Building Thought Leadership That Sells | Paul Falcone | 708

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on today's podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Paul Falcone. He's a recognized expert in hiring, performance management, and leadership development. He's a bestselling author. He now works directly with organizations of all sizes offering customized programs that range from keynote speeches and webinars, and he's got a ton of experience across the Fortune 500. He's written 5 going on 6 books, I believe. So he's pretty proficient there. And, uh, here he is. Welcome aboard, Paul.

Thank you, Peter Winick. It's a nice intro. I kind of liked it, but it's 17 books, not that we're counting.

Oh, 17. Okay. Then I need my other glasses. Then we—

No, it's fine. They came out in different batches and I advertised them different ways, but they were all with the American Management Association and/or HarperCollins Leadership. So, Cool. Wow.

I think many people I know have not read 17 books, let alone written 17. Yeah.

I don't sleep at night a lot, but that's okay. That's fine.

Yeah. So let me, let's, so I'll ask you one of my favorite questions is how do you get here? Like how did all this happen? Because I would doubt that a young 10-year-old Paul, while his friends were playing baseball, said, I'm going to write 17 books and be a speaker. And like, how did this all come to be?

A little bit by accident. I didn't know what I was gonna do when I grew up. And so I went to UCLA, I studied German, which is a long story 'cause I'm Italian, but I ended up getting my master's degree, didn't know what I was gonna do, went to a recruiting firm and said, "Can you help me?" And they said, "Well, why don't you work here?" So I said, "Fine, what do you do?" And I stayed there for about 6 years and became the director of sales training and eventually went in-house with a client company. I ended up loving HR 'cause it, there's such a people element to it. But because I had the master's degree and I didn't go for the PhD, there was still that biting piece in me, Peter, where I wanted to publish. I always wanted to see my name on an article or a book. Okay. The bottom line was I ended up living two dual lives. It's like I'd work during the day and I'd write about it at night. So I became a columnist for SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. Yeah. I wrote for them for 20 years. And I was also writing for the AMA, the American Management Association. They had a book publishing division.

Yep.

Pitched the idea and that was the first of what's now 17 books. So lucky for me, I'm where I am now.

And 3 years ago, I was like a nights and weekends thing, mostly a nights and weekends.

So this is hobby.

So I've, I've seen that movie before where it's a passion, it's a calling, it's, I kind of do it over here and then that thing blows up. How much overlap was there between the night stuff and the day stuff? Were you getting sort of fodder ideas, whatever, from the day stuff that fed the night? Like, because they're probably not totally a wall between the two.

People would say, where'd you come up with the content? And I'd say, believe me, I'm not that creative. The content finds you when you're in human resources. It's like, you did what? There was a cycle to it. I ended up taking what I was seeing in real time and turning it into articles for Sherm. And then when I had enough articles for Sherm, had enough content, content for a book. And it just kept going and going and going. I would change the names to protect the guilty.

Sure, sure.

But I was lucky where the companies that I worked were very supportive in my writing, whether it was Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, NBCUniversal, City of Hope. You know, they were all like, fine, Paul, just put a little disclosure in there that these are your ideas and then not tied to the company. So you don't make it our company. You be that kind.

I, I, I think there's a lot of frustrated folks in the corporate world that have other creative outlets, whether it's music, whether it's art, whether it's writing or whatever. You know, you've got the CMO that's in a punk band or, you know, whatever that might be. And I love the idea of you having the courage to talk to the folks at work saying, hey, I'm gonna do this. Are you, you cool with that? And not only do they say they're cool with it, but there's encouragement, right? Which probably wasn't your expectation when you first did that.

