The Best Leaders Don’t Figure It Out Alone

The world right now is littered with mastermind groups for entrepreneurs. You know, there's just dozens and dozens of these groups of entrepreneurs and YPO is clearly the highest level. And you're not just the entrepreneur. You also do the hired gun president or CEO. You're kind of the top person in organizations. How do you get these people, the men and women who are members of YPO globally? And I have a client who's in YPO in Thailand and he said his chapter accounts for 37% of the GDP of the country.

Yes.

Like you're dealing with the real player, real company CEOs. How do you get them to come and join an organization like this and be vulnerable? How do you teach CEOs at this level to be vulnerable and open and willing to learn?

The key for us is we do it through member-to-member interaction or member-to-prospect interaction. The key for us is it built into the DNA of the organization is the spirit of volunteering and the spirit of openness and humility. A lot of it stems from the work that comes out of the Forum product that you were speaking about when we first started speaking. Forum was something that YPO introduced 46 years ago now, which is really a very intimate gathering of 10 to 12 members from non-competing companies who get together once a month for 4 or 5 hours. And it's a highly scripted, moderated experience where you have one of the members actually leads and moderates the group. You get trained to do that. And the purpose of forum is so that you can bring your entire self into the forum. Um, nothing that gets discussed in the forum is allowed to be disclosed to anybody outside the forum. If you disclose that, you're invited to leave the forum.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and that's very rigidly maintained. What happens is after a period of time, You as an individual forum participant bring all of your issues to the table. It starts out business and you get business issues solved. You're not allowed to give advice in forum. You need, you speak from experience. And that's one of the key drivers that I'll anchor in on a moment is that YPO members get trained to speak from experience, which is very different to advice giving. So somebody that's been through, let's just say a business failure, a massive business failure where there was a bankruptcy or there was a massive turnaround or the individual had to put the, a month's payroll on their credit card or mortgage their property. And then how they got out of that, how they solved that business problem. All of those things get disclosed very personally, very truthfully within Forum because there's a guarantee that what gets said in that room stays in the room. So that authenticity, that sort of humility, that egoless ability to safely share what's happening in your life, that starts to permeate through the whole organization. You will hear members say, I'd like you to hold this conversation that we are having under the guidelines of forum confidentiality. Those on the inside is, I'm telling it like it is, and I expect you to hold that in confidence. And so it's not a legally binding framework, but it's part of the DNA of the organization. So when we go out and attract members, prospective members, we very often lead with, The concept of what would it be like if you were to meet with another group of very successful CEOs, the same age as you, younger than you, older than you? And what if you were able to learn all the lessons that that individual had learned in their business career and in their personal lives in a manner that's truly authentic, that's based on trust, that's factual, and that's real. And you're getting it from the person that lived through that. Would that be a useful experience for you or an opportunity for you? I have very seldom had a qualifying prospect say no to that invitation.

Yeah, that invitation is huge.

Powerful, isn't it?

Yeah. It's funny, I'm sitting there listening to him going, wow, yeah, of course, like just sign you up, right? Yeah.

And then it's also about the whole person. So we know, you and I both know as CEOs, as presidents of organizations that we We not only bring our business responsibilities and accountabilities to the table, we bring our personal lives to the table. We bring our own desires. One of the things that we've migrated to YPO over the years is we know that a lot of our members, once they've achieved a certain amount of success, they want to give back or they want to impact their community. They want to do something that's socially good. They want to change the world in some positive way. And so we also now provide a platform for those of our members who want to have a significant impact outside of the pure sort of profit generation desires when you first get into a business. More and more of our members, Cameron, are playing multiple roles, whether it's giving back in their community, leading in politics, impacting through some technology or through philanthropic giving, and really starting to have an impact on the world. I'll talk a little bit about the strategy and the evolution of where the organization is going and how we need to provide in an ecosystem. And I use the word ecosystem because we don't feel we need to own the peer-to-peer space.

Yeah.

We're really good with our defined constituent group and we really help them and provide opportunities for access to learning, to each other, to great thought leadership, to great institutional relationships with universities and thought leadership around the world. Create a place for young children and spouses to work within this and collaborate together. We can collaborate across a variety of different ecosystems to really help make the world a better place at the end of the day.

For sure.

And business makes the world go round. We all know that, right? It all comes down to business hiring, whether it's in the for-profit business sector or the non-for-profit business sector.