Revolutionize and Transform Your Leadership | Full Conversation

I know that these rows would not be filled and the whole, the whole hotel wouldn't be full unless I brought you because they really don't want to hear from me. So I appreciate you coming, Simon.

No pressure.

No pressure, no pressure.

Yeah.

Yeah. So Simon's in it.

So I'm sure that you can actually, I can leave and you can actually do a fantastic presentation since everybody wants to hear from you. But I want to talk a little bit about this infinite strategic plan because, you know, I think I stalked you or maybe I found you somewhere and wouldn't let you go until you helped me. But I want to kind of walk us through how that happened. And so we initially had a conversation about this idea of doing an infinite strategic plan. And you, you were kind of intrigued by that. So tell me, tell me what your feeling was when we brought that idea to you.

So.

I am an idealist. And the world that I'm trying to build, a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and in the day fulfilled by the work that they do, is just that it's something that is. It is an unachievable vision. But I want to commit my life to getting closer and closer to that. And the path that I've chosen is leadership and businesses. I think that if we can find support and celebrate the leaders and the companies.

That are doing the right thing and leading in the way that I think people want to be led, we're more likely to get closer to that goal, to that vision, to that just cause. And so when you called and said we want to do this, immediately a light bulb goes off and says, this is one of the companies that's help advancing towards the greater good. In other words, it's mutually beneficial, right? Your goals are your goals, your vision is your vision. But we can cooperate and work closer. So immediately I'm curious.

And a lot of companies are.

Full of it.

And not because they're bad people. It's because, you know, they don't really either understand the concepts or believe in them, but they kind of have to. Like, every company has a purpose statement, but how many companies use their purpose statement to actually make decisions? You know, sure, companies say they're long term oriented, but they don't make decisions that would actually set them up for the long term. You know, they've confused bets and investments, right? They say they're making investments, they're really taking bets. One is short term, one is long term. And getting to talk to you and getting to know you, I realized what you're doing and how you're leading this company and what this company is trying to do actually, actually has benefits beyond your tenure, beyond everybody's tenure here. And if we do this right, the impact that we can have and the ripples that we can have, the people you serve and the ripples in the community are actually profound. And so it was an easy answer.

That's awesome. We appreciate you spending the time with us, spending the time with me. You had some, you talked about healthcare, though. You, you know, when we first started talking, you were not complementary of healthcare. What is your, you know, what is your feeling about healthcare in general, the way it's adjudicated here in America?

I mean, so there, there's two ways I would go at it. Both are related. If you look at leadership theory and the changing views on leadership from the times of Milton Friedman from the 70s and Jack Welch in the 80s and 90s.

The military is so far ahead in terms of embracing leadership theory and how to help teams thrive at their natural bests. Corporations, pretty good. They go in and out. Some are much better than others. But if you look at healthcare, you're probably 10 or 15 years behind. You know, hospitals are run like businesses.

People who are in administrative positions in hospitals sometimes have no medical experience whatsoever. And they've completely missed the boat. When you hear hospital administrators say, my number one priority is patients, well, it certainly doesn't look that way when they're making decisions, when they make short term financial decisions, which sometimes ripple down and hurt patients. But worse than that, that's actually not the priority of any hospital leadership. It's to take care of the doctors and nurses and support staff who are taking care of patients. It's the frontline staff whose priority should be patients. Leadership should be prioritizing the people taking care of patients. And that's how patients get better care. Because the number of experiences. I'll give you a real life scenario, a real life. And I can't remember if I shared this one with you, but this is an awful story that really captures my cynicism, Right. A friend of mine, a very dear friend of mine, at one o' clock in the morning had a miscarriage. The good news was there was a friend staying with her. And the two of them went to the hospital.

The bathroom is sort of like past the registration desk. And she says to the woman working in the registration desk, can I just go wash my hands, please? She's covered in blood. And the woman said, no, you have to fill out the form to be registered before I can let you go to the bathroom, because it's in the hospital. She goes, can I please just wash my hands and I'll fill. And they wouldn't let her in to wash her hands. So she sits there and fills out the forms with bloodied hands. Right? She gets administered, and she has the same tests repeated over and over because the nurse or the doctor who performed the test doesn't trust the other nurse or doctor who performed the test. So she has the same test repeated over and over. And you know better than I do than how this works, but apparently some of those tests reveal that you're pregnant. So one of the nurses congratulated her on her pregnancy. And again, you know this better than I do. There were no complications. You know, from a medical standpoint, it's relatively straightforward. She should have been discharged in a couple of hours. Thirteen hours later, she was discharged because the medical. Now, this is not gross negligence. There is no death, but the absolute. And I don't even want to say incompetence, because that would be at least a metric. But the complete mistrust that all of the staff had for each other not only ruins how they feel when they come to work. I can guarantee you none of those hospital staff are happy. I can guarantee you none of them have any joy helping people because of the horrible conditions they have working with each other. And the ripples of people who don't like going to work and who don't trust each other directly impact a patient. My friend, a decade later, doesn't want to have children because of the trauma of that experience.

