Faisal Hoque — Everything Connects

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No, I have not. That's okay.

He's a badass and he's okay with it. He's the founder of a couple new organizations called Shidoka Next Chapter. He's written a couple of best selling books. This new one that we're talking about today is Everything Connects. Cultivating mindfulness, Creativity, Innovation to create long term value. It's from Fast Company Press and his prior book Lift is all about the leader that creates global change. And anyway, so great books. I'm glad to get into this topic. I'm always loving the relevance of mindfulness in business. So welcome to the show, Faisal.

Thank you for having me, Bill.

Now you're in Houston today.

I am in Houston today, yes.

That's right, Houston, we have no problem. Here we are. So before we get into that, I gave like a quick couple of blurbs about you, but why don't you tell people your story and then we'll lead into the book itself and some of the stories that you share in the book.

Sure. So, as you already shared with the audience, I originally come from Bangladesh. I came to US as a student in my late teens. I started studying computer science and electrical engineering, typically what people do when they come from that part of the world. And that was in, you know, mid-80s, late-80s time frame. And since then, you know, I've started my career in corporate world, Pitney Bows Down, Bradstreet, et cetera. And then I started my series of ventures, all technology related venture. Yeah, ended up being in ge, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, I started writing. And when I first started writing, I think my first book came out in 2000 by Cambridge University Press where I was arguing that technology has no meaning if you don't really know how to manage it. Well, so there was a kind of like a different viewpoint as the technology is coming, talking about technology. And, you know, as time went by, you know, I traveled. I had a chance to travel all over the world, worked with customers all over the world. And I kind of went back to my eastern roots. I read a lot of these Eastern philosophical books and whatnot and traveled, had an extensive background in traveling throughout Japan. And that's where the idea of mindfulness kind of started. So seven, eight years ago, I wrote Everything Connects first edition. And then I didn't write anything else for a while. And then last year wrote Lyft. And then, you know, I looked at where a world has completely changed and we just released the second edition of Everything Connect by adding quite a bit more emphasis on mindfulness and the ability to connect within yourself and as a result, how you connect with the world. Because if you want to create longer term value, you kind of have to first know what value you bring to the world and then you can apply that to the rest of the world. So that's kind of like the summary of my journey thus far, if you want to call it a journey.

It's all a journey.

Yeah.

I think when you travel, when you work all over the world, you're exposed to such different ways of looking at something like, here we are the same human beings, and yet our cultures, languages and things are so profoundly different. It alters the way. And then that also has us see ourselves in new ways. Right. Oh, isn't that interesting? They do things like that over here. Like, that's not how we did it, you know.

For sure. I mean, I think the, you know, we, you know, business or work is very human process. Right. Because, you know, how we see things and whether we are biased or unbiased, that all stems from a particular lens, from how we grew up, what our culture has been and what we got exposed to or didn't get exposed to. Right. So if you go and work in Japan, it's a very different culture. If you work in Italy, that's a very different culture. If you work in us that's very different culture. But US in itself has many microcosm of culture. And each corporation has its own culture. Right. I mean, I've been, for the last five years, I've been heavily focusing on our federal government. And, you know, federal government is a whole different beast. Right. So each one of these has unique, you know, culture practices. Some broken, some work, some doesn't work. And my observation is strictly from that point of view. Even though I kind of try to tie. I'm a history buff, so I try to tie back to whatever happened in the past. And if you really, really, really study it, you know, a lot of things have changed, but, you know, the basic humanity hasn't really changed a whole lot. It's just different time with different practices.

Well, let's, so let's, let's have you tease out some of these ideas. I asked you to identify some stories and that kind of thing. As we got ready, you shared one that you went right to right away. Let's talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

