Welcome back to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast that explores the stories of successful entrepreneurs who've overcome adversity, and still built thriving businesses. And we're tapping into the wisdom of Skip Bowman today. He's an author, consultant and keynote speaker who loves to talk about growth mindset, and psychological safety. Funny, we love talking about those things too. Skip’s book is Safe to Great. He was born here in Australia, but lives in Europe now, and we are spanning three time zones recording this today. Thank you Skip for being here, it's great to have you.
Lovely to be here, excited about the conversation.
Yeah. So are we thank you so much for joining us, and we can't wait to get into it. So we're gonna just jump in the deep end of entrepreneurship and tell us, you are quite the consummate entrepreneur. So what is it about it that you really like? And how did you get here?
I suppose it's about having an idea, sometimes coming at crazy times, and say, okay, let's give that a shot. I have a consulting business I've had for many years, like 12 and a half years, etc, I’ve had lots of attempts at it. My first company was at 18, that didn't go so well, but then you learn, you learn from disasters as well. Sometimes it comes to you because it's a profession, but sometimes it comes to us because you have a calling, you want to try something new, do something different. I have a hotel which my wife and I are building up in France, it’s an old farm, and that's a calling. We were sort of lying in bed and sort of thinking, I actually don't know where the idea came from, but suddenly we were talking about it and suddenly we were online, and a month later we bought something and then Covid hit, and then ‘Oh boy’, then we had to work out how to pay for it. But there you go, we're okay now! But there is something very special about taking an idea and making it, turning it into something. That's a real creative thing and I love that.
You have to have an amount of, desire for risk, not necessarily desire, but less fear of risk than other normal people. Some might think buying a hotel, and trying to have a hotel during Covid is insane. So where does that come from?
It was insane. I didn't know Covid was gonna hit, we'd actually signed the deal for the house and then suddenly the whole world just, I hadn't seen that. I mean I've seen some strange things come and go, that one I hadn't seen coming, a global pandemic. I don't know, I’ve had to do some quite difficult things so when I think of risk, I don't really think about it like that. I just think of challenge. I think, ‘Okay, all right, that bank doesn't want to pay, help us fund that project, let's find another one. Every now and then, we sat there looking at each other, and we just got our first baby together at the time, we're thinking, ‘Ooh, this is pretty interesting.’
But we managed to find a bank after I think six or seven. I suppose it's just bouncing back from it and saying, and just keep pushing, because often there's a solution there, and often it’s the determination, the grit, to keep going that something emerges. I mean I don't believe in magical mystery tours, but I've been able to push through some boundaries which other people would say, ‘Why on earth would you do that?’ I mean, I wouldn't, as I said, I don't think I would invite anyone into that journey, because there are some dark moments where you simply go like, ‘Oooh, will we lose the deposit we paid?’, and all sorts of stuff like that but I suppose the determination and luckily, I think like every entrepreneur, you have to have a partner who's up for it, and if you can't look each other in the eye and say okay, let's make it work, otherwise, you're screwed, excuse the French.
I’m curious, is your wife entrepreneurial?
She is. She loves the project in the hotel. She's currently working in corporate, but she finds it really boring, so I think she has a real entrepreneurial spirit.
PS: This is going public, is that still okay?
All right. No, that's okay. But the reality is, when you're a couple who one is an entrepreneur, sometimes you have to make choices about, your biggest determinant of success is your financial setup at home. If you don't have that right, you're gonna be, it's not going to work. So having a salary that's more guaranteed is helpful, and I think an awful lot of small businesses are built up around that and that's how, that is a good way to make that work, to balance your risk out.
To bootstrap your business.
Yeah. And it just means that there can be a tough month or two, and the bank looks at you differently. Very differently I should point out. I've got a sugar mummy and she's good for me.
Can I have one of those too?
Okay, so let's put it on the table here Skip, tell us everything that's going on in your life. You said before we pressed play that you have two, three children?
Three children under three, yeah.
Three children under three. You bought a hotel.
They are all girls.
All girls, you’re blessed, aren’t you blessed.
Yep.
Yes. Good answer. Of course. So three girls under three, a hotel in France that you're doing a renno on, a consulting business..
And we rent out and we run events there yeah,
You've just written a book that is to be published later this year. What else have you got up your sleeve?
