Turning Market Disruptions Into Your Advantage With Terry Jones

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. 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 an welcome to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell and I am feeling incredibly blessed this morning. I've had 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, 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, that's 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 weekend, ironically, or 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 and 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, this gentleman is, 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 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 and 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 six 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 seven years until it was sold to Priceline for 1.8 billion. That's billion with a B dollars. He is the managing principal of Onnit. Excuse me, of On Inc. There's another company called Onnit, 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 perfect guest for our pivot 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 two, 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 for a week retreat. And that was a blast. Did you have a good time that week?

Great time. I met a lot of great contacts, Neat, 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 just, it's fascinating, 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 before. So electricity really had just come into the forest. And the whole thing is the 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 and 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, I mean, that blew my mind.

Yeah, pretty, pretty amazing. And you know, they, 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, you know, 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. There's a beautiful 10 minute canal video documentary of the canal's origins and how it began with the French. And they. 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 was Theodore. Theodore, that's right, Teddy Roosevelt, that decided that this was, that this was a major initiative. And I mean they solved, they literally took three Years, I think it was three years in between where they realized that the mosquitoes were carrying malaria and other things. And I think it was, was, what was it? Yellow fever that was killing killers.

And 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.

Mal air.

And not true. So it was 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 horse to an 80 mile an hour train. We went in communications from a letter that went by ship to the speed of light. So the amount of change and labor went from the power of a horse to steam.

Yes.

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 and disruption, do you?

No, no, I don't, I don't. I do write about sort of the beginnings of the computer era and you know, when 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 a hundred million people. Pokemon Go took 15 days.

Or Fortnite, probably tripled that in half the time.

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 two 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 is powering disruption?

You know, I've got, 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 that I believe you made reference to it when you spoke at TLC. 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. No, It's. There were 500, there's 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're talking about in the Fortune 500 were, you know, sort of, no horseshoe companies.

U.S. steel.

Yeah, I mean, exactly. So you go, why? 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? I mean, because right now I think on average a Fortune 500 company lasts about 18 years. That's, that's more the current numbers that they, 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 that it's very, very difficult to maintain the edge for a long time. And so you're the expert in this kind of software. You're the best COBOL guy ever. Well, you know, that's gone. So you have to continuously adapt and change and it's difficult. And you get to the point you're somebody like Oracle and you're mostly acquiring companies and trying to adapt to the cloud. You can have a new leader like Satya Nadella who's completely revolutionized Microsoft and bet billions on AI and brought that company back. Sometimes people make it. IBM has had sort of three rebirths. They're kind of on the wheel of life and we'll see. Now Ginny Rometti just left and we have a new team of two guys. But it's very hard to pull that act off. And you see, you know, 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 Reid Hoffman and Netflix that 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 because they were just talking about the past and it was still a good business. But he said, we don't want to do that anymore. And all you guys are like anchors. If you don't pivot and pivot People, you get stuck.

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

Well, I'll give you an example. My last company was an AI startup. So I mentioned off air that I got a call from Ginny Roumetti 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 and 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 build a conversational chat into a standard double click ad. 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 a B. Testing.

They're constantly testing, changing. And they started buying. So we pivoted sort of to a marketing company and later got this graph from McKinsey and it showed all the industries that deployed AI. And travel is dead, last of all industries. Now. I wish I'd seen that graph before I started the company. This is stupid. But we did pivot. I mean, we kept our core. We knew 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 the Netflix as an example. Your book is about disruption. I really feel like these are such compatible topics. And it's actually fun to have the two books sitting on top of each other. Like I can fan them out like that, you know, because there's such related things. And the way I look at a pivot, we've got sort of two types. I mean, there's a million. In fact, our new book is more about the micro pivots, but I won't get into that for the moment. It's. There's sort of pivot by design and then pivot, 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, you know that when we wait too long. So for example, I invested. Friend of mine was working for Polaroid and you remember Polaroid, right? Kodak. I mean, these, these are things that now there, there are probably, you know, kids, millennial age, that are. Or not kids, let's say millennial age, people who don't even know what Kodak is, never heard of Polaroid, but yet it's the. 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. I 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 that Kodak went bankrupt, Instagram raised a billion.

