Creating Excellence In Business Through Leaders Who Desperately Care With Tom Peters - Replay

How do you become a true leader in a way that's genuine and caring? In this episode, I speak with Tom Peters, who honorably served in the Navy and is the bestselling co-author of In Search of Excellence, the book that changed the way the world does business and is often tagged as the best business book ever. In November 2017, Tom received the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award. And in this episode, Tom shares that a leader's role is to make every living human being better and more successful in the way that they work. You need to connect with others as individual human beings, Tom says, not as job categories. Being decent, caring, and thoughtful when getting your job done despite all of the roadblocks is essential. We also discussed how to show your team that you truly care and the role of a leader in the new landscape of digital work. So, sit back and enjoy this replay conversation of my discussion with Tom Peters.

Life happens and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Change Proof Podcast. I have a great honor today to have as my guest, the one, the only, the unique Tom Peters. If you are someone who has studied business management, excellence in business, the authors of pretty much the most cutting-edge thought and thinking about what it means to succeed or how it is that we can create successful enterprises, how it is that we manage people effectively. This is the guy who is really at the forefront of so much of that. He has been an innovator for a very, very long time. So I'll share a little bit about his bio and his background, and then we're going to invite Tom into the conversation. He is a graduate of Cornell University as an undergrad, I should say, and graduated graduate school at Stanford, served honorably in the US military, in the Navy, worked in government, worked for McKinsey and Company, that storied consulting firm, for many, many years. And then struck out on his own and really changed the landscape with a seminal book called In Search of Excellence, a book that sold, God knows, I hope it sold millions and millions of copies. I imagine it has. It's been quoted. It's been used. And Tom has been speaking about what it means to be excellent. How do you create excellence in business and in management, in particular, how you manage other people effectively so that they themselves can grow as a result of your management? Something that we are in such great need of now are models for how it is that we can lead and manage other people, not just effectively, not just productively, But in a way that facilitates their own professional growth, their own personal growth. And Tom has been talking about this, teaching about this, has shared things about how it is that we do this tangibly for so long now. I'm so thrilled to have Tom on the show, and I'm just going to welcome you once again, Tom. It's great to have you on the Change Proof Podcast and can't wait to hear what we've got to chat about today. So, Tom, you, you, you probably have heard your own introduction a time or two. Like, for me, it's always just a little surreal standing in the wings waiting to be, you know, brought up on stage, listening to the introduction. And, and on some level, um, it's, it's just— I feel a little uncomfortable even just sort of listening to the way that thing unfolds. And, and now you've heard me sort of introduce you. Um, Tom, what's something that's not written that's not stated in your bio or your introduction that you would love for people to know about you?

Well, no jail time, I'm delighted to say. Though, though, if you are my age, driving sober was not all that common. And, uh, if you did overdo it a little bit— I was in Maryland— the policeman would stop you. And I'd had this happen a couple times. And he would say, Look, I'm not going to give you a ticket. You're going to pull over on the side of the road. You're going to stay on the side of the road. I'm coming back in an hour. And if your car is moved, you get a DUI. And it was a different era. On that topic— and I know I'm digressing— I want the statue in Washington at some point to be built to that woman who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Yes.

I'm not an expert, but I think literally from what I've read, she has saved tens of thousands of lives. And that really is fantastic. I should never be talking lightly about, you know, over-the-limit driving.

Yeah.

I'm trying to figure out the answer to the question. Well, one thing that sometimes is in the introduction, but not much, is literally— I went to wonderful places to school like Cornell, but the one block of time I would never trade is my 4 years in the Navy.

Yeah.

And not because of military discipline or anything like that, but my first 2 years were in Vietnam. And my commanding— I was a civil engineer. There's a group called the Seabees, And they are combat engineers, basically. And I was in a combat engineering battalion in the northern part of Vietnam. And my commanding officer was— and God bless you to my father— the most important mentor in my life and the most important teacher about the topic of leadership. He was tough as nails. He wanted us to get things built. He was, you know, ornery old soul. But of course it's an exaggeration, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was truly loved by his sailors. You know, not the junior officers like me who thought the world of him, but he, you know, there were 900 people in the battalion and I swear to God he cared about each damn one of them. I'm not sure he knew all 900 names, but You know, he would, you know, run into a sailor and the sailor was 19 years old or something. And he always stopped and chatted for 30 seconds and asked him how he was doing. And, you know, there's a way to ask people how they're doing if you're some big CEO type and you know that they could give 2 shits less. But he really wanted— he really was really there. And, you know, I was blind lucky because I had 2 deployments to Vietnam. I had 2 commanding officers. In my books, I've written a little bit about them and I call them Captain Day and Captain Knight.

