Expert Advice To Identify And Reach Your Potential

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. And so if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. And so today we're going to be talking about the why a better way. So if your why is better way, then you are the ultimate innovator. You constantly seek better ways to do everything from the most mundane task of brushing your teeth to improving the rocket fuel that powers the space shuttle. You can't stop yourself. You take virtually anything and want to improve it, make it better and share your improvement with the world. You invent things and take what has already been invented and improve that too. You constantly ask yourself the questions, what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? You contribute to the world with better processes, better systems, and operate under the motto Often Please Never satisfied. You were excellent at associating and taking from one industry or discipline and applying it to another, or always with the aim of improving something. You generally operate with a high level of energy because after all, that too is a better way. And so today I've got an interesting guest for you. His name is Daniel Bruder. He is the CEO of Fusion Dynamics Group, a Colorado based strategy and leadership firm. Dan has accomplished background in executive leadership, strategic planning, entrepreneurship, sales and marketing, operations, brand development, customer service, and corporate finance. He started his career in banking, becoming president in his twenties. He later transitioned into hospitality leadership roles before moving into entrepreneurial ventures, culminating in an international consulting practice. Dan is also a faculty member of Colorado State University's Executive MBA program and the University of Colorado Boulder's Graduate LEED School of Business. He holds a BS in Business Finance and an mba, each earned at the University of Central Florida. Dan believes that businesses have the ability to substantially impact communities through their products and people. With this idea in mind, he created the Blendification System, a signature series of workshops and keynotes addressing cultural strategy, culture strategy and execution to help companies realize their potential and spark communal growth. Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. Hi Gary, how are you?

Good. So you're up in Denver or in Boulder? In Boulder, which is where I went to school and my wife went to school, my brother went to school, his wife went to school and our kids are at csu, so we've got a lot of ties up there.

Yeah, it's a great place and actually a beautiful day here today too. So it's a good day to be in Colorado.

So how did you get started in the blendification process? Take us back a little bit. I know you said you went to University of Central Florida then what, moved from there over to Colorado.

Yeah, actually from ucf, went into the banking business and then wanted to do something fun. So I joined the resort business with Marriott and actually at the time in the 90s it was Marriott's timeshare business which turned into their real estate arm. And that turned out to be something fun, getting exposure to a great company. But the whole blendification thing came to me probably when started thinking about this when I was with Marriott in the 90s when I came out of the banking industry and I joined in corporate finance with Marriott and it was nice, I got some great exposure, some great people. But I kind of got branded as a corporate finance and accounting person. And I was like, well, I appreciate that if it's a compliment, but I think there's much more that I can offer. And as I looked around I saw quite a few opportunities and fortunately the company was growing. So I went into corporate marketing and when I went into corporate marketing I was branded as a finance person and then I went into corporate sales and was sales operations, things like that, and in the call centers and stuff. But then I was branded a marketing person. So each time I was branded something else or labeled something else as if that's the only thing that I could do. And it occurred to me that as a human being we can offer so much more and we don't really live in functional silos. We're actually operate at our best when we're really leveraging several different things that come within us and we have more to offer than just say for say accounting, finance, marketing, sales. Now that doesn't mean that we don't have strengths that we excel at. But some people, and I believe most people have a lot more to offer than what our corporate world wants to put them into. So the idea of lendification kind of evolved from that. It went on. Later on I started a strategy division within the division of Marriott that I was with. And when I looked at that I said, you know, if we're going to do this right I can't really represent marketing and sales, or I can't represent the product or the pricing function. It's really, if we're going to do a product that is equally profitable and makes an impact on the communities, it really has to represent every single side, every single aspect of the organization that was pricing product. We need to make sure our operations team, we need to make sure that our culture, the Marriott culture, was instilled within the people. So really it kind of came down. This whole blendification thing is that really for an organization to come together and pull together and reach its potential, it really needs to be looking at how everybody's impacting everybody else and how I'm impacting you and then how my impacts that impact you, impact the people you work with. While I was with Marriott, it wasn't really anything that I kind of put down on paper and started putting a framework around. The concept really came out of that. And that time there, being able to really maximize several different things and pulling people together to work together rather than working in functional silos. Later on, it got to be a lot more fun because I did a TED Talk on this TEDx talk, and it was, it was quite fun because my kids always joked with me because I said, really, this is about blending. Everything's really blended together. And I said, it's like blendification, you know, it's the act of blending things together, the intentional act of blending things together or embracing how everything comes together as opposed to making everything being separate. And I said, if you really think about it, talking to my kids, which ultimately turned into a TED Talk talking to my kids about how, you know, work and life are really blended together. And I started thinking about this whole work life balance thing. And I said, boy, for the life of me, if we're chasing work life balance, we're chasing our tail. Because to me, work life balance is not achievable. It's kind of like a dog chasing cars. You know, you never really get it and you don't even know why you're going after it. To go back what you're saying, why are we even doing it? Work, life, balance. It really hits one against the other when the truth is work and life are really blended together. And that's how we can reach our truth as a human being. When we look at work as being part of who I am, it's my calling, it's what I do, it's my vocation. And we look at our home life as the same, and they really become the same united together. Work and life are really blended together. So now what we do is we look at what's going on economically. And this is before the COVID virus came out. We look at the economic changes, the social changes, and we've been seeing this trend towards work and life becoming homogenous. You know, more working from home. People are working on hikes, people are working at the beach, people are working on vacation. Not that that's a bad thing, but it means they can go on more vacations. So how do we embrace that? And so the whole. That's the whole concept of blendification. So you know what? I do, and I've always been somebody that I never really liked books that were just conceptually based, like, say, hey, you should think like this, or you should think about that. While there are fun reads, I never really was able to apply those things. So this blendification concept to me was more an idea. And I talked about it in my TED talk too. It's just. It's a concept. But as I really built it out, I said I really need to build out a system that actually allows us, through our businesses, to actually build a blended life that we can reach our potential. So using our companies to train, develop and grow our people, embrace the concept of life and work being blended together so that we can actually allow people to achieve their individual why. I call it potential, but it's essentially achieving their why. And if we could, as organizations, embrace our responsibility to help learn or help teach and grow the people that work for us so that they can become better members of society. Now what we've done is our work life has become really a point where we start positively impacting our society. So it's kind of. It's gone all the way around to this concept and then building literally a step by step checkbox process around doing that, which is really my book that's out there. And it's really just. It's really an operating manual for building a blended company. Embracing everything that we're seeing now, particularly with the COVID 19 crisis, where none of this stuff should be a surprise other than the pace at which we've changed. But everything we're doing right now around working from home, trying to build cultures at home, that was all moving forward for the last 15 years.

