The Brutal Truth About Culture

As a company, are you willing to fire people if they break the core values? And if you're not willing to fire people, they're probably not core values. Maybe they're aspirational.

Hire, fire, promote. The culture is driven by the core values, and the core values should be the behaviors that you want to reward. I think companies are just trying to be too many things to too many people. They're afraid to say what they want and what they don't want. You're not everyone. You're not trying to appeal to everyone. At AP, I used to say we're trying to find the 2% of the people who want to share our values and live and work. If you're a competitive company, say that.

Can you give us an example or two of some times when you've really watched people absolutely live their core values and it might've been a hard decision?

I always say that living your core values is usually the harder decision up front and it costs you. It costs you friends, job, money, but usually over time as it ages—

So Bob, good to see you.

Cam, good to see you. Where, you know, it's like following Where's Waldo with you these days.

Well, I've been excited to talk to you. I know we've had to bump this interview a couple of times, but I wanted to talk to you about your newest book, The Compass Within. Funny story though about you being an author. I remember years ago, almost 10 years ago, you told me you were going to write your first book and I told you it was a horrible idea. I was massively wrong. You've done— you've written— not only have you written some really, really good books, but they've also massively positioned you as a great thought leader, which makes sense.

So yeah, and those books are different. Well, you wrote, I think you wrote the foreword for it, so you must have, you realized somewhere in the process that it would help. And that book was very different, but that book changed our, you know, our standing in our industry because it kind of explained a confusing industry to people and in a way that was super helpful.

And I also told Brian, who was the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK!, that he could never franchise junk removal. So I, you know, and I told, I told And then I told Garrett Camp from Uber, it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard. And that was 6 months before he hired Travis. So don't—

so you're like, when my mom says, I'm pretty sure that we should turn right, I know to go left automatically. I have a couple. One was this guy sent me this file share. He was running a tutoring business and I had met him and he was trying to put his tutoring business online. And then he sent me this disc with this new like file sharing backup thing. And I was like, I don't understand how this is different than Carbonite or whatever. And that was Drew Houston. From Dropbox. So, you know, we all have those.

Yeah, which we use like every day. So what I do know for sure is that core values are critical. Um, people talk about company culture and people talk about building great brands and, and people talk about core values and kind of putting them up on the walls and stuff like that. But the Compass Within really is all about the core values, correct?

Yeah. And, and Look, you talk a lot about, you've done a lot of work. There's a lot of work around company core values. Uh, and obviously those intersect with individual core values, but I think not, there's not a lot of talk and they both suffer from, when I present on this stuff, I do a sort of, I know you're all rolling your eyes when you hear me say core values. And then I put up these lists of all these one-word core values and integrity and family. And this is why people roll their eyes. But when you, you know, talking in the corporate world, when you and I have seen companies that have incredible cultures, they tend to have, you know, differentiated core values that don't sound like what everyone else says, and they're rewarding them and making decisions on them. It's very much the same for individuals, except they haven't been given a similar, uh, process or reason or understanding why that's important to them.

So I, let's, we're gonna dive in on that in a second. I want to, I wanna talk about the framework for the book for a second. You wrote the book more like a story and a parable with this kind of young character, and, and you wrote it as a very easy read versus like a how-to business book that tend to be really boring. And you know, when I think about the, the books that are written like those parables, uh, Pat Lencioni tends to write books like that, right? The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And, um, and then Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One Minute Manager, tends to write books like that. Not many people do, but I found it a really easy read. What was your reason for writing it that way?

So I had seen the power of this work. By the time I released the framework in a course, several thousand people had taken it. I got notes from people all around the world that this had made fundamental differences in their lives and they changed their location or their partner or their job. And so I knew this could help people, but I had this vision, Cam, I joke around, of that I was gonna write this book, it was called On Values, and people would walk by it in Barnes Noble and no one would wanna read it. And I love Lencioni's books, I love all those parallels, and I was like, I think that when people see this, they get it. But if I try to tell it as a story, it's going to be so boring that I don't want to read it. So I was like, huh, maybe the parable thing would work. I had never written fiction before, but I reached out to Bob Berg and Pat Lencioni and I had them read early drafts of that. And they were like, yeah, we, you know, we love this. Um, and so I was able to get their sort of feedback and mentorship on it. And what a lot of people say is it's kind of a mirror, right? The character in the book, Jamie, just becomes a mirror on their own life and they can all We all see ourselves as, as Jamie at some point. And so I, it's kind of served that purpose. The world is societal ADD these days. People aren't reading long books. You are kind of early on the short books. People are so happy to call me and tell me they finished it, you know, even though it's like an hour and 10 minutes long. And, and I think people want to get to the point more, more, more succinctly. So similar to Lencioni, at the end, it tells you everything you saw and it tells you how to implement it. But I think more people will probably get as much value of watching it in the story as they will being recapped at the end.

