Leadership Lessons From The Great Books | Transcript: Mash Up Episode ft. Leadership Models w/John Hill

Mash Up Episode ft. Leadership Models w/John Hill

January 28, 2026 / 01:39:41/S5 E178

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast

episode number 178.

And picking up from our book today as we

head into what is going

to be a mashup episode. And normally on mashup

episodes you wouldn't have a book. But we need a book to anchor ourselves today.

So from our book today from the Introduction

the Argument from First Principles

the Argument it is hard to write this book about leadership,

or quite frankly, any book about leadership considering the current pandemic in the world.

COVID 19 simultaneously changed everything about how leaders operate in

world and further exposed much of the remaining tenacious mental

infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution that is still around in small, medium

and even large organizations, and most of that infrastructure is

still on display in organizations. Employees are

at the bottom of the organizational chart believing that they are the foundations on which

the organization rests, yet feeling as though they are treated as basement

dwellers. Managers and supervisors are squeezed in the middle

believing they are the glue that keeps the top of the organization from flying away

and keeps the bottom of the organization in line. Yet the reality is they

are asked to care about something they did not initially build and are asked to

give positive lip service to ideas, innovations and approaches to change

they know will have a low chance of success.

Upper management and executives are at the top of the organizational chart believing they deserve

the status they have and that preserving that status is the only thing that

matters, yet feeling as though they are in a constant battle with forces

I.e. governmental regulations, organizational enue, etc.

The people in the organizational chart below them could never possibly

understand and that is just the

infrastructure in our organizations. Then there is the mental

infrastructure we tend to ignore that affects leaders even more.

How we teach leadership in academic settings, how we write about

leadership in books like this, and how we position leaders in our organizations through

promotion, compensation, merit, competency and other factors

has not been challenged significantly in the way the COVID 19 pandemic

challenged leadership assumptions and expectations. In many, many

years. When our organization had

physical office space before the pandemic and the knock on effects of social

distancing, government mask mandates and work from home regulations kicked

in, I would drive to that office still every

day. This office was down the street from the abandoned

industrial residue representing the company that stood, at least in the

20th century at the pinnacle of industrial revolution assumptions

about the intersections between work, life, leadership and the corporate social

structure that company, the internationally known

IBM, once located in Endicott, New York at its height employed

14,000 quote unquote IBM men and they were

majority men who were notorious for wearing the IBM corporate

outfit of a white shirt, a black tie and and appropriate slacks

with even their hair trimmed neatly in a corporate approved fashion

and endlessly conforming but relatively well paid flood of

men would course and spill through and down the street where my office

used to be located during lunch hours.

Their mere presence stood as the primary example of what successful, thriving and

scalable leadership and management practices could accomplish in the 20th century.

As did the presence of men working at Endicott, Johnson's shoe factory, John General

Electric, Carrier air Conditioning and other upstate New York 20th century

corporations. When IBM relocated its vast infrastructure

to Montauk from Endicott and dispersed its people more globally,

New York State, for reasons both the New York State government and IBM dispute

fired or early retired many of the people who worked in those buildings, the

majority of which were abandoned by the time our office was located there

20 some odd years later this

is what I am talking about when I refer to mental infrastructure.

The pandemic wrecked the mental infrastructure of assumptions, expectations and attitudes

of leadership at all levels in our global society and culture

and laid bare the frank negotiations between public health, public policy,

private medical choices, the responsibility to make a living, and the

responsibility to lead people to do so. Therefore, publishing

a leadership book is dangerous in today's world.

No matter what assertions I may make in this book, they could be frozen in

time by the reader or dismissed as being just a quote unquote sign of the

times, or equally as problematic. They

could be too easily embraced as the holy Grail

solution to all post pandemic

leadership problems.

All leadership, regardless of what

leadership we pick, begins with a vision.

By articulating a vision, a leader, intentionally or not, falls into a specific

model of leadership that encompasses their actions. But

visions, to paraphrase from the great economic writer Thomas Sowell,

can either be constrained or unconstrained. A

constrained vision of leadership acknowledges the fact of the limitations of human nature

that are beyond the ability of institutions, models, and even leadership visions to address

and even beyond the ability of themselves as leaders to fix or

ameliorate. An unconstrained vision of leadership assumes at

its core that leadership and leadership models can be leveraged to accomplish

any type of change. It also assumes that all circumstances,

situations, and environments are mere chains that can be broken off

if the leader is charismatic enough, knowledgeable enough, or even

just cares enough about their followers.

This is a continuing struggle that began when the first man tried to

organize the first hunting party to kill an animal for food and has

continued down to this day

and thus our mashup episode. Today

for books, particularly great literature, present leaders with

options around visions and provide a laboratory for leaders to

experience the strategic and tactical outcomes from either

a constrained or an unconstrained vision.

Leaders on the show today we're going to talk about these visions.

But just remember, without a vision of some kind,

your followers will fail. And without a model

to contain that vision or a model

to surround that vision, your people will behave in a chaotic

and a confusing manner.

And back for this season. And to explore the idea of

vision models and how literature intersects with all of

this. And of course, to help me read from my book, which

I read from the opening here, 12 rules for leaders. The foundation of

intentional leadership is our co host today,

John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. Happy New

Year, John. Welcome back to the show. Happy New Year, my friend. I'm glad to

be back. This is gonna be a cool topic to dig into. Absolutely.

So let's jump right in.

We've read many, many, many, many books on this show. We are now going

into our fifth season of this show. As a matter of fact, you were,

you were on in January of last year when we read Confessions of an Advertising

man with, with David Ogilvy and then continued

through with our romp through science fiction. And

then we talked about the book War by Sebastian

Younger. And of course, you'll be joining us this year

on some other books. I'm very excited to have you on around those.

But most of the books that we've covered, both fiction and nonfiction,

are written from certain assumptions that are either constrained

or unconstrained, or the author begins with

either position. They begin with an unconstrained vision, or they begin with a constrained

vision and then they move the narrative across a continuum.

For example, George Orwell in 1984

begins with an unconstrained vision and moves into a constrained one.

Or the play King Lear by Shakespeare begins with a constrained vision

and maintains that all the way through the performance

or Candide, which we covered as one of

our first episodes of the new season here by Voltaire

begins with a constrained vision, right? A constrained vision of optimism and

moves to an unconstrained vision, or an unconstrained set of assumptions about human

behavior.

When leaders see a vision presented to them in a particular

piece of literature that we've covered on the show or even hear it

discussed here, they can obviously make the determination, if there is any

value for them in leveraging the insights from that particular

piece of literature. To develop a model of leadership. But we've never actually

talked about that whole vision piece here, right. We've sort of

skirted around the edges of it. And I want to do that because I want

to talk about that today specifically to start, because one of the things we're

going to be doing on this show coming up this year is we're really going

to be focusing in on and developing projects around

models, right? What does a model of leadership look like?

And so I guess our first question

for you today is which books have you read

that presented a constrained or an unconstrained vision of human behavior

and of human nature? And what do you think of this idea? Am I just,

like, aiming at something that's silly and stupid or do I have something here?

