Jim Collins - Build Your Personal Flywheel | The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

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What are the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time?

Hey Ryan, hey Jim, how are you doing?

Oh, it's great, uh, great to see you and great to have a chance to engage in this conversation again. I've really been looking forward to this immensely. And, uh, here, let me just get this set, and then we can, we can get really going with our mutual curiosity.

I know that's what I get with you. Yeah, I love it. By the way, though, real quick, before we get going, what, what are you doing? Are you just climbing a bunch of mountains, riding bikes, running? How are you staying in such good shape?

Why do you think I'm in good shape? You look great. You look really good.

Yeah, it's just genetics. Um, yeah. Uh, you know, I, uh, so I have a rock climbing wall in my basement. And, uh, I'm, um, I'm, uh, so I've, as you know, I've always been a climber, and I'm built like a climber. But, um, well, I'm a little big for a climber, actually. I'm about 165 pounds. Best climbing size is probably about 145. But the, but so I've, I've been setting really hard climbing problems in my basement, which has been fun. And I love doing something where I'll just set some hideous problem, hideous for me, and maybe takes me six months to do something that when I finally do it, takes, you know, 40 seconds. I mean, I like that kind of intensity.

Um, but then the, uh, I recently got into riding gravel bikes. And gravel bikes are wonderful because you ride on the dirt roads. And my wife has always been a very intense, well, intense athlete, as you know. And then over the last few years, she's really put more emphasis on the cycling side of it because she can't run anymore. And so she's ridden her bike across the country a couple of times. And, you know, ridden across parts of Europe and things like that. And, and so when gravel biking happened, I sort of started getting back into cycling and joining her. So we have all these great dirt roads out here, and I just love being out on that. So I can't, I don't run as much as I used to. It's interesting. I, I can run hills, but I can't run flats. And, uh, there's something just, I think it hurts, or you just get bored, or whatever.

Oh, no, I never get bored. I mean, one of the things I love to do is actually, when I do go out and run hills, which I was doing more before we started doing the gravel cycling, is I would actually, uh, I love to like take one of the mountains around here, one of the local mountains like Cenitas or Flagstaff or Green Mountain or whatever, which kind of in our backyard. And the way I really like to do it is to actually do have a little timer that is a minute and a half on and then a minute rest. And basically, uh, do, you know, uh, hike fast for the minute, and then interval hard for 90 seconds. Hike fast for a minute, interval hard for 90 seconds. I, that is really, uh, a fantastic workout. And, uh, and, you know, probably better than just running straight through, actually, because you're really getting the interval effect. Yeah. And no, I don't get, I don't get, um, suffering is never really boring to me.

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Well, I thought maybe like the running flat was too easy for you, and then you're like, all right, I need to, I need to challenge myself a little bit.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I, I, I mean, I've never really been a great athlete or anything, but I do enjoy the, uh, the challenge of, of, of different things. And when I was younger, I, I did a number of, uh, marathons. And I was trying to qualify for Boston when the cutoff time was 2:50, uh, for Boston. And, um, uh, and so, and oddly, I never made it. I think my best time was like 2:53. I kept clocking in between 2:50 and 2:55 and never quite hitting, uh, that the 2:50 mark back when that's what it took to do it. So I, um, but, you know, what I found running the marathon is that a flat course was the hardest because it's, well, one, it, you know, you're, you're going to be running, I would have had been running somewhere between 6:00 and 6:20 a mile for most of the, most of the marathon. But because you're using the same muscles over and over, right? So like a rolling course, and when you go uphill, you're going to engage your quads or your hamstrings differently. But on flat, if you run a 26-mile marathon, like I blew up in Chicago. Chicago is a very flat course, and it's the only marathon I totally blew up in, completely exploded, uh, around 17 miles. And I think part of it was warm and humid and so forth, but the other is it just like, you know, it was all flat. And so, you know, and, and the tiredness is the specific muscle fibers, right? And, uh, you know, they've actually, I remember back when I was learning about this stuff and studying Dr. David Costill's work and stuff like that, that if you take, if you took like slices and pictures of the muscles of after somebody ran a hard marathon, I mean, the, the muscle cells are like exploded. They're like damaged for, for a period of time. And, and if you're using the same one over and over and over again for 26 miles, well, uh, yeah. So I, I don't, but I wouldn't describe myself as particularly an athlete or particularly fit. I live with an Ironman champion, so, um, kind of rubs off on you a little bit.

Well, what it means is that I will never be the athlete in the house. Smart. That's what my dad. I'll tell you, Jim, real quick. My dad, uh, he had a couple sons who got college scholarships, and one of them played and won a Super Bowl in the NFL. And, and he, and he did not have a really an athletic career at all. And he goes back to his high school reunion, 25 or 30 or whatever, and his friends go, wait a second, how did this happen? And he goes, you gotta marry right, guys. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. All the credit to my mom, right? So you gotta, you gotta marry right, right? You gotta, yeah.

So now, now Ryan, were you, uh, a competitive athlete?

Yeah, so I played quarterback in, in college. And I played briefly. So my younger brother played the NFL for 11 years. He was, was he a defensive player? Yeah, he played linebacker. Yeah. Okay. In the NFL, and he played with the Packers. I played quarterback. And so I went, I graduated from Ohio University in the Mid-American Conference. And then after college, I played, um, in the Arena Football League for a couple of years, which is great for quarterbacks because I don't know if you've seen Arena Football, but you just throw every play. So it's really fun. But it's like minor league baseball, you don't really make enough money. I mean, you make enough money to live, and that's about it. So at some point, you got to make the call, am I going to get called up to the big time or not? And in my case, the "not" happened after a couple of years where it's like, it's probably not going to happen. But it was fun. I loved it. I mean, it's the foundation of really my life. So I, I would say it means, it means a lot to me. I, I still obviously, I'm a big fan and and know the meanings of the coaches and and the impact that athletics had on me. It's, it's, it's really everything.

Well, you know, and, and it's, uh, uh, I, I'm, I'm curious about this. So one, what's your, what was your playing size and weight?

Uh, my height was the same, six foot one. Uh, my weight. No, you're not a tall quarterback. No, and that's part of why, that's part of why I probably, you know, it's one of the reasons why I didn't get a shot. But the lack of scoring touchdowns was the primary one. But no, I would say, um, I played at like 215 in order to take the pounding. And I weigh between 200 and 205 right now. So I don't, you know, I don't get hit anymore. And so I, I, I've scaled down. But I'm probably in better shape now, um, as far as like workouts and all of that stuff, because one, my wife is very into health and wellness as well, a great athlete, a great runner, weightlifter, like all of that. So Ann just makes incredible meals. So I would say like healthy meals, that that's been a huge help for me where my diet's completely changed for the better. So that's nice.

I would imagine with a triathlon wife, like, what the food has to be like pristine in order to do that.

Well, I would assume, wouldn't it? Well, I mean, so, you know, we're both in our 60s now. And, uh, and, and so, kind of the, you know, the intense world-class, you know, training, you know, when Joanne was world champion, it was, you know, we were in our 20s and a completely different sort of stage of life. And her, I mean, that was a, that was a wonderful time in our life, actually, because we organized our entire lives around her becoming world champion. And when she was, unless she must have been probably 23 or 24, when she decided to quit her job, turn down her admissions to Harvard and Stanford Business School, and to say, I'm going to throw everything in to try to win the Ironman and dedicate her life to it. And it's not like we had money. I mean, we just decided, we're just going to do this. You can't, you can't say, well, like, I'll kind of get my life in order and then I'll do that, and then try to do it at 37, right? That was the time in life to do it. And we went all in. And at that time, and I actually, uh, dedicated most of my energies in my 20s and mid-20s, I managed her athletic career. So I did her contracts with Nike and Revo sunglasses and, you know, Bud Light and all of that. And, and we went to all the races together. And I was, and so I was so much joy. Her last name's Ernst. I was so much Joanne's support crew at that time that people thought I was Jim Ernst, right? So.

And, and, uh, and, you know, and when you're, when you're, uh, you know, maybe, of course, you know, you were competing at a, a very high level. Not a lot of people compete in, uh, in college, right? Much less to go on to, uh, a shot at a pro career. Your brother, of course, um, playing, playing on Packers. You know, when you're, when you're at a certain age and you're playing in, or you're performing at an elite level, it's a very special, you know, place to be. And it doesn't last that long. But there's this time, probably in your 20s, maybe to early 30s, where if you were actually able to, you know, throw yourself fully into the only thing I'm doing is is honing this machine, uh, to be the absolute like exquisite best of what it can do at this time. You know, that is a, um, a very pristine phase of life. The interesting thing is that I'm not sure there's a high correlation between being in that phase and and being the happiest phase of life, because you've always got these other anxieties. I mean, if you're competing, it's not just about feeling good, like it's competing, right? And as, as Joanne pointed out to people, you know, it's, it's also a job. I mean, a job defined as like, you don't get to, you know, go to your sponsors and say, oh, I just, you know, I didn't really care about doing that well, whatever. I mean, you have big responsibilities. The performance lens is really high. Um, and, and the scorecard is clear in public, right? I mean, you either blew up on the lava fields, or you didn't blow up on the lava fields. You let go and the, in the run part of the race, or you didn't let go on the run part of the race. And, and but in instead of it being a private matter, you know, I'm going to be, you know, 870 seconds, it's like racing for first. Yeah. And, um, and I think that that sense of, you know, both the, the joy and the intensity and all of that of being an elite athlete, which I wasn't, but I got to be very close to, but also, I mean, the pressures, um, you wouldn't describe the pressures as like sheer fun. They're, they're very real. I mean, it's that sense of like, okay, here we go. It's, you're really out there on the sharp end. Uh, and it's a great aspect of life. I think one of the hardest things, and I'd be curious how you and how your brother have managed this, I think one of the hardest things is, uh, for an athlete, uh, is the, the renewal, transition to a different phase of life, because it's a, you, there is nothing probably that, or very few things in life that compare to the sheer clarity and intensity of elite competition. Correct. And life isn't like that. Life isn't, you know, life is much more ambiguous. You don't actually know a record at the end of the year, and you don't, uh, have a scorecard, and there isn't, I mean, it's, and the intensity is different, right? And just the sheer, you know, lucidity, I would imagine if I asked you for times that there are moments in games that are so seared in your brain that you know they're, they're more than a memory, right? They're like this, this you, this experience that is so totally seared because of its intensity. And how else do you find that in life? It's tough.

