226: Bill Flynn — Neurology and Leadership

Foreign. Hello everyone. Welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. Today we're talking all about how neuropsychology meets leadership. Neuro leadership. We're talking with Bill Flynn, a guy who's been an entrepreneur, an executive, a coach in our world and he's got a new book out Further faster that we're going to get into in just a minute. I want to remind everyone that we bring a new show like this every week. Every week and sometimes more in some weeks now when we live stream out, we bring a new show out like this and something to do with the world of Scaling up. Right people. Strategy, execution, cash and leadership. The fifth decision, I like to say, where we bring together the best ideas and how you're going to take the company through that, whether you're the ultimate leader of the company, are on the leadership team now. We've done over 200 episodes now. 220 some episodes going four years into this, we've got a huge listenership around the world. If you're not getting these every week, like and subscribe in particular, subscribe. You can subscribe here wherever you get your podcasts every week to get the latest from us each week. There's also a massive back catalog at scalingcoach.com at our website. Scalingcoach.com not only has the back catalog of all our so on any topic that you might want to look up, you could go find a podcast there to suit you and what concern you've got today. So all of that@scalingcoach.com along with downloads of the tools and links to the offers and websites and stuff of all of our guests. So all of that there. Plus we do a workshop intro to Scaling up every couple months. We've got one coming up. I don't know when this airs but or goes on the audio side. But as we go live today, we're just about a week out from our next podcast, our Pharmax Scaling up workshop. So if you're watching the live stream or right around September 10th, I believe is our thing, Lucy could probably drop a link or something in there for the address for if there's any late registrants that want to we have special rates. Pay what you can if you're in trouble right now or we've got team rates if you want to bring as many of your leadership team as you'd like to attend since we're online now and doing our workshops online, which are super fun, by the way. All right, so that's probably about enough of all of that. I'm the host of the show. Let's see, what else do I want to say? I don't think that's about as much intro as anybody needs. We're going to talk to Bill Flynn. We're going to get right into it. Bill Flynn in the world of neuro leadership, what we can learn about that. Bill, welcome to the show.

Hey Bill, how you doing? Thanks for having me on.

Good. Really good. Happy to see you. So Sudbury, Mass. That's where you are on the, on the right side of the country.

I am right in Henry Ford country. He owned all the land right around where I am. And so that's the world I'm in. Lots of, lots of trees and such. I have hundreds of acres of conservation land around me. So it's a really nice place to, to be if you like that kind of stuff.

I'm definitely enjoying and appreciating our yard around our house. We have lots of trees as well and a big, big yard. It's nice to have that space, especially during a pandemic where mixing and mingling with everyone is not my first choice of activities. Yeah, yeah.

We have a nice, pretty good sized back porch and so we have people over. I actually have clients here. I do sessions on my back porch because I don't want to talk for four to eight hours in a mask. And some of my clients want to do it live. Like really? It's like.

Okay.

So yeah, they're local so I just have them out back. It's great.

We're doing a ton live online. Right. Using online tools, doing virtual and all that stuff. We're making them really fun and I think we'll probably keep doing that after pandemic and things are solved and we're a little bit some new normal. But I imagine we'll do a hybrid because we're already doing some in person. In our case, it's not talking for a million hours in a map mask, but what we do is sit outside where we can get some separation.

Yeah, sure.

So outside without a mask. And then we're using a mix of our online tools, that kind of thing. So if people are curious. But I haven't gotten on a plane since March, which is kind of something for me.

Me neither. Yeah, I know I have a lot of. I have a lot of plane fare in the bank that I'm going to be using at some point, but I have not used it yet.

Don't you just last year, 130 nights away from home.

Wow.

About as many flights and that kind of thing because sometimes I just go local in and out, but you know, far and wide. And then this year, right here. So we've upgraded our cameras and our microphones, doing more from home than ever before. So before we go into the core idea here of what we can learn or how we can apply neuroscience to leadership, give us some background, tell us your story, a little bit of your entrepreneurial journey.

Sure. So I'm a startup guy and you being out in the Silicon Valley area, certainly understand this. So I did, I did 10 startups. Yeah, 10 startups over 25 years. Never a founder. I was always the scale guy. I came in, I ran sales, marketing services, that kind of thing. Any front office facing, I was five for six for a while, but then the last four, not so much. But I ended up at 50%. I've been through two IPOs, seven acquisitions. I've made a ton of mistakes, but I learned a bunch of things and I tried to put a bunch of those in the book as well. So I certainly have a great affinity for startup folks. But as you know, we don't usually work with a lot of startup people as coaches. They usually can't afford us or it's not quite proper.

