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 S1E08 | One Great Question: Why Leadership Feels Hard and Why It Does Not Have to Be image

S1E08 | One Great Question: Why Leadership Feels Hard and Why It Does Not Have to Be

One Great Question
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The leadership industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, yet most leaders still feel unsure, lonely, and overwhelmed. That disconnect is not accidental.

In this episode, we challenge the idea that leadership is complex, mysterious, or reserved for experts with answers. Using stories from kitchens, soccer fields, bookstores, and boardrooms, we break leadership down into something far more practical and human.

Leadership is attention to the right problem.
It is an intention around a small set of possible solutions.
It is a commitment to experiment, learn, and stay with the work long enough to get a real result.

This conversation reframes leadership as a lived practice, learned in real time with real people, not a theory mastered in isolation. If you are tired of leadership advice that sounds impressive but changes nothing, this episode offers a simpler, more grounded way forward.

Recommended
Transcript

The Billion-Dollar Leadership Industry

00:00:00
Speaker
How much do you think the leadership industry is worth just at a Barnes and Noble where there's like, you know, a hundred new bestsellers on the shelves all the time? Yeah, I don't know, billions. Isn't that, I mean, that's a crazy thing to think about. Like the whole world is so interested in this one topic that we've spent billions of dollars trying to get better at It's probably an easy thing to understand and a difficult thing to do.
00:00:25
Speaker
People just want an answer. Like, just tell me the answer. This a hard thing. Tell me you know how to do it, and so then I can do it. I think that we think leadership is monolithic. Yes. You know? We think it's this complicated when really it's problem, solution, result. It's attention, intention, commitment.

The Unique Charm of Bookstores

00:00:47
Speaker
So Jeff, I think I would be remiss not to ask a bestselling author of many books as a person who goes, going to craft this idea. going to bring it from the ether into reality. And it's in paperback. i don't Do you have hardbacks? I should know this as your friend.
00:01:04
Speaker
Are there hardback versions of your books? Yeah, you have one on one of your shows. Okay, there you go. and I need to see. Listen, I listen or read everything on Kindle apparently. there's a purveyor of many hardbacks and then also paperbacks that now live in these shelves. I will say one of my favorite games to play is when I'm traveling. I will go into a bookstore and be like, all right, let me find Jeff Gwan on the thing. on You know, I've sent you hundred a dozen pictures.
00:01:26
Speaker
For you, the bookstore experience, I mean, that must be kind of near and dear to your heart. What's the favorite or ah best bookstore out there or an interesting experience that you've had in a bookstore?
00:01:37
Speaker
Well, I should say when we were in Oxford this summer- and are very literate. Literary. There is a famous bookstore that has like many first editions of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, world famous bookstore.
00:01:56
Speaker
That's probably not the best ah bookstore experience I've ever had. One of the best, interestingly and ironically, um was ah recently in Huntsville, Alabama, of of all places. That is two very different places. Oxford, England. The literary capital of of of Northern Alabama, right next to the the NASA Space yeah Museum thing.
00:02:22
Speaker
No, actually, my wife and I were on an anniversary trip. ah And we just did kind of a, I wanted to just get out of town, do a night in a hotel. It's 90 minutes away from from Nashville. Went and stayed in a hotel. And then we ended up in a small local bookstore.
00:02:40
Speaker
And it was a tiny little bookstore. But they had such a good curated collection of And I realize now, like, that's the game in bookstores is not do you have it? But have you curated a collection that is enjoyable to look through? Because it's unlikely, if not impossible, for you to go into a bookstore and find a better deal than you could, say, find online on Amazon.
00:03:06
Speaker
ah There are some exceptions to that, but very few. And so you go into a bookstore for the experience, which is why you've always gone into a bookstore. And we went into this bookstore and they had one copy, only one of every single book that they had. But each of them were hand selected. And it was it was a small bookstore. There was maybe a thousand

