269: Carol Sanford — How to Create a Responsible Business

Foreign. To take it live. Today's conversation is really, I don't know, why does responsibility matter? Why should things work for everyone? Why should there be balance? Why not win, lose? Why is that even important? So we're going to get into all that more. Oh yeah. Some reminders for our listeners and viewers. Look, picking a technology partner is one of the biggest, most important challenges that we face lately in business, in any business. And if you're looking for a technology partner, you're probably considering things like can they actually do the job? Do they know what they're doing and how do they work with partners like me? Do they have a process or a way of working that actually works? Is their cost, their business model? Right, like dialed in for who we are, the way we work and so on. What can they ramp it up? Can they ramp it down? How's it going to work when we get into business together in delivering on whatever our projects are? So you come across a lot of companies like that. I know I certainly have. And one of the companies in our world, in the scaling up world is a scaling up venture incubator based in India that has a specific process or recipe for doing this kind of work with companies like yours in the mid market, small to medium sized growing companies dealing with that. And they've developed a model and approach for enterprises just like ours that deliver multiples on their competitors in terms of getting your projects done, getting your technology developed. If you'd like to check them out, I suggest you look at Clarion Technologies and see if they're a match for your business. We've got a link we're throwing up there on the crawl. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Bit ly. Bit ly. Clariantechnology is the link and there's some info there and they'll get in touch with you and they'll talk to you and they'll see together if they are in fact a fit for you and your business and your challenges. So I hi everyone, my name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. We do shows like this every week. We've got about three shows a week that come out to you now. We've done hundreds of shows on everything to do with your people, strategy, execution, cash and the leadership required to help your company grow and scale. The Fifth Decision. And so we've got all that and more hundreds of shows there@scalingcoach.com and unlike a lot of things, our shows are pretty enduring in value. So if you're looking to solve a hiring issue. You could go back and listen to our episode with Jeff Smarter. If you're working on articulating your vision more clearly, you could listen to our conversation with Jennifer Hoodie or, or Cameron Herald or Brian Scudamore and get into that kind of thing. So all of those and more@scalingcoach.com I'm joined today by Carol Sanford. Carol Sanford is a award winning leading educator, author, thought leader, producer, podcaster, et cetera, et cetera. She's got a whole lifetime of work with very notable companies like Google, Dupont, Intel, P&G, seventh generation. And people that I know and love like Tom Peters rave about her. So I'm really excited to have Carol join us on the show. Carol, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bill. What a lovely introduction.

We're talking today about this general idea of being a responsible business. And I think about, like at the beginning of shows, I like to tease the topic and I ask you, what problem does this solve? And you're like, why are we even talking about problems? And then you mentioned this notion that I don't hear a lot of people talk about. I haven't heard talked about for a while, but some of my dear friends have spent a lot of time talking about a world that works for everyone. And that's just an unusual way of looking at things and it is really delightful. So talk to us about. Well, actually before that, give us a little deeper cut at your background. How do you end up as this person on the show here today talking about responsible business? What the heck is going on with you?

I know. Well, some days.

Tell your story first.

Right. I'm going to give you two short stories. One is I studied with a man named Thomas Kuhn. He wrote a book called the Structure of the Scientific Revolution. He said science changes what it believes is true every era. And he called those paradigm shifts that when I sat in a classroom with him at Berkeley, it rocked my world because I had grown up in Texas with the idea that there was one truth. You learned it from your church, your parents, you know, the community ran and it never changed. And he told me, no, it changes.

Still true in parts of Texas.

It is true in parts of Texas. The thing that is important about that for who I am is I took Kuhn's idea, which he didn't tell us how to do it. And I developed a way for people to assess what paradigm they're in, understand what the impact of that is and how you can change it. So that's one thing. Secondly, I have a grand Second short story. I have a grandfather and grandmother who were half Mohawk, which is part of the Iroquois Nation. And they were on my maternal side. My grandfather was the first one off of a reservation and he spent a lot of time trying to get me to understand how I affected everything. He raised pigs. He picked up leftovers from grocery stores. He ran gardens. He cooked for our family. He even worked for the ag department advising. And he took me everywhere with him when I was 6 to 10 years old. He constantly asked me questions about the choices I made. What effect was that going to have on the pigs, on the people in town, on the big fair we were about to happen. And he would not let me live a life that was unexamined. That all has led me into being like I was with you. He called me a positive contrarian. He said it's really important you not just take things and accept them, but examine them and see how you're affecting them. I think that sets the stage for the teaser that you were setting up that I disagreed with.