When they're funded. Yeah, if they're funded and the founders or investors have done some work with us or our tools in the past, maybe not me, but somebody in world. So I have done some of that and probably will keep doing that. I also get some fairly early stage companies that are just starting to do that either with our direct coaching or in our accelerator program through the EO organization.

All right, cool. Yeah, I just find if you're, if you're really going to start, if you're pre business model, you know, then you don't have a strategy yet. Right. I always say you have two rules. If you're, if you're pre business model is solve a problem we're solving and solve it in a way that enough people will pay you enough money for it and don't run out of money. Those are the only two things you have to worry about. Everything else we'll figure out later. So anyway, yeah, so I did that for a long time, you know, that was a lot of fun. I love the puzzle. I love figuring stuff out from scratch. So I did that for a while and then I decided to be a coach. I don't know if you know, I don't know if I ever told you the story, Bill, but I became a Coach because Vern sent me an email.

Vern did?

Yeah, Yeah, I, I signed up for his newsletter about five years ago and I got this reply from Vern Harnish and like, well, this is the guy who wrote the book and this got to be a marketing thing. But it wasn't, it was him. And so I said, look, I want to do this thing, this coaching thing. What do you think? I love your book. Of all the ones I've read, it's the best one that fits for me. And he said, oh, why don't you go meet Keith? And so two months later I was in Arizona with Keith cup training me on how to be a Gazelles coach. So it was pretty fast and I'm really glad I did it. I think it's, you know, obviously it's a tremendous organization and I would say the major draw for me was people like you, right. Other coaches who were super accomplished, very generous with their time and their knowledge and the bar of the scaling up organization. The Gazelles organization at the time was so far above any other coaching organization that I, I looked at like seven of them and went so far above everyone else. So it was, to me it was a no brainer. So that's what I did. And I've been doing that for about four years. And pre Covid I was cranking, I was doubling every year in my income and then, you know, just fell apart there. But it's coming back now, so that's good.

You know, we had clients who were really hard hit in the first couple months and we still have a couple, but for the most part, so. And I thought, God, people are not going to be able pay me and, but they are going to need our work right to crisis, to pivot, et cetera. So I just began giving our work away. I just started offering to coach people for free and I was just like nonstop busy. And then we opened up our workshops for like if you needed, if you said just, you said I need it, we would give it to you for free. So for a few months we were just taking and filling every minute of every day that we could for free. And then a few of those companies started to pivot and hired us. And then we got busy enough and there was less, it was less critical. So now we don't, we have a couple that continued that are scholarship, but I don't have to offer it anymore. We're busy enough with the whole thing. In fact, we've gotten busier now and I can handle more clients because I'm doing Nothing too much in person. So more, less flying time so I can work with more companies today and, and more worldwide. Like, you know, I still have clients all over the world, just weird time zones.

That's cool. Yeah, I, I did the same thing. I offered my time for free and to be honest with you, Bill, nobody really took me up on it. I was shocked and I said, and I would say, here, schedule a time, let's do this.

I'll show.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, I had a lot of requests. I was very.

Yeah, I wish I had known. And some of mine just got nailed. I have a study abroad company. There's nothing they can do. Nobody's studying abroad. Certainly not in the U.S. right. Nobody wants us abroad. So they really got hit hard. And a couple others were relatively small, but a few of them come back. A couple went through the roof, you know, budget shifted to them and they were so busy they said, look, we're too busy to actually use you. We don't have any time to sit with you for a few hours.

Let's talk about the book. And you've got, we're going to focus in on some aspects. You've got a lot in this book. I know. When I was looking at your outline for it as we got ready for the show, I'm like, this is too much. The world further, faster. So let's focus in on this neuro leadership piece and you talk about something in here called ages maybe. Why don't you talk about how you applied this or what your story is with this?

Yeah, sure. So I'll back it up a little bit. So I got interested in neuroscience because I was a sales guy and I was an okay sales guy, but I've always been curious and a learner. And I said, you know, one of the biggest things that a salesperson needs to understand is how people make decisions and to be able to provide them information to make a decision. And so I said, why? How does the brain make a decision? And so I studied it and I learned that the brain does not make a decision the way we think it does. And so once I learned these sort of little tricks, I became the number one or number two salesperson everywhere I went. Now it's a superpower that you can use for evil because if you know how the brain works, you can actually manipulate someone and people do this. You've got these guys that can have an entire audience think the same exact way. They go on like cordon and all these late night shows and do all these tricks. It's just Tricking the brain, it's rather easy to do if you know how to do it. Cialdini knows how to do it through his persuasion and influence and all that stuff. So there's a lot of things you can do. So I found that fascinating. I just kept really got into it and when I became a coach, I said, hey, when we're coaching, we're helping people to make decisions. So I need to teach them how to make a decision and how, et cetera. We're change agents and you know, there needs to be a process for change. The brain has a certain way it reacts to change. We're teachers, so they're learners, right. And we say, look, if you want to, if your business doesn't grow, your people don't grow, your business won't grow. And that's about learning and the way we were taught. I don't know how you were taught where you went to school, but the way I was taught was, hey, sit in a classroom.

