What Creates a Healthy Organization with Keith Ferrazzi

I was once coaching a team and this one gentleman, he was Irish and he said, oh, well, in my culture, I'm just candid. And we're always candid. And I feel perfectly comfortable being candid. I'm like, well, great, we're going to get along well. And then I watched him in the meeting and I said, sir, you know, I appreciate what you said, but what you're really being is a lazy asshole.

You're not.

I mean, what you're doing is you're just throwing candor out on the table like a turd. And you don't give a damn whether anybody hears it or does anything with it. It's indulgent. You're just throwing out truth bombs recklessly. If you want to be a member of this team, you have to own how your feedback lands. And you've got to give, you've got to work your ass off to give it the highest likelihood of it getting executed.

Today I get to bring you back around the fireside to have a really fascinating chat. And our guest today, Keith Farazi, is a fascinating, fascinating human being, New York Times best selling author, and just generally extraordinary person. And what I really like about this is that you guys all know how much I appreciate when somebody can communicate effectively from stage. And Keith is definitely one of the people who can do that really well. But I will tell you that at a few of the events where we've both been speaking at, like Keith, I think it was in Bali at one point, we got to have a very serious, very fascinating conversation on a table. And as always, when those types of conversations happen, I think to myself, if only we'd recorded this. If only we recorded it and been able to share it with people. And so that's really what this show is all about. And it's just a chance to, for us to have one of those conversations. Keith, please welcome to the show. So glad you're here. Thank you for making it and being patient through our technical stuff.

No, thanks a lot, Eric. And I agree. I mean, I was thinking about that this morning. I'm such a blessed man to have had such extraordinary dialogues and sitting around such insightful people. I almost wish that there was a webcam on my head. You know, just those, that, that odd dinner with you or whoever it is. It's just. So this would be great. I'm really looking forward to this format.

Yeah, good deal. It's kind of fun. My team was pushing me for a long time to do some kind of interviews or podcasts and, you know, like You. I'm on planes all the time. I could never. But then when Covid came along, it's like, I have a studio, I've got time. And in direct violation of your book, never eat alone. I'm alone, so.

Me too. Me too. I've been actually quite good, as I was saying, a little bit during prep time with you. You know, I literally have been alone for two months. But I've also. I don't think I've ever been more connected. And my network has been expanding exponentially in such beautiful ways. And I can explain some of the things that I've been able to do. I've enlisted a group of 70 heads of HR of some of the largest companies in the world. And we're meeting on a weekly basis in small pods of 20 to ask the question, let's not go back to work, but let's go forward to work. What is that going to look like? And we've been ideating the future of the headquarters, the future of virtual selling. I mean, all of these areas. And I just hired the managing editor of Forbes, the former managing editor of Forbes, to run an entirely new effort on my behalf, a nonprofit of Go Forward to Work. I think today we're about to finally get to where all the bullshit has been for 20 years about the future of work. It's upon us.

You know, Keith, I'm really with you on that. And it's interesting because we shifted so much of our business about five years ago to allow us to build an online community and allow us to have an impact. So, you know, as a consequence, when this all happened, we understood the technology and we understood the skills, and it made it really easy for us to transition from being largely a live event company to being a live event online company. In fact, I would suggest there's a good chance that may will be one of our best months ever in business, which I would never have guessed when this was all blowing up in March. So I tend to think I like this idea. Let's not go back to work, let's go forward to work. And I think also one of the things that fits with me with that idea is people keep talking about the economy as if there's one. And of course, there's multitude. There's your economy, there's my economy, there's New York's economy. And so the way we look at going forward to work, the way we look at how our jobs are in the future, I think so many people have a disaster mentality about it. And I think it's like, this is one of the greatest times of opportunity we've seen in any of our lives.

