In this podcast episode, host SPEAKER A introduces Deloitte Consulting principal Geoff Tuff to discuss his latest book, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift, the capstone of a three‑book trilogy (Detonate, Provoke, Hone). Tuff explains the concept of "drift"—the gradual loss of alignment with an organization’s elemental purpose caused by regulatory, competitive, or technological shifts—and uses boating metaphors to illustrate how companies can unintentionally veer off course. He outlines how the trilogy progresses from shaking up assumptions (Detonate), to provoking new thinking (Provoke), to honing daily executive practices (Hone) that keep leaders actively engaged with management systems. A central illustration is the "Rock Band Rule," drawn from the Canadian band Our Lady Peace, which shows that passion creates hits but purpose sustains longevity; the band’s humility in scaling back to stay relevant mirrors the lesson for executives. Tuff also shares insights gathered from artisans—a chef, a film producer, a photographer, and the band—highlighting humility, relevance to audience, and daily hands‑on involvement as key leadership habits. The episode concludes with a concise recommendation: senior leaders should stop over‑thinking strategy, instead immerse themselves daily in the behaviors and systems that drive performance, thereby preventing drift.
Chapters
It's now time to shift gears away from some of the equity conversations into lessons in leadership. And I'd now like to welcome in Geoff Tuff, principal at Deloitte Consulting. And Geoff, first and foremost, today does mark the publication day for, of course, your book, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. And this is part of a broader trilogy, of course. But first and foremost, congratulations on all of your success as well as this being a major milestone. But let's start off with really defining drift and how this can play out in real life.
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you. We're super excited about this. We're obviously— we've been excited about all our books, but this one in particular is the capstone to our trilogy. We think really does bring things home. So as you noted, the subtitle has to do with defining drift. The way we think about drift, actually, we in our books, we use a lot of metaphors from the boating world. And when you're boating, obviously it's easy to drift off course a little bit, but you have usually the coordinates or a fixed point on land that you're aiming towards and you have the instruments to steer yourself back on course. In business, it's not quite that easy. There are a lot There are lots of ways that you can drift off course from your elemental purpose and actually lose sight of the fact that those small bits away from your original intention, whether it's due to regulatory shifts or competitive moves or new technologies or what have you, you can wake up one day and suddenly find out you're way off course and you have to, quote unquote, transform, which is the thing that we're trying to help companies avoid.
Geoff, as we kind of look at this as a broader trilogy, you start with Detonate, I believe, which is sort of, hey, shake things up. Be willing to, you know, have a beginner's mind. You then go to Provoke, and now we're honing things in. Is that meant to kind of follow that progression intentionally of like, hey, you shook things up, but you also got to make sure you're still on track, and that's the honing aspect?
Yeah, I would love to claim that we had this plan all along, but we didn't. So we wrote the first book, Detonate, just intending to be one and done, and we really felt quite passionately at the time that companies had to defy conventional wisdom, blow up the playbooks to succeed. In the face of exponential change and increasing uncertainty. But once we had blown everything up, we realized we had to talk to our readers and some of the folks that we work with about how you then think about driving a future in which you have advantage. And after Provoke, it then felt just right to bring it home with this book, Hone, which is all about how we would recommend senior executives, in particular at some of the world's most scaled companies, get really involved in the nitty-gritty details every single day to make sure they stay on course and avoid that drift I talked about before.
Okay, and you mentioned this term that I loved, that's rock band rule, which is basically passion, of course, can create the hit. Purpose, though, will keep that band together. So I'm curious, your takeaways, why passion is not enough to sustain some of this long-term success?
Well, so we had the great benefit in writing Hone in working with 4 different artisans in trying to pull together some of the ideas to be applied to the corporate world. So we spoke with a great chef, we spoke with a film producer, we spoke with a famous photographer, and we spoke actually with a good old-fashioned rock band, one of mine and Steve's favorite bands from Canada called Our Lady Peace, a huge indie band from the '90s that actually made it worldwide to worldwide fame. And they've been able to keep themselves relevant for over 30 years at this point. As we got to know the 2 members of the band, Rain Maida and Duncan Coutts, the lead singer and bassist in particular, we realized that there's actually a lot of what they've done over time in keeping their band on track and staying relevant for completely different— a completely different music landscape, completely different audiences. That can be applied directly to business. And if I had to boil it down to one essential lesson from each of these guys, it's to have the humility to understand that passion will not take you all the way there. They are, they are super passionate, great rock stars. We love them both. But they realized as the streaming hit the music industry that, you know, having the big record label, having the multimillion-dollar record production was not going to get them to the next phase of things. So they had the humility to say, you know what, We don't need to continue to own the rock world. We don't need to continue to aim to be the biggest band on earth. What we need to do is be relevant to our audience. They were totally fine with scaling things back a little bit, with playing to slightly smaller audiences, but playing to audiences that were ever more passionate about what they were doing. That was just one small lesson that we took from Our Lady Peace that we think every executive can learn from.
Geoff, as a consultant with 30 years' experience, experience, now a 3-time author. Obviously leadership is where you're focused on many of the books here. As educators and people in media here, we oftentimes talk with analogies and trying to illustrate things to get the message across. Is that what we're trying to do with the Rock Band Rule? It's a lot easier to show you these lessons than go in and just tell you, hey, here's the definition, this is how you do it. You need to see it. See it in action for those messages to really resonate?
I think that's exactly right. And to be quite honest, it's kind of more fun sometimes to read about rock bands and photographers and chefs than it is to read boring old business theory. And so what Steve and I have tried to do from the beginning in all our writing is to make our books as readable and as approachable as possible, not just for business readers but for all readers, and to use real stories from real people to help learn these business lessons. So that's, that's spot on what we're trying to do with the Rock Band chapter and all, and all the rest of the book.
OK, so really as a broad takeaway, what's one small move you recommend for some of these, these leaders who want to start this honing right away to really strengthen some of their team's alignment and frankly performance, as you do write about in your book?
Of course, don't overthink it. Don't overanalyze it. Just get in there and start doing things. And, you know, the whole, the whole premise behind Hone is that A lot of senior executives think that their job is, when it comes to defining strategy, to really think about the big vision and setting out the path forward and then giving it to other people to go and execute. But actually, that's exactly the wrong way of thinking in a period of time where we have no ability to predict what's going to happen in the future with all the changes that are impacting us. The best way to stay on track for senior executives all the way up to the CEO is get in there, work with your management systems every single day, know the behaviors you're trying to drive in your organization and outside, focus on those, and you'll be successful.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And really great way to leave it, of course, on a positive note. But we so appreciate your time today. And again, congratulations on all your success and of course, publication day, as I'm sure you've been pretty busy today, I can imagine. But thank you so much, Geoff Tuff, principal at Deloitte Consulting.