Well, when what came to mind is, as,

you know, we were talking about, the idea was less about is

one right and the other incorrect and much more about the

idea of, like, what happens whenever there's not alignment between

the leadership and the people. Right? And coming from sales,

there's a lot of ideas about sales. And you know, you got

to, you can't pay them too much because they're going to get lazy. You can't

really trust them, you know, and, you know, now, you know, with

all the digital marketing stuff like this and these big, huge systems and everything,

it's like, well, we don't even need to train them, right? Like, we don't even,

we don't need to find great salespeople. We just need to find people who will

talk to people, you know, and so there's, there's a whole lot of room to

miss the mark, you know, and I've seen situations to, where

everyone follows the same script. And, you know, the people who can follow

that script, they, they eventually, after lots of repetitions and

lots of failure, find a thing that works more often than it doesn't. You

know, coming from the military, it's, you know, you go through a process to

become what the government needs you to be. So that way, if you're, you

know, called to action, you, you can show up in the right frame

of mind and do what needs to be done. And so it's

just this very interesting situation of when, when it's not

misaligned is when it goes completely off the

wall, right? And it's super easy. And I spent about 10

years of, well, if you don't feel my way, you must just be dumb,

you know, like, and really just kind of short sighting everyone who didn't have the

same kind of like thoughts around this kind of stuff that I did,

right? Like the, the very emotional bombastic leaders

that just like to like, you know, push and push and push on people. You

know, the guys who want 80 hour work weeks and, you know, hustle culture at

large and all of these things. And you know, for some people,

it, it's, it's what helps get them through

the process, right? Helps them get to success, whatever version of that they're looking for.

But if you don't know what to go looking for, right,

you're probably going to end up in a lot of situations, environments,

right, that don't align with you. And it's super easy to think

that, you know, you're the problem, right. For a long time. Because I would

have these questions about, you know, should I pitch this person or, or was

it, was it, you know, not ethical to pitch this person? And

I would get pressure of like, you always make the pitch, you always make the

pitch. You know, it was kind of very confusing, right? And it kind of led

to me spending a lot of time thinking that I shouldn't be in sales at

all because I want to do the right thing, right? And now

most of my stuff is, you know, talking about putting the right thing first,

you know, which makes me not popular for some of these people who were

wanting salespeople that are going to be, you know, close at all costs, you know,

take no prisoners, kind of like sales cultures and stuff like that. And

so I don't really know that, you

know, categorically one is absolutely right and one is fundamentally flawed.

But if it's not aligned all the way through, you know, know from the top

to the bottom, it's, you know, going to be a lot

of friction. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you brought up the

term alignment. So I was writing some things down as you were

talking. So alignment process and then ethics, right? So

the, the holy grail of training and development is

alignment. That's the holy grail. Because

once you can get alignment right on any topic, whether that's sales

training or leadership training or

even safety training, right? Once you can get the people

aligned who are going through the training. And usually that's what training

is used for as a tool. Now, sometimes that's the best tool,

other times it's not. We can have a whole discussion about that. But

invariably the people who are choosing the training, whether

that's sales training, safety training or leadership training, are the

people who are searching for or, or wanting to get

more alignment. And they do not know how to

get from misalignment to alignment. They don't know

how to cross that, as the technologists say. They don't know how to cross that

uncanny valley that exists. Right.

And I would assert the reason they don't know how to cross that uncanny valley

is because the vision has changed, but they don't know how to say that.

Right? And so they'll tinker with the model, or they'll hire guys like you

and me, or they'll talk about ethics. Right?

Or they'll create a new discipline

framework for people who get out of line, whatever line that is.

Right. They'll do all of these other things,

except the one thing that they need to do, which is go

back and say, we started here. Maybe we started

with a constrained vision or unconstrained vision, I don't know. But we started

here, we wound up here, and our vision

changed, and we haven't addressed that successfully.

Now, I don't necessarily know that that's just something for people in the C

suite to do. Matter of fact, I think because of COVID 19,

that has now become the purview of everybody in the organization,

not just the C suite. But on a radical, right,

I go in a radical direction, right. With that.

So in thinking about alignment or

misalignment, right.

Misalignment can happen in so many different places, right? So in sales, right.

So many different places. What are some of the places that, as leaders,

we should be looking for? Not necessarily misalignment,

but if we sense there's misalignment there, right. What are some things we should

be? What are some signs of that?

Ooh.

I mean, I think the big stuff is

the thing. The thing that I hear from. From people over and over and over

again is like, why don't my people get it? And it's like, okay, who

should they be getting it from? Right? And so there.

There's this old line from my sales coach, and he always said, as a

default, we sell the way we want to be sold to. Right? And adding on

to that, the. The way that I talk about it now is we. We sell

the way we want to be sold. We lead the way we want to be

led. Right? So it's super easy to just, like, walk around

because you don't have enough experience, you've not met enough different types of people

to just go around and be like, well, if you're here, you must be like

me. And if you're like me, you're going to want to do it this way,

you know? And I Think. I think most people just kind of get

stuck there, right? And then whenever they do get frustrated because

there's a boiling point, right? People don't, you know, and this happens all the time

with founders, right, who are, who are bringing on their first salesperson, right?

And they forgot that the salesperson didn't start this thing. And it's not their baby.

So we're not going to have the same amount of buy in, right? They're going

to have care, they're going to have some buy in, but it's not their baby,

right? And so the idea, where's the urgency? Well,

it's a job for them, right? This is your passion and your purpose.

But expecting everyone to come to the same work with the same amount of weight

is just absurd, right? And this is where hiring

processes and personality assessments and culture and like

defining for yourself what's important to you and the people that you work with and

the people you surround yourself with on the team become really important. But if you're

still running around with this idea of, well, you know, if you want to work

here, you must just automatically have the same values as I do.

And then it's just super easy to like punt it down and be like, well,

you must be the problem as opposed to like understanding of like, hey,

did I even line this out clearly? Right, right. Is our, is our

value word cloud a bunch of table stake stuff like customer service and

like innovation or is it meaningful and

intentional and impactful and stuff like that? You know, and

I moved on this pretty, pretty significantly, right? Because as

a sales consultant and trainer, like I, I think that everybody

can do this job, right? It's hard and not a lot of people want to

and that's totally okay. But I think that everybody can find a path to

sales success if they're in the right environment, right? And they've got good

coaching and training and development. But there's a whole lot of people that are still

just running around talking about hunters versus farmers, right? And well,

if you're a sales guy, you should be happy to work on commission. Well, in

certain situations, like there's realm where that makes sense, right? If you're

on a car lot, I get it, right. If you're managing an 18 month

selling cycle to the enterprise, commission only is an absurd

thing that you're trying to sell on everybody because you don't want to pay them,

right? But if you're not steeped in this idea, you

know, you're just pulling from whoever you're pulling from, right? So

I think most people are not running around with their lights on

until they run into the wall a few times, right? And then

I think people start to get, oh, you know, maybe that

whole EOS stuff about like having values that matter. Maybe there's something to

this, you know. And you know, I, you know, there while

I had the idea that if you had good KPIs and you had good reporting,

everything should just kind of like manage itself, right? And I didn't

really think I was going around with the idea of I'm going to work with

adults who know what they're doing. But there was a vibe of that, you know,

and now it's like performance takes effort, right? Like

as, as both, you know, like martial arts guys, right? If you're going to perform

at a high level, you can't do the minimum. You got to be doing them,

you got to be doing more. And you know, there's a lot of roles

inside of an organization that are merit driven and performance driven

roles, which means there's a gap, right? And if you can't manage that gap,

I think, I think everything we're talking about falls into that gap between

you're given a goal, you're given a big task, and then you have to go

off and execute that task. And there's a lot of nuance in how that stuff

gets done well. And I will. I'm going to go again, I'm a

radical on this, so I'm going to go even more hardcore on this than even

John did. John sort of soft shootle this a little bit and made it,

made it kind of nice. And I'm going to. This is my 1, 2. So

he's the 1. Now here's the 2. Here's the overhand right from Riddick. Here it

comes. It's your fault as the leader if,

if the organization is misaligned. I'm just going to say it. It's your fault.

