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S3 Ep21: Sustainable Leadership and Business Strategies
41 Plays9 days ago
In this episode of the Dial It In podcast, hosts Trygve and Dave sit down with Steve Rice, a business strategist and advocate for sustainable leadership. They discuss the significance of ethical leadership, aligning technology operations with business goals, and the importance of sustainable practices. Steve shares insights from his work with the Globally Conscious Leader and DotcomJungle, emphasizing the need for companies to balance profitability with purpose. He also elaborates on agile communication models, non-arguable goals, and the concept of zero unmeasured externalities. The conversation delves into real-life examples of businesses transitioning to more sustainable practices and the challenges of modern technology and AI in maintaining ethical standards. Steve stresses the importance of maintaining core values in a rapidly changing world, aiming for long-term success and responsible growth.
Conntect with Steve:
LinkedIn
The Globally Conscious Leader
The Dot Com Jungle
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
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Transcript
Introduction and Unexpected Guest
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 FizzyWeb as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. Let's ring up another episode.
00:00:30
Speaker
I have to admit, I learned about today's guest, and this is to somebody that you booked. I would not have picked that from you. Oh, I think you're in martial treat. i was I was a huge fan of Interview with the Vampire in the 90s, and I read the whole books, the big series, the Lestat series. I think you've got the wrong rice. I didn't even know she was still writing.
00:00:55
Speaker
Whoa, it's this is a he and he's a delight. to he He's a delightful human and you're going to be super excited to meet with them.
Episode Sponsorship and Ethical Leadership
00:01:03
Speaker
Okay. Welcome everybody to another episode of Dial It In. I'm Trigvi. He's Dave. Today's episode is sponsored by Fractional Tactical. As a fractional CMO, your number one goal is to deliver success to each of your clients. With limited time and limited resources, you need marketing solutions that are data proven, easy to execute, and repeatable.
00:01:22
Speaker
BusyWeb understands the unique challenges marketing executives face. That's why we offer customized solutions for our fractional CMO partners. You tell us the results you need, and we create the strategy and MarTech Stack to get there. You have a concrete plan, your clients have measurable results, and you look good. We help you get there. Everyone wins by visiting fractionaltactical.com today to find your tactical mark marketing partner. 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
00:01:58
Speaker
You're talking about the guy that quarterback Notre Dame to their last national championship in 1988, right? Tony Rice? I don't think so. There's a much better Rice. I got nothing then. that end Maybe I should just do the intro and let you catch up. I clearly need a better AI robot too.
00:02:17
Speaker
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? Yeah, we I don't claim the comedy is good, Dave, just because there's plenty of it.
Introduction to Steve Rice and Sustainable Leadership
00:02:31
Speaker
Absolutely. I am so thrilled to introduce our audience to Steve Rice. 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 dot com jungle, Steve helps businesses align their technology, operations and leadership strategies to achieve their long term goals.
00:02:53
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. 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.
00:03:21
Speaker
Steve's unique blend of technical expertise and visionary leadership has made him a trusted partner for organizations looking to scale responsibly and sustainably. Welcome, Steve. Thank you, babe. Pleasure to be here. And I want to say as much as I've had to be here, I'm really disappointed that you guys forgot one salient fact about me. And why I am the first athlete to be elected into the Hall of Fame in both baseball and football. So you got to get your rice cleared up.
00:03:52
Speaker
Oh, sure. Yeah. So you're talking about Jerry. I believe you missed that. And Jim. Yeah. Jim Rice. oh jim right Okay. Yeah. jave Jim w Rice played for the Red Sox.
00:04:04
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. Yeah. 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. 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 dot .com jungle have been instrumental and I never miss a post. So thank you so much for what you do. Thank you. Well, currently I
Leadership in Changing Business Landscapes
00:04:50
Speaker
have it wrong. So what is it you do?
00:04:52
Speaker
I run, Doccomjungle is the first company that I started and basically focuses on technology. 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 up here is a non-linear but linear story. And basically, Globally Conscious Leader grew out of my understanding or experience in Doccomjungle, 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. And when I started fixing those issues in businesses that I was managing at the time before I started Docomjungle and then into Docomjungle, I also, once once we started fixing those problems, started of realizing that
00:05:44
Speaker
The next step is that there are communication systems and and that those make people look bad too. 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,
00:06:06
Speaker
There's been a lot of upheaval and a lot of change in how leaders interact and connect. Yeah. 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. How do you ethically and responsibly like lead organizations, especially when there's all this turmoil in the office? I think the 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. 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.
