#171: Turning Market Disruptions Into Your Advantage With Terry Jones

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So, please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling incredibly

blessed this morning. Just a wonderful start to the day. The way we begin our day is so, so important. It is for me. As years go on, there's a good sign of whether I'm going to have a productive day. by how I begin that day. And so this morning I made sure that I had a little time for meditation. I spent some time cuddling with my wife. I got to drink quite a bit of water, which is really important that I'm hydrating, especially when I'm going to be doing a podcast or I'm out speaking or anything like that. Taking care of my body is really very, very important. I did a good job of that for Monday morning, which is what it is here at this moment. I know when you guys are consuming, watching, listening to this, it could be any day, anytime, anywhere in the world, which is fascinating. But it is a Monday morning and sometimes coming off the weekend where the rituals will tend to slide just a little bit, or we might do some other things. And just as much as it's a weekend to recover, such an important aspect of us being able to show up as the best versions of ourselves in our businesses or any other area of our lives, we've really got to take care of ourselves. And recovery is such an important component of that. And weekends, ironically, are sometimes when we burn the candle at all ends and just end up that much more exhausted on Monday morning. So it just feels good for it to be Monday. My energy is great. My mind feels clear. And I really feel blessed that I've got an incredible guest, wonderful guest on the show this morning. I'm changing my language. I'm just going to correct that incredible because he's totally credible. We say that our daughter Chelsea pointed that out to me a few months ago. She said, Dad, you know how many times you say the word incredible or unbelievable? And what's the message there? What's the message to the universe when you say something's not credible? Or not believable. So just, you know, language makes a big difference. And when we talk about pivots, for example, the reframe that you can do instantaneously, even when you just catch yourself saying something that maybe isn't as accurate as you want it to be, is so powerful. So this gentleman is truly special, wonderful. And I'm going to read a little bit of his bio because it's pretty remarkable. I have just got to share it with you all. And then of course we'll dig in and I'll ask him some questions about exactly what's going on under the surface there. But Terry Jones began his career as a travel agent. My mom is a travel agent, still to this day a travel agent, so I know what it's like to grow up in a house with a travel agent. He spent 10 years in product marketing at American Airlines. He spent the next 10 years in information technology and then became the Chief Information Officer for American Airlines. And these experiences as a travel agent, as a product marketer, as a CEO prepared him to become the CEO of— get this— Travelocity. Which he led from a team of 6 to a $3 billion public company. He retired from Travelocity when it was taken private and then helped found Kayak.com. Many of you probably use Kayak every single day. I know a lot of us do, where he was the chairman for 7 years until it was sold to Priceline for $1.8 billion with a B dollars. He is the managing principal of On Inc. There's another company called Onit, but On Inc., a consultancy he founded to help companies in their transition to the digital economy. He served on over 17 boards, and today he is a board member with Boingo, SonicWall, Kenzie Academy, something that we had spent quite a bit of time right before we hit the record button talking about, which we may come back to again, and a number of others. He's also an author, the author of On Innovation. He's just released his second book, which I have right here in front of me. disruption off. Terry is a proven innovator and the holder of several patents. He is here with us today to share some innovation ideas, ideas about change. Of course, he's just the perfect guest for our Conscious Pivot show. And Terry, I just want to say thank you. Thanks for making the time and welcome. Thanks for being here.

Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. We've already had a great conversation, so we'll continue.

This is conversation number 2. Actually, Terry and I were just in Panama together because we have the pleasure of being affiliated with a group called TLC, and we were meeting down in Panama. Panama City and for a week retreat. That was a blast. Did you have a good time that week?

I had a great time. I made a lot of great contacts, neat people, and I got to see the Panama Canal, which I've always wanted to see. I read that book, Path Between the Seas, years ago, and it's fascinating. And, you know, and the most interesting thing was, I think to me there, one of the guides said, you know, none of the technology to build the Panama Canal existed 20 years So electricity really had just come into the fore. And the whole thing is gates are driven electrically, the trains that pull the ships through are electric, it's all electric. So that was a big risk. The diggers were all electric. And the steel in those locks is vanadium steel, which was invented, really popularized by Henry Ford in the Model A, super strong steel. They didn't have that either. So 20 years before, they couldn't have built it. And they sort of did it all with new tech and it changed the world. So pretty amazing.

It's a marvel. I mean, it's just to look at it and to see it operationally. And we did, we got to see several ships that night, which was— that blew my mind.

Yeah, pretty amazing. And we saw that they built new locks now for much bigger ships. And the funny thing is that to build the new locks, which are only half a mile long, the canal is 50 miles. Took them 10 years. Now it only took 10 years to build the whole canal the first time. So we haven't gotten a lot faster. That was also pretty interesting.

