How To Find Clarity After Unexpected Opposition

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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 you can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about the why of Contribute Now. Individuals with this why yearn to be part of a greater cause, something greater than themselves. You do not want to be the cause itself, rather to contribute to it in a meaningful way. You want to make a difference in the lives of others, in an organization or or in a cause that you believe in. You love to support others and relish the success of the greater good, the company growth and the victory of the team. Now people with this why seek to add value in all that they do, do their part and help in whatever way possible. You're often behind the scenes looking for ways to make the world better. When you show up in a more public forum, it is often to trumpet a message or support a movement. People with this why are go to people, the ones you look for when you need help with just about anything. You make reliable and committed teammates and are often found in all areas of athletic, performing arts and cause based nonprofits. Virtually every organization must have contributors in order to operate successfully. They act as the glue that holds everyone else together. They use their time, energy, resources and connections to add value to other people. Now today I've got a great guest for you. His name is Robert Teschner and he's called Cujo. He's a retired Air Force fighter pilot. He was the top F15C Eagle graduate in his class at the United States Air Force Weapons Instructor Course, the Air Force version of Top Gun. Cudjoe was asked to return as a weapons school instructor and subsequently became the Air Force's subject matter expert on team accountability, something high performance teams refer to as a debrief. Cudjoe eventually commanded one of America's few operational F22A raptor squadrons. During his Air Force career, Cudjoe flew combat missions over Iraq, homeland defense missions in the United States, and deployed his F22 squadron across the Pacific. In 2014, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. This adversity fundamentally changed his trajectory. He went from accepting a leadership position in the F22 to retiring early and having to figure out how to provide for his family with a body that was broken. His unexpected pivot out of the Air Force is a topic he tackles in his work with organizations looking to build resilience, develop team members with grit and the ability to overcome adversity. He now teaches leaders how to embrace the tenets of high performance teamwork in their business, in their to achieve better performance, drive engagement and accomplish their missions. He has simplified and adapted the tactics, techniques and procedures high performance teams use to help any organization win bigger and build teams that work. He is the author of the national best selling book Debrief to Win and is an increasingly in demand keynote speaker. Cujo, welcome to the podcast.

Gary, thank you so much for the privilege of being here with you today on your podcast.

This is going to be fun. So did I say that right again? I think I'm saying it wrong. You say it. Say your name.

Cujoe.

Cujo. Okay, I'm saying it right.

You're saying it exactly right, my friend.

Okay. For some reason as I was saying that, I thought I said it wrong and I couldn't get it straight. So you've got quite a history there. So tell us a little bit about it. What got you going in the direction of the Air Force in the first place?

Yeah, so, great question. It all starts with my father. My father was a career Air Force officer. He was a bronze star medal winning Vietnam era intel officer who then transitioned into the JEJ Advocate General Corps. And so he finished up his career as an attorney. When he retired from the air force in 1989, I felt like a part of me died. I felt like I was part of the Air Force. I felt like our constant moves and being around that environment was just part of our family fabric. And it was an odd experience when that was no longer the case for us. I was just finished with my sophomore year in high school. Tied to that in 1986, a little movie about second rate pilots came out. I think it's called Top Gun. Don't tell anybody. But actually it helped inspire me to want to become a fighter pilot. I was blessed to be able to watch it with a bunch of fighter pilots at Spang Dalam Air Base in Germany as a young boy. And that sealed the deal for me. And so I went off and applied to the United States Air Force Academy, and after some tribulations, was accepted to the class of 1995.

So how did your dad feel about you joining the Air Force?

He was tickled beyond belief. He was so happy because he was also. He loved doing the work that he did, but even more than that, he loved the people that he did it with. And I think when he retired, he recognized that he was gonna miss that camaraderie, that teamwork, that teamsmanship that exists and those kinds of teams. He would never get to that same level again. And he was happy for me that I was gonna be part of that experience.

How long were you in the Air Force? How many years was that?

So it was just over 20. I ended up retiring early as a result of the colorectal cancer. I was on a path to stay in probably 25 or so years because everything was going really, really well. My trajectory was very much upward at the time when cancer rocked our world.

So what was that like? What were you doing? You were in the. At that time, you were the head of your unit or what were you doing at that time?

