The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift by Geoff Tuff, Steven Goldbach

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Hi folks, this is Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen, there are the latest things that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, Chris Voss Show for 16 years, 2,400 episodes, bringing you the most brightest minds, the wonderful people, people to share with you their journeys, their stories, their lessons in life to help make your lives better. In the meantime, go to goodreads.com/chrisvoss, facebook.com/chrisvoss, linkedin.com/chrisvoss, Or just Chris Voss. Chris Voss won the TikTokity, all those crazy places on the internet. Today we have 2, uh, gracious young men on the show with us today. Uh, their book is entitled Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Geoff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach are on the show with us today. We're gonna be talking to them, and their book is available for preorder. September 30th, 2025, it will be coming out. Uh, Stephen is a globally recognized strategist and executive advisor combining creativity and rigor to help organizations create their own future. With Geoff, he is a globally recognized thought leader and widely sought-after speaker and writer on the subjects of strategy, growth, innovation, adapting business models to deal with change. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you?

Doing all right. Living the dream. Yeah, thanks for having us on, Chris. The introduction to your show really gets the blood pumping, so we're ready to go here.

I think it's the juice, baby. It's the juice. So give us each your, uh, .coms. Where can people find out more about you guys on the interwebs?

We are easy to find on LinkedIn. Both of us are available and interactive there. Geoff Tuff is G-E-O-F-F, or Geoff as my daughter likes to call him, T-U-F-F. And you can find me at Stephen with a V Goldbach, G-O-L-D-B-A-C-H. Both on LinkedIn are the easiest place to grab us.

There you go. So I'll throw it to whichever who wants to take the first question first. Give us a 30,000 overview. what's inside a book, your new book, and, uh, I'll give each of you guys a shot at that.

Steve, why don't you go for it this time, and I'll, I'll take us back on the journey after you talk about Hone. How's that?

Sounds, sounds, uh, sounds awesome, Jeff. So I'll tell you a story, Chris. So there is a— I have had the pleasure of working with this amazing chef, Flannery Clet Colton, for a long time. We got— my family got to know her and her business partner, Lauren Gary, In the early 2000s when she was starting her career in the East Village. And one night we were having it— she's been doing like special parties for us for 15 years now. We've seen her grow up and she's this amazing, accomplished chef. And one night she was in my kitchen and she was getting ready to prepare a meal and she started Taking out her knives, and all chefs carry their own knives. And she took out a, what I now know as a honing rod. And I said to her, you know, flannery, why do all chefs sharpen their knives before they cook?

Right?

And she's like, I'm not sharpening my knife, I'm honing my knife.

Mm-hmm.

And she made an important distinction. I'm like, what do you, what, what's the difference? And she's like, well, and she used a lot more swear words that I won't repeat here.

She is. She is. She's, she's a colorful, colorful speaker, that's for sure.

She's a colorful— she's both a sailor and a chef. And so you can imagine that, that, that, that sort of bleeds in it. But she said very succinctly, honing is realigning the steel in a knife to cut the way it needs to cut. Sharpening, you're actually removing steel from a blade.

Oh.

And that resonated with me. And I shared that with Geoff. And we thought that the metaphor was really appropriate for what we see in the world of business today. There's a lot of businesses who are addicted to transformation, but transformation is costly, risky, and fails a lot. And the reason that you need to transform or sharpen your knife is because you've waited too long and you've let the knife get rusty. You've let the knife get all gnarly and you have no choice but to sharpen it. And the reason why chefs hone is because the knife is their most important tool. They're— they could literally injure themselves every time they cut. Actually, a dull knife is far more dangerous than a sharp knife because it doesn't act as it should. And so what the chef is doing is just almost is always saying, I need the knife to perform as expected so that I don't have to sharpen it every time I'm doing it. And we saw this need in the world of business that businesses were going from one transformation to another. And between that transformation, they were drifting away far too, you know, too far from where they had intended to go. And so we view honing as the solution to a big business problem. That's like the 30,000-foot view. I'm sure we'll dive into it, but I know Geoff has wanted to talk about the journey.