Yes. Yeah, the story of the Panama Canal is actually quite fascinating and one that, I mean, I recommend just even if you— a beautiful 10-minute video documentary of the canal's origins and how it began with the French. And yeah, they were stopped. I mean, they were stopped cold. It was brutal. I mean, they lost more than 20,000 men in the process, and there was more obstacles than they could handle, really. And it was remarkable that it became ours. I mean, that it became the United States project at that time. So it was FDR's brother, so it was—

Theodore.

Theodore, that's right, Teddy Roosevelt, that decided that this was a major initiative. And I mean, they literally took 3 years, I think it was 3 years in between where they realized that the mosquitoes were carrying malaria and other things, and I think it was, uh, What was it, yellow fever that was killing so many? Malaria.

That was a revolution to understand that diseases came from insects because before it was always bad air. Malaria is French, right? Bad air, mal air, and not true. So it was as much a public health innovation as it was a technical innovation. And we realized that whole period, we went from kerosene lanterns to electric light. We went from the speed of a horse to an 80-mile-an-hour train. We went in communications from a letter that went by ship to the speed of light, right? So the amount of change in labor went from the power of a horse to steam.

Yes.

So we think we're in the time of most dramatic change, and that's what my book is about, but it's happened before.

You don't write about the Panama Canal in Disruption, do you?

No, no, I don't. I do write about sort of the beginnings of the computer era. And I worked at American Airlines, big centralized sort of steam-powered mainframes, right? And the huge change now is connectivity. I mean, the telephone took 75 years to reach 100 million people. Pokémon Go took 15 days.

Or Fortnite probably tripled that in half the time.

Right, exactly. But you think about, it's the connectedness of innovation today that is driving the pace of change. And the fact that computing has moved from these steam-powered centralized machines to the cloud, and that sort of tipped the balance because we now have 2 guys and a dog in Silicon Valley have the computing power of a Fortune 500 company. And that's allowed startups to move so very quickly and powering disruption.

This is a question I don't get to ask that many people, but this is right up your alley, I think. So there's a disruption statistic that I'll sometimes quote, which is that, and I believe you made reference to it when you spoke So, in 1955, they started the Fortune 500, which is always funny because I'll sometimes ask an audience— I don't mention this with every audience, but I'll say, so, how many companies were in the Fortune 500 when it began in 1955? And that actually gets— there's like a pause in the room to see if there's a trick here. There were 500 companies. And there's a giggle, right? And I go, well, and how many of those same companies are around today? And then people look and, you know, and these are the 500 most prolific, most successful, most innovative, whatever accolade you want to provide, right? These were the best of the best. And 88% of those companies don't exist to this day. And yet the industries do. It's not like the industry got, you know, it wasn't like we were talking about in the Fortune 500 were sort of horseshoe companies.

US Steel.

Yeah. I mean, exactly. Why is that the case? But then I'm also thinking in this moment with everything you just said about connectivity, do you think that's going to alter the statistic? Because right now I think on average a Fortune 500 company lasts about 18 years. That's more of the current numbers that they, uh, they're not around forever.

I think it's going to get shorter. Because so many of the new entrants are software-based, these large software-based companies, and software changes at such speed. It's very, very difficult to maintain the edge for a long time. So you're the expert in this kind of software, you're the best COBOL guy ever. Well, that's gone. Right. And so you have to continuously adapt and change, and it's difficult. And you get to the point where you're somebody like Oracle and you're mostly acquiring companies, You know, in trying to adapt to the cloud. You can have a new leader, Satya Nadella, who's completely revolutionized Microsoft, did billions on AI, and brought that company back. You know, sometimes people make it. IBM has had sort of 3 rebirths.

Yes.

They're kind of on the wheel of life. And we'll see now, Ginni Rometty just left and we have a new team of 2 guys, but it's very hard to pull that act off. And you see Ford struggling and you see Mary Barra, Making the statements at GM, we're going to be fully electric, we're going to totally change, we're going to revolutionize the company. Very hard to change all of that. There's a great story about Reed Hoffman at Netflix that, you know, when he went from mailing CDs to doing it online, he got to the point where he had to get the CD guys out of the weekly meetings.

Yeah.

Because they were just talking about the past. It was still a good business, but he said, you know, we don't want to do that anymore. And all you guys are like anchors. And if you don't pivot, you know, and pivot people, you get stuck.

That's great you brought that up. How would you define pivot? Let's say not just the word pivot per se, but the places where that concept actually is almost like a lifeline or a life skill for organizations and for their leaders today.

Well, I'll give you an example. You know, my last company was an AI startup. So I mentioned off air that I got a call from Ginni Rometty at IBM and she said, can you teach IBM Watson? About travel. And we started this company and it was always risky because it was the technology looking for a problem. But we built some marvelous products that dramatically increased the rate of purchase, online purchases in travel using natural language search and computer vision. But we were selling to IT and IT wasn't buying. They had their list of things to do and AI wasn't high on that list and they didn't really care about— we should have been selling to the CFO. And eventually near the end of the company, just before we ran out of money, we said, why don't we see if we can do this same thing in digital advertising? So we built a conversational chat into a standard DoubleClick and it worked like crazy. And guess what? Marketing guys take risks every day because they never know what works.

