In this opening segment of the Bestseller TV interview, host Taren Winterbrill greets author Leo Bottary, introducing him as the writer of "Peer Novation: What Peer Advisory Groups Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Teams." The host references Bottary's previous book, "What Anyone Can Do," noting its focus on peer groups, and the guest expresses enthusiasm for being on the show again.
Hi everybody, welcome to Bestseller TV. I'm Taren Winterbrill. We're here with Leo Bottari. He is the author of Peer Novation: What Peer Advisory Groups Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Teams. Leo, it's great to see you again.
It's so great to be here with you on the show again. Great to see you, Taren.
Likewise, we should tell our viewers you were here for your last book, which was called What Anyone Can Do. And that was about peer groups as well, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, definitely connected. Each of them stands alone, but I would certainly love it, of course, if people read all 3 books, right? The first book, The Power of Peers, was really written to look at how and why peer groups are so effective for CEOs and business leaders. And the reason it was written was I was actually working for Vistage at the time, and Vistage assembles and facilitates peer advisory groups for CEOs and business leaders all around the world. And I was leading a brand refresh at the time. And as I was speaking to CEOs and business leaders and asking them, how do you learn? How do you grow? They would tell me, I read books, I hire coaches, I get consultants, I go to executive development programs at Harvard and Stanford. And no one, at least in an unassisted way, was mentioning peer groups. And I thought, oh my God, these things are so powerful and they're so effective, you know, but people don't even have them as part of their consideration set. So the idea was, let's put a narrative together that really speaks to how and why these peer groups work as well as they do. So that was the first book. In 2017, I had a podcast called The Year of the Peer, and I figured it was my venture into podcasting. I could have it be a definite beginning and an end, and we could see how that goes. And that was on C-suite radio, of course. But I interviewed 50 really successful people from all different walks of life. And of course, part of the questioning all the time was, okay, did you do this all by yourself? And every one of them would laugh, of course, at the idea that, you know, they had countless people help them get to where they are. And so I took a lot of the, um, you know, findings from those interviews and talked about the common thread there, which was, you know, most of these people, it wasn't like they had, you know, superhuman talent or anything like that. Obviously, you They were committed to what they were doing, but they basically did what this gentleman Joe Henderson wrote about in a book in 1976, where he described, you know, really successful people as the people who do the things that anyone can do, but most of us never will. And so we talked about that in the book. And I think, you know, talked about the fact that when we surround ourselves with the right people, it can help us do those little things anyone can do far more often. So when you look at the power of peers and why peer groups work so well, and then you look at the power of any individual and what they can do with the help of others, then you start thinking about, well, what can this all mean to high-performing teams for our organizations? So that's where peer innovation comes into play. After having now done about 160 or plus workshops throughout the US, UK, and Canada with CEO peer groups and cross-functional work teams, and really seeing how these principles, these 5 factors, and that I've identified, you know, apply to high-performing teams.
