Navigating the Path to Impact: Dr Chris Stout on Psychology, Global Health, and Leadership

Welcome to the World of Voices, the platform where we bring you powerful conversations with leaders, innovators, and changemakers who are shaping the future of business and society. I'm your host Venky, and today we are honored to welcome Dr. Chris Stout Stout, LinkedIn Top Voice, bestselling author, and a respected leader in psychology. Speaking of today's conversation, what are your first thoughts of joining your first company from the starting of your career?

Oh, well, thank you. Thanks. It's good to be on here too. Back in the day with my situation as a clinical psychologist, the joining corporations was not so much what I would be doing. I had worked as an intern and a postdoctoral fellow in hospital settings, and that gave me an opportunity to get to meet practice owners. That gave me an opportunity to get to know other professionals in the area. So once I had completed all of my training and got my license, it became then an application process. The classic interviews and sending out resumes and things along those lines. I think for someone in the clinical medical psychology world, it's a little bit different than maybe just, you know, going out of undergraduate, but The similarities would be going through the interview process. I would say one of the things that I found and that I've, when I've mentored people, new graduates and early career psychologists, is to look to, to do the research on whoever it is that you're going to be working with. For example, in healthcare, it's kind of nice because you can see, have these people published? Do they teach at a university? What are the kinds of things that you can do a deep background on when you find out if you do get an interview who who's going to be interviewing you. And I always felt that that was kind of a bonus or a benefit to go in very well prepared, not just knowing about, for your audience, a company, but then also the people at the companies so that you show that you are very different than everybody else. You haven't just cut and pasted an application letter and a resume, but that you really took the time to say, hey, I really do want to be a good candidate for this position in your company, or in my case, in your practice or hospital.

So actually, Dr. Stout, your experiences in psychology, global health, and all these things, but what inspired you to choose this path, like global health and all this psychology and other sectors?

Good question. I actually, as an undergraduate student, started off as a math major. This is so long ago that it was sort of like the— there were actually— this was at Purdue and there wasn't even a computer science bachelor's degree program, if you can believe that. This was so long ago, 1977. So I'd gotten into that, enjoyed it. I enjoyed the math part of it, but back then programming was much different than it is today. And it was on these things called DEC-10, DECwriters, and you, we wrote in Fortran and it was just, just seemed like I, I couldn't fantasize imagining having a career in writing code. 40 years. So I had taken a psychology class and really enjoyed it, took another psychology class as an elective and enjoyed it and transferred over into the school of, well, department of mathematics and the psychology department were both in the school of science. So that was good to transfer credits and electives. And then I took just about every psychology class I could, did very well in them, very much enjoyed them. And then Basically the joke in the United States is that what do you do with an undergraduate degree in psychology? Well, you apply to graduate school because there's sort of like no jobs for just bachelor's level folks. So that really was sort of what got me into psychology. In psychology, you need to have a license to be a psychologist. So you have to go through, you know, get your PhD and then do a postdoc, et cetera, et cetera, dissertation. So it's a combination of clinical work and research. And that combination was very helpful for me because that then led to being able to do academic positions. I was on faculty at Northwestern in their School of Medicine, as in most recently at University of Illinois in their College of Medicine. And at the College of Medicine, they were just getting the beginnings of something called their Center for Global Health. And I was invited to be a part of that because of some of the work that I had been doing. I had a, a public health background. I did a fellowship in public health as well. And I, you know, I always saw psychology as being part of public health because it's behavior change and habits and things like that that can be good and healthy or not so good and not so healthy. And working with the colleagues that I had at the College of Medicine with the start of the Center for Global Health was just a perfect fit. I had done some volunteer work for Flying Doctors of America, traveled to about 6 different countries over the course of about 6 to 8 years and just really enjoyed that kind of work. Did a lot of the things that I did also in psychology that transferred over is looking at clinical outcomes. So we always wanted to measure baseline, do an intervention, and then measure post-treatment. And all of those things fit very nicely together. So to your question, it wasn't so much that, like, I never took a class in nonprofits. I never took a class in humanitarian intervention. So it was just sort of this kind of accidental thing through the steps of having these exposures in other areas that psychology allowed me to have that exposure. But it wasn't something that I'd specifically planned. But I think that, you know, for your audience in terms of career ideas and things is to say, I really advise people go in a certain direction, but be open to the other things that you see as you're going in that direction, that there can be a variety of things that are of interest and then to, to try those things on, see if they're a fit. For me, some were, some weren't. The global health aspect very much was. It played to a lot of the skills and interests that I had. I like to travel. I like to do research, like to work with people and create projects. The scientific training that I had as a psychologist helped inform that process and ways to do, design good studies and to be able to know how to write them up and hopefully get them published. So, In that context, I think a lot of us, and I think even more so with your generation, is you do a variety of things over the course of your career. And having that openness to exposure to new things, and it's just as good to say no to something as it is to say yes to something so that you don't feel locked in with a certain career path that maybe 20 years later you wished you had done something different.