I, I'll tell you, you know, especially as a quarterback. So my, where I went to college, uh, out of high school, was Miami University. And the other quarterback who was my exact same age who came with me, it was Ben Roethlisberger. And so I, I got an up-close look that in order for me to win, he has to lose. Or in order for for him to win, I have to lose. And I lost. Obviously, I had to transfer in order to get a chance to start since we were the same age. And what, what I think, I, it took years for me to get over, Jim, when I left the, the world of playing football, was that's actually not the way the world works. I, in order for me to win, you don't have to lose. A good book I like about this is Adam Grant's "Give and Take." But, but, but you, you don't have, I don't. When I got into the world, so my first job was after dumb football was, I was in a cubicle, a telephonic sales rep for a really good company, like very low base, super high, uncapped commissions. And so my thinking, though, was similar from the football field. Was I'm going to hoard everything I've got. I'm going to do everything for myself. I don't care about anybody. Because it was still in my mind, the only way for me to win is if you lose. And that's bad. Like, that is not life. And it took years to grow out of that. And I did well, like individually, but I didn't become like an actual leader and a manager of a team until I had to get, I had to grow out of that. I had to learn that that's not how it works. In fact, there is plenty, plenty for for for all of us to to prosper and learn and get better from. And so I think that took me some. I think football left me with so many incredible things, like resilience and work ethic and preparation, all these incredible characteristics. But one bad one was that life was, was, was kind of black and white, win or lose. And that's not life. It's like, it's not like that. Like for you, it doesn't hurt you at all to lift up other authors, other people in the space. In fact, I think it only helps you if we all kind of look to try to help one another. I found in my experience, we all do better when we try to do that, like honestly, with with with authenticity, as opposed to saying like, I gotta crush everybody in my path.

Yeah, yeah, that's so true. Um, so, um, I, I have some, you know, as we, as we begin to roll into this, I have a couple, a couple few questions for you all right to begin. So I knew you were going to do this, and I just love it. But I was, I was, this is the only part I'm nervous for because I'm like, wonder what Jim's going to ask. He's the only guest who asked me questions. But I know he's going to do it because that's how he is. That's who I am. I love it. I love it. Anyway, I'll do my best. Okay. Yeah. So we'll be there. So Dave, are we ready to roll here? Okay, great. So should we get to, uh, let's just go. We'll roll into it. Let's just go. Yeah, yeah, great. And the reason I do that, Ryan, is just because sometimes I'm like, I don't ever want to feel like rude when I'm looking down or making a note or whatever. And audio, I find to be, I, these are about conversations, yes, and, uh, great teaching moments, uh, through great conversations. And I don't want to slip into like, kind of a presenting mode. I want to be in a conversing mode, right? So anyways, here's my, um, uh, so this question just occurred to me as, as you were talking, and I'm, I'm curious how, uh, how does preparing for quarterbacking a podcast episode compare to preparing to quarterback a football game?

Wow, uh, have never been asked that correlation. So I'll talk about the similarities. The preparation, as you've probably seen when you study quarterbacks, like watching film, taking notes, understanding tendencies of the opposition. Um, there's some of that carries over. So part of my process is when I played football was trying to understand the tendencies of my opponent, trying to, um, create formations and looks that will be advantageous to match up. So if I have a really good outside receiver, my Z receiver, if I have a really good receiver, how can we get him in a position to where we're one-on-one with one of their weaker defenders? And so it's a, it's a game plan of like trying to scheme that up. Now, when you shift to interviewing, the, another part that's similar is I don't fully know what you're going to say. I have some ideas, I know where I want to go, I kind of know the offense I want to run, I know the plays I want to call, I have an outline, I have notes, I have thoughts. But I can't predict what you're going to do. I don't, I, I don't fully know. Just like I can study a defense and have a, have some ideas of what they're going to do based on our looks, I'm not certain of that. So the, the similarity there is, there is uncertainty in both interviewing on a podcast and playing quarterback. And we're tr, I'm trying to, in football for sure, trying to minimize that uncertainty. In the podcasting world, I'm not always striving for that because that's where some of the magic and the fun is. Like, I didn't know you're going to ask this, and this is fun. Like, this is where the magic happens. So there, there, there are definitely similar processes. I learned the value, I will say, Jim, of preparation from the legendary Bob Greg and Ron Allery. My two of my coaches in high school. And I was so, so, so, I mean, lucky to play for it. Like when you talk about who luck, which with you, and we're talking about Bill here in a second, I mean, the greatest who luck of my life, outside of obviously my mom and my dad, are Ron Ron Allery and Bob Greg because they taught me the val, they modeled that behavior as some of the leaders that you study and some of the the ways that you behave. And your wife, Joanne, with trying to run a triathlon, that preparation is everything. And it also can be the greatest medicine for fear. But I'm nervous or scared to play a football game, to give a big speech in front of a crowd, to to interview Jim Collins, one of the greatest medicines for me, at least, is my prep. So I think that's, that's where a lot of the similarities arise.

So, uh, and when you would be preparing for, uh, a football game, and I'm curious if it carries over here to preparing for, um, quarterbacking a conversation, which is in many ways what you're, you're doing, um, uh, would you usually have know your opening plays? Right? So you know Lombardi, what I have, like, you know, we have, we're gonna, we're gonna run the sweep somewhere in the first three plays, like we just do that. But do you have, when you prepare, you say, okay, I know what my probably in my first series, what my plays are going to be?

Would you tend to go into a game knowing, even though the game's going to unfold, what the first three or four plays are going to be?

Yeah, we, we started scripting plays, uh, my freshman year in high school. And we, we'd have them on the, we'd get the sheet of paper that the, like the morning of the game. So we'd have an idea. And the reason for those plays and the formations is, is we're trying to get an understanding of how the defense is going to defend our looks, our different formations, so that we can get information for later on in the game. So we're going to do a lot of different looks, a lot of different formations, different plays. Now, if, if though, we, we wind up behind schedule, so behind schedule would be like third and long, we might have to go off the script if we don't have a good third long play. Similar to quarterbacking a conversation, like I know we've already started, but I know where, when it's my turn, since when you're finally going to let me ask the questions, I know where I'm going to go first. But I, and I have a general sense of other places. Yeah. But, but really, it depends on how you answer my first kind of official question that, that then will determine kind of some of the paths that we're going to take. But there's a lot of different options for us here, I think, based upon what you say there. You know, in your case, by the way, I had two different opening plays I wanted to go with and said, I'll decide in the moment. And I'm, I think I, I think I know what I've decided, but, but I'm not sure yet.

Okay, that's interesting. You know, and, and it's interesting because, um, when I prepare for say, when I'm quarterbacking, uh, uh, uh, conversations, a different kind, when when people come to my lab in Boulder, and they say, there's an executive team here, or maybe a gathering of 20 CEOs around the, the table that we've created here in my management lab space, my job is to be very Socratic. And I never really give people answers. I try to really push them with the right questions. And the, uh, the, the way that I thought of it is, I'm preparing for it like I'm an NFL coach. What I have is I have ablation, and, you know, and I, and I know, I mean, like I've researched, uh, all the, all the players in the room. I've, or researched the company in great depth. And I know, you know, certain things that I know they're going to need to get to. I know at some point, I'm going to need to get to challenge them on X. And I know my opening questions, right? I, I know. And I've actually got certain openings that I use very repeatedly, just like, you know, the Packers sweep, you know, here comes Jerry Kramer, number 64, pulling out his guard, and you're going to know it's going to happen. And they're like, we're even going to even know what's happening, but we're still going to run it because it gets our our rhythm going. And so, and I, and I think of it as I've got, uh, when I watch, uh, a coach on the sideline, you know, they're always looking at their sheet as the game is unfolding. And I actually picture it very similar. You prep, prep, prep, prep, prep, so that you don't have to be rote. And, uh, and there's this really interesting mixture of, okay, I've got my, for me, the plays are questions. And, um, you know, and, and there are different kinds of questions that are different kinds of plays. And, and I go in, okay, I know the opening two or three, okay, that's like my first series. But then, like you say, then the game starts, right? And, and, and then it's like, okay, I, I've got this, this set of things and touchstones. And then something really surprising happens, right? That hour two, and where I've really pushed on something that, whoa, I didn't see that. Or I thought that wouldn't happen until day two, but it opened up right here. So I'm going to take it now. And, and that, and what I found interesting is, I, I truly think of it as, you know, like preparing as an NFL coach. And, uh, and what I found very interesting about it, and, and that's why I'm fascinated by your prep kind of analogy between these two are sort of putting them together, is that, you know, you would think that high, high levels of prep, you know, you know, it's like, I'm on planning for what I'm going to do. It's actually being so well prepared that you can adapt. And that's the critical thing, right? Even though you know certain plays you're going to run, it's only because you're super prepared that you can go, oh, I didn't expect this, so I'm going to run this play, and I'm going to run it now.

So true. What are some of those first opening questions that are, I don't want to say stock, but but are, but are regular questions that you ask when somebody comes to one of your Socratic sessions in Colorado?

