Welcome to The Thinking Leader, brought to you by Red Team Thinking. Bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think. Each week you'll get new ideas and insights from business executives, military experts, and innovative thought leaders to help you lead more effectively and better navigate your complex world. Now, here are your hosts, best-selling business author and top-rated leadership speaker, Bryce Hoffman, and former RAF Wing Commander and business agility coach, Marcus Dimbleby.
Welcome back to The Thinking Leader. Marcus, we have a very special guest today that you have been working very hard to get on the show. Who is joining us today?
I know, right? I've been a big fan of this man for a long time. He needs no introductions, but I'm going to introduce him anyway. He's a former US Navy submarine commander, author of the fabulous book, Turn the Ship Around. I'm sure you can guess who he is by now. And then lately he wrote the book, Leadership is Language. It's great to have on the show joining us today on The Thinking Leader, David Marquet. David, wonderful that you could join us.
Hey, thanks for having me on the show, guys.
Welcome to the show, David. Wow, such a fan of your work. You have really been a leader in leading leaders to become better leaders.
How many leaders can you lead?
Well, that's a question. We're all about leadership here. Tell us just a little bit about how you became so reflective about leadership. I mean, there's a lot of people who've commanded submarines over the years and not all of them, I would hazard to say, have drawn the in-depth leadership principles that you have from their experiences.
Hey, thanks. So people ask me, "Hey, why did I get out of the military?" This is the wrong question. The question is, "Why did I go into the military?" I was born in Berkeley, California in the late '50s, I was left-handed. I was this geeky, introverted kid, I'd be diagnosed with all kinds of social disorders at this point, and I love math. I love nothing more than just sitting and reading and doing math problems ad infinitum on into the middle of the night. But I felt passionately about the Cold War and what was going on and that we, quote, The West, needed to win because the idea that people could do what they want with their life, with their spouse, with their job, with their religion, their sexual orientation whatever, to me was incredibly powerful.
So what do you do if you're an introvert? And I read about submarines. Submarines hide from people. So I said, "I'm going to be a submariner," and that's the path I went down. Now, when I went to the Naval Academy that the U.S. Government... Now, what did I know? I'm 17 years old, I've never seen anything and I show up at the Naval Academy, it's this big impressive institution and they hand me this book, and the whistle blows at 4:30 in the morning and everyone has to get up. And the book says, "Leadership can be defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others so as to obtain their confidence, their obedience, and their respect." I was like, "Sure, give me some of that." And it sets the world into this-
Sign me up [inaudible 00:03:46].
Yes, sign me up for that. Okay. Right? Whatever.
Make money double.
Yeah.
Yeah. Supersize that. Because look, here was the thing, I was being anointed into the thinking and decision-making class, and I could picture myself as being the smart guy and I'd see what was wrong and I would tell people what to do. And everything in that model, all your tools are either about, A, you personally making better decisions and reading the tea leaves and patterns of very...
Submarine warfare is probably one of the most ambiguous things that there is on the planet. It's ambiguous because it's warfare, but it's submarine because it's underwater, so you can't see anything. So reading the ambiguities and making good decisions and then part B is getting your team to do what you want them to do. And all my tools were down that path.
Now, naively, I thought that being anointed into the leadership class meant that I was able to use my brain also, upward. But that was of course wrong. I was supposed to do what I was told from my boss and I kind of chafed at it, but I was like, what did I know? So I was like, Okay, great. This is how it is. And I played the game. And then I got thrust in the situation where at the very last minute I was sent to command a submarine, one of the newest in the fleet. I didn't know the ship. I'd never stepped on board this kind of submarine before. And even though externally, it kind of looked the same, it was right when we were making this transition from analog to digital.
So fundamentally it had missile tubes that I never studied, never had dealt with before. The different reactor plant. All the equipment was different. And that really pulled the rug out from under me because all my leadership was about knowing the right answer, getting the team to do it. It wasn't about getting the team to think. And I now think our language has so many artifacts of this dichotomy where, some anointed group are the leaders and the rest are followers and this goes way back. This goes way back in history.