I love that you did keep it short too. I think it, I think it was Winston Churchill that said, I'm sorry, this memo is so short. It would've been even shorter if I had more time.

I think it was Mark Twain. Uh, was it Mark Twain? Yeah.

Okay.

But, but, but, but you know, 50% of quotes are misattributed, so all good. Yeah.

86% of all quotes or stats are made up on the spot. Um, I also, by the way, love that you did a shout out to Hank Reardon from Atlas Shrugged in the book too. I saw the name Reardon appear, so Good on you.

Uh, you are the first person, as I said, to pick out that Easter egg. I have actually been waiting for someone to comment on it. Maybe my book has not overlapped with that crowd, uh, yet.

It's going to. So you also mentioned that your personal journey was in there and kind of the before and after of discovering your core values. So what, what are your core values and how did your core values, I guess, inspire the book?

So my number one core value that dominates most of the things I do is find a better way and share it. Uh, health and vitality, self-reliance, respectful authenticity, and long-term orientation. I could tie most of my books to those concepts. And I was invited to the EO Leadership Academy training years ago. And, and really, I thought I was going to go to this training and learn about how to be a better leader and the tactics. And the first two days, as I say, were just like this giant mirror. Put at us and like, who are you and what do you value? And while I so appreciated that they wanted to set this up as the foundation, they actually didn't tell us how to figure out our core values. And I realized I was very values-driven, but like most people, I could probably get in the zone of what it was, but I wasn't able to clearly articulate it enough to then act around it. So I spent 3 to 6 months doing that, doing that work, and then eventually turning it into part of our leadership training at our company. And after 5 or 10 classes of helping people figure out their core values, that's the framework that underlies the book. I was like, I kind of think I have this and I'd like to share it with more people.

I'm gonna ask you about the whole individual core values, 'cause you're the first leader that I've ever encountered who has helped employees come up with their individual core values. And then I'm gonna ask you in a bit, about how you try to make sure that they dovetail in with the companies. But, and also love the fact that you had find a better way. That was actually my very first coaching client 19 years ago was a company called Nurse Next Door. And I helped them start franchising and build their company culture. And their CEO was Ken Sim, their second command, a guy named John DeHart. And one of their core values was find a better way. So I love that you actually included that.

Well, for me it's in share it, which drives a lot of— Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that kind of made it an even stronger one. My core values for the CEO Alliance: deliver what you promise, be open and vulnerable, show respect for everyone, grow big, act small, and have some effin' fun. And I kind of kept them to 5, but they're short phrases as well. Is the short phrases part of your model?

Yeah, there's a couple of things that we could talk about. The validator, this is a different process than corporate core values, but the validator carries over. To me, is it more than one word? Heard? Can you make a decision on it? Is it unique? Does it— like, each of those I could make a decision on. I know what they mean. I could rate someone on them. You know, as the example someone gave last week was like, if a company is dealing with a problem and they have a core value of excellence with a customer, is excellence— I don't know, is that telling them the truth about what's going on? Is it not telling them the truth about what's going on? It's very ambiguous as to the behavior. As I heard you say each of those, and I've heard them before, it's very clear what you mean and what you want people to do.

Yeah, well, I think the other test that I've always talked about— let me know what you think about this— is as a company, are you willing to fire people if they break the core values? And if you're not willing to fire people, they're probably not core values. Maybe they're aspirational. Any, any thoughts around that?

Yeah, hire, fire, promote. To me, the, the culture is driven by the core values, and the core values should be the behaviors that you want to reward. I joke that we're We just trained a puppy for a year. We're all like dogs, right? She knows what she gets a treat for and she knows what she gets a bad dog for. And like, think about, I mean, you teach us every year, what do companies do with their sales, uh, commission plan? They go through it and they figure out what like improper incentive they rewarded that the entire sales force figured out how to get paid for doing the wrong thing last year, and then plug that hole this year. And then there'll be another hole next year. So really at the end of the day, it's Like, what are the behaviors that you want people to display?

Do you know what's crazy about behaviors? I just heard Chamath speaking last night about an AI tool that was following its own certain incentives. And the incentives were basically like, if you do all of these things, you get these certain rewards. And the system was chasing rewards. And the AI tool realized that if it lied, it would actually get more rewards. So it started kind of creating its own work and finishing its own work so that it would get more credits for work being created, even though the work had never been assigned to it. And all of a sudden, like, a manager realized that the system was like following its own fucked up reward system. It was weird.

