Scaling Up Naturally: Verne Harnish on Geoversity, Leadership, and the Future of Business.

My guest today probably needs very little introduction for anybody in the entrepreneur space. I first met my guest today back all the way in 2008 when he was in Beijing explaining about YPO and about scaling up. And he's the founder of the Entrepreneurs Organization. He's the author of an amazing book called Rockefeller Habits. And Scaling Up, and also a new book called Start to Scale. I'm welcoming today Vern Harnish.

Welcome, Vern. Jim, it's good to see you. Yeah, that was a while ago when we were together in China.

It was amazing because it seems like we've both lived full lives, but what we're going to talk about today is what you've done with your life with entrepreneurship, but also in an area that people maybe don't know so much about you, and that's about biodiversity and what you've been doing with the Geoversity. So I'm really excited to hear how you've been involved in projects in Panama and you're currently based in Barcelona talking to me today. So Vern, let's talk a little bit about you and what your mission is to help people to scale. And then we're going to talk about this amazing Geoversity, Nature's University.

Yeah. Well, you know what? I think we ought to, I'd love to just jump into that. I think most folks can look up my background, but You know, what drew me there is that, you know, if you look at it and we called Geoversity Nature's University, is that she has scaled so much further faster than us mere mortals. You know, if you look at ant colonies and beehives, they have survived a millennial of pandemics and all kinds of things in a way much easier. Than what we've done. If you look at particularly the last pandemic. And so we founded, co-founded with a guy named Nathan Gray. Nathan worked very closely with Mother Teresa. He then brought Oxfam to the United States. And then when the United States turned over the Panama Canal to the Panamanians, right in 1999, there was this rush of certain Panamanians who went into the jungles of Panama. And by the way, they're the closest jungles to North America and began to clear-cut. And I think you've got some video there that shows how it was clear-cut. So, we, through the generous gift of the Wheels, Colin Wheel and his dad, put up the money along with the Henson family because the frog, Henson's being the founder of Kermit the Frog, the frog is the kind of natural animal of Panama. And as you know, frogs are like the canary in the coal mine. When their population begins to decrease, we know that the biodiversity or the biome has become unhealthy. Anyway, we stink it. We went in there, bought up 12,000 acres right at this narrowest part of the isthmus that links North and South America. So very important corridor for biodiversity. And we began to replant. In fact, I and my two oldest sons, they're now 28 and 26, we planted literally the first trees of millions that have now allowed us to regrow this part of the jungle. So anyway, that's Geoversity. And in short, we've been bringing leaders of companies down to the jungle. And you saw our new bamboo pavilion designed to look exactly like a bird. In order to really learn from nature what's required to scale.

Vern, what a great, great strength.

And I wanted to raise this up because as you say, most people can look up Vern Harnish and Scaling Up and that's the Vern that most people know about. And that's why I was really excited that you were willing to share with me more about what you've been doing, if you like, with your own family and also helping to give back. It's geoversity.org. Org, by the way, for anyone that's listening. And also on the YouTube channel, I've been doing a screen sharing so you can also see that.

Then, by the way, we became kind of, uh, another jungle location for Jane Goodall. So Jane has spent a lot of time there, and we're very close to the Mayo Clinic, uh, so we've got the healthcare facilities if that was needed. And then James Cameron in creating Avatar. The company that was designing then the game around the latest Avatar used our jungle, studied our jungles as a way to make sure that they were real in terms of their representation of what it's like to be in the jungle. And then James Cameron's wife has the MUSE School. You might have seen that listed as one of them. So we've really become the green campus for Harvard, where I have my latest appointment, for Stanford, and James Cameron's wife's MUSE School. And so we've got some really cool folks. Leonardo DiCaprio is deeply involved in a foundation that has funded a lot of our work down there. And so it's become kind of a, again, we consider it the most accessible jungle to North Americans to do this kind of important work.

Vern, it sounds like it's become really a, a beacon for, yeah, getting to be closer to nature, um, and, and a really wonderful place for people to go and also to take some of the learnings from nature. What, what stimulated the desire to get involved with this? Because you've had a very successful practice, you've lived in, obviously in America, but also you've been based in, in Europe, I, I know, and you travel globally. What motivated you to get involved in Geoversity?