Well, some companies I don't think would take too kindly to it. One time I interviewed with a company and I disclosed it right up front. And they said, "Well, are you an HR guy or do you want to be Mark Twain?" No, seriously, that's what the person said. And I thought, "Okay, that's not going to work." It's not going to work for everybody. And there are some organizations I'm sure that would say, "Nope, when you work for us, you don't do extracurriculars." Thank God. But I knew that in advance, Peter Winick. It was like that was part of my interview, that was part of my onboarding. If that wasn't going to work, I'm sorry, this is a critical part of who I am. I just wouldn't stay with a company that said no to it. I just explored it in the interview process up front.

So at some point, I'm imagining there's a fork in the road, if you will, right? Is that the Twain— is there a Twain quote there? No, that's just a— that's not a Twain quote.

I like the metaphor. Stay with it. I'm good. Fork, I can hold. Yes.

There's a fork in the road and you've got to say, huh, do I stay on the corporate side or this thing's big enough to really support me and give me the things I need? What were— tell me about that, those decisions and how you, how you got there.

It's, again, I was the chief HR officer for the Motion Picture and Television Fund, which is the healthcare nonprofit. It's the retirement home for the people in the entertainment industry. When I got that job, it lasted about 5 years. They wanted someone with healthcare and they wanted someone with an entertainment background. And I was the candidate 'cause I had worked at City of Hope, I had worked at Viacom, Paramount, Nickelodeon, whatever. So I was, I thought it's healthcare in a retirement home. How busy can it be?

Yeah, right, right. This'll be easy.

Until COVID hit. And it turned out to be the hardest job I've ever had, probably the most meaningful. The CEO and I were connected at the hip. I will say this objectively, I think we did a great job getting the organization through that time, but we buried employees, we buried residents. It was a really heartbreaking time. When we were getting out of it in 2022, you could see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. I gave my 4 months' notice, found and trained my replacement, no drama. But what I realized was life is too short. I love teaching. I love training, management training, keynote speaking, coaching. This is kind of what I want to do. And I realized life is too short.

So stay there because I want to talk about the journey of, okay, so now you decide because you thought you had this job that was probably a little more cushy. You did a terrible job of planning and predicting COVID. So you hit me with that. And it's, and it's literally, you know, all HR jobs, literally life and death if it's a retirement home where people, you know, elderly people are alive, right? Like, that's, that's an awful thing, right? Like, like, that's not a phoned-in kind of, oh, now we get to work from home thing anymore, right? So what does it look like now, now that you're on the other side of this and have been for, for a while? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly? Because sometimes people are— they're afraid to make the leap because it's that matrix of the unknown unknown. So if somebody's on kind of where you might have been a few years ago, what would you be telling them to think about? Before they make the leap?

I was terrified to make the leap. Full disclosure. I mean, you come off of a W-2 with benefits and whatnot.

Yeah.

And then it's like, okay, now I eat what I kill. And how much does that private policy cost? Yeah, it's like it was, it was okay. 3.5 years later where I am now, it's the best decision I ever made. I'm only doing the stuff that I love doing. And I'm lucky because in a way, yes, I was jumping into the unknown, but I really had been preparing for it for the prior 3 decades with all of my writing. It does help to come out when you're author of bestselling books and whatnot. So I'll give you that. But it was still very hard for me. And it takes a change in mindset and there is a risk that's associated with it. My wife was the one who said, I was 59 at the time. She said, honey, do it now. Don't work till you're 65 or you're 67 and then start. 'Cause she said, I know you, you're gonna work, you're gonna wanna work till you're 90. You love doing the part that you love. Use between now and 65 to kind of build your pathway, build your client base. And I married up, she was smart and she called it and it really did work out well for me. I mean, we're also living half the time in Chicago, half of the year where our kids are. So I've got the flexibility to do that as a consultant, what I couldn't do if I were in a full-time role. Right.

Which is great. So gimme a sense of what the portfolio, what the mix of the services, the offerings, what's the, what does it look like? Who get, who's paying you to get what done? 'Cause you obviously have books, you have speaking. Gimme, gimme a sense of the variety of things. 'Cause sometimes people aren't even aware of What does the life of a thought leader look like? What do you charge for? What do you do? Who do you do it for?

