the why of product management.
I had a career, I've had a career working
in really large organizations that are matrixed,
that have a command and control hierarchy.
And it can be really tough to get stuff done
because you're removed from the customers,
from the problem statement and have not one, not two,
you might have a half dozen, if not more,
different stakeholders and each one
represents their own tribe of people.
And you have to convince all of them to get on board.
And it can take a lot out of people to be that persuasive
to, and so your message doesn't attenuate.
So you have a strong point of view or perspective
and you want to convince and persuade not just one person,
but this team of people that reports to that person
for why your idea is the good idea
and why they should essentially drop
what they're doing right now and do what you say,
essentially.
And the act of trying to persuade large groups of people
can expect, and this I think happened to a lot of people
during the pandemic, you experience burnout
because you might have clarity
on why something is important,
but the act of trying to convince large groups of people,
why it's important, you end up, you know,
reducing your own internal, you know,
mental strength, physical strength
to try to get to that persuasive point.
And so I started thinking,
I had the opportunity to think more deeply around
what's the purpose, why are we trying to do this?
How do we go about communicating and collaborating
across large teams and also kind of deep dive back
into the history of product management
and how it developed as a function inside, you know,
venture capital backed startups, that entire ecosystem,
the language and cultural mental models
that kind of got grew out of it
and got adapted into large corporates,
which aren't necessarily-
When you're talking about large companies,
you're talking about your experience at like American Express,
JP Morgan, Accenture and AIG,
those style of companies, correct?
Companies that have more, and I think I've actually,
yes, those are all examples of really large corporates.
Those are all examples of-
That's a lot of minds to move.
It's also, those are, that's a fortune 100,
fortune 500 kind of mindset
is when you have essentially thousands of employees.
And yes, it is a lot of minds to move.
And each one of those is built up
of various tribes and factions.
So what level of company entry level, you know,
is this conversation today gonna be relevant to?
So I think it's relevant to,
I think it's relevant to anybody
that is trying to change minds in any company
of more than a thousand people.
More than a thousand people.
More than a thousand.
You think that less than a thousand,
not as critical.
It is, not as, no,
I'm not gonna say it's not as critical.
I think that because of the size and scale
of the organization,
most companies in the United States are,
most small businesses,
which is the backbone of the American economy,
is less than 200 employees.
And so when you get above a thousand
on the scale of human coordination, you're huge.
And so anything above a thousand employees,
you're beyond more than 150 people
is how many names and faces that we have
from an evolutionary perspective,
this is the Dunbar number of the number of people
that we can keep in contact with
and maintain sanity, essentially.
So when you're above a thousand people,
you're already beyond,
your orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number
of the number of names and faces in the organization
that you actually keep in contact with.
And so you're realistically only talking
to maximum probably 150 people,
but your organization is much larger than that.
And so being able to deep dive
or what I call like spearfish into your organization
and contact people who are,
and be able to mind, you know,
Vulcan mind meld with somebody who has fingers on keyboard
or knows the customer or knows the problem statement,
they're a subject matter expert in that specific space.
And being on specific go to that person
because that person's boss or that person's boss's boss,
that person's boss's boss's boss is orders of,
or is layers removed from the actual expertise
or the problem or the knowledge space.
And so they're getting information filtered up to them
or down to them, depending on how you view the org chart
or tree.
Sure.
And so-
Repositions, I mean, really, who cares?
Oh, screw you.
Well, I mean, I, so something that's come very,
I've realized there's something that's natural.
I'm gonna point you in a new direction.
So the smaller companies, you know,
anybody who's got less than 200 employees,
is this like an ultra secret sauce
that they really need to be preparing for now?
Or again, is it, you know,
and are we gonna dive into that today?
Or is this gonna be more for those
who are at the thousand person level?
I think, well, so if you're less than a thousand people
and you want to grow,
I think it's extremely important to be prepared yourself,
you know, emotionally.
And then the people that you bring into the organization for,
because it's a lot more involved
and takes more effort to course correct
people's mental models in your culture
after they've already been brought in
and after you already at that size,
than it is to take, to address that challenge earlier on.
It takes less effort-
If you just challenge the culture in one direction,
then getting everybody who's already bought
into that culture,
shifted to a new one can be a catastrophe.
