Designing A Transformative Culture: The I Love Marketing Live Virtual Q&A featuring Jason Korman - I Love Marketing Episode #380

You have to start with really understanding a few things. First off, you have to try to really get into touch with and understand the way things really are. Not for you, but for your people. Chances are they're not going to tell you the truth. They may. They'll probably tell you a version of the truth. But you got to figure out, like, how do you really assess the way that your people are really experiencing their work?

I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Do you know what culture is and what it isn't? Learn how to effectively improve your culture, get your team motivated from the inside out, and drive better performance through cultural transformation. In today's episode of the I Love Marketing Podcast. In this episode, Jason Korman, Dean Jackson and Joe Polish share how to align outcomes with less complexity through culture. Jason will explain what culture is and where people get it wrong. And you'll get the ultimate formula to drive your vision home and finally get things done. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network annual event, then apply today for invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com welcome everyone to.

The I Love Marketing Q and A call slash. We're going to have a guest today and what I want to do first because there's a lot of questions that have come in and I believe what Jason Corman, who I'm going to introduce momentarily, will talk about will actually answer some of the questions and give some insight that some of you have. And I think it'll be fun. Even though he's kind of a pessimistic individual, he's very bright. So let me introduce him. Let me read his bio so you at least have an idea of who this dude is. So Jason is the co founder and CEO of Gaping Avoid Culture Design Group based in Miami, Florida. Jason is a serial entrepreneur. Most of his business life was spent in the wine business. At age 24, he created La Crema Winery from the assets of a bankrupt Sonoma county wine producer, eventually farming nearly 200 acres of vineyard in Northern California. Later, Jason went on to create a storm hook. Am I saying that right? By the way, Jason Stormhook.

It's pronounced H O. Ok. Yeah. You got it? Yeah.

Okay, good. Because you know how much of a heavy wine drinker I am not. A South African winery that became an early case study on utilizing social media to create a global brand. For this work, Stormhook was awarded an at age 50amongst a number of other marketing and winemaking awards. After teaming up with Hugh McLeod on Stormhook Marketing, they co founded Gaping Void Culture Design Group. The business was very much based upon work done with Stormhook that demonstrated new powerful ways to execute change. Utilizing culture as a management system. Gaping Void has focused on developing innovative tools to implement human change in organizations. It is all based upon its proprietary culture science method. The company is assembled across a functional team of creatives, consultants, writers, marketers and psychologists all focused on developing new ways to execute and scale human centered change. Gaping Void serves a variety of enterprise, mid market, higher education and government clients including AT&T, Microsoft, Genetech, Zappos, University of Southern California, Yale University, US Air Force and MIT Sloan School amongst many, many more clients. Just to give a real quick history, Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach gave me one of Hugh McLeod's first books, which was not Evil Plans, but Ignore Everybody, which Ignore Everybody.

Yeah.

Amazing book. All of Hugh's books I think are fantastic. The first one is really filled with a lot of profanity, which I find especially endearing and awesome. Then we met going on probably like eight, nine years ago, and you guys came to my very first event that I did in New York where you illustrated the event. That was the year we had Peter Diamandis, arianna Huffington, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Steve Forbes. We had a whole slew of really awesome speakers at that event. And from there we developed just a really great relationship. Everything you see behind me, all of these illustrations, Jason. So I don't call it art is part of a culture wall and they do a lot of cool stuff. I do this as part of a team. I couldn't do this all by myself. Great team to make it happen. I hope you don't do it all by yourself because you'd be like never sleeping because you guys crank out.

But also I don't get.

I don't like, just get. We don't get the insights out of thin air. I mean, we have a great team, you know, help me come up with them.

Yeah. So I just don't want to take all the credit.

All right, well good, good. Well there. Well then I will just say read his books and then beyond that, it's a seed for many other things. So Jason, explain what the hell you guys actually do and then I'll go into some questions related to business and culture.

Okay, so thanks, Joe. Huey, you're wonderful as always. Love you. So what we do is we design and execute cultures within organizations. The insight is that for almost any type of business organization, nonprofit, university, any group of people, that culture, when properly designed and executed, is a management system and can provide the ability to consistently execute to people's highest levels. And there is a. And we can talk about it. We'll get to it eventually, I'm sure, in this discussion. But there is a flywheel effect of consistency and execution that's possible through the designing and execution of culture. We are best known for our visuals, but it's not about the visuals, right? It's which we call semiotics. Joe's. Hugh's a little off message on that. They're semiotics. And we will dig into that, I'm sure, at some point in the next bit of time. But essentially it's about how you design next to culture, scale, and that's what we do.

By the way, though, when you say that word, say it again, the S word. What is that?

Seotic.

How do you expect the average person to remember that and use that as like a way to describe what you do?

Okay, we don't expect the average person to do it. But I'll tell you this. The first time you have a conversation, when we have a conversation with a client or prospective client, they go, what the fuck? And then the third time they're going, oh, semiotics, I get it now, right? And here's the thing. Semiotics are things that we are surrounded by, right? The most famous ones are the Nike swoosh or McDonald's golden arches, right? They are objects that we attach meaning to so that you can spread the idea that is attached to the object. So if I say to you, if you look at a picture of the Nike swoosh, you will think, just do it. You will think of all the things that Nike has already spent billions of dollars embedding in your brain about their brand. So we apply that principle to how you get behaviors to spread in organizations. Just like behind you. Sorry, just to finish the thought, you have a wall, and your wall is not typical of the types of things we do, but you have a wal ideas that are really important to you to a visual. And you could stand up right now and start talking about any one of these things and give us some deep understanding about what ELF means or any of the ideas on the wall. So that's what we do.

This is going to be put out as a podcast. So those of you that are listening to the audio, so you're not seeing it, so just check out Gaping Void. I'll ask you throughout, Jason, where people can follow you guys and what they can watch and all that. When people come into my office, they're always commenting what they say. They're I love your art. Right. And until they understand the deeper meaning behind it, their conversation starters, they're jumping off points and that's what, you know, I mean I even have like on this other have Gary Halbert's quote, you know, any problem in the world can be solved at the right sales letter. One of my favorite quotes, be willing to destroy anything in your life that isn't excellent. So Dean, you have some background here on this. Anything you want to say before we get into some questions?

You know, the brilliance of the semiotics that using a word like that is that it creates something that is counter to somebody saying we need to get some artwork for the office. That that's where it seems because it's so deceptively simple and in the way it looks, there's. There's a science to it. That's what that word implies. And that you're not just buying art for the office. That's you could just go to Staples and buy art for the. Or go online and there's lots of places that you can get posters or art or whatever it is. But only semiotics has a science of a outcome that you're creating with it. What's the intention of getting there? You don't just want to leave that willy nilly when you look at where you know now it's become really culturally accepted knowledge that you can pre suede people to do and think and believe and behave in any way based on the environment that you surround them in. If you read pre suasion by Robert Cialdini's book that, you know, they show again, example after example of experiments with children, especially where they'd have, you know, images in the classroom that would foster certain behaviors in the kids. If there was images that depicted cooperation and people working together when they would knock a pencil off of their confederate's desk there, the number of kids that would go and help the person by picking it up increased when it was they're surrounded by a, you know, for lack of a better word, a culture of cooperation versus a culture of independence where they put images that showed independence and you being the an island kind of thing that the kids that were in those classrooms at a significantly lower rate even thought of helping someone whose pencil fell off. So if you can do that with kids, imagine what semiotics could do for your company. Especially if you're a big organization with Hundreds of employees book a return on semiotics.

Dean, thank you for unpacking that. And there's a couple other things that might be of interest to people. We have a friend, professor at University of North Carolina. Name Sridhar Desai, and Sridhar, social scientist. She did a lot of research in how messages and environments shift behavior. And there's two, and they're both written up in hbr. They're relatively easy to find. In one crazy research study, what she did is she went into Fortune 500 boardroom. She monitored the behavior and language of people in the boardroom for a period of time. She then placed a teddy bear, a stuffed teddy bear, in one of the boardroom seats and then monitored the behavior and language of people once the bear was in the seat. Right. For a period of time. And what she discovered and what she was able to prove was that people act more responsibly, more ethically, and more empathetically right in the presence of something that reminds them of their childhood. She did a similar study in a restaurant. I don't remember the name of it. I think it was in Denver or Colorado Springs, but doesn't matter where. Basically, what you paid for your meal was voluntary, so there was no prescribed pricing. Basically you got served and you paid what you wanted. And she could actually increase the value of the meals that people were willing to pay by the messages in environments. And I'll just make one other point. If you think historically, back to the beginning of time, we have always used environment to impact behavior. Anybody who's been in a cathedral in Europe can, you know, I don't care if you're a religious person or not, you walk into one of the old cathedrals and you can't help but feel something, Right. The fellow we know who's an art historian and philosopher in the uk, Alan de Botten, says that those buildings were designed to remind you of what there is to hate, what there is to love and what there is to fear, Right? And they're designed to actually emote and put you in the context of religiousness in the moment. And what we're doing in many respects is applying sort of age old theory and execution to contemporary business problems, right? But the visual is actually all you see. What's actually interesting, most interesting about it is the thing that happens before the visual is actually made and then how you use it to actually execute change, which is really what we're doing in fact, is a sort of new contemporary version of change management is effectively what we call it culture, though.