Yeah, I think the idea is you got to have ABCD plans. You know, there's your primary, but to the degree that you can diversify, the better. So for me, what I love doing, what I spend most of my time doing is management training. Companies could be Fortune 500, could be startup, could be whatever. But a lot of times the managers don't understand how to do things. They know what to do, they just don't know how to do it. If my books had filled any kind of gap out there, Peter, it was that it taught people how. The how is what's important. How to hold the tough conversation, how to do the documentation, how to interview a salesperson versus a C-level person versus a recent college grad. Just real practical stuff. And that's the stuff that I can bring out there now. The second piece of it was I speak at all the conferences 'cause I've been doing that through Sherm. And that just kind of lent itself. And that, that's my biz dev funnel, right? Yeah. Because people see me speaking. The third issue is executive coaching, the one-on-one piece where I get to either work with an individual CEO or C-level and/or their senior leadership team. And that's a combination of training and one-on-one coaching. Now, I also diversify. I'll say if you need HR advisory services, I don't get a lot of that, but it's there. If you need expert witness testimony, I have that there. I don't get much of that. But to me, the idea is don't go in with only one. What made more sense to me was kind of like my books. You know, my books are on hiring, they're on performance management, leadership development, ethics. I like writing about the full scope of whatever my discipline is. And I would recommend that for people. But I, I, I like a lot of what you said.

One of the things I wanna expand on is, you know, most people when they're making that transition, they say, oh, I'm gonna be an author and a keynoter. 'Cause those are the two obvious ones. I, I will write a book and then someone will bring me in and pay me to speak. But like things like expert testimony, even though you don't do a lot of it, That's interesting. So I think that what people need to be thinking about is, okay, I've got this stuff, right? Like, here's the cupboard and here's all the ingredients. How might I format that? Because I would argue that sometimes when somebody's brought in as a, an expert witness, they're really regurgitating something that they wrote in a book or whatever. But the value that, that hiring agency is paying on you for the expert witness is crazy, right? Like, it could be you know, whatever, $50K a day or something. It could be even multiples of that because the stakes are really high and they're bringing you in and they, you know, whatever it is. And you look at that and go, yeah, I kind of did that for like 12 minutes on a workshop the Tuesday before in Cleveland and got paid, you know, a couple thousand bucks or something. Is that an interesting way to sort of think about who places the most value on the ideas at a moment?

It is. One client had said to me early on, Paul, we're going to do a corporate offsite retreat. Would you facilitate it? And I was like, I mean, I've been to corporate offsite retreats on the receiving end, never thought of facilitating. I was like, sure, I could do that. And you know what I mean? It's this kind of thing. It turns out that NYU, their Stern School of Business, has a whole program on event planning and these kinds of things. And it's like I had access to tools. So the funny thing to me, Peter, the way I look at it is be open to this stuff. Yeah. Go to ChatGPT or Google Gemini and say, this is my background, this is what I've done. I'm thinking about opening my own practice. What are some of the funnels out there? What are some of the disciplines that I should consider that I can monetize based on my experience? Enter. Enter. Yeah. It all comes out and you're like, I didn't think of that. Yeah. So it's funny how a, a simple search on ChatGPT or whatever your AI large language model is, could open up things that you never even considered.

That's amazing. So talk to me a little bit around, uh, about 17 books under your belt. What has changed, evolved? What's so different today when you're writing? And when I say writing, I also mean the publishing, promoting, you know, launching a book today versus 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

That's a really good question. I just feel like there's so much more competition. There's so much more space. I mean, there used to be the Big Five publishers and now there's the Big Six because of Amazon. And people are self-publishing out there and, you know, there's a lot of volume. It's just a lot of volume. Now, in full disclosure, I always let the publisher like HarperCollins or the American Management Association do the publicity. I mean, I was working full-time. I didn't have time. And even now, the only real thing is every once in a while I'll post on LinkedIn just as a reminder. You know, I've got toolkits on my website or I've got these books that you might want to look into as a book of the month selection or You know, for your high potential emerging leaders.

