Agency, Strategy, and the Science of Thriving | 690 | Jon Rosemberg

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is John Rosenberg. John is, uh, an author. He's an entrepreneur, and he will tell you some of the other interesting things that he does, but his, his latest book or his new book is called A Guide to Thriving. So welcome aboard, John.

Thank you, Peter. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I'm looking forward to the conversation and to diving in. Thanks.

So let, let me ask you one of my favorite questions that I ask pretty often, which, which is sort of, how did this happen? Right? You didn't, you didn't wake up one day at 5 years old and said, this is what I want to do. Or maybe you did. Yeah.

Like, I did not. I was in the corporate world for over 2 decades and I climbed the corporate ladder and, you know, I had achieved everything that I thought I wanted to achieve when I ended up working for a startup. We raised a Series B round of $150 million. We were growing double digits every month, and I was like, I got it, I made it. And I burnt out and I had never felt so empty in my entire career. So one day I had just gotten back from a trip from LA. I had just purchased new facilities for the organization.

Yes.

And I was in a call with a, with a technical team and the call escalated very, very quickly. And I ended up just shutting off my laptop, shutting off my phone, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. So I went downstairs to the basement and my kids were playing with Legos and I just sat there with them and started playing with the Legos. And I realized that I hadn't been present for them for a very long time. And that hit me hard. And I was like, I cannot do this anymore. So 2 weeks later—

Wait, so what, what's worse, being in corporate America or stepping on Legos barefoot?

Uh, that's a great question. I, I, I'll take the Legos. Uh, I'll take the Legos any day. Anyway, so in that moment I realized I was physically present for them. Like they could see me around the house, but I wasn't really there. I wasn't really connecting with them. So this is when I decided to walk away. I went back to school and got my master's in applied positive psychology, and that sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to learn more about thriving. And as I started learning about everything that has come up over the last 2.5 decades, I was just fascinated by the amount of research and information and exploration that there is around this idea of going from survival mode to thriving.

So let me ask you that. So if, if there's more research, more data available around thriving, are more people thriving today than not?

Well, a recent study by Forrester and, uh, and Gallup too, they have two different studies suggest that only about one-third of employees are thriving. So we have about 7 out of 10 employees who are not thriving. Now, does that mean that they're necessarily in survival mode? We don't know, but we know that there's, there's a big gap there in terms of how many people are actually feel like they're thriving.

Got it. So from a Wonk standpoint, how are you defining thriving? Because sometimes what happens when you're having conversations with thought leaders is, you know, someone thinks they're talking about X, but they really mean Y. So what is your definition of thriving? What, what does that look like? What does that feel like?

I love that question. So first, let's define what thriving is not. And I would argue that for me, thriving is not success. It doesn't mean that you have a big house and a nice car and, you know, 5— would you fly on a private jet? That's not thriving. That's success. And that's a fair definition of success. For me, thriving is this, this state in which we're calm, connected to others, and we get to be creative.. It's a state in which we get to engage our prefrontal cortex, a state in which we get to be, show up in the world as our authentic selves. That's thriving.

So it sounds to me like maybe it's a first cousin or connected to flow. You can't be in flow without thriving, or that there, it sounds to me like there's a relationship there.

I, I would say, and I argue this in the book, that flow is a subset of thriving. It's a form of thriving.

Got it.

Right. When we are in flow states. It's likely that we're thriving. Yes.

Got it. Right. 'Cause you couldn't, I would imagine by definition you couldn't be in flow state and survival at the same time biologically.

I haven't seen any research on it, so, uh, we can speculate about it, but I would suggest that probably not. But yeah. Hey, who knows? There might be people who are able to do it.

Cool. All right. I wanna segue into the business side of this. So this, this started as a passion project for you. And it's clearly evolved and you've invested a lot of time and energy, went back to school, wrote the book, et cetera. What is the current business model for you as a thought leader?

So 10 years ago, I wish I would've had a book like this, right? Yeah. I was in— for you to read in the throes. Yes. For me to read. 'Cause I was in the throes of being in this perpetual state of survival mode where unless I got a raise or I got a promotion or I got a bigger team or I built a bigger kingdom for the companies that I was working before, I felt like I wasn't enough, right? I felt like I just needed to reach that other milestone in order to prove to myself that I was enough. So I'm, I'm not sure how this is going to turn into a business yet, Peter, to be honest. Uh, for now, what I know is that me and my partner Lara American, and she's the founder of Lara Bars, we've started Anthr, which is, uh, a firm that it's meant to help organizations find more thriving in their day-to-day. And what we've been doing is engaging with companies, for-profit and not-for-profit, that are looking to bring wellbeing as one of their key performance indicators. Companies that consider that their employee wellbeing is a strategic advantage. And, and by the way, there was research from Oxford just last year that showed that companies who, who prioritize wellbeing and companies in which employees are experiencing more wellbeing outperform other companies in the market by about 37%. So, so the data is really compelling around prioritizing thriving.