Jason what would you say to people that are just very small companies, single person operations, 5 people, 10 people? When it comes to culture, how would you define culture?

Okay, so really simply, and I'll say this, okay, it's social science. There's a zillion theories. You scrape the Internet. HBR has got one, MIT's got one, every school's got one, Ed Shine's got one. They're all wrong and some may be useful, right? So our theory and what we operate against, what's really effective for us is that culture is a collection of beliefs and mindsets and mental models and principles and worldviews that together inform behavior that drive business outcomes. And one of the fallacies of culture, one of the things that's not very well understood about it, is that we all tend to default to core values when we start talking about culture. But core values, and Joe, you will like this, core values are mostly bullshit. And I can explain why if you want, but core values usually turn into platitudes. And there's a very clear reason why, once you unpack it, what culture is as a belief system that's designed to motivate and to give guidance to people in terms of how you want work done and how you want them to be thinking about their responsibilities. I'll just add, when you get it right, what you wind up achieving is really simple. Greater cooperation amongst your team and less complexity. And the organization of chaos. It doesn't really matter whether you've got a few people or you've got thousands, to be doing that ultimately, on the very, very basic level, that's what it achieves.

You just said the organization of chaos. I've thought about this quite a bit. In the constant pursuit of people that go to seminars, read books, try to implement all kinds of different strategies and methodologies and ways to make a business run. On the back wall here, there's one that says, influenced by Dan Sullivan, says other people's bad news, your good news. And so much of money is made. If everyone that is listening to this right now, watching this right now, if you think about in your career, your own company, whatever it is that you're selling, how much of it is actually taking other people's bad news and turning it into good news? If you just take. I love marketing. If people are not good at marketing, they don't know how to do marketing, that's bad news. If they can't get people to buy their stuff, but it's good news if they pop on here and we happen to share something with Them that helps them better think about it and better position and sell what it is they're selling. And so, so much of business is transforming other people's bad news into good news. And the, you know, the, the analogy I use all the time is if you're hungry, that's bad news. If there's a restaurant, that's good news. If you break your ankle, that's bad news. If you can go to a doctor, that's good news. You know, all the way up to someone dies, that's bad news. But if there was no one to help with death, that would be terrible on all levels. Business is continuously dealing with anxieties and problems. Therefore, I think it's impossible to have a business that doesn't have constant problems and challenges. And in this particular case, I zoom in on the word chaos. Most companies, most people that I know that are running businesses, there's some part of it that is so incredibly screwed up. And there's this belief that you're going to walk out on your back porch of your beach house and everything's going to be smooth and awesome and you have money. That's not the case. I think the reason a lot of people just are not entrepreneurs cannot be entrepreneurs is this whatever they're born with that allows some people to deal with the craziness of running a company. Because as an entrepreneur, you're hurling down the freeway at 100 miles an hour while you're also having to change the tires. When you say organizing chaos out of. From your perspective, what is the most important thing that you do when you come in with this knowledge to affect the performance of a company and the people so it functions better. Knowing that there's always going to be shit shows and being able to explain that to people in that way. Hopefully I'm making sense.

The first thing one needs to understand is what is the reality. I would say in every organization there's two realities. There is what I refer to as the pretend reality, which is the reality of the entrepreneur or in a big organization, the C suite. That almost never is the reality of the way things actually are. If you're working for the person or the organization, the first thing you have to understand this is one reason why it's really hard to change culture for yourself, for your own business, is because objectivity and self awareness is a scarce thing. But first one needs to understand where they are. But then the next piece is really understanding what are those beliefs and mindsets and mental models and principles and worldviews that are going to Align your people to better outcomes, to doing their job better, to connecting, to caring more, to showing up every day, being excited. And we have a simple model basically on a culture change model, which really reduces it to. Reduces the change to three principles. First, and we developed this with BJ Fogg, Joe, who runs the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. I know a friend of yours. With bj, what we did was really break apart. We applied his behavior models to culture change. What we saw was that you could reduce culture change to three elements. One is creating what we call a future motivated state. Which answers the question, what's in it for me as an employee? Why should I show up every day being excited and being motivated to be part of this thing? If you're a decent sized organization and you have lots of things going on, you can apply it to the macro culture, the big culture of the company, or you can apply it to individual projects. It doesn't matter. It works the same. You need to establish clear language about the future, where you're going. You need to then visualize it for reasons which we can talk about later. Then the other piece of. There's two other parts. The next part is what we call articulated belief. And the articulated beliefs are the beliefs and mindsets and mental models and principles and worldviews, et cetera, that if people adopt it will align folks and give them information about how you want the work being done. Richard Thaler is a professor at University of Chicago. Won a Nobel Prize a couple of years ago. He says it's not that people are stupid, it's that life is hard and the chaos that you just described is a reflection of the hardness that it is to run a business. It's really difficult. One of the key elements within your tent, within your company is to align your people. So we're all starting at the same point so we all understand where we're going together and what we think are the ways that are going to get us there the best, right? So that belief system, here's the thing, it might be 100 or 200 things. It doesn't matter because no one's memorizing it. There's no test. These are ideas that we understand clearly that are available to people to help them do their work day to day. Okay, so there's a third part of this, right? And this third part speaks to the visual treatments that we do. The only way that your motivation and your belief system work is if you relentlessly socialize those ideas across your organization, day in and day out. The relentless socialization looks like Environment, it looks like PowerPoints, it looks like, oh, all your comms, outward bounds. So whether it's social media, whatever, and projecting these ideas to customers internally, externally, etc. Etc. Perfect examples of this. That's the Zappos model. We've done a bunch of work for Zappos over the years. What Zappos designs is one thing, which is their culture became their brand. If you think about Tony's business or Amazon's business, is that it's really on the face of it. And this was an insight that Hugh had one day when we walked out of there. On the face of it, it's a pretty boring business. Full price retail, a call center, a warehouse. Right. Dull as dishwater. What makes it exciting, what makes it sexy, what differentiates it from everybody else online? The reason why Amazon bought it, which also is an interesting thing we can talk about. The reason why Amazon bought it is because they bought it because it was differentiated from everybody else in retail. And they did it through culture. It was a marketing thing. But the point is you need the language. You need the way to communicate that. And in any business, that's the fundamental, which is all transformation is linguistic. You need the language, you need to be able to articulate it clearly with people, to align your folks internally. And then you need to be able to take them on the journey so they understand where they're going and how they're going to get there.

No, that's great. Do you know, by the way, Tony's now stepping down from Zappos?

I hadn't seen that. When is that effective?

Soon, if not already.

I haven't seen that. Okay, so you want a little factoid on that which is kind of fascinating. Right. They sold Zappos to Amazon in 2008. Right. Rebillion 2 in Amazon stock, the billion 2 is now worth $90 billion. If they haven't sold it.

Wow.

If they haven't sold it.

I don't know which is. You know, it's funny, I actually interviewed him, which everyone can watch it. I think we've even put that up as an I love marketing episode. I did video. You can watch it on YouTube. I did a video interview at the Zappo headquarters with Tony, like right at the time that that was happening. It was pretty fascinating watching all that.

I remember watching that at some point. So, yeah, anyway, so there you go. Awesome.

Dean Jackson. So I don't obviously dominate this whole conversation because I can ask Jason a million questions. Why don't you. Oh, wait, hold on. Before I do that, you're going to say something in a moment. But Gina had private message me where she said, okay, got a request to have Jason repeat what he said about environment shaping memories.

So environment shapes behavior. It wasn't much memories, right. That would probably be a Ben Hardy thing, but it shapes behavior. Architects design for behavior in buildings. They're thinking about what we want people doing in a place. How are we going to construct something that's going to get the best behavior out of people? But architecture aside, if you look at environments that are designed to get people to do things, my favorite example, as I mentioned earlier, are the old cathedrals of Europe. Right. Because I'm not a particularly religious person, Joe. I don't think you're particularly religious person. But you know, if we walk into any of those old cathedrals of Europe, if you walk into, you know, before it burned down, but Notre Dame, you're just overwhelmed by the place, the physicality of it, the environment. And what I mentioned was this fellow, Alan de Patain, who had said that these places were designed to remind us of what there was to love, what there is to hate and what there is to fear. Right. And it's been this way since the beginning of time. Think about the Coliseum. Think about all these old structures. They are designed to make you feel a certain way. And what I'm suggesting is that the same sort of tools can be leveraged to solve hard business problems. And we could dig into a bit more about why that's so if you're interested. And that business problem fundamentally is around alignment. It's around how do we get people thinking in a consistent way and not that you want everybody to think the same way. Definitely you do not want people thinking all the same. But what's the consistency beyond what we're doing together, why it matters and how we get there? Environment is a hugely powerful way of achieving that.

How do you start with someone then if that's the going into it, knowing what's possible or what you've seen, how do you start the process of, of coming up with what's going to be the right thing for the environment? Yeah.