Well, it was like everything in life. It was a chance meeting. I mean, the short story is I and the family were deported from Costa Rica. That's a whole other story. I met recently with the president of Costa Rica who got the Nobel Prize for him being able to kind of bring peace to the region. And I shared that story and he apologized, but we got caught in the geopolitical mess between Central America and the United States. During that kind of crazy time. So, we got deported. So, we were getting ready to do some things in Costa Rica and we're like, let's go to Panama instead. And the rest is fortuitous. We ended up building a couple properties down there, spending most of our summers with my 4 children and had this chance meeting with Nathan Gray who had launched Mamoni Valley. And he and I met up and said, let's co-found this organization called GeoVersity. And really who we have to also give credit to is Tamsen Wooley Barker. Tamsen is this biomimicry professor. She was out of Arizona State University and she wrote, Jim, what I consider probably the single most important book this century. And that is a book called Teaming, T-E-E-M-I-N-G. M-I-N-G. So, how organisms, superorganisms team, kind of flock together. And in there, she described 5 overarching principles of these superorganisms that we're seeing as the foundation of how you scale the modern organization. And I don't think they necessarily knew the language, but the unicorns, those that have scaled further faster than us mere mortals have really adopted naturally these 5 underlying principles. So that's what we're teaching leaders of normal companies to adopt.

And so people are going down from large companies and getting involved as well in the Geoversity, and presumably there's a knowledge exchange and a support exchange. Vern, how does it work, if you like, with the people in Panama? Because it's also important I know, isn't it? To have, you know, not just to be sort of dropped in a group of foreigners doing things somewhere, but also to be helping, if you like, the local economy and the local community. Help us understand a little bit more what you're doing with Joversity. I know you as a person, you've always been so generous with your time and your energy. I'm sure you're giving back in that way too. So what's happening in that way?

Well, we work very closely with the Kuna, who are the native population there in that region. And they were so appreciative that we came in there and helped them rebuild and represerve what is their motherland. In fact, it was very cool at the latest COP gathering that was up in, was it Scotland? We were right at the epicenter of that. We had them create this beautiful beautiful mola sail that now is being used to sail a bamboo raft through the waters to bring real attention to the business of Panama, which is water. If you really want to know what's the business of Panama, the business of Panama is water, because without a healthy biome, they don't get the rains that are necessary. And people don't realize All the commerce, 90% of Walmart's commerce, for instance, moves through the Panama Canal, the new one. And that requires massive billions of gallons every day. I always thought the Panama Canal worked from just moving water from, you know, the Atlantic to the Pacific. No, there's a big lake that has to feed both sides. And so the business of Panama is water. And so our real focus, Jim, is not as much the jungles, but what has happened to our water on this planet. You know, I don't think by accident our makeup of the same kind of water is roughly the same as the makeup of water on this planet. We mirror that as a, as a, as a human. And we know that if our pH goes acidic, that's when we become unhealthy. And our oceans are very close to becoming acidic. I, I think it's what we call the second real inconvenient truth is I think we're more at risk with the pollution of our waters, the runoffs, the fertilizers and all of that, that if we, we move another 2/10 of a pH, eggs won't hatch, fish eggs won't hatch and other things. So we are really bringing together and with the leadership of Panama, Stanley Motta, who's one of the wealthiest guys there, who actually stated that the business of Panama is water, is one of our benefactors, that we've got to work together to preserve what really preserves life on this planet.

That's so interesting. And yeah, I mean, I was very fortunate to go to Costa Rica and go overland. And when I was a student and see how verdant it was back in the '80s.

And it looks as though there's been a lot of deforestation and as you said, a lot of industrialization. So what can you do with Geoversity? Because presumably some of the companies that are coming down, like you mentioned Cisco and so on, they could play quite a big role too in terms of changing policy and helping in the local politics. So how do you play that role to try and raise awareness of these issues? You've mentioned Leo DiCaprio is coming down, but this now seems to be a global, if you like, PR problem is about how do you educate people on these topics?

Yeah. Well, I think first of all, it's making sure that we have a new P&L, which is peace and love. And I do think that is the P&L that is going to drive business moving forward. And there's a lot of leaders who understand that and believe that, and that we are all part of one ecosystem, and it does us no good to pollute that ecosystem. And so anyway, we're really getting people focused on the water side of our ecosystem.

That's interesting when you say the water. So what can we do from a practical point of view as businesses when you say getting them focused? What sort of work are you helping them to do and how are you using the Geoversity as a platform for sharing that?