Well, no, I'm happy to talk about the journey because, Chris, this is the third in what we declare to be right now a trilogy of strategy books, and we can talk about those. But I am actually, instead of taking us on the journey, Steve, I'm going to steal one of your metaphors because I really liked it when I heard you talk about it. But Chris, the metaphor that I will attribute to Steve now, but will forever now claim to be my own, is of someone who's trying to stay in shape or get in shape. And, you know, the— if, if let's say we have an individual who wakes up one day and says, I am going to absolutely do my best to be healthier, to get in shape, to exercise as much as I can, and to, and to live a better lifestyle. That person goes out for a 10-mile run and they say, that's great, I've done a great job, I'm feeling a lot better now. But then they don't do anything the day after or the day after. And 6 months or 7 months or 8 months go on and they say, oh man, I forgot about that pledge. I better go and overhaul myself now and go out and do whatever extreme version of exercise or extreme version of— if there's some sort of cosmetic intervention in order to get back on the track that I wanted to. That's akin to a business suddenly waking up one day and saying, oh man, I didn't do all the stuff I needed to do. to stay in shape. I now need to transform. And so what Steve and I are arguing in Hone is it's just the same as the— a company that is honing is just the same as a person who is trying to stay in shape day in, day out by paying attention to how they're feeling, to doing small acts of exercise to stay in shape, to monitoring some of their vital signs, to understanding where they may be off track and making those micro adjustments along the way. So they don't have to wake up one day and say, oh man, I'm totally off track. I need to do something drastic.

Yeah, there you go. There you go. So hone is the big thing. Now, you mentioned you guys have written a lot of books together, and you said this is a trilogy. Tell us, tell us, uh, where this state is, where this is in the trilogy. Is this book 1, 2, or 3? And then, uh, how many books do you guys have total together?

So this is the 3rd book, and we would characterize it as an unplanned trilogy. We got together And wrote our first book, Detonate, in— we wrote it in '27. It came out in 2018. Detonate was all about blowing up best practices that businesses seem to rely on. And the reason is because best practices don't get you to high degrees of success by definition. If every company does the same best practice, they're all average. Provoke was about— Provoke was about— Provoke was about—

The second book, which came out in '21.

Yeah, Provoke is the second book in '21, and that's about shaping the future to be what you want it to be rather than waiting for it to arrive to take action. And Hone is about, you know, once you've blown up the playbooks and shaped your future, how do you keep it going in perpetuity?

Hmm. There you go. And so people can take advantage of the book and order it up. What do you— what do you see as the big problem with organization strategy where everything's changing? I mean, AI is changing so fast right now, it's pretty crazy.

So the big problem is that everyone recognizes that everything is changing quickly, whether on account of AI or any number of other exponential trends that have started to hit the world in the last 5, 6, even, even 10 years, but they're not doing anything differently. You know, we as gentlemen in their 50s have grown up in the business world for a few decades now. We learned all the lessons at business school. We paid attention to all the way that we're supposed to run things, as do most of our colleagues who are out in the market running big organizations today. And the reality is what will work and win today is fundamentally different from what has led organizations to be successful up until this point. But the problem is we've got built into organizations either written playbooks or written rules about the way the business operates, or even more pervasive unwritten rules, what Steve and I call orthodoxies, about the way things should be that stop people from actually understanding how they need to act in the face of exponentials. And so, if I had to sum it up very simply, we are missing opportunities because we are linear beings living in an exponential age.

Yeah, there you go. Some of the things you talk about is stop transforming And start honing, and how leaders can make small and continuous adjustments to keep the organization on course. What are some of the ways that they can apply that? What are some of the ways they can lead that as leaders?

Well, let's take a very specific example that is current and on everyone's mind right now, and that's AI. We're kind of amazed at how slow The AI rollout has been. When we think back, the ChatGPT moment that came out was 2023, and we're now midway through '25, and businesses are just starting to wrap their heads around it. And what we're seeing is a good demonstration of the way in which businesses tend to take action against Things that are, as we wrote in Provoke, obviously matters of when it will come to fruition rather than if it will come to fruition.

Mm-hmm.