I've been there many times in startups.
So, you're absolutely right on that.
So what's the biggest secret?
I think-
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Calame, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hey, what's up everybody?
Welcome in to another episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame,
founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I'm excited to be discussing company growth and cultures
and being able to dive into your virtues ruthlessly
as a leader and lead people.
And really I would say our world has become
quite the fragile world when it comes to
dealing with individuals and conflict and all that.
So, Sam's style and his background
and what he's been able to do with massive companies,
I know it applies tremendously to the startup world.
We were just talking right before the intro about
how if you establish a certain type of culture
around dozens of human beings,
while you're small, when the day comes
where you have to shift to an entire new mentality of growth,
it can be very jarring and disrupting.
It can cause great organizations to crumble.
There are so many organizations that do not
know how to survive the levels of scale and growth.
And if you haven't heard of the seven figure desert,
there's a reason why some coaches out there
call it just that.
It is not easy to grow and scale
no matter what stage of business you are at.
So before we dive in with Sam,
I always want to give a shout out to our sponsors.
ColdClick is what we use for our LinkedIn automation.
I highly recommend the software.
I also recommend making sure that your messaging is on point
as you go into using a tool like this.
Now, I wanted to say before you go into it,
that's often not possible.
What we need to do is make sure that we're paying attention
to how our audience responds to our messaging.
And there's what's called lead indicators
that help us understand is our messaging attracting people
in the right way, with the right emotion,
with the right level of excitement.
You can actually over-attract people in the beginning, too.
Hello, clickbait, for instance.
So make sure that you're getting great advice
and consulting with the right marketing companies
as you get ready to use such a tool.
But also, don't let that hold you back from getting
in front of more people.
If you've got a vision, you need to get other people involved
in your vision in order to be able to move it forward.
It's likely not something you'll do by yourself.
Then there's simply fast websites.
And that's somebody whose vision caught my attention.
I wish I had found something like Shane years and years ago
when I was starting my website.
So I actually don't know how good he is at what he does.
But what I do know is that if I had found him
when I was in the beginning of launching my website,
I probably would have paid him right away and said, OK, $179.
Go ahead and launch my website.
Let me know what forms you need.
And I would have just gone forward with that.
Because when you're getting started,
it's so easy to get distracted because you have a million
things that you need to do.
And the website, it's not the most important one.
No matter what people tell you or make
you want to think about what you should be doing,
you do need to get a website launched.
And then from there, you need to focus
on producing profitable results, not getting busy.
Busy is broke.
Production is profitable.
All right, last tip for the day on those matters.
Now let's go to the water project.
The water project, many of us just celebrated Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.
I hope you at least take the opportunity
to say thank you to people in your lives,
even if you don't celebrate it.
In this case, I am grateful for the water
that I have access to.
And I would really, really appreciate it
if you would spread the word for the water project,
or perhaps a different cause of your choice.
The reason why I like the water project
is because I can see the people whose lives I'm affecting
thanks to the way that they manage these campaigns.
So I can choose which community I give back to.
And then I can see them either build the Sand Dam
or the Boer Hole Well, as they're called respectively,
for the different communities that they're serving.
And then it also makes it really easy
to imagine the types of effect that whatever I gave
is going to provide to the generations that are coming
after these individuals.
We have the opportunity to help millions.
If not billions of people in the world,
this is one of my core causes of choice to support.
So if you have the opportunity to share it, please do so.
If you have the opportunity to give back,
then don't hesitate to go in there and make your contribution.
And we appreciate you all.
So with that said, let me pull up Sam's background a little bit
before I bring him on stage.
He is from San Diego, California,
which I call paradise.
I'm a huge fan of that area of the world.
If you haven't been, definitely go check out La Jolla sometime.
And George's, I think it's called George's.
There's a restaurant right there over the bay
that is absolutely amazing.
Anyway, enough plugs for today.
15 plus years of experience in product strategy and execution
and helping companies like American Express and JP Morgan
and Accenture.
His background is extensive.
We became friends quite quickly.
And also having studied in Mexico City
means that we get to connect on my personal project
a little bit for Oportunidades de Trabajo para Latinos.
So we'll have some fun with that, perhaps not on the show.
But I bet you'll see Sam and I do several things together
over the years to come.
