January 9, 2024 • 30 mins
Crushing Competition Ep 1 Management Superpowers Leadership Priorities B.D. and David engaged in a conversation about strategic management and the concept of 'employee heroes'. David shared their motivation behind writing their book, emphasizing the need for a practical handbook on leadership implementation. They highlighted the importance of consistent leadership and setting priorities, using the example of Sam Walton. B.D. praised the book and asked David to share more examples of 'superpowers in action'. David shared a story about the founder of Southwest Airlines and how focusing on a 10-minute turn helped save the airline from bankruptcy. They stressed the importance of setting and adhering to priorities, especially in times of crisis. David also discussed Steve Jobs' management style at Apple Computer, emphasizing their focus on setting and adhering to priorities, and their process of bringing key managers together to identify and focus on important tasks. Superpowers in Management: Focused Approach David and B.D. discussed the importance of a focused approach and the concept of 'superpowers' in management. David emphasized that the key to success is not merely relying on instinct or gut feel, but rather, adhering to a specific process that ensures optimal results. They cited examples from their own experience and research, underscoring the significance of critical skills such as effective hiring and feedback. B.D. shared personal anecdotes on how David's methods have positively impacted their organization, including the recent hiring of two new employees. Hiring Practices and Day Management Discussion David and B.D. discussed the importance of process-driven hiring in selecting top talent for their organizations. David emphasized the significance of a candidate's likeability and snappy answers in the hiring process, while also highlighting the need to focus on the outcomes a candidate can bring. B.D. questioned who was currently leading in hiring practices, with David mentioning Amazon and Mckinsey and Company as examples of companies with strong hiring processes. Additionally, David shared their strategy of condensing complex hiring information into a concise manager's handbook to make it more accessible for busy readers. Finally, the conversation shifted to the underrated skill of effective day management, a topic inspired by David's conversation with the COO of Disney. Productivity Tips From Harvard Study David shared insights from a study they conducted at Harvard, which revealed that CEOs have specific strategies to manage their day and filter out digital noise. They suggested a few tactics to improve productivity, such as reducing meeting times by 20 minutes and ruthlessly unsubscribing from distractions. They also emphasized the importance of setting limits on email-checking frequency. B.D. appreciated the advice, noting that implementing these tactics could save a significant amount of time. Powerful Questions and Employee Heroes B.D. and David discussed the importance of asking powerful questions in management, with David referencing Steve Jobs' habit of asking "What did you say no to today?" They also touched on the concept of creating employee heroes, emphasizing the role of teaching skills and embracing collaboration within an organization. The conversation ended with David highlighting the significance of teaching essential skills to the entire team, rather than relying solely on one individual's leadership.
Find more about Dave on https://daviddodsonauthor.com/
Find more about Dave on https://daviddodsonauthor.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Grow, Sell and Retire is thepodcast for the lazy overachiever. B.
D. Dalton, author of theassistant Purchase, True Gravity and Grow,
Sell and Retire, is here togive his twenty five years of secrets,
tips and assistants to take your businessto the next level. This podcast is
for anyone who wants to sell more, work less and make better business.
(00:24):
Now here's your host BD with today'sGSR podcast. Hey, everybody, very
excited today be D Dalton here forthe Gross, Sell and Retire Podcast.
I'm doing one of our firsts andthis is our first kind of mini series
we're going to have and we're luckyenough to have Dave Dodson on the podcast
(00:45):
a couple months back and thought thatit'd be great to start off this year
talking about crushing your competition. DaveDodson, Welcome to the show. No,
b D. I'm g grateful tohave to be able to come back
here. I appreciate it. We'regonna have some fun with this. So
we're going to this in three parts. So you've got the manager's Handbook,
which last time I offensively called boring, which I was toldly taking the mick
(01:08):
out of that, but in generalI thought it was an amazing thing because
it sounds like manager's handbook. Okay, we've been there before, but I
think the key thing here that youput in the sub heading, which is
build a team, stay focused,make better decisions, and crush your competition,
which is kind of the thing we'regoing to talk about today is crushing
your competition. Today, we're goingto talk about management superpowers. Next episode
(01:30):
we're going to talk about creating employeeheroes because it's not just about you,
it's about and the managers. It'sabout the team. And then the last
one is leveraging strategy, because Iknow you're you're hot on strategy, but
we're going to dive straight into managementsuperpowers. But first of all, you've
talked to quite a few people.So when you gather this up, could
(01:51):
you walk us through just the littleponded history of where you gathered your management
information from and why we should listento you today. Sure. And actually
I don't know whether to take itas a compliment or an insult that you
said that the book was boring,But I got to tell you, I
really had when I was writing thebook, I really had this tension between
do I want to write something that'skind of like entertaining for the weekend,
(02:12):
and then people put it down anddon't change behavior, or do I want
to set it up like a handbookwhere someone will read it and they'll say,
Okay, look, it wasn't necessarilythe most entertaining story I ever read,
but there's useful things in here thatI'm going to implement starting tomorrow morning.
And that was what I sort ofaired towards. So that was definitely
the intent of writing The Manager's Handbook. I wanted it to be a book
(02:35):
that is not just read, buta book that was used. And how
I got there BD was and youand I've talked about this before on earlier
podcasts, is that I was justnoticing that some people were just much better
at getting stuff done than others.And I wanted to move away from this
kind of notion that great leaders werecharismatic or born a certain way or looked
(02:57):
a certain way, and what werereally the underlying characteristics of people who were
great leaders? Put another way,able to get things done. And I
got absolutely infatuated with the story ofSam Walton because I think back in nineteen
sixty one, he is surrounded byTarget, Kmart, J C. Penny
Sears. These are iconic brands andhe had nothing on them, and yet
(03:23):
he absolutely annihilated all four of them. I mean, a couple of them
are still in survival, but heannihilated them. And he didn't invent the
department store. What he did ishe consistently out implemented them. And of
course, if Sam Walton were alive, they he'd be the richest person on
the planet. And then I startedlooking at other leaders like Jeff Bezos and
(03:45):
Zuckerberg from Facebook, and I realizedthat consistently these people that we put up
on a pedestal is being able tosee around corners and having X ray vision
really were just extraordinarily good at implementingthings and getting things done across an organization.
So then I had to kind ofharness this and say, okay,
well that's fine, but that's notvery useful. What specifically do they do
(04:08):
and how do they do it?And can mere mortals like you and me
get our arms around this and actuallydo it? And sure enough, absolutely
we're achievable. And so when wecome to it, and I love your
book and we we use it allthe time, I've got it bookmarked to
the eighty additional minutes a day eachday on page one nineteen. So yeah,
you actually all the tactical stuff isamazing. So it ran through a
(04:32):
bunch of names. I know you'veinterviewed a bunch of people that you actually
some of them you mentioned, someof them you didn't. But could you
share a story where you witnessed actuallysuperpowers and action, because I know you
just referred to the story of SamWalton, but you've actually interviewed different managers
and you've actually run businesses yourself.So what are some superpowers in action that
(04:53):
you've seen that we might not evenrecognize as superpowers in ourselves as managers.