So, uh, so the, the, it's interesting because you and I are both, you know, try to use the, you know, the artistry of of questions. And, uh, so I think of it as I've got, it depends on whether it's a multi-organization group, like say, 20 CEOs from 20 separate companies around the table, where I'm going to be getting and challenging them to learn from each other, or whether it's an in-company or an inside organization where I'm going to be challenging them to think very hard about themselves. The, the in-company ones, uh, and by the way, they both all start with the exact same sort of flavor. But, uh, there's always an opening question for an in-company one. And that opening question, you have to just sort of picture the way it works. I'm actually in that room right now. We have a table that was built specifically for this room. It's got six corners in the room, not four, so that I can use those corners to put people in. It's a completely secure space there that if you, you know, one side are windows, one side is a hallway that we control, one side is a buffer room, and one side is a mechanical room. So we've even had people send security teams to sweep the place beforehand because what would be discussed here should not escape into the world for any number of reasons. And, and so you're in this space, they're in Boulder, they have to come here, the Flatirons are outside the window. And I always sort of set it up that they're all in there, and they know that that they're going to get a lot of questions, they're not going to get a lot of answers. And I wait until, and I say, we're going to start at 8, and I'm very clear, 8:00. It's not, it, I mean, it's 8:00:00. I actually have an atomic clock, a clock that is set to the exact atomic time. And at 8:00:00:00, I open the door and walk in and I say, "Good morning. I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to make the most of our time. Everybody, take out a blank sheet of paper. I want you to write down the top five brutal facts that face the company today." Go. It were 8 and 12 seconds. I mean, the whole idea is there are no pleasantries. There's no, they're not going to talk about how the flight was or did they enjoy dinner in Boulder? Like, we are here to make the most of our time. Just even the tone-setting part of it is very important because I'm trying to set the tone of, we don't have time to waste. I can't waste your time. You're here to have your brains challenged. And then they're just all of a sudden in silence on pieces of paper. And, and then one of the next things is, I want you to allocate 100 points across those factors because what I've learned, and what a really powerful thing with point allocations is, they come up with the five, but it often, if you ask people, tell me the top five brutal facts, they'll start with number one and they'll put a lot of conversation on number one. But if I say, I want you to now allocate a hundred points based on importance and impact, concern, total is a hundred across the five, well, actually number four gets 70 points. And so that allows you to say, we need to talk about number four. And how does that really affect? And what's brutal about it? What are its implications? Right? And, uh, and if you start right out of the gate with, uh, what, let's, let's start with an honest accounting of the brutal facts as you face them. What are they? And you get people talking about that by, you know, by within seconds, thinking about, and then talking about within minutes after that. The session opens. The entire thing opens up because that is that's like this, uh, you remember the first Star Wars, right? Where you, if you can just get the shot in the one place in the Death Star, the Death Star sort of explodes. Well, what are the brutal facts is one of those, one of those shots, right? It always just goes right to the heart of the map, bang, right out of the gate. And that's, that's always the opening play. That's, that's the Packers sweep.

Jim, you are, uh, speaking my language with the 8:00:00:00. I always, one of my biggest life pet peeves is to start a meeting one second late. Start on time, every time. It shows respect, responsibility, as you said. And, uh, you certainly don't have to do that with your stature and what you've done. So the fact that you showed that type of respect and responsibility for them. And the second you start the meeting, don't wander, don't wonder, let's go, like, it's time to go. Once the meeting starts, we are going to go. Now, if somebody walks in late, whatever. My dad told me this earlier, he goes, hey, don't start your meetings late. Don't wait. Oh, we'll, we'll wait for a few to get. No, never, ever, ever do that. They'll learn. They'll learn that your meetings are one, you're one of the few leaders whose meetings start on time. I gotta get to this meeting on time. We start exactly at 8:00:00:00. I love that part of it.

Well, and you used a really key word there, Ryan, uh, which is respect. Yeah. And, uh, and the, there is respect. Preparation is respect. Preparation is respect. So if you don't respect your opponent, one of the great ways to show it as an athlete is you don't prepare for the game. Oh, you know, they're, they're, they're two and nine. Well, actually, then you're going to lose, right? Because you haven't given them the respect. And, and when people come to the lab in Boulder, or you're holding meetings, but you have a responsibility. It is, it's a tremendous sense of responsibility. We must, for your sake, not for my sake, for your sake, we have to make the most of this time. And, uh, and again, it's back to like preparing for, uh, an NFL game. I mean, when that, when that game starts, like it starts. Your head knocked off if you're not ready to go, right? Exactly. You know, so you're not going to be like, hey, Aaron Donald, can you just kind of hang out there for a minute? It's not going to work out very well. Well, you may end up on your back very quickly. But yeah.

So, um, let me, I just want to ask you one other question, if we're getting into this, then as we're, as we're, you know, as we're talking about this, um, the last time we started with something that was very, uh, interesting to me, and I just, by the way, I want to go back on something, Ryan. Um, for anybody who's listening to this, uh, Ryan did one of the very first podcasts that I'd ever done, before I did, I'd done a couple of others related to events or a couple of experiments, but Ryan was like one of the first ones that just kind of organically came to us that I agreed to do. And we've edited it and decided to do it. And it was actually, for me, a real eye-opener of how the right conversation with the right host can be potentially great teaching moments through the process of great conversation. And so it was a real turning point for me to open up. Now, I'm still going to be highly selective and not do too many of them. It takes back to preparation. It takes a lot of work to to prepare, so you just can't do that many, uh, as a result. But that previous podcast was a, if anybody was listening, if you haven't heard it, um, it was, it was masterfully done by Ryan. And, and I think there's some wonderful things they pulled out. I hope you folks will go back and find it. But at the beginning of that one, though, I came to you with a real sense of curiosity of like, what is this whole genre? What are you doing? Why do you like it? What, how do you do it? What's it about? We had a nice conversation at the start about that. What I want to ask you, just following up on that real briefly, is so we talked about your recipes and your preparation last time. Has it, has it changed substantially in the three years since we've been together? Uh, have you honed it, revised it, or, uh, is it still like, no, I've kind of got a similar recipe, I'm just doing it better and better?

It evolves. It's evolved to the point to where, like a lot of things in life, the more you do it, the better you get. And I've got a lot of repetitions. I study, listen to others. I think now I'm probably less robotic, less less formulaic, more agile, more willing and able to go where it's going to go. This one is being like pretty meta, but this is an example of it, since we haven't covered anything that I've written down. Well, we'll get to that in a moment. No, I love the one thing I did remind myself by the way, your team is the best. Mel and I mean, I just had great pre-calls. So I got to tell you, Jim, like it means a lot to me. Like you're, you're one of my heroes. To hear you say those kind words means a lot. I'm okay saying that because because "Good to Great" you know, changed my life. So the fact that that you appreciated the, it was episode 216 for those, uh, uh, I get asked all the time at keynotes, what's your favorite? And 216 comes up all the time. It's Jim Collins. So, uh, I would, I would just say, I, I just become a little bit more agile. Uh, I've become, I've, I've started talking more, um, because I try to be coachable. I try to listen to feedback from people that I really respect. And I would say the overwhelming feedback I've gotten from long-time listeners, from people I look up to, from, you know, uh, people I love that that care about me, is, "We like it when you talk more." Meaning, when you share your perspective, you share your point of view. You've talked to 400 people now, you've done all these other things too. Will you speak up? It's not an interview anymore, it's more of a conversation. That's what we want. And so I try to do that. Like I try, I try to to lend and share more of my beliefs. I've had some people say, "I actually like, will you just do solo episodes?" You know, so that that warms my heart. So I try to to do more of that where it's more of a conversation and less of an interview, whereas probably the first two to 300 of them were interviews. And since that, we've, it's become more of a conversation, which people seem to like, and I know I certainly enjoy, even though initially it made me a little nervous to kind of lean into speaking up a bit more.