Cuneiform hieroglyphics.

Yeah, basically I'll just tell you that I didn't know you're good hair for that. So it's. Sitting in a classroom having someone fill you up is not actually the best way to learn. That's not how the brain learns. It has a particular process it goes through to learn. So I took all these things and I, and I sort of put them into what I do. And that's basically neuro leadership. Neuro leadership is leading with the brain in mind because at the end of the day, people are crazy. We are all a little nuts. We're highly impulsive, we're highly irrational, highly emotional beings. And if you don't understand that as a leader, you'll never be as good as you possibly could be. And the example I gave, which I think sort of solidifies, you know, sort of this further talk about ages and scarf and stuff we're going to do is maybe you did this as a leader. Maybe it happened to you when you were younger. Is you're in a meeting and you're running the meeting, your boss is in the meeting with you and the meeting ends and the boss taps you on the shoulder and says, hey Bill, I got a few things I want to tell you about the meeting. Can you follow me back to my office? And that's all he says?

Yeah.

What happens? You start freaking out, right? Oh my God, what did I do wrong? Am I going to get fired? If I get fired, the kids can't go to college, we can't buy the new house. We can't do. And you start catastrophizing because your brain has negativity bias. And by the time you sit across from him at his desk, your brain is in full fret mode.

Yeah.

You are not listening to anything they say. You're probably nodding and doing, you know, just trying to be, you know, polite. So the boss didn't do that on purpose. He or she was trying to. They may have actually wanted to say something really positive to you, but. But because they didn't understand how the brain works, they did it wrong. So here's what you could have done, right? The meeting ends and says, hey, Bill. And they sit down next to you and they say, you know, that meeting went pretty well. But as you know, one of our values is Kaizen continuous improvement. So what I want to do is let's work together to make this the best meeting it possibly can be. Here's what I'd like you to do. Put something in my calendar. A coffee or lunch or whatever it might be. And I want to have you come with, say three things that you thought went really well in the meeting. One or two things that you thought, hey, you know what? If we improve this, this would make it even better. I'll do the same thing. And we're going to keep meeting until this. We agree that this is the best meeting we've ever had. That's the same thing. But now you haven't put them in threat mode. You haven't done status. There's certainty, there's autonomy. There's all these wonderful things. If you don't understand that, you will unwittingly put your team, your. Your folks, your organization into threat mode without. Without knowing it.

Well, it seems like there's this time we often hear we need to talk. And you're like, oh, fuck.

Yeah, right? And that's, you know, that's usually with your girlfriend. Right.

We need to have a conversation. That's like the worst, right? Can I talk to you for a second? Is just a step above. But I think you're giving without going into it. You're saying, that was great, but I have some ideas to improve it. Can we talk next week? You know, now I'm like, oh, okay. So he's got some ideas. He's on my side. We're working together right there. Yeah. So you're just. You're speaking to it. I think this comes up a lot with leaders. And, I mean, I've had at least three conversations this week with CEOs who were. Who were asking themselves Things like, well, how's this going to. Like, I want to talk to a key person about this and how's it going to go and what do I. And I'm like, always, you have to think about how they're going to think about it. And they're always thinking about, what does this mean? Is this an opportunity or a threat? An opportunity or a threat? And that's like the filter that I'm listening for all the time. Is this going to be good for me or am I in trouble? I think that again and again and again. Right, exactly.

And if we sort of back it up to today and the thing we're in is the brain, there's some research out there that says the brain has three levels of threat that it's in all the time. One is just environmental. Right. This was pre Covid. Hey, we know that life isn't a guarantee. You gotta be careful. So you're always in some level of threat, but it's manageable. It's sort of a green level threat. And then there's sort of the neighborhood threat, which is, something's happening. It's not great. So I'm in a. I'm a little more cautious. And then there's. Oh, it's right, it's. It's personal. Right. So I have a leader who got Covid. And he doesn't realize it, but all of his team are in. In that personal threat because he got it. He wants us to go in the office. He got it in the office. You know, I don't want to go in the office because I don't want to get it.

The office is a place where you get it.

Yeah, right. You know, and by the way, it's irrational. The office is clean. He doesn't have any more. What. All these things. But that's. But if the brain is in threat mode, it's not rational. You can't act rationally. So he's sending them Wall Street Journal articles and data saying, oh, it's subway safe, and blah, blah, blah. And they're like, I don't care. You know, my grandma is living with me and she has respiratory issues. I'm not going to the office.

