Booking Celebrities: The New Storytellers With Bruce Merrin
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Booking celebrities for appearances is one of the most important functions of public relations and management teams because those appearances, more often than not, really do mean a lot to the people there to witness it. Just being in that space with a speaker who’s also a storyteller can take a person to so many worlds beyond themselves. Bruce Merrin is the Founder and Owner of the Celebrity Speakers & Entertainment Bureau. Joining John Livesay, he shares some of his most heartwarming stories on the job about both celebrity speakers and the people who got to see these celebrities in the flesh.
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Listen to the podcast here
Booking Celebrities: The New Storytellers With Bruce Merrin
Our guest is Bruce Merrin who is the Celebrity Speakers Bureau Founder which is then a top ten grossing firm in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In 1973, Bruce booked his PR client, actor Michael Landon, on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. Bruce credits Carson for inspiring the idea to launch a Celebrity Speakers Bureau. After the show at NBC in Burbank, Johnny Carson invited Michael Landon and Bruce to his Malibu home for dinner. When Carson suggested that he create Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers Bureau, Landon offered to be Bruce’s first client. That’s quite a wonderful story of origin. Bruce, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s an honor and a privilege.
I am fascinated not only to know the story of the origin of how your Celebrity Speakers Bureau started, but also to hear your personal story. You can take us back to your childhood, school, wherever you want that you knew you wanted to be in the entertainment business or the speaking business or PR. Tell us what your early childhood inspirations were.
First of all, I was born in Louisville. My first and big sports star was Muhammad Ali. When I met him, he got such a kick that I was born in Louisville and he was too. We moved to New York City. I lived there until I was graduating in the sixth grade. The important story that ties into my business is my dad was a big Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He took me to the Brooklyn Dodgers games often. One of my favorite players was Jackie Robinson who wore number 42. Fast forward, he became my second sports client that I ever represented. When we were living in New York, that was a real impactful thing for me that I became a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and that Jackie was my hero and became my client.
Booking Celebrities: You find out the true value of a person by how they treat people, how kind they are not only to people who are like them but to regular people.
After graduating sixth grade, we moved to Las Vegas where I am. My dad was the President of the Flamingo Hotel back then and this is where the entertainment side comes in. Dad, because he was the president of the Flamingo, he and my mom would take me to all the big headlining shows here in Vegas. Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, the way the entertainment side comes with a great story. When I was in the seventh grade, they took me to see Sammy Davis Jr., certainly one of the greatest performers of all time. I was a young junior high guy at the time. I had heard of Sammy Davis, but I had never seen him perform.
We went to the Sands Hotel, we sat in the front row and Sammy as his closing number does a song that was called Mr. Bojangles. Everybody knew that was his song. After the show was over, dad and mom took me to Sammy Davis Jr.’s dressing room and I got to meet him and I was impressed with Sammy. He’s one of the greatest entertainers that I’ve ever seen. We were driving back home and I was in the seventh grade then, I said to my mom and dad, “Mom and dad, I want to work in the entertainment industry.” At a young age, after seeing Sammy Davis Jr., thanks to Las Vegas and my mom and dad, those are what gave me that first spark of loving entertainment.
I imagine that being around that much talent and seeing it close-up gives you a different perspective that you get to see them as people and not somebody famous that doesn’t have challenges and things that other people have.
Thanks to my mom and dad, I did. I get to meet these people up close and on a friendly basis as well. The other Vegas story that I’ll share because this is something that affected my life as well. Brenda Lee, the great country music artist, had over 40 top ten Billboard hits. When she first headlined in Las Vegas at the Flamingo where my dad was president, she was only twelve years old. She was the youngest headliner ever to perform in Las Vegas. She was twelve and I was twelve. My dad said, “How would you like to come to the Flamingo pool? We’re having a twelve-year birthday party for Brenda. You can meet Brenda and then you’ll sit in the front row and watch her show.” She had a big hit. It was a number one hit. It was called Jambalaya. I was familiar with her because I would hear her song all the time on KRM Radio here in Vegas. Not only was I her date at the Flamingo pool party, but at the dinner show, I sat in the front row. I’m blessed at a young age. Thanks to my mom and dad, I got exposed to the entertainment industry and it was in my blood from a young age.
The fact you got invited to Johnny Carson’s Malibu home and he was such a private person, that shows that celebrities feel safe to be with you. I want to put that out to everyone reading this episode. In life, whether it’s your personal life or your career, if people feel safe to be themselves around you that you’re not going to judge them or be star struck or whatever the issue is, it’s the best compliment anyone can ever give is I feel safe to be myself. Certainly for me, if someone feels that they can be safe to be themselves with me, that’s what I try to create here as the host of the show. In my personal and business life, that is what’s jumping out at me about you is that all these people felt safe to be themselves in front of you.
[bctt tweet=”Be A Giver, Not A Taker. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s a kind comment to make and you’re right, because imagine I was a young guy at the time when I went to Johnny Carson’s home and Michael Landon was my first big celebrity client. What you’re saying is certainly correct but think this was 46 years that I was at Johnny Carson’s home. Think about how Johnny and Michael impacted my life? Your comment is accurate. The funny story is the next day after the dinner, Ed McMahon calls me up. He said, “Johnny tells me you’re starting a celebrity bureau. I’d like to be your third client.” He was. I’m blessed but that’s an insightful comment that you make because if people don’t have that trust, it never would’ve happened.
One of my big inspirations, I like to quote him quite often, it’s Dr. Wayne Dyer. One of his wonderful quotes is, “If you squeeze an orange, you always get orange juice. It doesn’t matter what time of day, middle of the room, in the corner.” He said, “What happens when you get squeezed and you’re under stress and you’re squeezed into a corner?” It was such a great metaphor. I know that you booked him with Steve Jobs and Apple. Would you share that story with us?
Having done this many years, I’ve been blessed to book about everybody in the world. Dr. Dyer, without question, would be in my top five of all time because I use the term. I already know you and you’d like this term as well, impact lives. I like to have the ability to impact people’s lives. One of the ways that I can do that is by booking clients like Dr. Wayne Dyer, and he was such an amazing speaker. Whenever I booked him, I’d always get a call or a text or some message from the client saying, “Dr. Dyer was the best speaker we’ve ever had. Bruce, you’re my hero.” Dr. Dyer was an amazing man. The lady that was the main executive that worked with Dr. Dyer lived in Miami.
I was in touch with her all the time, but Dr. Dyer truly, he’d be in my top five because of what he talks about and writes about in the books. He had a great quote that you mentioned. For me, he’s still alive. He was such an amazing guy and every time he went out and talked to audiences, he did impact their lives. I will say, of all the speakers that I booked them all. He would sell more books at his engagements than anybody because everybody wanted to get a copy of his book. I’m glad that you did mention Dr. Dyer. He truly was one of the greatest of all time. I love him and I do miss him.
The other thing that you talk about is the impact and there’s a whole philosophy of a good speaker can hold an audience’s attention. A great speaker might give them some takeaways that they can start using in their career, but an extraordinary speaker is someone who has an impact for months, if not years after their talk. I know for myself when I hear people echo back something I’ve said, the old way of selling is to Always Be Closing, the old ABC. I reframe that to ABK, which is Always Be Kind and to the way you talk to yourself and your coworkers and the people you’re working with, telling people to put ABK on a Post-It note. That one little takeaway, people will come up to me and say, “ABK,” and it stuck. It had an impact. That feels like you’re on purpose and doing what you’re supposed to be doing in your life. Do you have a story of a speaker you booked had that impact either there’s a story or when so-and-so spoke they said this, and people still talk about it?
Booking Celebrities: Instead of trying to sell or close with people, ask them this question: What is important to you?