Right.

And Captain Day was this first one and Captain Knight was the second one. And I said to somebody, you know, all the things I've done professionally have been really cheesy. Any question that needs to be answered, what would Captain Day have done? Do it. What would Captain Knight have done? Avoid it like the plague. But, you know, and then, which really sounds weird, perhaps my first 2 years were in Vietnam effectively. And incidentally, given where this conversation is coming from, in Southern California, I was in a place which you may or may not know called Port Hueneme. It's near Ventura. It's within rock-throwing distance of Ventura. And then for my troubles, as I said to somebody, I think it may even be in my bio, I then went to the real war zone called the Pentagon for 2 years. And what could have been, given what you do for a living and I do for a living, what could be a better experience in learning what a bureaucracy is all about? And one thing I learned, incidentally, and, you know, I like to get noisy about this just a little bit, We talk about the bureaucrats, the bureaucrats in Washington, the bureaucrats in Sacramento, the bureaucrats in wherever. The mid-level bureaucrats in the Pentagon cared as much about— they may have had an infinite amount of bullshit to have to put up with because of the bureaucracy of the federal government. They cared as much about the outcome as somebody working for Elon Musk or somebody working you know, at Starbucks for Howard Schultz. Just a set of decent, caring, thoughtful people going about their job and trying to get it done despite all the roadblocks. And so when people talk to me about government bureaucrats, of course they're jerks, but by and large, they're your next-door neighbor, for God's sakes.

I think— I mean, I'm hearing you say bureaucrats on some level have gotten a bad rap.

Yeah, I mean— Or at least it's half the story being—

it's like half the story, right?

You have to deal with a bunch of shit. Welcome to the real world. And I think the translation of the term is they're trying to get in your way. And the ones I worked with in Washington were trying to get the damn job done. And they had to stumble over 80,000 pages worth of— I got to know this guy. Bob Stone, he was the number 2 guy in the Assistant Secretary of Defense's office for logistics— or not logistics, he was responsible for all military construction. And the first thing he did when he sat down at his desk in the job is he called in some captain or admiral or commander and he said, I just looked at the construction guidance manual. It's 375 pages long. He said, I want a draft from you by the end of next week, maximum length 3 pages. And, you know, literally they took the holy Bible of defense contracting and cut it from 400 pages to 3 pages. And the whole world, you know, did not flip on its axis or anything, but, you know, it's— so the bureaucrat The bureaucrat, 9 out of 10 cases, is trying to do his best of a not easy situation.

Yeah. I mean, I think that that's— we probably will cut the cord on that a little in the moment. But I just think in the world that we're living in right now, where it's so easy to scapegoat— I mean, scapegoating is not something new, obviously. But to cast blame and to create sort of an easy way to judge. I think the bureaucrat has that word, or the way, you know, government and people that are in ministerial positions are seen. It's kind of— it's really pejorative, right? It's a negative thing.

Well, and also, I think, and we could spend the next day on the topic, social media has made it incredibly easy to do it in ways that can be Instantly, truly poisonous.

Yes. And divisive. And I can't imagine, honestly, people wanting to go into that work when it's so easy to have them be under the bus for, you know, for pretty much anything. But I want to go back to what you said in your work. And so many people will be familiar with the books you've written, In Search of Excellence just being one of the many books. No quiz here, Tom, but how many books have you written at this point? I'm just really just curious. 20. 20 books.

Remarkable. Now, here's what's important about that. 20 as a former engineer.

I'm not sure I'm getting the connection.

The most unlikely thing on earth.

That you'd go into a more creative pursuit, you mean? Like right-brainy and all that?

Yeah. Well, what I mean is that engineering at Cornell was just Brutal technical stuff.

