How to Overcome Failure #46 Manager Mojo Podcast

Steve:            Hello and welcome to the Manager Mojo Podcast. I’m really thrilled today to introduce our guest, Mr. John Spence.  John is an internationally recognized executive consultant and trainer and he’s the author of four books, so he’s been busy. He’s written Awesomely Simple, which I absolutely, totally love that title, John.  He also has written Excellence by Design Leadership, Letters to a CEO and Strategies for Success and you can find those easily on Amazon just by doing a search.   John has been named three times as one of the Top 100 Business Thought Leaders in America.   He’s one of the Top 100 Small Business Influencers and he’s one of the Top 500 Leadership Development Experts in the World. His consulting and training expertise have sent him traveling all over the world and he’s been called upon by over 500 client companies from large companies like Microsoft, Bank of America, Apple and many, many others. John is simply a master of living by his own credo, which is making the very complex awesomely simple.

I want to welcome John to the Manager Mojo Podcast.   John, how are you today?

John:            I am fantastic, Steve.  I’m very honored to be here and I look forward to chatting with you. We’re going to have a fun time.

Steve:            I’m thrilled you’re here as well and I know you have so much fun and interesting content to share.  John, tell us a little bit about what you’re passionate about these days – what you’re spending most of your time doing.

John:                        Yeah, sure.  I’m entering – which is crazy to me – my twentieth year of being a consultant/trainer/speaker and I’ve done a lot of different topics, but right now I would say that the things my clients want the most is – and I put it in a pretty good order – the first one is disciplined execution. There’s no shortage of bright, sharp, smart, talented, innovative, creative people, but there is a huge shortage of people that can take ideas and turn them into action. I spend a lot of time right now focused on accountability and disciplined execution.  I spend a lot of time talking about culture because people understand that one of the keys to success in your business is the quality of the people that you can get, grow and keep on your team, and a major factor of keeping that team together is the culture within your organization.  And then I spend a lot of time on high performance teams, on how to take those people, once you get them, and make sure that they’re as efficient, effective and successful as they possibly can be.

Steve:            Very cool. It sounds interesting and I’m sure you’re having a great time doing it.

John:                        Yeah, it’s neat because I run around from industry to industry. I’m with a bank one week, I just got off the phone with some folks from Kraft and Pepsico, I’m doing some work with something called the Women’s Foodservice Forum – which is 3,000 of the female senior leaders of top companies around the world – and, then I’ll be with a small company this week, helping them out – a publishing company – so, I go from Fortune 100 to start-ups and across all industries in a month, which means it’s always something new and innovative.  It also gives me an opportunity because I get to look across all those companies to see the fundamental things that work well across every industry.

Steve:            Yeah, I agree, it’s fascinating to see the differences and, more importantly, I think sometimes I have more fun looking at the similarities.

John:                        Yeah, so I basically built my entire career off of looking for patterns.

I read about 100 – 200 business books a year – I have every year since 1989 – worked with hundreds of companies and, for me, I’m always looking for the pattern of what works extremely well or the pattern of what causes the company to go into bankruptcy and help them avoid that.

Steve:            Well, John thank-you for bringing that up because I think that leads me to what I want to talk about first today. You know, it is important for all of us in management and leadership to read and to really get a diverse amount of opinion and I’m really pleased to hear you say you read so much.  But I also know from your own experience, it hasn’t always been that way for you that you were such a passionate reader. Would that be a fair statement to say?

Here’s how to overcome failure!

John:            Oh, because I failed out of college on the first try because I didn’t read anything?  Yeah. (they laugh)  Absolutely, it would be fair.

Steve:            (laughs) I love that story. Why don’t you share just a little bit of that story with our listeners because I know there are a lot of people who think, “You know what? I’ve got to be perfect all the time in my career,” and nothing could be further from the truth.  Sometimes failure can be just the medicine you need.  So just share a little bit of that if you don’t mind.

John:                       Perfect is a fantasy.  You might want to strive for it – I don’t want to strive for perfection.  I just want to be okay, pretty good, you know, above average.