Well, you have to test. It's constantly A/B testing.

They're constantly testing and constantly changing and they started buying. So we pivoted, you know, sort of to a marketing company.

Right.

And later I got this graph from McKinsey and it showed all the industries that deployed AI and travel is dead last of all industries. And I wish I'd seen that graph before I started the company. I would have said, this is stupid. But we did pivot. I mean, we kept our core, we knew what we were about, but we said, it just isn't working in this way. So let's transform that. And sell it to people who wanted to buy. That's one kind of a pivot.

Right. Well, you use Netflix as an example. And so, your book is about disruption. I really feel like these are such compatible topics and it's actually fun to have the 2 books sitting on top of each other. It's like I can fan them out like that because they're such related things. And the way I look at a pivot, we've got sort of 2 types. I mean, there's a million. In fact, our new book is more about the micro pivots. I won't get into that for the moment. There's sort of pivot by design. And then what I was calling pivot by default. Now I'm thinking of it more like pivot by disruption. And it's really not even for me pivot by disruption, it's pivot by self-disruption. So there is that pivot by that when we wait too long. So for example, I invested, a friend of mine was working for Polaroid and you remember Polaroid, right? I mean, Kodak. I mean, these are things that now they're probably kids, millennial age that are, or not kids, let's just say millennial age people, Who don't even know what Kodak is. Never heard of Polaroid. They're the patent holders. They were the creators of digital photography, but they wouldn't cannibalize their existing instant photography business. So here I am, got a friend working there, invested some money in the stock, and within a couple of years, the company's bankrupt. And it was their competitors that got to market first and were able to seize that opportunity for digital.

The day Kodak went bankrupt, Instagram raised a billion. Photography didn't go away. So it just changed. And the problem was, They were totally surrounding a technology that got blown up, not by another camera company, but the cell phone guys killed them really in the end. Digital photography started it, but it was really the cell phones that did them in. So it's very, very hard to change your business model. But it's interesting—

Well, but that's the question, right, Terry, is that you can wait for the market to disrupt you, which I think is what— you do a lot of public speaking and you're in front of people all the time. They're still playing it safe, right? There's this whole concept of how can we protect our turf, just like those guys at Netflix that had the CDs or whatever, you know,

going— Self-deception, not self-disruption.

Self-deception, that's it.

That's what's going on. I had to speak to the Yellow Pages. This is about probably 12 or 14 years ago, and I just come out of Travelocity, and they wanted me to talk to the Yellow Pages about innovation. And I want to stand up and say, ladies and gentlemen, you're toast. End of speech, right? But they were paying me a lot of money, so I took about an hour to weave it together for them. They could have been Google. They were Google if they'd gone online. They had the data. Google didn't.

They had the data. Right.

It didn't work. So you've got to take risks and you've got to experiment. And that's sort of the number one lesson in my book is that companies, every company's founded by a risk taker. But when they grow up, they get rid of risk because they've got to make the quarter and we can't do that. And they become operationally focused. The CEO of Panera Bread says, Our delivery muscle gets way stronger than our discovery muscle. But if you work out with a trainer, you don't just work out one arm, you work them both. And you have to keep discovering and you have to keep changing. And some companies are doing that. One of the things I talk about in the book, because I talk about 10 disruptive technologies and 5 new business models. One of the business models that's quite interesting is called outcomes. And traditional companies are looking at outcomes. So for example, Komatsu, who builds heavy construction equipment. Instead of selling equipment, they now have drone-based diggers. They come out to your construction site, they use drones to measure how much dirt you have to remove, and then they use these automated diggers to remove it. So they moved from selling dirt removal equipment to selling dirt removal. That's an outcome. Philips just went to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and they said, we want to sell you light. And they said, what? So we want to sell you light instead of lighting. So they signed a 20-year contract to provide light in the airport. And what did that cause them to do? Well, they immediately put in bulbs that use half the energy because they're paying the electric bill. They put in bulbs that last 75% longer because they pay for them. And guess what? When the bulbs burn out, they take them back to the factory and they're in this circular economy of recycling them because it's now in their interest to do so because they're not in the business of sell and throw away. So they have a much more profitable, larger business based around what they know, lighting, but they changed what they sold into light.

So it's a new paradigm.

Yeah.

Part of that disruption or that pivot is where is there a new paradigm that's possible? And selling an outcome or selling a process, which is what it sounds, feels like that's—

The process, yeah.

Yeah, a little different. Terry, so I mean, look, there are lots of people listening and watching this that have taken risks and gotten banged up doing it. And then there are those other ones who are still on the sidelines who probably watched their friends year after year, the ones who took a risk and got banged up and go, see, I'm so glad I didn't do that. Right?

Yeah.