Oh, I think there's, I mean, seriously all of them are full time jobs, including being a dad. It’s nuts around here, I don't know quite how it works. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I like all those features. I feel that I'm in a transition though, I feel that I'm shifting into the writing books process and then looking at building a slightly, a very different business, which is very interesting. I mean I've never done that before. The book business is a business in itself and doing these partnerships, so I'm really learning a lot about how to build that business along with how to run a hotel.
You've also developed tools and assessment tools and assets in relation to the business.
Yeah, I started a research project about six, seven years ago, to bring psychological safety and growth mindset together in one idea, because I felt there was, that was an interesting point of departure. I took the name Good to Great from the famous Jim Collins book. I think it was a bit of a joke to start with but then I said it to myself and the Safe to Great, I went, ‘Oh, I like that’, and I said, Oh, that's that's a pretty good idea.
And I'm a bit of an expert in psychometrics as they call it, which is, the measurement surveying of organisations, culture, leadership, etc. So I just set about building that, and I’ve been doing that alongside my business over the last seven or eight years, and slowly building up this global database, which enables us to produce these reliable maps of leadership in terms of how much growth mindset is present in a leader and a team and an organisation, and that's the foundation for what we're doing. And that's been an enormous amount of effort. I mean building that IP, there’s a lot in that. So yeah, it's been a really, as usual, busy six or seven years, I've lost track actually.
And you mentioned having a distributor for those tools as well.
Yeah, I think it's, again, shifting out of the consulting model, it's not that I eliminate that entirely. One of the biggest problems is how does an entrepreneur in services, particularly consulting services, able to turn it into something that's clickable, or some sort of, because you can't sell consultant businesses very easily, it's very hard to accumulate wealth in them. But on a clickable business, where you have distributors and you have running on business, which is independent of your consulting service, that's a different ballgame. And in my industry that is the goal because it's suddenly then you've got an online business that you can sell, it's automatically valuable. And so I've been trying to get here for a really long time. I've had this vision, wow, probably for longer than about 10 years, or even longer to be honest. It's just taken an awfully long time to get in the position where I can realise so this is like the fruition of, I don't know, countless hours of work to get where we are today. We're not finished, we're finished enough that we can and have been able to provide accreditations and train others to use our tool. So that's very satisfying. I feel like, that was a big idea, and the book really is an important apex in that business model and the keynote business as well, but I'm like lots of other consultants that are seeking that way of converting your knowledge and experience into something that can generate more business for others, that you can take what you do and put it into another business so they can be successful as well. And that's cool. But it's a very new step for me, and so there's a lot of things I'm learning and I'm lucky I have an old mate who's an expert in negotiations and franchise arrangements and stuff like that, who like this morning, we spent an hour bashing through a contract, and hit some details.
I'm excited by it. In principle it’s the relationships, the ability to help others grow a business, which I'm excited about. It's fully entrepreneurial. It's full on, there's no doubt about that and I do feel at times that I am out there floating with very little safety net. I suppose that's inevitable when we do what we do.
It absolutely is. So what was that insight that you had that led to Safe to Great mindset? What was it that you saw leaders were missing and needed to become great?
I think that probably goes back to a client project I was on back in 2006, which was so long ago it doesn't really matter. I was working for BHP Billiton, which is a big iron ore company, and they were working with a toolset that had an approach that I hadn't seen before, which was this ability to use one model to link the development of culture and leadership, so you'd be able to link those two things together.