Yeah.

Right.

So you're writing on, on, you know, a lot of your topics are evergreen, right? Yeah. That's true. So if you're talking about giving feedback, we could update that, tweak that in the age of AI or, or in the age of hybrid or something like that. But the core principles are the same and to some degree timeless.

Yes. So one little tweak. So one of the books that I'm best known for, and it's kinda my flagship book, is called 101 Tough Conversations with Employee— to Have with Employees. It came out like in 2008 when I was working for Nickelodeon. The publisher made the book orange to kind of correlate with the Nickelodeon theme, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Second edition came out in 2019, right before COVID Yeah. I just finished the third edition, so it'll take till probably fall of 2026 to come out. But if you think what's changed since 2026, you've got, wow, we had COVID. We had the adrenaline rush, adrenaline junkies because of everything with COVID This idea of managing compound volatility and disruption is now one of CEOs' top 5 priorities depending on what you're looking at. Now you have this concept, the hybrid thing, remote work, all, you know, union rise. Well, wait a second, we think our employees are gonna form a micro union. Listen, however you feel about unionism.

Yeah.

As an employer, as an HR person, you don't want to handle it, right? Right. You gotta handle that and represent the company. But so many of these changes, the isolation, uh, of the Gen Z Zoomers, the 27 and under crowd, they keep testing out as the loneliness, loneliest, most isolated, most depressed generational cohort on the planet. More so than the retirees in retirement homes. What is our obligation as the elders, as the managers? What is our obligation to pass wisdom to the younger gen and get them the They miss their most, their best years. They miss either their high school years or their college years, or they miss their first years in employment, which for me was all about making friends and having mentors. They miss that and they don't even know where, they're not even aware of what they missed. You know, what is our obligation to help with that? There's so much new stuff out there. It was very easy to come up with new content for, for the new edition. So, right.

Interesting. So what are you thinking of? Next? Not necessarily in terms of a book, but think about from the business standpoint, hey, I'd like to do more of this or less of this, or I'd like to learn more about, you know, put on your Paul the CEO hat, not Paul the author hat, and say, what are you looking at for the next, I don't know, 6, 18 months?

Well, two answers to that one, Peter. On the one hand, there's so much out there in terms of turn your course into a workshop or a class. Eventually, I think I do want to do that, but that'll be right before I retire. Right? Because then you can, I know you can monetize this thing and, and repeat yourself even though you're not working.

Sure.

But I don't wanna do that now cuz I want people to hire me, not my video.

It's, it's, I would, I would, I think it's an end, not an or. I don't think there's cannibalization. I think there are different markets at different price points. So you say if I bring Paul in, it's gonna cost X. If I, if I, uh, license Paul's online course, it's gonna cost Y. And on a per capita basis, those are very different numbers. And I think they actually feed into each other. My two cents. Little freaky.

No, no, totally agree. I totally agree. In the short term. So if that's the longer term goal, like I'm thinking about how can I make this thing live on beyond? Because I'm a one-person LLC. I'm, I don't want employees. I just wanna do my own thing.

Yeah.

Um, but in the shorter term, I'm thinking about, you know, what is the new content out there? So for example, one of the things I'm being asked to talk about now is leading through crisis and disruption. And it's like, well, good, I've got a book on that. It came out 2 years ago. That's the hot topic because people are like, how do we do this? We're building the plane while we're flying it. Like, how do we keep our marbles in place, like in our heads? And what do we do with employees who are suffering from this? And what's our obligation for that? There's a lot there.

