Monthly Archives: July 2024

The Hidden Factor in Leadership: How Trauma Impacts Your Team

The Hidden Factor in Leadership: How Trauma Impacts Your Team written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Kelly Campbell

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Kelly Campbell, a trauma-informed leadership coach and the author of Heal to Lead: Revolutionizing Leadership Through Trauma Healing. Kelly Campbell specializes in guiding leaders to integrate trauma awareness into their leadership styles, fostering supportive and effective team environments.

With a deep understanding of how unprocessed trauma can influence behavior and leadership dynamics, They offer an interesting perspective and a novel lens for transforming workplace culture.

 

Key Takeaways

What is Trauma, and do we have enough (that’s right) enough of it?

Kelly Campbell defines trauma as “unintegrated energy and information” that overwhelms the nervous system, affecting how leaders respond to stress and interact with their teams. We discuss the critical role of trauma-informed leadership in creating a supportive and innovative work environment. By acknowledging and addressing personal and collective trauma, leaders can enhance trust, collaboration, and psychological safety within their organizations.

We probably won’t go as far as to call it a “safe space” as, according to them, only your employees can determine that. But a “supportive environment,” for sure.

T – Trauma

L – Leadership

C – Consciousness

Kelly Campbell emphasizes the importance of self-awareness in leadership. They explain that many leaders unconsciously exhibit people-pleasing or controlling behaviors, which can undermine team morale and productivity. Through self-reflection and trauma healing, leaders can shift from reactive to responsive behaviors, understand their internal biases, and foster a culture of openness and growth.

Understanding and integrating trauma-informed leadership practices improves individual well-being and drives organizational success by enhancing employee engagement, innovation, and retention.

 

Questions I ask Kelly Campbell:

[01:42] How would you define Trauma?

[03:29] Could you discuss the prevalence of trauma and its impact on leadership roles?[06:16] Can you share examples of how trauma has influenced leadership behavior in both positive and negative ways?

[05:42] What are some organizational benefits of implementing trauma-informed leadership practices?

[07:57] In your experience, how can organizations better equip their leaders with the necessary skills beyond technical abilities?

[16:02] How do you address the challenges faced by leaders who lack exposure to diverse experiences and knowledge?

[19:04] Why do you compare some of your methods to therapy, and how do leaders typically respond to this approach?

[21:13] Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about your Heal to Lead program?

 

More About Kelly Campbell:

 

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

 

Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (00:17): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kelly Campbell. Kelly speaks and writes about trauma, leadership and consciousness, something she calls the new TLC. She’s also the author of Heal to Lead, revolutionizing Leadership Through Trauma Healing. Kelly is a trauma-informed leadership coach to emerging and established leaders who know they’re meant for more. So Kelly, welcome to the show.

Kelly Campbell (01:33): Hey John. Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (01:35): Alright, so we’re going to talk a lot about trauma, pretty weighty topic perhaps, but let’s maybe start with how do you define trauma?

Kelly Campbell (01:44): Yeah, that’s a great place to start because I think that there’s a lot of misconception around that. A lot of people have this idea that it has to be something that’s really big and really impactful, and that’s not actually true. So trauma, the way that, or the definition that I’ve come across that I love the most is really just unintegrated energy and information. So I’ll say that a different way just for everyone to wrap their heads around When we have situations or experiences where our nervous system doesn’t have the ability to cope with them, that becomes trauma and that’s how trauma is stored in our body. So it’s really just an overwhelm of the nervous system, and so when I say it’s unintegrated information, the nervous system’s inability to integrate what it’s being given or what it’s on the receiving end of, that’s where if that remains unresolved or unprocessed, that’s where we get into tricky territory and where it becomes problematic because then it’s kind of floating around and coming back and really causing some maladaptive behaviors. But we’ll get into all of that as we continue to talk.

John Jantsch (02:52): It sounds like when you talk about energy that is lucid almost sounds like the electrical cord that’s frayed in some places and it’s like you never know what kind of damage it’s going to cause. Right?

Kelly Campbell (03:04): That’s a great analogy. That really is a great analogy when a cord that’s electrified gets cut and it almost has a mind of its own, right? Yeah. Something else driving you. And so that’s why sometimes you might have a reaction or a response that feels to the other person very just not in line with what the reaction should be or what they’re expecting, and sometimes it’s because of that loose wire that you’re talking about.

John Jantsch (03:29): I don’t want to be a complete downer, but I’m getting ready to be the statistics on some horrible things that happen to people that cause trauma are pretty sad. But as a whole, especially since you’ve definitely broadened the definition of trauma, how many in 10 people that are in, especially as you apply to leadership, leadership roles, I mean, is this really impact how big a deal is this, I guess is what I was saying?

Kelly Campbell (03:54): Yeah, 10 out of 10.

John Jantsch (03:56): Yeah,

Kelly Campbell (03:56): It’s 10 out of 10 because here’s the deal, none of us have had a perfect childhood, and this isn’t about blaming your caregivers or your parents. This is about really understanding how trauma impacts all of us, and that could be what some people call Big T trauma, those big impactful, more obvious things. Maybe being in a household where your parents were getting divorced or maybe you grew up in a war torn country where safety, physical safety was a big deal and not available to you. So things that have shaped your worldview that were very impactful, that’s what we typically call big T trauma. We think about those things along the lines of the ACEs study, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente study from the late 1990s, and it kind of gave us a framework of 10 to 12 things, two of which I just mentioned, but that’s not where it stops.

(04:51): So if it stopped there, then maybe we could say, all right, well that might’ve impacted two thirds of people. If we broaden that a little bit and understand the reality of the situation. My nervous system and your nervous system are two different nervous systems. So what might be impactful to you might not be to me and vice versa. So when we’re younger and we have what we might call small t traumas, things where or experiences where we’re made to feel embarrassed or shame or abandoned or betrayed or humiliated, all of these other, I would call them maybe like death by a thousand paper cuts, right on their own, they might be impactful, but many times the small T traumas are continuous. And so that’s where it really starts to erode our sense of self and really becomes the foundation for how we see ourselves in the world.

John Jantsch (05:42): Well, I’ve always felt that leadership, good and bad is really an act of or lack of self-awareness. And there’s a whole lot of people that I suspect listen to this. I threw myself in this category, frankly, say, nothing really bad happened to me. I mean, I can’t identify really anything, and I was never hungry. I was never bullied, those kinds of things. So somebody who maybe is thinking that, how do you uncover the fact that you’ve said every single one of us has this at some level?

Kelly Campbell (06:14): Yeah. Well, you’ve touched upon it a little bit already. You are automatically thinking, I never went hungry. I was never neglected. I never maybe had physical abuse. Those are only big T traumas. So you’re not thinking about all of the other times when

John Jantsch (06:29): I did have a teacher that told me I would never amount to anything one time, I do remember that one. And

Kelly Campbell (06:33): The fact that you can recall that lets me know that actually did impact you. And there might’ve been other things along those lines where even if they were just verbal, we tend to downplay, oh, well, it was just verbal or get over it kid, or that made you tougher or you had to overcome something. This whole resilience culture, those things over time really do impact. And so what you touched upon before about self-awareness, if you’re self-aware enough to understand that when you get feedback, for example as a leader and all of a sudden you feel angry, you feel defensive, you want to be right, you want to challenge it. That might indicate that there might be something in your past where that a similar situation had occurred and maybe you feel like you’re being, I don’t know, accused of something that isn’t true. So I would kind of maybe try to trace that back. If it’s me, I’m going to try to trace that back a local functional detective, but that’s not really what matters. What matters more is, are the ways in which you’re showing up as a leader creating psychological safety for other people? Are you showing up in ways where you’re inviting curiosity and innovation and collaboration with your teams? And if you’re reactive versus responsive to different things, then you’re not creating those environments. So that self-awareness piece is really important.

John Jantsch (08:00): So how have you seen some of the things we’re talking about show up in maybe good ways and bad ways for people that are either aspire to be leaders or in some cases thrust into leadership roles?

Kelly Campbell (08:12): Yeah, yeah. I mean, emerging and established leaders we’re all human, so it’s just one has a little bit more experience than the other. Some of the ways I see this sort of manifest, and I talk about in the book, I talk about this bifurcation between, or not even bifurcation. It’s really a spectrum between people, pleasing leaders and people controlling leaders. And you and I can be each of these things or pieces of these things on any given day. So people pleasing might look like taking on a lot on your plate, maybe because you’re taking so much on and you’re trying to make sure that everyone else has a great experience, making sure everyone’s happy on your team, you’re going to take on so much that some things are inevitably going to fall, and so you become a little unreliable. You might also be pleasing to other people with a little bit of an underlying motivation.

(09:09): Again, this is subconscious. You’re not doing this consciously, but you want the attention or praise or gratitude from your employees. And so if you don’t get that, if you’re pleasing and trying to make their lives happier and you don’t get that respect or even reciprocation, you might start to get resentful, then you might become a little passive aggressive. There’s all of these really interesting and very nuanced ways. Sometimes they’re not as visible as others. So that’s more on the people pleasing end, on the people controlling end of the spectrum. It’s a lot more obvious and it’s a lot more predictable. So these are your authoritative, get over it. We don’t have time for those emotions in the workplace. Taking credit for other people’s work, making sure that some people don’t get promoted because they maybe are too much of a threat to your authority or your power. Speaking down to other people, making sure that you keep that balance of power at all times. Again, sometimes these things can be conscious, but most times they’re not. So lots and lots of ways that shows up. And then of course that trickles down into the organization, whatever kind of organization you run.

John Jantsch (10:25): Would you say that these trait traits, behaviors that you’re describing, I mean aren’t unique to the workplace? I mean, they show up at the little league manager and they show up at church. I mean, it’s kind of just people being who they are, conscious or unconscious. Would you say that’s true?

Kelly Campbell (10:43): A hundred percent. And that’s a great point is that this isn’t just relegated to a boardroom or something like that. This really is the little league coach who’s power hungry and yelling at the kids. We’ve all seen these things and many times we have been these things or are these things. So it’s easy to see it in other people. It’s a little harder to recognize it in yourself.

John Jantsch (11:10): So far, at least we’ve probably been talking about at the personal level. Let’s talk a little bit at the organizational level. People bring you into organizations to maybe work with folks that maybe they’ve identified something that needs to be worked on, or maybe it’s just, Hey, we know we’ll all be better people with this work. But organizationally, what have you seen have been some of the benefits of people really saying, Hey, our leaders, they don’t just need to know how to run good meetings. They also have some of the, do we still call ’em soft skills that show up or don’t show up? What have you seen organizationally?

Kelly Campbell (11:49): Yeah, so leaders who, in general, leaders who are more self-aware, who are actively working on their own healing, their own trauma, they do create more supportive environments. Some people say psychologically safe. I try to lean away from terms safe spaces because my personal belief is that I cannot create a safe space for another person. I can create a supportive growth environment for my team or my employees. They are the ones who say whether they feel safe in that environment or not. So I’ll just say that. But creating those or those supportive environments really comes with that and that work that you’re doing on yourself. Therefore, in the organization, those employees are going to feel more like they can bring their full selves. They can maybe voice opinions, voice risks, voice threats, voice feedback without repercussion. So now you have more trust created inside of the environment.

(12:49): When you have more trust created, you’ve got more collaboration, more innovation. That all trickles down to the bottom line if you run a for-profit organization. So we see this in so many different ways. It could be everything from employee retention and employee engagement to innovative new ideas kind of think tank mentality where again, it’s all rooted in trust. And so if I feel like I can really be myself and I can voice the things in a very conscious way that I think are going to improve the team, the work, whatever the things are that we do here, then the whole organization just feels different. And when you say soft skills, and I talk about feeling these things have been historically pushed away for such a long time because we came from the industrial revolution where everything was productivity focused factory. If somebody got sick or couldn’t do a job, then we just remove them. But that’s very expensive today, and it’s also just not the right way to do business. I think part of that also comes from this different level of consciousness that we’re bringing to business. That business in general is not there solely to make money. We’re here to develop relationships, to develop our people, to see the sustainability of an organization over time. And that shortsighted, very, that older, more antiquated mindset didn’t think that way. It was like short term decisions get to the bottom of it.

John Jantsch (14:31): People were assets,

Kelly Campbell (14:33): People were assets or yeah, you could say it that way. You could say it that way. But yeah, I mean there’s a million benefits of this work.

John Jantsch (14:42): So as fortunately, companies have become much more intentional about diversity and inclusion, has that presented challenges for leaders who that’s a new environment for them?

Kelly Campbell (14:58): Sure, sure. Of course. I mean, I think I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about that for people who have benefited from the systems that we have been in for a very long time, hundreds of years. It’s a new environment. And especially some of the leaders that I work with that are cisgender, heterosexual male, it is a new environment for them. And so again, they have to encounter their own biases, their own prejudices. That’s part of the healing work. That’s part, there’s so many different aspects of trauma and so many different aspects of how we become who we are as leaders, and we’re just gathering lots and lots of information from the time that we were born up until the time of right now when we’re in our leadership role. So that is something that can be challenging for them. And also, again, they have to be willing and courageous to encounter that and to engage with it if they’re going to change

John Jantsch (16:00): And do cisgender white 60-year-old male. Right. So I think you were talking about me in some regards. Do you find that some of it’s just lack of exposure, lack of experience, lack of knowledge? Certainly an openness, but in some cases just I’ve never, it’s almost like I don’t know how to respond or react or even operate in this environment. Yeah,

Kelly Campbell (16:22): I think two things come to mind mean on the extreme level, it’s hard to hate up close. So the more that you have exposure and the more that you feel connected to and start to understand and empathize with other people who are different from you, you’re going to start to see them as human and not this other. And so I think that’s just part of it to your exposure question. For sure, for sure. There are a lot of people, leaders who maybe have employees who have different pronouns than they’re used to. If I’m encountering people like that where it’s like, oh, I just want to be honest. These pronouns, they’re hard for me. It’s like, okay, well then all you’re lacking is practice, right? Because you use they and them and their all the time in your language. So let’s talk about that. Let’s practice that. My pronouns are they, she. So let’s talk about that.

John Jantsch (17:17): And I think that’s a helpful dialogue, no question. Especially

Kelly Campbell (17:20): When there’s no judgment coming from either party, right?

John Jantsch (17:25): Yeah, that’s one of my favorite Mr. Rogers quotes. It’s hard not to someone once you know their story.

Kelly Campbell (17:30): That’s

John Jantsch (17:30): It.

Kelly Campbell (17:32): I just got chills. I love Mr. Rogers did a lot of good for us.

John Jantsch (17:35): Who does? So tell me how you work with somebody. It’s just typically somebody, probably, there are a variety of ways, but what’s a typical engagement that somebody would say we need to bring Kelly in?

Kelly Campbell (17:46): So I mean, it really depends. There could be some among a leadership team, and in some cases I’m working with the entire leadership team. In those situations, I’m coaching each of the leadership team members individually, and we’re also doing group sessions, depending upon where they are. The group sessions sometimes can be in person, and I’m pretty close to New York City. So if that is available, then we will do that for part of the in-person group team sessions. But it’s really about, in the one-on-one sessions, it feels more like therapy than anything else because we’re talking about the business, but we’re talking about how does the leader show up in ways that they aren’t necessarily proud of or that they would like to change? Or if they’re complaining about someone, we flip that around and we say, okay, well, how is that situation mirroring some way in which you want to be different? Or why is that the behavior of this employee or this other leadership team member? Why is that actually rubbing on you? What is it about them that you actually see in yourself? And they’re like, and think about that. And so in order to have those kinds of conversations, again, you just need to be willing and courageous.

John Jantsch (19:04): It’s interesting, you referred to it as therapy, and I imagine in a lot of ways it is for people because we don’t often get the opportunity to actually look at that, to have somebody question us on, well, have you thought about why that exists? I mean because just a bundle of reactions half the time. And so the idea that somebody’s asking us to think about how something occurred and how it could be different, I’m sure you get two types. I’m sure you get some resistance to that. And I’m sure you also get people that are like, this is the first time I’ve been able to explore this.

Kelly Campbell (19:37): I think more often it’s the latter, only because by the time someone is seeking out coaching, and particularly the kind of coaching that I do enough to say, I think the problem might be me. And I really think that in order to work through this conflict or help the organization as a whole, we need to change. Or maybe they’re in a period of transformation with the company or the organization. They’re enough to say, yeah, I think part of the stumbling block or part of what needs to actually evolve here is me. And that’s the interesting thing about coaching is I’m not doing anything. This is not right.

John Jantsch (20:19): I’m not fixing, you’re not prescribing,

Kelly Campbell (20:21): Definitely not prescribing. That’s psychiatry, but not fixing. I’m holding these clients as whole and complete and perfect as exactly who they are. What I’m doing is empowering them to figure out what they want to change and how they want to get there, what that looks like for them. And I’m really just holding that space and asking them very poignant questions to try to get them to think differently without an agenda. So sometimes a leader might come to me and say, I don’t know which way I want to go. Do I want to stay in this organization, or do I want to actually exit? And I say from the beginning, I don’t have an agenda here. Whichever way you go, that’s what I’m supporting. And we navigate that together and sometimes we’re together anywhere from six months to 18 months. Wow.

John Jantsch (21:10): Well, Kelly, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you would invite people to connect with you and obviously find out more about Heal to Lead?

Kelly Campbell (21:18): I mean, everything about my work and the book is all on my website. Obviously with my background in marketing, I wanted to make that easy. So website is just klcampbell.com.

John Jantsch (21:28): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Embracing Mortality: How to Live a Life Without Regret

Embracing Mortality: How to Live a Life Without Regret written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jodi Wellman

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Jodi Wellman, an expert in positive psychology and author of You Only Die Once: How to Make it to the End with No Regrets. Wellman is known for her unique approach to living a life free from regrets by embracing our mortality and using it as a catalyst for meaningful change. Her insights offer a fresh perspective on how to live a life that is not only full but astonishingly alive.

Jodi Wellman’s journey into existential exploration and positive psychology provides listeners practical tools and motivational strategies for making the most of every moment. She emphasizes that confronting our mortality can lead to a profound shift in prioritizing and approaching our lives. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking a more intentional and regret-free life.

Key Takeaways

You’re only young once, says John Craige, but I often wonder: How often are you old? Alluring, yet taboo. Compared to other cultures, On this side of the planet, we’re usually weird about the subject of Death.

According to this episode’s guest, It all starts with our denial. In her Tibetan Book of Death but with humor, Jodi Wellman reveals how embracing our mortality can be a powerful motivator for living fully without regrets with You Only Die Once. She emphasizes balancing vitality with meaning, setting anticipatory goals, and the importance of community and accountability in achieving a fulfilling life. Stick with us and learn how we can transform our lives into an astonishingly vibrant journey by making bold choices and integrating pleasure and purpose into our routines.