Yeah.

And there wasn't any room for all that fizzy frizzy stuff. There was—

You couldn't read between the lines, in other words.

Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. Well, you mentioned Captain Day and Captain Knight. Now, in my work that is primarily about change and resilience as a way to navigate change, and I tell a story about my days as a 19-year-old lifeguard on a beach where we called our— you know, we had a lifeguard corps. It wasn't the military, but there were military people there. It was a system similar in some respects. So we had a captain, our captain, very influential. So Captain Day, Captain Knight, these are— it's a tale of 2 leadership styles, I'm assuming, from that.

Yeah. It's a— as I said, Captain Day was actually tougher about getting things done But he cared about the people who did them. And he made it entirely clear that he did care about them. Right. And when he gave you a hard time, even though he was your commanding officer, when he gave you a hard time, it was usually with a smile on his face. You know, he would call me in and he would say something that I had screwed up. And he would say, now, Tom, you and I both know it could have been a little bit better than that. And he would say it with a smile, but it was a smile that devastated you in the best sense of the word as opposed to— Right. You know, I know we haven't got a million years, but with the second commanding officer, and I will remember this until my deathbed, which I'd like to be a little while from now anyway, I was responsible. I was in the operations group for writing what was called the deployment. report about what we had done for the last 9 months. And the commanding officer called me in one time and he looked me in the eye and he said, Mr. Peters— Mr. is the, what you call a junior officer in the Navy, you don't say lieutenant or anything like that— said, Mr. Peters, do you not know the difference between the word tangible and palpable? And I did the one thing I shouldn't have done. That is, I burst into laughter. But I mean, you know, sure, I should have used the right word, I suppose. But, you know, that was his level of concern. And, you know, the other commanding officer would have said, you know, come on, guys, we got to get that damn bulldozer fixed. I'm coming out to help you.

So, Tom, I think this is so poignant— now there's a word, maybe— in the moment, like to meet the moment that is the Great Resignation. You probably, I don't know if you've seen a time in your history, your long and illustrious history in advising businesses, leaders, et cetera. Have you seen a time when more people have voluntarily decided to leave the ranks of the employed?

No.

And I want you to, if you could, to tie it back to what you just shared with us about those 2 styles of leadership, because I have a theory about it, but nobody cares about my theory in this moment. We want to hear from you.

Well, given the new technology, given the pandemic, given the power of Zoom and so on, I understand that there are significant differences about how we get work done. Okay, the role— a leader has one role, and it is not to have the best technology. It is not to have the best whatever. The role of the leader is to make every living human being with whom she or he comes in contact successful and growing. And I don't care whether it's a 2-week temp or a 22-year employee. The judgment of the leader as a person is what hap— I had this wonderful thing happen. I was giving a speech in Mumbai. And sitting in front of me was a 4-star Indian general who ran the army, you know, which scared the hell out of me as a young junior officer from, you know, standing there saluting. But at any rate, I don't know how we got into it, but he said, when I'm looking at promoting X or Y into this next role, There's really only one thing I'm interested in. I want to go back and find the people who worked for him and find out the degree to which they became more successful because of the 2 years they spent with Tom Peters. He said, that's the measure. I'm not interested in their P&L and did they do this and do that, but what was their record of growing their fellow human beings? Now, that's what a leader It does. And it's difficult, particularly in technical areas. And I'm kind of a case in point. Engineers solve technical problems. And then unless you or I is a total incompetent, wherever we've gone to work, by the third year, second year, we'll be leading some kind of project team, right? Mm-hmm. Maybe part of another team, 7 or 8 people will be— I don't care what words you use, reporting to or what, but you'll be the person in charge. At that point, and this is what I particularly talk to young people about, your life changes. The entire measurement of your outcomes is the people stuff, period.

Yes.

You want to deal with technical stuff? Fine. Hire the best technical human being on earth. That's your job. But it is no longer your job to add up 1 and 1 and try to get 2. You are in the people business. Incidentally, there's some wonderful research reported by a Canadian by the name of Henry Mintzberg, and it is wonderful in that it says— I forgot what the research base was— a liberal arts graduate gets half as many job offers at roughly half the salary of the technical person, the engineer like me or what have you. By year 20, the liberal arts graduates are many levels above the engineers and the scientists and being paid significantly more. And it is mainly what I just said. The liberal arts graduates and their background, they deal with people. Yeah. You know, it's all about people, whether you learn it from Plato or what have you. So it's a 100% people business and nothing, nothing, nothing that you're— but, you know, I just wish we had more time because one other little story.