Interesting question, you know. Itbrings me back, frankly to very early
on in my business career when Ihad a chance to have a one on
one cocktail frankly with Herb Kellher,the guy who started Southwest Airlines, and
(05:14):
we were sitting at this bar inPalo Alto, and he tells me this
story about the ten minute turn,and the ten minute turn was what saved
Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher as theCEO, was the CEO and founder of
Southwest Airlines and again a little bitlike Sam Walton Beattie. He was surrounded
by American Airlines, United Airlines,Delta. He had no business winning and
for many, many years. Theend of the story is that Southwest Airline
(05:36):
became the most profitable airline in theworld. But he was almost at the
he was telling me the story,so he said, we were almost at
the edge of bankruptcyre I think hesaid they had one hundred and eighty dollars
in the Trekking Acount had to sella plane to make payroll, and he
realized planes only make money when they'rein the air, and so he developed
(05:57):
a ten minute turn, which waswhen a plane, I want it back
up in the air in ten minutes. Now. What was fascinating about that
and why it's a perfect laboratory toyour question, b D. Is that
in order to do that, hehad to say, these are all the
things we're not going to be focusedon. We're going to be focused on
one thing. And so, firstof all, there's a whole chapter in
(06:18):
the book about the ability to setand adhere to priorities. He's at one
priority, we have got to getthe planes back up in the air,
and the second thing he did asa leader is he harnessed the whole strength
of the organization. Because you don'tget a plane back up in the air
by just having an edict. Doyou have to get the flight attendants,
you have to get the baggage handlers, you have to get the gate agents.
(06:38):
Everybody committed to that. So hegot so then he harnessed the whole
organization around it. He came upwith a very simple slogan ten minute turn.
Maybe an analyst would have said,oh, actually the right amount is
twelve minutes and thirty seven seconds,but that wouldn't work. He had to
pick a number that everybody could justsay, ten minute turn, ten minute
turn, ten minut turn, andhe completely saved the airline around it.
(07:00):
That was tactical. He didn't seearound corners. He didn't. He wasn't
a magician, He wasn't a youknow he What he did as a manager
is he got everybody focused on onething to get things done. That's my
favorite story about using a superpower.And by the way, BD, what
he did could be done by everyone of your listeners tomorrow. So when
(07:21):
you're looking at that and he wasable to do that, how did how
do you discover what you think youneed to know? How does a manager
sit back and look at their wholebusiness. What's the number or what's the
thing that they need to focus on? Because he said, a plane doesn't
make money unless it's in the sky. How does a manufacturing or a software
(07:44):
or somebody else in another company lookat how they should find their ten minute
turn? Exactly, So I simplifiedit to answer the essence of your story.
But he didn't just come up witha ten minute turn while he was
walking to the office that day.It was actually a result of some serious
analysis between he and his chief operatingofficer in right hand person when he built
(08:09):
Southwest Airlines. So let me moveto a different story to better explain that.
Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, youcan't possibly imagine an organization that had
more polls. Let's do this,let's do that. Let's focus on this
than a coming like Apple Computer.Especially during the Steve Jobs era, Steve
Jobs recognized that in order to setin and here to priorities his equivalent of
(08:31):
a ten minute turn, he neededto put in place a process. So
it's all described in the book.In the Manager's handbook, he made a
process about how he would bring hiskey managers together, how they would go
through this set of exercises to identifywhat are the possible priorities that need to
be done, how you eliminated downto just a few, and then focus
(08:54):
the organization around that. And themagic of Steve Jobs is not that he
was a visionary in the sense thathe knew where where Apple should go.
He was actually a process person.He surrounded himself with great people, which,
by the way, is the firstpart of the book, the ability
to build a team. He wouldhe would surround himself with great people,
and then collectively they would establish whatthose priorities were. And then he was
(09:18):
a ruthless enforcer of those priorities.And so when I when I wrote the
part of the book about setting inandhering to priorities, instead of just saying,
well, look what Herb Keller didor look what step Jobs did,
in the end, I said,here's the process that I've synthesized. Looking
at all these different leaders. Runthis process in your own organization, whether
(09:39):
you are a high school principal oryou are running general motors, it's actually
the same process. And when whenpeople apply those processes. They're looking for
something that's either going to add tothe bottom Everything that has to add to
bottom line, doesn't it. Everythinghas to create something at the bottom line,
because then you could hire more people, or creed more stuff, or
(10:01):
spend more on R and D.But it's not what sometimes we go with.
Managers go with their heart versus numbersin smaller organizations. So sure as
you say BD, you know inmost organizations that we think about there are
for profit organizations and if you don'tbring in more money, then you send
(10:22):
out. Eventually you're going to goout of business. But one of the
keys to that, as we've talkedabout, is focused. And by the
way, just as a quick aside, I now run a workshop with much
smaller companies than Apple Computer where wego through a two day process of setting
and adhering to priorities, and it'samazing the difference between what people the CEOs
(10:45):
will come in with is what theythink is important, which is usually a
very very long list and not veryspecific, and they walk out with their
equivalent of a ten minute turn andthen I hear back from them six months
later and they go it was liketurbo charging my organization that's what we all
need. So as we're moving tocrushing the competition, if you have your
own specific ten minute term, thenthat's what everybody's adhering to. So you've
(11:11):
got that. And you just talkedabout how you saw this in Sam Walton,
you saw this with kell her withall, how do we identify our
own superpowers? How do we lookat what we're actually good at as a
manager, and how do we startto uncover that without boasting or bragging that
we're good at this My research inworking with the Manager's Handbook, and as
(11:35):
you said BD, I also ranfive companies prior to joining the faculty at
Stanford Business School, so I wasable to bridge my own personal experiences of
what worked and what didn't work,the academic environment at Stanford at the Business
School, teaching students and listening tocase subjects and so forth, and then
my research that related to the Manager'sHandbook. And what I found is that
(11:56):
I do love the term superpower,but there's one part of it I don't
like, which is there's an implicationthat we all have our kind of own
special, unique superpowers that we shouldemploy. Honestly, that's kind of an
excuse to get away from the basicsof how you run an organization. And
that's why, by the way,you can crush your competition because most people
(12:18):
say, well, I'm going todo it on instinct or I'm going to
hire on gut feel instead of Ihave a process that will lead to the
best hiring of people. You know, when I give feedback, I do
it in a certain way. No, there's a specific way that you give
feedback if you want to get theexcellence out of your team, et cetera,
et cetera. So the superpower isthis, Bde. The superpower is
(12:39):
saying, wait a minute, Okay, some of this is tedious, some
of this is hard work. Butif I apply myself with these five critical
skills, my superpower is the factthat I'm willing to do it. I'm
willing to do the hard work.I'm willing to do even the stuff that
is yucky, that is less interestingthat Jeff Bezos did at Apple at Amazon,
for example, that became his Thatbecame his superpower to harness those five
(13:03):
critical skills. If I sat downwith any of your listeners today and I
said, give me ninety minutes ofyour time, and I will radically change
your ability to hire, great hireand retain great people. I would be
I would be one hundred for onehundred because I'm just walking people through the
steps of good hiring that most peoplewant to bypass. That's the superpower being
(13:26):
willing to do that. And we'veI've used your we've we just hired two
new people, and we used youryour questions, and we let go of
somebody, and we used your easyway to let go of somebody in the
tactics that are in the book.So it's applicable every day of the week.