Not only that, it was a model that talked about strength and what great looks like, as in what's effective leadership, what creates psychological safety, what makes organisations grow, but also talked about dysfunctional leadership. In other words, mapped out what things are unhealthy, dysfunctional, potentially toxic, in cultures and leaders. And that critical side of things surprised me when I first saw it because I hadn't seen anything like it, this was probably about 10 years into my initial career, and I said, ‘I like that’. And I worked with those tools and approaches for quite some time, but felt that there was something I wanted to, to modernise it, to bring it into something. And I think Amy Edmondson and Carol Drake's work has brought some really new thinking. I think the world that we're operating in as leaders today is very, very different to where it's been before, and I think too many leaders are kind of stuck with ways of approaching things that are pretty old fashioned, and the future is coming fast, and it ain't pretty. So that really drove me on, I really do have a legacy with this is that I'd like leadership to fundamentally embrace the future of work, and the future of work is going to have some characteristics, one of which will be, it's going to be co-robotic, in other words working with smart machines. Secondly, it's going to have to fit within this, how do we manage a climate that's out of control kind of space? How much we’re controlled by Facebook and things like that? How do we make sure that we're leading in transparent and open ways, because otherwise, our agency as humans is going to be impacted, already is impacted negatively by a lot of technological development, and I think we need leaders and organisations that understand that and can work with that. So they're big ideas, I know that's a bit philosophical, but leadership needs to think. We're going to have huge ethical problems, already now and in the next 10 years, it's going to get really bumpy and politicians will not be fast enough to solve this, business leaders will have to step in, and perhaps lead the way in some respects, and whether that be a small entrepreneur or big corporate leader, similar kinds of things. Because otherwise the consequences for our communities and our employees is pretty scary actually.
You're so right, and I feel a little bit relieved that it is an opportunity for businesses and for private enterprise to step in, and to lead. Because too often we, as society, sit back and wait for the government to do what we know needs to be done, and then it doesn't happen. And we need to take personal responsibility and start walking the talk and if we see a solution, then let's work on enacting the solution. Anyway, not to get too political, but I mean I think that's very visible all over the world.
Yeah we need communities, we've got to strengthen our communities, we cannot continue down a path that just separates everyone into their individual little home and makes them scared. We've got to get people out there engaging in their communities and building safer, growing, healthier communities, anything that resists that is a problem and we need to fix it. And there are lots of new business models emerging which are based on community and building healthy ones and I can't choose everything but I'd love to promote them, and to say, we need to include those choices in the way we lead our businesses.
The pandemic swung the pendulum, so it's really isolated people so much that now the pendulum has such momentum it's going to swing right back to go strong on the community and the connectedness.
I hope so. The problem though, is that there's a huge benefit to keeping people fairly isolated. Without getting again, too political on it, but it's just how it is. We have the ability now to sort of micromanage everyone down to super detail, and that's no good for you, I can reassure you, our stress and mental health problems in America or around the world, will not be solved by self care and individuals looking after themselves, that's not going to solve any of that. And it never has, there's no evidence to suggest self care or mindfulness can solve a serious stress or burnout problem, it can only really be solved by reengineering the work itself. And that means peers and bosses need to reimagine how the work is done every day to deal with that, otherwise, the opioid crisis will simply get worse, it's not going to get better, we can't. So there’s a need for healthier ways of working, definitely.
And of course AI is, the productivity coming out of AI should enable us to have healthier workplaces, because it's going to enable huge lifts in the biggest leap in human productivity possible will come from smart machines, that's a massive opportunity as long as capital doesn't take all the money for itself, that it shares some of it with the employees and make sure that it's a humane workplace. Not just the work itself but the changes that each employee will have to go through to work within these smart machine, co-robotic spaces, that's a big thing. Because I mean 40% of all jobs are going to get wiped out in five years, so there's a bit of change necessary, there's a lot of relearning needed.
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Massively. We've been talking about this, we've been talking a lot about AI lately and the impacts, and I've been thinking a lot about this, it will come down to the leaders, the mindset of the leaders, because a leader could say, ‘Nice, I can wipe out 40% of my staff, which is more profit for me’, or the leader can say, ‘Nice, now my staff is going to be that much more productive, I can get more and build more with them’. So there's a very different mindset and how, in your opinion, do you think leaders, or what do you think leaders should do to embrace a better, wholesome workplace for all that benefits a leader but also benefits their employees and culture in general?
I think we're seeing companies making those choices. There are merging structures, and ways that companies that are making those choices can brand themselves so that, because you need some sort of virtuous loop here in some way, you have to get it so that the good choices you make about how you lead your people are things that customers value, etc. And you become a part of a self reinforcing movement. I think we're seeing that. Without that self reinforcement, in other words, a movement of some sort towards organisations that have that, it won't work. But I think there are consumers out there, quite a lot of them that want to make good choices that want to be trading with organisations that are making good choices about employees, and perhaps the environment or whatever that happens to be about the communities that they work in. And they need to be encouraged and whether the government needs to get behind it, I don't know. But I think there's enough buyers and consumers out there that want to make educated choices about who they trade with. Now they may not be able to have a premium that's massive to start with, but I think that we're seeing those signs that there is an opportunity here to grow. Even big corporates see that if you take the chairman of Siemens for example, he's right into this he says that we're doing the great, this Great Reset, as they call it.. not the World Trade Organisation, they meet in Davos, in Switzerland, the rich club, the Great Reset, it’s about rethinking work. And for them it's an opportunity, but it's an opportunity because there is an aware buyer consumer out there who wants to make better choices about the products and services that they consume. I think that's where we have to go, but accelerate it by, like a call like this, where we're talking about those ideas and promoting those people, building the communities and the support mechanisms that make it more of a realistic, an obvious choice.