Sure. I mean, you know, I like using him because he's such a multifaceted, fascinating personality. Right. He's done so much because he was an artist, sculptor, engineer, entrepreneur, you know, a hustler in many way to get funding for his ideas. Right. So if you look at his personality, there's a. There's a couple of observations that you can take away if, if you study what he has done. But also if you look at some of the, you know, the diaries of the notebook he has left behind, he used to always say that, you know, he would go in the nature, take deep walk and get submerged himself into the nature and have deep observation of what was going on in the nature. And then as a result, he will kind of immerse his mind in a way where you would be able to connect the dot to a future state that allows him to look at some particular outcome. So as an example you know, he is probably the one of the very early person who tried to create a flying machine, which is more on the airplane, right. And he observed birds and their flight patterns, right? And as a result, you know, he built this, tried to build this in a flying object, right? So literally mimicking, you know, wings and whatnot. And some of his things work, some of these things didn't work. But the point is that he was deeply mindful about what he was doing on a daily basis and purposely taking, you know, cues and learning from many different discipline and trying to find within himself who he was as an artist, as a sculptor, as an engineer, as an entrepreneur, and then apply it to real life. So I like using that example a lot. And if you look at most of the interesting people in the globe, they're all multifaceted, faceted, they don't fall in one kind of particular discipline. They borrow and mix and match many different things. And if you look at where the technological revolution today is, you know, you're increasingly seeing convergence of bioscience with computer science, with robotics, mechanical engineering, etc. Etc. So the disciplines are increasingly converging. And if you look at that, that discipline comes from being mindful about understanding who you are and what value you want to create, how that allows you to connect with the world as a result of that, come up with the creative process, that allows you to come up with something innovative that's long lasting and impactful to the rest of the world.

So when you say mindful, what's your definition of that? What do you mean by that?

So if you look at the classical, you know, exam, you know, definition of mindful, which is really come from a lot of this spiritual tenant where you calm your mind and you don't think about anything and get hourly focus on whatever your, whatever present moment is. And as a result, you see a clarity that you wouldn't see otherwise. So meditative technique allows you to be mindful, but that is not the only definition. So in the context of what I'm talking about, you can get clarity by emptying your mind by being utterly focused on whatever you're doing. So for example, you know, the Zen Buddhist monk, you know, they sweep their floor and cook and that's their way of practicing losing, empty their mind so that they can learn from themselves, right? So, so as a mere morals and who are trying to live and doing work, you know, that ability to get that grounded allows us to be utterly focus on whatever we want to do and whatever we're doing and the way we're doing it, that gives you the clarity and the focus to whatever you want to create. So how many of you've heard it? A lot of time, like, you know, musicians, when they play music, they get completely lost and they can't think about anything else. When a chef cooks, you know, they completely get lost in their cooking and don't think about anything else. When a writer writes, and I've seen this in my, my own practice, you completely forget whatever is going on around you. And the best work comes from that level of, you know, complete clarity and complete focus.

So I think when I think of mindfulness, right, I think very often we're thinking about like awareness for sure. Where is the mind going? If I'm mindful of something, if I use it generically, it's usually meaning mindful of myself being self aware. And if I'm applying it to something, mindful of nature or mindful of a particular thing, mindful of the energy we're using in the house. Today I just had somebody looking at our leakage around the house. I think in this case you're talking about being self aware and thoughtful and intentional versus reactive. Is that your operating?

Absolutely, absolutely. Because, you know, I mean, it actually impacts not just about you, it impacts every single relationship. Right. So meaning when you are interacting with somebody and you're trying to respond to whatever they're saying or whatever, they're trying to add value, if you're not utterly mindful and focused on that particular moment, you really don't have the quality that you would want to have from that interaction. Right. And why that matters is that you can't really create or lead as a group if you're not be self aware and self aware of the people that are around you. That's trying to collaborate with you to create something meaningful. Right. So, so, so it's really about that complete out our focus and awareness. I mean, like, you know, I give this example all the time. When you go to a meeting and let's say five people are there, and often enough you'll see people pulling out their phone and texting in the background and looking at emails on the laptop. And I think about how disruptive, how useless that conversation is. Right. So, so it really requires you to kind of forget about everything else and just focus on that particular moment. Imagine if you were looking at your phone while you're doing this interview and I'm looking at whatever is going on the screen. I mean, we'll have a really lousy interview or lousy conversation.

I've Never done that.

So that's really the point.

You know, it's actually really hard not to do that because today we're being continually bombarded. Not only that, in most of our cases, my watch is synchronized with the phone, synchronized with the computer, and they kind of all alert and bombard at once. And one of the biggest things I do lately is manage the notifications, turn things off because I'm like, I don't need to know about that all day long.

Listen, I won't go to a digital watch. Yeah, I've got a very analog watch.

Look at you.

Partly because of that Zen master, I'm.

Going to be so focused. Oh yeah. Well, if you work in a defense environment, DoD or like, you have to have all non digital, non communicating, you can't have one of these satellite connected, super. Tracking everything, listening to everything.

