Tell me about your vision. My vision is for high
performance leaders to find a sense of resilience
in the time of chaos. This is more chaotic. I've
been working in business my whole adult life.
This is maybe the most chaotic I've seen it.
And my vision is for executives, high performing
executives and entrepreneurs to find resilience
because. It is on us to help lead the world.
Tell me more about that. Yeah. So often when
I'm working, I do a lot of coaching. And when
I'm working with executives, they have this sense
of the chaos like it's somehow out there. What
I know from my own experience, what I know from
the research is that chaos is an inside job.
I do a lot of work with the work of Viktor Frankl,
who wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning.
Probably the most powerful line from that book
is that the single greatest freedom, the one
that can never be taken away from us, is the
freedom to choose our attitude in any given situation.
And I think for a lot of executives, they think
of the chaos as somehow out there, like it's
something else. It's the market. It's the current
administration. It's whatever they think it might
be. But in fact, chaos is an inside job. It's
something that we do. And so my vision is really.
How do we help high performing executives rewrite
their internal narrative, come to a place of
radical self -ownership and then build teams
that transform the world? Wow, that's awesome.
Thank you for sharing that. So tell me more,
how did you get started on this path? So my background
is in change management. I was an IT person.
I came up in the world of IT. I was an IT entrepreneur
for many years. And what I noticed was that we
were building the greatest systems in the world.
And it really came down to people and culture,
like whether they were actually going to accept
the work that we were doing. And that was my
transition into organizational development, organizational
change. And what I realized as I grew that practice
is that increasingly the limit was not even our
ability to sort of. communicate the right things,
get the right training out there and all that.
It was often executives at the top who had gotten
there by sort of scrapping and working their
way up the organizational chart, but then they
were experiencing scarcity and fear and just
an internal disruption. And so because I was
increasingly doing more and more coaching, this
just seemed like a really logical place to move
into figuring out how do we actually help executives
find a sense of internal calm so that they can
lead their teams, they can lead their companies,
lead the world and create great products and
bring great things out into the market. Thank
you for sharing that. What would you say at...
is your why or what you do uh ask me that again
what was what's your why or what you do what
gets you to bed every morning you bet so my personal
story is my why so i'm a person in long -term
recovery um and like a lot of people who struggled
with addiction i came to a place where my life
just crashed around me um and i had to figure
out how to rebuild my life and what i recognized
was that there was people who were willing to
love me and believe in me until I could do that
for myself. And I talk about this in my TEDx
talk called The Revolution of Interdependence.
And so my why is saying, how do we how do we
bend? human culture toward interdependence? How
do we realize that as great as we all may be
individually, we're far greater together? And
so it comes out of my own experience, but as
I've been able to bring it to clients, I've also
seen some really exciting outcomes, transformed
companies, better mergers. I mean, a lot of these
things that we think of as very technical outcomes
are often made more successful by internal transformation.
So my why is my own story. And what is your story?
Yeah. So I was the director of IT change management
for one of the largest consulting firms in the
world, 53 ,000 employees. And yet I was just
miserable. I was like, this can't be what it's
all supposed to be about. And so like a lot of
people with addiction issues and substance abuse
issues, I continued to... behave in ways that
were really harming me, harming the people around
me. And it wasn't until I had this moment of
crash, this complete breakdown, this bottom line
moment, this rock bottom moment, that I began
to say, okay, how can I rebuild? How can I pull
myself back together? My story is that a lot
of that happened around the time I was just beginning
my new business. I was beginning my recovery
journey right as COVID was breaking out. So not
only was I sort of finding a new way to be in
the world, but I was also responding to one of
the most chaotic events we've had in our world
over the last hundred years, which was the COVID
pandemic. Really saying, OK, you know, starting
with myself, what are the stories I'm telling
myself that are getting in the way? How can I
move into a place of radical self -ownership
and then how can I begin to build? Well, I call
it a life team, but it's simple. Like the best
way to think about it is if you walked into the
headquarters of Apple and Tim Cook was there
to get your coffee or take your coat, you'd say,
well, surely, Tim Cook, you've got something
better to do. And yet when we think of ourselves
as CEOs of our own lives, we think that we're
supposed to be able to do everything. The most
successful among us, including Steve Jobs, figured
out how to build a life team around them to help
them succeed. Yeah. So from that to where you
are today, your journey as a leader, as a speaker,
as a coach, how did all that come together? From
COVID, the lessons you learned, and now we're
here today. So my work early on as I was building
my business was largely transactional. Okay.
