Finding Brave Epis 331 - The Power of Positive Disruption, with Dr. Patrick Leddin

Hello everyone. This is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created the show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life, to rise up, speak up, and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts, and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of finding brave, and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful, and meaningful life, business, and career. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. How are you? This is coming to you, uh, in, in June, and I'm hoping your summer is starting off wonderfully. And I am just so I am so, so thrilled to have our guest today who, you know, we had had a wonderful journey here, Patrick, in getting to know each other a little bit. We have Dr. Patrick Leden here, and the story about how we met I think is so interesting. It's a little bit rare for me, but I met you at the WOBI conference in New York City in November, You know, when I was told you— that I had the opportunity to talk to you and James Patterson about your new book, uh, I was just so thrilled. And the minute I met you both, I was so— I was so fascinated by both your journeys, how you came together to do your new book, which is not so new now, all of it. And you were so gracious in that interview, and it's led to a number of things. So first of all, just thank you for taking the time to be here. Thank you for everything you're doing about helping people handle disruption.

And thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Oh, it's so fun. So fun. All right, everyone, I want you to know about Patrick. Illustrious Dr. Patrick Ladden is a former Airborne Ranger infantry officer who went on to serve as a senior consultant at both KPMG and FranklinCovey before founding two successful companies of his own. He's a sought-after global keynote speaker, the host of the top-ranked leadership podcast which— the Disruption Lab, which I've been on. It's so fantastic. And the author of multiple bestselling books, including the co-authored book we just talked about, New York Times bestseller with James Patterson, who is the number one bestselling author in the world, as I understand it. Uh, as a faculty member at Vanderbilt University for over 12 years, Patrick directed the program of business studies and led a multi-year research initiative on how leaders and organizations Can not just survive disruption, but thrive in the face of it. Could there be a better time to discuss this? So thank you again. Thank you for taking the time.

Excited to be here. Thank you.

Oh, so thrilled. All right. We have a number of questions that I know people are going to really want to understand, but what we were chatting about just for a second before is, you know, I, I do a lot of writing on LinkedIn, Forbes, as you know, and Everything is AI now. Everything. There's kind of no topic in business or no lens that now isn't exploring AI. And you work with so many leaders and teams. Can we just start with— and I want to talk about your book as well and the key theme, but we're living what disruption is. We're living personally, professionally, career-wise, we're living disruption with a capital D. Can you tell us from your perspective what the biggest concern, fear, preoccupation is for leaders today? And, you know, I know it trickles down to everyone who has a career, everyone who's working, but What do you work on with CEOs and leaders most that we may not know about because we're not behind the scenes like you are?

Can we start there? Yeah, that's a great place to start. And you're right, it shows up in every conversation, Kathy, that I'm in these days. I like to tell people I'm a human behavioralist. I'm not a futurist. So I don't know where AI is going to go, but I don't think anybody knows where AI is going to go. We just know it's going. And we know it's the— I tell audiences sometimes or groups that I'm working with, it's that if you look at the— The creation of the internet as opposed to the Y2K bug. If people remember the Y2K thing, right? Right around 1999, 2000. This is the internet. This is not Y2K. It's not gonna go womp, womp, womp. It's going to do something. And the question is, we're not sure what. So, you know, what are people wrestling with right now? I am very fortunate. I get a chance to work with a lot of, um, executive teams in organizations. So the C-suite, as you would, you would say, and, uh, oftentimes in these 4-hour kind of mini offsite sessions I typically do with them. And AI usually comes up as a main topic. So it shows up in lots of different ways. I would say that when I'm dealing with the, the C-suite specifically, they're interested in, okay, we know we're gonna, we've been doing something around AI. How do we leverage this, scale this, do something more strategic with it? Because when you look at the research that's coming back saying, well, a lot of organizations aren't getting the return on investment they're making in AI, behind closed doors, what you hear executives say is, yes, predominantly because we're not pointing the bat at the big things.

We're pointing at that.

They know that. They know that. And we need, we need, we need to do something AI related. We're giving a special project here and something special there. But what if we point the enterprise's biggest goals with AI associated with that? And I'm seeing more and more of that type of discussion. But there's fear, obviously, because if we, if we wait and we miss the opportunity to leverage it, might our competitors do it more effectively than us and get the gains from it? If we point it at the wrong thing or under, um, under, uh, capitalize it? Will it not deliver the result we want? And therefore we kind of missed our chance. So there's all that kind of conversation going on. I think everybody, regardless of, like you said, the individual levels all the way up to the C-suite, also are saying, you know, how does this impact me individually as well? And then when you deal with the board, um, executives, I have a chance to work with board executives sometimes. They're very much interested in things around governance and risk and what is this gonna do to the brand's reputation and et cetera, et cetera. So there's, there's a lot of conversation that I'm happy to unpack that I'm hearing around AI, but it is showing up in, in every conversation.

How fascinating. I, your answer is a little different from what I thought.

Mm-hmm.

Um, it sounds like a lot of organizations, they're dabbling in it, they're doing their best to introduce it and deploy AI, but they're probably not those companies maybe that we're hearing every day, huge companies that are laying off 13,000, 10,000. It, they're not at that point yet. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I, I don't mean that. Yeah. Let me break that apart. So, when you hear that, you hear a lot of tech companies that are doing these massive layoffs right now, Meta or other ones that are doing massive layoffs. And it's definitely, kind of more core of what's going on in their business is probably causing them to, to make these layoffs as far as how they're implementing and using AI and where they see it scaling over time. When I deal with companies that historically wouldn't consider themselves a tech company, they're a food and beverage CPG type of company, or they're a hospital or something in the healthcare system, or they're a government agency. Or they're a small to medium-sized business that looking to grow historically, they wouldn't have said we're a tech company per se, but everybody's a tech company now. Mm-hmm. Because everybody's creating this themselves in so many ways. So I, I, you know, I remember growing up, I grew up in the Midwest and I remember growing up and everything kind of started on the coast and worked its way to the Midwest when you think of like fashion and trends, you know, so somebody shows up skateboarding in Chicago, it probably was hip in LA 10 years earlier type of thing. Um, so there, there might be a degree of kind of ripple happening that way. A lot of the tech companies— I was out, I was out in, um, California this past week working with some clients and, and they are much heavier in, in the tech space and they are much more progressive and aggressive in what they're doing. I see. It's just that, you know, if you look at the, the curve you would typically see in adoption rates of businesses when it comes to, you know, the bleeding edge all the way to the laggards, et cetera, all the way through the curve, you know, nobody really can afford to be at the far end of the curve where they're just waiting to see where it all plays out. It's just how much are you willing to lean into it and bleed, bleed in the process. And I also think that a company that is very tech-forward historically will feel like, you know, leaning a certain amount into AI and adopting it feels like the right aggressive play for them. Companies that are a little bit, um, less tech-forward, historical manufacturing or whatever it might be, they feel like they're leaning aggressively into it, but just not as aggressive as other companies might be.

