The Business Behind the Keynote | Andy Freed | 713

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, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today's gonna be fun. My guest is Andy Freed. Andy just wrote a book called Lead Like the Boss, which is a reference to Bruce Springsteen that we'll get into a minute. But he's got another gig, right? Like, so his main gig is he is the chairman of his company, right? He's got 20-plus years of experience. He's got a BA in government, Harvard University Master of Public Policy. So interesting fellow, but somehow amidst everything he's got going on, he's like, I gotta write a leadership book based on Bruce Springsteen. So I had to take advantage of this opportunity. So welcome, Andy. Welcome aboard.

Thanks for having me here.

Cool. So first, let's start with some of the backstory. When you and I spoke a little while ago, you mentioned how many Bruce shows you've seen. So this isn't a theoretical, this isn't a plot.

No, no, no.

How many times have you seen the boss?

I've been about 95 shows.

Got it. Got it. And what was it, you know, what was the, the spark? Why did you say, I gotta write a book about this and here's why I need to frame it? Cause there's been lots of books written around Bruce in terms of just movies. There's like, this isn't the first time somebody's noticed that this is an interesting gentleman. Right. But tell me your take on this.

So my take, I'll be honest, a little bit of self-preservation. So I was coming home from a show in Phoenix, Arizona, and about, I think it was '23 or '24 and said, geez, I gotta justify that I just went out to this thing. You know, because lo and behold, there was a client meeting there, but I stuck around for the show. Said, I, I should write something about why I was there, because I learned a little something when I was there. And wrote something up on LinkedIn that wind up not really going viral, but getting pretty picked up by a lot of people who said, this is interesting stuff. Because I wrote about just the lessons I had learned from watching the way Bruce interacts with his band and watching the way he interacts with, uh, the audience.

And so stay there for a minute. So I, I think that's you're going through that quickly. Like, of course I wrote that up. LinkedIn and other platforms, you know, with Substack, whatever, whatever it is you might be using, are great places to throw stuff up just to see if there's a there there. Right? So you often wouldn't say, I'm gonna write this little piece on LinkedIn and then that'll turn into a book and then I'm gonna do this, that, and the other thing. You're like, let me just share this. Right? And then, you know, there was validation.

Lo and behold, there's some sharing that went on. Absolutely.

Yeah. So that tells you that you, you struck a nerve cuz it's probably not what people typically expected to come out from Andy, right? Based on your profession, what you're doing, whatever. You're like, why is this dude riffing about, you know, a Springsteen show and what he observed? So anyway, I think that's a good takeaway for folks to say, well, here's something I'm doing. It doesn't dead on fit into what people expect of me, right? But let me throw it out there and let's just—

no, no. And that, that was what social media was supposed to be. Yeah, it was, you know, it was supposed to be social. I mean, the idea that you could throw out ideas and, um, you know, actually have some dialogue about stuff. It's turned into something else, but there's still elements where you can do that on social media for sure. You're absolutely right, Peter.

Very cool. So now how did you determine what the gist of the book is?

Yeah, so that got it started and then I started looking deeper at, so, so what, what first drew me to it? I'll say kind of the first lesson I took away, um, and one of my first things that I still love so much about Bruce shows was, as a kind of example of Bruce's leader, is, you know, Bruce at the end of a show, you know, on the last tour he played with 19 people on stage. Well, at the end of every show, he retreats to the back of the stage, and as they're leaving the, leaving the stage at the end of the night, he shakes their hands, whispers something in your ear, to thank them for a good show. And that's whether it was Gary Tallent, who he's been playing with since 1973, or there's people on the tour this time that he just started playing with this tour. He thanks every one of them. And what they say is, for 10 seconds every night, Bruce Springsteen makes me feel like the most important musician on the face of the earth. And I thought—

let's stay there a minute. As a business guy, you're a chairman. Number one, a 1 to 19 ratio is not ideal, right? We've been taught that it's 1 to 8, 1 to 10, 1 to 12, whatever.. And I'm assuming that just because there's 19 people on the stage, there's probably another multiple of that doing things backstage.

Yep.

No, no question. Probably another 50 or I don't know whatever the math is, but it's, it's not 20. So the fact that he acknowledged each of those 19 and could have said, well, the chorus, you know, Sally leads the chorus and there's 3 ladies in the chorus. Like I just talked to Sally. Those are not my, you know, those are skip, skip jumps or whatever. Yeah. But like to go to each one and acknowledge them. Now we know this as leaders. Right. We, we, like, this is not a new revelation, but when you saw that firsthand and said, oh wow, because when we, when we think about it, it's powerful to see. Yeah.

And to see that he also gets that, you know, Jake Clemens gets a hug, somebody else gets a high five, somebody else gets something whispered in their ear.

Yeah. On a personal level.

He knows what matters to them. But like, imagine if that, like, when you hear them say like the, I feel like the most important musician on the face of the earth. Imagine if your whole company felt that way every day because of something you did.

Well, and the other thing I would say is most rock stars, not most, but many, and I think this applies to most CEOs or many, ultimately become divas. You know, when you're the CEO, you're not worried about the Uber, the car's waiting downstairs for you. Somebody took care of your lunch.

I'm, I'm the first one to leave the stage. Yeah.

Uh, right.

Yep. I'm, I'm gonna leave the stage before you guys do and drink. I, I need all the refreshments.

And we could justify, I mean, and, and this even goes to, you know, I've, organizations where I've even got my own elevator and nobody goes in my elevator. I have my own bathroom in my fancy, like, so there's this diva around CEOs and we could talk about why that is. Their time is valuable and, and all that sort of stuff. But it's the opposite of sort of rockstar, or it's, it's similar to rockstar behavior, but it's different than what you saw with Bruce.

Yeah. Well, what Bruce gets also is, you know, it's 100 years ago, but, uh, William James, who was the, Father of American psychiatry, wrote, the deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.

Yeah.

Think about that. Like deeper than sex, deeper than money, deeper than power. The deepest need we have is that need to be appreciated. You know, so that idea and understanding that and understanding, just showing appreciation to somebody is so important. Just that moment of saying, you know, I see what you do and it matters. Yeah. Like how powerful that could be for a leader. So that's what started it for me was realizing that like, okay, that's an idea worth spreading.

So now you decide, now you, you throw it up on LinkedIn, right? And you're like, there might be a there there. At what point did you, did you say, or did somebody influence you to say, okay, let's do a book that this, there's a, there's a potential for a book here.

I think seeing the response to the LinkedIn page, which wasn't like, it wasn't like a million people responded. But a lot of people who I respected responded saying, well, this is kind of interesting. Uh, is there more here? Um, and just to your point on LinkedIn, uh, you, you're throwing it out there and now you're getting that response and thought, well, but maybe there is more here and, you know, maybe I should start thinking about it more. So then it was when I kept going to shows, I just kept thinking about it more and I'm still enjoying the show, but I'm also like looking at other little things and thinking about what else is going on.

Give me an example of a nuance or something that you picked up because you went in with this sort of lens of, hey, I'm not just here to have a couple beers and enjoy the show. I have a theory here and I might want to learn something. So what are the things that—

I mean, just watching Bruce's energy on stage and recognizing that Bruce at any moment is the pinnacle of energy in the arena. There is nobody that cares more or has more energy in the arena than he does. And contrast that with how many times have you watched somebody just phone it in for a PowerPoint presentation, but stay there.

So I, I mean, I think we could even extrapolate this to performers, whether it's Broadway theater, whatever, where you're like, somebody says, oh, you went to see so-and-so and it was a phone it in. Like, yeah, I got to see a band that I've loved for 30 years. Um, was it I'm disappointed, right? I can't say they didn't do a good job. They didn't— it's not like they sung the notes off cue or the music was bad or the, you know, can't nail it down to something like that. But it's like, yeah, and you know tomorrow they're going to be in Pittsburgh and just doing the thing, right?

Yeah. So yeah, but by contrast, you know, Bruce has played Born to Run live 1,878 times in his career, and every time he brings it his all because he knows that there's two kinds of people in the audience. People that have seen him 95 times and are comparing him to the other times they've seen him and seeing as he lost a step, and people are seeing him for the first time and want to see what all the fuss is about. So he brings it, he gives it his all. And if he's at a 9 in energy, the audience can be at an 8, you know, but if he comes in at a 5, you can't expect the audience to be at an 8 or a 10. That's just not going to happen. And that's what I think a lot of leaders forget when they're presenting or when they're talking to a group. Is they've got to be the pinnacle of how much somebody cares about that material. You know, if I'm sitting there and saying like, well, it's the staff meeting, I do the staff meeting every month, I'm just going to phone it in. I can't expect my staff to be any more excited than I am. You know, they're going to come— if I'm at a 5, they're coming in at a 4. And that's something which Bruce gets, is that I'm going to bring it my all so that the audience can hit that level as well with me.

All right. So I wanna go in a little bit of a different direction and, and that's this. You're a business guy, so you're CEO of a company, right? How big is the company?

Uh, Virtual Ink.

No. How, and how big is that? How many people?

Oh, about, uh, we're about 200 people.

Right. So this is a signi— significant company. There are a lot of demands on your time. There's a lot of things that you can be doing. What are you hoping happens or What are some of the outcomes that you're hoping? Because the book is fairly recent in terms of its pub date.

What do you—

what's your hopes?

Well, what I would say is more than anything, what I've tried to kind of build my career at the company is the notion that the job of leaders is to create more leaders. You know, that, that's like job one of leadership is create more leaders. So I've been trying to do that in my company, and I'm hoping the book's a chance to do that outside of the company as well. Some people can read it and learn a little something about leadership. They can hone their game, they can up kind of how they're doing, and I'm creating more leaders, man, that is a, that is mission accomplished for me as a leader.

Okay. So how does the book— so explain to me how the book helps with that. Is it the book by, by reading it or, or—

Yeah. So the book really follows the arc of a Springsteen show and talks about the leadership lessons that comes out of each kind of moment of it. And gives people practical tools and tips that they can do and that they can bring into their own leadership. No, because I'm not a big theory guy. I'm not looking to write like a big, you know, Harvard Business Review kind of story on here's how I hope things work. I'm big on, again, I'm a roll up your sleeves, you know, hoodie wearing CEO that wants to get things done. And if I can get them done faster, great. You know, so a lot of what the book's trying to do is draw a very short line between that theory and practice. Yeah, somebody can leave with some things they can really do.

Would be kind of fun if the next time I went to a Bruce show in, in the merch section, other than overpriced sweatshirts, there was, uh, a book section. That would be—

that would be pretty cool. I'd be all for it.

Now, how, if at all, might it benefit you professionally and/or the business?

I mean, for me, it's a little bit of this. It's, you know, what we're doing right now, it's exposure. You know, so our business is a business that runs, tends to run in the background of a lot of organizations.

Okay.

You know, so our business is that we run technology consortia and standards bodies. So we work with a lot of multi-company companies that are multi-company organizations that are trying to get something done. For example, we worked with a group that was trying to create the standard for mobile payment, which is about 300 companies coming together to make that work.

Okay.

But nobody knows we exist. We're virtual. That's why we named our company that. We were— we exist in the background. Right. So, so the book is a little bit of a stepping into the foreground of this is what we do and this is our secret sauce. You know, so it's an attempt to kind of, you know, drive, drive some exposure for the work that we've done.

So stay, so stay there for a minute. If you are in the background, I would imagine your competitors are in the background. So in a, and I don't mean this in the wrong way, it's, it's, we're all being commoditized. So a lot of the work that you do is a commodity. So now if I'm looking at 3 providers and one of them's got this kind of out-there CEO, maybe not out there, but CEO that sees the world a little different, world a little differently, and wrote a book on Springsteen, it's going to at least get me to pause and go, well, that's interesting. Tell me more.

Like, like, yeah, I'll say the people that pause on that are also, frankly, the people I want to work with.

It's the same.

Yeah. And that's something I learned along the way is like, you know, if somebody looks at that and says, That guy's a little out there and I don't really want to talk to the Springsteen, you know, that crazy bald guy that likes Springsteen. Hey, that's great. I've saved myself some time because that was going to be a miserable working relationship, you know, versus somebody else.

Right. So I've never seen an RFP that says, and, you know, attach the manuscript of the book your CEO wrote about a rock star. Right. Like I've never seen that. Right. But I like the self-selection piece, right? If they're only looking for the lowest price or the service gap, you know, the things that are the things, then that's kind of gonna be a boring relationship. But I would imagine it's definitely a conversation starter. There's lessons there. You know, you, and I don't know if you're doing this, but you could offer a potential client, say, hey, I, I'd be happy to come in and talk to your team about this if this resonates.

Absolutely. And look, I, I go back to you years ago. I worked for Senator Paul Tsongas when he was running for president. He remembers when he first got outta college, he went to the Peace Corps.

Yeah.

And yeah, he was one of the first Peace Corps classes and he went after the Peace Corps, interviewed at a law firm and they said, what's this Peace Corps thing? And described it. And he said it was, you know, the greatest experience of your life. And they said, well, I guess we can overlook that kind of from the law path. And he walked out of the interview and said, this isn't for me. And I remind my kids when they interview that, like, you're interviewing the company too, of like whether or not it works for you and You know, with clients, it's the same thing of like if somebody looks at this and says, yeah, let's go backwards on that, right?

So if there's a self-selection process that goes on on both sides of the equation, I would guess that your retention rates of clients are higher, your margins are good, your business is stable. You don't get hit often with—

I think life is more fun. Yeah, work is more fulfilling. You work with people that want to work with you, that you want to work with. That are your kind of people. Life's too short to do anything else.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Any other surprises that have come to you either from the process of writing a book? 'Cause that's usually a place where light bulbs go off to people and or the phase you're in now, which is sort of helping, you know, supporting the launch and getting the book out into the world.

I want, yeah, a couple of things. One of the things that in terms of the process of writing a book is it really forces you to understand why you know the things you know. And that's sometimes a really hard thing to figure out at 57 years old of, you know, when somebody, when you say, for example, you know, Lee Gee's linear messaging doesn't work, but, you know, talking points aren't as effective as other ways to approach things. And then somebody, well, why? Well, I just know that I've been at this for a long time. Well, okay, tell me why. Give me an example.

You know, so the books, really forces you to go back to the fundamentals of why, you know, the things, you know, uh, so questioning a belief and, and, and did you uncover some that said, you know, I always thought X, but on further reflection, I'm actually wrong and need to reconsider. And maybe Y is true.

Sometimes it's that, or sometimes it's that, well, I didn't really understand what was behind that. You know, if you take, go back to what we were saying earlier about appreciation. Going back to, well, it's not just that it's really nice to shake somebody's hands, it's that it's the deepest human need somebody has. And that there's science behind that. And there's a lot of things within the book that I also will talk about some of the brain science and neuroscience that goes behind some of this, you know, that, you know, just the idea of, you know, why am I more at ease listening to Bruce lyrics in the car, then I get tense when my daughter has control of the radio and Taylor Swift comes on, even though I like some of her stuff. But familiarity also is something which, you know, it goes back to brain science and comfort.

Well, there's a comfort. It's, it's sparking memories that you might have had hanging out with your buddies on the shore or whatever, right? Like there's a connection to it that you probably don't have to Taylor Swift as a 57-year-old.

Even as simple as understanding that, like familiarity in our kind of reptilian brains told us that we weren't under threat. And when you hear something different, your immediate reaction is, this is unfamiliar. I wonder if there's a threat out there. And just understanding that and how that can give you greater comfort is— Yeah. Yeah. And that, that goes also to, for leaders, understanding that that's why it's so important to repeat messaging. Um, that when same message the same way. 7 times, people pick up on it, but they get comfortable with it in a way that they don't if I change it every time. And I might think changing it every time is keeping it fresh for them, but really I'm adding to their anxiety and adding to their uncertainty.

Unintentionally.

Unintentionally and unproductively.

Right. Which is not a good thing to do.

All right.

So I'm just gonna, just for the record, I'm hoping there's not a sequel to this book on, you know, the Swifty School of Management or something. Osaka.

Yeah, I'm, I'm quite— I'm not quite a— I've been to the Taylor Swift show. I got to the Eras show with my daughter. I had my, uh, friendship bracelet on.

Okay.

Um, but I, I wouldn't say I'm all in yet as a Swiftie.

Okay, good. I, I would, I would, uh, I would say ditto. No, no, I don't think we're the demographics, right?

So I'll, I'll, I'll say this. The line for the men's room has never been shorter than when I went to the Eras Tour at Gillette Stadium. I mean, that was really the, you know, the cherry on the sundae, if at all.

So on that note, I appreciate your time. This has been great. And thanks for sharing your story, Andy. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

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@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.