Chris Collins explains how leaders shape outcomes through intentional design: staffing choices, physical spaces, even a statue's placement. Small, deliberate elements drive behavior. He uses the "broom sweeps clean" rule for struggling businesses and how a Lincoln statue quietly redirected foot traffic.
Welcome, Everybody, to your 17 laws of leadership. We are on law number four today. Here are the books that I have pulled. Oh, that's heavy. So you can kind of see there's actually one below this that you're not seeing there. But we're gonna have a lot of fun. So in the last video, we talked about the importance of not leaving things to chance, and we also discussed the importance of intentionality. And this week's law is going to teach us about how to design and create an outcome and the recipe for that. Basically, we're going to go through a lot of different kind of.
Concepts in. In this, in this rule. I would tell you guys that the thing that brought this to light for me early on in my career was.
You know, being a owner of a business or being even a manager inside of a business, you have certain controls that you don't have when you come in from the outside to fix a business. An example is you can fire somebody if you're the owner of a business, but if you're a consultant or somebody from the outside coming in to fix a business, you can't directly fire somebody. You have to go through quite a few steps and make a case for it. And that just kind of is true with a lot of different things. And so in my journey, what I started to do is I would play these games with myself where when I would go into a business to turn it around, I wanted to see how quick I could turn it around. Like, how fast could I flip it and how low could I keep the turnover, how fast could I flip it with the existing people there and not have to have a mass exodus. And that's a tall, tall task. You know, early on in my career, I was given the advice that the broom sweeps clean. And when you're fixing a business, if it's breaking even, to make it profitable is really easy. Like, you could almost just make a couple changes and you. You can make it profitable. But if a business is losing a lot of money, and this is kind of where I loved to exist, is the harder it was and the more money it was losing, the more excited I got, which is sadistic in a sense, or masochistic or whatever, because many times I. I would just look at myself in the mirror and be like, what are you doing? It's madness. And so I. I was kind of given that advice early on, is if a business is losing money, the broom sweeps clean. And you'll hear a lot of really talented, successful entrepreneurs or executives from Mark, Cuban, Elon, everybody will kind of say that if. If they acquire a business that is losing money, the management and leadership has to go. And then maybe a lot of people underneath, like, think about Elon buying Twitter. And I think it was like 80% of the people ended up going away, but the people at the top, for sure, instantly went away. And I, you know, just thought, like, that takes a long time to replace everybody, and unless you come in with a team, it's really hard to do. If you come in with the team, then the team becomes the operator, and in a sense, you've got to stay there forever in order to keep the business going the way it was. And so I developed different skill sets and perceptions about how you can fix things really quick. And this rule is a big part of that, in the sense that everything mattered.
And you. You had to intentionally create an outcome in that way. And it's from the smallest to the largest things, and we'll. We'll go through that. But when we were designing this library, I. I had that in mind, and I thought, like, what could be a thing that I could do to kind of prove the point of this rule? Which. The rule is form equals function. And this comes in. In, you know, the human element, the physical element, and then the spiritual energy element.
And they're all connected in a sense. But I was thinking, like, how could I. How could I just instantly throw that on people without them knowing? And so one of the things in the design is I had a. A statue of Lincoln, and we picked Lincoln because he was the least controversial figure, and he's got his hand to the left. And when people come into the library, they have a choice of going to the right or to the left, and most of the people go to the right. And it's simply because of a statue pointing that way. So just think about that for a second. They have no relationship with the statue. You open the doors to the library, There's a statue there. In the statue, putting his hand to. To one side directs people that way, which is hilarious. And it. In an insight into just the tiniest little thing can have a huge effect on an outcome and people's behavior.