Well, Tom, let's see if it fits. I mean, I'm hearing you say, and I think this is— and I want to repeat this for myself, but I want to repeat this for everybody out there who's listening to this now, that leadership is about being in the caring about people business. It's It's the people business, but I think it's something you said earlier about your Captain Day caring. You used the word care. And I don't know—

I used another word in my book, and I used the word desperate. And I said, a leader is desperate that every person who reports to her or him grow and develop during the 6 weeks or 6 years that they are working for me. And I said, it's a— and I also said, becoming a manager, becoming a boss is the highest human achievement, well above brain surgeons, because your life is helping people grow. One of my favorite things in the world, and it isn't a digression, but it's just so wonderful that it has to be talked about anyway. The great New York Times columnist, David Brooks, wrote a piece a couple of years ago, and he contrasted what he called resume virtues and eulogy virtues.

Uh-huh.

And resume virtues are, he went to Cornell, he worked for McKinsey, he was promoted 7 times, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The eulogy virtues are, what do they say about you at your funeral? Yeah. And as somebody else said in another thing of the same sort, at the funeral, they talk about how did she or he treat people?

Yes.

And it no longer matters whether you were the valedictorian or last in your class in engineering at Cornell or the University of Michigan or wherever.

Or as Maya Angelou might have said, how it is that you make— how do people feel in response to your To you, to your leadership, right? How do you make them feel? How do they feel in response?

Absolutely.

And that— so this word desperate, I think it's wonderful to use it in that context. Desperate that people— meaning that you're having— there's an urgency to the, to the idea that you're helping people to grow.

Yeah.

And, and there's a responsibility.

You've got 2 issues. A, you don't know how to hire, which is entirely possible. But B, it means you— I haven't learned, and you said this a couple minutes ago in a different context, I haven't learned to connect with you and connect with you as an individual human being, not as somebody who's in a particular job category or what have you.

Yes. So in speaking with organizations on a pretty routine basis, almost daily for me these days, and listening to leaders, you know, everything from CEO to mid-level managers that are asking our company to speak to resilience or how it is we manage change and how we deal with the future that's completely uncertain, etc. I'm hearing a lot of things, and I want to put one of those things to you and get your perspective. If you're— if we get the time, I might say how it is that I respond to this. But—

Okay.

This senior-level leader is saying that he is noticing this exhaustion, which we're seeing across the board, right? People are exhausted. He's seeing that people would love to care at a deeper level about the people around them. And he wants them to connect at a deeper level, but he's hearing something. And then he shared this with us and I was like, wow, this is such transparency. I literally was leaning in to hear it. He said, when they're having conversations with people and they're asking, so how you doing? And then the response is, you know, can I really— are you really asking me?

Yeah.

Or is this the usual, the perfunctory, how you doing? Oh, good. How you doing? And everybody goes, okay, we asked, we ticked that box, right? You okay? Everybody, you good? Right? And everybody goes, yeah, yeah, we're good. They say, okay, good. I checked in with my team. I checked in with my people. And we know that's BS, right? Because if you just ask that next question, like instead of how you doing, what are you doing? Or you ask that question, tell me, share a little bit more. You say you're doing okay. I want to really know. And then they say, no, in all honesty, we're being honest now, I'm struggling. And he said his people don't know how to handle that response. They're not therapists, they're not counselors, they're not ministers. What do they do in that moment? They, like you said, let's say they've been an engineer and 2, 3 years later they're leading a team of 7 and now somebody says to them, I'm struggling. And they're at a complete loss, Tom, for what to do. So I want to Put that potato in your lap and get your thoughts on where it is that we can support that junior leader, that manager who's going to handle that kind of a serious, serious conversation.