Is it true that your next book is going to be about how companies can transition from being great to green?
Yeah, I think that's an exciting project we started a few months ago, I did forget to mention it was one of the things I'm doing.
Yeah, I'm trying to work with a company. There's two phases to this, one of which I think there's a lot of companies that are starting green. In other words, they're stepping into some sort of sustainability pathway because there's a lot of new business opportunities emerging there. But they're also legacy companies of various sizes that are needing to make new choices about how they operate, and to perhaps link into these communities that value, customers that want to buy products and services that are made that way. So I feel there's a lot of emerging literature about how to do that, so I felt it was important that we looked at what does the leadership require to do that, and one of the key fundamental theories is what we call Ecosystem Leadership, which is sort of stepping and leading, not from a sense of leading your company, but leading your ecosystem or the community, which can include suppliers, and vendors and consumers and communities. It might even include collaborations with municipalities, the mayor, or the state etc. Because typically, these new business models require lots of changes in the way we do things, right? So if you take hydrogen and some of these other new movements, they're gonna require lots of changes in how we store electricity, how we make it, all sorts of things are going to change, which offer lots and lots of entrepreneurial opportunities. But to do it quickly we need local government, local businesses, and consumers in that area working together to realise these opportunities. The company I'm sort of partnering with at the moment, has a really crazy job, they are trying to help the NHS, which is the health provider in the UK, to manage its recycling of everything they throw out. So they've done a recent audit, where they go into all those lovely bags that you throw out at a hospital, and sorting through to see how much sorting is being done, because it has an enormous influence. Because if you don't sort the recycling correctly you can ruin a batch. So they’re there with their gloves on and their hats on and everything and they're going through some fantastic bags of refuse to do an audit. And this is an enormous, it's a fantastic business opportunity because they’re going to have to comply with some very, very stringent sustainability requirements by 2030 and to get there in the timescale, there's a business there for some people to consult. So all you entrepreneurs in that area, you might have to get your gloves on and your mask on and sift through some nasty bags but this is a business, and these are good jobs, and these are good business opportunities. So I'm trying to work with that company to see how we sort of create leaders that can not only motivate their employees, but motivate local governments, motivate local consumers, you know understand the behaviour of getting people to recycle properly in hospitals. How do we do that? And that's cool. That sounds fun. We've got a timeline, we've got to do it fast. We’ve got to do this faster than we've ever done before.
So Skip, talking about the speed of AI and how fast we all need to pivot towards this new workspace that we're in and recognising it's much easier for an entrepreneur starting out with a very small ship full of people versus a business with 500 crew, a cruise ship that has to turn, we know that we can turn a sailboat faster than we could turn a cruise ship. So how does the speed of it impact how we work? How can we pivot into this new co-robotic workplace? I absolutely love that term, I'm totally stealing it and will be using it in the future. It's exactly what it is, and it's moving so fast, and I'm sure it is slowing down some and speeding up others. In general, how can we move in this new new environment quick enough?