So you talk about certain of various things like psychology and education combined, but what experience do you have in your life that led you to be exposed to the psychology and all these things careers, all the above career?

Well, probably two things. One, a very personal and one not so much. The not so much was in my personal life, I guess this is personal too, I like to climb. So One of my goals in life is to climb the Seven Summits, so the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents. And way back in the early '90s, I was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and met a person there that was one of our porters. And he was working his way through seminary and he and I just really hit it off. We had a great relationship and kind of long story short, we were trying to, we in the United States were trying to figure out ways that we could be helpful to him and the projects that he was involved with in Tanzania. And through that process, we found— we tried to ship materials over for education materials and things like that. That was not effective, took too long, cost too much, was really kind of just too laborious. So we, through a— my mentor who is an attorney said that you need to create a— in the United States, an NGO also goes by nonprofit or 501(c)(3) tax status. And he said, you need to form one of these. And I said, I have no idea how to do that. He said he and his wife, who's also an attorney, could help us do that. In that respect, just again, kind of, it had nothing to do with research and nothing to do with my career. Here I am on the side of a mountain having a nice relationship with this fellow, him then coming back to Tanzania or him staying in Tanzania, but coming back after he had finished his seminary to work with orphans, to work in two hospitals there. We helped them found a kindergarten for the orphaned children, and we continue to consult with them. They're our primary project with this 501(c)(3) that we started called Center for Global Initiatives. On a more personal side, in terms of psychology, I think that one of the things that appealed to me— I grew up as an only child with a working mother. My parents divorced before I was 1 year old, so, and my father lived 1,000 miles away after their divorce. And it, I think a lot of it was, you know, as a young child and I had a variety of different kinds of orthopedic issues and challenges and things to deal with and obesity and whatnot. And I think a lot of that really sort of led me to wanting to figure out how to be of help to people. I felt like I could have used some help back then too. So when I first started out as a clinical psychologist, I worked with children and families. And because that was just really sort of something that had felt like, you know, it was something that was important to me that I kind of wished I would've had in, in my upbringing. I had a particular affinity to working with families and enjoyed that kind of thing and working with kids, working with schools and working in the context of inpatient and outpatient kinds of settings. You got some very challenging cases and some kind of straightforward cases. So I feel like, you know, and I should also say that now as a parent, as a father of of two adult children that I feel like a lot of my training helped me become a better parent because I sort of was, you know, I didn't know what it was like to grow up with a father because I didn't have that. So, so it's sort of been nice for me to have all these things like a Venn diagram, you know, start to kind of overlap and be supportive of one another. But I feel like the choosing of psychology was kind of based upon some of my early experiences and some of the own challenges and traumas that I had.

That's very wonderful. And you are talking about the, you were first NGO and helping others through your work. Coming on to the next questions, you have worked with global institutions and leaders around the world. How has the experience shaped your leadership philosophy throughout the career?

