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S3 Summer Edition Steve Rice
11 Plays9 days ago
In this episode of Dial It In, Trygve Olsen and Dave Meyer have a conversation with Steve Rice, a business strategist and advocate for sustainable leadership. They discuss various topics including the importance of sustainability in business operations, the challenges of balancing ethical practices with business growth, and how technology and communication can support these goals. Steve shares examples from his own experience working with manufacturers and outdoor industry leaders, emphasizing the significance of creating sustainable products and processes. They also explore the concept of non-arguable goals and the importance of maintaining core values in business.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to dial it in a podcast where we talk to fascinating people about marketing sales process improvements and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me Dave Meyer and Trigby Olson of busy web as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:26
Speaker
Let's ring up another episode.
Summer Recap Series Introduction
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to our summer recap series on our favorite episodes from the dial it in podcast. We're recapping and we asked some of our staff members to highlight their favorite episodes.
00:00:41
Speaker
Today, Danielle highlights Steve Rice.
Spotlight on Steve Rice
00:00:44
Speaker
Steve Rice was a personal favorite of Danielle's because she loved the mix of sustainability speak in combo with how his personality encompassed exactly what he preached.
00:00:53
Speaker
He asked thought provoking questions throughout the podcast and highlights his ideas with fun personal anecdotes. Now Danielle says she remembers seeing his bio pictures and immediately started smiling because it was real.
00:01:04
Speaker
It was refreshing change of pace from all the traditional pictures that we tend to get sent as our podcast is produced. He has a big smile and a glass of beer just as big, and he looked like someone that Danielle would enjoy meeting.
00:01:17
Speaker
Throughout the episode, there were a few highlights that Danielle highlighted for us. Steve points out the fact that his shirt is eight years old and his pants are 20 years old. He embodies sustainability even in what he wears.
00:01:29
Speaker
He shows that bad business and unethical practices directly affect your company and its consumers and not in a good way. He states that the worst businesses are often putting toxins in the air that harm us and that they frequently see high turnover rates for a reason.
00:01:44
Speaker
And one of Steve's most impactful statements for for Danielle was, if you wouldn't want it happening to your granddaughter, don't do it. She loved this immensely. Steve has a ton of great advice throughout the episode, and we love the value that the episode brings to the world.
Sponsor Mention and Transition to Leadership Discussion
00:01:59
Speaker
Whether your company is actively planning sustainable changes or not, this episode brings a more impactful, eco-friendly mindset to light. Enjoy Steve Rice, and see you next week.
00:02:10
Speaker
I have to admit, i learned about today's guest and this is just somebody that you booked. I would not have picked that from you. Oh, I think you're in March will treat. I was, I was a huge fan of interview with the vampire in the nineties.
00:02:27
Speaker
And i read the whole books, uh, series, the list out series. I think you've got the wrong rice. I didn't even know she was still writing. Well, it's, this is a he and he's a delight. a he He's a delightful human and you're going to be super excited to meet with him. Okay. Welcome everybody to another episode of dial it in. I'm Trig V. He's Dave. Today's episode is sponsored by fractional tactical.
00:02:51
Speaker
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00:03:03
Speaker
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00:03:16
Speaker
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Steve Rice on Sustainable Leadership
00:03:22
Speaker
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00:03:30
Speaker
So wait a minute. You said it was a he. i think i know what you I think I know what you're getting at because I know what we're talking about today is ethical leadership. So... You're talking about the guy that quarterbacked Notre Dame to their last national championship in 1988, right?
00:03:44
Speaker
Tony Rice? I don't think so. This a much better Rice. I got nothing then. that end Maybe I should just do the intro and let you catch up.
00:03:55
Speaker
I clearly need a better AI robot too. Have you ever noticed, Trigby, with a name like yours and people always getting confused about your name, that most of our bits at the beginning of these are you missing the names on people?
00:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, we I don't claim the comedy is good, Dave, just that there's plenty of it. Absolutely. I am so thrilled to introduce our audience to Steve Rice.
00:04:18
Speaker
Steve is a good friend of mine and a business strategist and advocate for sustainable leadership. Through his work with the Globally Conscious Leader and Dotcom Jungle, Steve helps businesses align their technology, operations, and leadership strategies to achieve their long-term goals.
00:04:34
Speaker
With decades of experience in organizational growth and digital transformation, Steve specializes in guiding leaders to navigate the complexities of technology adoption while fostering sustainable practices.
00:04:46
Speaker
At Dotcom Jungle, Steve has helped numerous businesses choose and implement the right tools for operational excellence. His work with the globally conscious leader emphasizes balancing profitability with purpose, inspiring leaders to create meaningful and lasting impacts.
00:05:01
Speaker
Steve's unique blend of technical expertise and visionary leadership has made him a trusted partner for organizations looking to scale responsibly and
Communication and Technology in Leadership
00:05:10
Speaker
sustainably. Welcome Steve.
00:05:12
Speaker
Thank you, ba And to me, it's a pleasure to be here. And I want to say as much as I'm happy to be here, I'm really disappointed that you guys forgot one salient fact about me. And I am the first athlete to be elected into the hall of fame in both baseball and football.
00:05:28
Speaker
So you got to get your rice cleared up. Oh, sure. yeah So you're talking about Jerry? I believe you missed that. And Jim. Yeah. Jim Rice. oh jim right Okay. Yeah. dave Jim w Rice played for the Red Sox.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yes, yes. and we we could go We could go all day, and i' but I don't want to get into the San Francisco treat or any of that stuff because that's way deep in the- Condoleezza was another person who had- Oh, great. That would have been less fun. I'm so delighted to have you here, Steve, because we've had lots of great conversations over the years.