Yeah. Well, you know, your investments really speak loud. And so, I'm the second-largest investor along with a good friend of mine, John Ratliff, who runs our coaching organization in a company called Holganix. In fact, we just got Richard Branson on board and involved with the organization, but we're essentially working to get rid of most of the fertilizers on the planet. Fertilizers have done to Mother Nature's biome, gut biome, what antibiotics have done to us. And this whole Organixx product, I kind of refer to as the probiotic from Mother Nature, and it goes in there and revitalizes our biome and the result of crops in terms of root length, quality of produce, reduction of the nematode challenges that farmers have. And we've gone from a few acres to millions of acres to on the way to tens of millions of acres. Richard Branson's helping us get it spread throughout Africa. And if we can replace these such harmful fertilizers that have polluted Mother Nature with something that's more natural, then we can make a huge difference. So those are some of the ways that, yeah, in a practical sense, we're tackling this issue.

And how do you pronounce it?

Holganics, did you say?

Yeah, Holganics, because it's the runoff of these fertilizers into our rivers that then feed into our oceans. That is what's really killing the biome again, like antibiotics have done to us.

Okay. And then for anyone that's interested in following this, which I'm sure I'm having my breath taken away as well by what you're doing, Vern, it's holganix.com. Build soil health, reduce fertilizer, and boost crop yield.

And by the way, the founder, Barrett Ursik, was a student of mine at that MIT program that I founded for EO. Today called EMP, the Entrepreneurial Master's Program, which they still let the old man come in and kick off every year. But Barrett built one of the Northeastern United States' largest lawn care companies, and he himself recognized just pouring all of these fertilizers onto these lawns and golf courses and other things just wasn't the way. Yeah. And that he needed to find an alternative, and he did. And he's done all of the science with all the top universities, he's backed it up with all the research, and he's really gotten a bunch of now top farmers starting in the United States on board. Because look, at the end of the day, people know that it's not good for us to kind of, if we would kind of poop in our own nest, so to speak. Exactly what we're doing with this fertilizers.

Well, with the fertilizers and if you like some of the other stuff that's coming up at the minute, how do you help companies to sort of communicate the value of doing good, being, you said peace and love, because there is a short-termism, isn't there, Vern, that people pursue in the stock markets, but you are taking a much more holistic and long-term view.

Yeah. But, you know what? Hey, the short-term gain from Wholganics is so immediate that it's been selling itself through word of mouth. And, we're actually, our distribution channel is local farmers. And, we find a leading thinking farmer in a particular area. And, it's the wisdom of the crowd. They all communicate. And, if within a year, you're getting higher rates of production, lower costs. Look, we've got an economic solution that is superior to the amounts of fertilizers we've been pouring onto our earth. It's been an easy sell.

But from the perspective of my show around getting noticed, it's interesting your strategy for distribution. I guess that's why I'm asking you that.

So you found thought leaders. And you've gone in and what have you done, given them product to try first, the whole organics, and then they experience a full season and become ambassadors for the program. Is that how that's working?

They do. And it's, you know, we have a company in the US called Amway, kind of a direct distribution model, just like Tupperware and some of the other things. So the farmers themselves then become the distribution channel. And so it's the wisdom of the crowds, which we've learned we can trust more than we can the experts.

So it's wonderful. I mean, you've always been an amazing entrepreneur and then you've taught other people, including me, by the way, of course, to be entrepreneurial and then now taking it to a much bigger platform, Vern. That's, you know, well, frankly inspiring, isn't it really?

Yeah. And where do you see the challenges of getting more people to get involved in, for example, Geoversity and what you're doing with WholeGanics? Where do you see the challenges?

We are using these 5 principles that Tamsin Woolley Barker discerned out of these ant colonies and beehives, and it's really allowed us to scale exponentially.

Well, let's talk about what those 5 are then. I mean, you're the guru on scaling, and if you've got the 5 on your hand, let's talk about them.

What are they?