I mean, but yet still they don't have one thing that when I woke up this morning, this was the word that sort of came into my awareness when I was thinking of you, I was thinking of myself and I'm thinking of all of us and that's freedom. Like, where are we without freedom? And so, I'm not saying this to say you can't work within someone else's organization or be an employee and not have freedom. But there's a certain freedom from our creative expression, I believe, is stifled in a lot of people.

Yeah, but I think you can have freedom if you have safety.

You gonna share something about how to have both?

Well, I think so. There's something in corporations called the bozone layer. And the bozone layer is the impenetrable layer of middle management that stops good ideas from moving upward, right? And because they don't wanna take risks.

Bozone layer, is that what you call it?

Bozone layer. It's a layer of bozones, right?

I'm literally taking it seriously, writing my notes. I'm going, the bozone layer. Wait, no, the bozone layer.

It's a layer of bozos. It's not their fault. They don't take risks because they've seen what happens to people who do, right? Right. So what's incumbent upon leaders to do is to say, okay, here's Bob's idea. It's going great. It's a new idea. Here's John's idea. It failed. And we're giving John another chance. In fact, I promoted it because the idea failed. John didn't fail. And here's Barbara's idea and it's doing okay. And if people see that you kill projects and not people, then they'll take a risk because there's safety. I mean, look, in circuses, people get shot out of a cannon, but they do that because there's a net, right? There's got to be a net.

Except the Flying Wallendas, which have none.

Well, the Great Wallendas, yeah, it's a different deal. But their motto is, you fall, you die.

It's a different context for sure.

You got to keep hiring a lot. And that's the case in many companies. You fall, you die. And that's stupid because, hey, if I do good, I might get a 5% raise. And if I do bad, I'll get fired. It's stupid. So the only way, you know, big companies and you take like Google, they celebrate failures and they have a celebration if somebody is strong enough to say, this project is a zombie, we should kill it. And hey, that's great. We want to do that because they know that in the startup world, 75% of startups fail. So why would their little project succeed?

You

know, they know 75% of them are going to fail, but that's— how many— Edison said, I never failed. I just found 10,000 things that didn't work.

Yes. I heard you say that there are organizations that are actually— somebody said to me some years ago, compensation drives conduct. It drives behavior, right? You said that organizations that are actually paying, giving bonuses to project managers to kill their own projects early enough in the process. Just say a little bit about what that is because that blew my mind when I heard you say that.

Because you don't want to keep spending the money on a zombie. And that's the other thing that happens because people say, well, I can finish the marathon. I can finish the marathon. It's going to work.

Eventually I'll be right.

And if you use data, and today we're a database society and you can do A/B tests and you can see if it's going to work, say, no, it's not going to work.

It's not going to work.

Now, obviously there's some ideas that you just have— there are people keep hammering their head against the wall and it finally works, like the Post-it note story and many others, right? That probably wouldn't have succeeded in corporations. But in corporations, if you allow— if you say, hey, we're going to do 100 experiments this year, I only expect a small percentage of them to succeed, and that's okay. And it's going to be driven by what the customer says. And does the customer want this? That's what's so important. I mean, what's going on at Tesla is so exciting because every day— Hmm. I have a Tesla and I see these tweets that go to Elon, And he says, well, that's a good idea. And 2 months later, it's in the car. So the customer is really driving the development. And that's because we have these new cloud-connected products where you get feedback so quickly.

Hmm.

And that's what Microsoft has learned. That's what online companies have learned. But now offline companies are learning where Caterpillar now has smart tractors where they actually learn what the farmer is doing rather than getting anecdotes from the dealer

Right. Completely different reconnaissance, if you will. Like they're getting real-time information from the field. Terry, so very few people that we run into, that anybody runs into, frankly, that have started and exited 2 multi-billion-dollar companies. You happen to be one of those individuals. But you said in between, and I want people to get this because I think this is really important, with all that, that there have been ventures you've started, great ideas, you know, Somebody once said, again, I just love this, that every great idea I've ever had always, or every, sorry, every mistake I've ever made started out as a great idea. And you had a great idea, but it didn't work out. You started to tell us about that. And so there's been things that haven't worked out, failures, loss of investment capital, et cetera. Yeah. What's the mindset component for someone who's not yet exited a billion-dollar company for themselves and is having that, is going through that failure or that sort of daily barrage of humiliation of the feeling of Just being humiliated.

Innovation is not the Olympics. In the Olympics, you get one chance. And if you're not in the top 3, you're probably out of it forever, right? And I like to say innovation is like baseball. And in baseball, if you fail 70% of the time, you are awesome.

You're a Hall of Famer.