I remember you.

But photography didn't go away. Kodak did. So it just changed. And the problem was they were totally surrounding a technology that got blown up. Not by another camera company, by 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. And so it's very, very hard to change your business model. But it's interesting, but this is the.

Question, right, Terry, is that there's. You can wait for the market to disrupt you, which I think is what. I mean, you do a lot of public speaking and you're in front of people all the time, and they're, they're still playing it safe, right? There's this whole concept of, there's, 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 my. 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. But they could have been Google, right? They were Google. If they'd gone online, they had the data, Google did the data, right? It didn't work, you know, 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 is 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 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 they talk about 10 disruptive technologies and five 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 move 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. 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 the circular economy of recycling them because it's now in their interest to do so, because they're not in the business of selling 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, 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 people that take, I mean, look, there are lots of people listening and watching this that, that have taken risks and gotten banged up doing it. And then there are those other ones who are still on the sidelines, who've watched, 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? I mean, but yet still, they don't have one. One thing that when I woke up this morning, this was the word that that sort of came into my awareness when I was thinking of you, I was thinking of myself, and I think of all of us, and that's freedom. Like, where are we without freedom? 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 that I believe is stifled in a lot of people.

Well, yeah, but I think, you know, you can have freedom if you have safety.

And you're going to show us that you're going to share something about how to have both.

Well, I think so. You know, there's something in corporations called the boson layer. And the boson layer is the impenetrable layer of middle management that stops good ideas from moving upward. Right. Because they don't want to take risks.

Layer? Is that what you call it?

It's a layer of bosons.

I'm literally taking it seriously, writing my notes. I'm going, the boson layer. No, the boson.

No, it's a layer of bosons. It's not their fault. They don't take risks because they've seen what happens to people who do. 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, you know, 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 will lend us, which have no net.

Well, the great one lend us. Yeah, it's a different deal. But, you know, their motto is, you fall, you die.

It's a different context, for sure.

You gotta keep hiring a lot. Yeah, but, you know, 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. Is Stupid. So the only way, you know, big companies and you take like Google, you know, 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 they say, 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 it don't fail. But that's. You know 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 so, meaning compensate. Somebody said to me some years ago, compensation drives conduct, it drives behavior. Right? And 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.

Because I keep spending the money on a zombie. And that's the other thing that happens, you know, because people say, well, I can, I can finish the marathon. I can finish the marathon. It's going to work, right?

Eventually I'll be right.

If you use data, and today we're a database society and you can do AB 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. Obviously there are some ideas that you just have, you know, 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, it's like what's going on at Tesla is so exciting because every day I have a Tesla and I see these tweets that go to Elon and he says, well, that's a good idea. And two months later it's in the car. So the customer is really driving the development. That's because we have these new cloud connected products where you get feedback so quickly. That's what Microsoft has learned, that's what online companies have learned. But now offline companies, where Caterpillar now has smart tractors, where they actually learn what the farmer is doing rather than getting anecdotes from the Dealer a year later.

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 two 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 started great ideas. You know, somebody once said, again, I just love this, that every great idea I've 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, etc. You know, 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, you know, daily barrage of humiliation of the feeling of just being humiliated.

It's not. Innovation is not the Olympics. In the Olympics, you get one chance and if you're not in the top three, you're probably out of it forever, right? And I like to say innovation is like baseball. And at 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 can't, 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, you know, if that's what you want to do now, if you want a, you know, 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 out and change it and know that your nose is going to get bloody. And you know, look, in Silicon Valley, we look for people who've had, you know, 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, but you look for people who have experience in doing this. I've talked to two startups already this morning before I talked to you, or 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 is 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, particularly people maybe you've done it before because you're a first time entrepreneur. So we're looking for that. But you know, investors invest in two 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?

Yeah, it's probably, it's probably, you know, the people.

I mean, more the people than anything, right?

Yeah, yeah. Because the model is going to be wrong, right? It's not wrong.

Right, right, wrong.