The reason why I again wanted to bring him onto this show
is because I know that companies that
are struggling with articulating their vision
and struggling to establish great cultures are, in essence,
not doomed to failure.
But it's pretty close.
The success rates aren't high, my friends.
So let's bring Sam on.
Let's pick his brain, and let's dive
in his vision for company success.
Sam, thanks for being here today, man.
Jackson, thank you for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
So beyond my feeble attempts to make sure
that people knew who should be listening and why they should
be listening to you, I'd love for you to just mic drop this
a little bit.
Again, who should be listening from your perspective
and why should they listen to you?
So I think the critical aspect for entrepreneurs, founders,
product managers in the course of defining a problem
statement and then building a solution for that problem
is you first have to know yourself.
What are your own internal motivations?
What drives you?
What is your why for trying to solve said problem?
And earlier, we were talking about what's
the challenge that growing organizations have,
especially when they get to some kind of S-curve limit
where they get to one point and then they've flattened out.
And it takes a lot of effort, time, and energy
to change culture at that point if you didn't pay attention
to it before.
And culture comes from the word cult.
It's the root of the word.
And it is the way we do things around here.
It's in the water.
It's in the air.
It's how we operate.
It's how we communicate, how we collaborate.
It's our definition of normal right now.
And I think it's really important to understand
that culture is constantly changing, especially
in organizations that are growing, that are going
through a tough patch, are trying to re-stabilize whenever
you have team members leave.
One way of my one kind of shorthand
that I've used to describe that sense of instability
that organizations can have is that culture changes
one funeral at a time or with every birth.
And so when you have an org chart or a team that
has a critical person leave, now you have a vacuum.
And people are trying to understand,
what do we do now before somebody else used to do that job?
And now what do we do now?
What's the normal now?
And what you're experiencing is culture change in that point.
And so if you weren't paying attention
to the definition of normal or that person's personality
defined normal up until now, you're going to have a change.
And so an antifragile culture, an antifragile way of being
is one that responds positively to change.
And so whenever it is stressed, for example,
our immune system is an example of an antifragile structure,
an antifragile system where it has
to be stressed in order for it to get stronger.
Another example is stand-up comedy.
You have to get on stage, and you have to get booed off
before you get better.
You have to bomb first.
And so that is an example of change happening.
Those are examples of change happening in real time.
Our systems, they get stronger by being stressed.
And so organizational culture is another example of that,
where if it doesn't get stronger as a result of change,
it will just collapse on itself.
And for founders, entrepreneurs, or product managers
that are trying to build a strong culture,
it's important to know what are your own issues?
What do you have that you haven't thought about?
What are your unprocessed thoughts and feelings and emotions
that you need to think about?
And it's really important to know yourself.
And what do you bring to the table in order to address gaps?
Because you are not going to be able to do everything.
The objective of growing an organization
is to be able to find either generals or specialists
who can work on your team to solve problems with you.
Startups or companies that are larger than 1,000 employees,
we're talking about team-based organizations
that need to collaborate and communicate
in order to get anything done.
And if you have a whole bunch of people
who don't know anything about themselves,
don't know anything about the problem statement,
and are just executing, then you get a bunch of pirates
that happen to be on the same ship.
And then you basically get a culture of piracy,
which if that's what you're going for, keep doing that.
Don't change anything.
But if your objective is to have a healthy organization,
to have a healthy sense of collaboration
where there's open lines of communication
and you're able to collaborate
around a specific performance challenge
and address that in a healthy way,
you will, your culture will change
and you will experience growth
because you're trying to solve this problem in a healthy way.
And from my experience, especially in large organizations,
is that the culture tends to be
just the way we do things around here now.
And from a management and a leadership perspective,
specifically, the status quo isn't great, it's not okay.
This is why we're trying to change.
This is why you're here, is to try and change the culture.
And so selecting for it during the interview process
is why culture fit is a thing.
Selecting for it to the interview process,
but then also putting an expectation on people
where I don't want things to stay the same.
In 18 months from now, if everything is exactly the same
it was when we started, we have failed.
And from a startup perspective, a founder perspective
or a large corporate perspective,
I deeply believe that change management is continuous.
You're constantly trying to change.
Status quo is death, is where you've just stopped.