Yeah, and I love what you’re saying about kindness because I believe you find out the true value of a person. If they’re at a hotel, how do they treat the valet? How do they treat the concierge? It’s not the people that are millionaires or billionaires. How did they treat regular people? I love what you’re saying about kind. The instance story that hit me was President Gerald Ford. I, as you know, have been lucky to book all of the past presidents, starting with President Reagan. Here in Nevada, we booked President Ford for a big event along with many other people. One of the people on the stage that same day was Bruce Jenner. We get a talk show about some stories there. President Ford was such an amazing gentleman. A gentleman is a word that I would think. He was on the stage in front of about 5,000 people. When he finished his talk, he got a well-deserved standing ovation with the past presidents.
The Secret Service is with them. As soon as he finished, they were storming the stage and they wanted to whisk them away to the limousine. President Ford holds his hand up to all the Secret Service and says, “Gentlemen, these nice people out here have some questions they’d like to ask me.” He was kind about that and he stayed for 30 extra minutes answering questions. He didn’t have to do that. He easily could’ve gotten into the limousine and left. In terms of kindness, that was a story that immediately made because he was such a kind person that he cared about all the people there in the audience that was there instead of leaving and getting in the limo. He wanted to answer some questions and make them happy. To me, that showed a lot of his character, which had nothing to do with politics.
One of the things I talk about is trying to find something you can do that’s unexpected. Luxury is defined as giving somebody something that they didn’t even know they needed. If you can do something that makes you irresistible and helps you stand out against other people, that extra bit staying for an extra 30 minutes, people want to know that it’s not another job to you. When you come and give a talk and then the more you can customize it and be available and sign books or take pictures or talk to people before you give a talk and customize it to them. I know when I spoke to Anthem Insurance after my talks and said, “How long have you worked in healthcare? I don’t, I took the time to learn your acronyms.” Some people said to me, “Our biggest challenge is, we’re asking people who are nurses and MBAs to sell.” I said, “Let’s ask them to become a storyteller instead of a salesperson.” “They’d like that.” Here’s the secret sauce, Bruce, that people can read, which is trying to do what you’re afforded. What else could I do to give extra value?
In this case with Anthem, I said to them, “What’s happening after I give my talk?” They go, “At the end of the day, we’re going to have an improv session and people from the audience are going to shout out objections they get from doctors and people are going to on stage role-playing.” I said, “What if I stayed and was helping them if they got stuck in the improv of what to say? I could whisper in their ear?” They went, “No one’s offered that. We didn’t even think to ask a speaker to do that.” That’s what made them select me versus someone else. They said, “I wish you could be in my ear all the time. You are The Pitch Whisperer.” It became that extra bond. There’s another example of letting people who are reading our blog think to themselves, “What can I do that would show part of my character and give extra value that’s not even anticipated or requested?”
It’s a beautiful story and I admire and respect what you do. When you mentioned storyteller, no matter who the speaker is, if they are a good storyteller, then they got me at hello. You can get people that are experts and then you can throw out all these different facts. If they’re a good storyteller, especially one of the things I tell to younger speakers who are starting to try to make it, I said, “At the beginning of your talk, if you can touch the hearts of the people in the audience, that goes a long way. If you can touch their hearts, what is your story that would touch their heart and have them at hello? Also, if you can make them laugh, that’s great too.” I love what you were mentioning about storytelling. It’s such an important aspect of a good speaker to be a good storyteller.
[bctt tweet=”When people feel safe to be themselves with you, they want to work with you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Stories make us memorable. A lot of clients that I work with, whether they’re architects or law firms or tech companies or healthcare companies, they usually get down to a final three where they have to present. Fill out all the paperwork and it’s between them and two other people, and they say, “We hope we get to go because we think whoever goes is memorable.” The problem is you can’t control the order you present like an interview for a job. I said, “Whoever tells the best story are people going to be memorable.” That’s what our brain is wired to remember a story. It’s coming up with things that touch the heart. One of the upcoming social media posts I’m going to be doing, because buildings and restaurants are being closed does not mean you have to close your heart to other people. That’s what good communicators and storytellers do is you take what’s going on and try to have people see it differently. That everything is closing. Don’t close your heart. Still have heart connections with people.
It goes back to the networking phrase, “Givers gain.” It’s not having your hand out saying, “What can you do for me? Instead, it’s what can I do for you?” Especially at this time. I love what you’re sharing. To me, that’s important. I believe the greatest gifts are free. What can you do for somebody else that doesn’t have to do with the money? The way you can touch your heart or impact your life, I applaud you. I’m giving you a sitting ovation.
One of the things that you have talked about, great soundbites and I love a good sound bite because it’s memorable, you tell people that hire you, whether it’s IBM or other Fortune 500 companies. Never hear the sound of one hand clapping at your event. Can you tell us a story of a speaker that you booked that took people from being bored to being entertained and how that all works?
It’s interesting when you’re talking like this, it’s what pops into your head because I’ve been doing this so long, I got to work with all of the astronauts starting from the beginning of the John Glenn’s of the world but Wally Schirra was one of the early astronauts to became famous and he was good that he wound up going on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. What impressed me with Wally Schirra is he was able to connect with his audience by inspiring and motivating them with experiences that he had in space, but yet taking it down to the earth and the people got what he was trying to say. As an astronaut, he was somebody that I enjoyed working with because he was a hero to everybody in the United States and around the world. He was able to speak on the same level with the people in the audience. He was one of my favorite speakers of all time because, while I worked with all the astronauts, he was one of the early ones, but it shows how good he was the fact that Walter Cronkite, the great newsman, said, “Wally, I want you on my broadcasts.”
I know I’ve had the privilege of being interviewed by Larry King. I did my homework. You can imagine and I read that he does not like small talk. I read his story of origin because I’m always fascinated to hear that. It turns out his big break was interviewing Frank Sinatra. At a time when Frank Sinatra was not doing interviews because his son had been kidnapped and the media was saying it was because of possible mafia connections. Larry has a great story about all of that. I brought that up to him before we went on camera and he said, “That was a great night.” When he asked me what makes a good story in my interview, I was able to say, “You have a great story how you got your big break interviewing Frank Sinatra. Would you mind telling that story and then we could break it down for everyone watching as to what the elements to that story?” The famous tennis pro Arthur Ashe said, “The key to success is confidence. The key to confidence is preparation.” If you’re going to interact with somebody iconic, whether it’s Walter Cronkite or Larry King, you best be prepared.
Booking Celebrities: Instead of trying to sell or close with people, ask them this question: What is important to you?
Larry is one of my favorite people of all time. I first met Larry when he was hosting his radio show in Florida. I was booking clients on his radio show and then when he went to CNN because of the nature of our public relations to business, I got to know him well and I did book them. I’d say maybe about ten times for speaking engagements. When you mentioned Larry, I love him and I was sad when he finally did go off CNN because I thought he did a great job. I love the story about Larry, and I’ll trace it back to Johnny Carson. One of the great things about Johnny Carson, he was a comic genius, but something that I heard from all the celebrities that went on his show when he did his interviews, all the celebrities would say, “Bruce, he is such a great listener. He didn’t always interrupt and he left the person who was his guest do the talking.” Larry had that same quality. Without mentioning names, some people who do shows are always interrupting and they always want to give their point of view and get in but Larry was a good listener. Whenever I book PR clients, they loved it because he was able to listen without always having to feel that he had to throw in his two cents. I love Larry King.
One of the things I work with salespeople on is improving their listening skills because if you ask someone a question and they don’t hear the question properly and they answer something, you feel like, “What is this? A politician trying to avoid the question?” Sometimes it is because you didn’t hear it. I often tell people, “Before they’re willing to listen to you, they have to know you care enough to listen to them.”