So it's very. It's very. Anyway, I have a teenage son and I've noticed how people's behaviors completely gotten whacked. Yeah, I can use that word.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it's particularly hard to do that. On the other hand, right, I remember we like, you know, we gave our kids access to technology very young, right. And they're both highly proficient users of technology today. We gave our son a laptop with all the appropriate parental controls in place and then he promptly rooted the laptop and bypassed everything. And I'm like, well, I remember talking with his mom and we're like, well, if he knows how to do that, then hopefully we've taught him enough to have the judgment about everything else. And so I didn't try to relock it or create a restriction. I'm like, clearly he's intelligent. He's going to have to figure his own path out in the world. And you know, he's very aware of every possible thing. In fact, today he's an AI developer. His company is a little company called Midjourney that's all in the news these days. And you know, he's like acutely aware of the misuses of their technology and that kind of thing, right?

Sure.

And aware of his own role. So, going back to Da Vinci for a second before we move on to the other stories, you're saying that Da Vinci was practicing mindfulness of himself or that he was going intentionally into nature, mindful of things in nature at a deeper level, or both.

See, it's both because you can't do one versus another. So if you really want to be super observant of whatever is happening around you, that means that you have to be super observant of who you are and what you are consuming and what you're really taking in. Right. So it's like the, you know, we use this example of a empty cup and water. The water takes shapes of, of the empty cup. Right. So context, mind is like that, right? Yeah. So he couldn't, he had to be super absorbed, you know, aware of, of self and super observant of whatever that was going on around him.

I'm emptying my cup just a little bit of its water. So observing himself. Okay, so then let's pivot into the next thing, the next story. You were talking about the creation and development of the iPhone. How is that an example of mindfulness? What's happening there?

Sure.

I mean, we know that story to varying degrees, right?

Yeah, And I like to use that because it's a reminder because most of us are familiar with devices. So if you really look at what was the development path of the phone, Steve was really focused on coming up with handheld device, meaning a tablet that will almost replace your desktop. So remember in late 80s, sorry, late 90s, he had that brick like tablet. Those of us are older know that, how clunky and bad it was. Right. But he kept on it and ended up coming up with iPhone. But once he, sorry, iPad. So once he has developed the iPad, what he realized is that the operating environment and those iconic, you know, those, those interface, the iconic interface could be taken and put it into a smaller device which could replace a phone. He was not trying to invent phone, he was trying to. He basically leveraged whatever he did in iPad and put it into a phone. As a result, the phones got accelerated with the, the smartness and all those apps and you know, which increasingly got better, but increasingly also got obnoxious, AKA the conversation we were having a few minutes ago about how our kids, you know, like not just kids, even adults, I mean we're glued to those kind of things. But so it was, it wasn't, you know, it's a progression. Right. So creativity and innovation is a progression and it's a input and contribution of many different people and awareness of how you connect the dot. And you couldn't do that if you are not mindful, but also are not collaborative enough to take advantage of many creative output that happens and then come up with the ultimate output or ultimate product. So that's how the notion of mindfulness, creativity and innovation plays a role. And as much as we like to think that innovation is like a one man show or, you know, it's a one Time process, it's quite the opposite. There isn't a single long lasting innovation that's not a collaborative process, that's not iterative and that's not a contribution of many, many, you know, I mean, and then I also use, you know, I mean we all immediately think, when we think about movies, we think movies are extremely creative, right? Because got actors, you got, you know, backdrop scenes, you got sound, you know, all kind of stuff, right? And if you look at the movie production process, which, which, you know, you can take that example in a corporate setting or you know, in a business setting, it's different people plays different role and they contribute different things at a different time to create different scenes, different movies and different way of doing things. And as a result it becomes, you know, highly enjoyable as a, as an audience. Right. So you can think about that.

So that's collab. Wait, that's collaboration and specialization, right. What's the role of mindfulness there?