Well, anytime there's disruption, right, it provides a great opportunity. And as I've been thinking about how, by the way, I unfortunately was not ahead of the curve when all of this happens, when it comes to online communities, I have always been the last person into trends. I swear to God. I remember many, many years ago, my book Never Eat Alone had just come out, and there was a gentleman who was a bit of a fan of the book. And I'd known him through this thing called Renaissance Weekend, which is sort of a New Year's gathering. And he had created this website that was intended to try to create a network online. And I said to him, I was like, you know, Reid, I really appreciate what you've created, but you cannot replace physical interaction with digital. And of course, that was Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn. And at the point, you know, he was just starting this, and I literally, if I had been. If I had an ounce of, you know, if I had an ounce of openness and more curiosity, to be honest, what I could have done is I could have leaned in and been more curious relative as opposed to opinionated. And I look back on it and I wish I had, because frankly, Look, I love LinkedIn. It's one of the most extraordinary platforms out there. But I believe that had I been more curious, I could have put more humanity into it from the beginning. And I think one of the things that we need to do in the social media world is we need to start to integrate humanity elements into our technology. Right? I mean, Zoom can either be used as a broadcast platform, but the way I've been using it is I've been using it to create radical intimacy in short sprints. Yeah, you can do it, right? Anyway, I don't want to go on and on and on, but, you know, the point is I'm getting there. I'm getting there late, but I'm getting there, and I feel blessed for it, actually.

But, you know, Keith, here's, here's what I find interesting about that. Like, I heard this great expression a while back that, you know, if you're over 20 years old, then you're an immigrant to the Internet, and if you're under 20 years old, you're a natural born Internet citizen, right? And you know what's interesting is, is that, wait a second, it's not always the citizens that have the best advantage, as we've seen. I mean, the best people that take advantage of the American dream.

Are immigrants.

I mean, I'm one. You know that. It's funny, like, sometimes. Excuse me, but sometimes the native population, the native British population, Native American, and I don't mean native, but, you know, the. The citizenry often takes for granted the phenomenal opportunity. And then an immigrant comes in and says, holy, I have a new way of seeing this. And I've been watching you, and I think that's exactly what you brought. Sure. You were like, you're probably like, my mom. Digital watch. No way, man.

Speaking of my mom, one of the things I did. So my mom's 89 and has asthma, and I've been so worried about her, of course, in Pittsburgh. So one of the things I did is I shipped her a very large iPad, right? And fully loaded with everything she could possibly need, including my buddy Eric from Zoom, the CEO of Zoom. I fully loaded Zoom. I created a URL. I'm not actually going to say what it is. It's a URL that is directly aimed at her that all of her old friends will know so that anybody. She just keeps Zoom open all the time, and any of her girlfriends that want to come in and say hi, they can. So she's not inclined to want to go see them. Because in the past, she was like, well, why can't I go and, you know, go across the street with so and so, and why can't I do this? I was like, mom, you got to stay put. You really do. And now she's got this virtual friendship that just is constantly happening from girls that she knows from where she stays in Florida, from. From down the street, et cetera. And it's just beautiful. Right? And so, you know, we've got to start thinking about. And by the way, I got that idea years ago from the CEO of Ideo when they had acquired. Oh, gosh, the furniture company. I'm now just forgetting, because I know the CEO as well. Anyway, they created a virtual wormhole on their two desks. They just kept the video open all times. And that's one of the things I'm encouraging to C Suites right now, that they actually keep a video window open at all times, because they used to be able to have the physical ability to just run down the hallway and grab somebody, Right?

Yeah.

And that kind of organic, serendipitous interaction isn't happening as much. So, therefore, how do we create it? So I'm trying to think of ways to constantly Jerry rig the systems that we have to create the kind of systems that we need in a human interaction.

And that, you know, I think that's exactly what I mean about, in a sense, the, you know, being an immigrant to the whole thing is you just look at and go, I don't care what it was built for, I want.

To know what I can use it for.

And I'll tell you that my, my first wife and I, we often ended up spending quite a lot of time apart, you know, and we used to open up a Skype window and we would just leave it.

Are you going to get intimate? You're going to get too personal in here?