It's amazing. So superpowers some ofthese some of these funny things that
(13:48):
we have in Marvel and some ofthese other movies where you think that you
know who the superhero is, butthey're actually the super villain, or they're
the super villain. But by theend of the Superhero What are some superpower
that actually are actually masquerade or coverup other things, or we think that
they're a superpower, but they're actuallycausing problems for us. Well, if
(14:09):
I could return to something that Iwas just referencing a minute ago, I
think a great example to start withwould be hiring. I cannot begin to
count the number of people who sayI hire on gut feel, I hire
on instinct that they think is theirsuperpower, that they can look at somebody
(14:30):
and just get a sense of whothey are and how they're going to perform.
So let's spend a minute on that. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book Talking
with Strangers, fascinating book, andhe tells the story about the British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain, and how hesized up Adolf Hitler, who was the
(14:52):
Chancellor of Germany at the time.This is way before World War two,
this is when it could have preventedWorld War two. And he went back
to Britain and he said he hadthis great feeling about Adolf Hitler and he
based it on, among other things, the way Hitler shook his hand that
he had that he did it.He gave him his two handed handshake that
(15:13):
he saves only for special friends.And Nevill Chamberlain used his gut feeling instinct
to say, this is a manI can trust by the way Hitler fooled
a lot of people. Yes,he didn't become a monster on the outside
until after he had fooled so manypeople. The person that he did not
fool was Winston Churchill. Winston Churchillnever met Hitler. And the fascinating part
(15:37):
of that is, and the insightfulpart of it is, is Winston Churchill
based his opinion on Hitler on data. He looked at how Hitler behaved,
what decisions he made, what hedid, and what he didn't do,
and he drew a conclusion from that. Neville Chamberlain sized up Hitler based on
gut feel. Okay, now let'sbring it back to earth here. Okay,
(15:58):
talk about you know, hiring.We do exactly the same thing we
look for, like if we're nothire, well, we look at likability.
Are they sort of similar to us? Did they have good, snappy
answers to our question as opposed towhat is actually the data? What are
the outcomes I'm looking for when Ihire this person? And how am I
going to figure out whether those outcomeswill happen under this person? And I
(16:22):
lay out that step by step bystep in the manager's handbook. So to
sort of come full circle with yourquestion, Bedie, a fault superpower is
this kind of gut feel instinct?The real superpower is I run a hiring
process that is excellent and as aresult of hiring an excellent running an excellent
hiring process. I hire above mycompetition, I get people from my competition.
(16:47):
My people are better, and thenyou get to crush your competition.
So who's doing this really well rightnow? So if you're looking at managers,
if you go notable brand names,who's who's out hiring people right now?
It used to be Facebook because theyare meta or whatever they're called at
this point in time, because theyjust paid more and they were buying everybody
and acquiring. But now I thinkthere's a there's a leveling up happening in
(17:11):
tech. But who's who's out thereright now hiring the best of the best
that you're seeing in in commercial worldversus academic world. I think Amazon runs
a fantastic process when they hire McKenzieand company. And I know mckensey company
comes under fire it sometimes because they'reso big and they're they have their hands
(17:32):
in so many different businesses, butthey run a very methodical process to hire
people. The common denominator of Amazonand mackenzie and many others is that it's
process driven by the way. Wemay have talked about this before, BD.
I'm not sure about this. Butwhen I got really deep into the
hiring piece of uh, you know, the manager's handbook, I went and
(17:52):
I got, I don't know,it's probably like a dozen hiring books.
I mean, it is a lot. And I stacked them up and I
shut the door, and I said, nobody talked to me for a week.
And I read all of these books. Well, first of all,
what was common is they all saidyou got to run a process. Every
process was a little bit different.But I harmonized this process into you know,
I took what was arguably, Imean a thousand pages and I put
(18:18):
it into twenty five pages. AndI put it in twenty five pages because
you know, my readers don't havetime to do what I did, which
is to read twenty five books ora dozen books. That's that's the best
part about books. That's the bestpart about coaches dealing with that type of
stuff is that you're getting somebody's knowledgewisdom, and they're they're reading and learning
to be delivered here. And Ithink, still, I think your your
(18:40):
book and the manager and that bookis actually one of the most tactical hands
on managers documents that I've read.So yeah, I tried to I try
to take each piece of it BDAnd I said, how can I describe
this in as few words as possibleas opposed to how can I fill a
book? And you know, somechapters or eight pages, some chapter or
twenty pages. But the goal wasget your point as quickly as possible so
(19:03):
that my busy reader can get backto running their organization. So what's what
a management power? So we've gonethrough the hiring, which is that?
But which other one do you thinkis most underrated when it comes to looking
at their business and sitting back asa manager is we've gotten got instinct in
there and we've got the hiring.What's an underrated one that people should be
(19:29):
looking at this year? If they'redoing the after they got the hiring done
and they've got the helicopter, looksomething else that they should really be sitting
back and going, Hey, Ineed to really work on that. Oh,
this one is screaming in my ear. I can't wait to answer your
question. So it started with Iwas having a cup of coffee with a
good friend of mine, who atthe time was COO of Disney, and
(19:51):
we had a coffee at ten o'clockin the morning. It was outside at
the Stanford campus and I got thereat ten oh three or ten oh four.