So you're doing, you know, I did a lot of, I've
actually done a number of mergers. So typically
big company X was buying small company Y and
they would bring in someone like me or me in
particular to say, okay, how do we create a single,
how do we merge into a single organization? And
I was very good at it. You know, transactionally,
I was I was successful in helping the dealmakers,
whether it was private equity or internal funding.
I was I was successful in helping them build
a single company out of that. But what I noticed
is that kind of culture always frayed at the
edges and a lot of leaders got burned out in
the process and ended up bailing altogether on
the work. And so, you know, my question was,
OK. Surely there's got to be a better way to
lead in the world. And it began really with first
some simple questions. I started, I was working
at one point with a private equity firm and I
started asking them, okay. what would make this
merger more successful? Because yeah, you're
achieving your ends, you're achieving your financial
goals, but clearly you're leaving money on the
table in part because people feel burned out
by the work. What would make that more successful?
And out of that came what has become this process
I call the resilience stack. I'm a former software
developer, so I think in terms of stacks and
developing ideas in terms of stacks, just like
software. And what came out of that was this
idea of the Resilience Act that said, OK, how
can we really work with leaders so that internal
transformation becomes the way that they lead
in the world, not leading from a place of authority
or leading because they have the right position
on the organizational chart, but leading because
they have done the hard work of internal transformation.
And just over time, I've I've been blessed to
do more and more of that kind of work. I still
do some very traditional organizational change
work and mergers and all that. But over time,
I've gotten I've been blessed to do more and
more of that work with executives and increasingly
now with entrepreneurs, because I think entrepreneurship
is the great hope for the future. Like when I
look at the chaos that's happening, not just
in America, but in the world generally. to me
entrepreneurs are the hope of the future entrepreneurs
are someone who who look at a problem and say
surely there's a better way to do that um and
so um increasingly i'm also working with a lot
more entrepreneurs and helping them think about
like what kinds of products and services will
make we'll leave a better world behind for sure
and i think it's it's needed it's it's needed
to a great extent i don't know what stat i was
reading but very recently there's a stat i was
looking at where the entrepreneurship, the amount
of revenue that small businesses were producing
and how many small businesses were there and
how many people were employed. I think most people
were employed by, I think, 80 % of them were
through small businesses in the last decade.
And I think the stats today is, I think, 40 %
to 60%. So which has strategically changed. where
now the big organizations are employing people
instead of small business owners. There's a lot
of change coming. There's a lot of change coming
through that. And you were talking about Steve
Jobs. In the book, I think this is, I mean, we're
getting into a nitty gritty of stuff, I think.
But Philippe mentioned in the book the way Steve
Jobs went about recruiting people. He would go
and find A players. And he will relentlessly
pursue those A players, right? To the point where
they're like, this guy wants this more than I
do. So he will join him. And then once he gets
enough of those A players in the team, those
A players only just want to work with A players.
So those A players that you have created, go
find other A players to work with because they
hate working with B, C, and D players. They're
not even in the calculations. That's how he created
that recruitment cycle of things where it's exponential
growth when he gets those kind of leaders together
in a place where you know you can do it, but
I know he can't. So I recruit that person to
do it for me. So that's amazing. Absolutely.
And one of the things Steve got very good at,
he wasn't good at this early in his career, but
particularly in the late 90s, one of the things
Steve really became exceptional at was not just
recruiting A players, but recruiting A players
who made up for his own weaknesses. And so one
of the reasons why Tim Cook was so exceptional
was because Tim Cook had this operational capacity.
Steve was a genius. but had a difficult time
shipping product. Tim Cook helped solve that
problem. Johnny Ive. had this best balance between
design and production. And so he could take Steve's
wild ideas and turn them into beautiful products
that could actually get produced and actually
shipped. And so that to me, that's a classic
example of what I mean by a life team or by interdependence
is when we are not just surrounding ourselves
with A players, but we're surrounding ourselves
with A players who help us be exceptional in
the world. They fill in the spaces that we don't
create. 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 going to get more and more fun. We'll have
more and more engagement as well. We'll invite
people to participate in the show. And thank
you for giving us your time and attention. Have
an excellent time building out your vision and
becoming a vision pro yourself.