The Value of Unexpected Book Discoveries

00:03:24
Speaker
books in there. yeah Your average Barnes and Noble has, you know, like a hundred thousand books in it. So the purveyor of this story is really thinking about what do you really need? That's right. what do you like What's the one book for you? new yeah And so we kind of walked through and when my wife and I are traveling, i like to pick up a book, get a record sometimes. And we always wanted to like mean something, you know? So we picked up book
00:03:49
Speaker
a book that was a series of of essays. I can't even remember who it was by. And we we read it on our way back home, you know, driving from this trip and it's on our shelf and we'll probably slowly read through those stories.
00:04:00
Speaker
But we found that book and she's always the one who has the eye. She's like, oh, this is our book. We should get this book. and And we did. As a gifted editor, that makes sense. she can Yeah, for sure. She's she's the the most well-read person I know. But some that experience of going, oh, like a bookstore can be something other than just like a bunch of shelves with a bunch of classics that you pretend to have read and then a bunch of like, you know, modern business books and and and pieces of of fiction.
00:04:30
Speaker
And so I love that. And and I love going to into record stores too, as you know. And um it's true, you know, I could like go online and find whatever record I'm looking for and buy it. But the fun of going into a record store, even into a bookstore, is finding something that you needed that you didn't know to look for. That you needed, yeah. Yeah, like, like you go oh, this is a surprise. That's always the most fun part of shopping anything. It's like, oh, I found something that I didn't know existed. I'm going to take it home and hopefully

Skepticism Towards Leadership Literature

00:04:59
Speaker
enjoy it And it's interesting you bring up this idea of like you go in and you didn't know you needed this. Right. Because I think this is my heartbeat of the question of bookstores and also kind of how it relates to leadership. well One of my favorite things to do is to walk through any bookstore and we just happen to have three of them within, you know, 30 seconds of the house here, which is really fortunate and unfortunate for my bank account.
00:05:23
Speaker
But one of them is, you know, Barnes & Noble and they recently, you know, built it. And there was a grand opening and it's in the, you know, development right next door. And my wife was so excited because she loves nothing more than purchasing ah eight books. um And BookTokers or Instagram for books is like our favorite place online. And so we're walking through the store and I was having this flashback of like, I've been walking through Barnes & Noble as a company now for years.
00:05:49
Speaker
I don't know, almost 30 years now. Like it was the thing, like when you were a bored, high schooler, you got some time to kill. You know, I was super cool. That's why i was walking through Barnes and Noble. um But they had these big comfy chairs and I would just peruse through. And at that season, I was reading these fantasy books called The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan that they recently turned into a a series on Amazon Prime. And I would go for hours in comfy chairs just like this and read my book and then put it back on the shelf and come back. A good immigrant. Like a good immigrant getting my free literature.
00:06:21
Speaker
ah You know, it was it was leased or rented, not owned. um And I didn't have to even pay for the rent. But I always used to think I would walk through past these sections, and this is before I was in any you know business or marketplace, and there would just be leadership book after leadership book after leadership book. And I'm like, who is reading all of these books? Like I read Lewis or Tolkien the fantasy stuff. And then every once in a while, I might get into a biography or a classic and some people are like, oh, have you read Ivanhoe or something like that?
00:06:54
Speaker
But I'm like, who's reading the 18 principles of leadership? So I was curious, you know, in your experience of bookstores, like, how much do you think the leadership industry is worth just at a Barnes & Noble where there's like, you know, a hundred new bestsellers on the shelves all the time?
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know, billions. Isn't that, I mean, that's a crazy thing to think about. Like, the whole world is so interested in this one topic that we've spent billions of dollars trying to get better at it.
00:07:23
Speaker
And what it makes me think... is that anytime that is happening, it's probably an easy thing to understand and a difficult thing to do.
00:07:34
Speaker
And you said something very telling to me recently. It's like, people just want to want an answer. Like, just tell me the answer. This a hard thing. Tell me you know how to do it, and so then I can do it.
00:07:45
Speaker
And I think leadership is actually a lot less complicated than we make it out to be. I think that we think leadership is monolithic. Yes. You know, I mean, John Maxwell had to be one of the founders of sort of the modern now so school of the ah books where leadership has become a genre.
00:08:08
Speaker
You know, i mean, he, I don't know, has written 50, 100, 200 books all on the same topic. just created a factory of, you know, co-writers and ghost audiences and partnerships where... And i do think if you've if you've ever been a leader ah at the top of an organization or a team or whatever, um you do feel lonely.
00:08:31
Speaker
And you do know that you don't know what the hell you're doing. And you wish somebody would come tell you what to do. But like that doesn't happen because you're the one telling everybody what to do.
00:08:43
Speaker
I remember my first real leadership position was running a kitchen for a ah mission organization where we were sending out these ah music missionaries, these missionary musicians.
00:08:56
Speaker
And my job was my job as a guitar playing, nearly fluent in Spanish person was to cook for all of these people. I was like, what is a mistake? You know?
00:09:08
Speaker
And um and my leader at the time, my boss said to me, he was like, no, you're a great leader and we we need that leadership in the kitchen. Like we need these people to eat. We've got to feed 50 people three times a day and you're the only one who can pull it off.
00:09:24
Speaker
Um, so I don't know if that was, you know, real or not. He might've like whatever, but I actually, learned that was the best leadership training I ever had because i was working in a kitchen. We had six or seven people in this big kind of industrial kitchen