It's going to change. I mean, my last company, my partner said, and I was chairman of this company, he was on the board. He said, well, let's go out and raise money. I said, 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. 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, then 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 in Shark Tank when all five sharks say this is a stupid idea. And the guy says, I'm continuing just the way I was. Maybe 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. Right. I mean, he was in his. His model was not working for. For. And I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs that, that, you know, when they. They feel so strongly about something, they. They're blind. They're. 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 is 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 got, you know, that's Steve Jobs the same way.

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

No, it's not quit there. And, you know, you know, 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. You know, 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 know, you have to be tough and you have to believe in yourself. I mean, you know, how did. How did Steve Jobs take blackberries and turn them into phones? I mean, 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 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 they're talking today, we're in the election cycle, and it's all about electability.

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, starting a new kind of insurance business. Well, he's been in both tech and insurance, so he has the subject matter expertise to do this. He knows the business well enough, and he wants to blow it up, you know, and he has passion, you know, and if he had a. I don't know, if he had a great education, that would be terrific, too. And he's been in business before, you know, and. And that's great, but he hasn't done a startup before, so that's a. You know, they're looking for passion, and they're looking for somebody who's gonna work 24 hours a day. Right. Is hungry. 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. You know, he just didn't want to work hard enough anymore because you can't ever.

Not hungry enough.

Not hungry enough. And I didn't really know that. He seemed hungry. You know, he was lean, he was a runner. Looked hungry, but he wasn't hungry. So that's important. You got to be hungry. And. But subject matter expertise and passion is really important. Now you can come, you know, 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 they gotta have something. The CTO at Kayak would not hire anybody with travel experience. He wanted none of them to.

Fresh. Right? Fresh perspective.

I did it differently at Travelocia. I hired 50. 50. I heard 50 people. 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, you know, who argue with you.

That's a good. That's a very good tip, actually.

William Wrigley said if two people in business always agree, one of them is irrelevant, right?

Yes. Who's redundant in that comment?

I don't want somebody who just says I'm right all the time. Well, people 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. 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. And you know, if, what do you.

Do with the bozos?

Yeah, well, if they're, if they fail over and over again, they put them on, as we say to American, put them on the bus. You know, they were gone. We couldn't. You just can't wait. And also, you know, at Kayak, the same cto, he would go all over the world to hire the best programmers, engineers you could find. And the last question he asked, the interview was, who's the smartest person you know? And then we 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, way worse than A level engineers. There's just a huge difference. So, you know, 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. So did you.

What'd you think of his philosophy or, you know, the 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, look, 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, you know, but it's very hard to have them in a company that's moving at light speed. So you really got to look for the best people you can find. It makes, it makes a huge difference because there is no perpetual motion machine. You got to keep changing and that's important.

Has that always been the case, do you think, Terry? I mean, gotta keep changing the way we have. You know, it is the case today. I mean, because the Model, I mean, or we used this word earlier, paradigm. The paradigm has changed. I mean business, business today, the future of work is now. I mean, this is a very, I.

Think we feel that. But, but you know, think about again, let's go back to 1850 to 1900. You know, no electric light, everybody, 90% of people worked on the farm today, 3% do, you know, so we've gone through these huge changes before. I mean the big corporation didn't exist in the 1800s, existed in the 1900s. That's where, you know, they really started. And we had trust busting and you know, these huge companies built up and then there were theories of management and how to do it. And you know, that's changing again, right? We continually evolve. But I think this in the pace of innovation has always come from small companies. It's always comes 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 it 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 will have a problem. And I think one of the most critical things to remember about AI is this is a learning system. These systems learn 24 by 7 by 365. So if you haven't started with AI, your competitor, I mean, look at Tesla, they have 10 billion miles of learning, 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. 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 two questions left for you. First of all, with disruption off, what's your highest aspiration for this book? And I didn't read the 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, 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 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, you know, I didn't have to write a book. 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 eight 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 that 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 and they outsourced all the business and they outsourced all the workers away. And that's been. That's been devastating. But they also. We all lost whole industries. We lost steel, we lost furniture, we lost electronic manufacturing. We don't have to lose everything, you know, 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, if we take risks, you know, if we have.