00:06:02
Speaker
And what I'm always left with you is that- The idea, especially the globally conscious leader side of your business and what you do, you're really all about walking the talk and the things that you talk about and that you share in globally conscious leader. And of course, through.com jungle have been instrumental and I never miss a post. So thank you so much for what you do.
00:06:27
Speaker
Thank you. Well, apparently I have it wrong. So what is it you do? I run, DotCom Jungle is the first company that I started and basically focuses on technology.
00:06:39
Speaker
If you'd asked me in when I was 16 or 20 or 22, what I would be doing, i would tell you I would have been a fisheries biologist. So how I ended it up here a non-linear, but linear story.
00:06:51
Speaker
And basically Globally Conscious Leader grew out of my understanding or experience in DotCom Jungle, where I was learning this As I was understanding that bad technology makes everybody in a business look bad, right? And good technology makes everybody look good, except the people who either need to be moved somewhere else, or maybe they need to get a job at Taco Bell or something.
00:07:13
Speaker
And when I started de fixing those issues in businesses that I was managing at the time before I started Dotcom Jungle, and then into Dotcom Jungle, I also, once once we started fixing those problems, started realizing that The next step is that there are communication systems and and that those make people look bad too.
00:07:31
Speaker
So it's not a matter of technology at that point. It's a matter of process and understanding and listening. So that's how I connected those. Amazing. So as we talk about leadership and how leaders adapt to changing business landscapes,
00:07:46
Speaker
There's been a lot of upheaval and a lot of change in how leaders interact and connect. know, I think when we started chatting, Steve, it was before COVID and the whole work from home movement. And now the return to office movement is in full swing. So that's been a lot of big changes.
00:08:05
Speaker
How do you ethically and responsibly like lead organizations, especially when there's all this turmoil in their office?
Pandemic Adaptation Case Study
00:08:13
Speaker
I think process, maintaining a process of communication that you had have regardless of the technology you're using and making sure that your technology supports that process is probably key.
00:08:25
Speaker
We all know we're doing it right now. You can talk just as easily over Zoom or some other video chat as you can in person. Maybe you missed some body clues or whatnot, but when it comes down to it, accountability is always one of the most important things in a business.
00:08:42
Speaker
And not just for the owner of the business itself, but for ourselves. We feel good about ourselves when we have accountability, take accountability and follow through on time.
00:08:53
Speaker
The businesses that I saw who were really successful that in the switch over call it March 15th, 2020 was a big day. Everybody went home and one of my clients basically shut their doors on the 10th.
00:09:05
Speaker
They sent everybody home with pay and they were thinking about this ahead of time because we were talking about it with them anyway, not knowing and pandemic was going to happen. But they basically shut the doors, got their entire tech team together, talked about communication and what they were going to do, bought into Microsoft's platform, then brought everybody back in for a week. They did they still did no business. All they did is train people how to use that tool.
00:09:31
Speaker
So the the technology barriers are out of the way. And when they came back to work, basically have to call it two weeks paid vacation, ah but it didn't count against their vacation time. Everybody knew how to use the tool.
00:09:42
Speaker
And they already had their communication mechanisms in place, the way they talk to each other, how they answer questions, how they phrase things. And so they were up and running and faster than any other business that i dealt with by far.
00:09:56
Speaker
and And they were already at that time updating their entire supply chain because they they had a a major factory in China that did most of their pre-assembly and manufacturing.
00:10:06
Speaker
And a smaller one in Thailand. And they just pivoted radically and quickly without a lot of disruption. So the short answer is if you've got a good culture in place, because culture beats strategy, as they say, eats it for lunch.
Sustainability in Business Practices
00:10:22
Speaker
That culture should span across technology as long as you teach the technology correctly. The weird part for me during that time is ah we've been a mostly virtual company for a while. And so everybody else's Monday was a new world order and mine was just Monday.
00:10:38
Speaker
yeah And all of a sudden everybody flocked to all sorts of different channels and everybody flocked to doing all sorts of automated tools and all of it it was crazy.
00:10:52
Speaker
universally bad. one a date One of the things that Dave and I do for our day job is we host a webinar and we're both individually and together very good at it, but it's a learned skill to do it well. And almost everybody, the the world just became so incredibly noisy.
00:11:11
Speaker
almost overnight and it really is so still. ah Yeah. And it's, it's never really gone away, especially with the advent of AI where now all of a sudden AI is writing content for you, but it it it also starts with the same line every time.
00:11:24
Speaker
Like I will immediately reject anybody who sends me an email that says, I hope this email finds you well, but didn't. So why am I even going to talk? Or hi quote name. Just kidding. Right.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's not funny. as As you advise companies on ah balancing technology and growth, the communication externally and internally is so incredibly important.
00:11:49
Speaker
How do you balance always wanting to be on the cutting edge with it things just being enough? Well, I have a, I'm going I think this is an interesting answer to that question because I work mostly with manufacturers in food manufacturers, outdoor industry, especially weird metal things that get sold to the air force and Boeing and whatnot.
00:12:12
Speaker
And. For their production, they're totally state of the art and ahead of the curve. For their business processes and whatnot, their job is not to be at the leading edge of technology.
00:12:26
Speaker
Most of these companies, I'll say they're somewhere when they come on board to me, they might be somewhere between 2004 and 2010 in terms of their yeah ep maybe their marketing. And my job isn't to take them in 2025 to 2027, it's to maybe get them up to or because they can actually ride that for another years.
00:12:45
Speaker
so seven two eight not seventy eight yeah so when it comes to Like I said, when it comes to R and D and design, they've got to be ahead. And when it comes to marketing, they've got to be on the nose, which why they need someone like BusyWeb and you guys.