How fascinating. So let's, if we could, let's roll, roll back the tape a little bit about your book and, and the research project that started it. And so now you started this book before the AI wave, right? Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, AI has been around for a while, no doubt. But it hasn't been— ChatGPT wasn't out, Claude, all those type of things that have put it into our conscious. Consciousness for sure.

It's almost like you were prophetic, you know?

Oh, I don't know. It was, um, you know, it's funny that, so I was teaching this class at Vanderbilt called Leading Business Through Times of Crisis, and we had different guest speakers come in. It was, I, I think it was really unique experience. When I explained to people, they're like, wow, that, that would be an interesting college class to take. So imagine you're an undergraduate student, there's 20, 25 students in the room. So a relatively small class, and each class period, the students were given a new case study to read.. And that case study was written only for that class. So we've never released it anywhere else. You won't find it at Harvard or any place like that. There's no other place for these case studies. And each case study was about the guest coming in next. So we had the CEO of American Airlines, Doug Parker. He'd come in with Sarah Nelson, the president of Flight Attendants Association. And the two of them would spend an hour and a half or so talking to the students about how management and labor work through crisis. And it was kind of one hit after another. William Dillard III from Dillard's Department Store came, or founders of these tech companies, all different kind of groups came in. And one person who came in was James Patterson. And—

How did that happen? Did you reach out to him? No. Oh, he went to Vanderbilt.

He went to Vanderbilt. And I was very fortunate to have somebody who knew him and asked me if he'd be interested in speaking in my class. So I had this gentleman named Michael—

About crisis? About—

Yeah, well, about career and about the disruptions in his career. Not disruptions, we weren't using that word at the time. About just leading himself through kind of times of crisis. And as fate would have it, he came into the class and he says to the students first, which is I think a pretty funny line, he says, "Hi, I'm Stephen King," which is a great opening line. And, you know, I later learned that he has sold more books than Stephen King and John Grisham combined. Like, oh my goodness. And then he asked them the question, like he said this, he said, "Are you living a good life?" is what he asked the students.

That's what he started with.

Yeah, I want you— he goes, I want you to live a good life. I don't want you to feel like you're on one treadmill only to get on another treadmill, only to get on 3, 4, 5, 10 more treadmills in your life. And he said, I'm living a good life. Here's how I did it. And he called the presentation that day The Power of Disruption. And yeah, I know, right? And when it was just too much, it's so— and he went through, he went through his story, and people may or may not know his story, but He tells a little bit in the foreword of the book, but he graduated Vanderbilt. He wanted to write. So he went to New York City and thought, well, the only place you get paid to write is in advertising and marketing. So I'll try to get a job in that space. And the biggest firm at the time was J. Walter Thompson. So I'm going to get a job there. And he started off, he said, I disrupted their hiring process because their typical hiring process was you'd make up a portfolio of ads, you know, fake advertisements to show your skills and your chops in that space. And he said that I did like everybody else did. I made up a portfolio. And I brought it to them. And then instead of waiting for them to call me the next week, I showed up with another brand new portfolio. And the third week, a brand new portfolio. And he said, they hired me in week 4. He goes, thankfully, cause I ran out of good ideas. But he also said that I disrupted their process in a positive way. They were used to people doing it, drop off one and wait for the phone call. He said, I just kept coming and they thought this kid's got something. And then he said he went into the job and he eventually started migrating his way up and he became the youngest creative director. He wrote the tagline, "I'm a Toys 'R' Us kid." That's a James Patterson tagline. He disrupted the way they hire people because he said he looked around. An ad agency is only as good, like most firms, as good as their talent, as good as their people. And they're kind of getting a bit stale, he felt. So he put an ad up in the New York Times, one page, and he said, it said something like, "Write if you want work." And then it gave a number of problems.

What did he say?