And it means that you know less about yourself,
you know less about your team,
you know less about your customers,
you know less about the market
because you stopped learning and stopped growing.
And this is kind of part of the growth mindset.
I think people that are founders,
people that are entrepreneurs or real product managers
tend to have an entrepreneurial mindset.
They're kind of wired that way.
But convincing and persuading a bunch of other people
about your vision or the problem that you can identify
and that you can see in getting a bunch of other people
on board to that vision, that takes effort, that takes energy.
And what I've noticed over the past
at least three years or so,
is it can take a lot more effort and energy
to convince a small army of people essentially,
to be able to get on board with your vision and your idea.
And so that's why I think that
having a positive energy is important,
but being critical about yourself
and about the people around you
and the problem you're trying to solve
is key to growth, is key to an anti-fragile culture.
And it's key to change management,
it's key to product management, it's key to growth.
Absolutely.
So what would you define as your vision
for those that you serve?
I am trying to make things less worse.
Make things less worse.
Yes. Okay.
Because so I've noticed about myself
and I think there's other people like this
who are attracted to what I call wicked problems.
So a wicked problem is one in which there is a,
it's a complicated problem
and the only answer is a complicated solution.
There is no simple solution for a complicated problem.
And that's the definition of a wicked problem.
You can't necessarily solve wicked problems.
You can make them less worse.
So this can be your go-to-market from a sales cycle,
it could be from a legal or compliance perspective,
it could be tech debt from a technology perspective.
These kind of evolved to be the way they were
because of culture.
We decided this was okay or normal for us now
at some point in time.
There are trade-offs and decisions that were made.
And so now these, we've accumulated kind of
decisions essentially.
And so now we're stuck.
We're not stuck, but we're slower than we were earlier
in our decision-making process.
And so in order to help,
we can't solve said problem, but we can make it less worse.
And so that changes, that involves change in our own mindset
and how we think of the world
and what is our own place in it and what problem,
what is a specific problem that we think
we're trying to solve?
Because I think in many cases what we have
are multiple root causes to problems.
And we try to articulate a point solution
for one specific root cause
and kind of ignore the fact
that there might be other root causes involved
or choose to de-prioritize those other root causes.
And then we execute on a point solution.
We need to have a more effective go-to-market.
So we're gonna put a new CRO,
head of sales is gonna get hired
and they're gonna bring their Rolodex,
which is a term that most people haven't even seen
in Rolodex in 30 years.
We're gonna bring them on
and then they're gonna execute on the Rolodex
and they're gonna solve the problem for us.
And then it turns out that your client success team
or your technology team or your operations team
has other issues that were unrelated
to your stagnating growth
or were related to your stagnating growth,
but you believed that just a new salesperson
with a new Rolodex was gonna solve that one solution
or be a point solution for that problem.
And it involves taking a more holistic kind of look
at your organization, your team,
the product or service that you're offering,
the market that you're competing in.
What are, I mean, AI is gonna be this thing
for the next few years when we all kind of grapple with?
A lot of change.
There's gonna be a lot of change.
And so an anti-fragile organization is one
that is trying to be positive,
but also being critical and not feeling bad
about being critical.
And I say in the way my shorthand for that
is joyful and ruthless.
You can be joyful, we should be joyful,
but we should also be ruthless.
And people, the term ruthless tends to have
this negative connotation around it.
And I think that that's actually not healthy or good
because the root word of the word ruthless
comes from Ruth or rue, which means to feel bad.
So if you are ruthless, you don't feel bad.
You should not feel bad about taking into account
the tech debt from an engineering perspective.
You should not feel bad about taking into contracts
from a legal perspective.
You should not feel bad about taking into the fact
that this person's Rolodex does not,
the end all be all solution for growth.
So taking into account all the variables
shouldn't make you feel bad.
It makes you ruthless.
And so that being joyful and ruthless at the same time,
I think is important to build a future proof,
anti-fragile organization.
It's huge.
Entrepreneurs are struggling tremendously
with that, small business owners even further.
There's a difference between the two
for those of you who are listening.
And it's, they're your blind spots
and they're your limiting mindsets in many respects.
So we're gonna dive into that further in just a little bit,
but Sam, what's your vision for you,
for yourself over the next,
you feel free to define how long that goes.
