Dave Kline, Owner of SkillScouter - How to become a great manager? - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 49

Hey, Michael here. Welcome to another episode of the Michael Girdley Show. Uh, today, uh, I had one of my favorite follows from Twitter who talks a lot about management and leadership, um, which are two topics near and dear to my heart. His name is Dave Klein. Um, so Dave spent a number of years doing consulting and then ended up at Bridgewater, um, which is, for those of you unfamiliar with it, one of the most extreme kind of cultural and management environments, uh, in the United States. So, um, he and I spent a bunch of time kind of talking about human nature, talking about about how to work yourself into being a new manager, how to think about those things. Talked about the shift in hiring overseas, one of the things near and dear to my heart. So lots of good stuff here, things to learn from him and see how he's thinking about kind of building the practice of management out in the marketplace, which is some of the stuff he does as part of his company, the Management Accelerator. So I'm excited about this one, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. Uh, and before we get into the episode, here's a quick word from our sponsor. Hey, Michael here. Uh, sponsor for today's show is actually, uh, a product that I'm a part of called DMBridge. Uh, and what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built, uh, to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. Um, a lot of the other solutions, uh, do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox. So we created DMBridge, and what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So, uh, we're currently live with the product. Uh, would love for you to sign up and become a customer, uh, and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app. And go on there, put in your name, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. Dave, thanks for being here today. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Thanks for having me on. It's going to be great.

Yeah. Well, you're my first Bridgewater alum or refugee, depending upon what you call yourself. So this will be fun to kind of dig into how that's affected your management approach and all that kind of stuff.

Just, just barely, you know, with a decade in the whole thing.

Just barely. Well, cool. Well, I, I feel like I know you pretty well having got to know you on Twitter and interacted in DMs and all that kind of stuff. But, um, for people in my audience that don't know you, maybe just give us a quick background. Like, what do you do today and how did you end up, you know, starting to do that?

Yeah, so today, um, I basically have two businesses. So, um, like you said, I, I left Bridgewater about 18 months ago with a goal to go buy a business. We kicked the tires on everything from an oil change franchise to a website for helping felons reenter the world. But we settled on buying one that was an education affiliate site. So it reviews everything from Python to piano. And, you know, when people go take those courses, we get a little cut of the revenue. And so that was business one, and that was meant to really like give us some cash flow and a runway to basically be able to work for myself. And then, um, you know, a few serendipitous things happened. You know, when we bought that site, the idea was one, diversify traffic by getting into social, and two, start to cover these cohort-based courses. And so, um, I kind of put those two things together, ended up taking Saul Hill Bloom's audience building class, uh, you know, and one thing led to another where, you know, the 30 people who followed me became the 3,000, became now the almost 60,000. Part of that then led to getting to know the Maven team, building a cohort-based course with them for new managers. And that has now led to multiple corporate cohorts, multiple public cohorts. And so I have a second business now called the Management Accelerator that's really focused on just helping managers get those baseline tactics from delegation to feedback to measuring the business so they can be on the right side of the 60% who fail.

Yeah, that's awesome. So, you know, just stepping back a little bit, like, so how did you end up at Bridgewater? And then kind of why did you decide to, to leave that situation?

I mean, if we wanted to rewind it way, way, way, way back, you know, like, I, I grew up in upstate New York, lower middle class upbringing, you know, divorced parents, one-stoplight town, you know, pretty much like child of the 1980s. Um, and I had these like two different forces, you know, my dad was like a serial, mostly failed entrepreneur. And then my mom was like, literally spent 50 years typing other people's words. You know, she was a transcriptionist, she was a data processor. And so it was like pretty humble beginnings. And then I would say over the last 20 years, it's been this, um, sort of like these new levels of the video game of life keep getting opened up. And so I got a scholarship to a great school and went to school in Pennsylvania, and then I, being an alumni, got a job at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a consultant, and then you know, that led to working at Columbia, led to working at Moody's, led to working at Bridgewater, you know. And I really spent the majority of my career those last two spots with 10 years each, um, you know. And I think some of it is just like that, you know. I think you at one point you wrote something, if I'm remembering right, that like a lot of times we'll be like a reaction to our parents, right? Either like there's something they did or the way that they conducted themselves that either deeply makes you want to emulate them or like react to them, you know. And so I've always had this like entrepreneurial itch, and I think that was from seeing my dad and his various schemes and scams throughout my childhood. Um, but I was also like deeply risk-averse, you know. So like every time I kept like punting, I kept waiting for, you know, the great idea that'll come. And if I just had maybe a little more money in the bank account, I could have a little more runway, you know. And 2 years became 10 years became 20 years.

Yeah, well, I mean, and so just so I understand, like, when you start to spend a decade at a place like Bridgewater, um, for people that don't know, that's Ray Dalio's kind of hedge fund asset management business, which is pretty big, pretty famous. 10— in 10 years, like, it be— you know, that can become pretty lucrative. So did you— I mean, were you making a big lifestyle shift at some point to, to leave there and go become entrepreneurial, kind of at our age, right? I don't know exactly how old you are, but Maybe late 30s, early 40s.

I appreciate the late 30s round up. Definitely mid-40s.

Mid-40s. Okay, so I'm 47.

So I got you by a couple. Merely 45.

Yeah, it was—

I mean, it was definitely stepping off the— I'd say it was one of the biggest surprises to me, actually. Right. So you're like, okay, I've got this steady income. It's pretty lucrative. And the idea was like we had sort of prepared for like multiple years of either making zero or less. You know, that was part of, you know, my wife and I, we literally moved houses so we could have like a smaller footprint, a lower interest rate. You know, we thought carefully about the cars we had, etc. But we were really trying to like maximize that runway. And, you know, knock on wood, thus far it hasn't had to be a material, a giant material lifestyle change. You know, like the business we bought provides some cash flow and then the, you know, the training business sort of ended up usurping the original business much faster than either of us would have guessed. Yeah.

So how did you decide on the, I guess, the marketing business, the one that's the lead gen business for online education? Like what was appealing about that one versus some of the other kind of more conventional stuff that you looked at?

You know, we're up in Connecticut, so all the conventional stuff, we're in Connecticut. So it's, you know, everything I got down the path on with these other local businesses, it quickly got to, you know, it's a minimum wage state that's approaching $17. You know, so all of the franchises that sort of like did really well in Mississippi on paper, when you ran the model here in Connecticut, you're like, wow, that's an upside-down business. Um, you know, some of the other physical ones, we just like didn't— I had a harder time imagining my day-to-day, you know. Like, I just, I appreciate people who like want to go and get dirty and like, you know, pinch hit when people call in late. But the, the idea of having like a global market available to me, um, yeah, and we could talk about that, but like having a global market of 3, 4, 5 billion people who want to learn, you know, in a rising industry and just sort of being able to tap into that was far more interesting to me.