Aristotle justified slavery on the basis of, some humans are just born to lead and some humans, most of the humans, are born to follow. And this echos throughout history, and it's really immoral, probably isn't too strong a word. It's just wrong. It's not the right way to run a business. It's not good for humans, on either side, I would argue, and it's just the wrong way to think about it. But this is so deeply embedded in our programming, we don't even realize that it's an assumption that we're basing all of our leadership behaviors on.
Yeah. It becomes a default [inaudible 00:06:51].
And it's ineffectual too.
Yeah. Hugely.
It's ineffectual too in that when you have this top down command and control leadership and you're not creating a feedback loop with the folks on the frontline, folks at the coalface, then you're missing a lot of information and a lot of ideas and a lot of insights that can help you make better decisions as a leader.
Yeah, I think ineffectual is a little bit harsh of a criticism. It's been very effective for a lot of people. And if you're right, you can make a lot of money. But the word I'd use is fragile.
Fragile. [inaudible 00:07:36].
Because if you're wrong then you were going to go... So you're going to make a hundred million, make a hundred million, make a hundred million, bankrupt. And we see from Wells Fargo and Boeing and the Russian military behavior in Ukraine, on and on and on, that in these cultures, people won't speak up, you're giving people a pass on thinking, and so you're really relying on one person's big brain. And the world shifts and the person who's got the big brain telling everyone what to do, doesn't see the shift, and then everyone tanks. And so like you're saying, Bryce, it is ultimately ineffective, but then of course we blame the people, that they didn't execute it as fast as I wanted them to.
Always [inaudible 00:08:30].
Well I like fragile.
Fragile. Yeah.
Fragile is a good word for it because when you describe it that way, I think back to one of the leaders I had an opportunity to work with a lot was Sergio Marchionne, who was the CEO of Fiat, the CEO of Chrysler, the CEO of Caterpillar, the CEO of Case New Holland, CEO of all these companies at once. And first time I met Sergio one-on-one, he put down half a dozen BlackBerrys in front of him, which will date when we got together. I was like, "Sergio, what's up with all the BlackBerrys?" And he says, "Well, this one's for Fiat. This one's for Ferrari. This one's for Chrysler. This one's for..."
And at the time, all of these companies were really successful and he was making huge bets. He managed to talk Obama into giving him Chrysler for nothing. He was rolling the dice and it was working. Like you say, it was working, but it was all him. And it was such a graphic image of someone who was holding everything so closely in their hands that he had to have a separate BlackBerry for each one.
I love that. I wish I had a picture.
I do have one somewhere. I'll look and see if I can find it.
I would love to see that. I'd love that picture. Because the other thing that links to is, in this structure, we need to understand that this structure was designed in the industrial age. Well it actually probably predates that. But the permission-based organization results in him having all those BlackBerrys because he's an achiever. He's in the Jack Welch school of I'm making all the decisions and I'm the giant brain and I have these octopus tentacles out and I'm controlling everything. And we gain a lot of psychological juice from that. We don't like to admit it, but we do. And all day long people are, "Oh Sergio, what do you think we should do? Oh, blah blah. Oh David, what should I do here?" "Oh well, let me tell you."
And what we espouse, first of all, empowerment is not binary. This is one of the biggest problems that I see in organizations. We say, "Oh no, no. I don't make a decision. You make a decision." Well that's a very binary approach. So we like to just ratchet it from permission to intent. Intent sounds like permission, but we say, "Hey Captain, I intend to submerge the ship," not "I'd like permission to submerge the ship." At the end of the discussion, if you say, "I need permission," and I just turn and walk out of the control room, go down to the [inaudible 00:11:02] and have a cup of coffee, no one's doing anything. Because in permission, you need yes. And the more people have to say yes, the less probability there is that things goes forward. So permission-based organizations were designed explicitly to prevent action from taking place. That's the purpose of a permission...
So if you were speaking with the language [inaudible 00:11:20] I'd like to, can I, mother may I? It's designed not... And then we say, Oh, why aren't things happening very fast? And we do all these things. We do a reorg and we used to have tribes, but now we have squads. But none of that matters because we're still getting permission. So when you say intent, it flips the whole thing because with intent you say, "Hey, I intend to submerge a submarine." And now we always talk about, we call it expose your thinking, "Hey, here's why. This is what our mission calls for, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, and here's why it's going to be safe. All personnel below we checked the water depth, blah, blah, blah." And then if I turn around and walk out of the control room, guess what happens 30 seconds later? Dive, dive.