There's no negligence, there's no lawsuit. But health care sucked in that situation. And unfortunately, this is one case which I know is being repeated over and over and over again in this country, not because of lack of education, not because of lack of technology, not because of lack of. Go down the list of how we usually weigh the quality of health care. It's because of a distinct, completely broken leadership structure, nothing else.

Yeah, we hope. That wasn't one of our sites.

You know, I don't think it was.

We'll talk later. I don't think it was, but we'll fix it.

Yeah, no, I don't think it was. Well, it's a different conversation. I know it wasn't. Yeah, awesome.

So sorry to make light. I was feeling so down, I had to bring myself back up a little bit. But, you know, so we met for. So just so you all know, I went out and I got information from all of you, got information from my team and I brought a bunch of like a bag full of papers to Simon's office. It was actually a very cool office.

Thank you.

Very cool office. So. And I, and I sort of, I get in and he says hi and I fanboy him for a little bit, you know, and then I sort of throw the papers on the table and he's like, oh my God, I got so much work to do. But we worked that day and there's some bones there, right? There's a goals. There's some really good stuff there. And we spend about six, seven hours, about six, seven hours working together. He looks into my eyes as we get ready to leave and he says, how do you feel?

And a single tear rolls down my eyes. But, you know, I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel right. And so that infinite mindedness, that infinite gain, it's a tough. It's conceptually, even when you buy in, even when you really understand from a business perspective, I mean, there are day to day goals, right? There are people here that are worried about their site today. How do you balance and how did we balance that? Short termism goals and really kind of pulling up to that infinite mindedness, that infinite strategic plan, which another note is that it's never actually been officially built before. So we were kind of building something.

Yeah. So I think everybody here already knows what an infinite mindset is. You just don't realize it. Which is just a quick show of hands. Of those who have children, how many are absolutely, singularly devoted to ensuring that you're happier, healthier and more successful than your children?

Okay. Turns out you would actually like to pass something on and you would actually like to, whether you call it legacy or whether you just want to see your children happier, more successful than you could have ever dreamed of for yourself. And you will attempt to make decisions to achieve that. Sometimes you do well at it and sometimes you do badly. You know where you say your kids are a priority, but you're working so much and you're missing the baseball games and you're missing the school plays and something will happen and you realize I got to reorganize because I'm playing too finite minded. It's too much about me. I gotta sacrifice a little bit to actually put in for the kids. It's a difficult job and it waxes and wanes and it has pride and guilt associated with it. But the point is, you understand it. It's the Same mentality.

Which is, what an awesome experience to leave behind an organization that will be in better shape than you found it. And 10 or 20 or 30 years after you've left, it will have greater impact in the world and the ripples and the people who come through your system, both employees and patients.

Than you could have ever dreamed of. And you get to sit back in your rocking chair on your front porch in your later years and say, I helped do that. So we have a sense of it now. The biggest misunderstanding of having an infinite mindset is, is that it is not the absence of finite goals. They are not mutually exclusive. The infinite game, the infinite mindset, is the context within which those finite goals exist. In other words, the goals you choose are building towards something. I'll give you an analogy of how businesses usually think and how this changes it. So here's.

Here's a metaphor. So you walk out your front door one morning and you see your neighbor packing their car. And you say, where are you going? And they reply, vacation. And you go, oh, cool. Where are you going? They said, vacation. Like, no, no, no, I got that. Where are you going? And they look at you and they go, vacation.

And then you try to get past this ridiculous line of questioning and you say, well, how are you going to get there then? And they say, well, I'm going to take 95 and we're going to drive 150 miles a day due north.

And that's how we're going to go. That's how most businesses operate. Right.

What's your vision? Growth.

Cool.

To what end? Growth. Well, how are you going to get there? And they'll tell you their financial goals and what they want to achieve and how much money they want to make in the year. Right. And they're all excited if they drive 200 miles in the day, really depressed that they only get 100 miles in the day, Rewarding everybody for driving faster on the freeway in what direction.

And the problem is, this is where finite mindedness overtakes infinite mindedness. That is a finite mindset with amorphous vision. Useless vision. Infinite mindedness is having a very clear sense of cause, a vision that is so far in the distance that we'll never get there, but it gives us a direction. And absolutely, you need to have finite goals. We want to drive this many miles on the freeway every single day. The difference is if the freeway is blocked, you take a side road that's slow because the road to success is not straight, nor is it easy. But you don't go Veering off over here and you know, which opportunities to say yes to and which to say no to. Somebody says, I've got a plane. You're like, oh, my God, planes go so fast. The plane's going in that direction, right? And so you turn down the airplane and rather take the bumpy side road because it's going kind of in the right direction. And people accuse you of being unfocused, but actually you're more focused than anybody else. It's that you're focused on the destination. You're agnostic as to the route, but absolutely, you have to have goals. And I think the other big mistake that companies make is that they're more obsessed with hitting the goal and ignore how they got to the goal. Right? Trend data and how you do things is as if not more important than the goal itself. So I went to visit OCS Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, for the Marine Corps. Any Marines in the audience? Okay, there we go.

