they split between them, year in and year out, serving these highly recurring tall businesses operating out of a sort of inconspicuous warehouse in Dallas, Fort Worth. And we kind of looked at each other and said, Here's this sort of obscure small company out of many possible industries in one city, out of many possible cities. Do you realize how many opportunities must abound? Because we see this, and that's what the world of attractive small businesses is comprised of.

    Richard Ruback
    And note how much money they were making.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Yeah, note that.

    Richard Ruback
    They were making over a million dollars a year. Each one of the things, I think, is very interesting is in the small business space, you can find a lot of businesses that are capable of generating that kind of annual income, like, a million dollars a year to their owners. That's a lot of money. That's nothing to say. Oh, yeah. Well, what would you do if you were successful, right? That is successful.

    Adam Outland
    So do you two feel like you suffer from, like, this disease, where, everywhere you go, you're always assessing the business model, like you're at a gas station, or you're….

    Richard Ruback
    That's such a funny question. So this drives my wife crazy. Every time somebody comes to do a service, I want to engage in a conversation of like, how does their business model work? So just a couple weeks ago, somebody knocked on my door and said, Hey, see you have apple trees. Would you like us to start taking care of your apple trees, and, you know, revealing perhaps too much about myself, but I hate heights, and I also hate failure, and I've had these apple trees for about 15 years, and they've grown so that I now have to deal with heights, and they almost never produce apples. So I hire these guys, and then I can't help but wonder, so how many people? How come they have two schedulers? So I can call to schedule the appointment in there, somebody else is saying, How come that work? And seems like, it seems like it says that it's one of, you know, such and such company, like, it's part of a funeral home, you know, it's like a roll up. Could you do an apple tree maintenance? Roll up? How could that possibly be possible? And I spent hours and hours and hours, and my wife is always Rick, would you just let them do their job?

    Royce Yudkoff
    I agree with Rick. I do this too, all the time. I actually never thought of it as a disease, though. I thought of it as a superpower. Like, you know, every time we encounter some service, we're thinking, Well, how many can you process in a day? And what's your average charge, and what's your cost, and what might you be making? So yes, we confess. We do that all the time.

    Adam Outland
    Shifting gears for just a second, negotiating a potential deal with a seller, right? There is such a psychological small business world, you know, they're they put their livelihood in this thing. They're emotionally attached. I mean, some of it's not uncommon for a small business owner to refer to their business as their child, right? Because of the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. How do you account for the psychological element when you're navigating a deal?

    Royce Yudkoff
    You've raised a very important point, because the actual buying from a seller is a is a challenging experience and hard work, and there are at least two reasons for it. One is almost every seller you deal with is a first time seller, so they're embarking on a intricate transaction of something that's very important to them for all the reasons you've said, plus their family wealth is concentrated there, and they've never done it before, including never picked the advisors like lawyers and accountants that they need, so you have to sort of help them through the process. But the second piece is, do they really want to sell? And you know, Rick likes to say that finding a committed seller is actually harder than finding a great small business, and I think that's really true. Part of your early diligence when you're looking at the company, is not just the numbers or sales recurring. Does it have any customer concentration, those sort of hard skill assessments, but making sure that you understand? Does this seller have a compelling motivation to sell? Now they're getting older and they really want to move to a retirement community. They don't have a natural successor inside the firm. They don't have partners where they have to get alignment of three or four people on selling. There are a bunch of clues that you can look at that say, Yes, this, this seller probably doesn't have to sell, but they have a strong propensity to sell. By the way, hiring a broker is a is a good clue on that too, particularly if the broker charges. A retainer, and not just a success based fee. So there are a set of clues you should be looking at early on to determine to borrow Rick's words, is this a committed seller?

    Richard Ruback
    One of the things that's challenging is first time sellers are first time sellers. And so there are standard parts of any negotiation, like working capital, that almost invariably create conflict and hassle if they use a broker. The brokerage community is, you know, it's really important to get a broker who's really good at getting deals done. Suppose you're selling your house, so everybody's going to come in and say, Oh, your house is really special. We really love what you've done with it. It's just It couldn't be better? No, no, no, let's not paint the walls or anything like that. I'm going to get you a high price for your house. And people get enamored by this idea of a high price, but they don't ask questions like, how often does this broker find a buyer in a reasonable amount of time, how much discount off the asking price normally occurs. Or even worse, how much premium above the asking price normally occurs, right? Because that just says they're not doing their pricing job well, how much delay, how much hassle? People don't ask those questions and they should, probably should. How often is this broker able to bring the firm to sale in an orderly way. How many deals get busted? How good are they at managing buyers? How right there are all these questions about what a good broker does, and a good broker does a lot more than sweet talk the seller. A good broker has to understand the business has to market. The business has to be able to anticipate the kinds of questions that a buyer is going to have. Is this really recurring revenue? Can we talk about revenue quality? What's going to happen when I hire the Q of E firm? Are they going to find out the accountings not as it's represented? All those things, all those things a good broker can help you with most first time sellers don't know the questions to ask, and similarly, is when it comes time to get legal advice, they often hire their estate attorney to help sell their business, and so they don't have any understanding of what terms and conditions are in a reasonable, small firm sale, and the estate attorney feels like they've got to earn their keep by being obstructionist. Oh no. We can't do it that way. We have to do it this way. We need to have a personal guarantee in the selling out. We need to do this. We need to do that. We're not paying any working capital, crazy stuff that are just not market terms. And all those lead to bad outcomes.

    Adam Outland
    Wonderful and well said, knowing the knowledge that you have now, what is an 18 year old version of yourself get in advice from who you are now?

    Royce Yudkoff
    Adam, that's a that's a very provocative question you're asking, because what you can't possibly know is that both one of Rick's sons and my son both have elected to become entrepreneurs through acquisition, without any solicitation on our parts at all. And so the idea of giving a young person advice is not only our profession, but is very personal. I think I would say that if you're a capable person, this field is definitely accessible to you. You can do what the people who are running small firms, does it takes grit and energy, and you have to hang in there, even, you know when you get bad news, but it is definitely achievable, and if you have a taste for professional independence and making decisions and having a lot of control over your life and potentially building significant wealth, this is a path you should examine very carefully.

    Richard Ruback
    A simpler way of saying that is that I would tell my 18 year old self to hang out with some 40 year olds and see how happy they are in their jobs and their families and have dinner with them. And one of the things I think they're going to discover is the 40 year olds and 50 year olds who own small business are a lot happier.

    Adam Outland
    Wow. Thank you for ending on that note. Thank you both for your time. Please chime in. Chime into their podcast. I know I will.

    Royce Yudkoff
    Thank you. Adam, it's been a pleasure.

    Richard Ruback
    Thank you.

    " target="_blank">

Survive, Reset, Thrive, with Dr. Rebecca Homkes – Episode 487 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On May 20, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • author, Business, CEO, executive, growth, leadership, learning, reset, strategy, success, survive, teaching, thrive
High-growth strategy specialist, executive advisor, and lecturer at the London Business School, Dr. Rebecca Homkes, explains how growth is a loop, not a line, and lays out the 4 C’s that threaten a business, the 6 questions to ask in the middle of a strategy reset, the 3 things thriving organizations have, the difference between […]
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  • High-growth strategy specialist, executive advisor, and lecturer at the London Business School, Dr. Rebecca Homkes, explains how growth is a loop, not a line, and lays out the 4 C's that threaten a business, the 6 questions to ask in the middle of a strategy reset, the 3 things thriving organizations have, the difference between a teaching and a learning organization, and how to establish your MUST-WIN battles.

    About Dr. Homkes:

    Dr. Rebecca Homkes is high-growth strategy specialist and the founder of a boutique consultancy firm, advising CEOs and executive teams focused on growth and success through uncertainty. She is a Faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education, Lecturer at the London Business School (LBS) Executive Education, Advisor and Faculty at BCGU (Boston Consulting Group), and previous Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE)’s Centre for Economic Performance.

    Dr. Homkes is also the director of the Young President’s Organization (YPO) global Active Learning Program (ALP); a former partner with GrowthX, a Silicon Valley investment ecosystem and innovation consultancy; and the faculty lead of fintech scaleup accelerators.  A global keynote speaker, she is a member of several advisory boards, directed the joint McKinsey & Co and LSE Centre for Economic Performance Global Management Project from 2007-2014 and has written for publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Businessweek, Fortune, and Forbes.

    A Marshall Scholar, she received her PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics in International Economy.  Prior to LSE, Dr. Homkes received two degrees at Indiana University: BS (Honors) in business administration alongside a BA (Honors) in Political Science where she was a Wells Scholar and graduated as the schools’ top graduate in 2005 and its sole Herman Wells Scholar.  She previously served as a Fellow at the White House’s President’s Council of Economic Advisors and has worked in strategy consulting with Bain & Co. She lives between Miami, San Francisco, and London.

    Dr. Homkes partners with leaders, organizations, and educational institutions to provide counsel, training, and game-changing advice. A secret weapon for CEOs around the world, Rebecca is known for her focus, dynamism, and unflappable demeanor. She brings a professor’s approach to building learners’ capacity, capability and confidence. 

    Learn more at RebeccaHomkes.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Stephanie Maas
    How are you?

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Excellent!

    Stephanie Maas
    Let's start with your book, Survive, Reset and Thrive.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Yeah, I'd love to thanks so much for asking. So Survive, Reset, Thrive was written in starting in the spring of 2020 but it was based on frameworks and guidance that I've been using for for a decade before that, you know, most of the book is things that I've been doing with companies who are looking to go on a growth journey, and what happened in that period of time, which was not dissimilar to happened in Brexit in 2016 here in the UK, or in 2022 is that entrepreneur leaders were calling me and saying the same thing they were saying. Why me? Why now we had this growth pathway. Things were working, and now we've got this crisis right. And I found myself saying the same things over and over again, like, yes, we're facing kind of a change situation, so we have to survive and stabilize. Then we need to reset, because the strategy we had before needs to update for the changing time, and then you can go back to being a Thrive company, but we've got to go through this loop, and after repeating the same guidance for weeks at a time, you know, I just finally wrote it down in an email. It was sent out on a Saturday night. I got, you know, 100% response rate on the Sunday saying, this is the most useful thing I've read. I'm going to send it to every CEO I know. And that article kind of became a workshop. The workshop became a program, and then about a year and a half, two years later, it became the book.

    Stephanie Maas
    Super cool. So one of the things you just mentioned that I want to pull on this string a little bit is you mentioned it's a loop. Walk me through that, because I think when most folks hear this, it's more of a checklist. Okay, we survived that check. Now we've reset check throughout, but you mentioned the word loop, so walk me through that.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Absolutely. You know, everything in growth is a loop, not a line. And that sounds really simple to say, but we really love checklists as human beings and send us managers and leaders of companies we love to be done with things right when you finally check something off, you know, develop strategy done, communicate strategy done, execute priority done. And that's not how a changing world that we're facing and executing our strategies are in. It's constantly going to be moving and evolving. So we need to move from this checklist mindset of how we approach strategy and growth into this loop mindset. And there's a lot of power in doing that, right? So survivors that thrive is a loop, and what happens, let's make it more practical, is you can be in Thrive mode, and everything can be going great, and there can be a shock to the system that sends you back to survive. These can be external shocks. You know? You can have a surprise interest rate a surprise election, you could have a big macro event like war or COVID, but you could also have an investor pull out or lose a major customer, and when that happens, you've got to go back into survive mode. And we don't want to do that. We feel once we've gone through the steps to thrive, we'll stay there. But there's real humility in losing the ego and saying it's time to survive. Then they can go back to reset again. Then they can go back to thrive. So we need to embrace this loop mentality be able to grow through these different changes that we're facing as we're trying to lead our companies through this uncertainty.

    Stephanie Maas
    So let's start with, you know when, and I really love how you said you have to, you know, embrace the humility to recognize, hey, we're in survival. How do you know, other than you coming in saying, Hey, by the way, you know, or the profits tanking, what are some key characteristics that, you know, okay, we need to go back, or this is where we're at.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    I think most of us intuitively know when our organizations are in that mode. And part of what I'm trying to do with survive, reset thrive, is give you permission to make that pause to say, hey, the survive mode is actually not only opposite of growth, it's part of growth, right? Going through survive and restabilizing is a critical part of the growth journey, not antithesis of it. And like giving you permission, I know that sounds overly simple, Stephanie, but that's a key part of it, right? Is you've got to take that pause, because most of us know we just don't want to admit it without kind of the reason for it. So what happens when some of your basics are compromised? And I call the basics the four C's or cash cost customers communication. You know when something starts impacting our cash flow? You know when our costs are growing faster than our revenue for a reason, outside of hyper growth or doing something like a land grab, when we've lost a customer, or seeing customer churn, or having issues with our customers, or communication becomes broken or spotty, or lots of friction, because kind of go through your four C's. And what I recommend organizations do is set the baseline, not the goals, but the baseline, like, where's the minimum any of these four C's should be at any point in time? And when those get triggered, that's the pause point to go into survive mode. And there's real power again in knowing when you're in it and admitting it. Now, I always feel like I'm badly paraphrasing Fight Club. You know, the first step is kind of admitting it, but the first step of being survive is admitting you're in survive, because now we can handle it right now, we can take all those proactive steps to stabilize and move again out of survive, because you don't want to be in survive longer than you have to. But, and there's a big but, this is a yes, but not a yes. And the longer you refuse to admit that you need to take that stabilize, you're actually losing a lot of things that you need across those four C's. So the simplest is set those baseline triggers for cash cost customers and communication, and when you start approaching them, then it's time to take the pause.

    Stephanie Maas
    So when folks take the pause in your experience, where have you seen leaders just really handle this well, like, what have they done to handle this pause, recognition of survive, etc.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    You know, I actually had this experience. And, you know, you can just feel proud of an entrepreneur when they're like, wow, like, you know, you can handle all these steps. Well, I had a company who, one of their major companies, you know, spun out a subsidiary. The subsidiary went bankrupt, so they were facing millions of, you know, euros not going to be paid to them at the end of the year. And when you're a small to medium sized enterprise, a couple of million not coming in does impact you, right? When you're not a major organization. So we're going into survive mode. You know, a lot of that cash cost customer Well, actually, three of our kind of triggers, if you will, have been broken, and they had a Strategy Workshop scheduled to reset the growth strategy for the next year. You know, the classic response, which is not the right one, by the way, is to cancel the workshop, you know, all hands on deck, focus on operational metrics. He still got his team together, and they repurpose that time to go through their survive metrics, you know, make actionable plans on what they need to do across all the four C's look at their top priority and say, Okay, what still goes like? What pauses, you know, what changes? And the team left the most energized I'd seen them, you know, in a couple of years when what should have been, you know, one of the worst times they've been in the past five years. But they use the time to say, we know what to do here. We've already got the time scheduled. We're going to go through, survive, we're going to be stabilized. And they gave themselves a deadline, you know, by the end of key one next year. We want to see progress on all of these. We're going to be back to growth mode at by the end of q2 and that's what we want people to do. The temptation, I want to repeat purposely. The temptation is to cancel everything related to strategy and just tell people to be heads down, execution mode. In survive mode. You are still in learning code. You want people heads up, listening, learning, getting these feedbacks, emails from the market, incorporating that in so we can move into reset as soon as possible.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, so then we move into reset, and my mind immediately goes to, you know that that on your phone, when you can't get it to work, you go to the Hard Reset, but the trade off is you lose everything. I mean, it's like worst case scenario. You're starting all over. Walk me through what reset looks like from your perspective and your counsel.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    You know that's funny, because hard resets do happen, but like all of us with our phones, man, you don't want them to right? But look, hard resets are, are not the normal reset. The normal reset. You turn the phone off, right? You gotta pause and wait a minute, which was probably good anyway, because you were getting frustrated, right? It turns back on, boom, you're ready to go again, right? So in a reset, you pause and with the team, you answer some critical questions that you need to answer for growth. And those questions are six, what's going on and how's it going to change, and what is success? So where are we going to play? How are we going to win? What could stop us? So what should we do? Go through those six questions, reset the situation. What are changing beliefs about the changing time? Reset their right to win. How are we really going to compete in that changing world? What's that mean for where to play choices define a new finish line or where you want to be at the end of the cycle, address the challenges and then figure out your top priorities. You know, a normal reset takes kind of a couple of months for any sort of mid size organization, a couple of weeks for a very small one could stretch longer for a big organization, though I'm never happy about it, but that's just what scheduling happens, kind of in these large organizations, and the majority of the time. Stephanie, that's what it is. You go through those six questions, you reset, you update, and there's power in doing that every three years, even if you don't feel the situation is fundamentally changed. Now, occasionally those hard resets do happen, and what happens is, as you start to go through those questions, you realize Everything's changed. All the fundamental assumptions you had that went into your previous growth strategies have now changed. Completely different situation. Your right to win is eroded, your where to play choices all need to update the finish lines you had are now completely outdated, are no longer relevant. And when that happens, you do need to declare a hard reset and to make it more practical. We're facing these. We're watching these in the market right now. We're watching Starbucks and Boeing and, you know, all of these companies, Nike, bur. Area going through hard resets right now, and that's what's happening. The board realized it wasn't working. CEO out, new CEO in all of these challenges of being revisited. Now this process take a couple of months to a year. But you know what hard resets can be? The most powerful thing that happened for an organization, we sometimes see the most dramatic growth journeys after hard reset happens.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, so we've realized things have changed. We're refocused. Now it's time to thrive.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Well, first, I appreciate your patience of asking about survive and reset first, because most people want to jump straight to the Thrive. All I really want to do is talk about thriving. Can I just skip to that part? And I originally joked with the publisher. I wasn't joking, but they didn't take me seriously. You know, let's only send people the first eight chapters of the book. And you know, once they've read those, they can apply because you got to do the hard work of the survive and the reset first before you can get to thrive. Because I know my entrepreneurs, right, they jumped right to chapter 10 because that's the part that they cared about. But look, thrive is not a given. It has to be earned. And just because you've reset the strategy, what you also need to reset is your execution capability. Now, different strategies demand different things from the organization, in terms of our hardware, like our processes and wiring, our software, like our culture and behaviors, the top team that we need to lead, it our distributed leaders to really guide execution in this shared understanding. So this transition from the reset to thrive is actually the really difficult part, and more friction happens there than the transition from survive to reset, because we assume that that's the more simple pathway. But resetting a strategy means you need to reset your execution capability and capacity as well, and that could take some time, but you got to be super honest about what's working and what's not, be prepared to rebuild and reset, then you can become one of these Thrive organizations. And it's a simple recipe. Thrive organizations have three things, strong balance sheets, strategic insights, and they execute with agility and learning, right? You bring your strong balance sheet through from the survive phase, your strategic insights from the reset phase, and then you execute with agility and learning, because strategy is a living, breathing document, and we're going to learn and adjust and change as we go. And that's a key part of being thrive is again, I'm going to say one of the things you can say to me that really makes me mad is two things. I'll give you two things not to say to me. Thing one, just say, oh, Rebecca, we're in heads down execution mode. My first response is, well, get out of that, right? I want you in heads up learning mode, right? And this second is, if you ever send me a document labeled strategy, final, all caps, I have this new thing now. I don't even open it. I just reply back to the email and I say, No, it's not never final. We're going to keep updating and adjusting as we're going.