No one is waiting. So, in a permission based environment, you need all those BlackBerrys because the team is waiting on responses from you and if you go on a skiing, vacation, everything grinds through a halt. And if your company gets bought and you go away, your company's value is just what's innate in you. So in permission based, people go to the offsite and they don't care because they know, Oh, people send intent. "Hey, this is what I intend to do." They and be [inaudible 00:12:34]. Well, that's on... You didn't respond but that doesn't hold people up. And so freeze the leader to do higher-level thinking.
And in the case of Sergio, he was a chain smoker and he died suddenly and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
Right, right. Yeah. I mean, sorry, but that's the structure.
Yep.
I was really interested in what happened to Apple after Jobs died because I never met him and I wasn't really close to the company, but I got a sense that he was kind of, I got all the answers, kind of a guy. But Apple's done well, very well. I think Tim Cook's done really well. And I think there is more to, what we say is great leaders embed greatness in the processes and the people of the organization, they don't keep it in their own personality. And I think there was more of that going on that at least I, from the outside and from the books I read could see.
Yeah, I've worked with a lot of people who were direct reports to Steve and in the past life I was a tech reporter in Silicon Valley in the nineties. And I think that the thing about Jobs is that he was one of those people who liked to have all the answers, but he also liked to surround himself with people that, even though he could be pretty rough on at times, he surrounded himself with them because he knew they had answers, too. And so he cultivated a team. And that's the thing. Well the thing I used to say about Sergio, people would ask me, what do you think of him as a leader? I'd say he's a great leader in the short term, but he is not building a team. So in the long term, what does it matter? Because ultimately at the end of the day, you have to move on, one way or another.
Right.
Either because you age out or retire or have a sudden heart attack.
Yeah, and you become an Achilles Heel of the organization, don't you, if you do that. But like Job says, and it's his famous quote where he says, "You don't hire a smart people and tell them what to do." The whole purpose is you hire them so they can tell you what to do, and if you are willing and humble enough to do that and have that two-way street communication, that's how you get an effective chain of command operating and pushing that information down where possible to make control enabled at the coalface for the frontline operations.
Yeah, it's two times that you've said coalfaced.
It's one of Marcus's favorite words. [inaudible 00:15:07].
Well, I think coal employment in the UK I think is almost zero at this point.
I know, right? I know.
Yeah.
[inaudible 00:15:14].
So the frontline. We use frontline.
The frontline. No, no, no, that's fine. Coalface. I like the picture of that, too.
Yeah.
The book I'm working on now is on ego.
Oh, I love it.
I'm working with a partner who's got a PhD in psychology he actually knows something. His name is Dr. Michael Gillespie. And you're all aware of the human biases, escalation of commitments on cost, all these kind of things which color the way we make decisions. And so it started out as a decision-making book and we were looking at all these biases which quickly becomes, everyone's inventing new biases every day or renaming them. So we said, Well what's the common cause of as many of these biases as we can get? And basically it comes down to ego. Not so much in, well I'm just a bombastic jerk, but just the fact that our default reference point for experiencing the world is right here behind our eyeballs.
So we like that, we like attention and when we make decisions, our model for the ego is basically, it's this entity which it's fixing itself. It likes to be fixed like a mountain climber going up the mountain, you want to be attached to the mountain. And the ego says, Oh, I made that decision attached to that. Oh I got A plus on my math test, attached to that. Oh my mom told me I was the smart kid. Oh, attached to that. And so the problem is not these attachments so much, it's, I can't release. I can't let that go and go on to the next thing. So as a mountain climber, I'm stuck on the side of the mountain and I can't move forward. And so we attach to being the person who knows all the answers, and I gain psychological as, Oh well what am I if I'm just sitting back here quietly and when the product goes really well, rather than me, the CEO standing in front of the TV cameras, I send out the product owner and let them take the juice.
Hey folks, Bryce here. If you're listening to this and you're liking what you're hearing and you're wondering, am I a Red Team Thinker? We have an easy way for you to find out. Just go to the show notes, click on the link there to our free assessment to find out if you are a Red Team Thinker and what you can do to think more effectively, to lead more effectively, and to make better decisions faster in your complex world. Like I said, the link is in the show notes or you can simply go to our website, redteamthinking.com, check it out. I can't wait to see how you score.