Yeah. Was, did you end up, I mean, it sounds like you liked kind of the economic dynamics and the way the business worked, but you know, how much of that do you think fit who you were coming into the market? Like you've clearly gravitated towards education as a space that you like, like you, you like teaching and like sharing. Was that, was that part of the appeal or like, did you feel like, oh man, like I understand how to do, you know, e-com marketing and I can, I can really grow this business and make it rock? Or was it some combination of those things?

It is definitely not that I knew a damn thing about e-com marketing. So that was all the learning curve. I think it's the combo of like naturally as a leader, I was more coaching and developmental. You go back to the background, like a lot of those ladders up for me were education based. And then, you know, we were talking before we hopped on, like as a parent, it's like such a, like a thing that we fixate on of like, how do we educate our kids? What's the right vehicle? Um, and so like education is so front and center and important to like me, combined with, um, seeing what's going on in the world, right? There's like so much innovation, so many companies disrupting. You see this like massive amount of debt that people have to go into to get a higher ed degree, and then you can turn around and, you know, take I had Scott Galloway when I went to Stern, right? He's pretty, you know, Prof G's pretty famous. You can go spend $7,000 and not get into his brand strategy course, or you can go to his website, Section 4, and take it for $700 anywhere in the world. And you're like, wow, that's like a massive shift in power and access that didn't exist before, you know. Or take the freelancers who are, you know, in countries where all of a sudden getting paid $12 to make an Excel model is life-changing. You know, and so you just see all of these, and the platform to get there is, you know, in many cases online courses or tutorials or these groups that allow them to rapidly get those skills and make that leap.

Super cool. Okay, well, I mean, I love like the fervor you have for kind of this idea of education and growth and all that kind of stuff. Like, it's really fun as somebody who's an education entrepreneur too, but I'm also another stuff entrepreneur as well. Like, it's, it's super fun to, to hear, to hear other people share that stuff. So I'm Also why I'm so glad we're talking.

Since you're in that space, like, what do you think is going to be— I, I have my own theory about like what the last domino that needs to fall, but like, what, what do you think are like the next big things to fall in kind of online education or like education?

Oh, education disruption. Um, man, it definitely feels like just following the dollars, there will be more of the things that are currently only accessible to US people that will continue to get more democratized overseas. You know, things like coding boot camps, for example, which I'm, you know, near and dear to my heart. Like, I think you're going to see more and more of those get pushed overseas and really be helping kind of follow the dollars, which is like, if you look right now, you know, every single US company, whether they talk about it or not, is offshoring stuff as quickly as possible. Like, they're just They've all gotten to a point where they can't hire American workers as quickly as they want to or at a rate that they can afford. And we've got a situation where there's just acres of people overseas. Argentina is a great example where there's no domestic opportunity and they're all incredibly hungry to figure out how to get into the broader world of more productive business. So I think stuff like what was formerly Lambda School, our in-person coding bootcamp is a great example. I think those are going to be pushed more and more overseas over time. So that's a trend I see. I'm also a terrible person to be like, tell me what's going to get disrupted next, which is maybe where I got bored with VC as a career. But that's the biggest thing I'm seeing. And that's one of the things I've been thinking about a lot. How do you leverage where all these, this value chain, right? Where companies globally want to hire in these remote places, but a lot of times these remote people don't have something even as fundamental as like English, right? And that's one of the things you actually see, the overseas engineers who don't speak English as a native language, the ones of them who can speak it fluently get paid like double what the non-English speakers get paid. Like, it's pretty, it's pretty astounding. So how do you kind of be part of that unlocking of value for all these overseas people is kind of a big trend I'm thinking about. I don't know. I don't know if you wanted a 4-minute diatribe about the topic, but clearly I've thought about it some.

So I was going to say the one that, um, when I think about— I was thinking a little bit more US-centric, but like the— it feels like the last piece that has to fall into place to, to really put pressure, I think, on like higher education is going to be the credential problem. You know what I mean? Like that there, there is still this thing for most employers, or they signaling thing to say that I went to this 4-year university that has these credentials, you know. But, but when you, when you strip that piece out, it's like you can get access to the best instructors now. You can get the, you can get the instruction when you need it versus sort of like stockpiling it for like 10 years down the road when you've already forgotten it. There's all these like good innovations, but like we haven't getting more social followers or getting great reviews on your Fiverr projects. It's like a helpful step in the direction of different type of social proof, but it's not a Harvard business degree.

Oh, that's why we just put it on the blockchain, man. Proof of work. It's totally practical. The blockchain could be your resume.

Bitcoin.

It's a big bunch of horse shit, dude. It's so not fun. People tell me that, so I'm like, do you even understand how this works? Like, people would think that's thing. You know, I mean, the tough thing there is you have all these hiring managers and maybe the places you've worked are unique, but in my experience in flyover America, like most hiring managers are actually interested in covering their own ass. They're not actually interested in how do I find really good talent. They're trying to find people who are not going to be a problem for them or get them fired if they hire those people. So it's like super easy to just delegate that to Okay, well, you know, they went to Harvard, great. Like, we're going to hire this Harvard person because we delegated and abdicated the responsibility to determine if this person was any good to Harvard. And, you know, what are you going to do, get mad at Harvard? Like, so I think that, that kind of stuff, it's almost a cultural shift that we have to make to start to solve for that. And I know Bridgewater and stuff, like, you guys do— did stuff differently in terms of quantitative hiring and stuff like that. But the place is still full of Oxford and Harvard graduates last I checked. So it's not like—

Well, I was going to say, I think you sort of have a different logic, but you get to the same place. Like when you, you know, in really both places I worked, we sort of had enough of a calling card and a brand that if you wanted to approach someone, you pretty much could, you know, which then creates a new problem, which is like, how do you want to sort through the world of opportunity? And so you would use shorthand rubrics like, where did they go to school or where else did they work or what company did they start, et cetera. You know, and so you, but so you end up in exactly the same spot, that there's not a credential replacement. Um, and I think we, we try to think pretty broadly about it because we were thinking about it in terms of alpha, right? Like, how can we go, go get the, you know, find the alpha in the talent market in the same way we try to find alpha in the actual investment market?

Well, I mean, that's why, like, I frankly see, um, the inverse of what you're saying is like, you want to find, when you're hiring a great person, you want to find something about them that doesn't fit the mold of easily identifiable great talent. So like A lot of times when I see an MIT degree or a Stanford degree or whatever, I'm like, ah, there's not going to be a pricing arbitrage here. Is there going to be a good opportunity? Because that person's easily identified and your best case is all downside actually, because I've seen folks who have Harvard degrees and I talk to them and I'm like, really? They let you in there? You know, like, you know, so it's one of those things that it's actually a negative signal if you're trying to play that game of identifying unidentified talent.