If you're looking for someone to blame, go grab a mirror and hold it up

to your face because it's your fault. And here's how I know,

okay? I know it's your fault because

when I was building my first business, I had

the massive realization that no one cared about it as much as I did.

Not one employee, not one vendor,

not one customer cared about it as much as I did.

And for me to ask them to care about it as much as I did

was, quite frankly, not the

correct question. That's not the correct query,

right? So if I'm searching for alignment, I'm going to use

an old school sort of Greek idea here. Physician, heal thyself.

Right? Like, you got to fix alignment within

you. And by the way, if you're misaligned with your project,

maybe, and I'm in the process of doing this right now, maybe

you kill the project and go on to something else where you are aligned. Right.

And yes, I understand you've got bills to pay and you've got people

to feed and you've got plates to fill and mortgages don't pay

themselves and electric bills don't pay themselves. Themselves. And.

And kids, braces don't pay for themselves. I get it. Money doesn't fall out

of the sky, nor does it grow on trees. If it did,

we probably wouldn't have a, you know, $39 trillion national

debt. We would just go out and shake the trees. I get it. I

understand. And because two things can be true at once.

You have to care. But you can't ask the people who are following

you to care, okay, more than you do. They

can't get there. They can't overcome that. But

what you can do, and this is the. But what you can

do is you can ask them to buy into

a vision. You can ask them. And by the way, just like John,

I'm agnostic. I think that

constrained versus unconstrained is a binary that just gives us a place to land.

I don't care which vision you pick, but I do

not want you to pick no vision. I don't want you to just be a

person out there doing stuff. Right.

And literature gives you a good container

for how this particular vision that you have picked, whichever one it

is, may indeed play out.

So there's a couple of books that you and I have talked about and I

mentioned them in the script. I look at Martian Chronicles as

maybe more of an unconstrained vision, even though it comes off as

pessimistic and cynical, which we talked about that on our episode

because Ray Bradbury was pessimistic about human beings. But he was.

He was pessimistic in an unconstrained manner. Unconstrained

pessimism. That

might be pretty close to where I'm at, like, these days. Right. Yeah,

it's fine. Yeah, it's tough. You know, people are

chaos machines is like one of my. One of my favorite lines. And I tell

everybody, right? Like, you cannot manage the chaos of someone else, you know? Right.

And you just have to know that going into it, otherwise you're just going to

be upset all the time. But Then you have a constrained version of human

nature, which is more like Miyamoto Musashi is a book of five

rings. That's a constrained vision of. And by the way,

constrained vision is really focused on trade offs, right? So it does

the acknowledgment of the pessimism. The Bradbury and I just made up a word

there, level of pessimism and it

says that's baked into the human condition. And

so because it's baked in, the only thing we can do is engage in

trade offs because we can't, we don't have, we don't have access to the

ingredients. We can't go in and substitute out

stone ground, you know, wheat that I raised in my

backyard for enriched flour in the

Pillsbury, you know, cinnamon roll,

roll that I just got. Like, I can't go in and change the ingredients. I

don't have that kind of power. I'm not the Pillsbury

Corporation. And unconstrained vision says we're going to

march on, we're going to march on the Pillsbury Corporation and we're going to make

them take the stone ground flour.

If a leader picks well. So literature, right? This is where I'm going. So literature,

right? So literature helps us sort of

figure out some of this stuff versus

a business book, right? Because business books don't even talk about

visions. You know, I got this idea of visions from, you know, an

economic book, quite frankly, that I don't think most

business leaders would even read unless they were really deeply ensconced in

economics. And by the way, we're going to be covering that book.

Just as a side note, we're going to be covering that book on the show

next month. So stay tuned for that. It's called A Conflict of

Visions by Thomas Sowell. So we'll be

covering that with a guest, not John, but with a guest who

is going to give us a very, very unique perspective on

that. A person who has actually lived, interestingly enough, an

unconstrained life. So this should be very interesting talking to this fellow about

this book. What,

what, how would leaders apply this sort of thinking

to. Well, no, actually a better question is

this. Let's say I go up and pick out, I don't know,

do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Okay.

And I'm looking for what the leadership vision is in here or

what, what is the vision of the characters in here? How do I spot that,

John? How do I, how do I see that as a leader?

Oof.

Because I'm trying to use this book to get me to some sort of understanding

of alignment, right? But not ethics and process. That'll come later.

Or, or maybe it'll all come in the package together. Because I'm going to see

the ethical conundrums inside of the book. I'm going to those, those things are

presented very baldly in front. But the vision part,

that requires a little bit more, to use a larger term, discernment, a little

bit more intuition into what Philip K. Dick is trying to do

with, with his, with his story there. I think

it, you know, kind of going back to what I was saying a second ago.

Like, I think you, I think you, you can't. I

think when you're, when you're in the spot that I was, that, well, I'm just

going to give everyone good instructions. And then it's on you to not mess up

these instructions. And then when you do mess up, you're the problem.

Like, that's where, like, you got to be

above that tier. You know, that, that level of thinking, right?

World is wider. People think differently, right? People communicate

different, they work different. They've got different appreciations for things like conflict and

relationships and, you know, culture and stuff like that. And so

when, when it's just, you know, to put it on the lines of a drill

sergeant, you either like me or you're wrong, right? If you're still

in that mode, none. Like, you're not even

listening to this show, you're not reading any books, you're not doing any of these

things that we're talking about because you're just going around and I call it,

you're a little mini tyrant, right? You're just going around with your world view

and this is the right one and everything. And so when you're at that level

and you're just expecting, right, you're an expectant leader, right? Everyone

should just come up ready to work. Things from home and other situations

shouldn't be impacting your performance. And, you know, why don't people care enough? And all

these other things. I don't really think that you're going to get

much done, right? You're just going to be mad at the world, mad at everybody

you hire. No one's going to be able to say anything to you because they're

going to be the problem every time it comes up, and it's going to be

a recipe for disaster, right? Now, when you're stuck in

that situation, I met a lot of people that

are stuck in that situation. I still meet people who are stuck in that Situation.

I don't know really how to get those people to, like, pick their head up

and look around and turn their lights on and be more, More open to it,

right? Like, I, you know, I think reading helps,

but if, if only nerds read, right, you're probably not gonna, like,

turn. Turn to that and everything. So, you know, I think,

I think great mentorship, I think coaching and development can be great things,

but ultimately, I think people have to run into that wall, right? Like,

when, you know, I just think that most people are just

not fully aware of how wide the

lane can be, right? And so, yeah,

when you're, when you're there, it's just everyone else is the problem, right?