Who's on the cover of the Jack Welch book of Jack Welch? Jack Welch.
Jack Welch.
Jack Welch.
What did Jack Welch name his MBA program? The Jack Welch MBA. If you don't think that that whole thing is about Jack Welch, then I can't help. This is awesome. This is awesome. So everybody, if you guys have not read Bryce's book about Alan Mulally called American Icon... Look, no, look, let me say this. This is great. And there's so many little nuggets in this. I love I...
This is not a paid promotion [inaudible 00:18:45].
I paid my own nine 99 to buy this book. This is not a paid promotion. Look this, it really is tremendous. It's a tremendous story about a tremendous leader. But the problem is if you look at Jack Welch, just say, Well what leaders did he create? Oh, well these are the guys that went to Boeing and screwed it up. These are the guy-
After Alan left.
Nardelli, who screwed up Home Depot, then the New York Stock Exchange and then some other company.
And Chrysler.
And Chrysler. And so why? Because they fell into the trap of thinking... What Jack Welch did, and I won't take this away from him, is he was a great achiever. He achieved lot plus he had great timing. If you bought any company in the United States stock or around the world probably, the day he took over GE and sold it the day he left, you would've made a ton of money. But what he wasn't was a good leader. Because when leaders lead the scorecard on leadership starts ticking the day you exit.
Exactly.
[inaudible 00:19:51].
And well then what we do is we see how the organization does without you. Now imagine if you're going to give, I was working with the Air Force on their performance evaluations and we got this close to implementing this, but they ended up wussing out at the very end, but the idea was let's give the leaders, let's give the captains of the squadron commanders an evaluation one year after they leave based on how well the organization did without them.
Oh, Marcus was a wing commander. What do you think of that?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you see so many people just, you can see their tours, their two, three year tour, first year getting away with doing nothing by working at what's going on. Second year looking busy, third year hiding all the skeletons and then planning their exit. And then when they go, within six months the poor guy who's come back in and he's spending all his time picking up all the mess and trying to fix what's being done.
I always said if you plotted the performance evaluations for every organization, they would go, Oh, it's all screwed up. The [inaudible 00:20:56] and then oh, look how much I'm, and oh, it's so great, now I can leave. And then the next person comes in, it's all, well there's this big this, how can that be?
Yeah.
It can't. But the thing is how does it change your mindset,
If you know you're going to be evaluated on how your organization does without you, think of how that changes the way you interact with your team on a daily basis. And I think this is the right mindset because now you're investing in building leaders and if you are a genius and you are, fine. Help them to be able to make the same, replicate the decision making structures, whatever it is that you use to come up with the right answer. See the future better than everybody, fine, help them with that. Or probably more likely, because there's so many sensors out in the organization, you're not going to sense like Blockbuster, I can sit in the headquarters, but I'm not going to sense even though I can read the financial numbers, what's happening in the marketplace. But I guarantee you a lot of people were [inaudible 00:21:54].
Somebody knows.
Scores, did.
Somebody knew.
Coalface, somebody knows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Right. Right.
That's one of our core thesis, David, is like I said, I used to be a financial-
Coalface.
I've been inside hundreds of companies. I have never been inside an organization, business, government, military because we work with all of them, that there aren't plenty of people who know what's wrong and how to fix it.
Yeah, I mean look at Boeing, we know now because you saw the texts from the test pilot saying, "Yeah, this thing is really acting crazy in the simulator. I guess I lied to the FAA." He was saying that sort of jokingly because he was convincing the FAA that he was good to go. But it's every grounding and collision that the submarine force ever had, once investigated, revealed that somebody on the crew knew, or knew sounds too deterministic, but had a sense that things were amiss and the ship was standing in the danger but either didn't speak up because, well, "I must be the only..." "I must be wrong, because I'm the only one who sees this."
I'm the only crazy guy. Yeah.
I'm the crazy one. Marcus, you're familiar with this from your-
All the time.
... Flying time.
Yeah. All the time.