That's interesting. That's very interesting. And, uh, um, so in, in that, in that spirit of the, the conversation, uh, I, I'm gonna put my, our conversation in your hands. Um, and, uh, and, and I, you know, I trust your curiosity, uh, and I will, I will follow, uh, I will follow your lead into, uh, where you'd like to go. We're going to go to a few days or shortly before your 25th birthday. That's where we're going to start.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I was in, in my second year, uh, at the Stanford Business School. And there, there was a course, uh, that, you know, you have courses there where you have really popular professors and popular courses, and then some that are lesser, you know, lesser known or whatever. And, and I, I was, uh, and I didn't get into a section that I wanted to, just, you know, there, if it's oversubscribed, there's kind of a lottery about who gets in, who doesn't. So I ended up because of this sort of chance process in a section of of a course that was taught by a brand new professor at the school by the name of Bill Lazier. And Bill had been an entrepreneur, uh, an accountant turned entrepreneur, very successful. And was really going through a real shift in his life where he was going to go from building companies to building young people. I didn't know that. I had no idea who he was. And I remember going around to my classmates and say, this, you know, Professor Lazier, like, anybody know who he is? And no, nobody had heard of it. What was the first time he'd ever taught? And, and so I said, well, I'll just go and see what he's like. Truly, just, I mean, there's, I walk into that room, and there is the person who would turn out to be, among many mentors I've had, the one is really the chairman of the board of directors, the, uh, the closest thing to a father that I ever had. Now, when I first started, I didn't know that. Bill took an interest in me. I don't know why he took an interest in me, but he took an interest in me. And, and he sensed, uh, I think that I was this sort of high-energy propulsion machine, but I really lacked guidance. And that was true. Uh, and, uh, and what, when Bill began inviting, uh, me and Joanne, uh, over to his house with, uh, with his wife, Dorothy, and we would have dinner, and he just began gradually shaping me, by asking and pushing and challenging and questioning, within this very, very kind way. But what he was really doing was he was beginning to give me something that I'd never had before, which is, uh, uh, the, the parental caring of trying to shape your character, right? Trying to instill values. Uh, and, and that's what he was doing, but he was doing it in a very subtle way. It wasn't pedantic at all. It was just in a series of conversations. Then a few years after that, so probably just about five years after that, there came this really critical moment. And Bill had known that I had always, I was, it was sort of heading towards towards the end of Joanne's athletic career, and I was coming up on age 30. And Bill knew that I had this interest in potentially, uh, teaching and maybe researching and studying things. And, and I had a real interest in entrepreneurship and small business and so on and so forth. And then there was another stroke of luck. This was a tragic, uh, stroke of luck for someone else, but it still was a stroke of luck, uh, that that hit me, which is that another, uh, professor had a family tragedy and had at the last minute, basically not be available to teach a section of entrepreneurship in small business, Business 352, which is the course that Bill also taught sections of. And so the deans were scrambling for somebody to come in and and fill this section. And Bill goes to the deans on my behalf and completely puts himself out on the line and says, "I think we should give, uh, this, this young guy, Jim Collins, a shot to do this." And the deans, I think, were quite skeptical. But Bill basically just said, "I'll, I'll take all the risk. I'll take all the responsibility. I will, hopefully, you know, I'll make sure he doesn't mess up too much." And, and, and they really kind of didn't have any choice. I mean, the analogy I've always had is in my mind is, you're this young pitcher way down in the minor leagues, and you happen to be standing there in Yankee Stadium. And for whatever reason, the bus carrying all the pitchers ends up, you know, stuck and can't make it to the game, and the game's about to start, and you're just kind of standing there. And somebody says to you, "Hey, you know, why don't you let him pitch?" And put him out on the mound. But then Bill comes, basically essentially, helps me understand, "This is your shot, right?" And, and you get these moments in life. And, and what you do now is going to, and how well you do now is going to make this huge difference potentially in your life. So if you go out there and you throw a really good game, like you might get to pitch again in Yankee Stadium. And I ended up, you know, pitching in the Yankee Stadium there for the first seven seasons. And that became where, you know, "Built to Last" was done, and "Beyond Entrepreneurship" was done, and then the launch out of that, and everything that's happened since. And so this, this mentor did, uh, so many things for me. But, but one is shaping me as a person, shaping me in my values, setting a standard for what character was about. And then the second was, when it came time to bet big, he bet big on me. And he believed in me, and he trusted me. And I think the, the big, kind of part of it was his trust. That I don't know why he, what gave him the trust in this, but he trusted me with really, in the end, his reputation because he'd gone to bat for me. And he had this sense that I can't let him down, right? This now, this is huge. It's not just an opportunity. It is a massive burden of responsibility. I've got to make good on it, right? I have to make good on it. And, and that became the turning point and the inflection. Everything that's happened since, every, every book, every piece of research, this conversation, everything, none of it would have happened. None of it would have happened had it not been for this tremendous mentor that that stepped in on my behalf at the right stages of my life.

What do you think he saw in you that gave him the confidence to put his name on it, to to back you with with his his juice, his capital, like all?

Of his weight, I mean, he could have picked anybody, and he picked you. What do you think it was he saw in you? I've often wished I could ask him that.

Bill died in 2004, which is part of why, um, you know, why I wanted to go back and upgrade and re-release *Beyond Entrepreneurship*, which is where I've written about Bill, where this story is coming from, and to really honor Bill and bring Bill to the world. I, I knew in 2004 when he died, I wanted to write something about him, and I didn't know what. And Joanne had this great idea: "Why don't you upgrade *Beyond Entrepreneurship*, add new material, but most important, put in a great chapter about Bill? Bring Bill to the world and gift Bill to the world as part of it." And, um, but Bill died in 2004, and I, I never asked him that. I never asked him that. And, um, I think it was because, you know, remember there were five years in there where we had many conversations, uh, where he, we would be, you know, whether it be over dinner or going for a walk or on the phone. And I think what happened was he just, he, he had enough iterations, right? Enough, uh, conversations, and he knew how I handled the stuff with Joanne. And I don't know, I think he had, it wasn't just totally out of the blue. It wasn't like he threw a dart at the board, but over time, I think he gained confidence from our conversations enough. But I also think Bill just, Bill just had this, this gene in him, which is to believe in people. He just, and, and so I think also part of it, I don't know if there was anything particularly special about me because I think he did this for a whole bunch of other people in other walks of life. And he just was just had this instinct that if he believed in people and he trusted them and he threw them out there, that even if some people disappointed, the net benefit of it's almost like being a venture capitalist, right? Where you know, maybe you place 10 bets, and seven of them end up, you know, kind of not making it, two of them may, you know, do reasonably well, and one is, you know, a huge, a huge impact on the world. I think Bill kind of looked at it as he was like a people capitalist, a people, people venturer, and, and he would place bets on people. Um, but not so much like from, he wouldn't want anything in return. He wasn't seeking a return on investment. He just kind of had the sense of if he bet on enough people, some of them are just going to do really remarkable things. And isn't that marvelous? I think that's just Bill had that gene.

Well, I'm going to cover a couple of them. So I'm going to jump around since you just brought it up, so I'll go with it. But he, you talk about one of the lessons you learned was, was to make the trust wager. And the quote was, "I choose to assume the best in people and accept that they sometimes disappoint." This is about leading with trust. And Jim, this one particularly spoke to me because, because I think this is one, the right way to lead, and two, I just, a more enjoyable way to live life, uh, of believing the best in people, trusting them, knowing that, yeah, every once in a while, you might get burned. But isn't that a better way to live? Isn't that a more enjoyable way to go about living and leading is to assume the best in other people, to assume they're telling the truth, as well as then that is the signal like, "Hey, look, I'm a trusting person too." Like, I'm going to do what I say, of higher integrity, but I'm going to lead with it outwards as well. And that, that's one of the critical life lessons that you say you've learned from him.

Yeah, and that, that lesson and another one sort of go hand in hand. So maybe I'll, I'll, I'll share, uh, the story I put in *BE 2.0* about me coming to Bill. So in our last, uh, conversation, you and I had, I shared the story of, you know, leaving Stanford and placing a big bet. And, you know, Peter Drucker so kindly saying, you know, "Go focus on being useful." And, but it was still very scary and on out on her own. And, uh, and our, Thelma and Louise, Luke leap that Joanne and I talked. But what's interesting is when I left the kind of reasonably, uh, you know, comfortable and nice environment of a place like the Stanford campus, it kind of go out into the regular world, and I was shocked and stunned to discover that there were people who behaved in ways that I experienced as highly untrustworthy. I mean, they, they abused my trust. And I was initially just really destabilized by this. I was just stunned by it. And so I, I went to Bill and I said, "Bill, I really want to talk to you about this because, um, uh, my faith in human nature is getting, is getting really tested here. But you seem to always trust people, and I'm really struggling because what I'm finding is people are not always trustworthy. So how do I deal with this?" And Bill, Bill said, "This is just one of the huge forks in life, and you need to decide, Jim, as a basic stance on the world, which, which side of this you want to be on because it's going to affect so much of everything for the rest of your life. You, you've got to come down on one side of this. So the basic choice you have to make is, what's your opening bid with people? Is your opening bid that you trust them? You grant them, you, you invest a sense of trust in them from the get-go. They don't have to earn it. They don't have to prove it. They don't have to gain it. They have it from the start, and they can lose it. But that's the opening bid. Or your opening bid is, I'm more worried, I'm going to have an opening bid of distrust, but you can earn my trust. You can become somebody who I trust by virtue of what I see." And, and Bill said, "This is one of those big choices." His view was to make the trust fit. And when I pushed him, I said, "But Bill, the truth is, not all people are trustworthy, or not all people are all trustworthy in all situations. I've been burned. Haven't you ever been burned? I mean, have you just been fortunate?" He said, "Of course, they've been burned." And he told me the story about somebody who's very close to him that he had had taken advantage of his trust, and it cost him. They said enough that it actually really hurt. Now, Bill was always very careful. He's like, "Also, you know, watch the cash flow. Don't, you know, don't leave yourself open to catastrophe." And he had these controls in place and things like that. But still, the sense of, um, I think in the answer to betrayal is what most hurt him. But there was a financial cost as well. And he said, "But I still continue to, to have the opening bid of trust." And he said, "Jim, it comes down to this. It's, it's, it's a, it's upside and downside. And I just choose to believe that that is a much greater upside in trusting people and much greater downside than not trusting." And then that kind of came round to something that I don't think I really understood until later, which was for Bill was always about people and about kind of ultimately the great flywheel effect of just the best people engaged with the best people, and the most trustworthy people engaged with the most trustworthy people. And Bill's view was that if you, if you have an opening bid of trust, the best people will be attracted to that and it will serve like a magnet. They'll bring you, bring those people to you. And it will also help them be more trustworthy. Bill's view was, "Look, if you trust people, you're going to change the behavior to be more trustworthy. Your trust will make them want to be worthy of that trust if they're the best people." So, uh, so you win on all dimensions on that. And then he went to the other side. He said, "Think about the downside of not trusting. The best people are going to be repelled by that. Uh, you're not going to have that magnetism." And, and, and so, uh, and then he also said, "You never know the full story." He said, "Sometimes you have to be very, very careful. It could be that somebody isn't untrustworthy. It could be they were incompetent. They just simply weren't able to execute what they said they tried. They weren't trying to do something wrong. They just blew it, right? And it's like, you know, I dropped the pass." Well, does that mean he's, you know, lacks integrity? No, he just dropped the pass, right? Yeah. And, uh, or the other, and this is something I really learned from Bill. It could also just be a misunderstanding. And, and Bill gave me, you've talked to me about the importance of having like really great attorneys. And I initially thought that was about like, you know, so you protect yourself and you have really good, you know, contracts. You invoke. He said, "Oh, no. If you do this really right, you'll never have to invoke the contract. The whole point of a really good contract is so that you never have to go to the contract. And the whole point of a good contract is so that two trustworthy parties are both writing down on paper their understanding of what they're committing to, so that down the road, there's no inadvertent misunderstanding that damages the relationship. And good contracts make for good understandings, make for good relationships. That's their purpose." And so this was just Bill's, you can just sort of feel his whole ethos, right? Everything that's like this web, people, trust, relationships, all of that is kind of packaged in this idea of trust. Now, there's one, one other thing about it is, is that I actually think that he's, if he just did a hard-headed analysis, he probably, if you did enough iterative cases of this over time, so long as you don't have something catastrophic, he's probably just rationally right as well as emotionally right on this. I still find it hard, but he had a big impact on me with that.