So, okay, so I'll share with you some work we're doing right now. We're currently redesigning. Well, we're actually creating a culture of innovation for the Global Strike Command, which is part of the air force, about 35,000 airmen who handle all the nuclear arms for the Air Force. There's a four star general that runs it. And he has basically said, look, we need to be more innovative. We need to be, to be driving change. We need to stay current with the times. And there's something called the National Defense Strategy, which is the sort of top line document that informs all the dod and they say the same, okay, so here's the tension. You're dealing with nuclear arms, you're dealing with. Also yesterday morning I was on a B2 airplane which costs $2.2 billion. There's only 20 of them in the world. And there's this incredible ecosyste just to support those planes, right? Like unimaginable, right? And those planes have nuclear capabilities and conventional capabilities. But it's really complex and it is a rule for everything. Trust me, like anything, everything, anything would want, anybody would want to do any day, any part of the day, there's a rule for it. Okay, fine, so they want to be more innovative. So what is, you know, how do you become more innovative in that environment? Do you see the tension there? Like, like high risk, hugely expensive equipment, oh, nuclear, etc. Right. Okay, so what do you do? The first thing you do is you go in and see, okay, how are people really doing their work? How do they. It's a bit of ethnography, right? Really observation of the way things actually are working. So here's the insight. Even in an environment where there is a rule for everything, the organization actually runs on norms, not rules. Because how they look at their work, there's no rule for that. What you have to do is through their behavior, understand? This is, oh, the risk adverse environment creates three times as many meanings as there needs to be, or everyone's just scared, scared shitless actually, all the time. So how does that impact their ability to actually execute their work? And what you wind up doing is you observe the behavior, you root cause it back to what's going on in their brains that makes them unable to actually innovate. You then design the types of thinking around the types of innovation that you want people to adopt. You create the language for it and then you build the semiotics and you build the socialization plan and you integrate it into the work environment. We did a project like this at Edwards Air Force Base a few years ago in 90 days, just to give you an example. 90 days. And this is, and I'm not exaggerating, we increased engagement around innovation and they have a metric for it, which doesn't matter for the purposes of this conversation over, well, 1,000 times, and I'm not exaggerating a thousand times in 70 days. And so what it is, is really looking at the Psychology of the organization, understanding where do we need to be? Right. Like what's the beliefs that would actually drive, say, innovation? Finding out where they are and then designing the language that will get people there and then embedding it in the work environment.

What I was going to ask you about with all these different types of companies and organizations you work with. Microsoft, Seth Godin endorses your guys work a lot of small companies, all the Genius Network members, because you've been in Genius Network for a while. What's it like working for the government and for some of these big companies versus working for smaller entrepreneurial companies, who's more of a pain in the ass and more weird?

That's such an interesting question. Okay. It is really frustrating working in a government environment. I mean, you have no idea. I mean it is. Everything is not twice as hard, not three times as hard. It's like five times as hard.

Does that mean you charge them three times as much?

I really can't address that because that's actually 10 times.

Yeah.

We submitted a proposal recently on something and the guy we sent it to said to me, do you not want to do this? I said, no, we want to do it. He said, well, are you just signaling me that it's a real pain in the ass? I said, yeah, that's what we're doing. So, okay, so here's the insight in government work. Here's the paradox. If you're a civilian of the government, which most people are, you cannot get fired. You literally cannot get fired. Oh, but you're still scared shitless. Everybody's scared shitless. And so that's the basic problem dealing with government work.

What are they scared of though?

Okay, lack of psychological safety, prescriptive rule based, tough environment where innovative thinking is not like the good thinkers usually get penalized. It's really interesting and the work is really interesting too. And I'm not. I mean, and that's not to say there aren't. Almost everybody is totally dedicated to the work. They want to help the country. They work hard, they're smart, a lot of very, very smart people. But man, the environment makes it so everyone's scared. And that's one of the things our stakeholders are normally people who know that if they could just tweak that a little bit that they'd get a lot more productivity. You see this in big companies too. You see it less. So unless you've got a really sociopath kind of leader in an entrepreneurial business, you don't see the fear very much. But we've seen it. I mean, it's a thing. So I'd say that's the biggest sort of fundamental difference in the work between entrepreneurs and government. And so fear makes it very hard to get change to stick in most entrepreneurial environments. So here's the thing. What every entrepreneur wants is more influence. They want to make more money. They want to have extra tools to lead their people and they want the hacks. We all want to have hacks to help create, create better environments, to drive better performance. That's what we want, right? Like if we can make that happen, it's like, hell yeah. So with entrepreneurs, it's actually super straightforward. Right. It's like, okay, let's figure this out together. We will give you the tools and we'll make it sustainable. So it's not a one time thing. It's infinite. Right. Which is one of the premises. Culture is an infinite game. It's not a one time act.

So these things are same just as applicable if you're building a community of your clients or members or anything, as if it were employees. A lot of people don't have hundreds of employees, but we've all got communities of hundreds or thousands of people.

Yeah. I would argue yes. And so language and ways to spread those ideas and I'll make a point which I think everybody, we can all relate to. So if you think about famous entrepreneurs these days, there's I think from my perspective, one person who is communicating, one famous entrepreneur who's communicating better than everybody else. Right. Who would you say that is from your perspective? Elon. Elon.

Yeah, just say Elon Musk.

Yeah. So, okay, so Elon Musk, he's taking people to Mars. He's creating a world without gasoline powered cars. He is going to send trains going through tunnels at 600 miles an hour. Right, okay. Like those, we talked about motivation earlier. Right. That models which is motivation and articulated beliefs and socialization. So he's really good at articulating that future. But it just so happens before him, Steve Jobs was really great at it too. Right. And before Steve, Bill gates in the 80s was talking about a computer in every desk computer in every home when there were no laptops. Right. There were no PCs. But before them it was Henry Ford who in 1908 said, I will create a car that every man with a job can use and can afford to own and they will be able to fix it themselves. It will give them freedom to go and do whatever they want. Right. So 1908. So here's the crazy thing about that. In 1908, 1% of American households had electricity and plumbing. So here comes along this dude that no one ever heard of. He says, I'm going to give you, if you got a job, you're going to get a car and you're going to be able to go anywhere you want. I would argue that's the equivalent of saying, we're going to Mars now. Right? And so here's the thing, what all these guys have in common and scores of others, right? If you look at the Internet and you scrape it for quotes and stuff, you'll say, well, of course these people are quoted because they got famous and they were, you know, they're well known, right? But the opposite is actually true. They became successful and famous not because, you know, well, specifically because they were great communicators. They were able to get people to rally behind their causes, whether it was creating a Model T or whether it's going to Mars. They've done an amazing job at being able to express the motivation for people and then, oh, what they believe in, that will get us there. Call it marketing. It's fundamentally the creation and design of culture as well. Same principle, but the ability to articulate that, spread it and embed it in a community is the key, right? Doesn't matter what you're doing, internal or external.

You know, you've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. I mean you've, you've worked with a lot of very influential, well known people. I've had two meetings with Elon Musk at SpaceX, thanks to Peter Diamandis setting those up. And you know, he's, he's a very quirky, weird, awkward dude and brilliant, as are many of these people. Like a lot of the artists you work with, very, very quirky. So what strikes you as, as the weirdness factor necessary for extreme forms of creativity and building? Some of these things. I've never met what I would consider anyone that even remotely resembles a normal person that has done some of these things.

Okay. Years ago we did a project at MIT Media Labs for Volkswagen with a buddy of ours who's actually based in Milan. It was a week long thing for the CEOs, CMOs and chair chief engineers from. They own Porsche, they own Audi, they own Bentley, all their brands. If you think about this, we do a lot of work in what I would refer to as engineering cultures, scientific cultures. So the point of that week was to get the marketing guys and the engineering guys to get along, which never really happened. I mean, they pretended, but it didn't really happen. But anyway, here's the point. The point is that there is a guy who came in who was a professor at Harvard and he did a talk which had a really profound impact on me, where he talked about what he referred to as a slice of genius. He said, in any company as a leader, your job in many ways is to figure out what is the slice of genius that a particular person can occupy within your system and designed to bring the best of them out so they can do the highest value work. I think that a lot of creative geniuses, if you will, are dismissed as too far on the edge or not capable or just too hard to manage and then either they are pushed out, most often pushed out or otherwise relegated to some place where they actually can't do their best work. I think as entrepreneurs, one of the privileges we have is to actually look at somebody who's amazing at one thing and maybe a tiny thing and then be able to say, how do we create an environment where they can do their best work? Right? And I would say in our business and you know, and it's, you know, we do business in giant companies because we can solve big problems, but we're a small business, right. I would say that our entire team is based on that principle, right? Meaning no one's asked to do stuff that they're really not that good that although for some people. So like Jeff's on the call. Jeff Shub, who's. Okay, so Jeff's a physician, right? He's a doctor. He graduated medical school six years ago, came to work for us the day he graduated because he decided he didn't want to be a doctor. Right. And Jeff, he left us in a, you know, for a couple of years in between because he lost his brain a little bit, but whatever came back. But you know, but he's been on a really very much on a journey to discover like where's his place and what does he do. And I'd say over the last year, right, he's really done an amazing job at becoming a fantastic facilitator as somebody who's able to get people in organizations to socialize the new norms that we create to get people to connect in new ways. Right. And so, okay, so it took a long time, but now in many ways he's on his way to being his best. Right? And we're all working processes, especially me. But I think that the opportunity entrepreneurs is really to help people self actualize to become better. And so the crazy creatives from where we sit are really just massive Opportunities to be able to create really differentiating approaches to solving problems and building a business. So, I don't know, does that make sense, Joe?