So, the first is the ability to harness collective intelligence. You know, if you look at an ant colony, what they're trying to do is find food. And if you're a business, what are you trying to find? Revenue. That's the food that feeds your organization. And so, what do they do? They send out scouts. And by the way, there's a book called Scouts that I think is fascinating for business people to read. That's really what you're doing with your cold calling or sending salespeople out or your social media campaign or whatever. And then some of the ants find some food, so they lay down pheromones, that scent, and that signals to the rest of the tribe. There's not a bunch of management. And as you've seen, major companies are all getting rid of managers. As Mark Zuckerberg said, I don't need anybody managing programmers, I just need programmers. And everyone's saying the same. So the ant, that signals the rest of the hive that that's where it looks like there's a lot of food. So more ants head that way. And if they find an abundance, the scent becomes so strong very quickly, millions of ants are able to get to where they need to go. Well, the equivalent of pheromones is Google. That was really the gift that the Google boys gave us. And if you think about— I don't know if you remember the original name of Google.

No, I don't actually.

It was called BackRub. You rub my back, I'll rub your back. And the algorithm was based on the point that, hey, if I'm looking for something, It's the ultimate in democracy. It's really everybody pointing to that video to change their battery in my Range Rover remote. We all instantly voted and said, that's the video we ought to watch. That's where the answer is. That's where the food is that we need right now. And that's why the politicians around the globe have felt challenged. At the end of the day, we don't really need all of this leadership. You know, we could pretty well figure out what restaurant to go to without the experts, what video we need to look at without the experts. The need for experts has gone away ever more so now with AI. And that is a huge threat to those who try to hold on and cling to power. And that's why I'm really happy that Elon Musk bought Twitter, X. It's been revealed it was being controlled by governments. And that's not what we need. We don't need anyone, you know, inhibiting the flow of pheromones, signals to the rest of us that there's the truth. Because I trust the tribe better than I trust, again, any expert.

Okay.

That's a big change. So that's the first thing. Yes. And that's, that's the distribution channel we're using with Hoganics. They don't have to rely on any experts. They can trust their neighbor and they can see it with their own eyes, the length, the depth of the roots and the quality of the produce and the yields. I mean, you know, in one season, and that's why it's been able to grow exponentially. The other thing that they do, number 2, is they nurture kind of the hive creativity. So it's interesting, Harley-Davidson a while back got rid of their major ad agency and they chose a small agency in Boulder, Colorado, where I lived just before coming back to Barcelona. And what this agency guessed was that there was probably a lot of Harley owner group, POG members who are top ad agency executives. And so what they did is they said, hey, why don't we put up a contest? And whoever can come up with the most creative ways to promote Harley-Davidsons, then we'll produce those. Now, as a result, what did that creative cost Harley-Davidson?

Zero. Zero.

And one of the things that we know according to Dan Pink in his book "Drive," that uncommissioned art is always much more creative than commissioned art. And so if all you're doing is commissioning one ad agency, all you're getting is access to their handful of creatives. Here Harley was able to tap into the collective intelligence and creativity of the entire tribe. So one of the guys that we hosted on a virtual summit we did on this geoversity topic was my buddy Rob McCune. So Rob bought a gold mine in Vancouver or up in Canada. He lives in Vancouver and he hires 15 of the smartest geologists the world could buy. And he hired the top one to be the leader. Jim, they couldn't find an ounce of gold. And in fact, when Rob went down and interviewed the 15 geologists, what was inhibiting it was the guy he brought in as the leader, the expert who knew it all, didn't want to listen to anybody. That's the problem. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That's what gets in our way of transcending our consciousness, if you've read any of those kind of books. Yeah. And so here's what Rob did instead. He said, you know, I'm going to turn it over to the crowd, to the tribe. So he put up all the geological data they had and he put together what was called the Goldcorp Challenge. Any team around the world that could find, find a clever way of modeling our data in a way no one else had ever thought of. If you can find 6 million ounces of gold, you'll win $500,000 Canadian. Months later, 1,000 submissions from teams all over the world. You couldn't hire those people. Two teams that teamed up in Australia, about as far away from Canada as you can be, won and split the prize. It was a team in Sydney and a team in Perth, who, by the way, the leaders of those two companies happened to bump into each other in the waiting room of a big mining operation in Canada. Look, I mean, mining in Australia is more sophisticated than probably any place else in the world. They said, did you see this crazy guy in Canada's Goldcorp Challenge? He goes, yeah. He said, why don't we team up and see if we can win it? Well, they did. And Jim, they found $6 billion worth of gold. Now, what Rob has done is he's now built— building a mine down in Chile, and he has actually hired on his team an architect. He's hired on his team designers. He's turning this mine into a tourist attraction. What it— because we do need the mining, but How do we do it in an ecologically and beautiful way that it becomes a tourist attraction instead of an eyesore, that it's giving back instead of completely taking away? And so Rob's been able to tap into the collective intelligence of the crowd in order to do this. Now, the third principle is that we have to rely on reciprocity and sharing. You know, I don't know about you, but I use TripAdvisor to find a good restaurant. So I feel compelled to share back. I owe it to the tribe for me to share my honest opinion to prevent somebody from making a mistake and believing the hype that might be on Facebook or Instagram. And so that reciprocity and sharing is critical. What does it mean? You can't be a pig. You can't be somebody who hoards information as a power play. And that was one of the early things that McKinsey had to really come to grips with. You, fourth, have to rely on distributed leadership. So, if you look at the structure of an ant colony, it's 3 ant teams. With the team lead. And the team lead is chosen at birth for their willingness to share information, not hoard information. And so if you look at a hive, it really only has 3 layers: team members, team leads, the sergeants that are the ones that win wars, not the generals, and then you've got a queen. And by the way, I remind men it's a queen, queen, not a king.