Which leads to the relationship part of life. Can be a series of transactions, or you can build relationships. Transactions can give you some success, but relationships make for a great life. And I, I would, and you, and one of the questions you pose is, "How do you know if you have a great relationship?" And that's, if you were to ask each person in the relationship, "Who benefits more from it?" Both would answer, "I do." And I think that's a, that's a good question for all of us to ask with all of our relationships. And I think of it first and foremost with the most important person, my wife. Is, would she say that? I hope so. I hope I'm trying everything out because I know I would say that, right? Because I certainly get the better end of the deal. But, but, but I, but I think it's, it's, it's good personally with your, your loved ones and your spouse. But, but also with anyone you have a relationship with. And it seems like, like I'd love to hear more about about that aspect when it comes to to the transactional life, which we all know people who do that, and they do have varying levels of whatever you would call success from time to time, versus the person who works to build meaningful relationships.

Yeah, so, so this was, this was one of the, uh, the other lessons that you, of course, you've referenced in there, that that Bill taught me that had a big impact on me. Because, you know, he, he had this view, the, you know, you basically, another one of those like forks in the road of just how do you come at life? And, and Bill, uh, said, "You, you can go at life as a series of transactions, and that can actually be highly correlated with success." You know, so, uh, or you can come at life as building relationships. Uh, and Bill's view was, "The only way to have a great life is to build relationships." And I think, first of all, gets to the, the essence of a lot of this. Just be really clear. Bill is an enormously successful person. You know, just to kind of tick a couple of the aspects of of his growth and his success. He was, uh, about to be a partner at an elite accounting firm and then quit just before he got partnered because he was afraid that if he got partner, he wouldn't do his entrepreneurial dream. And so he left his firm and leaves, did his own businesses. They were all still private today, still thinking along, years and years later, became a very successful entrepreneur. Then, really got interested in in developing young people, returns to Stanford to teach. And, by the end of his life, you know, he, he served as the, uh, first ever, uh, inaugural holder of the Nancy and Charles Munger Chair for the Study of Business and Law at the Stanford Law School. I mean, and, and he was so impactful there that when after he passed away, when they created the, the, the Munger Residence Center, the courtyard is called the Lazier Courtyard. And, and he also was chair of the board of trustees of Grinnell. He had been on multiple boards. I mean, if you sort of look at it and says, this, if you, the arc of what's in the success curve of Bill's life, you would say, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick on almost every dimension. But that's not how Bill looked at life. Bill looked at life as not a series of successes, but as as a, as a, as a constant compounding set of relationships. And, and everything he did went back in. And, if I think about what are my deepest core values that I got from Bill? Relationships, relationships, relationships. And that you can come at every situation as, is this a relationship or a transaction? How do I make it a relationship situation? And, and Bill's, that really is true. I, I would ask him that question about what makes a great relationship. And, and he said, "The thing about, you ask each person independently, they both would say, 'I benefit the most.'" And I thought that was insane because I thought, "Man, I'm the one that hugely benefited from Bill." And Bill's like, "Yeah, but you see, I would answer that, 'I benefit more.'" And, and, and so, yeah. And our relationship, Bill died in 2004. Our relationship's still alive. Bill's alive right here in this conversation. I still have a relationship with Bill. I want to build and build to the world, right? That's because of this incredible relationship. There's, there's no transactions. It's relationship. And, and so where that's really affected, though, in a lot of ways, is when you, you can take it into say, in our little operation here, the Good to Great Project, which kind of exists to support, um, me doing my creative work and so on and so forth. We think about relationships in everything we do. And what, as, as, you know, we say no to the vast number of things that people ask us to, to do or ask me to do. But there's kind of two ways to do that. You can say no in a way that's transactional, or you can say no in a way that achieves what we call the prime directive. And we have a thing we call the pro, I suppose taken from Star Trek, but to me, is this prime directive, which is we have this, this sort of uber responsibility, which is no matter what answer somebody gets, in most cases, it has to be known. They have to walk away with an enhanced sense of relationship to us, and to the work, and to the ideas that enhance you, no matter what answer they get. And that's what we call the prime directive. And, and there are lots of ways to achieve that. So if it's just a series of transactions, you're, you're processing yes, no, yes, no, oh, this is a good one to do, whatever. But if you're thinking about it is, every single situation is a relationship from the beginning, and the relationship should be enhanced by the time we're done with the conversation, even if it's a no, which it usually is. How do we accomplish that? And that I learned from Bill. And I absolutely agree with him. You, life's really short, right? And so in the end, what does it all add up to? At some point, it comes down to the quality of relationships. How many people can you just, you know, say, "Hey, man, I love you."

Speaking of that, Bill created a generosity flywheel. And part of how he did that, and how I know you are the same, is you think of the mantra, "Never stifle a generous impulse." And so one day, I want to go to another moment. One day, two large wooden crates appear on your front porch. Can you, can you finish that story?

So, so this is just, this is so just a typical Bill. And but it, but it, it's, uh, so, you know, Joanne and I, we didn't, we didn't come from, uh, we came from about as far away from, uh, wealthy families as you could get. I mean, we lived in, I lived in a basement at one point that was just cold. And, and we had a Christmas rock because we couldn't afford to have a Christmas tree and such. So, you know, it was just, even started having even a bottle of wine, no matter how expensive, uh, would be a real treat. Joanne and I were getting started. And, uh, but Bill loved really good wine, and he has a really wonderful wine cellar. And one day, I had commented about how much he, I really enjoyed the glasses of wine that we would get a chance to share with him that we could at that point have never afforded. And so shortly after that comment, or somewhere down the road, these two crates show up. I'm like, "What is this?" And I opened it up, and it's these two crates of, I mean, really exquisite wine. I mean, we're talking French Bordeaux and, you know, really great Cabernets. And this is really good wine. Like, you're almost feel bad opening one of them. And we have a little tiny, like, standing rack that we built down in our basement. We can't even fit all the wine bottles in. And, and so I, I called Bill. I said, "You know, what, what's the deal with this?" And he said, "Oh, um, Dorothy and I were having an inventory problem." Meaning, we don't have enough space for the wine in our cellar. He had huge cellars. I don't know if he had these. We were having an inventory problem, and I was wondering if maybe you could help me out by taking some of this off my hands. And so he had this way of, he just, he, he was just generous by nature, but he had this way of exercising his generosity as if you're doing him a favor by accepting his generosity. And I always remember this line. It actually is a line that comes from Bill Hewlett, who's probably the most well-known business person that reminded me of Bill in countenance and flavor and so forth. And Bill Hewlett always had this, this line that he believed people never stifled a generous impulse. And that is a great mantra for living, right? You're sitting there, you're trying to decide, uh, you know, "I wonder if this person's doing a wonderful job. I mean, is it time to maybe raise their salary, recognition?" Or, "Gosh, there's, there's all these different places in your life." But just like if you have a generous impulse, never stifle a generous impulse. It's so good, man.

I would, I could cover all the Bill stuff. There's a few other things outside of that that I want to hit. If you're, if you're like, "Okay." Actually, another one is an interaction with a different person, a different leader, a leader that probably more people have heard of than Bill, although I love what you're doing to get his name out there because the, the latest book, *Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0*, which his name is equal in size to yours on the cover of that book, um, is it's so good. I mean, it is. My dad came over and he saw it the other day and he's just like, "Man, you got another one." I go, "Look at the title. Look at the author." That was like, "Whoa, Jim." I just said, "It's, it's so good. It is just, it's so well-written and well-told." Not surprising, obviously. But anyway, October 2007, you get a phone call. And on the other end of the phone call, it's Steve Jobs. He has this idea of creating Apple University. And you, because you're you, of course, say instead of him, you know, asking you questions, you immediately flip it and ask him questions. Like, like you do to everybody, including me. You said, "What did you first build upon to emerge from the darkness? What gave you hope?" Because people forget that there were some really rough times. I mean, Steve got fired from Apple at one point, a company founded. And, and you're talking with perhaps the greatest product visionary of all time, of our time. And so obviously, you're expecting him to talk about the operating systems or the Macintosh computer or other product ideas. And yet, he doesn't. What did he talk about?

So, uh, so it was actually, uh, uh, it was very interesting for me to, to hear this. And of course, he, of course, was always ultimately going to, you know, go to the great products. And in the end, he wanted to create a great company that would create great products and would be able to do so long after he was there. And what he was thinking very much about is the kind of the ultimate product would be Apple Computer Company itself, right? And that would be the ultimate iPod, the ultimate iPhone, if you could get that right. And so that it could continue to take on. And of course, so far, it, it really has. But so he, he called me about this. And, and I was asking him questions. But what I was so struck by was first thing he started talking about was people. And I knew that he had, you know, from our research, I knew that he had also, you know, short of the cost structure as well, because you gotta remember what it was like in 1997. 1997, Apple was on, uh, really on the verge of irrelevance, and perhaps, uh, losing its independence, maybe even death. It had, probably wasn't going to die. It probably would have been bought by somebody, but they'd even tried to sell themselves to other companies and hadn't succeeded. And then came this moment when after years in the wilderness, Apple needed a, a new operating system. And it turned out NeXT, which was this other company that he'd been working on, happened to have the right kind of operating system. And so he got to come back into Apple to bring the operating system. But it turned out he kind of came in as the operating system, if you will, and got to revitalize Apple. But people, you need to remember, Apple, most people thought Apple was just no longer going to be relevant in the world. I mean, it was really at it, it was in late, late stage for the five stages of the decline. And if you go to stage five, you never come back. And he started saying about people. And the first thing he started talking about was, "Well, I had to find the people who still believed in the magic, still believed in the original sort of vision of what this place was really all about." And the image I had was, uh, sort of a Star Wars image of like the scattered Jedi, right? And, and the Empire had, it was out there doing its empire thing, but you find the Jedi and you pull them out of the, out of the woodwork. And around those core people would become the way to reignite and re-establish the spark of, uh, of Apple. And, and of course, then, you know, we did great products and so forth. But, you know, the, all those products we associate with the later stages of Apple, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, all that, those came years later. I mean, they weren't into the 2000s, right? A decade later, I think for the iPhone, after Steve came back. And the, the reason I start that chapter there, which is a chapter on some of the things I've learned about how to do the first two principles, is that even somebody that we so associate with the, what the product, the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, his first was "who." And this idea that if I get the right "whos," that's the only way in the long run we're gonna get the best ones. And if even Steve Jobs is that way, it's sort of almost uber makes the point about it's still first "who."