I'm not going to get. Not that kind of Skype window. Keys.

Come on now.

I'm not going to answer those questions, but, you know, we just left this Skype window open. I'd be working at my desk and there's Skype over here with the video on. And it's like every now and again she'd get up and go, hey, can I make you a tea? She's 3,000 miles away. But it creates that feeling of connection. So I really like that idea a lot.

Yeah, I love that. And I could just see it. It sort of brings a little tear to my eyes just thinking about right there next to each other. And even if just somebody's kibitzing around on the side, right. It doesn't matter.

It's beautiful. It is really nice. I want to talk a little bit about, like, you know, you're. You're good at your title generation. You know, you really name your books. Well, I think. And that's really great. And I want to talk a little bit about leading without authority. And I want to talk about that because I've been fascinated by leadership since I was little. I used to go to summer camps all the time and they would always like draft me to be like an assistant counselor whenever I went there. And I never really understood that because I never felt like I showed up that way in school for some reason. But in summer camp I was always the guy. But the weird thing is I remember even then I really liked, like, I liked the feeling of being in that, you know, that like in a sense, a leadership position. But I also remember part of that as a young, as a 12 year old was the significance that came with it.

And of course, I was just gonna say if I throw back to that, that probably for me was the lack of significance that I grew up with, you know, a poor kid from Pittsburgh, my own man was an unemployed steelworker. Right. And the fact that I remember that first taste of leadership, and it was in Fact at summer camp it was. And that gave me that sense of, that sense of significance. And I have to say that that hounded me in a negative way throughout my young career. The young man who wrote Never it Alone did not understand what I'm teaching in leading without authority. And it was quite, it's been quite a journey for me in my life and it's a blessed journey, but it was difficult and rocky and I have a lot of apologies. I've done my best in making amends along the way, looking back from team members and things, but yeah, no, I get it. And you want to riff into that from here now?

Yeah, like here's a conversation, an unfortunate conversation I had one day when I was 21 or 22 years old. I looked about 17 and I was working for this tech company, first full time employee and they'd been trying for ages to hire people. It didn't work. They got me and boom, I just hit it off and I was selling like crazy and tops it. And then we started recruiting people and the company grew and grew and grew. And so now I'm 24 years old and I still look 17, but I'm the top sales guy in the company. And the owner of the company comes up to me and he goes, I want you to be like the sales director of the company. And I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. He goes, yeah, but I don't want to tell anybody. And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well, you just look too young and you know, like if I'm out there talking to investors and if I have to walk you in as our salesman, it's just not going to happen. So I want you to do the job. I'll pay you to do the job, but I don't want anybody to know you're doing it. How about the people, inside leadership without authority? No, he didn't, he didn't want them to know. He just wanted me to do it underneath it. Like no actual authority, but like lead. It was literally lead without authority. And that's why I was so fascinated by how would you approach that.

How old are you, Eric, now? Yeah, just 50. Oh, good for you. I want whatever facial cream you're using.

I think it might be a zoom filter, I don't know.

So, you know, that's interesting because I think when that was happening to you, what was happening to me as a 20 some year old young man at Deloitte was that I had heard the CEO say that he wanted someday for Deloitte to be at par with McKinsey. And Accenture at the time was called Anderson Consulting.

Yeah.