It sounds like you were in search of a better way.

Yeah, yeah, you could say that. I think there's searching for a better way tactically, but underneath that is why do we even care about searching for a better way? Right. And I think that's. It's not about just doing things better. It's about, what can we really do if we make things better? And that goes back to our potential. It's like, what could we really achieve in our life as a human being if we really set our minds to it? And that's looking at our strengths and looking at our weaknesses and building goals and building culture within organizations. What could we really, really do on our own? What could we do if we recruited others that had the same vision, the same mission, the same cause? What if we all aligned on this? Why? And then we put all our resources together, we set goals, we built strategy, and then we communicated within an organization. What could the impact be? So it's one thing to have a better way, but it's another thing say, why are we actually doing this? Because, you know, I could get better at a lot of things but have no real purpose with them. You know, so it's not about just getting better. It's getting better for a reason.

And so what do you say is your reason for getting better? Why did you do this? Why do you care about blendification? Why is that important to you? At what point in your life did you start to say, I don't feel like this is better what I'm doing. This seems to me like I'm just spinning in the, you know, the mouse and the wheel. So at some point, something happened to you that got you to see this differently because you were on. There is no faster wheel than timeshares. Yes. Right. I'm not going to let you off the hook yet on the whole timeshare thing. All right, Just so you know, because I want to hear a little bit about that. But I'm sure in going through the timeshare model, you saw something that worked and didn't work. And then everywhere you've gone, you've seen you. Okay, let me see what you guys are doing. All right. There's got to be something better than this. I'm going to the next. See what you're doing here. Okay. There's got to be something better than this.

Well, if you keep letting me talk, I'll have you be. I'll have you buying one here pretty soon, so you better watch it.

I've been through enough of those and I haven't bought one yet, so it's going to be a tough sell.