Yeah, no, totally. Totally. Well, let me ask you, what actions would you recommend everyone here take in order to create a stronger, more effective culture? Like, what do you.

You have to start with really understanding a few things. First off, you have to try to really get into touch with and understand the way things really are. Not for you, but for your people. And chances are they're not going to tell you the truth. They may. They'll probably tell you a version of the truth. But you got to figure out how do you really assess the way that your people are really experiencing their work? That's number one. And you can try to do. Do it through assessments. You can get a free assessment on SurveyMonkey and it could tell you something. They're not that useful. One of the insights is in our world, every big organization is totally fixated on assessments, collecting data in the belief that all that matters is data. Data is the key to everything. And that when it comes to understanding people, data is actually not that useful. And because people will how they feel about something, but they most often don't even know why they feel the way they feel. So, Joe, have you ever woken up in the morning and just felt kind of crappy about something and gone through a few hours and gone. I don't even know why I'm pissed off, but I'm just fucking pissed off. Has that ever happened to you?

Oh, yeah, it happened today because I knew I'd be doing this with you today. And I was like, shit, man, I have to talk to Jason. He gives out this weird edit. And even though you look good on paper, from a chemistry standpoint, like, if you're dating someone, it's just a weird chemistry thing. So I totally get what you're saying.

Yeah, Those moments, the feeling is mutual. And I love you too.

So I have. Yeah, absolutely.

So here's the thing, right? So you could walk around for four or five hours feeling really unhappy and not even being, you know, come to terms with why. And occasionally. And this happens to all of us, right? Over time, you get a little bit older and you get in terms of. You come to terms with your emotions and you kind of go, okay, I need to sit down and figure out what the fuck is pissing me off, right? But if you think about it, if you got people working for you and you send out an assessment and you're just asking them about how they feel about their work or how they feel about these different things. Right. They don't even know why. In many cases they feel the way they feel. They just do. Right. So you get this data back and basically the data, yes, it tells you how they're feeling at the moment, but you need to understand why. And getting there is actually not that easy. Right. So that ethnography I mentioned earlier, really through observation, is how you get there eventually. But as the owner of a company, you can't really observe. You gotta have somebody else to it for you. But anyway, so first you have to observe, secondly, and understand what the heck's going on. Secondly, you have to think deeply about. And this is not something you do just by yourself, but you do with some of your folks. What are the things that we need to be thinking about, believing in mental models, mindsets that will help us do better work, that will be useful to us in executing our mission, whatever the work is. And you collect those over time, you collect those over time. What's going to make us more agile, what's going to make us be better for our customers, all those things. And you collect them and you collect and you turn them into aphorisms, you turn them into what we would refer to as memetics. We can talk a bit about memetics and how it goes into semiotics, but there's a science of memetics. Richard Dawkins, who's an evolutionary biologist in the UK, wrote a book in the late 70s, early 80s about mimetics. And basically, basically his theory is that people are hardwired to share ideas and for ideas to spread just the way that genes spread person to person. Basically, Joe, you're in a memetic business. Your job is to get knowledge someplace and share that knowledge with people. And you get a benefit from sharing that knowledge. A obviously they pay you, but baby, you get to watch that knowledge move through the community and it came from you. And there's a real gratifying aspect to that. Dawkins basically developed memetic theory. The term memes comes from that. When you see Internet memes, if you see Grumpy Cat, which is. Grumpy Cat's no longer with us. But when Grumpy Cat was around sharing, Grumpy Cat was actually mimedics. It was sharing the idea to spread through communities. What you want to do in your business is you want to create the idea, the language, and then you want to turn them into memetics, which is really crafting the language in a way where people can repeat it Ideally, you want to attach those memetics to semiotics, to visuals, and then you want to use them to spread. And that's how you do it. Okay, so here's the other thing. You never stop doing it. Once you stop doing it, it dies, right? So you need to continue to do it to spread the ideas.

And what Joe presented about chaos and.

Entrepreneurship, that's like a perfect example of a mental model that will define behavior. Just getting comfortable with chaos and continuing to push forward. And so then how do you illustrate.

That the whole point of what you just said, getting comfortable with chaos and still pushing forward. I've been interviewed a bazillion times and a lot of us ask the same questions or get asked the same questions. How would you define success and that sort of stuff? It's always kind of funny to me where I think if anything, and again, these are just my opinions, treat it like a 12 step group, take what you like and leave the rest, right? I don't think the treadmill of shit ever ends in business. As a matter of fact, in many cases it accelerates in the middle of what's going on right now in the world. With the pandemic, with coronavirus, with political battles and everything else going on, what changes is just the ability to navigate it and deal with it and tolerate it and be affected by it. And I think a lot of people that I know as successful simply what would have killed me psychologically when I first started in business, like shit I deal with by nine in the morning every single day now, right? And so part of it is being able to handle that chaos and ride it like a wave, as if you get more skilled at surfing.

So I think the chaos thing is really about acceptance of ambiguity. I mean, that's how they think about it in bigger companies, right? There isn't clarity. Things are random and it makes everybody, all of us, really uncomfortable. But if we accept that the world is random and that the world is chaotic and that we have sort of models in our brain as to how we want to deal with that chaos, then whatever comes along, right? And sometimes you find yourself in a business, and I've been there, where things are so fucked up that every day is just the level of chaos, the level of insanity is just too high, right? That's a different problem. But the regular chaos that your customers and clients and employees are bringing to you should be handleable if you have the systems in place to deal with it. I think one of the insights that we developed years ago was this idea that all of business has this fundamental belief which is completely flawed, and I refer to it often as the big lie. The big lie is the only thing that matters in business is data. Big data. Call it whatever you want. It's the reason why all those workforce assessments are done all the time, and that all that matters is information, data, etc. And it's true, okay? It's true if you're an engineer with your engineering. It's true if you're a physicist, if you're a chemist, that data is really important when it comes to people. It's total bullshit when it comes to people. Actually, the only thing that really matters, or 80, 90% of what matters, is emotions. And the problem is, when you start talking about emotions in business, people get very, very uncomfortable because they simply do not know what to do and they're not trained for it. I think tracking back to what culture is for culture is really about how we create an environment that feeds people's emotions in a way that matters to them, that makes them care a bit more and makes them want to do a better job. And the fact that it's designable is really a new idea. So if you want to reduce chaos, just going back to your chaos question, what you have to do is create the emotional environment for your people and your customers and all your stakeholders that aligns them to where you want to go. So I see this culture is values. Culture is not values, Amber.

Why do you have to be so hurtful about it, though, Jason?

That's one of the other big lies. Okay? So, Amber, where are you? Can we have a conversation? Hello? Okay, so here's the thing. If you. You look on the. You scrape the Internet for the most popular core values, right? You will get a list, and the list will look something like. And I have a slide on it, which I could call up if anyone's interested, but it'll look like. It'll look at things like diversity, inclusion, innovation, customers, integrity, honesty. Okay? There's a list of 30 or 40 that some of which, or one or more of which appear in almost every. Every set of core value statements, right? And here's the problem. If people knew how to do those things, they would be doing them, but they don't know. So by saying they're a core value, and that's what we have to be doing, I'll go back to that Richard Thaler quote. It's not that people are stupid. It's that life is hard, right? So telling people that they need to adopt these values gives people no indication of how to do it, right? So one example, we spend all our time working on innovation. Innovation is a core value from lots and lots and lots of. Lots of companies, right? But they can't seem to do it. And I'll tell you why. The reason is that typical core values are complex outcomes, right? And attaching a single word or phrase to the idea, right, is a reductive exercise. And a reductive exercise means that you take a complex idea, you attach a really simple word to it or phrase to it, and then you expect that people will understand what it takes. Takes. And the point is that those core values are outcomes. And the way that you get people to actually deliver those ideas is through a belief system that actually informs people how to do it. So core values is really something that can happen way down the road, but it's of no significance, because what we really need to know is what are the beliefs and mindsets and mental models and principles that we value as a group of people. And one of the outcomes might be innovation or it might be customer, you know, customer centricity or might be whatever, right? But stating a core value is not what it's about. It's about the thinking that goes into how we get there, and that's what's useful, and that's what helps people do it. So a statement of destination is not a replacement for the roadmap. And that's to quote Keith Cunningham. Joe.

Yeah, so I'm going to do this match you another question. Then I'd like you to participate in the Q and A with some of the questions that people have just on all kinds of random things related to their business. You know, you've been in Genius Network for a while. You've done a lot of work with Genius Network members. And I think what you guys do at Gaping Void is pretty awesome and pretty profound. And rarely does anyone ever fully understand it just by hearing it being talked about, right? And there's a lot of things that you guys do, and you actually are one of the smartest people that I know, and you do some amazing cool. So what sort of tools does Gaping Void create to really help people affect these organizational changes? And simply, I think you actually do help because it may sound complex to some people what you're talking about, but you actually do help create a lot of elf easy, lucrative and fun. And I've seen you take people's abilities to communicate what it is they do to levels that no person that's teaching them how to do PowerPoints or anything like that does you. You create a lot of simplicity out of the complexity and chaos that exists in a lot of people's businesses. What are some of the tools that you guys use and do and that people can actually get from you?