And I registered that. And I went back to business school. I was a summer Internet Deloitte. I went back to business school and asked a professor if I could do a white paper on the subject of professional services marketing instead of doing the normal class load. And I spent the entire semester speaking to the Chief Marketing Officer, McKinsey, the Chief Marketing Officer of Accenture. I told them all that I would turn the data back to them when I was done, so I wasn't doing anything disingenuous. And I ended up creating this amazing description of how these great companies had built their brands. And then I shipped it to the CEO of Deloitte. And I said to the CEO of Deloitte, you once met me, you don't remember, at a cocktail party for interns. And I asked you a question, and here's your answer. And the next thing you know, he invited me down to New York City. And I'm sitting across the table from him at dinner, and he says, farazi, I want you to come into the company. And I said, sir, I've got some other interviews. Literally, the next day, I had an interview with McKinsey. And he said, yeah, I know about your interview with McKinsey, which I thought was creepy. And he said, but you're going to make a difference here, and we want you here, and those people don't even know who you are. And I said, you know what? I'll do it under one condition. For the remainder of the time that I'm here, I would like to have two dinners a year with you, please. And he granted me those. And the first project he asked me to work on was the project of taking that white paper and activating it inside of the company. And I said, well, but if I do it, will you make me Chief Marketing Officer? He was like, absolutely not. You're a child, right? Your child. And you would have to be a partner. And I was like, make me a partner. He's like, shut up. Just shut up. Just come in and do this project. You're lucky that, you know, you get to work at the top of the echelon of the company. Anyway, within three years, I was the youngest elected partner of the firm ever. And I was the Chief Marketing Officer at a ridiculously stupid age. So, look, this book, Leading Without Authority, isn't just for that. That young man and woman. Because what I have learned over the years and because that message, what I just told you was also taught in every Deloitte. How do you deepen relationships and become so audacious to believe that anything's possible? Along with deepening relationships, along with leading with generosity? Because nobody's going to. What I did for Pat leconto, the CEO, is I led with generosity, right? I did something nobody else could have imagined doing. And I went way overboard to be of service to somebody based on their vision, not my ambition, right? So I did that. Then what's interesting is, and I tell this story in literally the first chapter of Leading Without Authority, then I get to be this big deal, right? And there's articles written about me and I get invited over to be the chief marketing officer and head of sales globally at Starwood Hotels. Now, this was a young brand at the time. Barry Sternlicht was a young CEO. Ambitious, driven. We were creating the W Hotel, we were creating the St. Regis Hotel. I was overseeing the marketing and sales of this massive global enterprise. And we wanted, and I created with the team the Starwood Preferred guest program, which is that it became award winning. Da da da da da da. Right? I behaved like a leader who clung to authority because this was what I was suggesting. I felt like, wow, I had busted my ass to do all of these things that weren't handed to me at Deloitte. Thank God I now have authority. Thank God I now have permission to lead. And I treated the head of Europe like an individual that I knew better as the global head of marketing. Right? I took the budget away. I reallocated it. I wanted to make Starwood a big deal. And anyway, I made a lot of mistakes. We did a lot of great things. I'm not going to suggest the tenure there wasn't really glistening. It was awesome. But I made a lot of mistakes. And the biggest mistake that I made was the head of Europe became the new CEO. And that made. He just eviscerated the global marketing function. He basically took all of global marketing and he said, you want to be head of North America? I was like, okay, I'm gone. I get it. So I see today leaders leading organizations where they feel that they've got to have control and authority to be transformational. And I'm skipping to the punchline here. Even in my own company, I think of a division head of a company of mine that feels that they have to have control over this person or that budget or this, that whatever. And, you know, as soon as I see that, I see myself as a young 20 something, the ego associated with needing to control and to have in order to be extraordinary. And what I realize is if you fight for control to be extraordinary, the fight for the control is a dissipation of the energy to be extraordinary, because the inputs that you need to be extraordinary are so unbounded. So my team today, so, you know, you were just talking. I want to. By the way, you're one of the. One of the few, but I love interviewing with you because you have so much to contribute. So I apologize. I'm going on so long in this discussion because I want to hear your point of view. But what's happened is to be transformational today, you've got to be unbounded. On who's your team? My team today includes one of my dearest teammates is Peter Diamandis, who wrote the book Abundance, and he's got a new book out just about global transformation. I mean, the guy is one of those brilliant people in the world, but he's one of my teammates.

Right.