This is the real question. It's the speed that’s the problem, and even the size of the change. It's way beyond what humans are meant for, we like generational change, we like 20 or 30 years to get around to something new, and that's why psychological safety has come up as a huge issue to be honest, I think it’s why Amy Edmondson who researched the idea for quite some time, why it's really resonating so much everywhere. It’s people going, ‘I'm actually a bit worried about this’. I think the latest inflation crisis hasn't helped either, so a lot of people have been struggling to pay bills, this is not optimal. You can't have a growth mindset and learn optimally when you're really scared about something foundational, something at work or perhaps in your finances, and something like that. So this is where if we don't reinforce community, reinforce relationships, reinforce our families, our people aren’t gonna be learning anything, they're going to step back into very protective defensive modes of operating, and some of the social unrest we see around the world has got a lot to do with that, is that I don't know whether I can step into this yet. So what am I going to do? I'm going to step out of this, that's not going to get us anywhere, because we cannot get off this, we're not going to change technology, it's going to come, there’s no way you can avoid it. But slowing it down, reinforcing community is important. That's why I feel that hyper individualised leadership has reached its nadir. I don't think you can continue just to manage one to one, I just don't think that's going to work. If we don't have teams, whether they be virtual or co-located, we've got to have stronger relationships, otherwise we're going to lose it. Humans just go very, very protective and boring and dangerous if you don't work hard to create that psychological safety that Edmondson is talking about, and then we can grow, then there are possibilities for growth to happen. But don't just scare people and then tell them to learn.
What's your advice to leaders, whether they be government or private, to get their teams into that safe space?
Well most of the leaders don't know what's going on either way. Let's face it, this is happening really fast, most of them are just going to continue doing what they usually do. So whenever they see a challenge they're just going to perhaps sack people or I don't know what, hire a consultant to solve the problem. A lot of leaders need to get a lot cleverer about what's going on, I think there's a lot of leaders who simply don't understand what's going on with AI, they don't understand what's going on with their communities don't really understand what's going on with their workplace relationships and the mental health issues. They need to learn a lot more here about what's going on and stop blaming individuals for it and start saying that if we make better choices at work, as leaders, we can create better mental health, less burnout, less stress, and psychological safety, which can lead to learning. It can all be done and there are methods for it but if you're frazzling out, frustrated, worried about, don't really know what's going on and just doing knee jerk reactions yourself as a leader, it's gonna get messy. That's what I call hippos, aggressive controlling leaders, etc.
And so they can learn more about this in your book once it's published?
Oh, yeah I cover it. I can't talk in great length around that issue because I've got some other things I need to share with them, which is about behaviours and principles about great leadership. But I've only really embarked on this journey myself because I thought, particularly during Covid, ‘Hang on, there's something going on here which we need to think about’, and then I realised that there is a lot more going on here than I had thought myself. So I think there's a real need to start learning and talking about some of these issues, but not just apply the usual thing, and what we saw here with the layoffs in the IT industry was the usual thing, which is, ‘We're struggling a little bit and let’s sack 10 or 20 thousand people, right’.
Good excuse to get some extra margin.
When I look at some of the companies I do work with, Lloyds Bank, they've gone in and said, ‘No we have to retrain’, even do substantial retraining of people into digital areas, simply because they're not going to get any employees anyway because the demographics are against it, most countries are restrictive on immigration, they're not going to get new employees, they have to retrain and that's going to take a while. Humans just simply don't learn new industries or new competencies that quickly, it's going to take half a year, or a year, maybe two years to retrain people. I think you do see companies that have taken that on themselves to spend the money to retrain their staff, and to provide them with good pathways into a smart machine era, Lloyd's is one of them and there are others, right, Blackrock’s another one. And we need to be championing those efforts because no matter what, they are the right efforts. Now I'm hoping other entrepreneurs, the problem is that when we're small businesses like us, how can we afford that? That's where it gets harder and that's where I think there is a need for local governments or ways of sharing that need to retrain people somehow. I think there are some countries that are better at that than others but there's definitely a need to share that burden, because otherwise entrepreneurs just simply won't be able to do that. I'd love to be able to support it, but there's limits to what I can do within my cash flow with three or four people on my team, and I can do some stuff but I can’t do everything right?
Yeah, you've initiated the conversation, you've gotten people thinking about it, you're putting a fire under them, so that's your part. I'm sitting here listening, say I'm an audience of this podcast and thinking, ‘Well it's all changing so quickly, how do you retrain in that environment? Don't you have to wait to see where it's going?’ But of course, that's ridiculous because it's just gonna continue changing quickly. How do we pin it?