Yeah, so towards the end of my career, in fact, I was just down the road from you. You know, you're in Albuquerque. I was down in Alamogorda, New Mexico, as the chief executive or the commander of the 7th Fighter Squadron and F22 Squadron that used to be there. After command, I went off to the National War College to get another degree, and then we went to Stuttgart, Germany, to be part of the headquarters U.S. european Command Staff. And that was. That was designed to be a pretty quick tour. And I was going to come back to the F22 off of that after about a year on that tour. So I was working on the staff. I had been promoted to full colonel. I got the call one Saturday evening in Germany that I was being invited back to the F22 in a senior position. And even though at that point I was still kept together with a bunch of safety pins and wires and whatnot, I said, absolutely, I'm in.

And so is flying a fighter jet is tough on the body?

It is. It absolutely is. I've got a few vertebrae that are semi fused and kind of cracked, the upper part and the lower parts of the spine. But absolutely worth it. Absolutely worth every pinch, every pain, just the privilege of being able to be part of that for as long as I was able to. Heck, I'd go back and do it again in a heartbeat.

So most of us are never going to have that opportunity, right? I'm never going to be. I'LL never be able to fly in a fighter jet. What is that like? Take us through the takeoff and, you know, just give us an experience.

Yeah, Imagine that you're just exhausted out of your mind. You wake up, you just have nothing left to give. Now imagine feeling that way sitting at the end of the Runway with takeoff clearance to push those throttles into afterburner and to launch yourself on a rocket ship into the sky. I don't care how tired you are, there's an adrenaline boost that kicks in and you are ready to rock and roll. And from the point at which you plug in those afterburners and take off to the point at which you come back in and land the rest of the flight, it is a high energy, high impact, you cannot duplicate it on Earth kind of a feeling. The best way that I could describe maneuvering a fighter aircraft around would be to take your experience on the most aggressive roller coaster that you've ever been on, multiply it by a factor of 100, and then I think you get close.

Oh, my gosh. You know, I know what it's like to maybe go zero to 60 in four seconds or something, and that's pretty exhilarating. But, you know, a fighter jet goes, I don't even know what the acceleration is like for that.

Yeah, the acceleration is one thing, the fact that you can maintain the speeds that you can get to is another thing. But really where it comes into in a real focus is when you merge, when you pass another airplane going the opposite direction. And that's where you get a sense of just how fantastically fast you're going. And you'll transition from going super fast to now applying multiple times the force of gravity on yourself. The F22, the F15, we pull nine times the force of gravity at the high end. And just that experience, and that's the part that doesn't do wonders for your back. But that experience is another indication of how much power, how much raw power you have at your fingertips. And you're doing that while you're looking over your shoulders. You're doing that while you're making decisions about something that's going to happen somewhere down the road. You're doing that while you're trying not to hit your wingman and while you're prosecuting an attack against an adversary. And you're doing that in a three dimensional space that's always changing. It's volatile, it's dynamic, it's complex, it's uncertain, it's just, it's just so much. And when you don't have that anymore. You feel that absence. You absolutely feel that absence because you cannot duplicate it. At least in my experience on this earth.

You know, I know a lot of athletes go through this, and I sort of went through this when I stopped competing. At a high level, you're used to the getting ready for it, the preparation, the mental, the fun of just competing. And then all of a sudden it's gone. And like, what am I going to replace that with? And there's not much. So I can't even imagine what that's like for you.

Yeah. And that competition factor, that's one of the big drivers of why people stay with this kind of a career for so long. Because there's one thing of understanding how to employ the machine. There's one thing about embracing tactics, another thing to go out there and win consistently. And that's what we're constantly training to do. Our objective is to have 100% success rate. When we're called on to go achieve our clients missions, that's Defend America. And so that constant search for excellence in our domain, you can't ever achieve it. You're always striving forward. Things are always changing on you, and that keeps you engaged. In its absence, it can be difficult to find the same degree of meaning that you once had.

And so you were diagnosed when you were in Germany or when you got back here?

That's right, I was in Germany. And I woke from a colonoscopy to find out that doctor thought that the tumor he found that morning on a beautiful sunny morning in downtown Stuttgart, had been growing for about 10 years. So that was a bit of a shocker. Yeah.

And so then you had some options. You had to leave the Air Force, or was that pretty much your only option?