Or maybe they said it but they didn't really have the language.
Power graded.
So we think... Yeah, power graded. So we're programmed to ask binary questions. Is it safe? Will it work? Are you sure? Are you sure? Now, in a culture of binary questions, I've just set a very high threshold for when it's not safe and I'm going to speak up. On the other hand, if I can speak probabilistically, "Hey, this might not be the right thing to do," or "I think we might be shooting the wrong target." "How sure are you?" "Only 10%?" Okay. But it allows us to say more, it gives the team permission to be wrong, is the traditional way to say it, but you're not wrong. If the weather man says-
Crazy discussion, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It-
Because when you say 10%. So he was like what, 10% we shouldn't be firing. Let's talk about this.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's talk about what percentage do I need it to be before I don't shoot. Like well I don't know. We're in a hot war and it's World War II, so yeah, whatever. We'll take the hit. But-
Well this the problem with-
Like today, no.
A.I. and machine systems uncoupled from human decision makers is they can make great probabilistic determinations. But what to do with those determinations, I would submit, is best done in conjunction with human decision makers when you're dealing with high stakes issues, in many cases.
We got Hurricane Ian bearing down on us, but by some of the tracks it like goes right over my house. Some of the tracks, it goes to the east, most of the tracks go to the west. But if you think of it sort of like, where's the hurricane going? Will it hit us or not? Then I think it leads you, I had this problem on this... I think it leads you into limiting your decision. So I had this problem on the submarine, I don't know, maybe Marcus saw this. So we have to pick up a seal team and we look at the weather and the weather's supposed to be good, we wait for the full moon, or not the opposite of the full moon, new moon. So no moonlight, dark as possible, blah blah blah blah, blah.
He optimized the conditions. "What's the weather? "Weather's supposed to be good." So I sent a team of junior officers to go plan this operation out. It's going to happen in three to six hours. And they come back and they brief me and I said, "Well what if the weather's not..." So the main plan is we're going to use the main deck on the submarine and the main deck hatch, which is only about a foot and a half above sea level. And if the weather's not good, you can't use that hatch because the waves come and they go in the submarine, not good.
So I said, "Well what happens if the weather's bad and it's greater than three foot waves?" They're like "Well... " And you could tell they haven't really-
Yeah.
... like they've put one cell on this and it always frustrated me, why aren't you guys planning out case B very well? We have a plan. So not, but they really didn't. And I think what happens is, let's say it's 90% good weather, 10% bad in their minds they're like, There's a 90% chance that everything I do to plan out case B is going to be a waste of time and everyone's very busy, so we don't do it. And then when a case B happens one in 10 times, we're not ready.
Yeah. And that's why this planning that way in complexity doesn't work anymore, doesn't it? And we're seeing that and what we're talking about here is creating plans with optionality. You have to bake those, plan B, plan C into your original planning because that 10% will show up one day. And if you've not planned for it at all, that will completely make the plan fail. It'll catch you totally unawares, whereas that little bit of time upfront thinking and asking the right questions, it triggers that thought process, is what you're trying to achieve in, as you said, junior officers now our frontline personnel.
Yeah, precisely.
I love this. I want to get to this point, David, I want to go back to this point about ego.
Yeah.
Because I agree with you completely that a lot of the cognitive biases and heuristics that we resort to are really a product of ego and a product of the fear that if we ask for help, if we don't have the answer, if we're not decisive to a fault, then people will not perceive us as real leaders, and it probably gets into imposter syndrome and a lot of other things as well. How do you get people, as leaders, to begin to pry their fingers off the mountain side and relinquish some control?
So the fundamental tool, psychological tool, is called distancing. You need to move away from you. You're locked inside, we call it, you're locked behind your eyeballs. And so you can distance, I'll give you three ways to distance. One, be someone else, be somewhere else, be some time else. Be someone else means think of yourself in the third... Even something as writing a journal in third person tends to mitigate anxiety. David had a bad day today, David was upset about... or whatever it is. If you journal in the third person. People have alter egos, so Beyonce had Sasha Fierce, so she created. So that's kind of an extreme case of this distancing. So that's be someone else. And there's other pieces to it, but just imagine that you're a different representation of yourself.