00:13:01
Speaker
And, but when it comes to the keeping track of everything, that we We haven't changed much. Like the way someone tracks WIP and offshore products coming in in supply chain, what we do is that almost exactly the same. We just have computers to count the numbers for us.
00:13:22
Speaker
Essentially ERPs are how someone runs their enterprise part in the finances behind the scenes. That hasn't changed in a long time. Well, for people who are listening who don't know what an ERP is, can you define, and get can you give us three sentences on what an ERP is? Yes.
00:13:37
Speaker
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It helps you track all the raw materials that you buy as they come through your business, get made into products and get sold out the door so that your finances can track all that too.
00:13:53
Speaker
That was two sentences. One was very compound. and was perfect. So what I think is fascinating and I've always enjoyed chatting with you about Steve is especially for your outdoor brands that you represent. And I know we don't have to name names or anything, but you represent some of the absolute biggest in your biz.
00:14:12
Speaker
And it's very much a business of needing to manage the manufacturing side and keeping tabs on them on the yeah ERP and what's happening. but also helping them market and go to market with some of these products. So can you share like a couple of stories? you and And again, we don't have to name names. by I remember from our chats that you have just fascinating conversations about how some of these big companies have had to tweak things and some of the ways that you've been able to get better results by making small adjustments.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah. mean, one of the more interesting stories I can tell is a company that I worked with that when I came on board, they had just hired their first marketing director and it was an internal hire from operations.
00:15:05
Speaker
They of course had marketing before and they were almost, they were not almost, they were entirely B2B company. selling to REI, Bix, Cabela's, that kind of stuff. Right.
00:15:18
Speaker
And they also were selling um internationally. This is an internationally recognized company. think They sell to GM, all the major car companies, every major manufacturing facility in the United States probably has one of their products in their building, one or two or five.
00:15:35
Speaker
And my first few conversations with the CEO, we talked about B2B, sorry, B2C stuff. And he's he literally looked at me and said, we're never going to sell direct to consumer.
00:15:47
Speaker
We're never going to have a forum or a blog. I don't need a marketing team for all of that. And I looked at him and he was an old friend. And I said, in five years, we're going to look back at this conversation and we're going to laugh.
00:16:00
Speaker
And now it's 15 years later. That company has, i think they're about eight or nine X where they were back then. They sold their wholesale division to a local company, a local guy who used to run their company back in the ninety And now they're entirely direct to consumer and absolutely killing it.
00:16:23
Speaker
And of course their margins went from 50% to 75 and 80% when they went direct to consumer. And ah i believe the marketing team outside of the actual manufacturing or assembly teams that are on the workflow is the largest department in their company.
00:16:40
Speaker
Wow. So it's amazing how just one little tweak can make all the difference if you're open to it. Yeah. That one was a lot of little tweaks. Just the first idea of making a consumer product has to be hurtled.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:57
Speaker
and One of the things that you talked about a couple of times, and I know that in reading your website is you talk about sustainability. And I think that's one of those Dickens words. Dickens in A Christmas Carol says enough is the most enigmatic word in the English language because it means something different to everybody. So like I was thinking about that as i as I thought about sustainability.
Sustainable Growth Models and Agile Communication
00:17:18
Speaker
And are you just talking about environmental or are you talking about and how does it, what does sustainability mean to you?
00:17:26
Speaker
have a company you for. That's a great question. No one's ever asked me that in that way. And I love that question because a sustainable business, I think, should be sustainable from an environmental standpoint.
00:17:38
Speaker
But also, if you want to be a sustainable business, you have to have a sustainable workforce and you have to have a sustainable supply chain and you you have to be flexible. You have to have a sustainable R&D department. I don't think you can get away with having a business where you don't come out with new products.
00:17:51
Speaker
If someone's leapfrogging you every day. So the, in a sense, trigby, the answer your question is all things need to be sustainable. The other piece for me that really drives what I'm trying to teach people is that While it's hard, it is hard work to do this.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's only because it's hard work to run a business. It's not more difficult to run a good business than it is to run a bad business. fact, I would make the case that it's easier and a bad business accidentally kills people with toxins. A bad business has a very high turnover rate.
00:18:26
Speaker
Bad business has HR problems. And there's plenty of people who are maybe watching this in clients that I've worked with who All of a sudden they turn and they look and they go, wow, you're right. We have a 30% turnover a year here. Why is that? One, it's very costly, right? It costs basically, you do the math, it's six to 12 months salary, average salary to hire somebody and train them.
00:18:50
Speaker
So every time somebody leaves, what costs you 40 to 120 grand? Guess something like that. That's expensive if everybody's leaving all the time. And sometimes it's hard for an executive to find out that it's them because most often culture starts at the top.
00:19:06
Speaker
But I've also been in business where the executive understood that they had limitations, right? And they knew that maybe they were hothead and they didn't see things all the way sometimes because they were the one who made and bended something with their hands 30 years ago.
00:19:22
Speaker
And they love working with their hands. And now they're managing 120 or 160 people. And, and the smart ones say, okay, yeah, I do. I am a hot head. sometimes make poor decisions because I'm not thinking full ahead. I'm not listening to people.
00:19:36
Speaker
So i'm going to put a team in place that is better than me. It's, I call that the George Washington model, where it said, I wasn't that great. I just surrounded myself with great men. So I think that leads to the most interesting concept of sustainability, which is sustainable growth.
00:19:50
Speaker
And I think that's where Dickens comes back into play because I think that means something different to everybody. So when somebody comes to you and says, i want help growing, typically when they come to me, what they say is, I want double. No, you don't.