Well, I grew up in Miami, Florida, in a very wealthy family, went to prep school, got great grades, got accept to a lot of colleges and I chose the University of Miami because it was close to my house, close to my boat and close to my girlfriend. (laughs) Not really why you choose a college, which is why I ended up – 2 ½ semesters later – with a 1.6 GPA.

Steve:            Congratulations, that’s awesome. (laughs)

John:            Thank-you, thank-you. Well, it was the highest GPA of all my friends – can you imagine that? I was at the top of my group of friends with a 1.6 and they kicked me out, which was bad enough.  But to take it a few more levels, my father’s one of the top alumni to ever graduate from the University of Miami.  The years that I got kicked out he was on the board of directors and there was a wing of the law school named after my father, so you’ve really got to mess up to get kicked out of a college where there’s a building named after your dad and that was the big turnaround – well, close to the big turnaround – for me.

Then, I applied to the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida – where I live now – and I’ll never forget the day I handed the woman my transcript and she literally laughed at me and said, “We don’t take people like you.”   I walked down the steps from the registrar’s office, sat down on University and 13^th Avenue – which is about ten blocks from my house now – and cried and I realized I’m just about to throw my life away.   I had dreams of owning companies and going places and doing neat stuff and I realized that college, at least for me, was a stepping stone.  I needed to do that – or I felt I did – and I was just about to toss it out the window, and that’s when I became a fanatic about reading, studying and learning.   The first area was: I’m going to learn everything I humanly can about how to be successful in life.  I’m going to listen to every tape, I’m going to read every book, I’m going to go to every seminar because I figured out really well how to mess things up.   I might need to do some studying on how to do things right.

Steve:            What a great point, John.   A lot of people think, okay, I screwed up and we don’t realize how quickly we perfect failure.  We can do that well. (laughs)

John:                        Well, the funny thing is, if you can perfect failure and you can mess up habits, you can change habits, you know? At least from a learning standpoint, I’m a living example of just absolutely ignoring my education and almost losing it and, now you were kind enough to mention me in the top 100, top 500 of what I do in the world now and the turning point was when I realized that not all of the answers were in the books.  But there was an awful lot of good information I could read, study, learn and apply some practical wisdom and advice from smart people.   Then I would usually find out what I needed to be successful and move to the next stage.

Steve:            What a great experience.

John:                        It’s not a mystery, it’s not a secret.   There’s no secret to where to find a silver bullet, but there are some fundamental things that people work on every single day and one habit builds on the next to that higher level of success – whatever your definition of that higher level of success is, whether it’s money, fame and power or if that’s just to be really good at your job and nobody knows it and you don’t make a bunch of money at it, but, boy, you love it and you live your values every day.  I mean, my definition of success is when your core values and your self-image – the thing you want to create in your life – are in harmony with your daily action and behavior.  So you’ve got a clear set of core values that you live by, a clear picture of the kind of life you truly want to live and you actually live that every day – to me, that’s being very successful.

Steve:            Oh, me and you both. I concur 100%.  So John, once you had that Ah-Ha! moment where you’re looking at your future – and obviously things changed and here we are years later and you’ve been very successful and you help people all over the world achieve the success that they want – and, what I would like to hear is, if you would, tell us in those early years when you were really getting into business, and you were learning the ins and outs of business, what were the things that were driving you to learn and to become this leader that you are today, this thought leader that shares with everybody?

John:                        Well, it’s a magnificent question. There are two things that I want to share with you: the thing that turned my college career around, but it’s been the single most important thing that I’ve ever learned in my life, which — coming from a guy that read over 5,000 books — says a lot.  That’s a big statement.

Steve:            It is.

John:                        Here it is:  You become what you focus on and like the people you spend time with.   Whatever you fill your mind with, whatever you read, study, learn, whatever you put in your brain and whoever you choose and your close associates will directly determine what your life will look like a decade from now.  You become what you focus on and like the people you spend time with. This was how I was going to overcome failure.