    Stephanie Maas
    Very cool. Okay, let's talk about that for a second, this continuous learning. I think that that's a huge difference maker between leaders that really do thrive and ones that don't. But oftentimes there. I think a lot of folks fight this natural state of, hey, we're here. Let's not rock the boat and just stay here. And they don't come out and say, I'm done learning, but their actions show that. So walk me through this idea and concept about keeping learning a critical part of this process.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Yeah, thank you for asking, Stephanie. It is not only a critical part. It is the most critical part is that in now close to 15 years of working with high growth and high performance organizations, I will say quite simply, it is the number one differentiator. Organizations that learn faster are organizations that grow faster. It is the ultimate differentiator, and frankly, differentiator because it's hard. A lot of us pride ourselves on being learning organizations, because we do monthly webinars, or we have town halls, or we have share sessions, or we have book clubs, or we go to business schools, like all really cool things like keep doing them, but that's being a teaching organization, not a learning organization, right? Being a learning organization is what you alluded to, saying. We don't have all of the answers yet. So here's the questions we need to ask, using your customers as learning partners, you know, not just transactional vehicles, encouraging kind of constant experimentation and testing and learning while executing, never assuming that every variable and every metric we have in the plan is the perfect one, right? Because things are going to change as we go. And this is a different culture. Now, being a learning organization doesn't mean that we're changing things all the time, right? Learning is actually very, you know, methodical, like engineers can do this learning velocity too. In fact, they're quite good at it, right? You know, you can build all of these things forward, but you've got to kind of, again, break the notion that once something is in a plan, the plan must be executed. I know it sounds silly, but words matter. I've said, let's stop calling them strategic plans. There's something about the word plan, right? It just frames our brain. Everything in this must get done, and I want it framed as I'm going to keep learning as I'm going this strategy is just my best hypothesis of where growth is. Going to come from over the next three years. Like any hypothesis, I got a lot of it right and probably some of it wrong. So I'm going to keep learning and adjusting as I go.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, so now there are strategic hypotheses.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Yes, I'm just dropping the plan word again. Frames matter, right? And as soon as our brains are framed that everything must get done, I get heads down, and I want people heads up, learning and moving as we go.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, I just have to go back and highlight two things that you said, because I think they're so critical and we just don't hear them. One is, you define the difference between learning and teaching. I've heard it 101 times. People say, hey, we do all these things, but the way that you turn that, nope, that's when you're teaching. But then going back to ask questions. I think that's the second thing. And so many times when we get out of a learning mode is when we stop asking questions. And to your point, we don't have to be in a constant change mode, but that's real feedback. That's how we know are we going to get to where we think we want to go, or do we need to change our strategy? Because where we thought we were going isn't really where our demand is, and learning is asking questions, and continuous learning is not teaching. Talk to me about a must win battle.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Well, first, I'm agnostic to the language that you pick as an organization, right? So my only thing is whatever term you use for your top strategic priorities. That term must have integrity, so you can't use it for anything else. So if you're going to have five strategic priorities, great. The word priority is now protected. It can only refer to those five things, goals. Rocks again. You do you right? I said not to recently at a summit, you know, some of the President was saying, Well, you know, the CEO doesn't like the term must win battles. Can we call them so and so? And I said, Look, call them drafts. As long as you execute. It's like pick one word, right? That's all I care about. So I started using the term must win battle. I've got some colleagues at IMD who use it as well, because we have a massive language inside organizations. Now you go to any company from 10 employees to 100,000 they have goals, priorities, aims, rocks, OKRs, KPIs, targets. I could keep going and going, right? And this isn't small organizations. That happens. So put yourself as an employee. If I've got all of these lists of things, which in the English dictionary all translate to most important thing, what am I working on every day? Right? And you need something that cuts about the noise and says, No, these are the must wins. And I love the language of must win battle, not nice to have battle, not business as usual battle, but these are must wins for growth. And there's really power. The absolute clarity of this is what we must do to get to that finish line you want, the midterm you want them clearly focused on value creation, and you want them to cut across the organization. A great test for Do I have the right list of must win battles is that I just rename my departments. By that, I mean if you have a marketing one, a sales one, a product one, and a people one, you don't have a strategy. You've just renamed your departments, right? A great must win battle cuts across the organization, because that's how we truly create value. We pull from the best and do this integrated approach to what it takes to drive growth. And that's what you're looking for in a must win again midterm, two to three years, focus on value creation, market oriented cuts across the organization to bring out the best of what you have.

    Stephanie Maas
    Give me, if you can, don't you to violate any confidences. But can you help us point to a real life example of a company, an organization that you've seen go through this loop successfully, just so we get a real life idea of what it looks like?

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Yeah, you know, you know, I've named, you know, luckily, I've got wonderful companies that I work with, so almost all of them were willing to be named in the book. So, you know, Deputy 40 company has gone through this cycle a couple of times now. And I love that example, because they're one of the, also the very few companies I work with where their culture is actually part of their right to win and their must win battles are focused on where growth is coming from, right, not necessarily where growth has been. So great example there Gorilla Glue company, another company based in the US, but of course, growing globally very quickly. They're on their second cycle of muslin battles. So successful, we had to reset a year early right from the original plan, because they're going to that next stage of growth. And the company I just mentioned, they're smaller than in Primex, based in Latvia and Riga, Latvia one of my favorite places to visit, by the way, and they're on their third cycle, and they've doubled every three years since I started this approach. And they're in concrete and construction, and that's about as much as we want them to double. You know, when I work with FinTech companies, you know, I just wrapped up one with one this morning, based here in Europe. You know, we want you doubling every year in the scale up phase. But if you're doing anything hard, like construction, concrete manufacturing, I only actually want you doubling every three years. And so I've got lots of them who are having that kind of success. But this takes discipline. And what I've really realized when I look at companies who do this well and others who go through the process. And don't is, growth is a commitment. And I know you're thinking, of course, Rebecca, eye roll, growth is a commitment, but here's what I mean, you can't just commit to the strategy. You've got to commit to building the capability to execute the strategy. Now, I don't care how smart people are in your organization, throwing a new growth strategy isn't going to get it done. Are you as a leadership team saying, Not only am I committed to this growth strategy, I'm committed to growth, which means I'm going to slow down, to speed up, I'm going to make sure I'm building the capability of my team. I'm going to be prepared to change things as the situation changes. I'm going to make some tough decisions on people or markets or products, because that's not where growth is coming from. Growth is an absolute commitment, and a lot of organizations aren't prepared to make that commitment. Frankly, it's hard, right? And I'll share something with you. Stephanie, when I wrote the book, one of the first big feedbacks I got from one of the editors was Rebecca, you say stuff is hard, too much. No one likes hard stuff, and they wanted me to rephrase all of that language to make it feel more approachable. And I started to do that, and then I pushed back, and I said, I can't do that, because this stuff is really hard. But you know what? That's cool. Why? Because when you do the hard stuff, well, that's differentiation, and that's what we're trying to do with growth strategies.

    Stephanie Maas
    Most people, when they hear commitment or discipline, I think the loop in the brain is going to the strategic plan and being committed to the check and the must dos. But what I just heard you say, correct me, if I'm wrong, is the commitment is to the growth. Yes, that might mean altering or changing, but it sounds like it's a it's a verb.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    Growth is a verb and a noun, right? Is it is constantly changing and moving. Go back to our strategy hypothesis. Now, people here that are thinking, No, Rebecca, we're too big. We have shareholders, we have boards. We need to stick to the plan. Plans are hypothesis, right? This is not advocating for chaos. You're having the strategy in place at all times, but you have the humility to acknowledge that we didn't get everything right the first time, and our situation is going to change. We're going to constantly be bringing that change in, and that means you've got to build this capability for an organization that can handle and adapt to this change. Now people try to do this, and they do this by cheating. What do I mean by that? Instead of five growth priorities, they have 10, or they have 15, or they have five, but each of the five have five sub bolts, each of which have 15 under it, they're trying to caveat for every single iteration the market will give them right? Which means you're actually starving any of those growth priorities of the time, treasure or talent they need to succeed. This is why it's hard to be a high growth company. You've got to be ruthlessly prioritized on those few areas of growth, but build the capability of an organization that can adapt and change as the situation around you changes.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, there are so many additional strings I could pull on here to lean in on your expertise, I mean, but in the spirit of time, is there anything else you want to make sure that we address here today together?

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    I think we'll just repeat hard is great, right? So just because we've said a couple times things are hard or difficult or only a few people do it, if you've got any sort of entrepreneurial spirit that should light something in there and say, Hold on, like, Tell me more, right? Things that are hard are great, because when you do hard things, well, that is differentiation. Everything in survivors that thrive is doable. I've seen companies of employees from 10 to several 100,000 you know, from 10 million revenue or even smaller to, you know, over 30, 40 billion are working on, survive, reset, thrive, you've just got to make the commitment. And I think have an honest conversation with yourself and your team. You know, do we want to commit to growth? And not everybody does. That's also Okay, right? But then, you know, I'm going to annoy you, Brittany, you have a conversation with me, because I am absolutely passionate. Wake up every single day on what we can do to do this lead high growth journeys.

    Stephanie Maas
    Incredible, incredible. Thank you so much for sharing such meaty content. Very energizing to hear you talk. Thank you.

    Dr Rebecca Homkes
    It was absolutely my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for the great questions.

    " target="_blank">

Talent, Hunger, Wonder, with Bob Bush – Episode 486 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On May 13, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • Adam Outland, Bezos, Business, CEO, leadership, motivation, risk, success, Tesla
Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, explains the key business point on which he disagrees with Bezos, breaks down risk tolerance internationally and domestically, shares the historical lesson we can learn from Nikola Tesla, and talks about keeping the hunger and the naivety that is your spark. […]
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  • Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, explains the key business point on which he disagrees with Bezos, breaks down risk tolerance internationally and domestically, shares the historical lesson we can learn from Nikola Tesla, and talks about keeping the hunger and the naivety that is your spark.

    About Bob:

    Robert (Bob) Bush Jr. is a senior investment executive with experience across industries, geographies (USA, Europe, China, Middle East, and Africa), as well as asset classes (venture capital, private equity, Islamic Finance). He has engaged in various financial and operating special projects for sovereign-related entities, family businesses, family offices, investment companies, corporations, and startups. Bob has provided live television commentary and keynotes at global conferences on innovation, social impact, sustainability, global investing, and international trade. His unique experiences, love for learning and teaching, as well as an established network of relationships, fuel his interests in innovative business models, public private partnerships, and entrepreneurship. Bob’s international experiences with multinational corporations and government advisory as well as his love for learning and teaching have given him a unique perspective on solving global challenges.

    Currently, Bob serves as the President, CEO, and Co-Founder, along with the late NBA Hall of Famer, Dikembe Mutombo, of Mutombo Coffee, as well as an Advisor to the European Commission, Royal Families, and Dubai Prime Minister, and a Contributing Writer to ForbesMiddleEast.com.

    Mutombo Coffee is an African-American and woman-owned brand that invests in female-led coffee farms, embodying their mission as a “coffee with a cause.”

    Bob’s overall business transactions have totaled more than $30 Billion, and he has co-managed assets nearing $10 Billion (USD).

    Learn more at MutomboCoffee.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

    LISTEN:

    SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

    SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

    __________________________________________________________________________

    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Bob Bush
    I'm enjoying this. So until you kick me off, I'm good to go.

    Adam Outland
    Awesome. I know you are a contributor to Forbes Middle East. And Jeff Bezos said, and I'm heavily paraphrasing that he mentioned, how the US is such a good fertile ground for business, partly because of the risk tolerance of the money in the US that that there are many organizations that are have a high risk attitude towards venture and taking bets that isn't as common in other countries. But I think you have an interesting perspective, because I'd be curious your thoughts about the risk tolerance in the Middle East for investments from an uninformed perspective over here, it seems that it's quite high, but you might have a different perspective on that so. And I think even your greater comment on the economics of risk, risk in general would be interesting.

    Bob Bush
    Yeah, I'm familiar with Mr. Bezos comments. There are a couple of things there. I think venture capital and PE do not have a high risk tolerance and so and it seems that I'm going against one of the world's richest man when I say this. So let me really sort of unpack that. Yeah, what you find when you talk to sophisticated investors, it's all about the risk mitigation. These guys don't make money by taking non risk adjusted risk. It is all about a risk adjusted risk. And so because of the size of the capital pool, you have different kinds of risk players who are comfortable with certain kinds of risks for startups or certain kinds of risks for growth companies or certain kinds of risks, right? And so what are the things that and I'm sure that that Bezos would agree that when you look at a capital stack, you will find that there is ample capital for whatever risk level that you want, sufficient enough to have a very robust, robust market around. So it's not so much that the US has a super high risk tolerance, but that there is enough, there are enough players, wherever you want to be on the risk spectrum who are comfortable with understanding that particular risk at that development, and the mitigants for that risk, and that's who they bet on. They don't bet on the guy who's taking the most risk, or, you know, the company, or the team, or the woman who's taking the most risk. They're betting on the company, the woman, the team that knows how to mitigate the most risk for that type of risk. That's the bet.

    Adam Outland
    And I think you're probably dead on that, that Bezos would agree on that. I think his, he probably operates with a different definition of risk that the average person and probably lines up with what you just described.

    Bob Bush
    Right? So let's, let's dig that a little bit deeper. What we have, you know, this kind of links to the Middle East, and it links to Europe, where I've been fortunate to have done some work with the European Commission and other capital providers across the world. And so one of the things that the United States has is reasonably patient capital. Very little capital is patient, and certainly not PE and hedge fund capital, but it's reasonably patient, meaning, meaning that it can be sticky, that if, depending on where you are in that capital structure, if you need three years of capital, or if you need five years of capital, or you need seven years of capital, or you need 10 years of capital, right? There are capital providers that are willing to take that turn, provided that Dominicans are there and that, you know, I had the pleasure, I was asked to advise a particular group, several groups of the European Commission around this very point. I know if you just saw recently where the commission has now allocated $200 billion for AI development, and it was 100 almost 100x and what they had internally thought they were going to put into AI just a year ago. And so I've lived in Germany. I've spent a lot of time in in Switzerland and Austria and talking to Europeans where these sources of capital are. Spend a lot of time in London as well. One of the distinctions between sort of European risk taking and the US is and I. Take it from the entrepreneurial side. So the European Commission asked me to go around Eastern Europe, to the Balkans and all these Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, and meet with entrepreneurs and accelerators and incubators. So this was, just may have been about 10 years ago, on this very question of, you know, you know, appetite for risk, etc. So from the European Commission perspective, they had the Chinese and the Asians, tons of capital, very assertive, very aggressive to their East. And then they had the Americans, very end of that innovative, very assertive, very aggressive. And the Europeans were getting bookend and squeezed. And so having been an American that had lived in the Middle East, who was now living in Europe, I was living in Europe because my former wife is European, German, and so we were started a family there. And you know, you're at a dinner party here and there, and people start asking you questions. And before you know, if you're saying, Can you come to Brussels? So I ended up doing some work in process. So the point is, is that the entrepreneurs, the best, most innovative talent that's coming out of these countries is, I would say, superior to the talent coming out of US universities. But the incentives. So think about it this way. I had the pleasure of getting a philosophy degree at a liberal arts school. You don't have that kind of luxury in many of these eastern Europe. It is physics, it's math, it's engineering. You make stuff.

    Adam Outland
    You make stuff, right.

    Bob Bush
    And so the pragmatic and practical pool of talent at that university, at that mindset level, they make great stuff. And guess where those the best and the brightest go up until recently, they become PhD students. And when you talk to them as PhD students, and then you talk to them, I spoke at dozens of universities, and talk to professors and departments, those departments and professors eschew their best and brightest doing something as pedantic is making money. Yeah, interesting. So there's this stigma that if you're that smart, why would you want to do what those 120 IQs guys do in London? So you got culturally, this issue of not supporting innovation in that sense. So you've got a lot of by best people not being trained and how to truly be innovative. They can be inventive. They can make, you know, you know, test is a wonderful example that's exceptionally invented, but he got out maneuvered by Edison others around how to make the business model being truly innovative around those inventions. That's a historical, culturally relevant point. Even today, his level of inventiveness is top notch, but his ability to meld the capital get the business model around it, he got out maneuvered. He got outgunned by Edison and CO, right? And so when you're really thinking about the fertile ground for risk, or fertile ground for talent, or matching capital to talent, etc, there's some really interesting things that I've personally had to observe going from the just on the talent side, exceptionally talented kids. And so what ended up happening is how they started bridging and learning from the Americans. Then you had a lot of and Ukraine was a perfect example of this. They started doing it, outsourcing to some of these countries, because these kids could code and they had good math skills and they had good engineering skills, etc. So that's transition. And now they realize, well, wait a minute, why am I doing the code for that Silicon Valley company? I want to be that Silicon Valley entrepreneur. So organically, there's sort of this shift around all of that. So Do not underestimate a bright person who shows up every day without the best resources and their ability to create something that is world changing.

    Adam Outland
    That's right. Well said. A question I ask everyone, but one that I just love, in general, is, you've had a wealth of experience. Let's say you were able to just sit, sit on that bus from Illinois to St Louis and talk to that young man who's riding to school every day. What advice would you provide him, knowing all the things that you know now?

    Bob Bush
    Well, as you've already picked up on, and I'm not trying to be unorthodox, we think the young man has something to tell me less than me telling him. And I'm going to tell you why. Because as you start having the weight of the world on your shoulders, you got kids, you got wives, you've got employees, you've got bigger problems, right? You think keeping the same level of curiosity and inquisitiveness and maybe naivete that you can do anything you want that should. Me, I want to make sure that this world does not beat that out of me and beat that out of other entrepreneurs, because it can happen. Man. You know, I remember reading very early on about an immigrant that came out of Europe during the 30s in New York in the middle of the Depression, and 50 years later, he was this super rich industrialist. And they asked him, How did you do it? He said that I never read the papers, right? So what I would say to anyone that asked this question is, those aspirations that we all have, those that that sense of wonder, etc, don't lose that keep that young man and that young woman in your spirit, because before you know it, the world will do its best to take it out of you. So I think that young man has a lot more to teach me than I probably do him. That's a real value to me. Of course, I got more skills and I got more people, etc, but the heart of that matter, that talent, that God given hunger, that God given inquisitiveness, don't want to lose that, because that's your spark.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, the a plus player is the person that's humble, hungry and smart, and you could replace hungry with curious, right? But the more these interviews that I've done, I couldn't agree more, right? The humility and the hunger is a good combination with intelligence. And the more I've learned about business, the more I realize I don't know. So it's pretty easy to remain humble in this business when you're learning all the time.