That's right.

Same with the bees, right?

It's the queen bee.

It is. It's the end of men, I think, in terms of our approach. And that's it. And that's what Cisco, for instance, is studying to restructure how you organize humans to serve other humans. That's all we're trying to do. And the hive and the ant colony does it slightly better than we do with our top-down kind of militaristic command and control approach that's driven by the masculine for generations. And all it's done is put it, got us in war.

So it's interesting.

And underpinning, it seems, all of that is the technology of communication becoming ubiquitous, right? That actually the common theme to all of this, whether it's the pheromones, is that The democratization of information, that's right, means that you're not tied to the location or the individual. As you say, you can reach out to people in around the world to get a problem solved, and they come together for that project and then dissipate.

Yeah, you know, my, my mentor Tom Peters, um, who was kind enough to endorse my first book, he was, he was really the first to say that all future work will be organized like the movie industry. If you think about it, this never before ever assembled group of independent contractors all over the world, actors, actresses, you know, cameramen, microphones, you know, whatever, sound, come together. You see the list at the end of a movie. It's a mile long. And then they spend $100 million over a year, and then they make or break it over a weekend, you know? And then you disband and you come back together in a different form and shape to do it again. But that is why freedom of speech is so sacred. Anyone who wants to stop what they think are the crazy ideas That's the problem. I trust us to figure it out more than our leaders. And so that's what really, if you want to look at the election in the United States, was ultimately all about, which was what Elon Musk is pushing. We've got to maintain our ability to communicate freely with each other. As individuals and not be controlled by others. And that's what's critical for the health of a hive or tribe.

And it sounds as well that's critical for the planet too, Vern, if we have the collective understanding about what we're doing to the planet. That's right. Bring us back a little bit to the Joversity. Yes. That what you are doing is creating a hive of information activity that people can go to and get skills and then go out around the world and then build their own projects, presumably as well, right? Which is what you're also doing.

And then the fifth principle is that these systems, Jim, are regenerative. And that's a very precise word. It's in a way the opposite of resilient. If there were two words that made me throw up in my mouth over the pandemic. It was every time I heard the word expert. Expert says— I knew we were being fed a bill of goods. I would rather trust the hive than any expert. Number 2, every time I heard the word resilient, I just— it depressed me because what is resilient implies And here's the analogy. Let's say you're a superhero and you've got this shield. If it's a resilient shield, then as it's taking hits, it's breaking down. But what you hope is it lasts long enough and you last long enough to survive that battle and then heal yourself, repair yourself to go, you know, do it again. A regenerative shield is one that as it takes hits, it gets stronger. And that's it. And that's what Mother Nature does. She gets stronger, not weaker, from the chaos, from these episodes. So people say, all right, Vern, give me a practical example as a human. Well, let's start with our bones. The whole challenge with getting to Mars is our muscles and our bones will atrophy because they're not under stress. They're not under that chaos. And you know what happens the minute your bones, you quit lifting weights and whatever, they get brittle and you break your hip and you're done for in the next 24 months. The only way you strengthen a muscle is by tearing it. Then it gets stronger. You are stronger at the broken places, not weaker. The same with our immune system. It's that old adage that the farmer kids are healthier than the city kids. And so all of these antibiotic soaps and all of those have done nothing but weaken our immune system instead of what nature gave us, which are these natural attacks which are designed to make us stronger instead of weaker. So we were designed to be regenerative. So was nature. And so our goal is how do we build regenerative organizations that get stronger from all of this chaos instead of just trying to resist and survive?