Well, yeah, I hear fundamentally like as a character, as an identity, being responsible at core, who am I? What's my ripple in the world? Right.

Yeah, I would really agree with that. I think what I'd add to it, Bill, is that there is an ecosystem you're in. It's not just one on one. Like I'm affecting my friend or my neighbor or the climate in some generic way we can't quite grok. But there is a system at work and you have to really think about how it all interacts. And that's why I actually started using the word responsible. By the way, the book the Responsible Business, which I'm going to talk from Today, I wrote 15 years ago and it is the forward is written by. Right, Right. But we just re released it is being reprinted so many times we've just re released it in paperback. But the point of that book is the answer to your question, which is can a corporation or a not for profit understand that the way it runs its business is changing and affecting the life, not just selling products, but affecting the lives of everyone who buys from them, for all the people who work for them, all the people who they buy from earth in many different ways. The community and investors learning to see not just ripple, which I like the term that use, but it's ripple in a systemic way. And I think that's what's core to responsibility is knowing a single action can have a huge effect.

Yeah, so that's. That's a pretty heavy duty thought and I. And for the most part in being out, you know, making your way in life and making a buck and surviving and scrapping and like that, we don't think about the ripple, we don't think about the long term, far reaching effects of things, things like that. This is also really related to, we've had on the past, we've talked about conscious capitalism and we've had Raj Sisodia on the show before and a speaker and the notion that when we take into account all this, we make our business and our work stronger. But I think even like you're speaking to something I reminded like even deeper than that. I'm probably going to lose like a portion of my audience now. But I. So I remember first like hearing about the butterfly principle, right? The notion that a butterfly flaps its wings, flutters its, its wings in one side of the earth and then causes profound weather changes on the other side of the planet. And that things are so connected and rippling and that kind of thing. And that seemed conceptual and kind of cool, except a little remote and not deep.

Yeah.

But then I remember like feeling it in my bones one night when I. On a hallucinogenic experience, right. And there I am just tripping crazy and the TV goes off. So there was a time when TV programs ended at night and the national anthem played and then they played the color bars and then it went to just snow to like fuzzy interference pattern. And I remember looking at the TV as it played through all that stuff and then there was the snow on the tv and I looked at it and I'm like, oh, that's the interconnected molecules of the universe. We're listening to it, we're affecting it, we're seeing it. We're all connected. Everything's connected. We're all vibing off each other and vibrating and all that. I had experience as a late teenager and I still feel it today, like a deep, profound connection to things. Trippy and conceptual, but also like, like felt and inescapable. Right. The one of the most religious, you could say, or spiritual experiences of my life was there on acid in front of my TV at 3 in the morning. Right.

So let me bring the part of your audience we just lost back by giving them a concrete example about how that relates to their business. It does. All right, so there's a company called Merida, used to be Merida Meridian.

Yeah, yeah.

Which makes extraordinary textiles rugs. They used to sell them through Pottery Barn. And you know, the big, big stores didn't even have their own name on Them and they wanted to grow their business. Now that's what you're talking about. How do we grow our business? I said, all right, first we're going to look at redefining your place in the ecosystem. What really is the essence of Merida. And it turned out if you went and looked at who they had working for them, where they drew their ideas, they were filled with artisans who were migrants who had come from around the world. They were living in Boston. That input that came from Vietnam, Thailand, Brazil, where these artisans were not even being acknowledged. They were making commodity products. Once that got lifted up, we started looking at, well, what would it be like if you sold, stood through a box store, you sold through interior designers, and you sold that story. So we set up laps inside Merida where. Where the interior decorators for huge hotels around the world, famous big name interior designers and architects came and worked in a studio with these artisans who had escaped. They had a story which was amazing. That process allowed us to redefine based on the essence of the company and still maintain the integrity of all the sustainability, all the kind of work that took out toxins from the manufacturing change. How we work with people, with the core of the butterfly is essence, which spreads and you can grow. We grew that company about 35 to 40% annually in revenue. Now, I bet your listeners are listening now. That's what the butterfly effect is about. And we went off into Brazil and looked at where the suppliers were sending things and discovered the elders. There were elders like me, right? Who were they making these beautiful fibers and dyes, and yet they were getting laid off because of fair trade. They didn't fit the criteria you could pay. You raised what you paid, but you didn't take care of the village. The village. It's part of the butterfly effect. Now, I don't think you have to do acid, although I've never tried it using this process. But I think seeing that there are aspects that if you can go understand the essence of your business and what. Not so much what makes it unique, but what makes it what it is. And now you can build a responsible company, which you got the whole ecosystem involved. So did I lose you, but got your reader, your listeners?