Right. Uh, you have any good tricks for finding the unidentified talent?

Um, man, I think that, uh, I think that spending time reading the resume to try to put together somebody's story is really interesting to me. Like, I try to understand how they— how to think about them, what they've gone through, and what their journey is in their resume as a way to understand what you're most likely going to end up with. You know, for example, if you've, you know, I think the most simple example is you look at somebody's resume and they've switched jobs every 9 months for the past 6 years, right? Or last 10 years, right? What kind of story does that tell you about what the person's going to be likely to be and kind of give you hypotheses to talk to them or not talk to them? So, you know, somebody like that, I'm going to go into it and say, oh, you switched, you've had 10 jobs, you know, 6 jobs in 6 years or 9 jobs in 6 years. Like, You might be chasing, chasing the money, right? You might be in it for mercenary rather than mission. So, you know, that's— I don't think that's a really good trick, unfortunately. I do like to use a lot of quantitative assessments ahead of time just to save my own time, where it's like, right, instead of me taking 2 months to dig into your background and get to know who you really were and work with you every day, if I can have you do a 10 or 15 minute assessment after our first interview, and saves me months, like, that sounds pretty good. So yeah, what about you?

You know, I was gonna say, in the— in the— you sort of split it into two buckets where, you know, one bucket is sometimes we're just gonna have to do interviews. I think you and I would be pretty aligned. Like, I tend to— I would tend to go more towards, like, always wanting to understand the why behind stuff. Like, what motivated them? You know, why did they make that? I don't want to— almost never even actually care what the actual choice is. You know, as more like how they can like sit above it and like, well, why did you make that choice? You know, what assumptions did you have when you made the choice? What were you bet— what did you bet was going to happen when you took that job? Is that what happened? How did you react to it when it happened? You know what I mean? Just because all I want to do is play over and over until I can see the patterns for how they're then going to deal with the scenarios when they're inside my walls.

So how much of what you're just saying is, uh, you're, you're identifying if somebody has a growth mindset or not?

Uh, a lot of it is growth. I think, yeah, that might be the easiest summary at all, right? Is you have to have— because if I was breaking it into the constituent parts, right, I'm looking for self-awareness, right? I want to see like that they can see that they are imperfect, as we all are, and then that they know what to do with it. Do you know what I mean? So there's a— sometimes I think people just affix the growth mindset to like, I'm open to getting better and being fallible, but I also need then like that they can put it into action. That they can realize, "Well, I've got a really strong arm, but I have no accuracy, so I should play right field, not pitcher." That kind of idea, so you can kind of look down on yourself. And then, I don't know, that would be the one difference. I have to be more than just being willing to grow and be curious, but it goes a long ways, right? If you're curious and constantly hungry and constantly evolving, for me, that covers over a lot of sins.

I'm with you. Yeah, I just— and I do the same stuff, right? I run like the top grading methodology to do interviews, and, and part of that is just like understanding how people think about the decisions that they made in the past and how they think about them now, right? And, um, you know, and, and some of the times they make it really easy for you. Like, you'll interview a person and like 3, 3 bosses in a row were all assholes who, uh, who were idiots. And it's like, well, How likely is it that 3 of them in a row were terrible people? And it's possible, but at some point you gotta look back at the candidate and wonder like, what, what went wrong with them? So, um, but yeah, I'd spend a lot of time on kind of the same exact, same exact aspects. So, so, you know, one of the things I wanted to dig in with you, like, um, we're both nerds about like management and leadership, um, and you write about it a lot. I, I'm a dilettante in between writing threads about France.

Um, which I very much enjoyed going. I got to go to France through you.

Oh, well, I, I got actually got texted. Well, first of all, that, that, that thread was not one of those I'm gonna go make this happen thing. If you saw the way the hook started on the thread, and for those of you who don't know, I, I live tweeted a French, uh, Parisian food tour that we had, a private food tour my wife and I did. It was amazing. It was like the most This lady was just hilariously French who led the whole thing. And I wasn't intending to produce any content that week and you can see it in the way I wrote the thread is I kind of just backed into like, holy shit, we're on a food tour and this lady's going crazy. And it was just amazing. So if you're on Twitter, check it out. But I mean, the lady just did all this most insanely French stuff ever. There was a point where she, stopped our tour so she could go chastise some French policemen who she considered to be eating poor quality food. She just went and started to yell at these poor young men. It was just the best.

Anyway, so I enjoyed mostly the disdain she had for Americans while giving Americans a tour. Oh yeah, that was great.

It is interesting. I got back from France and I'm talking to my buddy and he's like, he's like, I hate that place. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I love that place. And, um, like, we had 100% universal— everybody was kind to us, like 100%, like the opposite of whatever French kind of like stereotypes is of being rude and distant and all that kind of stuff. Like, everybody was just like so nice to us. And we did 3 things. One is we, um, we tried to blend in. So like, we wouldn't show up in like, you know, flip-flops and like You know, uh, Guyabera shirts to everything. Um, we were, we were gracious and just super kind whenever anything happened. We're thank you very much, just gracious, anything happened. Um, because there it's actually super important. Um, as I found out, like, they, they, they have taken this American idea of, um, equality to like the furthest extreme. Like, you'll never see super rich people driving around flashily showing off wealth. Like it's all, if it is, if it is like promoted, it's like super subtle. So you don't see anybody driving Lambos, like unless they're like some of the more recent immigrants, like nobody shows off wealth. Like the, the $150 million people, like they look just as classy, but middle of the road as everybody else. Like they won't show it off. And third thing we did is just, ah, I mean, maybe, maybe not in downtown, but nobody, they just, it was just one of those things where Our tour guide said they actually had a hangover from the French Revolution when all the very wealthy people were scared they were going to get murdered by the mobs, that they started to hide their wealth. Yeah, she said that's what happened. And then we spoke French or tried to speak French, and then they would switch to English and they were all super nice. So my buddy, he's like, I hate it there. Everybody was rude. I was like, tell me what your approach to France was. He's like, I tried to speak English to them. I told them how it was going to be. I demanded American-level service. I dressed however I wanted to.

I hit them with my flip-flop when I didn't like what they had to say.

Totally. I was like, ah, you're just doing this totally wrong. It's totally wrong. So, but we got, you know, the tour guide. I mean, she was super nice to us, super kind, but she still pooped on America. It was great.

Anyway, it's amazing how far kindness will go, man. Yeah.

So I was— thank you for reading it. I really enjoyed it. But anyway, I got us off topic. What we're talking about, we're talking about management, right?

Yeah.