I'm with you. Yeah. No, it's the whole structure around the timeshare. But it is neat because if you look at what Marriott did, Marriott really took. And if you take this whole concept not to sing the praises of Marriott too much, but they were an awesome organization that took a really sound culture, a sound business, sound people, and then took in a business, this business model, this thing called timeshare that was really dysfunctional as an industry, the 80s and, you know, the 90s. And they said if we can put our professionalism into it, we can create a better industry. And that's exactly what they did. They found a good model and then overlaid what they did really well with and turned it into a world leader. And they're still there today. You know, back to your question of, you know, how did I actually fall into this? I didn't really make a conscious decision, of course, in 2000 and I left the Marriott organization 2005, huge impact on my life. But in that period of 2005 and 2008, I was doing several different entrepreneurial things, was managing partner for a company and doing some different stuff that with some smaller organizations until of course, the market crashed in 2008. That's when I became a consultant. You know, in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be a consultant, but I never really thought I would do it. But fortunately I had to do it. So I don't know if I found it or it found me. And so at that point, I didn't really have a plan or an idea. I just kept going with building strategy with organizations. And what I found is that within the strategy component, there wasn't a lot of uniformity. There's some really good companies out there that did strategy, but it was really just all customized base. You come in with a blank sheet, you spend hours doing interviews, and then you pop out a hundred page PowerPoint document. And that's the path I followed because that's what it did. And then I started thinking, I don't know if this is the right path. And then simultaneous to that thought, I was asked to teach strategic planning at Colorado State University, their capstone strategy class. That is the final class that all business majors take. And then I thought, oh God, this is going to be great. I can't wait to do this because now I'll get a chance to see all the different models, all the different research that has come since I left graduate school in 1995, I think. And the truth is that when I started looking at it, the teaching was not that different, the syllabus was not that different than the same thing I had in 1995 in graduate school and not too different than the one I had in the late 80s. And I was almost disappointed because I was looking forward to embrace something new, something special, and I was going to learn and I was going to apply that not only in my teaching, but also in my practice. And then I realized through research and reading books and stuff that I think they just. We're just not there. We haven't advanced the model at all in strategy. So I started doing more and more research and I realized that strategy hasn't really changed in something, you know, really since the 80s. We're still teaching, we're still using the same, same strategy models in our businesses that we did in the 80s. It's all about crushing the competition, competitive advantage. And I thought, gosh, that's not how we ran businesses at Marriott. I mean, we don't know. We didn't have a model or anything, but we didn't. When I ran a business, it wasn't about crushing the competition. Why are we teaching that and why are we using that within our strategy structures? So I started building out a model that said, hey, you know, it's really. This is how we build a connected company. And when we build a connected company that's sitting on all cylinders, where everybody's got each other's back and we all see what we're working on and we know why we're working on it, we become happier, and then we go home happier, and we praise our children happier, and we show up at community events happier, we embrace things. And now what we start seeing is a whole community lifting. And if we do this throughout the country, we see a whole country lifting and we do this throughout the world, we start seeing dramatic change. And that's really what. That's really where it takes me. So to go back to what you're saying, I don't think it was anything that I was disappointed with or anything that I saw. I think it found me. I don't know why. I honestly don't know why I'm here and why I put all this together. It really was a compilation of fair, different things that were put in front of me that I looked at and interpreted and said, well, this is just the next progression of building something that can fundamentally change the world through business.

When I listen to you, I see myself and I hear, as you're thinking, it's exactly how I would think, which is there has to be something better. And do you ever stop looking for a better way? Does Dan always think about better ways to do things? Is he typically not satisfied with how things are? What would she say?

She would say yes to a fault and granted, you know, when we talk about strengths and we talk about a lot of different personality profiles, we look at all these things that people excel at. There's also the counterbalance to that, too, because there can become an obsessive personality when you do find what you're really good at, what your calling is, and how you really think that you can make things better. To your point, because the truth is, is that to make things perfect, we will never get to. So to find a better way, you never really reach that goal. So that has to be counterbalanced with some sort of a guardrail, which comes back to your reason, your why, your fulfillment, your joy in life. And that. That's how I look at it. It's because, quite frankly, I'm never gonna. I'm never going to really achieve the perfect way. To your point, around better ways. So how can I achieve fulfillment on my path by working for a better way? I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah.

So you're asking a question that I struggled with for a long time, was, if I'm always looking for a better way, when do I stop?

Yes.

It took me a long time to figure out the answer to that question. And the answer was. Was something so simple that I didn't want to accept it as the answer. And the answer is when we stop is when it's good enough. When it's good enough. And the only time it's good enough is when we say, this is good enough. I won't stop until I finally sit back and say, okay, you know what? That's good enough. I'm good with that. Then I can move on to something else. But until then, keep going, Keep going, keep going. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah. I think you're right. The question is, when is it good enough?

You say it is.

Yeah. And I don't know if I have the power, the willpower, or the. You know, I don't know if I'm smart enough to figure out what is enough for me.

And that becomes your challenge to define that. So if you start by defining when good enough is there, you'll have an endpoint. If you don't define it, it will never end and you'll never be satisfied. And it's really critical to be able to do that for you and me in the way that we think.

Because I wonder if this is, like, you know, enjoying the journey. You know, like, sometimes I'll go do a hike or something, and I'll hike up a mountain, and I won't be Satisfied until I get to the top. And then sometimes I actually think I'm at the top, but it's a false summit. And so, you know, my mind tells me, hey, stop and enjoy some of the views along the way. Don't be in a hurry because you just might get disappointed when you get to that theoretical top. So I think it's really defining what we're really what brings us joy, what brings us fulfillment. And sometimes the pursuit of this can actually bring us that fulfillment in life. I don't know.

Do you find that it's hard for you to enjoy the journey?

Yeah, sometimes. Particularly when building things. You know, I just wrote a book and there were days that the book was not really fun.