Yeah, yeah.

So. So you have to sort of understand that. And once you sort of get past that, then you. You get to understand these things about learning and threat.

What is your age's story or where. Where did they show up or where did you learn this or apply this?

Yeah, so my, My age story is around coaching. So when I, When I became a coach, as you know, you have. I don't actually. You've been there a while. I don't know if you had to get certified, but I did. You did.

Okay.

I know there are some. I know Ken Estridge and a whole bunch of these Michael Sink over there. And like, we didn't have to go through this, you know, it probably couldn't pass it if. Exactly. So that was about four years ago. And you have to go through this process and it's a little vague, you know, and I think they make it sort of, you know, mysterious and whatever, for whatever reason. And to be honest with you, Bill, I wasn't bought into the whole idea, like you're gonna make me pass. No. Taking the certification, like, you know, it's basically open book, you know, and I have all these things and making me memorize things for a period of time so I can spit it back to you. I was never a fan of that anyway, so I, I was one of the problems. But. So I didn't pass the test the first time through and I, But I wanted to be certified. I knew it was something that was.

I've failed a few coaches on their attempt at. But help them eventually become good coaches. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so. But I really want to do it. And so I reached out a bunch of other coaches who had just taken in and done it and said, what did you do and how did you do it? And so, so I, so I said, okay, let me, Let me apply what I know and what other people have done. And this is, this is a. I used a particular method is one of my main things that I did is called the Leitner method, which a lot of us know, which is basically use flashcards and you write the question on the front and the answer on the back, and then you ask yourself the question and then you don't look and you try to answer it. And if you got it right, you put it in one pile. If you sort of got it right, you put it in another pile. And if you got it wrong, you put it in the other pile. Right? And then you take the ones you got right, put aside. Then you squish the two pile, two and three together, which was a sort of. And then you just keep going. And I did that over and over and over again until I could go through the pile. There were 120 something cards. I could go through it three times dead. And actually Dave Behney was my guy the second time around and I did the whole thing and I went through the test and he looked at me, he kind of smiled and he turned around and he looked at his clock. He said, that was 37 minutes. I have never seen anyone do it that fast. I'm like, okay, I don't know. I said, well, I failed the first time. So it's probably average is wrong. So it's a method that really works. So. So just to get into ages a little bit, if you want.

Yeah, tell us, what does that mean?

So ages is a particular method by the Neuro Leadership Institute, which I have a certificate from. And the. The premise is that.

Does it have. Does it have nice borders?

Yes. Gilded, you know, gold and laden in. Is beautiful stuff. Yeah. Pay enough money that I should.

And you paid money and I. But I always mock everything, so.

Exactly. So ages is this process that's. That stands for attention generation, emotion and spacing. And this, according to Neuro Leadership Institute, is basically how the brain learns. The first thing is, is you have to. The brain likes. Has to figure out what's important. Right. So it has to figure out what. What is the attention. Which. Which things should I pay attention to? Right. And one of the things that's important is that the brain, the last major upgrade of our brain was somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago. So we're applying a really old tool to a completely new set of things. So it's. It. It glitches on a regular basis. But one thing that it does, my.

Brain glitches all the time, all day.

So it needs to know what should I pay attention to, what should I not? Because it's a lot of information coming in. It's got to know what to get rid of because there's thousands and thousands and thousands of things coming at you every minute. So the hippocampus, which sits sort of in the middle, down near the brainstem, is the traffic cop. And it's figuring out. So it's like, what do I pay attention to? So you have to figure out how do I get their attention. And usually novelty works or something. So that's something they have to do, get their attention. And you have about 90 seconds to get someone's attention. Like if you're doing a speech right, I'm sure you speak, etc. You have about 90 seconds for the audience, for you to grab the audience, you have to do something, but then you have to get it again every 10 minutes for about a half an hour. So that's. Attention generation is really about the brain. If in learning your job with the brain is to make sure that you Retain it and are able to recall it. And generation is sort of the main thing here, which is we're able to recall an apple because there are so many connections to Apple, to us, that we can just pick it at the top of our head. But if, you know, onomatopoeia or some crazy word or something has fewer connections, so we might forget the definition of it or something. There are certain words I always forget the definition of and I have to remember because I don't use it.

What does generation refer to?

It's. So you're generating information about it. So let's assume that apple's in the middle and then what's connected to apple is red crunchy fruit. My grandmother used to make apple pie, you know, and you have all this. So you're generating all of these connections to the thing and that the brain. Oh, this is important. There are so many things. This is like Google, right? There are so many links to this thing. This is important. The brain is focused on two things. And you mentioned earlier, opportunity, threat.