So stay there for a minute because I think that's the point that you're bringing here. I, I, I think about that a little bit differently in that every thought leader's got their stuff. Here's what I'm known for, right? And then there's a temptation to go a little bit beyond that, but let's just say, here's, here's my stuff, right? And then you say, this is evergreen, right? Like, so that book that came out 2 years ago was just as in vogue when it came out, right? It's universal. The principles are universal. But then what happens is there are factors beyond our control that happen in the marketplace that say, ah, right now crisis is more in vogue. I remember the 2008 crash, right? And right before 2008. So if you look at 2006, 2007, going into 2008, there was this wave of happiness books in the business world, right? Why? Well, everybody was getting second mortgages and driving big cars and, you know, they were over living these large lives. So the feeling or the emotion or the whatever that was in the water was, wow, we must all be happy because we're getting all this stuff, right? Then market crashes. Now it's like a bad country song. I lost my dog. I lost my wife. I lost my home. Right? And the next wave of content was resilience. Now, it wasn't like we had to create all this new resilience stuff. It was always out there, but the demand for resilience based on what was going on in the market went through the roof. Right? And the happiness stuff went away 'cause it was almost in poor taste to be embracing happiness in a period when your friends are foreclosing on homes and losing their— like, it's, it was kind of not what one did, right? It's like, okay, at an organizational level, how do we get people to be more resilient? How do we get them to suck, you know, suck it up and get through this or be more gritty became a thing. So I think people, and not a lot of thought leaders are aware of the external factors that say, oh, there's something going on here that's making my stuff decreasing the demand for my stuff right now. And it doesn't mean I'm, you know, I'm out of style, right? It's just, that's the market, right? Well, what for everything that goes down, something goes up. So what's out there in the marketplace now that someone needs help on? Like, there's always been books on remote work. Guess what? In 2020 through 2023, the demand for those went through the shelf because it went from a theoretical to applying, like at lightning speed. So sounds like you're doing that, whether you're aware that you're doing it. I think you're doing that nicely.

Peter, the funny thing is, you know, when I, when I switched from corporate to having my own practice, what my concern was, my biggest concern was if I'm not in the trenches, I'm not gonna have content. To write my articles, to write my blog, to write new books.

Well, except you got 25 years of stuff.

Well, this is true. This is true. But the funny thing is, now that I go into all these individual companies, nonprofit, public sector, Fortune 500, man, I'm getting earfuls. There's so much content I've got coming at me. It's like it's actually a good time to be a writer. And so some of the things that where I can see the need is when I will write one of the books I taught for years at UCLA Extension. On ethics. It was a mandatory course. And I like to teach the ethics class for the people getting their certification in human resources management. But there was never a book. You had to borrow articles and piecemeal stuff together. Yeah. So I decided I'm writing a book on it and it's called Workplace Ethics: Mastering Ethical Leadership and Sustaining a Moral Workplace. And it's all about managerial ethics and employee relations. Fine. But it's not the time for that right now. I'm sorry. No one's really at the level where ethics are important. There may come a time, though.

But the pendulum always swings.

Pendulum swings. And so my point is the diversification is critical. The book on effective hiring makes sense, but probably not right now. The book on documenting discipline and structuring terminations and layoffs, that one could be a little bit hotter right now because companies are in a little bit of a downsizing mode.

More recently, DEI, there was so much great stuff out there on DEI and then like just the climate changed, right? So if, you know, that was your space and if that was what you were known for, the demand just went down. Without getting into the politics and all the craziness of it, the demand just got cut, period, full stop, right? Like nobody's buying, you know, purple socks anymore. If you're in the purple socks business, you've got a problem, right? So that's— it's part of the game. Interesting stuff. This has been a great conversation, Paul. I appreciate your time and sharing sharing your, your, uh, experiences with us.

Me too, Peter. Thank you. I've always admired the work you do. I love your, your podcast. To be part of it is quite an honor, so thank you for inviting me.

Oh, then we have plenty of more time to tell me how great I am. No, I'm kidding.

At least another 10 minutes.

Yeah, keep going. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Paul. Good stuff.

My pleasure, Peter.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.