So my vision is, as I learned this term
relatively recently about sentinel intelligence.
And it is about, it can be an aspect
of kind of seeing the writing on the wall
or from a way to kind of adapt that Wayne Gretzky quote,
like where the puck is going, skate to there.
My vision is about trying to identify a bunch of different,
where a bunch of, how a bunch of different trends
are affecting each other.
And because a lot of there's a lot,
I noticed about myself that I'm a generalist.
And so as a generalist, I rely on specialists.
Specialists know and are subject matter experts
in their very specific niche area.
And they may not have the perspective to see
how change is affecting other areas.
But as a systems thinker, they're related to each other.
They have knock-on effects on each other.
So how does technology affect law,
affects human capital management,
affects product management,
affects a number of different, affects sales.
These are a bunch of like related areas
in companies, small or large,
where you have specific people
who have a very niche specialized vision.
And my own perspective and my vision is,
we need to connect these.
We need to connect these different perspectives
that have value,
maybe don't have what they're lacking as other perspective.
And a big part about it is speaking to people's ego.
What is the thing,
why do they feel that they know so much?
Or why do they feel that what's so important?
What's the thing that they are still holding onto
a little bit that's affecting growth?
And so that's my specific kind of view
is promoting more systems thinking
in terms of how we help companies grow.
And maintain for that matter.
Okay, this Sentinel Intelligence,
I'm glad that came up as well.
Generalist versus specialist, how they work together.
This gives me a lot of different alleyways
that I wanna explore.
Before we dive into any of those aspects of culture,
what would you say your worst leadership experience
ever has been?
There's so many.
Yeah.
You have to have, I don't-
I would expect that from the guy who said,
we make things less worse.
I would expect that, good for you.
I feel like you have to have suboptimal experiences
in order to get better.
So if you don't have crappy ones,
I don't know what you were doing.
Like you had no friction or struggle.
Mediocrity.
Yeah, like you had to have crappy experiences.
So there's plenty to select from.
I would say from my perspective,
one of the more crappy ones was when I realized
that I was on an island from a management perspective,
being new to a role, being recruited into a role
where you expect that somebody wants you to be there.
They've pulled you in and then you're like,
why do you think I'm not being supported there?
They've pulled you in and then you get put into role
where you are a people manager.
You have people reporting into you.
And then you have this literally day to night realization
that you are not being supported yourself.
And so now you have people manager,
people who are relying on you, you are their manager,
but then you don't have that support yourself.
And then you realize, oh, maybe the reason I feel this way,
maybe I'm having this leadership experience
is because that leader is not being supported themselves.
And so it ends up being this like multiple layers
where you get this like dawning realization,
like, oh my Lord, like not only am I not being supported,
they're not being supported.
So how deep does this lack of support go?
And so at that point it was, I say it was the worst
and most of anybody's worst leadership experience
is gonna be a character revealing experience.
And it where it shows you about yourself, who are you?
It reveals things to you about yourself.
Because the objective of leadership is to create
and generate more leaders.
And if you, and this specific case is where I realized
that I wasn't being supported,
if I'm not being supported, how am I gonna do my job,
which is to create more leadership?
How am I gonna be able to create this sense of support,
belonging, inclusion, confidence essentially
to other people to go execute and do their job
if the person who I'm reporting into
is unable to give that to me
because whoever they're reporting into
is unable to give it to them.
Like this is gonna, I had to kind of pull together myself
first in order to be able to execute in that particular case.
But that was my worst leadership experience.
There's a series of books.
They're wrapped up in there.
That's a really, and I like what you said.
You said your worst leadership experience
is a character building experience for you.
And the sooner we can recognize that,
the sooner we can pivot to seeing the opportunity at hand.
You know, if we fight against that, we may not learn,
we may not learn anything from the experience,
but being able to do so is probably the option
that we all want.
So just ask yourself,
if you're in one of those experiences right now,
how is this building my character?
How can I use this to build myself and my team up?
So good for you.
Thank you for that.
What's your best leadership experience look like?
I mean, I get with almost the inverse of that.
It's where I was in a culture where
there was a strong sense of customer centricity,
where there was a culture of literally every Friday afternoon,
sitting around a conference room
and listening to customer calls.
Listening to specifically,
because from a product management perspective,
there's this term that gets thrown around,
which is pain point.