So you know what I'm talking about, ocs. I care if they're good leaders. I said, well, how do you know if they're good leaders? He says, we judge them by the quality of good leadership. And he went on to explain that the Marines understand that sometimes good leaders suffer mission failure, and sometimes bad leaders enjoy mission success. You can't tell if someone's a good leader or a bad leader if they hit their numbers at the end of the year. You just know that they hit their numbers at the end of the year. But if you look at the qualities that make somebody a leader, they're more likely to succeed more often over time. And there's that infinite mindset again. Over time and again, trend data matters. And so the analogy that I like to use, and I think I wrote about it, I can't remember, but. But the natural I like to use is, like, think about health. Like, if somebody says, I want to be healthy, okay, there's many things you have to do. You've got to exercise. You've got to eat right. You've got to nurse your personal relationships. You've got to sleep well. There's probably 30 other things. You can't do all of those things right all the time. It's a striving, right? They wax and wane. It's the same in business. You got to get leadership, you got to get culture, you got to do marketing, you got to do sales, you got to do finance. You're never going to do it, all right? All the time. It's a striving they go like this, right?

And it's totally legitimate to have arbitrary goals within that. I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. Totally fine. Just like in business, the annual goals that we set are usually made up. A bunch of people sit in a room and go, I think we should hit this number. And somebody goes, I think we can do better. Okay, this number. Okay, that's the number, right? It's nonsense. And it's usually annual because that's when we pay taxes, no other reason.

And we strive towards that goal. Well, like human beings. Not like human beings. Human beings need metrics. Metrics are super important. You can't run a marathon without metrics. It's actually unnerving because metrics tell us speed and distance. We need to know how fast and how far and we stand on the scale in the morning. It's good. It's not good. We have good days, we have bad days. And you hit your goal and you're ecstatic. But here's the problem. You have to keep doing it for the rest of your life. It's not an event, it's a journey. And business is the same. You know, you hit your goal, congratulations. Now you have to keep doing it. And so if all you do is hitting goals, hitting goals, hitting goals and moving the goalposts each time, over time, it's thrilling when you're new, it's thrilling when you're young. Do that 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years, it starts to lose its thrill, it starts to lose the joy. And I find that senior people actually, even high performing senior people actually find more malaise in their careers than junior people. Happiness is hitting the goal. Happiness is fleeting. Joy is something. It's like you love your children every day, you don't like your children every day, right? Like happiness, you get happiness. Happiness comes and goes. But you should be able to have joy at work no matter what the conditions are. That's because you feel like you're contributing to something bigger than yourself. What's more interesting about this analogy, about this metaphor, is what happens if you miss your goal. You know what happens? Nothing. In fact, you're way healthier now than you were when you started. Because you were doing all the right things. You were not just trying to hit the goal. You were building a strong team. You know, John Wooden, Coach K, all of these world famous coaches, not a single one of them was obsessed with winning. None of them. And yet they're the winning most coaches in history. They were obsessed with building strong players who cared about the team. And it turns out that they won more often that they lost than they lost like the Marine Corps. And so having an infinite mindset is understanding. It's. It's understanding that there's a practice, not an event. You know, and we treat business like sports, but business is not like sports because there's not a beginning, middle and end. It's more like healthcare. It's just ongoing. It never ends. And you have to keep working at it. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But we want to pay attention to how we got somewhere because I want to know the values. I want to know the ethics of an organization. I want to know if they're training people right. I want to know if people are performing in a way that is that we recognize as high quality leadership. And though you may miss the goal, I guarantee you you'll hit the goal in 14 months. You just got the timing wrong. And more importantly, you. You're more likely to keep hitting your goals year after year after year. When you have that mindset.

That'S powerful, you can drop the mic. Yeah. Don't be careful.

We have to pay for that.

So.

I'm a little bit. So I think you're my friend, but I don't know if I'm your friend, but going to call.

They call that a parasocial relationship. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're friends and all the conversations that we've had and I've seen you do this with other friends that we've been around. You always say, I want to push you. You actually did it to me back there. So I want to push you a little bit on us because I think everybody's sort of wondering, so you've heard of our infiniteness and what we really look back and Teo talked about. That's kind of how we were founded. You've heard the stories, you've seen. You've actually helped build a lot of it. What do you think is going to trip us up? What do you think as you look and you doing your premature, albeit assessment, what do you think that could potentially trip us up?

So, I mean, there's some pretty consistent culprits. Incentives and rewards are a big part of it. I mean, talk is cheap, right. You'll get the behavior that you reward.

And so there's nothing wrong with rewarding hitting a goal. There's no problem with that so long as you also reward.

The behavior that got you to the goal and don't reward apparent behavior. You know, I think under performers, believe it or not, are not the biggest culprit of underperforming organizations, it's keeping toxic geniuses on the team for too long. The lack of courage to get rid of high performers who are, who are just, everybody knows, destroy the performance of everybody else. I think that has more of a negative impact on an organization because you're chipping away at your culture bit by bit by bit. And by the way, you lose respect from your teams because everybody knows this person is toxic. And by the way, when I say toxic, we've attempted to coach them, you know, like, there's no change, like. And.

You talk a big game about values and ethics, and yet you keep somebody who obeys none of it. They just happen to be a high performer. That has more damage, I think, than underperformers. Underperformers you can usually coach up.

It never happens in healthcare.

No, of course not.

Yeah.