I was late. He was sittingthere calm was Tom and names Tom
Stecks. Tom at the time hadtwo hundred and fifty thousand people in his
part of the organization in six continents. Okay, he's on time. I'm
the one who's late. Okay.And he's looking at his phone, probably
(20:15):
responding to a text message from hisson, and I'm, you know,
I'm like the proverbial chicken with hishead cut off. So I just said,
Tom, like, how do youdo it? I mean, you
have a quarter of a million peoplethat are depending upon you, and you're
sitting here reading a text message fromyour son. I'm and I'm the one
who's late. And that's when wegot pulled into this conversation about how the
(20:36):
best leaders are extraordinarily good at managingtheir day, and most people wake up
and they open up their email andthey chase the shiny objects and you know,
go doing the things that they enjoyand that they're good at, instead
of the things that are going toreally drive the organization forward. And subsequent
(20:56):
to my so I had to takeyou know, Tom, I had to
speak aha when I was with Tom, but then I had to convert it
into first of all, taking careof my own, you know, my
own day. So the professor MichaelPorter, who is the most prolific business
professor in terms of writing ever professorat Harvard Business School, and he was
(21:18):
visiting me in Jackson Hole and kindof the same thing. He was sort
of watching me run around, andhe said, I'm going to do an
intervention. So he did an interventionand he actually looked at how I manage
my day and he said, Iwant you to apply these things that we
learned when we did a study atHarvard on about one hundred CEOs and they
followed these CEOs in fifteen minute increments, collecting sixty thousand pieces of data on
(21:42):
how these CEOs manage their day,and they all had a very specific way
that they could quiet the noise andfocus on the things that was most important.
So b D the other superpower isplanning out your day in the morning
or the night before. Most peopleneed to do in the morning in a
way that you stay focused on thethree or four things that are really going
(22:03):
to drive your organization forward. Andsaying no to everything else, and I've
got I've got a routine that Ido every morning. I describe it in
the book. It takes about awhopping four or five minutes maybe not even
that, to plan out my day. And once I built that routine in
place and I do it religiously,I went from forty miles an hour to
one hundred and forty miles an hour. And I've had people say God,
(22:26):
like, I cannot believe You're like, you do all these different things,
and you get all this stuff done, and how do you do it well?
Because I take about four minutes inthe morning and plan out my days,
it's actually not that complicated. Ialso do, which I describe in
the book, how to avoid theincoming traffic of text messages and emails and
so forth, in that dopamine hitthat you get when you get to clear
(22:47):
off your email. But it's notactually moving the organization forward. Well,
I could say to I could sayto your listeners, hey, you know,
be better about the distract the digitaldistractions, and everyone doo nod till
their head would come off. Butthen they go, I can do the
same thing. So in the book, I say, okay, here's seven
steps. Seven things. You dothese seven things, and you will knock
out about eighty percent of the digitalnoise so that you can focus on the
(23:10):
things that really will move your organizationforward. How about if you give us
two of those. Don't get themall, everybody's got to go buy the
book, obviously, but we giveus, give us one or two of
those, so that we can actuallyturn around today and say, here's here's
one thing that i'm doing the daythey've told me to do. All right,
I'll give you. I'll give youa couple of really simple ones.
One is, take all your thirtyminute meetings and change them to twenty minute
(23:33):
meetings. Take all your sixty minutemeetings and change them to forty minute meetings.
That's going to save you if youhave a typical calendar like mine,
about an hour and a half aday, literally, and you will get
the same amount of work done.That's one second thing. Ruthlessly unsubscribed.
When you get something that comes inyour inbox, what they're basically saying is,
hey, stop doing what you're doingand pay attention to me. Read
my article, look at my ads. You got to ruthlessly unsubscribe because they're
(23:56):
extraordinarily good. At grabbing your attention. The next thing is to set certain
limits on when you read email.Now, most people find that really hard
because it's so fun to get offof the deep work, the stuff that's
hard, and go answer some mindlessemails. So what I say to people
is I say, okay, lookstart easy. Say I'm going to look
at my email six times a day, okay, And when I look at
(24:19):
it, ask yourself this simple question, if I had looked at it earlier,
would it have changed the outcome?The answer is almost always going to
be no. So you go fromsix and you go, Wow, that
was really much better. And thenyou go to four and you go that
was fantastic, and you go tothree and now you're really starting to get
things done. But you can't justsort of say, read your email less
often. You have to set limits, and it doesn't matter whether you start
(24:41):
at six or sixteen okay, andthen scale back. So those are three
quick ones. Those are awesome.And I mean that if you do all
those things and you're only checking youremails, that you've just just bought everybody
at two hours of their day,well BBD, we've all been on planes
or in some such wish where theinternet didn't work right and you get off
(25:03):
the plane and you're like, geez, I cannot believe how much work I
got done right yeah, or howor how much more relaxed I am,
or how the world didn't end that'syeah, yes, because they had a
flight from Denver to Boston and Isaid, I'm not going to connect to
the internet until thirty minutes before landing. I got so much important stuff done
yesterday on the plane. That isthat is awesome. So I if you're
(25:26):
looking at this and you're kind oflooking at a at a at a manager,
and you're you're stepping back, what'swhat's the best question that you can
as a manager ask your team oryour business the best question, the best
question about anything, anything, thebest question that you can ask. Because
(25:47):
if we got herb Keller looked atit and said, the ten minute turn
around, you know, and sowhat's the if if you were just that
that killer question that might be sittingthere in the background, that I'm going
to completely played your Steve jobs perfect, go for it. He would go
around. And this is a storyI learned from Johnny Ive who was his
chief designer. He was the guyif you have an apple and you like
(26:10):
how it looks and how it works, you got that's the person you have
to thank for it. And whathe said was that Steve Jobs would walk
around and he would ask us onequestion, what if you said no to
today? The point is that focusand priority is not about not doing the
things that you shouldn't do. It'sabout doing the things that you know.
(26:30):
As as as Johnny, I've said, as you know in your heart are
great ideas, but you can't doit because you're working on something else.
And so if I could go aroundand ask anybody the question, I would
say, what did you say noto? Today? What did you say
no to? Today? And allI'm doing is I'm quoting Steve Jobs.
That's awesome. There's this plagiarism andpiracy rules the world, especially when when
(26:52):
it comes to good ideas. Thereare not that many new there are not
many things that need to be invented. I mean that that was one of
the pleasures of writing The Manager's Handbookis I really just curated the best practices
of fantastic leaders and got it downinto a few pages. I was I
was a curator. I didn't Ididn't invent anything in that book. But
(27:14):
everything you've done is you've dispelled andput it into simple tactical things that we
can do today. So this hascoming kind to the end of our management
superpowers. And next time we're goingto come back and we're going to talk
about creating employee heroes. So tokind of lead us into that thinking about
creating employee heroes, what do youwant us to think about or bring back
(27:37):
to the table for session two whenwe're thinking about as a manager looking at
our team, we've just asked hima question of what have you said no
to today? How are we goingto start to rev them up? So
that somebody can come back and listento episode two. It wasn't until I
was deep into finishing the book thatsomething dawned on me, which was that
(28:00):
the leaders that I had studied werereally teachers. And it was actually when
I was stumbling upon or thinking aboutJeff Bezos and how he ran Amazon,
and I want you to I wantpeople to think about it this way.
First of all, by the way, like the other leaders I mentioned,
Jeff Bezos did not invent book sales. He did not invent buying things online.
(28:22):
He should have been crushed by Barnesand Noble and Walden Books and everything
who had cheaper cost of good soldand better brand names. He out implemented
them, and he out implemented thembecause he realized this. And I'll just
use an example of meetings. Whatdifference does it make if Jeff Bezos is
great at running meetings and everybody elsein his organization is poor at running meetings?