    Bob Bush
    None of us are smarter than the market, brother.

    Adam Outland
    That's right. That's right. For our listeners, please share Mutombo coffee, which I know we didn't spend probably nearly as much time on this as we could have, because you have such an interesting and colorful life. But where can people learn about the Mutombo coffee, the respective social initiatives, and how can they participate?

    Bob Bush
    Mutombocoffee.com of course, we have a website, M, U, T, O, M, B O, coffee.com we also have launched an Amazon store, and so that will will start doing more with that. Primarily, we've been B to B for the last few years, so we're now just starting to which is why I'm sticking my head up and doing more podcasts like yours, because we want people to know that that we exist, etc. The one of the other things we will do for your listeners is we'll create a VIP code for them, and anyone that puts in their code when they go to the website, they will get a VIP preferential pricing for our product as a way for us to say, thank you for introducing us to your listeners.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, love that. Well, thank you. Wow. This great, really great interview. I mean, really good for our listeners. Hopefully you've enjoyed it too. Great conversation.

    Bob Bush
    I did. Make me look good, fellas, make me look good.

    " target="_blank">

Commerce Over Charity, with Bob Bush – Episode 485 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On May 6, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • Business, CEO, Dubai, failure, leadership, learning, success, values, Wall Street
Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, shares the life lessons he learned on early-morning bus rides, and reflects on being allowed to fail (a little bit), talking his way onto Wall Street, getting “behind the numbers”, the head and the heart connection, helping develop Dubai, defining “social […]
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  • Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, shares the life lessons he learned on early-morning bus rides, and reflects on being allowed to fail (a little bit), talking his way onto Wall Street, getting “behind the numbers”, the head and the heart connection, helping develop Dubai, defining “social impact”, and being valuable instead of just being important.

    About Bob:

    Robert (Bob) Bush Jr. is a senior investment executive with experience across industries, geographies (USA, Europe, China, Middle East, and Africa), as well as asset classes (venture capital, private equity, Islamic Finance). He has engaged in various financial and operating special projects for sovereign-related entities, family businesses, family offices, investment companies, corporations, and startups. Bob has provided live television commentary and keynotes at global conferences on innovation, social impact, sustainability, global investing, and international trade. His unique experiences, love for learning and teaching, as well as an established network of relationships, fuel his interests in innovative business models, public private partnerships, and entrepreneurship. Bob’s international experiences with multinational corporations and government advisory as well as his love for learning and teaching have given him a unique perspective on solving global challenges.

    Currently, Bob serves as the President, CEO, and Co-Founder, along with the late NBA Hall of Famer, Dikembe Mutombo, of Mutombo Coffee, as well as an Advisor to the European Commission, Royal Families, and Dubai Prime Minister, and a Contributing Writer to ForbesMiddleEast.com.

    Mutombo Coffee is an African-American and woman-owned brand that invests in female-led coffee farms, embodying their mission as a 'coffee with a cause.'

    Bob’s overall business transactions have totaled more than $30 Billion, and he has co-managed assets nearing $10 Billion (USD).

    Learn more at MutomboCoffee.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

    LISTEN:

    SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

    SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

    __________________________________________________________________________

    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Adam Outland
    It's great to meet you Bob, and I'm excited to talk about your most recent endeavors around this. One of the things I really love is exploring the journey to the current destination. When you see someone who's generated unique success, I feel like your resume unique is a good explanation. Really excited to dig into it, because it's so different than a lot of the experience that people have that have been on the show in the past. So hear a little bit of the journey. Of course, we can talk about the current destination as well.

    Bob Bush
    Yeah, love to do that. I mean, sometimes I think the journey looks more like a vagabond, and other times it's a little bit more purposeful. But in all cases, it's been wonderful.

    Adam Outland
    I love it. So tell me, you know early days, what were some of your conceptions of what your you thought your path was going to be? What track were you on when you were at a young person, and then what changed?

    Bob Bush
    Thank you for that good question. And I'm not one to really do a lot of reflecting and reflection. I do a lot of introspection, but not a lot of reflecting. And I would say the first journey of any meaning that might be interesting to the listeners is a journey that I took, in fact, my first year of high school, I was born and raised in Southern Illinois, the Mississippi River bifurcates, Missouri and Illinois. So I'm on the East St Louis side, looking at the arch on the St Louis Missouri side. And for four years, I commuted by bus, often two busses, occasionally three busses to get to high school. And so I would say my most significant data point on this journey, as meandering as it's been, is that commute. You know, I'm 1314, years old. Can't drive yet, needed to get to. I went to a Jesuit boys school across the river, very fine School in St Louis, that commute and being and I was undersized. I was a bespectacle kid. I was a geeky kid. My book bag weighed almost as much as I did. So you know those images of these little kids with their backpacks and stuff, and so I'm kind of dragging my, my pounds of books to classes every day, just the interaction with the public, right? The lady who's, you know, at 6:30am she's just finished her shift, or maybe the guy who just finished his his midnight shift. And then there's the lady who's on her way to work, because she's, you know, working in a as a as a baker, and all these different sort of types of people as I'm making my way to school, and I wasn't scared and intimidated at all about it, but I'm like, How did my parents allow me to do that? Right? And they said they were scared, but I wanted to go to a good school. I enjoyed the challenge of that, and I wasn't bothered by the two plus hour commute. I was up at 530 whatever I got done, I wasn't sitting at my desk by eight for those four years. So that was the first journey, and I remember thinking as I would go back and forth, either going towards the arch or away from the arch. It was a tale of two cities, and I actually wrote about that for my entrance exams for college. How is it that such a short piece of river that's less than a mile wide, the difference could be so grand and so great, and so I'm leaving what would be called the inner city of East St Louis, going into this beautiful campus with very bright kids, and it comes from the St Louis side. I'm sitting behind people whose parents own some of the biggest companies in the Midwest, certainly in St Louis sports teams and engineering companies and law firms, and that Taylor two cities was very stark, but I learned through my classmates, etc, that there was much more we had in common than not.

    Adam Outland
    Oh, that's really extraordinary. And, you know, I think, you know, you get into a different environment. What I heard in your story that actually made me want to ask another question. First is it sounded like you said you You made this choice that you wanted to go to the school.

    Bob Bush
    Yeah. And I can tell you, it's tough to make any young teenager or kid, you know, at a certain point do anything. It's just almost impossible. So one of the things that my parents did is allow you to make choices, allow you to fail a little bit, but not too much. A scared me is okay. Maybe a broken arm is okay for. Some parents, but let's not lose a limb, right? Yeah. And so yeah, it was truly a choice to go because I I had a fire and an appetite for I was very intellectually curious, and unfortunately, the programs and the schools that were sort of the easy commute were going to meet my academic interests, and so I had to there were two schools that across on the st louis side that I that were considered nationally ranked and world class. I didn't know what the Ivy League was called and all that stuff. Then I just knew that I showed a little bit of aptitude, and I wanted to be around, you know, an intense sort of learning environment. And so it was 100% my choice that my parents supported. The tuition was quite expensive. I sometimes worked after school, and it taught me discipline and but I it was a wonderful academic setting. So it's certainly it was my choice, and it was a choice that really put me on a very firm footing as I went to other steps in that journey.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, well, you take out any any part of the rest of your story, and you already have, you know, a predictive amount of success that you know is coming out of a young teenager. Because the other thing I do know about teenagers is that they're not typically very inspired to work extra hard.

    Bob Bush
    Unbelievable.

    Adam Outland
    So to actively make the choice for academic rigor and to get on a bus of strangers, to get down there says just a lot about the kind of character you had.

    Bob Bush
    Two, brother. Two busses, sometimes three. But it was fun. Learning was fun. Learning is still fun. I'm still hyper curious. So it wasn't I didn't consider it rigorous or challenging, it was just kind of a natural thing. So I guess I've been blessed in that one.

    Adam Outland
    So take that observation and then move that forward through college to your entry into the professional world, like the things that just occurred naturally to you. Yeah, okay, I'll take three busses to get to a school that's academically rigorous that I can learn from, of course. That makes sense. How did that interplay into your early career as a professional?

    Bob Bush
    Oh, boy, so lots and so I'll tell you a story. I I was a philosophy major. Went to a small college, Amherst College, about 1600 kids. In fact, my college was about the same size as my high school, and I chose there because it was one of the toughest colleges to get into. I'd never been to Boston, certainly not to Amherst. And we went to looked at the big, you know, Ivy League schools, and I fell in love with the little college setting, and studied philosophy and English literature, read Latin and Greek. And so I'm I'm around looking at all what my friends are doing and classmates, and they're going to Wall Street, they're going to consulting firms, they're getting their MBAs. And so wanted to learn more about that. But mind you, I hadn't studied finance or any of that stuff, but I applied to Wall Street because that's where my friends were going. And I heard you could make a lot of money doing it. And much to my surprise, they said, What does a philosopher have to do with making money on Wall Street? And I said, Well, I don't know, but I did pretty well in school. If I don't have the same answer that all the other kids give you, I bet I'll give you an interesting one. So they said, Okay, you young whippersnapper, we're going to put you in sales. And I said, No, I want to be in mergers and acquisitions. They're like, You gotta be kidding. The M A guys, they're the Masters of the Universe. Like, you gotta have a very strong economic and maybe physics are certainly math, grounding, etc, finance grounding. What do we do with you there? And I said, Well, I'll learn it. Give me a chance. And so I talked my way into being a financial analyst at a major Wall Street firm, and they kicked my butt because I didn't know nothing. 80 hour weeks, 90 hour weeks, some 100 hour weeks, and I was put on the largest leverage buyout in the history of finance, RJR Nabisco, and I was one of the analysts on that deal. And so I went from studying philosophy to doing high stakes, large buyouts as an analyst, and I had to make up for what I didn't know. But I'm quite competitive, and I enjoyed learning it, and I was a geek, so I didn't mind if I miss social activities and stuff. I was sort of single minded about learning this craft, but I had to bust my hump, and occasionally I was hazed and all of that. And that's just part of it. There were not a lot of African Americans on Wall Street doing that kind of work at all. And so the notion of having a mentor or having the support system, they, you know, they throw you in the middle of the baton, and you swim or you don't. And I just sort of, well, let's just get on with it. And so I kind of Mr. Magood my way through all of these things that others would say are challenges and and because, by the grace of God, I. Always landed on my feet.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, with that analyst role, you being as curious as you are, like, what were a couple of key observations that you made as an analyst that said, I can make a career out of this thing?

    Bob Bush
    I'm not so sure. Cuz now, looking on hindsight, I don't want to appear to be smarter than I was then, but certainly so there's the observations I was making real time, of course, and then there's the looking back 40 years observations. And so I don't want to sort of conflate them, but it's kind of difficult to couple them, but sort of one of the things that is a thread from my experience in high school and the experience I had being in another pulled environment with financial analysts and these Wall Street bankers and stuff is that there really isn't that much difference, a little bit of grit, a little bit of hard work, being coachable, having some discipline. It's all the same kind of stuff. So one observation was, whatever the challenge happened to be, despite the fact I didn't sort of walk in with the same sort of skill set, what I did have, from my liberal arts background and my philosophy background was very helpful. I got some fundamental understanding of how to approach a problem, how to solve a problem, how to think through a problem, thinking about methods and processes, etc. And so I then I realized that why I navigated the philosophy in the first place? Because I'm not particularly intimidated by chaos or mess or data that doesn't seem to align. I have a bit of a natural ability, thank goodness, but some training to go into, whether it's any field, I think, and through a little bit of hard work start myself out. And so I think that was one of the key observations, is that this is just another problem to solve.

    Adam Outland
    Beautiful. Philosophy is a lot of things, but there are a lot of rubrics for problem solving baked into philosophy. And I feel like so much of navigating business and growing business is a matter of of untying the knots and solving the problems that are both inside and inside the business and and the big problems that are the business is designed to solve for everyone else.

    Bob Bush
    That's right. Well, you know the biggest knot, right? It's the people problem, that's the biggest knot.

    Adam Outland
    People are your biggest problem and your greatest asset. So, so how do you get just help us skip over to this component. You know, your your role as a senior investment executive took you to a lot of different geographies. I mean, well, outside of the US, what drove you in that direction? Or maybe it wasn't your choice.

    Bob Bush
    Well, another sort of dot on this journey. We had a friend and an undergrad who sister lived in Dubai in the early 90s, and she was very cute, and he was very cool, and he says going to visit my sister, as she lives in Dubai, said, I'll come along. Never been to Dubai. And so we went to the desert, and I hung out with Kareem and spent some time with him and his family, etc. So that I first traveled to Dubai was personal one, and just for fun. And while I was there, I was talking to a gentleman who was a Bedouin, and he was dressed in local garb, and he said, What are you doing here? And I said, I'm on vacation. And he started laughing, right? This is the early 90s, so he's struggling. Well, what are you doing on vacation? I said, Well, I'd never been and my friend is here. So we started chatting, and he said something to me, very profound. He said, We don't need you here. And I said, What do you mean? He says, we can send our kids all over the world to your schools. So if you ever want to come back and you want to do something here, it's not what you know, it's not your learning, it's how you communicate and whether you understand my culture and you can communicate with me. And he literally took his hand and he moved it from his head to his heart. You make that the head heart connection. And I would love to have you back, but if you think you're going to go and you're with your fancy schools, to come back and teach us something or help us with something, don't need you for that. And I really thought about that because I was contemplating going to business school and doing more finance, etc, and I shifted to go to study international relations, Arabic at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. So rather than getting a traditional finance degree, I went and started language skills, economics, cultural orientations in Washington, DC, that actually helped orientate me to, yeah, this is not about just the dollars and the cents. There are people behind this, right? You know, there's the famous the famous phrase that pilots don't fly planes, they fly people. And so if you really want to get behind the numbers, you got to understand. What those numbers represent?

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, it's not just about recording the data. It's it's how your ability to interpret it that really makes a difference, right? And kind of makes or breaks someone's ability, you know, career path in that area, I can see that. And I think the international component, I mean, just it must have been such a good learning experience in and of itself, to travel like you gave in that great anecdote, meet with people and break down different barriers that we all have in our own mind and perceptions of the world around us. So this brought you to your experience with, you know private equity, you know venture capital, in the experience that you had and where that led you. What were some of the bigger transactions that you were a part of that provided significant lessons for you?

    Bob Bush
    Right, and so the role that venture can play in capital formation and economic development, the role that PE plays, I've had the good fortune of I moved to Dubai in the early 2000s to to work. I was an advisor to the Prime Minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, to talk about how to make Dubai a viable and sustainable immigrant that was world class, and what kind of services could be offered. And I was a small part of a great team that helps develop the economic development strategy of a wonderful immigrant and a wonderful country, and so using the traditional tools of M A and financial structuring and engineering and and understanding optionality and all these things to bring it into a very practical way, helping to develop a country, develop a region. Fabulous. I was head hunted for the role, and they wanted someone that had this curious admixture of of skills and experiences. So the random guy I meet in Dubai is why I study the Middle East and Africa, because I've done finance. I had the finance I had worked in an entrepreneur work working a couple of FinTech companies before it was called FinTech around capital formation. Because while I was in graduate school, I finally did go to graduate school, I received a fellowship to travel through Africa, and I backpacked through Africa for almost a year, visiting capital cities, and one of the the first place I landed was in Accra, Ghana, because Accra had just launched its its equity exchange and Trying to understand how capital formation could have an impact on the development of Ghana, the country, all these little bits. And I didn't know sort of where these things were going to go, but it's headhunted. It's like, Well, you got the entrepreneurial bit, you got the economic development bit, you know about the region. You got financial training. You seem to be able to get acculturated pretty quickly. Would you come from New York and and work with us here in Dubai? And I remember telling some of my friends, and they were once, one funny story is one of my friends said, you know, Bob, this is money making Manhattan. What are you going to go do in the desert? And I said, you know, I don't know, but they're saying all this crazy stuff. If they can do half of it, this is going to be a very interesting journey, and if it doesn't work out, I can always come back to the US Now, fortunately, not married, no kids, right? I didn't have those tethers, so that's how I ended up moving to Dubai in 2003 and then working on what has to be considered one of the most amazing formations, country formations and formations in the last 100 plus years of what they did in what was a desert into now a top 10 global destination.

    Adam Outland
    No kidding, and to be on the ground floor to experience that. So there's a stereotype Bob that maybe isn't completely pervasive, but that folks who choose private equity and venture and these things that you know, you know, they don't really care about social impact. But this isn't obviously a true stereotype. There's many that are involved, including yourself. And so what you know, you obviously it took a slightly unconventional path to get into the path that you did through philosophy undergrad, so you already were outside the box. But what led you down the path of creating social impact, and how has business helped with that?

    Bob Bush
    Yeah, I think you can sort of see the dots right. So before you can criticize something, you might want to become an expert at it. Everyone's got an opinion, but every opinion is not informed. And so just starting with, what does social impact mean? Right? That's environmental sustainability, that's financial sustainability, right? That's that, you know, those elements. Have some type of capital component, and whether that capital is relational capital or social capital or financial capital, I just see PE or finance is just one of the tools that is necessary to creating impact. And that social impact is financial impact, that social impact is economic impact, that social impact is environmental impact, etc. And so getting some proper training, and then working in a in an immigrant and with other governments to sort of figure out how we can take these traditional access to capital issues, access to market issues, and create business models around them. To me, this is a culmination of all of those other things that I've done to see if I can take what to your point, or skills, or one type of impact shareholder, ROI, and see how you can if you have any kind of facility, right? And you know, one of the, one of the challenges that the world of Silicon Valley has and the world of Wall Street have is, what kinds of questions are you asking? You ask the kind of question about the kind of problem you want to solve, and then the money goes to that. And you can, you know, do we really need flying cars? But if that's the question, you can you can come out a viable business model, there'll be someone that'll help you fund buying cars, absolutely to your point of sort of coming from the outside, whether that's the outside, or having to commute to go to St Louis for school. I've always had the blessing of being able to look at something a little bit more broadly than most, and I apply that natural instinct and these traditional skills to go, can I take this totality of all these other experiences I've used in some perhaps traditional ways, and bring those skills into something by asking different questions and hopefully getting better output and and I remember one of the first images that I ever had that gave me a global perspective, and my father and mother still have it. There was a an African boy who was skeletal. Could not have been more than six or seven years old, eating from a bowl that had a few pieces of rice, and I remember asking them, and I still ask today, why does that have to exist in our world with so much surplus? That's a question that I had as a little boy, and a version of that question I still ask myself, as we now are dealing much more focused on the agriculture and coffee and cocoa and these things. So it may look like it's this sort of security, strange path, journey to get into social impact, but I think in the way we define social impact, right? We're not a charity, commerce. Can we use the commerce over charity? My partner may rest in peace, has has a very viable foundation that has done a lot of foundational work and has given millions of dollars in education and health care. It's a nonprofit. When we started this, he and I said, I we want this to be a social enterprise that needs to use the same metrics of of operational efficiency and capital efficiency as any other business, because that's viability. And we're going to use this model and the things that we've learned. So sir, you are the passion and I'm the purpose, and together, we're going to see if we can ask some good questions to have some impact.