I think incentives and incentives and rewards are a big deal as well. So a quick personal story. So when I was young in my career, I worked for a big ad agency and.

We had a big new business pitch that was happening. I don't remember the beginning of the new year. And usually the senior folks do the pitches and the junior folks do the support. And I was junior and I was assigned to this pitch. So supporting role. And it happened to be Christmas and all the senior leaders went on vacation, but Yahoo was still at the office. So they gave me and another junior person an assignment which is called Prepare the War Room, which basically means hang the research on the walls. That took an hour. And so we still had a week to kill. And so we decided to comb through the data and comb through the research, find insights and write the whole pitch ourselves, you know, kill time. And when the leaders came back, we presented our document to them and they actually used. And rewards are a big deal as well. So a quick personal story. So when I was young in my career, I worked for a big ad agency and.

We had a big new business pitch that was happening. I don't remember the beginning of the new year. And usually the senior folks do the pitches and the junior folks do the support. And I was junior and I was assigned to this pitch. So supporting role. And it happened to be Christmas and all the senior leaders went on vacation, but Yahoo was still at the office. So they gave me and another junior person an assignment which is called Prepare the War Room, which basically means hang the research on the walls. That took an hour. And so we still had a week to kill. And so we decided to comb through the data and comb through the research, find insights, and write the whole pitch ourselves, you know, kill time. And when the leaders came back, we presented our document to them, and they actually used our document and our strategy in the pitch, and we lost the business. We did not win the pitch. And my boss gave me a huge promotion. He actually moved me up two levels. I skipped a level because he wasn't rewarding my outcome. He was rewarding my behavior. And guess what he got. He got a lot more initiative, because that's what got me promoted was initiative. And he was smart enough to know that if he only came up to me, like, great effort, but you didn't win. So there's nothing I can give you next time I'm not helping or I'm playing it safe, or I'll just leave it for the other folks to do the work, because that's the behavior he rewarded. So I'm very impressed by organizations who adapt their incentive, reward, and recognition programs to align with the behavior that they actually want.

Yeah, that's. That's. That's profound. Especially in healthcare.

It's hard. And I'm not saying abandoned performance. I'm saying balance performance. We over. It's tipped too far on performance for legitimate reasons. It's just easy to measure. Right. One's quantitative, one's qualitative. It's easy to recognize count and reward. Quantitative. That's why we do is more difficult. The other one. And. And sometimes you have to trust the leaders that they know what they're doing and who they. Who they're. Who they're building up. You also want to be careful about not making heroes out of people, but that's a different conversation.

So can we change gears a little bit? I want to change gears because I know you always wear orange.

Yeah.

And it's actually the vituity orange.

Yeah.

So I want to act like I gave you that watch, but I didn't.

Yeah, you did not. But. But you're welcome. Yeah, yeah. Or thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. But tell me a little bit about the optimism company, because I think it's actually interesting that we talked a little bit about what you were building and our strategic plan. Invituity.

Yeah.

Tell us the audience about your optimism company.

So, as I said before.

What the vision was.

Inspired, safe, and fulfilled. And I recognize that there's a missing skill set. There's a miss. There's a skill gap to achieving this vision. Right. We talk about hard skills and soft skills. I despise the term soft skills because there's nothing soft about them. Number one and number two, hard and soft are opposites, and these are not. These two things are not working against each other. Hard skills are clearly the skills you need to do your job. You know, I wouldn't trust you to give me medical advice if you didn't go to medical school and pass some of the tests that they give you. Those are hard skills, right? I like human skills, not soft skills. And human skills are the skills you need to be a better human being. And human skills make you a better leader. They give you a better bedside manner. They make you a better team member and teammate. Right? And we don't teach human skills. We just don't teach them. So a lot of people are bad team members or substandard team members or substandard leaders. Not because they're bad people. They just have never been given the education. I would never expect you to know how to do surgery without training. How can I expect you to lead without training? It's a skill. And so we built the optimism company to fill that gap and teach human skills only things like how to listen. Things like how to have an effective confrontation, like somebody screwed up badly. How do you. Or you need to go up the chain of command, your boss is an idiot. How do you tell your boss they're an idiot?

Thank you.

In a way.

In a way that they will hear the information rather than just be defensive. Right. And it goes in every direction in an org chart. How to give and receive feedback. I like to. We all give feedback the way we like to receive it. Turns out not everybody likes to receive feedback the way we like to get it. Turns out. So these are some of the skills where we're dedicated to teaching. And the amazing thing is when you talk about improving lives, like you're devoted to helping people improve lives. Turns out if you teach the skills at work in order to help them improve work, turns out once you have those skills, you have those skills. And you find that companies that make companies that do a good job of teaching human skills, they. The people who work at those companies tend to have better marriages, they tend to have better relationships with their kids because all those skills come home. You know, if you get better at listening, guess what? You're better at listening to your spouse. You know, if something goes wrong at home and you've learned how to give feedback or receive feedback, guess what? It works at home, too. So when you talk about improving lives, this is what I'm talking about, the ripples of our work, you know, so.

I'm going to kind of Weave in some of the questions that people are asking. And then I'd like to, hopefully we can get some mics.