Write if you want work. And then it had a number of problems to solve. And it was something like, you are selling beans. Here are the ingredients. Using the ingredients in the ad, make it sound sexy. You know, that type of thing. Or you have to sell telephones to monks who have taken a vow of silence. What would you do? So things like that. And we ended up, I think he said they hired 40 people off those ads and it just changed the trajectory of the creative team. And then he became the youngest, CEO of J. Walter Thompson North America in his 30s. And he told the students, he said, "And then one day I'm driving into work and I'm like, I'm sitting in traffic on the Jersey Turnpike and I'm in the wrong lane going the wrong direction." So he quit and went into writing. And then from there he told them the story about how he wrote multiple books a year, multiple genres, multiple co-authors. And in the process of doing that, I've later learned he sold around 500 million book copies. So by this time all that was over. And by the way, Kathy Caprino, it wasn't, um, It wasn't one hit after another. He had some tough times too, just like all of us. It's a human experience. He was engaged in his 30s to the person at the time was the love of his life and turned out she had brain cancer and she died suddenly. So he had the ups and downs too. And he said, that's the most, that's the most horrible disruption you can have, the loss of someone like that. So by the time it was over, you know, as someone who's working at the university and had worked in business before, I was really interested in like, what's the research question? What's the angle here? The interesting thing, what stood out to me was, hey, we all want to live a good life. We all want to lead a great team or be on a great team. We all want to build a great organization, but there's kind of two parts to doing it, right? There's the defining what that looks like for you or your team or your organization, and then it's living it out in the face of the disruptions or curveballs the world's going to send you. So I'm trying to live a great life or build a great organization.. And then AI comes out, like you were talking about earlier. Well, that's a disruption. What do I deal with? What do I do with that? And we started studying how do people deal with that. One, one example would be, um, talking about the AI specifically in our research. We talked to the CEO, uh, spent about an hour and a half with the CEO of, of a company called Tractor Supply Company. And you know, what they do is kind of in the name, Tractor Supply Company. So you go to their places and people may or may not be familiar with them, but if you've been to one, you know it. But if you don't, Imagine typically a freestanding store that you go in there and you can buy things for your fencing. You can buy food for your livestock. You can buy birdseed. You could buy some clothes, predominantly some rugged outdoor clothes or things, supplies like that. And they run a really great business, about 2,000 stores, $8 billion in revenue. Wow. A long track record of success. Well, when the disruption of COVID hit, All of a sudden, people's purchasing behavior started to change. And it really showed up differently at Tractor Supply Company because what happened there is all of a sudden, instead of just having their traditional customers coming in, they had a lot of younger customers. They had a lot of millennials who said, I want to raise chickens in my backyard and grow my own food. How do I do it? Wow. So you can imagine in the midst of COVID and trying to keep their employees safe and keep their stores up and running like they were trying to do, At the same time, they had a massive shift in who else was coming into the store. Wow. So they embraced AI pretty early on. They created a device that would be in the ear where a customer would ask a question that was different than they would typically get, like, tell me about this particular dog food, or tell me about this for chickens that wasn't being asked in the past. Well, the people in the store could ask their AI device, what's the best answer to this? Wow. That's it? Yeah. Over the course of COVID They went from an $8 billion company to almost a $16 billion company.

Because of these new needs and people taking in—

New needs, new customers, and the ability to meet their need because things like technology helped them do it. So you had a situation where Hal Lawton and his team was pointing AI almost a bit out of desperation in the moment, but pointing it at what was the most important thing, which is that point of sale with their customer.

What an inspiration. Right? What forward thinking. So, You know, one key theme of your book is— I call it, you don't use this terminology, but don't bloody yourself against the disruption. Yeah, I'd love to hear you talk about it, but before you do, I'm fascinated. So you were, you were in the military, infantry. What were the disruptions that led you to do this work, can I ask?

Yeah, sure. Of course. You know, boy, that's a great question. I'm just thinking back through like the thread of life and say, okay, what is it? I think that one thing that has been helpful to me personally, whether it was starting a business and running a business or being in the military, was the ability to— I kind of thrive in ambiguity. Like when I don't know exactly what the answer is, it doesn't overly freak me out. I can kind of sit there and try to figure it out and bring good people around me to help me do it. So that's why I like doing research. That's why I like starting business. I, that, and I think even in the military, but here's the difference in the military. And I oftentimes start with this when I'm talking to audiences like larger audiences. I tell a story about a time in the military when I went on a nighttime parachute jump and I tell them that I had gone on nighttime parachute jumps before, but this one was different because every other nighttime jump I'd been on before was during training, smaller scale, not that many people. It was nighttime technically, but you could still kind of see there was like—

these were trainings that you went through? Yeah. Training.

Live warfare. No, this here. Yeah. And everything I would talk about here was, was in, in, in training as far as unit training or, or going to schools. So everything else had been before had been in schools, parachuting and airborne school, parachuting and Ranger school. If it was a nighttime jump, it was like twilight. When I got to my first unit, the 82nd Airborne Division, they're like, we're gonna do a nighttime jump. And I thought, that's no big deal. I've done a nighttime jump before. I had not done a nighttime jump like this before. It's 2 o'clock in the morning. It's 1,500 people jumping out of 22 airplanes. It's a completely different world. And, uh, we were jumping in Fort Stewart, Georgia, which is— if you're not in the US listening, it's in the southeast part of the US. They're known for really tall pine trees and they had a lot of tall pine trees there. And we jumped out of the plane that night and we were right over the top of those trees, which is not where we're supposed to be. But, you know, when you think about all of this, I was trained to jump at night, even though it was new to me. It was a disruption of my status quo. I'd been trained to do it. I'd been trained to jump with lots of jumpers. It was just new with so many. I'd even been trained to deal with how to land in the trees. And that's exactly what I did. Everything they told me to. And it was like, bam, bam, bam, bam. And I landed in a tree and I was hanging there. And even then they told you, okay, you got two choices.

You're listening. You have them in your head.

No, no, no. I just— they had trained— they drilled into our heads. They told this so much to us, right? So they You have two choices when you land in trees. One is you stay there until somebody comes and gets you, or the second one is you actually deploy your secondary parachute, your reserve parachute, which is on the front. You would, you would use that in the air if you needed to, but obviously I didn't need to that night. Uh, so you pull that secondary parachute, you deploy it, and then you just let it all out like a rope. And then you get outta your harness and you climb down this thing. That's what your second choice is. And I was late. I remember hanging in the tree and I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. And I'm like, well, What do I want to do here? Do I want to hang here till morning? Because I heard a lot of other people were crashing in the trees around me. So, I wasn't the only one. But what I was a little bit fearful at the time was, what if the sun comes up and I'm the one guy still hanging in the tree? You know, the brand new lieutenant.

Competition got you going.