Yeah, it wasn't fun writing a book. It wasn't fun proofreading the book. And that journey became a bit monotonous. I had to remind myself to your point. I had to remind myself why I was actually doing this. And if I hadn't determined or identified that why, writing a book would have been complete kind of task based exercise and not a fulfillment based exercise.

So when you took the why discovery and it came up with better way, how did that feel?

No surprise. There's several other assessments that I've taken along the way that point towards a consistent message, whether that be maximizer within the strengths, finders, things like. Things like that. It was a consistent message. I can't remember all the different categories that would have fallen, but I would believe that would be one of the top. So that it didn't come out at as much of a surprise. It was more like, yeah, that's more.

Confirmation because you already felt like you're somebody who's improving things.

Yeah, as much as I can, you know, as much as I can improve. That's the goal. But I think there's this altruistic egotism which is, you know, doing things to help others so that I get fulfillment. So there's also a sense of personal pride in making things better and, you know, helping others find a better way. But I also get a lot of satisfaction out of that as well.

Right. See, from my perspective, that's why you do everything you do. It's not just a little part of you. It is you. In everything you've told me and every step you've gone along the way, it's been in search of a better way. And that's why what it tells us is that why would I choose Dan to work with? There's tons of strategy things out there. There's tons of stuff not exactly what you have, but, you know, like it in every business, not just you, there's 600 dentists here in Albuquerque. All right, so the question is, why would I choose you? They don't care so much about what you have, Dan, Because I can find something similar, and not exact, but similar. The question is, why would I pick Dan to hire for my organization? Why would I read Dan's book? What am I going to get out of spending time with Dan? And the bottom line is, is you are in search of a better way and you can't stop yourself. And if I'm looking for a better way to do something, then I'm going to talk to you because that's what you do and you've done your entire life. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think it does. And, you know, finding a better way.

Sharing it.

Yeah, sharing it. And also when we look at this too, and when I work with organizations and leaders, my hope is that we're not just going through a lifelong exercise to make more money, you know, and then we find out, for example, I had a company that sold their business, made quite a bit of money, and then within a few months they were on to the what's the next chase? And we look at this and really the question is, why do we want to make money? You know, what's real, the real significance of making money and what can we do with that? And really, when I work with companies, I do struggle with people that their main and singular and sole pursuit is just to make money. To compare bank accounts with their next door neighbor. And to me, the question is, what's behind that? What does that enable you to do with that money? What does that enable to do with your influence, with what you've been given? And that's really the challenge is working with organizations. Because we all get so caught up in our EBITDA or our profit, and you need that. But I think it's really what's underneath that or what's beyond that door. Once you achieve that and you open the next door, what's beyond that? And it goes back to your why and what's the true fulfillment? Because there's nothing worse, and I've seen this, than working with executives that really put their heart and soul into a company in order to reach certain profit guidelines over a 20 or 30 year period. And they wake up and they're 55, 60 years old, and they've read all their tactical goals and their financial goals and they go, is this all there is to it? You know, is this it. Is this what I've been waiting for, for all these years? Is this what I've been chasing when I find I got it? It's really not what I expected. And what I'm trying to do is say, hey, and then they go find what they're looking for, and then the last, you know, five, 10 years of their life, they actually find it. And what we're trying to say is, hey, why don't we start looking for that and putting that now? Why don't we find what we're looking for now, then use our business to get there and integrate it? You know, it's really coming back to blending. Why don't we take that, what we really want out of life, and bring it forward to today?

So let's talk about that. There's a lot of executives on this that listen to this podcast, and they're listening to you right now, Dan. They're saying, you know what? I feel like I'm on that path. I'm 45, and all I can think about it. All I've been thinking about is money and building my company and getting my next. Joining the country club, getting my next new car, my next second house, third house. That's been my focus because everybody else is doing that. How do I blend in life to that? Or what is life? Or how do I define my life? Or what are the steps that you take somebody through?

Yeah, I start out, and I really just start out by talking about potential. And if we look at what is my potential as a human being? And that, to me, just changes the frame framework.

So what do you mean by that?

Yeah, so if I ask somebody what their. What their vision is, they can tell me their vision. But I ask you what your potential is now. It's. Now there's a sense of responsibility. So what can I accomplish in my life? So if I ask you, Gary, what your potential is, most people would come back to me and they'd start saying, well, I'm good at this, and I like doing this, and I can succeed at that. And if I put all these things together now, my potential actually might be different than my vision. Meaning that if I look at potential, it's personal, it's what I can do, it's what I want to do. And then we can actually look at a whole bunch of different things. So what we do is we actually start out by talking about somebody's potential in their context. What do you believe your potential is? In life. And I believe that we, in life, our potential is really dictated on helping others reach their potential. Potential. So if we look at our potential as a human being, One function of that, one component of that is how are we helping others reach their potential? So we could reach our potential from a financial sense. We could maximize our absolute financial capabilities, but not actually help anyone else achieve their potential. And then, therefore, we would not be achieving our own potential in life. So the question is, hold on a second.