Yeah, you can get a shout and we can repeat the questions from the.

Audience so we can find them. But I do want, before we do that somebody asked a question that I want to weave into being grateful to you. So you, you know, I'm grateful personally. I think vituity is grateful for the time that you spent with us, really trying to push us like you do, towards, towards what we already knew, but wanted to make sure it could manifest in how we impact the world. But for you personally, you've told me this before, so I'm cheating. But what would you say your personal just cause is?

Well, it's the same.

To inspire. To create a world in which the vast majority of people wake up inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. And I, I show up as a friend in the same way I show up as a leader of my company in the same way I show up as a, you know, just to support somebody I work with.

You know, my why is to inspire people to do things that inspire them. And that's why I get out of bed in the morning. That's why I wear orange. It's not for you, it's for me. I'm human. I get sucked into the daily details. I mean, I can be emotional, I can be reactive, I could be short sighted. And so these little flashes of orange are simply to remind me. And I'm obsessed. Like, I carry a notebook and a pen in case I have any, in case I hand up any ideas. And so it's an orange pen, turns out, and I had them made. So on the side of the pen it says.

It says inspire. Because that reminds me of my job every time I write down an idea what it's supposed to be doing. And so improve lives. If I can push you. I looked at your document over there. It said improving lives. And it said there were three things. And they all had ing. They had. All had the gerunds, which is passive, as if it's just happening. And they should be in the imperative. Improve lives. Because it's everyone's responsibility every day. And improving lives, of course it's built into your product, of course, of course it's built into your profession, of course. But if you're truly showing up to improve lives, that means for the person to the left and the person to the right as well. And so to show up as a leader committed to improving Lives like, I want you to be the best doctors in the world because you're going to improve people's lives. I want you to be best leaders in the world because you're going to improve the lives of the people who work with you and work for you.

So for me, I don't separate personal and professional. It's me.

Awesome.

It's not just something I do at work.

Awesome.

All right, so I want to. Where are questions?

Any. Any Quanessa's like, me, pick me. I'm standing up.

Okay, let's go. We got. We got a mic. Hold on, Vanessa, because I don't think everybody can hear you.

We got one coming.

If you shout. If you shout. Oh, there you go. Here, it's hers.

Vanessa, I appreciate you speaking up. I know you're shy, so.

Moo.

You called on me, man. I was just sitting here. So I do the wellness work for the enterprise. And a lot of what you said really spoke to me because I do think when we say improve lives, we need to start with our own lives first. And so I'd love to hear just maybe from you a little bit more as to how.

What happens when you do focus on improving the lives of the people in this room, what happens outside of this room and to the organization and to the lives that we're trying to help outside of this room.

So.

I'll come at it from the side.

We have forgotten the value of service as a nation. We over indexed on rugged individualism, Marlboro man type of stuff, right? We celebrated the individual. We made heroes out of CEOs.

And we forgot about the team and the group and the company and the fact that it's always a team effort because human beings are social animals. We're not that good by ourselves. And no one on the planet has achieved anything alone. It all became. Somebody took a bet on us, somebody believed in us. Somebody was there with us late at night. Somebody gave us a shoulder to cry on. And so, you know, there's an. There's a great irony in personal achievement, which is you can't do it alone. It's just not. You don't have the. Nobody's got the stomach for it. And if you look at the highest performing, quote, unquote, individuals on the planet.

And you and I have talked about this, individual athletes are terrible gauges because they organize their whole lives around me. And so, like, I have a friend who's a. She's an Olympic medalist and on an individual sport, an ice skater, and she'll freely admit that she missed birthdays, she missed Thanksgiving, she missed Christmases because she had to be as they, as all Olympians say, I have to win the Olympics as if there's one winner, Right? And the, and the even thicker irony is, is she won a silver medal at the Olympics.

The gold medalist fell in her routine. My friend fell twice. So you're not the best in the world. You're just better that day than one other person. Right?

Anyway, my point is, is that is like, I like it when people commit to helping each other. In Alcoholics Anonymous, we know there's a 12 step program, right? And we, most of us are familiar with the first step. Admit you have a problem. And Alcoholics Anonymous knows that if you master 11 steps, but not the 12th, you're probably going to still succumb to the disease. But if you master the 12th step, you will more likely overcome the disease. The 12th step is to help another alcoholic service. And so when we say you have to be healthy, you have to protect your health, you have to exercise, you have to eat right, it's so much stress. And except for the few people who are that disciplined, those disciplined people make the rest of us feel insecure.

Really, the best way to get yourself healthy and get yourself well is to help somebody else who's struggling with the same thing. If somebody's struggling with their weight. If you're struggling with your weight, help somebody else who's struggling with their weight. If you don't have the discipline to exercise, help somebody else who's struggling to have the discipline to exercise. And when we commit to helping somebody else overcome the problems that we're struggling with, it is amazing how much we overcome those problems ourselves. And we get the intense, intense oxytocin joy of helping someone else, which, as we said, is infinite minded. It's helping your children as opposed to just helping yourself. So I love wellness programs, especially when those wellness programs, programs are organized to help us not only get healthy and take care of ourselves, but to have the incredible joy of serving those who are struggling with the same things.

Service.

