📖 To access Travis' complete book list, visit his storehere
Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, with our Season 5 co-host, dave Nurchi, and this podcast is all about inspirations that we find from different leadership books. Different books about getting shit done just things that inspire us. This book that we're talking about right now is the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and what we do is we take our observations from the book and we talk about our experiences with those observations. So things that we've actually put into play, thought about putting in play things that worked out haven't worked out. Hopefully that inspires you A little bit about us, just so you understand where everything's coming from.
Speaker 1:
I'm the chief executive officer for seed planning group. Dave's our chief operating officer for seed planning group, so we get to talk about this all the time, and the other counterpart that we have that's not here from our executive team, bill Hamilton we'll give him a quick shout out. He's our CFO and chief technology officer. We basically just hang a bunch of hats on him, but he does a phenomenal job and these are discussions that we have all the time between the three of us on how to approach different things, so we're trying to bring that to people. Maybe it'll inspire you and how you do business, or if you're starting a business, or if you're just a manager someplace or an employee and you're trying to understand why your managers are crazy. Maybe this will help. All right, so we're going to do a takeaway today, and our takeaway for the day is having the right kind of ambition. Smart people do not want to work for people who don't have their best interests at heart, and we want our employees to take ownership and become the quality control themselves.
Speaker 1:
Ben Harrow, which refers to this as the Bill Campbell attribute Remember, that's one of his mentors that he talks about in the book. So, getting back to our agenda today, we have to quickly do our who the podcast is sponsored by, and that is C Planning Group, fee-only fiduciaries, a wealth management firm that helps people overcome the challenges that are keeping them from personal fulfillment. Yes, that is shameless. That is the company that Dave and I helped to run. However, that's where all of our experience comes from and some of the insights that we bring you, so check them out. Support seed planning group. You can find out more information at seed pg, as in seed planning group, seedpgcom. All right, dave, so let's get back to our takeaway, and, uh, I like this one, um, because this is the intent. One right Rating, the intent on your forehead. Let's talk about how that impacts the people around us, maybe the people that we're trying to inspire.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it really. It's going to be, I think, a big factor in the motivation or the energy in people. If you're, if people walk into a meeting room or they know every time you're, you know you're coming up with a new initiative or project or something and the intent behind it is to either you know, advance myself or look good to the boss or my manager, or whatever the case is, you're not, the buying is going to get smaller and the motivation, right, people are going to look at it like not, not just like what's in it for me, but they're going to say why are we doing this? Like, if it's just to you know, advance and advance this guy's career, there's no purpose to it. Right, you're kind of losing that whole purpose of what you're doing as a company. So I think that's going to really decide what kind of energy you have from the people you're working with.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I'm thinking of somebody in my mind that walks around with the intent on her forehead, and it's a very positive intent, um, and she's very smart and and we're not going to say her name, david, you know, I think you're going to figure out what I'm talking about, um, and the first step in getting her to where she is, I think, was building the trust, the whole trust bank that I always talk about, right, helping her understand. This is the mission when, where are we going and do we mean it? So you establish where we're going and that we mean it, and so so, assuming whatever company you work for is like ours, where it's like look, this is about something bigger than me, it's about something bigger than Dave, it's about even something bigger than our clients. It's about making a change and a lasting impact. Right, Once you build that trust and that person buys into it, they like okay, your intent is pure, I get it, it makes it. So it's easy for them to grab onto that, because the type of person that you're looking for is the warrior, the little beasties, right, you're looking for that person who takes it upon themselves to fight the battles for the purpose of the company, right, who believes in it so much that they're going to go to war over the principles. And so this person I'm thinking about walks around and we've had lots and lots of discussions, encounters, fun conversations with this person, but it's always in pursuit and in demand of following that that you know, call it the just cause or that mission it's.
Speaker 1:
It's the warrior mindset, and warriors need something to believe in. Warriors don't just fight for the sake of fighting. Warriors, really, you know the, the, the, the really really amazing ones. There's something that they're fighting for, right, there's something that they believe in so much and that leads to the initiative of if you have a room full of warriors, anybody who's in that room who's not a warrior, anybody who's in that room who's not fighting for the same cause that they're fighting for, they're going to cannibalize. There's no room for that.
Speaker 1:
And it becomes painfully obvious as we've gone through some of the transition as a company that we've gone through, those animal instincts have actually come out. You know, when you bring somebody into the environment, that somehow gets through, because people are going to get through every now and then. That don't fit quite right. Somebody gets in. That doesn't fit quite right, or somebody, let's say, the business, as the business is growing, they can't keep up. Those animals, those warriors come out and they're just like. We don't have time for this. You know, like this is, this is damaging what we're trying to build, or this is, you know, detracting from we're trying to build, and not necessarily in a mean, spirited way, but in just a very aggressive. This is bullshit. You know this. This has to change. Um, or we're going to make sure that, you know, this person realizes this isn't the right place to be.
Speaker 2:
And that's the whole. That's the warrior mentality, right? It's like you're not going to take this away from me, so when people really care about-.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2:
The company they're at right and what it means. So if you're here and you represent what it means and you fight for it, you look at someone who doesn't have that mentality and you're basically saying you're not taking this away from me and every other warrior that's here. So you're either going to change or you're going to leave.
Speaker 2:
And that's why, when you have that group right and you have those people, that's what's going to win out right. You have enough of those people. You're going to create that. Where you can't avoid it right, the people who are not adapting to that or who are not warriors will leave because there's nowhere for them to go yeah, because there's a ferociousness.
Speaker 1:
There's like a fierceness to it and, like you said, I think the mentality is you're not going to take this or destroy this. You know this, I've been looking for this too long, this is too important. I'll be damned if I'm going to let you wreck this. And that's the quality control Like they own that mission, right. It's not like sometimes you can get on a boat and here's a paddle, you know, or sometimes you're just like you are the boat, right, you are the vessel that's going to lead it.
Speaker 1:
And I guess maybe that's the leadership part of this. You can create an entire organization of leaders that will make it impossible for people to leech their way onto it. But I think it starts with that trust bank. It starts with the head, guys or gals from them down. It starts with the intent and saying look, and being pure and true and honest to the intent.
Speaker 1:
Here's what we're trying to do here and I think if you want to galvanize people and really get people to buy in, it's obviously much bigger than you or your individual needs. It's about this mission that the organization is pursuing and then, once you get some of those people in there, I mean you know it, when you meet one of these people, there's just a spark to them or an energy to them and it feels like I'm just in their way, I got to get out of the way. And if you can surround yourself with people that you're just feeling like, I got to get out of their way and let them do their thing and they got this. I mean, the sky's the limit on that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you take pride in it. It's like defending your household, right. You have a household and you got a family there. Someone tries to rob you or come into the house. You're going to do everything you can to stop that and say this is my house.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, this is how this works.
Speaker 2:
You're not going to come and invade everything. I take pride in everything I have and that's how you look at that. The people who fight for the company, the purpose and everything it's about. It's the same feeling. It's. We've created this. I'm not going to do this again, right? I'm not going to lose this because I take a lot of pride in it. So you got to see yourself out, type of thing.