That’s a brilliant comment that you’re making. One of our clients is a gentleman named David Fabricius. He’s spoken in over 100 countries. He’s one of the best speakers that I’ve ever seen, but he has a tagline that he shares with audiences in the sales area that you can identify with and certainly people that are reading. That is instead of trying to sell them and close them, ask them this question, “What is most important to you?” Not selling them but try to find out from them what’s most important to them. When they answer that question, that can give you a good idea of how to then follow-up.
That helps people ask good questions when they’re interviewing for a job. When I was on television that was what they wanted to talk about. We have to sell ourselves, including getting a job and daytime TV. Help anybody who’s watching tell stories, bring your resume to life through storytelling. At the end of most interviews and when they’ve asked you hundreds of questions, they will typically say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people are saying, “When does my vacation start?” I ask this question, which is, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” You’re future pacing and you’re showing not telling that you’re someone who goes above and beyond the minimum job requirements. That’s the joy of well-crafted story question that makes people start to think of, “I got somebody hired from asking that question.”
Going back to your story about your astronaut speaker. People often will say to me, “I’m looking for your help in coming up with a story. I haven’t climbed Mount Everest. I haven’t been to the moon.” I opened my TEDx Talk, which is called Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life, with a story of being a lifeguard when I was in high school, having to save a young girl. The lesson I learned from that situation is to don’t panic and stay calm. How that helped me in my career when I got laid off and that’s another takeaway that people say, “Not only does that help me in my career, but it’s helped me with my life when things get off track.” With the entire world being disruptive, we want to be people who stay calm and don’t panic when the world is panicking. Buying everything off the shelves and all that other stuff that’s going on that is creating such. We don’t want to contribute to that. We want to be the voice of calm and confidence in our social circle and certainly when we’re able to be in front of an audience. I thought you might have a story of your career when you didn’t panic and stayed calm.
[bctt tweet=”The greatest gifts are free.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ve got to throw in one thing because when you mentioned the astronaut. We booked Buzz Aldrin many times and he was on the moon. He has the most spectacular videos and stills from the moon. When I do book Buzz Aldrin, I always get big thank you’s from everybody because they’re dazzling and they’re amazing. There’s one story that comes to mind. I had booked Magic Johnson for a big event in California and this was before we had iPhones and texting. He was late. He was over 45 minutes late. Number one, my face was getting red and I was getting nervous. I thought, “What if he doesn’t show up?” We didn’t have cell phones at this particular time. I couldn’t use a cell phone. What I decided to do was I took the microphone and for about fifteen minutes, I interacted with the audience and I told them some stories.
Thank goodness after I did my best to charm the people in the audience because for me, it was an emergency, it was a red alert. He wasn’t there. There were about 100 kids there that were going to get signed basketball. Instead of panicking and maybe going in the other direction, I decided to take charge, stay calm, and interact with the audience. They appreciated that I did that rather than making them keep looking at their watches and like, “Where is Magic Johnson?” I felt good about the fact that even though it was a mini crisis, for me because he was a big star. I’m a Lakers fan and one of the greatest Lakers fan of all time. Instead of panicking, I did that and thank goodness it ended up good.
That’s another example of your professionalism. In the entertainment business, they call it vamping, to keep it going because that dead time seems eternal if someone’s not up there filling the space with other questions and ideas. That’s as good a place as any to leave. Is there a quote or a book that you’d like to leave us with that you recommend, that you find inspirational or helpful?
I can’t think of a quote, but I will say, because when you said inspirational, the greatest stand-up comic and actor to me in showbiz was Robin Williams. I booked Robin Williams many times and Robin at the end of his speaking engagement, would come up to me and shake my hand and say, “Bruce, you’re the greatest.” It’s meaningful to me because Robin is my all-time hero in the comedy area. The fact Robin Williams would say to Bruce, “You’re the greatest,” that does stand out in my mind.
That shows that no matter how successful you are, it’s important to give people feedback to appreciate them. Do you want to tell people how else they can find you or follow you on social media?
Booking Celebrities: Instead of panicking and going in the other direction, you have to decide to take charge and stay calm in the face of adversity.
On Twitter, it is @CelebSpkrs4U. We have Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers on Facebook. On LinkedIn, they can follow me on Bruce Merrin and then on Instagram, it is @BruceMerrinSpeakers. Those are four different ways that they can follow me. You’re a delight and I admire and respect all that you’re doing in this area because you impact lives. That’s a plus.
Thank you, Bruce. That means a lot. I appreciate that.
Important Links
- Bruce Merrin
- Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life – John’s TEDx Talk
- @CelebSpkrs4U – Twitter
- Bruce Merrin’s Celebrity Speakers – Facebook
- Bruce Merrin – LinkedIn
- @BruceMerrinSpeakers – Instagram
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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How To Get Co-Workers To Like Each Other With Jason Treu
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Growing a company is not all about generating revenue. It also means honing your employees to work alongside each other to reach a growth goal. On today’s show, John Livesay interviews Jason Treu on the importance of having a harmonious workplace. Jason is the bestselling author of Social Wealth and a TEDx Talk speaker. He teaches on building relationships and shares some tips on how to get co-workers to like each other. He also talks about his free downloadable game called Cards Against Mundanity, a game which builds deep, meaningful relationships with anyone in minutes.
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Get Co-Workers To Like Each Other With Jason Treu
Our guest is Jason Treu, who’s an Executive Coach. He works with executives and entrepreneurs to maximize their leadership potential and performance. He also helps them build and execute their career blueprint. He’s the bestselling author of Social Wealth, a how-to guide on building extraordinary business relationships. He was featured at the TEDxWilmington where he debuted his breakthrough team-building game, Cards Against Mundanity. Finally, he’s the host of the podcast Executive Breakthroughs, bringing game-changing CEOs, entrepreneurs and experts that share their breakthroughs and breakdowns. Jason, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.
I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, high school, college, wherever you’d like that you could say, “This is when I started to figure out my path.”
It was back in high school and college when I had the foresight to start getting involved in organizations, volunteering and serving other people. Through that, I started to see the glimpses of when we can work together, we can do great things. Also, the opposite when we can’t, we can do little at all. It’s how do we get the best out of other people and then get the best out of us. I even thought to myself about all my teachers that I had and I loved. It was because they could reach me and bring the best out of me so I could get more engaged. Vice versa, you also give them a lot of energy and enthusiasm because of how you show up to their class. Early on, doing all those things manifested in me doing more and more things externally. Even though I’m an introvert, I found a lot of my energy was working with other people.
[bctt tweet=”The magic of building relationships is in groups, not one on one. ” via=”no”]
It’s good to figure that out. That’s a great takeaway. Just because you’re an introvert doesn’t mean you don’t have a career working with other people. It doesn’t mean you have to be in an office doing accounting or something and never talking to anybody.
A lot of times when you talk to introverts, and I’ve been doing this quite a bit, the biggest challenge and biggest gap is they want to have as many conversations as extroverts. It’s the path getting there that is exhausting for them so they hung out. I’ve done this over the last couple of years as a pet topic. If you could instantly have deep vulnerable conversations that mattered to you, would you have considerably more topics around that? Almost everyone said yes. What they don’t like is the small talk and the other things that’s required to get there so they are opt-out. It’s too much work for them mentally and how they’re built in order to get to that point. If they could be transported there, that would be a whole different subject. That’s an interesting thing that people leave out when they talk about the difference between introverts, senile, ambiverts and extroverts.