When I was the University of Miami I focused on all of the things that weren’t important – going to the beach, going to drink and hanging out with my girlfriend.  All of my friends had a 0.9 to 1.6 GPA.  We were focused on failure not success. When  I went to the University of Florida, eventually, I asked myself – and here’s another powerful idea: the quality of your life will be determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself and others.  When I started college the question I asked myself was: how can I have as much fun as I possibly can in college? And, the answers were: don’t go (laughs).  When I got to University of Florida I changed the question to: how can I have as much fun as I possibly can in college while keeping a straight-A average, staying healthy and preparing myself for my dream job and my dream life?  I ask that question about everything I do.  If I was about to do something, if I was about to take an action, if I wanted to skip class and hang out by the pool I asked myself: is this going to allow me to still keep a straight-A average, keep healthy and set myself up for a winning life?  If can do both, then I will, but if I can’t I will be disciplined enough to go back and study.  So those were the big ideas in college.

When I got out of college I was hired by one of the Rockefeller Foundations to do public relations and marketing work – which is what my degree was in – and, just a few short years later, at the age of 26 I was made CEO of that foundation and I became very, very lucky because I worked for Winthrop P. Rockefeller III and he had a right hand man – a guy named Charles Owens.   Charlie was Mr. Rockefeller’s right hand man, strategist, lawyer, accountant all rolled into one and Mr. Rockefeller asked him to keep an eye on me, to help and to mentor me.  What Charlie would do is walk into my office every Monday and hand me a book and say, “I’ll see you Friday for lunch,” and we would go to a local diner and drink sweet tea and have some cornbread and he would grill me on the book. What did you learn? What was in there? What were the key ideas?

But, then he did something that totally changed my career, he said, “Alright, what are you going to apply? What are the three things you’re going to do differently as a result of reading that book?”  I would tell him and he would write them down and say, “You will now be held responsible for that in your job. Here’s your next book.”  So, for six years I got a book every Monday, I made a book report every Friday, but the key thing is I was held accountable for taking the ideas and executing them the next Monday.

Steve:            Wow, what a phenomenal opportunity for a young man to have, a mentor that would say, okay – not only here are good books – but, we’re going to hold you accountable for actions each week. Wow, I can totally get that.

John:                        Yeah and it’s been one of the things that’s changed my career, changed failure to success, and it’s also given me a huge lead in the market place, the ability to take ideas and execute on them.

Steve:            John, just to dovetail on that a little bit, I think it’d be interesting for you to know as well as for our listeners, I’ve been running surveys from managers asking them about do they value a mentor and, obviously, what you are talking about is an amazing mentor.  Ninety percent (90%) of the people we’re surveying say yes, they value a mentor, they’d love to have one, but a full 67% – over 2/3 of the people that respond – say that they don’t have one.   So there’s a huge, huge gap out there for mentorship and for people to hold others accountable to their desires and success. How can you overcome failure without help?  I think you can’t.  Failure is temporary if you have the right mindset.

John:                        Let me say two things back – because I get people asking me to mentor them all the time, a couple hundred a year.   I have a very clear response: tell me what you want to learn, and then I assign them three books to read and say, “Read these three books and make a book report on each.  Literally type it out.  I will meet with you for breakfast or lunch and we will discuss them.   I will ask you questions and if you’ve read them and understand them then you’re on the team and I’ll mentor you.”

Steve:            That’s great advice and I want to suggest to those that don’t have a mentor, you can reach out.  Just reach out; we’ll help you with that part.  As I’m listening to you talk about this experience, John, now I begin to see behind the scene a little bit and I want to ask you if my opinion is right.  So you have this experience and you’re learning and you’re applying and getting the real world management leadership experience where you’re being held accountable to really high-quality action and, then at some point, you have the idea to write this incredibly titled book called Awesomely Simple and I love, love, love the title because, even on Manager Mojo, our listeners understand this, we talk about common sense solutions to management and leadership issues.  So tell us a little bit about what gave you the idea for Awesomely Simple because the advice in it truly is brilliant.

John:                        Well, I’ll give you the background on the book quickly and, then I’d like to share with your listeners the formula that I built – a very quick formula – based on the entire book to give you an idea of what it focuses on.

Steve:            Cool.