Right.

And it's really reward and threat generally, but same thing. And Brett has a 2x level over over reward because our ancestors survived. And the reason they survived was because they weren't stupid and they didn't take a lot of risks. So our brain is risk averse.

Yeah.

So you have this generation that's important. So anything you can do. So if you're teaching someone something, anything you can do to have them generate what they work, what they know to it. So when I do presentations or workshops, mostly presentations, I ask a question at the beginning, I say, hey, you know what? At the end, hopefully you will learn this. If you did learn that, what would that mean to you? And I make them write it down. And like if I do a Vistage talk or something like that, or EO whatever, I have them read it out loud to each other and they share all these things and now they're invested, they're like, if I could learn that, I get this benefit. So that's, that's generation. And then emotion is important. As you probably know, anything that was highly emotional, either negative, you probably remember some really bad things like that happened 30 years ago because your brain again is biased towards negativity. But I also remember some really positive things. Right. Maybe when your kid was born or you got the great deal or whatever, you're going to remember a lot more details because emotion is important to the brain. The brain has multiple neuron clusters feeding it and it says, oh, I get them all this great information. Because, and if, and if it's a high, highly emotional environment, I probably want to remember this because either I get, you know, the brain is thinking, I get the apple or the fruit or the nice tasting thing, berry, or it's a saber tooth tiger, stay the hell away from that thing. Yeah, right. And most of the stuff in the middle, it just kind of, if you remember it, great. If you don't, it's not that big a deal. But so the extremes are really good. And lastly is spacing, which is the Leitner model, which as I mentioned earlier. Right. Is that cramming for a test is about the worst thing you can do to learn something. You can learn it for a period of time. And there have been plenty of research out there that doctors are going through medical school. If you ask them three or four months later, they have forgotten between 60 and 90% of the. Of everything they learned three months earlier. Which is a little scary, right, if you're a patient, because they don't do it right. They're cramming. So it's better. What I did with the cards that I mentioned is I did it over about a month and I spaced it out. So I'd wait a week and then I do it again. And then if I did okay, and then I'd wait another week and then once I got it through, I waited. Then I'm like, I have this down. So those are the four things in ages that really work if you're trying to teach someone something.

So I. So the spacing refers to how recently you did it or that you need to. How often.

Yeah, you want to. So. So like let's, let's just do school because it's coming back into play. If you want someone to be able to recall something later and you're a teacher, you should sort of give them a little bit at the beginning and then maybe 20 minutes later refer back to it. And then maybe at the end of the class, refer back and maybe three or four classes later refer back to it again. They're much more likely to retain it because your brain is saying, wait a minute, I heard this before. Because your brain is just a prediction engine. It's trying to predict what's going to happen. And if it gets lots of information that's the same over and over again, it's like, well, this is much more likely to happen. So I'm going to assume this is going to happen because it's happening over and over again. And that means you'll learn it because your brain is saying, Good. This is something I should store in a certain place in my brain to recall it later.

So let me tell you what I did and you tell me how that thing applies. Right. So when I had to pass the certification and all that, and I have used the scaling up tools, I learned it very early on from Vern through the old birthing a Giants program that, where the, the Rockefeller habits and stuff got developed and so on. And we applied it in a couple of businesses and to varying degrees. Right. A lot of it I was just terrible at and or ignored or thought, well, I don't need that. And the mistakes I made are numerous. But then I went to become a coach and I'm like, I'm going to be a coach really fast. So I went through it then I knew that there was going to be an oral panel, like a review at the end of the process. There's a lot of things to do to certify even if you've been a successful CEO, like, they really want you to own it. So I said, okay, it's a problem and answer kind of. Or it used to be. So they'd say, they'd pretend role play and they'd say, as a CFO or CEO, here's our situation. So then I learned that I'm going to tell them what decision area it is, what the tool I'm going to use, and a key story or like the source thing that went with it. So I know I want to go three things, starting with the decision area and then the tool and then where it comes from. And so I put those on my wall visually, right. As I charted them and then I drilled it. I could do that. Then when I did my thing later, I could just go there mentally. I'm like, okay, that's people thing. And right under that is that. And like that kind of thing. I could just go spatially, mentally, visually, because I had created a visual diagram of it and I could then, even after it was gone, remember it like a map in my mind.

That's perfect.

Right? So that was a novel thing. And it feels like that was the generation now. I did it a bunch of times, like I reviewed it. Right. And the emotional piece that I could see is really the stories. Like what was the heart of each story. There was a fear or a failure or aha or something like that in each and every story that went through it. That helped me to remember the details of the story.

Yeah, can I stop you there for a sec?