Well, the first thing I'm going to say is rude and crude. And the rude and crude thing is, and we're now going up a level, you should never have promoted the son of a bitch into a managerial job, period. There are people who get along with people. There are people who give a shit about people, and there are people who do so on a lesser degree. You know, it's that— I quoted this guy who was a biotech CEO in my book, Two Things I Want to Tell You, and he said, we only hire nice people. And this is biotech, for God's sakes. And he said, look, You've got some job category. And he said, Tom, you're a smart guy, but you don't even know how the name of the degree, it's so sophisticated. He said, I found something out though. Whatever it is, no matter how narrow it is, there are a lot of people who have that degree. Don't hire the jerks. So now I'm Tom, you've just had an interview with me. You're drooling. I am so incredible at the skills that are needed. You can drool all you want, Mr. CEO, but when I leave your office, I now have to run the gauntlet. And running the gauntlet is 6 or 7 interviews with a receptionist, with a junior research person, with somebody in the finance department, Any— despite the fact that you're in love with me, any of those 6 people can say, don't hire Peters. And, you know, I think that is just bloody brilliant, basically. The second one— and, you know, I almost want to say it slowly, and I know, you know, I hope people pay attention to it— every darn list that comes out, the best medical group is always the Mayo Clinic, for God's sakes. And there was a book that came out, oh, 5, 6, 7 years ago now called Management Lessons from the Mayo Clinic. And the one thing that I remember in 400 pages— it was an excellent book— is I am now interviewing you for a senior position in thoracic cardiac whatever the hell it is, okay? And we have a 20-minute conversation. You're the, you're the famous doc who I will or won't hire. What you don't know, whether I'm doing it on my iPhone or with a pencil in my hand, is during our conversation— and this is a literal thing— I am counting the number of times that you use the word we versus the number of times that you use the word I. I. And if the I beats the we's, I don't care how many lives you have saved on the operating table, dude, you ain't coming to work here. And it sounds simple, but there's a wonderful quote later on in the book by a woman who was a pretty famous surgeon who came to work for Mayo. And, you know, people in those positions don't tend to exaggerate. She said, she said, I am 100 times more effective here than I was in my prior hospital because we practiced team medicine and not ego medicine. And, you know, it's so— nobody ought to be in that leadership position unless they know. Yeah, I mean, you're going back to the thing you started it with, is the phony conversation versus the real conversation. The how are you, in which it's obvious that I don't give two shits about you. You know, it reminds me, which I was actually writing something about that, I think it was in a tweet this morning. I did a TV show for PBS, and one of the people who we featured was a woman by the name of Pat Carrigan, who had been the first woman to run a GM auto parts plant. And she had done well somewhere, I think it was in the South or something, and she then was called up to do it in a 2,000 or 3,000-person plant in Michigan. And so she just lived— she had, you know, it's obviously a complex technical job to run a plant with 2,000 people. But she lived on the shop floor, basically. And I remember one— I was over there shooting for 2 or 3 days, but there was a shift change that must have been 6 AM. And so I have 8 people sitting around the table talking with me. Tough old UAW birds from the plant floor. And I went around and asked each one, and nobody's going to believe what I'm about to say. And I'm sorry, it is the truth, but I understand if you don't believe what I'm about to say. None of them, mainly, mostly in 20 years of career, had ever seen the plant manager out on the floor, ever. And then I talked to the union boss. In a big plant, there will be a full-time person who is the, you know, Mr. UAW for Plant X. I talked to the union boss and he said, well, he said, you know, Pat comes to the plant first day and I get a call. And on the other end of the line is Pat. And she said, you know, we'll call this guy Dick. And she said, Dick, I want to talk to you first thing. Can I come down and— can I come down to your office and chat with you? He said, in my entire career, no plant manager had ever come down to my office. I was always summoned to be at Mr. Big's office at 10 AM or whatever it was. He said, He said, it was just— he said, this— I don't know how tough you are or I am, but this son of a bitch is 10 times tougher than both of us put together. He said, I teared up when she came in the door. Yeah. And incidentally, to, you know, kind of put the icing on the cake for Ms. Carrigan, she performed so well in that GM parts plant that the legislature of the state of Michigan Sent her a letter of congratulations when she retired. I mean, that's care.

Again, yeah, theme. The theme being, yeah, care, but genuine.

If not, don't hire them. And for God's sakes, don't promote them.