I don't want to do that. I can't get out of that story. So, I'll do the second thing, which is climb out of the tree. So, before I got out of the harness, I decided I'm going to see if I'm steady in this tree. And it was literally like this. I reached, I reached up on my risers just to make sure I was steady in the tree before I started messing around. I didn't want to slip and fall. And I pulled on my harness above me and I slipped about 6 inches and I was standing on the ground. And, uh, you know, when I, when I start that, when I, when I use that conversation with audiences, I was, like I said, I was in California last week talking to a benefits administration kind of backend technology company with all their partners at the summit. I tell that story. And of course you might say, well, oh, what he's gonna tell us now is You know, life's full of disruptions. You might jump at dark, you might jump with a lot of people, you might land in the trees, but just go ahead because you could land on your feet. And that's not the takeaway from this. The takeaway from this is that if you think about everything I went through there, jumping at night, jumping with all these different things, somebody had gone down the path before. Somebody had figured out that I might run into this. Somebody had trained me how to do it. When you said, are they talking in your ear? I'm like, no, I just knew it because they told it to me. But the disruptions that a lot of people are running into in their lives right now there isn't necessarily a playbook for it. There aren't standard procedures. And the rules are being rewritten almost in real time. So the question then becomes, OK, I can't train you for every disruption that's going to come your way. But what I could help you think about is how do you deal with disruption? And how do you look at disruption, first of all, from a mindset perspective and say, you know what? Disruption sometimes blows things up and breaks stuff. And I don't like that. Nobody really does, but maybe it's fertile ground for something new and different. So when Hal Lawton at TSC sees disruption changing in the store, he could be like, you know what? This is a temporary thing with the millennials coming in. It's kind of, let's just let that settle down and go away. We'll give them typical service and we'll see how it goes. Maybe they'll find their way to other stores or we can really lean into it. Another story that we came across in the research was a guy named John Ingram. And you're talking about technology and companies. So John Ingram, their family has a number of businesses, Ingram does. And one of their businesses that he was running at the time was called Ingram Content, which would do book distribution. Historically, when a publisher has a book, they have a trusted partner out there who warehouses that book so that when you buy it somewhere, and they have to ship it and fulfill that shipment. It comes out of Ingram's warehouses. Well—

Ingram, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. Ingram. Yeah. So John Ingram is talking about one of the biggest problems they had in their business was what he called the long tail of books. So you have— if you think about a curve, you have some books that sell a lot of copies, and it makes sense to keep those in your warehouse because you're turning them over a lot. But then you have a ton of books that sell very few copies. But it costs the same amount to warehouse them. So they're constantly trying to figure out which ones we have to have in stock and which ones do we not want to keep in our warehouse because warehousing is expensive. You have to pay insurance and a roof and somebody to move it. And then if it gets damaged, you got to deal— I mean, all those types of things are expensive. And one day John was at a conference and he was coming down an escalator into the expo area. And in front of him, he saw a contraption he'd never seen before. It was a print-on-demand book machine. Oh, now one person could look at that and say, that is going to destroy our business because we warehouse books. But in his mind, he thought, this could save our business because we can print things on demand as opposed to keeping everything in the warehouse. And we can leverage the fact that we've had a long-term relationship with all these authors and all these publishers who trust us with their manuscripts. Because in order for us to print on demand, we have to have the electronic file of the manuscript. And now he says that that particular disruption and the choice to embrace it like that probably saved them going through COVID because all of a sudden they were printing millions and millions of copies with a very short, small skeleton crew.

All right. I'm getting some themes here. And I know in your book you talk about a number of disruptor personalities and profiles. And I'd love to touch on that, but I'm really curious. Patrick, you mentioned— how did you put it? Early on, how did you say it? You never got freaked out when there was a change in direction or there was something coming your way that was different from what you expected. Is that how you put it?

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that far. I do probably get freaked out a little bit in my mind sometimes. But I said, I think I said I'm pretty good at ambiguity. Not necessarily like knowing I'm gonna have to sit with something for a while.

And can we talk about this? Yeah, sure. Because everything you're sharing to me, you know, it's the first time I'm hearing these specific stories. You can see that the, the, the, the mind of the person facing the challenge— I mean, we're only getting the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure they went, oh no, here goes our business.

And yeah, of course.

4 months of hysteria, maybe. But they're able to do what you're talking about in the book. Don't lean back and say it's the end of the world. Try to lean in. And in a way, it's positive thinking. But, you know, positive thinking gets a bad rap. It's more like, what am I not seeing? What, what could this be doing that in 5 years I can look back and say, This was the best thing that actually ever happened to us. What are the traits that we have to cultivate in ourselves that we can see life like this?

Well, I think the— yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on you. Go. I was just gonna say, I think the first part is to recognize that— and these people did this, they— and I've gotten better myself at doing it— is to recognize that in these moments of disruption, emotion usually comes right along. It's like in the sidecar. So if, if something happens and, and, and it doesn't have to be something as big as COVID or no AI, it could be just a conversation with a team member in the hallway or a family member around the dinner table or the results of a, you know, your blood work at the doctor. And they could be good results like, good job, you're eating better and moving more or whatever it might be. And your numbers are going in the right direction. It's still disruptive. It stops you for a moment. Or it could be the results you didn't necessarily want. But when those moments, when it, when we get stopped in our tracks and we're not sure exactly what to do next, that's kind of that disruptive moment for us. Emotion's gonna show up and some people show up anxiety over something. Some people show up fear, some people show up anger, some people show up excitement. Sometimes you have a little bit of both. You might be excited about this new project, but nervous about it at the same time. You know, all these different things and it's okay. It's, it's not okay. It's beyond okay. It's human to recognize that, that, that, that those are the emotions and it's inter— and give yourself and your team a space to process it. I have a partnership with a— Jim Patterson and I have a partnership with a company called Franklin Covey. And Franklin Covey took some of the content of our book and turned it into a course called Disrupt Everything, Innovate for Impact. It's being used in organizations and they do a great little exercise where they ask people that, what, what's the emotion you're feeling about this particular disruption? Think about a disruption you're dealing with, what's the emotion? And then it goes a step further. It says, okay, what emotions do you think your other people are feeling around this? And where are you on the journey on this thing? And then it says this, it's kind of a funny little activity and I encourage listeners to consider it. It says, imagine for a moment that that disruption is an amusement park ride. What would you call it? And it's, it's a fun little exercise to do on your own. And I've done it with lots of audiences too. I'll ask them that question and I'll get things like, you know, Tower of Terror, House of Horrors, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, I forget the name, but the one where it spins and you stick to the wall and the floor drops out, or the Scrambler or the Tilter Whirl or, or what the Edge or whatever they call it. And then they laugh and then they kind of process. But what you're doing is like you're naming this thing. And sometimes when you name it, it just becomes a little bit more like you can get your arms around it mentally. So I would just say, first of all, that the idea of your emotions— somebody said, said once you heard this expression like, we— I am not my emotions. But we kind of are, kind of are, cuz, cuz our emotions play into so many of our things. So just kind of own it. Talk about it with your team, talk about it with your family, talk about it with whoever. Um, and then the next step becomes, what do I do with it? And that's where you start to discern. And discernment is, is a big thing we picked up on these people doing as opposed to reaction.