 

Questions I ask Jodi Wellman:

[01:42] How do people typically react when confronted with the idea of their mortality, especially in cultures where discussing death is less common?

[03:48] How can someone break free from the rut of monotonous routines, as illustrated by your stapler analogy?

[06:57] Why do you think people find the fear of leaving a situation—whether it’s a job or relationship—so much greater than staying in it?

[08:50] Are there recent trends or events driving people to think more about mortality and make changes, or have you just noticed it more recently?

[11:00] Does the idea of not living a squandered life give people the freedom to pursue their own happiness, regardless of other considerations?

[13:14] When someone feels stuck or unfulfilled, how do you help them explore and redirect their life path?

[15:46] What insights have you gained from observing people who have made significant life changes?

[17:13] How do you translate complex academic concepts into practical advice that resonates with people’s emotions?

[19:58] Where can people connect with you and find a copy of your book, “You Only Die Once”?

 

More About Jodi Wellman:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 

Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made

John Jantsch (00:16): .

(00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM.world/scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World/scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest, today’s Jodi Wellman. She’s a speaker, author, assistant instructor in the Master of applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of 4,000 Mondays. She really just wants people to live squander free lives without deathbed regrets. And we’re going to talk about her book that deals with that very topic. You only die once, how to make it to the end with no regrets. So Jodi, welcome to the show.

Jodi Wellman (01:34): Oh, thanks. I’m excited to be here with you.

John Jantsch (01:36): So obviously the point of the book is no regrets, right? Or how to make it to the end without regrets. The hook, of course, is to shake people and say you’re going to die. So how do you find that people take that? I mean, especially Americans, we don’t like to talk about death. I mean, in Eastern cultures it’s actually a very common practice. How do you find particularly people on this side of the ocean taking to this idea of you telling ’em they’re going to die?

Jodi Wellman (02:06): Yeah, we are really weird about it. And yet it’s a funny thing because on one hand there is the eyebrow raised. I mean, right now half of people listening are like, do I keep listening? What am I doing here? Wait, I’m kind of all lured. What do I do? And so I’ve noticed this really kind of cool, wait, tell me more. And yet we’re scared and it’s okay. We come by. Our denial, honestly, especially like you said, Western cultures, we don’t really want to talk about it, and yet we do want to talk about it deep down where it gets a taboo and it’s like, therefore it’s alluring. And so it’s this kind of neat dance between don’t talk about it, but can you whisper it? And so for me, I mean, I make fun of it. I clearly, I use a tone that’s irreverent and which I couldn’t not do, but I doodle about it. If you can doodle the grim reaper, I mean, you can talk about anything if you could doodle it.

John Jantsch (02:54): So I am sure you’ve done a lot of, there are a lot of texts that have dealt with this. One of my actual favorites is, it’s going to sound really creepy, but the Tibetan Book of Death is actually an amazing work. And I feel like your book is kind of the Tibetan book of death with humor.

Jodi Wellman (03:09): You know what? I’m going to log that one. That’s the compliment I’ve received of the week woman.

John Jantsch (03:13): So I suggest if folks want to pick up Jodi’s book, I suggest you get the audio book because it’s basically a standup routine.

Jodi Wellman (03:21): Thank you for saying that. We do have a lot of fun. There are a lot of F-bombs. And I mean, if we’re talking about the fact that we’re all totally going to die, and I think you’re hinting at this, we’re talking about death in a way that is not just to talk about death, even though it is sensational and ridiculous, it’s in service of carpe diem of living before we die. But we need the prod, we need the cattle prod, or else we do just take life for granted. Do you find that?

John Jantsch (03:46): Yeah, and I think particularly, so you talk about 4,000 Mondays. I’m on the three digits probably of Mondays. So it’s certainly been a wake up for me. And I think a lot of people in my position in life, I do think a lot of people particularly, I mean we don’t think about it all. The first 1000, right? 2000 through 3000. I think that’s where everybody gets stuck in, well, this is what I’m doing. You use the stapler idea that maybe you could actually recount that story in your own unique way to talk about that idea of just being stuck.

Jodi Wellman (04:17): Yes. Well, here I was in my corporate existence, things were good, but they weren’t really adding up how you’re in life and you’re like, why am I not happier? The trappings of success. I wanted to make a change, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I remember being at my desk and I was stapling stuff together, and lo and behold, I run out of staples. That’s no big deal. All right? I get up, I go find the storage room, I get a row of staples, and I replace it in my stapler. And I distinctly remember saying to myself, if I’m still here, by the time this row of staples is here, I better not be. And I felt encouraged by this notion like, oh, I’ve got a 200 staple deadline only. The thing is, John, is I did nothing about it. So about a year goes by, I’m at my desk again, ready to blow my head off, but pretending everyone thought I was engaged. And then I stapled more pages together and my stapler runs out, and I felt sick to my stomach, but obviously I was hoping to be saved. I was hoping someone would headhunt me and pluck me out of this quiet life of desperation when oh my gosh, I had to learn that lesson. And the truth is, I reloaded that stapler like three times

John Jantsch (05:23): Before, and staplers weren’t exactly having a day still, right? I mean, there weren’t a lot of things that we were stapling anymore.

Jodi Wellman (05:30): No, yes, this is an indication of several years. But I needed to learn that in a way, holy, why can we have agency? We have to clue in sometimes to where we are feeling like we are settling in life. That for me, is a real warning sign if we’re settling and tolerating for long. Oh my gosh, back to this idea that life’s short. Let’s do the thing even though it’s hard to just take the plunge and take the risk to shake it up and find more happiness.

John Jantsch (05:56): So there are a lot of examples, and you have some in the book, near death certainly wakes people up, right? Going bankrupt wakes people up. I mean, there are a lot of things where comfort is actually kind of like the enemy, right?

Jodi Wellman (06:09): Oh, you said it so well. I mean, I love a good comfort zone. Give me a fleece blanket and I, I’m under it. And it doesn’t do much for making stuff happen in life. So these are called boundary situations in psychology where it could be a big birthday, it could be retirement, it could be a loss of a job. Any rite of passage in life that jolts us a little bit to go, whoa, my world has been moved. Maybe it is a bit of an existential reminder when you have the big birthday, but those are important to be super honest. I mean, a lot of us in the science of positive psychology, we talk, it’s like a crappy reality, but it’s the crappy stuff that elicits the most meaning in life. And most of us will, we need the impetus, we need the inciting event, and we’re just not motivated enough to do it on our own accord.

John Jantsch (06:57): So I mean, the person that you described is stuck in a job, stuck in a marriage, stuck in whatever. Is the fear of leaving that so much scarier than just staying put? That’s kind of a vice, isn’t it?

Jodi Wellman (07:10): Absolutely is. And this notion, as I said in my TEDx talk, this line I still think is really important. And it’s like our fear of death is rivaled only by our fear of living. Most of us are not pleased about the idea of death or of public speaking, but we can at least deny and get around that. But the idea to commit and participate and maybe make some bold choices, even though we know they’re the ones that are probably going to be the best for us, the ones that, again, back to regret, you started our conversation by outlining the books about avoiding regret. It’s like when you’re lying there, hopefully lots of morphine coursing through your veins at the end would be there with their vein thing where you’re like, I just regret not doing that. And if that could be the case, now’s your chance to course correct it and maybe take action on it. Literally starting this afternoon,

John Jantsch (08:01): And I’m probably guessing it is not. I just wished I would’ve worked a few more hours,

Jodi Wellman (08:07): Only I’d answered more emails.

John Jantsch (08:09): So you have some quotes in here. One of my favorites in this topic, I believe is attributed to EE Cummings, the poet, and he said, most of us will regret on our deathbeds, not our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. And I think that to me beautifully wraps that up. The things we didn’t do, not the bad things we did, but the things we just didn’t get around to.

Jodi Wellman (08:29): It’s so true.

John Jantsch (08:30): Yeah. So you cite, there’s a lot of literature really on this. Ryan Holidays stoics, you put Mente Maori in there. That’s been a symbol that he’s used in his writing. I had Oliver Berkman on the show, 4,000 weeks, I think it is. And so is there something going on that is causing people more to consider this, to write about this, or have I just noticed it more recently?

Jodi Wellman (08:58): Yeah, you’re just tuned into it with those triple digits.

John Jantsch (09:00): That’s right.

Jodi Wellman (09:01): Yeah. No. Well, I believe that there has been, again, this equal kind of repelling and yet fascination with death. But let’s just be honest. I mean nothing like a global pandemic to wake us up to our temporary nature. So I do think that has tuned us in a little bit more to, whoa, whoa. The things I thought were, we do this delusional thing where we like to think, oh, I’ll have time to do it later and later is very elusive and it’s very comforting and fuzzy. And now whether it was the pandemic did help us go, wait, I want to reorganize my priorities, and maybe now that means that I have to take it more seriously. Yeah,

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Jodi Wellman (11:13): Yeah, I mean, that would be one hell of a month

John Jantsch (11:16): Because

Jodi Wellman (11:17): I think you would whoa, the party and then you would drain your bank account and you would probably ostracize yourself from all of your friends potentially, and certainly your partner. And yeah, here’s where I look at this. There is a potential for some people who maybe are a little more impulsive and maybe don’t have as good of a self-management skills about the idea, do I go and spend more money now to enjoy my life and then maybe risk not having as much later, or do I save every penny I have so that I make sure I’m comfortable in retirement and live life then, which we all know is, but then I’m going to be, again, wasting my life and living small. Now, it’s always going to be the awkward balancing act. And my shortcut to finding the answer to that is about asking yourself what you would regret and what you would regret doing and not doing.

(12:07): So there’s one woman I know who is, she’s planning a really big expensive family reunion trip. She’s going to finance it and take her family on a really fabulous cruise. And she said, I’ve done the math, and her grandma’s about to die. So there’s a bit of a sense of urgency, nothing like death to prod us along again there, John. So she’s like, I’ve done this and I’ve calculated it. It’s a big deal for me to do this financially and with time off. And she’s like, I would regret not doing it. But she also knows that by doing it, she’s not going to compromise her retirement or she’s not going to not pay the mortgage for seven months because she took her family on this cruise. So these are about choices where it’s like, am I on the verge? Is it still technically responsible, or is this going to cause more anxiety and peril because well, wow, on a whim, kids, we’re just going to move to the Croatian coast, but you haven’t planned any immigration stuff and next thing you know, that’s going to be a bigger problem. So I do think it’s always about what would I regret doing and what would I regret not doing, and am I going to blow up my life later?

John Jantsch (13:08): So the middle ground, I suppose, is living astonishingly alive. Perhaps somebody comes to you and says, they probably just come to you saying, I have a feeling I feel stuck, or I feel like something’s missing or whatever. How do you help them unpack and find and reroute the course, I guess?

Jodi Wellman (13:29): Yeah, I like that term. Well, the number one thing is to diagnose the dead zones. Lots of tools and ways in the book. It’s in a pre-mortem, which is like, let’s look at your life today, what’s working, what’s not? And it’s about saying, whoa, now that I do this thing, I realize my social life or my lack thereof, or the fun and recreation category. Whoa, I didn’t realize that had flatlined as much as it had, and that, wow, I think I might want to pick up a hobby again. And so sometimes it’s about identifying in, you can’t unsee it ways about where your life is feeling dead. That gives you a starting point to know where that you might want to throw yourself a fricking buoy in the water and say, well, what would that look like? I also look at life in two dimensions.

(14:12): So it’s wider with vitality, which is the fun and the pleasure and the neat fun experiences. And then it’s deepening it with meaning, and that’s having a sense of purpose and good meaningful relationships, and maybe spirituality if you want, but it’s deeper stuff. And so for most of us, we do have a sense of whether we want more of the vitality and or more of the meaning. And again, that’s a diagnosis of like, no, my life is meaningful enough. I’ve got a job that makes me feel like there’s purpose, but I am just so freaking bored. I might want to add in a little more fun. What would that look like? And again, all we can ever do is one thing at a time. So would maybe in this example, hypothetically, what would one thing be? Can I get nosy and ask you if you’re thinking about your life widening with vitality, deepening with meaning, is there a dimension that stands out to you that you might want a little more of, even if it’s already

John Jantsch (15:01): Good? No, mainly because I’m very intentional about this. The one thing I will say that’s lacking a little bit, and this is just I have a distributed team. I’m here in the mountains in Colorado, in a rural area. I can go for literally weeks without seeing another human being besides my wife. And so probably forcing some of that interaction that, and I think some of us have just developed that habit because of this stupid thing called zoom. We don’t even have to go see clients anymore. It’s amazing. So I would say that’s probably the area that would come to mind first.

Jodi Wellman (15:33): Maybe just a touch more of the social side. Yeah, yeah. The antis shining situation.

John Jantsch (15:38): Yep. Yep. So you, I’m assuming that because you work with people, you’ve had a couple successes with people breaking through a little bit. What are some of the things you’ve learned actually from seeing people make a change?

Jodi Wellman (15:52): I love this question. Well, I think about in workshops I do, which is mostly the case now doing keynotes and workshops with groups and teams and events. And it’s like there’s something that’s really cool that happens when you socialize your regrets that you might be having or your desires for more vitality and or meaning and bucket list stuff. People love to learn and go, oh, oh, that’s right. I wanted to learn how to speak Italian too. And all of a sudden, everyone’s adding to their lists. There was a group I worked with recently that did this really cool thing, which is kind of what I advocate, but they actually did it, which is what if you supported each other in living these full lives? Oh, outside of the confines of work. Because the presumption, and this is based in research, which I go into in a hopefully not boring way, is about how if you’re happy and well-rounded and fulfilled outside of work, you’re going to be way better when you’re in work and more productive and more creative and this, so this group all committed to things that they were going to do to either feel widening, deepening, and they held each other accountable.

(16:53): So then I came back around one quarter later and it was like, someone’s like, oh, wait, what a rafting. I’m so proud I did it. And someone else was so excited because they rekindled their music habit. Someone else was really excited because, well, this person did the orientation to be a volunteer at the local whatever, because you have to go through all the steps. So they were actually holding each other accountable and high fiving each other for not just the work outcomes, but for living. And that was a pretty cool thing that again, builds trust on a team. Then you’re all supportive of each other’s lives in a broader sense.

John Jantsch (17:25): Yeah, you start seeing ’em as people. Oh my gosh, that’s got to be against some HR policy somewhere. So I think I said actually, sorry, instructor of master of applied Positive Psychology. So how do you take that academia and bring it down to practical applications for human emotions?

Jodi Wellman (17:47): Yeah. Well, everything that do, every intervention, every recommendation is rooted somewhere in the science. And it’s typically positive psychology, but it could be other branches of social psychology or cognitive or other parts of psychology. And so for example, if I’m talking to somebody about one little life tip, if you will, I call it like this, the lowest hanging fruit is anticipation. It’s having something to look forward to. And so I have this very simple intervention where it’s like, take out your calendar and you want to have something to look forward to one week in advance, one month in advance, and one year in advance. And these can be big or small, I don’t care. But that is all rooted in the science of savoring. And so I don’t need to necessarily give people the references or details, but I will let them know at the beginning of every workshop that it’s rooted in the science. And when I’m writing my blog posts, I will post it. I will give the reference. But I’m glad you asked that question because it matters to me that things are generally empirically based, not just like an instinct. Not that those things don’t also deliver for some people. There are some people I know who swear by putting out manifesting, and that’s really great. And if that works for you, do it all the time. And I don’t have the evidence necessarily on some topics, and so I just would not go there personally. Yeah,

John Jantsch (19:01): Yeah, absolutely. So it is funny, as I listen to you talk about the anticipation, I remember, that’s certainly advice people give when I have aging parents and things that my father passed. It’s been a few years now, but I remember them actually talking about saying, make sure that he’s got something to look forward to. And obviously that works at all ages of life, but I imagine it’s probably even more dramatic in a case where somebody feels like they don’t have much going on.

Jodi Wellman (19:32): It’s a really good point. It also has applications for people who have more of clinical issue in terms of mental health issues, depression, just having that little thing on the calendar that might be just a glimmer, and we’re just really simple creatures at the end of the day. Right? It’s like, just tell me I’ve got a good meal coming on Saturday night and I’ll live for it.

John Jantsch (19:49): Yeah, it’s our subconscious completely controlling us. So Jodi, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is there’s someplace you’d actually invite people to connect with you and find a copy of. You Only Die Once.

Jodi Wellman (20:05): Oh, well, thank you for asking. I am over@four.com and the book’s there and fun stuff. Resources, you can calculate how many monies you have left there. So no excuses not to do your mortality math.

John Jantsch (20:15): Yeah, there’s a lyric in a song that I heard the other day that I thought was so funny. The artist goes on and says, if you’re only young once, how often are you old? And thought that’s really like a lot of people say, oh, you’re only young once, right? And I thought, well, okay, how often are you old? I think you ought incorporate that in somehow.

Jodi Wellman (20:35): Thank you. I’m writing that down on my yellow sticky. Thank

John Jantsch (20:37): You. John Craigy is the artist, so go look him up. He’s hysterical. Too alive. Well, again, Jodi, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Marketing For Supervillains

Marketing For Supervillains written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jesse Wroblewski

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Jesse Wroblewski, the founder and CEO of a New York-based marketing agency and the author of Marketing for Supervillains: Diabolical Tips on Differentiation, Decommoditization, and World Domination. He has close to 30 years of experience in the marketing industry and has been featured in prominent media outlets like Rolling Stone and Fangoria. Known for his offbeat yet practical approach, he shares proven differentiation strategies that help businesses stand out in any market.

Key Takeaways

Jesse Wroblewski highlights the importance of adopting a supervillain mindset to differentiate your brand. He explains that smaller businesses should use creativity and wit to compete with more prominent, established brands rather than trying to outspend them. He emphasizes the value of polarization in marketing, stating that being loved by a few is better than being mediocre to many. He also introduces his “universe of differentiation” concept, outlining practical ways to stand out in a crowded market.

Authenticity is crucial for successful differentiation, and brands should align their unique selling propositions with their core values and strengths.

 

Questions I ask Jesse Wroblewski:

[01:29] Can you elaborate on using supervillains as role models in our marketing?
[03:20] When can polarization be beneficial in marketing?
[06:16] There are numerous Japanese references in your work. What draws you to Japanese culture?
[07:26] Could you highlight a few of your 12 differentiation methods?
[09:34] What’s more important to consumers: being better or different?
[11:56] How can conservative brands embrace differentiation without fear?
[13:02] What common traps do new clients fall into when trying to differentiate?
[14:27] How does authenticity impact marketing, positively and negatively?
[16:12] How can we stay current with trends without looking like we’re chasing every idea?
[18:43] What outdated marketing practices should be discarded immediately?
[21:04] Where can people connect with you or get your new book, “Marketing For SuperVillains: Diabolical Tips on Differentiation, Decommoditization, and World Domination”?