John:                        The reason I wrote the book is because I met so many business owners who had put their life savings into the business and pay roll and had people dependant on them and were just making it so complex.   I’d look at them and think it’s just not that complex.  Yes, there are some complexities, but there are some fundamental things that if you just do these three, four or five things every day 85% of the problems in your business will go away.   Because I travel so much – I’d drive across towns and see all the closed businesses and it hurt me because I realized that these people went bankrupt, they lost their livelihoods, everyone got fired and it was probably because they just weren’t focused on the right things.

So, let me fast forward and I’m now going to go through – I don’t pump my book or push it very hard – but, let me give you a formula that I derived based on my entire book.  That book was based on reading hundreds of other books and all the businesses I worked with and I took it and boiled it down to this formula and I call it the Formula for Business Success, so it’s:

(t + c + ecf) x de = success

And, I’ll explain it now, it’s:

(talent + culture + extreme customer focus) x disciplined execution = business success

These aren’t the only four things, but if you hire top talent, take great care of them, you create a winning culture – a culture that’s engaging and also delivers results – and you take that culture and focus it on delivering amazing products and services to your customers and understanding and knowing your customers better than anyone else in the market place, then when you execute what you learned flawlessly, you’re 89 – 90% ahead of everybody else. You still have to have top quality service, you still have to have good financial management, but if you have top talent, a winning culture, extreme customer focus and you’re great at execution, those four things will carry almost any business a very, very, very long way.

Steve:            Very interesting and I can just hear people right now saying, “Hey, what was that again?” so, let’s go over it just a little bit slower this time, so you said it was:

(t + c – what is t?

John:            Here, you go:

(talent + culture + extreme customer focus) x disciplined execution

Steve:            Extreme customer focus.

John:                        Yes:     extreme customer focus) x disciplined execution.

Here’s what I believe – I’ve been teaching a class at Wharton for about fourteen years on Strategy and Strategic Thinking – for most businesses today the only sustainable, competitive thing that you have is the quality of the people that you can get, grow and keep on your team and the relationships they create with their customers.   Step 1 is you’ve got to get the best people you can possibly get on your team and that doesn’t mean that everybody has to have four advanced degrees from ivy league colleges and has been a former space shuttle pilot, but it means for the job they’re going to do you want to get the best person you possibly can – top talent.

Then you want to create a culture that’s got two sides to it. It’s a culture that has top talent excited, involved, engaged, having fun, enjoying their work while – at the same time – delivering business results.  Also that it’s a great learning culture that attracts top talent and engages them where they meet the numbers, they deliver the results, they keep the business highly successful.

Step 3, then is extreme customer focus and I have a saying that I’ve used for years, “Whoever owns the voice of the customer, owns the market place.” Whoever knows their customer the best, understands them the best, has the strongest relationship with them is basically building an economic moat around their business because, again, it’s one of the only things you can’t copy or steal.  I can’t just throw money and win the loyalties of your customer away from you.  If they’re highly loyal, you know them well and you’ve got a strong relationship that’s an incredibly powerful business advantage.

Then you take those three things: top talent, winning culture that delivers results, extreme customer focus – owning the voice of the customer –and you multiply it by disciplined execution, which is all about accountability, delivering results, keeping your word and making sure that you take your wonderful ideas and turn them into fantastic action in the market place.

Steve:            Very cool, yeah, I want to talk about that for just a minute because for years, one of my businesses is I actually help companies identify the right people for jobs. We do a lot of behavioral analytics to help people do that, but one of the problems that I see over and over again is that people really are confused about talent. They don’t understand talent very clearly and everybody says, “Let’s get talented people,” but what they do is get resumes and they try to let it be determined there instead of their ability to deal with people and what the job needs. Do you find that same type of thing going on in companies, since you’re going all around the world?

John:            Oh, yeah, most companies on a scale of 1 – 10 – with 10 being world class and 1 being absolutely pathetic – are just slightly above a 2 at hiring. (laughs)  They haven’t done a good enough job of identifying what talent is for their business.  They also hired, like you said, on resume, not on results.   I’m much more about — this is what you have to do in this job and this is the result.  Your resume’s nice, it’s interesting, but you need to deliver results.  I did a CEO conference years ago – had 400 CEOs there – we were all talking about talent.  At the end of the evening it came down to this: hire for attitude and aptitude, train for skills – which is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s real.