00:20:03
Speaker
Because if I give you a hundred new customers, you can't actually work them all. Yeah. How do you help companies figure out what's a, sustainable is one word, I think practical and realistic is another word for a growth model. How do you help them figure out what's best for them?
00:20:21
Speaker
Well, I'm a big proponent of an agile style communication model within a company at all levels. I'm not a big fan. So let's talk about that. Cause I, am but before you go on, cause I think agile ah communication style is great, but not everybody knows what that is. So can you break that down a little? Yeah, I'll put it into context by noting that there's two main ways to manage a project.
00:20:44
Speaker
They're modifications in site each. And that I think everybody can understand when a contractor goes to build a house, they have to figure out how many square feet, how many rooms, how many board feet of this, how many board feet of that, how many, how much of a plumbing packs they need to put in the building. They have to figure out everything in advance because they have to cost that out.
00:21:06
Speaker
And so they're doing all their discovery beforehand with the architect and everybody else. Uh, and then she just got the name of waterfall. They have a waterfall style, meaning you have to do this. Let's see, go this side. you have to do this first before you do this, before you do this.
00:21:23
Speaker
And as you move along, the stuff you have to do gets less and less, but you can't put the roof on. over here before you put the foundation in here. That's waterfall project management, essentially.
00:21:34
Speaker
And every contractor has to do it. You will not find a contractor doing agile project management, which I'll explain in a second, because then you, I always think of the I Love Lucy episode where she decides the bathroom should move and what she starts moving stakes around the ground. That doesn't work if you're trying to build a house.
00:21:52
Speaker
Agile project management is actually really good for things that you don't really know the answers to. And most of us, when we're, especially in design work, computer design work, programming and whatnot, we don't always know how we're going to get there.
00:22:07
Speaker
It's why we invented the idea of user stories. it's It's not how we get there. It's what the user experience is at the other end. That's basically where Steve Jobs went with the iPhone and the iMac. And it's where Simon, what Simon Sinek means. it's not what you do, it's why you do it.
00:22:22
Speaker
So agile project management, You do some discovery. Like we know we're going to make some device that people can carry around, but we don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet.
00:22:33
Speaker
And you get all the smartest people in your company together and maybe they go off into their own little agile meetings, but it's a lot of brainstorming and it's a lot of, you're looking at a list saying these three or four things are the most important things we need to do. We can't even do that until we do these. so you have dependencies and agile project management allows you to pivot really fast.
00:22:55
Speaker
So when people say fail fast and move on, that's basically agile project management, especially in technology, because what what you know now is obsolete nine months from now. So you might be developing the new iPhone for a particular chip, but six months from now, NVIDIA is going to come out with one that's faster, that's the same price, and you're going to need to change your architecture.
00:23:16
Speaker
In agile project management, you can do that easy, not easier, yeah Perfect. So that that thank you for that. I just wanted to make sure that everybody who was listening in was jiving with your answer. So you were talking about sustainable growth and how do you how do you model that out for individual people?
00:23:32
Speaker
First of all, i would i tell people like you do, no, you don't want 2X. 10X. Also, ah there are gobs, millions, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands or millions of stories of angel investors coming in ah saying, we're going to make investments. we're going to help you do this. We want 10X in like within two and a half years or out of business.
00:23:53
Speaker
Because their model, that that is not a sustainable model. it's For the angel investor, it's a mathematics and investment model that works for them because one in 10 or one in 20 of those is going to make them several million.
00:24:06
Speaker
And I have a little bit of beef about angel investors because I've seen them come in and completely to destroy businesses in small town America a lot. Yeah. but eighth and its VCs are probably the ones that are most dangerous at that, right? Where they come and are like, oh yeah, we have our little and investment house and we want to run through it and you're going to go. And the whole thing where we need to 10 X and get out is that whole short term method or thinking that gets most of corporate America in trouble.
Challenges in Business Models
00:24:36
Speaker
And they're they're most excited about it. And believe me, I get it. and And I'm not saying they're all evil. I'm just saying like for the needs of small town businesses, That's actually not what small town business needs. Small town business needs people who are going to come in and say, okay, we've got a 20 year model here and we'll do 10 X in 20 years.
00:24:54
Speaker
And our exit strategy is to grow this business in a reasonable, smart way to make it more efficient, to be a better business, get our turnover from 30% to seven, have things like that.
00:25:10
Speaker
ah That's how you make a sustainable business. And the models maybe when the original owner passes away 93, it gets sold to the employees as a key ops and everybody who was an investor before totally wins.
00:25:25
Speaker
And they went along the way because they're helping run a business that's making money, kicking off cash the whole time for 20 years. And then they get a bonus at the end. But you're not going to buy a yacht off of that as ah as an investor. but If you did that right 19 out of 20 times instead of one out of 20, you'd be buying yachts. Right.
00:25:42
Speaker
For sure. And you'd be helping. ah You'd also be creating a lot more jobs, a lot more affluence in the community. You'd have a bigger influence over the, if you want to have influence over the economies of small town America, own a thousand businesses.
00:25:57
Speaker
Don't just be at Walmart. Nothing against Walmart, but I won't buy from them just because I buy a shirt and it lasts me about eight months. Whereas like this shirt I think is eight years old and the pants I'm wearing are 20 years old.
00:26:08
Speaker
They're from the outdoor industry that cares about Once again, Trigby, to answer your question, sustainability. There's a lot of aspects to sustainability. It's, and you know, what where you get your products, what they're made out of, how they're made, what kind of waste comes out of that process, if any, how it gets to you, how long it lasts is really important, and how repairable it is.