 

More About Jesse Wroblewski:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

 

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch My guest today is Jesse Wroblewski. He has been at the helm of a New York marketing agency for close to three decades, is often offbeat work has been featured in Rolling Stone, the book by five weirdest websites ever, and fan Gora, as well as a plethora of other media outlets. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, marketing for Supervillains, diabolical Tips on Differentiation, de commoditization, and World Domination. So Jesse, welcome to the show.

Jesse Wroblewski (01:39): Thank you so much. I figured my last name was long enough, so I decided to make all my intros and my titles even longer. So mouthful. Well done.

John Jantsch (01:50): Yeah, there was some hard words in there, that one. But speaking of names right, I usually ask us ahead of time. Did I nail the pronunciation?

Jesse Wroblewski (01:58): You did it well, absolutely.

John Jantsch (02:00): Awesome. Alright, so my first question is, what’s a supervillain got that we need to be using as a role model?

Jesse Wroblewski (02:08): Sure, sure. So there’s actually a lot of parallels. The first parallel, obviously being after 25 years of being in marketing, I think we all a little mad sometimes. So it’s some cynical takes on what’s going on in marketing. But what the real mantra was when you are a challenger entering a market, there’s usually always a mega brand, a name brand in the vertical, and that name brand is kind of like a superhero. They have huge public favor, they have huge muscles, which in marketing equates to huge budgets. And for a smaller guy entering the market, it’s almost a recipe for disaster to try and go head to head with them and try to out be more popular or spend more money. So if you think about movies, the supervi usually doesn’t have all the resources a superhero has. They certainly rarely have the same muscle tone, so they have to use their cutting wit and brains to outstart the bigger guy. So a lot of the book comes from an underdog mentality, a challenger brand mentality, and using things that the tried and true marketing that everybody else is doing, where you might not be able to compete on social media or SEO or pay-per-click going where the other guys,

John Jantsch (03:21): I noticed quite often with supervillain, there’s a bit of polarization too. I mean, a lot of people love the supervi in a movie, and of course a lot of people really hate them. Is there an element of that in our marketing that is actually kind of good to be a little polarizing?

Jesse Wroblewski (03:35): I think so. I think so. Being everything to everyone means you’re nothing to anybody. So I think I’d rather be adored by a few than in the middle of the road with a lot of people.

John Jantsch (03:48): So there are a whole lot of industries out there that feel, again, emphasis on the word feel, what they do is a commodity. I mean, there’s no way for me to differentiate except be the cheapest out there. What do you say? There might be occasionally a case where that’s true, but not very often, quite frankly is what I’ve discovered. And so what do you say to somebody that just feels like, oh, I dunno, we’re this kind of company and everybody’s the same?

Jesse Wroblewski (04:16): Yeah, absolutely. Because the crux of the book, so in the book, excuse me, most marketing books will tell you, run out, find your differentiator, and then figure it out and tell it to the world nice and succinctly. And that’s I meant task, right? That’s not easy to

John Jantsch (04:31): Do.

Jesse Wroblewski (04:32): So in the book, I codified 12 different ways that brands throughout history have successfully differentiated themselves. And for those that say, I’m really not that special or I can’t be, we’re just like everybody else. I always hawken back to the ultimate commodity, which is water. So water in the developed world is free, and if the government came along and said, what you do for a living, the government’s now going to offer for free. How would you continue to get people to pay a premium for something that can get for free? So rather than carrying a bucket of water around with you all day, which is free, you buy bottled water in the tune of 17, 18 billion a year, what are you really buying? Chances are you’re buying convenience of not carrying that bucket around, or maybe you have a bottle of water in your car and you’re buying refrigeration because it’s cooler in the refrigerator. So there’s a lot of byproducts for what we do. So you could say, I’m an accountant, I’m a marketer, I’m a this, I’m a that. But chances are you’re not really selling accounting, you’re not really selling marketing, you’re selling peace of mind, you’re selling convenience, you’re selling all these things that are secondary, but in the back of people’s minds, you’re actually curing a lot of anxieties. So I say any brand, any product in the world can absolutely be differentiated if you have enough courage.

John Jantsch (05:52): Well, and I remember Perrier and Evian, those water were cream brands. It was like, oh, you’re drinking that. Again, I think some of the shine has gone off of that, but I think at one point when it was unique, that was what they were selling was like, we’re the trendy water.

Jesse Wroblewski (06:09): Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and the water industry just keeps growing and growing and us suckers keep throwing money at it.

John Jantsch (06:17): I’m curious, there are numerous Japanese references and throughout your work, is there a particular interest in the culture?

Jesse Wroblewski (06:24): I’m a lifelong martial artist, so I guess coming from, I was always the smaller guy in school, smaller stature. I was in, I think the largest high school in the country with 2,600 students, and I was the smallest guy in the high school. So I guess that was some stem of me kind of joining the martial arts. And there are a lot of, I say parallels or a lot of things that don’t equate to the English language, but are very relevant to lifestyle and marketing.

John Jantsch (06:54): Yeah, I think what’s interesting for other cultures is a lot of times there’s a word that literally means it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s a concept, if that makes sense. I never can remember it, but I live in the middle of a national forest and the Japanese word for forest bathing, which now I can’t remember, but it’s not a literal translation to that, but it’s a concept. I don’t know if we have many words like that in the English language that can’t really be translated other than a concept or a feeling. So you started talking about the, I think you said 11 or 12 ways. Is that your universe of differentiation? So do you want to hit on a couple of those by name?

Jesse Wroblewski (07:37): Sure, sure. So on my website there is a download of what we call the universe of differentiation, and it’s just a visual guide of 12 different planets that have each identified as a different way to successfully differentiate your business. And then once you figure out which differentiator resonates with you, your business, your brand history, then we kind of take a look at who lives on that planet. So who would be most attracted to that differentiator? So out of the 12, there are some common ones. So the first one that people are usually drawn to are definitives, differentiating by definitives. And you probably experienced this because this is the high time of differentiation for the summer. If you’ve ever seen an ad for a theme park, they use this differentiator like crazy, specifically talking about their rollercoaster. We have the tallest, the fastest, the scariest, the longest, the oldest, the most.

(08:34): The nice thing about differentiating by definitives is you rarely get challenged. So you can make pretty boastful claims, and there’s usually not a metric to challenge it. So you metric becoming commoditized. As a general marketing agency owner, I felt that I was on the verge of becoming commoditized. So I felt that I was usually the driving factor. Even though a client paid me money, I was always driving to get them to launch their website, give me your copy, give me your approval. So I deemed myself the world’s most proactive agency, the most proactive agency on earth, the no homework agency. So it’s a fun little way, you might need some additional differentiators, but it’s a fun exercise. Kind of say, Hey, I’m sticking a stake in the ground and this is my domain. I’m the blank industry.

John Jantsch (09:19): 25 years ago, I started calling Duct Tape Marketing, the world’s most practical small business marketing brand. And same idea, I had heard a couple of people tell me, well, your stuff is just so practical, but you’re right. I mean, nobody’s going to say, show me the statistics on that. Right? We’re more practical, better versus different. That’s an argument. I think a lot of people is like, we have the best widgets and well, that’s fine, but we have purple widgets. Which one of those do you think from a marketing standpoint is more important to a consumer?

Jesse Wroblewski (09:46): So I liken it back to differentiator versus USP unique sales proposition and people, they usually get them confused, and I’ll give you the best analogy that I can figure out. So going back to the example of water, the ultimate commodity there is a brand, one of my favorite brands, not only for water, which tastes the same as all the other waters, but for a marketing in general, which is liquid death. Have

John Jantsch (10:10): You heard of it? Yeah. I mean it’s absurd. So they have captured the imagination of the millennials like nobody else.

Jesse Wroblewski (10:18): Exactly, exactly. So while all the other brands are chasing their USP, Hey, we are hydrated more, we have a better delivery system, all these different things that tell you why their water is better, liquid death came along and just differentiated themselves and created a lifestyle brand to a very niche audience. And in my opinion, that differential blow away any USP that claims they’re better at what everybody else does.

John Jantsch (10:47): Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry. Go ahead after you, sir. I was just going to say, so to some extent is one of the real goals of differentiation to actually project emotion feeling. You said lifestyle, I mean that whoever you’re trying to attract is actually more attracted to that than really any feature of the actual product or service.

Jesse Wroblewski (11:09): So I say finding your successful differentiator is the mic drop moment. So we, as marketers, and lucky for us, we get in bed with the company and it’s a rebrand. So we got to get a new logo, and then the competitor gets a new logo and it’s like, oh, we got to redesign our packaging, and then the competitor redesigns their packaging and we got to lower our prices and the competitor lowers their prices. If you could find that differentiator, that is the thing, here you go. No one can touch us. You can lower your prices, compete with us on a logo, the arms brace, that differentiator is checkmate. You can’t copy, you can’t clean up our dust. So I think that’s kind of the checkmate moment in marketing.

John Jantsch (11:52): So over the years, I’m sure you’ve experienced this, I have as well, particularly maybe a little more buttoned up brand that feels like, well, we’re architects, we’re professional service providers. This is what everybody in our industry does, which to me is the ultimate opportunity for differentiating, but they’re scared. I mean, wait, we don’t want to be seen as how do you get somebody over that idea that that’s actually screaming at you to be different?

Jesse Wroblewski (12:20): Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the common question I get asked, which you illustrated perfectly is different, is usually synonymous with odd or weird. But in the universe of differentiation, we have examples from brands like Rolex, Steinway, pianos, they all use the universe of differentiation to successfully differentiate themselves. And you may not associate Rolex with being different in your brain, but they’re head and shoulders above the competition because they have successfully differentiated themselves. So it’s not just for the outlandish or the guy that’s not afraid to wear a weird shirt for everybody.

John Jantsch (13:02): So when you go to start work with somebody, or maybe you’ve just seen people do this, you may not be a client of yours, what are some of the biggest traps they fall into? They’re like, drink the Kool-Aid. Yes, we need to be different. But then they screw it up.

Jesse Wroblewski (13:18): Everyone asks me, how do I get the client over that final hurdle? So everybody comes to the table, whether it’s marketing or whether it’s fitness, I want to get fit. I’ll do anything. I’ll get up at 5:00 AM I’ll run 50 miles, and then five weeks from now you’re sleeping in and in that discipline. So I tell my clients that I am great at branding and differentiating, but I suck at reading minds. So trying to get them to be vulnerable and look, we have at minimum 12 opportunities to differentiate If you say, Hey, you know what? I really don’t feel like comedy or being approachable is synonymous with my brand, let’s figure that out upfront. That way when we get to the finish line, I don’t come up with you with this crazy outlandish head, and now you got to stay up at night. We’ll get all the vulnerability out of the way in the beginning, and we could make great decisions leading up to the finish line. And then the rest is data. What is the data support? Then we pull the trigger. So it’s never a frictionless effort, but I think setting the bar, setting the table properly can be very beneficial.

John Jantsch (14:27): What role do you think authenticity plays both for good and bad? I mean, we’re a stodgy old brand, but we’re going to do something to so those kids like us, and it just doesn’t really come off. I mean, so how important is it that it not only be different, but it be real and true?

Jesse Wroblewski (14:46): Yeah, so I think it’s a term that’s thrown around too

John Jantsch (14:50): Completely.

Jesse Wroblewski (14:52): No one knows what the hell it means. But I say in my book, and I am absolutely guilty of this, I failed a bunch of times repositioning my agency, and it was great fodder for the book. And one of the ways I failed was I was 100% logical about my repositioning, which means I found an industry that had a problem that I could solve. They had a ton of money that they were throwing in marketing, and I basically said, Hey, I can come in and revolutionize this market, but when it came down to writing a blog about it or attending a trade show, I was like, it was homework. It was nothing I would’ve had rather done. So it really wasn’t authentic to me. So I think it’s not a pivotal ingredient, but if you can align it with your differentiator, that’s such a huge leg up on your path to success. So if you are a differentiation pairs with your natural authenticity, it’s going to be a huge headstart for you.

John Jantsch (15:50): Alright, let’s talk a little bit about rebranding. You see a lot of companies out there that feel like, oh, it’s been five years since we’ve done this, and sometimes they’re sort of informed by trends. I mean the hottest business going, apparently today is an AI marketing agency, and 10 years ago it was a social media marketing agency. So how do we balance that idea of we want to stay current, but we also kind of look silly chasing the idea of the week?

Jesse Wroblewski (16:23): Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a tough question that I don’t necessarily have the answer to other than every pendulum is going to swing the other way. So we were actually contemplating at our agency as everybody’s trying to be AI this AI that coming right out and saying, we are the 100% human agency, anti ai, everything you get will be created by a human with human feel, human emotion. So if you’re thinking of chasing a trend and it doesn’t feel authentic or it’s rubbing you the wrong way, maybe the pendulum coming back the other way, you might be able to position yourself for the future.

John Jantsch (16:59): Yeah, I mean, once Twitter put out a user guide, all of those social media marketing agencies went out of business, didn’t they? And I think it’s important to really understand that fundamentally what we’re here to do, you would probably agree with this in the marketing space, actually hasn’t changed. I’ve been doing this for 30 years as well, and I think that’s probably a point of view that people lose track of, isn’t it?

Jesse Wroblewski (17:21): Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I put out a video just kind of a lot of the perspective of my book is a cheerleading for our fellow marketers. So we as marketers have been through a ton of revolutions, and if I say, if your marketing agency didn’t call you and try to get you to open your wallet for NFTs, clubhouse, the Metaverse, all these things, you should call them up and just thank them, right? Because as a salesman, I’m always looking for a chance to upsell, but I have a fiduciary responsibility to tell my client, Hey, you know what? Maybe we don’t invest in Snapchat right now, or maybe we don’t jump into the metaverse. And often distaste they kind of want it even though I tell them not to. So it takes a ton of integrity to be a marketer and that easy money in regards for your client’s wellbeing.

John Jantsch (18:12): Yeah. The question that has served me well over the years is when some new tool has come along, I’ve said, how could this help me serve my existing clients better? And if I couldn’t really see a practical way to do that, I mean, NFTs, I was drawn by the hype, but I just looked at it and went, what? How? Yeah.

Jesse Wroblewski (18:34): Yeah. And it’s hard. You get those phone calls, Hey, I want to do an NFT, and it’s easy money, but it’s also you got to battle with your integrity. So yeah, I agree.

John Jantsch (18:44): Sitting where we are today in 2024, we’re recording this. Are there any current shortcomings in traditional marketing practices that we all still see or have seen for the last 10 years that you think people need to immediately chuck?

Jesse Wroblewski (18:59): Yeah, I think exactly what you just touched upon. So I’m a big analogy guy. So I am not a party goer. I kind of go to the party, I make sure everybody sees me, I make my appearance, and then I bounce. So I could say I was there. I think a lot of businesses take that approach with social media. They just want to be in the conversation. They don’t provide any value, they don’t even provide a dialogue. It’s more of a monologue, and they’re just putting mindless content out there. And I think as I call it, commoditized content. As commoditized content grows, and now we’re seeing a massive spike with ai, how much content, completely useless content is going to be swarming these social media platforms. There was an interesting stat that came out for the first time in human history. Something happened on the humankind level that people are willing to pay more for less meaning people have suddenly realized that instead of paying a hundred dollars to my cable company for 200 channels, which works out to 50 cents a channel, I’d rather pay $5 for one channel and get rid of all the crap.

(20:05): So I call it human climate change. We’re changing the way we take in content because there’s just so much of it. And I think that’s unquestionably going to be in the form of marketing, particularly social media, where if you’re putting out crap, people are not only going to ignore you, they’re going to repel you and do whatever they can to get you out of their funnel of

John Jantsch (20:25): Well, and I think marketers for the last 10 years have gotten pretty lazy ad targeting. It’s been pretty easy to do. Actually getting results in search engines has actually been pretty easy to do if you knew what you were doing, and I think it made a lot of marketers lazy when some of that goes away, I think a great deal of what you’re talking about is going to be the thing that draws into specific businesses.

Jesse Wroblewski (20:49): Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, they just took away the middleman and now everybody can market and everybody shouldn’t market. It’s in our forum. I think we’re going to finally start learning that again.

John Jantsch (20:59): Yeah, more than ever strategy. So Jesse, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you or certainly pick up a copy of marketing for supervillains?

Jesse Wroblewski (21:09): Sure. I would love everyone to check it out. It’s all available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and I tell everyone that I am at heart a frustrated filmmaker, so I put lots of explosions and lasers into my YouTube videos. So if you find me on commoditized on YouTube, I’m sure you’re going to find a video on there that’s entertaining and educational.

John Jantsch (21:31): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few moments with us. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Transform Your Leadership: The Power of Thoughtfully Fit

Transform Your Leadership: The Power of Thoughtfully Fit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Darcy Luoma, an expert on leadership and personal development. Author of Thoughtfully Fit® and Certified Speaking Professional, Darcy Luoma is a highly sought-after coach and speaker who has worked with over five hundred organizations in forty-eight industries to create high-performing people and teams. The concept of “Thoughtfully Fit” is a framework designed to help individuals and teams enhance their performance and navigate challenges with greater agility. This episode is packed with rare insights on transforming any agency’s leadership approach by integrating thoughtful practices into your daily routines and organizational culture.

Key Takeaways

Darcy Luoma explains the “Thoughtfully Fit” framework, emphasizing self-awareness, agility, self-management, and building stronger interpersonal relationships. Our conversation provides practical tips for integrating the “Thoughtfully Fit” principles into your daily leadership practices. These tips help leaders at all levels foster a more thoughtful and practical approach to managing teams. She also highlights the broader implications of adopting this mindset, including personal growth and a more fulfilling professional life. By focusing on thoughtful practices, leaders can achieve a balance that enhances their personal and organizational success. Leaders can improve decision-making, adaptability, and team dynamics by reflecting on their actions and fostering a collaborative environment.

 

Questions I ask Darcy Luoma:

[01:58] How do you go about making high-functioning people?

[03:01] What is the difference between being physically and thoughtfully fit?

[04:12] Talk about how the framework helped navigate your personal life.

[06:00] What role do our thoughts play in how we show up or act?

[08:11] How hard is it to make progress with people unaware of their blind spots?

[10:47] What does a coach do compared to a consultant or advisor?

[18:39] Is practice key, or are there other ways to improve?

[20:48] Is there someplace you want to invite people to connect with you and grab a copy of Thoughtfully Fit?

 

More About Darcy Luoma:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 

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(01:05): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Darcy Loma. She’s a highly sought after coach and speaker who’s worked with more than 500 organizations in 48 industries to create high performing people and teams. She balances running her thriving business with raising her two energetic teenage daughters and competing in triathlons. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, thoughtfully fit your training plan for Life and Business Success. So Darcy, welcome to the show.

