Taking Thought Leadership from Page to Practice | Liz Wiseman | 560

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. And today I'm really excited. I've got a really special guest, Liz Weissman. She's a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to top organizations worldwide. She wrote the New York Times bestsellers Multipliers, The Multiplier Effect, and the Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts: An Impact Player. She's the CEO of the Weissman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley. And she has worked with Apple, AT&T, Disney, Meta, Google. She's received all the Thinkers50 Awards. And, and basically in the world of thought leadership is what we technically call a rock star. So, uh, Welcome aboard, Liz. Thanks for joining us today.

No, happy to be here. I have zero musical talent, so definitely not a rock star, but thanks to be here.

Exactly. So you're not announcing the drop of your newest album?

No, no. Like, my nightmares are like I'm on stage with a guitar and I don't know how to play. So I'm an anti-rock star.

You're an anti-rock star. There you go. Cool. So why don't we start with sort of your journey? How did this happen? Because what I find fascinating about my conversations with thought is it's typically not as deliberate or linear or planned as one might think or is obvious in many other professions.

Oh, yeah. Mine is probably in the not particularly planned category. I've always had a pretty organic approach to my career, which is just kind of go where you can do something useful. And usually, there's something valuable there to do. My career, I guess, in short, is the first half of my career was managing the learning function in a big corporation. You know, I was the head of Oracle University, and so I had a lot of experience managing the training and the learning process. And now in the second half of my career, I've really flipped that, and now I'm teaching, managing, and leading.

Right. So you went from being on sort of the buy side to the sell side to some degree, right? Yeah.

You know, in some ways I, that's exactly what I did. I never thought of it that way, but I think it's one of the reasons why I approach my work the way I do, not the teaching part of my work, not the research part of my work, but I know what it is like to bring in outside speakers. I came to this work having hired in C.K. Prahalad and Clay Christensen and Jim Collins, um, and Rosabeth Moth Kanter. Like, I had brought them in and I think I have a tremendous amount of empathy for the act of trust and faith of putting somebody on a stage and giving them a microphone and saying, please speak to all of our most senior leaders in this organization.

Just stay there for a minute because I think a lot of times thought leaders don't truly understand because they haven't come from the other side that you did, the amount of risk and to some degree courage it takes, right? Because it, it's a lot, right? We're gonna, we're gonna gather our top 200 people. Once a year in Zurich or wherever, right? So the time is literally the company's most valuable time. They've only got so many hours together. And if you put someone there, now they might be doing a great job relative to how they usually deliver, but if it's not a cultural fit, if it doesn't resonate, if there's a little bit of a faux pas or they're not aware of kind of what's going on, it could be a disaster.

Oh, absolutely. And they're giving you this incredible valuable real estate, this time block. And they're also giving you a megaphone. And what you say gets amplified. And I think a lot of speakers would look at it as, if I do a bad job, I've dinged my career. I've made a fool of myself. It's like, oh, no, you've made a fool of the person who brought you in. And I remember this one experience I had at Oracle. I took a, a really large PO to my boss, which was the chief financial officer. And I think it was for $250,000. And it was to bring a particular professor in several times into the organization to teach kind of once a month for us in this program. And my boss, who I had a great relationship with, he turned the color of the shirt you're wearing. He's like a little bit more red. He just was blue, red in the face, just kind of screaming. About what a ridiculous request this was and nobody was worth that kind of money and what could he possibly teach our organization. And he kind of calmed down. I just talked him through it. And I thought, yeah, I could see why he would react this way. Like, on an hourly basis, that's ridiculous. But so is paying $100 for a pill that's taken 15 years for the pharmaceutical company to develop and they're advertising their costs, et cetera. And I remember me saying, no, I think we're going to get incredible value from this. This is why I'm doing it. This is why this is the person we need. And every single person who brings someone into their organization is taking a risk like that.

And things that you said that I want to touch on. One is if a speaker doesn't do great, they're like, oh, you're doing my career. But I think actually as a speaker, you don't get to have a bad day at work. Right? Most of us get to have a bad day at work as a keynoter, and we've— listen, it happens, but you kind of don't. There's really almost no excuse unless you have some personal tragedy or something. You can't go back to the client later and say, yeah, that was kind of a, you know, I didn't sleep that great, or I had a headache. Like, it doesn't— that doesn't work at all.

No, you don't get to no-show unless you are like in traction in the hospital. Um, right. I always tell people, I'm like, no, yeah, I, I'm sick, but The only reason I don't get to show is that I'm on life support in the hospital.

Exactly. You got it.

You show up and you don't get to show up with your sort of B game and you don't get to have a bad day. Like every day has to be amazing. But, you know, and it's so easy though as a speaker to look at it from your perspective. But I think what that first half of my career taught me to do is really look at it through the, the sponsor's perspective, the executive and One of the things I look at, and I would encourage anyone who's speaking on a stage, if you don't already do this, I would encourage you to do it. I guess maybe you might have been trained to make eye contact with the audience, like, look around. I don't worry about any of that. What I do is I keep my eyes on the people at that front table who invited you there.

Right.