Well, if you are, as a leader, if you're not observant and can recognize where these different people's, you know, talent or whatever you want to call it, play a role and then pull them together to be collaborative, then you will fail. Right? So I mean corporations don't innovate because they have bad people. It's because leadership often doesn't recognize how to leverage the talent that, that are right around them or what asset? Not just talent, it's also assets. So you go back that iPhone example, it was just recognition of talent. It was the fact that you already have an asset, maybe you can take that and create a derivative offering, right? So it's that awareness is where it becomes crucial. And I didn't really touch upon hugely on empathy, which is really the foundation of a transformational leadership, because empathy leaders are really driven by influence and inspiration and how they connect with other people with empathy. But I did talk about that extensively in Lyft, my other book, and all of these things are very much connected. I mean the next generation leaders are self aware, they're influential. They are. They're constantly looking for recognition of other people's talent and where to use them and then create groups of resources to go through one offering that they may want to create. Offering, meaning could be product, could be service, whatever the case may be, and then get a next set of people and resources for the next one. It's not the same people who can create, you know, the best product all the time. You need to learn from outside in order to really accelerate your internal ability and capacity to scale something or build something.

I guess what I'm hearing so far is that the critical skill to bring teams together and to innovate is to be able to read the situation, the people, to see all of that. And if you don't start first with sort of being highly observant, including of yourself, then you can't be effective in all that.

Absolutely. Because, you know, I'll use your, your own word that you just used a couple of minutes ago. I mean, reactive versus proactive. How do you become proactive? It's the way you become proactive is when you're highly observant. Right. It's, it's, it's easy to react. It's a lot harder to like sit back and see what's going on and then kind of react. So observation of talent or observation of opportunity and observation of idea and where it may or may not add value requires being, you know, not reactive, it requires proactive, it requires a grounding. And only then you can do that. You cannot do that by being reactive.

Yeah. In the book you talk about different roles. How does that tie in here? Or what are the examples of that?

Sure. So you know, I mean, it's actually a lot of those things are taken from, you know, design principles. And if you look at a design principle, what happens is that, you know, you first maybe doing a ideation process and then you go through a kind of a creation process or doing many different, the iteration and different ways to do it, maybe create a portfolio of options and then you go to the actual creation process. So if you look at these very different sets of the design concept, you need to bring people that think about a group of people that just doing ideation, people who does ideation, maybe they are not the best people who does the distribution and people who are doing distribution maybe are not the best people who does the production. So their roles. What I, what I, what I argue is that you really have to be observant of the state of development if you want to use that are innovation cycle and bring people together for that particular stage. And so if you look at our ideation cycle, it's not that you just get people together who have the best ideas, because ideas is not going to have any kind of pragmatic approach if you don't also bring people who knows something about production, something about distribution, something about marketing, something about scaling, whatever the case may be. So my argument is that you do create a cross collaborative team, but it's utterly focused on the stage of the innovation process that you're at so in ideation you focus on idea creation and create different options. You go through the same kind of a step every step of the way. I call it cluster, meaning it's the cluster of resource or cluster of talent that you bring together. Did go through that process which also very kind of computer sciencey notion that you have cluster of code that you use, which are base code that you can utilize for whatever reason. But that's kind of your model operations and model way of doing things.

Interesting. So mindfulness, creativity, innovation coming together and the connection of these things. As we got ready, you talked about Coca Cola. What is that? What's the connection there? What's the story behind Coca Cola? That we're not seeing the sugary soft drink for over 100 years all over the world, right.

I mean, you know, so, so again, again using Coca Cola as an example because we all know Coca Cola. So if you look at a can of Coke, right? I mean think about all the stuff that went into the aluminum as a container, the way it's shaped, what, what is in that sugary stuff? Meaning, you know, there are some natural products, there's some, you know, the beans that are used to, to have that, that flavor, the way it gets carbonated. These are many different destination point and journey to gather those raw material to bring a can of Coke, right? And so the point is that it is that this, it's a combinational, you know, it's not can of Coke is not the brilliant of the aluminium or the sugar or whatever else chemical stuff they put in. It's a combinational stuff of a lot of different things and that's what makes it unique. So often when we think about innovation, it's not really starting from scratch. It's thinking of the end result and then kind of say okay, well this is the end result I want. How do I bring it together? You know, you see this, you know, Elon Musk talks about it all the time that, well, you know, EV space is not about ev. It's like a convergence of a lot of different technology and packaging it in a way that's consumable, right? So I mean that's true in every single product offering you can imagine more and more every day. I mean I'm, you know, you can see this in medical field more and more. I mean, you know, the, you know, the application of micro robotics and gene therapy and actual medication. There are really many different multidisciplinary, you know, learning that, that, that are being applied to create, you know, very serious cure for many serious Diseases. Right. So you can apply that notion and everywhere. I mean also I mean, you know, you know that, that thing we use strips for our cleaning the teeth, I mean, you know, teeth whitening strips. That was the same story. Yeah, the teeth whitening strips. I mean the similar story. I mean the company looked at glue from somewhere some other part, you know, one part of the company, they looked at the, you know, how it's going to be packaged from somewhere else and how it's going to be get how it's going to taste from somewhere else. And then as a combination of those different resources and whatnot, they came up with the Whiting strips. Right. So you can find like many, many examples in everyday thing that are very successful are really combinational and borrowed from many different places. Not just somebody just sat there and started from scratch and came up with some crazy innovation. It's rare. It happens, but it's rare.