Darcy Luoma (01:38): Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:40): Can you make me a high performing people? I really, that would be amazing. Can we just spend 20 minutes working on me?

Darcy Luoma (01:46): Absolutely. You know what the number one thing is, John, if you want to be high performing. Absolutely. We cannot make someone be high performing who just loves being a couch potato and metaphorically, right?

John Jantsch (01:59): Yeah. So I’m going to jump around and get way off my question that I was going to ask. I suspect you have lots of people that say, Darcy, I read your book, fix My People.

Darcy Luoma (02:08): Yes.

John Jantsch (02:09): And so how does that go?

Darcy Luoma (02:12): Well, how that goes. I mean, absolutely. And one of the things I’ll say, if there’s, whether it’s A-C-H-R-O or a president or whoever it is that calls and says that depending on what they’re looking for, let’s just say they say, I’ve got a vp, and here’s what’s really common. John, the person, whoever it is, whatever their title is, they’re really good at their job at the technical. They’re a great lawyer, they’re a great engineer, they’re a great carpenter, whatever it is, but they struggle in the interpersonal and the team dynamics and the leadership. And so if they come in and say, fix them, the first thing that we’ll say is, do they want to be fixed? And do they think that they have a problem? Because save your money if they don’t think they have a problem and they don’t want to improve, that’s what’s key. That’s the first of success.

John Jantsch (03:01): So the book is thoughtfully fit. You do play a little bit on, obviously you’re physically fit and you play a little bit on that metaphor. What’s the difference between the two really in your mind?

Darcy Luoma (03:11): Yeah, yeah. It is a metaphor and what I find is when I train and practice for a triathlon, I do better. I get better results. I am less likely to get injured. They’re more fun, I feel better afterwards. The same thing is if you want to get better results in work and in your relationships in life, you need to train and practice. So most of us don’t know how to have a tough conversation, how to deliver hard feedback, how to say no when you’re overwhelmed and you’re asked to chair the volunteer fundraiser in your community and you feel so bad. So what I find with coaching clients is that what we do in coaching, they’re coming in, they’re essentially training and practicing so that they can have better results and fewer regrets in life. That’s the through line for the metaphor being physically fit and thoughtfully fit.

John Jantsch (04:00): So you start the book off with a chapter in your life that was a little tough. I’m sure you’ve told the story a hundred times. You don’t have to go into the details here, however, talk a little bit about how, I mean, you talk about in the book that the framework that you’ve developed actually help you get through that. Talk a little bit about how that model helped you navigate.

Darcy Luoma (04:19): It really did. I mean, whether you’re a business person or an entrepreneur or, so, we have challenges, we have problems, we have uncertainties, whatever it is, big or small. I’m no exception. So when my life blew up, I found myself at a place where I needed to. I didn’t need to. I had just finalized the thoughtfully fit model, and in this case, I’ll give just the tiniest context. I’m happy to share more, but what my husband was arrested for sexual assault of a minor, and I had to hire my own attorney, and my attorney said, Darcy, don’t talk to anyone about anything. And so here I was at the worst moment of my life and my support system was cut off. And so I became ground zero to test drive this model, which we incidentally had just finalized five days before. To be able, at the core of the model are three simple steps. You pause and think before you act. And so there were so many examples, John, where I was blindsided and I was caught off guard, and I was just in a world of hurt. Where had I reacted in the moment? I would have done something or said something I’d later regret. And so I became really the test case to utilize the thoughtfully fit model in my own life.

John Jantsch (05:38): So one of the first, I mean the framework has three major components. Each of those components has a couple of steps. You hinted at a couple of there, but let’s back all the way up to how unaware are we of what our thoughts do to us in terms of, again, I say unaware. I think a lot of ’em are subconscious, they’re habitual. They’re what role do our thoughts play in how we actually show up or act?

Darcy Luoma (06:05): Everything they absolutely do because you think about if you show up at a meeting and somebody is leaning back and their arms are crossed and they’re disengaged, and your thoughts are, you know what? He never liked me. He didn’t think I should have gotten this promotion. And your thoughts start going, it affects your behavior and all of a sudden you’re acting and you’re snippy or you’re short, you’re cutting ’em off. There’s a

John Jantsch (06:29): Direct correlation. You’re sweating. You’re right.

Darcy Luoma (06:32): Yes, yes, exactly. There’s a direct correlation to our thoughts that feed into how we’re feeling and what our behaviors are.

John Jantsch (06:40): Yeah, yeah. I remember when I first started speaking 25 years ago on stages, and I mean I had never done it before, but I knew I needed to, so I got out there and did it. But I remember, I mean, I would get hot and I would get mean physically because I’m always thinking, am I smart enough or do they like me instead of what am I here to give, which you eventually come to, but it’s actually not just your actions. I mean, I think it’s your physiology, isn’t it?

Darcy Luoma (07:07): Absolutely. And so the key is it’s not to minimize those thoughts or make those thoughts go away. Our humanity, we’re going to have that imposter syndrome and Oh, am I ready? Is this audience, do they believe me and all that? That’s our humanity. When you’re thoughtfully fit, you raise your awareness of those thoughts. So instead of those thoughts controlling, you have awareness, and then you can consciously choose like, okay, you know what? Whether or not I’m the right person to be on the stage, I’m here and I’m going to knock it out of the park so that you can reframe it and choose how you’re going to move forward despite those thoughts, that can be really, like you said, that can really create the physiological response in you.

John Jantsch (07:50): One of the things, I’ve interviewed lots of people that write leadership books and coaches that work on trying to help people get to achieving their goals. And it seems like a theme, a common theme that I hear over and over again is the either lack of or need for or work on self-awareness before you can even start the work. Do you find that in yours as well? I mean, when you’re working with somebody, if they aren’t aware of their blind spots, if they aren’t aware of how this is going on, it’s pretty tough to start making progress, isn’t it?

Darcy Luoma (08:19): Absolutely. You’re right on. And I think that’s probably, if there’s anything that’s most important, that’s where it starts. And I even think about John as a triathlete. So I have a coach and we just started open water swimming two weeks ago here in Madison, and I’m out there swimming, and I’ve been swimming a long time, and my coach will point out my blind spot. She says, Darcey, you right arm is crossing way over your body, and that’s why instead of swimming straight, you are swimming to the left. That is something that without that awareness can’t, it’s a blind spot for me. And with that awareness, now I can adjust what my behavior is and straighten it out. In that case, literally, it’s the same thing with how we show up, whether it’s as a leader or a team member, if we aren’t self-aware of the impact we might have RB F1 of my speaker friends calls RBF resting bothered face. You might not be aware that people think that you’re angry or upset when in the reality is like, oh, I’m just thinking and this is my thinking face.

John Jantsch (09:29): Yeah, it’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs, and they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link. We’ll also receive 15% off an annual plan. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. So you mentioned coach, it seems like these days, coach, consultant, advisor, agency, I mean, the terms seem to all be blending together In your definition, what is a coach there to do?

Darcy Luoma (10:57): Well, I’m a little bit of a stickler, John, and most of the world isn’t a stickler, but I have. So I’m a master certified coach and I’ve worked my tail off to earn that degree. And what basically, the reason I say I’m a stickler is because when you’re a coach and you’re truly doing pure coaching, you’re holding the other person as the expert, whether it’s the client or the team or the relationship. They have the answers and the wisdom and the expertise. And as a coach, you are helping. You’re mirroring back what you’re hearing. You’re asking tough, powerful questions. You’re pointing out blind spots and hard truths. If I come in as a teacher, a mentor, an advisor, a consultant, I’m the expert. Let me tell you what, and both are valuable. I’m just a stickler that be clear on what you’re doing and have the ethics to be able to articulate which hat you’re wearing in any moment.

John Jantsch (11:53): Do you sometimes have to fight this to say it’s obvious dummy? Here’s the answer.

Darcy Luoma (11:58): When I first started, absolutely, that was the hardest thing ever. I train coaches and that’s one of the first things they say is, but darcey, why would I ask a question when I know what they should do? And that’s a false premise because you have no idea what they should do. You know what you think they should do based on your history, your beliefs, your stories, your values, but you have no idea what they should do. Once I got through that and started to get better results when I resisted the urge to fix, tell, solve, advise, now it’s easy. Now it’s not even hard to resist because it’s so much more powerful, but absolutely the first several years, it was painful. It was so hard.

John Jantsch (12:40): One of my favorite quotes, I attributed Stephen Covey, somebody probably said it before him, but as no one sees the world as it is, we merely see the world as we see it or as we are. And I think that’s so true. I mean, you really have no ability to assess what’s going on because you never have all the information. So break down your framework a little bit. We started talking about the core, go ahead and maybe give us the high level sketch.

Darcy Luoma (13:05): Yeah, the high level. So we started looking at what are the themes. We started to see, okay, we’ve got all these clients that come in. At the end of the day we say, okay, what do you want coaching on today? And we found that there are six main obstacles that get in the way of peak performance. Three are internal where we get in our own way, and then three are external where there’s challenges with other people. And so I’m happy to give a high level sketch of those six if you’d like or not.

John Jantsch (13:30): Yes, do it. Yeah.

Darcy Luoma (13:31): So the first one is there’s so much to do. I can’t even think that aligns with the thoughtfully fit practice of stillness, which is about being able to quiet the mind. And of course, just like if you want peak performance as an athlete, you need rest days. You need to recover your muscles, build stronger. The same is true if you want to be thoughtfully fit. The second internal practice is we have clients coming in saying, oh, Darcy, here’s what I’m coaching on. I didn’t handle myself the way I wanted to and name the situation. And this is the practice of strength, which is being able to consciously choose how you show up in every situation, even if your thoughts are trying to get you to unconsciously react on autopilot. And then the third internal is getting stuck. So that was a common theme that clients would come in, they’re stuck in a job they don’t love, stuck in a relationship, stuck with a project, and endurance is the thoughtfully fit practice that helps you to overcome those obstacles to get unstuck. So I’ll pause there. Those are the three internal,

John Jantsch (14:34): And this probably is true for both internal and external, but I’m sure a lot of times we’re just, we have ingrained habits. Somebody pushes a button and we react the same way. Even if a hundred times we’ve said to ourselves later, I do that. So what are the ways do practice or what are the routines or rituals to you talk about practice with your coach. This seems like something that you can’t just one day go, oh, I’m not going to do that anymore. You have to actually build some muscle or resistance or ability to pause or whatever it is.

Darcy Luoma (15:09): That’s exactly what it is. So it’s just like you’re training physically to build your muscles. In this case, you’re training your mental muscles and you just named it. And at the core, I mean we’ve got lots and lots of tools and a lot of exercises on how you can build resilience and all of that. But I’ll just say for the benefit of your audience here today, that’s why the core is what it is. Those three steps, you have to pause first, and that is what’s important because it kicks you off of autopilot. Once you have paused, that sets you up to think. And in the model think is about asking some powerful questions, what’s triggering me right now? What do I need? What’s hard about this? What would be the ideal outcome of this conversation given that I feel attacked? And with the new awareness that you have from thinking, then you can act thoughtfully and that you talked about those habits, those well worn ruts. If somebody attacks you and you don’t pause to think, you just react and you go right back to that habit and you yell, you cry, you shut down, you stonewall whatever it is. And so that ability to pause and think in the moment gives you a chance to pivot and to act more thoughtfully.

John Jantsch (16:23): Well, I hate to sound like a quote machine here today, but you just hit remind.

Darcy Luoma (16:27): I love quotes. This is

John Jantsch (16:27): Great. Reminded me of another in Vitor Frankl’s book. Yeah, there is a moment between reaction and response and in that moment, Azar freedom or something like that. I misquoted it a little bit, but I really, that’s a quote that really does a lot for me in that same regard.

Darcy Luoma (16:44): Absolutely. That freedom to choose that lies between that stimulus and response, that’s where the power is.

John Jantsch (16:49): Yeah. So the second half external. So it’s all the stuff that comes at us, especially in the workplace.

Darcy Luoma (16:56): Yeah, absolutely. So the first external is somebody come into coaching and say, okay, Darcey, how can I get fill in the blank, my boss, my colleague, my spouse to be different. If they would change, I could be happier. And I don’t disagree, but spending energy and time trying to change somebody else or being angry, they’re not the way you think they should be is a waste of time. So that is the thoughtfully fit practice of flexibility that’s being able to stretch to accept others just as they are, instead of trying to change them to be the way you think they should be. And then the second, excuse me, external practice is creating relationships that have a win. So a lot of times they come in and say, I’m in this relationship, it’s stressed out and there’s a win-lose mentality. Either I want to win, I don’t care what happens.

(17:47): They’re sort of aggressive and that might work in the short term, but certainly in the long term it doesn’t. Or there’s other people whose default is to lose, keep the peace. I’m not going to say anything. It’s not a big deal. And so this is the practice of balance, which is being able to balance what do you want and need with what I want and need so that we can achieve alignment in the relationship. And then the last practice, the last hurdle that we found, obstacle that gets in the way of success is people reacting poorly when blindsided. And so being able to have the agility, this is the practice of agility to respond thoughtfully instead of reacting on autopilot.

John Jantsch (18:29): Do you find that, so there’s a whole lot of parts here. So somebody goes through, they listen to you on stage, give a keynote, or they spend an hour with one of your coaches. This is a months long, maybe years long process. Is it not to maybe correct some old habits, instill some new one by one, have enough? You talk about practice, you have to get triggered enough times and say, oh, I handled that one better. I mean, is that what you find or do you find people are able to just turn the switch on and start saying, I’m just going to do better?

Darcy Luoma (19:04): I think it’s both. So certainly just like if you say, okay, I want to get physically fit. Doing one sit up once a month isn’t going to do it, but doing sit up and starting where you are and saying, okay, I’m just going to go buy some running shoes and I’m going to jog four blocks and walk back home key. So you start where you are and you certainly can flip a switch and say, I want to be better. I want to improve. I want to be more thoughtful. I want to be less reactive. I want to set better boundaries. I’m overwhelmed. I’m saying yes to whatever it is that’s getting in the way. You can start now and you can see success. And just like if you do train and you do the marathon on Saturday and it’s like, yes, I’m fit. Well come Monday. It doesn’t stay forever. You need to keep training and practicing. And the same is true with being thoughtfully fit. There’s constantly new layers of self-awareness and training that you can do to have the emotional intelligence to be able to show up the way that you want and to break those habits and to not get triggered.

John Jantsch (20:07): It’s almost like I’m hearing an intentional plan as well. You also don’t wake up and go, I’m going to get fit and I’m going to run a marathon on Saturday. Right? Sure. You have people that do the same thing, right? It’s like, I’m doing all nine of these tomorrow as opposed to like, okay, let’s work. Let’s peel this layer, let’s peel that layer. And it becomes an intentional plan and practice, doesn’t it?

Darcy Luoma (20:30): It really does, John, and I think you can’t do it all at once. You cannot. Cram is indeed a journey and to be, that’s both the good news and bad news, but to be consistent is what’s key to see those results.

John Jantsch (20:44): Yeah. Well, Darcy, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by the Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to connect with you and find out about your work and as well as maybe get a copy of Thoughtfully Fit?

Darcy Luoma (20:54): Yes. But first let me just say I am a super fan and I’m so honored to be here. We love Duct Tape Marketing. We love your team, and so I just need to make sure to share that how thrilled we are. And darcy loma.com is our website. If somebody wants to take a quiz to find out which of these six obstacles are their biggest, then go to thoughtfully fit.com and you’ll get the results immediately, and then a training plan so you can start to train to get thoughtfully fit.

John Jantsch (21:21): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Hypothesis-Driven Growth: How to Turn Data into Revenue

Hypothesis-Driven Growth: How to Turn Data into Revenue written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Doug Davidoff, the founder and CEO of Lift Enablement and the author of The Revenue Acceleration Framework. Dough Davidoff brings over 20 years of experience advising small and mid-market companies focused on significant growth. Known for his no-nonsense approach, he combines real-world research with systems design to develop effective business and growth strategies. In our conversation, Doug Davidoff defined the concept of hypothesis-driven growth and explained how businesses can leverage this approach to turn data into revenue.

Key Takeaways

Dough Davidoff emphasizes the importance of hypothesis-driven growth, where businesses form hypotheses, test them, and learn from the outcomes to make data-driven decisions. He distinguishes between speed and velocity, highlighting that true progress comes from moving in the right direction. A strong Rev Ops function is crucial for optimizing revenue generation and enabling marketing, sales, and customer success teams to work cohesively. While embracing organizational silos, he stresses the need for proper context and communication. Companies can use well-designed frameworks to align strategies across departments, ensuring consistent and scalable business growth.

 

Questions I ask Doug Davidoff:

[02:12] What’s the difference between rev ops and marketing?

[04:56] How does the difference between speed and velocity affect business growth?

[06:24] Where do people get applying tech to marketing wrong?

[08:58] Talk briefly about the underlying objective when you enter a company.

[11:00] How do you address companies that take a very siloed approach to Sales & Marketing?

[13:24] Are there totally different approaches to legacy companies and companies starting off?

[17:07] What’s a thumbnail sketch of your typical process and methodology?

 

More About Doug Davidoff:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

 

Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch & Dough Davidoff (00:17): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM.Jantschworld/scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Doug Davidoff. He’s the founder and CEO of Lift enablement. With over 20 years of experience advising small and mid-market companies focused on significant growth, he has directly advised more than a dozen companies that have collectively sold over $1 billion known for his no nonsense approach. He combines real world research with systems design to develop effe-cutive. I just made up a new word, effective Business and Growth Strategies is also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, the Revenue Acceleration Framework, A Proven Roadmap to Transform and dynamically Grow your Business. So Doug, welcome to the show. John, it is great to be here. Long time Dan, and if it makes you feel any better, every word was made up at some point. Yeah, that’s a good point.

(01:55): That’s a good point. I think I might be onto something though. If I could say it again. It sounded like something I could own and define. Yeah, it’s like right up there with Strategery or something. Yeah, exactly. I wonder if we could start off, if you have your own podcast where you talk about, or at least in the titles, rev ops, right. Let’s start with a definition. What’s the definition or the difference, I should say, between rev ops and marketing? So Rev Ops is really a strategic backstage discipline that’s responsible for looking at how a company generates and sustains revenue, how they allocate the resources. So a strong rev ops function is enabling marketing. It’s going to generate more velocity for marketing. But yeah, so it is really taking that holistic approach and managing those trade-offs so that marketing can do what they do best and sales can do what they do best and success can do what they do best.

(02:54): So you would suggest, I know you do suggest, so I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that it’s a completely different discipline than marketing. Yes. Yeah, it is. The analogy that I like to give is, if we think about theater, what we want to do as a business is we want a standing ovation. We want people to love what we do, and they can’t help but talk about what they just saw and what gives you that standing ovation, that front stage experience, right? What’s the front stage? Anything that your customers see, feel, or touch? We’ll talk to any actor on Broadway and they’ll tell you the key to a successful front stage experience is a really good backstage and a really good support function behind that backstage. That’s rev ops. Would you say that this is an area that it’s not necessarily a new discipline, but is it one that people are waking up to or do we still have a lot of room?