Well, you have good questions. I guess it's, it's been very interesting to see kind of the good and the bad. I've seen situations like we had a project in Cambodia and it was just really, I won't divert and go into all the details, but it was just sort of a kind of a disappointing, sad experience based upon poor leadership, really. That leadership was, problems with it was around communication, problems were around ways that people were treated or mistreated, ways around leaders having more selfish motivations for them, you know, themselves, and maybe, maybe even something that, you know, you and I might call, you know, kind of corrupt. You know, and it just was sort of like disappointing, like here we were with our team to try and be helpful and provide our services free of charge and really kind of felt like the people that we were hoping to partner with were not out for the people that we all hope to work with and help, but kind of more so out for themselves. On the opposite side of that, I mean, I've had wonderful opportunities to work as a, you you know, as I've been a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Clinical Officer, I've actually been a CEO as well too. So I've been having people that I report to, even as a CEO, I reported to a board. And I felt like once I became a CEO and even the other, you know, C-suite level things, because of the experiences that I had had that hadn't been so good, I, you know, it's one of those things where I'm sure you've been like this as well. If I ever am in this situation and have the opportunity to treat someone better than I was treated, I'm going to do that. And that's what I try to do. I think my leadership style, I try to be what's called like a servant leader. I try to have great empathy by virtue of who it is that I'm working with and trying to think about what are good motivational things for those people that I am working with. I've been fortunate with the nonprofit because all of us are unpaid. So that brings a whole other dynamic into leadership. Sometimes people say, oh, I want to— if you're in a business setting, it's like, I want to earn my bonus, or I want to get a raise, or I want to get a motion. When you're running a 501(c)(3) or an NGO and everyone's a volunteer, the aspects of motivation, those aspects are gone. They aren't there at all. You, I'm not giving anybody a raise. I don't get a salary. They don't get a salary. We're all doing other things to, you know, pay the rent and whatnot. But, and again, it comes back down, I think, in leadership situations like that, to have an empathy for why is this person or are these people wanting to help us and work with us as volunteers. What is it that I can do to help make that easier for them? That's part of my job as the leader of a nonprofit. What are the things that I can do to try and— because oftentimes my weakness is I try and kind of do everything. But what can I do to be able to offload some of my duties and responsibilities to very willing and capable volunteers? And then for me not to have to worry about it, but to be able to just keep supervision and oversight to make sure things happen and happen on time and happen well, and then to be there to support them and to augment their efforts to make life a little easier for them in whatever their projects are. So, you know, I think it's through those kinds of exposures to seeing— and, you know, we all know who great leaders are. I mean, whoever, you know, might be— it might be a Nelson Mandela or a Malcolm X or a Martin Luther King or, you know, whoever. But, you know, everybody also has their weaknesses too as leaders. And I think it's important for us to kind of keep that in mind that none of us are perfect. We make mistakes, and then the key thing is to learn from them. And as a leader, if we've made a mistake in our companies or our projects or whatever, to be able to identify that, take ownership of that, and then very transparently figure out collaboratively a solution to what those kinds of issues and problems are.

So, Chris, you are doing a fantastic job in nonprofit organization. And other psychology services and all these things. But what are your future visions for other things? And what are your future plans?

Gosh, I would say it's— there's a little bit of a paradox in answering your question. I wrote— I'm a LinkedIn Top Voice, and I write a lot around these kinds of things, leadership and leadership in the nonprofit areas and humanitarian work. And I wrote a piece a while back kind of talking about Schumpeter's aspect of creative destruction. And I know within the Hindu religion too, there's, you know, the different gods and destruction as well too. And the things that can kind of come from that. And basically what I wrote in that is that at some point in time, I'm not there yet, but at some point in time, I kind of want to put myself out of business. There will always be a demand for the work that we do, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a demand for what Chris Stout is supposed to be doing. So I think it's important, back to your other part of leadership, you know, to groom people to be able to take the place of, you know, whoever's the current leader of an organization, be it for-profit or not-for-profit. So for me, I kind of always keep that in the back of my mind, like, who am I working with right now that I think could, you know, carry the mantle of the center, you know, if that was the way to go with it. The other side of it, the maybe more paradoxical side of it, is to take that destructive aspect and to say the center has run its course. Whatever funding that we have left in our checking account, we need to spend that down to zero. And then, you know, that, that will shutter the entity and there'll be other entities hopefully that can take its place that we've grown. One of the things that we do is help other people start their own 501(c)(3)s. So we sort of hope that, you know, we've planted those seeds so that they can sprout and that they can grow and then they can, kind of do the same thing and then do the same thing. So it creates a perpetual cycle of doing that. It doesn't necessarily mean that it always has to be the Center for Global Initiatives. I think we'll always stay small. I used to have grandiose thoughts of, you know, getting very big, not anything like World Health Organization or a World Economic Forum or anything like that. Never ever like that. But I found that we are able to fill gaps that larger entities and organizations can't. Or just, you know, it's, it's, which is again, kind of a paradox. So, so professionally with the non— with nonprofit work and with the center, I think at some point in time, someone else will either take it over from me or we'll close it down and hope that the entities that we've helped found can, you know, kind of take up that slack of whatever it is that we're not doing. Because I think one of the issues is always worrying about sustainability. It's not sustainability of the Center for Global Initiatives, it's sustainability of the projects that we've started or that we've collaborated with. And that's what's really kind of more important for me. Personal note, I think that I feel very fortunate right now with the other activities and things that I'm doing. I've been doing a lot of mentoring. I've been doing a lot of advising, working with some startups that are very exciting in the AI space. So I think those things, I hope those things will continue. I think you know, as these companies grow, then, you know, my role with them will change. And, you know, maybe some will go public, maybe we'll sell some, you know, those kinds of things. But I think that will probably be a— I hope it'll be a repetitive process in that way. And then just as my, you know, on a very personal note with my family, you know, just looking forward to trying to spend more time with them. As again, I mentioned, my children are adults now, and they live in different cities than where we do. So trying to make time for that because that's always super important and restorative to be able to spend time with them as well too. So I look forward to that in my personal future.