You're trying to address a pain point.
Pain is a sensation that causes an emotion.
And so it's one thing to listen to a customer transcript
of a call.
It's an entirely different experience
to listen to the cringe of the person
on both sides of this conversation,
where neither one is happy about the situation
or how they got into it,
but you're listening to the pain.
And so the culture of an organizational leadership culture
that literally referred to managers as leaders.
So your boss was not your boss, they were your leader.
And it's the semantic difference between saying,
who's your boss, or saying, who's your leader?
Because it's a chasm of difference
between what those two words mean.
And so from a culture that literally referred
to managers and leaders,
it was a culture where you had senior people
also listening into these calls to hear the pain points
and the cringe from customers firsthand.
Because once you internalize that pain point,
it's almost impossible to get in front of that,
to stop it.
Because now I know this pain, I felt this pain,
I heard this pain, and we are going to prioritize a solution
to address this, all of us together,
because I'm gonna make you listen to this too.
So that kind of leadership experience where you felt
that the end, the top of this org chart tree
was the customer, I think was one of my,
one of the best leadership experiences I've had.
I'm gonna challenge you on Ruthlessness, right?
On this and joyfully, on this reality that
there's a difference between boss and leader.
And I wanted, I'm excited about what your response is
because you also know Mexican Spanish, you know?
And we both speak Spanish fluently, me to some degree.
But I've noticed that the word jefe, boss,
has a very different connotation and feel to it
for my Colombians, my Peruvians, my Argentinian friends,
my people from Mexico, and we as a melting pot
here in America, right?
We've got all of this language introduction coming in.
Semantics, there's people who are so big
into semantics battles, et cetera.
What am I getting at?
Our need to be able to be ruthless, joyful,
not cave, and yet still be able to express ourselves
while respecting others.
That whole thing is spinning faster and faster every year.
What's going on with that?
Because I don't think that, again,
and maybe I'm wrong in this.
I wanna hear what your perspective is.
My Latinos love the word boss.
And I find it strange,
because I'm trying, I don't wanna use that word.
Like that's an F word.
It's funny that you say that
because there's a brother-in-law of mine here
in San Diego uses the word patron.
Yes.
And I think it's also regional differences
within Mexico, et cetera,
or within Latin America for that reason.
But the translation for patron is patron.
So they're essentially your boss is sponsoring you
to do this thing that they want you to do.
So when you're reporting into somebody,
as they're your jefe, your boss, your patron,
they're giving you some leeway.
They should be giving you some leeway.
They're your sponsor.
I'm giving you some authority.
Well, I had to look it up real quick
because I was like, wait a second.
For restaurants, that's a customer.
Right.
So it's the opposite.
Right.
Okay, go ahead, hit this.
I think there's lots of things culturally
and language mixed up into these relationships.
And I think it ties back to how people view org charts
because I turn org charts upside down
and I turn into an org tree where your leader
or your boss or manager is supporting
a bunch of people above you.
Yeah, the mantle's on their shoulders.
It's on there.
And a lot of people who aspire to be the boss
and wanna be the jefe,
they tend to stick with the boss
and stick with the traditional view of an org chart
which has the boss on top.
And I think if you turn the org chart upside down,
it kind of internalizes that,
oh, you are actually supporting everybody above you.
And so if you are not supporting them,
then it's gonna make their job even harder to do.
So what is your job?
Your job is to be the support, essentially.
And so, yeah, I think there's some differences
between how the languages are used,
but I think it's from almost,
from a visualization perspective
of how you look at yourself in the organization itself
is that if you look at the CEOs,
like the root of this tree,
and then you get various branches going up,
that the top of this tree,
the leaves are doing the photosynthesis
and that's what keeps this tree alive.
That's a play game.
It's the closest to the customers, yeah.
All right, game time.
So we've got a hundred year old organization
that's had an org chart, right, forever.
You got two executives who don't care.
Like they like the org chart the way it is
because it's always been that way.
And they know that the leaders
are still supposed to support.
They're doing fine as a company
because they do have good customer support and success.
Then you got two other executives of an equal level
that one, it shifted to an org tree.
When you have two votes on each side,
what the heck do you do, Sam?
So I think, so I'm gonna have this,
you showed this earlier on the website,
but there's, do you want nice things?