00:07:01
Speaker
and not just for the owner or the business itself, but for ourselves. We feel good about ourselves when we have accountability, take accountability, and follow through on time. The businesses that I saw who were really successful that on 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. 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 pandemic was gonna happen.
00:07:35
Speaker
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. And for a week, they did they still did no business. All they did is train people how to use that tool. So the the technology barriers are out of the way. And when they came back to work, basically you 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.
00:08:02
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. 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.
00:08:26
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, that culture should span across technology as long as you teach the technology correctly.
Virtual Work Challenges and Technology Balance
00:08:46
Speaker
the weird part for me during that time is yeah 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 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 universally bad. what a da 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.
00:09:30
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. 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 for a high quote name? Just kidding.
00:09:55
Speaker
Right. 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. How do you balance always wanting to be on the cutting edge with it things just being enough? Wow.
00:10:16
Speaker
i have a i' mean 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.
00:10:31
Speaker
and For their production, they're totally state of the art and ah ahead of the curve. For their business processes and whatnot, their job is not to be at the leading edge of technology. Most of these companies, I'll say they're somewhere, when they come on board, me they might be somewhere between 2004 and 2010 in terms of their ERP.
00:10:53
Speaker
and maybe they're marketing. And my job isn't to take them in 2025 to 2027, it's to maybe get them up to 2019 or 2020, because they can actually ride that for another 78 years. 728, not 78.
00:11:07
Speaker
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 is why they need someone like BusyWeb and you guys. And, but when it comes to the keeping track of everything.
00:11:25
Speaker
that we We haven't changed much. like The way someone tracks WIP and offshore products coming in and supply chain, what we do is that almost exactly the same. We just have computers to count the numbers for us. Essentially, ERPs or how someone runs their enterprise part in the finances, behind the scenes, that hasn't changed in a long time.
00:11:50
Speaker
Well, for people who are listening who don't know what an ERP is, can you to fight and get can you give us three sentences on what an ERP is? Yes. 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. That was two sentences. One was very compound.
00:12:16
Speaker
That 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
Business Strategy Shifts and Cultural Changes
00:12:31
Speaker
biz. 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.
00:12:42
Speaker
but also helping them market and go to market with some of these products. So can you share like a couple of stories? yeah and And again, we don't have to name names. i 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.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah. I 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. They of course had marketing before and they were almost, they were not almost, they were entirely a B2B company.
00:13:31
Speaker
selling to REI, Bix, Cabela's, that kind of stuff. right And they also were selling um ah 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.
00:13:55
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 he said, we're never gonna sell direct to consumer. We're never gonna 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 gonna look back at this conversation and we're gonna laugh. And now it's 15 years later.
00:14:23
Speaker
That company has, I think there were about eight or nine acts 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 90s.
00:14:37
Speaker
And now they're entirely direct to consumer and absolutely telling it. 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 work floor, it's the largest department in their company.
00:15:00
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. Yeah.
00:15:17
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. And are you just talking about environmental or are you talking about and how does it, what does sustainability mean to you?
00:15:45
Speaker
have a company 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. 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 and&D department.
00:16:07
Speaker
I don't think you can get away with having a business where you don't come out with new products if someone's leapfrogging you every day. So in a sense, Trigby, the answer to the 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, 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. In 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. Bad business has HR problems. And there's plenty of people who are maybe watching this and clients that I've worked with who
00:16:55
Speaker
They, all of a sudden they turn around 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. So every time somebody leaves, but costs you 40 to 120 grand, guests, something like that. That's expensive if everybody's leaving all the time.
00:17:18
Speaker
And sometimes it's hard for an executive to find out that it's them because most often culture starts at the top. But I've also been in business where the executive understood that they had limitations, right? And they knew that maybe they were hot head and they didn't see things all the way sometimes because they were the one who invented something with their hands 30 years ago. And they love working with their hands. And now they're managing 120 or 160 people.
00:17:48
Speaker
And the smart ones say, OK, yeah, I do. I am a hot head. I sometimes make poor decisions because I'm not thinking full ahead. I'm not listening to people. So I'm going to put a team in place that is better than me. it's I call that the George Washington model. I 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. And I think that's where Dick comes back into play because I think that means something different to everybody.