No, I will say this. I mean, the United States Air Force has been wonderful to me since the day that I signed up and showed up in Colorado Springs in 1991. When I shared with the Air Force what it was that I was going through, the Colonel's group, everybody that kind of managed me, my leadership chain, everyone bent over backwards and offered me so many different options. It was my decision, my family's decision. We were sitting in our hospital room there on one of the many, many weeks that I spent recovering from the two GI related surgeries, discussing the future. My shared concern was if we stay in this life, even if it's less aggressive, even if I'm not flying, just the idea of being part of the defense of our country, there's a stress factor There that our thought was, if we can remove that stress, maybe we prevent a recurrence. And that was a big driver for our decision to leave the Air Force when we did, which was a tough decision. And looking back on it now, it's, you know, it was tough. It was tough.

I mean, everything you were. Everything that was you. Right. I mean, was gone.

Yeah. That, you know, so much of who I was was wrapped up in flying high performance fighter aircraft, being part of high performance teams, being part of this defense structure that's so important for us and for our friends and allies across the globe. And so to cut that out and really to do so in a matter of weeks, I mean, we went from, you're going back to the F22, things are going to be awesome to oh, my gosh, we're going to have a major international move. My wife was, what, six months or so pregnant with our fourth child in the midst of this, and we're going to go back, try and reinvent ourselves. So we added a lot of stress at a time that we were trying to cut it out. Gary. We weren't very smart.

You know, I always. Something that crossed my mind when I did some work here at Kirtland Air Force Base with a friend of mine that's a colonel out there is when he had me come out to visit because I'd never been on a military base before. And when I, when we came out to visit, the level of respect that he had, that people had for him as the colonel, there was something I'd never experienced. Right. There's a definite hierarchy and chain in the way people talk to each other in the military world. And then when you come out to the civilian world, that doesn't exist so much because nobody knows. I was curious with him. I, in fact, I asked him, I said, you know, what's that like? When he walks in the room, everybody stands up. And then when you come out into the civilian world, you don't have that same interaction with people. And I'm curious for yourself. You know, there's a definite level of hierarchy, and you were pretty much at the top of the food chain there. I would, I would guess coming from that to out in civilian world where nobody knows you, they don't know you know anything about you other than you're now an ex military that has three and a half kids, Right?

Yeah. So, look, I would say more profound than being at that level of command is the tightness and cohesiveness that you have at the unit level down within the squadron. Amongst your teammates. And here's a good illustration of what that looks like. When we moved. When we came back, my family and I, we moved from Greece. We were in Larissa, Greece, about four and a half hours north of Athens, for two years. We had two children. One of them was born in Greece. We brought them to Alamogordo, and we arrived at our house that I had rented without my wife's being able to see it. She was back in Larissa when I came out and did a quick site survey and took a look at things and said, this will be it. We got into our house probably 10pm on a Tuesday night, let's say. We opened the door and the house was already welcoming to us. Our squadron had broken in somehow. They had stocked the refrigerator with everything that we could think of. They had toys for the kiddos, they had gifts for us, and a gigantic sign that says, welcome home. Now, where do you see that? Where do you have that kind of engagement, that kind of cohesiveness outside of a high performance team? So that's the part, really that you miss. And when we came to St. Louis, which has been a home for Teschner family Since the late 1800s, my branch, my dad's piece of this was always odd because we were always gone, living someplace far, far away. But coming here, it was not the same experience as moving from Greece to Alamogordo because we didn't have that. We just didn't have that team setting here. My wife, who we married halfway through my Air Force career, to this day, she says, you know, if you were to go back and join again, I'm all for that, because I miss the people, I miss the experience. I just miss that. I miss those bonds, she says, and so do I.

Your brother's in combat and your brother's on the team. And so now you teach that, right? I mean, you help organizations develop that same sort of bonding I do.

And it's so important because if we can harness the goodness that comes from the high performance team world, what you've experienced, what I've experienced, and we can bring that into our organizations. Oh, my gosh. I mean, imagine the potential. There's so much untapped potential from our teams. Just because we don't have, we don't elicit the best from our. From our teammates often. And so if we can tap into just a little bit more, imagine what the future could look like. And that's a strong piece of what it is that I do. But how we got here is also interesting.

So what do you See as the secret, if you will, to a high performing team, what are the things, characteristics, how do you develop? You know, I'm a listener and I've got a business and I've got my team and I'm not performing at the level that I feel like we could. What do I do?