How did you come up with the title of your TEDx Talk? I know you talk about that every leader needs to show some vulnerability. If there’s anything I’ve learned from giving my own TEDx Talk, which happens to have been at the same location you did, is the need for vulnerability. It’s a different talk than being an inspirational motivational speaker.
A hundred percent, because you’re having to give a speech in a little short amount of time that you have to convey a significant amount of information, meaning entertainment, which is the hardest thing to do. I look at a 45 to 60-minute talk that is much easier because you have a lot of leeways and you can try a lot of things. That’s great but when you’re having a short talk, you can’t. You’re not practicing this and giving this 100 times. You’re doing it once or in front of a small number of people ahead of time. You don’t know what a bunch of strangers are going to think about what it is that you ended up saying.
When I started on the journey doing the talk, one of the things I was looking at doing was to stand out or do something different like a how-to speech. One of the challenges doing TED Talks is because there are so many of them, it’s hard to use it as a solely branding thing. I wanted to do it that it would force me to create something along with it and people could walk out of it doing something with it. That’s the other thing that’s frustrating me with TED Talks. They’re inspirational, motivational and they’re at a higher level or whatever it is they’re trying to convey. The problem is when you do stop listening to it, what do you do with the information? I feel that’s always a shortcoming. It’s the same thing at a conference or anything else you go to. How you make it real is the bottom line.
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: The thing about a group of people is that you have to get them all working together.
That helped me think through how was I going to make it actionable and then I look back to the biggest challenges. My clients, my friends or anyone that I was talking and coming in contact with was about their ability to get the most out of the people that were working around them. Either they were managing their coworkers or managing up, it didn’t matter. I felt that was the problem to tackle because that’s where they felt most out of control. It pretty much controlled a lot of their success, existence, happiness and fulfillment, but they were unsure of how to do it on a consistent basis and how to build the relationships with people, individuals, groups and external however you want them to gather and make that work.
The title of your TEDx Talk, How to Get Coworkers to Like Each Other, is the surprise there because it would be, “How do I get coworkers to like me,” or, “How do I get along with coworkers?” You’ve got an interesting and unique twist here of not trying to get them to necessarily like or get along with me because we’ve had a lot of content on, “How do I get along with somebody I don’t like.” Yours is more focused on, “How do I get coworkers to like each other?” Speak on what’s one of the big takeaways from your TEDx Talk on that.
The thing about a group of people is, you have to get them all working together. At the end of the day, we’re dependent on groups. We talked about this before. You have a podcast team behind your podcast. Getting them to all work together and bought in, thinking strategically, adding in ideas can help you or make your show significantly better. Their relationships with each other are hugely dependent on your success. When you can facilitate that, it’s the key. If you’re with a group of people, which typically happens, or a team working in a company of any size, there are usually some people who get along and some people don’t. You never get to be in that place where you’ve created something great.
I always like to tell people, “Think about a time in your life when you accomplished something that was significant and you were with a group of people that you felt invincible around, either personally or professionally. It happened to all of us at least once in something that we had done. Even if it’s a brief flash, it could even be like a school sports team or something as small as that. Not even having to do with work. If you could recreate that feeling, emotion, communication and success into every single team you are on, imagine what success that would be in your life and what it could do for you.” I thought to myself, “That’s one of the holy grails that people struggle with.” It’s not your relationship with other people. You could have great relationships with all the people you work and interact with but if they don’t have it with each other, you end up having to do significant work. You’ll never be able to do the things that you could do if they had them independent of you.
That leads to what is something that leaders can do because they all get stuck and maybe even hit rock bottom. I wrote an article about going from Rock Bottom to Revenue Rockstar when I got laid off. That’s what my TEDx Talk is all about, how do we pick ourselves back up? You talk about that in terms of uncovering our blind spots
[bctt tweet=”What is your biggest blessing in disguise? ” via=”no”]
One of the things I’ve found when I’m doing any work with a group of people or anything is it comes down to your level of self-awareness. When I’m doing conflict resolution work with people, to take that as an example, you have to stem this trust and build trust. The challenge comes in when you can see your blind spots and the challenges that you have. It’s hard to come to the table and be vulnerable and put them out because that’s what other people see in you, but you can’t see yourself. When you can identify and communicate that to other people, they know that change is real and they know that you’re committed to it, but that’s the problem. We can’t see our own blind spots the way our brain is organized for survival patterns and other things when we’re able to have a deeper conversation.
That becomes the problem because those are the things that hold us back the most. That’s the problem with almost every leader. The data is 95% of people think they’re self-aware but only 10% to 15% are. You can look at all studies and it’s pretty close to that. That’s the problem. The higher you get, the more you overestimate your abilities because you don’t have people around you that are willing to tell you the hard truth because of risks and other things. You never get to the point where you’re constantly iterating and getting better and hearing the truth. We all need to be able to do that. The thing is, you have to look inside yourself and you need to get help from the outside in order to figure that out because we can’t see that. When you can, you can take a massive leap forward because a lot of this stuff has to do with past patterns, things that you grew up on and the blueprint of you seeing the world.
Self-awareness to me is not about all the things I’m not doing well. A lot of that is pattern recognition. Recognizing the things that you’ve been doing that may, in a lot of instances, have helped you. I’ll work with salespeople that are good at dealing with objections because they don’t hear them. They don’t hear no; they hear yes. The problem is when you start being successful. When that happens, you can’t do that in managing people. You become horrible at it and you’re unable to get the best out of other people because you’re not listening to them. You’re trying to direct them to the answers that you think they want or you believe they do.
A lot of that’s illuminating those things for people and sharing things. Perhaps you grew up in a family of six people and you would yell over your siblings to get your parents’ attention. You grew up early on valuing and knowing that listening was not a good thing because if you listened, you would never get hurt and nothing ever would happen. You used to talk over other people. The problem is in business, if you stop listening and asking questions, the higher up you go in, the more successful you want to be. That’s a significant blind spot but it’s not a thing you did on purposely. It’s something you learned because you had to.
Let’s talk about how that comes to life with this free game that you created for everybody. How’d you come up with the name, Cards Against Mundanity?
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: Self-awareness is about recognizing the things that you’ve been doing that may, in a lot of instances, have helped you.
I did a little twist on Cards Against Humanity and I talked to a lot of people. One of the things out of my TED Talk was I wanted to figure out a way to help people build a high level of trust and to get deep conversations with people to move it forward. Essentially, take a complete stranger and be able to have a conversation that you could only have with the closest people in your lives and feel comfortable doing it. I found this research by Professor Arthur Aron. I was looking at a New York Times article and I read about a woman falling in love and going to a bar, asking a guy 36 questions and they end up getting married.
I was like, “That’s pretty interesting.” She had asked him many questions in a bar? I clicked on the study and essentially what he did was he asked vulnerable questions and have complete strangers do it. Over the course of 45 minutes, what happened is 30% of the people created the closest relationship in their lives. To me, it is pretty incredible. To think that that would be possible for someone to do that. They replicated this study so many times with different people and geographies that I wondered if it would work in a group.
The first time I ended up doing it, I took his questions and got together people at a restaurant on a Saturday night and had someone else organize it. I didn’t do it. I found an acquaintance of mine and I asked them to bring people that I didn’t know on Facebook or LinkedIn. I asked the first twelve questions he had. I figured that for an hour I test it out and see what’s going to happen. After an hour, the people were sharing things that I thought it was like in a reality TV show. I’m watching these things and you think to yourself, “I can’t believe these people are sharing all these things with other people.” Some of these people knew each other, but some of these people did not. They didn’t know me at all. I wanted to leave and I said, “Thanks for showing up.” People grabbed me and I couldn’t go. I joke at people who are saying, if I ever had to go to prison, knock on wood or be arrested, I would know how it feels because I couldn’t leave. They wanted to know what the other 24 questions were.