So we had that ChatGPT moment. The honing leader would have said, let's start to trial this in a really small way in parts of our organization so that we can learn about it and so that we can continually expand this to our advantage over time as that became more apparent. And frankly, AI— has been around for a lot before, you know, the, the so-called ChatGPT moment in '23.

Mm-hmm.

So leaders should have been playing around with this a lot earlier.

Mm-hmm.

And, but what we saw the initial reaction to be was, oh my goodness, I gotta figure this out before I deploy it. In fact, the first instinctual move was to shut everything down, right? And not let your employees use it until you figured out that, and that sometimes makes sense in certain regulated businesses, but in oftentimes cases, that's the wrong response. We should be purposefully trying things in a small way so that we can learn because, you know, the— but what, what we tend to do is say like, we've got to figure everything out and then deploy it in a really big way. And that's the transformation approach. And that's just, it's just hard. It's just, there are so many moving parts. It makes such a big deal of it. Our view is that on issues like this that are continuously disrupting your customers' experiences, your costs, your employees, you've gotta just keep learning and actually admitting that you're not gonna have it all perfect, but just deployed in your organization in some way. That applies not just to AI, but all kinds of other changes that, you know, might, might take place. But I think it's certainly very pervasive today in the world of AI.

And I think the problem, Steve, that you're describing here— and Chris, I hope this makes sense— but we have an orthodoxy. Let's go back to the term orthodoxy. We have an orthodoxy in the business world that when there's an opportunity to change, to do something different, to adopt a technology, to launch a new product, or what have you, there's a binary model. You can either be a first mover where you do something aggressively and you move first in the market and you assume you're going to get all the advantages from doing something big and bold and out in front.

Yeah.

front, or you can be a fast follower where you let others pave the way for you by taking on the risk, and then you try to adopt the technologies quickly and catch up with them in some way. Both of them presume— both of those models, at least in the common conception of them, presume that you have to do something big in order to shift your organization. What Steve and I are arguing actually is that there's a model where you don't have to choose between those two.

Mm-hmm.

And you don't have to take the big, bold step and do something as the first mover. You don't have to wait for others to do it. What you can do instead is immediately start to take what— or start to make what we call minimally viable moves. And so that's been a central thesis to all 3 of our books at this point. The notion behind a minimally viable move is very similar to— I'm sure you and all your listeners have heard of minimally viable products in the product development domain. What those are, are you— let's say you're working in a lab, you develop something that is minimally viable for its purpose, you put it out to the market, you get some feedback, And if the feedback's good, then you continue on down that development path. If it's bad, you go a slightly different direction. That same concept can be applied to any sort of management decision, to how we adopt AI, to how we think about combating a competitor, how we think about entering a new category or what have you. And so what we're arguing in Hone is that what you can do— and we should come back and talk about what the mechanisms are to hone and what the purpose is— but what we're doing is saying, just take small steps forward every single day. Test hypotheses. Every move you want to make, turn it into the smallest smallest testable hypothesis, and then go take action quickly and course correct as you need to. And I'll stop this diatribe with just one metaphor. I think we raise it in Detonate first, but it's the whole notion, like, if you're trying to conceive of what it means to make a minimally viable move, imagine walking through a deeply wooded forest with a lot of overgrowth and what have you, late at night, no flashlight, pitch blackout. If you're trying to get to the edge of the forest and get out of the forest, what you don't do is run as fast as you can because you're going to trip over something because you can't Or you don't take huge steps forward because you may trip over a log or run into a tree or what have you. What you do is you edge your foot forward, you feel for whether there's something in the way, and if there isn't, you continue on down the path. If there is, then you change course a little bit. Doing that type of thing in the course of making business decisions is what we're trying to argue for, actually, in all of our books, but especially in Hone.

There you go. You talk about identifying your organization's elemental purpose and using it as a North Star. Tell us about that. How that works.

Yeah.