Sure. So I want, I want to comment on a couple things you said. So one is, and I've heard this so many times, you wrote the book you needed to read, right? Like, so now why did you do this? Now some people are writing a book in very, um, deliberately, very strategically from a business standpoint. They know where they sit in the market, they know what the market needs, they know sort of where they're at. They're sort of what I would call mature thought leaders, if you will, in terms of the business side of it. Others are like, I don't know what's going on here, but I, this has to be done, period, full stop. Like one of the reasons I'm on the planet is to document this and the, and the act of writing the book will help me. And if nobody ever opened it or if I never hit send to the publisher or whatever, that might be okay too. And then they sort of figure it out. And I, and I think that's, interesting, somewhat scary, and they both work out typically, right? But at some point you have to apply a strategy against the serendipity or the intrinsic need to do this.

I agree. And I would argue that I'm closer to the latter than the former in terms of how I went at this. I'm still kind of, in a way, pinching myself that Wiley picked it up and that now it's going to be published in just like 6 weeks and it's a big deal. And at the same time, it's helped me hone into my ability to have faith. And let me define faith because I think people, when we hear the voice or the word faith, we usually think about God. I think faith is the capacity to live with uncertainty in the world. And there's been a lot of uncertainty in terms of the process for this book. And in my conversations, as the process has evolved, I've realized that doors are starting to open, right? But I wasn't really hoping that one of those doors would open, or I guess I was hoping, but I wasn't really aiming at any of those doors to open, right? So it's kind of an interesting place to be in, especially as a business leader.

Yeah, I'm, I'm sort of a more of a stubborn strategist given what I do, and I would say hope is not a strategy, but I like the way that you're framing it as faith, cuz that's different than hope because hope is a bit of It's a bit more vague than faith. Like somewhere in your brain, your mind, your heart, your soul, you knew, you knew something's going to come of this, right? So that's faith. Hope is a little bit more, I don't know, wishy to me, but broader.

Yes. And, and by the way, there's lots of research on how important hope is for, for having, for thriving and for having wellbeing in our lives. But as you correctly point out, Peter, it's not a strategy in business. Hope can be really helpful in terms for us to kind of jump into the deep end, but ultimately we, we do need to chart a path. And one of the things that I suggest in the book is that I talk a lot about agency as the key to moving from survival mode to thriving. And I define agency as the capacity to make intentional choices. Yeah. And in order for a choice to be intentional, you have to have other choices available to you. And if you translate that to the business world, That is strategy. What, what is strategy? Strategy is deciding, looking at all of your options and deciding which ones you're not going to do, right? And that, that's a, it, it's an, it's an interesting lens with which to look at life.

I love that. So one of the framings that I like to work with when it, when it comes to someone's thought leadership is, okay, let's play a little game. Let's, you know, if there was game show music now, we'd cue it up, but we don't have that. Hello, Bug Show. What is the benefit of thriving? 'Cause you mentioned a couple things. You mentioned at the organizational level, 37% or whatever, but break it down for me, the benefit of understanding and moving down a path of thriving at the individual level, at the team level, and the organizational level.

So at the individual level is very clear. We get to engage with the part of us that thinks and processes, and we go from, from being reactive to being proactive, we get to be intentional. And this is incredibly important, especially because a lot of us repeat the same patterns over and over again. And when we lean into our agency, we get to break those patterns. So that can be really powerful. It could mean making a huge career change, starting your own company. It could mean marrying somebody else. I don't know, whatever that may look like for, for, for the person, for, for our listeners. At the team level. It means, wait, wait, how?

I just wanna add to, I, I wanna just unpack an another component of the individual piece that I, that I wanted to ask. I would imagine for some there might also be a health benefit. If you're in survival mode, the adrenaline's going, the blood pressure's on, you're probably not exercising, eating right. There, there's probably a whole bucket of just physical stuff that you're putting on yourself that isn't good. Is that so?

Yeah. So I would say there's kind of. 3 areas in which we, you could see improve improvements in wellbeing, having a big impact. Your thoughts. So for people who experience a lot of overthinking and a lot of anxiety, when we're thriving, that decreases.

Mm-hmm.

Your emotional life. So for a lot of us, you know, when we were kids, especially for us men, when we were kids, we were taught, you know, you're either angry or happy and everything else in between. We don't do that. So you can have a richer emotional life and emotions are really good messengers and they tell us what actually matters in the world. So they can, it can be really helpful in terms of knowing how to make better decisions in life. And the point that you're making, it's the, the body, the sensations in our body and the health of our body. And there's lots of research that suggests that, you know, from your heart health to your Like you said, the cortisol decreases and we just, we, we just get to navigate the world in a much less stressful way. So that's at the individual level.

Okay. Now, so back to the team level, back to the team level.

I, I think for teams, what's, what's really important is that, you know, I learned in my career after being an individual contributor, starting leading teams and then big teams, I learned that I had to trade productive value, i.e., how productive I was myself, or relation— for relational value, i.e., how much I could get other folks to do their jobs in the best way that they could. When we empower teams to do their jobs in the best way that they can, and when they're thriving, we can see how performance actually increases. And by the way, there's, again, there's lots of research on this. Let's not get into the details of it, but High performers are usually thriving. There is a strong correlation there. At the organizational level, what it creates is a lot of adaptability, especially today with AI and hybrid, hybrid work and all of these, uh, new trends that we're experiencing. When we get to engage with all of these changes and all of this complexity and we're thriving, we can actually see a lot of nuance and a lot of but we can deconstruct this complexity in a way that allows us to make decisions that are beneficial in the long term for the business.