It's interesting. I've started talking about, and, and you'll find that I, because I've been to all these AI sessions and people are talking about all your SOPs and training it on your documents. Well, You got to train it on your values, right? You're going to have like, companies have to be really implicit about this is a core metric of saying, I know the SOP says X, but if our value says never be disrespectful or whatever, then this, this sounds pretty disrespectful. And I think that has been, I don't know how you can train it on it if you're not clear or you don't have those stories of lore of the violating the core value or doing the core value that it can try to learn and emulate from.

That's really interesting. You, you talk, you know, in, in the story a little bit about some office politics that I think it was called Jones Communication or something. It was a PR firm that, that Jamie worked for. Are these drawn from real people or situations or, you know, situations you've observed?

Well, I've been accused of being Jamie and Jack and a whole bunch. It's really more of an amalgamation, uh, of different things that I've seen. And I've walked in a lot of these. I used to work with, in our early days, we worked with a lot of startup companies and I would walk in all their lobbies and I would see these values and I would see behaviors, you know, that had nothing to do with those, with those values. And so it was just, it's more of a compilation. It is not based on any one company or person or town or otherwise.

What are some of the disconnect signals that you see in high achievers? Like if you've got leaders inside of your company, and I've always believed that you know, everything starts at the top, right? That if the CEO doesn't know their own core values and live their core values, there's no way that the, you know, the company is going to be living them. But what kind of disconnects do you see from, you know, VPs and C-level where they're disconnected from core values? Are there any signals that, that you look for that entrepreneurs or COOs should look for?

You know, it's interesting. A couple of things. One, I think companies are just trying to be too many things to do too many people. They're afraid to say what they want and what they don't want. You're not, you're not everyone. You're not trying to appeal to everyone. At AP, I used to say, we're trying to find the 2% of the people who wanna share our values and live and work, you know, how we work. If you're a competitive company, say that. Gandhi has this quote and, and, and I kind of switch happiness for culture, but he says, happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are all aligned. To me, that's just a great culture is, is, is what I think. And what I'm saying and what I'm doing, that doesn't mean that it's what everyone wants to hear. So I think one, you know, companies are way too trying to like appease everyone. I always say, if you're a company formed out of ex-athletes and 80% of the bonuses is kind of like Uber, it's competitive, right? Like our company events are competitive, they're aggressive. Most of the bonuses go to, like tell people that and you'll get a lot of ex-athletes that'll wanna come work at your company, and that'll be what the culture will be, and they want the competition, but people say things that they don't believe. And then, you know, inside the company, I think they're not as clear about, I think every company can have standards for leaders or how they want leaders to behave inside of their companies, but all leaders are different. And if you're talking about that level 5 leadership, Um, it's, it's more about authentic. It's not about what sounds good. I said to someone, this is where people really struggle with. They try to pick core values that sound good. I'm like, some people are inherently skeptical. You know what? If you're a skeptic, like there's some great applications of that. And then there's some problematic applications of that, but people should know that, like, that's kind of your superpower. Like, that's what you're good at. Don't tell people you're open-minded because it sounds better, like, or trusting. That's not, that's not actually true. Right.

Yeah. Unless— well, I, I like that Gandhi quote. I was just at an event, um, an ISTA Tantra event last week in Greece, or two weeks ago, for a week. And we talked about, are your feelings, thoughts, words, and actions all completely aligned? And where are you out of integrity with those in different— and I'd never heard that concept before. So how—

it's so simple. Think about it. Think about how many people wake up.

How simple.

How exhausting is this, to wake up and think something and say another thing and then do another thing. Like, that's just like, it's the literally the definition of incongruence. Like, but, but, but I think we are trying to be, our companies are trying to be everything to everyone. The COO Alliance is not everything to everyone, right? It's, it's stop trying to go to the lowest common denominator and say what you mean and mean what you say. I used to say at Acceleration Partners that if we hired someone and it didn't work out, you know, in like American football, there are teams that are running teams and they're throwing teams. Like, I hope that someone would say, you know what, they kind of told me they were a throwing team and I'm a running back and I came and I hope I could convince them to run, but like, they're really a throwing team. And so they weren't for me. The worst thing you could have ever said was we weren't what we said we were versus, oh, you are what you said you are and it's not the right fit for me.

Well, I think, I think that would be a really good exercise for a leadership team to do, or for a business area to do, where you have everyone sit down and journal for a half an hour about where they're out of integrity with their feelings, thoughts, words, and actions related to each of the core values. I, I kind of journaled around some stuff, and I'll read them to you. I looked at my diet, my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kids, my health, my work, travel, sex. And then I talked, where am I out of integrity? And diet is an example. I said, you know, cheating and having cheat meals, having snacks, rationalizing that it's okay to have the short ribs, too much sugar, too much red meat, choosing the delicious food too often. I'm like, that is so the opposite of what I wrote in my vivid vision. I wrote about me being healthy and choosing salads. I'm like, I'm not fucking doing that. Like, so it was a really hard exercise for me to look in the mirror for myself. Do you ever do that with teams, or Do you ever try to get people to examine their own—