No, no, no. I think it's so. It's really great that, you know, there was a time when I wouldn't have admitted that for sure, but since leaders like Steve Jobs and others have come forward and talked about some of their experiences and how it expanded their thinking, I'm not afraid to admit not actively encouraging anyone to Use drugs of any kind, and I'm not a user of that today, but this notion that we are connected and I think can lead, like when you tell that story, and I think about some of the companies that have tried to bring things into balance, have looked for where things are out of balance or where they're work is win, lose, or coming with some cost or unintended impact, like not a negative impact. Right. They're all impact. But sometimes it gets a little depressing, right? Oh, if we uncover something else, then we're going to have to redesign that, we're going to have to rethink that, and then it's not going to work. And I think there can be a fear of going down that road and working through some of those things that. That you'll just uncover more. And certainly I can remember proposing things that were more in balance and. And seeking to be more responsible than being nitpicked by people as being not good enough or not yet dealing with more and being somewhat depressed by that. I've certainly heard that reaction from more than a few people.

So I don't use the term balance. I think I understand what you're after. What I'm talking about here is a complimentary idea to that, but I think it overcomes the fragmentation you're talking about. And what I mean by fragmentation is the minute you start trying to improve one thing, it opens doors. Like you're saying, it creates the next thing, the next thing. But that comes from having broken things down into simplest, smaller. Work on this, make it better. Now that has to be better. And that way of working, I think, is antithetical to what I'm talking about. And when I say what we did with Merida, we didn't look at one thing and figure out or look at how we looked at all the various things and got them equally important. Instead, we worked with one idea, one, which is what's the essence of Merida? What is it that makes it distinctive? Now we infuse that in everything. We don't change anything. We go back and find out what it is. The showmanship was the term we ended up working with, and it becomes a focusing device. Everything is around showmanship, not of Merida, but of the interior designer. Their story, their fame, their ability to brand what they were doing. Now we don't work on anything that doesn't lead to that, and that's the hack. The biggest problem we have when we try and improve things is we do open so many doors if we don't know toward what not balancing it all out, which is why I'm arguing a little with the term balance, but instead finding out what is it you are going to grow toward. So if you're going to grow Merida toward showmanship for interior designers, you're going to only focus on that. In dupont, we did the work to find the essence, and it was 206 years ago, founding, and it was about managing risk. That's what E.I. dupont was trying to do with dynamite and then eventually chemicals. We didn't look at changing a million things, no matter how it showed up. We asked, does it lead toward managing risk? We won't do it. As Chad Holiday, he wrote the foreword to that book, by the way, after doing that work in Depot, we won't do it unless we can manage the risk. So that cuts down that cacophony of things linking to, linking to. Linking not only links to one thing. What is the essence of the company we're moving into everything toward. Now talk to me about how your idea about essence, if you are balance, may fit there, or it may be something different. Maybe just. I can't quite grok. You smiled when I said grok before, so I thought I'd say it again because I love James Highland.

Reference. If you only learned the term grok and then aspired to grok something, you would elevate yourself as a human or Martian.

I agree. I agree.

Yeah. I'm always delighted when people will use reference, something like that, like, to grock it. So I think about there being a balance, an ebb and flow, a give and take. Things move in and out of balance. The tide goes in, the tide comes out. Right? It's seeking a balance. The moon pulls it one way and then. And then it releases it, and then it moves back in. And, you know, that happens multiple times in a day. I think about, you know, things get out of balance for a while.

You, you.

You run a sleep deficit, and then you crash and your body pulls you back in balance or whatever it is, that kind of thing. And I think about, like, trying to find a natural flow in something. Things die, things are born, right. There's things decay, things are created. All of those things kind of being connected ebb and flowing back and forth. So I was thinking more about that. And as you start to open up stuff, you see more opportunities for things. You become aware of those ripples because we're talking about people in Merida and dupont and whatever. There are existing operations and existing things that may not be in sync or true to that essence. That you're. So you're distilling down a fundamental essence that is positive in some way and then truing up to it or something like that. Right, but you're not creating from nothing.