You're a Hall of Famer. You are the best ever. And that's what happens in startups. You got to move on and just say, you know, or I have people who say to me, I'm in a big company. I've got all these ideas. And the company, my boss has never changed. I said, find another company if that's what you want to do. Now, if you want reliable, just a job, come there, punch a ticket, that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're a person who wants to change the world, then go ahead and change it and know that your nose is going to get bloody. And look, in Silicon Valley, we look for people who've had successful failures, if you will. In other words, hey, we did everything right. We hired the right people. We thought we had a good idea. Hey, people gave us millions of dollars. It's not that we didn't execute well. It turns out that nobody really wanted that product, or in the end, we couldn't manufacture it. Okay. Now, if the same person does that over and over again, makes the same stupid mistakes, obviously, maybe they're not cut out for this. You look for people who have experience in doing this. I've talked to 2 startups already this morning before I talked to you. who were calling me asking for advice. And this guy said, I'm only one person. What do I do? I've got the idea. The software's ready. I said, hey, you don't have a CTO and you don't have a marketing guy. You better get a great gal to be your CTO, a great marketing guy, and go for it. But you got to have people around you who can help you, and particularly people maybe who've done it before because you're a first-time entrepreneur. So we're going to look for that. But investors invest in 2 things, the idea and the person.

The management. Oh, you know what? Do they invest? Is one more important than the other, Terry? Meaning the business model versus the management of that?

It's probably, you know, the people. I mean—

More the people than anything, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Because the model's going to be wrong.

Right. Wrong. Right. Right. Wrong.

It's going to pivot. It's going to change. I mean, my last company, my partner said, I was chairman of this company and he was on the board. He said, well, let's go out and raise money. I said, well, we don't have a CEO yet. He said, yeah, but we have a team and we're working and we'll go out and raise money. I said, I don't think that's going to work. Well, I have 30 meetings to tell you it doesn't work. And they said, Terry, if you'll be CEO, we'll invest. And I said, no, I don't want to be CEO. I'm 70 years old. I don't want to do that. And they said, too bad. Come back when you have a leader because we invest in the leader.

Right.

And we want to make sure the person who's running the ship knows how to run the ship. And so that's really important. But to go back to your previous question, if it fails, You've got to move on. Now, I think you also have to pivot and you have to listen. We've all seen those people on Shark Tank when all 5 sharks say, this is a stupid idea, and the guy says, I'm continuing just the way I was. I think you should change a little bit. Listen. Sometimes they're right and sometimes all the sharks are wrong. And if you've got enough money, you can hang on and do that, but usually it means you better change a little bit.

Well, Jeff Bezos ended up right, and I think everything pointed to him being wrong for a really long time. I mean, his model was not working for— And I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs that they feel so strongly about something, they're blind, they're not objective any longer. And—

I would disagree. I think his model was working. He was just losing a lot of money. But he was great because he just convinced Wall Street that losing money was good and we're going to continue to do it.

Well, that's his vision, right? So I mean—

On Wall Street. And it's the same thing that's true with Musk. I gave a speech recently called Henry Ford versus Elon Musk, Building Car Companies 100 Years Apart. And they're very similar guys. It's quite interesting. They both had a couple of bankrupt companies when they started. They both had failed. They both wanted to build a car for the masses, but they had to start out selling expensive cars to get the money to build cheaper cars. And they're both irascible, difficult people, and they both never gave up. You know, that's Steve Jobs the same way.

And Bezos too, right? Never quit. There's no quit there, right?

No, there's no quit there. And I was talking to somebody who wants to work with him on a charitable thing, and I said, We got to approach it from a business. He's not there yet. He's not a charitable guy yet. Gates is, but Bezos has still changed the world. So let's think about it as a business and maybe he'll respond to it that way. So you have to be tough and you have to believe in yourself. I mean, how did Steve Jobs take BlackBerrys and turn them into phones? It's clarity and focus. He absolutely knew what he wanted and he focused on the endpoint and he wouldn't give up until he got there. People told him it couldn't be done, He said it can be done, but he was in the enviable position of having a pile of money to go do that.

Exactly.

Not everybody does.

Right. Well, you're describing in many ways, I think the— so I asked you about mindset and then you brought up that people that Wall Street will invest or venture capitalists will invest in the leadership, will invest in the CEO. So if you could, and maybe this is not so much a recipe as it's just a rumination, I suppose, on what is it that makes for that CEO being investment-worthy, let's say? You know, they're talking today, we're in the election cycle and it's all about electability.

Electability.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, they're looking for— first of all, if there's a great idea, they want somebody who hopefully— like this guy I just talked to who's starting a new kind of insurance business. Well, he's been in both tech and insurance, so he has the subject matter expertise.

Right.

to do this. He knows the business well enough and he wants to blow it up and he has passion. And if he had a great education, that would be terrific too. And he's been in business before and that's great, but he hasn't done a startup. So they're looking for passion and they're looking for somebody who's going to work 24 hours a day and is hungry. Right. I hired a CEO for a company once and it was a startup and he'd already done a successful startup. He was too rich. He just didn't want to work hard enough anymore because you can't ever stop—

Not hungry enough.

Not hungry enough. And I didn't really know that. He seemed hungry. He was lean. He was a runner, looked hungry, but he wasn't

really.