The Practical Side of Leadership

00:09:38
Speaker
and we were feeding, I don't know, 50 to 75 people three times a day, which is not an easy thing to do. And you've got to, whatever you make, you have to make it at scale. You know, when we made,
00:09:47
Speaker
ah ah homemade applesauce, hot applesauce for a dessert, which was delicious. i made this giant 20-gallon pot or whatever. ah But I remember that um i whenever I stopped doing something, I felt guilty.
00:10:06
Speaker
grew up grew up lower middle class, blue collar, hardworking family. Like you you do not eat if you do not work kind of thing. And so, but I noticed something like when I was in this kitchen, which was like when I,
00:10:19
Speaker
um was working on something, I would eventually kind of look over and I would notice one of my peers would stop working or they wouldn't know what to do or they'd come ask me what to do. And so I actually saw that there was a cost to not leading. yeah you know And so it was it became a discipline for me to just step back, kind of watch the team function and then be able to like step in and and help where I needed. and I think leadership is...
00:10:46
Speaker
learned kind of like that. You have to learn it on the job, and then you also need somebody else's experience to kind of come and and kind of let layer over so that you're you're learning in real time how to actually do it.
00:10:57
Speaker
And that's much more expensive and time-consuming than reading a book and thinking, like I got it. It's way messier. There's not a four-part plan. ah But one of the things that strikes me, even in your story about the kitchen, the word that I kept on hearing over and over, it's this fun four-letter word, and sometimes a hard and heavy one, is in need Because this idea for leaders and leadership is, and the phrase is pretty common to the point where it's cliche now, it's like, see the need, meet the need. Like that's the role of leadership all the time. You're just fighting fires.
00:11:29
Speaker
And I think that's the way all great leadership should start. But I don't think that's the place or the desire of the end goal is just constantly just meeting a need. And I think of leadership in this kind of triangle. And when I talk about Barnes & Noble and this billion-dollar enterprise, the reason I point that out is I'm like, it's more interesting to use your much more fun word if it's monolithic and scary. It's easy to monetize that. It's like, if it's too big, it's too scary, it's too unknowable.
00:11:58
Speaker
And I'm going to say something that might be kind of insensitive. I don't think that's true. Yeah. I think actually that leadership is three things. And in the triangle, I talk about it's attention and intention and commitment.
00:12:14
Speaker
Well, but to what? Okay, so there's a need. You have to give your attention to the right problem. So there's been a need presented. So that's the first thing. are you Is there ah a problem driving this need?
00:12:26
Speaker
So once you have your attention on the right problem at the top of the triangle, and you come down, do you have your intention set to two or three possible solutions that directly speak to that problem, that need, that we're giving our attention to?
00:12:41
Speaker
And then finally, are you willing to experiment with one, two, three of those solutions to make sure that you get a result that has been defined and that we're now committed to?
00:12:52
Speaker
And it's really to me, and i've I've watched this, you know, and I'm still a young leader. i've only been doing this for 20 years. But over and over, I just watch it's either one step or the second step or the third step that's being broken. And if you could fix any one of those by a small degree, it's shocking how much better the leadership gets really fast.
00:13:11
Speaker
Because what I see in companies is we spend a lot of time and attention in these bad meetings Well, because nobody's actually decided this is the need. Okay. Another word for need is the problem. This is the problem that we want to solve. Okay. Let's give our full attention to that today, during this meeting, during this season, quarter, year, whatever the thing is. We're going to give real attention, demonstrable, expensive attention, because that's the other key in leadership.
00:13:36
Speaker
We hear this all the time in social media when people are marketing things. They say, we now live in ah an attention economy. Your attention is the most expensive thing you own. And so if that's true, it's the most valuable thing you can invest. And so there's a problem, it's going, how much numerically, time, energy, all these things we've talked about before, am I willing to invest facing that problem?
00:13:58
Speaker
Once we kind of solidify that, it's wild how quickly I'll watch a company once they really even start there and going, hey, this is the problem that we solve. This is the thing we're going attention to. Immediately, the clarity, it's like ringing a bell for dinner like you see in an old TV show where they're like, time for dinner. Everybody comes right. That's what the bell of a problem does. That's what the need does. We know we're going to solve this thing. People are like, okay, great. Finally, somebody told us what the thing is.
00:14:24
Speaker
And the second you do that, then you move into, okay, well, let's be intentional with that now. We're gonna set our intent to two to three possible solutions around this. And then the value of that is, okay, now we have momentum. We don't know solution is gonna work, so now we're gonna use that phrase again. We're gonna experiment. We're gonna see if this works. And to your point before, we were talking about like people who um might to other people feel casual around failure.
00:14:50
Speaker
Well, this is failing forward. It's experimentation. We're seeing what