And then flip it around and saywhat if everybody at Amazon was great
(28:45):
at running meetings and Jeff Bezos ranlousy meetings? Of course you would take
the ladder. And so the pointis that these great leaders, first of
all, they need to embrace theseskills themselves. But then quickly, the
whole point of it is is toteach those skills to your team. And
that's when all of a sudden anorganization takes off. There are no one
person organizations out there that are successful. The best organization are the ones that
(29:07):
have learned and embraced the importance ofteaching everybody else how to manage their email,
everybody else how to hire well,everybody else how to run good meetings.
Dave, it's been amazing having youon talking about the Manager's Handbook,
talking about crushing your competition and aboutmanagement superpowers. Can't wait to have episode
two coming up soon. Thanks somuch for being on Gross Selling Retire OKBD.
(29:33):
Thanks for joining us on grow Selland Retire. For more information,
tools or to book one of ourteam members. To work with your team
business, or to speak at yourevent or conference, visit rockfind dot co
dot uk. If you like thepodcast, you'll love one of BD's three
books, The Assisted Purchase, TrueGravity and The Book. The podcast is
(29:53):
based on Grow Sell and Retire.If you want to work for the rest
of your life, that is yourbusiness. If you don't, that is ours.
Grow, Sell and Retire is thepodcast for the lazy overachiever. B.
D. Dalton, author of theassistant Purchase, True Gravity and Grow,
Sell and Retire, is here togive his twenty five years of secrets,
tips and assistants to take your businessto the next level. This podcast is
for anyone who wants to sell more, work less and make better business.
(00:24):
Now here's your host BD with today'sGSR podcast. Hey, everybody, very
excited today be D Dalton here forthe Gross, Sell and Retire Podcast.
I'm doing one of our firsts andthis is our first kind of mini series
we're going to have and we're luckyenough to have Dave Dodson on the podcast
(00:45):
a couple months back and thought thatit'd be great to start off this year
talking about crushing your competition. DaveDodson, Welcome to the show. No,
b D. I'm g grateful tohave to be able to come back
here. I appreciate it. We'regonna have some fun with this. So
we're going to this in three parts. So you've got the manager's Handbook,
which last time I offensively called boring, which I was toldly taking the mick
(01:08):
out of that, but in generalI thought it was an amazing thing because
it sounds like manager's handbook. Okay, we've been there before, but I
think the key thing here that youput in the sub heading, which is
build a team, stay focused,make better decisions, and crush your competition,
which is kind of the thing we'regoing to talk about today is crushing
your competition. Today, we're goingto talk about management superpowers. Next episode
(01:30):
we're going to talk about creating employeeheroes because it's not just about you,
it's about and the managers. It'sabout the team. And then the last
one is leveraging strategy, because Iknow you're you're hot on strategy, but
we're going to dive straight into managementsuperpowers. But first of all, you've
talked to quite a few people.So when you gather this up, could
(01:51):
you walk us through just the littleponded history of where you gathered your management
information from and why we should listento you today. Sure. And actually
I don't know whether to take itas a compliment or an insult that you
said that the book was boring,But I got to tell you, I
really had when I was writing thebook, I really had this tension between
do I want to write something that'skind of like entertaining for the weekend,
(02:12):
and then people put it down anddon't change behavior, or do I want
to set it up like a handbookwhere someone will read it and they'll say,
Okay, look, it wasn't necessarilythe most entertaining story I ever read,
but there's useful things in here thatI'm going to implement starting tomorrow morning.
And that was what I sort ofaired towards. So that was definitely
the intent of writing The Manager's Handbook. I wanted it to be a book
(02:35):
that is not just read, buta book that was used. And how
I got there BD was and youand I've talked about this before on earlier
podcasts, is that I was justnoticing that some people were just much better
at getting stuff done than others.And I wanted to move away from this
kind of notion that great leaders werecharismatic or born a certain way or looked
(02:57):
a certain way, and what werereally the underlying characteristics of people who were
great leaders? Put another way,able to get things done. And I
got absolutely infatuated with the story ofSam Walton because I think back in nineteen
sixty one, he is surrounded byTarget, Kmart, J C. Penny
Sears. These are iconic brands andhe had nothing on them, and yet
(03:23):
he absolutely annihilated all four of them. I mean, a couple of them
are still in survival, but heannihilated them. And he didn't invent the
department store. What he did ishe consistently out implemented them. And of
course, if Sam Walton were alive, they he'd be the richest person on
the planet. And then I startedlooking at other leaders like Jeff Bezos and
(03:45):
Zuckerberg from Facebook, and I realizedthat consistently these people that we put up
on a pedestal is being able tosee around corners and having X ray vision
really were just extraordinarily good at implementingthings and getting things done across an organization.
So then I had to kind ofharness this and say, okay,
well that's fine, but that's notvery useful. What specifically do they do
(04:08):
and how do they do it?And can mere mortals like you and me
get our arms around this and actuallydo it? And sure enough, absolutely
we're achievable. And so when wecome to it, and I love your
book and we we use it allthe time, I've got it bookmarked to
the eighty additional minutes a day eachday on page one nineteen. So yeah,
you actually all the tactical stuff isamazing. So it ran through a
(04:32):
bunch of names. I know you'veinterviewed a bunch of people that you actually
some of them you mentioned, someof them you didn't. But could you
share a story where you witnessed actuallysuperpowers and action, because I know you
just referred to the story of SamWalton, but you've actually interviewed different managers
and you've actually run businesses yourself.So what are some superpowers in action that
(04:53):
you've seen that we might not evenrecognize as superpowers in ourselves as managers.
Interesting question, you know. Itbrings me back, frankly to very early
on in my business career when Ihad a chance to have a one on
one cocktail frankly with Herb Kellher,the guy who started Southwest Airlines, and
(05:14):
we were sitting at this bar inPalo Alto, and he tells me this
story about the ten minute turn,and the ten minute turn was what saved
Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher as theCEO, was the CEO and founder of
Southwest Airlines and again a little bitlike Sam Walton Beattie. He was surrounded
by American Airlines, United Airlines,Delta. He had no business winning and
for many, many years. Theend of the story is that Southwest Airline
(05:36):
became the most profitable airline in theworld. But he was almost at the
he was telling me the story,so he said, we were almost at
the edge of bankruptcyre I think hesaid they had one hundred and eighty dollars
in the Trekking Acount had to sella plane to make payroll, and he
realized planes only make money when they'rein the air, and so he developed
(05:57):
a ten minute turn, which waswhen a plane, I want it back
up in the air in ten minutes. Now. What was fascinating about that
and why it's a perfect laboratory toyour question, b D. Is that
in order to do that, hehad to say, these are all the
things we're not going to be focusedon. We're going to be focused on
one thing. And so, firstof all, there's a whole chapter in
(06:18):
the book about the ability to setand adhere to priorities. He's at one
priority, we have got to getthe planes back up in the air,
and the second thing he did asa leader is he harnessed the whole strength
of the organization. Because you don'tget a plane back up in the air
by just having an edict. Doyou have to get the flight attendants,
you have to get the baggage handlers, you have to get the gate agents.