Yeah, sure.

So did you said earlier, I think that you did some, you had some clients and you were applying this before you became a coach for sure, I.

Had clients, but also to my own businesses. Right?

Yeah. So that's the emotion. Why? Because you probably put pressure on yourself because you didn't want to, you didn't want to let these people down. There was some sort of psychological pressure either from them or from you. That's the emotion. Right. And that's why study groups work is because you, you feel the social pressure to, to not sound stupid in front of your peers. Yeah, that's a, that's part of the emotion as well. Yes, I think, I think you're right. The stories, the stories aren't necessarily emotional in your ability to remember them, but because they are stories, you remembered them. Our brain likes stories. Right. Because we didn't have writing until way, way beyond in terms of history. Right?

Yes. So flip the leadership side to what you're saying. I think that this applies in the same way. When I'm preparing to give a talk or I'm teaching a leader to pitch or to give a talk or whatever, we usually lead with some attention grabbing thing. Like a fact. One in four of you is not going to make it. Like, look around, who is it? You know, and here's what's going to happen. And like that. So something arresting, attention getting surprising. Right. That's that attention piece. And then, and that also, then Bridges has a bit of novelty in it. Right. And then brain likes thing is telling the story and that's about. Well, it's a story, it's narrative, but it, it brings an emotion into present, into the conversation. Right? Yeah, we connect. If you're a good storyteller.

Right. The only thing I would say is the thing you did at the beginning has to have some cohesion. So they probably know the name of your talk. So if you came in and you're going to do a talk about business scaling and you started talking about African antelopes and a story from, you know, your grandfather that's. They're like, what? And now they're confused. You got their attention, but they're like, what? Where am I going?

This applies to tech companies now.

If you could, if you could tell like a really strange story and then tie it back at the end, you kind of got them. Right. You have to do it quickly. You can't take 10 minutes to do it. If you can do it in a minute or two, then that gets them too because they're like, where is he going? Yeah, that works too.

Yeah, you've hooked Somebody I, I think that makes a big difference. That novelty is really interesting and useful. Attention grabbing, novelty, the tugging on emotional levers, all that seems relevant as a leader, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But the novelty is really important because this is what I've learned is that novelty is key because supposedly when we get something new, it goes through a general certain path in our brain. It goes through the brain stem first brainstem is fight, flight, freeze. Why does it do that? Because if it's new and it doesn't do that, we could die. The path first is, is everything safe or not? Friend or foe, safe or not, threat or reward? Okay. It looks like it's okay now. It comes up and it doesn't get to our executive function until a little bit later. So that's why novelty is really important because it gets the attention of the oldest part of the brain, which is really the most powerful. There's this guy, his name is Jonathan Haidt. Are you familiar anything from Jonathan Haidt? He's a, I, I think he calls himself an evolutionary psychologist or something. He works at, I think he works at Stern or some new, he works in New York. And he says the brain is basically an elephant and a rider and the elephant is the old brain. And basically if the elephant wants to go somewhere, it's going, the writer can do nothing about it. Right. If you want that cookie and you know, your, your brain, your front part of your brain is saying, don't have the cookie, we don't want to do that. That's calories. And you know, I'm going to have to work extra hard. But if you sit there for 20 minutes, you've exhausted that resource. And the elephant says, nope, we're getting the cookie. Sorry about that, but I want that cookie. And so he says there's these two relationships. And he said what he's learned is that through his study is that the writer is mostly there to rationalize the behavior of the elephant. It is not necessarily there to control it much, it's to rationalize it. So that's why when we make decisions, our limbic system lights up most and then we make up the reasons for the decision after the fact. So basically we're lying about the decision that why we made the decision we made. Since we're rational people, we're like, oh, well, I'll have to make up really good reasons and have to sound.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's mostly emotional. The decision making process is almost all emotion and there's no language in the limbic system.

So explain that all the Languages, higher brain, where we explain and justify and all that. So talk about. You mentioned before, as we were getting ready a story about an organization you were with in 20078 something you had a big catastrophe. Yeah, I forget what you said there.

That's basically how I got into coaching is I had an experience where I became a coach without really knowing I was becoming a coach. But I had to. I worked for an email hosting company before really Gmail was anything. And Office365, we were actually the precursor to Office365. We were a Microsoft certified partner and I came into the organization as a consultant. The guy wanted to sell the business and I helped him. I beefed up his sales and marketing stuff and about 10 months later he sold the business. And by then I had come on as a full time employee and I was asked to run the company, to run the division. It was about a. I think it was about a $9 million vision when I took it over. And on January 2nd of 2009 that was my first day. So we're in 2008 crisis right in the middle of it. 2009 was my first day, official day as GM. And we didn't deliver email to anybody on January 2nd, nor did we deliver email to anyone on the 3rd and halfway through the 4th. So everyone was pissed.