00:26:31
Speaker
And Patagonia has this diet. And I'm not saying that they know exactly what to do now and they're always going to do it. But what they have dialed is the ability to pivot when they learn something new along that path.
00:26:44
Speaker
And I'll give you an example. When they first started making sleeping bags, They have a set of parameters that they scale, I think, on one a scale of 1 to 10. And it has 1 to 10, like how sustainable is the fabric or how bad is it for the environment and how much material does it take to make this?
00:27:03
Speaker
Is it recyclable? And at some point, they made these sleeping bags that were great sleeping bags, and people started sending them in for repair, and they realized that the way that they had constructed them Made them have to remove too much stuff from the bag.
00:27:16
Speaker
It took way too long to repair it. And it ended up wasting down and wasting other materials. And they added another thing. This is agile. They were agile enough to add another parameter that said, what we make needs to be repairable.
00:27:30
Speaker
And if it's not above a seven or eight on our scale of one to 10, we will not make it. Sustainability means a lot of things. I think that's fascinating because in an era of time where everything is falling apart quickly, like I recently shot for a washer dryer and somebody, the person I met was saying they are, they're meant to last about five years.
00:27:52
Speaker
have to drop two grand on something that's going last five years. And I can, you know, The American and then therefore the world appliance market is in the same spot that the American car manufacturers were in 1980. They're making things for planned obsolescence.
00:28:10
Speaker
And part of that, unfortunately, is some of the federal guidelines about how to make things. But mostly they're just going for the bottom. They're going for the bottom line. And even i i have a my own repair guy in town and I said, is it really worth it to buy a Viking or a KitchenAid X, Y, and Z? And he said, they're all made by the same company.
00:28:30
Speaker
You get the exact same thing right with a different logo for the same price. And he's like, i their parts are interchangeable. So yeah, the Viking looks awesome and it has big heavy metal on it and stuff like you pay for that, but underneath Yeah, it's planned obsolescence and it's actually frustrating repair people because they actually want to help people repair.
00:28:53
Speaker
I actually have a washing machine. The guy came over and he said, that problem you have is totally not fixable. So ride this into the sunset. He actually said like an old Buick and when it actually stops turning, then call me.
00:29:05
Speaker
And I think what's so interesting is we roll back to like things four or five years ago is companies have figured out that the subscription model, the old, the old gym model really works for just about anything that, you know, if you're paying less per month, but you're continuing to pay it every month, whether or not you're using it or not, it doesn't really matter.
00:29:24
Speaker
And I think you find that especially in apps and and new phones is you almost have to get a new phone every two years now. Yeah. We definitely live in a world where from a monetary standpoint, we're getting, it's like getting pecked to death by ducks.
00:29:39
Speaker
Like, okay, I'll pay the 4.99 for BritBox. I'll pay the 9.99 for Hulu. I'll pay the 14.99 for Netflix or whatever. But it's every single thing is like that. And I mean, I don't know what the answer to that is, except just chill out and but you don't have to subscribe to everything.
00:29:55
Speaker
And maybe this doesn't apply to you, Dave, but for me, generationally, it's very hard because I have a 10 year old at home and I have Hulu and I have Netflix and I have this, that, the other thing. And we watched a show on TV once and he's cool. Let's watch the next episode.
00:30:11
Speaker
was like, we can't, we have to wait till next week. So he said, why? said, because they only come out once a week. Why? and I didn't really have a good answer for that. So when he says there's nothing on TV, and that's just a disgusting answer because everything's on TV right now. right You have that problem with your kids?
00:30:32
Speaker
but dave are Dave, because dave Dave has older kids than I do. Yeah, a little little bit. And the ah the dual screen thing is ah is a bigger problem, I think, with my kids because they'll watch any episode and they actually love going back into deep catalogs and watching things that I never would have thought they were interested in.
00:30:50
Speaker
But they're constantly on their phone snapping and sending notes and reviewing things and Googling and all of that stuff as they're watching. So attention is so much different now than what it was when we were growing up.
00:31:06
Speaker
And you have kids as well. Are they plugged in? Yeah, but they're not as they They're able to silo their activities for the most part. The younger ones especially, there's certain things they really love and they watch a lot of anime.
00:31:22
Speaker
They're very into music, as I am. i dont Do I have a... Yeah. Yeah. we do Beautiful guitars in the background. Yeah. We all play instruments and play music together. And I went for some reason, maybe it's cause we grew up in a really small town in Orion. They did.
00:31:37
Speaker
Actually I did too. I was not an adult when I was here, even though I was 24. Um, twenty four um We do, ah there's a lot of outdoor activities we do and you just put your phone away and not as much for us.
00:31:49
Speaker
I'm not saying it's better or worse. It's just the way my kids are. And one of my kids is one of the leading hurricane forecasting people for highly technical and technology oriented and you won't find him rear written on his phone.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah. what So Steve, looping back sustainable leadership and across the work that you've done over the years, it seems like the core shift that we're seeing is that things get more just flexible and or transient, I guess. So there's like, we expect washers and dryers not to last as long. We expect our clothing to out and and
00:32:33
Speaker
That is now moving into just being selfish, our marketing and how we approach, how we engage with people, because it's more of a bright flash in the pan versus a long relationship that you have, especially with consumer brands.
00:32:51
Speaker
and So there's a lot of trendy in fashion, whether it's outdoor fashion or just old school, like straight up Dior or whatever. So how do you, or how would you recommend with your clients balancing the need to be quote unquote viral with the need to share that you have a quality product that's meant to stand the test of time?
00:33:15
Speaker
It might be self-fulfilling prophecy for me because I don't attract, nor do I say yes to companies who are in the disposable fashion industry.