(06:38):
Everybody committed to that. So hegot so then he harnessed the whole
organization around it. He came upwith a very simple slogan ten minute turn.
Maybe an analyst would have said,oh, actually the right amount is
twelve minutes and thirty seven seconds,but that wouldn't work. He had to
pick a number that everybody could justsay, ten minute turn, ten minute
turn, ten minut turn, andhe completely saved the airline around it.
(07:00):
That was tactical. He didn't seearound corners. He didn't. He wasn't
a magician, He wasn't a youknow he What he did as a manager
is he got everybody focused on onething to get things done. That's my
favorite story about using a superpower.And by the way, BD, what
he did could be done by everyone of your listeners tomorrow. So when
(07:21):
you're looking at that and he wasable to do that, how did how
do you discover what you think youneed to know? How does a manager
sit back and look at their wholebusiness. What's the number or what's the
thing that they need to focus on? Because he said, a plane doesn't
make money unless it's in the sky. How does a manufacturing or a software
(07:44):
or somebody else in another company lookat how they should find their ten minute
turn? Exactly, So I simplifiedit to answer the essence of your story.
But he didn't just come up witha ten minute turn while he was
walking to the office that day.It was actually a result of some serious
analysis between he and his chief operatingofficer in right hand person when he built
(08:09):
Southwest Airlines. So let me moveto a different story to better explain that.
Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, youcan't possibly imagine an organization that had
more polls. Let's do this,let's do that. Let's focus on this
than a coming like Apple Computer.Especially during the Steve Jobs era, Steve
Jobs recognized that in order to setin and here to priorities his equivalent of
(08:31):
a ten minute turn, he neededto put in place a process. So
it's all described in the book.In the Manager's handbook, he made a
process about how he would bring hiskey managers together, how they would go
through this set of exercises to identifywhat are the possible priorities that need to
be done, how you eliminated downto just a few, and then focus
(08:54):
the organization around that. And themagic of Steve Jobs is not that he
was a visionary in the sense thathe knew where where Apple should go.
He was actually a process person.He surrounded himself with great people, which,
by the way, is the firstpart of the book, the ability
to build a team. He wouldhe would surround himself with great people,
and then collectively they would establish whatthose priorities were. And then he was
(09:18):
a ruthless enforcer of those priorities.And so when I when I wrote the
part of the book about setting inandhering to priorities, instead of just saying,
well, look what Herb Keller didor look what step Jobs did,
in the end, I said,here's the process that I've synthesized. Looking
at all these different leaders. Runthis process in your own organization, whether
(09:39):
you are a high school principal oryou are running general motors, it's actually
the same process. And when whenpeople apply those processes. They're looking for
something that's either going to add tothe bottom Everything that has to add to
bottom line, doesn't it. Everythinghas to create something at the bottom line,
because then you could hire more people, or creed more stuff, or
(10:01):
spend more on R and D.But it's not what sometimes we go with.
Managers go with their heart versus numbersin smaller organizations. So sure as
you say BD, you know inmost organizations that we think about there are
for profit organizations and if you don'tbring in more money, then you send
(10:22):
out. Eventually you're going to goout of business. But one of the
keys to that, as we've talkedabout, is focused. And by the
way, just as a quick aside, I now run a workshop with much
smaller companies than Apple Computer where wego through a two day process of setting
and adhering to priorities, and it'samazing the difference between what people the CEOs
(10:45):
will come in with is what theythink is important, which is usually a
very very long list and not veryspecific, and they walk out with their
equivalent of a ten minute turn andthen I hear back from them six months
later and they go it was liketurbo charging my organization that's what we all
need. So as we're moving tocrushing the competition, if you have your
own specific ten minute term, thenthat's what everybody's adhering to. So you've
(11:11):
got that. And you just talkedabout how you saw this in Sam Walton,
you saw this with kell her withall, how do we identify our
own superpowers? How do we lookat what we're actually good at as a
manager, and how do we startto uncover that without boasting or bragging that
we're good at this My research inworking with the Manager's Handbook, and as
(11:35):
you said BD, I also ranfive companies prior to joining the faculty at
Stanford Business School, so I wasable to bridge my own personal experiences of
what worked and what didn't work,the academic environment at Stanford at the Business
School, teaching students and listening tocase subjects and so forth, and then
my research that related to the Manager'sHandbook. And what I found is that
(11:56):
I do love the term superpower,but there's one part of it I don't
like, which is there's an implicationthat we all have our kind of own
special, unique superpowers that we shouldemploy. Honestly, that's kind of an
excuse to get away from the basicsof how you run an organization. And
that's why, by the way,you can crush your competition because most people
(12:18):
say, well, I'm going todo it on instinct or I'm going to
hire on gut feel instead of Ihave a process that will lead to the
best hiring of people. You know, when I give feedback, I do
it in a certain way. No, there's a specific way that you give
feedback if you want to get theexcellence out of your team, et cetera,
et cetera. So the superpower isthis, Bde. The superpower is
(12:39):
saying, wait a minute, Okay, some of this is tedious, some
of this is hard work. Butif I apply myself with these five critical
skills, my superpower is the factthat I'm willing to do it. I'm
willing to do the hard work.I'm willing to do even the stuff that
is yucky, that is less interestingthat Jeff Bezos did at Apple at Amazon,
for example, that became his Thatbecame his superpower to harness those five
(13:03):
critical skills. If I sat downwith any of your listeners today and I
said, give me ninety minutes ofyour time, and I will radically change
your ability to hire, great hireand retain great people. I would be
I would be one hundred for onehundred because I'm just walking people through the
steps of good hiring that most peoplewant to bypass. That's the superpower being
(13:26):
willing to do that. And we'veI've used your we've we just hired two
new people, and we used youryour questions, and we let go of
somebody, and we used your easyway to let go of somebody in the
tactics that are in the book.So it's applicable every day of the week.
It's amazing. So superpowers some ofthese some of these funny things that
(13:48):
we have in Marvel and some ofthese other movies where you think that you
know who the superhero is, butthey're actually the super villain, or they're
the super villain. But by theend of the Superhero What are some superpower
that actually are actually masquerade or coverup other things, or we think that
they're a superpower, but they're actuallycausing problems for us. Well, if
(14:09):
I could return to something that Iwas just referencing a minute ago, I
think a great example to start withwould be hiring. I cannot begin to
count the number of people who sayI hire on gut feel, I hire
on instinct that they think is theirsuperpower, that they can look at somebody
(14:30):
and just get a sense of whothey are and how they're going to perform.