Yeah, no, I think— I mean,

you know, that, that it's the, the military always says it. You know, I was in the Navy. The sergeants run the Army, the chief petty officers run the Navy, period. It's the first-line supervisors. They're the ones who run the joint. And, you know, either way I put it in my books is I said your collection of first-line supervisors, 4 of them in a car dealership and 47 of them somewhere else, that collection is the number one asset of the organization.

And they've got to be desperate that people grow. That's the through line here.

Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I'm proud of myself for having plucked the word desperate out of the sky.

I know. It's just a wonderful use But it's obvious.

Listen.

In that context.

You know, the week that we're talking, Coach K finished his first game at Duke. And he lost. And he was such a gentleman and such a wonderful human being in that. It's, you know, I

don't know. Leadership is not a thing that is easily, I think, easily taught. I think it's something you experience. Everything you're sharing about leadership isn't something you learned in your management class at, you know, graduate school in Stanford or wherever. I mean, it's like you learned it out in the field with people that were modeling it for you. And that's how I think we learn our values anyways. You learn them as they're modeled to you as a child, whether it's parents, grandparents, or others that have influenced you. You agree with that, Tom?

I want to tell you one other little story that sounds not connected, but it was something that was triggered in what you just said. And this is about as far away as you can get in a way, but it's really spot on if I If I tell it right, you've got some problem. You have a CAT scan, and later that day or the next day, and 200 yards away or 200 miles away, a radiologist is going to read your CAT scan. Okay, when— 2 groups. Group A, the CAT scan, the data from your CAT scan And I'm the radiologist, is going to come across the screen and it's going to be a bunch of numbers and it may be a bunch of graphs, it may be whatever the hell it is. It's going to be all tech data, if you will. Now, in this one experiment, your data is coming, but before the data comes— because now when you came in for the CAT scan, I said, listen, this is just something we're doing with record keeping. Would you mind if I took my iPhone out and took a photo of you? In case 1, before the radiologist starts his work, I see your photo, and then the other group didn't see a photo. In that world— and I'm not technically, you know, schooled, so I'll probably use the language wrong— what we're looking for in your CAT scan picture is anomalies, things that just— that aren't Just a little bit off. Okay. If I saw— if I didn't see your picture, I discovered 80% less anomalies than the radiologist did who started out. It's a simple dumbass iPhone photo of you taken, which humanized the whole thing.

Yes.

And I mean, you know, you and I are talking about it in terms of managing in the military or managing in the Pentagon or what have you, and all that's true. But just to see the power of the humanizing— I just see a photo of a real human being, and then all this damn data comes across, and you came alive because of it. And I hate to use this language and keep using bad, you know, salty language— it was a picture taken from an iPhone that, you know, shows up before the charts and the graphs come along,

right?

It's crazy. But it's exactly what you and I have been talking about in slightly different language.

It's, you know, you could call it soft, you could call it a lot of things, but the word care, it's just a lot of words to use, right? We could pick any number of words. I mean, we talk about how it is that we create resilience, but in essence,

I've

got the basis of it.

Go ahead. I might sell the word to you. I love the idea so much that you are having a conversation With the owner of giveashitism.com.

Yeah.

And so that's my analog to care.

Yes. And again, no matter the words we choose, it's— there's a thing there that means that you're not just on a perfunctory level interested in another, that you genuinely have some vested interest in their success, their growth, their how they're doing in the world. So we're gonna— we're wrapping up here, Tom. In your professional life right now, what, what are— what's something— what's one thing that you are just jazzed up about?

Well, I'll give you 2 instead of one.

Okay.

And they're both long-term interests, but they've just, you know, gotten higher and higher on my list. Uh, one of them is fabulous design. You know, to me, the company that lives to take another penny out of cost makes me want to go like that. Yeah. It's products and services that, you know, Jony Ive, who was the former chief of design at Apple, said it, that make the world just a teeny bit better. Design is about caring. Design is about soul. And that can be demonstrated, you know, as I said it, it can be demonstrated in a ball gown, or it can be demonstrated equally in a block of coat. And it's about thoughtfulness, caring, inspiring, and so on. And so to me, fabulous design is the number one differentiator.