So that's important. You got to be hungry, but subject matter expertise and passion is really important. Now you can have people who don't know anything about the industry and want to blow it up, come at it laterally, right? But usually those people better have a couple of startups under their belt. Because the CTO at Kayak would not hire anybody with travel experience. He wanted none of them to know travel.

Fresh, right.

Now, I did it differently at Travelocity. I hired 50/50. I hired 50% people who knew travel and 50% people who didn't, and they fought like cats in a bag. It was crazy. But I thought that was good, right? Was it good? Yeah, it was good to mix it up. And I think that's important. I encourage corporations, hire people from the outside, hire millennials, hire people who aren't like you, hire people

That's a very good tip, actually.

William Wrigley said, if 2 people in business always agree, one of them is irrelevant. Right?

Yes. Who's redundant in that conversation?

I don't want somebody who just says I'm right all the time. I want people to tell me I'm full of baloney. And that's important. Now, there are also— the end of my book is a whole series of things that you can do to avoid disruption as a traditional company, but it's good for startups as well. I mean, one of them is lose the Luddites. If you have people who just don't believe in technology, won't change, they're the naysayers all the time, well, let me play devil's advocate, get rid of them. They belong somewhere, but they don't belong in a startup. They're not there.

What do you do with the bozos?

Yeah. If they fail over and over again, they put them on, as we used to say in America, put them on the bus. They were gone. You just can't wait. And also, Kayak, the same CTO, He would go all over the world to hire the best programmers, engineers he could find. And the last question he asked in the interview was, who's the smartest person you know? And then he would go hire them. And so we had a team of World Series champs and we went public with 200 people because we had such a good team. B-level engineers are way worse than A-level engineers. There's just a huge difference. So if you're going to do a startup, don't hire your best friend. Unless they're a genius, you hire the best person you can find. You got to build a super team and spend a lot of time at it. And getting those super people together is going to make all the difference in getting to success.

Did you read Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs?

I did.

Yeah. What'd you think of his philosophy Isaacson attributed to him that he, you know, about A and B players especially?

It's absolutely true. Yeah.

It rang true for me as well. It's harsh.

I mean, it's harsh. Now look, people, In the whole world, there are a lot of B players and you have a big company. That's okay because they can do a lot of good work, but it's very hard to have them in a company that's moving at light speed. So you've really got to look for the best people you can find. It makes a huge difference because there is no perpetual motion machine. You got to keep changing. That's important.

Has that always been the case, do you think, Terry? I mean, that we got to keep changing the way we have? It is the case today. I mean, because The model, I mean, we used this word earlier, paradigm. The paradigm has changed. I mean, business today, the future of work is now. I mean, this is a very—

I think we feel that, but think about, again, let's go back to 1850 to 1900. No electric light. 90% of people worked on the farm. Today, 3% do. So we've gone through these huge changes before. I mean, the big corporation didn't exist in the 1800s. That existed in the 1900s. That's where they really started. And we had trust busting and these huge companies built up. And then there were theories of management and how to do it. And that's changing again. We continually evolve. But I think the pace of innovation has always come from small companies. It's always come from startups. It has forever. I'm listening to Edison's biography right now, and it's fascinating the number of things that were invented in that period. But connectivity is driving it much faster. I think AI, I talk a lot about AI in the book, is going to move things very, very quickly. And the combination of AI and drones, AI and robotics, AI and Internet of Things is going to change business profoundly in a short period of time. And those businesses who aren't investing, I think one of the most critical things to remember about AI is this is a learning system. These systems learn 24/7/365. So if you haven't started with AI, your competitor— I mean, look at Tesla. They have 10 billion miles of learning.

Right.

Ford has none. So when it comes to rolling it out, Ford has the expertise to build things, but they're not going to have 10 billion miles of software learning and a single software platform to put it on. That's a big detriment. The financial companies that are into AI are moving very, very fast. AI is being deployed in many, many businesses. And as these models learn, businesses get smarter, can make faster decisions. And the people who don't bother with that are going to get left behind.

Terry, I've got 2 questions left for you. First of all, with Disruption Off, what's your highest aspiration for this book? You know, I didn't read the subtitle. I want to put that out there as well. The Technical Disruption Coming for Your Company and What to Do About It. So this is an incredible resource, great book. It'll be a part of our show notes. So everybody that wants to find out where they can buy the book and find out more about it as well as about you, will be in our show notes, of course. But what's your highest aspiration for the book and why you wrote it?