    Adam Outland
    I love it. I remember as a 20 something year old having a an early midlife crisis, very early midlife crisis, where I was thinking about, what's the purpose of life, what's the impact I want to have, you know, and that kind of led me to like, what's the problem I want to solve? And I thought, Wow, there's so many problems to solve, so I should probably be in politics. You know, I'd studied government and politics as a result, and there's a point where I just shut myself in my room for a couple of days to just really write out all the things that were in my brain and to process where, where I wanted to go and, you know, looking back on my studies, you know, studying government, politics at University of Maryland actually led me to this belief that being a politician actually is quite limited in the type of impact that you can have. And that's true and not true, probably, but I came to a personal conclusion that one of the biggest challenges were, are the people? What we started, people are the biggest problem, the greatest asset, right? And I thought to myself, you know, if we could change or impact education, and maybe even in unconventional ways, we could help young people develop a higher EQ, some of the things that are not taught in schools, but how we manage our. Emotions, so that their emotions can't be hijacked by others. You know that they could have more self confidence and self value, that they can reverse engineer their goals? I mean, these things that had helped me have a transformative experience in my life, that maybe that was the best place of impact, and that led to a career of coaching and development and building a business that does the same. And so I hear your story, and I think I agree with you that a big part of life is making sure we're solving the most important problems, and everybody's got a different perspective on that, but we have some brilliant people in this world that are chasing relatively silly problems to solve, or in some cases brilliant people that choose maybe to just be important in this world instead of being of value. You know, what I hear you doing is being of value. And so what are the biggest problems that you think are worth solving?

    Bob Bush
    Wow, man, like, how long is this show? My goodness first. Thank you for that. You know, do your own reflection. And I love how you summed it up. You know, there are people in the world that choose to be more important instead of being more valuable. And it kind of links to the conversation that we had a little bit earlier about understanding valuation mergers and acquisitions, the valuation, the value to value an asset, and understanding the values of an asset, right? And as much as people can be a problem with regards to efficiency and getting things done that the values are have to be about, then it have to be distinguishable from the dollar value. And this is a way that, when I'm sort of approaching a problem, you know, I I'm very mindful of the, you know, what are we measuring? How do we measure it? And is this, is this going to be a values driven metric, or is this a valuation driven metric? And they're both important when you're talking about creating a sustainable model. And so in to get you your question about what kinds of problems to solve, every problem at some point has this tension, are we thinking short term? Are we thinking long term? Or we want to, we want to, you know whether it's health care, there's a cost benefit analysis. Well, if we can get the vaccine out six months earlier, it is going to have X percentage of people that can help, but Y percentage of the people are not going to be helped because we haven't, because there's maybe some additional things that we can do. There's always contraindications, right? There's always risks, there's always the obverse side of that coin. And so to me, it's not so much which problem is more or less important. It is. How do you tackle whatever problem you're you're doing right? Because I don't want your listeners, and I certainly don't think this way to think that. Big problems, major problems. Oh, my problem is, I'm trying to save the world from malaria. There are problems in your neighborhood, there are problems in your school. The question is the mindset around it, so let's not think about it in terms of big problems or little problems. It is whatever problem there is before you bring it, bring an interdisciplinary, bring a diverse, bring a viable bring a perspective, a mindset, recognizing that value and values are not the same thing.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, yeah, well done. I think that's a good it's a great perspective. You know, big problems are important to solve, but at the same time, they don't have to be hairy and audacious and worldwide, in fact, you know, we need a lot more people solving the local problem that adds up to a big solution. And it's really about having a problem solving mindset and how to tackle them.

    Bob Bush
    That's right.

    " target="_blank">

Innovating in Style, with Anya Cheng – Episode 484 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On April 15, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • AI, Business, CEO, entrepreneur, founder, leadership, Silicon Valley, startup, Stephanie Maas, success, Taiwan, tech, technology
Anya Cheng is the founder and CEO of Taelor, and a former Head of Product for Meta, eBay, Target, and McDonalds, shares the absolutely insanely tenacious path of networking to her first job, getting to Silicon Valley by accepting a job in Minnesota, an eye-opening story about the prejudices that still exist in the startup […]
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  • Anya Cheng is the founder and CEO of Taelor, and a former Head of Product for Meta, eBay, Target, and McDonalds, shares the absolutely insanely tenacious path of networking to her first job, getting to Silicon Valley by accepting a job in Minnesota, an eye-opening story about the prejudices that still exist in the startup world, how to turn office busywork into project management, how to amplify yourself by amplifying others, the value in finding out that your business may actually have a different clientele than you imagined (and why that's OK), and the TRUE way to eat oatmeal in Japan.

    About Anya:

    Anya Cheng is a Taiwanese American technology executive and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Before launching her artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Taelor, she helped build Facebook Shop, a social commerce initiative where people can explore and purchase products directly on Meta (formerly Facebook) and Instagram. Before that, she led the go-to-market for Facebook’s Wi-Fi Tech and Innovation team where she improved digital literacy by bringing the Internet to countries without fast connections. As Head of Products, she transformed eBay Classifieds’ emerging business and built Target’s mobile tablet eCommerce app. As McDonald’s Senior Director of eCommerce, she launched their global food delivery apps from scratch.

    Cheng is currently Founder & CEO of Taelor, a AI-powered menswear rental subscription platform busy men to rent styles and for brands/retailers to test products and predict trends. Taelor is an award-winning sustainability startup that has won various competitions hosted by accelerators including Draper University, University of Chicago Polsky Center and SPARK Accel.

    Cheng is also an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University and 500 Global (formerly 500 Startups) where she teaches software product management and marketing. She is the author of a best-selling career book, a TEDx Talk speaker, and a social media influencer.

    Cheng was named a Girls in Tech 40 Under 40 in 2018 and nominated as a Marketer of the Year by Min Magazine U.S. in 2013. Her work has won 20+ awards including the Webby Award Best for Shopping App, The Communicator Award, and the Rising Star Award of Social Network Category by Mobile Village. She is a volunteer career coach who has inspired thousands of young professionals and currently serves on the volunteer boards for the North America Taiwanese Engineering and Science Association, Taiwan Tech Arena (a non-profit supporting minority founders) and STUF United Fund (a non-profit supporting charitable causes.)

    Cheng received her MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Master of Science degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University. 

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Anya Cheng
    This is Anya from here in Silicon Valley. I'm running AI companies, and so excited to share more. And before that, I led the E commerce team for Meta, eBay and Target.

    Stephanie Maas
    Wow, I wish you had an impressive background.

    Anya Cheng
    haha, just a lot of big tech companies. Facebook shopping, was head of product for eBay's new business in the US and new market in Latin America, Africa, Asia, helped McDonald's to build a full delivery business when Uber eat just started, and helped Target to move its tech office here in Silicon Valley. But my personal entrepreneurship journey just started less than three years ago in the AI spaces.

    Stephanie Maas
    Absolutely. Well, I want to start with, if you don't mind, let's go back just a smidge, because you do have an interesting background. Just walk us through where did this love for tech, all things e, if you will, related. Where did that begin for you?

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah, so maybe I share a little bit. I came to the US in 2007 went to Northwestern University for my master degree in marketing. When I graduated, it happened to be right after Lehman brothers, went bankrupt. So there was no job anywhere. I remembered I was waiting outside of other departments building to, as soon as the interviewer came out of building, I was, hey, this is my resume. I am not even student of these departments, but people say that, you know, Anya, this is dumb, job searching is about networking, you shouldn't be cold calling or ambush people. So I realized that I don't have much connection. But that's not true. I do know professors, no? I was a student, right? So I knock on the door of every departments professor, I say, I'm a student here. This is my resume. Please connect me to someone on LinkedIn who I already researched. This guy talked to you on LinkedIn, so I want to talk to him or her. And then one day there was a professor say, I don't know you, I cannot connect you to anybody, but tomorrow, I have a panel, and you are welcome to come as students and to listen to the panel. By the way, we need more students. Can you bring 10 more people? And so I went. I my English was so bad I didn't understand anything in the in the speech. But after that, I went out and talked to the speaker. Hi, I'm Anya great job. Really good on the speech. I have no clue what she was talking about, and this is my resume. Can I talk to someone in your company running department on digital? And she said, Yes. So I went on job interview. I thought it was perfect, everything they were looking for. A few weeks went by. Nobody contact me. I follow up with a recruiter. The recruiter pick up phone. Asked me, please do not call me anymore, because I was layed off. So the recruiter was layed off from the company. So I said, Okay, you have nothing to do? Do you want to come out for coffee? She said, Okay, why not? So we had a coffee. She told me a lot going on about the company, who is a decision maker, what's the challenge of the company? And she also gave me an idea. Anya, Chicago is the third largest city in the US. Do you want to go to New York? And LA, they are bigger city there for probably more jobs. So I went and I printed out 2,000 alumni from Northwestern University. I started cold calling each of them. I said, I'm coming to New York. I'm a student. Can I meet you for coffee. And with that, I met with a lot of people, but everyone say that I am not hiring. So I call a company in Taiwan, a magazine. I say, Hey, do you want to cover these amazing conferences for stories in New York? They say, yes. I say, I can be a reporter for free. And I call the conference say, Hey, I'm a reporter from Taiwan. Can you give me a press ticket? And I got into a conference, and end up I met with a lot of people, so I called the companies, the magazine company CEO again, I said, I learned a lot from your competitor, and do you want to know what they are working on? She said, Yes. Before I go, I put together a business plan, because I remember I met with a recruiter who was layed off. So I went on interview there. You need someone who knows a little bit marketing, a little bit digital, ideally, not very expensive, just out of college? And I know someone: me! So she asked me, Do you want to be a contractor? Anyway, that's how I got my first job.

    Stephanie Maas
    Absolutely, incredible. What an incredible story. And I've just got to go back and pick out a couple of nuggets of things that I think really speak to your creativity, your insatiable work efforts and desire for the outcome. I mean, you're a masters student at Northwestern, that should be enough to get you a job, but to your point where, you know, we just launched the financial crisis of '07, '08, '09, you take your time. You went face to face asking for researched LinkedIn connection introductions. Do you know that has got to put you in the like 0.01% of the population that uses LinkedIn?

    Anya Cheng
    In fact, what I found most effective during the search was actually one time I was rejected again. I walk out the building. I was in a newsstand, so I saw there were newspapers. And on the newspaper, what do you say? It say publisher name, so and so, if you want advertise, call this number. So I bought all the newspaper, and then I start calling each of them. And somehow, for some reason, I was able to actually get on and talk to New York Times, CEO senior and VP and SVP, of like ESPN, all of those companies.

    Stephanie Maas
    That is incredible. Talk about determination. Holy Hannah. So then, did I hear you say you printed out a list of 2,000 alumni and started calling them all?

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah. And then my English was so bad I didn't know even how to talk to them. So I went to a senior care center near campus, and I practiced my interview with those seniors, because you can… no one will judge your English. You spend time with them. So that's how I did my interview practice. My 93 years old. Her name is Connie. She's from Japan, and I still remember she will put the soy sauce into the oatmeal because she said that's how she eat breakfast back in Japan.

    Stephanie Maas
    So okay, so if you learn nothing else, if you want to, you know, be like a true Japanese oatmeal eater, you're going to want to put soy sauce in that. Got it, check. So your first job is with this magazine. Take me on your journey from there.

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah, so I was there for a few years, and I was mostly focused on digital part of a business. At that time, I didn't know what that means, like product manager. Then I joined Sears, and Sears was looking for someone who helped on deciding where to buy on digitally. So with my magazine background, they feel like, Oh, great. Then you have the media side the background. Now you can be the buyer side the background to see, help us to evaluate where you would you buy media. And while I was doing that quickly, we discovered the most effective way of buying media is using data. And after I doing that for a few, for a year or two, they say, Hey, Anya, when they come to my website, the homepage. It doesn't make sense. Would you like to come and help us to personalize our homepage and websites? And that's how I started my career in product management. And from there, Target hired me. I remember that they they asked me if I want to move to Minnesota. I didn't want to, but I say…

    Stephanie Maas
    No, actually, I have no desire to go to Minnesota. Thank you. Yeah.

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah, thank you. But, yes, my career goal at the time was coming to Silicon Valley. So I was looking for a job in Silicon Valley, but Target came to me and they say, Hey, Target is cooler than Sears and Kmart, so you should come join Target. So I accept the offer. I went to Minnesota. They call me. Anya, I remember you say you don't want to come to Minnesota. I said, Yes, yes, yes. They say, You know your managers role was opening. But now I found a guy, but the guy should be based in San Francisco, and he doesn't want to move to Minnesota. But now, since you have a manager there, you can actually work there. And that's how I actually moved to the Bay Area, by saying yes to something that wasn't relevant to the Bay Area yet at all. And from there, I help Target to build their tech office here in the Bay Area. McDonalds come to me, they say, it's amazing. You launch your tech office here in for Target, you launch your apps. You won 11 a word Best App of the Year by Apple. Can you do the same for our E commerce team? We want to launch something for food delivery globally, and you will be able to do similar things and help us launch office here. And that's what I did. And then eBay came to me. So I joined Ebay. I helped them to focus on product for Africa. And then eventually the Meta came to me. They say, Hey, you have experience in Africa. Do you want to go to places in Africa that does not have internet? So, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda? That was my job. When I joined Meta, helped bring internet to country does not have internet. But then during that time, I realized that social commerce is big game, live streaming and Tiktok shopping, and everyone is talking about social commerce, shopping on social media. And I realized that I did have a lot of E commerce experience from eBay and McDonalds and Target. So they're like, Hey, why don't you come and help just to build Facebook shopping. And that was how I ended up my last job in big corporate was Facebook shopping.

    Stephanie Maas
    Okay, so just for some of our listeners, can you just share with us what were some of the ways that you overcame the challenges of being female, of being Taiwanese, the language barrier, the stereotype barrier, the prejudices that we just know are out there, intentional or unintentional, other than just incredible determination and work, how were some of the ways you were able to come overcome some of those challenges?

    Anya Cheng
    I actually feel a little bit less of that before I became a startup founder, but it's actually a lot more. You can tell a lot more after becoming startup founder. In the startup world today, in the US, there are 30% of us businesses were founded by female. Where female, at least one of the founding members female. In the US, 15% and in the Bay Area, for tech companies, 30%. However, for VC backed company, for VC money, only 1.8% goes to female founded company, 1.8% it's actually down from two years ago, 2.1%. I remember a month ago, I went on a startup competition, and one of the finalists, she was actually really nice and she got her hair up. So she was on the stage with 1000s of people, and then I said, Wow, nice dress, nice hair. And I also love your accessories. This is an amazing ring, like giant diamond ring. And she was like, you know, I'm not married, and I wear this because research shows women who are married, people trust them more because someone trusts them. That's why I wear the ring going on competition. I was totally in shock. And she is white woman who has 15 years of career, very, very successful, even she will have to put on the ring for the competition. So at the beginning, I felt pretty disappointed. And then one day, I thought of, you know, what, if people the world only give me opportunity because I'm a minority, if only minority will give me an opportunity, then I go or go find minority investors. So I start talking to people who are Nigerians and Kenyans and Italians and Spanish and from Mexico and from different part of the world, and Paris and Singapore and Taiwans and Japan. If I can combine every minority investors to be my investor, I have more than enough. I am majority, right? But throughout my career, in corporate, there are some tips to share to people. For example, people tend to assign miscellaneous work to woman, and the best way is not actually saying no, because people hate you, like you're like, hey, Anya, can you order lunch for us tomorrow? Can you host the holiday party for the office? It's kind of hard to say no, but what you can do is you say yes, but then you start putting together a rotation plan, yes, yes. I will help. But then, okay, week one is this person, okay, you will do this. Week two is this person will do this. Week three, you're organizing, but you don't do it yourself. You're organizing. So you plan as project management, or, for example, people hate woman to promote themselves, so always amplify each other. And this when you are in the meetings and you say, okay, great, just Stephanie, I really agree, and I want to echo Stephanie's point of view. You help her, she will help you. And then amplify people don't want to hear you promote yourself, but they will listen to you when you promote others. And also, for example, you can at a certain event that you know they are very few women, and you can organizing it in a way that they will stay. For example, you know that this is the tech competition that usually less women participate. But then before that, you have a company all hands, and in the end, you say, Okay, we have this tech event right after. I encourage everybody to stay so create an environment that's easy for women or minority to be able to participate. And also, you know, guys, they actually hang out with co workers on weekend, while women tend to hang out with people who are nothing to do with their work on weekends, you know the loose ties will help. So next week, find someone who you are not very familiar with. Ask them for lunch. Just a simple step, the loose tie will be able to give you insights and secrets in the office or industry that can help you. So invite someone who you are not very familiar with next week for lunch.

    Stephanie Maas
    Very tactical, super practical. So now let's talk about where you're at today, owning your own business, working with AI, share with us a little bit about that journey.

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah, I'm now running an AI company called Taelor, and it's a company we use AI to pick clothes for men. I actually constantly feel a little bit impostor syndrome. I was the only few female leader in tech that didn't come from engineering background, but lead large technology teams. So I want to look great, and I try some subscription boxes, but you have to buy and I didn't want to own that much stuff. And I don't have fashion sense. I don't know which one looks good. I have to decide, because it's a new item. So I have to think, can I buy this in some other places that will be cheaper? And then I also, if I buy it, I will have to do laundry and ironings, and I don't want to do any of those things, so I try some rental company, but most of them require you to browse through 1000s of items. It was a hard moment that I realized most of fashion companies are designed for people who are into fashion. They're not for people like me. I'm just a lazy person or busy person who need to do good, want to be successful, but does not care about fashion. I need to do good for my job, for my day, for my work. I do not care if I wear red or blue. All I care is that I am successful in the next meeting. I close the deal. I do well in the social events. I did well in my TED Talks. So I start wondering is, are there people like me? Hate shopping, hate laundry, but very purposeful and need to look good? Yes, they are busy men. They have no idea how to look good, but they need to look good. And turns out that we are a menswear business, but to serve them, you need service. You need to pick clothes for them. But before Gen AI, it wasn't feasible. You have to hire someone, spend hours and 1000s of dollars and buy the clothes and someone style you, but now with AI three seconds. AI can pick perfect outfits and become your personal stylist, and that's how we started.