I sat there for three hours and I went through these things. They were getting more excited as you were going along. I did this two more times to see if it was real. At that point, I realized that the magic of how you build great relationships isn’t necessarily one-on-one, it’s in groups. Through groups, the sharing is insulated and you’re protected because if you share it with anyone outside of it, all these people know. It stops you from doing it because you’ll be a pariah. You find connections with at least a couple of people who have similar experiences and emotional experiences about things when you answer the same question. That’s the key. They have to be deep questions such as, “What’s the most important lesson you learned in the last year? Tell me about the person you’d like to thank who helped you become the person you are. Tell me about your biggest blessing in disguise.” When you start to get to that with a group of people, that’s where the magic starts. You can break the trust curve and the relationship-building curve.
Also, “What is your biggest blessing in disguise?” Not your biggest blessing, but for me, what makes that question interesting is because it’s in disguise. When it’s in disguise, people can’t go to the cliché answers like, “The biggest blessing is getting married,” “My kid,” or whatever they might say. If they have to think about what is it that’s in disguise where they’re like, “Getting laid off,” it doesn’t look like a big blessing, but it turns out like it did become a blessing. I’m fascinated by this whole concept. One of the connection questions you haven’t heard, “If you could pick a year of your life to do over, what would it be and why?” I bet people have a lot to say about that.
[bctt tweet=”A big challenge among introverts is having as many conversations as extroverts. ” via=”no”]
People say it honestly. The other thing I’ll have a small percentage of people say, “I wouldn’t do anything over because I got here the way I am.”
That’s a good insight too.
You’ll see a small percentage of people that will mention and say something like that. These can be taken in many different ways with people that every group organically goes in a different direction with it. The other thing that happens too, which is pretty magical and which I didn’t realize until I started doing this in large groups is if you do it in a room with hundreds of people or you could dive in for thousands, but close to that is everyone treats everyone like they’re in their groups. The magic in a group like that is they extend it everywhere because they’re in that moment and they know everyone else did it and they want to talk to them so they treat everyone differently. There’s a complete mind shift in a group when you do this. When you look at good speakers, they do similar type things to this in the entire group. They take variations of this and that’s what they do to build more trust, rapport, likability and other things with other people and great salespeople too.
The best salespeople do this in a different form. In essence, what it does is it allows people to see how you do that at the highest level. Once you get there, like any other tool, you can modify and use it and make your own strategies and implement it the way that works for you. You can use it in a multitude of stuff where you could ask a couple of questions. You can do it in a group, use it for hiring and onboarding. Fifty thousand applications building rapport and sales engagements. I call it like a Swiss Army knife. There’s a place I start off with. At the end of the day, building trust, relationships, teamwork, communication and all these things that he does exceptionally well are the foundation points of every single thing we do in our business and personal lives.
The core to this is psychological safety that people feel they’re not going to be judged, won’t be shared out of the group if they share something confidential and you set that criteria up so everybody has an agreement on the matter.
Building Meaningful Work Relationships: Networking per se is not just the people you’re meeting, it’s the people behind them. The indirect network is really the goal and how successfully you can mine that.
You do, and there’s also a group implicit thing. I’ve gone back with people and I’ve never heard it happen. I follow up with people all the time because the group insinuates it. If you do it one-on-one and you share something, you don’t know whether you get a buy in or not and you don’t know the rest of what was said. If you’re getting 5, 6, 7 people and they’ve all heard it, you have a lot harder time explaining why you shared something in confidence. All those people will self-police because you’ll be so scared of the ramifications for doing that in a group like that. There are some cases that someone could do it somewhere, but we’re talking about the minuscule chance of all the people I’d done it and gone back and doing it right.
I’ve counted at least 25,000 people who have done this so far. I would say probably a little estimate. It’s hard for me to track everyone, but I’ve never gone back and asked for all the groups of people and speaking where it ever occurs. Physiological safety is absolutely a critical thing and people don’t understand the value of that. That’s the higher-level place where magic has gone, especially in business. That’s where the great ideas, innovations and breakthroughs start to happen. You can co-create that with other people in the group or team or organization.
In your book, Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships, you talk about something called your Social Wealth GPS. We all know what a GPS is in terms of getting us from point A to point B. We all know about wealth, money and building tips but you’re talking about something different here. You’re talking about social wealth. What’s a social wealth GPS we can use?
It’s your relationship capital. At the end of the day, it is about having a group of people and networking per se. It’s not only the people you’re meeting, but it’s also the people behind them. It is an indirect network. It’s the goal and how successfully you can mine that is pretty significant. It’s hard too. These are things that are a lifelong thing that you have to put in but at the end of the day, the capital that you have with other people is the most valuable form of capital in the world. They’ll do anything for you and vice versa.
When you can create those relationships that aren’t like a bank account in terms of give and take, but in terms of unlimited resources either way, that’s where you can create a massive level of social capital both professionally and personally. It’s something that once you understand how it works, you can do it successfully. The problem when engaging with people is you don’t know where you’re going to find them and you don’t know whether you’re going to find a giver, a matcher or a taker, like Adam Grant mentions, in any engagement that you have with someone. You have to operate the boundaries and know how to give without attachments. Once you start understanding a blueprint of all this stuff, it’s much easier to operate and to build those types of relationships that you ultimately want and have usually in short supply. You can have them in a significant way. You only have to understand how to do it.
[bctt tweet=”Being curious and learning is what life’s all about. ” via=”no”]
That’s one of my favorite parts about hosting this podcast. It’s the relationships I get to start and create with my guests. I’m sure you have examples and stories yourself of either being a guest on the show or having someone on your podcast and how that’s led to multiple things because you’re in a situation where you’ve got some social wealth starting where you’re saying, “How else can I help you and how else can you help me?” You’re already helping them by having them on your show or whatever. They tend to say, “Who else can I introduce you to as a guest?” or whatever it is that you need at that particular moment.
As a keynote speaker, people will often say to me, “You were great. Do you have any other speakers you can recommend?” There are all kinds of ways that people can give back to you once they have you on their radar, have a rapport with you and feel comfortable about knowing who you are and what you do to help people. They go, “This team could use the card game because you’re having some trouble with the people not getting along and I know the guy.” That’s an example of that coming to life.
This is a long-range thing when you’re building this too. The short-term opportunities is for you all the time but if you keep doing it, partly the greatness is you don’t know who you’re going to need when they need them and you don’t know what someone is going to do 5, 10 15, 20 years from now, especially in a world of social networking. For the first time in the history of doing anything, you can track people because before, you could never do that unless you kept in touch with them. You would never know. If you lived in San Francisco and someone lived in New York City, how would you keep track of them? Before the advent of social, you couldn’t.
Networking, business relationships, and relationships in general, we’re entering a new phase where having a lot of them is more important because you’re going to ebb and flow in your life. You will have something that’s at least somewhat of a warm lead or relationships or at least it’s not completely cold like an introduction where you don’t know anyone. There are a lot of things I don’t think we don’t fully understand because we haven’t gone through a full cycle of someone’s life where they’ve had access to this from start to finish or at least from early adulthood onwards.
Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships By Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network
Before I let you go, I want to ask you about your comment that curiosity is a requirement for long-term success and not short-term success. Can you give us the story around that?
One of the things I found in life is when you’re curious, you start asking questions. One of the things I saw was when I was speaking at a huge HR conference for the State of Maryland, one of the guests there was Buck Showalter who used to be the manager for the Baltimore Orioles when they were better. One of the things that he said that helped him manage, be successful, stay in Major League Baseball and do the things he did was he kept asking questions from people. He was curious on how things had to work.