In this part of my career, I didn't have to write a book and I don't have to be a speaker, but I do it. And I do it not only professionally, but as you and I discussed for the State Department all over the world, talking to startups. I've been to 8 countries now doing outreach to startups. I think it's important that traditional companies in the United States, Get with it. Get with the program and realize we're not the center of the earth anymore. The Chinese are generating way more PhDs than we are. They're iterating their government policy around research and development. There are a lot of government policies they have that are terrible, but they're investing a lot in research and development. We're not. Our retraining of people here in the US is going down, not up. US companies have to wake up and they have to realize that they went through this hell of outsourcing, They outsourced all the business and they outsourced all the workers away, and that's been devastating. But they also— we lost whole industries. We lost steel, we lost furniture, we lost electronic manufacturing. We don't have to lose everything, but we just have to look at these new technologies and say, wow, Internet of Things, 3D printing, we can bring things back to the United States. We can be the leaders in drones and blockchain and all this stuff if we take risks. You know, if we have—

Yeah. What's the wake-up call really?

If we have fearlessness, if we fix the odds, if we— I talk about don't play pinball. You saw the video in my speech of the pinball of decision-making where every department has a flipper that can say no, right? And so we're used to saying no and not yes. So I go out and make these speeches to big trade associations and hopefully some of the people, and I get feedback from them, will say, wow, this helped me think about my business in a new way and I need to apply these new technologies and maybe more importantly, new business models. So that I'm not disrupted. I don't want to have a historical marker in my town that said, here lies the Jones Company, right?

Right. Rest in peace.

Yeah, rest in peace. They missed the zig, they zagged, right? So that's my goal for the book.

Well, I'm personally happy that that's your goal. I think this is a message that must be repeated. It's like, it's a redundancy to the message that has to be, we have to be okay with cascading. I think as Patrick Lencioni would say, cascading these redundant messages because they're important. They have to get in. We're sort of hardwired for safety. I mean, we know that if you study the brain, we know we've got these default mode networks that want to have us just sort of keep ourselves from too much harm.

And, uh, the guy who wrote the book at Pixar says, you know, they call it plussing,

right?

You have to say, you have to say and not but. Don't say but.

But immediately negates everything that came. I love you, but I respect you, but, right?

Yeah.

Um, and I'd like to plus what you're saying. You know, it's just feedback. I mean, everything is feedback, right, Terry? I mean, if we took the money aside, if we took this, the idea of success and failure and what that meant to our self-esteem aside, all of it, strip it all away. What are we really talking about? Just, we're creating solutions for things that, or we're iterating, use that word earlier, we're evolving as human beings and just take the judgment out and have nothing but pure feedback. We iterate that much more quickly. We'd get to solutions that much more quickly.

Take criticism seriously and not personally.

There you go. That's a wonderful— take it seriously.

Yeah, take it seriously, but don't let it hurt you. I got to change.

This is a great lead into the final question, which is about a topic that I do a lot of— fascinated by it, do a lot of research on it and speak about it, which is resilience. How would you define resilience? And it can be personal or it could be in the context we've been speaking about in business. Because organizational resilience, I think, is a very important thing. So what's your take on that?

Let's go back to the topic we've been on, which is failure. You know, I think it's getting up and dusting yourself off and going out again. I'm the chairman of a Boys and Girls Camp in Minnesota. For a month, these kids are out in the woods taking canoe trips. And I did this when I was a kid. And I remember having to carry my load across the first portage between 2 lakes and falling on my butt in a giant mud puddle. And I was 9 and my counselor came up and said, get up, let's go. Come on. And I got up and soaking wet and covered in mud. And I staggered across this quarter-mile portage and I was thrilled. You know, I had succeeded. And I went back and did that for 12 more years. I mean, I loved that challenge of being out in the woods and succeeding with a group of people. And I think it had a lot to do with my later life is that I look for the challenge and you're always scared and you always feel a little bit weird in your gut when you're out there on the edge. But if you don't feel that way, you're not changing the world. If you're just comfortable, it's not good enough.

Yeah. Comfort's highly overrated, huh? On some level.

You got to have uncomfort. One of the guys who started Google said, you always do something uncomfortably exciting. And that's right. You have to be a little uncomfortable to be resilient. I mean, you're uncomfortable and then it doesn't work and you say, well, it didn't work. Now, why didn't that work? And what else can I do? And the what else can I do comes from, I think, the most important quality for entrepreneurs is curiosity. You have to be curious. You have to be curious about what didn't happen, what did happen, how can I change it, what technology could I apply, what were the people. I'm curious, right? And if you're curious about things, you don't just sit back and say, oh, well, to hell with it.

Well, I mean, you were a CIO. You had everything going for you. You could have stayed on that track, and then you— but you stepped out into this world, and this is before Travelocity, and that was a pretty insane decision from a career standpoint.

Oh, it was.

By some people's estimation, right?

I had a big mortgage, a big salary, a wife and 2 kids. I said, no, I got to run this little thing. It'll work and let's see what happens. And I figured I could get another job if it didn't work as a CIO, but CIO was boring and it wasn't interesting to me. It was like orchestrating cats and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I lost all my hair running the biggest computer system in the world.

Yeah. I lost all my hair being a lawyer for— I know the feelings.