What's the, 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 know, 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, you know, 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 said, 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 there'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 study the brain. We know we've got these default mode networks that want to have us just sort of keep ourselves from, from too much harm.

And the guy who wrote the book at Pixar says, you know, they call it plus it.

Right.

You have to say. You have to say and, and not but don't say but don't say but.

Immediately negates everything that came. I love you, but I respect you, but. Right, yeah, and, and I'd like to plus what you're saying. You know, it's just feedback. It's a great. 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 are. Or we're iterating used 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.

I mean it's take criticism seriously and not personally.

There you go. That's wonderful. Take it seriously, not personal.

Yeah, take it seriously, but don't let it hurt you. You know, it's just. I gotta change.

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

Well, you know, 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. You know, I'm the chairman of a boys and girls camp in Canada, in Minnesota, and 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 two lakes and falling my butt in a giant mud puddle. And I was nine, you know, and my counselor came up and said, get up, you know, 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 succeeded. And I went back and did that for 12 more years. I mean, I loved, you know, that challenge of being out in the woods and succeeding with, with a group of people. And I think it had a lot to do with my later life, is that, you know, I, I look for the challenge. And, you know, you're always scared. I mean, 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. You know, if you're just comfortable, it's not good enough.

Yeah, comfort's highly overrated, huh?

On some level, you gotta have uncomfortable. You know what did the guy 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 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. 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, hell, well, I mean, you were a cio. You, you had everything going for you. You could have stayed on that track. And then you. But you stepped out into this, you know, world, and this is before travelocity, and that was pretty. It's a pretty insane decision from a career standpoint by some people's estimation, right?

Big mortgage, a big salary, you know, wife and two kids. And I said, now I got to run this little thing, you know, it'll work, and let's see what happens. And I figured I could get another job, you know, if it didn't work as a cio, But CIO was boring, and it wasn't interesting to me. You know, 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.

I lost all my hair being a lawyer for feelings.

I just saw the heck with it. And you know, gosh, it grew like a weed in the spring. 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 had multi hundred million dollar budgets and thousands of people working with me before, so I was lucky in that regard. But 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 at another show. 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 balance, 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. But you're back in. You're back in the game again. Right.

And you know, one thing I just. I started a year ago. I had two 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 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. And it's a really nice way to start the day. I used to start with caffeine, which is like stepping on the accelerator. And now I just start with nizo. I don't recite haikus or anything, but I guess I could. At the same time, 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 gonna do some of that. My brother is Much more into that side of life. So, you know, 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 real different. Yeah, well, you have. 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.

Yeah. So I don't meditate yet, but I may after, after learning from Dawson. I'm trying to do some more of it.

Miso soup's a good way to begin. Well, listen, I have 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.

It's on Amazon and I've got an audiobook as well that I, 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, three page chapters. So it's a, 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, you know, risk or whatever and you know, use it when you need it. Keep it.

Resource. It's a tool.

Resource. It's a tool and it's, you know, 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, with the, the ritual that I've had for more than 10 years. A waking ritual. I really believe fundamentally that the first, the first input, let's say I'm trying to. I'm not, I'm not so much a tech. Don't. 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, more around, around ideas and language and things. But, but I'm more comfortable with tech now than I've ever been before. So I'll say this. So it's the, the first keystroke of the day for, for me is this, is this concept of, of waking up. Waking up and imagining that as I'm waking up and as we all wake up, it's, it's as if we're given a brand new opportunity, a brand new shot each day, day to program to use that. That tool of programming right out of the gate to create what that day is going to be for us. And so if you. 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, you know, even. Even sometimes feeling, you know, 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 mean, it was just. And 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. That's.

That's.

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

Gratitude is, you know, tell Alexa to turn on your miso soup.

No kidding, right? Have Alexa put up the miso soup, say, I'm great. And then if you want, I know your brother did a very. A wonderful TED talk about seeing the world, you know, in a. Seeing what's right with the world. Celebrating what's right with the world. So my version of that are these four simple words. Takes 10 seconds. You say, start today with that gratitude, that feeling that it's. That it is a blessing. And then say out loud, I love my life. I love my life. Terry, do you love your life?

I do indeed.

I can 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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