When he went to Baltimore as a manager and the team wasn’t doing well, he brought them into the corporate office and showed them the ticket sales, walked in and said, “Everything that you do is connected. These people have to eat and feed their families. The phones aren’t ringing. If you don’t play on the field well and when you don’t care, look what happens to this as an entity. You have a responsibility to think bigger.” That’s because he got curious and he always talked about how he asked questions to other people in his managers, leaders and team before he jumped to a lot of conclusions.
When he was going to go recruit baseball players, he would go and meet their parents, their family and ask questions to other people about their character and other things even before the baseball questions came along. He said, “Today’s world of people is obsessed with analytics and everything else.” The difference isn’t there anymore. The difference is in the people, relationships and getting the most out of them and being curious. That’s something that can serve us all well. It’s consistently be curious and learn because that’s what life is all about.
What a great way to end. Jason, let people know how they can find you and your wonderful game card.
You can go on a website. It’s JasonTreu.com. You can get the cards at CardsAgainstMundanity.com and my books on Amazon and through the website. Coaching, teamwork, team building services and other things are on the website too.
You’ve inspired us to figure out new questions to ask and new ways to stay curious.
Thanks.
Important Links
- Jason Treu
- How to Get Coworkers to Like Each Other – Jason’s TEDx Talk
- Social Wealth
- Cards Against Mundanity
- Executive Breakthroughs – Jason’s Podcast
- TEDx Talk – John Livesay TEDx Talk
- Rock Bottom to Revenue Rockstar – John Livesay Article
- New York Times – Article
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Breakthrough Reinvented: Bridging The Gap Between Technology And Innovation With Sterling Hawkins
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
History has proven time and time again that the breakthrough of yesterday simply becomes a necessity of today. As people of the present, the responsibility of reinventing and reimagining the modern age falls to us. Internationally-recognized thought leader and top-rated keynote speaker on innovation, Sterling Hawkins, joins John Livesay in this episode and to share how he got started in the industry in a non-traditional way. Sterling explains the struggles of coming in blind in the industry, and provides some tips and strategies on what to prepare and focus on for you to gain firm ground. He discusses the different aspects needed to be considered in breaking through and how household companies overcame the challenges in their industries.
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Listen to the podcast here
Breakthrough Reinvented: Bridging The Gap Between Technology And Innovation With Sterling Hawkins
Our guest in this episode is Sterling Hawkins, who is an expert at innovation specifically in the retail space. He said, “Your breakthrough potential is connected to your tolerance for risk and that change is happening at such a pace that we don’t know how to cope with it.” He’s got some insights into how he personally copes with it. Finally, he said that discomfort is needed for innovation.
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Our guest is Sterling Hawkins who is out to break the status quo to create what’s possible for humanity in our time. He spent his career igniting new views and inspiring people to act on them. His journey has been nontraditional right from the beginning. Sterling grew up a fifth-generation retailer, having to master the intersection of human behavior and technology under extreme competition. In 2004, Sterling cofounded, launched and sold his first tech company, Convena, where he developed innovative approaches to beat the competition, handle high growth, and achieve performance no matter the obstacles.
He went on to be involved with the launch, growth or investment in over 50 companies. Sterling reviews over 1,000 new technology companies every year, further refining the keys to realizing breakthrough innovation. He gives back that experience as a mentor to leading entrepreneurs working through financial growth. He is the Founder of CART, which is a platform to drive the adoption of emerging technologies of Fortune 500 companies. He speaks and runs workshops around the world for Samsung and many other companies, including the United Nations. Welcome to the show, Sterling.
Thanks, John. It’s great to be with you.
I always like to ask my guests to tell their story of origin. We hinted at it with you being a fifth-generation retailer but take us back as far as childhood or school where you started to say, “I want to do something unique and nontraditional.”
I grew up in my family supermarket. I remember being 5, 6, 7 years old passing out cookies to people who were waiting in line for things and grabbing whatever we wanted to eat when we were kids. The selection is endless, especially the child. There was this defining moment for me at fifteen. I didn’t enjoy the life of a supermarket kid. My dad says to me, “You’re going to work here and we’re going to start you out at night crew this summer.” I’m like, “We don’t just get free food all the time and hang out whenever I want?” It’s a real awakening for me like, “This is work and this is how retail operates.” Looking back on it, it’s such a tremendous experience to be exposed to that level of things where I was doing everything from sweeping and mopping the floors to stocking the shelves. I worked my way up through managing most of the departments, which was a blast. It informs everything that I’m doing now because it was people-oriented.
You had that experience and your first real-life job was getting into marketing and branding, right?
[bctt tweet=”It’s very difficult to start a company without a lot of experience. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wouldn’t recommend this to people but my first “job” was I started a company with my dad. It was called Convena and we said, “We’ve got a store to test things. Let’s develop some software and create a company that can deliver a personalized message to everybody shopping with us.” We built it together. We launched it in our family store. Long story short, we sold it to a group in the Bay Area, which brought me out to California and this is probably 2005 or so. It was quite a journey. We got acquired by a much larger company that went on to raise $550 million.
What’s one thing that you wouldn’t recommend doing? Is it because it was with your dad?
No. It’s difficult to start a company without a lot of experience. I tell people with entrepreneurship in general, which I’ve done a lot of. For a lot of people, I wouldn’t wish it on them because it is hard to get up every morning, making the bread, getting it done, selling it and marketing it. In fact, I’ve never had a real job in my life. You’re a jack of all trades and you get it at a point where you’ve got some support and help and you’re scaling things. You’ve got to be ready for that because there’s the sexy allure of the “entrepreneur” now. It is a phenomenal opportunity to create something new in the world. You just got to enter into something like that, acknowledging the risks you’re taking on and which you can step into.
I once heard somebody say, “You have a choice. You can work for somebody else for 40 hours a week or yourself for 80.” You’re also involved with this Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Association. People would love to learn what’s going on in that world. When I was speaking at Coca-Cola, they were talking about using virtual reality to allow people to imagine what the coke machine would look like before it got installed in their store. That’s the baby steps of it. What do you see happening in that world?
We’re looking at over 1,000 new tech companies every single year and virtual and augmented reality is a major part of that. It’s one of these situations where the sky’s the limit and there are some great applications of VR but they’re niche. For example, a store owner being able to see a store stand or a new coke machine and what it looks like if you were to buy it. There’s a lot of gaming and I don’t think it’s reached quite that critical mass to get it in the market. It’s a lot of what I talked about, which is the turning points of innovation or the difference between the linear trajectory that most of us are on and most technologies start on and without exponentially possible.
Waze is now sending notifications like, “You’re within three miles of Domino’s Pizza. Here’s a coupon.” Google and Coca-Cola have partnered up so while you’re in the grocery store, they can tell you’re walking by the display in a grocery store and send you a coupon. That is all part of retailing, isn’t it?
That’s right. We live in a day and age now where technology is accessible to many people and it’s changing quickly that it becomes a new normal for us. A good example of that and most people are familiar with this. There used to be this massive industry called the taxi industry. The whole generation wouldn’t think twice about calling a cab. That’s what you would do in New York and other cities when you want to get somewhere without a car. They’ve spent a lot of years improving the taxi industry. They are going to take credit cards and then they’re going to improve the gas mileage and then they’re going to improve where taxis are around the city, state or wherever they are. They weren’t thinking about what’s exponentially possible and then along comes Uber. Whenever I was flying to a new city and there’s not an Uber there, I’m confused about what I’m supposed to do.
Breakthrough Strategies: It is a phenomenal opportunity to create something new in the world. Acknowledge the risks you’re taking on and which you can step into.