Wow.

You know, we're not, we're not Pavlov's dog. Yeah. So we're not Pavlov's dog, right? Remember, folks probably remember Pavlov's dog, those research studies. Um, there's a few things in life we remember. Pavlov's dog and Eli Whitney made the cotton gin. I don't know why we hear those things different, but, but, um, Pavlov's dog, he would ring the bell and then feed them, ring the bell and then feed them. And then they started to, when he would ring the bell, they would salivate because they're anticipating being fed. And then he'd take away the food and they'd just ring the bell and they'd still salivate because he had separated stimulus from response. The bell rang, they salivated. Well, as human beings, we have the ability to separate between stimulus and response. We can choose something different. If I give you the space to think about your emotions with something and, and to make it okay to process through it a little bit as a team, then to say to yourselves, okay, what should we do? What could we do? And you talked about the, you called them the 5 personalities. We don't actually call 'em personalities because, because, um, sometimes a personality is like, this is how I'm pre-wired. And that's how we think about it, right? And taken to an extreme, sometimes it can be, this is how I'm pre-wired. You need to deal with this. If you wanna work with me, you gotta recognize this is who I am and you need to adopt to me type of thing. We don't want people, we want to say this, these are 5 roles. And sometimes in disruption A, you might choose role 1. In disruption B, you might choose role 3. You might have a tendency to more often than not, left to your own devices, you'd take on a particular role, but you're also mature and you're also discerning what to do. And everything has context. So one role— I see.

So it's more flexible and malleable given the situation, given— I see.

Yeah. It's like, okay, you're dealing with this thing. This disruption happened. This customer called and they asked for this thing and then another one customer and another customer. And all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, what's going on? I'm being disrupted from my normal pattern. What should I do? What role should I choose to jink on? And a couple of the roles, and this is a nuance that's I don't know, maybe if we— maybe when it goes to paperback, we'll hammer it a little bit harder for folks because I think that they don't see it right away until you spend time reading it further or talking about it. We didn't call the book Change Everything. We called it Disrupt Everything. And there, that's a— might sound like a little nuance, but it's a big difference. Sometimes when you're faced with the disruption, you might choose to embrace change. So John Ingram could come down the escalator, see the print-on-demand machine and say, we're gonna do that. I'm gonna figure that out. Hmm. Sometimes you come down that escalator in life and you see something new and you say, we're not going to do that. I understand the rest of the industry's going that way, but that's not who we are. That's not the type of business we're trying to build or the team we're trying to create. So we're gonna say no to change and double down on stability. When we say disrupt everything, sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is go after change. Sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is chase stability. When everybody else is chasing change, you say no. And I mentioned William Dillard, who came to my class. Um, so this is for folks who may or may not be familiar with Dillard's Department Store. It's out of Little Rock, Arkansas. It's an 85-plus-year-old business, been family run since it was founded. It's a, uh, department store like you would see at the mall. It's like a Macy's or a Nordstrom or whatever it might be. You have Dillard's. And if you look at Dillard's in the 2000s, they were following the same path like most retailers were, where internet was created. They created a website a little bit earlier than 2000, but you know what I mean? They created a website. Everybody else started selling stuff online. So they had a physical store and an online presence. Dillard's did that. Um, when people started putting apps on phones, Dillard's put an app on phone. When COVID came, just like everybody else dealing with that disruption in stores, they were masking up and bringing your product out to you at the door. When COVID started waning, I would say, and kind of going back to quote unquote normal, some of those stores, many of the stores, almost all of the stores would keep, still keep some racks by the door where you could order something online and then come inside and pick it up and take it out. Many of them still have those little distribution places in their store. Dillard's said, hold on a second. If we keep going down that path, following the same change every other department store is doing, We lose the essence of who we are. Hmm. So, and what could happen over time is all of a sudden half of our store could be warehouse. What has made us successful is people coming in and having an in-store experience. So they said, you know what, we're really not just competing against our, our competitors. We're competing against the couch. We want people to come in and have this experience. Like, this is crazy. If you were to invest in Dillard's in 2020 and hold onto their stock for 4 years till 2024, You would've beat Tesla, you would've beat Amazon. An 80-year-old department store went up 1,200% in value during a 4-year period. And a lot of it had to do with doubling down on who they are. So when we say disrupt everything, again, sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is say no to change. And we all know this when we were kids, when you were a kid and like a friend group said, let's go do this. And you're thinking, I don't think we're supposed to do that. Mom said not to, or whomever said not to. And you say, I'm not going to do that. Everybody looks at you like, what's going on with you? You're the one saying, I'm seeking stability. I'm sticking to who we are. I'm not going after that change. I'm not leaving my house after curfew, or I'm not going to that store we're not supposed to go into, you know, whatever it might be. So we've had that moment of being the disruptor who says no to something. And we talk about in the book, 2 of the 5 roles we talk about are leading a movement towards stability or moving out on your own towards stability. And I think that's a really I think it's a curious thing to consider, if I dare say it's insightful. I think it's insightful for just to think about and say, you know what, you need people like that. You need people on your team whose natural tendency is to kind of be hesitant at change. Not completely— not completely like allergic to it, but just the ones that say, I don't know. They could sometimes be your best helpers because they might say, that's not who we are. That's not our values. That's not the life we're trying to build. We've already got 10 things going on. Whatever it might be.

That's fascinating. And I think part of being successful at that is knowing who you really are.