So an elemental purpose is, you know, effectively why, you know, what at its core this business was, you know, put on earth to do. It's not, it's not necessarily the purpose statement that is, that is usually ascribed, you know, or ordained in a wall on a plaque in the organization. But it's at its core, what does an organization do? So we— you can't see an organization's elemental purpose per se. And so we— you have to hypothesize about what that might be. So we thought about a company like Apple in the book, and we said, well, it seems like its elemental purpose might be to bring, you know, a touch of high design to every— and user-centric design to every every technology and everything it does. Because if you look at what it really does is like elevate the user experience in all capacities. The reason why elemental purpose as a concept is so important is because when a company has a tendency to drift off course, it's because it's gotten weighed down by things like things that have taken it away from its elemental purpose, whether it's competitive actions, or whether it's new technologies that it's getting enamored with, or as— and this is a metaphor that I'll attribute to Geoff, given he's the sailor of the two of us— all the barnacles that get accumulated on a ship's hull and prevent it from actually feeling the water as you go. I'm not sure, Geoff, if I've completely—

Run with it. Close enough.

I'll keep running with it.

My sailing friends won't bust you Yeah.

So, you got to get this accumulation of crap that prevents you from really seeing and performing against your elemental purpose. And what we would argue that you have to strip away some of that to get back to basics. You see that in lots of different companies today going, quote unquote, back to basics. And that's what we mean. But you have to have a sense of what that is. And very rarely in an organization's lifespan should an elemental purpose change. It can, and technology can be a forcing mechanism in that. But really, if you have a sense of what you're put on this earth to do, you should be able to adapt to the surroundings that you have.

There you go. One example you guys give is Patagonia is, we're in business to save our home planet. It serves as an internal compass. Kind of interesting sort of thing. We make a lot of clothes to go in the landfills so we can save the planet. But I mean, I mean, Patagonia is a good company. Is there anything you got? Do we get everybody jumped in on that question?

Well, so that's a good example, Chris. And it's a good example of actually a company that did declare a purpose and a mission statement that's pretty well aligned with its elemental purpose. But the purpose of an elemental purpose, if we bring it back to the book, is to give you that path forward That allows you then to make those day-to-day management decisions that we were talking about before. So when we talk about honing, we're talking about the most senior executives— and we should talk about the role of who does what in this system— but the most senior executives of any organization paying attention day in, day out to the things that they have in their control that drive behavior in their system. And when I say behavior here, I'm talking about the behavior of employees. I'm talking about the behavior of customers, of suppliers, of partners or what have you, because ultimately nothing changes. You don't stay on track, you don't course correct. Nothing allows you to stay on track unless someone somewhere changes a behavior. So at the heart of honing is understanding your elemental purpose, understanding the behaviors that you need to be able to impact as a senior executive throughout your entire system amongst all those audiences that I talked about before that will help you achieve that elemental purpose. And then identifying the tools that you have at your disposal to drive those behaviors. And those tools that we talk about in the book are management systems. They're all the things that you have at your disposal running a company that will allow you to impact the behavior of others. And we're happy to dig into what those management systems are if you're interested.

Yeah.

Let me jump in for a sec, Chris. So no CEO sets out and expects to drift. Right? CEOs are all really busy individuals. They spend tons of time with investors, with their boards, with their customers. But because they're really busy, they don't always have attention to every single aspect of how the system of that organization is working. And oftentimes, they make major decisions, and then those decisions get delegated to lots of different parts of the organization. And they either don't get implemented in the way that they were intended, or the decision sort of becomes stale because competitors do different things. So, the organization naturally drifts off course. When Geoff talks about designing the system, you need to make sure that the organization as a whole is being steered. But when CEOs go from one big challenge to another big challenge, it's kind of hard to continue to navigate the system. And what we're saying is they've, they've got to be the chief system designer of that organization and constantly making small changes to the management systems of the organization to get people to behave differently in order to get that organization back on course, pointed directly at that elemental purpose.

There you go. There you go. Now, one of the things you talk about as well in the book is CEOs must become chief system designers. Why CEOs and how does chief system designer work?

Well, I think, Chris, in many ways, it comes back to the direction Steve was just going. And I'm going to create a juxtaposition here that is probably greater than it typically is. But if you think about the average CEO or even the above-average CEO, the great CEOs, often the way most of us think about them is they are the bold visionary leaders who spend their time understanding where they want to be competing in the world, making commitments on behalf of the company to their investors, to their stakeholders, leading with the grand vision statements. And then they expect, rightly so perhaps, that the rest of the organization then achieves what they're setting out to do.