It's never my fault, you know, and it's,

it's, you know, you hit the nail on the head. It's, It's. It's our fault,

right? If. If everyone else is crazy, right? If. And

I don't really like the whole sales and dating kind of metaphor that everyone

uses, but, like, if you date a whole bunch of people and they're all

crazy, at some point we need to, like, look at the common

denominator of, like, maybe they're not all that bad, right?

I've also been in the room where everyone is

feeling such pressure to, like, keep their status and keep

their job, right? That I've honestly heard things like, well, you know

what? We just need to let all these people go, bring in new people, and

that's going to fix everything. Like. And

I was literally. It was a zoom call, right? We're on the zoom call. I

had to. I had to mute myself and turn my camera off because I, you

know, the. The filter was about to run out, right? Because I was

like, I was. I was so gobsmacked, right,

that this was, like a thing that was actually said, right? Because I'd heard

about it, I'd seen people post on LinkedIn about it and everything else like this,

and I was like, yeah, but, like, you know, I was thinking that if I

kept, like, working with bigger companies and bigger companies and bigger companies, eventually

I was gonna. I was gonna work with people who got it right. And so

this is a big fundraised VC back situation. And,

like, these lines were just being handed out, and I was like, well, there's. It

was if I had a bingo card for absurd leadership

statements, right? Three weeks into this project, I hit all of

them, right? You were drunk half the time, taking a shot every single

time. Like, one of the things that I noticed was

that, you know, a Lot of people didn't feel comfortable being open and honest with

the CEO. And so I was like, hey, CEO probably wants to hear

about this, right? And so I was like, hey, not for nothing,

I just want to let you know some of your people don't really feel like

they can be open and honest with you. And he goes, john, I'm a CEO

of this company. Your pulse should race when you're talking to

me. And I was like, I have a book you need to read, and you

have 30 days to do it, or else we're going to wrap this thing up.

Because that's not how I operate, you know? And

I mean, it's just until you are aware that

I think. I think everybody takes up space, right? And I think about

this all the time. And, you know, in Jiu Jitsu, one of the things you

talk about is you got to create space so that way you can move, right?

And you have room to work and everything. And most people,

especially these people who were not super aware of themselves yet, and they're just kind

of going around on borrowed, you know,

motivation and mantras and stuff like this that they got off of Twitter.

They. There's. There's no room for them

to think about it any other way, right? And so it's just, well, I'm

smart. You have a problem with me, you must be the problem. And it's like,

if that is where you are and you can't appreciate that, you are

at least 50% of this, maybe

87% of this, maybe only

15%, and just understand that different people need different things.

You're not ready to lead anybody. You're not even leading

yourself. Couple of things before we go back to

the book. So you. We are

30 minutes in, and you mentioned Jiu Jitsu before I did, so that is. That's.

You're welcome. Thank you. I appreciate. The dam. The dam is now open, sir.

Thank you. Normally, I have to open it myself, but, you know, hey, you did

me a favor this time. Excellent. I love that. And then this is how. This

is how you become a repeat guest on the show, everybody, right? You get to.

You open the can before he does, right? That's right. That's right.

And then the other thing is, I think you're the first guest.

I mean, Tom Libby might have used. No, I don't think Tom has even.

You're the first guest to use the term gobsmacked on the show. So

congratulations, you've crossed over that divide as well. So there we go. I'm going to

make T shirts later on today, you'll get one in the mail. There you go.

That's right. There'll be. You can get those in the Leadership Toolbox

Shop at Leadership Toolbox Us. No, there is no shop. Don't go

there. You won't see a shop. I've never been. Actually, I

should probably make T shirts for this show. That would be a really good idea.

But the. The other thing is that

when I think about what this show

does as one of the resources that we provide, what the content of this

show does. Right. You know, I started

out with a vision, and it changed, right? Because

at first, my vision was just, I have a vision for reading

books that I don't see covered

anywhere else in any kind of way. Right. And I

was like, I'm going to read literature, going to pull lessons from it, and it's

going to be for leaders, and it's going to be called the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books. Cool. That's a vision. It's a simple vision.

And by the way, it was a constrained vision. And gradually, over the

course of time, what has happened is the process has become

more constrained, but the vision has

expanded. Right. And I even say it in our opening. Right.

You know, welcome to the. And it even sounds. Again, I get

embarrassed when I say it because it's so unconstrained. But. But welcome to the

rescuing of Western civilization at the intersection of

literature and leadership. That is an unconstrained

vision. So I want to be very clear. You can

start in one spot and move to someplace else.

Yeah, but you have to start somewhere.

This is the key thing that both John and I are getting to begin

somewhere. And yes, to John's point, okay, if you don't want to

read, fine, don't read. There's thousands of good podcasts to listen

to. There are hundreds of opportunities to take advantage

for training. There are great resources

floating around on the Internet in terms of workshops and seminars, like

what John does and like what I do. There's all these opportunities. The.

The problem is not that you don't have. The problem

is not a lack of resources. That is not the problem that we currently exist

in, which might have been the problem 50 years ago. I'll give you. That might

have been a problem. Resources were hard to. You couldn't get them. You know, you

couldn't. You couldn't. You couldn't just call somebody at IBM and be like, tell me

all your secrets. I get it. This is not the

problem in 2026. If anything,

we're on the far other side of the pendulum, right? Correct.

We have too many. I mean, way too many. And

not enough discernment, not enough distinction, right? Because, like, you

know, I, you know, I, I follow

a lot of people who make video content, right? And I'll see people, and

you'll see people clinging to these ideas that are for a vertical or

for, you know, like, consulting versus agencies, right?

Is one of these things that I, that I talk about with people all the

time, right? If you're. I was working with a woman,

and she didn't want to be an agency because all she kept seeing

were these, like, stories about how, like, agencies suck and client work sucks

and just be a consultant and just. And just show them the way, right? But

she hated all of our clients. And then when she could get them to

go off and do the thing, it was never at the level or standard that

she wanted them to be, right? And, and, you know,

I'm a little further down the path. And so, you know, I'm like, why don't.

Like, why, why be a consultant? Like, why not just

be an agency? Do them, do the work for them at the,

at the standard that, you know, is important, Charge them a little bit more and

do the thing. And she's like, well, like, agencies suck. And I'm like, where'd you

hear that? And, you know, she. She spouted four or five

really big, you know, influencer names, right?

And. And I was like, okay, that works for some, some people,

but, like, look at the frustration you're living under. You hate all of your clients,

and you're frankly not at the level of being good

enough of a conversation, being able enough to get them

into action, into lead to an awareness

of the work and wanting to push that better and everything. So you, for your,

for your own piece, should just run an agency and do it for them.

And she was like, well, I don't know. I don't know. And. And she's like,

well, then why. Why are all these horror stories about how bad it is?