It’s like taking you back in time with a rotary phone or something. You’re like, “What’s a taxi stand?”
I’m like, “There’s no Uber in the city, how do you get to the hotel?” Within five years, it has become this new normal for most of us. That’s the world that we live in now where a technology that launched several years ago is almost expected by everybody a couple of years later.
We’re the perfect person to ask this question about because we’re both living in Los Angeles. You watch what’s happening when you get off the plane. LA was probably one of the first cities to have Uber. You had a choice as a passenger getting off a plane. You could go down the stairs and wait in line to get a cab the traditional way, or you could go upstairs like you were checking back in and wait with a group of people in mass ordering Uber and Lyft. It was a bunch of traffic but it was still cheaper than the cab downstairs. It probably would take you longer than a cab would because they weren’t all lined up and people had to get there so you had to wait up.
Convenience and price saving are worth having to wait longer than it would be faster just hopping in a cab. Now, the game has changed again. Everyone has to take a shuttle or walk a mile into a location with your luggage. That’s the last thing you want to do in the rain and the line for the shuttle is worse than any taxi line ever was. You get there and you have a choice. You can order the Uber on your phone while you get there and they give you a code or you wait and you get in the line to get a cab. I got to the Uber and I said to him, “Why would anyone ever take a cab?” Because there’s no longer a savings of time. The whole thing is even disrupted yet again.
Or money in a lot of cases.
Uber is still cheaper so I don’t understand why somebody would unless you didn’t want to deal with your phone. To your point, it keeps changing and it goes, “Eventually, in a few years, we’re going to build some way to get you here faster than the shuttles.” In the meantime, we’re trying to eliminate the traffic so this concept of how we move people and how we move product whether it’s an Amazon drone delivering your food to you now. Overnight is not fast enough anymore.
“I need it in an hour or 30 minutes.”
[bctt tweet=”Your breakthrough potential is equivalent to the amount that you put on the line. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Domino’s Pizza is doing this. They are using artificial intelligence to anticipate your pizza order to try and shave 30 seconds off the delivery time. People’s expectations keep going up and up. Let’s talk about what you’re doing at the Center for Advancing Retail and Technology or CART. Tell us what it does and what trends you see coming.
CART operates on this premise of most businesses, especially legacy businesses that have been around for 20, 30, 50, 100 years, they’re good at what they do. They’re good at getting toothpaste on the shelf or getting gasoline to the stations then into your car. They’re optimized for that and not much else. They’re condemned in a lot of ways to this linear trajectory of, “How can I fix, adjust and change something that I already have?” There’s nothing wrong with that. We have to do that as humans and as business people especially. The risk is the same thing that happened to the taxi industry where somebody comes in from the left-field and totally rethinks, reframes or solves a problem that you thought was cutting the cost of doing business.
What’s happening is if you overlay on that linear growth that we’re on, technology is on this exponential growth curve. There’s this new normal pace of change increasing every single day. The only way to future proof your business is to develop a culture, a group of people that can create and embrace change at a faster rate. CART is designed to do exactly that with a lot of the companies that we work with. We not only can work with them to accelerate the pace at which they make decisions and will do it by moving them through transactions, discussions and processes. They get to decisions about eleven times faster than they do otherwise but we also bring them new technology and tools that step them further into that innovation gap and gives them a chance to get a piece of what might be exponential growth playing with a virtual reality implementation or an autonomous vehicle. Maybe even 3D printed food or things. As they can connect to some of those technologies and they can do it faster, it positions them much better for the future.
“Because you need to be more agile than ever,” is what I’m hearing. With technology changing fast, you have to make faster decisions. How do you de-risk someone’s fears of making the wrong decision by making a fast decision? That’s traditional thinking. Don’t rush into any decisions and yet, you don’t hold on to that model in your head anymore if the technology is changing fast. Am I painting the picture of the gap accurately that you’re solving?
You are. What’s fascinating to me is that humans, you and I, are not built for that kind of change. Our biology, our feeling and even our thinking are tuned towards tomorrow being a lot like now. We feel a lot of anxiousness or anxiety or fear when it comes to presenting us or confronting us with something new, especially if it’s going to potentially, dramatically transform something or it’s going to cost a lot of money. The key with our clients and for everybody is your breakthrough potential is equivalent to the amount that you put on the line. If you put a little bit on the line, there will be a little benefit. If you put a lot on the line, it could be much more beneficial. To your point, you’ve got to balance those two things to say, “We’ve got enough skin in the game to make a small enough decision that if we were to lose it, we don’t lose everything. At the same time, it’s meaningful enough and inspiring enough that we’re going to work towards the potential breakthrough that this thing is going to bring.”
Do you have a story of one of your clients you’ve worked with at CART?
There are many stories. It’s funny because innovation, like entrepreneurship, can be very sexy especially as a consumer innovation, “I want the latest virtual reality goggles, watches and everything else.” It’s easy to do at an individual level, especially when you pay $100 to get one of these cool devices. For a company which is one of the biggest food manufacturers in the world, it’s a little bit different for them because they’ve been around for more than 100 years, at least some of their subsidiaries. They’ve gotten good at what they’ve done. To talk about implementing new technology, selling their products in a different way or getting them to the consumer in a different way. It totally contradicts because what they’ve always done has worked. I was working with them and we were looking at some social media tools, especially TikTok. Have you done a TikTok yet, John?
Breakthrough Strategies: Technology that was released five years ago has become normal and expected by the people of today.
I’m familiar with it, but there should be an age limit. There are certain clothes I shouldn’t wear and I should not be on TikTok. Let the kids have that one thing, but I know what it is. It’s going to be the next Instagram.
It’s taking over. Older generations are on it and companies are putting a lot of money into it. We’re having this discussion about this brand stepping into doing a campaign on the platform. They do some other things on social media. When you’re talking about it as possibilities like, “We could do this. We could do that. We could do something else,” it’s exciting and inspiring. There’s a lot of conversation in the room. As soon as you get to that critical point where you say, “Of all those possibilities, let’s pick one. Let’s pick a possibility and let’s start framing up the contract for what that is going to look like.” At that point, you’ve got to put something on the line. In their case, it was a little bit of money. It’s not bad and it’s not wrong. It just becomes a little more serious when you sign on the dotted line to say, “We’re going to commit to doing this.” That’s the only way to realize new possibilities, which is to put yourself on the line.
Would you say that your breakthrough potential is connected to your risk tolerance then? Would that be accurate?
Yeah.
One of the things that you touched on is we’re not built to take on this much constant change. It’s stressful on our bodies and our own brains. The growth and change at an exponential rate that’s never been experienced before can take a real toll on people’s mental health, stamina and physical health. You are someone who is working on your own self-development and growth. You’re teaching yoga. Can you share the importance of that as someone who’s traveling the world speaking and the stamina that’s required for that at any age? You had literally, from my observation, Sterling and why I respect you so much, is you’re walking your talk. You’re modeling for people how to embrace this disruption and constant innovation and still stay physically centered and calm. Any thoughts on that?
It looks better than it feels on a day-to-day basis. It does take a significant amount of effort, will and everything else. To some degree, discomfort is necessary for any innovation. For myself and for people, we can grow from the level of discomfort. I might be worried about a $500 decision but if I get comfortable there, then maybe I can stretch it and make a $5,000 decision a couple of weeks from now. What we’re doing is we’re acclimating to more levels of stress and faster change. Biologically, what’s happening is the cortisol that gets into our blood when we get nervous, anxious, confronted or excited in some shape or form is it starts to go away as you acclimate to these levels of endurance or performance.