Okay. Oh, so the one thing I wanted to dig into is like, how do you think that the Bridgewater days where you work there and they have this idea, this radical candor thing, which means everybody's like super direct and tells each, you know, I guess I read that there was once there's a meeting where like they get up and you find out in the meeting that there's a list of who are the worst managers in the company and they push your name up on it and that's how you find out in front of everybody else. But there's that kind of stuff that like, I wanted to dig in with you because I have this thesis that that's just everybody giving each other an excuse to be a jerk. But maybe you think differently having lived through it. To me, like my fundamental thesis is you can be as direct as you want to be, but you could just take a little bit of effort and do it, do things kindly and with kindness. And so like, what do I have wrong about this concept?

It's funny. I thought I don't usually tell too many stories, but you just get, you just like gave me a little bit of PTSD. Because I think I wrote that list. So it was a list of the top— So there was this idea of everything is data, right? And we're trying to evolve that and we're trying to, in the same way that you could go through compounding your understanding of something as complicated as the global macro financial markets, you could do the same thing for people in management. And so again, that's going to be a messy process to figure that out. And I would say it's probably still a process that's going on, but we would collect all this data, like data about how the managers managed. And you would— and so there was a list. We basically collected up that data and we said like, well, what's predictive of performance? And then like, let's rank it. And I remember like helping make the list and it was like, we'll draw the line at 500. And I was 497 on my own list. I was like, this is great. Like, this is a list of all the people who might be incompetent. And I just was in charge of creating it and being on it. And It was, it was like two— I would say like I have two minds, right? You're one which is like, that sounds crazy, right? That, that like, A, that would even happen, but B, that I would be, you know, like, here, could you just co-author your own death certificate? Um, but in reality, like very little— like that, that's actually not what happened. Like honestly, the number one guy on the list ended up going on Farnam Street with Ray to talk about it in a podcast. Like, it was so funny. Um, but, you know, but I think it was like a forcing mechanism for that, like, extreme self-awareness. We're saying, like, you know, if you can be that clear-eyed about how you might stand up and how you may rank, then you can just deal with that reality, right? You can deal with, you know, everybody thinks they're amazing at all things, and you're just not, you know what I mean? Like, I am— I'm a relatively creative problem solver. I am not very damn organized, you know? And yet I was also the COO of 3 different groups. And so you're like, your only way you're going to pull that off is by creatively hiring people who are going to like offset or who are going to complement, who are going to create the completed system. And so I think the benefit is like we took that farther than any place I've ever worked, you know? Like I started in consulting, it was like a wake-up call, right? When I resigned and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm destroying the project, I'm leaving, I'm like a senior project manager. And the guy I resigned to was kind of like, peace. Like, your replacement will be here on Monday. Like, this was not hard. You guys are all, you know, basically like cogs in a wheel. And so to go from that sort of like, you know, homogeneity to then like every single person down to 60 attributes and what they might be like was pretty stark. But then you start to see the power of it. You know, you can really create high-performing teams. You can connect with people in much more personal ways. You can motivate them in a way that gets the most out of them, or you can give them the support if that's the type of person they are. So I don't know. That's the plus side is that, but I'm not saying it's not a little kooky.

Well, no, I mean, I'm cool with kooky, like case in point here, but like how much of that, a lot of that seems to me to be unnecessarily mean. Like the way, you know, and I know, let's talk about the list of the worst managers thing. Like, is it, you know, that just seems like a— yes, let's be transparent about it, but like the people finding out about it in the meeting, like, and maybe that's not— maybe this is not a real thing that happened, but to me that's just like, well, like, okay, if we're gonna do that, that's fine, it could be a public list, but like why not deliver that to the person privately beforehand so they can be prepared and think through it and then be okay with that? Like, why not put in that extra 10% effort to have that little kindness that shows, hey, we understand how you're going to go through this and it may feel poorly, rather than expect them to just be like, suck it up, buttercup, which is, you know, to me it just, it just seems lazy.

I don't think it would have— it was certainly not lazy, man. I've never worked harder in my life. I think with the, the, uh, it was because so fundamentally the culture— and I don't think this is true in most places, like, I wouldn't You can't take the Bridgewater model and drop it in anywhere without adjustment. It was so critical that the radical transparency, the radical truth, that accurate was more important than kind. Those words are written down. You know what I mean? And so it was to some degree, and when we would have concepts like separate what's true from what to do about it. So even implicit in what you're saying, that they would need time to process it or take a blow from it, you're starting to already move into, well, what does it mean? And instead, this would just be like, well, is this even accurate? Here's a model we just made up that ranks people. Is that accurate? Most of the time, we'd then be debating the model. Is that the inputs we need? Is that what we would expect? Would we expect Dave to be 497 or would we expect him to be 3? What is that? And so that part of it was just getting that model tuned. And then there's like, okay, well, what do we want to do about it? Do we fire the bottom 250, or do we just sort of say, like, you know, the bottom 100 needs, like, a remediation plan to get better, and the middle need, you know, to kind of keep doing what they're doing, and the top need new stretch opportunities because they're our future stars or whatever else. And so it— I mostly would agree, but that— but the thing I think was different is, like, we had that agreement walking in the door. Like, you, you went through an interview process, you watched video. Like, I watched a video of someone being fired in a public meeting. Do you know what I mean? It was like, this is how transparent it is. Like, this person just got fired in front of 40 people. You in? Do you know what I mean? And so like, I think what's harder is people imagine it inside of their own organization without that sort of handshake on the way in. And then no way, man, you can't do that to people. That's when you have the Coinbase problem. You know, like you're renegotiating the deal mid-cycle and everyone loses their minds.

It's interesting. How much do you think existing organizations can start to nudge themselves in that direction if they want to? Or do you think once you're set, like you're like Coinbase, you're set and screwed? And arguably Coinbase had bigger problems in culture. Like the fact they couldn't ship an NFT platform was just like, they gave that guy $800 million or something from Google and shipped that. Like, I don't know, I could produce something like that on a weekend with just like a couple programmers. Like it's unreal. Anyway, go ahead.

I was going to say there's like a lot of like 18-year-olds in dorm rooms are shipping NFT platforms, and so that is a little bit embarrassing for sure. Um, you know, I reflected on it a lot. Like, I have a few buddies, we've all laughed and said like, you know, what would you, you know, starting your business, or like a number of us will like— I coach execs, a couple of them consult at other companies— I'm like, how much do you think is portable? And I think like we— the number we keep throwing around is like 75 or 80% of it. Like, if I were— I think to make it more universal, you have to make two adjustments. So one of them is, um, and I think I've heard even in a recent interview Ray say this, which is like, a lot of it's written in response to, I think, human nature. Like, a lot of the principles that were written down. And so it's like, oh, in general, people will have a favorable view of themselves, so let me write principles that like counteract that. Um, and I think that probably swung too far. And so like, instead of feedback being so premised on like the negative and weakness. It needs to be more balanced, um, and probably if anything skewed towards the positive. So I think that would be a, that would be a tweak that people would have to make for this thing to really work. Um, you know, and then I think the other is because it's more unique to the business, right? You're an asset manager, and so like you can win by being right 55% of the time, 60%. Um, that means you can invest heavily in debate. You wanted to bring to bear the best ideas. People should be super encouraged to dissent if they see a better way. But that is so, again, so fundamental to the culture. But we would often— that would show up everywhere else. Should we be debating a budgeting system? You know what I mean? You're like, no, it's not our core business. And so I don't know if you're not an asset manager, if that's sort of over-indexing on the debate component. Is super practical. I think you need to dial that back and have slightly different variations of the system. But a lot of the rest of it I think is pretty portable. And then it would just depend on how far you're moving from where you are to where that is today. And if you're a super political behind closed door, recording every meeting all of a sudden is not going to fly. That's going to take a journey.