And I think you've got on your, on your website at geoversity.org how the land has grown back again, right? And that's wonderful how with some time and some, you know, care and attention.

Mother Nature does come back in the same way that human nature is, as you say, to come back and maybe in a different form, but stronger again. Vern, now you're moving forward with the Geoversity and that work. Where do you see if there's a piece of advice for people? Because you're saying now, we're moving from the hierarchical traditional model, which of course will cause some challenges for some societies like China, which is traditionally and politically around the Confucian model.

Yes.

For entrepreneurs today, what do you give as advice? Because if it's becoming like following the crowd and all sort of clusters are coming together and falling apart, it's upending the way that we've been taught to build organizations. So, what's your advice?

That you first need to build an organization that taps into the collective intelligence of all of your people, not just yours as the CEO, founder, and the senior team. So, example, one of my heroes, he's an anarchist. He actually studied anarchy at the University of Michigan, is this beautiful sage named Ari Weinzweig. Now Ari owns Zingerman's Deli. It's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's considered probably one of the best delis in the US, if not the world. Ari does $80 million in revenue from one location, and he does it with about 800 students that he hires from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And what he's done is he's built a company where the 800, all of them contribute their collective intelligence, their creative insights, their leadership to his deli, which is why he's been able to take a little startup location to $80 million and be the first company in the United States to adopt a system that was birthed in the UK and creating a kind of a trust-driven firm that can never be sold. So, it's becoming employee-owned, but it's a higher-level trust that means that none of the employee owners can ever put it up for sale. So, it's going to continue in perpetuity like an ant colony or a beehive. And so, Ari's figured out a way to make sure that all 800 that he's continually moving through as they graduate are helping to fuel the growth of his— both fuel the growth and maintenance of his beautiful organization. So, that's first from an internal perspective. The external perspective is there's a book out. We just hosted him at our CEO Summit at Harvard, Vijay Govindran. Vijay is a professor at Dartmouth. He was the one that first studied that companies that figured out how to deliver services to the bottom of the pyramid, like in India, then are able to sell to the first world. If you can figure out how to do it cheaply, then now you've got a solution for everybody else. He's got a new book called Fusion Strategy, and I really encourage everybody to read it, watch his videos online. And what he's saying is this. The companies that are winning big are those that are continuing to collect data information from their customers after the sale. So for instance, what's the largest movie studio in the world today?

Is it the MGM? It'd be the Amazon one maybe, is it?

It is Netflix, $20 billion a year. And Why have they raced to be number one and so successful? Because unlike the movie studios that will utilize a lot of information up until the movie is released, Netflix is continuing to collect data, intel, intelligence from all of its customers. What did you watch? When did you watch it? What do you like? They can tell all of that. Which helps them, them predict what would likely be the next hit. And so Vijay outlines how all companies, including John Deere tractors, are now collecting data way after the sale is made and using that data to continue to support the farmers. Coming back to farmers, for instance, they got the ability now to have technology that is able to apply an insecticide if it's needed in a pinpoint way, as opposed to spraying an entire field. Both that reduces dramatically the cost to the farmer and again, is much more friendly to Mother Nature. So in short, it's who can tap into the broader collective intelligence of the planet. And that's what Rob McCune did to find 6 billion ounces of gold. That's what Caterpillar Tractor's doing and the new generations of tractors. And that's what Netflix is doing in order to now race to become the largest movie studio in the world.

Vern, what a fascinating set of insights that you've brought as always. I expect nothing less. You know, it, it, Always brings such new perspectives talking to you because you've taken it up another level and you've managed to bring both this biodiversity element and then map it into what companies need to do and entrepreneurs need to do to stay relevant and to survive.

Our role is going to be quite different, isn't it, as entrepreneurs, as really as you say, understanding collective intelligence, understanding where things are going and be a facilitator. Not necessarily a dictator anymore.

Jim, I love that. Facilitator instead of dictator is precisely the translation of what it is that we're doing. And again, I want to remind the listeners here, the real guru here is Tamsyn Woolley Barker in her book Teaming. And I really encourage you to take a look at that book.