Yeah.

We're actually arguing that while that has a time and a place, most CEOs have completely overplayed that part of their job and underinvested in the more important part of their job, which is acting as chief system designers, which is where your question was anchored. What it means to be a chief system designer is not to be the big, bold visionary. It means to be the person in the weeds day in, day out, understanding what mechanisms they have at their disposal to drive the behaviors that will allow the organization to stay on path, not to drift, to achieve its elemental purpose. It doesn't mean they have to do every single one and control every single management system. But our argument is that the average CEO needs to be spending a lot more attention and a lot more time in the mechanics of how the business is operating and really understanding the impact of behaviors through the system than they are typically today.

Oh. There you go. Uh, did you want to jump on this?

No, good question. Yeah, go ahead.

All right. Uh, so as we go out, guys, uh, what, what are some offers that you guys are doing? Do you guys do speaking engagements, uh, with consulting, working with corporations and teams? What are some of the things you guys offer on your website people can take advantage of?

So we, we do speaking engagements. We are open for, open for business in that way. We would love to come speak to your organizations. We do that both virtually and in person. If you're running a conference, Geoff and I can be very entertaining. If you're a company, you can have us do both speaking events but also workshops where we help you work through some of your challenges and can adjust some of those management systems or challenge some of your orthodoxies.

There you go.

And I will say, Chris, the main thing I hope your listeners take away is that while We can be entertaining. We can do stuff up on the stage and people generally seem to like it. At the end of the day, what we care about is engaging in a way that drives a change in behavior. It would be completely antithetical for a couple of guys to come along and write a book about the importance of changing behaviors and then not commit to do that ourselves. And so what we hold ourselves accountable for whenever we engage with any sort of company, whether it's in the traditional client service work we do or in some of the speaking events that we're involved in, is making sure that behavioral change actually results from it. And what drives that change is gonna differ by the organization, by the setting, by the challenge, what have you. But that's our commitment to anyone that does give us a call.

And Chris, there's one other message that I think it would be important for us to share with your listeners. So we took inspiration throughout the book from the world of artisans, and we watched And profiled 4 different artisans in Hone. We had Flannery, who's our chef. We had Ana, who is a famous photographer. And, we had Sam Pollard, the famous documentary filmmaker and editor, particularly known for his editing in the 1990s of Spike Lee's films. And then, the band, the rock band Our Lady Peace.

Hmm.

And, we said that if you're— what artisans do naturally because they love and they're passionate about their subject, is that they are constantly looking for ways that they can improve their artistry, whether it's Ana and how he captures an image, or in Our Lady Peace and how they've evolved to be much less— more than just a rock band and more of a business enterprise to take advantage of the new reality that we live in, or in the way that Sam has changed how he directs and how he captures subjects and the subjects he looks at. These are— when you're an artisan at the top of your game, you are constantly looking for the next way to improve. And we think that that curiosity, that day-to-day, that day-to-day constantly slightly dissatisfied with how things are going to try to make it better, is a mindset that business leaders can bring to constantly be looking for ways that they can improve their customer experiences, improve their employee engagement, and have greater impact. And so we just think that there's a— there's learning that business leaders can have from that community.

There you go. There you go. Well, guys, this should be fun. You guys will have the book coming out September 30th, 2025. Give us your .com so people can find you on the interwebs.

Once again, I'll say just head to LinkedIn. You can find me, Geoff Tuff, G-E-O-F-F-T-U-F-F, or Stephen Goldbach, S-T-E-V-E-N G-O-L-D-B-A-C-H. LinkedIn is the best way to find us, and you'll find us both responsive and, I hope, helpful.

And also ways to buy the book, get in touch. You can reach us at our sites. You can find all the information there.

There you go. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming to the show. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris. That was fun.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold. It is entitled Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. There you go. It's something where, you know, you gotta— I like the analogy of honing the knife instead of destroying it, where it loses Steel. I like, I like the concept of that that you mentioned at the beginning of the show. Uh, thanks for us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com/fortresschrisvoss, linkedin.com/fortresschrisvoss, Chris Voss 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other, stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, guys.