Awesome. So I have a question here that's percolating its way to the top while somebody takes the mic away from Vanessa.

I'm kidding.

So we feel like, and I'm paraphrasing here, but we feel like we're on an island. We feel like we have this infinite DNA that we've learning about now, but we always felt that way. We feel like a lot of people in the industry are super finite healthcare systems, especially where they have quarter to Quarter. Their leaders may only be in for a year or two, maybe three maximum. What's your advice as we interact with them? How do we help to move them to be more infinite in their thinking?

You don't.

I mean you can't change other people. You can serve as a beacon, as an example. You can offer support if they ask for it. Can't force anybody to do anything. And we go back to incentive structures. I can guarantee you they have missile. They could agree with you. But they're not going to change their behavior because their incentive structure is organized in the wrong direction. You know, if they're only incentivized by quarterly performance, guess what they're doing. So, you know.

You wish them luck and sometimes feel sorry for them and.

Go about your business. I mean like I know sometimes you have to interact with them and sometimes their short minded, their short termism affects you because it creates stress for you. But that's part of the joy of working the system. This is a creative enterprise, you know.

Yeah. I mean you serve as an example because your business will outperform everybody else. Your business will outshine everybody else. Your employees will be happier, your doctors will be higher performing and derive more joy and they want to stay here. And over time they're going to actually make more and do better. And all of the standard metrics also go up. All the money goes up also. That's the great irony of this. And at some point other healthcare systems start looking at you going, maybe we should copy Vituity because they're doing better. And so the early adopters will be curious about you early and want to learn and are willing to take risks to change. But most companies won't because there's risk associated. Until the pressures are so great that they actually start looking for a new way, I wouldn't worry about it. It's their problem.

Over time we might attract different clients based.

Yeah, of course, of course. You become a shining object. Yeah.

Awesome. Okay, we need one from the audience.

I think that's part of the problem is we, we like, we're so obsessed with what everybody else is doing.

Yeah.

I think it's part of the problem with thinking about competitors versus worthy rivals, which is we were. One of the things I did when I first discovered these concepts and started talking about them and writing about them is I canceled my subscriptions to all my trades because I realized that when I would read these articles about what companies in MySpace were doing, I either felt bad that I wasn't doing it or I copied them. So I was Johnny come lately and what I started doing was reading other companies trades, other industry trades, because they were doing things that weren't being done in my industry that I could just steal and learn from or they were having ideas that were helping me solve the problems that nobody in my category was solving. I was more curious what other people were doing because I was always late to the game. If I was only reading about what my people were doing. Now you have to read things obviously to keep up. But I stopped thinking of them. I stopped reacting to those things.

At all.

We got a mic. We got a mic coming.

So I think this is wonderful. My name is Jason, so I live up in Marin. I have a phenomenal site, can't complain. But what was resonating with that last question you answered, and the question I have for you is more about how do you work with hospital leadership? When they are our partners, we are actually beholden. Our contract.

Yeah.

You know, is.

It'S in our best interest to keep them happy.

Yeah, but.

So if they don't buy in, we can't just turn away like you suggested?

I didn't say turn away.

Well, not turn away, but it is what it is. I mean, there still has to be a give and take. So. But let me take it a step further. So I understand as the medical director walking that fine line between my partners and the hospital.

Sure.

But I think the hardest part for a medical director is getting our partners to understand what you're saying and still remain positive despite administration not supporting us the way that say, a new grad at a residency wants to feel supported. And so we're in that fine line. So what would your advice be? Be for me to take back to a young partner? Because it's easy for me in my mind to understand why the administration can't do X, Y and Z.

So what we're, what we're talking about is like you don't have to be a bureaucrat to still function within a bureaucracy. You play by the rules of the game. Right. Clearly you can't be all high and mighty because A, it's not appealing, but B, it's not going to work. And so I always like to bring it down to an individual. Right. What if one person is, I mean, at the worst obstructionist but the least cynical. And they're cynical for all the reasons we've talked about, misaligned incentive structures, etc. Maybe they were just. That's how they were raised, you know, So I, if it was one person, you'd actually know exactly what to do, which is you'd have a little empathy. So I, like, I went for a walk with a friend of mine who's struggling at work, and this is how the conversation started. My boss is a terrible person.

I hate working for her. She's a terrible person. And I said, oh, my God, does she abuse her children and kick her dog?

And she said, no. I said, ah, so we don't know that she's a terrible person. We just know that she's a terrible leader. Right. And so. And so it's the same thing here, which is a little bit of empathy, which is they have pressure on them that you and I can't even comprehend. Right. Maybe they weren't given an education about how to lead. Maybe they have had terrible role models. Maybe they've got screwed up incentive structures. Maybe they have a terrible boss. You know, like, we don't know what they're operating in. And we have to assume that they're doing the best they can with the circumstances and the tools they've got. So for us to come in with empathy and to affirm rather than argue.

You have to do it this way. They say with confidence, you'd be like, ah, I can only imagine that's, you know, I know that you're interested in some of the stuff that it's frustrating. And I think just leading with empathy and affirming their feelings.

They'Re more likely to be partners even if they can't do the thing. I think it's very, very human.

