Entrepreneur Explains How He Traveled 40 Countries and Leads His Teams

So one of the big lessons I've learned about nomad life is there's an Instagram version and there's a real life version. Right, the real life version. We've been on the road now for two and a half years. So let's say that two and a half years, 40 countries over the last two and a half years. And some of those countries is like five cities per country. But let's just say it's 40 countries in two and a half years. That means finding 40 new grocery stores, 40 new coffee shops, 40 new yoga studios, 40 new gyms, 40 new trainers, 40 new couple people that you like to hang out with, and then you're constantly packing up and moving to the next place. If I gave you seven items that you had to go pick in a grocery store, you could go in, you'd know your way around, you'd be in and out in seconds. I can't even read the labels in some of the stores. I've been, I've been in Japan for the last month now I'm in Korea. We walk into grocery stores, we go through multiple aisles, and we don't even recognize the food, let alone do we even know a grocery store to go to. So, yeah, there's a real life version of it, of being. Being on the road and being a nomad. And I'm not saying I don't like it, I love it. But there's also a hard part there too. One of the real big pieces of advice I'd give anyone who wants to start the journey of being a nomad is the purging process. Right? How do you get rid of everything or get rid of almost everything you own? Because I sold a home in the us, got rid of a home in Canada, got rid of cars, sold all our furniture. All I have is a 5 foot by 10 foot storage locker with some art and some family heirlooms that my kids said they wanted. So the purging process of selling everything in two homes. The piece of advice that I would give you is start maybe three or four months before. Anytime you purchase one thing, give away or sell or donate two things. So if one book comes into the house, two things get taken out. If you buy a pair of shoes, two things get given away. If you buy 20 things that are coming into your kitchen pantry, 40 things are getting thrown out of your home. So, yes, you can buy groceries that you're eating, but if you buy things that actually go into a cupboard, you have to throw away too. That purging process helped Me get rid of tons of books and stuff in the kitchen drawers filled with clothes and closets filled with clothes that I didn't need. So that when I actually had to start purging to really begin the life of a nomad, it was then easy because I'd gotten rid of so much already. Years ago, I was at the main five day TED conference, and I've gone to the main ted conference for 10 years and, and one of the things I learned there was this idea of idea babies. Well, an idea baby was I would listen to one TED Talk and then I would listen to a second TED Talk and I would listen to a third TED Talk. And those three ideas, those three main stage ideas, would percolate and become something that I would use in my life or in my business. So I've taken that with me back into the business world. Often, employees and leaders struggle with contributing to an idea or contributing when a question is asked because they feel like a little bit of that imposter syndrome creeping in. It's like, oh, well, my idea is really not that great, or my idea is just part of the puzzle. Well, when Kelly shares her idea and Dave shares his idea and Mary shares her idea, those three ideas are exactly what the team or the business lead is looking for. And they take those three ideas and kind of merge them together and the idea baby is born, which is exactly what they're looking for. So when you don't share your idea, you're starving that person of the chance to pull the ideas together into exactly what they're after. So it really is important. If you're invited into a meeting, your job is to contribute. And if they didn't want you to contribute, they wouldn't have invited you into the meeting in the first place. One of the core reasons why people hate meetings so much is because meetings suck. Mostly because we suck at running meetings. If the leaders would actually understand how to run a meeting, how to organize a meeting, how to teach the people who are attending the meeting to participate and contribute, then meetings wouldn't suck after all. Remember something that's really important in business? When we would send our kid off to play Little league baseball. Let's say we sent Johnny off to Little League baseball. If we didn't teach Johnny how to catch a ball and how to toss the ball and how to hold the bat, then Johnny's going to come home from baseball and say, daddy, baseball sucks. Like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Well, why do we send our employees into meetings without teaching them how to participate? And attend meetings. Why do we allow our managers or leaders to actually organize meetings and require people to come to meetings without teaching them how to run meetings? So the reason I wrote the book Meetings Suck isn't to bitch and complain about meetings. It's to teach everyone how to run them, how to attend them, and how to participate in them. And then also what core meetings you need to have happen inside of your business. In addition to the popularized L10 meeting, there's all kinds of different meetings that need to happen and we need to run them and how to attend them. At the end of the day, there's only three different styles of a meeting that happen. And it's important for a leader when they're creating the agenda for decide what style of meeting they're having for every different agenda item. So let's say that you're going into a meeting and you're covering four different main items in that meeting. There's three different styles and you have to decide which one applies. The first style is called infoshare, which means information being shared. And it's either top down or a leader is telling the team something, or it's bottom up where the leader is asking and the bot the team is contributing up through the organization, or the team is contributing laterally and everyone is just sharing their ideas with each other. Right? That's infoshare, like a five minute update on what's going well in your business area. The second style that happens in a meeting is called creative discussion. And that's the brainstorming, that's the blue sky. That's when people are throwing their ideas around and everyone's contributing. Post it notes are going up on the whiteboard or