So a few things. First off, I mentioned earlier these zoom backgrounds, okay? So here's the thing. In a in person environment, you have the opportunity of signaling people a thousand different ways, right? You could do it through a fancy one watch. You can do it through a fancy suit, through your shoes, right? You could do it, you know, through. Through anything, you know, a briefcase or, you know, or, you know, fashion, right. In a remote environment. That list is really limited, right? And so when it comes to showing up in virtual meetings, this idea that Dean alluded to of persuasion or how do you inform conversations, right. Is really, you know, one of the few tools you have to show up differently, right? So we set up something and we saw in. We have a morning huddle, which Lara, I don't know if Lara's on the call or not. I think she was at one point, which we call the morning cuddle that gave me Floyd because, you know, because we have to be different. Anyway, so the morning cuddle, right, Everybody started just to use these things, right? And we saw it was just organic and we saw that actually it was changing the conversation. And we went, holy smokes, we don't need. We weren't. And this was March. It was at the beginning of. I mean, we did it every morning. But it wasn't until Covid that we really started to think about it. And we thought, oh my God, you actually can inform a conversation just by putting a different background up. So we set up a site which is gaping void virtual backgrounds, they're cheap as they're 25 bucks. And you could get a collection of ideas that you can use to inform your employees or your clients or whoever you are on with. And you could be really sneaky about it and be subliminal and all that, or you can do stuff like, okay, so here's something that I'm might use, right? And this is not perfectly designed. So I might, you know, like as we, you know, as we have a close a deal with a prospective client, okay, what do we want our relationship to be right now the question is, how else are you really going to have that conversation with somebody? You put that up and they go, that's interesting. And then you're in there, right? You're in there having the conversation. So the point is though, that informing, you know, meetings that you have and the ideas you want to spread is really interesting. This one's for you. You, Joe, just so you know.

Doublemaker Lane. Yeah. Awesome.

You're welcome. So number one. All right, so just simple, cheap virtual backgrounds. One two is we've done a bunch of these for Genius Network folks, is cultural walls. And culture walls can be simple or they, you know, or there's lots of ways to achieve it. But the idea is you create your belief system. You take the top 20 or 30 ideas and we've done culture walls that are biggest. I think for Dave berg We did one one that was 40 or 50, I don't remember tiles. Obviously you have a big one, but typically the 20 tiles. We'll work with you to determine what's the belief system you want to have that's Most useful, top 20 ideas, and then build a wall, install it. You get to use it as a tool for doing standups and huddles and all that. But also you can get the images digitally. So you can do this in virtual environments, environments, push them out in social media, all that. That's really powerful as well and relatively simple. We do full on sort of immersive environments. We did something recently for Jody Williamson in Chicago and he's got a training business where we do a wall. But also we thought about his clients coming through all day long for training. How do we want to craft an experience so that when people walk into the office, what do they see? And then what's the experience that you can take them as you go down the hallways? We did a version of that for Babs and Dan as a strategic coach basically was really Dan's 10 really core ideas about having a successful life or for lifetime growth. But it depends. So the question is, what's important to you? What are the ideas that you want to literally tattoo into people's brains? And do you want to create an environment to do that and would it be useful and in a remote environment. So here's the thing. Everyone's saying to us, how do you create culture in a remote environment? And the answer is the same way you do it in an in person environment. You need the language, you need a way to spread it, and then you embed it into the interactions you have.

Really simple, Dean, anything you want to say or ask before we go into some Q and A.

And that's how time travel is possible. That's how it happens right there. I was thinking, as you're going, it can even be an audience of one. I mean, you imagine the same things doing it for Your own personal environment that you're trying to share shape with your own army of the people, the voices in your head. It's all the same process.

You know one thing I want to mention, too, Jason. So I'm taking a sabbatical next year. So I'm going to take the entire year off, and I'm going to immerse myself in art and music and health and different things. And, you know, the lot of the recovery work that I do for myself and others, I'm going to let Genius Network be run by its members and by my very awesome team that we've put together. It's going to be a weird experiment. Things could blow up. Things could get better. I hope they get better. It's a real testament to see what I've built. If things actually get better when I'm gone for a year, and when I'm done with that, I actually want to sit down with you and take all the lessons and insights and perspectives and things I've learned, and I actually want to have you guys illustrate how to actually better take care of yourself. Because most of the entrepreneurs I know, including many that are influencers and making money, I mean, there's not a lot of people I would want their lives, even the ones that have tons of money. I mean, it's just. It's fucking crazy when I look at how some people live their lives. And I know that you guys have the ability to create context around almost anything. I mean, I've seen you communicate and explain things that other people simply can't, cannot communicate very well. And when you're so close to it, it's that whole saying, you know, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar. And, you know, Dean Jackson has that great line, a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. And when it comes to marketing, marketing is, you know, what you say and who you say it to. It's the story that you tell, it's how you tell it. It's not just the content, it's the context. It's not just the communication. It's the comprehension. And so part of it is I'm creatively destroying my life in a lot of ways. I'm going to basically have an identity death. As much as I can. I want to dismantle every part of my ego that I think is important, that isn't important. And I want to actually become a happier person with less shit on my plate, because I'm just buried in stuff. Even though many parts of My business are elf. There's many parts that are not. And I want to actually create a whole story around that and actually let people know that you can walk away from a lot of shit when you think you can't. And overcoming addiction was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do in my life. So I think taking a sabbatical is not going to be that hard. But I also know I'm going to have withdrawals because, you know, workaholism is a respectable addiction. So, anyway, the reason I bring this.

Up right now, Sullivan's idea of the immigrant mind where, you know, all the immigrants, you're leaving everything behind. You get to choose what's coming with you on the new journey. And that's the. That's really what you get to do with the sabbatical is it's the equivalent of that, you know, journey across the sea in a ship that most of the early immigrants took to get here. You know, symbolically, you're doing the same thing. It's interesting.

And here's the thing, too. So you take, like, my relationship with Dean Jackson. You know, we've known each other 25 years, so Dean will continue with I love marketing, and we'll have a lot of genius network members that will be part of the I love marketing thing. And all of the stuff that's being done right now, all of that is going to continue. And, you know, I've got to figure out at what point, because I'm probably going to pop in once or twice in a year period. But that's it. I mean, I'm not going to do a like, oh, let me act like I'm taking a sabbatical, but I'm really working, living a double life behind. I mean, I literally cannot do that because that would. What that would even would do for me would be terrible. So the reason I'm bringing this up, though, is that I know a year after that happens that it's going to be a whole different. Like, I will have created a whole different world. And I'm going to want to be able to, you know, there'll be a culture within all of that. There's going to be a story within all of that. And I want to be able to take what I'm saying and now and say, okay, here's where I was and here's what I've learned. Because I would love more than anything for, you know, to be whatever catalyst that we can be with what we're doing here to truly help, you know, change people's lives in good ways and to be the first domino sort of effect. And so the last thing I want to ask you out of all the stuff you've seen, all the companies that you help, what are some of the most important lessons you've learned over your life around change, change, getting results and success? That would be well served to share here before we just kind of end this portion of the conversation with you.

So I think it was funny at the beginning Hugh mentioned Rory Sutherland. And Rory's new book is a great book. And he talks about this idea that there's logic and psychologic and, and that people generally work off of or on psychological terms, not logical terms. Danny Kahneman, who's a Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, really started behavioral economics. He likes to say that thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats. We'll do it if we have to, but we don't like to, right. And so I think this sort of realization that we are mostly on autopilot and we're often and mostly not thinking too hard or think too clearly. Once you understand that and you watch the events of the world unfold, it actually puts things in a different light. Two examples I can give recently of current events where it's obvious what's going on. So the shooting the other day in Wisconsin of the fellow as he was getting into his car, those cops are on autopilot. They were not thinking right. It was obvious. You watch the video, they weren't thinking right. If you look at some of the police action, that one up in, I think Buffalo or Albany, where there was a cop that pushed the old guy backwards, he fell and cracked his head open. I don't know if anybody saw that, but it was probably four months ago, three months ago. You watch the cop, he's not thinking right and he's on autopilot. And I think that a lot of our worst behavior is really we're on autopilot in Danny Kahneman's model, thinking fast. And so the same thing applies at work. Same thing applies. We're just doing. And our brains are effective and we're efficient as humans because we're able to do that. But that's a two way street. So that emotion, really emotional piece of work is really, I think, something that we have to be more thoughtful about. And we pretend like it doesn't matter, but it actually matters. Another piece of is that people crave. We really crave meaning and purpose at work. And the successful businesses out there, the successful organizations of all types, are really good at Connecting people to those ideas that really get them showing up every day going, hell, yeah. As Derek Sivers would say. Right. Like, really wanting to be part of what they're doing. And you know, our mutual friend, Graham Weston, we once did a piece for him which we grabbed a quote which was, people want to be you. Members of a winning team on an inspiring mission. Honestly, one of the most concise sort of representations of the human condition. That's what we all want. Whether it's our own business or whether we're working for somebody or for a client. That's what we want. I think that. And there's a related idea, which is that we believe that information and knowledge changes behavior. And it doesn't. I'll clearly illustrate that. And this is from a buddy of ours, Mark Earls is in the uk, social scientist. And you see, if information and knowledge really drove behavior, then we wouldn't have addiction, Joe. There'd be no obesity, there'd be no sort of antisocial behavior, because we all know better. But knowing better doesn't equate to different behavior. If you're thinking about changing people's behavior, it's never going to be about information and knowledge. We've spent. And this is our mutual friend Barbara Annis has this thing she talks about where, when it comes to diversity and inclusion training, there's $8 billion spent a year by US businesses, $240 billion over the last 30 years. And it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed the thing, because you can't train people for these things. You can't train people to be more inclusive or diverse. You've got to create a culture, an environment that will drive that kind of behavior. So I could go on, but you get the idea. It's really all about the emotional reality of what it's like to be human and understanding that it doesn't just stay at home, it carries itself out every day at work. As great leaders, we need to acknowledge that and really think deeply about what that means for us and our people and our customers. There you go. I hope that's useful.