Oh yeah.

But even within that, there's nuance because we can stay stuck in who we think we are. And that can, you know, if the world is moving beyond that, that can be damaging. But in this case, they held on to something that had made them so, so successful, it seems.

Yeah.

But within that, there's a lot of nuance about— can we— first you have to know, for instance, and I do want to talk about individuals too, who— career people, you have to know your brand, you have to know who you really are. Like, you know, I don't want to get too deep down to my own thing, but I happen to love AI in certain ways. So I, um, back in 2024, an organization, Delphi.ai, approached me and said, would you like to develop your own clone, your own digital tool? I was so on board. I so loved it. It was trained with 1.5 million words I've written, and, and it, you know, the voice, I would, I loved it. Unfortunately, what I found truthfully was— and I can see the conversations, and that's for the safety of the individual using it because, you know, do no harm. I was a therapist too, you know, after being a corporate VP. Uh, I never want the advice to be something that's going to be misleading. No one else can see the conversations but me. But I started to see that people were using it in some cases where they should be talking to a human. The nuance was too great. Like, I'm going to fire Sally. And, you know, and they would be maybe even my client at the time, but they were using the tool. And I felt like—

You think about— you're talking to, like, ChatGPT or something like that, and you say, I think I should fire Sally. Here's why, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you think? It'll say, good idea. We believe that's a good idea. And then you come back and say, you know, on second thought, maybe I shouldn't. They'll go, that's a great idea. It's like, wait a minute.

They are both great ideas. Oh, thanks for the context. My bad. You know, yeah, it's too important. So in some ways I've felt I've been a disruptor in that. I love it. I use all sorts of AI tools and I have two that I'm working on right now to develop.

But the beautiful thing about AI, and I heard somebody say this last week at a thing I was at, he said, "AI has the ability to make all of us B-minus students in every topic, but you have to choose which one you're gonna be an A-plus student in.". And typically it's not gonna get us there yet. Now if I'm using an AI tool that's only going reference into certain things where the experts live, that's probably giving me better answers than one that's going out to the general public. 'Cause the internet's kind of wacky sometimes. And sometimes the loudest— actually what'll happen is if I send out, if, if it's just searching, if it's just going, okay, 5 months ago I received all is what I'm drawing from. And all, all I'm drawing from here is everything that's on the internet. Well, it's gonna look for the loudest voices or the most prominent voices, which is usually not your experts. So the ability, like when you said it's trained on 1.5 million words that you had written or, or, or, or talked, um, spoken, then, then it is bringing your expertise to that.

That's different than just letting it out to the wild west of the internet. Love it. There's one other thing I want to get your perspective on because you're working with individuals, not just businesses. So often it's like when my guest is talking, I can almost hear the thoughts of listeners who are going to be challenging what we're saying. Yeah, but, but that doesn't talk about me. So I'm sure you've seen this and are dealing with it. I am, uh, as a career and leadership coach. What happens when a person's in a situation where their job and their career will disappear?

Yeah, yeah. And it's very real.

It's real. And I don't want it to sound platitudinal that, you know, just embrace your disruptor mentality or profile or traits. You know, people are going through some real crises here. And have you helped anybody through this in a way that our listeners can hear some real advice about what do I do when I'm 54 and I'm not ready to stop and my job is gone.

Yeah, that's a real question. I do not want to take it lightly because, I mean, quite frankly, I do a lot of writing and speaking. I'm 57, right? So where is it going to go in the future for me as well? I think about that too. So I would say a few things. First of all, that part earlier about knowing who you are. And what you value in life. That's really critical. It does help us not just in the easiest of times making decisions, but more importantly, in the hardest of times making decisions. I think that I got more and more clear on what my purpose is in life as I see it, why I think I'm on planet Earth, about 10, 15 years ago. And that really changed the trajectory. And I think in some really positive ways, or maybe it was accelerated.

What is it? What is your purpose?