So what's the application for our listeners, for our leaders? What do they do with this awareness of that thing? There's lots of elements, lots of people that's it's not overly critical about any one innovation but perhaps what's the application of this forward looking.

Look? I mean I think it start with this is going to sound redundant but it's really start with self because you have to you know, figure out who are you and why you want to do something and what value you want to create. I mean and the value definition is really very individualistic. Right. So I mean you may say my definition of value is that I want to make a billion bucks. Somebody else's definition may be that I want to change the world which is, you know, I mean nobody can change world by themselves. But you know, some people do things so it really starts with you know, who you are and why and what you want to do. So and it goes from there and then you know, so the, but that even though it sounds very esoteric, it's, it's. You can be very disciplined about this and it takes many, many years of practice to be constantly being self aware to catch yourself to, to be that self aware of your internal self and whatever is going on outside. Now once you do that then what I argue is that it can make you highly creative. Doesn't mean that you can scale innovation because innovation requires process. So innovation requires this structural process of cultivating talent and putting them in right places and defining the end result and then looking at where the discovery of where these things exist and then coming up with combinational way of doing things right so that's actually a systemic way of doing things. Magic happens when you apply these self awareness with systemic thinking and then constantly, you know, trying to scale it with, you know, the self, you know, the experiential learning that you're getting from your team, but also from outside of the, of the, of your team. And you know, one of the one thing is for, for sure is that listen, the most talented people now are not within your organization, right? So if you really want to innovate something, you're going to have to work with literally people who are outside of your organization. Right? So, so this requires even more of that because I mean, you know, people have options. If you can influence and inspire them, then I don't work with you, you know, so to start from there, right. And then, but even if you get them on your board or on your camp, whatever you call it, then it will require some sort of a systemic management way to really create that value in an organized manner that ultimately has any kind of commercial or impactful value.

Well, it's big concept stuff to think about. Some good examples, probably more to read and then think about where are you at and what impact are you having in the world. If you want more information on Faisal and his book, you want to find it, of course we'll put the link up right now. But the book is everything connects and I will put that up and then faisalhawk.com is F A I S A L and we'll put this in the show notes as well and put a link on the screen. But and also. And then H O Q U E Faisal.

Ha. That's correct.

It's easier once you hear it one time. Once you.

That's right, that's right.

Like so much, especially in English, the pronunciations can be a little bit fascinating. It's a great conversation. Thank you for getting on and talking with us today. Remind our listeners if you want to give us feedback if you've got something to share with us in turn or you want to get in touch to suggest an another guest for that kind of thing. Our email is info scalingcoach.com the website scalingcoach.com where we've got all kinds of information and more and then a thing that's of critical notion. Our sponsor right now is recruiter.com and recruiter.com has a new program called Shortlist. They'll send you a short list of 10 pre screened ready to go candidates for your job opening right away. And you got 10 people, $3,000. Boom. And there you go, you're off to the races and there's a special code discount for listeners and viewers of the show. The the code is scale up. We'll put that in the show notes. It's also right there on the screen. Recruiter.com Shortlist the code to use scale up to get 10 candidates to shortlist your Filling that job very quickly. Filling jobs has been definitely a challenge last few years, especially in the critical roles. Thanks again to Wanda Mitchell producing our show, getting our guests ready, getting things out the door every week, and to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish who created the whole scaling up and Rockefeller habits, frameworks and tools right in the beginning and and then to the folks at Podfly Productions who help us prepare and produce and edit especially the audio side of our show and all the show notes, that kind of thing every week. Thanks to Podfly. Thanks again everyone for listening for watching. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by alignment, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.