Joe, it's Jeff Madoff here.

Hey, Jeff, how are you?

Hi. So what I found fascinating about what you were saying is, and it was very, very interesting, is that it all ties back to religion. And religion becomes the template for creating culture, for visually communicating, whether it's a crucifix or a Star of David or the crescent mo with a sar. And that even in business, like at Apple, for instance, the brands have evangelists. So it even Takes on religious nomenclature. There is a destination, that's heaven, where good behavior is rewarded. And of course, nobody's ever come back to tell us whether it is or not, but that's what it is. And there's a constant visual consensus, consistency in the architecture and with the symbols that are used. And religion feeds the emotions. And the origins of religion was to reduce chaos and fear by imposing an order on it. So that preamble makes me wonder if, in what you're doing, do you see religion as a template for it? Because I teach creating brands, and I use actually Christianity. Christianity as an example. And it has nothing to do for or against religion. It has to do with the observation of the phenomenon and the psychological effect on people to create followers.

Great insight. And I would say, yes, it's a religious model.

That long question, got that short answer. How'd I do that?

Also, sorry, I was muted too. Jason, give out information, how people actually reach you.

Okay, so the amazingly great thing about having a really strange company name is that when you Google Google us, you will only find us, I promise. Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 15. Gaping void, G, A, P, I, N, G, V, O, I, D. And if you spell it in two words, which is not how it's spelled, you'll still come up with us. You probably. If you did it as three words, you'd probably get it too. I don't know what those three words would be, but anyway, so gapingvoid.com, that's how to find us. I'm Jason@gapingvoid, or culture@gapingvoid. And we will get it. So there you go. Joe.

Joe.

So, Jeff, I didn't mean to be short in the response, but yes is the answer. And I think. Okay. And I think the insight there, and I don't want to offend anybody. All right, so this is not a religious discussion, really, but religions were designed to solve some human needs. I would suggest businesses can be designed to solve similar kinds of needs. And in a world where. Where lots of people are becoming less religious, they need it and they want.

It well, because there's a perception of order among the chaos. So there's a safe space, so to speak. And that safe space is also what creates a business that attracts people. If you know it's gonna work, if you know what's gonna work for. Even though if that's a perception, you want it to work. So that connection, emotion is also what creates a successful brand and business.

Yeah. And I would argue there's something also connected to that which is meaning.

Absolutely.

And, you know, Hugh did a cartoon in 2004, right. When I met him, a couple months before I met him. And the cartoon and the image was. The market for something to believe in is infinite. And it's that image. And that idea is as strong today as it was, you know, 15, 16 years ago. Like, that idea, right. Is an idea that if you can actually activate it. Right. You do whatever you want, doesn't matter. Right. You could even build a new religion, Scientology 2.0. And I don't need a psychologist or on the call, but. Yes, well.

Well, because you what any organization, including a business, can do, the worst thing they can do is erode trust. And because trust has been eroded in so many institutions and businesses, that's why that belief has gone so far down. So who do you believe in, who do you trust? And that becomes a major thing in business. You buy something, you want it to be good.

By the way, Jeff, if you were to get a physical fight with Jason, you think he could take him?

Of course he could.

I mean, what do you think? Are you kind of scrappy?

I wouldn't want to fight Jason, but the mental wrestling is a much better exercise and more fruitful.

Is there anything you'd like to leave that we didn't cover that you would have liked to have shared?

Honestly, we could have done four hours. I mean, this is an endlessly fascinating subject for me, and I think for a lot of us, because it feels hard, amorphous, but when you reduce it down to it's fundamental, it starts to make perfect sense. Right. And so I think that exercise of going through that process, I think is liberating for all of us. And so I'd be delighted if you want to do this again or want to do something with the questions. I would love to do it, but I just hope it was useful for everybody and that we all sort of came away feeling okay with at least an insight or two that's fresh and different. So that's it.

Awesome. Thank you, and have safe travels, man.

Appreciate it. Bye, everybody.

Yeah, thanks, Jason.

And by the way, we've got interviews with Jason and things with Hugh that are on the Genius Network podcast. You can do searches for them online. I'm sure Gina's already posted a few things, so. Yeah, thank you. And I've had a couple messages asking when I'm going to take my sabbatical. It actually starts in January, so we've got a couple of more Genius Network meetings. We're going to have our Genius Network End event, which is November 6th, 7th and 8th. Many of you that are watching right now are Genius Network members. So you're going to be there. Those of you are not. If you're interested in that, I'll ask Gina. It's geniusnetworkevents.com it's going to be a very interesting event we're doing this year. I'm creating something unlike anything we've ever done before. The event is not going to be built around speakers. It's going to be built around discussion based on the dangers, opportunities, and strengths of our clients and what they most need solved with what's going on in the world and things like that. So a DOS conversation is something that Dan Sullivan created. So we're gonna be doing a lot of DOS stuff. Dean Jackson is going to be heading up a lot of things along with many of our members. And it's pretty cool. Everyone I've spoken with in Genius Network is like, yep, we'll continue to pay to be a member and we will help with whatever you want. So it's pretty cool. I mean, it's a testamen to having curated a group of givers and people that are awesome and just want to help and have zero problem whatsoever of investing in being in a connection network, which is really what I try to do with Genius Network. It's not just a mastermind, it's a connection network. The last thing that Jason had before he left, the last illustration he had, I'm trying not to say Art said, no connection, no power. And I thought that was pretty cool. So that's what we all need. We all need connection. So, Dean, you ready? First question. You're going to answer it. We're going to do these quickly. We can get through a few of them. So after strategic, this from Eric Atkins, after Strategic Coach or Genius Network, what's the single best thing you ever did for your business? Or if there was just one thing you wish you could make every entrepreneur understand, because if they did, it would just make their whole life better, what would it be?

So I know what is for me is I think that you, and you kind of alluded to it when you were talking about the whole purpose of this sabbatical is get crystal clear on what you want your life to be first. That's the number one thing. Because then everything else can come around that, you know, like, that's. That was one of the most impactful things that I ever did, was get crystal clear on how I know I'm being successful. And we've talked about That a lot. But that idea for 21 years ago now, I did that and it's been such a guide post and for a lot of people it's confusing. It's confusing to people where Joe, you and I have jokes about the things like you look at it as a lack of ambition or a lack of something. And I was looking at it as crystal clarity on what my life is. And you said something about there's a lot of these people that you know, that you wouldn't want to switch lives with for anything. Like I look at, I was watching Mark Zuckerberg being grilled in the Senate hearings on or the congressional hearings or whatever it is on the privacy stuff that they were going through. And I thought to myself, there's probably, there's not a minute of that guy's life that I would, would want to have in my life. And it's just a thing that when you get to a point that you've sort of, let's call it won the money game when you win and by called winning the money game by being at a point where you're not doing things because of money, that you're not doing them for money, you get this thing now to really, unless you're clear on what your life is really about, there's always this never ending temptation to just keep running.

You know, more recently, I'm noticing more than ever is people like, I'm obsessed with this, be obsessed with success and obsession. Obsessed is just a code word for addiction. Like I'm completely out of thinking control. But if there's one single thing that I did in business, it wouldn't even be a business strategy. It would simply be taking care of, of health. Like it's literally taking care of your mental and physical health. It's doing recovery work, you know, because I was, you know, I became a millionaire and was littered with addictions, you know, and that's, that's not fun either. And it's funny. Peter Diamandis, he'll have lunch with, you know, Jeff Bezos, you know, once it, once a year though at least they'll do and sit down and have lunch, lunch. And there's just stories of how insane the life is now. Granted, I mean, you know, I'm not here to make a statement like whatever someone's into, it's their life. You do whatever the hell you want. If someone loves, you know, craziness, more power to you, you know, and, you know, I'm all for people doing whatever it is they want to do as long as it's, you know, not one.

Of the funniest things of that. And everybody's different, Right? Like, so I was playing golf with Tony Robbins when. Day. And this was in. In January. And we were talking, and we're talking about, I know I'm being successful when. And I was, you know, I wake up every day and ask, what would I like to do today? And he just looked at me, said, dude, I don't have one of those days till March. Like, every minute of his day is mapped out to the minute he rolls six people deep at all times. With the assistant. With the assistant. And the whole thing and agendas and every minute is maximized.