If someone’s got a bad attitude, they don’t like certain people, they’re pessimistic – there’s no class you can send them to, there’s no workshop they can go to, there’s no book they’re going to read that’s going to make them suddenly a happy, joyful person.  They are more destined to be a failure in the job. If they’ve got a great attitude and they’ve got the ability to learn – which is, kind of, what your resume proves – then you can send them to the training and get them up to speed, unless it’s brain surgery or an airline pilot.  You can train somebody what to do, but you cannot train attitude or aptitude.  They are or they aren’t.

Let me recommend a book – the single best book I’ve read recently on the diagnostics and stuff, which would probably support what you do very strongly because they recommend using analytics and all those other things as absolutely fundamental to the hiring process is a book called Who. It talks about how to really put in a hiring process that will deliver very, very qualified candidates in a much higher success ratio in your hiring process.

Steve:            You know, the people who are listening to us on the Manager Mojo Podcast are those people who already have a good attitude.  They’re trying to move ahead with their lives.  So what I want to do is to make sure they understand what we’re talking about.  Even though it may seem common sense or basic, it actually is pointing out a tremendous opportunity for each one of them because – just to put a little bit of data behind what we’ve already talked about today.    You’re sharing that you’ve been all over the world, you see that people are failing and they don’t have these things. Well, the Gallop Organization continues to do research on employee engagement and whether people really want to go to work or not, and their latest research shows just how badly business is failing worldwide.  It shows that 87% of employees worldwide are actually disengaged, meaning that they’re just showing up for a paycheck.  So there’s a lot of opportunity for people to apply ideas like your formula.  Let’s talk about talent and culture and being extremely customer focused.   You start doing those things and you’re going to win, aren’t you?

John:                       Yeah and let me share a little bit more data.   I’ve got a proprietary database of about 10,000 high potential employees in top companies around the world.  These are small town, big companies – but these are the best of the best. These are the folks that have been handpicked to take the company over.  I coached some of the top 50 employees at Fortune 100 companies.   These are what I called voluntary employees – they’re so good at what they do, they’re so talented that if they quit at 9:00 a.m. this morning they would get a job with your competitor at noon.   So they come to work by choice because they have options.   The go to the business they work at not because they have to, but because they want to.   They like the company.   I sent out a survey to all of them and said, “Why do you work where you work? What is it about the place you work that keeps you there?”

And, they gave me six answers.   They weren’t in any particular order, but I’ll put them in an order, and I’ll use the one that everyone’s thinking of: #1 is pay.  Here’s what they told me. “As long as I’m paid 10% above or below what I would make to do the same job at any place else – as long as I’m roughly making about what I would make to do this job for any other company – pay comes off the table.  That’s all I need.  I just need to know that my pay is fair –10% above or below.” Once you get parity on pay, it comes off the table.

Then, the next thing is: challenging work. “I want to do something that tests my mind, that’s challenging and rewarding and meaningful.”

The next one was: I want to work with cool colleagues. “I want the other people at the company to be fun, interesting, talented, innovative, creative, great attitude, good sense of humor, all that stuff,” so cool colleagues.

The third one was: I want a winning culture.  A winning culture was all about, “Am I treated fairly? Are we having fun? Do we take pride in the organization? Do I get praise?”   The fundamental things that the Gallop Organization has identified for years.

The next one is: was there an opportunity for both personal and professional growth? “Am I learning new things? Am I increasing my skill base? Am I constantly exposed to new ideas and new information that’s making me better, stronger, faster, sharper at my job and is there a chance for me to grow in the company? Is there a career path?”

And, then, last, but not least, was: am I working for a leader that I admire? “Is my boss/my manager/the leader someone I admire?”

I’ll go through them quickly again: fair pay – 10% above or below what I would make to do the same job at any place else – challenging, meaningful , rewarding work, cool colleagues, fun people, great culture, winning culture, chance for opportunity for personal  and professional growth, manager or boss I admire. Only one of those, Steve, was money, the other five are atmosphere issues – the other five are culture – any company can do that.