No, you're creating from something that was probably primal. The first thing. Now I've got an idea how what I'm talking about fits with what you're talking about. Let me see if I can make that link and I'll give you another story. All right, so essence is the initiating energy, the one, the one thing. But there is the ebb and flow, the complementarity, the positive and negative of battery or it won't charge. That's like the energy that takes the whole of essence. And I often say what's going to have to be complementary when we go out and work. So for example, Seventh Generation, let's take a smaller company. Well, Merit is small, but 7th generation makes non toxic household products, personal care products. I worked with them after they were not making money for a long time, then breaking even and grew them. So Unilever has now bought them. Now what we looked at was what is it that is the essence of Seventh Generation first? So I'll tell you that and then we'll go to the complementarity that creates the balance. The essence of Seventh Generation was the ability to discern dissonance. And that came, came through Jeffrey Holland, the founder, where everything about him looked to see where something was not working or where it was or where like Walmart he had. He would rail against Walmart who would say they were doing one thing and they were doing something else. He would demonstrate, get arrested, do all sorts of things to try and call attention to why Walmart was not really living up to the words it was putting out in the world about helping the poor buy groceries, stuff they couldn't get access to. Now Jeffrey finally understood that the way he had to do that was he had to create dissonance with their actions. He had to actually intentionally create imbalance or else people couldn't see what he was talking about. So he would show, all right, if you are doing all of this packaging material and throwing it away, what you're doing is polluting the environment. Mostly you're polluting it near where people of color, people of lower economic standards or income could not have a way to live healthily. And so he said, here you've got one thing extreme here where you're creating cheap imported products, but what you're doing is polluting the world. He made a marketing campaign out of showing what happens when you have imbalance and showing it through imbalance and saying if you don't learn how you can do both, how do you get products delivered to people and in a way that don't pollute the environment? Guess what happened out of that? Lee Scott, the CEO of Walmart finally invited Jeffrey and I got to go with him. Was a great conversation where he said, how is it that you make those links, those flows was the word. He used your word, those flows that went from what you saw. And I could see what Sam Walton wanted to do, but I couldn't see where it was going. And he said because you have not yet had your team learn to envision the effect of their choices. And so that became what he worked, what Lee Scott set out to work on. He said we're going to look at the effect of everyone, our choices on climate change and we're going to change the ones that need to be changed. All that came from playing with balance and imbalance.

Yeah. So going and looking for and seeing things, becoming aware of, conscious of something greater, wider than the blinders on way that sometimes we can operate right in the world. Yeah, I get that. Interesting and useful and scary sometimes. I can remember some years ago we wanted to expand production. We wanted to add some factories in India and we'd been buying some things from India and from across Asia for some years and we wanted to add some factories. So I sent one of our managers to India to go talk to the factories and the first level was great. They were greeted graciously and treated lovely and told lots of nice things and with all of that, like the. Some of the artifacts of the culture and that kind of thing, you know, great experience. But then she said, show me the environment. So they started to take her around the factory and they showed her some of the things and again it was well ordered and that kind of thing. She's. And then she started to dig a little bit, scratch the surface. Right. And she said what's behind that door? And she started opening the doors and looking around and. And then like in peeking a little past the, you know, behind the curtain.

Yeah.

Then that's where the separation occurred. So then we started to see, oh, they're height like literally in some places the smell was overpowering because of toxic chemicals and things like that and bad hygiene and you know, I think there's something there to see and to notice. In other cases we went and you know, we heard a good. And like, okay, who are these workers and where are they from? And tell me about their lives and that kind of thing. And then we started to actually see differences in some places where people actually knew the answers and they knew the footprint and they could talk about the programs they were doing and the sort of larger relationship of the work that we did, our products out in the world and that kind of thing. You could start to see those full connections and. And that helped us to make a different kind of choice than we were prepared to make on the surface of choosing only somebody's best pitch, the best pricing, timing, that kind of thing.