    Stephanie Maas
    That is so cool. Okay, anything that we haven't talked about that you were hoping to address in our time today?

    Anya Cheng
    Yeah, I think it's just for people who want to try something a little bit more like looking good and saving time and feel confident, if you are also a business, who have something that you can partner with us, we would love to see what we can do with each other. For example, we partner with dating sites, we partner with coaches, and we also partner with fitness centers and people losing weight. And you don't need to buy large, medium, small clothes. And you can actually just rent the clothes during the journey, and eventually buy the clothes or look great after you work out and you dress up. So if you are any of those business, feel free to reach out. And I'm at anya@taelor.ai that's a, n, y, a, at, T, A, E, L, O, R, dot, a, i, and we would love to work with you and help to save the environment.

    Stephanie Maas
    Thank you so much for being here with us. What an incredible story and journey. And I really love the way that you're not just taking this passion for business, but you're also combining it with your passion, as you said, for sustainability, doing good in the world. Just thank you so much for being here.

    Anya Cheng
    Thank you so much.

    " target="_blank">

Your Best Life Forward, with Dr. Amy D’Aprix – Episode 483 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On April 1, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • Adam Outland, advisor, author, Business, empathy, entrepreneur, finances, founder, leadership, Lifebridge Strategies, listening, money, planning, retirement, success
Dr. Amy D’Aprix, President and Founder of Lifebridge Strategies, talks about bridging the gap between the stages, changes, and events of life transitions, how life and money go hand in hand, using the right “script” in your interactions, the 3 levels of listening, why empathy is everything, and offers a tease of what’s to come. […]
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  • Dr. Amy D'Aprix, President and Founder of Lifebridge Strategies, talks about bridging the gap between the stages, changes, and events of life transitions, how life and money go hand in hand, using the right “script” in your interactions, the 3 levels of listening, why empathy is everything, and offers a tease of what’s to come.

    About Dr. Amy:

    Amy D’Aprix is an internationally respected expert on lifestyle issues relating to retirement, aging, caregiving, and family dynamics.

    With a Ph.D. in Social Work, “Dr. Amy,” as she is affectionately known, provides down-to-earth, practical, and professionally informed guidance on Life Transitions to individuals, professionals, and organizations.

    A compelling, pragmatic, inspirational speaker and coach, Dr. Amy has addressed thousands of Financial Advisors and their clients across North America. She has consulted for the financial industry and trained advisors for over 20 years, providing sound guidance in navigating Life Transitions to ensure the success of overall life goals and financial plans. 

    This passion is reflected in Trusted Advisor of Choice, a program for financial professionals to better understand their clients’ concerns and LifeMap, an exclusive membership site to help advisor's clients proactively prepare for the life transitions they face.

    Amy is a Certified Professional Consultant on Aging (CPCA) and sits on the Board of Directors of the International Federation on Ageing.

    She has authored the book, From Surviving to Thriving: Transforming Your Caregiving Journey and co-developed an audio coaching session and companion journal, Building the Bonds of Friendship at Midlife and Beyond. She also created the Life Memories Journal and Caring Cards to inspire more meaningful conversations between generations.

    Dr. Amy is regularly sought out for her expertise to be featured on podcasts, radio, TV and in publications.

    Learn more at LifebridgeStrategies.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Adam Outland
    Today's guest is Dr Amy D'Aprix, president and founder of LifeBridge Strategies, a partnership with the Southwestern Family of Companies. An internationally renowned expert on lifestyle issues related to retirement, aging, caregiving and family dynamics, Dr Amy, as she's affectionately known, has provided guidance on life transitions to individuals, professionals and organizations for over 30 years. Amy, it's a pleasure to have you with us. One of the things we love asking our guests about on our podcast is a little bit of their history and their path that helped them arrive where they are today. Most people in their teenage years weren't necessarily dreaming about the profession they made as an adult. In fact, they've gone through a lot of change and transformation in that period. But what did you start off being motivated towards as a young woman, and then how did that evolve?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    I love that question. Adam. I get asked a lot about, how did you get where to where you are? It's a circuitous path, which I think it is for many people in their careers, and certainly for entrepreneurs, my background is social work. So I have a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD in social work. And my original thought was I was just going to work with older adults and their families, you know, to help them have better lives. And I did that. I did some of that. Early on, doors opened, and I walked through those doors, and I didn't even know those doors existed at one point, you know, and then you walk through and you have an opportunity, and you find another opportunity in the future. So where that all led me was after I did work, I actually worked as a home care social worker and worked with families who's had a family member with dementia, did a lot of work in policy, and then I ended up teaching at University for 13 years. I worked at university, both teaching social work graduate students and doing training around North Carolina on issues related both to aging and on the other end, to young families. And I was doing my doctorate at the time, and during that time, I thought, I'm not really cut out to be an academic. I love being in the classroom, but I'm not a researcher. I love reading research, and I really had one of those kind of existential crises about, Do I finish this doctorate, which I'm halfway through and have invested a lot of life energy and money into, or do I just stop it? And I felt like I should finish it, even though I didn't think I was going to use it the way I originally thought. At that point, I got an opportunity to do speaking and to work for a company that offers a designation for business people around aging. That was like an intro to aging class. Certified senior advisor is the designation, and I started teaching for them all over the United States. That program got brought to Canada, and one of the big banks in Canada brought that internal and put all their advisors and their vice president through it, and they got to know me that way because I taught several hours in this three day program, and they asked me if I would come up on a work permit to Canada and help them figure out what to do for their clients on the non financial side of retirement, I did that in 2008 came up for a year and then ended up staying and we developed all sorts of training workshop for the clients around life transitions. And that's really my love. Adam is helping people. How do they get through a life transition? And, you know, I say that's the stages, changes and events we go through in our life, retirement, estate planning, caregiving, we developed one to help women have a better relationship with money, and suddenly I was completely immersed in financial services. What was interesting is I find financial services gave me a platform to do work that I hadn't had an opportunity to do, and it was so exciting getting to have these conversations with people and help them through these transitions that just snowballed.

    Adam Outland
    Well that's an amazing story. What do you feel are some of the skills that you may have developed all the way back when you started doing social work that stuck with you?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Empathy is the first word that comes to my mind, you know, and I say, you know, when we think about empathy, I think we all have some idea of what that. Means, but, you know, but stepping into other people's shoes, I say empathy is really about saying to someone, I see you, I hear you, I understand you, and conveying that. And a lot of people feel empathy, but struggle conveying it. So that became something I took from my early work. I also think a lot of the love of helping families, because I have a real I, you know, we live in family, whatever we call family. It could be family of choice. It could be our biological family, whatever it is. How do we strengthen families as they go through these transitions and help them have a better time? Because in key transitions like caregiving and when the estate, when the estate is settled, these are two key points, families often blow up, and I believe it's mainly preventable if people only have what I call essential conversations and learn how to work together better.

    Adam Outland
    100%. I mean, empathy has been, kind of a fundamental trait in general to be successful, I think in business in any format, right?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Yeah, it really is. And I think we all crave it, right? We want to be seen and heard and understood, and we don't often get it a lot in our day to day lives. So those of us who learn how to do it and business people who get good at it tend to be more successful.

    Adam Outland
    When you started the prior business that you've built up until this point, it was called Life Transitions, correct?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Yes.

    Adam Outland
    There's always inherent risk when you start a company, and so a lot of people risk averse to doing that. What compelled you to start something for yourself?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Yeah, I think I've always been pretty entrepreneurial. In the time I was doing social work, a lot of times I also had a little side gig doing sales and something. This is a very weird combination, right? So I always felt a little who am I? Am I the social worker or the sales person for decades, probably at least for the first couple decades of my career, I felt a little out of step with people who just sort of seemed to know this was his Lear path, and they got a job. And so I, when I was working for the company that offered the designation CSA, I started to move out on my own, and I was an independent and a solo preneur at that point. So from the time I became a solopreneur, I had no net, right? Those of us who do these things often don't have been met. And I think you have to have a certain makeup to do this, you know, I if you look at most people, as you said, Adam, are pretty risk aversive. They want the security. And when we talk about being an entrepreneur, we often don't have external security. So we have to find that somewhere in ourselves that we're okay. And I think I just always felt that if everything fell apart, I could always go get a job, but that I wasn't really cut out at it. And I I want to tell you a funny story, because I'm now at an age a lot of my friends are starting to retire and from jobs with pensions, you know. And those of us who are entrepreneurs don't usually have a pension, so one of my friends and I will sometimes say, why didn't we just take a job and stick with it for 30 years, like other people do? But that's not if you're an entrepreneur, it's not in your makeup. You know, one of the things I think I would have done if I had a job was I might have met a guidance counselor, like my dad. And what I joke is, I would have met a guidance counselor, but then I would have thought I could run the department, so I would have then gone and become the head of the department. Then I would have thought that there are a lot of things in this school that need fixing. And next thing you know, I would have tried to move on. So, you know, you have to know who you are as an entrepreneur. So I think I took the risk just because inherently I felt secure enough there would always be a Plan B I could operate with Plan B, and I kind of kept that in the background. And there were times it was really scary. I've gone through those times.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah. Give our audience context for this business in particular, LifeBridge Strategies, that partnership with Southwestern Family of Companies, what is the problem that you're specifically addressing?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Well, so as I was doing the speaking engagements for clients. What I realized was the advisors needed help in having conversations about these topics, so I developed some workshops for the advisors that were quite successful, but what they would say to me after the workshop is okay, so how do I say that to my client? And I realized they needed coaching around the conversations and how to do it. So I started our first product, which is trusted advisor of choice. And trusted advisor of choice is for advisors to we call it a practice Elevation Program instead of a training program, because it's it's really about working with advisors who want to take their practice to the next level. It's framed around life transitions, so again, the stages changes and events that people go through. And it's a modularized program with videos on the topics such as retirement, estate planning, caregiving, how to improve your practice with women, how to work with old. Adults, referrals, those kind of things. And in each module, besides the videos, we have some client facing tools. We have some advisor resources. And each mod for each module, there is coaching, available, group coaching, and Adam, we launched that during the pandemic. And I was very fortunate, because initially, the pushback I got was, advisors are not going to want to do training online. They had no other choice of ways to do it, and so we launched trusted advisor choice to fill the gap to meet the need of, how do you deepen your relationships with clients by better understanding their life and tying life and money together. And one of the things I say is that life and money go hand in hand. And what we teach in that program for the advisors is how to go where the client is, which is on the practical, emotional and family aspects of their life, express empathy. And then segue back to the business conversation. It's that we've actually trademarked this process now because it's been so successful, and it's called Lyra, and it's about going to the client, but coming back. And what's great about it is then the advisor always feels in control of the conversation, because they know they can segue back and forth between the life conversation and the money conversation, which is key. So that was the big need we were filling with that, which was, you know, how do you deepen your relationships with clients, by understanding them better, expressing empathy better, and tying that to the business. From that, we developed life map, and that's for clients, but the only place they can get it is from their advisor, Adam. What that is, are really robust resources for clients on these transitions. And again, it's about strengthening the advisor client relationship, because what we found with trusted advisor of choice is advisors would say, Great, I'm comfortable having these conversations, and now clients are sharing things about their life, and I don't have any resources for them on the life side. I only have resources on the financial side, and so it's like opening a wound without a bandage. So we created this program that has, again, robust resources for clients from professionals who are top in their fields, and the only way they can get it is from the advisor. So it again deepens that relationship.

    Adam Outland
    You know, I hear the empathy come up, but it was really in the questions that you guide them to ask or not ask, curiosity and asking great questions. Is there a specific common question that you either guide in your trainings advisors to ask or not ask, that come to mind right now, just as an example?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Sure, well, and I've got to speak to the curiosity, because that is actually one of the things I say, is that you have to go into these conversations with curiosity, and you have to listen at what I call level three, which is listening for what's not being said. So, you know, level one is listening to reply, and we think, we don't do it. We all do it, and it's actually an occupational hazard, because we want to add value. So we're listening to add value. And then level two is listening to the content, which obviously is better. You know, you have to be present do all that. But level three is about going somewhere beyond that, and it's about listening to what's not being said, to what what the person feels about what they're sharing with you. And you know, I often share a story around this that I sat in on an advisors training who was a really good advisor, and she knew this client really well. And the client was a 72 year old woman retired, didn't bring her husband. She was a physician, but the advisor knew the client, and they had nice conversations. We went through a portfolio review, she went through some planning, and then at the end, right as the advisor is kind of wrapping up the meeting, and the client says, I'm going to Italy to see my mother. And the advisor responds at level two and says, which, again, is to the content. And says, Great, have a wonderful time. Let's connect. When you get back, and I'm thinking to myself, this client 72 her mother has to be quite old. And the client did not look enthused. She looked upset, you know, and so I said to the client, How's your mom doing? And she said, she's not doing well. She has dementia. I'm not sure she'll recognize me, and I'm guessing this may be the last time I see her. And I said, I am so sorry. I can't imagine how hard this trip is. She said, it's very, very hard. So in that moment, I made the connection that deepen, not the advisor, because they didn't switch to level three. She had left the room and wanted to move things on, so that and the curiosity factor helps you get to where you are. And then you said, Is there specific questions? This is one I. Have advisors. Ask advisors often say, Tell me about your family. Instead, I ask them to say, tell me about the people that you want to take care of. When we look at financial planning or estate planning, now you may say, Well, what's the difference? Well, the difference is they may have people who are not in their immediate family who they're taking care of that you'll never know about unless you say something. They may have a niece. They may have somebody outside the family. And what you want to do by asking these kind of questions is create context. The person knows exactly what you're looking for when you ask a question like that, tell me about your family is you know, what do you want to know about? So asking questions with context is a key thing to do. And with advisors, I try to get them instead of saying, So, what are you going to do in your retirement, asking specific things like, So, what are the three most important things to you that you're going to do in your retirement? And I had one advisor tell me he shifted to that question, and one of his clients said, wow, I've not thought about that. I've got two things I've been thinking about, we're going to travel, and this client was a big golfer, I'm going to golf, but when you ask me about the third, I realize that my wife and I need to have different conversations. Those two things aren't going to be enough for me to do. And they ended up getting to this conversation about how so many people struggle in retirement because they don't have purpose. And the client came back and said that question for him was a game changer. So it seems like such a little thing, but specificity in questions and creating contexts makes a huge difference.

    Adam Outland
    Also not telling people that you can imagine things that they're going through, but instead telling them that you can't imagine things they're going through. You know, people aren't feeling good that you're sitting with, but you want to relate and say, Oh man, I can imagine that must be really hard, when maybe what they prefer to hear, and what's probably reality, is to say, I can't imagine, I cannot imagine how tough that must be.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    And you know, one of my favorite takeaways on empathy is you can say to somebody, if they cut you off guard, I'm so sorry that you're having to deal with this. And, you know, I don't even know what to say right now, except I'm so sorry that is a great thing to say instead of trying to say something profound. Or, you know, I think that again, if we think about being present and wanting to convey to somebody that you see and hear them, and it's hard when we get hit in a going to be business or personal with something pretty significant somebody's going through. It's a skill that we all need to practice. You know, I always joke. Some people think, of course, I must be great in empathy, because I teach it. And I used to joke when my daughter was a teenager, don't ask my daughter, she had a different perspective on that.

    Adam Outland
    But in, you know, in reality, that's, it's, it's really important training. And I often, you know, as a consultant with that training and background that I have, have often thought that people often misconstrue consultancy or sales as being very scripted. And I often reflect on the fact that it's actually what we're all very scripted. I mean, we all have our response mechanisms to introductions. It's Hi, how are you? I'm good. How are you? It's just what we say, and you don't even realize it. Do you go to a different country? Like if you go to Germany and you ask someone walking down the street, Hi, how are you doing? It's so weird to ask that question to a German that they'll look at you and they'll tell you exactly how they're doing and it's not well. So I always think that, you know, good, effective sales training and script building helps us build more effective language to truly be impactful in life, versus we grew up with, which is most likely not the best script.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Yeah, I agree with you on that. You know, very few of us grew up in homes where we where we heard warm, empathic responses to things, and it wasn't because they weren't loving people. It was just a different time, right? And a different approach to parenting.

    Adam Outland
    That's right, yeah, that's such a good point. What's the vision where you want to take Lifebridge into the future, and what's your hope in terms of impact?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    I always want to have a huge impact. So I'll start with that. I'm here in at this time, in the world, at this time, to do what I can to make people's lives easier and to help people have better quality of lives and more peace of mind. So that's that's the impetus for what drives everything I do. We have two offerings right now, the trusted advisor, choice for the advisors, life map for the client. And the goal there, again, is to help clients, really all of it is to help clients have better quality of life as they go through transitions. So our goal is to work with advisors all over North America and beyond to help them have again practices that are, you know, the other word I like to use is more fun. It's more fun to do business this way than it is to not really know your clients. So help advisors have more effective businesses and help their clients get through life more easily. That's our vision. We want. Take it, you know, as big as we can to do that, and then behind that, Adam, we have another offering that I'll just tease, which is called Essential conversations. And I'm excited to really get life map and trusted advisor out there, so I can start getting essential conversations out to the world.

    Adam Outland
    I love that. But in any part of the population where you can focus on, you know, just instilling curiosity at a different level is helping everyone. Because we could all benefit from being better students and learning how to listen first and ask better questions instead of coming in. We have a kind of a crude expression that you be in their industry often shows up and throws up all over their thinking they have all the things and the magic sauce that'll help. But while we are driven by adding value, usually greatest value can add is understanding.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    And I think it all comes down to authenticity, right? If we can just bring our authentic selves in. And when we're nervous, we're not as good at it, and when we're, you know, feeling pressure in our businesses, it can be sometimes hard to do that, but that authenticity and true caring for those people that we're interacting with that comes through and people want to work with people who care about them.