We have to be dangerous about the narratives we create about other people. And as leaders, we do this to our employees and employees do this to us. Right. Like, I'm not talking about after work venting. That's perfectly healthy. I have no issue with that. But we've all had the experience where we're sitting in a leadership meeting and the name of an employee comes up and somebody goes, that guy's such an idiot. Or, ugh, so lazy. Oh, my God, what an. Such an underperformer. I don't even know why they're on the team. Right? And the problem is all the other leaders hear that, and then that starts getting repeated. Now the other leaders start saying, ugh, lazy. Steve again. Oh, surprise. We got another problem with Stacy. Right. And that narrative now becomes toxic because we now start treating those people as lazy, stupid, unmotivated. Right? And none of that is true. It might be true. Like they might be lazy, unmotivated, and disengaged, or they might be struggling, or they might have issues at home. Or they might be in the wrong job, or they might be freaking out or maybe they have a bad boss. I don't know. I just know it's not necessarily that. And it's incumbent upon us as leaders that if somebody starts to form a narrative about one of our people that we immediately cut off and say, maybe or maybe, and then you give the list. And by the way, it goes the other way around, which is we also sometimes make heroes out of people. Oh, she's. If you just give it to her, she's. She'll fix everything. Because then the one time something goes wrong, you There's. You can't give feedback because you created this public hero out of somebody who does no wrong. And that. That's equally as toxic. And you create your own toxic geniuses. I've done it. I know I'm talking from experience, right? But we do the same with our clients. That idiot just doesn't get it. Now, we all treat that person as an idiot who doesn't get it. Rather be like, I know deep down inside they love what we do and they wish they could do it. They're never going to tell us that. They're never going to show us that.

So I think empathy and patience are remarkable things. And to bring it down to a very, very, very human level.

And then you play the cards you dealt. It's not your system that you're dealing against, it's their system, but you're not in their system. You just have to work alongside of it and help them achieve their goals based on their metrics and their system, which you will try and do to the best of your capabilities. And you will tell them that we're going to help you achieve what you need to. And a million questions. Lead with more questions. There's data on this, which is a good salesperson. Let's start with a bad salesperson. A bad salesperson will ask on average seven questions in a meeting. A good salesperson asks an average 32. So it's over 4x. So the more questions you ask, the more data you'll get, the more you know how to lead with empathy. That would be my suggestion.

Let's go back to the audience.

Yay for empathy. We got an applause for empathy.

Yeah, we got an applause for empathy. You know, Simon, I will say you said this to me before in a different way, but it struck me when we were talking about health systems, we actually internally do some of that too, in what you're talking about. And I always say to people.

I don't think you should ever interview for a position? Because I think every day that you interact, you're interviewing for that position. You kind of know how people behave most days, right? Until you say, hey, there's a job opportunity. And they, then they behave like someone totally different. So it's, it's very interesting, right?

Southwest Airlines, unfortunately, they don't do this anymore. But Southwest Airlines, if you were applying for a senior position, they would fly you to Dallas for the interview. Right? But what the candidate didn't know is that before you walked into your interview, they talked to the gate agent who checked you in in your home city. They talked to the flight attendants who served you on their planes. They talked to the chauffeur who drove you to their office. They talked to the front desk who let you in, and they talked to the secretary who said, he'll be right out. And they already knew exactly who you are before you had the interview. I love that.

All right, who has the mic?

I do.

Hi, I'm Tiffany. I'm Bitoti's director of leadership development. So I love this leadership content you're talking about. And I love the way you frame the term human skills, because I've been asked to help our leaders improve, myself included, improve our human skills. So I'd love to hear a bit about, from your perspective, what your approach would be toward helping people be more human.

So you're asking me the same question as how do I exercise?

I'm like, well, you have to do arms, you have to do legs, you're gonna have to do core, you're gonna have to do back, you're gonna have to do chest. Well, where should I start? Yes.

You eventually have to do it all. Just start. And so my advice is usually, what's the fastest, simplest thing you can do with the highest probability of success? Start there. Like, what program can you implement with very little friction, Acceptable cost that will have some degree of success pretty quickly. Do that one first. Right. Like, curls are much more fun than sit ups. So start with curls. You know, eventually you're gonna have to get to all of it, but you're, you're getting buy in and people are starting to see and feel the difference and so they become more open to more things later. I tend to encourage people to not start with some big multi year program that costs millions of dollars to implement and then launch it, and then the marketing launch that goes with it, and then very low adoption. I don't believe in launches, I just believe in starting. Like I said, the analogy is healthcare not sports. It's not an event, it's a practice.

And. Or start with things that interest you. Like, I need the skill. I'm going to start there because I want to take the course or read the book or whatever it is. Yeah, I wish I had a better answer for you.

Nope, that works.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Awesome. I think we have time for one more question and then I'll give you closing some closing comments. One more amazing question. No pressure.

Hello. I'm a new medical director with vituity. Just started in October. So I have officially.

I was going to say I've drank the Kool Aid. It's a very different group than any that I've seen before. They seem to stand for really, that servant leadership. And it's a different experience than I've ever seen. My worry is, coming into it, when they're at the pinnacle, we're at the top. People are seeing our difference. People are giving us contracts left and right. How does our senior leadership balance that and keep the quality? When we are being recognized and we are winning over these contracts, people see the difference. How do we balance growth with our mission being as many lives as possible and balance that with keeping the quality that pituitary is known for?