Well, I worked in. This would remind me. I worked in South Africa just as Mandela was coming off Robben island with Colgate Palmolive. And there were, well, I mean, you know, the stories. They were blowing up taxis and it was a dangerous time to go. And the guy who became general manager asked me if I was willing to go take the risk. And I said, well, what are you trying to do? And he said, well, I actually want to build a great new South Africa by building a great company. And what we're going to have to do is look at the racism, the, the toxic materials that were being used, the dangerous situation that was being created. And I suggested something about how you work when you hit that environment. I've done this in India, but your particular story is reminding me of South Africa we set up. And this is the way I always work, where we did an education campaign rather than trying to tell people what to do, because if you tell them what to do, they try and hide what they've been doing. It's like they feel like there might be judged if you're going to go look behind their doors and so forth. So I said, no, Celia, that why don't we educate people to assess themselves? We're going to give them a way to look at and understand the flow of what I call a value adding process, how a manufacturing process, a creative process can look when it's whole and complete, when taking into account all stakeholders. And then their job is to assess, not tell us, but assess themselves on how they're doing and come up with their own path forward. So we did that for a couple of years. They ended up creating events and transformational businesses in Soweto and Alexandria where they use products at Colgate, because we were inside of a company to be able to build small businesses for women who were using it to educate the entire township on what oral health looked like because 90% of kids were losing teeth by the time they were teenagers and the people there knew that. But if we told Them how to work. They might not have worked on that but they used it as a way to rebuild their value adding process. Now here's what we were really doing for the business and following Salis idea we were building leaders for South Africa. All of the people who led that, who we were educating them how to be leaders, educating how to be managers, educating how to run a facility. We're also learning how to run township councils and how to build events in the township. This is what I mean by responsibility. Where you can do multiple things at one time and you can give people the ability not to be afraid of what you'll find behind the door that they would have to explain. But you put them in charge and you're just in charge of education. Mandela gave us an award for that essay. Us I didn't serve anything. I was the educator. But what he created was a constitution award. Because of that education we were able. And I always say we because I was so invested in it. I wasn't employed. Right. I flew it back and forth. But I'm still say us because they said that about us. He said we had shown the world that you could take black Africans who had quote not been to school and therefore soon to be not very smart in status was. But they were educated by life. And we moved them into the top 5% of the leadership of the company became 95% black. People noticed we couldn't do that. Mandela had put in the constitution. That's responsibility. But we also grew the company 65% quarterly. Did you hear that? Quarterly in revenue. Because we were operating in different ways. So we were responsible to the investor, we were responsible to the employees. We took away and got rid of many of the toxic manufacturing processes. I think that that resonates with me for what you were talking about in India you were involved in.

Yeah, I definitely hear something there. And I think like to relate it back to local companies. In a modern world our businesses have big effects. Right. On much bigger than we realize day to day. Right. So we have our employees and. And that's one group that we really see and feel. We know that the income from there supports their families and often beyond like one person for many of our companies and then there are the people that we do business with. So if you do business with another business then your business, your product or service is like fuel or a tool or something for someone else. So now we've got another level of that and then all of their employees or it could be direct and you're providing sustenance or Enjoyment or any number of other things direct to an end user, consumer, that kind of thing. So there's the effect on those people. Is it healthy, is it sustainable, is it all of those kinds of things? Then they're the people that you're sourcing from and all of their impacts and not just them and are they making enough money or that kind of thing, but their communities that they operate the way that they operate, the way things are transported in between. There's all of these connections of things and all of these impacts. And thinking about that from a place of responsibility, I can see as being pretty transformational. When you start to have things not be out of balance, to use my way of thinking about it, not something that's creating a deficit somewhere that's going to have to come back and get paid back. We think about that like the environmental issues. Somebody produces a factory and they don't think too much about the effluent or the, you know, the crap flown out of the factory. And then they go be they shut down or they run too long and then at some point it builds up and it creates another crisis. That's like building up a deficit of something that then has to be dealt with, an imbalance, if you will, and creates a problem. There's like a long term liability there and they could get shoved out to the community, other kinds of people, because it's buried, forgotten like that. Right. And we see that in places where there's truly disastrous. And what I was struck by like Raj Sisode and others saying is that in their studies, the people and companies that operate in a responsible fashion, they would say conscious capitalists, people who are paying attention to all the stakeholders and all the ripples of things actually do better. And I certainly think of it as sustainable being that. And I think that's what you're saying too. But then you take that to really pivotal things. So you think about like mining in South Africa, right? As mining goes, so goes the country, so go whole communities, things like that. If you transform those and alter them in some fashion, empower the workers, that kind of thing, you fundamentally change the entire society.