Define potential. For me, I am a little confused. So define potential, and then give me an example of what somebody would say when you say, what's your potential?

Yeah, and when I look at it, and there's really not a singular definition for potential, One thing it is. It is unique to an individual. But the way that I've defined potential within an organization Is through a series of components. One is if we can develop and identify what our cause in life is, that's a component of identifying our potential. If we then identify what our intention is for various different subgroups within a company. So that would be our customers, what's our commitment, what's our intention for our customers, what's our intention for our employees, and what's our intention for our community? So now if we look at our intention for those three subgroups Layer in an organizational cause, now we start seeing this thing called our potential being defined. So taking it a step further, now, what behaviors within the context of our potential, what behaviors do we see or do we want to see within our organization? So now there's a behavioral component of our potential. In order to achieve our cause, we start looking at our behaviors and our habits. So we start defining our potential through our cause, our intention for key components of our business and. And also our behavior. So that's one component of defining our potential. Our potential is further defined in what we focus on. Where do we want our focus to be for our customers? Where do we want our focus to be for our product? Where do we want our focus to be for our internal operations and our people? So now we're actually layering another level of definition around potential. And then below that, we start looking at what are some specific goals and objectives for our customers, our product, our operations, and our people. Now, this is a very, very long definition, but this thing called potential, it's not something you'd find in Webster. You could. You can look it up. But my definition of potential is in its extreme deep process. Where in an organization, we define our cause, our intention, our behaviors, then identify our focus, where we want to focus, and then specific goals around that, we put all of that into this blender, so to speak. And that really makes up our true potential as an organization. All of those things together. And now what we've done is we've created a culture for an organization. If we do a good job defining all these things, we've created the foundational culture, how we want to operate, what we want to pursue. And by doing that, we've actually defined our potential. And not only defined it, we've actually outlined a process to go get it. So it's a very, very long and lengthy. If I was to write all of that down, it would be a very, would be like a one page definition. But in order to really pursue and realize our potential, it's much more than just five words that say this is our potential. It's really a whole process. It's a system more per se. To define and pursue your potential is really a systematic approach to life.

I think I'm just getting confused in the word potential, because for me, potential is like a what could you do? What is your ultimate possibility for what you're gonna do with your life and business? Is how I look at potential. Like if you think of a potential of an athlete, I mean, or, you know, what's possible? What's your high end.

Goal?

And maybe that is the right word. It just throws me off a little bit because of maybe our standard definition of potential.

Yeah. And if you look at it from an organizational context, ask yourself, what is your potential as an organization?

I don't see as there's any limit.

Yeah. But there, it's really almost limitless, our potential. But there are limitations because we're limited in terms of capital, we're limited in terms of our physical time. So how do we leverage these things? So we have to also look at some of these limitations that we have. And some of these, you know, basically some people call it, you know, obstacles.

Right.

Or mind trash, because those are all things that can limit our potential. So it is a bit different than looking at, you know, what is a specific goal. But you know, again, when we look at goals, goals on their own are somewhat useless because they're not backed up with why are we doing these goals? You know, what do these goals actually achieve? In terms of what is. If we achieve these goals, are we actually fulfilling my potential as a human being? Am I fulfilling my potential as an organization? If we've defined our potential through our cause and our intention.

So where do you add in outside of work? Because are you blending work with home life?