Do these, do both of these two factions,
essentially these two tribes, they want nice things.
How badly do they want nice things, essentially?
That's the question you're asking
because it goes back to change.
How accepting are you of change?
And I have this quote on the website as well.
It's like, I think there's three reasons
why we can't like, we don't like nice things.
Oh, I didn't realize that you translated.
That's interesting.
Oh, Cynthia, you have it in Spanish, but it's okay.
That was great.
I'm sorry about that.
But there's three reasons we don't,
we can't have nice things,
which is basically sunk cost, ego, and motivated reasoning.
And so does this team, this is 100 year organization,
does it wanna grow?
How badly does it wanna grow?
And how much change is it willing to accept
in order to grow?
Which is the nice thing that they're saying that they want.
And so sunk cost is this fallacy
that the way that we've been doing things
is the best way that we can do things.
Ego is where we have built on top of sunk cost
because of the way we've been doing things
is the best way to do things.
That's just, it's on me.
It's how I operate.
I'm the one that doesn't wanna change.
And those first two things,
sunk cost and ego add up to motivated reasoning.
Now you have a really good reason
because of the way you've been doing things,
it makes sense to you is why we should not change,
essentially.
So between these two factions,
I think the question to ask is how badly do you wanna grow?
If the answer to the question is just a little bit,
then don't change anything
because then you'll just grow a little bit.
But if the answer to the question is I wanna grow a lot,
okay, well then you'll have to change a lot.
If you're saying that you wanna grow a lot
and not change at all,
then you're probably not gonna achieve nice things.
You're not gonna have nice things
or you're gonna struggle to try to obtain these nice things.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, that's fair.
We'll leave that where it's at
because the hypothetical can go down
so many different rabbit holes anyway.
I wanna dive into what powerful lesson
kind of the visionary has learned from your experience.
If this is your final lesson
that you could ever share with people, what would it be?
I think it goes back to knowing yourself.
Study yourself and your own experience
and your own learnings
and understanding those.
People experience this fog of war
as they go through their professional careers.
And the reason for that is because when you're stressed,
cortisol levels are elevated,
which inhibits memory retention.
And so when you're going through this suboptimal experience,
you're learning stuff,
but you're not remembering what you learned.
And so I think it's really important to go back
and even look at your own resume
and look at your earlier experience
and try to articulate what did you actually learn
from that experience?
Because it could have been soft skills
and actually you're probably more likely
to have learned soft skills from that experience
than you did hard skills.
And so the lesson I think is to examine your own experience
and in your own fog of war throughout your career
in suboptimal environments
that might've been toxic or unhealthy
because that's probably where you yourself learned
lots of things.
And you're experiencing knowledge blindness now
about what you learned then.
And so it takes some unpacking
to be able in this concept of knowledge blindness
comes out of mental health and therapy,
but I think it's applicable to organizations as well
and people in companies
as people have grown their careers
to examine their own professional experiences
to better articulate what was the thing
that they actually learned from their own experience.
In order to be able to help other people
develop those skills
without it being toxic or healthy or suboptimal.
You want these people to learn these skills
without having to struggle.
Like you did.
That was awesome.
I'm gonna have to,
it's probably the first powerful lesson version
where I'm gonna have to go back and listen again
because it was so intellectually deep.
But at the same time,
you talked about the stress inhibiting memory retention
and running first-class business
and trying to run vision pros live
and all things that we're doing.
I've noticed a tremendous dip in my memory.
Almost to a scary degree where I was like,
wow, this has been accelerated
as a result of the pandemic, by the way.
Everybody is actually low key stressed.
This is why three years kind of feels like it flew by
because everybody's just been low key stressed.
And so that's why you don't remember what happened last week
or last month or last year
or it feels like it just flew by.
That's also a secondary reason.
It's helpful too.
It's that, again, I think it goes back to your concepts
of joyfulness and ruthlessness,
the ability and willingness to accept the good.
This is my definition of it,
but accepting the good in my life
while also recognizing the symptoms
for an opportunity to change and improve where I'm headed.
You talked about, again, this concept of wicked problems,
making things less worse.
I know people can hear that
and just sound the alarm on negativity.
Like, what a negative guy.