So coming on to the next question, what are the key qualities of a leader should have in the starting of their journey?

I think that, again, this is probably from my personal aspect of it, what I've seen absent and what I've tried to do myself. I think it's really important to look at empathy. For those that you're leading. And to realize that everybody is— whoever you are a leader of, I mean, you could even consider yourself, if you're a leader, if you're the professor in a classroom, you're the leader of that classroom, so to speak. And your followers are your students or your employees in a sense are your students because they're earning grades and things like that rather than earning money. And I think it's important to have clear expectations in terms of what deliverables are. I think people, they'll be, and you know, it's sort of like a bell curve. I mean, there are going to be some people that are super motivated and want to get A's if we want to use the academic example. And other people that say, I'll be fine. I just need to pass this class. If a C is fine. And other people will struggle even though they'll try hard and it'll still be tough to maybe even get that C. So it becomes my responsibility to kind of be able to deal with all of those students, if you will, in a business setting to deal with all of those, you know, employees and people under me to make sure For the people that are struggling, how do I identify them and what can I do to, you know, support them? How can I reward those that are doing really well and maybe those that are doing really well, could I even channel them back to help coach and support those that aren't doing so well, like a tutor or, you know, something like that, a teaching assistant or something in a class? So I think having an appreciation and understanding of where your subordinates, if you will, the people that report to you, are having that empathy to understand that some people, you know, you know, just honestly, you can empathize with them, but they may not be a good fit. You know, they, they may not, they may need, if it's a student, they may need to change majors. If it's an employee, we unfortunately had to let people go because it just really wasn't a good fit. They weren't happy. The organization, I wasn't happy. The organization wasn't happy. Whatever our task was, wasn't getting done in a way that other people would want it to be done. But again, that all goes back to empathy and then being sympathetic with people when you have to do— it's wonderful when you can give bonuses and give A's and things. It's not so wonderful when grades are bad or when you need to have those human resources conversations with people about performance improvement kinds of things. But I think important throughout all that is that you as a leader are the same person. You don't change hats and say, okay, I'm going to be mean now because this person's not doing well, or I'm going to blame that person, they're lazy or they're not working hard enough or whatever. It might be a variety of other things. It might have problems at home. They may not have the skill set that's appropriate for that class or for that job position. That's my fault. If I make a bad hire, that's not the individual's fault. That's my fault. I should have vetted better. I should have done something different. And then that gives me a learning opportunity as well. So maybe to kind of summarize all that is to have empathy, to have clear goals and expectations, to have clear reporting so people know where they are on those goals. Am I achieving my goals? Am I, you know, KPIs to be, you know, am I hitting what it is that I'm going to need to hit to get a good grade or to hit my bonus this year? And then to be able to kind of constantly, don't just wait for a year-end evaluation or whatever, but to kind of have constant, almost like a dashboard of being able to track how well am I doing as an employee? How well are my employees doing as the leader of that company to be able to make sure we're all Working well, is there a problem over here? I can focus my energies on that problem. I can not have to deal with that and work on growth if there aren't any problems, if everything's functioning well. No one should ever be surprised. No employee, no student should ever be surprised with a bad grade or a bad evaluation. They should have gotten lots of feedback way before the report card comes out, way before their annual review happens. And again, that's the responsibility of a good leader.