Well, we already know, the predictions are pretty clear and they're coming to fruition about what industries are gonna get hammered, and they already are. I mean we're not making this stuff up. But most people are fairly ill informed about what that is all really about. The biggest challenge is that white collar work in the US and Europe is going to be hammered, and that’s the problem. It's a double combination, one of which is smart machines, but also because smart machines can allow people in low income countries to be able to compete very, very aggressively with white collar work in Europe and the US. So that means we're gonna have to step up big time, and there's no time to wait, you gotta get into it. Even something like embracing ChatGPT and some of these new technologies coming out, Microsoft's going to come out with all sorts of automated features, you're just going to have to get on to this man. You can't just sit there and say, ‘I'm no good at this’, you just gotta go for it. I'm surprised at how good ChatGPT is and what it can do for me, it's really impressive, and some of this other AI stuff, it's really, really impressive, and we just got to go for it. I think entrepreneurs, luckily, perhaps already have that instinct to say, ‘Okay, I gotta learn this, if it can make me more productive and give me a half an hour extra per day’, I was about to say something rude, but yeah, do it, just do it.
Absolutely.
We have an Australian here, I was gonna throw out one of those wonderful localisms then!
It's okay we don't have a child audience, we’re all adults here. I think it's a lot of a difference of mindset between a fear based mindset, and I think the bigger company you have, the more people you're responsible for, the bigger your profit margins and all of that, the more fear of losing it is going to impact how you approach it versus a curiosity mindset where someone with a smaller business, a solo entrepreneur can afford to be more curious. And just Oh, yeah, can this give me back some time? And I think that's how younger people approach things, too. I have a 14 year old, and he's very curious about things and he's willing to try things and take risks. And so what if it doesn't work? And so what if it blows out? It doesn't matter. He'll just go for it anyway, and give it that try because he's curious about these issues. And I think if we approach things and lead with the curiosity mindset, we're gonna grow faster than someone who has holds back. Would you agree?
Absolutely yeah. Curiosity mindset, I call it growth mindset. It's the same kind of thinking. It's very easy in the cut and thrust of a day running a business to get really caught up in the numbers, and did we make enough today and staying on top of that is a real battle. I think you also have to make choices of who you're hanging out with, it’s that classic thing that some very famous people would say that you've got to make sure that you're, if you're going to spend time at the golf course, or you're spending time at the country club, make sure it's with the kind of people who are saying, ‘Let's get on this’, rather than people who are saying, Oh, they're in the old days, watch out for nostalgic types and get them out of your life! Because they're not going to help your bottom line in five years, you can hang out with the people who are saying, ‘Okay, well, what are some of these young people doing with tik tok? What are they doing with X, Y, and Z? How can we embrace it? What could that look like?’ I mean it is wicked what can be done, so that's what I'd be looking at, who am I hanging out with? What kinds of inspiration am I seeking?
And I'm hoping those entrepreneurs who have always been good at adapting and changing will do so as well here, they might need a bit of love and support from us. So here's a big hug to you all. Let's go and kick it. Let's do this thing.
100% that's what we are here for, I love the saying, ‘If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room’. I'm a big believer, you’ve got to go out and seek the mentors, the people who are that little bit ahead of you. So who do you seek out? Who are your mentors? What are you reading? What are you curious about in that space?
That was a bit like talking to my business development consultant, my old mate, he is really sharp at this stuff, has his own, he's a venture capitalist, and if I have anything associated with this, I'm gonna pick up the phone and say, Hey, Matt, what's up? And he's built some amazing businesses and really knows how to do that. And so that's, that'd be one person I'd reach out to. For me, it's also these new business models is just saying, ‘Hey, I got no idea, what's the right thing to do?’ When I say to that, it's not because I'm lacking confidence to work it out, I'm open enough to say like, I don't really know how to do this. I've never marketed a book before, I've never built a distribution or a franchise model, who can I talk to? What would that look like? And to be honest, the internet is full of really good stuff. I was really impressed, I was trying to work out how to use some software again and then I found this fantastic little video of a woman who had taught her grandmother how to do it to record her memoirs, because I was sort of wanting to do my own audible version of my book. It was a cute little video, and was very informative, and it was wonderful to see this 80 or 90 year-old woman reading to demonstrate how to record in Premiere to do my book. I think the internet is full of so much good material to learn from, this podcast is probably one of them too. I think that's a great way to learn, and again make sure you're expanding your network with the kinds of people who are working with things that are more cutting edge more out there.Think carefully about who you spend most of your time with, not to say you ditch the family, but you want to make sure that some of your business associates are perhaps very different to you and, have some different experiences and different business models and see what you can learn from them.