Yeah. And look at, yeah, I think to look at what they're saying and doing and why do they want it. What I forgot to say before too, which is interesting because the thing that people ask me a lot is how do I know a core company's core values are sort of real before I join? That's a very common question. And there's a very simple answer to that, which is we encourage, or actually I tell this story a lot. You may not know this story. I used to brag to people that we had behavioral-based questions, and now with, you know, AI, it's so easy to create these. But we had behavioral-based questions around all of our core values. And this is when you were coaching us. And I was like, Cam, we've got behavioral-based questions around all of our core values. Like, and you were like, how do your people on your team know if it's like a good answer or not a good answer? And I was like, oh shit. And so we went, we went back and said, this is what a 10 sounds like. This is what a 5. Sounds like. And so think about the inverse of that, which is you should, in an interview, if you were to say to your interviewer, can you tell me what the company's core values are? And first of all, if you get like, oh, I don't know, or those are on the wall or whatever, and you've looked them up, then, then you know they're BS. Well, then you can rattle off a couple of them and say they have integrity. And you say to the person in the interview, can you, can you tell me about a time when someone at the company, like, you know, made an example of integrity or positive or negative? You basically want to do that. You want to ask them behavioral-based questions. When they can tell you that the things they said are the core value and they can't come up with anything, then you're pretty sure that that company probably has core values. They're just not the ones that they put on their wall.

Or that, or that that person doesn't examine their own contribution to the problems. They don't examine their own growth. Right. They're, they're not kind of being, they're not critiquing themselves. Yeah. I liked that a lot. Um, it's funny. I just, I just looked on Zoom to make sure that I was recording. I'm like, oh, I'm so glad I'm recording. And I had a flashback. To interviewing your COO on my Second in Command podcast about 8 years ago. And we were 40 minutes into the interview and I went, oh my God, I forgot to press record. I was talking to Matt.

Zoom yells at you. Shockingly, Riverside doesn't, but Zoom's like, you know, you're talking. Did you mean to record? I actually think it's always a little interesting.

Now it's— now I auto-start them. I literally panicked going, oh my God, I hope I just didn't do that again. Um, all right, I want to talk about the process that you talk about in terms of the discovery process, because the only other time I've heard of anyone working with people to discover their core values was the Jim Collins Mission to Mars exercise, where it's kind of like, if you were going to restart your company on Mars, who would the 4 or 5 people be that you would pick? And then describe those people, and then those, those kind of description of people start to net out at the core values. What's your process like? What's your discovery process like?

Yeah.

And I guess people are always asking the difference for a person than a company.

It is the filter's the same on what makes a good core value, but the process is different because you're extracting from yourself rather than trying to look at what are the common things that we appreciate about each other. So the process in the book and that Jamie goes through, and that is in all the materials, is there's 6 behavioral-based questions that I've come up with that extract enough data to form the themes of your core values. And we can kind of talk through a few of those, but there's kind of high-level ones like, in what non-work environments have you been highly engaged? And I don't mean like, like at, you know, whatever, but what were you doing? Like, what did it look like and feel like in your professional roles? Like, when did you do your best work? Again, not when I worked at McDonald's as a fry cook, but when I was given autonomy to do my own thing and I had independence and that. Then there's some tougher ones, you know, what would you want said about you in your eulogy? That's a very common EO thing. And then some of the most valuable ones in this process are— because the definition of a core value is that you feel bad, very bad when it's violated. I can usually get to most people's top core value with a sort of anti-value exercise because it's very deep for them. So these questions are very interesting in that they, they bring out the answers that kind of give you hints. And that's When were you disengaged in a personal or professional setting? And what are the qualities in other people that you struggle with the most? What drives you crazy? Right? So Cam, if I were to ask this to you, like, what, what if you think about an interaction or something like what just makes like your skin crawl in terms of a behavior that someone demonstrates?

Being late, like being, being more than 30 seconds late. Like it drives me fucking fruity bonkers. Like if you're—

I was late for this call.

So, so I was wondering if you'd missed it and if there wasn't a password for it. And I was like, it's okay. Cause it like, anyway, I used to make sandwiches during our coaching calls. So you, you kind of have a couple of free hall passes.

You're really sitting with that feedback. So, so late drives you crazy. Late drives you crazy. So what is, what is it about being late? Is that a sign of reliability to people or is it just the late in itself?

Well, it's interesting. It's interesting. I was actually, my very first business that I ran, I was 20 years old and I was given a franchise of a group called College Pro Painters.

Yeah.

And we were trained that showing up on time would send a signal to the customer even before you landed the job, that you delivered on your promises, that they could count on you, that your word was good. And so I think that was a very early thing of like, you know, mean what you say and say what you mean and deliver on your promises.