So let's spend a minute on that. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book Talking
with Strangers, fascinating book, andhe tells the story about the British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain, and how hesized up Adolf Hitler, who was the
(14:52):
Chancellor of Germany at the time.This is way before World War two,
this is when it could have preventedWorld War two. And he went back
to Britain and he said he hadthis great feeling about Adolf Hitler and he
based it on, among other things, the way Hitler shook his hand that
he had that he did it.He gave him his two handed handshake that
(15:13):
he saves only for special friends.And Nevill Chamberlain used his gut feeling instinct
to say, this is a manI can trust by the way Hitler fooled
a lot of people. Yes,he didn't become a monster on the outside
until after he had fooled so manypeople. The person that he did not
fool was Winston Churchill. Winston Churchillnever met Hitler. And the fascinating part
(15:37):
of that is, and the insightfulpart of it is, is Winston Churchill
based his opinion on Hitler on data. He looked at how Hitler behaved,
what decisions he made, what hedid, and what he didn't do,
and he drew a conclusion from that. Neville Chamberlain sized up Hitler based on
gut feel. Okay, now let'sbring it back to earth here. Okay,
(15:58):
talk about you know, hiring.We do exactly the same thing we
look for, like if we're nothire, well, we look at likability.
Are they sort of similar to us? Did they have good, snappy
answers to our question as opposed towhat is actually the data? What are
the outcomes I'm looking for when Ihire this person? And how am I
going to figure out whether those outcomeswill happen under this person? And I
(16:22):
lay out that step by step bystep in the manager's handbook. So to
sort of come full circle with yourquestion, Bedie, a fault superpower is
this kind of gut feel instinct?The real superpower is I run a hiring
process that is excellent and as aresult of hiring an excellent running an excellent
hiring process. I hire above mycompetition, I get people from my competition.
(16:47):
My people are better, and thenyou get to crush your competition.
So who's doing this really well rightnow? So if you're looking at managers,
if you go notable brand names,who's who's out hiring people right now?
It used to be Facebook because theyare meta or whatever they're called at
this point in time, because theyjust paid more and they were buying everybody
and acquiring. But now I thinkthere's a there's a leveling up happening in
(17:11):
tech. But who's who's out thereright now hiring the best of the best
that you're seeing in in commercial worldversus academic world. I think Amazon runs
a fantastic process when they hire McKenzieand company. And I know mckensey company
comes under fire it sometimes because they'reso big and they're they have their hands
(17:32):
in so many different businesses, butthey run a very methodical process to hire
people. The common denominator of Amazonand mackenzie and many others is that it's
process driven by the way. Wemay have talked about this before, BD.
I'm not sure about this. Butwhen I got really deep into the
hiring piece of uh, you know, the manager's handbook, I went and
(17:52):
I got, I don't know,it's probably like a dozen hiring books.
I mean, it is a lot. And I stacked them up and I
shut the door, and I said, nobody talked to me for a week.
And I read all of these books. Well, first of all,
what was common is they all saidyou got to run a process. Every
process was a little bit different.But I harmonized this process into you know,
I took what was arguably, Imean a thousand pages and I put
(18:18):
it into twenty five pages. AndI put it in twenty five pages because
you know, my readers don't havetime to do what I did, which
is to read twenty five books ora dozen books. That's that's the best
part about books. That's the bestpart about coaches dealing with that type of
stuff is that you're getting somebody's knowledgewisdom, and they're they're reading and learning
to be delivered here. And Ithink, still, I think your your
(18:40):
book and the manager and that bookis actually one of the most tactical hands
on managers documents that I've read.So yeah, I tried to I try
to take each piece of it BDAnd I said, how can I describe
this in as few words as possibleas opposed to how can I fill a
book? And you know, somechapters or eight pages, some chapter or
twenty pages. But the goal wasget your point as quickly as possible so
(19:03):
that my busy reader can get backto running their organization. So what's what
a management power? So we've gonethrough the hiring, which is that?
But which other one do you thinkis most underrated when it comes to looking
at their business and sitting back asa manager is we've gotten got instinct in
there and we've got the hiring.What's an underrated one that people should be
(19:29):
looking at this year? If they'redoing the after they got the hiring done
and they've got the helicopter, looksomething else that they should really be sitting
back and going, Hey, Ineed to really work on that. Oh,
this one is screaming in my ear. I can't wait to answer your
question. So it started with Iwas having a cup of coffee with a
good friend of mine, who atthe time was COO of Disney, and
(19:51):
we had a coffee at ten o'clockin the morning. It was outside at
the Stanford campus and I got thereat ten oh three or ten oh four.
I was late. He was sittingthere calm was Tom and names Tom
Stecks. Tom at the time hadtwo hundred and fifty thousand people in his
part of the organization in six continents. Okay, he's on time. I'm
the one who's late. Okay.And he's looking at his phone, probably
(20:15):
responding to a text message from hisson, and I'm, you know,
I'm like the proverbial chicken with hishead cut off. So I just said,
Tom, like, how do youdo it? I mean, you
have a quarter of a million peoplethat are depending upon you, and you're
sitting here reading a text message fromyour son. I'm and I'm the one
who's late. And that's when wegot pulled into this conversation about how the
(20:36):
best leaders are extraordinarily good at managingtheir day, and most people wake up
and they open up their email andthey chase the shiny objects and you know,
go doing the things that they enjoyand that they're good at, instead
of the things that are going toreally drive the organization forward. And subsequent
(20:56):
to my so I had to takeyou know, Tom, I had to
speak aha when I was with Tom, but then I had to convert it
into first of all, taking careof my own, you know, my
own day. So the professor MichaelPorter, who is the most prolific business
professor in terms of writing ever professorat Harvard Business School, and he was
(21:18):
visiting me in Jackson Hole and kindof the same thing. He was sort
of watching me run around, andhe said, I'm going to do an
intervention. So he did an interventionand he actually looked at how I manage
my day and he said, Iwant you to apply these things that we
learned when we did a study atHarvard on about one hundred CEOs and they
followed these CEOs in fifteen minute increments, collecting sixty thousand pieces of data on
(21:42):
how these CEOs manage their day,and they all had a very specific way
that they could quiet the noise andfocus on the things that was most important.
So b D the other superpower isplanning out your day in the morning
or the night before. Most peopleneed to do in the morning in a
way that you stay focused on thethree or four things that are really going
(22:03):
to drive your organization forward. Andsaying no to everything else, and I've
got I've got a routine that Ido every morning. I describe it in
the book. It takes about awhopping four or five minutes maybe not even
that, to plan out my day. And once I built that routine in
place and I do it religiously,I went from forty miles an hour to
one hundred and forty miles an hour. And I've had people say God,
(22:26):
like, I cannot believe You're like, you do all these different things,
and you get all this stuff done, and how do you do it well?