Speaking of mining, let me give you one last story here, dupont. I worked with their mining in Australia and we're working with people who'd been in mines in South Africa and they were when I started there and Chad Holiday was responsible with that group at the time they were being sued by the government of Australia for destruction of rivers, streams, howls, health, economics. All of it was going downhill. And what we did is looked at educating them about how. I still think you don't go directly to sustainability because if you do that, you don't look at the uniqueness of that mine in that location with what it's doing. And that's my complaint, really, with people who work on kind of saying do good for all, because you aren't really going and looking at Australia. What we did in South Africa was unique to that period of history and time and what it needed, not a program that says get everybody equally okay. So what we did in Australia was we said, what's the essence of mining and what is it when it's titanium? Which particularly was what they were doing. As a result of that, we were able to invent a new technology that created a proprietary way of mining that transformed the industry so that instead of taking down 90% of a mountain, and I'm rounding here, right, to get a small amount of titanium you can make into titanium dioxide for paint and makeup and Oreo cookies and all that, instead you took down 5% of a mountain. And you did it in a way that rebuilt as you went. You stopped deep, well injecting, but you ended up with margins which were triple what the industry was. And dupont still holds it. That is an example of what it means to do better financially. It certainly made Chad Holiday get promoted and keep going at end the the chain. So personally, he became chairman, CEO and president of DuPont, and it reversed the government, stopped all of the lawsuits that they had going and the problems they had going. So everybody did win. But the point I'm trying to make is you don't just go in and try and do good for everybody. You look at this unique situation. What's the essence of it? How do people work on it? We worked on townships. Townships didn't exist there. We worked on that in South Africa. We worked on what they were mining and what it meant to work that way there. If you don't start with that, to me, you're only in a sustainability level and not in an ecosystem responsibility level. Am I translating here?

Well, let me see. I think what you're saying is that it's not conceptual or theoretical. It's applied to the unique environment or situation that you're operating in.

Exactly. And we have been going and doing a story of place. So when we were in South Africa, we did something called Story of South Africa. What is it that makes it who it is? And it turns out that it's a lot about birthing newness. We think it's where the birth of humanity, where we became Homo sapiens, the first version of what we are today. It also is a place that certain kinds of crops started there that then spread around the world, particularly certain kind of beans and greens and things that have nutrients which work today. When we looked at birthing and shared that with Mandela, part of what he ended up saying, right, we're birthing a new South Africa now. We have something that is unique to this place. It is the essence of South Africa, and we built from that.

Yeah, I get that. I pulled up, while you're talking, the definition of responsibility, because when we use a term like that that we use commonly, without consideration, sometimes it seems useful to look at what does it actually say or mean. And I'll let you speak to this. I'll read a couple of sections of it. Of course, like all definitions, pretty long. So the first is having an obligation to do something, having control or care over someone as part of your job or role, being the primary cause of something, so able to be blamed or credited for it. Of a job or a position involving important duties, independent decision making, control over things.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things there that when I talk with people about responsibility, I get us to talk about, which is there are kind of four levels at which we can do good. One of them is sort of at the level of being kind. You can kind of be good to people. You can share. A next level up is we can kind of be empathetic. Oh, yeah, I've been there. I've felt that. You know, I got. I feel your pain. The next level up is compassion. Oh, I want to make your pain go away. That's a lot different than kind, a lot different than empathy. But the fourth level, which you just read in that description, is caring. And my definition of caring when I'm talking about responsibility, is I want to build your ableness to do what you want to do. I don't want to give you my version of getting rid of your pain or give you my life that you would get to live. I want you to live your life. So wherever we went in South Africa, in Boston, with Meredith Meridian in Vermont, in Australia, it was all about finding out what are they pursuing. That is where what you were talking about comes from a deeper place. And I do think that is hinted at in here. And it also, the minute you can see that you feel a duty, it said obligation, either of those, to do something, I can't not help you. When I was there, I never wanted to leave South Africa because these young black men, mostly who were working there had so much hope for their families. And with what Mandela was doing, they were coming forward and they were. I would. When I was in the US or Europe working, I would leave and I'd come back and they couldn't even remember what we worked on. We'd have to go, start over, rebuild in South Africa. I couldn't keep up with them. They would take everything I'd given them. They would have applied it, they would have extrapolated. They would take it into the township, into the council they were running. They were driven, you know, we would say, because they felt an obligation, because they cared. And that is to be exactly what we're talking about when we say responsibility.