So I just said, the heck with it. And gosh, it grew like a weed in the spring and it was so much fun. And the nice part was that I knew enough about running a big company that as it grew, I didn't have to leave, which happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. It gets too big. But I'd had multi-hundred million dollar budgets and thousands of people working for me before. So I was lucky in that regard. My first book on innovation talks about building something like Travelocity inside a big company. And there are a lot of interesting lessons from that we could talk about on another show. It's intrapreneurship is real different than entrepreneurship.

Fascinating. Terry, what's one thing you do daily to maintain resilience? I mean, you seem like a very harmonious guy. You know, some people might say balanced, but I've met you, spent time with you. See, you just seem like your feet are, you know, you're grounded, which is good. And you're coming off of a business that didn't work as well, right? So, but you're back in the game again, right?

So, yeah. And one thing I just, I started a year ago, I had 2 goals last year. One was to write another book and the other was to lose a lot of weight. I had gotten way too heavy. And I had my first grandkid coming along and I went off to the spa in Spain and they taught me some things and I've lost 45 pounds since then. And one of the things they said to me, the longevity people, you want to have a long life, start the morning with miso soup.

Yes.

And every morning now I sit down quietly. I live out in the woods in Lake Tahoe and I just look out at the river running by my house and I have a cup of miso soup. It's a really nice way to start the day. You know, I used to start with caffeine, which is like stepping on the accelerator. And now I just start with miso. I don't recite haikus or anything, but I guess I could at the same time. But it's a nice way for me to start the day.

Are you a meditator? Are you—

I'm not, although I did—

How about prayer? Are you a prayer?

I'm not a prayer, but I did start the meditations with Dawson Church down at TLC, and I really like those. I'm going to do some of that. My brother is much more into that side of life. So we lecture together. He lectures on creativity. I lecture on innovation. So he's the creative side.

He's a special guy too. The two of you, I mean, just the two of you, just two brothers and—

Yeah, real different.

Real different, yeah. It's like my brother and I, just my brother and I, very, very different and yet very similar.

And, you know, we both have been blessed with success. And yeah, so I don't meditate yet, but I may after learning from Dawson. I'm trying to do some more of it.

Miso soup's a good way to begin. Well, listen, I've so enjoyed this conversation. I know there's just people out there probably pulled off to the side of the road because they wanted to listen carefully, take notes. And I will say, get this book. This is an incredible book, Disruption Off. As I said, it'll be part of our show notes.

Yeah, it's on Amazon and I've got an audiobook as well that I narrated and get on Kindle. So enjoy it. It's a really quick read because it's like my first book was 72 3-page chapters. It's a cookbook. Right? You can read it front to back, back to front, any way you want. Open it up to teams or risk or whatever and use it when you need it. Keep it handy.

Resource. It's a tool.

Resource. It's a tool. And everybody's into short-form media. Well, that's what it is.

Yeah. Fantastic. When it comes to short-form tools and resources, I'm going to leave everybody with the ritual that I've had for more than 10 years, a waking ritual. I really believe fundamentally that the first input, let's say, I'm not so much a tech That's not my paradigm. I was an English major. I've always kind of gone down that road. Even as a lawyer, it was more around ideas and language and things. But I'm more comfortable with tech now than I've ever been before. So I'll say this. So it's the first keystroke of the day. For me, it's this concept of waking up, waking up and imagining that as I'm waking up and as we all wake up, it's as if we're given a brand new opportunity, a brand new shot each day to program, to use that tool of programming Right out of the gate to create what that day is going to be for us. And so if you get up as I used to get up, feeling sort of sense of dread or anxiety about the day, or just rush to get that cup of coffee, get my heart racing, and even sometimes feeling some other emotions, just anger or disappointment or whatever the things are, my day would tend to go sideways pretty quickly. I mean, I remember commuting into the city. It was coming from New Jersey, getting to my office in Manhattan, and I could get so angered in traffic within a half hour. I'm not alone. I know there's a lot of people out there like that. So the way we begin, that first keystroke, if you will, to start the day is incredibly important. So let's wake up. That's the first thing. I mean, Terry, you agree to wake up tomorrow?

Yeah. I'd like to wake up tomorrow.

Right. No guarantee.

No guarantee. No guarantee.

For any of us. So it really is something when we realize in that moment tomorrow that we are waking up, you just go, hey, I remember Terry saying, you know, no guarantee. Well, I've got another day. It's something to be grateful for. Gratitude.

Tell Alexa to turn on your miso soup.

No kidding. Right. Have Alexa put up the miso soup. Say I'm grateful. And then if you want, I know your brother did a very, a wonderful TED Talk about seeing what's right with the world. Celebrating what's right with the world. So my version of that are these 4 simple words, takes 10 seconds. You start the day with that gratitude, that feeling. That is blessing, and then say out loud, "I love my life. I love my life." Terry, do you love your life?

I do indeed.

I could tell, man.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Ah, you're a wonderful guest. Thanks so much, brother. Appreciate it, and we'll see you all soon. Ciao for now.

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