So, I mean, one of the things I've been really digging into lately is how can you systematize culture, right? How can you design it and create it And I think you've hit on this also in kind of what your business has become, right? Like there is no class on how to be a manager. It's one of those things like I, business school doesn't even really have it. They want to talk to you about leadership, but like it's the practical nature of a lot of things you talk about. Like what do you do week one? Like it's not even really covered anywhere. But I'm curious, like why has nobody kind of a Bridgewater alum like create, like created like an EOS for like Okay, here's our operating system of this culture and stuff and how we're going to do it. Or would that just be taboo for you guys as alums to kind of package that up?

Well, I mean, I think you have— Ray's packaged some of it up himself, right? He's got this concept of Principles University. You can go get a— he and Adam Graham built a personality test that you can go take similar to what we had. There's this concept of a dot collector where you can give feedback. I think Speaking of Coinbase, they just signed up as a client. Um, that was pretty public news, right? Literally, you can rate everybody in the company on a bunch of dimensions aligned to the culture and build a picture over time. So he's gone down that path. Um, but I think the thing you're suggesting is slightly different, and it's sort of the gap that I saw with— I sort of like shrugged because I'm like, I think it's the same problem I'm seeing, which is, you know, that too many companies think of like management as a destination. Right. It's like, oh, congratulations. You're now in charge of other people. You know, good luck. And in reality, it's like a whole new craft, right? Like everything that got you to where you were now might become a liability, right? Like, oh, you're used to getting everything done yourself. Now you have to rely on others. You're used to being super vocal and like, you might want to let other people speak. You know, you've got to like adapt and accommodate people. And there's just tactics you can use. You know, but I think very few companies are like teaching that OS to kind of to use your language. And I don't entirely know why, because it feels like a really bad ROI call. Yeah, right. You're going to take often your best contributors, throw them into an entirely new craft, and then give them no like running start to get it right, right? Like you wouldn't throw your analyst into, you know, building models and not teach them Excel.

What I mean, it ties into kind of the old there's like an old saw where you want to know who the absolute worst sales managers are. They're like your highest performing salespeople. Have you heard that one? It's like, ah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it turns out because exactly like who you need to be and the things you need to do in each of those roles are entirely the opposite.

Yeah.

So it's interesting, you know, and I think, I mean, I've read Ray's stuff and I call him Ray because, you know, we've never met and he has no idea who I am, but it's totally fine. But it's called Principles for a reason, which is, I think one of the things I like about what you're doing is it's much more practical in terms of helping people get to a place that's actionable. I think I've talked about that book, The Effective Manager, and I like it because it's just like, do these 3 things and here's how you do them and don't screw them up. And they're very practical, which EOS is that way too. But I think that's where I think there's still an opportunity. Ray is very much a high-level thinker, you know, and they're principles. Principles are not actionable a lot of times. And I think a lot of people people need to buy a system around something like that. So anyway, that's all I know about that.

No, I mean, it's the same, it's the same. I obviously, I very much agree, right? Because that's the thing that we're doing, which is, you know, oh, you should delegate. And people are like, how do you do that? What was so surprising to me, even building the course, is, you know, when we built it, we called it the New Manager Accelerator. And then like 60, 75% of people who applied had at least 5 to 10 years experience. And so I wouldn't let them in. And so, but I interviewed them and I was like, why do you want to do this? Like, you've been managing, like, you manage 25 people, you've been doing it for 7 years. And they were like, I've been making it up the whole time. Like, I, I can't, I worked for 2 bad managers. I got promoted. They decided to train me through hazing, which was go figure it out. I've faked it. Somehow I've survived. But like, I would love a month to like step back for a couple hours a week get some stimulus from different people and like clear out the tech debt in my management system and like start anew. And I was like, oh, who— so just to like open my eyes to how much bigger the market was than I would have guessed.

So Mirko, who is our producer, who's listening in intently and making notes about every time I touch my keyboard and make too much noise, it's very— it's very— makes me, makes me feel very self-conscious. But anyway, the, um, So you made the decision to do a cohort-based course to teach people stuff. And you know, I've done the economics on that and you know, I think there, it's definitely interesting and you're doing it on the Maven platform and they seem like really good people. But then there's the other end of the spectrum, which is doing a full self-service course where, you know, you're not having to, you know, basically teach the course live to people and, and run kind of a seminar style deal. How did you think about like the trade-off of doing each of those things? And the reason I ask is Mirko has done a great job of kind of talking me into, okay, well maybe it's time, like take some of this content in my brain and like monetize it that way. And I've gone from totally hating courses to where I am today. So I want the world to know that my thinking on stuff is evolving. But how did you think about those two options and then decide on doing what you did?

God, I wish I could tell you I had like the perfect strategy. It was honestly a little bit of that serendipity we talked about, right? Like I took that Sawhill class on audience building. Was seeing somebody like— I really enjoyed the format. Like, it surprised me on the upside in the sense of, um, one, sort of finding other people who were very much in lockstep. Like, the best, the best examples I had, I was like comparing it to going to college or getting my MBA, you know. And like, some classes you're really excited because it's like something you're gonna go apply at work right now, like when I was getting my MBA. Um, other classes I was like, I'm not an accountant and I'm not doing anything in accounting, but I have to take accounting, so I guess I'll just check the box. And like, you fill a room with like that mix, but then for a cohort-based course, like people who like raise their hand to take that course from me right now. And so all of a sudden you get like 35, 40, 50 people who are like, let's do this. So A, the energy's high. B, they're all suffering in the same way. Right. And so there's this like, sort of like commiserating that happens that has nothing to do with you as the instructor, other than attracting these people. But they were helping each other out. And so all of a sudden, this thing that can be lonely, you know, like if you— depending on, like, a lot of people were founders, a lot of people were in companies where there weren't others who were like in the exact same place, or it wasn't particularly like collaborative or developmental. They could instantly get 4, 5, 6 people who are on the same page. Um, so I don't know, I experienced that with Sawhills class. So I had this community, I was getting these tactics right when I needed them. Um, it was like really nutrient-dense, and I was like, oh, this would work for these managers too. And so that's, that's sort of how I ended up picking that. Now we're actually building backwards the other way. Like, we're, um, I don't think it's going to go, um, this is where my two businesses overlap. Like, I don't think I want to go quite to like putting a 45-minute course on LinkedIn Learning. Uh, I think you give up a little bit too much. But we're playing with, um, we're basically going to create like a set of modules combined with, um, you know, email prompts for about 2 months to sort of onboard managers into new teams. So whenever you take over a new team, ideally you would like join this. You'd be getting prompts every Monday, the email your manager should send you but won't, access to the content you need. And then we'll probably do like monthly or every 2 weeks kind of like AMAs with that group. So it'll be come way down from me having to perform 3 times a week for a cohort to mostly, mostly self-led.