So coming on to the next question. As a leader, how you see the technology and data, like AI and all these things, in the global decision-making and problem-solving?

Yeah, you know, it's a hot-button topic now. I mean, you read a variety of things today in the business press that talks about AI replacing jobs, et cetera. And there's almost kind of a bifurcation. Half the people say it's going to replace jobs. The other half says, no, it's not going to replace jobs. It's going to create new jobs. Who knows? I mean, we'll, you know, we'll find out, you know, in the next few years. I think it's just going to be a bit of a mess right now. I think there's people that are kind of riding the wave of AI being sort of this panacea that it's going to, you know, fix everything and other people that it's going to ruin everything. So I don't know. I work with 3 AI companies currently, and I can tell you all 3 of them are approaching using the tools of AI in very different ways, which I love. I mean, I think that's a very creative, you know, kind of way to do it. The best advice, and it so varies on what kind of company and what kind of work you're doing, but one of the best pieces of advice I'd heard about that is to say whatever kind of AI you use is to consider it as a smart intern. So the AI never replaces what it is. You don't just like, you know, tell AI to do something, it does it, and you don't, you know, review it, supervise it, evaluate it, and fix it because there's always going to be, you know, hiccups and problems. Going back to me as a psychologist, there's a lot of risk and a lot of people looking at the issue of AI being a substitute for medical advice or for psychotherapy. I think there is promise there, but I think we're not quite there yet, and maybe we're a little further away from it. The other problem with that in psychology is that there's what's called an atrogenic effect. Like, people— there's lawsuits now in the United States for people that have committed suicide by virtue of the AI prompting them to say that that's the good solution to their problem. And like just horrible other kinds of things. So I think it's very difficult when you have these new technologies that don't have a whole lot of guardrails around them. And it takes these unfortunate legal cases to have to then, you know, go back to the drawing board and say, well, what can we do to prevent this? Because you just— no one can predict the future. You never know what bad side effect that something's going to happen. I think having said all that, I think it's important for us to have good ethics around it. There's even ethics of, like, there's a class action lawsuit right now against an AI company because of all the scraping of data without copyright permission. You know, I think we'll kind of sort through all those issues and things too, sometimes through the court, and hopefully in the future we'll learn and, you know, do things better in the future. But I think depending upon what you're, if you're a knowledge worker, probably AI is going to be a big accelerant to the kind of work that you can do. I've seen very good applications of AI in clinical charting, which means that healthcare providers, physicians, psychologists, et cetera, can do the stuff that they love to do, which is be with the patient and not have to spend so much time on the stuff they hate to do, which is charting. So I think there'll be a variety of different kinds of ways to use things, but just almost like with any other tool, even a hammer or a saw, you know, you can make something wonderful with them or you can create a lot of damage with them. So I think it just is incumbent upon us to have a lot of responsibility and And maybe even a little bit more common sense about the kinds of things that we know about and to always be aware ethically of the things that we can't predict and that we don't know about today that we need to fix in the future when a problem arises.

Exactly. I think the people with AI expertise can replace the people without expertise, AI persons. That's the thing. AI cannot replace man. So it will not replace employee or any other things. It will only replace the non-creative person in the company. So that's what matters in the technology. So coming on to the next question, what has been the one of the most challenging moments in your leadership journey and how did you face it?