Having to care for things or the opportunity to care for things. You know, on one level, when I think about the things that I have to do, the things that I have to handle, I can get exhausted very quickly. I can feel like I'm not enough. There's never enough time, that kind of thing. When I think about that, I'm responsible for a great deal of things. When I have a huge impact, when I care about a great range of things, I actually start to feel very powerful. When I start to think about all the impacts that I have in the world and the people that I touch. And even with a few conversations, the entrepreneur that I talked to the other day and I said, listen, if you just shift this with, your team's gonna show up differently. And, like, you know, later that day, he said, oh, my God, it's like it was night and day. I said this, and everything changed. And I think. Then I think, jesus, I'm powerful, right?

Wow.

I can do a lot of stuff. And I'm actually interested in doing more. I'm like, give me somebody else to talk to, right? If I can cause that little shift with something I said, I call that.

Switching from being an agent to being an instrument. So if I. And. And there's nothing wrong with agency if we don't have it. And that was part of the definition, responsibility. I have to have enough ego to get up and go. I have to have enough courage to fall in a few ditches on the way. So I gotta have agency. But I also have to understand that I am not the source of all that's gonna happen. I am an instrument in an ecosystem of things moving. And if I'm wise enough and I care enough, I can bring new capabilities to that system that will exist long past the time I was there, and no one will remember my name. And that may be the most important mindset to have that gives me energy.

When I hear the word instrument, right. I hear. I think about what immediately comes to mind is musical.

Yeah.

Medical instrument or whatever. But I think about the. The musical instrument is a vehicle for the music to be produced. Right. The player uses something. So what is it? If I think, am I the instrument? What am I the instrument of? What is the song that I'm being used to play? Right. And not personal to me. It's being played through me. I didn't invent. I'm not the first person to say my life is about making a difference, but when I give my life to making a difference, it is a song, if you will, being played through me as an instrument in the course of my life.

That's beautiful, Bill. I think the metaphor is a powerful one to be able to think. And I also was envisioning, as you're talking, and I have this crazy person clearing. We're just going to ignore them, that I. I think of the instrument also as something that happens in, like a jazz quartet or an orchestra, where I am an instrument in the creation of something. And if my part isn't played, it reduces the variation, the creativity. But if I am and I play my part the best I can. You do what you were just talking about.

Yeah. Talk to us about Kingsford Charcoal. You shared.

Kingsford was an amazing experience in my life. It was one of my earliest clients to try all this out on. And what that meant was that I was going to be working with people who had an eighth grade education. And that eighth grade education meant that they were assumed to be lesser minions, like they were machines. But we had a guy named Will Lynn who ended up leading that change effort, and he was the president of Kingsley. That process was an education one where one of the things that charcoal did was it created retort to make it into charcoal, but that left pollutants behind. The pollutants, we could have just done a kind of sustainability project, but instead we turned it over to all of the employees, the suppliers, and educated them on how it was that production worked. But also we asked each of them to come up with something we called a Promise beyond ableness. And what that meant was they could see something that really needed to be done, but they didn't know how to do it. But they were going to promise to do it because it really, really needed doing. We're back to our obligation. Right. And we were going to support them in learning how to do that. One of the teams understood and worked until they Created a retort process that significantly reduced the particulate which was causing charcoal to be such a disgusting process. And by the way, it wasn't much worse than gas. But gas grills got popular because of it. But that group invented a grill that could still use charcoal and a retort process. A whole closed system process that ended up creating the dominance there is in the Kingsford charcoal market right now. That was 25 years ago. It started and I've been able to stay connected with them. They went to owning 75% of the market. They still do. They have margins which exceed all the others in the industry who, who make any kind of product like this. But what's really amazing is every human being who worked in that process, who created their own promise and said this is what they're going to do. They ended up creating their businesses on the side. Mayors, heads of projects in their community. And they still came to work at Kingsford every day. And then when it was time, because we'd gotten so productive and created a. I just noticed a new product Kingsford has coming out right now, which was out of Hickory that we had in the pipeline that we invented 20 years ago. They had so many they couldn't carry all of them into fruition. But the major thing was we finally had to close facilities and contractor plans. But instead of just laying people off, what happened was we worked with every community saying no person will be without a job until they have the same or better job and pay. Kingsford did that. That's a Clorox company. In that process we built education process. Remember? Now they have an average 8th grade education. We built so that everyone could read and write or 99% of them, including their families were able to help start up businesses in the local towns where we were closing them down and do what Jane Jacobs used to call import replacement. The town needed a business. People were driving 100 miles to get some car repair accountants. These people were able to get degrees or certifications. And Kingsford went from 11 large facilities to six with being able to produce eventually 100 times what they're producing and never laid off one person. And every one of those people were able to either create their own company or. Or join with a partner or have a job that they felt like was the same or better than what they had before. That's responsibility, right?