Yeah, yeah. Work and life blend together. And the Blendification of work and life is a little bit. I look at it like this, is that if. And I look at it first from the company standpoint. So if we do a good job as a leader inside our organization, we lead our people, we understand what they're looking for. If we're seeking out how we can help them realize their potential so that they achieve what we call earned success, they achieve fulfillment in their life. What happens at work is we have a really happy and fulfilled employee that does a really good job, but they go home at night. And now we start seeing this natural connection of what happens at work happens at home. So by default, what we do at work is influencing our behaviors at home. So to give you a personal example of this, when I went into the banking industry, I went into customer service training. First thing I did, we had these kind of expensive banking training programs back in the. Back in the late 80s and 90s. And what they did is they taught me, they said, come in here, and when you sit with a customer, understand what their needs are, spend some time asking them questions, discover what's going on. And then once you fully understand what's going on, once you've connected with them, once you have a really good understanding now, you have the right to actually give them a prescription for what they need. And they did this in the context of being empathetic, being compassionate, so that we could actually service these customers. But I started thinking about this in my early career, and I said, you know, gosh, that kind of works with how I work with my. How I. My relationship at home. So what if I actually did that with my, you know, at the time, girlfriend, later on, my wife? What if I actually. What if I actually sought to understand what was going on with my wife before I started telling her what to do? And what if I was empathetic to my wife? And then later on I had kids and I said, you know, gosh, what if I applied those skills, those same skills that this company did, thinking that would make me a better customer service representative, so to speak, that actually made me a better spouse, it made me a better father, it helped me when I was at community events. And so what I started seeing is this natural growth at work was automatically impacting my ability to be a better leader at home. You know, I remember growing up when I was a kid, you know, every single night there was like. It wasn't like it was at dinner where we had like, these next 10 minutes are going to be focused on what happened at my mom's work but every single night that happened. So to think that work didn't impact our home life is crazy because I knew every single person like they were my sisters or my brothers that my mom worked with. I knew them. And to sit here and say that work doesn't impact life, and the point is, is that if she had a really good or positive relationship with somebody at work, that then boiled over to what happened at home. So it's not necessarily that we intentionally say, now go home and raise your kids this way at work. I think that's a little, excuse me. In our training at work, we don't say go home and raise your kids this way. The fact is, if we build a really strong community inside our companies, a strong culture based on a solid foundation, a solid cause, solid intention, solid behaviors, we define the behaviors in our organization that we see will enable us to reach our potential. If we do all this really well and then we build tactical ways to do it, these same processes, the same culture, this same way of leading at work is going to boil into how we lead at home. And that's the impact. Because I honestly don't know where I would be if it wasn't for probably three significant companies that I had an opportunity to work for. They really influenced how I showed up at home and they're influencing my kids today, who are 23 and 20. And these are companies that I worked with in the, you know, 20, 25 years ago. So another long drawn out answer for you, but really to me is that the company acts as somewhat of a center or leadership role in helping people achieve their potential at work and at home.

One of the things that better way people are really good at is associating taking from one industry and applying it to another. And that's kind of what it sounds like you've done. You've taken business and applied it to home. You've taken all these other businesses that you worked with and learned from, from, and combine them into your blendification process so that you can take companies from where they are to getting closer to their potential. Because nobody's ever going to reach their potential. Right? Does anybody ever reach their potential? Is there such a thing? Or is that the North Star to shoot for?

It's a, you know, yes, yes and no. I would argue that from a comparative perspective, I think Bill Gates is pretty close. You know, people like that.

If you ask him, do you think he would say he is?

Probably not. That's a good question. Probably not. But, you know, you look at people like that and you go What. What can I do if people. If he can do things like that? And maybe that's not my potential. My potential isn't doing what he's done. But we all need to know what our potential is. I think you're right. Is that there is some sense of mystery about that too. Yeah. And rightfully so. That's why we need to wrap that up in our cause, our intention and behaviors, and then build specific goals around that. That's why the mystery needs to be broken down into real specific goals and components that really define it a little bit better.

How is potential different than vision?

Vision to me is a. It's kind of like a dream. This would be cool if. It would be a really nice thing. The word vision, I think is, when I came out of graduate school, was very well used in order to get the foundation of that was to get companies to think about something bigger than profits, having something greater. And I think it was effective in doing that. I think it's kind of run its course, though. I think when a millennial hears the word vision, they almost go, oh, here we go. Here's my dad's, you know, my dad's way of running a company. And I think we have a vision of something, but I don't think it's as deep as what we can look at when we look at our potential. Because if we convert vision into my potential, it now becomes personal and either some level, a little bit more level of accountability.

I'm still a little confused. So give me an example of what a company would say or person or a CEO or would say when you say, okay, so what's your potential? What do they say? How do you use this?

I would say I do. My companies that have worked with me would say, I look at my potential and I define it through my cause, what I'm doing, truly passionate about. And that could be somewhat like your vision.

Okay, so let's. Hold on a second. Let me just ask you for your company, Blendification company, what is your potential? What's the potential?

Yeah, my potential is through my cause. My cause is that through companies, through leaders, I believe that my company can be the spark that activates leadership potential in companies. So leaders take the responsibility to help their company achieve what they're truly good at so that they can become better leaders inside their company, inside their homes, and inside their communities. And we do this through our company. So I want my company to be the spark that activates companies and leaders potential within their companies. So rather than looking at this as just a You know, a company is like a leader, just come to work in order to reach these. These metrics or these KPIs. There's something deeper than that. That's what I'm really trying to get to through our potential.

So it's very similar to what is your why.

Yeah, there's a definite correlation. Yeah.

So why are you doing this? Well, I want to be the one that shows these. I'll be the spark that shows the companies how to reach their potential. Yeah. So it's. You're going to show them a better way is how I would look at it. Let me show you a better way to. To combine these so that you have the impact that you've been wanting to have.

Yeah.