Oh, yeah. I have a friend that knows Jeff Bezos, and he said that the last time he talked with him, he said he's trying to maximize how quickly he can brush his teeth.

Yeah.

How busy he is. Right. And it's like, you know, but what the hell? I mean, so there's this Einstein letter, this guy holding it up. It's in German. It's written in German, so I don't expect you to read that, but it's stationary. This was auctioned off. I actually opened up a genius network meeting a couple years ago, and this was where it says, these autograph notes in which Einstein offered his thoughts on how to live a happy and fulfilling life. Sold at a Jerusalem auction house for a combined 1.8 million. And this one particular note, the one I just showed you the picture of, it sold for $1.56 million. One and a half million dollars. The letter had originally been estimated to sell for between 5,000 and 8,000. And here's what Einstein wrote on that stationary in German that the person that bought this paid one and a half million dollars for. So I was like, this is the. This was a million and a half dollars, this quote. And I'm now starting to realize the importance of this as I'm preparing for my sabbatical. He said, a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success. Success combined with constant restlessness. A common, modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness. And, you know, yesterday I got back from Lake Powell. I spent three and a half days, four nights actually, on a houseboat with Joel Weldon, who was our guest, a previous guest on I Love marketing. If you've not heard or listened to that episode, go listen to it, because it's great. And Joel, he's 78 years old. He'll be 79 in a few months. This guy, the Happiness that he has. He just had heart surgery three months ago, less than three months ago. And he's literally sky skiing, water skiing, fricking jumping waves on jet skis. I mean, he's docking the. Like, the guy can do everything on this lake. And it's fascinating to me. And he's so damn happy, and he's so connected. And it was just. And I had no Internet connection for three and a half days. Like, nothing. No texts, nothing. And I'm in the middle of a lot of stuff going on that I have to prepare for right now. And it just gave me a taste of, like, man, you just really need to turn this shit off. And you need to. To go inside and you need to quiet. You know, yourself, whatever that is. You know, some people, that's an activity. Other people, it's in meditation. I'm not trying to.

I don't know how profound this is, but a big, like, thing for me is when you realize that life happens in real time. And that's all you can do, right? Is there's only. It's only happening now. You can have this big list of all these things to do, but the reality is you can only do what you're doing right now. And that's really a perspective changer when you kind of realize that you've really got 16 waking hours today to do whatever it is. And you're going to either to the extent that the things that you have to do take more. We had a realtor client one time who just said to me, she wakes up, goes to bed in tears, because at the end of the day, her to do list has grown instead of shrunk, and you feel this overwhelming pressure of more and more and more to do. And I think a good metaphor. I've always loved metaphors. But when I was really thinking about this, I know I'm being successful. When I do is the life metaphor. I think that works for me. What I'm really looking for is to be an artist with a $50,000 a month trust fund. That's kind of the mental model that you want to have, where you can pursue and chase whims and do whatever you want without necessarily the need for what you're doing to be commercially viable, or that you feel the pressure to do something for the money. You do it for the joy and the inspiration of what you want to do.

All right, next question. I'm in the process of writing a book. This is from Rick Dumas. I'm in the process of writing a book, mostly from My experience in the automotive business and would like to use this to help other like minded businesses. So to change that, think of yourself. You are in the process of writing a book documenting something in the whatever business or life situation you're in. Could be music, whatever, and would like to use this to help other like minded businesses. So he obviously wants to target people in that business with the skills and so he'd like help in that area. So Dean, what advice would you give other than listen to the episode we did on books, right?

Yeah, well, I mean, but books. But even that, that's just a tool. What he's really talking about is my favorite power move, which is syndication. And that's been the magic formula to any wealth that I've built has come on the back of syndication. And that's from when you crack a code, when you create an algorithm that works for a particular business to then syndicate that solution to all kinds of other people. Because in local businesses of that a car dealership or a real estate agents is how I've done a lot of it. But financial advisors, franchise operations, all these things where when you can solve the puzzle once, just like Joe did with carpet cleaners, that what you solve for your own carpet cleaning business becomes the foundation for your syndication empire to show other people how to do it and get the same results. It's so it's what drives the whole franchise model which has become the most successful business story of the last hundred years is the franchise.

By the way, if anyone wants any recommendations on how to take knowledge, package it and put it out there. Listen to the episode that we did with you and Tucker Max on putting together books. We've got a lot of good stuff there. All right, so this is from Gary Pollini. Let's see, what advice do you have for connecting with a target market that is emotionally distressed? I have been relatively successful, but I'm always looking for ways to improve. Thank you. I think that's actually just a really good indicator. Wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. So whenever you're looking for a market that's emotionally distressed, you connect with them by having a solution to whatever it is that they are distressed about in being able to convey that in an emotional way that engages them. So part of that Dean goes back to the eight profit activators. And we always remind people, read Breakthrough DNA on Ilove marketing.com it pretty much is a roadmap for the before, during and after model that Dean invented. And it covers the eight profit activators. The first one Being select a single target market. So what would you add to that?

I think that's the thing. When you've got a content that you can apply to solve a problem, any problem, you've got something that's valuable and enduring.

Valuable and enduring, that's it. How does one know? You hear this whole term, and we've talked about this, but I always like bringing it up is you hear people say, just be valuable, just create value. What the hell does that even mean?

Well, I think it's the shorthand for this whole game that we're playing right now. If you look at the macro of this, as a society, as a species, we're playing the cooperation game. And that's what's allowed humans to rise to the most successful species on the planet. Right? Because we've learned how to communicate and cooperate and that's based on the providing of value. Each has a value that we can contribute to the greater good. And, and to the extent that we can cooperate with other providers of value, that allows us to work in the things that allow us to create value. If everybody had to go out and hunt their own food or grow their own food and prepare their own food and build their own house and do all of the things that you have to do to self sustain as an individual, we wouldn't get as far as we do when the first people decided, hey, why don't you stay here and build the hut and I'll go out and get the food and we'll come back together and we'll have made more progress here or you know, that kind of thing, where we banded into, you know, groups of 150 people to create that kind of tribe kind of, you know, mentality that that was for years and years and years. That's the progress that we made, you know, and to the extent that we were able to then communicate and cooperate and add value, meaning something that you are willing to exchange your money and time for, that's really what it is. So value is you being able to recognize, recognize what someone else needs and your ability to contribute that in exchange for something that you need or value.

If someone created a Zoom toilet, because now with everyone in front of Zoom and they need to like pee or you know, do other things and they needed a toilet, would that be creating value for people in a distressed market right now?

I'm way ahead of you. I'm sitting on one right now.

Okay, that is awesome. All right, perfect. That was really a great explanation. Value and cooperation in all of that.

That's right. Zumpot.com get on the watch for our Kickstarter.

I mean seriously, whoever comes up with it, just even calling it a zoom toilet is going to get attention. Even if it's just nonsense. It would literally. There's a multimillion dollar idea right there. That's go. All right, so Mike Shirobi, his problem is hiring the right marketing team to help grow the business. So his and let me say this before I say his question is I heard years ago and I think it's pretty good advice is there's two things in business you do not delegate unless you actually have a handle on them. That's using the bathroom. No, that's not it. The first one is the chef checkbook, right? The money. And the second is the marketing. Unless you have a handle on it. Because a lot of people try to delegate the marketing and they don't understand it, they want to abdicate it, they want to sweep it under the rug and then they waste a ton of money, it doesn't work. And then they're like marketing doesn't work. And they end up hating marketing. Which of course defeats the purpose. So you really got to think about that. So his question is how to source small business marketing lead generation specialists help helping with landing pages and outbound campaigns. Me and you, Dean, have hired God knows how many people have spent literally millions on these sort of things over the last two decades. What advice would you give there right now?