Yeah, Great question.

So number one is don't believe your press, right? So if the bar is low. So Donny Deutsch was a famous advertising guy who said, it's not hard to stand out in an industry full of idiots, right? So it's like you're doing great and you're being recognized, but where's the bar? You know? You know, you have a lot of room for improvement. And I think the analogy is the iceberg, which is no matter how much of the iceberg the market can see, which is your performance, your growth, your. Your remarkable culture, you know, that there's way more work to be done beneath the ocean. And so no matter what people say and how other people celebrate you, the answer should always be the mentality. Should always be tip of the iceberg. It's tip of the iceberg, you know, And I think you have to be careful at believing your own press.

You can enjoy it, you can reward yourselves, you can pat yourselves in the back, and then you get back to work. You know.

Humility matters here. And I think where a lot of companies go sideways is they start to actually believe we are the best. And an infinite mindset. CEOs do come up to me and say, but Simon, like, no offense to you or anything, but.

We are the best.

On Every metric. And my answer is always, for now. For now. And we can't judge the quality of a crew by how a ship performs in calm waters. We can only judge the quality of a crew by how a ship performs in rough waters. So while things are great, sure, you guys are amazing. Let's see what happens when you get pounded a little bit by some waves and some storms. Let's see how the team comes together. Then let's talk about how great this team is.

Difficulty is the test.

So, yeah, enjoy it. It's nice. But don't necessarily believe it. And remember, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, I think.

I think it's interesting.

It gets to be personal once you're in the fold.

Sure.

And you know, you want to advance the cause, you want to improve the lives of vitans, you want them to enjoy.

Unless there are new vitons out there. And so I think the key is with growth or with any of those things, that we should always look to people who aren't enjoying what we have and give them an opportunity. So that's a great question. So I have maybe a final thought. We have about five minutes left. And so.

What would be your final thought? To vituity, Your final advice? To vituity.

So growth is fine, remember? But growth is the fuel for the car. Where are you going? Companies don't exist to make money. Companies exist to do something, to have some sort of impact or make our lives easier, offer some sort of ease or.

Some sort of contribution to the end user. And money is the fuel that helps them to keep doing that. So I want you to have more fuel in the tank, otherwise the whole thing dies. So that's fine. Just again, context, context, context. But if we take it up a few thousand feet, I'd say that you have an opportunity that you don't even realize that's way bigger than the category in which you operate. Which is if you look at our nation.

There'S a few funny trends.

One is people don't trust politicians anymore. Shocker.

Like their trust level is at an all time low. But we have this strange moment in time where they seem to trust corporations more than anything else.

Right. Which means corporations are the better leadership models than our own actual civic leaders. And if you look at our nation, there's been a total loss of idealism. We've lost idealism in our country. If you go back to Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy. So I don't care what your politics are. Our presidents used to literally stand on the stage Both of them did this in their inaugurations and talked about peace on earth. They literally used the terms world peace to explain the motivations for their actions. In other words, they were infinite minded. It was an ideal that they knew they would never achieve, but my God, they would die trying, which was the point. And we don't talk about world peace anymore as a motivation. In fact, invoking those words actually sounds cheesy. It sounds corny to say, oh, I believe in world peace, right? It didn't used to be that way. And I think when you look at your cause to improve the lives.

Of as many people as possible, that is world peace. If people are healthy, if people know how to talk to each other and treat each other and listen to each other, with whom they may have disagreements, whether they're political or business, those people are happier people. They're more fulfilled, they're more inspired, they go home happier, more fulfilled. They treat their kids better, they treat their spouses better, they treat their neighbors better. You ripple that out a few thousand feet, you get world peace. I think the impact you can have on the world in your industry and beyond your industry is greater than you realize simply by doing the things that you fundamentally believe in and committing yourself to a cause bigger than yourselves. Believe it or not, if you get this right, other companies will copy you. In the 80s and 90s, GE was the leadership factory in America because it was a different form of capitalism, a different form of Jack Welch made. He was the poster child for short termism and made short termism the standard that it is today, at great cost to the nation.

And.

If you had GE on your resume, they let you run a company you knew nothing about. Sure, you can run Home Depot, whatever. You know, like if you had GE on your resume, everybody wanted you. Imagine, having vituity on a resume makes you eligible to lead any company in any industry just because of your reputation. And guess what? They take all the values and all the lessons and all the things they learned here and they bring them to the other companies. The reason Jack Welch's model spread and became normalized in our nation, why mass layoffs have become standardized, why short termism and quarterly results have become standardized, is because all those GE.

Went to lead other companies.

Now imagine that it's all vituity, alum.

Or people who you worked with who saw the world differently and all of a sudden over the course of about a year or two, started leading differently just because you were so nice and you made them feel seen and heard and understood, which is all anybody wants. I want to instill in you that the impact that you can have on your company, on your industry and the nation is riper and more available than you realize.

The time is now, and I'll tell you, the nation is sick and we need our lives improved. If not you, who.

It.