And I walk—

Couple of points there. So I'm taking so many notes here. 2 points I wanna extract from what you just said there. One is providing value because it is hard to impossible to say, well, you know, I'm a bestselling author, blah, blah, blah. Of course I'm worth, you know, an exorbitant, I'm worth $75,000 for a keynote. It's really, really hard to justify that. So I think you really have to work hard at showing the client where value can, can happen. And oftentimes, quite frankly, it's not in the keynote cuz at the end of the day, a keynote changes nobody's behavior and drives no business outcomes. That's like kind of the dirty little secret in the keynote world. But it's a great way to bring a level of awareness and engagement and get people to sort of play with those ideas. And then, then they go, ah, maybe we want more. So that's the first point. And then the second point that you made is I love your focus on the front table on the left because a lot of thought leaders fall into the trap of thinking the folks they have to kill it for is the butt in the seat. And the, and the reality is there are buyers and there are users, right? So the people that were told show up at 2 o'clock at the Aloha Room because we're bringing in Liz, to speak to you. Listen, we wanna make them happy, but if you sign the check, we need to make you happier and we need to understand what drives you and what motivates you and what success looks like. And I think far too many thought leaders don't get the difference between those two populations.

You wanna, and I think they're different populations. I wouldn't necessarily say that you need to make the buyer happier because the buyer is happy if the user's got value. And so I don't want to discount the idea that you are there to serve the needs of that organization and that audience. But what I mean is I watch the eyes and the faces of the people on that front table to the left, as you called it. I look at when I take a stage, I notice there's an excitement in their eyes, but there's a worry in their eyes. And it's that first 5 minutes of— What if she says something stupid? What if people don't play along? What if this falls flat? And it's a terror. Like, I watch terror in people's eyes.

Yeah.

And then things, like, roll, and then things are working, and people are getting the value. And I watch this complete change of disposition and facial expression of people like, okay, I made the right decision. Validation that, like, this is what we're looking for. And I think it taught me empathy for the people who brought you to the data.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com. /ltl and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. I wanna move from keynoting, right? Because a lot of folks kind of, I don't wanna say obsess on the keynote, but, but stay very much in the keynote space because If you do that well, the money's great and, you know, you don't need to have a whole staff and all that. But in, in reality, my experience has been that the keynote should be the beginning of a relationship with a client, not the extent of the relationship. If you really want to drive measurable outcomes, if you want them to embrace your ideas, if you want their leaders and managers to practice what it is that you've researched and studied, and that doesn't happen in the form of a keynote, you have to actually think through What is that suite of products and assessment tools, video-based learning, et cetera? What, what have you done there to sort of drive stickiness in an enterprise and behavior change at the, at the org level?

Yeah. Peter, to answer your question, is it okay if I, like, take you back to where I started my career? So I ran—

We're doing a flashback now. We need lights.

We're flashing back.

Flashback.

I ran the corporate learning function, and I worked for a huge global software company. And so part of that was management training and professional development, but a lot of it was product technical training. And so when Oracle launched a new version of the database or a new suite of tools, it was my job to make sure that every single person in that company was trained on the new product, meaning they knew how to install it, sell it, tune it, you know, uh, support it.

Which probably took priority over people, right? Product probably trumped people in that culture.

This was a software company run by Larry Ellison.

Yeah. I, that was what I was Yeah.

And so I spent almost 2 decades with this mindset, which is when you have a product, you need everyone ready, equipped with the tools, the training, the support. And so when I released my first book, on release date of my first book, Multipliers, I'm like, okay, well, here's the keynote, here's the workshop, here's the assessment. I wasn't thinking about it from a business and how to produce income, I had had this trained into me, which is you don't put something out there into the world without the tools that people need to be successful with it. Like, to me, it was a—

But it's the basis of a far more robust business that's not dependent on is Liz in the room or in the Zoom today.

Oh, absolutely. And it turned out to be like, I think one of the strengths of my work and research and books has, has not been the books themselves. It's been the the ecosystem, the support system that companies can get training and roll it out. Multipliers, you can get that from Franklin Covey or our partners, BTS. You can take the assessment, the Light Week. We've got that whole little universe around it to help people be successful with it, which means it can grow deep roots inside of organizations. But I'm just confessing that this was not business savvy or genius on my part. It's just the way I had been trained to think, to run a large learning.

But it gave you, I think that when you came out on the scene as a thought leader, it gave you a competitive advantage because lots of folks have great ideas and books and they make for a lovely keynote and people can chat about them over the cocktail party. And then, you know, 3 days later you're like, how was it? Oh, that was kind of cool. Like, whatever. But when it moves from speaking being maybe the beginning of the journey, you're gonna take an organization or a team or a function unit functional unit through, it's really, really different, right? I think it's just really different when they start to use your language and your models and your methods and your frameworks.

Yeah, we, we've offered a system to organizations that wanna deeply implement the ideas and, you know, it's, it's always, you know, it's my favorite form of feedback. It's not like, oh, hey, you spoke at our company and it was great, or I read your book and I loved it. That's nice to hear. What I love hearing is people saying, wow, you came and like spoke at our company, or we went through your workshop, right? That was like 5, 6 years ago and we are still talking about it and still using those ideas. That's what, that's what I work for.