If there's one part of the workshops that I've been teaching over the last year and a half that's really opened leaders eyes and it's interesting because of course I'm on your podcast today and this is your focus of your work. But I concentrate on team purpose and I concentrate on clearly articulating and not just taking for granted that we all understand why we're here and what good it is that we do and bring forth. But rather I ask, does everybody on the team share the same purpose? And if not, why not? And I invite the team to spend some time and put the rigor in to developing it. And I know that it's not going to happen in a 10 minute session. It's going to be something that we iterate on over time to arrive at the clarity that's necessary for us to all buy into it and then derive from it what it is that we need to go out there and start caring. I mean, how many people actually care about the work that they do? You know, I mean that's just a broad general question, I don't know. But what I have found even in the short time that I've been working and it's been about two years that I've been moving out with my company, Vmax Group, in that time I would say that I've run across a disproportionately large number of people that they do what they do primarily focused on the what. And as a result of that, the engagement is low, the care factor is low, the desire for excellence is lower than it could be and that's what we're trying to change. And so even without knowing you, Gary, when I started this work I've been 100% in alignment with you on it and therefore it's even better to be speaking here with you today because of it.

Yeah, and I agree with you, that's, I love what you're doing. And do you feel that it starts first with the individual? Does it start first with the team? Does it start first with the leader? Where does it, where does the what have you seen as the first step?

Yeah, you can enter it from any of those entry points. I've seen it where the leader has worked on it. And said, hey, organizationally, this is our why. And so now let's work on the team why that's in support, support of the organizational why to get buy in, to make this grand why, if you will have traction. I've seen it the other way as well, where if I can understand why it is that I'm here and then I can bring into alignment my why with the team why that I'm on, or I can find a team that aligns with my why now, now suddenly there's meaning that's being derived from my work, which if that why is in concert with the organizational, now we're in lockstep and moving out. So I think you can enter from either point. But here's the big takeaway. You've got to seek it, you've got to do it. Regardless of which way you enter that question. It's fundamental. It's the foundation for everything else that we're going to build upon in the pursuit of excellence.

So step one is clarity of purpose or clarity of why.

Right, exactly.

And then you've got us. You've got to have people that are, that are seeking it, that are interested in it. Right.

And you know, I think what we find is, is that even if people haven't been exposed to the question before, and even if you might think they're not going to care, just opening the possibility of this discussion. I watched an individual who, in a discussion about why it was a controversial discussion, the leader came in and said, hey everybody, here's your why. I printed it out last night. And he handed out, you know, little sheets of this is your why, if you will. And immediately you had one person who said, okay, who signed off on this, you know, and another person. So are you kidding me? You're getting, tell me what my why is. And there was a huge pushback and it was, it was going south pretty quickly. And all of a sudden this gentleman who was kind of quiet all day, he chimes in and says, stop right there, if you would, please. I have been checked out of this company for a number of years. Mentally, I've been going through the motions. I'm showing up, I've been doing. It's been a long time since I've cared. And as I look at this, as I look at the statement that was presented to me just now, it reminds me of why it is that I showed up here x many years ago. And I think he was close to 15 or 20 years that he'd been there. So this reminds me of why it was that I even started here. And I think it's necessary for me to reflect on this, to re. Achieve what it was that I once was, to become who it was that I once was so that I can support our mission. That then tempered everybody else's response and we had a fantastic conversation about it. But just think about that somebody who at some point mentally checked out and was just going through the motions to collect a paycheck, to get access to benefit. You can only get so much out of. Out of somebody that's really not there with you on their side, only getting so much out of the experience. And how much time, Gary, do we spend at work every day of our lives?

Yes, right.

For sure. So deriving meaning from it. I think there's a deep. There's so much goodness to that quest and it satisfies an inner longing that we have. Why are we here? What are we doing? What legacy are we leaving? What purpose do we serve? And if we are intentional about seeking that, well, now we can unlock the full potential of what it is that our teams can do.

I love that. Let's go back again for just a minute. So how did you decide to.

Move in the direction that you've moved now from sitting in the hospital bed to saying, I'm leaving the military and taking my family home to where you are now? What was your. How did you decide that, Gary?

