Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Marty, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's a pleasure to have you.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: I wanted to ask you something. You talk about incremental behavior. We used to call this the ladder of efforts in the military. What does that mean? Why is that important?
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Well, it's the old African adage, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time.
It's just the, the concept. Project management's based on the same thing. You lay out a master plan, a master timeline, and then you start defining all the incremental milestone events, and then you break them up into even more finite supporting events until you basically have this long punctuated fine list of things you have to accomplish to achieve the end goal.
Life is like that, learning is like that. Sometimes you get a leap, sometimes you have an aha moment, but usually it's an aha moment because you have a pent up misunderstanding or a kind of a banked set of understanding, training etc that you didn't really grasp. And suddenly something triggers that understanding moment. You go, ah, I get it. But it's not because you just are clairvoyant or psychic, whatever. It's because you've had so much input, you just needed a, a catalyst to see what you're supposed to see. So I think incrementalism is natural in a lot of different events and a lot of different activities in life.
And from a training standpoint, or a mentoring and tutoring and guiding standpoint, it's a pretty good battle plan.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: I think there's something daunting when we kind of look at the end goal and we're like, holy cow, that's where we need to get to, it's almost limiting from a certain perspective. So having this plan and small steps, baby steps my dad used to call it, it really enables you and empowers you to have this track of progress which is easy and one step at a time. So I think it's incredibly important. Have you seen any kind of environment, either in the Navy or the professional environment, where the lack of this plan, of the baby steps really led to disaster?
[00:02:12] Speaker B: I'd say almost anytime where training, whether it's training to understand through knowledge or training to be able to perform a task, skips elements of knowledge, awareness and practice.
And either because of time constraints or because of the lack of training of the instructor or whoever designed the curriculum or the format, their lack of awareness of what should have been included in the plan, you get kind of a hollow schedule, a hollow event.
And because baby steps are what the SEALs call it too. That's what they call the training. You train to all these different lines of talent. And some of the baby steps take a long time, some of the baby steps are pretty quick, but you always do it very incrementally because you have to prove knowledge and performance by practice and demonstration before you can move to the next baby step. That way when you get to some milestone, you actually achieve something at that point. It's, it's a wholesome kind of achievement and landing point. So if you, whether it's in business, you know, you throw together a seminar and you think that in the seminar you're going to create this explosion of awareness and a change of attitude, change of behavior, which is a lot to expect from just a seminar or a speech or something like that, or even a half day workshop. But a lot of times when people design those things, they actually pack all that 100 pounds of expectations into a five pound bag and they end up delivering something that's either confusing or it's hollow in its outcome.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: How does this translate into the corporate environment? What are you doing differently when it comes to, let's say, onboarding of new employees or transitioning between teams? What does this look like in practice?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: So it's a little bit tougher to do it in a business, especially if it's a smaller business. If you have a large business and you can actually apprentice or kind of do a, an internal intern program where somebody just goes around and floats from department to department, you know, around in a division and they get to see and observe and smell and taste. It's kind of like a ride along until they get a general sense of awareness, understanding along with maybe a little bit of cultural onboarding training. You know, here's the org chart, here's what we do as a company. So if you have that, that size of a company and you can get away with that, that's a good way to do it. Ross Perot was famous for that. He would bring people in, ex military guys, a lot of seals, by the way, and he'd say, you know, I know you've got what it takes to be a good worker. I know you got a good work ethic and everything. You don't know anything about my business. And I have a lot of different kinds of businesses in my quote unquote business. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to float you around and you're going to get to experience things. And that, that's a really good, that's a really Good approach in a smaller company. The reason it's difficult is because it's kind of like somebody's replacing a squad member in the middle of a battle and he jumps in there and he doesn't know exactly what's been going on, doesn't know exactly where the enemy is, doesn't know a lot of things. You can't really just stand there, stop everything and say, okay, let me, let me bring you up to speed with a training program and everything, because you're trying to do it on the fly, in the middle with all that pressure to perform real time. So with smaller companies, the first thing you got to do is you got to make sure that somebody's assigned to be the mentor or to be the guardian angel of the transition in or the transition over. Because if you don't do that, you just give lip service to it. They'll fly, they'll float over to where they're going to go, or they'll come into the company and they'll be lost.
And they'll either fortunately run into a natural guardian angel, just somebody that takes them under their wing, or they may even find the wrong kind of person that starts to influence them.
So you need to take charge of that. You need to let them know when you hire them that this is the process you're going to follow. You also have to let them know if you're going to do things like cross training, create bench strength, or create redundancy and resiliency in a smaller organization. A small organization can be a department in a big division and a big company. So it really comes down to the human unit that's involved.
If you do that, when you hire and they expect that, and they are okay with that, then they are open to be trained, they're open to be mentored and coached, and they realize they're going to meet a lot of different people. And their job is basically to take notes, soak it in, ask good questions, and then try to learn to a point where they can perform.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: To play the devil's advocate here for a moment, in smaller organizations, it's very hard to measure the value of, you know, sitting around and soaking up for, I don't know, two or three weeks, maybe more. But I would argue that you're accelerating your pace of productivity after you've done that.
But we can't see that. We can't. It's very difficult to measure that productivity. When you think about organizations that you design, how do you think about productivity in general and about things that lead.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: To productivity I think everybody has a different definition of productivity.
So I'm on several boards, and one of the boards has private equity guys, and their language is finance.
So when I think of productivity, I think of human motivation and human attention to detail and attention to the quality standard and trying to get things done within a time that's been allotted for it and. Sure. And working within the labor cost expected and all that, so that all that stuff comes together. That's a business operator approach. The private equity guys are looking at dollars. They're looking at what's the dollar input and cost, and what's the dollar output related to that cost.
I have this conversation and I have to talk kind of in two or three different languages all the time about productivity.
I'm the CEO of a healthcare company, so productivity for a doctor or nurse sounds like an unethical objective because really what they're supposed to be doing is dealing with whatever patient presents itself and whatever the issues are with that patient.
Yet you have to run a hospital.
And so hospitals start looking at what are the metrics of productivity of how many patients are being seen by any particular doctor or nurse or specialist, which then puts pressure on those. Those medical professionals that they're not used to or they never thought about, or they don't like because they didn't get into medicine to be working in a factory. And patients aren't widgets.
So from that point of view, productivity has to be looked at as the quality of the behavior and the underlying motivation, intention of the behavior.
So we have to be careful that we're not trying to incent them or to pressure them or to teach them or train them to show productivity metrics that are unrelated to what the patient needs.
Because that would give, you know, if you increase that, you would increase the metrics, you increase the numbers, and the financials would go up. So somebody would be happy from a productivity to financial outcome point of view.
But it would probably be unethical. And eventually you'd lose those medical professionals because they wouldn't stay in that job or they find someplace else where medicine is being treated like medicine.
If you're in a factory, it's a different. A different focus. There's less about ethics and it's more about ergonomics and, you know, the tools you have available to you and the realism of the expectations being laid on the entire workforce in the factory because the factory is deficient if the processes are deficient, if the materials are deficient. It's really hard to point at a human being and say, that's the productivity problem.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: How do you balance these two things? On the one hand, you want to make sure that you're profitable because otherwise the organization shuts down. But on the other hand, those non tangibles are incredibly important and have a huge impact on the business.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Not everybody that is in your audience is probably an aficionado of American football, but one of the things that a quarterback does on the field is constantly monitor the status of all the players on the field.
And one of the responsibilities is to keep the ball moving, to keep everybody doing what they're doing by some set place. To think of those as processes. The rules of the game are the systems.
But things change and they may come out of the huddle and decide they're going to do one thing and somebody's moved out of position or moved into a different position and they have to read the field and they have to make a call. So for all the time that those quarterbacks are playing during the game, they don't know, they don't really have an idea or an expectation of what exactly is going to happen when they come out of that huddle, what they're going to see.
And they're given the authority to work it out, figure it out and make a call, you know, call an audible, make an adjustment, whatever, change the play.
Leaders and managers really need to think that way rather than, I'll get used the factory metaphor again. You basically count all the heads, they're all there, everybody's in their station. You hit the big power switch, the factory goes live, you walk out and you come back eight hours later and you look at how many widgets were made.
Okay, that's one way to do it. But another way to do it would be to go in there and walk the floor and observe human behavior and be aware that people get sick, people get hurt, people don't show up, machines break down. Well, if you're off someplace, waiting to come back eight hours later, you're going to miss all those tells, all those kind of reality checks. And you also miss the opportunity to understand your business at the ground level and the effect on the people. Because some of those things I mentioned causes other people to react. If somebody's late and somebody else is sick and there's two gaps and somebody else has to jump in there, there's a secondary human effect. So I think a good leader, good manager needs to kind of stay on their game, understand their business, understand their people and what they're trying to produce. And they have to kind of manage by wandering around whether it's virtually or in person and pay attention to the tells.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: There are metrics that are precursors and there are metrics that are trailing metrics, revenue trails. And what that means is that it's kind of the thing that happened after all the other things happened. But these signals that you're talking about that happened before, those are the things that tell you that a problem is about to happen or that there's a risk or a danger here. And my point being is that if you understand your business, you can find those future indicating signals or metrics and those ones are incredibly valuable because they allow you to act in advance. So I really appreciate your point. How do you even go about finding these signals and these metrics that are kind of future predictive part of its.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Experience, meaning that you've been under people that are enlightened enough to think this way. I mean, I didn't just pop out of the Navy and suddenly understood all this and wasn't covered in my undergraduate, my graduate degree in business.
A lot of it's watching bad leaders in bad organizations either from a distance. Like when I managed money for eight years with ubs. I was reading analyst reports of companies and management teams and seeing what they were saying and management team made this decision, made that decision. I could see it was like million case studies right about things that went right, things that went wrong, and things that just kind of didn't really have an effect. The other thing I think you're right about the precursors, lagging leading indicators. But besides seeing things that might be going wrong, the other thing you can find out is whether things that you wanted to go right are going right and are improving.
Use a sports metaphor again. If it's a track athlete and you time them in a sprint and then you put them through a training program and you put them through a rehabilitation post workout program and then you go back out and you time them again a month later and there's an incremental improvement. So you may have watched all through all that process and everything, but when you went to measure, it validated that your attempt to change the behavior performance of the athlete actually took hold and changed the performance of the athlete in a positive way. So if you have training programs or morale programs or motivational programs or cross training programs, which also increases morale and empathy by the way, because everybody starts to see what everybody else's rice bowl looks like.
When you see that, you say you see more of a collective team approach. There's a loyalty to the, to the group rather than just to themselves. It a subtle thing and it takes a while to create. It's a natural thing in the military because that's what they, that's the whole job of the military. They give you some incredible mission and if you screw up, everybody that you like dies. So you know you're paying attention, right? You're not jumping in your car and leaving at 5:00 because your job's only about paying your bills. So it's harder to do in the commercial world.
But those behaviors, and I've been training people for a long time because that's what you do in the military, ends up being trained. And then you start training everybody else and you do the baby steps approach. And sometimes you get an incremental positive feedback that what you're doing is working. And sometimes you don't. Sometimes nothing's happening and sometimes the approach is totally wrong and you're the wrong coach or the wrong mentor and you have to find somebody else to go in and influence things.
But I watch for those things too. And one of my jobs is make sure that I teach my leaders, my managers to look for both aspects to set everybody up for all those positive behaviors I was talking about and manage and monitor them. It's a sustainment program. It's not a one class kind of a thing. And you hope it all just takes.
And obviously for all the things that are system and process breakdowns or labor breakdowns that any good businessman should be able to be aware of and start to anticipate they're going to happen. The universe always throws you a left hook when you're not expecting it.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: This is true. I mean, the beauty of what you're saying is really, to oversimplify it, is that really you're conducting an experiment. You're conducting an experiment, you have a hypothesis, you're saying, okay, we're expecting this metric or measurement to go one way or another, and you're actually looking at that metric a little bit after. I think what we're seeing in corporate America very often is that we make a decision and we expect it to just work. We never come back and revisit if our assumptions were in fact correct. There's an absolute beauty to what you're describing here on kind of making the decision and then measuring that it made sense to us. And hey, if it didn't go the way we wanted, we can always make an adjustment and making a change if we're even asking that question, I think that's so refreshing and delightful.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: Much easier to diagnose the plan than to have no plan. Because you know, if your engine shuts down, you know nothing about engines. You just stare at your car. Right, right. But if you know how the engine works, you know what the schematic looks like and all that, and something happens to your engine, you know how to trace the schematic and you know, you start working backwards from one point or the other, you can do the full six Sigma kind of thing, but you end up getting to a point where you find the failure causation and then you correct it. But you have to understand the construct. So you should create the construct. If you're going to go in, if you or I were to go in and we were going to try to fix a company, we would have the same challenge as if we were trying to start a company or we were just trying to continue to grow a company. You'd have to go in, you'd have to absorb the atmosphere, the environment. You'd have to basically take note of everything, you know, the quality of everything, from the signage on the door to the way people answer the phone. You have to just absorb everything.
And the more experience you have, the easier it is.
Anybody that's ever been a fighter for any length of time can watch a fighter who's an amateur and in about 60 seconds figure out what the major flaws are without being a professional trainer because you've done it enough, you know what's wrong. The same thing like these shows, you know, where Bar rescue and the restaurants, these people have done this 30, 40 times. They walk into these restaurants and they see the first big ten low hanging fruit, things that are raw. And they see it probably within the first 30 to 45 minutes that are there.
They talk to the people that are involved in running that restaurant or that bar or that business. And usually within the first day we went back to, to our hotel and went to dinner, we'd look at each other, we'd probably be finishing each other's sentences. We'd say, yeah, I saw that. Yeah, I saw that, I saw that, I saw that. Because they're classic issues, right?
So they're classic issues because they're important to fix a company, but they're also important to start a company and maintain the quality of a high performing company.
And it just takes a little bit of practice to do that or have a mentor or leader that is helping you learn those things. Or if you're curious, you should go to a mentor leader and say, here's my dilemma. I don't know what I'm looking for. And maybe they'll give you some help.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Appreciate that.
Marty, I read one of your articles. It was incredibly interesting. I think this is really important to bring up.
You say when it's time to bend the rules, it's counterintuitive, right? What the rules are there to, you know, we say in the military that they're written in blood. Explain your philosophy behind that article. It's really interesting.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Well, that was partly an excerpt from my third book that actually came out today, believe it or not.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Congratulations.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Be different. Yeah.
So I started looking at creativity. I'm on the board of a, of a group nonprofit called Best Robotics. It's been around for 31 years. And it was started by two Texas instruments engineers who wanted to inspire kids to get involved in technology. Right. So now we're almost 32 years down the road and I was trying to come up with some ways to change the strategy. They brought me in for that reason on the board and how could we. What's the secret sauce? What's making this so valuable? What makes it so successful from the perspective of the kids primarily, not the perspective of the adults and everybody else.
And I saw that there was this kind of unbridled creativity in the kids. They're not taught what to do. They have eight weeks to prepare their robot. And the robot function changes every year. Sometimes it's actually like an Amazon fulfillment plant type of robot where they have to go around and move boxes and do all kinds of things to get points.
Last year it was the da Vinci robotic surgical approach. So they had to create robots that could go out to a human shaped thing and start doing things to the body and all that. So and if there's 15 teams, there's 15 completely differently designed robots because there's no kit, there's no rules, there's no schematics.
And I saw that. And there's no alpha leaders, there's no architecture, there's no organizational structure, and they're 6th to 12th grade. And I said, well, how is this happening and why is it happening?
And I talked to some of the engineers involved in the program and I said, well, are they doing it the way you would do it? Well, no.
What would guide you on the way you would do it? Well, you know, I was taught how to do this. And in other words, an engineer who's gone through engineering school knows what the rules are of engineering. They also know the rules of physics and know the rules of a lot of other things. Weights, measures, you name it. Same thing with software. So what we had here was kind of a much, much more complex version of the one kid in class that gets in trouble because they do the division problem, but they do it a different way, even if they got the right answer. And usually what happens is that creativity is squashed. There's only one way to get to that right answer.
So when I saw that, I thought, okay, so what they're doing is they're not really breaking rules or ignoring rules or bending rules because they don't know the rules.
So that's really great that they're doing this. So does that mean to get this kind of unbridled, innovative thinking and imaginative thinking kind of inspiration, the way it would leap from solution to solution, that you have to take the intellectual kind of shackles off to free up your mind to just try things and experiment everything. Well, that took me down the path of talking to brain scientists and people that believe that there's not enough experimentation in a lot of different human behaviors and endeavors.
Something we used to have to do because we didn't know very much. So we just keep practicing, and it wouldn't work until we eventually got something that worked. Then we'd innovate and improve on it, right?
But the end state got me to where I understood the nature of the seal teams.
Before 1980s, SEAL teams were in the Green Berets. We were called unconventional warfare because we weren't conventional, because we didn't do it the way the rules say you're supposed to do it. We were the people that were going to go in and do it the way nobody expected you to do it. So, for example, if an enemy general is supposed to show up at some place on a Wednesday, anybody defending that general would expect anybody that's targeting that general is going to show up on that Wednesday, right?
And we'd show up a week early and we set up and be in position for when the general got there.
Because nobody would expect that a conventional solution would be wait till the general got there and then drop a bomb or do something, right? So unconventional thinking requires you to bend, break, or ignore the rules.
And that's because the missions and the tasks that you're given are so outlandish and so crazy, they defy the conventional resources ability to execute.
So when I put those two things together, what those kids were doing with their minds without knowing the rules and what we were doing as seals, embedding and breaking and ignoring the rules, I came to the conclusion that as an adult, maybe you're too late to not know the rules. But you're not too late to learn unconventional thinking. And that was kind of like my progression through until I eventually decided to write a book about it.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Here's what I would argue, right? If anybody in the audience is thinking, oh, okay, this is a technique that you need to use if you're a seal. I'm going to argue this is completely not true. In fact, very quickly, I'll tell the story. We were a struggling startup. We had to get SOC 2 compliance, pen testing, penetration testing, cost $50,000. Everybody's telling me I have to do this. I go up to the auditor and I'm like, hey, if I bring in an architect to review my infrastructure every two weeks to a month, white box review. Can this substitute pen testing? Thinks about it for a second. It's like, yep, I mean, it's clearly written in the rules that you need to do pen testing. But the simple question of, well, could I do something else? Yielding savings of $40,000.
This is a technique of, call it thinking out of the box. Call it questioning the, you know, the common knowledge that is incredibly valuable to a level that it can create competitive advantage in the business environment. Is there a method or a technique or how do you learn how to kind of do this?
[00:25:57] Speaker B: So, and I can't remember if I share this in the article, but I get asked that question a lot. And I figured out, okay, I'll codify it in a way, I think that's easy to understand and still effective.
So it's a three step process. The first thing is intellectual humility, which to me means you have to drop all your kind of baggage in your mind that you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, that you've been very, very successful. You got to get rid of all the football players you think always work and all the formulas you think always work. And that kind of kills the arrogance side and cleans your mind. And then you got to do the same thing on the negative side. You got to get rid of all the bad things that would have held you back from taking a chance or overtaking risk before that cleansing is your intellectual humility. The humility part isn't, is that it's not just thinking less of yourself. It means to clean your mind of any other prior assumptions, positive or negative, so that you're prepared for the next step. The next step is intellectual curiosity.
And just by asking the question in your example, you executed intellectual curiosity. You asked the question that shouldn't have been asked. It isn't asked. It's not written down someplace because you were curious. And to not do that means that your initiative is squashed because you think the rules are the rules are the rules. So that second step, intellectual curiosity, really charges you with learning everything you can possibly learn about the thing in front of you from every angle of attack you can come up with from lots of sources. You talk to all kinds of people in the time that you have allotted for it. You don't just talk to the same group you always talk to because you're basically. It's like 10 people in an elevator breathing each other's breath. We all like who we like. We surround ourselves pretty much with people that we like and get along with and they kind of think our way. Right?
And that's why if there's a high risk thing coming up and you're surrounded with a bunch of Navy SEALs that don't care about risk, you're going to, you're probably going to get a lot of advice, oh, let's do this right. And nobody in the elevator is going to be going, wait a minute. Because you don't have the risk person on your team, so you can do it to yourself.
And the more curious you are, the more you realize what you have around you. And you can kind of restructure that a little bit. You don't have to own them. They can just be friends. They could be people that are willing to be a contact and input.
You can get source obviously anywhere on the Internet. And look at it. I like talking to people. I'll set up with competitors, whatever, people in other industries that are doing something like mine, like if it's staffing or it's a linear thing, moving trucking from point to point is not that different than moving oil from point to point. It's a linear supply chain issue. But there are things that other industries have solved that other industries aren't aware of because they haven't got there yet. They haven't run into that particular problem. So that's it. So you gather all the data, all the inputs, all the insights, and especially the contrarian ones. Then the third step, which is intellectual creativity. And I call it intellectual creativity because you did the first two steps. Now instead of just knee jerk creativity or say, you know, make believe creativity, you've actually gone through the cleansing portion, the enlightenment portion, and now you're ready to sit down and try to throw something together to see if it works. And if you do that, that's great. If you're a leader, try to get everybody that's in leadership positions to do that. You kind of become like superpower because you have all these people that know as soon as there's a challenge there, they gotta clear their mindset, reach out for X number of hours or days or weeks, whatever they have allotted to them, come back, throw it all on the table or on the whiteboard, roll up their sleeves and then go into the third phase.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: That's absolutely delightful. I gotta call out the Idaho book, 10 Phases of Innovation, that type of technique that you mentioned, which they coined as cross pollination because you're taking something from a different industry or learning from it, how they figured out how it's a applicable to you. I have nine more techniques. Absolutely delightful book. Highly, highly recommended read.
Marty, this has been wonderful. I have one scripted question for this show and it's a little bit of a difficult one.
If you had to go back to 20 year old Marty, what would you advise him?
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Well, 20 year old Marty had been a SEAL for two and a half years and he would think that he wasn't a quitter.
But I would say that it's not about not being a quitter in the military.
You have to not be a quitter in life and you need to be able to jump through the hoops when the opportunities show up. Take a chance, take a risk, and then once you've committed yourself, don't quit until you've completed it, whatever it is.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Marty, thank you so much for joining the show. I appreciate you.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