Grateful for that.

Yeah, right. Email is like air, right. It's just supposed to be there. So I lost a thousand customers in a week. And then I. And my. The head of the larger company was about $100 million company that bought us. We flew around the country trying to keep our customers, mostly our partners. And we had two big partners. One was Ingram Micro, who you might know, multi billion dollar company. And another one was Endurance, which you might not know, but they bought Constant Contact about three or four years ago for a billion dollars. So they were pretty big too. So we were in trouble. And so I had to do something. And I had never been a GM before. I've run sales and marketing but never run everything. I'm technically adept, but I don't know how a network infrastructure works. I've never run tech support. I have no finance background whatsoever. So I had to figure it out. So what I told my guys is I don't have any answers for you. I'm not going to give you answers, but I'm going to sit. I want to say let's debate, discuss and decide what does success look like for us when we get out of this? Let's do that. And that's what we did we, as a group, decided? And then I said, great, Now I need each of you in your individual apartment to draw the map from where we are today to where we decided your group would be successful. And they did it. And guess what, Bill? It worked. And it wasn't anywhere near what we do. It was probably a modified eos. It's very execution oriented, a little bit of. A little bit of other stuff, but that was it. And it worked phenomenally. We doubled the size of the business in double after I left in two years. We didn't. I didn't lose one employee. We got. We increased the average order size by 30%. And we. NPS wasn't really a thing yet in 2007. It was kind of coming up, but it wasn't really what it is now. So I did my own. I said, we gotta ask people how we're doing. And I did it out of five instead of out of 10. And the first time we did it, we were 2.9 out of five, which is a 58% approval rate. When I left, we were 4.6. So that was all wonderful. But the best part, so it's all great. You can go my LinkedIn profile and see all the great stats and wow, wonderful. Bill, you're great. But the best part, this is why I became a coach, is two of the guys, the guy who ran the network infrastructure and the guy ran tech support, said almost the same exact thing to me. They said, bill, I just want you to know what you made us do, I hated, was really hard.

You meant the visualization and the map.

And all that stuff?

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm so glad you made me do it, because now I know how to do it. And I took that away and said, I want more of that someday. And that's what I think. That's basically what we do as a coach, right? We just spread it across multiple places. We help them to learn how to run their own business without us. And hopefully we keep adding value and they keep us in the mix, but at some point, they don't really need us anymore. That's the job. So that's how I became a coach. That's why that's, that was the thing. When I reached out to Vern, that was in the back of my head is I think I could take what I learned here and apply it with Vern's, which was much bigger in terms of, you know, people, strategy, execution, cash. And, and, and yes, it worked. I love it. It's. It's. I now know what a calling is I knew what it was intellectually, but. And you've done this, you do it for free because it's a blast, right? You're in the room for eight hours and all of a sudden it's five or six o'. Clock. What happened?

Well, the coaches are also people who are not, I mean they've had some accomplishment. They're not living hand to mouth, they're not living paycheck.

Agree.

It's a job of passion and calling and we do well and we help people grow. Their companies sometimes extraordinary, but all of them really great. And as long as they stick with the process and they do the work. You're right. We don't actually teach them. We're not teaching them or telling them what to do. We're teaching them the tools, the processes. We're taking them through something so they create and make the decisions themselves and start to pull it together. And we might provide some advisory at some point, we might provide some feedback, some coaching, some, some training, a mixture of modes of things. It's rarely that we are very directive. Sometimes when somebody's in a crisis we're like dude, just do this and call me back. But I think you're right. Yeah, there's something to that. And then I think that as leaders, developing leaders, developing leaders, we want them to understand their own psychology and their own learning thing which is where this neuro leadership begins. And then what's the learning and psychology of the leaders they're leading and the people they're learning in? So that it's all like we're, we're mindful of the craziness of trying to lead human beings to accomplish something together.

Well, especially the way we've learned to do it is that we, we back to that threat mode. You know, our team, human beings strive for five things. They strive to understand status. They strive for certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. I've always joked there's a fairness gene somewhere in us. You know, we all have it and we'll act irrationally. This is really cool. And if you've heard of the dilemma game, which is you have 10 bucks and you have two people who don't know each other and they don't see each other and one person gets 10 bucks and they can give as much as they want to the other person and then the other person has to accept the money in order for them both to get the amount of money and it's been done for decades and the same results show up, which is if you don't give them more Than three or more dollars. They reject the offer, which is irrational because you came in with zero dollars. Anything you got was better than what you came in with. But we'll say no, you know, that isn't fair. I'm not even taking it. Yeah. And I'm going to punish that person for not being fair.