Well, My purpose in life is to provide ideas and insights that will help other people live their great purpose. And that's what made me go when the time came along to sell our business. When somebody offered to buy our business, I was like, why wouldn't I do that? Because I think there's another way I can live out this purpose more strongly. And then when somebody offered me a position to teach at Vanderbilt, well, why wouldn't I do that? And then when opportunity comes to research, see, all of a sudden it's like, okay, now I know better what projects to say yes to and what projects to say no to. Both projects take usually the same amount of energy, but which one's going to reap a better outcome toward your own purpose? So part of what I would say is, you know, disruption's not the— actually, uh, let me, I want to steal this line from somebody. The guy who came, Doug Parker, who came from American Airlines and talked to my class those years ago, he had this great line. He said, a crisis is never the time to make introductions. And I've loved that line because he said, I need to know all the CEOs of the other airlines. I need to know the legislators. I need to know who runs labor. I need to know all these type of people before the crisis happens. And I would just say the same thing is true in regard to a disruption is not the time to meet your team, or better yet, it's not the time to meet yourself. You need to like get to know yourself today, spend some time getting to know yourself today, because that's probably the best conversation you can have. Um, so getting clear on who you are. I think secondly is, is it is really true that people's worlds are being disrupted. I had this guy talk to me and this very specific story. And you mentioned AI from the very beginning of this conversation. He came up to me, he said, this is all good and interesting, but AI, I'm afraid it's gonna take my job. I said, okay, why is that? And he said, well, I, I'm a writer at my company. I write copy, I write what's on the webpage. He goes, I wrote, I write speeches that our CEO gives. And the other day our CEO gave a speech that was probably 85% written by ChatGPT, that type of thing. He's like, I might lose my job. And my response to him was, yes, you might lose your job. That's, that is a possibility. But before you work on your resume or leave right now, although your resume should always be great, but before you leave right now, what, what if we think about this? Is there a way in the, with the existence of AI, you could be more valuable to your company, not less valuable? And he thought about it. And he said, "Yeah, I think there is." I said, "Great, look at these 5 roles." And I showed him those 5 roles that we were talking about. I said, "There's trailblazer, there's torchbearer, there's tinder gatherer, there's firefighter, there's fire chief. Which one could you take on?" He said, "I could be a trailblazer. I could lead out on my own toward change and become the guy around here who knows more about AI than anybody else." That was about a year ago. Oh my God, he's still there. He's still there? Yeah, right? So, Elvis, he's still there, yeah. So, he decided in that moment, instead of just waiting for it to come and get him, or be the big boogeyman over there, he's gonna lean into it. But I also feel it's important on the front to say, yeah, it might take your job. That, that, that is the reality. And there are going to be things that are gonna go away. And quite frankly, uh, years ago I was working, uh, at, when I was teaching at Vanderbilt about, um, oh my gosh, it was 6, 7 years ago. I was, uh, working with teams in our, what we call the Wondry, which is Wonder and Foundry together. It's the, it's the innovation center at Vanderbilt.. And I was working with project teams there and we would bring in outside companies and those outside companies would sponsor 6 students over the course of a year, including internships to work on kind of big problems they were dealing with. And what they wanted to do is robotic process automation type of work. And they were predominantly pointing it at people in, in the accounting space where they're saying, okay, if you're doing a lot of things repetitively, we can automate those things. I mean, in many ways, AI is, It's really great at copying and pasting. That's really what it's doing. It's just doing it really, really fast, like predicting what's going to be the next thing. So they were saying we could take these things and automate those things. And then the question inevitably comes down to, okay, if you take away 100 people's jobs because of it has been automated, what do those people do? And the flippant answer to it, quite frankly, is, well, they get to do higher-level thinking, you know, the stuff they always wanted to do. And then you talk to the people, it's like, some of them are like, I don't even know what that means. Some of them are like, I don't want to do that. I like doing debits and credits and working with these things. I like watching something balance. I like doing the, So AI does certain things well. It can do a ton of communication. It can make— it can put more words out there than you can possibly imagine, some good, some not so much. It can do a pretty good job at running processes. There are some unique things that are uniquely human at this point— creative problem solving, decision making, imagination. These are all new things that we kind of bring to the table. But saying to someone, oh, you can do more of these things because it'll take over that, Just that alone, some people would be like, that sounds great. And other people like, that sounds scary. That sounds like I'm losing power. That sounds like many things, or that sounds like something I don't even know if I'm ready to do, or I'm 50-some years old or 60-some years old. I don't know if I want to do that. So at the end of the day, remember we're leading and working with humans and we have to help them figure out their place in this new space. But it is sometimes, you know, I'll have, I can tell it in the face when I'm talking to audience, I'll say, um, something like, I know some of you are thinking, okay, AI's coming, but I'm only 3 years from retirement or 5 years from retirement or 7 years from retirement. I can hang in there. And I'll say to the audience, I'll say, mm, it's running faster than you are. Doesn't mean we have to be scared at it. It just means we just need to kind of confront it for what it is. My dad worked for 38 years at the phone company. Most of that time was installing telephones for 38 years. Toward the end of his time at the phone company, he got into a more of a leadership role and he had he had an administrative person. And this is when email was really starting. My dad will be 95 in a month and a half. So it was, email was really starting. Yeah. And, um, he said that he had his, his assistant would print off the emails and give them to him. And he looked through the paper copies. Right. And then one day my dad's boss called my dad and said, hey, do you see that email that I sent you? And my dad said, oh, so-and-so is not here today to print that for me. And his boss said, you can go look at it yourself. And my dad said, that's the day I decided to retire. But some of us aren't in that space right now, where it's the time to retire.

Sweet. Oh, that's so sweet. You know, I just, I speak to you and I, and I'm sure your audiences feel this way. You're not sugarcoating anything. But I feel calmer speaking to you. I feel, and it's not Pollyanna. It's, it's This is what we're dealing with. This is how I hear. These are the threads I'm pulling out. The very first thing is we need to understand who we are, what makes a difference in our life, what we care about. That said, if we overly attach to that— and I have a little story, I won't go into it too much— but if I overly attach to who I'm serving and how I'm serving and those things change— let's say DEI has been, you know, diminished, and that was how I did a lot of speaking and made a lot of money that way— you can break yourself against that change, or you can understand, could it be opening a door that was shut to me without me even understanding that it was shut? In other words, you know, I work with a lot of men I always have. So focusing only, or, you know, in a great deal on DEI, and now that's gone in terms of speaking. What doors does that open? What new ways can I be me? Just bigger, different, pointed in another way. I mean, to me, it's what you offer is a way to be more ourselves in a way that we never would have thought to do. Does this make sense at all?