Number two is, be somewhere else. So Bill Yuri, I think probably got the best example of this where he talks about in negotiations, we're imagining ourself, we're on stage, imagine yourself in the balcony looking at yourself.
And number three is, be some time else. Which the most powerful way to do that is to imagine in the future. So if you ask a psychological study for people, said, here's some criteria, pick the best car. Tomorrow you're going to buy it and then you're going to buy this in a year. They made better decisions if they had just imagined the decision was in a year then to do that on steroids, imagine you are in the future. So I actually moved the calendar. On the submarine I had a calendar, which I always had running six months in advance. And I'd said, Okay, imagine what day is it? We're at the end of September. So imagine it's the end of March and at the end of March I'm sitting there thinking, what would I want David to do today.
To get you to it-
And what happens is, it activates more long-term thinking. Because today all I want to do is solve the problem and move on. But if I'm like, Well crap in March I'm going to be dealing with the same issue over and over and over again. I'm just going to keep solving this same problem. How about I build a team of problem solvers? So it allows me to say, "You guys go away, come back in 30 minutes, tell me what you think." I mean, let them build the team of problem solvers and not get trapped the way. Sergio was. And then for example, we call it, be the coach, not the quarterback. We picture ourselves, I'm the quarterback of my life, I'm on the field, I'm throwing balls, I'm motivating my players, and I get hit and I feel a sac and it hurts and I'm wrapped up in the moment. But the coach is on the sideline and he is like, Yeah, that hurt. And then you come off the field and he don't care.
It's like, well what are we going to do next? It's like, yeah, that happened. I'm not pretending it didn't, but-
Move on.
I don't... Move on. Great. Now what are we going to do next? But I'm so... Whatever. What are you going to do next? So be the coach of your life, not the quarterback of your life. Now there are some moments if you're climbing a mountain, be in the moment. Like don't be...
Yes.
That's a good time to be in the moment, but before and after, a lot of times in our life, we're not doing those kind of things to activate the learning vector and when we're in decision making mode, we think it's better to have these different perspectives. And what it's fundamentally doing, it's separating you from what it feels like, my ego. Then it's easier to let go of that thing and reattach higher on the mountain.
Wow, that's such powerful, powerful advice. I love that. Distancing, letting go a little bit so that you actually become more successful and help your organization, as you say, become more successful too.
Yeah, because all these fixtures are all, they're all rear word looking. It's all about things that happened in the past. And so the ego is fundamentally trying to foot the past in a concrete pattern and say fix to that way. I'm still alive, I'm pretty successful. Don't change anything. All those things are attached to me. And the thing is, we can't help it. There was a plane, ASIANA 214, in San Francisco coming in. I'm sure you-
Yes.
... you remember this and there was a... So the pilots coming in, he's being a monitored. So that's another stressor that tends to push you back inside your own eyeballs. And the lights went from four white to three white, one red, two, to four red very rapidly. He claimed, of course as the plane's getting closer so the lights are getting bigger, he never saw them go to for red.
And he's talked about, well maybe there was a flash. The other two people in the cockpit did. But I think what happened was, his brain, it was such uncomfortable information, your brain actively filters it out to protect you from this uncomfortable. So the reason he didn't see it, and this is not a conscious thing, this is a human thing. The reason he didn't see it was because his brain stopped it, at some point, from going to the conscious part of his processing. Now that's the first problem.
The second problem is when we see it, but then we deny it. We go, Oh well. Or we explain it, well the reason is because this, we had the best, we did the best we can with tools we had, blah blah blah, rationalize. And so it's all part of it. But some of these things happen and you don't even have a choice over it. They're already distorted by the time you perceive it at the perceptual level, it's already been distorted in your favor.
Absolutely and that was a part of the findings in the Vincennes that shot down the airbus, wasn't it? Where the radar controllers thought they saw an aircraft accelerating, descending towards the ship, and it wasn't.
Right.
Stayed on track at 37,000 feet, but because of the context and the scenario and the pressure, that's what their brain told them to see. [inaudible 00:34:37].
And they would've sworn on a stack of Bibles that that's exactly what it was. And then you go back and look at it and say, Whoa, whoa, what? This is not what... Someone altered the tapes.