Wow. Oh gosh. There was a time I had mentioned earlier that I was a CEO. So I was a CEO of a startup and I'll keep it kind of vague around what, what it was, but things were going very well. We were very much, we had a little bit of venture capital to get us started, but it was a wonderful, the good and the bad. The wonderful part was that I had this opportunity to kind of go back to a lot of colleagues. That I had worked with in the past and be able to recruit them. Even, you know, I mentioned that I had been on faculty at Northwestern and I had this very cool experience of being able to go back and talk to the chair of my department and offer him a job. So it was just sort of like, and he took it, which was great. So we had sort of in my head, sort of this dream team of very highly competent professionals in each one of their specialties, nursing, psychiatry, et cetera, psychology, et cetera. Et cetera, and we're able to kind of, you know, put together this dream team. The problem was that in behavioral health, there are so many, in medicine in general too, there are so many different kinds of regulations and hoops that you need to jump through that take time. So you're kind of, your burn rate, you know, you're spending money because you're paying salaries and people aren't really working yet because you don't have patients yet because you don't have all your certifications yet, but you still need to have the staff. And then going through all that, then the reimbursement for that. It's not like if you're Apple, you know, you build a phone, you sell a phone, that's great. You, you create an app, you sell a subscription to iTunes, that's great, et cetera. It's so different in the healthcare world. Beyond the, all the, the certifications and licensing is that there's insurance companies and insurance companies have something called managed care. And so you might get paid X dollars an hour under normal circumstances, but insurance companies say, well, we don't want to pay you that much. We're going to pay you 75% of that for kind of no good reason, just because they need to make a profit. And this is kind of how they do it. And people get insurance because people can't pay out of pocket, et cetera. It's a whole nother, you know, talk for another day. But having those kinds of challenges to have a kind of like a high overhead and create really what I wanted to be like the best program that I could imagine was going to be very expensive, primarily with salaries and overhead. And then the reimbursement levels to be able to cover something like that. Just was not there. So I had to deal kind of explaining to a board who was naive to all these kinds of issues that, pardon me, was kind of always thinking that, pardon me, that they were going to be more like, you know, selling a product, so to speak. So all we, it's a commodity. So we just create more of the commodity. We sell more of the commodity and everything's fine as a business. In service industries, in healthcare services in particular, that is not the model. So We could not hit the targets that our board of directors wanted. We had a high burn rate of our initial venture capital. We went back and got more funding for it. We're able to kind of start to get our feet underneath ourselves, but the board was a little bit impatient about that. And as you probably know, when boards are impatient with profitability, first person to go is the chief executive officer. So that was me. So. Well, I shouldn't say the first, but then it was sort of like myself and then the people that I had, most of the people that I had recruited, not all of them. So it was sort of this, you know, wonderful situation of, you know, rainbows and butterflies of imagining what this center was going to be like and then getting the people that I wanted to, them saying yes to it, being able to work with this great team of people that I loved, being able to start to do very good work and then having the carpet kind of ripped out from underneath you and then having to say, well, all these people, half the people you recruited, you're going to have to now let go. And then once that had been done, then I was let go. So it was horrible. You know, it was just sort of like, just so sad. Not just, I mean, no one likes to lose their job, but then to lose it in that situation where, you know, you had such hopes and such visions. I mean, I was telling people, we had a ribbon cutting ceremony and I said, I'm so happy to be here. This is the last job I will ever have. And That lasted a year, maybe, you know, it wasn't the rest of my career. So, you know, the things to learn with that, I mean, there's, there's practical kinds of, one is just, you know, don't be so, you know, fantastical to think that everything's always going to be great. But maybe the more important is that it's really important for boards. And I've seen this too with another company I was with that went public, that funding, private equity, venture capital, and boards really can have it out for their C-suite people. And like with the one, the company that went public, they felt like, well, everybody that grew this company over the course of 15 years, you know, I mean, we were doing good enough to go public. Um, you know, they don't have any experience with publicly traded companies. So even though they have great, you know, understanding of how the company works and the faces of the company, the funding people said, well, we need to bring in people that know how to run a publicly traded company. So they did that, wiped out all the C-suite people and brought in new people. And that was sad for all the C-suite, all of us, but then it was also kind of sad for the company because within a very short period of time that went sideways and they got delisted from the NYSE and it just didn't work. So, I mean, it's sort of like the key thing is really kind of keep an eye on your board. If you're in the C-suite and be able to, you know, give them, let them know what it is that you're doing and why it's so important so that they don't make sort of, you know, ill-informed decisions based on other experiences with other company companies that maybe are not in the niche that you're in.

So regarding your experience, you have worked around the world and all the institutions. How do you see diversity in the environment? Of various sectors?