I'm like, because they're trying to sell you something. They want to sell you

their course. They want to sell you their stuff, right? But, like,

if there's room for both to be true, you know, like, I've

gotten to a place to where I'm. I'm now pretty good about being able to

get people unlocked, and so that way they can go and do their jobs well,

which means I don't have to do it for them. But that's a skill set

that you have to, like, learn, and it's independent of being good at the work

that you're hanging a shingle for, you know? Correct. A lot of people forget about

these things, you know, and. Yeah,

it's just if you like, like, my business has shifted pretty significantly because of

this idea. Because when I, When I first went out on my own, I didn't

want to be a trainer, right? I didn't want to be a guy who

coached people around this thing. I just wanted to build a CRM for people. But

lo and behold, right, I would start working with the team. I'm like, why is

there no loss column, John? Deals, don't. Deals, deals.

Don't get lost. We just give up because we're not pushing hard enough. And I'm

like, that's insane, right? That's insane. And so then, like, you know, coming

around of like, oh, how I use a CRM as a feedback loop and

mechanism so I can't hide from my results anymore is kind of tied to how

I think about the job, and maybe I'll have less frustration, right? And then

also pair that with, like, people starting to ask me for some of these things,

you know, and so there's. I love that idea that

you don't have to start perfect, but you need to be open to, like, the

right feedback from the right sources, right? As opposed to just, well, you're wrong,

you're wrong. You're an idiot. Right? You're wrong, you're wrong. Oh, one

person likes me. Oh, well, you. You get it, bro. No one else gets me,

you know, and everything else like that. It's, it's. It's insane. But

most people want to hang out in that limbo,

the unaccountable limbo. Back

to the book. There's a way out of unaccountability, by the way. We do

cover that in the book. Back to the book for just a minute

here. 12 rules for leaders by. Well, you know,

so we're going to pick up with. We're going to pick up with. With rule

number one. And we're developed a methodology in this book. And

I, I don't think I've ever talked about this with, with. With John on the

show, but it's a methodology that links vision

to model, and it answers the basic question which floats

underneath a lot of this, which I can already hear leaders asking the

ones who have been with us, you know, 30 minutes in now,

how do I get there?

How does that happen? Because, you know, they're saying, you got to get there. You

got to get there, you got to get there. I've got all these options. Well,

how do I get there? Well, here's a simple, although not easy

model for how you get there and I

quote the methodology of communicating with clarity,

candor and courage or the three Cs was developed and teased out

through research and development from the work we have done with teams and leaders over

the last 10 years and was meant to clear up the tendency among organizational

leaders to communicate with themselves, their teams and and their

organizational structures with obfuscation, deception and

insincerity. This is a trend that has continued

to grow in the realm of thought leadership and has achieved heights of scale never

seen before or experienced because of the prevalence of social media

platforms. However, leaders need to understand,

wrestle with, adopt and practice intentionally and ruthlessly the

3C's methodology. This is to

have greater success in defining their roles and responsibilities to the team, the

organization, and the culture. Leaders can extract higher levels of productivity and performance

from teams and organizations to the application of the 3Cs. This will

ensure lower levels of false and real conflict, less political wrangling

over decisions, more accountability, and higher levels of

genuine trust. In the first step, the

leader defines what the problem is they are facing with themselves, the team and or

the organization by first clarifying the issue.

Clarity in conversation, thinking, speaking, and writing to make thoughts, feelings, and

motives known to the other party is critical. Clarity applies both to

thinking and communicating. Establishing clarity as the shared

organizational goal of all individuals requires ensuring team members feel

comfortable with communicating until a shared understanding is established.

A leader's commitment to transparency contributes to clarity.

Candor in a conversation, being candid with empathy and a focus on

intentionality are also critical for success. Candor contributes to

an individual's credibility and trustworthiness. Your employees and

colleagues must believe you are honest, forthright, and sincere. This means they must

believe you are speaking your truth and the truth, or

at least not lying, about circumstances and conditions, no matter how difficult they

may be, and that you are doing so with their best interests

in balance with your interests and the organization's interests in mind.

Courage in a Conversation Having the courage to neither delay nor avoid the

conversation is critical to achieving success. Bernay Brown

describes courage as a quote, unquote heart word. Although the

contemporary definitions focus on bravery and heroism, Brown encourages

us to remember, quote, the inner strength and level of commitment required for

us to speak honestly and openly about who we are

and about our experiences, good and bad. To be

courageous about confronting the problem with themselves, a team and or the organization,

a leader must ask the following questions. Am I ready to confront the other

party without escalating? Am I offering a solution to the problem or just providing

feedback? With no solution? Am I able to emotionally address

the reactions and consequences of this confrontation in a healthy

way? Now let me skip down a couple of paragraphs.

Many leaders struggle with the basics of establishing clarity, engaging with

candor, and responding and planning intentionally with courage for many reasons. However, the

number one reason is. Is. Wait for it. Ego

leaders. Egos cloud their inner monologues, causing a lack of clarity

in their thinking, which leads to a lack of clear writing and clear speaking.

A sure sign of a leader who has abandoned their roles and responsibilities

is the presence of jargon heavy language that serves only to confuse,

misdirect and there's this word again. Obfuscate an issue.

Ego rears its ugly head when leaders are pressed to be candid and usually about

small issues or matters at hand. Being candid requires having a healthy dose of

self awareness. Furthermore, leaders struggle when they lack

clarity in themselves, necessary to accomplish the goals they seek and

the honesty to talk about them. Candor is also a problem because

it is often mixed in with the desire to be liked and to not

offend. This desire then results in hard conversations being

avoided, hard decisions being made at the last possible moment, and

allows people to elevate themselves in status rather than being directed to

do the hard work of emotionally maturing and growing or leaving the

organization. Being candid also requires a measure of vulnerability and

exposure, which means trust must be reciprocated. If the

leader is covering up, so will every other subordinate leader

and to close. Finally, the courage or heart to think, write, say

and act in an ethical, moral and social fashion means more than just bending to

the whims of the crowd. Sometimes the crowd is

wrong. The team often needs to be

led to where it does not want to go. Sometimes the

courage to lead in this way results in burnout, personal acrimony, hazing,

appeals to the dominance hierarchy and all other manners of commonly accepted social

and political negative outcomes. Keep in mind, the courage to lead

in this way sometimes results in excellence, achievement, and moving the team past the mere

accomplishment of a result and toward the accomplishment of

of something greater.

This is the linchpin. This is the.

Yeah, linchpin. I think that's a good word. That's a Seth Godin word. This is

the linchpin. Clarity, candor and courage that exists

as a. And maybe even a lynching is a good word or the best word.

Maybe it's a bridge exists as a Bridge to go from vision to a

model. What do we do in order? How do

we get to where we can have a model of

leadership? A model is a framework fundamentally, and it is

developed after a vision and it exists to provide boundaries for

visions, whether they are constrained or unconstrained.

In the 20th century, most leadership models are

based on research from examining group dynamics in a post World War II,

mostly male dominated, mostly corporate America.

This is reflected by the way in some of the literature that came out of

the late 20th century as well. Noir literature, spy,

espionage, thrillers, even in cinema and in

the movies, which you know, I love. If you're listening to this show, the man

in the Gray Flannel Suit, if you're a person

who watches science fiction or thriller stuff, Twilight Zone, Albert

Hitchcock Presents the Outer Limits all presented

this conformist vision of America

where as I said in the opening, the edge cases

were merely that, edge cases. Now, all

this began to unravel in the 1960s and the 1970s

and well, so did those

models, right? And models based in 20th century Psychological

and organizational research do hang on

though, and they still influence how leaders leverage communication,

emotional intelligence, persuasion, influence, motivation,

accountability, discipline, trust, and even responding or reacting to change.