Leadership as Coaching

00:14:53
Speaker
doesn't work. What's the old Edison idea of, right? I didn't, i didn't you know, not make a light bulb a thousand times. I found 999 ways that don't work. And each one of them got me one step closer to the way that would work.
00:15:05
Speaker
And then the place I think I see most humans, and then companies are made up of humans, so then where most companies fail, is we're not then committed to a result. The result isn't clear that we're hoping for, like, oh, we wanna do this thing by this time.
00:15:20
Speaker
And then we haven't actually set any commitment, like, oh, we're all saying yes to this thing? Okay, we're gonna experiment with this thing. And as it fails, we're gonna go back to solution number two as opposed to one and then try that thing out. Yeah, yeah, okay, we're all committed to that solution, that result, and we'll keep on experimenting. And because of that, your best and brightest people fall off because they're like, you aren't intentional people. You aren't committed to this thing. And great A players in companies have great attention to the right problem. They have a real intentionality to solve those things because it feels like momentum to them, because it is. And then they're just committed humans who go, I like to win.
00:15:56
Speaker
i don't want to be in organizations where it's not only, i don't I don't mind losing if there's a direction. I just don't like this middle place where, what are we just living in a perpetual tie all the time because it doesn't really matter?
00:16:09
Speaker
I want to do work worth doing. And so if there's not a win, it doesn't feel like this is worth doing. yeah So I think for me, leadership is a lot less complicated. And so that's why i kind of ask, I wonder how much money has been made in aisles of bookstores around the world going, we think it's this complicated when really it's problem, solution, result. It's attention, intention, commitment.
00:16:35
Speaker
I think I actually know the answer to that because I had to do that research for a book that I was working on a while back, which was like the whole leadership development um ah industry. Because there was ah from from all of like the publicly traded companies, you know, they they publish, they have to report on all of their ah yeah um numbers And It was like hundreds of billions of dollars per year that American companies were investing in leadership development.
00:17:06
Speaker
When you contrast that with all the Gallup polls about how engaged workers are, you basically see that we keep investing more money in leadership development and it's not actually making a difference. And I think that's because...
00:17:18
Speaker
you're investing in the leaders. What is a lead what ah what is spending, you know, whatever, $20,000 every year in leadership development? It means you're taking the leaders out of the organization, you're sending them to a seminar, you're buying a bunch of books, you're you're taking the leader out of the team that they're leading and you're going and you're basically making the leader better, hoping that the team will get better. But the best leaders I've seen are are like what you're describing, which is they're watching the team function It's like a great coach. They're like watching the team play the game and they're seeing how they can play it better.
00:17:54
Speaker
When I started ah coaching soccer for my son's team years ago, assistant coaching, assistant to the coach. Assistant to the assistant? Yeah, assistant to the assistant coach. Kind of a white thing?
00:18:06
Speaker
And um this was actually really cool because when we we started um a new season of soccer, we had we all had to go to like a half-day coach. coaching training Saturday with donuts and coffee and a bunch of middle-aged dudes, you know, who... Complaining about their hammies. Yeah. yeah And they actually had professional English football player come in and can't remember what team he was from. Okay. But he came in and... To play Manchester United will make me more interested in that story. That's where was. Yeah, yeah. And he had played professional soccer. And he came in and he said a few things. He was like, first of all, none of your kids are going to be professional soccer players. Just get over it.
00:18:48
Speaker
you know, unless they're playing every single day in the street since they were three years old. You're not taking this seriously. Second of all, the best way you can teach the kids to play the game is not yelling moves at them from the sidelines. It's letting them play the game and letting the game teach them how it wants to be played. He says to just scrimmage scrimmage, scrimmage, scrimmage, scrimmage. And he listed all these like studies and reports. And he said, this is what makes great soccer players is is you...
00:19:17
Speaker
coaching isn't telling each individual what to do it's seeing how the team sort of works together and then making that work better and better and i was not a particularly good soccer coach um but i did take that to heart you know as both a you know junior soccer leader And and as ah a you know leader in and business, like as much as I can step back and just kind of watch the game being played and then observe how we can kind of upskill different areas will become much, much better.
00:19:50
Speaker
And in order to do that, I mean, you've got to be paying attention and you're not really investing in yourself. you know You're investing in the team. no Yeah, the best companies that I see do this with me is when they ask me to come in and coach the executives, but also then say, hey, we want you to do some team development. I'll go in for a one day and typically it's like a retreat format.
00:20:12
Speaker
And then they're always surprised when I ask the employees, middle management or frontline workers, I'm like, if I waved a magic wand, what thing gets better here? And that's to your English footballing you know friend who's going, let them play and then see what the how the game wants to be played. They're already on the field. They're already in the company playing the game. And then when I just get curious and be like, how does this game get better if you were in charge, if we waved this magic wand and all of a sudden you wanting to play? And that shows a leadership that's really curious. And that shows a deep attention, like you were saying, a deep interest or intention. And then it goes, we're not scared of the messiness of that answer. We're just committed to getting everybody a win, which in your case was having the kids learn how to play the game. And in this case, it's going, your company, everybody wins for a little bit more curious about how do we lead ourselves?
00:21:00
Speaker
first and then how do we lead our teams and then the organizations and then the world by having this level of curiosity around well how should it be played by the people who are actually playing it yeah and in the vantage perspective ah the the the the vantage point of a coach is very different from the vantage point of a player on the field 100 and they're both valuable perspectives because if you're on the field you really can only see a few feet in front of you Right. And if you're standing back as a coach, you can see a much you know bigger perspective. But the very simple reason that they didn't want us coaches yelling at the kids from the sidelines was they didn't want the kids looking to us to for their cues on what to do. And if we were to tell them, kick the ball over there, um there's a delay there. Mm hmm.
00:21:49
Speaker
You know, and if you're watching professional soccer being played, it's it's being played at such a velocity and intensity. You don't have time to look off to the field and go, what should I do, coach? It's it's happening too quickly. And most games that are being played at a professional level ah including the game of business, including the game of relationship to your spouse.
00:22:11
Speaker
Like they're happening so quickly in real time.