And yeah. And so there's an implicit promise to show up on— this is why a lot of people will say that.

But then what happened was, and this is why I think— and so my first core value is deliver what we promise. But I think for me, because I did it so many times that first summer, you know, I did 150 estimates and landed 75 jobs. If you do that 150 times where you show up on time and you look at your watch and go, oh, I'm here exactly on time as I told you I would be, which they trained us to say, and I saw the customer's reaction, I'm like, fuck, this matters, man. Like, people, yeah, people, people buy this.

You were 18 or 20? You were 18 or 20?

Uh, 20.

Yeah. So 20 to 22 is the outer bound of when all these core values sort of cement. And a lot of it's from parental stuff, but it's also experiences where you learned early on, this works, this matters. And what's interesting is why I've learned to probe on the inverse. Someone would be like, oh, on time's the core value. But I could tell that it, that's just the symptom of it. Right. That's one. And that showing on time is delivering what, what, what you promised. Um, but you could see how strong it was and how, when that's violated, and there's probably a whole other way. Whole bunch of other things, you know, for you that when someone tells you they're going to do something and they, and they don't meet it, you know, that is, that is part of your personal operating system. And probably, you know, that's a promise you make in all areas of your life.

Yeah. All the time.

It's just, and I'm sorry for being late. I missed the Cameron, you know, password in the link. And I was like, then I tried it with a lower C and I was like, what the hell?

You know that I even have my watch. Set 5 minutes fast, and my microwave and stove clocks are 5— when I used to have homes, I sold them 5 years ago— but like, I would have everything 5 minutes fast, and I would forget that I even had them fast. My car clock was 5 minutes fast, but it used, it used to like get me to show up on time.

Well, this is important. So, and this is the coaching and the advice that I give leaders on why this is so important. So, Kim, if you have a team, right, and you're a leader on a team, you are basically probably putting people in jail who show up late or, or do other things, and They may not realize it. And what you have to do with that value as a leader is say, look, it is very important to me on my team that you keep your word. And what keeping your word or your promise looks like is showing up on time, meeting deadline. People need to know this. That's the say, think, and do. So first, there's so many leaders who get really mad at people 'cause they don't know why they're mad, right? They just know that it's core. For a lot of people, it's a trust. And so for a lot of people, they have a core trust issue. And if you dig into that, they usually had a violation of trust. And so people who show up late or can't be found in the afternoon at a remote work company, they instantly put this person in the penalty box, don't tell them, stop giving them assignments. And they, they don't have enough clarity themselves to be able to go to their team and say, guys, girls, here's what I value. Here are my red lines. Here's what's important to me as your leader.

Have you— so you said something about, I'm not talking about your job at McDonald's. I'm not sure I quite understood why you were precluding the jobs that people had at a young age, because I've always felt like some of our core values and our operating system, we were hard-boiled as kids and as teenagers.

Sorry. Yeah, I said that. I didn't, I didn't mean— a helpful answer wouldn't be when I worked at McDonald's. It would be what did you like about that job at McDonald's? Right. Like, what is it? Yeah. So like people answer them to simplicity. Like you've got to answer. I loved working. I loved getting in there with my hands. I loved having responsibility. That's more helpful than, than I worked at McDonald's. That was, that was the only clarification there.

It was interesting. I was telling someone the other day that I was very, very moved twice on donating to people who are needy. Once I was walking my son to a baseball game and he was 8 years old, 9 years old. And we were walking back from the baseball game and he gave a homeless man $2. In Canada, we had the $2 coins called the toonies. And he gave this homeless man $2. And as we kept walking, I turned to him. I'm like, Aiden, that was really nice of you. Like, I'm really like, I walked past the, you know, the homeless people all the time and it didn't even dawn on me that I'm very touched by that. And he said, well, I just felt like he might have needed it. And then he stopped and he said, wait a minute. And he ran back a full block, talked to the man for a minute, and then came back. And I said, what did you do? And he said, I realized I had $5 in my pocket and he needed it a lot more than I do. And my son at 25 now cares about humans so deeply. And I realized that that was something that he was hard-boiled with somehow, some way in his early operating system. Probably his mom. Maybe, but like the humanity of caring for people. Right. And like, he doesn't call people bad names and he doesn't make comments under his breath. Like he just cares about everybody. It's really a beautiful trait.

