Prepare to witness the intricate interplay of hope, endurance, and the art of steering the ship amidst the squall of adversity. We dissect the contagious nature of hopelessness and its impact on team spirit, but more importantly, we illuminate how a leader's relentless determination becomes the torch that guides their team to reflect the same tenacity. Acknowledging fear but defying its grip, we reflect on strategic retreat versus fear-induced withdrawal, cementing the idea that true leadership is about standing firm in the face of uncertainty and leading by valiant example. If the idea of rallying your troops with unshakeable resolve resonates with you, this episode is your battlefield anthem.
Prepare to witness the intricate interplay of hope, endurance, and the art of steering the ship amidst the squall of adversity. We dissect the contagious nature of hopelessness and its impact on team spirit, but more importantly, we illuminate how a leader's relentless determination becomes the torch that guides their team to reflect the same tenacity. Acknowledging fear but defying its grip, we reflect on strategic retreat versus fear-induced withdrawal, cementing the idea that true leadership is about standing firm in the face of uncertainty and leading by valiant example. If the idea of rallying your troops with unshakeable resolve resonates with you, this episode is your battlefield anthem.
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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, and welcome back. We've got our season five special guest, dave Nertschi, with us. We're getting after lessons learned from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and our point today that we're getting into, I think is a good one. It is do not have an exit plan when you need to have 100% faith in the future. That is brought to you by NQR Media, and you can find us at nqrmediacom, where we unapologetically bring to light things that need to be talked about. So again, that's nqrmedia. At nqrmediacom, it's also where you can find more information about all the podcasts that we mentioned on the show. You can find more information about this podcast there as well, and we even have a reading list on there. So if you wanted to get more into some of the stuff that we're into, that's where you can go for more information. All right, dave, we got to get into the point here, and I like this one Do not have an exit plan when you need to have 100% faith in the future. I think I twisted a little bit of Ben's words a little bit. I think his point was a lot bigger and I kind of condensed it down, but his point was and he talks a lot about wartime, ceo, right, and? And fighting for your life as a business. And his point is is, if you believe in what you're doing and you're going to war and you're fighting for your life, you know you better not be planning to escape out the back door, right, like if, if you put doubt in the back of your head, that number one you're, you could fail or you're going to, or you're likely to fail, right, yep, um, so if you, you're thinking about your head okay, the likelihood of me failing is high enough that I need plan b in case I fail. Right, like, where am I going to get my paycheck next week? Thinking in the back of your head okay, the likelihood of me failing is high enough that I need plan B in case I fail. Right, like, where am I going to get my paycheck next week? If you know, I got to fire myself, you know, because? Because I go bankrupt with my company, um, the problem with that is that weakens you, right, because you're no longer fighting with everything you have, you're fighting to preserve your escape hatch, right, it's like you know, I can go right up to the edge and I can bail out right when it gets really hard, because I can go to this other place.
Speaker 1:
And that's really what he's talking about. He's like forget about it. Who's going to fight harder? The person with their back against the wall, or like who's been backed up to the edge of a cliff, or the person who there's nothing behind them that's going to slow them down. They can just turn around and run away. And he's saying fight like you're going to fall off a 5 000 foot cliff to your death yeah, it's like the burn the ships mentality, right, you can't you have no option to leave it.
Speaker 2:
This is this. Is you, you fight to the death or you survive, type of thing. Um, yeah, I look at this one, it's you, you hit. You hit the point of like, if you're spending energy and time on the what ifs or the plan B, that's just taken away from what you should be spending your time and energy on as getting through whatever challenge you're facing at the time.
Speaker 2:
And it also it made me think. Most of us probably the majority of people listening have changed jobs before or were sick in a job. You know they, they were done with their job and they're looking for the next opportunity. And what happens at that point if you think about it, um, you, you start to kind of not focus at all on your current job and you're looking for the new career. Right, you're looking at what's my next move and any work you're doing, probably that point is getting half your attention, if that you're kind of just sending it through, and all of the good energy and focus is going to this new potential opportunity. So that was one of my takeaways here of how I think of that. If you're not focusing on the important stuff, you're wasting a lot of energy.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I think that think about the book when he goes and they're about bankrupt. And he goes and talks to the private equity guy and he's like somebody told me to come talk to you. We need money or we're not going to survive. He was down to like 30 cents a share and he goes and talks to this guy and the guy listens to him and he goes, I'll see what I can do. Listens to him and he goes, I'll see what I can do. And then he starts buying shares. His fund starts buying shares, his buddies start buying shares and they they basically keep them from getting delisted on the stock exchange. Um, and then later on in the book he says you know why'd you invest in me? And the guy said well, I didn't know anything about your business. He goes I invested because you had so much conviction, right.