Uh, so how much are you charging for your Maven course?

Uh, the last cohort was $2,000.

That's amazing.

And then, I mean, it's management, so 80% of the people are getting reimbursed. Yeah. Which is part of it.

Okay. Here you are. Join waitlist. And how many people did you take in?

Uh, we did 35 in the first two cohorts. Um, we might bump the next one in the direction of 50. I just, I didn't, I wanted to go through a couple to see like how much we could like connect personally and, and, you know, what the grades were going to be like. But the, you know, the first one of the questions we asked, which I borrowed from, uh, Sean Perry's course, was if you apply what you learn, how much value will you get? Like, how much value will we create for you and your company? And super interesting. So our first cohort was $750, and the 35 people said on average 7x. So they said about $5,000 in value. Then we moved— since we had really high grades, we moved it to $2,000. And running roughly the same course, we made some tweaks and investments. Um, that group said 10x on average. So it was very interesting to see, like, as we moved the price up, I think we attracted even a higher, like, even a higher caliber of the actual students, which made the community go up and made the perceived value go up. Um, And, and we still, I think we can still now probably go a little bit bigger, but, um, it's been great.

So, I mean, do you think you could have—

why wouldn't you do it?

Why wouldn't I do the course?

Um, yeah, why would you— what, which way would you go? Let me ask it differently. Would you, would you go asynchronous or would you go—

I'm a lazy Girdley. Uh, but so, so the prospect of like, I, I understand how much work it is to teach a class like that to a level of excellence that I would insist on. And when I sat down and did the math, I said, okay, like, this is how many hours it's going to take me in my estimation to get it to be as good as I want to charge the price that I want and be consistent with what kind of brand I want to have and how I want to live my life. And the economics at the time when I talked to them about the, the doing the in-person cohort-based one, it just, the math didn't work. I was like, oh, I should, I can, if I want to achieve my goals over the next decade, I should not do this. Um, and I'm better off giving it away for free, frankly. Um, I don't mean to be, I have a hard time talking about this stuff. Anyway, that's, that was the analysis I did at the time now. And I'm like, oh, if I want to keep, you know, it's not like I'm building up a recurring revenue IP thing by doing this cohort-based thing either, right? It's like, you gotta, you gotta keep showing up and doing the cymbals like the monkey to get the money. I don't know if you're familiar with that metaphor or not, but my grandparents always had that, like the playing monkey toy when I was a kid.

Oh, I got that. I was going to say my symbols are just out of view.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, and I'm trying to have less of those, right? Or like to some extent, like if I want to sell my time, like I can sell my time without as much prep work because people, turns out they just like to hear random bullshit opinions about stuff anyway. So that's why it's kind of like, well, you know, the prospect of how, how do you do a course and create IP that you can sell, but like also not create a new job for myself, like that's much more appealing. Short answer to your question. But then the question is, to make that course really good, how much work, you know, does the live cohort course enable you to really understand the unknown unknown of what the students are going to be thinking and then turn that into a really good self-service course? So what do you think?

I was gonna say, that's, um, what I think— some version of that. I think some people use coaching for that reason. And then the cohort course does the same thing. Like, I get to interact with 35 people who are all leaders at different size companies, different industries, and then the themes just start to pop out. And so you're like, oh, you know, like, at some point they've all felt like an imposter. So if I'm going to make a, you know, a course that's over here, I'm gonna have to address that. Or they're, they're all struggling with delegating important work. Like, even if they figure out delegating the crap, you know, how do they delegate the really, you know, put themselves out of a job and do that with confidence? Okay, I'm gonna have to have that. So just like getting to hear all those types of things, um, has been hugely fueling to like what I write, but also what we're also building. So that the flywheel is real. And, and I, I do feel the monkey symbol thing, you know, because we're both doing the cohorts you can see on Maven, but we're doing them with companies too. Like, we've we're now on to our third company, you know, what we're doing, just private cohorts.

Yeah. Well, but I think that's probably more powerful because then you already have the knowledge and the, the IP, and then it's like, okay, well, I know I'm getting paid this for the hours, and I'm— I know how much corporate training pays better than training to random yokels. So totally dig it.

I'm still to figure that out, I think.

Yeah. But no, it's been, um, so did you build it all by yourself, or did you like have a team member?

No, uh, I mean, solopreneur is the hot word, but you know, my wife and I have turned into duopreneurs. Um, maybe we'll coin that. Uh, so she's, you know, she's my course manager slash, you know, also our realtor slash burgeoning Twitter personality as well. Um, so, uh, but no, she didn't touch a damn slide. That was all me.

Okay.

What do you have, 8 companies now? I'm like, how the hell does that work?

Uh, 10, you know? Yeah, 10, 10. I'm working on 11 and 12. Um, yeah, well, I mean, it— do you want the answer to the question? I kind of want to know.

Well, yeah, I've got 2 and I'm already starting to fall apart.

This will be my $3,000, uh, course question. But no, I mean, there's a system to do the whole thing and defined roles as well. So, um, for me, you know, I, I basically do the opposite of whatever you do as an operator. So You know, for an independent company, you know, I want to view it as an atomic unit with inputs, outputs, and then APIs where I can go in and ask for information or get it sent to me automatically. So I treat each company that way. And I sit on the boards of those companies. And it turns out when you're on the board of a company, it is a very part-time job to do that because you actually are doing it wrong if you're doing any operating. And then the operator, that's a full-time job. That's very narrowly defined as the CEO. And then we run a board structure on top of each company, and we have board meetings, um, at a cadence that works for the company. Um, so at a high level, that's how it all works. It's just a mini version of what any other holdco does. Um, but I just have no CEOing at all. I don't operate things.