I could be cheeky and ask you Skip, whether your book was written with the help or significant help from AI but I trust all of that, I think you're a very disciplined author.
It was, yes! Well in the process, it was because I was sitting at dinner with my business development manager in Fremantle in Western Australia, where I come from, and we were having dinner in Freo and he says, ‘Have you seen this Chat GPT thing?’, I said, I've got no idea what this is about. And he's really nerdy by the way, he runs an AI-driven security camera business, that's just one of his projects, and he was showing it to me, and he says ‘It’s really crazy, you can just do this’, and he was showing us over dinner, that's how nerdy that was. And I thought that was really annoying, as usual with Matthew and then I went home and I looked into it and I realised he’s bloody well right! Not that I would use it to write, I think it's a bit tedious as a writer, I'm hopefully a better writer than AI is. But there are some, sometimes you need a little bit of a kick, and it's nice that, I like the way you can just write natural questions to it, it's just easier. And it does come up with some really good answers, now you have to double check them because some of them are just completely wrong.
As some of the recent lawsuits have attested to.
Lots of my friends are unreliable as well, they say lots of C. R. A. P….
So true, they'll tell you something. You're gonna go and tell somebody else without fact checking.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind some sort of fact checking control on some of my friends and business associates as well.
That's Siri on the way home. Hey, Siri, is it true that?
Yes, but I love writing and always have done, so I've hopefully written a book together with some people who really helped me, the editors and proofreaders, etc. That's been a fun process to work with really clever people that I've become a better writer because of it, and it was really annoying, particularly Lesley, my copy editor and wow, she just said ‘Nah, fix this. Make it 25% shorter. You can do this in one sentence instead of five.’ I’d wake up every morning, she's in Canada, and I'm in Copenhagen. I’d wake every morning to this huge list of corrections. Oh my God again, here we go again. But I do love it, I love that something better came out of it, there's absolutely no doubt about that.
Is your skin a little thicker for it?
I can definitely get a ping of annoyance, but I'm brutal when it comes to learning, I've always had that quality, I prefer to know how crap it was and just hit it. I might get a little bit, I don't get defensive, I tend to get annoyed mainly with myself, and then I just suck it up and get on with it. I've been a reasonably good learner over the years, but if I screw up I just yeah, look I screw up every hour, and most of the time I don't even know I've done. Maybe this is it, what people get wrong about, they think it's about we all need to make more mistakes. No, no, dude, you're making mistakes the whole bloody time, you just got to admit them and talk about them and try to improve. There are mistakes everywhere, some of them, opportunities are mistakes too, missed opportunities are mistakes as well you know that we didn't get that business or we didn't talk to that person on the bus that may have changed your freakin’ life.
Oh, that's what keeps me awake at night, it’s the missed opportunities.
That's it, for any entrepreneur it's that thought, ‘Oh my god, if I just stayed a little longer, or I'd spoken to that person at that event and not that weird person or that person I usually talk to who bores the hell out of me.’ Missed opportunities, I hate that, it drives me nuts. Because we're all in the business of luck, we just have to be there at the right place at the right time, but we just got to be there, just got to be in a lot of places and hopefully luck will be with us. I love it, Elon Musk said if he had, he was asked, if you're a superhero what would be your superpower? He said I'd be lucky. He's right. I would love to be lucky all the time, that would be awesome. But we all know as entrepreneurs, that luck is usually the fruition of an awful lot of attempts at it.
Yeah, it takes a lot of work to be lucky. I like that.
Yeah. If I had a superpower, which would it be, I would be lucky. He is annoyingly good at coming up with a one liner, but there we go.
That's so true. The king of Twitter, he needed to. Don’t go there! So listen, I have to raise this on LinkedIn, not so long ago, we started a little conversation about, well you started the conversation, I chimed in, about whether people in the near future will even bother to read, because they will potentially be suspicious or sceptical that it was written by a machine and not a human. Which I disagreed.