That story is somewhat convoluted. It's an interesting one. The initial decision was. Was based on the desire to try as best we could to prevent a recurrence of cancer. And so the initial decision was pretty easy. We made it quickly and the Air Force supported that and did everything that they could to make our transition good. We took a cruise ship from Dover, Delaware, I'm sorry, Dover, England, across to Tampa, Florida. It was about a two week cruise with our family of four kids at the time. And every day we were conscious about leaving the negative memories of cancer, the negative memories of the amount of time the dad was in the hospital, all the fear and uncertainty and whatnot, just on the open ocean water. So we tried to do that for the kids and for ourselves, which was good. When we got to St. Louis, which we picked again for contingency purpose, if I get sick, we've got family here, we've got people to help out with our expanding family. That was good. I spent a little bit of time, I'd say the first year was really concentrated on the what. How do I provide for my family with a body that does not function. I spent A lot of time in the bathroom, Gary. Not having a lower colon is not a good position to be in. I would not recommend that anybody go there. Yeah, you can avoid that problem. Please do so. Get early checks if you're a guy. But. So there was a lot of time on the what just functionally how do we survive? And those were really dicey times and the stress factor was really, really high. And I turned down the obvious jobs that I was offered because they involve travel and I couldn't travel at the time. I just couldn't. Body was not supportive of being trapped in an aluminum tube for hours on end. And we took a job with a startup that never started. So that only compounded the stresses we were going through. My cousin invited me to come and spend some time with him, helping him in his mortgage loan business as his vice president of operations, which functionally meant that I was a mortgage loan originator. And So I spent 18 months about selling mortgage loans over the phone. Didn't have a book of business so I was having to craft it as I went along. It gave me insight into the challenges of small business and the challenges of sales and the challenges of overcoming objections and trying to get to yes. But in that time it also gave me a bit of an opportunity to focus again now on my why. The previous why was very clear to me. I'm here to defend our nation. I'm here to serve. I knew I couldn't do what it was that I loved doing anymore. But then I started iterating on how can I still achieve that same purpose just in the way that my body would allow for. And what being in that small business taught me was that we need small businesses to survive, to have a vibrant economy so that we can afford the defense that we feel. And if I can bring what it is that allows a high performance team to work to organizations that could do better, achieve more, become stronger, resilient, survive disruption. This was of course pre pandemic. Survive the kinds of disruption that we know are always going to happen, well then our economy stays strong and my brothers and sisters in arms that are still out there flying, fighting and winning, they've got the support that they need and that once we locked in on that, oh my gosh, that was the game changing moment. And so we established FEMAX Group. We started moving out on trying to get the message out about this and then made the formal plunge about two summers ago to go all in on this mission.

What was your energy like when you were focusing on your what versus your energy when you've been focusing on your.

Why, hardly any comparison. If you go back to what I was explaining about being exhausted out of your mind, but then being ready for takeoff in a F22, F15, whatever, and just the adrenaline boost, I didn't have it. I didn't have it. When I was focused on the what. And I kind of expected that too, Gary. I sort of knew that this was just a placeholder getting us to where it was, that we would eventually find that inspiration again. But once I realized, once I settled on and I clarified my why adjustment, I got the spark back and I got to be me again. Because it turns out that as cool as flying high performance fighter aircraft is, the real joy at the end of the day is teaching somebody else how to do that. Well.

One of the things that Top Gun didn't capture well the first time around was the fact that in order to have success as a fighter pilot, you've got to be a great teacher and coach. And that's what we spend most of our time doing. Our missions down in Alamogordo, they typically lasted about an hour, but we would spend hours upon hours discussing and learning from our experiences flying so that the next time we could do it better. It was a very forward looking, inspirational, how are we going to charge the team better tomorrow? And all that was about teaching. And so what Vmax Group does for me is it allows me to go back and be a fighter pilot again, be a teacher. I don't fly airplanes, of course, but I'm teaching. And the satisfaction of getting a message across, helping somebody to arrive at their team, why, and to take from that and build upon that, that's got me. Yeah. Just as excited now as I used to be.

You're able to live your why by multiplying yourself. Right. You're the ripple effect.

Yes.

You're that pebble that causes the bigger ripple, that changes the landscape of businesses, which changes the landscape of the economy, and it just goes on and on and on.