Love it. Yeah. And the sustainability of the ideas, cuz otherwise you get, you know, a lot of ideas, unfortunately you get the sugar high, everybody's into it for a little bit and then you crash and then you move on to the next, you know, donut or whatever the case.

I know, but Peter Winick, don't, let's not forget how great a good sugar high is.

Oh, yeah. No, we love—

I'm the daughter of a donut maker. And oh, man, I love a good—

Really? Uh-oh.

I am.

Daughter— that sounds like the album cover that you're going to do. Daughter of a Donut Maker.

Yeah. I hope it doesn't involve me having to play a guitar.

No, no, no. We— no, we could probably just do it with ChatGPT or something. But there you go. Daughter of a Donut Maker. I like that. So I want to talk a little bit about the publishing landscape. You've written 4 books, 5 books.

4 books. And then 1 book was a second edition, which was as much work.

So my mind, I've written 5 books, but I will call it 4 and a half for technical.

Thank you for, uh, yeah, placating me on the 4 and a half.

Yeah, we'll give you 4, 4.8, whatever. What's different now about how you go about writing a book? And then I wanna talk about the, you know, the world that is, or the insanity that is the world of publishing.

Well, I'd like to think I'm a little smarter about the process and have kind of a big picture. And so there's some advantages. Like, I know what it involves. The disadvantage of being a multiple book author is you know how hard it is. And honestly, I kind of am nostalgic. I really kind of yearn for the days when I didn't know what I was doing and I just jumped in. When I had written Multipliers, which I think has sold over a million copies or something, it's kind of up there. I had never written anything longer than an email note, maybe like a 3-page report and then essays in college or what have you and maybe a Christmas letter every year. But I didn't know what I was doing, but I signed a contract saying I had an idea, so therefore I needed to write a book. And so I jumped in headlong into this process. And I was the same way with my second book, Worky Smarts. Hey, I really enjoyed that book writing process. I told my publisher, I'm like, "I think I loved every step of this publishing process, everything except perhaps the index creation, which they sub out to do that, but I didn't really love that. But I loved every bit of the research, the writing, the editing." And I said, "I think I might have the bug." And she said, "Oh no, you've got the gene. You're sort of built to do this." And so I jumped into my next book, Worky Smarts, and then I'm jumping in, and now I'm like, oh, slow down. Like, I now know how hard it is. I know many how— I know the grind. I know the loneliness. I know the intensity. I know the, like, roller coaster of emotion that goes into the process. So I'm a little slower to do it because it's scarier.

And the other side, as difficult and tumultuous as it could be to write the book, let's talk about the other side, which is, you know, the marketing and the exposure and actually getting the books in the hands of folks. That, I would argue, is the harder part for most.

Well, it is. And it's my least favorite part of it. And so I know people who love it. I know people who—

Emotional part. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And they're brilliant at this. And I'm one of the people who's like, OK, it's a necessary evil. It's something I need to do. And so I do it. I don't know that I'm any good at it. But we've certainly gotten the word out.

Well, it depends. I mean, you're good at, from the standpoint of the name is out there, the brand is out there, the books sell pretty well. But I think the point is there's things that you need to do. And by you, it could be, you know, a publicist and a team and market, whatever. Doesn't mean you're standing on the corner handing out books, but that needs to be a part of the process that you put the effort and the energy into. And it might not be. Now, some people actually, like you said, it's interesting, enjoy that more because there's the immediate dopamine hit of, ooh, watching it go up the charts or the sales of the book or the people are buzzing about it, whatever. Some people, the joy is in really getting the ideas tight and the research and all that. I don't think one's better than the other. I think the reality is you need to do a little bit of both. So what's next? What's next? What's next?

Oh, I'm working on a new research project, a new book, which is probably why you saw me kind of express that reluctance of like, I'm doing it. So I have started my first round of Preliminary interviews, and then I'm going to start doing that.

So I'm working on— you might be passing a kidney stone. It was one of the two, and I didn't want to see if you were passing a kidney stone. So it was one of those two faces.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm sorry. I'm starting a new research and book project.

Cool. Can you give us a tease? Yeah.

You know, what I'm looking at is the long-term— kind of like most simply put, I'm looking at formative experiences in people's work life. And particularly the long-term effects of people's first bosses and their kinds of experiences that tend to— I don't want to say much, not because it's a secret, because I don't know just yet, but I'm looking at experiences that have a deep imprinting effect on people's mindsets and habits.

And is it more on the Best boss ever changed my world, or more on worst boss ever, PTSD, or we don't know yet? More on the latter. Okay.

No, both.

Both. Okay, cool. Because I, I, I think that you, it could go either way, or, but I think we've all had both of those experiences. Which one? And they both have impact and, and influence on how we lead and how we manage in the pot. You, you can have the worst boss ever and say, okay, what I learned from that person is I will never do A, B, C, and D. Yes. It might have been an easy way to learn it. Cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate your time and your energy, and I've been a longtime fan of your work. So this has been a real pleasure for me to spend a little bit of time with you here today, Liz.

Well, it's a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks.

Thanks so much. 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.