Speaker 1:
And if you watch Shark Tank or listen to Kevin O'Leary or any of those guys talk, they don't buy ideas. They don't care what your idea is Right, your idea could be anything, they don't care. It's the conviction and the fact that it seems like you would die over your idea to make it successful. You would do anything that it takes to make it successful. That's what people invest in. And when you think about it, most of business, when you look at it and see like why one business does great versus another, or how one business recruits talent, or how one business recruits clients or something like that typically it's confidence. And where does confidence come from? I have 100% faith that I'm going to succeed, and the reason why is because it doesn't matter what you throw at me, you're not going to get me to run for the exit and so as long as I'm breathing, I can move forward and I'll outlast you. If I have to right, it's this war of attrition. In our industry, in the finance industry, a washout rates something like 90, 95% of everybody who starts in it, and so it's a battle of attrition. It's how long can you survive so that enough people find out about you and your company and what you're doing and you, you gain more skills and knowledge and you know you can build a base and all that kind of stuff. But it is really about how long can you last and you have to believe that as long as you're breathing, you have an opportunity until until they take you out of the game and say you're out, game's over, you're done.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you have to play like. Think about, like a sports analogy, I, I whenever they say you don't run up to score and stuff, it's like it's not my job to stop scoring, it's their job to stop me from scoring. Right, and you should play, whether you're down by 50 or up by 50, with the exact same tenacity. Your, your goal should be absolutely to destroy whoever is playing against you, and I don't mean in a mean or vindictive way, but it shouldn't be. Oh we're, we're beating them by so much. I guess we should slow down and let them catch up. Right, it should just be like here's our pace. You either keep up with it or you don't.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and I don't feel bad for you if you can't. Yep, yeah, and I think it really. We talked about setting the tone right. If, what do you think happens if employees pick up on your half in or half out? You have all these backup plans. Now, all of a sudden, that's spreading throughout and it's like, oh shit, what do we do if our leaders are looking for plan B or not fully invested in this? Why are we? And you're going to have people jump and chip before you know it because they're going to pick up on those actions? You're not going to be able to hide that. That's something that's going to come out in the way that you know.
Speaker 1:
you're conducting meetings and all of that, yeah, the walls have ears and eyes. You know it's like, yeah, you're supposed to be the most confident Like we've got this under control, and the most tenacious like we're moving forward, and the most tenacious like we're moving forward. And the second somebody finds out that you're thinking about jumping ship. They're thinking this must be way worse than I thought it was Right. And the problem from a leadership standpoint is when you're facing the war of business, when you're facing hard times, you do not get through it without your team. Right. And if your team is jumping ship because they think you're jumping ship, you just we. In the last season we talked about hope and will. Right, so the hope is gone. Right, because they don't believe that you believe in the future, so their will goes next. Once the hope is gone, the will is gone.
Speaker 2:
Yep, yeah. And so then, the flip side of that is now your people see you fighting right, fighting till the end, not giving up in this hard time. They're going to rally with you. So you get the opposite effect of now, like now the team comes with you and like, hey, if you're fighting to the death, we're getting, we're, we're right next to you doing the same thing. So you, you really choosing your path there, your, your people, are going to follow you one way or another.
Speaker 1:
Right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
It's fight or flight, right, it's like everybody that mechanism in them or that reaction to either fight things or run away from things. Yep, and that's, that's fine. At a personal level, do what you got to do. But when you're at at the business level, I mean, the only time you run away is if it's part of the fight, if it's literally part of the strategy with the fight, you know what I mean. It's like you have to resist the urge to turn around and run because you're scared and and I think we I think we already did an episode on this but like you're gonna be scared sometimes it's gonna be like I have no idea what's happening next week or next month, but let's find out, let's see what we can do, let's see if we can get there. You know, and you just you have to go after it and if you don't, you can't expect anybody else to fight.