No, it does. Because I think in times of disruption, the challenges you're dealing with can be magnified. A strained relationship doesn't usually get magically better when the money gets tighter. But also the opportunities can be magnified too. We just have to be willing to at least give it a look. And I'm not saying everything's going to turn out rosy every time. You're right. I don't say that at all. I am pragmatic in so many ways, but I'm also like a dreamer. I like also say like, look what we can do. We can achieve a lot of things. I think that matches what I'm trying to provide to folks. I don't want to be Pollyanna to the point where I'm losing— I'm giving people false hope in situations. I want to give them reality. I mean, look what could happen. Look what you could do. And one thing we found is we were studying this more and more. Neuroscientists would tell you, Kathy, we like consistency. We don't like to make a ton of decisions. We like things to process and play out a certain way. That's very much ingrained in who we are because our brains do burn up a lot of calories. If I don't have to think about things, I don't have to go out and hunt for food when there was no buffet table around the corner. But as much as we like that consistency, we're also, despite the fact that we hear things like we don't like to change, We change all the time and we learn and we pick up new things. And I mean, think about when somebody over the course of a year, they might try a new exercise program, a new routine to get to work, something new for lunch. Try— we change all the time. We just don't like it sometimes forced upon us. But what we learned is that we are wired to disrupt. We have the ability to, unlike any other animal in the animal kingdom, to dream up this amazing future and then begin to manifest it. We have experiences, and you know this from your work, um, both in coaching and therapy. We, we have experiences in life. Everybody has their stories of the ups and downs in life. And sometimes the, the lowest spot is followed by a high spot. So we start to realize, boy, that thing that was so disruptive to us and felt like it was rock bottom, guess what? It wasn't. And then we're wired to disrupt because of the resources we have. The most disruptive resource we have these days is technology, and we've all got it at our fingertips. So I love it. I don't wanna, I don't wanna throw everything over to AI and have it run my, my world for me, but I, I don't mind it as a thought partner. It gives me some good ideas or ways to think about things or, or reframe things sometimes. And I think that's a smart way to use it. So just remember folks, disruption's gonna come at you, but you're wired to handle it. You got a big bad brain, you got experiences and you got resources and, and apply those. And we also found that there are, these behaviors of positive disruptors that we studied. And I was kind of disappointed. I was telling my research team because I had a team for a few years at Vanderbilt and they would— we would go through the code and all. Were they students who volunteered? I have 5 students. No, the university paid them for it, but they received a little stipend. There were 5 undergrads and then 1 grad student who would be the project lead with me. And we would go through and code all these interviews. And I really wanted to find like, what's the one behavior? What's the two behaviors? You know, give me the big T, capital T truth that if people do this, they got it made. There were 16 of them. And I was like, oh goodness. But then you start to realize nobody has them all maxed out. Nobody had— there's no perfect combination. If you have 1, 7, and 8, you got it made. If you have 2, 5, and 7, you don't, or something like that. Which, and then you start to realize, okay, wait a minute. We all have disruptive strengths. Some of us are more visionary. Some people are better rolling up their sleeves. Some people are good at running out and like at least looking at the disruption. Some people are better at standing firm in the face of doubters. Some people are better at picking up on insight. Some people say things smart. These are different versions of different of the 16. I've never met somebody who doesn't at least self-identify at having a couple of these things. Wow. And I've never been in a room where I talked to an audience like last week I was in a room with, it was probably 400 people in the room and I go through them really quickly and I say, raise your hand if you think you got this. Yeah. And all of a sudden it's like, raise your hand if you've raised your hand at any point. And you look around the room and go, it's all right here. Yeah, you've got it. Your team has it. So great teams are complementary, right? Strengths of one overcome the weaknesses of another. So you talk about, you mentioned earlier about doing a lot of work in, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion. Well, I'm trying in my own way to help people bring their strengths to the table. And that's the way you build a great team and all the voices matter.

Wow, I could talk to you for 2 hours.

And oh yeah, I know, we could keep going.

I know. Oh man, it could be a 5-part session. I'm— I feel like we're so lucky to have your thoughts and your— and James too, he's so fascinating. But this book truly is a manual for, you know, my first book was called Breakdown Breakthrough, and it was about the 12 hidden crises working women face, and many of them are the same today, but it's a similar thought that if you look at something that feels like a breakdown, if you can look at in 5 years, what could possibly happen that I would look back on this and say, I'm actually grateful for it. Yeah. Now, is that really going to happen? Are we going to be grateful for every breakdown we've ever had? No. But just opening the door to what could this be leading me to that in fact I really wanted but was too afraid or didn't even know? Or, you know, I think that these ways of disrupting and these ways of thinking about life, they're going to help us through what we would— what unilaterally we would think are the harder times. So I'm so grateful for your book. So where does everybody soak up everything you have to offer, Patrick? Where do we send them?

It's pretty easy. Go to patrickleddin.com. That's easy. It's L-E, Patrick, and then L-E-D-D-I-N.com. And you can sign up. I get a newsletter. I put out a newsletter like a lot of folks do. There's one on LinkedIn every week about disruption at work, and there's one, Disrupt Everything Else, that comes out on Thursdays. And really, you know, if people pick up the book and they start to go through it, they'll quickly realize, okay, this doesn't feel like a heavy academic piece. Not at all. Written at a university. And I can tell you there's a lot of research that goes behind it, but we leaned into James's ability to write good stories. So if you like the TSC story, you wanna hear that. Every chapter opens up with a story on someone and their disruption. And some of those disruptions at face value, like, oh, that's a pretty cool thing that happened to them. Some of it's like, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy and everything in between. And as, as Patterson would say, if you don't like one of the stories, skip it, keep going. Um, because over the course of, you know, a couple hundred, 300 pages or so, you're gonna pick up some insights that'll hopefully help you to tackle your disruptions in life because we're all the disrupted. Let's choose to be positive disruptors for good.

On those beautiful— on that beautiful note, thank you for joining me. Thank you. I just love it. And I love the work you're doing, and it's so needed. And everyone who listens to you is fortunate. Patrick, thank you.

I'll say the same thing back to you because you are a special person. And we were doing the interviews at that conference you mentioned. James Patterson and I were going kind of from room to room, and everybody was great in their own ways. But when I walked into your room, when we actually both have talked about it afterwards, we walked into your room, we're like, We really like this person. Just something about you clicked in the way you interacted with us, and I'm a fan, and I know James Patterson's a fan too. So thanks so much.

That means the world to me. Thank you so much for saying. All right, everybody, you know I say this every time, but this is a deep conversation with a lot of nuance, and I'm thinking that you might have questions. Something might have pinged your, your mind or your heart, and you think, gosh, I want to know a little more about that. Well, you're going to go to Patrick's I— but wherever you see this, we're both on LinkedIn. We're all having a ball on LinkedIn. I hope where you see this, you offer your question. Wait a minute, I didn't understand this. Or can you, can you fill me in a little more on this? We would so love to hear what are your takeaways from this discussion and the book Disrupt Everything. What's the full title?

It's called Disrupt Everything and Win.

And win. Take control of your future, right?

That's right. Take control of your future. Exactly.

Love it. Love it. Okay everyone, I really hope this is inspiring to you and it gives you a lot of food for thought for opening that door to what could be enlivening through all of this change. Thank you for being here and have a wonderful Finding Brave 2 weeks and we will see you next time. Thank you again, Patrick. Come back again soon.

Anytime.

Thanks so much for joining us today and please don't forget to check out Finding Brave.org for more programs, resources, and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding Brave.