Right. I'm going to reject them.

Yeah. So, you know, so that's how we work. Right. And I think that's why I put it in my book. The scarf model is a great model if you. If you just have that in mind.

Our thing again, slowly.

Status.

Status. Clear.

So status, which is what's my relationship in importance to others.

Yeah, certainly.

Right. What do I have?

What do I getting upgraded or not?

Yep. What do I know is true autonomy.

Is like predictability and like that kind of thing.

Yes. That's certainty. Right. I kind of know. That's why you probably do this. I have my, my CEOs write a vivid vision at the beginning. You know, my general thesis is, hang.

On one today with a client.

Yeah. Which is, you know, hey, if you're a leader, there's probably. We say that leaders have to be. Have to have, you know, humility and charisma and whatever. And I've learned in my study that everyone's. All the leaders are different, but they have two things in common. They have all shared a great vision which people get behind, and that's what they follow. Right. If you want people to follow you, they have to know where you're going. And the other thing I say, which is you have to have courage.

What's the A.

Autonomy.

Autonomy.

So, you know, give them their brains back.

I have some freedom.

Yeah. You know, then R. R is relatedness. So am I in the in group or am I in the out group?

Aha.

And then fairness.

I want autonomy, but then I also want to be connected.

Yeah. Well, yeah. So there's.

There's this thing but be. But be part of the group.

Yeah. So we want. We want. We want to belong, but we also want to be unique as human beings, which is. Which is in conflict. And there's this really cool meme which has a bunch of kids sitting in a stadium level sort of classroom and they all have Apple laptops. And at the bottom it says be different.

Yeah. Michael Dell's loving that one. So. And then what's the f. Fairness.

Yeah.

Which, you know, always feels to me like people strive for it and they feel like they should. They aspire to it. And like. Yeah. It's not fair. You Know, life is a fair. The world isn't fair. The rain doesn't care. If you didn't want to get wet today, it's still raining. Yeah, well, it's more.

It's more. Hey, you gave that person this thing. They're the same as I am. And I got something less.

Yes.

That's. That's gonna spark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Too bad.

I'm a fan. As long as you can defend it.

Yeah.

Then. Then do it. As long as you feel like you can actually defend it. And you might say, look, it's not fair. You're in the same job, but this person is twice as productive as you are. Guess what? They're getting more stuff.

Right?

It's not the job title you got. It's. It's, what are you doing with it?

I think this is the fundamental thing. The first thing that I think I do, and most of us do, especially leaders who have fairly high egos in general, is we're like, oh, what does this mean for me, this model? And how do I. How am I using this or not using this or what could I use with this and that kind of thing? But then remember, like, this is also all of your people. So we're speaking to them, and they have these concerns and they learn in these ways, and they are triggered by these things. Right. So first it's useful to look in the mirror, and then it's useful to look around you and consider how. How folks are reacting to that. I want to. Let me tell folks about the book and about your website and that kind of thing. But before we do that, I want to remind our listeners and viewers that if you like the show, if you've enjoyed it, if you've gotten some value out of it, give it a little click thumb up, and if you subscribe to them, you'll get our stuff every week, which is really useful. And then if you want to drop us a note beyond here in the comments, that kind of thing, you can also send an email to infocalingcoach.com although we're fairly full with clients now, thank God, we have 200 coaches in our world, plus some. And some specialists. If you could use some help or anything, send an email. It's on there on the screen. If you're watching this infocalingcoach.com info and our website, scalingcoach.com so if you're looking for someone, I'm happy to recommend someone out there like Bill or somebody else that might be able to help you and help you find that right fit because it really helps to have somebody who you can connect with and who you can honor as a coach and and all that. I want to give special thanks to the creator of all the things, Scaling up and the Rockefeller Habits, Vern Harnish, the Scaling Up Framework and all of that. The show is produced by Lucy Summers, who's been lurking in the background keeping things running for both of us and comments and that kind of thing. Our show. The audio is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and the show notes are written by Ayn Kadina and proofread by Tim McGowan. I want to thank everyone for listening and remind you to keep scaling up. The book is further faster. Bill Flynn is the author. The Few Vital Steps that Take the Guesswork out of Growth. You can find bill@catalystgrowthadvisors.com Very nice, Bill. Thank you so much for coming on on a Friday afternoon and chatting with us and sharing some of your wisdom and giving us a little taste of some of the juicy parts of the book. And I hope folks will go out and check it out.

And thanks to you. Thanks to Lucy as well. And, and and since we're doing Vern, Vern got me started. So thanks Vern, for sending me on this path.

Yes, thanks everyone for listening. That's our show. Keep Scaling. Sam.