And I look at that,
and I mean, I look at the reality of the world,
96% of businesses fail within 10 years.
And that does not mean that 4% succeed.
That means that 4% survive.
And out of that 4%,
the businesses that we would consider successful,
like you said, we have to look at the variables.
Do they have a balanced life?
Do they have time with their family?
Are they out of debt?
Do they have a six months cash reserve?
Even do they have all their basic first world needs met?
Well, I'm gonna coin that for what it is.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I think from a negativity perspective
is if you're a business,
you're producing a product or a service
that is solving a problem or a challenge.
It's addressing a need.
If you are producing a product or service
that didn't solve any pain point or fix any need,
then why are they buying your product?
Like there is some existing thing
that's creating demand for you.
And so if you're saying that that existing demand itself
is negative, okay, sure.
But you're essentially trying to make money
off that existing need or challenge.
And so that's the point of a bit,
a point of the, this is a Peter Drucker quote,
or maybe it's a Warren Buffett quote,
like the objective of a business is to create a customer
and it's marketing and it's a Peter Drucker quote,
it's a marketing and innovation.
Your product or service is innovating something
to solve a problem.
If there was no problem,
then you wouldn't need to market or innovate anything.
And so accepting that there is something
that's suboptimal out there
and that's why you are the one to solve it.
I don't think that's negative.
I think that's just the state of how businesses work.
Right, absolutely.
Well, and it's like,
there's just a lot of challenges out there
that have a lot of great needs.
A lot of people who have a lot of great needs
and it's easy to try to put blinders on
and lose sight of it rather than realize that it's there.
I'm glad you quoted Peter Drucker.
Nobody's ever done that on the show.
And I think his book, Effective Executive,
is one of the most overlooked books
of all time for business.
So well done.
Let's take some time to,
let's take the next few minutes to talk about
creating the anti-fragile organizational cultures.
What does that take, Sam?
You could just fire hoses for a little bit.
What are some of the high level aspects
we should be looking at or dive deep?
You're calm, kind of boxing you in the best I can.
So I think there's this negative connotation
around the word audit.
But I think from a leadership perspective,
it's important to self-examine essentially,
like take stock of where you are today.
There's a book my wife gifted me recently
where the title is basically,
What Got You Here Won't Get You There.
And I think that applies to lots of companies,
applies to startups, applies to product managers,
entire product management function, frankly,
that what got product management here won't get us there,
especially given the last 10 years of-
You weren't sleeping on the couch the night
she gave you that book.
What were you?
I'm just kidding.
But I do think the concept is really important
of taking stock and self-auditing,
understanding what got you here won't get you there
from a professional perspective.
People who have maybe five, 10 years,
15 years of experience have enough knowledge
under their belt.
They are relative experts in what they know how to do.
And so, but really deep diving understanding
what made you the way you are?
How did you get to here?
And what are you gonna need to change about yourself
or your business or your culture
in order to keep going further?
You need to understand who you are,
which is the phrase, know thyself.
Know yourself first.
You're gonna have to know yourself first
if you have any hope of growing.
I believe that's the effect of executives first chapter
as well as know thyself.
So, Wallace, that way to follow excellent leaders on that.
I hope that more visionaries do just that.
And that we learn to see these opportunities, audits.
For instance, but I love that you also start that
with a self-examination factor.
You said that three times throughout the show.
So I think that's something that all of us can look and say,
okay, what are we auditing about ourself?
Then turning to the opportunity to audit and optimize
the rest of the culture and organization.
And hopefully we have the diplomacy skills
and to pull that off when we go there as well.
Sam, this was an absolute pleasure.
We will have a landing page put together
with links to connect with Sam Vision Pros.
That way you can afterwards.
If you have any questions or comments
and you don't have the ability to go over there,
just drop it on the social media channel
you're tuning in from.
And we'll make sure to forward those.
In addition, if you would like to be on the show,
make sure to reach out, visionproslive.com
has a link to be able to apply as a guest for the show.
Sam, I'd love to have you back in the future.
This was awesome.
Do you have any final, anything else you want to give to us
before we go on our way?
Know yourself, be joyful, ruthless.
And that is the key to building an anti-fragile system.
Awesome, man.
I appreciate you.
Vision Pros, have a fantastic week.
We will see you on the next show.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.