So one of the things that your WHY helps you with is developing your message, which sounds very similar to what you're talking about with the potential. Is it like a potential message or. Because if you. If it's just a potential that I have in my head, it doesn't do anybody any good. Right. You have to be able to articulate it in a way that people want to rally behind it.

Yeah. So what I've created is what I call. It's called a strategy whiteboard. And through the strategy whiteboard, we actually define what an organization's potential is. And we start out by defining our culture. And our culture is supported by our cause, intention and our behaviors. So we look at that and then there's a series of exercises we go through. But beneath all that, like I said, there's what goals do we have for the organization? What's our business objective? So there's a series of several different components that actually make up our potential that are very, very tangible. So we take this concept of potential and we work it through like a funneling process down to specific goals, specific strategic focus, strategic outcomes, and strategic actions. Probably more than we have time for today. But it's basically, this is all defined through this thing I call a strategy whiteboard. And that actually helps us define our potential. You know, as we're going through this COVID 19 exercise here, what's happening? The companies that I've worked with, I was clear and went back to them, all of them, and said, your potential hasn't changed as a result of this. Everything. And we actually just last week went through an exercise where we went back and said, what is your true reason, your why? Like you. Every goal you had for the next three years, all of that, we had about 20 people on the phone the other day, and every single one of Them said, nothing has changed relative to what I want to achieve as a human being and what I want to achieve as a company. What has changed is our ability to do things in the short run. So when we talk about potential, we are constantly looking at what it is we want to create. You call it why, Simon Sinek calls it why. There's some component of vision, mission in that. Clearly there's a lot of crossover in that. But I think, to me, it's really defining that out through this thing called the strategy whiteboard that actually defines all of this stuff and gives us an action plan to go through.

Get it?

Excellent.

So I love what you're doing, and I think you. I can see how this just makes such a huge impact for people. You're getting them to think about stuff they never think about, right? They never even want to think about because they don't even know how to do it. It's like, it sounds good to go talk about that, but if I don't have some framework on how to do it, I'm not going to do it. Right. They avoid it. And you sit up in a room and actually take them through the process to do it. So at the end they're like, hey, man, this feels great.

Well, I think that in going back to my statement about reading books that were conceptually based, there's plenty of concepts out there. And in fact, I had a group of. Group of my CEOs through CEO group. We were working together one day and I was having similar conversation about this and I said, you know, if we define, and we could call it vision or why, if we define all that stuff what our vision or our why is, but we don't really build what that looks like in the organization. Build an action plan, build specific tangible goals and a process for communication within the company. Then all this is. Is just another chapter in a book. And One of the CEOs said, you know, haven't other people really put this together? And I was like, I haven't really seen a process that integrates all these things. Because it's hard, you know, it's hard to take, you know, your why, like you have there on your board, take that and say, okay, here's my why. But so now how do I actually integrate this into the DNA in my company? You know, I can post it on a board, I can send it in an email, but how do I actually make this a reason why we come to work? How do we actually do this? We all know it's important to do this, but what are the steps to take? I mean, the legitimate steps that we have to take. So when we're actually business planning, every year, we're doing our strategic plan that. That why or that purpose or that vision, that mission, that potential that cause all of those things, if that's kind of our center of focus, and then we build, tactically build a plan around that. So now what we're doing is we're taking this. It's influencing our culture, right? So now we're building this culture. Then when we do our planning process, we're actually using this to build our plan. But then we also use that to be the guiding light within our meetings and how we execute on things. So to me, it's more about building an overall systematic process than having a concept that we send out an email and say, read this. You know, if it's truly important to us.

See, you're hitting the nail on the head. For me, that's exactly what happened. When I read Simon Sinek's book 20 times and I watched his Ted talk 50 times, it was the same. It was a concept, right? And I needed to figure out my why. I mean, it's a great concept, but unless you know your why, it has no value. And so I didn't need another expert to tell me about the value of knowing my why. I needed someone to actually help me discover my why so I can do something with it. And that's when I became obsessed with discovering my why. And that's when I did this with so many thousands of people and found the nine whys. And that's how this all came about, because I had to find a better way. Just like you're doing with the potential is helping people find a better way to reach their potential. You first have to define it, and then what are the steps to actually making it happen? And so people don't hire you to give them another concept. Right. They got enough of those.

And quite frankly, I've written books, written a book. I've done all this work, and I can't lay claim to any single concept in there. It's really about the collective use of putting all these concepts together and defining them in a way that they all work hand in hand. Because I can't imagine there's any new concepts. I can't teach somebody something new when it's just about knowledge. There's a lot of knowledge out there. What we're really looking for is action. Yeah, it's the how. And I think that you said at the beginning, it's know Your why and how, all the. All those things. And I think that's what we miss in either the book writing or the consulting business is really the how. Because I think the how is just as important once we hit the next step, after we figure out our why.