Yeah. He probably has some core value of think of others or otherwise. And having now done this with thousands of people, I can tell you the data is pretty clear. Most, 90% of our core values are formed by the time we're 22. And the science even shows that we don't understand why or the morality. It's just the development of our operating system in terms of, I like this and I don't like this and I wanna do the opposite. And almost all of our core values fall into this bucket of, I call it, for or against. And they tend to be a lot of parental and childhood experiences that you just, before you could even understand why it was, you figured that out later, but it just became the operating system. So when I talk to someone and they tell me like, process and organization and structure are really important. And I ask them, and this is how you know it's a value, and I ask them, okay, where did that come from? I usually hear one of two stories. I grew up with a parent, a military or whatever, who reinforced process, discipline, structure, or whatever. Or I grew up in a house on fire with no one around and no parents and no one paying attention to anything. And they basically were like, I am not gonna live like this. You know, this is— —So you know it's a value when it's very strongly being repeated, or the person is telling you that they are actively— and it's interesting because two people can tell you opposite stories, but they have the same thing, right? And so either, you know, your son either was emulating that, you know, or he saw some sort of unkindness. I had a podcast host who told me one of his core values was no one was better than anyone else, and he had this incredible origin story of being at his house when he was 10 years old. His neighbor was talking to his son about some bad grade he got, and in sight of a tradesperson who was on the site, said something like, "If you don't work harder, you're gonna end up like this guy." And what was interesting was this person was a serial entrepreneur. They went to set up multiple companies with no hierarchy, right? This was, they could feel the core value, but they didn't have the words. And when we sort of solidified this on this call, no one is better than anyone else, he realized, oh, I can have hierarchy, I just have to tell people at my companies, you know, Cam's your boss, but no one is better than anyone else, because he got there sort of by bouncing off the walls, as I talk about, he didn't know where the electric fence was, but not setting up any hierarchy is not a great system either, but he had this just such definitive origin story about that hit him at 10 years old, and he decided in that moment, you know, he was never going to be that and never going to do that.

Well, that's also kind of why I like flipping the org chart upside down, like an inverted pyramid where the CEO is at the bottom supporting the C-level and supporting the managers and VPs, supporting the frontline staff and supporting the customers. And then you can talk about the communication channels and who's there to support who, but it's not like I'm not on top of you telling you what to do. I'm actually below you of supporting you and growing your skills and growing your confidence and growing your connections. I want to know about distilling down our core values. I mean, if we're sitting down and doing the work and coming up with all the stuff that really matters and that operating system that we've had, you know, for so long, but you end up with like 8 things or 12 things. I mean, even Tony Hsieh, and I disagreed with Tony and told him this at dinner one night, that you can't have 10 company core values or 12. Like, it's just too many. I think you're, you kind of nail it on the 5 as well. How do you, how do you distill it down to the 5? Oh, and by the way, a funny story. A company that I was coaching 10 years ago, their 5th core value was safety is number 1. I'm like, well, if safety is number 1, he goes, oh dude, that's genius. So safety is number 1 became their first core value. Yeah.

And look, I, I wrote a Friday Forward last week about a company that says like family atmosphere and safety is most important. And a lot of people say that. But you know what this company did when we got there? These are very blue-collar hourly workers. They got to the sort of— this was like a biannual offsite. They got free work boots, new work boots. They got a full health screening that the company paid for and they were incentivized to. They gave out awards to people who stopped the presses and stopped processes and found safety improvements. And they incentivized perfect safety records. Right. So that is There's a difference between saying it and, and, and the whole day had a family atmosphere. In fact, I mean, I'm presenting to this company with the executive team on a tour and one executive team member insisted he picked me up from the airport and my flight was 3 hours late. And another, the, the co-founder of the company dropped me off at the airport rather than taking a $10 Uber, right? That's family atmosphere. Like that's actually. Doing it.

I, I grew up in a very similar family to what that atmosphere would be. Something I've discovered in my work over the last 20 years of working with so many companies is a lot of business leaders didn't have that upbringing. Um, you know, their mom and dads were divorced. Their guy— I met a woman at a Baby Bathwater event who watched her dad. I'm not even gonna go there. Like, it was brutal what she had to endure. Um, a lot of people, family wasn't a beautiful upbringing, and I don't know where else to go with, with describing it. I know Zach Morrison talks from Elite SEM, now Tenuity, talks about— or I guess formerly, I guess he just left, he's CEO there. Yeah, he talks about building more of a Cirque du Soleil environment, like where, where the trust is so strong. And do you have any triggering words or worry about family, or do you just roll with it because people know what the intent is?

Generally for comp— so, so for companies, they're the exception, not the rule. I don't think family is a great thing for company. And I think it's confusing. They weren't saying everyone is family. They were actually saying it's a family atmosphere. And I think that's interesting in terms of how they treat it. Family is a terrible personal core value. Um, because the definition of a personal core value, it should apply to all of your life, your work, your community, or whatever. And so when I ask people, What is it about family? Then you start to get to the root. It means always show up, show up for your people. Oh, well, that's how you show up as a parent, but that's how you show up as a leader. And that's how you show up as a friend. Other people mean like, I always have your back and it's trust. By the way, those are the people that excuse the family member who's acting completely inappropriate. I did— the drunk uncle, right? Those are very— they mean loyalty, not showing up. So, What sits under that? It almost should be like, what—

it almost should be, what should a good family environment be? Right?