Exactly, Gary. That's. I mean, you know, you start small. There's no expectation that we're having the desired outcomes and effects just yet. But you have to go one at a time, one day at a time. A small percent improvement over time becomes something big over time. And I don't. None of us know how much time we've got left. That's one of the reflections we had in the hospital in Stuttgart. Don't know if I'm ever gonna wake up when they put me out for the first surgery. But whatever time that we have left. And I say we because my wife is just as much a part of this as I, and my kids have always been just as much a part of this as I am. The family team is often overlooked in military service, but they're sacrificing just as much, if not more so than the member is because they have no control over the outcomes. We all acknowledge that whatever time we've got left, we're making an impact and we're gonna leave a lasting contribution that's going to do good in this world and that inspires all of us.

Yeah, you can't stop yourself. Right? I mean, it's just what's in you.

Once you're settled on that, you can't. It becomes a dynamo. That's what's exciting about it, and that's why it's so foundational to us accomplishing what it is that we're on this earth to do.

I love that. How are you finding the transition of military concepts that work at the highest level, translating to business concepts for teams that are not yet performing at the highest level? Is there a good. Is there a good fit?

There's a great fit. You just have to teach it a little bit differently than maybe how we used to teach. And there's places where audiences are more receptive than others. There's teams that are more receptive than others. There's a lot of folks who look at the world from the standpoint of I'm not you or we're not you, and therefore what you have to offer doesn't apply to us. And so, you know, those are the people that actually intrigued me the most. Those are the organizations that I enjoy being around. Because making the breakthrough there is almost more impactful than making in a place where it's invited from the very beginning, but it's less about the military side of it and more about the science behind why things work. And that's where I spent most of my attention, especially in the early formative days of vmax. Group is studying, why do the principles work that we've adopted in the military? Because they ought to. The theory was they ought to cross apply into any domain. The theory is validated. Teams are teams. And so once we break through and say, all right, a team is a team is a team, don't worry about whether we're talking about a sports team or a family team or a military team. Let's talk about the principles that bring teams alive and make them click and hum. Now people start to open their minds to it and Then you have the breakthrough effects. And the examples we use are everyday examples that anybody can wrap their arms and their minds around. And that's where we, that's where we gain lasting traction.

So what are the characteristics of the best teams? What are the things that you want teams to be able to do? Tell me about the characteristics that you see.

Yeah, I would summarize it with this. If one of us fails, we all do. Just think about that for a, for a second, Gary. If one of us fails, we all do. And instead, and this is, this is highly countercultural right now. I mean, there's. We tend to just kind of writ large in society anywhere across the world, be deflective of, you know, failure, criticism, something that's got gone negative. You know, it's not my fault, it's them. They did the thing. It's, you know, when you flip that, when you turn it around, you have people that are arguing with one another over who's. Who's more to blame for something. And when the leader looks at it from the standpoint of how did I let my teammate down? Where was it in my training? Where was it in my leadership and guidance? Where was it and how it was that we went through this experience together, that I didn't support them? You craft a team that you want to be on for life. You craft a team where people will take a pay cut and suffer through hardships to be part of that. And I'm firmly of the belief that any team can embrace this. And I say this because we practice these principles. Our family team, the Teschner family team, aspires to be a high performance team. And our kids, Our oldest is 14. The next turn is 12 here in a couple of weeks. The next one is eight. The next one turns six in a couple of weeks. The next one turns three in a couple of weeks. I'm taking donations, by the way, for the, for the birthday fund. But our ambition, truly, my wife is a accountant by trade. Our ambition is to be a high performance family team. If one of us fails, we all do.

So what if we. Yeah, so what if one of your children decides, I don't want to be. I don't believe that. That's not what I'm not. I want to go have fun, man. I don't want to be doing my part here. I want to go have some fun.

Yeah. And that's, that's probably one of the more natural objections that people might prescribe to this is to say, you know, hey, this sounds far too regimented to Me, this, you know, what are you talking about? Look, we have a ton of fun because we're clear as a family on our purpose. We understand why we do the things that we do, what we say yes to, what we say no to, and we're committed to one another. And we have a lot more fun not poking at one another than if we were to do the opposite. And, you know, I mentioned my wife again, because if it's me talking about high performance team, we're coming from a high performance background. That's one thing. There's my wife who said, and I wrote a book and I kind of talked about some of these principles in the book. She's the one who said, now I understand what you've been ranting about all these years, and why don't we practice these principles in our family? And that was the tipping point for me to say, yep, okay, theory is valid. A team is a team is a team. Teamwork applies in any domain. And she's the one that advocates that. We apply these principles in our home setting. And when we do, our family team clicks.