00:18:15
Speaker
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. 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.
Sustainable Business Strategies and Examples
00:18:37
Speaker
How do you help them figure out what's best for them?
00:18:41
Speaker
Well, I'm a big proponent of an agile style communication model within a company at all levels. i'm not a bit So let's talk about that could i and but before you go on, because 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. There are modifications in site each.
00:19:07
Speaker
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, yeah how many how much ah plumbing packs they need to put in the building. They have to figure out everything in advance because they have to cost that out.
00:19:26
Speaker
And so they're doing all their discovery beforehand with the architect and everybody else. And then she just got the name im waterfall. They have a waterfall style, meaning you have to do this. Let me go this side. You have to do this first before you do this, before you do this. And as you move along, the stuff you have to do gets less and less, but you can't put the roof on.
00:19:48
Speaker
over here before you put the foundation in here. That's waterfall project management, essentially. 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'd I always think of the I Love Lucy episode where she decides the bathroom she moved and but she starts moving stakes around the ground. That doesn't work if you're trying to build a house.
00:20:11
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.
00:20:26
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. So Agile project management.
00:20:44
Speaker
You do some discovery, you 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. 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.
00:21:14
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. In agile project management, you can do that easy, not easier,
00:21:40
Speaker
yeah Perfect. So that that thank you for that. I just wanted to make sure that everybody who was listening and 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?
00:21:52
Speaker
First of all, I would tell people like you do, no, you don't want 2x, you don't want 10x. Also, there are gobs, millions, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands or millions of stories of angel investors coming in saying, we're going to make investments, we're going to help you do this, we want 10x within two and a half years or out of business.
00:22:12
Speaker
because their model, that that is not a sustainable model. 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. 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.
00:22:35
Speaker
but eighth and its VCs are ah probably the ones that are most dangerous at that, right? Where they come in and are like, oh yeah, we have our little and investment house and yeah, we want to run through it and you're going to go and the whole thing where we need to 10X and get out is that whole short term method or thinking that gets most of corporate America in trouble. 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,
00:23:04
Speaker
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 10X in 20 years. 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. ah That's how you make a sustainable business.
00:23:33
Speaker
And the models maybe when the original owner passes away at 93, it gets sold to the employees as a key ops and everybody who was an investor before totally wins. And they went along the way because they're helping run a business that's making money, taking off cash the whole time for 20 years, and then they get a bonus at the end.
00:23:53
Speaker
But you're not going to buy a yacht off of that as ah as an investor. If you did that right 19 out of 20 times instead of one out of 20, you'd be buying yachts 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. Don't just be Walmart.
00:24:18
Speaker
I think against Walmart, but I won't buy from them just because I buy a shirt and it lasts me about eight months where like the shirt I think is eight years old and the pants I'm wearing are 20 years old. They're from the outdoor industry that cares about Once again, Trigby can answer your question, sustainability. There's a lot of aspects to sustainability. It's, that 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.
00:24:51
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. And I'll give you an example. When they first started making sleeping bags,
00:25:08
Speaker
They have a set of parameters that they scale, I think, on 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? 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. 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. 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.
00:25:57
Speaker
I think that's fascinating because in an era of time where everything is falling apart quickly, like I i recently shot for a washer dryer and somebody, the person I met was saying they are, they're may meant to last about five years. I have to drop two grand on something that's going to last five years and I can, you know.
00:26:17
Speaker
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. 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.
00:26:39
Speaker
And even I have 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. You get the exact same thing with the different logo for the same price. And he's like, 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,
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's planned obsolescence and it's actually frustrating repair people because they actually want to help people repair. 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.
Modern Business Models and Marketing Strategies
00:27:20
Speaker
He actually said like an old Buick and when it actually stops turning, then call me.
00:27:25
Speaker
And I think what's so interesting as 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 but 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. 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.
00:27:51
Speaker
We definitely live in a world where from a monetary standpoint, we're getting it's like getting pecked to death by ducks. We're like, okay, I'll pay the $4.99 for Brit Box, 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 subscribe to everything.
00:28:15
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. I was like, we can't, we have to wait till next week. And he said, why? I said, because they only come out once a week.
00:28:40
Speaker
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? but dave or Dave, because dave Dave has older kids than I do.
00:28:55
Speaker
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. 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.
00:29:24
Speaker
when we were growing up and some of 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. there The younger ones especially, there's certain things they really love and they watch a lot of anime. They're very in the music as I am. i don Do I have a 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 because we grew up in a really small town in Oregon. Actually, I did too. I was not an adult when iman though I was 24.
00:30:01
Speaker
um we do ah There's a lot of outdoor activities we do and you just put your phone away. Not as much for us. and 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 rearing on his phone. Yeah. what so it's Steve, looping back on sustainable leadership and across the work that you've done over the years, it seems like
00:30:33
Speaker
the core shift that we're seeing is that things get more just flexible and or trans transient, I guess. so there's like We expect washers and dryers not to last as long. We expect our clothing to you know wear out and 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. and So there's a lot of trending roles in fashion, whether it's outdoor fashion or just old school, like straight up Dior or whatever.
00:31:20
Speaker
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? It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy for me because I don't attract nor do I say yes to companies who are in the disposable fashion industry.
00:31:46
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. There's always going to be people who respond to, I need the lowest price thing from Walmart. And it's 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 and I don't expect you to go buy a pair of Patagoni pants. I can tell you that if you did, it it's hard to make that investment upfront. But like the I think one of the favorite quotes was, but you can buy it now and cry later or you can cry now.
00:32:26
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. Fads, you if you run your business on a fad, you've got a six month runway.
00:32:46
Speaker
pretty much like you can't the feet think about the things that were popular years ago like I have the client who mentioned micro duct tape the other day and I had not heard of it 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 my wife, Tara, about it. I said, oh yeah, that was 10 years ago. And I was like, that's what they said. And Ashland Hardware had all sorts of printed micro duct tape. So 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. And I was like, I had no idea. But that lasted a year and it came and went.
00:33:28
Speaker
That explains why I have four rolls of like really weirdly colored duct tape in our house. Thank you, Steve. And really thin, maybe. Yeah. um Wow. But you know there's we just have examples all day long, but yeah Patagonia is not a trend. There are trends in the outdoor industry. 30 years ago, Windstopper jackets were invented and that was you could go into a store and they were everywhere. 20 years ago, soft shell jackets became popular. They existed in the 90s, but you couldn't
00:34:01
Speaker
find like good, but it was very difficult to find a really good Gore-Tex coach for a while because everybody was buying soft shell. 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, but you're not going to I'm not going to stake your business on pivoting to 100% soft-filled jackets in the outdoor industry and then wondering what the next one's going to be. because 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.
00:34:33
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.
00:34:49
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. The people who are putting that stuff together. Those people have a lot of ideas.
00:35:11
Speaker
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. I teach Mocha, which is a way to talk about things, motivation, opportunity, clarity, and ability.
00:35:29
Speaker
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. 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.
00:35:52
Speaker
OK, I'll start with it. Hopefully short story. Paul O'Neill became the CEO of Alcoa, I think in the late 80s, early 90s. He, I think, was the head of the Treasury Department, maybe under Clinton and Bush or something. Very brilliant guy. 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.
00:36:20
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. 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 because this guy's crazy.
00:36:41
Speaker
But what he knew is this was what he called a non-arguable goal. 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. And the way he fixed that is he said, look,
00:37:01
Speaker
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.
00:37:16
Speaker
because when you have people who are in a workplace that they don't like, they're gonna take all their sick days, every chance they get, and they might take extras. And their turnover rate is gonna be high. So he said, we're gonna start treating our employees better. This is how we're gonna start. And I'm gonna give, he gave out his phone number. He said, right now,
00:37:35
Speaker
Every manager, every director, every department in Alcoa around the world has an unlimited budget for safety issues. 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 one of 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.
00:37:58
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. Well, that guy got fired.
00:38:18
Speaker
So that non-arguable goal, you can look at the stats, I can't i don't know what they are off the 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.
00:38:32
Speaker
so What we teach, we have a non-argable goal, and it focuses on the concept of an externality. And that term was invented in the late 1800s but popularized in the 20s 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.
00:38:54
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. 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 all. Yeah, I don't know that it's been in my purview for that long.
00:39:23
Speaker
And what did you say, Dave? I don't think it's been as long as we think. yeahone A little 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.
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah. ah Wow. Wow. we count 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. Right. There's so many examples of that.