What is your definition of family? So I have a tree where I show it's 3 or 4 different examples that I've heard from people. That's their core value. And that's much more helpful for how they act in all areas of their lives. So if it's always show up, I actually had this in my presentation. I said, your friend's father dies and you're very busy with a trip. You should go to that funeral because if that's truly your value, you're going to feel horrible if you're missing it. Someone came up to me after the keynote and said, I think my value is close to that. And I actually missed a funeral like 7 years ago. And I think about it all the time. So that, that's the example about if you get to the right thing, it actually doesn't just help you in, in, in, in one dimension, it should be consistent across all those dimensions. Across them all.

I want to ask about, about the kind of individual's core values and the business core values in a second. But I first want to ask about the big decisions you've maybe seen some leaders have to make to live their core values that might have hurt profitability or firing a best friend, but living— like, what can you give us an example or two of some, some times when you've really watched people absolutely live their core values and it might have been a hard decision?

Yeah, so I, I always say that living your core values is usually the harder decision up front, and it costs you. It costs you friends, job, money, otherwise. But usually over time, as it ages, it gets a lot better and trust builds. And, you know, we live in this 24/7, say the right thing, tweet the right thing that everyone's saying that day. Those decisions tend to age really poorly. I think about all the companies who waited in 2022 sort of performatively into social justice and politics stuff and who didn't really do it for the right reasons. They kind of made a mess of their companies and cultures and had to dig out of that over the last 5 years. There's a lot of examples that come to mind. Two are my favorite, where companies actually referred— made huge company decisions based on personal core values. So the first was Dick's Sporting Goods. So the founder's son, years ago, the Parkland High School shooting in the US, they found it was a terrible massacre in Florida, and they found that Well, the, the, the, the shooter had not bought the guns from Dick's Sporting Goods. He— sorry, he had not used the stuff. He had bought ammo and guns. And the CEO had this core value from his dad that you take care of the community and the people that you live in. And they decided to stop selling automatic weapons and eventually weapons just because they felt like he— it really hurt him that that wasn't being a good community member. And there were people to do that and everyone. Their stock went down and everyone said whatever. Now Dick's like was up $600 million in market cap within 12 months. And literally like as the only survivor in that space. So he was willing to do something that was not good for the numbers, but it was a complete decision around just something his father had told him. Similarly, there was a young aspiring climber, entrepreneur years ago named Yvon Chouinard. Some people don't know that name. And he built the first climbing— Patagonia. Yeah. Oh, you blew my, you blew my reveal. Uh, he, he built the first climbing tool, uh, for, for rocks. Um, and now I'm forgetting the name that was called, was the one you sort of hammered into, to a rock and everyone, everyone bought it. And he was a big hiker and he went all around the world and he saw that this thing was destroying the rocks. Uh, and, and it was really causing environmental damage. And his dad had always told him, Um, you know, you, you leave things better than you found them. Like, and, and, and he was not doing that. And so he, he basically stopped selling them. It was 80% of his revenue, the kind of company collapsed. And he worked on inventing the crampon, like a new thing that would not damage rocks, went on to found this company called Patagonia, which has, has done okay. So these, these were decisions that, that cost them money, but interestingly, they weren't company core value decisions. They were like personal core values that had been embedded by their, by their fathers. In this case.

Yeah, it was called the Piton. Piton. Yeah. And then he came up with some of the, the cramps that you put in. Yeah. Sorry. I used to love to rock climb back in the day. I got to, I got to speak to something around core values. My mom passed away 24 years ago this week, and she had a saying that I think really illustrated someone who absolutely lived their core values. My mom was, was was merely a housewife, raised kids, and had, had almost 700 people come to her funeral. And she was literally just a housewife. It was insane, the number of people that came and were lined up. And but her saying was, I have to live with myself, and so I want to be fit for myself to know that whatever I do and whatever I be, I'll always be so proud of me. And I think that someone who is truly examining their living of core values. And I remember at her funeral, a friend of mine, Bill, came up to me and he said, he, he kind of had, um, Bill Corney, he had tears in his eyes. He was kind of choked up. He said, I wanted to say thank you for something. And I said, what? And he said, well, my mom had passed away 3 weeks before your mom died. And your mom was literally in hospice handwriting writing notes to friends and she wrote a sympathy note to our family and made sure that food was delivered. And you're like, your mom was dying and she was sitting, you know, being thoughtful and caring of others. And I think that's where people have to reexamine their core values inside of their company and for themselves and just say like, you know, what are people going to say at your funeral? What do you want them to say? But even more important than that, Do you like the person in the mirror that you see?