I think we've come to this point now where as we migrate to Cloudlandia and everybody's allowed to work from home and everybody allowed to convert. It's essentially we can tap into all these marketplaces like everything is evolving to the point now where you can get it all on demand as much as you need. Like you look at design, we talked about design Pickle as a model. There's a lot of those different ones that you get unlimited design for a of lot low fixed price over the month you can have unlimited requests, but they're queued up and you get them one at a time and then you just multiply the subscriptions that you need for your pace of design. That same thing is being done with videos. You can get any writing project that you need with a top notch writer for a dollar a word. Basically at the highest level we're talking about somebody with a MA master's level understanding of writing can write a thousand word article for you for $1,000. That's a big opportunity if you are tapped into the vision that coordinates all of these capabilities when we were at the Free Zone conference in Phoenix, that was the last time we gathered as a group there in Scottsdale with Dan Sullivan. His high group is the Free Zone Frontier. And I did the, I think it was the opening talk, I guess about the idea of the VCR formula, which is vision capabilities and reach and that where those are the currencies right now in Cloudlandia, that if you have a vision, virtually any capability that you need is available and commoditized. And I mean commoditized in the good way. Meaning that it's available for sale. Not demeaning the value of it, but that it's available for sale. If you need design, you need coding, you need photography, you need writing, you need music, you need anything can be bought. It's commoditized. You don't have to go out and find or be in proximity to somebody. You can find global talent from anywhere in the world if you've got a vision. And then it can be multiplied with reach. Because right now you're seeing that the best thing in the world right now is that anything can go viral in an instant. You can go from obscurity to the highest level of attention. And we talked about Lil Nas X last year with Old Town Red. Creating out of his grandmother's Closet. The most successful song ever written in the history of the Billboard charts. Went the longest of anybody on number one on the Billboard charts. And it was through a collaboration with him and another young kid living at home at his parents house, putting Beats online. And this kid lives in the Netherlands. And it was just the most amazing thing that when you look back at 20 years ago, 1999 was the peak of the music industry. $14.6 billion of mostly CD sales right before Napster came in and disrupted the whole thing. And then since Napster up till now, there's story after story. Story of the Peter Diamandis called it the democratization of this. Twenty years ago there were six gatekeepers to all of the music in the world. The six biggest music labels determined what we heard, what we were able to buy, what was produced out there because it was expensive to create CDs and to create new records. And now two kids making independently Beats and making the full rap song in their basically parents and grandparents house with their MacBook. Can collaborate at a distance, never meet and create the largest, the most successful song in the history of the Billboard charts. That's where we're at right now. That's just the reality. And there's story after story after story. Of that, that vision is the driver of all of it. It's the ultimate that ideas and execution, you know?

Yeah. I mean, so my takeaway with that is just don't underestimate all the capabilities that exist if you simply have a vision and you know how to use them.

If you know how to use them and you've got reach to put them through. That's how Kylie Jenner became a billionaire. That's how all of these things that are happening right now, you're seeing all the things that are going on, that the layers of middlemen that it takes to get things to people, you start tapping away now that all of these things, even Netflix, look at Netflix direct to consumers. They make the content, they buy it, they put it up, and they get it right into your home. And they're huge, huge, huge dollars.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay, so since it's posted here, I'm going to answer this one real quickly since Sally's with us. So Sally, who's on this, is in the chat. I own a ski shop with a large established mailing list of existing customers. All of them are interested in skiing, but in different aspects of skiing. Should we subdivide them on mailing lists, social media pages, websites, etc. I liken it to selling to road bikers and mountain bikes bikers, but they are both bikes, but different personalities and you can add to anything I'm going to say. But yeah, the more that you can narrow down and speak specifically to that group of people, the higher the response. Because, you know, someone riding a mountain bike versus a road bike, they're going to view things differently. You know, I love direct mail and I love grabbers. And I'll ask Gina to post if you guys have never seen the video of grabbers from years ago that me and Dean did. It was at the my office. We went to a dollar store and we just bought all kinds of crap and then laid it out all over a table. And we're just coming up with ways to use these to get attention. I mean, even if you've never done direct mail, you'll learn a lot about how to think about grabbing attention. In the 90s, I licensed my marketing stuff to many different industries. So I was selling the carpet, upholstery, cleaners, and I licensed my course to other experts in other industries. Auto sales, heating, air conditioning, printing, painting, plumbers, jewelers, hair and nail salons, pest control. I mean, we're selling millions of dollars through other people of my marketing course to other industries and in the auto Industry. I was having the auto dealers buy, like, what do you call them, Hot Wheels cars. So if they're trying to target Corvette buyers, they would have little miniature Corvettes or they would have little trucks. And so if you can get motorcycles and surfboards and little toys, which you can certainly find in bulk online, I would literally do direct mail and use things like that for specific people in your industry and just attach these things. And it's a Gary Halbert technique. Like if you. Dear friend, I've attached this toy car to the top of this letter or this little miniature mountain bike for two reasons. One, and then I needed a powerful way to get your attention. And two, what I'm going to talk about here is whatever your thing is that you're selling, it just creates the conversation. So absolutely, like you said here, you know, subdivide them and create different categories of who your list and who your buyers are. So what else would you say to that, Dean?

Yeah, I love that we've done with the cars. We've actually done things where we'll do a giveaway, a new car giveaway, and we talk about, you know, which car will you choose? And we'd have the sports car and an SUV and a luxury car and the pictures of them. But they're toy cars that we take pictures of in the park parking lot from perspective to make them look real size. But then underneath it, we put a big asterisk, you know, cars shown approximately actual size. And we display them in front of the. The cash register for people. But it was fun. You know, you get that whole excitement of a new car giveaway and you do it 10 cheap. You know, it adds fun into it. But I think the whole thing about separating the different types of trees because cross country skiers are different than downhill skiers are different than mogul skiers or snowboarders or everybody's their own sort of thing.

All right, Tom Pierce, Clarity on above question Designing my training. Okay. How rediscover the niche's real needs and wants in today's environments of avatars, aspirations and what they want to avoid? I guess how to rediscover the niche's real needs and wants in today's environment. Environment avatars and spray. I mean, I would almost go back to a DOS conversation when the pandemic started. My clients of who I want as a client, you know, successful entrepreneurs that, you know, want to build and grow their businesses that do over a million a year for Genius Network is, you know, just one. One of the financial categories. There's other things too. You know, what changed is the dangers, opportunity, opportunities and strengths. So I think having a DOS conversation and identifying those things is always a way to identify the niche's real needs. Because everyone here has an opportunity in your life. Could be health, it could be money, it could be your business, it could be relationships, it could be with your children. We all have opportunities, but we don't reach the opportunities that we are pursuing if the dangers are greater than the opportunities, unless you're like really lucky or someone comes in and saves the the day. So there's the real dangers and there's the psychological dangers. And the way that you help people overcome their dangers is you link them to the strengths that they have to reinforce their strengths and they become more capable, more resourceful. One of the ways that I assess what's going on with the marketplace is I simply ask them, what do you need solved? If you could wave a magic wand and what would happen? So we have ways of doing conversations. Any of you that are Genius Network members see how we do that. When someone fills out an application to become a member of Genius Network and we ask them questions and we identify and we're able to clearly see if we can help them or not. Because a lot of the marketing that I'm constantly doing is not just to attract, but to repel. Not to repel offensively, but to just say, I can't be all things to all people, but here's who we can serve. So those are just ways that I think about it. What would you say?

Yeah, no, that's a smart, smart way to think about it. I mean, getting everything thinking about one person. You got to start with your, it's the scientific method. You got to start with your observation and make your hypotheses, you know, figure out what is the identify what the problems are that needs to be solved. If you've got a potential solution for, for it, you set up an experiment and you do the work with that one person to see if you can solve that problem or deliver that benefit for them. And when you're able to do it, then you document that and you try and duplicate it. And if you can duplicate it, then you've got what we call a scale ready algorithm. And so often people try and scale without having the algorithm figured out. It's frustrating because you're experimenting and trying to figure out. It's only frustrating to try and figure out the solution with 10 people than it is to try and figure it out with one. It's much more relaxing to Figure out the solution, document it, duplicate it with one more person, and then you're ready to go. Go to 10, because now you've already got 90% of it done. It's just about the execution of it.

I hope everyone found the conversation today with Jason Korman stimulating, insightful, gave you some perspective. We will continue to do these. I also want to thank Dave and Charlie. I don't even know if they're out there because they've been doing the I love Marketing meetup groups and this is sort of a spinoff for this. And as we go through the world, we will, with what time we can make available. We'll continue to do Q and A, we'll continue to have guests. One of the things I'll start doing, people ask me continuously about can they reproduce my newsletter, the three a Week, which I. The three a Week email concept, literally Dean Jackson's one that taught me that. And those of you that subscribe to my Three Weeks, you can, if you don't already, simply go to any of my websites, JoePolish.com or whatever, and subscribe. And I send out my thoughts and musings on all kinds of different things, from business to addiction to health, wealth and health, you name it. And we put gaping void illustrations in the messages. And so I was having a conversation with Jason Corman a couple weeks ago about how people, just like he's had some people take the gaping void images, they'll share them on social media and they'll blank out gap void. And I'm like, you got to be a real loser in order to do something. Like, really like, how hard is it to cite and give credit to the original source? And that's always been one of my biggest irks with influencers and people that are speakers and stuff, where they'll take someone else's ideas or they'll read something in a book and then they'll try to call it their own ideas. I mean, whenever possible, I will quote the source and if I can't remember, I'll say I can't remember. But, you know, it's just an integrity thing. And so a lot of people that are dispensing advice in the world are just assholes personally. I mean, even though they may have good thoughts, those thoughts are not their own. They're thoughts that are coming from other people. And there's a lot of theft of other people's IPs, and I believe it's getting worse and worse and worse. And so a lot of people ask, you know, can, can you use stuff in your newsletter and I'm like, yeah, as long as you cite it and don't, you know, put your name, you know, just, yeah, feel free. I mean, we love sharing ideas. Me and Dean do this because we're trying to be valuable and helpful and useful. And we both get a real kick out of knowing that, you know, our ideas and thoughts that were definitely transformative to our businesses and our lives, we're able to share these and help other people with it. So I'll start putting out some gaping void illustrations on Instagram and on different places on a more regular basis. And if you like them, just share it. And just make sure you tag gaping void and make sure you cite the source. And that's one of the things we'll do because conversations that are valuable are useful to be spread don't miss another.

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Sam.