What I try to do is continually push that edge of what I can acclimate my body and myself to be comfortable with. Inevitably, it’s going to push me right up against things where I’m uncomfortable. I do these crazy things like skydiving, shark diving and any physical activities where I’ll get confronted. By choosing that discomfort, being able to step into it and grow from it gives me the capacity to not only do all the things that I’m doing now but expand the difference that I can make in the world. I’m not special. It’s the human capacity that everybody’s got the ability to do.
[bctt tweet=”Innovation, like entrepreneurship, can be very sexy. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
This concept of, “As soon as I get into a comfort zone, I’ll be comfortable,” and it is counterintuitive but that is not the case. Your comfort zone is like being in a velvet rut. You get depressed because you’re not stretching and challenging yourself to tolerate something new. Students who think, “As soon as I get out of school, I never have to read another book or learn anything new,” are in for a rude awakening. You’ve posted on Twitter and things that you’ve spoken at the Technology Innovation Gap and spoken with leaders of a supermarket called Hy-Vee.
It’s a great group of people out in Des Moines, Iowa.
Can you share what’s going on in that huge supermarket world? What gaps are there between technology and innovation that was going on at that event?
I can’t share specifically. Supermarkets are one of these legacy businesses in often cases that have gotten good at sourcing products, distributing them out to their stores and creating decent experiences to shop those stores. What they’re confronting is, almost cliché at this point, Amazon and everybody that are selling things online as well as with these different delivery mechanisms whether it’s drone delivery, autonomous vehicles or anything else. Retail, especially when a lot of industries are under this huge pressure, Hy-Vee included reinventing the experience, what the store means, and how to satisfy the consumer’s wants and needs. One of my favorite parts about retail is it’s at the heart of most societies, satisfying our wants and needs, feeding us, getting us clothes and everything else and reveals part of most everything.
Do you remember the time when you could not pump your own gas?
I do remember that.
When they started asking people to do self-service or full service and you have to pay more, people were mortified. They’re like, “What? I’m paying someone to pump my own gas so I don’t have to get smelly gasoline on my hands.” We’re starting to see that in grocery stores where they’re not incentivized. What I find fascinating is you’re not saving any money by bagging your own groceries. Supposedly, it saves you time if you do it faster is the reason to do it but I’m thinking to myself, “There’s no financial incentive like there was with gasoline.” It’s like, “Help us save overhead and bag your own groceries and bring your own bags, by the way, too.” “Why don’t you pick up lettuce while you’re at it?”
Breakthrough Strategies: A human’s biology, thinking, and feelings are tuned towards tomorrow being a lot like today. That’s why we get anxiety and fear when there’s something new.
It’s a notoriously low margin business, especially supermarket retail. As they get crunched by more people buying some of their products online, they’re looking for, “Where can I save pennies?” That leaves us bagging our own stuff in a lot of cases.
What do you think about Amazon’s test? There are still a lot of hotels. You go into the hotel, there’s a minibar, you pick up a drink and you go, “I don’t want it.” You put it back and say, “Sorry.” You picked it up and you buy it. They figured out technology-wise to be able to let somebody pick something off a shelf in a grocery store and read the label and say, “I’m not buying that.” It puts it on your phone as a purchase and takes it off when you put it back in. To me, that is revolutionary. That’s a huge leap of, “I can pick touch something and not be committed to buying it.” We are eliminating union paid jobs of thousands of people who’ve been checking people out of grocery stores for decades. Do you think that’s going to take off?
I do. It’s a brand new experience and a good one. By the way, have you been into any of these stores?
I would love to.
Whenever you’re around once, check it out because whenever I’m in there, you go in, you take the products off the shelf and you just walk out. I have this sinking feeling that I’m stealing and it’s uncomfortable.
It is because we’re trained that way, “Where are the handcuffs?” “John, can you come to bail me out? You’re my one phone call.”
It’s still funny because I’m walking out with the product visible in my hand like, “I’m not trying to take something here. I’m doing it by the book.” As soon as you get used to that, a couple of things happen. One is you’re now rooms for shopping in most other places because you can walk into stores and you have to wait in line. It creates this new normal as Uber did. Secondly, it doesn’t feel like you’re buying anything. People tend to buy more things. The same thing happened with credit cards, by the way. As soon as you don’t have to take cash out, you spend a little more money.
[bctt tweet=”The heart of companies is what they stand for, who they are, and what they believe in. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The same is true with me. I’m like, “Did I order that on Amazon? What in the world is in this box?” I’ve already forgotten I’ve ordered it and you do a little more impulse shopping with Amazon.
What was fascinating about Amazon is how they’ve gone from a company that sold books online to now they’re doing everything. The heart of companies is what they stand for, who they are, and what they believe in. Amazon has got this great mantra that says, “Day one.” Whether you’re on the first day on the job or you’ve been there for 7, 8, 9 years, you walk in like it’s your first day. The genius of it is on your first day of a job, you’re looking for how to do things differently and why they do those things. You’re questioning things, you’re looking for where you can add value and you’re a little bit uncomfortable. They created an entire culture of people that go in every day looking at things new and asking questions like somebody is starting out. It’s given them this fantastic growth in arms into everything.
It sounds like they’ve got a great culture where it’s safe to ask questions and you’re not going to hear, “This is the way we’ve always done it. Therefore, we don’t even discuss it.” That’s the opposite. I’ve talked about this when I give keynotes. It’s focused on “one thing first” and people forget Amazon just sells books. Many startups want to boil the ocean like, “Look at all the things we’re doing.” Imagine if Amazon launched with all the products they have now. People will be completely overwhelmed by buying toilet paper and books. They were known as an inexpensive way to get books. First, you got the social proof before they started expanding. That lesson is true, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not. Be known for one thing first and then you can expand beyond that, but it doesn’t, in any way, shape or form diminish the fact that they still sell books and they’re now selling everything else. As a speaker, anytime at branding, you’re more known for one thing first and then you can speak to other things. The easier it is for people to go, “This is who Sterling helps and what problems he solves for them.”
Apple has done a good job at that as well. Their mantra for a lot of years was, “Think Different.” That’s certainly uncomfortable if you’re the one person in the room that thinks differently than everybody else. They’ve built the whole culture that your point started with one thing and has mushroomed into all sorts of different devices and industries that they’ve disrupted.
You give a lot of different keynotes around innovation thinking and the innovation gap. What I love about your takeaways on the innovation gap is, “You have to first let go of everything you think you already know,” which is so Zen. I love that.
It is difficult to do.
It’s because you’re like, “What?” and that’s our entire identity into our knowledge. Only when we let go of what we think we know can we discover what’s possible. You have to take the audience on a journey because they’re already resisting letting go of what they know before you can start getting them to imagine new ways of doing things.
Breakthrough Strategies: Retail is under a lot of pressure to reinvent the experience of what the store means and how to satisfy a consumer’s wants and needs.
It is a blast every time. Speaking is one of my favorite things in the world to do and to step in front of a group of people that more often than not tends to be cynical about whatever it is that they’re doing and rightly so, the world is a hard place. To break through that force field to discover some new things is a blast.
How can someone reach out to you? If someone wants to hire you as a speaker, find out about CART or even have you come in and do a workshop, what would be the next step for them to explore?
SterlingHawkins.com is the best place. CART’s website is AdvancingRetail.org. I’m searchable on most social media except TikTok. I’m not there yet.
Any last thoughts, a quote or a book you want to leave us with?
It was great spending some time with you, John. I know we go back several years now but then having this conversation, I appreciate being on your podcast, who you are and the difference you’re making out there in the world.
Thanks a lot. That’s Sterling Hawkins, everybody, breakthrough innovation. If you want to watch somebody walk their talk, follow him on social media and explore having him come and speak at your next event.
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