00:33:26
Speaker
And if someone actually came to me and was sincere that they didn't want to be doing that anymore, there'd be a lot of conversations, but that world, there's always going to be people who respond to that.
00:33:38
Speaker
There's always going to be people who respond to, I need the lowest price thing from Walmart. And it's a... I can't blame them and I don't think anybody can. If you're making 15 bucks an hour and the government thinks that you're not below the poverty line, like you're scraping by.
00:33:52
Speaker
And I don't expect you to go buy a pair of Patagonia pants. I can tell you that if you did, it's hard to make that investment upfront. But like the, I think one of the favorite quotes was, you can buy it now and cry later, or you can cry now.
00:34:07
Speaker
and not buy again later. But the self-fulfilling prophecy part is that people who come to me, they want to do that. They don't want to be part of the disposable fashion economy. They're not even, they they might be part, they have to be part of like social media.
00:34:20
Speaker
Fads, you If you run your business on a fad, you've got a six month runway. Pretty much like you can't the feet think about the things that were popular years ago. Like I have a client who mentioned micro duct tape the other day and I had not heard of it.
00:34:36
Speaker
And they said, oh my God, it was huge. Like our business jumped. We did a microde berkeley micro duct tape. Yeah. or Tiny duct tape, something. and I asked ah my wife, Tara, about it. She said, oh yeah, that was 10 years ago. And i was like, that's what they said.
00:34:51
Speaker
And Ashland Hardware had all sorts of printed micro duct tape. She said, don't you remember? we would take the kids there and they would be picking a whole bunch of different ones. And their friend Lily was making clothing out of it.
00:35:02
Speaker
And i was like, had no idea. that lasted a year and it came and went. That explains why I have four rolls of like really weirdly colored duct tape in our house.
Trends in the Outdoor Industry
00:35:14
Speaker
Thank you, Steve. And really thin maybe. Yeah. um Wow. But you there's we just have examples all day long, but yeah Patagonia is not a trend. There are trends in the outdoor industry.
00:35:27
Speaker
can tell you 30 years ago, when stopper jackets were invented and that was, you can go into a store and they were everywhere. 20 years ago, soft shell jackets became popular. They existed in the nineties, but you couldn't find like a good, but it was very difficult to find really good Gore-Tex coach for a while because everybody was buying soft shell.
00:35:47
Speaker
And now if you go into a place, you'll be lucky if there's one soft shell jacket in a huge company like a REI, you know, so there are trends. You're not going to not going to stake your business on pivoting to a hundred percent soft shell jackets in the outdoor industry.
00:36:03
Speaker
And then wondering what the next one's going to be. Cause you know, and what I'm coaching is essentially i want to call it common sense, but I don't want it to be my common sense.
00:36:14
Speaker
What I'm saying is you've got a lot of people in your company and they're smart. And if they're not smart, then let's figure out who's not smart or actually who's not a good fit. Let's use that better because you don't have to be brilliant to be a good fit.
00:36:30
Speaker
And you don't have to be brilliant to come up with good ideas. Good ideas most often come from the work floor. When you go down and start talking to the people who are making the products where Eliyahu Goldrat, who wrote the goal, would say, this is where the value is created in the company.
00:36:47
Speaker
The people who are putting that stuff together. Those people have a lot of ideas. And so to to throw something in here, what I like to teach is the agile-ish style of meeting and project management that helps with accountability.
00:37:02
Speaker
I teach MoCA, which is a way to talk about things, motivation, opportunity, clarity, and ability. And that's a way to allow people inside a framework to say things that maybe they didn't think about saying before and and be able to share them with a group.
00:37:18
Speaker
And I can explain more about that in a little bit. But also, we're a big fan of non-arguable goals. Have you guys ever heard of that concept? Yes, yes. But i I think it's going to make a lot more sense if you describe it a little bit more for our listeners.
00:37:32
Speaker
Okay. I'll, I'll start with a hopefully short story. Paul O'Neill became the CEO of Alcoa, I think in the late eighties, early nineties. He, I think was the head of the treasury department, maybe under Clinton and Bush or something. Very brilliant guy.
00:37:46
Speaker
And Alcoa was a major international corporation, also horrible share prices, company in disarray. And at the very first stock meeting, he said, we're, everybody was standing there, if all the stock shareholders.
00:38:00
Speaker
excited about what he was going to do. And he said, we're going to make Alcoa the number one company in the world again. And we're going to focus on one thing. What's that going to be? He said, we're going to focus on worker safety.
00:38:12
Speaker
And there's literally stories of people who are in that room who left and were managing mutual funds and sold their stock in Alcoa. This guy's crazy. But what he knew is this was what he called a non-arguable goal.
00:38:25
Speaker
And he knew ah how you treat anyone, how you treat everyone. And they had high turnover, they had high injury rates, and they had low quality materials coming out of their manufacturing facilities.
00:38:37
Speaker
And the way he fixed that is he said, look, All everyone who works for this company around the globe, they matter to us. And the way we measure how well we're doing in their eyes is by measuring number of worker days lost to injury or sickness.
00:38:56
Speaker
Because when you have people who are in a workplace that they don't like, they're going to take all their sick days, every chance they get, and they might take extras and their turnover rate is going to be high. So he said, we're going to start treating our employees better.
00:39:08
Speaker
This is how we're going to start. And I'm going to give, he gave out his phone number. He said, right now, Every manager, every director, every department in Alcoa around the world has an unlimited budget for safety issues.
00:39:23
Speaker
And you don't have to go to your superior if you're in charge of the department to fix something. And if you work at any way through these companies, you're an employee and there's something dangerous and you've told somebody about it and they don't fix it, you call my number.