    Adam Outland
    100%. One of the kind of lightning round questions I always love asking; pieces of technology, is there an app or something that you found useful or constructive in your practice, business with advisors?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Well, I have to tell you the thing I'm I've been drawn to AI, and I'm not using it a lot, but I'm using quad or cloud, depending on how you say it. And I'll tell you how I use it, because for me, this is making a huge difference in speed of getting things done, but also in creating more depth. So I act like Claude is my graduate assistant, and so I ask Claude questions that come back with, you know? So I'll give you an example. We create these client facing tools that are around life issues. So now, after we do that, I go to Claude and ask a question about that topic area and see what comes out from AI that we might have missed. And what we've done on a couple of the tools is is really deepen and improve them based on those responses. And so sometimes I use Claude to generate an I, you know, as I'm thinking about an idea and thinking, Where should I take that? And sometimes I use it, and on the other end to say, how did we do but it is like having a graduate assistant in who does this in three seconds. So I'm only using AI like, a teeny little bit, but I'm amazed how much it's shifting how I do my work in a really positive way.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, but it's pretty amazing how it's going.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    It IS amazing. And I know we have lots of concerns about where it's going, but I'm pretty excited about what it's doing for me and my business.

    Adam Outland
    I love that. And what's something that you've learned here in the last couple of years through your work directly with the advisors or the client that you didn't know before. Like, what's I mean, we're always learning, but is there something that's that light bulb moment that over the last few years that's really come to you through these conversations and discussions that you that you have so often?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    I think that one of the things that surprised me with the advisors, that I learned was how many of them struggled to make that connection, because they were afraid of being intrusive in clients lives, and so that was an interesting thing that we had to work through about, you know, because curiosity, you know, you think about, They're sitting with someone. They're talking about deep life issues. It's like, how far can I take that conversation before I'm being intrusive? And so I was surprised by that. That was something that was kind of a surprise. And also with the advisors, how open they were to adding the things that I talk about into their practice. You know, the people I work with want those relationships with clients, because you do better work. And I think on the client side, you know, a lot of the people I work with are financially well off because they've got financial advisors. And one of the takeaways is that we all, we all are struggling with the same things. It doesn't matter what are income level you know, if I ever thought money solved problems, I let that belief go when I started working with ultra high net worth clients. You know, more money, more problems, sometimes with your if you haven't done the work about yourself and your family and you're not grounded. So those things that we do to ground ourselves, to learn, to grow, the things we do to cement things in our families, they matter and matter no matter what income level you're at.

    Adam Outland
    There's an organization you might be familiar with called Tiger, 21 people who come together peer to peer, advisory to some degree, where they have a certain amount of liquid well. Wealth that presents, within itself its own challenge. And, you know, some people listening to this might be a challenge I'd like to have, right, but you know, in conversations with a couple of their chapter leaders, what, what I've found is that, yeah, one of the big challenges they face because of wealth is the is the secession planning component. Oh, yes, you know, giving your wealth to your child. If you don't do it and you have it, it can screw up the relationship. And if you do do it and you have it, then it can screw up the teenager or whoever is about to have it, if you don't construct it in the right way. And there's very personal things, even as a consultant, working with business leaders of companies, when you come to the business being passed the next generation, yes, that they're, they're incredibly challenged by and it's often not the structure as much as it is the emotional implications of the relationships itself.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Everything you said, I concur with. I get to work with business owners sometimes. And you know, it's, it's like having a baby that you're, you're thinking, how do I, how do I pop past this baby to someone else, or or, and one of the issue with business owners that surprised me was they often give absolutely no thought to this, and they say, I'm just going to work forever. And the problem with that is, at some point they're not going to be able to work in that business. Something hits them now or because they pass on, and they have to, you know, and a lot of people haven't done very good planning. And I think that's another takeaway I had, is I've been working with or on behalf of older adults and their families for about 40 years now. And I think one of my big surprises is, or big takeaways is, people don't do very good life planning for that last third of their life. We do it well for earlier than the last third. So that's one of my real passions, is helping people do that planning so they have choice, control and independence and have the best quality of life possible. So that was a huge thing when I started working. You know, again, doesn't matter what income level you're at. People often don't think about those things.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, being intentional with your life at every stage.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Yes, at every stage. And we're, you know, we've done a better job early, and then we sort of get people say, Oh, I'm going to retire. And they sort of see that as one long stage. But it's actually many chapters within that to continue to have passion about your life forever. In order to do that, we have to be intentional.

    Adam Outland
    Well, you've just made me decide to alter the final question. I always end with asking our guests to give what advice they might give to their 20 year old self. But I mentioned a different question. Okay, what advice would you like your 100 year old self to be able to tell you now?

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    Oh, I love that. That's a great question. When I think about that, I think about what I would hope because I'm 62 so it's almost 40 years to continue to plan your life, to continue to stay engaged and continue to make sure you have purpose and connection for the next 40 years, because that's what's going to get you through.

    Adam Outland
    Well said. Thank you so much for giving us your time, Dr. Amy.

    Dr. Amy D'Aprix
    I appreciate it. Thank you.

    " target="_blank">

Beyond Basketball: Championship Lessons for Success, with Tyler Summitt – Episode 482 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On March 25, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • basketball, Business, coaching, decision making, leadership, Pat Summitt, speaker, Stephanie Maas, success, team building, teams, winning
Tyler Summitt, son of legendary coach Pat Summitt, as well as the Co-Founder of Pat Summitt Leadership Group, shares the group’s mission, the story of Pat’s humble beginnings, the art of mastering full executive decision making in 90 second or less, the “secret sauce” to Pat’s leadership, what she definitely didn’t understand about, but learned […]
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  • Tyler Summitt, son of legendary coach Pat Summitt, as well as the Co-Founder of Pat Summitt Leadership Group, shares the group’s mission, the story of Pat’s humble beginnings, the art of mastering full executive decision making in 90 second or less, the 'secret sauce' to Pat’s leadership, what she definitely didn’t understand about, but learned from, a 5-year-old’s soccer game, how to visualize winning in a (very, very) highly detailed way, the key component that gets you to over a 90% success rate, and the answer to the mystery of just who is “Trish”?

    About Tyler:

    Tyler Summitt is the son of University of Tennessee women's coach Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in college basketball history at the time of her retirement.   Since her passing in 2016, Tyler now plays instrumental roles in continuing her work and legacy through the Pat Summitt Foundation and efforts to fight Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the Pat Summitt Leadership Group.

    About Pat Summitt Leadership Group:

    The Pat Summitt Leadership Group is dedicated to helping others through Pat’s transformative leadership philosophy, The Definite Dozen. The group strives to empower leaders across various fields to cultivate their unique strengths, foster collaboration, and drive positive change within their organizations and communities.  The approach is rooted in Pat’s twelve Definite Dozen principles for success, emphasizing the importance of accountability, communication, and continuous personal growth. Whether you're a seasoned executive, emerging leader, or aspiring entrepreneur, this program provides the guidance and support needed to unlock your leadership potential to lead with purpose, passion, and resilience.

    Learn more at PatSummittLeadershipGroup.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

    LISTEN:

    SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

    SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

    __________________________________________________________________________

    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Stephanie Maas
    Hey, Tyler, how are you?

    Tyler Summitt
    Good, how you doing?

    Stephanie Maas
    I'm good. It's super nice to meet you.

    Tyler Summitt
    Absolutely likewise. Thanks for having me on.

    Stephanie Maas
    So I'm not from Tennessee. I don't know anything about basketball. I know your mom is ridiculously respected. I know enough to know that.

    Tyler Summitt
    You know what's awesome. I love that. You know why I love that? Because I love talking to people that have not heard of mom. Because a lot of times, if people have heard of Mom, it's like, oh yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that story. But when we do things for the past summit foundation or the past summit leadership group, and people don't hear about mom, a lot of times, they their their life is just changed in a way where, if they'd heard about mom over time, it's like, okay, but when somebody gets smacked in the face with some Pat Summit it's pretty cool. What happens? Heck, we just, we just got a testimonial. I'm it's on my desk right now. I didn't go and start like this. How cool is this? This is a testimonial for the past summit leadership group and the online program. It's this program. It's like an eight hour course on the definite dozen. And my mom, you get certified in my mom's definite dozen, her 12 principles for success. This is from the financial industry. This is an IT. Listen to this testimonial, testimony says I was not from Tennessee. I didn't really follow sports. Okay, sound familiar? I was a little skeptical when this past summit online leadership program was introduced, thinking, How is a basketball coach going to teach me an IT leader? I wasn't sure I would connect with her, but I was sorely mistaken. I found that the way she loved and invested in her people was exactly how I felt a leader should be, and I found myself wanting to be more like her and to see the impact that she had on her people, even decades after they're gone from Tennessee, basketball cemented for me that how you treat people and lead people for the good or the bad will follow them for the rest of their lives. It makes me strive every, every day, to be the type of leader that impacts my team in a positive way, and I am more careful in the choices I make daily. There you go.

    Stephanie Maas
    Awesome. Okay. With that being said, I want you to start from scratch, start at the beginning.

    Tyler Summitt
    Yeah, absolutely. My mom was just a winner. I don't know how to put it. She was a winner. And it wasn't just on the court, it was off the court. I mean, she literally retired as the winningest coach in the industry, and so retire with more wins than anybody, men or women. She was labeled the coach of the century. That one always gets me still like Coach of the century, like for whoever's listening to this, take your title and put of the century out of it. Maybe you're the salesperson. What if you're the salesperson of the century? You know? Maybe you're the stay at home. Mom, what if you're a stay at home? Mom, of the century. Is that not crazy? I mean, of the century. And she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, highest civilian honor that you can possibly get. She was top 50 female leaders in the country, like leader, not sports. For those of you that aren't sports people, this ain't about sports. It's about life, you know, and my mom got every accolade you can imagine, gave keynotes, did so much for women's sports, yes, but women in general, and honestly, leadership and so it really, really proud of her. It started when she was on a dairy farm. You know, she was so shy, like, if you had met my mom back then, I'm told that you would not think this was gonna be somebody that went on to become a celebrity. You know, one story that she liked to tell about how shy she was is when she was playing in the Olympics, and so my mom is the head coach at Tennessee, but playing in the Olympics, there's no WNBA, there's no professional women's professional basketball. They'd take college players and a head coach to go play in the Olympics for the 1976 How crazy is that my mom ended up becoming the first American to win an Olympic medal as both a player and a coach. And so she's playing in the Olympics. And again, this is going to tell you who my mom was back in the day, first game with her teammates, first team with her coaches, and her dad comes to watch. He was a six foot five tobacco farmer. I mean, this guy is scary. This guy is, like, legit, and he's in the first. Front row, and he's up there and he's yelling, rebound. Trish. Trish, rebound. My mom's full name is Patricia, and her family called her Trish, not Pat. Nobody knows that my mom's name, I mean, they all think this is Pat. You know, they use Pat. So it's like, Who's this guy yelling at? So my mom's playing hard, but she said one of her teammates that game had like 30 rebounds. For those who don't know basketball, 30 rebounds, it's crazy. And so my mom said this teammate of hers had like 30 rebounds. That teammates name was Trish Roberts. Trish Roberts thought this scary six foot five tobacco farmer was gonna kill her if she didn't rebound. Right? I tell that story because it shows who my mom was, this shy farm girl, to be honest with you, that was too shy to correct people at age 18, and she was too shy to do that, and now we all know her as Pat Summitt, and I think that's just a message to anybody listening. I don't know what you're going through in life, but I know that my mom's story can help you, because she has gone through so many things that we're going to talk about, you know, on this podcast, that it just shows you if you can do things the right way, if you can make winning an attitude, if you can be it's a mindset you can control. It's in your control. It's just a testament to what you can accomplish in life. My mom went on to do all those things, but she had to go through the wall of being shy. She had to attack that head on. And so that gives you a kind of like, where did she come from, and then who did she become, and how did she do it? So maybe that was a good place to start.

    Stephanie Maas
    Fantastic place to start. Okay, so incredible icon. What's this Pat Summit Leadership Group, PSLG?

    Tyler Summitt
    Yeah, that's a great question. It is an organization that I co founded so that people did not miss out on knowing who my mom was, but more importantly, on learning from her and helping themselves in their own life. You know, I think there's certain figures that that can just impact people. They're almost like, you know, you hear their story and you see what they've done, it's like, oh my gosh, you just believe and my mom was just one of those people. And so, you know, as an only child, I wanted to make sure people continued to be successful, and it's happening. Listen, I read you that testimonial from the financial industry. I mean, we've got entertainment industry. Dollywood's gone through, finance industry, restaurant groups, construction companies, healthcare, stay at home, parents, you name it. Every industry is going through the trainings and listening to keynotes and going through in person workshops and going through online programs and all the above. We're reading books. My mom is still impacting people right now, today, we're all over the place, and we're helping people in every industry. So it's, it's so cool. What's happening? It's my mom's definite dozen the book she wrote back in the 90s is 12 principles for success. Everything's based off of that, and that's what she attributes her success to. And it's applying that to, okay, and your company. How does that apply? And again, it's changing lives for the better. And as you can imagine, as the only child, I mean, I just enjoy, I thoroughly enjoy seeing people improve through my mom's legacy.

    Stephanie Maas
    Ok, so drill down with me. So you're saying, hey, it's these 12 principles. Where did these come from? What are the real life applications, what are some of the takeaways that you have seen be so meaningful and impactful for folks?

    Tyler Summitt
    Absolutely. So my mom had a recipe for success. It's that definite dozen. Now, when she wrote it, actually sat down and wrote the book, she had already won three national championships. She ended up winning five more. And so the definite doesn't. It's not like my mom reinvented the wheel for leadership. You know? It's things like communication, respect, teamwork, hard work, things like that. And so there's these skills, though, that it seems like we're losing in today's day and age, right? Because of cell phones, because all the noise and emails and the news and all this stuff the past. Summit leadership group uses a variety of different methods, in person, training online, to come and say, Okay, here's the right way to do things. Here's how you can treat people the right way. Here's how you win in life with people. So again, what are the real life applications? Well, the first thing that's really taken off is when you go through our online programs, and we have multiple we have one that's just overall leadership definite does, and we have one that's a power of teen. We have one that's specific for women's leadership. So no matter who you are, what industry you're in, there's one for you. And what we've seen is, is when people go through that and they spread it out over six months or a year, habits are formed, right? And it's great to say, here are my goals, but let me just watch you for a day, and I'll tell you who you are. Let me watch your habits. Let me watch what you do do. I don't need you to tell me about you know what you plan to do and what you're thinking about, and what you tweeted you were going to do, and what you told your friend you were going to do, and what your New Year's resolution. I don't know any of that. I need to see what you do with your habits, and then I'll tell you who you are and what you're going to accomplish, and if you're going to accomplish the goals or not. And so that's what the online program does. Our online programs, you can go the website and look them all up. It'll take you through over time, self paced, bite sized learning, and you learn, okay, this is how I build habits, and so great place to start is right there, with the website going checking out those online programs.

    Stephanie Maas
    So you said something super keen, and we've talked a lot about this in the podcast, is there is, without a doubt, there's so much conversation and content around developing leadership skills and developing leaders. And I think this is part of what makes your mom's story so unique. She was on that cutting edge where a lot of leadership was really management. They didn't call people leaders. So I would imagine just simply the fact that she approached what she did and how she did what she did from a leadership mentality really made her stand out, because even coaches, they were managers back in the day, that's how you led, is through managing people, telling them what to do. It was very different. Well, then we had this tremendous growth of folks like your mom, that really took management and transitioned it into true leadership. It's inspiring. It's the Stephen Covey's the Pat Summit. It is really looking at things and learning different what to me, is so interesting. It's like over the last several years that has fallen to the wayside, because exactly what you said, the distractions of technology and we are really seeing this thirst and desire and avoid in this next generation of leadership that truly they know the term, they know how to describe leadership, but they haven't experienced it, and they certainly don't know how to implement it. What I'm hearing from you is this is an opportunity in an organization that's committed to bringing that back and showing folks this is how you develop, because leadership, it's this absolute science, and I think that's what I'm hearing from you, is your mom figured that out and is able to translate that to the masses.

    Tyler Summitt
    No, you couldn't be more right. I mean, we every day, and that's why I love the past and leadership, we attack, we absolutely attack the things that technology is trying to do to us, that negative news is trying to do, that all the noise is trying to bring on us that, you know, everybody's trying to play the game. Look at me. Look at me. Look at your competing and keeping up with the Joneses. And it's just like, ah, there's so much noise we all know. Honestly, I think we all know what we need to do. But are you doing it? You know, are you doing it for the people around you? And yes, people we're seeing with, with companies that bring us in and like, hey, we need help on loyalty and retention. And it's like, okay, well, they're not leaving your company. They're leaving your leaders. They're not being led. They're not being invested in. They're not improving. They don't see a future here. And mom was so magical at this. Strategy is a word that we throw around a lot. Let's do a SWOT analysis, and let's do all this complicated stuff. Hold on a second. Let's boil strategy down. Because my mom was magical at this. She was she was a master at this. She had to do this over and over again. In games, she'd have 90 seconds. In a basketball game, there's a time out. It lasts 90 seconds, Max, some of them 30 seconds. And she'd have to bring everybody in. She'd have to listen to assistant coaches real quick, her staff, her C suite, then she'd have to go into a huddle again. All this in 90 seconds, get everybody organized. Say, Okay, here's what we're going to do, here's how we're going to do it, and here's why we're going to do it. Here's why it's going to work. It made them believe in it. And then she'd say, Okay, now let's go. And then she'd have to do it again. She have to do it and again. In the game. And then in her career, you gotta think, and a college team, you lose 25% of your seniors, they leave. So you 25% of your team every year, and they're like your leaders. You're not losing front line. So she's losing 25% every year and bringing in 25% which are rookies, fresh out of high school. So every year she had to go through strategy, what, how and why. And I think we're talking about leadership. I think we're losing sight of making sure everybody has the why, and we've, you know, we've heard TED Talks and we've read it, but I don't know your why. But do you do it like I'm challenging the people listen to this? Do you do that in every area of life. Do you do it in your faith? I don't care what your faith is. Mom is a Christian, I'm a Christian, but whatever that is for you. Do you have that like you have a strategy for your faith? We all have mission statements at work. Do you have a position statement for your life? What about your family? You have kids? Your kids know why they're here. Do they know how to be successful? They know what they're trying to do. What about your significant other. Do you know what you're trying to accomplish? Do you know why you have that relationship? Do you have a joint statement where it's like, this is what we're trying to do? My mom did it over and over and over again. It was so simple, but everybody bought in because she was a leader. And here's the secret sauce, she would help them with the what, the how and the why. Okay, before a season even. Started the what, let's start with the what. She would say, okay, the what was usually a national championship. And she got eight of them, which is a lot. So she would take them through sometimes different things before a season, before a game even started, she always say, okay, what are we trying to accomplish? National Championship? All right, let's go through the National Championship celebration. They haven't even played a game yet, and she says, We're going to celebrate this year's national championship that they haven't won yet. And she goes, Okay, we're all going to walk in a line like this. All right. Now you're going to sit in this order. But okay, good. The band is on the left. Imagine them there. The all the fans are on the right. Okay, now, here's what, here's the speech. I'll talk first, you're captain. You talk second, the banner is going up right here. Hey, tomorrow, does everybody have a suit and a dress? We're going to the White House to meet the President tomorrow, because we won the national championship. She's literally doing daily affirmations. I mean, this is in the 80s and 90s, so before our time, she's literally taking them through daily affirmations. It's like it already happened. It's like they already won in April, but it's August. And then, I mean, they're, they're months and months and months and months from even that game. They don't even know if they're gonna make it to that game. Everybody knew the what now let's go the hat. Okay, she would have her players lay down on the court and visualize what they were gonna do in the game the next day. And listen, that was a lot for a coach to do that, because you only got an hour for tournament practices, which is not a lot for a practice. You only got an hour. She would seemingly waste practice time to have them lay on the court, close their eyes and visualize but it worked, and they beat the competition, and they were successful. Do you do that in your life? Are you doing that with your team? Are you doing that with your family? Are you doing that with your peers? Do you wake up and have a horny routine? That's what we're trying to help people do before you look at the phone and you look at the noise and you look at all this stuff, you've got to take control of your life. You've got to take control of your team before we go through the emails and you've got to take control and say, This is what we're doing, how we're doing let's go to the why, because it's the most important point. Everybody knows that. But listen to what my mom did. My mom would have one on one meetings with everybody in the organization, everybody, and it took some time, and everybody's like, I don't have time, trust me, you have time for this. You have time to have one on one meetings with the people around you. If you don't have time for that, then come on, turn off the TV, turn off the emails, turn off the shows, whatever you're doing, get off of Twitter and all the social media and have a real conversation with somebody and say, Okay, why are you doing this? Why are you at our company? What's the goal? What do you want? Why are you here? Like, why? Like, tell me your why. And my mom would do that with each player. She would know that player number one wanted to go on and play professionally. She want to go overseas. She want to travel the world playing basketball. She'd know that player number two just wanted to make your family proud. That's it. She didn't want to go on and play pro. She wanted to do a career, something else. And so what if my mom tried to do the same speech to both of them? What if my mom tried to motivate them the same way? What if my mom just came in like a cookie cutter and like some managers, and said, All right, here's what we got to do. Go and that's it. No, my mom would she still do the what and the how? But then she go to player one, she said, Hey, she would she whisper. She said, Hey, there's going to be pro scouts at that game tomorrow. You've got this. You've got this. Your dreams are coming. She go to player number two, and she'd say, hey, hey, the game's on national TV tomorrow, your family's going to be so proud of you. You've earned this. It was magical that just that small little 10 seconds to each individual reinforcing their why and their why fit under the company. Why the business? Why the organizations? Why, if we win as a team, everybody else accomplishes their goals and really caring about people. Mom loved the quote, people do not care about how much you know until they know how much you care. My mom cared. I mean, she cared about people so much, and so I think that's a real life example of something my mom did over and over and over every year.