Because I take about four minutes inthe morning and plan out my days,
it's actually not that complicated. Ialso do, which I describe in
the book, how to avoid theincoming traffic of text messages and emails and
so forth, in that dopamine hitthat you get when you get to clear
(22:47):
off your email. But it's notactually moving the organization forward. Well,
I could say to I could sayto your listeners, hey, you know,
be better about the distract the digitaldistractions, and everyone doo nod till
their head would come off. Butthen they go, I can do the
same thing. So in the book, I say, okay, here's seven
steps. Seven things. You dothese seven things, and you will knock
out about eighty percent of the digitalnoise so that you can focus on the
(23:10):
things that really will move your organizationforward. How about if you give us
two of those. Don't get themall, everybody's got to go buy the
book, obviously, but we giveus, give us one or two of
those, so that we can actuallyturn around today and say, here's here's
one thing that i'm doing the daythey've told me to do. All right,
I'll give you. I'll give youa couple of really simple ones.
One is, take all your thirtyminute meetings and change them to twenty minute
(23:33):
meetings. Take all your sixty minutemeetings and change them to forty minute meetings.
That's going to save you if youhave a typical calendar like mine,
about an hour and a half aday, literally, and you will get
the same amount of work done.That's one second thing. Ruthlessly unsubscribed.
When you get something that comes inyour inbox, what they're basically saying is,
hey, stop doing what you're doingand pay attention to me. Read
my article, look at my ads. You got to ruthlessly unsubscribe because they're
(23:56):
extraordinarily good. At grabbing your attention. The next thing is to set certain
limits on when you read email.Now, most people find that really hard
because it's so fun to get offof the deep work, the stuff that's
hard, and go answer some mindlessemails. So what I say to people
is I say, okay, lookstart easy. Say I'm going to look
at my email six times a day, okay, And when I look at
(24:19):
it, ask yourself this simple question, if I had looked at it earlier,
would it have changed the outcome?The answer is almost always going to
be no. So you go fromsix and you go, Wow, that
was really much better. And thenyou go to four and you go that
was fantastic, and you go tothree and now you're really starting to get
things done. But you can't justsort of say, read your email less
often. You have to set limits, and it doesn't matter whether you start
(24:41):
at six or sixteen okay, andthen scale back. So those are three
quick ones. Those are awesome.And I mean that if you do all
those things and you're only checking youremails, that you've just just bought everybody
at two hours of their day,well BBD, we've all been on planes
or in some such wish where theinternet didn't work right and you get off
(25:03):
the plane and you're like, geez, I cannot believe how much work I
got done right yeah, or howor how much more relaxed I am,
or how the world didn't end that'syeah, yes, because they had a
flight from Denver to Boston and Isaid, I'm not going to connect to
the internet until thirty minutes before landing. I got so much important stuff done
yesterday on the plane. That isthat is awesome. So I if you're
(25:26):
looking at this and you're kind oflooking at a at a at a manager,
and you're you're stepping back, what'swhat's the best question that you can
as a manager ask your team oryour business the best question, the best
question about anything, anything, thebest question that you can ask. Because
(25:47):
if we got herb Keller looked atit and said, the ten minute turn
around, you know, and sowhat's the if if you were just that
that killer question that might be sittingthere in the background, that I'm going
to completely played your Steve jobs perfect, go for it. He would go
around. And this is a storyI learned from Johnny Ive who was his
chief designer. He was the guyif you have an apple and you like
(26:10):
how it looks and how it works, you got that's the person you have
to thank for it. And whathe said was that Steve Jobs would walk
around and he would ask us onequestion, what if you said no to
today? The point is that focusand priority is not about not doing the
things that you shouldn't do. It'sabout doing the things that you know.
(26:30):
As as as Johnny, I've said, as you know in your heart are
great ideas, but you can't doit because you're working on something else.
And so if I could go aroundand ask anybody the question, I would
say, what did you say noto? Today? What did you say
no to? Today? And allI'm doing is I'm quoting Steve Jobs.
That's awesome. There's this plagiarism andpiracy rules the world, especially when when
(26:52):
it comes to good ideas. Thereare not that many new there are not
many things that need to be invented. I mean that that was one of
the pleasures of writing The Manager's Handbookis I really just curated the best practices
of fantastic leaders and got it downinto a few pages. I was I
was a curator. I didn't Ididn't invent anything in that book. But
(27:14):
everything you've done is you've dispelled andput it into simple tactical things that we
can do today. So this hascoming kind to the end of our management
superpowers. And next time we're goingto come back and we're going to talk
about creating employee heroes. So tokind of lead us into that thinking about
creating employee heroes, what do youwant us to think about or bring back
(27:37):
to the table for session two whenwe're thinking about as a manager looking at
our team, we've just asked hima question of what have you said no
to today? How are we goingto start to rev them up? So
that somebody can come back and listento episode two. It wasn't until I
was deep into finishing the book thatsomething dawned on me, which was that
(28:00):
the leaders that I had studied werereally teachers. And it was actually when
I was stumbling upon or thinking aboutJeff Bezos and how he ran Amazon,
and I want you to I wantpeople to think about it this way.
First of all, by the way, like the other leaders I mentioned,
Jeff Bezos did not invent book sales. He did not invent buying things online.
(28:22):
He should have been crushed by Barnesand Noble and Walden Books and everything
who had cheaper cost of good soldand better brand names. He out implemented
them, and he out implemented thembecause he realized this. And I'll just
use an example of meetings. Whatdifference does it make if Jeff Bezos is
great at running meetings and everybody elsein his organization is poor at running meetings?
And then flip it around and saywhat if everybody at Amazon was great
(28:45):
at running meetings and Jeff Bezos ranlousy meetings? Of course you would take
the ladder. And so the pointis that these great leaders, first of
all, they need to embrace theseskills themselves. But then quickly, the
whole point of it is is toteach those skills to your team. And
that's when all of a sudden anorganization takes off. There are no one
person organizations out there that are successful. The best organization are the ones that
(29:07):
have learned and embraced the importance ofteaching everybody else how to manage their email,
everybody else how to hire well,everybody else how to run good meetings.
Dave, it's been amazing having youon talking about the Manager's Handbook,
talking about crushing your competition and aboutmanagement superpowers. Can't wait to have episode
two coming up soon. Thanks somuch for being on Gross Selling Retire OKBD.
(29:33):
Thanks for joining us on grow Selland Retire. For more information,
tools or to book one of ourteam members. To work with your team
business, or to speak at yourevent or conference, visit rockfind dot co
dot uk. If you like thepodcast, you'll love one of BD's three
books, The Assisted Purchase, TrueGravity and The Book. The podcast is
(29:53):
based on Grow Sell and Retire.If you want to work for the rest
of your life, that is yourbusiness. If you don't, that is ours.
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