And are you using like cash flow from business 1 to then fund the starting up of business 2, or are you giving the operators like big pieces of the action? Just like, what's— is there like a—

totally depends, totally depends upon the, the situation. You know, my belief and hypothesis over the past 5 years as I've watched the economy of the United States was that there were going to be fewer and further between opportunities to actually create stuff. So I wanted to create a model where I could be as flexible as totally possible. So like that meant if something came in that was like a leveraged buyout, I wanted to be able to do that. If it was, I want to incubate a high-growth startup and I saw an opportunity there, I could do that. If it was, you know, bootstrap a services business, like I could do that. So every situation, while it feeds up into me as the holdco and I get to do asset allocation across those things, everything can be customized based to fit what the opportunity is rather than try to fit whatever my model is.

Gotcha. And so is the primary thing when you're getting it started, picking that CEO or picking that operator? Is that Is that like where your biggest risk is?

Uh, the, well, it's the biggest limiting factor always.

Yeah.

Um, leadership is, you know, if you look at, if you look at all the kind of key ingredients that go into baking the bread that is a new venture, uh, and making it successful, like money is not in short supply, customers with money's not in short supply, like time, no, no, it's always down to the operator. So, um, you know, for me, I'm doing all these kind of gymnastics to try to find operators and also try to create them. If that makes sense. So like my model recently over the past couple years, uh, and Mirko, who is our producer, is in this bucket where I hire these people that are associates and then they go in and they get like their first leadership role and I hopefully mentor and help them through that process. Um, but other stuff where it's more mature, you got to go find somebody off the shelf. So like when I run into somebody who's like a really, really good operator, um, like I hug them and love them and squeeze them and try to keep them around and be my friend. Uh, like, like, uh, I will— I've got a short list of those people, and I'm just like, when I run into them, there's like— they're like gold when I find them and I have them around.

So that's so good. I'm gonna— I'm gonna steal this when we make it public for my class, because one of the— in the recruiting module, I talk about how, you know, if you— what you ever— you're recruiting for right now is at least 12 to 18 months in the future, right? And that idea that you're just gonna nurture the types of people that you will need in some form that you don't know yet, so that when like the moment, you know, meets that opportunity, you can make the match. That's how recruiting is actually done. Otherwise you're just hiring, right?

Yeah.

And the odds of hiring are much worse than recruiting.

Totally. Well, I mean, I think you can make hiring better, but recruiting is much more fun. It's much easier, um, especially for roles where you're like trying to hunt those 10x people. Like when you find a 10x person, you're like, I'm not forgetting this. I'm never going to forget you. So it's like Last of the Mohicans. Stay alive, whatever it takes. I will find you. Cool. So we are running out of time, but you put down two topics and I definitely want to talk about these because the feedback I get about these episodes is they're best when I argue with people. So hopefully these are something where we can like violently disagree, but still be nice about it, unlike Bridgewater.

So Uh, you said it was your first one. I don't want to disappoint.

Uh, so you wrote these two things out. You wrote common enemies, real or imagined, and then people want to be told what to do versus having agency. So what do you want to talk about?

We can do that. I'm not sure we're gonna even argue about them. I just, I was remembering you had done a thread, so I went to go back and just check it out. Um, just like unexpected thing, unexpected wisdom that you've pulled through the years. And like, these two jumped to me.

Okay.

And so the, um, I think we probably agree on the first one, the common enemies. I was just sort of curious if you had any good stories of seeing people do the imagined one, because I always go to sports, you know, like partly, um, rightly or wrongly, I love sports as like a metaphor for business because they sort of have all the problems we do, but they have it every year over and over and over, and they have a scoreboard. Like, we get to figure out if it worked or not. You know, and so like when I want to learn about recruiting, I study Nick Saban because I'm like, that thing is a masterclass. Like if you, if you want to learn to recruit, you just go emulate that in business, you will win. Um, and all of these guys invent enemies. Like, and I see it in sports. I'm just curious if you had seen it anywhere else.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen it in business multiple times. But my favorite, by the way, my favorite one of these, you got— if you haven't seen it, the Michael Jordan Jordan documentary. Did you see that? The ESPN?

Oh my gosh.

So yeah, if you go back and watch that and you'll see that Michael Jordan actually makes up falsehoods about other people in order to motivate himself, in order to create an enemy. And he'll be like, so-and-so reporter wrote this and they did this and they did this. And then they cut to the other reporter. The reporter's like, I didn't do any of those things. There's no proof. It was just, it was just totally made up. Um, and I've done it, I've done it myself, like where I go to a you know, CrossFit gym where it's like competitive and I'm very competitive. And like, I recall like an episode in a team workout where I like started to scream at my buddy, like, we're losing, they're over there trying to beat us.

Like, what's wrong with you? Let's go.

And like, I was just trying to make him work out harder. Uh, cause I didn't want to lose. Why did I want to lose? Cause I made some stuff about my colleagues across the hallway. So across the gym. So, um, yeah, I mean, the common enemy thing, seeing companies do that. Like the one I've actually, you know, the Lambda School guys, Bloom Tech, like nobody has done a better job than kind of co-opting what's broken with higher ed than Austin and like his people. Like I think it's just such a genius move to get behind that movement that people are mad at the way college is going and then use Lambda like as the solution. So I think that's one where like it wasn't even an imagined thing. Um, and to some extent they're only carving out like this little part of it. They're doing tech education. So there's a little bit of imagination required to get there. But, but I think that's what makes the common enemies actually really good for a company to rally around. It needs to be a thing that people are actually passionate about. It needs to be something that can actually rally them for that common enemy thing to work. Um, otherwise it just doesn't make any sense. Like you, it's not believable to your people, to your customers, or any of that kind of stuff. So I really like that one. And I had another example in my mind, but I just totally forgot what it was. So, but yeah, I've seen it. I've seen it.

I'll say the other thing that jumped out at me is I also think, especially for new companies, it helps put you in context for everybody else. So like, I have a good friend who created this company called Studz, but it's basically like a high-end piercing company. Yeah, no, no, no, don't, different website, different website. Um, but no, so it's basically like this whole idea of like, you see the people with like 7, 8, 9 earrings, but today you have to go to like, you know, that kiosk in the mall where some 16-year-old punches your ear with a piece of plastic, or you have to go to a tattoo parlor. So she saw this opportunity, but basically also created the common enemy and partly like could position herself both for the company to motivate people, but then also the market's like, oh, You're Claire's but high-end, you know, or you're, you know, you're a tattoo parlor but not skeet or whatever the, you know, and, and somehow like the enemies were both internal and external and helped with the positioning. So I think that's another, like, I think it's underutilized. Anyway, that struck me because I think it's underutilized. Like, I don't think as many— I think people are like, it doesn't have to be like enemies you're going to bitter battle with, but it has to be like, I'm gonna go compete, I'm gonna compete like with voice and like with fur.