    Stephanie Maas
    I don't want to oversimplify this. I think you just hit something that is so clutch. People know their what, and it's not hard for them to figure out what their what is. They sometimes think they know their why, but it's not until they really share it with somebody else and drill down into the details. Does it really come to life? Which, when it comes to life, it becomes meaningful, but that middle piece of the how that is where I think so many folks don't know, and what I'm really hearing is this mission this group is to bridge that gap. You think you know what you want, you think you know why. And we're going to expand on all that. But most importantly, let me show you how.

    Tyler Summitt
    Absolutely. And I think what comes into mind when you say the how is, are you willing to sit there and do all the, you know, analyzing, all the stuff you want to do, but then can you simplify it? And can you say, Okay, here's what I'm going to do every single day. Mom had certain things she did every single day, and she was just consistent with that. She was always trying to improve those areas. She was trying, okay, let me, let me improve this one a little bit, let me improve this and all. But there were certain things that she did where she knew if I do these things, I might not win every game. Right? My mom didn't win every game, but she was a winner. And over time, if you're willing to do that, you're willing to do the things that other people aren't willing to do, you're eventually going to get things that other people aren't willing to get. I mean, our world's competitive. I'm just being honest. Really, it doesn't matter about other people, you know, they're they're competitive. It matters about yourself. Are you competing? They'd be the best person that you can be? Are you the best version of yourself? And that, again, is what mom did so well, and she knew how to do it, and then she helped other people know how to do it. You know, it's crazy, too. You talk, you talk about teen, you know, there's a there's research on this, and I've heard it various different ways, but if you just have an idea, just like I kind of want to do something you actually have a small chance of accomplishing. It's like 10% like, where it's just, I got an idea like this, you know, I could do this. And that's not bad. Like, one in 10 shot, if I just think it's something, you know, okay, if you create a SMART goal, and we all have heard that ad, you know, specific, measurable, make sure it's time out. If you do that, okay, it goes up. If you set a how, like, how you're going to do it, the process, it actually goes over 50% so that's what gets you over 50% but if you set up weekly accountability meetings with other people and say, hey, check in on me on this, hold me accountable to this. And you actually attend those meetings and they're holding you accountable, you have over a 90% success rate. So you have the what you know your why you got the how that got you over the hump. Make sure there's other people around you, you know. Show me the cry, people you surround yourself with, yada yada yada, and we all know that. But do you do it? Do your friends know what you want to accomplish? Your friends know your dreams. You know their dreams. Are you holding accountable? Are you helping each other make good decisions? Same with your family, same at work. This is every area of life. That's what I'm trying to say the past seven leadership group. It's about life. This is legit, and I've seen it work because I grew up with it, and I saw one of the biggest winners of our time, and how she had an attitude, and how it was in her control, and how she helped others do it. And so yes, you were exactly spot on the what, the how and the why, bridge and the gap, and then, and then having other people to help you accomplish it with the past, some leadership group. I've seen it help in times when times are really, really hard. I don't know life is this way. We're either coming out of a crisis. We're in a crisis right now, or about to go into one. Maybe you're in one right now, and you're trying to get a little something, you're trying to get a little motivation, you're trying to learn everything's been learn everything's been good. You might be going into one, I hope it's really far from now. The Pat Summitt leadership group, we want to help you be ready for those situations. We want to help you in life. We want to help you prepare for those things that you just don't see coming when life just smash you in the face.

    Stephanie Maas
    Meaningful. Okay, slightly off topic, did you play sports growing up?

    Tyler Summitt
    I did. I played a little bit of everything. You know, actually, one of my mom's favorite stories was the story about me playing soccer. And this story goes into it shows who my mom is and how much she's willing to change and improve over time. So you gotta understand, I'm playing soccer. I'm like five, but at that point, my mom's already done a lot of the things. Like, she's already been coaching for decades. She's already on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She's already known throughout the state of Tennessee. It's like, you know, nowadays it's Pat Peyton, Dolly and Elvis. Those are, like, the four first name people that you'd at least heard of if you're in the state of Tennessee, right? And so she's already that. She's already celebrity. She's already the greatest coach, the greatest in her industry, but she comes this five year old soccer game, and, you know, I'm out there playing on the first half. It's her first game, my first game, every you know, and so everything's new. So I'm out there playing, I come over at halftime, and I say, okay, Mom, how'd I do? And she said, You did all right. And you're, you know, Seth, you're, you're learning my mom. Now, you know, that's not my mom, like you're starting to learn. Like, it doesn't sound like a past something thing to say. So I was like, now, come on, mom. Like, how'd I do? She said, Well, you're not being aggressive, not impacting the game. You just stand in there. Like, do something. Go that way. Go there, go left, go right. You know, do something. I'm like, okay, okay, I'm gonna help my team. Okay, so I go back out there. Second half, I'm everywhere. I am in line to in line, sideline to sideline. I'm all over the place, and so I'm winding I come over, I'm breathing, come back over to my head coach, and we get in our huddle, and he was not happy with me. He was actually really upset at what I just done in that second half. So I'm confused. Now I walk slowly over mom. I'm very confused as like, okay, Mom, you tell me to be more aggressive. My coach just told me I was playing out of my position. My mom did not realize I was the goalie in the car ride home. I i explained that as a mom, yeah, I was, I was the goalie, and she's, does that matter? And so, you know….

    Stephanie Maas
    That's awesome.

    Tyler Summitt
    It don't matter your position at basketball, or you you're up and down, you're side to side. So clearly, coach of the century hadn't learned soccer yet. But reason I tell that story, the reason she told that story, is what she did after my mom coaches. Century. Took pen and paper. She goes to a 23 year old assistant soccer coach at Tennessee. That soccer coach went on to be the head coach. She's a Texas now she's the head coach of Texas, so she knew what she was talking about, but my mom didn't know that she's 23 and so my mom goes and sits down pen and paper, says, Hey, can you teach me soccer? And starts taking notes. Then that tells you how much my mom was investing in family, and she knew how to be a good mom, but then she started taking notes on team bonding exercises, how to build culture. See, soccer has more players than basketball, so my mom's thinking, if it'll work for 20 people, it'll work for my 10 players. Starts taking notes. My Mom won two more national championships after that, after taking notes like that, using some of those team bonding exercises, using some of those things that help your culture, and needed them too. With that 2007 2008 national championship back to back, she needed some those personalities didn't mix at the beginning. A lot of people don't know that, but those teams needed some of that, and she used that. So again, I asked, Are you open to change? Are you comfortable being uncomfortable? Think about how uncomfortable you would be if you are whatever you are of the century. You're the best. And you go there and you're taking notes to 20 something, and you're taking notes and you're going back to where the industry you're really good at, you're applying it. I mean, how open to change could you possibly be? And so that I asked somebody listen like, Are you resisting change? Is there somewhere in your life, career, home, maybe in your health? I don't know. Are you resisting change? That's what we enjoy helping with. That's what mom enjoy helping people with, being comfortable, being uncomfortable, being comfortable with change. That was one of the things my mom was actually consistent. At. Sounds weird. She was consistent being uncomfortable. She was consistent changing and always trying to get better. So that was a long winded answer to say. Did I play sports? But yes.

    Stephanie Maas
    That's awesome. This has been so meaningful. You know, I could have gone online and read her bio, but hearing you talk about her super meaningful. And I think it really shows again. One of my favorite quotes that you quoted was people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, and this really brings that to light. Yes, you're honoring your mom without a doubt, but you're also really putting into others to better their lives, an amazing woman. Thank you for helping me get to know her today.

    Tyler Summitt
    Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

    " target="_blank">

Action Catalyst Update: John Rossman

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On March 18, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • author, Business, coaching, data, digital, disruption, future, leadership, metrics, speaker, success
Author, executive advisor, and Managing Partner and Founder of Rossman Partners, John Rossman, rejoins the show to discuss “the innovator’s dilemma”, building foundations, chasing perfection, and making big bets, how to REALLY use metrics and make metrics a verb, 3 megatrends for the future of business, the role of business in democracy, and the #1 […]
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  • Author, executive advisor, and Managing Partner and Founder of Rossman Partners, John Rossman, rejoins the show to discuss “the innovator’s dilemma”, building foundations, chasing perfection, and making big bets, how to REALLY use metrics and make metrics a verb, 3 megatrends for the future of business, the role of business in democracy, and the #1 mistake leaders make.

    About John:

    John Rossman is the Managing Partner and Founder of Rossman Partners. He is a business strategist, operator, and expert on digital transformation, leadership, and business reinvention. He has consulted with many great brands including Novartis, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, Walmart, and Nordstrom. He served as senior innovation advisor at T-Mobile and senior technology advisor to the Gates Foundation. He is an operator and builder whose love is diving into business problems and customer needs designing solutions and business opportunities. 

    At Amazon, Rossman was responsible for the launching and scaling the merchant integration team and played a key role in launching and scaling the Amazon marketplace business, which is now over 50% of all units sold at Amazon.com. Also responsible for the enterprise services business with responsibilities for Toys R Us, Target.com, NBA.com and other great brands.

    As an author, Rossman has released “Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader”, “The Amazon Way on IoT: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World’s Leading Internet of Things Strategies”, “The Amazon Way: Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles”, introducing readers to the unique corporate culture of the world’s largest Internet retailer, with a focus on the fourteen leadership principles that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive leadership culture — as only an insider could do, as well as 'Big Bet Leadership', an executive leadership playbook for winning in the hyper-digital era.

    Additionally, Rossman is a keynote speaker on innovation, leadership and digital transformation. John leads workshops on a wide variety of innovation, internet of things, digital strategy, and creating a culture of agility, trial and error, scaling and accountability. His goal is to give audiences tools they can immediately use to operate differently.

    Learn more at JohnRossman.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Host
    We are pleased to welcome back to the program John Rossman, an author, executive advisor and keynote speaker on digital transformation, leadership and business reinvention. He was an early executive at Amazon and now serves as the managing partner and founder of Rossman Partners, and he was previously our guest on episode 433, of the Action Catalyst. John, welcome back.

    John Rossman
    Great to be back.

    Host
    A lot of your public work in the past has touched on your time at Amazon; The Amazon Way, Think Like Amazon, that was sort of the focus the last time we caught up. You've got a few new works out now. But I want to start with the Rossman Business Manifesto: The Pig, The Lipstick, and The Playbook of Champions, This really sounds like you're taking the more holistic ownership of all of your experience, bringing it together. Who's the target audience for this manifesto, and what's the specific problem it's addressing, and how did you come to identify that problem?

    John Rossman
    So I get to do a lot of keynote speaking, and I have some clients, and one of the interesting things I've seen over the past year is most of my work has been about kind of major transformation, innovation, but I've had a half dozen keynotes where it's like, no, no, no, no, no. We want to focus on our culture and execution and kind of like some of the basics. And so that was like one clear signal, and the other signal is last year we saw a number of just gold standard brands. Ironically, a lot of them out of the Pacific Northwest. Here, a number of gold standard brands who went from being lauded in the pinnacle within their category to like a substantial business challenge that they have, right? So the brands I'm thinking about, think about this set of gold standard brands, Starbucks, Boeing, Nike and Intel, right? Very different sectors. All of them a different sort of situation, but they clearly have suffered from a combination of what I think are kind of two factors. One is they get kind of trapped within their own business model, and they're just incrementalizing themselves to the next thing. So that's kind of the innovators dilemma. And the other is a cultural thing, of like, what their expectations are in the business between themselves, and that's kind of a culture of mediocrity that hasn't become just accepted. It's actually become the standard within a number of kind of healthy companies. And I think that that combination is really the challenge that I address in the pig, the lipstick in the playbook of champions, of being both trapped from our own success and not seeking high performance, both for our business and for the way that we work. And so that's the specific problem. But I wanted to get it out. It's a free resource ebook. It is a playbook. We outline specific things to do that I think are both practical, but they're underplayed. They're understated within most organizations, but a couple that I think are super powerful and simple. So there's three sections of the book, building the foundation, chasing perfection, taking big bets under building the foundation, one of the key plays is about people, and I think everybody starts with the wrong place when they think about getting the right people in the organization, helping them be successful. Because everybody thinks it's about like the person, and I disagree. I think it's about a thoughtful design of the organization and what the job is that needs to be needed. And so many companies haven't really thought through, you know, for this role, for this team, for this core capability, or a company, what's the job that's needed now and going forward. How would we define it? What do we think kind of the consistent goals are going to be? What's the decision making criteria and scope of this? What are the key metrics that we imagine this role having? And what do we think the the non obvious skills and background and actions? Attributes that would help somebody be successful, even if you have somebody in the role today and you want to help take their performance from good to world class, rethinking what the job is, is a super powerful way to help that person achieve those goals. But it goes so underplayed in companies, and this is not a big exercise to do, you know, and everything, but companies don't do it. So that's an example. Here's another one, and it's kind of from the chasing perfection section of the book, which is all about, like, how do we run a great business today, and how companies design and use metrics to actually get the signal of where aren't we good enough from a customer experience or from an operational standpoint. Today, I was a partner at Arthur Andersen. I was a green belt. I'm an industrial engineer by education. I thought I knew how to use metrics for impact, and I learned a whole graduate level course at Amazon, and it's been kind of one of the consistent things I work with clients in my keynotes on since then, is like metrics and how we use them. And there's two parts that I'll talk about here today. One is like, just how you design metrics, and it always has to be a balanced scorecard of metrics, right? You can't have just like one metric. You need efficiency, you need quality, you need cost metrics, right? And it's the design relative to those. But then the second part is like, what do you do with those metrics, right? And so I always talk about, make metrics a verb, right? They're not a thing, they're not static, they're a verb. And the and the action that we take is, how do we discover the signal, not to pat ourselves on the back, but to see where there's opportunity to chase perfection? And that was, I think, the design of kind of the metrics meetings, and the tone and the tempo and the purpose of those meetings is an absolute game changer for teams and companies that can turn metrics into the fuel that a improve the business for today, but it also it's like going to the gym. If you do this all the time, you're going to get the idea that fuels the next section of the playbook, which is big bets, like, how do you actually innovate and transform?

    Host
    You've mentioned part three as big bets, and you've already alluded to your other work, which is Big Bet Leadership, Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper Digital Era. But we've all heard about the digital era. We've been in it for a while now, but before we dive deeper, just give us the definition of what the hyper digital era is. Exactly what's that distinction?

    John Rossman
    We know we're not good at making change happen, right? Like, if you look at the history of time, like the competitive advantage and life of companies tends to be pretty short. And if you think the past 2530 years of digital transformation and digital disruption has been something, the next 25 is going to make that pale in comparison, right? Like we are heading to an era, and it's not just because of technology. I outlined kind of three mega forces with kind of a fuse tying them together. And the three mega forces are a disruptive technology, which is, by itself, a highly disruptive factor. But the second one is just as disruptive, which is the aging of our population, the ability to attract, retain and get better leverage out of out of our skills and out of our people, is going to be a core competitive advantage. Because if you are just going to try to, like, continually hire and compete, you're going to be at a competitive disadvantage. So that's the second major, major force. Mega trend is, you know, the aging of a population and how scarce skilled talents can be. And the third is the overall indebtedness of our country to entitlement programs and to surfacing our debt, and that's going to create downward pressure for capital, so you're going to have to be both efficient for your capital, but it's also a calling, which is for our country to win, we have to innovate, and that innovation comes from all of our companies. It doesn't come from somebody else's place. It comes from our place. And so those three mega forces together are going to create a vortex that creates both an opportunity and a challenge, and there's going to be a bunch of new winners. There's going to be a bunch of new losers in what I call the hyper digital era. And we you can't wait until you go, Oh, now I get it. Now I really need to change. You need back to kind of the athletic metaphor, like you need to get good at how you go. About innovating and transforming. It is an organizational capability. And so the best attribute you can always have is some patience right time to do these things. And so if you wait until you see the signals of kind of slowing growth, customers who don't love us, competition, that's that's kicking us in the rear. Now you're under pressure. Do it from a position of strength and growth. That's the time to build the capability of like, building the next businesses, innovating better, delighting customers better. That's the championship way.