And one of the things you do when you work with companies is is ask them about metrics that they track and then even prioritize those metrics. And you, this is one area where you, you do have an answer. And there's one metric that towers above them all, beyond sales and profitability and cash flow or product innovation. There's one. And that one metric is the percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those key seats. When you're talking about metrics, and the metric that towers above them all, I'd love to hear you expand on that. I have a follow-up about, you know, sometimes when we need to make changes because that's part of this too. And it's, it's the hard, not always fun part when you have to make changes, whether it's firing somebody or or what. So that, but that part, I thought really stood out to me when, when we're looking at the metrics, that this is the one, this is the one to really think about first.

So, uh, one of you, men, we were talking earlier about the questions I like to ask folks when they come to the lab. And another one of the questions that's in the, in the playlist that I almost will always go to relatively early in the first sequence is, "Everybody take out a blank sheet of paper. And now I want you to write down what percent of the key seats on this overall bus are you highly confident you have filled with the right people for those key seats today?" And everybody writes it down. And then they ask a simple question: "How many people have a number 90 or above?" And you rarely get a lot of hands up. And, and, and my, and then I just say, some very simply, "You have just identified your number one priority." Uh, if we, if I'm talking with any of you two years from now, I, I want that 90. Like, I'm sorry. And if we ended our our session here, if we ended our time together here, like that's, that would be like I'd be fine if you did that and nothing else. I'd be fine because everything starts there. And what, uh, and so when people have their management meetings, when they have their team meetings, when they have whatever you're tracking metrics or customer service indices or, uh, looking at your, um, you know, your current cash burden or your return on sales or whatever it happens to be, though, it's good. I like for you to run the numbers, sports. I think that's great. But the number one metric is, and it should start every conversation is, "Where are we on key on right people in cases?" And there's, now I want to be really clear, this is the key seat. So if you take, let's just use an example, a historical example of say, the Good to Great transition of Kroger and contrast to say, A&P. And one of the really key ways that Kroger made the leap from good to great when it did its whole superstore shift, and A&P didn't and eventually disappeared, right? So it's a great historical contrast because either one of them could have been the Good to Great company, but one of them was, and the other one wasn't. One of the key differences is the Kroger people became fanatic about the right people in key seats. And the A&P people, we found much less evidence of them being fanatic about that. Now, does that mean that absolutely every bagger and every checker was the absolute ultimate, you know, right person? I'm the Tom Brady of, you know, checkout person, right? No. What you have is, you have to be really rigorous. What are the key things? So maybe not every single bagger or checker meets the full test of a key seat, but the store manager sure does, because the store manager is the real people of the culture in that store. So part of it is figuring out what are the key seats. And, and the test of its re, of a key seat is any seat that meets, uh, any one of these three tests, and it could be more than one. A, anyone that's in the seat that has significant hiring responsibility. B, anyone that's in a key seat where, uh, failure in that seat could expose the company to catastrophe. So if you have say, a cybersecurity seat, and they fail, right? That could be a massively exposed flank. And, and third, is any key seat where performance in that seat has an outsized impact on the performance of the enterprise. And there are lots of ways you could have somebody who doesn't have anybody reporting to them. There's a single person, but they're that one scientist off working on the recombinant DNA breakthrough that's going to lead to Epigen, right? Massive outsized impact on the company. They're in a key seat, right? Even though they don't have any people reporting to them. Maybe they're just that one crucial scientist. So once you know what your key seats are, then you begin to go through them and say, "Okay, which ones are we highly confident that we have, Bill, with the right person for that PC today?" Now, some people are still in process, or the seat might be unfilled, or you're still testing somebody out, or whatever. But I think a good target to shoot for is, "We really need to try to get to 90 on that." That is, if you do that, uh, everything else, it's not that the rest doesn't matter. You still have to get, you know, you still have to get confronted brutal factor. You still have to get the flywheel turning, right? You still have to, you know, get out of the things you can't be the best in the world at. And all these sorts of things, of course, it's disciplined thought and disciplined action after you have the disciplined people. But if you don't have the disciplined people, if you don't have the right people at the start, none of the rest of it matters. That's why it starts there.

How do you know? One of the questions that comes up a lot, Jim, is, "I don't know if I should fire this person, or if I just need to work with them more. I'm not really sure, man. If firing someone shows a failure or management." So how do you know when to shift from develop to replace?

Yeah, so, so this is something we write about in, in the chapter. And, and first, I want to, I want to maybe before I even directly answer that, highlight two things. Um, the first is, it's a phrase that goes all the way back to *Good to Great*. And I know you and I, for, for different relationships to that work, uh, have deep, um, emotional relationship to *Good to Great*. And in *Good to Great*, uh, there's a line because that's the book where the research led to the idea of "who's two," right? We found that those two companies from good to great first focused on "who," then focused on "what." That's where the idea came from. Then in *BE 2.0*, I wanted to sort of expand on that idea, particularly for small, mid-sized company leaders and so forth. But the, there's a key phrase in *Good to Great*, which is "Be rigorous, not ruthless." And back to the idea of relationships, just because somebody might not make it on the bus, doesn't mean you don't have a relationship with them. And, and you, if somebody leaves the bus, or you ask them to leave the bus, or whatever that may be, a very rigorous decision to get to the right people, you know, 90% key seat fill, the right people, but they're people. And I, you know, one of the things that has always concerned me about the "who" principle when we wrote it is that people might skip over that idea. It's a tremendous burden of responsibility. If you brought somebody on the bus, and you put them in the wrong seat, and you made a hiring decision, that's on you. And, and therefore, it is up to you to handle it in a way, um, that is not ruthless, that is of concern for the person, and in such a way that you always ask yourself, "Could you call this person on their birthday every year for the rest of your lives? And when they welcome the call, would they maybe even thank you for helping them get on with their lives?" And that brings me to the second point. One of the concepts in, uh, about how do you, you're sort of fitting with a key seat. One of the concepts in *Good to Great* is the Hedgehog Concept. And the Hedgehog Concept is, you know, the three circles of, you know, focusing on one or a few big things that meet the test of, "We're incredibly passionate about it. We can be the best in the world at it. And it really drives our economic engine." And you do more things that fit those three circles, and fewer things that don't fit those three circles, and begin to build flywheel momentum. There's the personal hedgehog. The personal hedgehog is the same idea, but translated to an individual, which is: First circle is about, "Am I doing something I'm passionate about and love to do?" Second circle is not "best in the world," but "Am I doing something for which I am encoded? I am wired for?" And the, the difference on this is so critical. I thought I was going to be a mathematician because I went off to college, I majored in mathematical sciences, and I was very good at math. But then I met those people who are genetically encoded for math. And it's kind of like being an athlete, where you know you're good, and then you see what someone else does, and you say, "I'm really good, but that person is wired for that. And that's not my hedgehog." No matter how good I am on it, I'm not made for it. So finding those things that when you do them, you feel like, "I'm really made, I'm cut for this. I'm really made for this. I'm wired for this. I'm encoded for this." That's the second circle. And the third circle is, "You can get paid to do it." You're doing something useful enough in the world that a company will pay you to do it, or you, you can build a business around it, or however you can have an economic engine that allows you to pursue your goals. And then you have your personal hedgehog. I think one of the great successes in life is when you have people in seats on the bus that fit with their personal hedgehog. And the more that you can basically say, "What does it ultimately mean to have a right person in a key seat?" It's somebody that when they look at it, they say, "I feel so psyched to be in the seat because actually, I'm passionate about this and I love to do it. And what this seat demands sort of really activates what I'm encoded for. Oh, and what it does is useful enough, they pay me to do it." Right? Wow. What a great win. And it's a great one for the company. And so, and then if somebody, sometimes the conversation with somebody leaving the company is, you know, "This just isn't your hedgehog." And I've had people call me who weren't in their hedgehog, who I'm in touch with, call them on their birthday. As I had a conversation, business last year with somebody who's like, "You know, one of the best things that ever happened was you said this wasn't my hedgehog. I found my hedgehog. I am so happy doing what I really, what is really my hedgehog, and is just absolutely thriving and making a huge difference, uh, in the world." And so that's really, in the end, what you want to get to. So let me pause right there because there were these other elements of that of like, kind of what sorts of tests or how would you think about, are there any generic aspects of right people in key seats, et cetera? But I thought maybe those two very human aspects of it might be worth touching on.

You also have some questions you ask, right, to try to, to try to determine between, "Are we in develop or are we in replace mode?" Right? Like, what are, what's a question or two you could, to get to get that started in your own mind? Because like, you're really a Socratic style teacher, a coach. So what are some questions people could could use for themselves if they're like, "Oh, I don't know what to do here. Should I fire them? Do I just try to help them? What should I do?"