Well, done right, EOS kind of forces you to do this because, um, you know, that's the business operating system that I use in everything. And, um, it forces you to find the emotional reason, the purpose, the cause, the passion that you're doing what you're doing. Um, and one of my buddies actually here in Texas, um, in San Antonio, he refers to it as your noble cause. Like, why does this business need to exist to make the world a better place? Um, but it can, you know, it could be any of those things, but EOS actually forces you to define that thing. Like, why do you, why do you guys wake up emotionally and choose to do this as opposed to all the other opportunities that you have? Um, so I like that. And you see this kind of practical forcing function theme in the way I want to approach stuff. It's like, no, no, just adopt the system. It'll make you do it the right way. Um, but I totally agree with you. Like, most people don't really think about the emotions behind why they're doing what they're doing. So totally with you.

Right.

All right. We did disagree.

That does sort of push the second one I put on there. If you want to just hit it quick. This is what we might fight about because you wrote a thing which is, you know, in times of big change, people just want to be told what to do. And I was like, I don't know, man. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that's any experience I've ever had. So I wanted to sort of, I wanted, I wanted like the longer version than the tweet.

Um, so I, what I think I said is. What I think I said is what I would say the nuances of what I believe is most people, most people want direction versus most people want a narrow field of vision. Like they want to be told what to do. Like they want to be told what the company priorities are. They want to be told this is what our mission is. Like they want a lot of that. They want to be in a place where a lot of that's defined. And I think this is kind of parallel with like the percentage of people that are just better off and happier working in a big corporation. Right. Where that's exactly that kind of scenario versus say a you or a me who is out, like, I want to have a canvas that's the world and I want to paint and I want the freedom. I couldn't imagine being an employee. So like, but I, I don't think it's universal. That's not, not what I'm saying, but I do think most people want that stuff defined for them. They want direction. They want to be part of a bigger team. To some extent, they want a boss and want to be told what to do because that's just the life they want to live. And I don't think there's anything wrong with how they're wired. How they want to approach stuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, I don't think it's like they're wrong with how they're wired. My experience has been more that they want to— let's say they want to— maybe I might be parsing words, so we might actually be more aligned than not. They want to be— my experience is they want to be told how to win, but not necessarily how to play. Do you know what I mean? Like, when you're describing like, oh, it's a big change and they want direction, it's like, I I, I was debating even as I wrote it down earlier. I'm like, my experience is they want to know how to win and not be told what to do, or they want to feel like they arrived at what to do even though they're just sort of ultimately doing what you— what we're telling them to do. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, some of the— a lot of times when I'm like coaching people to like, you might know the answer or you might have a pretty good hypothesis about the answer, but it tends to go way better if you can get them there with 3 questions than one direction. You know, and so that was just like, I read that and I was like, ah, yeah, kind of.

I think I get the spirit of it.

But, um, I don't know, I think there's enough nuance there that like someone could take that and go be like, I don't know, the smart guy with 10 businesses, licensed, licensed to just tell people what to do. And I'm like, it doesn't always work that well.

Um, yeah, I don't know, is, was, or was this in the context of like Crisis time?

Yeah, I think it was, I think it was a moment of big change or something.

Yeah, I mean, I do think in times of crisis people like it when somebody steps up and says, hey, welcome to the show, this is our situation. You know, they go, go, you take you through an OODA loop and you go from there.

Um, I, yeah, if it's crisis alone, then I'm with you. Like, that's—

so I don't know what the context here is. Um, But yeah, I mean, I think the nuance there is, you know, we're all— I think I buy into the, you know, the philosophy that we're all wired differently and some people want a boss. They just plain do. And I think it's the majority of people that want a boss. And then there's some people that want to be lone wolves and like they're a smaller minority of the population. But yeah, anyway.

Well, I like it, man. One thing I know we agree on is like more real talk about stuff like that. You know what I mean? Like, the business can be business. Like, we don't— you know, we can stop dressing it up with like, we're all families, or like, we speak about it like, like, you know, loyalty and royalty of the kingdoms. Like, no, like, a lot of people, it's work, you know? It's a way to provide for their families. It's a way to like have income and like have the rest of their lives. And like, that's totally okay. Yeah, you know, I just— if we could just strip away a lot of the other nonsense, I think it would actually let a lot of the, like, some of the, some of the, like, extra friction that gets added to work fall away with it. And so I don't know why so many people are afraid to just kind of be real about it.

I've been to get into this recently with a lot of guests where it's like there's, there's been this kind of layer of bullshit that's been applied across the top of business where, like, you're not allowed to say you're in it for the money, you're not allowed to say this is a job. You know, you have to say that it's, oh, we're not a company, we're a family. It's like, no, no, like my family, like they all share the same DNA. That's how this works. It'll be interesting to see how much of that I think is a byproduct of times being so good for so long where that kind of fat was able to get onto the cow. And now that things are getting leaner, how long that'll be able to last. So I'm My hope and hypothesis is that we will return the pendulum more back to the middle, but not all the way to, hey, here's the list of the 10 worst managers in the company.

The best part, I, um, I just did some work with On Deck and like, I thought they had a great articulation. Like, literally in their principles, I think it says something like, you know, we're not family, we're like a high-performing athletic team.

Oh, that's great.

You know what I mean? Like, we have a shared mission, right? We have a shared mission, we have shared goals, we're going to push each other. But like, no, we're not. It's not family, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, like the differentiation.

That's the Netflix kind of approach from— and I'm totally blanking on the name of the guy, but you know, he's just like, we're the Yankees.

Yeah.

It's like, we're— our approach to team building is we're the Yankees. And that means sometimes you're not the right person for first base. Oh, okay. Well, I'm cool. And I can take pride in being the right person for first base. Super fun. Cool, man. All right. So, um, so you're doing the Maven course. And you're going to be, you're also doing corporate consulting. How can people follow along with your journey? I know you write great stuff on Twitter because I like it and reply to it and all that stuff. But what's the, what's the best way?

I would say that's, I would say I'm probably most prolific there. So if you want to follow me anywhere, it'd be Twitter. Um, I am also now on LinkedIn. That seems to be the new frontier for people talking about management and leadership. And by new frontier, I mean the 20-year-old, 20 years late to the frontier frontier. Um, Those would be the two places, you know, the, the management accelerator you can find on, on maven.com.

That's awesome.

And, uh, you know, a few more things coming out this summer.

That's really good. Yeah, my, uh, I've also learned on LinkedIn you could take your like shit posts from Twitter and put them on LinkedIn and they do pretty good.

So my, my joke post from last night about the employee email format has gotten a lot of traction, so I would say I have noticed a few of my friends have like taken things that got like 500 likes on Twitter and they put it over on LinkedIn and it gets like 5,000.

Yeah.

I'm like, oh, there is a definite difference in the audience.

I'm fine with it. I'm building, if it's copy pasta, I'll do it. I'll do it all day long.

So super fun.

All right, man. Thanks for doing this. I look forward to developing more relationship over time and appreciate you making some time today.