I think it's hugely important. I actually served— I work with the Auxiliary Branch of the United States Coast Guard. And for a period of time, I was a division staff officer for diversity because I feel so strongly about it as well. And the aspect of, I think, creative problem solving is hugely enhanced by having a diverse set of people. And that diversity can be anything. It can be race, it can be age, it can be experience, it can be, you know, kind of you name it. I just feel the more, I don't know, diverse to just reuse the word, but the more kind of, I think of it almost as complexity. The more complexity you can bring into dealing with a solution, the more creativity you can have with getting to a solution to a problem. I will tell you too, from a different perspective, from the NGO side of things and working with people internationally, A lot of times there's sort of been this West knows best or this bad hubris of coming in and working in another country and saying, oh, we know everything and we're the experts or whatever. I think that's horrible. I think that's doomed to fail. Anytime that we've worked someplace, we have come to that country by virtue of an invitation from someone in that country. We come into that country as guests. We come into that country as not knowing everything. We come into that country as being naive because the person working in that country on that problem that they're asking for our assistance with, they're the experts on what needs to get done. We're the people that it becomes our job to help them come up with these creative solutions. We become the diversity in that kind of a situation. Pardon me for my voice. So I think it's very important to kind of keep that in the forefront of your mind if it's working with other kinds of people in other kinds of situations in that respect. But I think that working in your own country with your own situations, bringing in different kinds of skill sets. Again, I think for me, I've been able to bring diversity because a lot of times psychologists don't come to the table to deal with these kinds of issues. You know, it might be— I also have an MBA, but I got that 10 years after I got my doctorate. So I mean, I think having different kinds of experiences from different domains and different areas and different expertise has helped me bring a different kind of voice. And I hope to bring, you know, different kinds of creativity to problems and to solutions. But I think people that ignore that or don't champion that or don't, pardon me, encourage that and encourage people to bring that diverse voice to bringing solutions to problems are really missing out.

Yeah. So you work around nonprofit psychology and all these things. How do you How do you balance the big picture, big picture and your daily tasks?

Productivity is a big deal for me. It's sort of like I have a lot of things going on all the time, which generally is good. I mean, it's, it's, it's busy. Sometimes too many things all happen at once. But I would say in terms of productivity, I think having some kind of system, people sometimes say, oh, it's willpower or it's, you know, these other kinds of things. I think it's really a system and developing, and once you have a system, then you can tweak it and you don't, you know, don't stay stuck with it if it doesn't always work, but to have a system. So I have a, pardon me, a system in terms of how I keep things organized. It's sort of a combination of a, if you will, just a simple to-do list, but then I prioritize what those things are in that day. Literally every night before I go to bed, I take that list and I look at it, make sure that everything that needs to get done tomorrow is on that list. And then I prioritize because there's certain kinds— sometimes it's a linear thing. This has to happen before this has to happen. Our conversation today was one of the early things to do today because it's early in the day and there's going to be— I've got 2 more meetings after this. There's other things that I could do before this meeting. So those things have now gotten done. Other things, because I always worry I'm going to forget something or something's going to fall off the list. So that list may have things that I'm going to be doing 2 weeks from now, but it's still on that list. And if I get ahead of myself, then maybe I can work ahead and work on those things. So I think it's just an issue of being able to maybe reduce things down to daily kinds of tasks and feeling like, you know, that to get through those things. I think it's also important from a healthy kind of perspective, you know, to take care of yourself. So I really pay attention to, I'm a big fan of coffee. I really pay attention to my sleep and I'm training for a big climb, upcoming climb. So taking care of my health and being fit and active is important. I will break out Pardon me, things in my day before even my regular workout, just to go for a stretch or a walk or do breathing exercises. And I come back to my computer and I feel like I'm a little bit more refreshed and now I've got a little bit more energy as well. So I think it's really a kind of a combination of taking a look at what needs to get done by virtue of your calendar of when, and then breaking those tasks down into what, you know, structuring what the course of my day looks like.

Regarding your personal journey, what book or anything, a movie, business movie or anything inspired you in the early age?