00:39:38
Speaker
And they actually had the guy in Mexico lost his arm because there was a line of paint around a machine that was spinning around and everybody told him, you've got to put barriers here because this is the main corridor for all of the forklifts and people, someone's going to get pushed into that machine. These paint lines good enough.
00:39:56
Speaker
So that guy got fired. So that non-arguable goal, you can look at the stats. i can't I don't know what they are off top of my head. I used to. But Alcoa was a major thriving and profitable and more profitable company throughout the 90s because of that singular goal.
00:40:12
Speaker
So... What we teach, we have a non-arguable goal and it focuses on the concept of an externality. And that term was invented in the late 1800s, but popularized in the twenties by an economist who basically said an externality is an effect you have on someone downstream who wasn't expecting that to happen to them.
00:40:34
Speaker
Now you can take that literally and say downstream, we're pouring chemicals into the river. Somebody down the stream is getting cancer. Right. But also there are financial externalities. There are externalities that we know about now that don't exist, didn't exist in our heads.
00:40:50
Speaker
For instance, carbon footprint. Do you guys know how long that word's been around and how long we've been measuring it and where it was invented? Not at my, oh right yeah, I don't know that it's been in my purview for that long.
00:41:04
Speaker
And what did you say, Dave? I don't think it's been as long as we think. You're not wrong. A little
Understanding Externalities
00:41:10
Speaker
bit of backstory. I went to UC Irvine where in the seventies, eighties, that's where the majority of the research was telling us, at least some of the more vocal was telling us about the ozone layer and climate warming and stuff. But the term global footprint was first used by a British vegan cafe or bakery in 1999.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah. ah Wow. Wow. Holy cow. It's 25 years old. here Literally before that day, no one had used that term, at least anywhere on the web. And there was nothing, you can't measure something you don't know about.
00:41:48
Speaker
Right. There's so many examples of that. You're playing out every day. Like, do guys know what a PFAS is? It's basically Teflon. It was invented in the 50s. Oh, yep. Yep. Miracle chemical knife or material. nothing Nothing touches it. Nothing sticks to it.
00:42:04
Speaker
It's what Gore-Tex is made out of. There's plenty of medical sutures and all sorts of things that are made out of it. there's a lot There were a lot of waterproofing materials that you spray on your coats.
00:42:14
Speaker
what they call DWR, outer industry term, durable water repolency, all made out of PFAS, mixed with something to like make it stick to your coat, water would beat up. Turns out PFAS is what we call a forever chemical.
00:42:27
Speaker
it's We didn't know there were forever chemicals. That term itself isn't very old. The scientists in 3M knew that Teflon was a forever chemical in 1952. They just didn't have that concept, but they knew that they just invented something that was so inert that And so slick that it was amazing. And we've used it. Now we know that everybody, every single person here listening to this, every person in the world has PFAS in their blood.
00:42:55
Speaker
You can go to the top of a mountain. and What? Yeah. yeah You can go to the top of a mountain to a place where there's a single pond, a hundred feet from the top of that mountain and you can test it and you will find PFAS in that water.
00:43:08
Speaker
And we now know that's something that's an externality that now we know is an internality. We know it exists. The only way you can get rid of PFAS in your own body is to give blood because your body cannot remove PFAS.
00:43:22
Speaker
So when we test, so. That's it. Now I'm going to have to go get blood later. I know. And, but the point here is there's things that we always measure. You run a business, you want to know what your cost per item is. You want to know what your payroll is as a percentage of sales.
00:43:38
Speaker
You want to know what your investment in marketing is. and And you want to know how long your product lasts. These are all things we think about and we're, we try to internalize them. And if you could measure how long your product lasts,
00:43:50
Speaker
You might congratulate yourself to be able to say, wow, they used to last three years. Now they last 20 years and and our clients appreciate it and our sales have tripled. You could be one of those people that says they last three years. Let's make them last in one year so they buy more often.
00:44:05
Speaker
That's just not a model. Now you ask, how do I do that? I just said, that's just not a model I want to be a part of. I don't think that's ethical. Say you want to save a penny? Plenty companies in the world have saved a couple cents and killed people because the somehow that's a acceptable risk.
00:44:21
Speaker
And my guiding light, I think both in globally conscious leader and dot com jungle, but mostly what I talk about at globally conscious leader is the granddaughter effect, or I call it the granddaughter policy.
00:44:34
Speaker
If you don't want this happening to your granddaughter, don't do it. this If somebody's, if you have a factory in China, And there's somebody that works there and their granddaughter lives downstream from them.
00:44:46
Speaker
And you find out that manufacturing facility is pouring dangerous chemicals into the river and that employees or anybody is getting sick. You need to find a new manufacturer or you need to say to them, if we're going to be partners, you're going to change everything that you do.
00:45:01
Speaker
That granddaughter is just as important as your granddaughter. That's to me, the guiding light and the non-arguable goal to sew this up that we teach zero unmeasured externalities.
Zero Unmeasured Externalities Principle
00:45:13
Speaker
And the key about this is A non-arguable goal is often completely unattainable. So I have no problem with saying zero unmeasured externalities. It doesn't mean that you have to measure everything.
00:45:24
Speaker
It doesn't mean that you had to fix everything, but it means that as a ah sense of corporate and personal responsibility and ethical process inside your company, you're actually going to be engaging everybody through an Agilist process in every one of their departments by asking the question, what don't we know yet?
00:45:42
Speaker
And this question is applicable to the R&D department. the Even if you're not talking about materials and chemicals and whatnot, R&D department might be asking about, what don't we know about the user experience? What are we missing?