    Host
    To point number three about debts and entitlements. We're now at the beginning of a new government administration looking to make a lot of changes to business and regulations and other things. Do you see a big impact there?

    John Rossman
    Yeah, well, a couple of things. I think that these changes were going to take place regardless of administrations. And I would say I'm hopeful and supportive of any administration that would seek to both serve our citizens better and do it more effectively. And I think that that is what every company needs to do, and all of our federal, state local government should serve you. Do it better, do it more efficiently. The government is here for the people, not the other way around. It's We the People, right? We the People grant the government these powers. It's not the other way around, right? That's why it's an important call to action to me, if our plan is to wait for the government to address and fix the situation, I'm not optimistic about that. That's why I think, especially small, mid sized, large companies, they need to see it as part of the mission of like, our company needs to play a role in how America is more competitive and more innovative, because that's how we keep our great democracy going. And so don't wait for the government to fix it. That's never a great idea. I think that, you know, I'm optimistic that they're going to start tackling some of this. But that's not the whole playbook. The playbook is our businesses need to play a role in this. One of the phrases I'm fond of is that complaining is not a strategy, right? And so what do we do with these observations today, in our business, in our team, in my life, that's what I'm always interested in, is action.

    Host
    Well, that's perfect for our podcast, right?

    John Rossman
    Exactly, The Action Catalyst!

    Host
    You make a pretty bold claim. You say that there are countless books making the case for digital transformation, innovation and reinvention, but they're not sufficient. But what are they lacking that Big Bet brings to the table?

    John Rossman
    Wow. You really did read it. I love it. I love it. So here's what's insufficient. What's easy to do is to talk to senior leaders, and it's like, Oh, I know I need to transform. I know I need to innovate. I know I need to leverage technology. I know I need to delight my customers better. I know I need to evolve my my operating model. I know I need to understand kind of this, this trial and error, experimentation mindset, but there's very little that actually for senior leadership and the teams that serve senior leaders. There's very little that actually says here's things that you the senior leadership team need to do different and the team that's driving this transformation. And so there's a lot written for kind of the individual contributor and the team leader around agile methodologies experimentation, but we couldn't find anything Kevin McCaffrey, I'm referring to and myself. We couldn't find anything that's like, here's what senior leaders need to do. Kevin ran new business incubation for T Mobile. I got to be the senior innovation advisor, working with them for three years. This is what we had to do AT T Mobile. Was our challenge. Wasn't like this tactical process of like, how do we explore, you know, new business models for T Mobile. It was helping the senior leadership understand how they needed to adjust or recalibrate, how they make decisions, how they allocate resources, how they spend time on these businesses and opportunities of the future versus their operating expertise in running today's business. And the biggest mistake that senior leaders make is they think that because they're really good operators and they understand, they've heard these concepts of innovation and experimentation, and so like, okay, I can do that. It starts from a belief system and an understanding fundamentally of what that is about and how to go about it, and if you apply the same tactics, the same belief systems, the same things that made you a great operator into this playbook of experimentation and major transformation, you will fail at it. And that's why we wrote the book. Big bet leadership is to for senior leaders and the teams. Serve senior leaders to really point out to them, these are things that you need to do different. Again, it's a very action oriented book, not theoretical. And that's what is missing in most books about innovation and transformation, is it's like, yeah, no duh, I need to change and I need to be competitive, but tell me what I need to do differently today as a senior leader to help make that happen. That's what we tried to answer in this book.

    Host
    But as a companion to that book, you've got a lot of tools available on your website for taking this big bet theme further, but one of the most intriguing to us was Big Bet GPT. Can you explain what that is?

    John Rossman
    Yeah, so, you know, we kept the book very readable, right? It's, it's 45,000 words. It's a great narrative. It's a great audio book. And so we offloaded from a lot of the templates and tools and, you know, checklists and things to do. And so one of the things we did with, with all of that, was we created a purpose built GPT, and we have a prompt sheet that goes with it that can help you do these exercises of kind of developing the what sucks, memo of really thinking through your three futures. Exercise of putting these practices into place, it won't think for you. It won't do the work for you, but it is an incredible companion to help you see different framing, different phrasing, different options that you have out there. And so it really is a kind of a turbo button to help you speed your way through thinking this playbook through for yourself. I think there's more for us to do there too.

    Host
    Well. I'm glad you said that. So what's next, and where can people find you?

    John Rossman
    Yeah, so people can find me on LinkedIn. John Rossman, that's really simple, or bigbetleadership.com is where all the resources and everything is, and that's also at rossmanpartners.com. What's next? Like, that's what I'm thinking about right now, and I think it's something that is a combination of for senior leaders and team leaders. How do I actually address these two core challenges that we identify in this business manifesto, which is a kind of being trapped by our success, that's the innovator's dilemma, and B, kind of suffering from accepting mediocrity, but leveraging AI to help you do that better. And how do I incorporate AI into everything that I do within an organization? That's what being an AI first company is about, and I think it's both kind of small tactics that you take, but it's also about re envisioning and leveraging AI. And so I think it's a combination of kind of business strategy leadership, but leveraging these very real and dynamic, fast changing capabilities that generative AI and other technologies bring to us. Because it's like a new internet. It's like, oh, now we have electricity. Like, it truly is a fundamental capability shift and again. Like, don't wait until it's too late. You gotta get comfortable, both individually and as a company, in how you leverage these things to make change happen.

    Host
    John, thanks for being here once more.

    John Rossman
    I love it. Thanks for having me.

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Living in a Post-AI World, with Terence Mauri – Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

  • Posted by Action Catalyst
  • On February 11, 2025
  • 0 Comments
  • Adam Outland, AI, author, Business, disruption, education, entrepreneur, future, leadership, speaker, success, tech, technology
Continuing the discussion from Episode 478, Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, talks about having sweet AND sour in your life, teaching wisdom & judgement, tearing down information silos, the 3 forms of curiosity, deliberate reductionism, and other important topics. About Terence: Terence Mauri, one of the world’s leading experts and keynote […]
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  • Continuing the discussion from Episode 478, Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, talks about having sweet AND sour in your life, teaching wisdom & judgement, tearing down information silos, the 3 forms of curiosity, deliberate reductionism, and other important topics.

    About Terence:

    Terence Mauri, one of the world's leading experts and keynote speakers on Leadership, AI and Disruption, inspires and motivates teams to thrive in ever-changing contexts. Thinkers50 has described Terence as 'an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership.'

    Terence is a MIT Entrepreneur Mentor, a visiting Professor at IE Business School, the Founder of Hack Future Lab, and a 5X Bestselling Author that has been seen in Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, and more.

    Prior to his current role, he was a managing director for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies working with clients such as American Express, JP Morgan and Apple, and emerged as a battle tested director who understands the challenges of turning volatility into value creation.

    Learn more at TerenceMauri.com.

    The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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    (Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

    Adam Outland
    One of the things that occurred to me, how valuable it must be as a leader to stay tuned in to the rapid innovations that are occurring, otherwise you can't leverage them. What do you encourage people to do, to stay plugged in to what's going on? How are people in your orbit receiving their information and staying tuned in to the future?

    Terence Mauri
    Brilliant question, it's a little dividend here, which is the science. The science shows, the research shows, we feel it at a heart a level as well. Is that when you part of a community, virtual or face to face, three things. Number one, discovery, the ratio of new ideas, new perspectives, counter intuitive perspectives. It goes up, and that's important. So discovery. Another one is energy. You know, actually, it's a great source of inspiration and action. And number three is cross pollination, that actually, you know, ideas need to connect together to create, to create breakthroughs. And so discovery, energy, cross pollination, all of this together, you need to be thinking about these three dividends and how you activate them in your in your life. And that can be done through reading, listening to great podcasts, watching Tiktok videos, attending lectures, speaking yourself, writing yourself as well, going to events, conferences, dinner events, you know, do the basics brilliantly. But also, once a quarter, do something that scares yourself. It scares you or excites you or throws you out of your comfort zone. And yeah, for example, I did an event with Google where they had a kind of dinner. Leaders came together, and it was called the sweet and sour dinner. And the idea of the sweet and sour dinner is that let's talk about the good stuff, but let's also talk about the bad stuff. Let's talk about the stuff that should be said that's not being said. Let's ask the questions that should be asked that are not being asked. You know, because of fear or politics or whatever. Sweet and sour is a really important point. So these sorts of conversations, conversations that don't just make us feel good, but make us think hard, gives you so much vitality.

    Adam Outland
    I love that. Given that this is your whole world and work, so you're very plugged in. What would you say are your favorite either conferences or maybe it's podcasts, or where are your best channels for staying informed right now?

    Terence Mauri
    I love, for example, masters of scale, a great podcast. Reid Hoffman, that's a great one. I was on disrupt TV with Vela Ashe, and that was an amazing conversation. So disrupt TV, Web Summit in Lisbon is a great one as well. Slush in the Nordics, that's another great one, which looks at the future of work, the future of leadership, the future of AI. These would be some examples of what I'm excited about right now that I'm constantly engaging with.

    Adam Outland
    Coming back to the academics of things which probably could use even more disruption. What do you think, from your perspective, is the class that's not taught but should be?

    Terence Mauri
    I think it's this idea of what happens in a post AI world. So this intersection of psychology, anthropology, humanity, sociology, that I think the olog is the future is about the origins. It's not just about AI and technology. That's one half of the narrative, but it's dominating every conversation. The other half of the narrative is the origins, because technology changes fast. But humans don't you know, we have Paleolithic brains, God like technology, medieval institutions, the complexities of the world are going like this. Our Paleolithic brains, capacity to respond to the complexities is like this. If you think about the processing power of a chip, it's increased over a trillion times since the 1950s our Paleolithic brains have stayed the same. That creates a wisdom gap, and we're not talking enough about that right now in academia, academia as well, is still very linear. It's kind of very, you know, siloed, and silos can blind us to new perspectives. So I think the future is horizontal. It's silo busting, its cross pollination. Collective intelligence. It's the ologies.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, you said wisdom. And I thought to myself, how does one teach wisdom? And maybe part of wisdom is judgment, right? And how do you help people have better judgment, or more effective judgment? And that is a challenging question probably worth solving.

    Terence Mauri
    And I mean, imagine, you know, if university there was a subject to University on wisdom. And actually, when you go to university, you just don't, you don't go for just three years, very transactional. But our relationships with universities are stretched out over, you know, maybe a lifetime. I think it's time, you know, this age of AI, Age of convergence, Age of disruption, Age of possibility means that we need to radically rethink, reset, reimagine these outdated structures, institutions that we've been holding on to. And this would be one example of how do we reimagine our relationship with academia over a 50 year to high horizon where we get mentoring, we mentor, and we're mentored. We're part of a long term community. For me, we need to rather get stuck in these silos at such an early age and become very transactional. I'd love to see societies and communities where we're tapping onto this collective spirit, collective generosity, generosity, reciprocity, and growing because of that, for the benefit of society, the planet, relationships, institutions.

    Adam Outland
    Yeah, well said, and you're right. I think about the silos in particular, you know, in medicine, you see it, it's siloed in the brain or the spine, and then, you know, someone goes into someone's else's lab, and they find a tool or a resource that they could have been using over the last five years.

    Terence Mauri
    Some of the most pioneering innovations have happened at the Cleveland Clinic, for example, to do with heart disease. And one of the reasons why they've done that their ratio of innovation is so high at the Cleveland Clinic is because they got rid of silos that, you know, they made it easier for happy accidents to happen. And what I mean by that is doctors, surgeons from different parts of the hospital coming together to talk, to share different perspectives on the same challenge. And they found that by doing that in an engineered way, engineering cross pollination, the ratio of IDEA, the ratio of innovation, that's now saving more lives, went up in a significant way, in a very measurable way, we can learn from these sorts of courage leap examples.

    Adam Outland
    And that's a great example of disruption that doesn't involve, sometimes people, I think, collate disruption with a software and that's a great example of disruption being in almost a human, organic meeting, where it's it's simply, like you said, cross pollinating and breaking down the silos to solve problems.

    Terence Mauri
    Exactly.

    Adam Outland
    You know, what actionable steps can a leader take to sharpen their organization's readiness for the future?

    Terence Mauri
    I think, start with this idea of future readiness muscle and, you know, we have muscle memory. So what I mean by that is some mindset shifts the the future. And the reality right now is that the future is not just about technology or trends that's important, but even more important than that, it's about mindset shifts and choices and voices and so this future readiness muscle we need to sharpen in meaningful, intentional ways. For example, the curiosity to learn, relearn and unlearn, the clarity to focus, because our attention spans now are one of the rarest and purest forms of leadership, capital, the conviction to make decisions, decision velocity, under pressure, despite volatility, despite uncertainty, these would be some muscles to sharpen, individually and collectively within the organization. A practical example that of that would be at Novartis, the pharma company. They have a 30 day curiosity hackathon, where they sharpen three types of curiosity over the course of 30 days, 100,000 employees. They focus on inner curiosity, so know yourself, know your blind spots, know your strengths other curiosity. Know, the people around you build bridges and outer curiosity, which is, what's a point of view you have about your industry? What's a point of view you have about weak signals or big trends that are impacting your industry? And what are you going to do about them? They call it triple curiosity, inner, other and outer. That's one example of how a company is bringing this future readiness muscle to life in a really human way. So inner is yourself out. Other is other people, and outer is really curiosity outside of the business. So looking at external trends, inflection points, competition. And even other industries, because with industry convergence happening as well, we also can learn a lot, not just from our own industries, but again, that you get trapped in silo thinking, but also breaking into other industries.

    Adam Outland
    Love that. And just a little speed dating questions that we love to end with, with a lot of our guests, I wanted to ask you a few of these too, because I think you have a different perspective. We heard a little bit of what you're listening to. What are you reading?

    Terence Mauri
    I love Cal Newport, uh, slow productivity. That's a great book. Slow productivity, this idea of do less but do better and practice reductionism, then we have this brain bias, adding complexity to complexity. Again, it's not a winning strategy. When the world is coming at you at light speed. You need we all need to start thinking intentionally about reductionism, and what I mean by that is doing less, but doing it more intelligently. For example, once a quarter, look at your business. Look at your workload. What do you need to detox? What do you need to declutter? What do you need to delete when you practice the reductionism in a deliberate way? It's a clarifier, an energizer, a multiplier. Gives you a no strategy as well, which helps you to obviously achieve greater things in shorter time spans. So reductionism. Cal Newport, slow productivity. That'd be one book. Another one would be Paul Oster, Brooklyn Follies. That's fiction. I think reading fiction is really great for the imagination. We've got to be careful about look at this little look down syndrome, constantly looking down and actually reading fiction. The research shows that reading fiction sharpens your imagination muscle, your empathy muscle as well. It also puts you in a slower, beater state of consciousness, which is absolutely a source code for strategic thinking, big picture thinking. The risk that we all take, these are addictive, and what that does is it forces us to become very transactional and very short term, and we get addicted to dopamine hits, short term thinking, reactive thinking, at the expense of longer term, deeper imagination and strategic thinking. So you know, read fiction as well a couple of times a year, at the very least, because that requires discipline. That's important. But also you'll really cultivate your reservoirs of imagination, which will make you stand out, by the way, in a world of sameness, you know, when we've got access to the same AI, the same chat bots. The biggest risk is this curse of sameness and commoditization is going to be your imagination, your onlyness that makes you stand out.

    Adam Outland
    I love it. I mean, to some degree, we're pretty complex computers ourselves, and so that power for creativity one of our biggest strengths that it's been a trend I've seen from a lot of interviews. Thank you for that. You've been through, you know, obviously a lot of personal transformation yourself when you think back. And the question I ask all of our guests to the part of your life we probably didn't talk about as much, which is the pre 21 year old Terence. What's the message you think you would go back and deliver having lived the life you've lived now that that young man would benefit from hearing?

    Terence Mauri
    I think, don't, you know, don't get I mean, it's easy to say this with hindsight, but we're forced into boxes. We force ourselves into boxes. You know, I remember everyone asking me questions from from about the age of 10, what, who do you want to be? What do you want to do? And I understand the intention behind these questions, but who the hell knows at that age, I didn't know, and I think it puts unnecessary pressure. So I know that it's positive intention behind a long time, but the risk is we put ourselves into boxes. We get stuck with perfectionism. We also get really obsessed with getting everything right first time. And of course, sometimes it's impossible not to escape that, because that's the way that college and school work. You know, you pass or you'll fail. So there are some institutional constraints that we have to deal with. I would say, be easier on yourself. Focus more on experimentation, and don't get so obsessed with a plan at such an early, early age focus on developing curiosity skills, relationship skills, conversational skills, presentation skills, skills that will define you and make you more distinctive in a world of sameness where everybody's got access to the same tools, these would be some sort of early reflections and Find yourself mentors. You don't even have to label it, but surround yourself with people who are different to you and your divergent perspectives, younger, older, different cultures. Go traveling. These are, these are great, you know, great initiatives, great actions, and practice courage. Redefine your relationship with. Failure as well. And ask yourself every year, what have I done this year where I've grown, where I've had a setback, where I've shown courage over comfort?

    Adam Outland
    I love it. I think one of the words I latched on to, that you just said, was experimentation. I think when I've looked back that whenever I've even while we're in academics, it doesn't prevent us from being able to try things in the real world scenario, especially with our connectivity nowadays, and it's so valuable every time you go out and you test an idea instead of just reading about it. This has been a phenomenal interview, where can people go to just stay connected to Terence and understand more?

    Terence Mauri
    Well, first of all, you know, thank you for such an incredible interview. I've loved your questions. I've loved our connection, and all the themes that we've discussed are so close to my heart, and I know they're close to your heart as well. It's always great. It's always an honor to meet a kindred spirit, and you never know what's going to happen. So thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. And so for me, you know, I'd want to pay it forward. There's a couple of platforms to stay connected, to reach out part of this community that were constantly part of building and nourishing number one is LinkedIn. Obviously, LinkedIn is a big one. Terrence Maori, LinkedIn. Another one is my website, terencemarry.com check out my podcast show, hack the future. And these would be two or three, and then obviously my new my latest book, The upside of disruption, is another great resource to check out the upside of disruption. And you know, I wish everybody good fortune, health and happiness. I leave everyone with the words of the late chemist Marie Curie. She said, in life, nothing is to be feared, only understood, and the more we understand, the less we will fear. But also Ted Lasso, my favorite coach, he said, stay humble, stay teachable.

    Adam Outland
    Couldn't agree with that last one more. Thank you so much, Terence, for your time. This was fantastic. Was a great interview. I learned a lot.

    Terence Mauri
    Thank you so much, Adam.

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