I am a big fan of a fellow named R. Buckminster Fuller. He's really was and continues to be a hero of mine. I think the first book of his that I read was called Nine Chains to the Moon, which is a very dense kind of book. Most adults. I was a kid and kind of stumbled upon it and got into it. But Buckminster Fuller, I would highly recommend just Google his name. You'll see he was an amazing, amazing person, well ahead of his time, and went through a variety of different kinds of challenges in his business life as well too, and was able to come out of them and combined academia with everything. I mean, he was really a polymath in so many different kinds of areas. I have 10 feet from me on a bookshelf, I've probably got 15 of his books. When I was an undergraduate, I just, I was so inspired by him by virtue of just all the things that he has done. And I could again, have another whole lecture with you about Buckminster Fuller. But as an undergrad, one of my professors, because I, he knew I was a fan of his and it related to a special project. He said, well, why don't you write him a letter and talk to him about your ideas? And I was like, oh my gosh, why would he, you know, I'm this, you know, 20-year-old kid in undergrad. So I found his address and I wrote him a letter and he wrote me back. And I was just like amazed and it was very helpful. I still have this letter to this day. And then probably he passed away probably about 3, 4 years after that. So I mean, it was, it just became all the more important to me. But then probably 10 years later, I had worked with someone else that had worked with him and wrote a book about him. And I got invited by the encyclopedia to write the entry for him. So I got to go to Stanford and I went to the archives. His work archives are at Stanford University and was able to write this encyclopedia entry on him, which I was quite honored. So, so I would say, and I still think about him. I mean, I still think about his work and I still take him as an inspiration by virtue of how he lived his life, how he dealt with his family and his loved ones, how he overcame adversity. He had very dramatic vision problems, which actually kind of led to very creative, you know, so there's a, there's a diversity, there's a disability that led to him creating the geodesic dome, for example. So I really kind of use him as a, as a, as an inspiration and a wellspring for creativity and being able to blend a variety of different kinds of systems all into a life and into a career.

Coming on to the last questions, what message or advice you would like to give to our upcoming leaders and authors and all the different kind of leaders throughout the industry?

I would say maybe it's a variation on something I mentioned earlier, which is I think it's very important to have a direction. It doesn't matter as much what that direction is, but to go in a way, because I think if you don't have a direction, everything is in, you know, to me, again, still everything is interesting, but to have a direction to go in that direction, for me, that direction initially was math. Then it was computer science. That wasn't gonna be something I was gonna do. I also had a point of engineering within that too, and architecture. Got into psychology. That was the direction. But in still in doing that direction, I had all these interests in other things and winding up in medical schools and hospitals and startups and AI and science and blah, blah, blah. But that was all going in a certain kind of direction. I took, I took side tracks, you know, off of that direction and then sometimes came back to it. But I think the important thing is, is have a, have a direction, but to feel very comfortable that you're not committed to that direction. You can change directions. You can take these little, you know, detours and see what that's like. And sometimes the detour is a slow dirt path and other times it's a superhighway. And all of those things are fine. So, I mean, my best bit of advice is to pick something that seems like that you really could, that you wake up in the morning thinking about that's really important to you. I wouldn't say it's a passion. A lot of people say follow your passion. That is not at all what I'm saying because passions can be great, but don't necessarily, you know, pay your bills. So, but have something that's realistic that you have a skill in that you can really involve yourself in. That you find important and stimulating and exciting. And while that takes you in a certain path, don't be narrow-focused that that's the only thing that you look at with tunnel vision. Keep an eye out for all the other kinds of things that are out there that your path is taking you on so that you have sort of this experience of meeting interesting people, this experience of doing other kinds of side projects. I would also recommend for people early career, say yes to everything if you can, new opportunities that come up, even if they seem maybe a little weird or a little off-kilter, experiment with them, try them out, and then, you know, do it. If it fits, then maybe that's a new direction for you. If you do it and it doesn't fit, that's fine. You've made a new friend, you made a new relationship. You don't have to continue doing that. And you get back on the path that you had and have a new opportunity to meet with somebody else.

Like, don't stop exploring the world. Hear, hear. That's the message here, last time. So if Thank you, Chris. It's really been a great conversation with you throughout the call. And to our audience, thank you for joining us, The World of Voices. Stay inspired, stay curious, and we look forward to seeing you in our next episode. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

Thank you. It's been an honor to be on.

Yeah.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Have a great day. Bye-bye.