Steve:            Absolutely they can.  They just have to have the desire to do it and understanding to do it.

John:            Exactly.

Steve:            John, one of the things that’s concerned me for a lot of years now is that companies will say, “I’m going to hire for attitude and aptitude and, then I’m going to train for skills,” but, what I’m seeing is that company after company is trying to shortcut  and they’re not training.  I’m seeing a lot of cutback in training where people should be taught leadership skills, communications skills and business skills and I’m not seeing that happen as much as I think it should be. Have you had a similar experience?

John:                        Yes, I’ve had many, many similar experiences and I actually talked to somebody, and it’s amazing when somebody actually says this to you – but I actually talked to a business leader this last week that said, “I don’t want to invest all that money in training my people because they’re just going to leave in 3 or 4 years and go get a better job.   I’d rather not spend that money and see them walk out that door.”   My question to him then was, “Let’s keep them dumb, stupid and mediocre and in your company?”  It’s always amazing to me that I hear the push back a lot of the times, “Well, I’m afraid to spend money really getting my people super good because they’ll just leave and go to the competition or it’s just too expensive to train my people.” So, it’s not expensive to have people that do their job at a mediocre level?

You know, you and I being in the training industry and helping people, it’s obvious to us, your best people are your most important asset, your worst people are your biggest liability.   I did a conference of top CEOs about two months ago – a couple hundred people in the audience and a panel of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies and a bunch of other people – and one of them made it really clear he said, “The game is running your B players. Your A players are already great, they’re smart, they’re fast, they’re your stallions, they’re awesome.   Just stay out of their way, they want something — give it to them, help them, but pretty much they’re self-motivated, they’re talented, they’re proactive, they’re moving themselves. The B players are the ones that if you can move a couple of B players into the A player range it makes a huge difference in the company,” but most companies I see focus on the C and D players and trying to get them up to speed.

Those folks are never going to get up to speed, they don’t have a desire to, they don’t want to, they don’t have the aptitude.  Not saying they’re bad people.  They’re great people.  They do their work and they do a fantastic job at their work.  But spending a lot of time, energy, and effort on trying to get someone on a scale of 1 – 10 who’s a 4 up to a 7 – it’s much better to invest that training and that time, energy and effort into someone who’s a 7.5 or an 8 and getting them up to a 9.5 and watch what they do.  The statistics show that if you take your average worker in the middle of the bell curve, you’re just regular old worker, they generate $1.00 for every $1.00 you give them – it’s pretty much a break even deal.   They have about equal value to what you pay them.  B players are about 11 times and an A player is about 22 times.

Now, the reverse, if you go back to a D player is -15 and an F player is -40.  So let’s get rid of the D and F players and invest in the B players.

Steve:            I get it, but that requires commitment.  It requires a focus on making your employees and your talent as good as possible.  This attitude of ‘I don’t want to invest in someone because they’re just going to leave anyway’actually makes your company a prisoner to mediocrity.

John:                        Absolutely, absolutely.

Steve:            There’s no other way around it.  John, awesome, awesome advice today. This has been absolutely wonderful, a great discussion.   I know people have really gotten a lot out of this.  How can people connect with you?

John:                        The best way is to go to my website, which is www.johnspence.com.   If you go there, I would suggest strongly, go to the resource section.  There’s a list of the Top 60 Business Books I’ve Ever Read there for free you can download.  There’s a link to my YouTube site where I have about 25 training videos –all free – on leadership, teamwork, accountability — great stuff there.  And I’ve also got a link to my slideshow site, which has all of the slideshows I’ve used in all of the workshops in the last five years for free.

Steve:            Awesome, John, it’s been a real pleasure. I want to thank you on behalf of the Manager Mojo audience for being a guest today.  It’s been an absolute delight and we want to wish you the most success in all of your endeavors around the world. Thank you for joining us today.

John:                        It’s been my honor and my pleasure, Steve.  Thank you for asking me to join you.