Well, and also, by the way, uh, you always have to ask, one of the questions is, "Do I have a bus problem or do I have a seat problem?" So it could be that you have a wonderful, right person on the bus, and, uh, but you have them in the wrong seat. And one of the most wonderful things that you can experience as a leader or a builder, a manager, is you saw that, and you, you recognize that. Now, hopefully, it's harder and a smaller, this is why one of the things makes running a smaller company a lot harder, you just have fewer key seats and fewer shots on goal of being able to say, "This is a great person, but they're not in a seat that really fits with them," uh, to be able to move them to a seat where they're really going to thrive and flourish. Or maybe the seats scaled much faster than the person has scaled, which happens in growing companies a lot. They were the right person in that seat, but then the demands of the seat grew at 4x, and they only grew at 2x, right? And now you have to sort of find a way to slice the dime into the seat. Uh, a couple of the other questions that I, uh, I find, uh, very useful. Now, I want to be really clear, I put these questions in *Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0*. There are seven questions in there. We don't need to go through all of them. I'll give you a taste of them. But I want to be really clear about something. Getting back to rigorous, not ruthless, it's, it's judgment, and it's people. And, and so it's not like, "Oh, I've answered four of the seven, so now I have my answers, right?" It's, you know, it, these are meant to have you think in a very rigorous way, rather than, "Here's a flowchart," or, "I can do a diagnostic tool or something like that." This is human judgment with compassion. The one of the questions, uh, that, you know, I always like to think about is, "What is the person's relationship to the window and the mirror?" And there are people who are, uh, when things go [Music] well, uh, they're really good at pointing out the window to give credit to other people and to give credit to things that help them. And tail ones that were at their back for how things went well, the humility side of it. And when things go badly, even if it was a bunch of stuff that was out of their control, their natural instinct is to stand in front of the mirror and say, "I'm still responsible for this. There are things I can do to grow from this. What could I have? What did I not see that I, that in the future, I maybe could better see? What kinds of mechanisms could I build that would indicate that whatever right or systems I should have in place, or timelines I should build, or whatever? I, I'm looking in the mirror. It didn't go well. I'm not blaming anyone else." Then there are other folks who are the opposite. When, when things go badly, it's somehow always out there, pointing out the window, right? Uh, it's, it's, uh, "Oh, well, the economy wasn't good enough," or "These people let me down," or "The FedEx didn't arrive on time," or, you know, whatever it happens to be, right? But it's pointing out the window. And then, but then when things go well, they kind of have a really good way of sort of muscling themselves in front of the mirror and sort of saying, "Yeah, I, I am really good. Look at me. I'm going to take the credit for this." And, and that's a, it's a question because I find the people who are able to look in the mirror when things go badly and really learn from them, and who are really good to point out the window to credit others, very naturally are the ones who have a tremendous capacity to grow. And that's, you know, in the end, I was just on the phone this morning with a person who's been close on our team for a long time, and she, the signature of her is her growth. And when she first started, she actually really struggled. It's been years now, and we've worked together, and she's just a constant growth machine. Everything she's just like, "How could I do this better? How could I?" Just absolutely wants to always learn and always grow and always learn and always grow and always learn and always grow. And that's what she thrives on. And so I will take somebody any day that, that, you know, they're just, you know, they're constantly that way over somebody who just starts really well because it's the long-term compounding effect of that growth that ultimately is a joy to be around.

Jim, I'd love to close with, um, a kind of a basic question with a potentially complex answer. And that is defining true leadership. Because there are, there are business leaders who may be listening who think they are leading when in fact they're simply exercising power. And they might discover to their horror that no one would follow them if they had no power. So you've said, "True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow." And I want this to be a mere moment for people of, of, of, of, you kind of sharing more about what exactly is leadership, what's true leadership versus just a title, a position, or power.

Yeah, let's, um, this is a great one to spend a bit of time on. And I think I think we should, um, play with a little bit before we close because it's, it's been a journey for me to, to understand more and more about this. So let's begin, first of all, with a great leader, uh, Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America and now Teach for All. Wendy is one of the greatest leaders that I've ever known, and she's a true Level 5 leader. One, Inc. magazine, at one point, we're having a conversation, and we're talking about the entrepreneur of the decade. This was back in around 2009. I'm like, "Oh, it's, uh, it's Wendy Kopp, I mean, hands down." And, and, and it was really interesting about Wendy. So first of all, she doesn't have the power of charisma. It's not, she's not like a powerfully charismatic personality. And I always like to use her as an example that if you have a charismatic cause, you do not need a charismatic personality, because the cause is charismatic. And your company's cause can be charismatic. And I had this, this privilege to, uh, serve the two-year appointment as the Class of 1951, uh, Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. And it was a phenomenal experience for me because I, I, I went there, you know, first, it was finally a chance for me to be able to do something in a very direct way that I care very deeply about, which is somewhere in my life, I, I, I needed a way to directly serve my country. And so to be asked to come in and spend time with the cadets at West Point was a marvelous gift to me to be able to do that. Not service like theirs, where they have to go out and like lead in really dangerous places, but, you know, kind of baby service to them, but still direct service to my country. And, um, and then, uh, in that role, uh, as the Chair for the Study of Leadership, but within the world's greatest leadership institution.

that I know of. They're probably Annapolis is one of them, like our military academies or some of the great leadership development institutions in the world. And as part of that, I would lead Socratic sessions with the cadets. And I would sometimes bring a guest with me, uh, to engage and discuss, you know, all kinds of topics.

And one time, I brought Wendy Kopp with me. And it was very interesting because, uh, we were in this seminar room, uh, the Eyes in Hiller said in our room at, um, at West Point. And it's not a very big room. I mean, it's, it's, uh, it probably seats 30, maybe something like that, around a table. And the cadets were initially having trouble even hearing Wendy because she's very soft-spoken. But they were really on edge because what she did and how she created this huge flywheel around education and now is taking it around the world, extraordinary leadership results. But she doesn't walk in with like, "Here I am, the great charismatic leader." She's Wendy. And so as she got talking, one of the things that began to dawn on me is how she got, you know, hundreds of thousands of young people to want to sign up to be deployed into our, uh, most difficult environments, uh, Harlem and the Mississippi Delta and the Bronx and so forth, to to be engaged with with teaching. And then some of them to stay in the world of education. And interestingly, she was able to do this with people who had lots of other options because they were coming out of really great colleges and so forth to sign up and go do this. And it's not like it was all fun thing to do. Well, these were really demanding roles. And she had zero power over them. She didn't have the power of money, right, because they could make more doing something else. She didn't have direct, she didn't have like the power of government mandate. She didn't have the power of, uh, of like being able to tell people to do it. And yet, she got, created sort of this, this, this vacuum, vacuumed in all these young people who wanted to do it. And so when I would be there with the cadets and say, "You never confuse the rank, your rank, with your leadership. You should be able to lead even if nobody knows what your rank is." That's what Wendy teaches. She had no rank, but she led. And of course, the great cadets would understand this very deeply because it's part of how West Point teaches.

And that sort of brings around to a question that I had wrestled with. I spent my years studying what makes great companies tick. And in that, of course, through 6,000 years of combined corporate history, and whether it be the Level 5 leaders in Good to Great or, you know, the 10X leader in Great by Choice, or whatever, really systematically studying some of the greatest chief executives of all time, uh, everything from Andy Grove over Intel, Katharine Graham with the Washington Post, I mean, just sort of Anne Mulcahy who saved Xerox, and some of the greatest corporate CEOs of all time. And, um, but I, I was left with this really kind of question in my mind, which is, we talk about leadership all the time. That what exactly is it? I mean, does it determine, really have any meaning to it? Because I don't really know what exactly it is. And so when I went to West Point, uh, on the, in the chair for the study of leadership, I thought, well, if I'm in the chair for the study of leadership, I'm going to walk away with a definition and an understanding of what I actually think leadership is. If I can't learn it at West Point, I'm not going to learn it anywhere. It's been in the business of building leaders for over 200 years. What is it?

And in my, my exploration there, uh, I came across, uh, the, the materials, uh, of Dwight Eisenhower, General Eisenhower. And in that, I, I stumbled across the way he thought about what leadership is. And it just, all the tumblers went into place that produced for me something that really fit with all my research, whether it be in the business, social, or social sectors, etc., to what the essence of leadership, what leadership is. Not necessarily Level 5 versus Level 4, because there's both leaders, but what the essence of what it means to lead. And it's simply this: It's the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. Now, if I have enough power, I can get you to do stuff, but that's just using power. And notice the, the elements of that definition. One of your first responsibilities as a leader is to see what must be done. And, and that may come by group discussion, it may come by insight, it may come by whatever, but this sense of this must be done. Someone's got to do something. Someone has got to do something. The second part is, it's not about getting people to do it, it's about how do you get people to really want to do it, right? When he couldn't go out and make people do two plus years of really hard teaching, she had to get people to want to do it. And then third, it's an art. And I love the word art, which, which Eisenhower used, because the way I think of it is, um, it's, if you look at artists, they're all different kinds of artists, and all different kinds of, uh, even, even within a genre, there are different kinds of artists. I mean, Berlioz wrote different music than Beethoven. And Beethoven really departed from Haydn. Or if you take, you know, great rock groups, right? You know, the art of Led Zeppelin is really, really different than the art of The Beatles, even though they have a lot of overlap between them. Or you look at writers, right? You know, the, the, the writing artistry of Toni Morrison might be very different than say, the, the, the writing artistry of John McPhee. But they're artists. And what I came to see is that, uh, it's an art where you have to sort of figure out what kind of artist you are. Now, some people, in their artistic toolkit, is a really good at giving a speech. The speech is not leadership, it's simply an art form for getting people to want to do what must be done. For other people, they may never be able to give a speech.