But if you take yourself away from it-
They did. They did. They did swear that that was until they saw the tapes again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Cognitive Dissonance.
I know. So we talked about the great book.
Yeah.
Here's another one. Turn the Ship around. Now this book, David is 10 years old this year, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
10 years old. Wow.
I know.
Time flies. I've been reading your, if I wrote TTSA Turn the Ship Around, I'd do something. And the one I loved was-
Yeah.
... I'd spend more time on the times when I was rigid about the rules we were going to live by. That sounds counterproductive to a lot of the stuff you talk about. Talk me through that. Because I find it, I understand it totally, but let our listeners understand it from you.
Yeah. I had the problem on the submarine, but also when we go work with companies and they say, "Oh, you're the empowerment guy" or "You're the give people the ability to make decisions guy." I say, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they immediately jump to, so I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, and like-
Adult chaos.
No, that is not right. The way I think about it is, if you think about your decisions as a product that your company produces and they're coming off an assembly line, I think about the product in a very sort of process-oriented way. Where most of us have gotten away from, well I'll put an inspector at the end to make sure it's good or bad, but I'm going to make sure that we have the right spray nozzles for the paint, and when the car comes off the assembly line, quality is baked in. But when it comes to decisions, we're still back with the inspector at the end and I'm the key inspector. So the decision process is not well defined, it's semi chaotic. The decisions are randomly good or bad.
And then I feel good because, "Oh look, bad, bad. Don't do that. Yeah, good. Do this." And I get psychological juice out of that. So the idea is think about your decision making as a process. And so I was rigid. Where I was rigid was now about the decision making process. So for example, we had some protocols for you needed to talk to some other people before you made a decision, you needed to think about certain things like A, why are we doing it and B, what is ensuring that it's safe, blah blah, blah. The way we ran meetings for example was we would vote first, then discuss. And the tendency is to, Hey, is 737 Max good to go? Oh yeah, blah blah, blah. We got to catch up the airbus. And then, but when you vote first and we ask how ready is 737 Max to go out to public? Then people vote unanchored and unbiased by the group.
Now here's where I was rigid. We also had a rule. No, they on Santa Fe. So if you came up to me and said, Well we, or they ordered the wrong part, so I can't fix my pump, I just walked away from you. Because the rule was no, they on Santa Fe. So the structural process rules I was very rigid on, but because I was rigid there I could release control on when the team came to me and said, "Here we thought about it, we think we've got conflicting evidence, we should go north, we should go south, I think we should go north."
Yeah.
"We're 65% sure about that." So I can say, "Okay, fine. Let's go north. See what happens."
Yeah. And I think that's where organizations are struggling up, because they're reading your book, they're seeing agile, self-managing, self organizing teams, and they're thinking it's letting go of the reigns completely without what you talk about. It's competence and clarity. And if you don't have those two things in spades, then you're not going to have that control or the authority and ability to control without being very dangerous. Which we've seen in so many organizations since then.
Yeah. I got that problem in my own consulting company. And the problem is, so confidence, I can't give you authority to make decisions about whatever, fill in the blank, if you don't know whatever, to fill in the blank. So the first question is, how much do you know about fill in the blank. And that requires people to expose their level of competence, which many... I have coaches on our team which don't like the idea that I can drop in and watch their thing at any time and look at the slides they're going to use any time, and any time we can be... And they get defensive over that. And so it's not a good fit.
Yeah, absolutely not. Right?
So we say embrace the inspector and invite scrutiny. Don't create a team that gives feedback. No one gives a hoot about your unsolicited. That's the [inaudible 00:39:57].
It's not about singing Kumbaya.
Yeah, exactly.
It's about...
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So w e say create a culture where people invite feedback. But let's be honest, Bryce says after, "Oh hey, can I give you some feedback? The story you told was a little bit longer." Like I'll smile and say, Oh yeah, "Oh thanks for that Bryce." But real deep down I'm like, "Screw you dude. What do you know?"
I was just listening to an interview between Tim Ferris and Tony Fadell, one of the great visionaries of Silicon Valley, worked with Steve Jobs on the iPhone and all this stuff. And Fadell was saying, you have to know what type of asshole to be.
Yeah.
And he-
Good point.