Curiosity and Team Empowerment

00:22:14
Speaker
The best thing that you can do is learn to drop into the moment and tune in and not think you know what needs to happen next. It's the art of having a really good conversation. You're not planning the next thing that you're going to say. You're actually listening, tuning in, and then reacting authentically in the moment, which is very scary. like Yeah, terrifying.
00:22:34
Speaker
Like I'm doing this in my conversation with you right now. Like, am I planning the next clever thing I'm going to say, am I actually listening to what you're saying and then reacting authentically to it, including maybe just going, cool, that's that's a good idea. Yeah. Or but maybe, i don't know. Yeah, exactly.
00:22:51
Speaker
And to your point of dropping in, i think this is what makes, in this current season for me, the fun around leadership, right? Because it could get overwhelming. And again, um you knew would that i'm going to keep on or not new but new to me that you're using this monolithic idea. it's so big. The fun is just dropping in the moment. Because even take the idea of succor. Succor is played by almost every person who's ever breathed on the planet for the last 80 right?
00:23:17
Speaker
This is a monolith and for me to go, i just wanna drop in and be a part of that, I wanna be connected to this thing, is really just going, well, how do the Brazilians play it versus the Italians versus the Germans versus South Africans and Americans? It's going, when you drop into that thing, it's gonna have its own flavor. Are you willing to be curious and be like,
00:23:35
Speaker
Why do the Brazilians play arguably some of the most beautiful soccer? Why do the Germans play some of the technically most accurate soccer? Like, you know, why why are these people playing in this way? And I think around leadership, again, if we can have this idea of being curious, set our attention first to this question of,
00:23:53
Speaker
What do I need in this moment? And what does that person need? What do you need from me in this place for you to win? oh I just need us to be focused on the right problem. And then could we get some win and momentum around the problem? And then could we actually stay committed to that for long enough that I actually feel like I get what I need? If we