And by the way, even if those models have collapsed, which I would assert

they have, and this is why we're in a chaotic period. Like John previously mentioned,

the people who are reacting to the chaos are reacting in

a way that indicates that they want to return to

the stability, psychically return to the stability of some of those

models. However, models based

in literature allow leaders to navigate outlier situations, those

edge cases and hard circumstances that didn't exist in the mid 20th

century. This is because the 21st century edge cases, the

outlier situations and the unusually hard circumstances have moved from the

bottom to the top of the leader's to do list in a world driven

by a roiling red ocean rather than a

blue ocean, a calm blue ocean of

dynamic change.

So we've got a model, we've got a bridge between vision

and modeling. We've got some

literature, we've got some books. I know

you said only nerds read, but we have audiobooks now,

so it's not only nerds that listen. So

if we were to compile. I'll ask you a question that's not on this list.

If we were to compile a list of books,

like if we were to walk into a leader's

corner office, whatever, right? Whether it's on

the third floor of a 12 floor building or the 12th floor of a 12th

floor building. If we were to walk into that leader's office,

what books should we. What literature? Not books. What literature should we expect

to see on their bookshelf? John, what would be some recommendations?

Expect to see. Yeah, Expect to see.

And not leadership books. Right? So like extreme ownership is not allowed to be on

the list. Extreme ownership cannot, cannot make the list.

Extreme ownership could be on. Could be on your list at. Could be on your

shelf at home. I would maybe expect that at a leader's home, but in their

office. Right. If they're really paying attention to what we're trying to do

here. Like if I were

walking. And I'll just give you an example, if I were walking into that leader's

office, I would expect to see Sense and Sensibility on

the bookshelf because that's

how you learn about emotional intelligence is through Sense and sensibility. My daughter is actually

reading Sense and Sensibility right now. Like, that's, that's what I would

expect to see. I would expect to see. I would expect

to see.

Oh, I would expect to see Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein.

That's going to tell me something, right, about that leader and about how they're leading.

I would also expect to see maybe 41 stories by O. Henry.

Right. Because that's a nice little dip into a pool

of how people engage with each other who are of different classes.

I would expect to see east of Eden by John Steinbeck because there's an

interesting idea in there about Tim Scholes and about

how vision moves through time across generations.

Right. So those are just some examples of things that maybe of books that I

would, I would expect to see that would not be business books.

But what would you. Maybe I shouldn't say expect. What would you like to see?

Maybe that's. That's a better question. Well, I mean,

I don't know if we talked about this when we talked about Stranger in a

Strange Land, but that was the book I saw on my wife's shelf

that indicated we, you know, we're gonna have some

cool conversations, right? Yeah.

I would say, I'd say anything historical

that's not like a McGraw textbook would be

super helpful. Right. Like, you know, just the, just the idea that we're,

you know, ramroded with the idea, you know, through, you know,

elementary school, middle school and high school in most situations of we're perfect

as a nation state. We don't ever make any pro. We don't ever make any

really big mistakes. Right. So, you know, we're always going to be

okay. And we always learn from these mistakes that we have made and

everything, which, you know, just if you can zoom out a little bit, we can

see how just untrue of a statement that is. Right? So,

and then, man, I'm going to be kind of one note on this, but

like, I would love to see any version of

philosophy. Like, I don't even really care which one it

is. Like, I'm a big fan of stoicism. You and I have talked a lot

about like martial arts philosophy and Musashi and the art of the samurai or the

way of the Samurai. Excuse me, but

like, you know, anything in that, in that space, right?

Something that is going to, you

know, hopefully get you to kind of think about why do you think the way

that you think. Right. You know, I'm, I'm very.

One of the things that I see on a lot of people's shelves which when,

when I look at their actions and I look at how they actually move, you

know, I'm, I'm kind of confused that the Bible is on some of the shelves

of some of these people that I see because it's like, well, I don't really

see you acting like anything that is in this book

from my reading of it, you know. And

so anything in the military

section, right. Like, I really like military sci fi,

right. For some reason I think Game of

Thrones, right? Just like the, the, the

fanaticism, right? And, and those things.

I think, I think military is a really interesting

lens to look at this, right? Because you know, everyone,

I, I was working for someone and this is a long

time ago, and they were like, john, you're in the military, right? And I was

like, yeah. They said, wow, that's hard to believe.

And I was like, why do you say that? And they're like, well, seem to

speak your mind a lot. And I'm like, you know, we're not still in, in

there, right? Because yeah, this is, this is

back home. I'm allowed to have thoughts and opinions here, right. I'm allowed to be

an individual, you know. Yeah. And you

know, so I think, I think people

should read widely, right? And, and try different things,

you know. But I, I know that, you know, reading is a, is a skill

as much of it, as much of it is like a hobby, right? And the

more you do, the better you get at it, the easier it becomes to kind

of pull your ideas out and be like, oh, how did I get here?

Right? Why do I, why do I feel this way, you know?

But I think it's. There's so much other stuff going on, it

becomes very easy, right? In a. In a line that we talked about in the.

In the kung fu school that I came up in. Always a good reason not

to go to class. It's always a good reason to not pick up the book,

you know, but largely

it. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about with people. Like, what do

you read? Right? Oh, I don't read business books. Cool.

That's not what I asked. What. What do you read? You know, and

diving into it, one of my. One of my favorite series of books. This is

like fantasy. It's by Robin Hobby. And there's

this guy, and he's a. He's a royal bastard, right? And so in this

universe, all the royal bastards were trained as assassins, right? Because you have access and

everything else like this. And this guy becomes kind of,

for lack of a better term, you know, brainwashed into just,

like, letting the crown, right, Just control

him and control his life and control his actions, right? And everyone is like, why

do you keep going through this for a family and

a group that's never done anything for you, right? And you can see that.

That stalwart resoluteness, right, that is

often lauded, right? But when you're on the other end of that

stubborn, you know, rigidness,

it doesn't make any sense, you know? And so I think. I think we only

get there by exposing ourselves to, like, lots of things, right? Reading as widely

as possible. That's why I love this show that you do, right? And I love

that it's not focused on just like, well, here's the. Here's the flavor of the

month in the business book, you know, because, you know,

there's a lot that you can figure out. The Patrick Rothfuss has got these great

books that my wife hates. She hates these books, right?

Because in her. Her opinion, it focuses way too much on the. On

the economy and this. In this world and universe, right? And I'm like,

but we spend so much time talking about how much more expensive things are, right?

So, like, there is. There is a parallel here, you know? Yeah. And

I think. I think you can read for lots of reasons, right? She likes

to read just for, like, entertainment and escape and, you know, that's okay.

But I think if you're trying to lead other

people, right, you have a. You have an obligation to kind of

zoom out, right? We're really good at selling ourselves

on literally anything we want to be sold on, you know,

And Going back a minute, you talked about IBM a second ago.

One of the favorite things that I've ever learned about IBM, right, is they were

known for keeping their goals super low. Yeah. Their sales people.