Okay, we'll put a link to Tamsyn's book in the show notes.

You have a new book out.

Do you want to just give a shout out to that and then let people know how they can get hold of you?

Good. Well, we've— the original book's called Scaling Up. And so you can just go to scalingup.com. My email is vern@scalingup.com. We try to make it really easy for people to remember. And the new book is Start to Scale. So an easier starter book than Scaling Up is really the graduate course. The undergraduate you need for the rest of your employees is this book. Came out October 8th, Start to Scale.

Start to Scale. I, I, you've sort of given us the postgraduate first. I had the Scaling Up book, didn't I, uh, first of all. And now Start to Scale sounds like where I need to go back to, to as I start to build a different business with this Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Yeah.

And by the way, the one of the things that drives me crazy, Jim, I don't know if you're a golfer or a tennis player, but Tennis used to be. Yeah. Yeah. So how often do you have to review the fundamentals as a tennis player? Like every stroke. Every stroke. Every— and same with golf. Yet in our world, people say, oh, I read that book 10 years ago, as if you mastered it with one reading. I'm going through Elon Musk's book, the one that Walter Isaacson wrote. For a fourth time. I mean, there's such wisdom in a guy that has done what he's done with SpaceX and Tesla and the rest. I'm going through Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs for a second time and picking up so many ideas that I missed the first time. So I'd rather your listeners pick a handful of books and continue to review those. Like, the grip you do on a golf or your grip on a tennis racket and a swing. It's the fundamentals that we've got to continue to review.

And Vern, it's interesting to say that because the other thing is, of course, when we read a book at a different time in our own lives, we've got a different perspective because our own experiences have changed as well, right? So when we read a book 20 years ago, when I read your book, first of all, I was in a very different place, both physically and logistically to reading it today with today's experience and so on.

Well, it's that idea that you can't cross the same river twice. And by the way, that was one of the big changes I made from the old editions to the new. We had this old analogy coming back to nature. We'll finish up with maybe this. It was this idea that we're going to plant a flag on Everest. The big, hairy, audacious goal. And we're going to crawl our way up that mountain. We're going to take that hill, which is a very militaristic kind of idea. And then I came to realize, which way does nature move? She's not trying to move up that mountain. She's moving down. And by the way, which way has civilization moved? There's nobody that lives up there. We all live along the coast where the water has ended, not where it began. And so I literally, in these books, took that old climbing a mountain and put a big stop sign through it and said, that analogy is dead. That was last century. What we have to do is really flow more naturally, get in the flow like a river would make its way from Everest to the ocean. And so again, nature, I think, has pointed a much smarter way for us to go up the hill or flow down. Down to the hill. Yeah.

And I think, Vern, as we all get sort of longer in life too, we realize that some of those slightly more burdensome going against gravity experiences, they're kind of counterproductive and actually getting closer to nature and closer to the things that matter. As you say, you know, the the P&L, the new peace and love on the balance sheet actually becomes the real wealth, doesn't it? That the other things are kind of transient and the cost of them actually can outweigh what we thought was the benefit of them. So one of the benefits of long relationships is it's wonderful to be able to have you again in conversation. So Wernher Harnisch, a pleasure. Thank you for accepting my invitation to come on the show.

And Jim, thank you for taking our conversation this direction. It was unexpected, but a lot of fun.

Good.

Yeah, I know I kind of trapped you on the, let's talk about your book.

And then I was looking about what Vern's doing with GeoVerse.

I was like, no one's really talked about that part of Vern. And yet it's such a valuable part of who you are, but also a valuable part of what we need to talk about in the world as well. And that you are leading that conversation as you have with entrepreneurship, but now marrying some of the merits of entrepreneurship with nature seems like what we all need to be thinking about now is we need to heal and to grow to the next level. So Vern, thank you for accepting my invitation and following me on this conversation as well. I was really delighted you want to do that. So thank you.

Jim, thank you for your maturity and insight to take it this way.

It's absolutely my pleasure.

Well, for everyone that's been listening, Vern Harnish is a legend in his own lifetime and you can find his details, just get in.

But of course, I'll I'll put his links in the show notes.

If you've enjoyed this show, please do leave a review and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And do check out geoversity.org. It looks amazing. And it looks also like the kind of inspiration that we all need going forward.

So thank you so much for joining me, Jim James.

And until we meet again, just encourage you to keep on communicating.