Revitalizing Barnes & Noble Through Local Insights

00:24:12
Speaker
can do these three things, I think we learn how to play that game properly.
00:24:16
Speaker
Attention, intention, and commitment. Speaking of Barnes & Noble to land the plane, it reminds me of a story that I read 2019, 2020, right around kickoff of the pandemic. What's the pandemic?
00:24:32
Speaker
a Pandemic is um it's a worldwide hoax. Oh. who I read this on the dark web. Let me tell you about deep state conspiracies.
00:24:42
Speaker
So what that this is this podcast was a ruse to get you into. Oh, into that to tell me all about the deep hoax? Well, it's to get everybody and into it. I'm very sorry. I guess I wasn't curious. We're about to rubbed.
00:24:57
Speaker
ah So you're experiencing the very real pandemic that happened to the world. Yes, continue. Didn't know we're going get all political here whatever. Um, so, uh, uh, Barnes and Noble, um, was like many, most, brick and mortar bookstores was increasingly seeing lower and lower sales numbers in store. Having to shut down lots of stores. Yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
Uh, I remember growing up. I think it's because they took away the comfy chairs. That was my big gripe. I, and also because I didn't pay for books. andmen's um Didn't read. Yeah. Uh, ah No, when I wow was reading Barnsville was like the fancy books. Remember, it was wonderful. Fancy. Fancy. Like they had the jazz music in the background. Super fancy. They had a barbox. Yeah. Like a good cookie that they went, I think, and got from the Cheesecake Factory. i was like, come on, guys. This was really nice. Anyway, the stores were were not doing well and they were having to shut down lots and lots of stores, close down lots of stores. And they hired the former CEO, I think, of Waterstones, the the English bookstore chain.
00:26:01
Speaker
Which if you've ever been in Waterstones, beautiful experience, beautiful bookstore. and um and And this person had just kind of rebuilt the in-store experience for Waterstones and and it had kind of saved the chain in the UK and rescued a lot lot of plummeting sales. Yeah, and side note, my wife recently went on an international trip and had a layover in London, and her only desire was not like, oh I want to go see some you know famous site in the city of London. It's like, I think my layover is just long enough. If I catch the train, I can get to a Waterstone, which is like the main one in you know the head of London, and then make it back to my plane to make my layover to the next country. And I was like, you're the only person I know who would put that much effort into getting to a bookstore. Yeah.
00:26:46
Speaker
ah They're great bookstores. And so this same person who had kind of ah rebuilt that brand, the in-store experience anyway, um did this for Barnes & Noble few years back.
00:26:57
Speaker
And and it worked. I mean, they totally, um they started opening new stores, in-store sales ah increased by many multiples of previous years.
00:27:07
Speaker
And what the leader did to change this culture was they didn't say like top down, here's what we're going to do. they started going into local Barnes & Noble stores doing what you did, which is asking the team, what do we need to do here to improve customer experience? You guys are boots on the ground, you're here, what are you seeing? Like what would make this experience better for our customers? And they told him, and he just did those things. And the main thing that happened was now if you go into a different Barnes & Noble store in a different city, they're not monolithic, they're different.

Personal Reading Habits and Humorous Anecdotes

00:27:44
Speaker
and And essentially what happened at a corporate level was they empowered local teams to do what they needed to do within their stores to retain customers and continue to increase sales. Amazing. Well, I'm very glad they did that hard leadership work so that Barnes & Noble still exists and bookstores still exist that I can go peruse, buy the books and then not read them. Because as my wife would say, i i think her phrase is criminally under read. I think that's the right phrase. yeah She said you catfished her. I did. In her phone now, when he calls me, i somewhere my name pops up as husband, lover, catfisher. Yeah. think. That's pink that survey Yeah. Person who lied to me and said he was a big reader just to... Just to get in her good graces. And here we are, two kids and almost 20 years later, it worked.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yes. um Well...
00:28:35
Speaker
Now you know. Knowledge is power. The more you know. Well, there you go. Whether you're playing professional soccer, lying about how many books you've read. Copiously. Or, you know, trying to be the next leadership business bestseller. Well, what whether you want to do that or rescue a dying bookstore chain, what what you need, if if I'm remembering correctly, is attention, yeah intention, and commitment.
00:29:04
Speaker
Correct. And those are triangle for leadership answering the question, what do you need? That's it. Well, there you Knowledge is power. Leadership solved. We did it. It is a monolith. Yeah.
00:29:16
Speaker
Billion dollars and we fixed it in one podcast. You're welcome, world. Well, I guess that's it. Until the next question.