Love it. Okay. And then finally, at the, at the org level, what is that? I mean, and the org level is typically, when I think about it, more aspirational of imagine an organization that was thriving, right? Like you never totally get there, but it's an aspiration to continually to get closer to that.

And I, I would argue that thriving is not like a one state that you reach and then I did it.

Um, Ring the bell.

The way I describe it, the way I describe it is more as a spiral, right? Sometimes we go up on the spiral and we, we are thriving and sometimes things happen. You know, we were talking before starting the recording about the 2000, the, the show that you recorded with Dan Ariely and how the 2008 crisis, I mean, when something like what happened in 2008 happens, it changes the complete landscape for your business. So your adaptability depends on your ability to thrive through those changes. It depends on your capacity to reframe and understand what is happening in the world in the way that best fits your business. And this is where thriving comes in. It has a, a lot of power for organizations, I believe.

Yeah. Excellent. You know, if I were to say to you, let's schedule a time a year from now, and at that point the book was— is it— you're going to deem it successful by whatever criteria? What are we going to be talking about?

Hmm. That is a wonderful question, Peter. And my short answer is, I don't know. You know, when, when this first started, I said numbers of copies sold and I said, oh, then impact, how many people I've reached. And I'm really not sure. It's like I said, this is the first decision in my life that I have made professionally speaking where I didn't actually have. A clear outcome in mind, which is, which is very unique for somebody who came from, you know, this is, this was my job. I was in operations for God's sake. I, dashboards were like my, I, every morning I had a, a, like a, a flurry of dashboards filling up my inbox and I would review all the numbers, you know? So, so to do something like this, it's really a leap into the unknown for me.

Yeah. So that's interesting because you would think once looking at the book, okay, tell me about the type of person that you think wrote this, right? And it wouldn't be those attributes, right? Someone that's an ops person, that's a spreadsheet guy, you know, whatever, that's metrics driven, KPI driven, you know, all those sort of things. You'd probably think more of a, what we would, you know, call right brain or, or, you know, uh, more fluid, more creative, whatever. So maybe the, that, that creativity and fluidity was always, was always there.

Hey, Peter, I started my career in procurement. So, um, exactly. And that's a reaction that I often get. I, um, my, uh, one of my claims to fame in my corporate career was negotiation. I knew how to extract the best value in whatever situation I was in. So this has been a tremendous pivot for me.

And frankly, newsflash, like there's hope for all you procurement people that I've dealt with over the years that are just painful to interact with at every step of the way and create sludge and annoyance and add no value to my life. But, um, you, you've, you've changed, you've reframed my thinking that there's hope for procurement people. We'll get to that.

I love that, Peter. Okay.

We're done here.

That's all we need. You know, the fact that we, yeah, procurement folks get a, get a bad rap. And, and, and I think I— No, they don't.

They earn that rap.

They earn it. But, you know, being, being in survival mode is very useful if you are in stressful zero-sum situations. It's really useful, right? To put yourself in that, in that moment where the adrenaline is rushing and the cortisol and all of this, and you're hyper-focused on getting the outcome that you need to get, right? But when that becomes a chronic way of living, when that becomes your lifestyle, it can be really problematic. And that was my lifestyle for 40 years, right?

Well, so the other thing I'll say on, in, in defense, which I never thought I'd say this sentence out loud, in defense of procurement people. Based on what you said earlier, they lack agency, right? You can't have a procurement person that says, hey boss, I decided to do this deal and, you know, pay them net 2 days even though our corporate policy is net 90. Like they've got, they're very, it's a rigid, they probably have some leeway obviously, but in terms of agency, I would think of a role that has very, very, very little agency would be procurement.

It's very clear what you're supposed to accomplish. Yeah. Lower price, longer payment terms, you know, the best possible legal and business terms that you can get, right? So, so it is a very zero-sum way of looking. Now, I'll share this with you. The best deals I closed throughout my career were deals where we sat at the table with our vendors, whoever they were. And listen, I worked for Sears Canada, which no longer exists, and we did about $550 million worth of deals with IBM. These were highly complex business process outsourcing deals. And we sat at the table with them for months designing the solution and trying to figure out how we were gonna connect whatever we were doing, whatever we were doing to the success of the business in the long run. Sure. And that changed the conversation 'cause it wasn't just about price, right? So, right. I think it's a, it's an, it's an important, uh, nuance that sometimes gets, gets lost 'cause we're just reacting to everything that's coming at us throughout the day.

Well, and price is often, you know, an easy, almost lazy metric, right? Because it's almost one that representative of the entirety of a deal, but you can negotiate a great price and bad terms or bad return, whatever. There's so many other variables. Anyway, this has been amazing. I appreciate your time and your transparency, and I wish you the best on your journey there, John.

Thank you so much, Peter. It was a pleasure talking with you.

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