Love

it. And then second thing I would talk about, which I mean, which I would refer to, which, you know, so many things you and I didn't have time for, uh, and we're— I won't say we're better than in the past, we're less worse. The research is clear. On average, women are better leaders than men. If you've got less than 50% of your board of directors is women, and if you've got less than 50% of your executive team is women, you are a dick.

I feel so good in this moment because more than 2/3 of the leaders on our team are women. So you just made my day, Tom. Most days I feel at some point like a dick, and now I do not in this moment.

little thing, which is kind of like the photograph, the radiology. There's a wonderful book I read years ago. The author's a woman by the name of Louann Brizantine, who's a neuropsychiatrist at the University of San Francisco— University of California, San Francisco. And she wrote a book called The Female Brain. And one tiny indicator, by the age after birth of 3 days, female— whatever you want to call them at that age— girls, baby girls, are making 3 times more eye contact with their fellow human beings than baby boys are. And, you know, and there's a wonderful thing, incidentally, and this came out of a fantastic book called Compassionomics, and we don't have time to talk about everything, Darwin never said survival of the fittest.

No.

Darwin said survival of the best communities. Uh, some other guy, Spencer, said survival of the fittest. If you have a great community, you produce more kids and the kids live longer. And back there, 80,000 years ago, that was incredibly important. Yes. And, uh, you

know, or as I might say, the most resilient communities.

As, as I meant to say and was on the tip of my tongue.

It was on the tip of your tongue, Tom.

Resilient community. There's no issue about it.

Awesome. Tom, it

has been an absolute— Listen, if you make it to my age, which is 79, you've taken a lot of shit and you've got to— I should be wearing your shirt.

Yeah.

You know, we'll send you one. We can't do this because this is a family audience. My shirt would say resilient MF, except we would spell it all out.

Yeah. Or today, again, in the language people know, resilient AF. Okay, Tom? Yeah.

Absolutely.

This is a shirt for you, buddy. Listen, a pleasure. Not an understatement, a pleasure to spend time chatting and catching up.

And the feeling is mutual. It's been a terrific conversation.