(03:44): There’s a lot of companies out there that don’t even consider this as something that they need to optimize? I talk about this in the book, actually. It’s funny because the answer to that question is really dependent upon the type of business and the size of the business. So it’s not new at all. IBM’s had sales operations, which is a portion of revenue operations for decades. I think if you take a look at the typical small mid-market business, the vast majority of them do not have a formal rev ops function. One of the things I’d like to point out is you have rev ops, whether you’re calling that rollout or not, it’s just happening in the tech space. Happy to say it’s no longer the top of the hype cycle because AI has pushed everything way past, but I actually think that in the tech space, we’ve seen rev ops become this catchall phrase for, oh, we’re rev ops, or let’s do rev ops.

(04:43): That’ll fix that. So it’s like in that place where it’s still trying to find your question of what is rev ops is still a very relevant question. So when it comes to, or at least in the context of business growth, I know you talk a lot about the difference between speed and velocity. How does that come to play in the context of business growth? So I’ve got to share the story of where I came to understand the difference between speed and velocity. So I was coaching my son’s baseball team. I was the third base coach. We’re playing the first game of the year, and Austin is our number nine hitter. And everything we knew about Austin was, you look at Austin’s fast, and so he’s on first base, there’s no outs. He’s on first base. I give the signal to steel, Austin takes off pitches, thrown catcher throws to second base, and I kid you not.

(05:31): The second baseman is waiting for Austin to get there to tag him out. Inning ends, I go over and everyone’s, what happened? What went wrong there? Did he not get a good jump? I’m like, no, I don’t know. And someone came along and said, you guys are missing, and Austin moves his feet really fast, but he doesn’t really go anywhere. And so that’s when I realized that’s the difference between speed and velocity. Speed is how hard are we working? How fast are we going? Velocity is, are we making progress towards where we want to be? And it’s the old Stephen Coveys that I can take a high speed train from Boston to Los Angeles. It doesn’t do me any good if I’m trying to get to Miami end a few years ago. I don’t hear it as much, but it used to be very trendy to call yourself a full stack marketer.

(06:17): I really don’t know what that meant, but it sounded cool. We’re talking about particularly in marketing, tech stacks are a huge deal. So I guess I should say what’s the right way to do that? Or where do people get that wrong? In terms of applying tech to marketing or Yeah, or to ops in the case, because a lot of what you’re doing is dialing in the technology, and if we’ve got all these disparate parts that don’t talk to each other, that’s probably a challenge. So John, I’m sure you’ve seen this through the years of fads and FOMO that come out. It’s amazing how when a company starts selling something, one of the things that has unfortunately driven the noise around rev ops is a lot of tech companies creating these solutions for rev ops and saying that you need rev ops. And so I think the first mistake is when you view anything through the lens of technology. So we live by what we call the prime directive at Lyft, and that directive is the business process must drive the technology. The technology can never dictate the business process. So it’s important to understand technology is not a solution. Technology is an enabler. It could be an accelerator, but it’s not the solution. So the big mistake that happens is we don’t get clear on what is the job that we’re trying to do? What’s the problem that we’re trying to solve?

(07:43): I deal regularly with tech that is not working. I’ve yet to see a time where the tech wasn’t working, where the issue wasn’t actually an ambiguity, a conflict or a confusion around the underlying business process. And so that’s the place where we get in trouble is tech makes it so easy to make it complicated. We embrace the complication, and this is our fifth CRM system this year, right? Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, I can show you 20 companies that tell you it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever had. It’s transformed their companies. And I can find you 20 companies that said that thing was rock. It didn’t do anything. Exactly. So you started to hint at it. And I know a big part of what you just talked about was the jobs to be done theory. I don’t really remember who gets credit for that idea. Clayton Christensen.

(08:37): Clayton Christians. The person who popularized it, at least I knew I’d hear it numerous times. I could remember it was in Crossing the Chasm, or was that Innovators Dilemma? Innovators Dilemma, innovator Solution. Okay, cool. Alright, so that’s a big part of what you just explained. So maybe make it practical. When you go into a company, you obviously open up that toolkit and instead of looking at the tech, you try to find the underlying solution or the objective maybe. So talk a little bit about that, how you apply that. Yeah, and one of the things that I talk about too when it comes to technology is never buy technology. You should only hire it. And if you start looking at the things that you’re doing, I talk about this from a marketing standpoint. I say never implement a marketing campaign. Hire a marketing campaign. So when we’re going to hire somebody, we start off when we say, what does success look like?

(09:30): What is it that the business is trying to accomplish? What’s the gap? What’s the capability? I look at technology, I look at campaigns, I look at strategies and tactics. People. I look at them as capabilities fill gaps. So here’s where I want to be. Here’s where I am. Here’s what I think the difference is. I talk in the book about hypothesis driven growth, always have a hypothesis. We talk about the science of growth. The science of growth is hypothesis, test, learn. And if you take that approach, have a hypothesis, figure out what are the keys, this allows you to be wrong. So I have hypothesis, I do something, I get a result from that. That result is either what I expected or something different. All the learning comes when the result is different than what I expected. Then I draw my next hypothesis and I just bring that cycle.

(10:25): And if you do that, you’re going to find you are going to make progress. Progress is going to be a byproduct of what you’re doing. And that’s why the companies that do that well, and that’s what I talk about in the framework, is they look back 18, 36 months later and they go, we’ve transformed. Wait, we’ve totally changed. Even though through that effort, they never really felt like they were going through all that much change. They felt like they had a lot of stability when in fact they were far more dynamic than the competitive set that was seeking transformation. When you work with organizations and they’re still out there, fortunately they’re changing some, but that still take a very siloed approach because that really, if A is not talking to B and B is not talking to C, things break down. So how do you address that?

(11:12): Do you just tell ’em they have to stop? What do you do? So I have a little bit of a counterintuitive approach here. I embraced the silo. So you talked about full stack marketers, and that reminded me of the term that came before that was the, you remember this, the T-shaped marketer. Yeah, right. A little bit of this and a lot of that. So the thing for us to understand about silos is we need silos. We need constraints. There is a specialization. If I’m doing social media, there is a specialization and there is a depth to what is going on with social media. Marketing has its role, sales has its role. So it’s not that the silo in and of itself is the, and I think too often we come in and we say we need to get rid of silos. And then someone goes, I don’t know what to do.

(12:00): What I find missing is the context. That’s why I love frameworks is the framework lets us talk to this. And what’s happened with sales and marketing especially, it’s my favorite image in the entire book is I talk about the old way of marketing, which was marketing, then sales. Then the new way of marketing is marketing and sales. In parallel. The right way is sales and marketing are completely intertwined. So when we look at the framework, it serves as that translator. It brings in the context. So where I see silos being a problem, the real underlying issue is there’s no context. We don’t understand why am I doing this? Why are you doing that? This is my job to do. So I like to think of it as manufacturing revenue. So we’re getting to various milestones and basically that’s my one trick, John, is I come in, I go, how do we find interest as a raw material and then implement a manufacturing process to take that raw material and take turn interest into engagement, into conversation, into inquiry, into advocacy, into customer.

(13:11): How do we do that? Where do people play? Where are those connections? And I find that really helps to simplify and bring that alignment that so many people are working so hard to get is your approach. Let’s say you’ve got an old legacy company. They’ve been doing fine chugging along. Everybody knows this is how we do it here. And then the opposite of that, somebody who still doesn’t even know if there’s a market for what they do, they’ve got to really go to market. Do you find that there are totally different approaches for those types of very broad range business? So that’s a yes and a no. I’m a great consultant, right? Exactly. The thing that I’ve learned about uniqueness is 80% the same and 20% different. So there’s an underlying model. There is a consistency. I talk about in the structures section of the book, the different archetypes.

(14:05): So now they’re not fundamentally different, but there are definitely differences between them. But by the way, one of the key things is I come across companies sometimes that are like they’re doing whatever it’s that they’re doing. They’ve been around for a long time, they’re good, they’re comfortable, they’re happy. Okay, you don’t need to change just to change. So there needs to be a why behind that. It tends to be, and I think most companies understand that today change is not particularly optional, but they don’t know what that means. So what happens is people like me oftentimes come and we say, you need to change what you’re doing. And what we mean is you need to change about 20% of what you do, by the way, to be able to succeed. If you need to do more than anything other than just a brand new startup, if you need to change more than about 20 to 25% of what you’re doing, I’m the wrong person.

(14:58): This is the wrong book. You’ve got troubles that need to be fixed. Address those. The thing that I found that’s fascinating is the difference between the companies that are just crushing it and the companies that just don’t seem to hit, they’re doing okay, but the juice isn’t quite worth the squeeze and life gets more stressful every day. It’s like a three to 5% difference, a big change. It’s an underlying structure and an approach that just needs to be tweaked. And by the way, the other thing I’ve learned about successful companies, they’re like successful families. Every successful family I’ve met is dysfunctional in their own unique way. So you show me any great company, I’ll show you a company that’s breaking a rule or two, and we have this tendency, here’s my 13 rules up, and I come in and I apply those 13 rules in the laboratory.

(15:56): I’m right in doing that. I killed the secret sauce again, that’s why I love frameworks. Let’s find out what is it that makes us different? What is it that’s enabled us to be successful? How do we play our game and stop trying to copy everybody else’s game? Yeah, I see that time and time again. Do you bring in this consultant who has a successful case study doing X, Y, z, and they want to apply that case study, but that’s not us. We can’t sell like that. I see it all the time. I’ll tell you, I learned that when I was coaching college baseball is I couldn’t work with this kid the same way I worked with another kid. They were completely different body types. They had completely different strengths and weaknesses. It’s like how do we make the game work for them? How do they play their game?

(16:41): That’s why I’ve always been a fan of yours, John, is I think that’s really the underlying element of Duct tape marketing is we’re humans. We are by definition different and special. Let’s understand that and be consistent to that, and how do we carry that out as the organization grows across what is an increasingly complex environment? That’s probably a better definition for what Rev ops is. So I’ve waited way too late to actually say, so what is your approach? What’s your process? What’s your methodology? Because that’s another show probably, but give me kind of a thumbnail sketch. If somebody calls you in and says, Doug, we need help. I read your book, it’s awesome. What would it look like? Your process, your methodology, I know everybody is different, but on the surface, you’re going to create playbooks, you’re going to audit, you’re going to look for data, right?

(17:30): Well, the first question I’m going to do, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to ask what does success look like? I still remember the first time I was doing sales coaching, sales training, someone called up and said, Hey, I’ve heard some really good things about, yeah, we’re looking for sales training. I’m like, oh, really? What is it that you’re looking for sales training for? You ready for this, John? We need more sales. And I said, okay. That takes out about half of my programs. They’re designed for people who want fewer sales. Okay, what does more sales mean? So what is success? Then we’re going to look at what’s preventing, what’s getting in the way. Then we’ll go through, we’ll understand. One of the key things that we do in our audits is really to understand again, what is it that makes you different and special?

(18:11): How do we reinforce that while addressing those areas and those obstacles? And again, what I find is far more often than not, we just reverse engineer success. You’ve had. I get the best compliment I ever got from a two day sales training program that I did was, you didn’t teach me anything new. I’ve done all of this before and I’m curious when you do this, what’s the result? That’s where my best sales come from. What if you did this purposefully each time instead of it after the fact and oh, wait, and that’s all I’m looking to do is where do you have your success? Let’s find what’s consistent about that. Can we get into the invisible part? That’s where I talk about structure is what’s the system design? One of my favorite quotes is, your system is perfectly designed to give you the results that you’re experiencing now. So how do we have to change that underlying system so that the behaviors and things like that follow? Yeah. There’s a great book by Marshall Goldsmith, I think is his last name. What got you here won’t get you there, and I often kid and say, what got you here will keep you here.

(19:25): That’s one you asked me about mistakes. That’s one of the mistakes that I see is we do our best customer analysis and that’s great. If your best customers look like what you want your best customers to be. A lot of times we’ve got to take a look at who are the customers that we’re not working with because that’s what our future best customer needs to look like. Absolutely. Doug, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duck Tight Marketing podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite some folks to connect with you, learn about your work? Obviously pick up a copy of the Revenue Acceleration Framework. The easiest place to get the Revenue Acceleration Framework is of course Amazon. My wife and associates tell me I spend too much time on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can get me at Doug Davidoff on Twitter. You can find me easily on LinkedIn. I’m happy to engage. If you have any questions or if I can help in any way share any experiences, I’m more than happy to. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments with us. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Fractional CMO Services: Strategy Before Tactics an Interview with John Jantsch

Fractional CMO Services: Strategy Before Tactics an Interview with John Jantsch written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

In a recent interview on the Near Media podcast, I had the opportunity to discuss the growing trend of fractional CMO services and how they can benefit small to midsize businesses (SMBs). As the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, I’ve been working with SMBs for over 30 years, and I’ve found that many of these organizations face similar challenges when it comes to marketing strategy and execution.

Increase Frac CMO retention and revenue

One of the key points I emphasized during the interview is the importance of strategy before tactics. Too often, SMBs focus on executing marketing tactics without a clear, overarching strategy in place. This leads to a scattered approach that fails to target their ideal customers or differentiate them from competitors effectively.

Fractional CMO services aim to address this issue by providing SMBs with access to high-level marketing expertise on a part-time basis. By hiring a fractional CMO, businesses can benefit from strategic guidance and direction without the cost of a full-time chief marketing officer.

During the interview, I discussed how Duct Tape Marketing’s approach to fractional CMO services begins with a comprehensive strategy phase. This involves working closely with the client to identify their target market, develop clear messaging, and create a customer journey map that encompasses all stages of the marketing hourglass—know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

 

Once the strategic foundation is in place, we help clients mature their marketing efforts through a staged approach. This involves setting priorities, establishing metrics for success, and consistently communicating progress to stakeholders.

One of the most significant benefits of working with a fractional CMO is building a strong relationship founded on trust. By advocating for the customer within the organization and focusing on strategy before tactics, fractional CMOs can help SMBs achieve sustainable growth and success.

 

As for the role of AI in marketing, I believe it serves as a valuable tool for increasing efficiency and producing content at scale. However, AI must be married with human expertise and strategic context to be truly effective. Fractional CMOs can play a crucial role in helping businesses navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by emerging technologies like AI.

 

Fractional CMO services offer SMBs a cost-effective way to access high-level marketing expertise and develop a comprehensive growth strategy. By prioritizing strategy before tactics and building strong client relationships, fractional CMOs can help businesses thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

 

The interview is broken into 3 parts and can be heard here.

Transform Your Business with the Metronomics Framework

Transform Your Business with the Metronomics Framework written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Shannon Susko, a strategic business coach and author renowned for her innovative Metronomics framework. Her expertise lies in transforming businesses through her unique growth operating system, helping leaders achieve sustainable growth and balance. Beginning with the Metronome effect, In our conversation, Shannon Susko defines the Metronomics framework and explains how it can revolutionize the way CEOs and leadership teams approach growth, strategy, and execution.

Key Takeaways

Like a Metronome, the CEO sets the speed of things.

Shannon Susko’s Metronomics Framework transforms businesses by bridging the gap between strategy and execution, emphasizing the role of CEOs as consistent leaders and fostering cohesive, accountable leadership teams. This growth operating system focuses on setting long-term visions, breaking them into short-term goals, and utilizing a behavioral accountability platform to maintain team alignment and productivity. By navigating the three growth phases—foundation, momentum, and compounding—Metronomics ensures sustainable growth and a balanced, enjoyable work environment.

 

Questions I ask Shannon Susko:

[01:55] How did your journey as a CEO form the Metronomics framework?

[03:08] Would you say, like most entrepreneurs, you went well-informed to gain the success you have today?

[05:06] How did you develop the term ‘Metronomics’?

[08:01] How is this different from other growth frameworks?

[10:45] As a CEO, how do you keep the momentum of the Metronomics Framework going?

[17:54] As a business coach, how big of a hurdle is the CEO and their inability to “let go”?

[19:33] Is there anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

More About Shannon Susko:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

 

Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (00:17): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Shannon Susko. She is a celebrated for her strategic prowess team leadership and financial acumen, having successfully co-founded Lead and sold two companies. Within six years. She developed the Metronomics framework fostering rapid growth and successful exits, and now she coaches CEOs and is the author of a number of acclaimed books, including metronomics one United System to Grow Your Team, company and Life. So Shannon, welcome to the show.

Shannon Susko (01:38): Yeah, thanks, John. Great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:40): You had a lot of hard words in your bio that I almost tripped over several times. I don’t

Shannon Susko (01:45): Know where that bio came from, John. I was like, so who is that person? Is someone on my team is working the word magic.

John Jantsch (01:55): So let’s just start with Metronomics. What was the genesis of it? How did your journey as a CEO form it?

Shannon Susko (02:04): Yeah. Well, it started in my first company. Metronomics has been around for 24 years. It’s a growth operating system, and it’s one that we built out a pure, desperate need to figure out how to unlock a way to grow a company and have fun doing it. And so it was our first business. We were stuck and we decided with my leadership team that we brought in from all over the world, I said, there must be a system. I asked my coach, you’ve got to have a system, right? Repeatable system. How are we going to do this? And you know what? My coach of all he’d already built, grown, sold many companies, and I say many because I don’t even know how many. And he’s like, yeah, no, you’re doing the right things. You’re learning from the right people. Keep going. And I was like, no, we got to find a way. So that’s where Metronomics came from. It’s a growth operating system to save leaders time and get them having fun in their business, get them outside the business, find the balance.

John Jantsch (03:08): So I don’t know if I would call you a business book junkie, but Yes, yes, I am. I hear you reference a lot of books and a lot of names that are people that I know. Would you say that all good entrepreneurs, that a lot of those people informed where you ultimately ended up?

Shannon Susko (03:25): Yeah, I mean, absolutely. When I was asking for the system, I kept asking, there’s got to be a system. Give me the book for two years, 24 months. I read four books a week because I actually didn’t believe there wasn’t a system. And so in doing that, and then, yeah, I haven’t stopped reading books. I still read a book a week at this point, not four, but at least a book a week. But you know what? All the great thought leaders out there, Jim Collins, Michael Porter, and all the genres and all the different systems in the business, they all gave us the what, right? And so you’d learn the what, and you’d go over and do that, and you’d play Whack-a-Mole on the cultural system, or you’d play Whack-a-Mole and the human system or the strategy system, but none of them were connected. And I was like, okay, we got that fixed. Now this broke run over here, run another. So we took all those great things and we actually plugged them into the system. It’s like when you think of my background’s technology, so when you think of a computer operating system that’s running Mac or Windows, many things plug into it, but it’s like the system that works day in and day out. That’s what Metronomics is. And we love taking all the different things that companies need and we plug it in when it’s needed.

John Jantsch (04:53): So I’m curious about the term where you landed on, I’m envisioning Sister Colette, my first grade piano teacher and the metronome metaphor. So how did you come to Metronomics is the term?

Shannon Susko (05:09): Yeah, well, funny enough, first book is called the Metronome Effect. And when I wrote that book, finished the book, finished it all, couldn’t think of a name. I checked all these names, went out for a run, and there’s a metronome on my Garmin.

(05:27): And I was like, oh, that’s really interesting because the metronome sets the speed at which you’re going to run, play the piano, and the CEO is the metronome in a business. They set the speed at which you’re going to grow your business. So that’s where metronome came into play. I did have a piano teacher as well. I did all those grades. I did have it sitting up on the piano, but it made me think that day, okay, you set the speed and you must hold that speed or rhythm or whatever it is. So that’s where that came from. Metronomics came from the word metronome, which represents the CEO, who gets to set the speed. We want a consistent speed in the organization, not one that goes fast and slow, fast, slow. So economics is the other word. And it was really about the balance of your life and your business, your economics, balancing your time with the dollars.

(06:22): So there’s a whole piece that we have in there, but that’s what I was fighting, is balancing teen business and life. So that’s where the economics piece came from and there’s definitely a method to that madness. And then the third word, and there’s a fancy word for how we made up this word, I don’t remember it today, but I know it’s in the last chapter of omics, the book itself. But it’s metrics and metrics. What we learned are not the things you track, it’s the things you forecast and the things you control that flow through your business. And so everybody who works on a team in a business owns a thing. They do a thing every day, and there’s so many of those things they do every day, and we call them widgets. So a metric represents a widget. And so those three words made up metronomics, which is this big long word, and maybe we shouldn’t have made up that word, but we did because it represented the things that flow through the business, represent the team that needs to connect to them. The metronome represents the CEO and the economics is the outcome you get, which is balancing your business and your life because most CEOs, especially startup CEOs, but even when you get to eight, 10 years, people are tired of the same old one. They can’t seem to unlock it. And this unlocks it, right? It gets you back your life so you have fun again and gets you the team you’ll want to work with.

John Jantsch (07:51): So you mentioned a couple of names, Jim Collins, Vern Harnish, Gino Wickman. I mean of all people that you recognize the names of creating similar systems. If somebody said, how are you different or how is Omic different?

Shannon Susko (08:06): It’s a great question, John, because I grew up on the late nineties on Rockefeller Habits, which was wearing Harish and learning pieces of that, and we had pieces of that. And then Gino’s work where the EOS came out later, but he grew up at the same time with rock habits. And if you take great game of business, Jack Stack and all the mini games that happen, they’re all very much influenced in all of this. And we put those pieces in place. We created the cash system, we created the execution system, we had the cultural system, we had those pieces, but there was still a gap in the middle. And the gap was the strategy and the strategy system. And the biggest difference is that by having your 10 to 30 year goal and having your annual goal, which scaling up EOS is great, they’re great execution and cash systems, and they line up with the long term, our three year highly achievable goal.

(09:09): That’s the difference. That’s the thing that connects your long term to now, and it’s so close, you can reach out and touch it. It’s 12 quarters, but you must lay out the execution quarter over quarter, 12 quarters straight to get there. And the system itself, the strategy system, not we know these days is not like, oh, we create a strategy, our five year strategy, it’s happening strategy we have to talk about every day, week, month, quarter, year. And this allows us to give that connection and the alignment to the team and that word widget and that word metric in regards to a three year highly achievable goal connects your team to where you’re going. It connects everybody in the company to the overall team results. And that’s the difference. Now, do we love a company? I love a company doing EOS, and they usually get to a point where they need to look further that strategic piece, and we just layer right on top of it. If you’re doing scaling up, Metronomics will layer right on top of it. It takes everything they’ve learned about a discipline execution system with a little bit of strategy and some of the cultural pieces and just puts it onto a little bit more of a timeline. Rocket ship of three years. It really challenges it.

John Jantsch (10:36): I dunno if this is the deliverable or the objective is to create kind of this repeatable playbook that the whole company uses. How do you stop that? How do you keep that alive? As I listened to you talk about it, so many people create systems and playbooks and nobody can actually even find the darn thing anymore a week later. So how do you keep that thing alive?

Shannon Susko (10:55): Yeah, so the way you keep it alive, you can write it down, you can have it out, and everyone goes, oh, isn’t that wonderful? And then nobody does it. At the end of the day, metronomics is about behavioral accountability, and at the end of the day it’s about behavior with your team on the field. And we actually created a field, a virtual field. It’s a behavioral accountability platform that is called, we call it Metro, the company. It’s in as metronome growth systems, but it is the metronome in the platform. Everybody logs in to the platform every day, and a lot of people go every day. They look at what they said they would do, they look at the cadence at which they set it. All the meetings are run through that platform day, week, month. And it really starts with how does the playbook stay alive?

(11:47): Well, number one, a coach that understands the playbook, so I’ll put my coach hat on for a second, but at the end of the day, it’s the CEO O with the leadership team, commits to the team habits, the team habits of the playbook, and that’s what keeps it alive. When the ceo, EO and the leadership team don’t want to do those habits anymore, the playbook, we evolve the habits, but they don’t want to do it anymore. The playbook is just a really nice system sitting there that no one will use. And as well as I know in any business, a system is only as good as the users of the system. You got to use the system to keep it alive.

John Jantsch (12:29): Well, and that was really going to be my next point. I mean, a lot of what I think stops great companies is that they get to a certain point where building a leadership team is different than managing a company. And so how do we evolve with this, right? We build the playbook, it’s awesome, but now we’ve got new problems.

Shannon Susko (12:51): So the interesting thing is we have the seven systems that all connect to one another and they exist in any business, whether you want to acknowledge them or not. That’s one of the biggest things I learned early on in business. But the thing that we found in Metronomics and with the research we’ve done over the last 14 years is that there’s three phases of growth that every company will be in at some point and some may never get out of the first phase, which is the foundation phase. It’s the very first phase. There’s five things that we’ve really got to pull the lever on to move from the foundation growth phase to the momentum growth phase. The third growth phase is the compounding growth phase. Most companies, whether it’s called that or not, it doesn’t matter. Most companies get stuck there because it’s a willingness to have a repeatable cash system and put the effort in to forecast cash first, have an execution system that works without the leaders, but in order to have that, the leadership team must be, it’s the CEO plus all the functional leaders that we have in companies, and it has to be whatever the definition of that team is, a hundred percent A players.

(14:10): And the last thing is it must be cohesive in order to get that far. While we’re doing all that in the foundation growth phase, we’re mapping the strategy and to keep it all aligned. Mapping the strategy gives us strategic pictures, whether we have all those other things working or not. We can still map our strategy, but it’s lining all those things up so that I always say, it doesn’t make it easy. It creates some ease, it takes some pressure off. We get some growth results just from picking off each one of those things, which actually brings the team back to keep doing it, that actually will take the team through to the other side and really grow the system. I always say the playbook meets you where you are. And so I go into companies and they have an A player leadership team. It’s cohesive.

(15:06): They have a cast system and they have a great execution system that’s working without them. I go, fantastic, let’s get the workout strategy. Because what they’re looking for, others come in that phase and they may have a couple of those things, but they might be stuck on that. A player leadership team. It depends how that team is formed, but we’re going to meet the teams there and that keeps it alive in the phase that they’re in. And then as they pick off the critical path, we know there’s a critical path for growth. We will move to the momentum phase, which you got to keep all those things alive in the foundation phase. Then we got to validate with confidence and strategy so that we can make better foster decisions to keep up with the speed of growth of the organization. We need to take the leadership team to that next level of cohesiveness.

(16:01): I call it team trust 2.0, but it’s where they’re at the point now that they have the time to coach their team, work on strategy and grow themselves into Jim Collins would call the level five leader Bill and Bob, Adam, scaling leadership would call it integral leadership. But it’s actually that next version of the leaders. They have time to grow themselves at the rate the company’s growing. And of course the last phase is compounding. We see companies go into the compounding phase top line, and they can’t sustain it, right? Because the thing that all those things have to be true in the first two phases. The last phase is you got to basically what we call the coach cascade system. You’ve got to cascade out the growth and learning of your team members in order to keep up with the growth of the company. And those are the things.

(16:57): That’s why some of the clients I’ve had for 11 years, and someone goes, have they not got it yet? But the playbook has evolved as they have evolved, and it’s really fascinating to me. It’s really fascinating, but very much reflects my tenure journey and my first company where it’s not a straight line across the growth phases. And once you get there, it’s not that you necessarily always stay there. The external environment can push you back. Your team coming and going can push you back, right? Your strategy can push you back. So yeah, it’s really exciting to actually put this in place and a team gets so good at it, they forget about it, they forget about the system, and then they’re just thinking within their business, but following the cadence.

John Jantsch (17:46): So I’m tempted not to ask you this question because we are close on time, but I know it’s a big one. How big of a hurdle is the CEO and their inability to let go in your work?

Shannon Susko (18:02): Yeah. I love working through the phases of this with a CEO EO because, and what I call a desperate CEOI was a desperate CEO. My coach could have said, stand on your head Shannon and spit out nickels, and that will get you there faster. I probably would’ve done that. And there’s different levels of desperation on how bad you want to win whatever winning is for that company. And so what I find is CEOs will, I was on a call earlier this morning and they do whatever. They’ll follow that system because of where they want to go. So I always say it’s how bad does that CEO EO, and I’m going to go plus leadership team want to win their game. That is how fast a CEO let go of things. And once they start letting go take off the sales hat and give it to someone else and take off the finance hat and give it to someone else, and they see the time, they get back to doing the things that are in their sweet spot, it goes a lot faster. But it’s just got to give ’em a little inkling of what it might be to let it go. But they’ve got to want to, there’s lots that don’t. They think everything’s great, and if they think it’s great, then it’s great, and they’re going to grow along at one to 3% a year and fantastic. As long as they’re having fun, life’s too short.

John Jantsch (19:28): Absolutely. Well, Shannon, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Shannon Susko (19:37): Yeah, you can absolutely just look me up on LinkedIn, Shannon Byrne, Susko on LinkedIn Easy, although I think the only one out there with that name and as well on metronomics.com, everything’s there. Lots of free resources, webinars. Yeah, please come and join our community if you’re interested.

John Jantsch (19:56): Awesome. We got a Canadian resources there too, just to put a little fine point on that.

Shannon Susko (20:01): Yeah. Oh good. Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch (20:04): Awesome. Again, well hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

How Music Transformed My Business Approach

How Music Transformed My Business Approach written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Stephanie Sammons, a certified financial planner and accomplished singer-songwriter.

Stephanie always enjoyed songwriting, singing, and guitar-playing and got involved in Nashville performing songwriter workshops. She worked diligently to improve her skills and decided to go ‘pro’ with this career at the encouragement of some of her Nashville-based songwriting mentors. She released her first full-length album ‘Time and Evolution’ on May 3rd, produced by Mary Bragg (highly respected singer-songwriter and one of the only female producers in Nashville). Stephanie was selected as a 2024 Kerrville New Folk Finalist, one of the most coveted competitions in the songwriting world! (they chose 24 songwriters out of 1340).

She shares her unique journey, from a successful career in financial advisory to embracing her passion for music. Her story exemplifies how following one’s passion can lead to unexpected synergies and a more fulfilling professional life.

Key Takeaways

Stephanie Sammons shares her journey of embracing her “passion” (as most people in the industry detest calling it) for music alongside her financial planning career, highlighting the courage needed to pursue dreams at any age. She discusses balancing her dual careers, the transferable skills between financial planning and songwriting, and the importance of community support in both fields. She emphasizes creating space for creativity through daily routines, illustrating how integrating passion into professional life can lead to a more fulfilling and enriched career.

 

Questions I ask Stephanie Sammons:

[01:58] Tell us about your journey from Marketing to Music

[04:37] How did you summon the courage to follow your passion?

[06:29] How do you find funding for all the music production costs?

[11:16] Tell us about the significance behind the song ‘Innocence Lost.’

[13:11] How much life experience is a key part of songwriting?

[15:16] Are any musical mentors or musical influences important to you?

[15:59] How’s balancing music and your advisory firm going

[17:19] “You don’t switch the writing on; it hits you when it hits you,” Do you find that challenging?

[18:19] Is your client base and financial firm influenced by you, “the empath artist”?

[24:44] Is there someplace you want to invite people to connect with you and listen to some of your music?

 

 

 

More About Stephanie Sammons:

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 

Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (00:17): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach.

John Jantsch (00:57): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Stephanie Simmons. He’s been a financial advisor and planner for 25 years, launched her own registered investment advisory firm in 2017. She believes in growth at a reasonable pace and is selective about who she takes on as a client. Good lesson in that one. She’s also enjoyed songwriting, singing, guitar playing, and got involved in Nashville performing singer songwriter workshops, and she released her first full length album, time and Evolution of this past May produced by Mary Bragg. She was also selected as a 2024 Kerrville new folk finalist. Kerrville is one of the top ones out there of anybody who makes the circuit. So Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie Sammons (01:46): Thank you, John. I’m so excited to be here. It’s been a long time.

John Jantsch (01:51): Well, it has been a long time. And that’s a part of my first question. Long time listeners wonder why am I having a musician on a marketing show? You and I actually met in a marketing context, I don’t know, 15 years ago or so. Talk a little bit about your journey to, I just mentioned you recently released a full length album, but talk a little bit about your journey to that point.

Stephanie Sammons (02:15): Yeah, I mean, most of my career I’ve been a financial, I’m a certified financial planner, worked for big firms, left the big corporate thing, got into marketing, I worked, did some marketing services for financial advisors, built websites, all that good stuff. Took a sabbatical from that career and then got back in it started my own firm, like you said, in 2017. So that’s my core career. That’s how I make my living. And I’ve always had this burning passion to do music. And I’ve dabbled in songwriting for probably, I don’t know, 20 years and guitar playing, being a self-taught guitar player. And I started going to these workshops in Nashville starting in 2016. And I got to work with these incredible Grammy nominated artists. One of them is a Grammy winner, and that’s Emily sells from the Indigo Girls. But I learned so much about the art and craft of songwriting, and I just fell in love with it. I was like, oh, I’ve been writing songs, but they are terrible and this is really how you write a good song.

(03:36): So I’ve been to, I just asked the woman who puts these together, their smaller group workshops, I said, how many have I been to since 2016? And she said 26. So I just studied and studied and started really working hard on it, putting my day work down, my day job down, and then starting on songwriting and getting better and improving. And there was just a culmination of whispers that made me decide to about a year ago to go pro with it. And I had to overcome a lot of my own head noise and excuses and those kinds of things. But that’s how I got here.

John Jantsch (04:18): So since I’ve already mentioned that we’ve known each other a long time, it probably is not an insult to say that was kind of a midlife change for you. So how alluded to the idea of that was a big change I felt People talk about all the time, imposter syndrome and those kinds of things. How did you summon the courage? Is that the right word to say, I’m going to go do this thing that seems ludicrous?

Stephanie Sammons (04:44): Yeah, I think courage is the right word. My first excuse was, you’re too darn old. What are you thinking? I’m too old to do this. I have another business where I serve clients day in and day out. What are my clients going to think that I’m running off to Nashville and leaving them in the dust? So I had that to overcome that, which was more in my head. And then I think the third thing was it’s going to be so much hard work because it’s like if you want to be a good golfer, you can’t just go out and start playing 18 holes. You’ve got to hit the driving range. You’ve got to practice your putting. It’s an actively, it’s an active sport that you have to engage in and practice and work at it. And this songwriting thing and performing is an additional layer.

John Jantsch (05:36): Yeah, I was going to say, I’ve always really respect songwriters who are also great performers because it’s two completely different businesses.

Stephanie Sammons (05:45): It is. And I’m introverted. And so that took a different level of courage to get to. So I don’t know. I mean, I think over time it’s just been part of my journey to build and build on the skill sets that are required. And when I reached out to the producer that I really wanted to work with and I had enough songs to make an album when she said yes, that pretty much launched me down the road. I’m like, okay, that is a sign I’m doing this.

John Jantsch (06:20): Okay. And you don’t have to get into specific numbers, but just in practice, how does, okay, you found a producer who said yes, you had the songs, they needed to be musicians, there needed to be studio time, there needed to be the production. How does all that get funded

Stephanie Sammons (06:37): By yours truly?

John Jantsch (06:39): Yeah.

Stephanie Sammons (06:40): I mean, that’s the beauty of, I mean, I’m fortunate that I’m in the position where I can self-fund this passion career. I’m trying not to call it a passion. Songwriters have a problem. The songwriting community has a problem with that if you’re not. But now everybody

John Jantsch (07:02): Has different job because anybody can pick up a pen and say, here are the three chords, but is that songwriters?

Stephanie Sammons (07:08): And so it really is another profession altogether. But I saved for it, and I knew it was going to be expensive, and it is expensive, and you don’t get a return on your investment, very little return financially. It’s more the experience that matters to me. And it’s okay if I’m in the red forever, but that’s what it takes. And everybody does it differently. Some of these songwriters out there where this is their core career, they will start a Kickstarter and get funding that way. So anyway,

John Jantsch (07:50): But the money’s really in the t-shirts, right?

Stephanie Sammons (07:53): Yeah. The money is in the merchandise.

John Jantsch (07:56): I

Stephanie Sammons (07:56): Never thought that would be, but

John Jantsch (07:58): It’s interesting you think of how that model has changed the music industry. You would tour to sell albums, and now the tour is where the money is, right? I mean, it’s really, I’m sure there definitely Taylor Swift making a lot of money on Spotify, but a lot of folks, it’s really changed the whole, it’s almost become more entrepreneurial, that ability to reach your fans directly to hustle and get gigs and do things. I mean, it’s really become a lot more entrepreneurial, hasn’t it?

Stephanie Sammons (08:28): You are correct, and you wear all the hats. You’ve got to be active. Instagram is a pretty strong community of singer songwriters, and we all support each other. But if you’re not active there, that’s really helped the most is just engaging with my community of peers and everybody. We all have different fans, and that’s kind of how you do it, but you wear every one of the hats. And at my age also and with my lifestyle, I’m not going to go get a van and tour the country, but I get to kind of build my own adventure. I’m doing selective festivals and just things that I want to do. I’m putting my name in the hat to try and get on some of those bills to be able to play different festivals and things.

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John Jantsch (10:36): Well, Curville is probably one you attended a time or two, right? I would think given where it’s located, I have an idea. Why don’t we listen to a bit of a song?

Stephanie Sammons (10:45): Great.

John Jantsch (10:46): That was from Time and Evolution, and it’s called Incense and Lost, and I have to call you out on this. Sold my Soul for a diamond ring. Now, there’s a lot of hope in that lyric, isn’t there?

Stephanie Sammons (10:58): Yes.

John Jantsch (10:59): So maybe talk us through, sorry, I stole your thunder there, but talk us through what that song’s about, what the influence of that song.

Stephanie Sammons (11:07): Yeah, that song came about because I shot a bird when I was 10 years old. My granddaddy gave me a BB gun, and me and my sister were just walking around their land going, what do we do with this? What could we do? And I shot a bird and I ran over to that bird and I literally watched it die in front of me. And I went from being ecstatic that I hid it to completely heartbroken that I killed the bird. And so that song is about, that experience was losing your innocence of time when I lost my innocence. And so that song has several vignettes describe stories of losing your innocence over time. And that was one of them that you mentioned. Yeah, you’ve run off and with the person you think is going to be the person the rest of your life. And you leave home and you don’t listen to your mom and dad, and it ends up being a disaster and you come back home hanging your head and traded your soul for diamond ring. It wasn’t the right person.

John Jantsch (12:14): So I sometimes wonder people laugh about that. I mean, you can’t write the blues unless you’ve just had a really hard life. And so how much of that really comes in, plays the part in songwriting? I mean, I sometimes laugh because I play around with writing songs too. But I mean, I feel sometimes the hardest choice I’ve had to make when I was growing up was like if I wanted chunky peanut butter or smoothie peanut butter, I just have nothing to write about sometimes.

Stephanie Sammons (12:43): I bet you

John Jantsch (12:44): Do. I’m sure it’s not, I’m sure it’s not true. But I wonder how much, not necessarily pain, but just life experience and how you experience life is a key part of songwriting.

Stephanie Sammons (12:54): Yeah, I mean, I would say that I am an empath and I’m always thinking about other people’s suffering, other people’s experiences. Why does some people have such a tough lot in life and others don’t? And things like this just plague me and people who struggle in my family. And so instead of addressing these things or sometimes I get confronted by various folks in my family, for example, and it ends up coming out in a song. I mean, they’re just things that are in my mind that I store up that I really think a lot about. And those are the things that come out through songwriting. It’s really interesting. That’s how I have the conversation.

John Jantsch (13:44): Yeah. Do you find yourself, I often, maybe this is romanticizing the whole process a bit, but you’re sitting in a coffee shop and you hear two people talking over there. That’s like an idea for a song, what they’re talking about.

Stephanie Sammons (13:58): Everything is fo for a new song. It really and truly is. And so are things and things that you see. I’ve seen a lone coyote roaming around out here. It’s not so much anymore because it’s warmer, and I live in Dallas, but I’m like, I’m going to write a song about that lone coyote. But I have to figure out what is the metaphor, what’s the coyote of metaphor for what’s it going to be about? And I keep ideas on my phone, just a running list, and then I marry those two things like, ah, I’ve got it. I’m working on a song called Marathon, and it’s about somebody who’s just had a really hard life and they keep getting up and keep getting up. So I try to find a metaphor that works for the song in general. An image.

John Jantsch (14:47): You mentioned you went to a lot of these workshops, and I’m sure you met folks that you would call mentors. Are there any mentors, musical influences that are important to you?

Stephanie Sammons (14:57): Oh yeah. I grew up listening to the Eagles and a lot of Boston Classic journey, classic rock stuff. And then later in life, I love cold play. I love The Indigo Girls. They were a big influence. Just the gals playing acoustic guitars. I was like, I want to do that.

John Jantsch (15:22): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I’m trying to think of the seventies. You had Joni, you had, I dunno. Did Stevie Thanks Guitar sound. Thanks Taylor. I was thinking women though. So last question. How is balancing music and your advisory firm going

Stephanie Sammons (15:38): Man, to some extent, it’s definitely two different sides of the brain, but there’s a lot of overlap. Financial planning is kind of formulaic, making the numbers work to meet the goals. And writing a song, you only have so much time. Every word counts. You’ve got to have a rhyming scheme, you’ve got to have a melody and a rhythm. And so I find similarities there. And then my financial firm is really, it’s a relationship business like anything else, like any other business. And I’m mostly helping people make good decisions. That’s what the job is. And so the way I balance them is I can’t do them both in one day. I’ve got my work days for my financial firm, then I’m going to rehearse all day music days, or I’m going to work on songwriting all day. One day. I have to just get in the space for each role that I’m practicing.

John Jantsch (16:46): Are you familiar with Rick Rubin’s recent

Stephanie Sammons (16:49): Work? Oh, I

John Jantsch (16:50): Love it. So one of the things that he talks about repeatedly in there is that you don’t switch the writing on, it hits you when it hits you. Do you find that a challenge? A little bit because it’s like, I have their song today. It’s like,

Stephanie Sammons (17:05): Yeah, if I don’t create space for that, it doesn’t happen. And so that can be, especially trying to juggle both of these careers. So I do things like journaling and I try to walk a couple of miles every day, and that’s the way that I can create space or being in the car is always a good place to capture something on my phone. So I’ve always got my phone nearby to record a melody. I always have melodies in my head, so I’ll record a melody and just sing it into my phone or put words in there and phrases for ideas. So it is kind of always on in the back of my mind, that motor is running.

John Jantsch (17:46): You have one of these little notebooks with all these little snippets in it that you someday will tie into something or go

Stephanie Sammons (17:52): Back to. Right. I have a bunch of those.

John Jantsch (17:53): Do you find sometimes that, I wonder if your client base and your financial firm is a little bit influenced by the empath artist sort of makeup that is you. Are you attracting folks that are opposite of that? Or are you attracting folks that your music is actually, to them is a real side benefit?

Stephanie Sammons (18:12): They’re all very supportive of my music, which has been refreshing. In fact, some of them have come out to a show that I did here in Dallas, which was shocking. I didn’t expect that. I have different types of clients, though. Some are real stoic and not emotional at all. And then others are just, they need nurturing and handholding and they’re just different. They’re different people. And I don’t know what the common thread is. That’s a really great question. I’m going to think about that.

John Jantsch (18:44): Yeah, it’s just an observation. Well, Stephanie, it was awesome catching up with you, spending a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Where can people find out, I guess if they need a financial advisor, would be one avenue of connecting you, but also find out more about your music and pick up time and evolution?

Stephanie Sammons (19:02): My website is, the best website is stephaniesammons.com is just my name. And I do have a website for my, it’s my wealth management firm. It’s called sammonswealth.com, but my music is everywhere you listen, apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, if anybody still listens there, I know a lot of people do our age, but I also have vinyl and CDs and all that good stuff.

John Jantsch (19:29): That’s all at stephaniesammons.com? Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Well, again, it was great catching up with you and hopefully we’ll run into you someday soon. Come to Colorado and play, and I can see you on the road.

Gain Freedom From the Fear of the Future: How to Thrive in an Uncertain World

Gain Freedom From the Fear of the Future: How to Thrive in an Uncertain World written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Dr. Frederik Pferdt, the first Chief Innovation Evangelist at Google and a renowned expert on innovation and creativity.  

Frederik Pferdt helped shape one of the most fabled creative cultures in the world. He founded Google’s Innovation Lab, where he trained tens of thousands of Googlers to develop and experiment with cutting-edge ideas and taught ground-breaking classes on innovation and creativity at Stanford University for more than a decade.

He has also worked with dozens of international government agencies, organizations, and businesses ranging from the United Nations to NASA to the NBA. His work has been highlighted in Fast Company, Harvard Business Manager, Der Spiegel, and BBC news, among many other media outlets.

Dr. Pferdt shares his insights on how not just optimism but radical optimism can transform our relationship with the future, helping us create a world we want to live in.

Key Takeaways

The key to thriving in an uncertain world lies in embracing radical optimism. He explains that radical optimism is about more than just seeing the glass as half full; it’s about looking for ways to fill the glass even further. By shifting our perspective (state of mind) to focus on possibilities and opportunities, we can transform challenges into chances for growth.

Dr. Pferdt emphasizes the importance of changing our mindset to a “mind state” – a fluid, adaptable approach to thinking that can be adjusted based on immediate circumstances. This helps individuals become more resilient and proactive in the face of change, rather than being overwhelmed by it.

He also highlights the role of compulsive curiosity in driving business innovation and personal growth. By continuously questioning and seeking to learn more about the world around us, we can stay ahead of changes and better prepare for the future. This curiosity, paired with unreserved openness to new ideas and experiences, can lead to unexpected and rewarding opportunities.

In this episode, Dr. Pferdt offers practical advice on how to cultivate radical optimism and develop a future-ready mindset. He shares personal stories and examples from his work at Google and Stanford University, illustrating how these concepts can be applied in real-world scenarios to achieve remarkable results.

Dr. Pferdt’s insights provide valuable guidance for anyone looking to gain freedom from the fear of the future and thrive in an ever-changing world. By adopting  a proactive approach to the future, we can create a future we desire, rather than waiting passively for it to unfold.

 

Questions I ask Frederik Pferdt:

[02:25] Would you say Ning was ahead of its time?

[03:50] Would you say a platform like Facebook then was another advancement of Ning or completely derivative?

[07:53] How would you define community?

[14:03] How important is having a clear and compelling purpose in designing your community?

[17:13] How do you manage having so many feature requests?

[21:18] Do you have an interesting case study of how someone achieved great financial success starting with a community?

[24:44] Is there someplace you want to invite people to learn more about Mighty and connect with you?

 

 

More About Frederik Pferdt:

    • Connect with Frederik Pferdt on LinkedIn

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 

Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with, it’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:14): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dr. Frederik Pferdt. He is the first chief innovation that helped shape one of the most fabled creative cultures in the world. He founded Google’s innovation lab where he trained tens of thousands of Googlers to develop and experiment with cutting edge ideas and taught groundbreaking classes on innovation and experiment with cutting edge ideas for more than a decade at Stanford University. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today. What’s next is now How to Live Future Ready. So Dr. Fard, welcome to the show.

Frederik Pferdt (01:45): Thank you, John for having me.

John Jantsch (01:47): It’s a pleasure. So let’s maybe kind set a baseline. When a lot of people hear about the future, it seems like people are either excited or they dread it. I don’t think that you’re going to tell people they should dread the future. So how do you get people to think appropriately about what the future means?

Frederik Pferdt (02:06): Yes, that’s a great question. And so I really want to help people to change their relationship with the future. As you just described, we feel sometimes anxious, uncertain about the future, but we also feel excited from time to time about the future. And we all know we live in that world where change is accelerating and it’s happening constantly and this can feel overwhelming for a lot of people. And so the challenge that we all face, I think, is that our minds are looking for certainty. And if we don’t find that certainty, we feel anxiety. So we spend a lot of time worrying about the future because our minds crave that certainty and really our brains are wired to make this feel uncomfortable for me, really about helping people to not think about the future and do predictions, but rather changing their relationship with their own future and saying like, Hey, what future do I want to create? Instead of asking what will the future bring? And I think that’s something that I’m personally very excited about because that changed my relationship with my future. And so taking control of what’s happening next is something very important. I want to help people to do that.

John Jantsch (03:34): So that idea of that’s obviously how to live, future ready, how to live the future you create, I think is obviously a big premise of the book. How do you get people past this idea of creating something that is unknown because it’s five, 10 years from now, entire things that we took for granted will no longer exist. So how do you get that kind of mindset?

Frederik Pferdt (04:00): Exactly. And you are mentioning an important point, which is mostly we talk about these futures that are way out on the horizon. It’s like five years, 10 years, or even like 30 years. That’s what we usually talk about. And for me, I want to bring the future close, which means I want to bring it so close that every choice you make in this moment determines what’s going to happen next. And so you mentioned something that I feel we also need to discuss, which is that notion of a mindset. That word mindset is just around everywhere we have, even in school, it’s taught, which is very important, having a specific mindset. But also we use it in organizations where we talk about we need to have an organizational mindset, for example, or we talk about it even with products, you can now buy products that help you to change your mindset might be like a drink for example, or certain pills and so forth.

(05:10): And I think we need to change that probably because we have mindsets all around. And Carol Dweck did incredible important work around that. But I found that it’s a term that is also overused. And even if you’re typing something into a document or use chat GPT or use Google, whatever it is, it always defaults back to mindset. And for me, the concept of a mindset refers to a stable, long-term collection of beliefs and values and attitudes that we carry with us. And it’s deeply ingrained and often resistant to change having been formed and solidified over years of experiences teaching. So it’s really hard for us to change a mindset. And so what I want to do is I want to change that notion towards a mind state. And for me, a mind state is something different. It’s fluid, it changes based on the immediate situation.

(06:14): It really reflects our real time emotional and mental responses, and it can significantly influence our decisions and actions. And for me, that mind state is our moment to moment perspective really that is influenced by our thoughts and emotions. And that really guides how we interact with the world. And I think for me, if we focus on the mind state, it helps us to actually also take control and how we perceive a situation and how we experience the present moment. And that is really something that is very powerful and I use in the book. And so by focusing on your mindset state, really you can actively shape how you experience and respond to everyday situations and thereby constructing the future you desire. And that’s the whole again, premise of what I want people to do.

John Jantsch (07:07): And I want to get into the dimensions further of that mind state a little bit, but can you give me an example of how somebody, you started to talk about traditional mindset as opposed to this future ready mind state. Do you have examples of how somebody can actually make that shift from one to the other?

Frederik Pferdt (07:28): Yes. So when we talk about one of the dimensions, for example, radical optimism that I put out there, we usually say either you are an optimist or a pessimist. That’s the categories we usually use in our everyday language. And for me, it’s not the usual way of looking at a glass half full or half empty type of person. For me, being a radically optimistic person is somebody who looks at the possibilities and opportunities that you can fill your glass even further. And so a radical, optimistic person transforms really challenges into opportunities and every situation into a chance for something exceptional. And by shifting that view, we find potential in everything. Uncovering those hidden possibilities. And this perspective really encourages us to aim for what I call better, making really every moment an opportunity for growth. I can share an example of how that might look like.

(08:36): So if I look at my desk and I see like, oh, I have a very clever desk, a regular optimistic person might say, Hey, fantastic, at least I have a desk to work at, right? That’s what they usually would say. But for me, a radically optimistic view is what’s better is that I can work on multiple interesting projects simultaneously reflecting my diverse interests and skills. So that’s a more radically view of a cluttered desk. Or you might say, I’m here in a geodesic dome and I have some noises outside where some woodwork is being conducted at the moment, which is great. Or you look outside your window, right, John, and you say, oh, I have a noisy busy street outside your window. So an optimist would already say, at least I live in a lively area. A radically optimistic person actually frames that as what’s better is that I’m part of a vibrant and alive community that offers constant inspiration and connection. So you see that in that language. It’s not just looking for what’s the positive about that, but what’s the better that I can find here in these situations? And that’s something you can train yourself in. That’s something you can practice and work on. And I think that’s something very powerful I want to help people to do.

John Jantsch (10:00): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try Active Campaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only.

(11:06): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. To what extent, and I know all of what we’re talking about is learned, so to what extent is this a generational thing? So I look at a 10-year-old now and they don’t think, oh, the future is something I have to learn. They think this is what I am. Some video game comes along, they don’t think, how do I learn it? It’s like, no, I am it. Whereas somebody like me who might say, for AI for example, this is something now I want to learn, but it’s something that I need to actually figure out or learn. So to what extent are those two ends of the age spectrum play a role in the ability to learn these behaviors?

Frederik Pferdt (11:56): Yes. So I’m a big fan of our next generation. I have to say I am just always tremendously in awe when I see the young generation taking control of their future. They’re going on the streets and telling everyone that we need to do something about climate change. And they’re really proactive in all of those things and how they use AI and new technology is something very powerful because they not just see the downsides, but they start experimenting and trying things out and see how that could work for them or what’s something we need to refine and improve. But there’s one interesting thing that when we grow up is somehow changing, and that’s curiosity. I have one of the dimensions of a future ready mindset is what I say. Compulsive curiosity and curiosity really drives us to explore and understand our world better, which is really crucial in our rapidly changing environment.

(13:00): So we are all born with that curiosity and it’s firing in all cylinders. When we’re children, you probably remember John like crawling around on the floor, you probably not but your parents when you crawl around the floor and you’re trying to put everything in your mouth and you look at everything and you taste everything, and you really explore with all of your senses, the world, every moment. And I think that’s very powerful, that curiosity, because you start to learn a lot, but our natural curiosity goes actually dormant over time. And so the good news is that we can reawaken it by continuously questioning and seeking to learn more about everything around us. And I think that’s probably one of the last frontiers of, for us humans probably is asking better questions. As you mentioned, AI and technology gives us a lot of good answers at the moment. So I think for us, it’s really about practicing the art of framing good questions and trying to just have that compulsive curiosity help us to discover. And so in my book, I give a couple of examples on how you can actually train yourself into asking better questions and really bring that curiosity back to everything you’re doing.

John Jantsch (14:14): Yeah, I wonder if there are people that have these traits more in abundance or naturally or socially, they got those traits. I always tell people, and you talk about this idea of bringing your superpower to things. I feel like curiosity has always been, I started my business 30 years ago. We didn’t have the internet and we’ve still been able to evolve and serve our clients. And I really think that curiosity, I’m always want to know how the new thing works, and I think that has served me abundantly over the years, but there certainly are some people that’s actually hard for them. So my question in this is, are there people that you find that naturally possess some of these traits or dimensions?

Frederik Pferdt (14:56): We all do to a certain degree. So again, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of Googlers over my 12 and a half years at the company, and I’m also involved with students at Stanford, and I work with incredibly talented people all around the world. And I find that these dimensions of that future ready mindset that I talk about can be really found in every human being because they’re deeply human qualities that we have. What I also found is that not all of us are using them to a certain degree. So what I argue for is that we need to dial those things up. We need to be more curious, we need to be more open, we need to experiment more, show more empathy. And if we do that, again, even using optimism in a radical way, if we all do that more, I think we can discover more opportunities in our future. That’s something very powerful, I think, to have to answer your question briefly. Yes, we all have those, but we can probably use those even more. And I’m going to show people how they actually can leverage that.

John Jantsch (16:10): So to that listener that’s thinking, maybe they’re reading the news headlines today and is thinking, especially in the United States, there’s a lot of talk about this divisiveness that’s going on and actually closed, becoming more closed. This is my tribe, this is your tribe, as opposed to what you call unreserved openness. So how do we get that turned around?

Frederik Pferdt (16:35): Yes. First, I recommend not following or not watching the news like minute by minute. We all have that negativity bias built in ourselves, and the news are really taking advantage of that. So the negative news, we want to read the first and watch immediately and so forth. But I would recommend not just consuming news, news, news all the time because it really draws you towards a conclusion where you might believe that the future is controlled by something else or someone else.