I've been, um, uh, really, really learning a ton about Benjamin Franklin for, for another reason, for other research I'm working on. And in the Constitutional Convention, as I understand it, uh, there was this, he wasn't, he wasn't a great speaker, right? That wasn't Franklin, right? He was, uh, really, um, just, uh, he was Franklin, right? You know, but in the Constitutional Convention, there was this great debate about how are we going to handle the fact that we have large states and small states, and how are you going to, you know, are you going to have it proportional, or are you going to divide it up, Senate and House, and so on and so forth? And what Franklin had this, a marvelous ability to do was to kind of like bring together the right people and engage them in a conversation to help them see, "This may be imperfect, but it's better than anything else anyone would ever have done. I'd like you to join me in this on the Constitution, right?" Unlike his back patio. Well, that's leadership too. And, uh, and then, you know, he would put out this one sort of perfect set of words that would help sort of capture like that, but would be in writing, perhaps that's the way that people would really hear it. And so, um, you know, there's, there's, it may be that you're really good at just, what I'm looking at, I'm not saying me, I'm just saying somebody might be good at, is, "I am really good at figuring out who the four people are that should be in a room together and ask the one right question and get out of the way." My artistry. And I, I, I'm more of a teacher than a leader. But somebody, I had to prepare for a conversation on, uh, uh, at one point, and the question came up, you know, "What, what is my leadership artistry?" It took me long. So I just asked my people. And the answer that I came back from the people around me, because I had no idea how to answer it, was, "I trust them and give them a ton of freedom in framework, in a framework, right? A ton of freedom to manage themselves to do their best work." And I didn't really realize that's my artistry. But what that does is for these wonderful people, when you trust them and give them a lot of freedom to manage themselves to do their best work, they really want to do their best work. So each leader, then, it's the same, you know, has to figure out what must be done, but then what's the artistry of creating the conditions where people will really want to do it? And that has nothing to do with power. If I can, if I put a gun to your head, I can get you to do a lot of things, but it doesn't mean I've led you. That's where I come back and say something very simple. This is why we should learn from the social sectors. The business sector should learn more from the social sectors because in the business sector, executives often have a lot of real power, power of executive decision. In the social sectors, you actually are often dealing with, uh, as one university professor, uh, or president, put it to me, said, "I'm dealing with a thousand points of no." And you have very diffuse power. And so if you could actually learn how people who don't have power lead and get great things done, and where you learn that, you learn by looking outside of business rather than learning from business leaders. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done.

I think you also quoted General Colin Powell, uh, in my, he said, "In my 35 years of service, I don't ever recall telling anyone, 'That's an order.'" Yep. Right? Even in that world where you think that's what it is every day. And he never said it ever in his career. Amazing. Well, and, and actually, what I, I, I would love to maybe, if we can just take a moment to close out a couple of other great lessons from that, be picking up on the Powell one. And then one of the, one of the things that really was an eye-opener for me when I went and did the study at the time at West Point and then got to know my friends in the military, who I so greatly respect. And, you know, you have this image that the way, well, it's easy in the military, you just order people around, man. The best general officers that I got to know, the best officers, the best captains and lieutenants and majors and colonels, and that they don't do that. They don't do that. They don't, they, the best ones would look at it is that they're, they're failing as leaders if they have to order people to do stuff. It's, it's more by, um, their style. And so the caricature of that is not what I generally observed amongst the very, very best military officers. But I would love to share one, maybe would be a great closing story, because it's one of the ones I put in the book, but I just, I think it's one of the great career lessons. Do we have time to do it?

You have all the time you want, man. Um, we've talked a lot here about people and decisions and now the leadership piece. And I want to share with you, uh, it's a story. It's in the people chapter of Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0. And it's, it took, I often have young people who come to me and say, um, "Yeah, looking for career advice." I've actually kind of come to the conclusion that I usually now want to respond to them and say, "If you really want my career advice, you should stop asking that question." And, and, and then I tell them about, uh, if I have the opportunity to, I'd like to think about two leaders. One is Anne Mulcahy, who saved Xerox. Who was not ever angling to be chief executive of Xerox. But when Xerox was in serious trouble in the early 2000s or late '90s, early 2000s, the, the board was really struggling with who should lead the company. Then a very inspired board member said, "Well, let me ask a simple question: Who inside this company would people trust and follow because they just so believe that that leader would have the interest of the, the best interest of the company at heart, even though we have to make really brutally hard decisions?" And one name came up over and over again, which was Anne Katie. And, and so they, they tapped her to be chief executive of Xerox. And it's a great turnaround story. Wrote about it, and how the mighty fall, and how she took Xerox from late stage four and, and helped give it another shot at life. What was really interesting is that her whole approach was, she didn't, she wasn't really focused on like, "What's the next big thing in her career?" She always understood, "I have a mini bus. I have a pocket of responsibility. And I'm going to make my mini bus a sparkling pocket of greatness. And I'm going to focus with what I have, not where I'm going next to my career. I have people, I have a minibus, I have something that's right in front of me, and I'm going to make it the very, very best I can." And where it might be small, it might be big, but my responsibility is to make that a bucket of greatness. And because she did that, every step along the way, she just kept getting asked to drive bigger and bigger buses. And then one day, they're like, they said, "We need you to drive the whole bus." Because you know, and because she'd done that over and over, she had this incredible currency of trust. People trusted her because they'd seen the way she led. It wasn't about "Anne and what Anne was going, where Anne was going, what am I going to get?" She was just really taking care of her people and taking care of her buses every time she had them. And then that brings me to the second story. And I, this had a big impact on me. Um, it's from General Lloyd Austin. And, um, General Lloyd Austin became a dear friend through my experiences with West Point and the military. And one of the great leaders that I've had the privilege to know, who I still know. And, and General Austin, and I were having a conversation once. He had invited me down to spend time with him when he was, he was Commander CENTCOM at this time. And, and we were, we were talking about career arcs and so forth. And, you know, Commander CENTCOM is really significant responsibility. West Point graduate, '75, a four-star general. And, and as we speak right now, he's the nominee for Secretary of Defense. But I was talking with, uh, with General Austin and told me the story about how being a few years out of West Point, he began wondering, you know, "Am I being promoted fast enough? What's my career on? How am I doing?" Et cetera. And he said, "One day, I just sort of woke up and decided, this is not very helpful. I made this decision. I would instead ask a different question. I would decide, 'How am I caring for my people?' I decided I would not focus on my career. I would focus on taking care of my people." And everything changed. They would not let me fail. And of course, from there has one of the most remarkable career records that's still not done. And, um, General Austin and Anne Mulcahy, you know, for, for folks you think about like, "I'm looking for career advice, I'm looking for career guidance," or paying attention to what's right in front of you and taking care of your people. Take care of your people, not your career. Take care of the bus you have, rather than thinking about, "I need to drive a bigger bus." And if you do that, you're more likely to die of indigestion having too much opportunity for responsibility than starvation or too little.

Wow, thank you so much, Jim. I mean, that that last part reminds me of a mentor in my life who I value so much, named Brian Miller. When he says to me, as he got promoted and promoted and promoted and promoted, I said, "How did you do it? How did you do it?" He goes, "You know what, man? I just always think about how to be excellent at my current job. And when my current job is leading a team, it's all about those people. It's all about them." And so I found that when I focused on them and helping them, I kept getting tapped on the shoulder. And I think it's such good advice of thinking about how to build an awesome career and some incredible relationships along the way, which, by the way, is pretty much all that matters. Is if you, you, you find yourself in a leadership role and you focus so much of your effort on helping them be successful, it will build a great life and a great career. I know this. I was at my dad's graduation, I'm sorry, his retirement party. They packed this standing room only room. And at the very beginning of the MC said, "Real quick, can, can, can we get a show of hands and maybe stand up for anyone in here who Keith Hawk has directly, I mean, directly impacted by, by through, through talking, meeting, a lunch, whatever?" Hundreds and hundreds of people stood up. It was, it was an emotional moment. And I think that's what it's about, man. Like that's, that's when it, when it's about like, "My focus is on helping others do everything they can to hit, hit and exceed their potential." Like, what, that's leadership. That's what it's all about. So, Jim, this is just the greatest. I'm so, I'm so, uh, grateful for you and everything you've put out. You've changed my life long before we ever talked. And now we've got to do it two times. And I'd certainly love to continue doing it as we both progress, man.

Well, I intend to keep progressing, as I like to, as much for myself as, as anyone else. I'm 62, but if genes and health permitting, I think of it as I'm 30 years into a 60-year career. So I'm at about the midpoint. And, you know, I, I intend to keep going and moving on to new questions. But I, I really appreciate you drawing out about Bill and bringing out Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, that the book we wrote together all those years ago, the very, very first book I ever wrote, was with Bill. And the chance to be able to bring Bill to the world, to share his mentorship with all these people. I, Bill is smiling because that's, in the end, what it was all ultimately all about, is changing the lives of other people. I highly recommend you get this book, Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, B 2.0, B 2.0. All of the names of the book. It's so, it's got multiple names. Walter names. I, I emailed Mel and I asked her, like, "Which name should we call?" I'm going to call it all the names. But no, it's so good. It's so, it's so well done. And I, I found myself, it's one of those books where you'll just constantly take notes and notes and notes and notes. And that's, that's what it's all about. And so I'm grateful that you, you, you put the effort to write it, um, and put it out there, man. And, uh, highly encourage people to get it. It's, it's just not surprising considering that the bible's for me was was first Good to Great, and then Great by Choice, the 10 Mile March, like all of it, Built to Last. And this one's right there. So I highly encourage people to get it. And like I said, Jim, I'd certainly want to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

Very good. Well, you have found your hedgehog. That's right. Try it. Hopefully, that next time I'm just going to, you'll think, "Oh, he's getting a little bit better, getting a little bit better." That's right. Right. That's my goal. That's my goal. It's good. Let's keep, let's keep getting better. That compounds over time. But, uh, no, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

All right, take care. Thanks, Jim. Okay.