He and I talk multiple times a week. Jim Kwik, who is one of the most successful businesses in. In online products, et cetera, and one of the most beautiful humans in the world, is on my team. Right. Just this morning, there's a young man that used to run this thing called the Speaker Actor Global Network. And I've got this book coming out, and he reaches out to me and goes, keith, how do I activate influencers for you? And we just designed a scheme where I'm going to give free coaching away to a set of entrepreneurs who could drive 500 book sales in the coming week. Right. Larry is on my team. And so it's like my team is unbounded and I couldn't afford any of them. Right. And so that's what we need in our lives today. So, you know, there's really three audiences here. There's this audience of this young person that we as entrepreneurs need to unleash, or this young person that you as an individual, forget what your company tells you you like. Back in the day when I was at Deloitte, I. I didn't need to be unleashed. I unleashed in service and created transformation. And then when I screwed it up at Starwood, I realized, and I see all of these executives still screwing it up today by fighting for control and authority as opposed to being unbounded. And then I look at entrepreneurs now, like myself, who is taking leading without authority and creating extraordinary things in a time of crisis that I couldn't been able to find. I've been able to find unexpected growth opportunities that I would have never smelled Never smelled if I had been constrained by the traditional boundaries of what leadership is that I used to believe in.

Yeah, you know, I think the lesson I got from that experience that I went through was that there ultimately are two types of authority. There's the authority that's given to you and there's the authority you earn. And if you wait for the authority that's given to you, then you sit there like, please sir, can I have some more? You're constantly waiting for this authority to be given to you or what you're.

Undermining or where you're undermining.

That's right. And then there's that.

Yeah, I mean, I see people creating bad energy and undermining others subconsciously. I mean, they're not bad people, but they think that there's a competition for the budget. And the reality is we need to co create, you know, we need to win this.

So when this situation happened for me, what was interesting is first of all, I declined the job because I thought the measurements were too difficult. Like if I had no authority to make decisions at all, then how are you? You know, the performance. But I declined the job and then did the job. So I declined the promotion, I declined the pay rise, the whole thing. But then I decided from that day on I would just do the job. I would train the people, I'd spend the time, I'd do it anyway. And what's, you know, what's crazy, I earned the authority. That's what ended up happening. And everybody recognized you can't earn authority by tearing other people down. You only. So that's why I was so fascinated to hear you speaking about that at that. You were on Metal yesterday and boy, like you just. There's some really powerful insights about the personal responsibility of leadership. That's so much better than waiting for somebody to give it to you.

You know, you said something and I often have this conversation with young people in the company where they want they. It's not. This isn't about young people, it's just about people, they want the job before they start doing the job. And I'm like, no, that is totally the wrong way to think about it. You start doing the job so far before you ever ask for it that it's. That it's not even a question when you ask for it. Now I do have to say that there's plenty of leaders out there who don't recognize and don't pay for value. So they have people doing the job and then that person comes to them and says, well, Listen, you know, can I have the pay raise, can I, etc. And the archaic nature of somebody's thinking doesn't give somebody that leap forward because they're still thinking about that person as this age, in this role, despite the fact that they're actually providing a lot of value. I've made that mistake. I've made that mistake in the past not giving people the credit for the value they were creating because my mind was stuck in who I thought they were. And yet once I lost them, I realized how ridiculous I was for not having valued them on what they were contributing at the time. I don't know. You're probably better. Look, what you're basically hearing from me is I've made a lot of mistakes as an entrepreneur, and all of my books are written from having failed to do them at some point in my life to then suffer the failure. And then I write about the way it should be. So that's basically my.

I don't think there's another way. Like, you know, it's funny, people always ask me, like, how do you choose a good business consultant? I'm like, well, you know, you want to make sure they're good communicator, that they've really been successful in their lives and that they've at least had one bankruptcy. Because if they haven't had some terrible stuff, then what kind of coach or mentor or consultant are they going to be when the terrible stuff happens? So I think the best lessons do come from that, which, by the way, that is part of the whole leadership thing is, at least for me, it's like not trying to. Not pretending you're perfect. Right. You know, it's like being here.

It's interesting just to talk about bankruptcy. I've never talked about this out in the open, but I've had.