00:45:53
Speaker
Oh, the product we make, it does this s thing really well, but it creates a notch in every item that people run through it. When you find that out, that's ah an extra knowledge you didn't know. What don't we know? Let's figure out how do we design this so it doesn't do that.
00:46:07
Speaker
So even in marketing, how do we do this better? What don't we know? right well We just found out that our most people who buy our product are 46 years old in liberal arts majors.
00:46:19
Speaker
You need to know that kind of thing. that's one Especially for marketing, that seems to be a great fit for AI tools like ChatTPT and all that stuff. You can literally, and we do this with our clients, we load up and say, what assumptions haven't we made or what questions do we need to ask that we haven't? so And that tends to yield some very interesting and helpful results. So that's one way that technology can help.
00:46:44
Speaker
Oh yeah. ah sure And technology, AI is what's interesting and it's scary. I use it every day. ah use it for my clients to, to develop basically all of their branding docs these days.
00:46:56
Speaker
And it's fantastic for that kind of thing. Cause I can point AI using different tools, like directly at a client's about page. I can upload information about their core values. It doesn't even have to be well written.
00:47:09
Speaker
It just has to actually be a sentence. And AI can spit out these fantastic branding documents that tell you how to talk to your unique customers, your ICPs.
00:47:21
Speaker
And you can then basically say, we want to start writing emails to these folks in a language that makes sense to them. Because you're going to talk to ah hunter in Montana differently than you're probably going to talk to a Um, yeah, a teenager in LA. I use AI for my clients for content, but I don't think I've ever produced an AI document that wasn't heavily vetted and edited before it went out. I find it's really good at providing structure for things.
00:47:50
Speaker
Give me the structure for a book on this. and or a pamphlet on this. And then but my my clients can say, oh, that totally makes sense. i'm goingnna I'm going to talk about adhesives and how they work in the manufacturing seats in the auto industry.
00:48:06
Speaker
AI is definitely a tool that's useful. I try not to think too much about AI robot dogs that are engineered to kill. Don't want to be a conspiracy. We'll have to bring you back to talk about AI robot dogs. I know I saw a show where i was like, that could happen.
00:48:23
Speaker
My goodness. um I, you know, ah what I think the the biggest takeaway that I'm getting from this, Dave, is that we need to have longer episodes because I've found that the last 10 minutes was he was throwing haymakers of truth bombs and things that I want to writing down and researching. How about you?
00:48:40
Speaker
I feel like we've got a solid part two in here where we get really nerdy about the intricacies of game and theories and coming up with how AI can work better and realizing how deep you it can go and thinking for your grandchildren across everything.
00:48:59
Speaker
I think that's, wow, fascinating. i'd I'd love to really explain zero and measured externalities. And because like I said, tell people like,
00:49:11
Speaker
Running a business is hard work. Running a good business is not harder. It's easier. And if you can have a couple of simple tools, you don't have to be a psychology major.
00:49:23
Speaker
you You don't even have to be a good communicator. You just have to understand a few simple things about human nature and try and create the best culture as possible and understand when you make mistakes.
00:49:34
Speaker
We all make mistakes. and But if you have a set of core values that are a guiding principle, then they're going to come up every day in your business, either as a really good process and happy employees, or somebody saying, hey, wait a second, that's not in line with our core values.
00:49:51
Speaker
Even like maybe maybe the way you're talking to me right now, like using Mocha, I'm not motivated to actually do this job because you're yelling at me right now. and And I didn't give you permission to yell at me. And I want to be motivated for this job because I really like it.
00:50:04
Speaker
So is there another way we can do this? Yeah, if we can come up with a way. And I think all things being equal, anytime you can all feel good about the job that you're doing and the products that you're producing and the way you produce them is far better than trying to squeeze an extra penny out of something.
00:50:25
Speaker
Get more pennies doing it the right way. And that's being globally conscious. Yeah. so I love this. Yeah. And it's a little crazy right now because the world feels a little reckless, but our, the world might change, but our core values should not.
00:50:39
Speaker
Right. And it's never been more important that everyone stands up for doing the right thing. So, and it's going to be smart and better for the world as a whole.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:50:50
Speaker
Great. Great. Awesome. Steve, we always like letting people give a self-promotion. Make it self-promotion. Right. So how can people find you and keep in touch?
00:51:04
Speaker
You can go if you're having trouble with the systems and the culture at your company. ah If you need systems help, I'm going to say you probably also need the cultural help and vice versa. But you can get in touch with me at the website.comjungle.com. There's a contact form there on the Global Conscious Leader.
00:51:19
Speaker
there is It's a very long, but as long as you can remember how to spell conscious in that long, thanks. You're good. You can find us, Google us. There's a contact form there. And of course, you can find me on LinkedIn under Steve Rice.
00:51:32
Speaker
And I'd love to chat with anybody. i just, I really want to help businesses be better. I want to help people be better and I want to learn from them. It's a two way street. I'm motivated to do this because I get a lot more information and clarity from new clients that I do than they do for me, I think.
00:51:48
Speaker
And that information gets passed on to all my other clients as well. So. And just remember, if you are ah being chased by a homicidal AI-controlled robot dog, a good way to get them to slow down and change the prompt is by asking it to spell conscious.
00:52:04
Speaker
That's right. So, Steve, thank you so much. Dave, thank you as well. This has been another episode of Dial It In, produced by Nicole Fairclough and Andy Witowski. And much like Tony Kornheiser, we are also going to try and do better the next time.
00:52:20
Speaker
I love Tony. I love you guys. Thank you. i It's been a distinct pleasure to be here. and um I appreciate you all very much. You ask great questions. Good people. Appreciate being here.