Ethical Business Practices and Externalities
00:40:11
Speaker
You're playing out every day. Like, do you guys know what a PFAS is? It's basically Teflon. It was invented in the fifties. Oh, yep. Yup. Miracle chemical nothing or material. Nothing, nothing touches it. Nothing sticks to it. It's what Gore-Tex is made out of. So 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.
00:40:34
Speaker
what they call DWR, outer industry term, durable water repellency, all made out of PFAS mixed with something to like make it stick to your coat, water would bead up. Turns out PFAS is what we call a forever chemical. 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 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. You can go to the top of a mountain and what 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.
00:41:27
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.
00:41:42
Speaker
So when me test so ah that would eat now I'm going to have to go give 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 where your payroll is as a percentage of sales, 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 we try to internalize them.
00:42:06
Speaker
And if you could measure how long your product lasts, 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.
00:42:25
Speaker
That's just not a model. 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 of companies in the world have saved a couple cents and killed people because the somehow that's an acceptable risk.
00:42:40
Speaker
And my guiding light, I think both in globally conscious leader and dot com jungle, but mostly what I talk about a globally conscious leader is the granddaughter effect or they call it the granddaughter policy. If you don't want this happening to your granddaughter, don't do it. If somebody's, if you have a factory in China,
00:43:01
Speaker
And there's somebody that works there and their granddaughter lives downstream from them. 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. That granddaughter is just as important as your granddaughter.
00:43:24
Speaker
That's, to me, the guiding light. And the non-arguable goal to sew this up that we teach is zero unmeasured externalities. 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. 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 gonna be engaging everybody through an agileist process in every one of their departments by asking the question, what don't we know yet? And this question is applicable to the R and&D department,
00:44:04
Speaker
the Even if you're not talking about materials and chemicals and whatnot, R&D department might be asking, but what don't we know about the user experience? What are we missing? 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 externality you didn't know. What don't we know? Let's figure out how do we design this so it doesn't do that? So even in marketing, how do we do this better? What don't we know?
00:44:32
Speaker
right how We just found out that our most people who buy our product are 46 years old in liberal arts majors. 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 chat GPT 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.
AI in Branding and Listener Engagement
00:45:03
Speaker
Oh yeah. ah sure And technology, AI is what's interesting and it's scary. I use it every day. I use it for my clients to to develop basically all of their branding docs these days. And it's fantastic for that kind of thing because 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.
00:45:29
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, their ICPs. And you can then basically say, we want to start writing emails for these folks in a language that makes sense to them. Because if you're going to talk to a hunter in Montana differently, then you're probably going to talk to a, um yeah, ah 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. Give me the structure for a book on this.
00:46:14
Speaker
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 yeah manufacturing seats in the auto industry. AI is definitely a tool that's useful. I try not to think too much about AI robot dogs that are engineered to kill. I 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.
00:46:43
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 the last 10 minutes was he was throwing haymakers of truth bombs and things that I want to write down and research. And how about you?
00:47:00
Speaker
I feel like we've got a solid part two in here where we get really nerdy a about the intricacies of game and theories and coming up with how AI can work better and so realizing how deep you it can go and thinking for your grandchildren across everything. I think that's wow fascinating. i'd I'd love to really explain zero unmeasured actionalities because I can tell people, like
00:47:30
Speaker
Running a business is hard work. Running a good business is not harder. It's easier. And if you can have a couple simple tools, you don't have to be a psychology major. 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.
00:47:54
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 in happy employees or somebody saying, hey, wait a second. That's not in line with our core values. 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.
00:48:18
Speaker
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. 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. Getting more pennies is doing it the right way.
00:48:47
Speaker
And that's being globally conscious. yeah I love this game. It's a little crazy right now because the world feels a little reckless, but are the world might change, but our core values should not.
00:48:59
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. Great. Great. Awesome. Steve, we always like letting people give a self-promotion. Naked self-promotion. Right. So how can people find you and keep in touch?
00:49:23
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 globally conscious leader. There is, it's a very long, but as long as you can remember how to spell a conscious in that long bench, 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.
00:49:52
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. And that information gets passed on to all my other clients as well. So.
00:50:12
Speaker
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. 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 Wachowski. And much like Tony Kornreiser, we are also going to try and do better the next time.
00:50:39
Speaker
I love Tony. I love you guys. Thank you. i It's been a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you all very much. Yes. Great questions. Good people. Appreciate being here.