And he said, if you're abusive, if you're putting people down, if you're be believing people, that's a bad asshole. But he said, if you care passionately about the product and you're going to push people to get it right, because that's what the customers need and to execute the vision that you've all agreed to as a team and hold people accountable, you may have to act like an asshole sometimes to do that. But it's a different thing from just beating people about the face and head.
Yeah. So if I were to lay into that, I would say I was a process asshole which allowed me to release being an outcome asshole. I think too many of the times we do it both ways, where we have randomized outcomes. I just say imagine that your job, you're buying a lottery ticket and then you win the lottery and say, "Oh, great job. You won the lottery. Good decision." And then you didn't win the lottery. "Oh, bad decision." Well, it's a randomized outcome. So for me, and your ego is part of this too, because your ego likes to attach to outcomes. So then you say, "Oh, back in 2005, I sold my house. And then it was, how smart am I?" But it was just a randomized, you were just moving from San Francisco to Vegas and blah blah blah.
And then you try and replicate that and it doesn't happen, and now you're all confused. Well,. It was just a random outcome. But the process, we don't have control over the outcome. We have control over the process. And also by the way, trying to hold people accountable for outcomes is... The best sports teams try to be agnostic about whether you won or lost. They say, Look, let's just... Like if you look at John Wooten's stuff, or Trevor Moawad, the coach psychologist stuff, sports coach then it's about, look, let's just do what we have control over. It's about aligning your focus on what you can control and release the rest.
And I think accountability comes into it. You have to have accountability of your team. When you-
For the process. For the things you can control.
For the process. Exactly. Not for the outcome, for the process.
Right. Yeah. Well people say, "How do you hold people accountable?" Which is weird because I never really felt I had to. The reason we have that word is because we say things like this Bryce. Okay, Bryce, you're going to deliver a 50,000 word manuscript in six months, you have this much thing, you have this many people on your team, you got this many resources, you're going to have this much quality and then I'm going to hold you accountable when you didn't, and you came short. Well that seems unfair. You really didn't have control over any of the input variables. Like oh yeah, but-
COVID happened.
Yeah. And then COVID happened. No one wanted to get interviewed. Yeah. But if you say, Well what did you do? Well, I just felt sorry about myself for six months, didn't do anything, didn't get out of bed. Well, okay, well then maybe that's something we can talk about. But we would always try and hold people accountable for the process. I was talking to my son the other day, he's a lawyer in DC, works for a nonprofit, and he is like, "Dad, you ever make any goals for yourself?" I said, "No, never a one." Which is sort of totally true. But I kind of wanted to push it a little bit. It's like what? Really?
It's like, yeah, I just said, I would just say, okay, if I want to do this, so let's say you want to retire with a million dollars, you can't control that, but I can control I'm going to save 10% of my paycheck and it's going to automatically go, even before I see it, into an account that it's very hard for me to get the money out of and it's going to invest in broad market index. And I'm just glad to do that, do its thing. And then if the stock market crashes, well you can't control it, but then hope feel bad about the outcome, because the process was correct.
Yes. I love it. This is such great stuff, David. So many great pieces of advice for leaders in all of this. It's like a masterclass in leadership here. It really is.
It is.
It's been such a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks, for-
You guys are-
... for taking the time.
You guys are awesome. Look, I'm so embarrassed I didn't put this together. I'm like-
No, no, no.
... a fucking idiot. But-
No, no, no.
Look, use some of that. I do not say it's a good book if I don't think it's a good book. This was great.
Awesome.
And I'd like to come back and interview you on ego, because the problem we have is we have a lot of the negative stories. We don't have enough of the good stories. And since you've talked to, I think Mulally could be an example of this and I'd love to-
Absolutely.
Okay.
Love to talk about it.
I'll follow up with an email with Mike Gillespie, my co-author and we'll just do a short thing. But the question is, what tools did you see him, I can't be too easy. I want to see him struggling with this, and how did he deal with it? What were the tools that he used to, and you know the construct of the whole book. So you can think about that.
We will have a great conversation on it.
You will indeed.
Great.
I'm looking forward to the book as well.
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Cheers, David.
Thank you guys. Have a great day.
Stay safe as well. Hope the hurricane pushes on by out West.
Yeah, that would be better for us. Just-
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