up on the wall. When people are contributing those kind of creative discussion, the blue sky is happening and everybody gets to contribute in the meeting. And again, you're being invited to that meeting so that you can contribute. There's no bad ideas. As a friend of mine, Joe Polish, has always said, there's no stupid ideas, there's just stupid people with ideas. So you're invited to the meeting, get your ideas in there, because that is the creative discussion that's happening. The third style of meeting is consensus decisions. And that's when the team discusses, they debate, they share ideas, they look at the data and as a team, they make a decision. And when they walk out of the room, they agree that all of the debate was left in the room and the decision has been made. Now, if you believe that you're making a decision on a point, but the leader believes it's just infoshare, then there's conflict. Right? If the leader believes that it's just a creative discussion, but you believe that it's just information being shared, then you're not contributing. So the key thing for the leader to do is to say, at this point, this is the style that we're covering. It allows all the attendees to understand what their role is in that particular part of the meeting. One of the most interesting feedback points I've gotten on the book Meeting Suck is that it's also for the frontline employees. People often think that it's a leader's job to understand how to run the meetings and what meetings are happening and how to kind of organize meetings. And that's very true because they're requiring the time of all these other people to come. But what the big insight they got was every single employee needs to read this book so that they can call out the leader when a meeting's not running properly. They can choose to participate in a more proactive way. They can understand the different meeting styles that are happening. So the book really expanded and that it became for everyone in companies, not just for the leader or the CEO. I'm often talked about the post it note exercise that I've done and I'm going to talk about two post it note exercises, but I'm going to talk about one now. And then you're going to have to follow me because you're going to find the second post it note exercise. Second. The first post it note exercise that I did at an event happened seven years ago. I was standing in front of a group of COs. It was a group of members of the COO alliance and I was trying to be the leader. I was trying to be excited and enthusiastic. But my wife had told me that she wanted a divorce a night before. I was really struggling. I was in really rough shape and I finally was like, you know what? Screw it. Everybody in the room is struggling with something. So I decided to get every single person in the room, all of the other COOs to write down one thing they were deeply struggling with on a post it note. Something at home, something personally. Maybe it was medical, maybe it was money related, whatever it was. And every single person wrote down the one thing that they were deeply struggling with on a post it note. They didn't put their name on it. And then I asked them to pass their post it notes into me and they all passed them in and I shuffled them around and I went back to the front of the room, and I read out all of the Post IT notes. I have a brain tumor. I'm not in love with my spouse. My kid's in the hospital. I should be at home with them. I'm going bankrupt. All of these truths were read out, and every single person in the room either started to cry or recognize that they were not the only person struggling with something. And that is an exercise I've done at every single COO alliance event ever since to show people that as leaders, we need to be cognizant that every person in our company is struggling with the human condition. Every person in our company is struggling with something deeply, and we need to be cognizant of that as a leader, because the most important thing to our employees is not our business, and it's not their list of projects. It's all the other stuff in their life. And if we care about them as humans, that's what will get them to care about the company more than they do today. That's the Post IT note exercise number one. The Post IT note exercise number two that I do is a little bit different. The first one was that exercise of showing the area that we're deeply struggling in. The second post note exercise is one that I learned from General Electric. I went to a session that CEOs were invited to at GE, and it was the GE workout process. And it was a process that they use to collaborate and brainstorm on problems or opportunities that they have. So the exercise is this. You invite the people into the room to have a creative discussion around a problem or an opportunity that the company has. In this case, we were doing an exercise where we wanted to take a certain brand of dishwasher and make it 10% cheaper, 10% faster, and 10% quieter. Right? Those were the criteria that they gave us in the room to pretend that we were engineers and salespeople and marketers, whatever. So all of the people in the room wrote down all of our ideas on Post IT notes. Right? And it was. There was no dumb ideas. It was just put all of our ideas on Post IT notes. And then every person had to stand up and read out their ideas and put all of the Post IT notes up on the wall. And as we read each of the Post IT notes and put it up on the wall, the team lead was able to say thank you. Or they could ask a clarifying question. But there was no discussion, no debate. It was simply, do we all understand each of the Post IT notes up on the wall? Then we organized all of the Post IT notes by is it going to make it faster or make it cheaper or make it quieter? And based on where those post it notes all lay, then we broke them down into business area. Was it sales or operations or finance? It allowed us to understand the 180post it notes that were up on the wall. And then we went through a process of eliminating all the post it notes that didn't really matter. And we kind of elected to stay with the top 10 ideas that came out of the 180 that were contributed from the group and over the top 10 ideas that were easy to put in place that would really move the project forward and that had a low pain in the factor, a low PETA factor I call it, where it didn't require a lot of people, time or money, but we could get a huge net result. So I love that post it note exercise. That's post it note exercise number two.