(17:11): And again, I said that in the beginning that we shouldn’t ask the question, what will the future bring? Because that’s passive, that’s waiting for the future to unfold, and it’s going to be controlled by someone else. We should ask ourselves, what future do I want to create, which is a proactive approach. And using openness, as you described, is something very powerful because unreserved openness is about really embracing change and the unknown with confidence and curiosity. So it means really being open to new ideas and experiences and even other ways of thinking, which can lead to unexpected and even rewarding opportunities. And so imagine you are in a long corridor lined with numerous doors. So that corridor is just filled with these doors, and each door represents an opportunity or new experience. So I would argue that someone with unserved openness doesn’t just peak cautiously through a slightly opened door and worried what might be on the other side.

(18:17): But instead, they approach each door, I would say, with that eagerness and ready to fling it open without hesitation. And so they’re not deterred by the uncertainty what lies behind the door. Rather they’re motivated to really see the potential for new possibilities and learning that’s behind the door. So every door would be wide open and you open that door and you walk straight through it because there’s always something interesting and new waiting behind that door. And I think that’s what we need to bring as an attitude towards everything instead of just being cautiously, even letting those doors being closed.

John Jantsch (18:55): So while I agree wholeheartedly with the dimensions and the premise, I could see a lot of people, this isn’t not an overnight project. I mean, this is changing attitudes, this is changing beliefs, this is changing habits. So what would be your advice to somebody who says, I want to take this on, but I’ve got work to do?

Frederik Pferdt (19:15): Yes. And again, I fully agree, and that’s why the subtitle is How to Live Future Ready. It’s a Lifestyle. But I also would say it’s not that hard to change because we are talking about a mind state, which is really about the perspective you have in any given moment that determines how you experience the present. And that perspective. We can change, we have control over it. If in one situation we show a little bit more openness or optimism or even empathy, that’s a choice we can make. And I argue that leads always to a better opportunity. It leads to possibilities. And so it’s not that hard to change. And I give people three things. The first one is I give some personal stories and experience I had over the years that could be potentially helpful. The other thing that I offer is I have about 14 people that I’ve personally trained and worked with at Google, just remarkable people.

(20:16): And so they share their own stories and how they changed their perspectives, which led to a remarkable future for themselves as human beings. And then I offer some practices that everybody can try out to see like, Hey, what does that practice help me to do? And how can I use that to shift my perspective? And I think as soon as you either read some of my experiences, you read some of the stories, or you practice some of that, I think you can start slowly to see opportunities for your future, and then again, find even some joy in crafting your own future and choosing your own future. And I think that’s something very exciting to do.

John Jantsch (20:58): Dr. Fayette, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Frederik Pferdt (21:07): Yeah, everywhere. Reach out, message me, or let’s have a conversation. And I really hope that we all take control of our own futures. I hope that we can now see opportunities in the future as well, so that we can craft a future that is desirable and that we all want to live in.

John Jantsch (21:29): Again, I appreciate you taking a moment, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Why Today’s Training Methods are Failing

Why Today’s Training Methods are Failing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

 

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Matt Beane, an assistant professor in the Technology Management Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a digital fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Institute for Digital Economy.

He conducts field research on the future of work involving robots and AI, exploring how these technologies are reshaping skill development and training in various industries. His latest book, “The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines,” breakdowns the significant shifts in how skills are acquired in the modern workforce.

Key Takeaways

Matt Beane explains that traditional skill development is becoming obsolete due to advanced technologies, impacting hands-on experience across various industries. In fields like robotic surgery, policing, investment banking, and bomb disposal, intelligent systems enable experts to work independently, disrupting the apprenticeship model. Organizations must adapt training methods to ensure practical skill acquisition by creating structured learning environments where novices engage with new technologies. By asking better questions and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, businesses can effectively integrate AI and robotics into training programs while maintaining high professional standards.

 

Questions I ask Matt Beane:

[02:02] What led you to into the field of studying master-taught lost skills in the workplace?

[08:08] Asides from the Medical industry, What other industries did you study that your learnings apply to?

[11:13] Did you have any industries that questioned your goals?

[13:54] Are there other factors besides technology such as organizational culture that contribute to lost skills?

[15:09] Is there a way that organizations can protect their “learned skill and knowledge base”, or those obsolete?

 

 

More About Matt Beane:

Connect with Matt Beane on LinkedIn

Visit his Website

Read the first chapter of The Skill Code

 

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

Speaker 1 (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever

John Jantsch (00:16): Made. What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Matt Beane. He does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we use across the broader world of work. He’s an assistant professor in the technology management department at the University of California Santa Barbara and a digital fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Institute for Digital Economy. He received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management. We’re going to talk about his book today, the Skill Code, how to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines. So Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Beane (01:49): Delighted to be here. Really appreciated the invite and excited to talk.

John Jantsch (01:53): We’re going to do our best to save human ability today. I think that sounds like a noble goal. So the premise, I’ll be very brief and let you talk more about it, but the premise of the book is this idea that we’re losing a lot of skills that the master taught the apprentice over centuries of time. So kind of led you to studying that particular gap or space,

Matt Beane (02:17): Right? The gap I wasn’t sure was going to be there. I’ve always been interested in training, learning and skill development my whole career one way or another. And since about 2000 and the confluence of that in AI and robotics got my fierce and firm attention. When it came time to pick a dissertation focus at MIT, I knew robotic surgery was a very interesting place to go because it boy, oh boy, doing robotic surgery is radically different than doing it the old fashioned way or even the modern way before that, which was with straight sticks, basically laparoscopic surgery as we knew about it in the nineties. And I just looked at the control apparatus for that robot, and it’s a giant Xbox controller basically with a 3D vision goggles that you wear and foot control. So you’re using your feet and your hands and I’m like, this bears almost no resemblance to the old fashioned way. How did you learn

John Jantsch (03:13): How to do? Yeah, the parts are looking at are called the same thing. But other than that, right?

Matt Beane (03:16): Yeah, no kidding. Although by the way, looking at it through this robot, you’re seeing it at 10 x magnification and an inch movement on the outside with your hands and the controller translates to a millimeter on the inside. So it’s a real different game. I didn’t know all that to begin with, but I figured the training for this has got to be real different for the training the old school way. How does it work? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? That’s the sort of going in question after no more than three months in the field in the operating room, watching real procedures with this thing, talking to residents, talking to surgeons, it was very obvious that everyone was assuming the way to learn how to use this thing is the same way that you should learn how to do the old procedure. And that was a fatal assumption, turned out to be false because, and by the way, the old school way is something we have encoded almost in our DNA.

(04:09): It’s literally 160,000 years old in surgery. They call this C one, do one, teach one. You basically show up, help a little bit, watch, get a little bit more involved as the expert decides you’re ready and sooner or later you’ve got somebody looking over your shoulder. Look at any profession I defy you. The book is full of examples of this. We just take that for granted as the way that you learn how to do stuff and build skill, which is the ability to do the thing under pressure basically reliably. That’s different than knowing conceptually. Like book smart. This is like, can you do it? So anyway, it turns out that mechanism of learning, this taken for granted thing, it was getting busted in robotic surgery because the console and the controller allowed the senior surgeon to do the whole thing themselves. So the resident becomes an optional participant at that point.

(05:00): I have to make mental effort to involve that person who wants to become me someday and there’s a patient on the table and therefore I’m never going to do that because they’re going to be slower and make more mistakes than me. So instead of the old school way, a four and a half hour procedure, that resident is busy for actually about six hours. They are working from before the patient gets, there’s any incision all the way till well afterwards they’re sweating the whole time and they’re helping out in consequential work. Now, they might be swimming in the shallow end of the pool, but they’re swimming now. They show up, help get that robot doc to the patient, sit in a separate control console and they watch a movie. That’s all they get to do. And so that was no one. Everyone recognized that was unsatisfactory on some level, but boy oh boy, they were just kind of tolerating it and surgeons would come out of programs after six years of big air quotes training. I have, well, I quote a chief of urology for one of the top hospitals in the states and he said, top surgeons suck. Now. That’s what he said to me, to my face. They’ve watched a lot of surgery, they haven’t done it. We have to retrain them when they arrive. So it was about halfway through that study that I realized most of what I just told you, because

John Jantsch (06:19): Really when it comes down to it, learning is reps, right?

Matt Beane (06:24): Yeah. And not reps on a putting green with no wind and a perfect sunny day, you got to have somebody throwing rocks at you. So it’s sure some reps in practice conditions, it’s helpful. But you’re right, even in surgery, they have a name for this. In their research on surgery, they call it dwell time, which means how much time are you in the or? That used to be the old proxy for you’re in there, that’s the best place for you to learn. Now it’s the worst. Anyway, I also made it a point in that study to try to find surgeons who were learning anyway, in spite of that barrier, I was very lucky to get some guidance to do that early. That turned up some really interesting and new ways to build skill that defied the new barrier of novice optional world that we’ve got now.

John Jantsch (07:12): Is the skill required to become a great surgeon different now? I mean motor skills maybe are different needs, or is it really just learning the tools?

Matt Beane (07:22): Sure, there are different skills involved, and that’s much less important than do you know a healthy way to build skill period in this context because the skills that you need to do your job are always changing a little bit, constantly. New version of this thing for my iPhone, gosh darn it, I got to learn a little something every day, right?

John Jantsch (07:40): Why did they move that button?

Matt Beane (07:42): Right? And big things come along every once in a while and we get a really big thing with chat T these days. But for most folks, that doesn’t mean you have a whole new job or a whole new set of skills. It just means say 30%. But if you have a healthy path to learning new skills, humans love to learn, then we’re going to do that. That’s no problem. If the way you learn is getting busted, then we have a serious issue.

John Jantsch (08:10): So you have talked primarily about medical industry, but you actually studied a number of industries, didn’t you? That this equally applied to?

Matt Beane (08:17): Yeah, over 30 now. So that was the immediate question. I published that study in 2019. I gave a TED talk in 2018, but actually from about 2016 on those findings were done. And I wanted to know where else is this happening? Is this novice optional thing happening elsewhere? It should be. That’s all I knew because I had the hypothesis that the more intelligent technologies, robots, ai, they allow a single expert to get more done with less help. If that’s really true, then let me go to some radically different places in the economy to study things like policing, investment banking, bomb disposal. I have a list of more than 30 now to see different technologies, by the way, different skills, different cultures. If this same problem is showing up there, then it’s time for all hands on deck. We’ve got a serious problem. And that resulted in that Harvard Business Review and TED talk piece, which came later.

(09:16): It looked to the world. I had just trumpeted my surgical findings, but in fact those were three years in the can. And I had spent the next three years being like, hang on. So that was the sobering news in 2019. This is everywhere I can look except for one place. I found one exception. It was accidental where tech was getting deployed in a way that improved skill development, which gave me more hope. And I think it was worth studying. And I keep trying to find and study exceptions like that. We need them. But in general, yeah, no, once I hit north of 20, 22 professions, occupations, industries, and so on, I just kind of stopped trying to find it.

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Matt Beane (11:22): No, because already on the ground. So number one, I should be real clear all those 30 plus industries I’m talking about and occupations and so on, I didn’t do all those studies myself because each one of these studies takes about a year and a half. I got primary access to data collected by other scientists who had done similar studies in their context. So investment banking, for instance, I’ve collaborated with a woman named Callan Anthony at NYU. She gave me her data set, I gave me her mine. We compared notes. We wrote another paper off of that. But in general, surgery’s a perfect example of this. Everywhere I’ve gone, everyone already knows things are not well when it comes to skill development, the next generation is struggling, but the productivity boost coming from these technologies is such an enticing, saccharine hit upfront that there’s no one party whose job it is to pay attention to. That unintended negative side effect of getting this productivity hit. The expert is happy. The organization, the person who’s investing in that capital is happy. And yeah, it’s kind of a pain to learn now. Can’t find a mentor to save my life, says the 24-year-old, nobody’s problem really

John Jantsch (12:34): Learning. Well, lemme ask this, will that catch up over time? Will that 24-year-old when he’s 48 and that’s all he is known be the mentor?

Matt Beane (12:41): Exactly right. This is why I’m trying to sound the alarm bell as loud as I can. This is why I wrote the book. It’s 3, 5, 7 years later, depending on the cycle time for your talent that the organization, the profession, the economy is going to start to realize that the next generation of talent just isn’t prepared for duty. And surgery’s noticing this now. So I announced my findings in about 20 17, 20 18, and I’ll just ground this out for you. They went kind of early. So I think other professions should get ready for this. The next generation of robotic surgical talent that’s floating in the hospitals have to spend an extra, oh, between 80 and 180 grand on what’s known as a proctor, which is another senior surgeon, either inside their own hospital from the outside to come in and retu this person on how to do the job. They just went through five years of training for it. That’s supposed to be good enough and everyone knows on the street it’s not. And so it adds to the cost base, the time to ramp to skill. That’s a bandaid solution. That’s just, there’s no way that’s going to work.

John Jantsch (13:45): Are there other factors besides the technology that are really kind of leading to this, but maybe even culture inside an organization? Demographics of the next generation coming up? I mean,

Matt Beane (13:56): Yes. Yeah. And so I think the fair thing to say is the problem I’m describing has been around since the advent of language, so about 160,000 years old. Let’s go back to ancient Greece, which I do in the book. There were big disputes about the shift from hand pinched pots to using a potter’s wheel and what was that going to do to skill around here? And an expert doesn’t need mentee or an apprentice quite as much. If they’ve got a powders wheel, they can do a whole bunch more themselves. So it’s just the intensity and the pace of what happens when chat GPT is free for everyone to use. They’re dramatically more self-serve on a much broader span of their work. Their dependence on a novice in different ways is dramatically the span of management control. These days. I’ve been doing studies in warehousing, for instance, the last few years. You have one manager to 50 to 80 people. And part of the reason for is technology. You can manage them through their iPhone, partially their schedule, their timing, discipline, pay, all that stuff. So it’s a tale as old as time. It’s just so much more intensified now that lots of things are digital, that it’s kind of a difference in quantity, amounting to a difference in quality, I think.

John Jantsch (15:09): Is there a way that organizations can kind of protect that idea of the learned skill and the knowledge base inside the organization? Or are you really actually saying those are obsolete in some ways? No,

Matt Beane (15:23): I hear you. And the back third of this book is what do we do now? And so definitely I have evidence to prove from studies that folks are fighting for their skill out there. They’re not doing it in an organized way, they’re not quite aware of what they’re doing. I’m doing my best to report on things that are working. So individuals can do things every day to protect their skill as they engage with these technologies. For sure. I have a post on my substack called Don’t let AI Dumb You Down, for instance. There’s some things that you as a user of that technology can do to avoid this subtle slide towards B plus territory. If you’re not careful, in fact nudge yourself up in towards a plus. You can in fact not just tread water. You can actually use this tech to enhance your skill by the end of every session.

(16:08): It’s just we’re not doing it. So that’s one level. But tactically managers in many ways, and people who run businesses have all the tools they need around handling this new tech. Anything. If you went to a top flight MBA program or more likely learn some great lessons outside of academia about how to mountain run a business and lead people, your tactics for dealing with new surprising events in your environment are probably just about as relevant now. It’s just everyone’s kind of got their hair on fire running around saying, when you know perfectly well how to run a healthy experiment with something that could be good or bad for your business right now. And what does that take to make sure that folks aren’t just trying it all on their own right now, which is not a terrible thing, but it’s just like yelling, fire in a crowded theater. It’s better to get folks organized. And what is an organized, healthy experiment in a business look like, by the way? That’s aggressive. You’ve got to be aggressive, fine but focused. So sure there’s stuff in the book and also on my substack about let’s just everyone remind ourselves. We know a lot. We know a lot about how to handle change and technological change. Let’s just put it to work.

John Jantsch (17:18): You know what I’ve been telling people for the last five, well, probably 30 years, but it’s really ramped up the last five years, is instead of saying, how can we use this technology to do something? We’re already doing faster or better or whatever, how can we actually ask better questions? You got it. That becomes our job, right?

Matt Beane (17:36): Yes. And in fact, part of the way you do that is the temptation immediately is just to use it to, I know how to do X, I’m just going to do X about two times faster, which is boy is entrancing.

John Jantsch (17:50): It’s

Matt Beane (17:50): Amazing. You can get it to write a memo in five seconds when it would take you 30 minutes. Geez. And that’s where folks stop. That’s the difference between top performers and average performers. The top performer goes and says, what could I do with this that I would’ve never even dreamed possible before? For instance, I made my master’s students who were most of them fearful of coding, had no coding expertise. And I said, you have three weeks on your own no help, but from chat GT to become a data analytics person, analyze this dataset and do plots in Python, use coding a solution in Python and then post it on GitHub, which is a shared software manipulation platform. And they looked at me like, are you joking me right now? What kind of class is this? This isn’t computer science. And I said, go. And they all did it.

(18:43): And by the end, I post this on my substack too. In the beginning I have their ratings on how afraid they were, what they thought with that nudge, mandatory, you must go do the thing that you thought was impossible before. And they all did it at the end. That was a shock to all of them, like hot diggity. I had no idea. I thought this was just kind of fancy, auto complete, like fake my own kind of thing instead of change the world. I wasn’t thinking broadly enough. I wasn’t asking the right questions. What could I do with this that I couldn’t do before? And if you can make yourself ask that question and then go for it. Try something really crazy. You’re going to fail. It’s going to be a waste in three nights or maybe 72 hours of your life, but you’ll learn a lot about this new world we’re entering that most folks will not have under their belt.

John Jantsch (19:31): And I think to some degree, what you’re describing is not about the end result, it’s about the journey

Matt Beane (19:37): And really in your bones skill, what you have at the end of that is not just, I know unquote a little bit about ai. It’s like, no, I’ve actually, I tried to decode sperm whale songs. I know talking to somebody who just took my challenge and tried to do that and they got some meaningful interpretation out of the data. It’s not as good as this paper that just got published. Actually doing that work by scientists who, by the way, four years ago got the memo and used AI to decode sperm whale songs. Another person wanted to sub Bruce Springsteen in for Luke Combs in that Grammy performance with Tracy Chapman. They got pretty far and this person didn’t code before. So yeah, that you will know in the deep sense. You’ll have skill that will inform your decision making and leadership in ways that most folks won’t.

John Jantsch (20:26): Well, Matt, I appreciate you taking some moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and talk about the future, I suppose is what we were talking about, right? To some degree and strangely the past.

Matt Beane (20:38): Yeah, exactly. Thousands of years ago, and I’ll just toss in for your listeners only. I posted the first chapter of the book online if they want it, ducttapemarketing.mattbeane.com. It’s sitting right there. They can just go and grab it. Hopefully the book is helpful to them, but the future is now. But I agree. It’s an old dynamic too.

John Jantsch (21:00): Yeah. Awesome. Again, appreciate you dropping by for a few moments, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.