Like, and by the way, who does, who does, who does that sound like from your earlier story? My son. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's, that, that, that's not a surprise. Although the thing that people struggle with in core values the most is they're trying to make it aspirational or a marketing slogan. You know that this doesn't work in company. It's the same for individuals.

So what I mean is like, like if you look in the mirror, are you living your own core values?

Correct. All your— some people are a little embarrassed by them, but, but every strength overused is a weakness and it's a strength or a weakness based on the environment you're in. So to my earlier example, we had someone on our team who had a core value. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was like, uh, something around evidence and needing the evidence or show me the data or bring the data or something like that. And when we got into the origin story, her mom was a straight up conspiracy theorist. So here's someone, you know, that, that her whole life she turned 16, 17, 18. And then had this revelation that all of the stuff that her mother told her was not true. And that's going to stay with you forever, right? You are now going to become the show me the data. So that's how she was as a leader. Now, for her to like be like, I'm chill and whatever, it wouldn't be true. But, but, but she has to realize that and realize where that has limits. But, but to, to try to put some gloss on that by picking a different value when she's really like Show me the evidence or, or, you know, evident, it needs to be evidence-based. You want to put this person in things where it's more likely to be evidence-based and not, you know, when people on our team came to there with a harebrained theory without data, they were rejected instantly. These things don't go away and they're deep. And it is when I do this work and explain it to people, this wanting, like a company, you can't pick the things you want to be. If these are the things that have been consistent since you were 20 or 22 years old, You have to be honest about, about what they are. They're already formed. As I say, we're not going to change 40 or 50-year-olds or even 30-year-olds in the workplace who've been operating with this operating system for 20 or 30 years.

I love it. All right. We've got one, one kind of wrap question. Um, if you wanted to kind of leave us with one final word of advice, maybe something that you knew to be true when you were in your early 20s, uh, or sorry, you wish you'd known when you were in your early 20s, but you know to be true today. What advice would you give your younger you?

Look, I still suck at this, so I would give it to my younger me and now, but it ties to this core values. But when you know it in your heart or in your book, like make the hard decisions earlier. They never get easy. We're just creating problems for future self. It seems easier. If you're like, this will just go away and it comes back. But every hard conversation that you avoid does not lead to an easier conversation. It leads to a harder conversation that then you're forced to have at the wrong time. And that, that, that has been my experience. And I think Tim Ferriss might have said, or who knows with this quote attribution, but it's something is, you know, like, success is the number of hard conversations you're willing to have. And I think if you get if you get better at that earlier and making those value-based questions and decisions, then, then that is a skill that will help you as you continue to develop.

What advice would you tell a COO or a second in command if they saw their CEO or company not living the core values? How should they address it with their CEO? When? How? You know, what's the best way for a COO to call their CEO out and and kind of get them realigned with the core values?

Well, one, make sure that they're agreed on what the real company core values are, but I would strongly, in that job or before that job, make sure that you understand that CEO's personal core values, you understand your personal core values, and make sure that you are generally aligned across those because there is this natural necessary tension in this vision operator role. In terms of the substance. And I always talk about there's a danger area. If you have one core value, you know, if you're about abundance and I'm about scarcity, we can dance around that one. But if I'm trying to work with you and we are fundamentally misaligned on 4 core values, that is just going to be an uncomfortable tension. So the role has enough natural tension. I think you need to make sure you understand each other's personal values. And then the rubric I always use with my teams is that people care why things are a bit— are bad for them. Someone was just asking me how could he get the company to care more about the core values. And I said, go to the founder, explain that like the reason why she's frustrated is because people aren't behaving in this way and they— we could get them to behave more in this way if we talked about or were more consistent about upholding this core value. Therefore, it will help you get what you want. Every time they're trying to get a get a company leader to care about core values and they don't, I tell them you have to tell them what they're going to get out of it. That is just basic human nature.

Love it. All right, where can people find you? And I know you've written, uh, Performance Partnerships, you've written Elevate, um, and, and at one point your company Acceleration Partners ranked, I think, as the number 2 or number 12 company in the United States to work for on Glassdoor. So you clearly know what you're doing. Where do people find you?

Sure. You can go to robertglazer.com and on there is the books, glazer.com, uh, the books, the podcast, and my weekly Friday Forward newsletter that 100,000 leaders get each week. It's 5 minutes to give you something to think about that week if they want to sign up on Substack. All right.

Well, when this link goes live, let's make sure we put it in the newsletter too. Really appreciate you sharing all this with us. Thanks.

Good to see you again too, bud. Thanks, Cam. And hopefully we're in the same place in the world one of these, one of these days could see you in person. Yeah. All right. Take care.

Say hi to, uh, say hi to Matt for me too. Okay. I will. Okay. Bye.