Wonderful, Tom. Thank you so much. Everybody, of course, we welcome your feedback. Love your questions. If you know somebody that would just salivate to be listening in on this, go ahead and share it. Share this episode, leave us a comment. And of course, we'll look forward to serving you further in the future. Thanks so much. Well, I mean, seriously, what an interesting interview. What an interesting guy, um, Tom Peters is. I mean, he's just— he's got so many stories. He's just so rich with, with information and insight, um, and ways to, to bring, to bring kind of dry topics at times, um, to life. Uh, loved hearing about Captain Day and Captain Knight. A wonderful way to sort of tee up the conversation about leadership styles and the effective way that we can be leading people now and not leaning into an old paradigm, the way things were done in the past, because there's no question that the way things were done in the past are not entirely effective in the moment. And I would venture to say, maybe entirely ineffective and even obsolete going forward. And I think that's really key, that we've got to develop leadership that is more like Captain Day, as in that we truly care about people. Tom said that in his book, In Search for Excellence, and in a lot of what he's been talking about as a keynote speaker, as someone who leads in thought leadership circles as an author. He's been talking about being desperate. I thought that was a really curious use of the word desperate, desperate that people grow, meaning that leaders have to be desperate that others in their circle, the people that they are modeling for, the people that they are leading, the people they're managing, the people that they are lording over, old way of thinking, old way of seeing things, that in that role of supervisor, of boss even, that they've got to actually care so desperately about the growth of their people. And I thought that was quite amazing. I asked Tom about a specific situation where in today's environment, managers may be faced with helping the people that they are leading and managing to solve significant problems in their life. Meaning when you ask somebody how they're doing and they say something like, I'm struggling, that manager has to be equipped, has to be prepared to meet that moment authentically and effectively. Tom answered the question in a unique way. I think he took the position that someone who's in that role as a manager who doesn't know how to meet that moment right now when someone says, I'm struggling. Maybe they're struggling mentally. They've been experiencing anxiety or depression, or they're just exhausted physically or emotionally from all of the ups and downs of this pandemic, for the sort of endless uncertainty that seems to be with us each and every day. And then the wave after wave of new challenge or new disruption. Even. I don't actually agree with Tom's assessment there that perhaps that person isn't meant to be a leader. They shouldn't have been put in a leadership role to begin with. Because I think that that is something that is new and different. It's not something that typically leaders are trained for. I know in my years as being a leader and any schooling that I've had about it, whether it was in law school or in business, or in any other area, other arena of my life, there's really never been any training for that. The concept of how it is that you help a person who is dealing with something for the very first time, something we have all never really had any practice at, which is to navigate a pandemic, navigate endless unknowns and endless uncertainty and endless disruption. I don't think that that has been a scenario that's been planned for that we're dealing with right now. And so I have a little bit more looking at that situation and saying, that manager may not have been equipped, is not equipped to be that therapist, to be that counselor, to be able to help somebody in that moment deal with their struggle. But I think that what that shows us is that there's a profound opportunity to help that manager not only to develop greater resilience, themselves to be able to become change-proof themselves by becoming more resilient mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually, but that they themselves can then model and assist the people that they're leading to themselves be able to navigate the changes, navigate the unknowns, navigate the future even in a way that's a lot more elegant. And To have that meaningful conversation with somebody doesn't mean that you have to have all the answers for them. It doesn't mean that you have to solve their problem. I think this is something that I've learned as a daddy, having 4 kids and 3 daughters and a son. And in particular with our youngest daughter, with my other kids, I tended to be more well-received, I suppose, when I was offering up a solution to a problem or something like that. Maybe they were just being kinder to me. I don't know. But with my younger daughter, I got a pretty good lesson when she was in her mid-teens that she didn't want me to try to solve the problem, that frankly, all she really wanted to do was share it. And if I was going to actively participate at all, it was actively listening that she was after and really nothing else. And only more recently, having done my share, fair share, I suppose, of listening, has it been the case that she's come to me with her problems to ask me directly. what I think about something or how I would approach something and get my guidance or my counsel or whatever it might be. And I think that that's something that, again, for people that are even in that place of struggle, it may well be that a manager's role is, is just to be there to support, to listen, to hold space for them, to ask further questions, clarifying questions to help them to see what's next, what's the next step, whatever that might be. It might be that they do have to see a counselor or therapist because they have some things that they're not able to resolve and they want to be able to talk about them more regularly or in a way, you know, where someone would get actively engaged in giving them feedback. So, I think what we do now is we've got to re-examine The role of that manager, the role that, that leader, that senior-level leader or that junior-level leader, to say, how do you deal with a person on your team who is struggling? Who's been courageous enough to actually answer that question? And frankly, that's the first manager— first duty of the manager is to ask the questions and then ask the next and the next and really care enough to go deeper. to want to know more and to do that active listening. And then to ultimately be able to just hold that space for someone's coming through things as they— as we all go through things and we have to work through things. And often it is that we are going to work through them. But to not work through those things alone, I think, is the key. We've got to let people know by our are caring and are— and this is something that Tom and I did discuss quite a bit, that through our actions that show caring, that we are showing the people on our teams that we have their back, that we're with them, that we support them, that we're desperate for their growth, as Tom said. And I think that's certainly where the two roads cross over. I so agree with Tom in that arena. And I think that we've just got to be looking at how we train leaders a little bit differently now to meet the moment. This is a very new moment and a very new time, and the future is going to demand more compassion, not less. It's going to demand more empathy, not less. It's going to demand more emotional intelligence, not less. It's going to demand more resilience, holistic resilience, not less going forward. So I'd love to get your comments, get your thoughts, your feelings. things that you agree with, disagree with, just love to hear them. So please feel free to leave a comment. You can email team@adamarkel.com. Of course, you can leave us a rating. We'd love to get your thoughts about the podcast. And we'd love you to subscribe. We'd love you to share this episode and others with other people in your arena. If you've not yet taken your own resilience assessment, you can go to rankmyresilience.com, rank myresilience.com and take that assessment, or you can get it on the website at adamarkel.com as well and find out where are you right now mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually when it comes to your resilience zone. It's been a blast as always. I hope you've loved this episode, and I can't wait to serve you further in the future. We'll say ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights To build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomechangeproof.