Tom Guarriello says he wakes up for his children, step-children, and grandchildren, and for his work as a management consultant. In the late 1960s, he was a psychologist helping severely mentally ill patients move from locked institutions to community living. He still does that work now, just in organizations instead of hospitals.
Hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. Just a quick reply to a great question by Digital Soul, who put to us a very simple question: what do you— why do you get up every day? Why do you wake up? And, you know, he had a great couple of great clips of his son Hayden, really terrific. And, you know, I don't know how old Digital Soul is. He looks to be, you know, maybe late 20s, early 30s. I didn't even check his profile, see how old he is. And when you're in your late 20s and early 30s and you've got a youngster like he does Man, the question of why you get up every morning is easy. You get up every morning for your kids, you know. You get up every morning because they got that— you got that smile and face coming at you constantly, all the time. When you get older, you know, your kids are still really important in your life, but, you know, Karen and I have his and hers daughters from our first marriages. 2 girls. Heidi is my daughter and Kristen is Karen's daughter. They're 37 years old and they're 6 weeks apart. So, you know, that was always interesting. And, you know, they're still our kids, but they're 37, you know. It's different when your kids are 37 than when they're 3. You know, like Hayden is. But I still get up in the morning for two really important reasons, and one of them, you know, is the reason that Digital Soul talked about here. People, you know, the people that I love and the people who love me are always one reason to get up every morning. And for me, the other major reason for getting up every morning is my work. My work— I'm a consultant, you know, I've talked about that a little bit, a management consultant. And management consultants, you know, people often don't understand the, I guess, the satisfaction of being a management consultant. The kind of management consulting that we do in our firm is really about helping organizations to get the best out of every person who's in the organization, to let everybody, to allow everybody to contribute to the maximum of their ability. And, you know, all my career I've been working with people trying to get them to be the best that they could be, to maximize every possible bit of talent that they ever had. I started my career as a psychologist working in institutions with seriously mentally ill people. And seriously mentally ill people, I mean, you know, back ward, locked up, 20 years in the hospital kind of people. People who had the most severe kinds of mental disabilities that it's possible for people to have. And when you spend time working with people who are in that situation and you're trying every day to get them to help to try to get them to smile or to help to try to get them to have a conversation with another person all towards working towards trying to get them to maybe get an apartment, work in a— back then, now this was in the late 1960s when community care for mentally disabled people was not so great. We were still trying to build a system of care that would really help people to be able to live outside the institution. Living in the institution was a horrible, horrible situation for people. And so when you work in that kind of situation with people in the most extreme circumstances that human beings can be in, you— I learned about the value of incremental improvements in the way people go about living their lives. That helping people to make the next incremental improvement and the one after that and the one after that was all— you never knew which one of those changes was going to be one that would really make a difference, that would really enable a person to be able to leave the institution and, you know, go live a more normal life in the community with other people. When I started doing management consulting, the thing that I saw was that in business situations, people had similar— I mean, not the same kind of disorders that we're talking about in institutions, but people were in many ways— you would find, I would find situations in which people were similarly limited. They really weren't being given the opportunity or nobody could take that step to try to do something special and different and really release the potential of all the people who were there in the organization. And so I got to be in situations and to help leaders to do that and to help. And work makes a dramatic difference in people's lives. When people are working in situations in which they thrive and things really click, like when you're on a great team and stuff is really happening, But you could just see everybody flourish. The quiet ones in the corner, the funny ones, the people would just come together and you could just see that. So anyway, I don't want to go on and on. I just wanted to say that, you know, in response to Digital Soul's question, two things continue to get me up in the morning. The people, the people I love and the people who love me, and my work, trying to help people to be what they can be in their situation, no matter what it is, and to try to make that better. So thanks, take it easy, see you soon. Bye.