So I hear responsibility really broadly. I also heard you say something. I don't know if I heard it exactly correctly, but I've heard it before and I think it's worth underscoring and that is learning to promise things you don't know how to do yet. Like I promise this and I have no idea how to fulfill that promise. Right. And that's a really unusual trait. It would come from a fundamental responsibility of being cause in the matter of your life and the world around you. Yeah.

You do have to, in a company, build infrastructure to do that. And I have. I did that with my children starting when they were six years old. I said, what would you like to do for our family? And they got to pick. And the first time was kind of off a list. But by the time they were nine years old, they took over a whole system responsibility. At nine, my son took over feeding us. At nine, my daughter took over paying all our bills and managing finances. And they chose that. She still runs my company and her understanding of the working of finances and household is amazing. My son's understanding of food chemistry is amazing. That didn't mean they had to do it all, it meant they managed it and they give assignments to me and to one another. The key is you have to build capability and infrastructure. You can't just make kids suddenly say promise to do something or an employee promise to do something. In my book the Regenerative Business, which is what I would name the first one if my publisher let me, but they wouldn't. I describe both what I did with my kids, but also how you build that infrastructure so people can move into it. And it's a genuine caring that their promise comes from. Like all the people in South Africa working on townships. It's a powerful idea, but you don't just. It's not doing, it's a system. So I just want to caution people, it's super important.

Before we run out of time, I want to recap some key takeaway things for people. Before I do that, let me give a shout out again to our sponsor who helps make our show reality and pay the bills and that kind of thing. And a key issue that a lot of people deal with and that's how to choose the right getting your technology developed, developed, redeveloped, enhanced, et cetera. And if you're looking for a partner to do technology development, you probably are interested in someone who knows their work, who knows who's technically capable, who has expertise. But you probably also need somebody who's right sized for your industry, for your company, who has a process that's suited to companies at your stage and doing that, who can balance and use creating great quality outcomes, but with also an agile development process, and who can ramp up and down as you need resources, you probably get hit and are aware of lots of companies that do that. I know I certainly am. But one of the companies from our world of scaling up that's worked with a scaling up coach forever and applied the same things that we espouse in our workshops and in the podcast and so on is a scaling up venture incubator based in India that brings a great deal of technical development to teams around the world. They've got a model that's tailored just to help companies like ours mid market companies scaling up and can produce benefits far beyond their competitors. I suggest you check out Clarion Technologies and see if they aren't a match for your business. The link is probably going below us right now. It's bitly bit.ly Clarion technology is the link. They've got some info there. They'll get in touch with you and talk about your particular technical challenges and so on. You had the blower. You can probably hear in the back my dog yelping. My guess is that my wife has pulled up outside the house and of course the studio is now at home and I mean she's back from grocery shopping. Anyway, Clarion Technology is a worthy partner. Let's talk about some of the final things and where people can go before we run out of time in our show. So you talk about dealing with reality. You talked about systemic effects and holes, looking at the a broader picture of things, getting to the essence of things and taking charge for yourself, allowing people to take charge, not only being responsible, allowing others to be responsible and develop capabilities that they did not have before. I think I covered some of the basic things, the main things that you talked about through all of your great stories. Did I miss anything there?

No, I think you, if I had to put them in order, I'd say really getting the idea that every company has an essence it's based on founding and hanging onto that is the focusing element. Then it lets you look at where you're talking about what does balance mean? And then we kind of ended with the idea of how do you build responsibility in. So I think you hit the good.

Stuff and we'll include both the dog and the blowers outside our respective recording sites. Being at home, you're right, there's pros and cons. Well, if you were down by our old studio, you'd hear the train going by, the BART train that would pass by and shriek and make all sorts of track noise. I want to give big thanks to Lucy Summers working behind the scenes to get our show prepared and scheduled and distributed. All that kind of thing. If you like the show, like like the show, like it, subscribe to it. You'll get updates every week wherever you go. Or go to our own website, scalingcoach.com and search the whole back catalog for something to deal with the problems, challenges, or whatever inspires you in the current moment around scaling your business. I want to give big thanks also to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework work, and to Albert Burge at Potfly Productions, who edits our audio. Each week. Our show notes are written up by and compiled by I. Cadena and then proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks again everyone for listening for watching. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up.