Right. And then putting massive accelerators on

top of those goals. So that way people would be excited to go out and

overproduce to go make more money. Now let's juxtapose that with all the

people that are like, well, we didn't hit goal last year, so let's just add

20% to this year's goal. And then we're just going to write everybody off who

doesn't hit this goal. Right. And they'll just keep moving it and moving it and

moving it up and everything else like this. Right. And so I just think about,

like, that was a strategic decision. And I can imagine the person

who came up with that idea stood in front of that, that board,

hey, here's what I want to do, guys. I want to take like

30% off of our goals because here's what I think is gonna. Like, do you

think that guy was on anyone's Christmas card list? Right. And I'm assuming it was

a guy because it was a long time ago. But, like, look at,

look, we still talk about them, right? The, the old line in sales that

we, that we talk about all the time is like, no one ever got fired

for buying IBM. Right. Still a mainstay, you know. And

it started from one strategic decision

that most people have never even heard about, never even thought, never

even tried. And instead they go the other way. Well,

in a strategic decision based on.

Because I'm going to keep banging this drum based on a specific vision

of how people should show up. So the vision comes first,

then the strategy, then the tactic. Right?

And that vision, I would assert, comes out of, as I said

in the opening, a combination of, of,

of seeing people as widgets, which was what Henry Ford brought

us. One person's as good as another person. We'll just pay him enough.

Health care will be a thing that we'll give them for free because it doesn't

cost us anything for free, doesn't cost us anything more, you

know, and one person is good, as good as another.

A combination of that and the Frederick Winslow Taylor scientific

management, you know, approach, which you combine

those two things together. And the scientific management

approaches that Henry Ford really liked lead,

now they can lead to prosperity. Don't get me wrong, we had 20 years of

prosperity in this country, but it only lasts about 20 years

because quite frankly,

and we talked about this both in, we talked about this in Candide and I've

talked about this on shorts episodes. We talked about this with Francis Bacon and the

great installation. I do fundamentally

believe that the American people and all

their flavors and eccentricities and differences,

we have taken philosophically

the final step on the mountain of the Enlightenment

as a nation state. We're just the last argument on that because we took

all of the ideas of Enlightenment rationality and human reason and

skepticism, and we turned that into freedom of speech and freedom of

assembly and freedom to do this and freedom to do that. And then we pushed

it as far as we possibly could, and we've been ruthlessly pushing

it as far as we possibly can for the last 250 years.

This is where we get into kind of some of the thoughts, this ties into

kind of some of the thoughts that I had and you pushed back on me

a little bit about those, about robots in our robotic future. You

know, last year, you know, I, I, and I

still hold that we do have in America because of where we

are and the kind of people we are philosophically,

forget spiritually and psychologically, just philosophically, the kind of

expectations we have about how we should be in the world,

whether we agree with those expectations or not, they come from somewhere and they came

from the Enlightenment push to push to its logical end.

And leaders aren't, aren't able to escape that, particularly American leaders.

Now, if you're listening to me internationally, we do have a lot of international

listeners. If you're listening to me from India or from China or

from Australia or from Brazil or from Spain.

And I just named a bunch of places where we do actually have active listeners.

Germany. You're going to have to look at your origin, your country of origin,

and sort of where, where things come from and how that

influences the, the unquestioned assumptions that

you have as a leader that you just approach literature with

those kinds of things, those kinds of assumptions are going

to massively influence the kind of

vision you create and then the kind of strategy you create and the kind of

tactics you create and ultimately the kinds of organizations and teams you

create. Wanted to go back to this idea you had about the Bible,

which is interesting to me,

and I'm going to work backwards. I'm going to add some other books that should

go on that list. So a History of the Peloponnesian War,

Herodotus's. You don't have to read all of it, but I mean,

Herodotus did make the point in that book that war is the father of us

all. I think it's probably useful to know that

then we have Seneca. I know you're a big fan of the Stoics,

Seneca's letters. You may not agree with Stoicism, you may think that

it's nonsense, but it's a good idea to be able

to sort of have that idea. A good idea to have that idea in

your head. I'm currently going back through the

Iliad and the Odyssey, looking for different things in the Iliad and

the Odyssey now than I was maybe three years ago when I. When I went

through it. I'm looking for different things now. But I do think that

we. One of the things that as leaders, we have maybe failed to do

at a. At a cultural level is we fail to rebuild myths

or restore myths. Matter of fact, we're spending a lot of time in

the last 25 years or so arguing about which myths we can have and which

myths we can't. And we don't spend a whole lot of time

leading on which myths we will have.

Which I think is. Is very, very crucial. And I think it's part of

the whole identity. The identity collapse and the

collapse around meaning that we've had in our culture. And

then to tie back into the Bible. The Bible is such a versatile book. It

can be read as literature, it could be read as

philosophy, it could be read as psychology, it could be read as myth,

it can be read as ancient folklore, it could be read as a tall tale,

it can be read as a sow

for skepticism. Or.

A weapon against faith. It is such a. Weirdly, not

weirdly. This is such a uniquely. That's the term looking for

uniquely versatile book. I would just push back a little

bit. I wouldn't assume anything about someone's behavior because they've got that book on the

shelf. I would want to know if they've actually read it. It should be the

first question. That'd be the first question.

That's a big thing. I would want to test them on that because the level

of illiteracy we have, and I'm not the first person to say this, the level

of illiteracy that. That even quote, unquote, Bible believing

Christians have just around what actually is in the Bible itself

is absolutely shocking. So the first question would

be, have you actually read that thing? And then after that, we can sort of

go off to the races, you know, Great point. Just great

point. Just like I would presume that if I'm walking into somebody

who. Walking into the office of somebody who says

they are A Muslim, I can't presume that

they've actually read and understood the Quran. I can't presume that

I have to ask them, have they read it, do they understand it? And then

we can sort of have a conversation after that. Now, there may be some. Because

Islam's different. There may be some ticks that indicate that they've read it,

but it's the same thing if I'm walking into somebody's office who is

proclaiming their Jewish identity and has the Torah on their shelf. Have

you actually read that? So I have a question for you around this, around this

topic, right? Do you think, oh,

this is an interesting question. Yeah. Do you think that,

you know, compare the Bible to the Torah to, you know,

all these other religions and everything? Do you think it's the percentage of

people who say that they are

followers of these thinkings? Right. You know,

and, and I'm putting everybody on one side in the

Bible on the other. Right. And in that thing,

I would, I would wager, I'd be willing to bet,

right, Jewish people, Muslims, right. Some of these

other situations, the, the ratio of people

who have not read the text is less.

You would think so. But what

you find or what I would. What I would say is this. It devolves

out differently. So you can be Jewish

and interestingly. Oh, yeah, because there is a big cultural.

Yes. Yeah. Never touch the Torah or the Talmud ever

and not even know about the Mish, the Mishnah. Like you can, you could have

heard about it on maybe, you know, if you attended a Sabbath

meal or something like that. But you can go your whole life as a Jewish

person and not touch that and still claim

Judaism. Now, Islam's a little different, but where

you get, where you get that disjunction

is where you are culturally Islamic, but the culture is

the book. And so you're getting the book in the culture anyway.

Even if you've never actually touched the. Book.