Hmm. Can you have a great team without a great leader?

You can. As a matter of fact, it's not as easy. It's not as easy to do that. But you can be a great team, even in spite of bad leadership. That's where the teamwork principles really apply. And not to get too academic on you, but when you study teamwork, science, and I usually refer to a book called the Wisdom of Teams by two researchers, Katzenbach and Smith, who studied teamwork for a couple of decades, primarily in business. Components of a good team. Commitment to common purpose, to performance goals, and to an approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. You can do that even in the absence of good leadership. Now, the ideal scenario is you have leadership that's committed to the exact same principles. And now you're getting maximum impact from this.

Got it. So tell me, I want to change subjects on you a little bit.

Sure.

Tell me about that picture behind you. And for those. So there's, you know, obviously a lot of people are going to be listening, so they don't know what. As I'm talking to Cujo here, I'm looking at this picture of a fighter jet behind him. It's a really cool picture. And so tell us about it.

This is a front on image of the mighty F15C Eagle, which is the airplane that I love above all others. It was hand assembled on the production lines at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri. We've Been flying this airplane since the early 1970s, and it is a war horse. Its combat record is 104 to nothing globally. And they teach us that when we're going through F15 school as young lieutenants, you know, don't screw it up is one of the things that we're taught. But it is a brilliant air superiority platform. It's designed to go out and to make sure that nobody attacks us at the home, nobody attacks us at the base, make sure that no service members are attacked from enemy air on the ground. And it's been extraordinarily effective through the years. And just to give you an idea of how much I love this airplane, I commanded an F22 squadron, which is a brand new, even more sophisticated weapon system with more power, more capability, and so much goodness to it. But when I first flew, the very first time that I flew the F22, I felt like I was cheating on the F15. That's how connected I've become to this airplane. And I love it with a passion.

And so why do you have it up in your. I don't know if we're in your office or in your living room or where we are, but why is that picture up in the background behind you?

It reminds me of where it is that I learn, the principles that I teach. It reminds me of who it is that I am. And you don't have to be flying one of those to be who it is that you are. And it's the source of the inspiration for the work that I do, and I don't want to ever lose sight of that. And so it's here. We've got another one, actually, of the exact same version up in my. My son's room, his bedroom. He loved it so much, we had to get him one, too. And it's just good for us. It's good for us as a family, and it's good for me personally as I go out and accomplish my life's work.

It reminds you of 100 and what was 145 and.

Oh, 104 to nothing.

104 to nothing. Yeah. That's the kind of team you want to be part of, right?

Yes, that's right.

So if I'm listening to this and I'm somebody that says, I would love to get ahold of Cujo, I love his book debrief to win. How should they get ahold of you?

Now, the easy button on this would be to go to vmaxgroupllc.com v m a x g r o u p llc.com plenty of ways to click into contact and we're very responsive. And I'll get back to you within a day and let you know what it is that we can do to help you.

And your ideal group to work with would be who?

That's an interesting question, Gary, because everybody benefits from high performance teamwork and as much as I have avatars and on the business side, we follow that piece. I think for your audience it's more inclusive than not because there's so many. For example, in January of next year, I'll be speaking to a group of senior business executives. During the day we're going to cocktail hour and then the families are coming in that evening and we're going to talk about cross applying these principles in the family domain. And I would not want to to be so exclusive as to miss out on the opportunity to do this with others. So it's a wide swath. Gary.

Okay, well, great. Well, I just appreciate you taking the time to be here. I've enjoyed learning about what you're doing and taking what you've learned in high performance military teams, high performance military planes experiences and applying them to everyday business and everyday families to bring the level up to high performance outside of the military. So I just thank you for what you've done and what you're doing. I just so much appreciate it.

Gary, the feeling's mutual. Thank you for the work that you're doing because this is the foundation upon which everything rests. And so for people to be focused on what it is that you're bringing into the world is helping them to achieve what it is that they're here to do and that's unleashing that, unlocking that. That's what we're all about. So thank you. Congratulations for the success that you've had. Here's to continued success with the work that you're doing and I'm glad to have been a very small micro part of the work that you're doing here this afternoon.

Awesome. Well, you have a great rest of your weekend and I look forward to staying in touch.

Yeah, likewise, Gary. Thank you very much and we will.

Take care.

Bye. Bye.