Well, so we'll talk about this after the podcast. But there's a. I've developed the way to do your how, your why, your how, and your what. So my why is to find a better way. How I do that is by making things clear and understandable. And then what I ultimately bring is a simple solution to help other people move forward so that anybody can do it. And so that's my why, how, and what. And you have yours, which I can tell is a lot different than mine, because you love complexity, you love the details. You love all the different things that you came up with there that are very complex and complicated and not so clear because of word choices. Right. It doesn't. The word potential is a struggle for me because it's not a clear concept that I can do much with versus a clear word that I get right away. You know, it requires a lot more conversation to understand what it is. And then I think ultimately what you bring is the right way to get results. So I'm going to just take a stab at what I think your why, how, and what is based on our conversation. And I would say that your why is to find a better way and share it. And how you do that is by seeking mastery and understanding. Then what you ultimately bring is the right way to get results. So what that tells me about you is that you love the details and the depth and diving in and figuring it out and taking it to a very high level and then coming back and assimilating it in a way that people can use it and get results with. Does that feel right to you?

Yeah, that makes sense. I think we have to feel right. Yeah, absolutely. You know, as a consultant, we have to move beyond just leading. Leading a horse to water. I think we have to actually give them tools to help them drink. I think that's. The consulting industry in itself is ready for a real change in the way we do business, because most of the time, consultants have been really successful in just bringing concepts, but we really need to actually take it down to, you know, what do we actually do? So, which is reason why I got into consulting because, you know, I wanted to make sure that we had the right steps to do things, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

I. A lot of money with big companies on consultants that didn't have the what, they had the why, but they didn't really have the what.

Yeah, the why is just the first step. It's the essential first step though. If you don't have the why, you don't have anything. So if all you do is start with, hey, let's talk about culture, let's talk about focus, let's talk about goals. That doesn't mean anything unless you know why you're doing it. And it's not as challenging process anymore to help someone discover their why. In the past it has. Every coach, creative and consultant I've ever talked to says, oh yeah, I help them discover their why. Yeah, we start with their why. Really? Okay, well how do you do that? Well, you know, we have them read a couple of books and we have this conversation and we try to figure this out and okay, great. Well what's their why? Well, you know, we're still kind of trying to figure refine that. I said okay, well, great. Well what's your why? Well, you know, I'm still working on that too. Well, if you don't have that essential first step, how do you ever get anywhere? It's all just more talk and more fluff if you don't start from the perspective of your why. And so like you said, there's a lot of great assessments out there, but only one of them is your why. If you don't start with that, like in your case, I get you now, I see what it is you bring, I see why I would choose you until that it's just more concepts that you're throwing at me. Right. So as you develop your message, it's not just around lendification. That's just a result of all of the work that you've put into this for 25 or 30 years or however many years this has been. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. And it's. I wish we had a real simple answer to this, but we're trying to do some really, really awesome things. As you know, the responsibility as a business leader, the responsibility of an executive is quite tremendous. When you look at your impact on the number of people in the leadership multiplier that happens when you have so many people that work, even if you have 100 people in your organization, you look at the multiplier impact and the number of people you as a leader of that organization impact, it's almost mind boggling to think of your multiplicative impact on the people within the lives of the people you work with. So that's why we need to do it right and have a process that goes across.

I love the way you're thinking about it, though. I love the thought of blendification. I mean, it just makes so much more sense than silos. You know, that's a great way to put it all together for people that are struggling with each of the silos. How do I live this and live this and live this, and how do I. What do I do here? Because we're all, you know, every CEO is there.

Right.

I'm sure you see it all the time.

Yeah. I think we've been trying to dumb everything down in the process. We've dumbed down our potential as a human being. You know, it's like we have these assessments that say, I can only do this as a strength finder, or I can only do these things. And then we put people into silos and we put. We draw a box around them and say, this is what you are. Do this. You know, and the fact is, I think we as human beings have much more to offer, and I think we as leaders have responsibility to bring that out in others.

So, Dan, I appreciate you spending the morning with me, and I know we got all. We went all over the place, and I think that was a lot of fun to hear more and more about you. And if people are listening and they say, you know what? I want to learn more about this. I want to talk to Dan. I want to connect with Dan. How do they do that?

Go to my website. One is FusionDynamics.net www.FusionDynamics.net They can email me at dan.bruder B R U D E R@FusionDynamics.net as well. I have another whiteboard or, excuse me, another website called strategy-whiteboard.com, so that's another one. But you can just check it out and reach me any way you wish. Pretty easy to find me on the web.

Right? So.

Well, thanks again for spending the day with us, and I'm excited. You've got such great weather up there in Denver right now. We got the same thing here, and I look forward to staying in contact as we move forward.

Great. Thank you, Gary. Nice chatting with you.

You too. Take.