Yeah, I’m not so sure because there's something of that connection with something human, to know there was an author matters a bit. I think if we look at it sort of like the service industry, it's a bit the same. The magic of that moment, that special moment is a human moment in service. It's that thing that happens when we're in a restaurant because you can make the best food in the world, but if that connection between people and your restaurant isn’t there, they're not going to give you a good review. Because the connection and how I feel about something shapes how I evaluate it. And I do wonder whether it raises this scepticism or this sort of cynicism is what am I reading? Is it real? Is it not? And we're in that, I mean we've had the truth war for some time, but the deep fake where we're headed is mind boggling. And I just don't know, I think there is that chance a lot of people will just turn off and and feel like, I think there's that chance of what we call a massive movement of cynicism. And so like, does anything matter? And I think that is a worry. Whether it’ll hit everyone I don't know, but I can understand why people would sit there going, ‘If everything's fake and everything's made up and it's all run by computer and who owns that?’ That's where all the conspiracy just gets out of control, and that's a pity.
And more clued in on leadership and what the right solution and leadership style will be.
Indeed! This is this question is that, one of the worst types of leadership is unpredictable. A leader that's unpredictable is the one that generates one of the highest levels of lack of safety. So one of the things about robots is they are more or less reliable, at least they have in theory, maybe I just don't know enough about robots, which is probably true.
No it's a really good point there about the predictability and the importance of that because that gives stability, and even as a parent, if you're an unpredictable parent, it leads to a lot of anxiety for a child, because they don't know what's going to happen next. Whereas if you have routines, and you have a way of doing things, and you're predictable in your response to emotion or things that happen or crisis, then there's this level of calm within a family, which often equals in an organisation where it's, ‘Okay, this crisis can happen, but the leader is going to react this way’, and everybody kind of falls into line of what needs to be done. And then you can act and pivot, especially during times of crisis, like a pandemic, right? It's exactly, it showed who the strong leaders were.
And honestly, this has been such an incredible conversation I really don't want it to end, I think we're gonna have to do a part two on this as well. Yeah. It's gonna move so fast, I think the conversation is gonna be a little different in three months from now, anyway right? Who knows where we're going to be. But we always like to ask on this podcast, and this will be our final question today is, we have talked a bit about resilience and it's underlined everything we've spoken about so far, but what is your definition of resilience? What does it mean to you?
I like the word grit, when I think of grit it's probably a John Wayne film. I think it was called True Grit. It's a lovely word, grit.
I have a whole model around it but I won't bore you with all the technicalities of it, but the ability to recover from setback, the ability to remain optimistic and positive, not necessarily enthusiastic, but willing to take action that is an attempt to make sense of things and make progress under extreme pressure, are examples of resilience. We know that people who are resilient have good relationships, and whether we're talking about resilience in the moment of crisis or through life in general, relationship is the most clear determinant, in particular mental health for men, and length of life. All of the theory is around that if you have good relationships you live longer, screw the diet, screw everything else, you've got to get that sorted. So isolated, detached, and people living on their own, they're not going to live long and no matter what we feed them it's pretty irrelevant. So, there's a lot to do with how relationship and connection provides us with the emotional spaces that allow us to do the things, as I said, to recover from setbacks, to remain calm and proactive in a difficult situation and be able to, find that extra energy necessary to step into complex, ambiguous, uncertain situations and make the most and make something good happen, make something great happen, means that in those difficult situations, you say, ‘Okay, I'm going to try to make something great happen, I'm going to step in positively, constructively, proactively, and I'm going to do that because I know that will best likely lead to others responding positively to that attempt, even if I'm feeling like S.H.I.T they will more likely respond to that and that will make me then feel like there are more resources available. I know that’s a funny word to use but fundamentally, resilience is about also responding in ways to crises that mobilise more resources around you because if you don't, you choose these negative paths, that’s more toxic or you cut yourself off from the resources that would actually enable you emotionally, intelligence wise, whatever, collaboratively to be able to solve this problem. So that's my offer of what resilience is.
Brilliant, thank you so much, and here's to gritty leaders who are brave, proactive, positive, and embrace all the new that is coming rapidly to work.
Yeah, Jacinda Adern, she's a wonderful example of that, she's absolutely a fantastic example. And also somebody who knows when it's time to stop, that's okay too.
Exactly. Brilliant, brilliant example. Thank you so much Skip. I've enjoyed this conversation immensely, and hope to have another one soon.
Love to.
Thanks.
See ya, thank you.
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Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, we're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation which is why we’ve built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it, look us up at www.twofouronebranding.com