How it shows up in Christianity, and this is the parallel is.

And you all can send me emails about this. This is fine.

People who read devotionals that are snippets of the book

out of context with commentary from other folks around it that

may or may not be accurate without having

to and presuming that that is the thing,

and then moving on with the rest of their day. So Christianity has it.

Islam, that's. That's fair.

Judaism has it. I mean, I think this, this happens with everybody,

right? Like, like, like I run into people and they're like, oh, yeah, like, I

love Stoicism. Joe Rogan is, is awesome. What,

you know. What'S

that meme? Tell me you know stoicism without telling me you don't know stoicism without

telling me you don't know stoicism. Yes, exactly. You know, and,

you know, the, the cultural aspect is, is a really great balancing point,

right? Because, you know, they're, you know, it is, it is

incredibly likely that it's the only thing you have around you. So then you just

kind of fall into the fold and you've never actually gone on, on your

own, you know, kind of like mental pilgrimage, if you will. Right. Of

like, you know, do I really believe these things? Right? Do I,

do I hold myself to these standards, or is it as

convenient? And I think we as

Westerners presume that. We presume our

sins and our virtues

are only unique to us. That's the thing.

And our sins and our virtues are not unique to

us. They are the same as with

everybody else. The thing is, they show up

differently in other places with other

peoples. And so you have to go there and you have to live among those

people. One of the things that, and I'll use a book, an example from a

book that we, that we read. So we read War, right? And

I watched the documentary that went along with that, Restrepo,

right? And the most

striking thing, one of them, several striking things in Restrepo was

when you saw the commander of the 5th

Battalion going and talking to the,

the local leaders

who we all thought were devout Muslims, but

in reality, remember when they killed the cow in Ali,

they only cared about getting paid for the cow. And that is

a disjunction, because if they had been truly followers of

Allah and followers of the Quran in the way that we would

interpret that from reading their book, the

cow should have not even been an issue. Should

have been, okay, this is whatever. And we're, because we're going to go talk to

people about Allah. Same thing. For

on the other side, they look at us and they go, well,

if you read the Bible, you would act this way, but you

don't. Yeah. And so we have all. So, again,

it's, it's, it's examining these unexamined assumptions.

And we can, again, we can use literature to do this in a safe kind

of way, point this out and go, well, I'm never going to go to the

Korengal Valley. The likelihood that I'm going to run into

a, a follower if I'm living in a certain part of

America, the likelihood that I'm going to Run into a person who is

a devout follower of Islam is

XYZ percentage. But I can still get these disjunctions from

literature. I can still see and explore these and

recognize them. And that's the value of. That's the value of those books

on the shelf. And that's what it. That's what it does. Like, again, I think

it's actually easier. Yeah, right. Because

one of the things that I try to do is like, whenever I'm working with

someone who's like, new to sales or has got some weird ideas about him,

the first thing I do is like, I. In my head, I call

it, like the mother tongue. Like, what is that mother tongue? What is that thing

you have done that you took deep

and you couldn't hide? You had to realize luck played a much smaller

portion than. Than everyone else talks about and everything else. Like, that's right, because like,

in martial arts, one of the things we always talked about is, like, your first

art is kind of like.

Like, as my friend Matt would say, you know, like, I'll study shingi, I'll do

tai chi, but, like, I. Wing chun is how I do work,

right? And so there's always this kind of thing. It's going to go back through

these filters and these lenses and everything, you know, and,

you know, so, like, I'm always looking for, like, okay, where is that thing where

you had to go do hard stuff and you couldn't hide in?

The feedback loop was so clean and clear that it wasn't. Everybody was against

you. There was no victim mentality. There was nothing other than

like, they're, they're. I saw this on a cooking show once, and I just think

about it all the time. Don't get. Don't get bitter, get

better. There you go. Right? Because, like, everybody has

that, right? And I. And I truly believe that, like, that if

you can kind of put yourself into that mode, right? Kind of going back to

the Musashi thing when, you know, the way broadly, you see it in all things,

right? Like, if I can find the kung fu version of whatever hard

thing I'm going through, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be able to find my way through

it. Right? And so I think. I think literature makes it easier to see

it as opposed to, like, having, you know, it's too on the nose

sometimes. Right? You know? Right, yeah, yeah. No, I agree

with that. And you know, you mentioned martial arts, so I. I came out

of striking disciplines, right? And we've talked about this before. I came out of striking

Disciplines, Right. And so, you know, got my black second degree, actually black belt

in, you know, taekwondo back before it got into the Olympics and did all the

nonsense with became watered down sport thing with ridiculousness

and, you know, learned all this great stuff.

And to a certain degree, if I'm doing

mma, there are some of those things that I can still do

inside of that space. But for me, that was 20

freaking years ago. That's number one. So my body doesn't do those

things anymore. But even more importantly in going into grappling

and going into jiu jitsu. And this was the

biggest bump for me, the biggest hill for me, which is why it took me

20 years to do something that I probably should have done 20 years ago.

I had to get over my identity, such as it were,

of being a striker. Right. And

look, the modern word is identity. And the word I

use in this book, and it's in a lot of business books, is also ego.

And I've used that word in training and in coaching and all of that. But

I'm really distilling down and actually talked about this in a different context.

Gosh, last week, talking with somebody,

I'm really distilling down the idea, or still distilling down

ego, the idea of ego into something that I think is a

lot more concentrated and a lot more powerful and a lot more accurate.

It's just pride. And I always think of

that scene in Pulp Fiction when Ving Rhames is hitting,

hitting. What is it, Bruce Willis in the head?

Any. I'm not gonna. If you know the movie Pulp Fiction, you'll know which scene

I'm talking about, you know, because Bruce Willis is the boxer and

Bing Rhames is the mobster and they get into an altercation and he starts

hitting him in the head and he tells him, you know, blah. Blah, blah, blah,

blah. Or. No, it was. No, it's not. It's not there. It's earlier in the

movie when he's talking about the bet. That's right. And about how he's going to

be in the ring and he's going to, you know, not want to go down.

And he's going to be like, that's. That's pride. You know, uses another term. I'm

not going to use that term. But he uses this pride messing with you. And

I always think about this, and not always, but I'm starting to think about this

more and more. How much pride messes with us.

Yeah. And how much we have to say, forget that pride.

And that's not the word he used in the movie, by the way, because it's

a Tarantino film. So forget that pride. You've got to let

that go. And the thing is,

pride is. It's insidious.

It crawls up into everywhere. And I don't know a person,

religious or not, who likes pride. Not

one. I also don't know any person, religious

or not. And we can take the religious connotations out of pride if we want

to. I don't know any person, secular or

sacred, with either kind of those worldviews

who looks upon that as being a. A positive

thing overall down the road because of

how it stops your development.

It prevents you from going and doing the new thing. Right?

It blocks you from success. It also

blocks you from failure. But it becomes the shield,

right, that we wrap around ourselves and we call it ego

or we self sabotage. We do all these other kinds of things. I'm kind of

working on this theory and we'll explore this throughout the remainder of the year. This

is one of my things that I've hooked on into a book, and now I'm

going to start seeing it everywhere because this is also one of the threads that

I'm going through books this year. So this will come up later on down the

year when we talk again in this season. But

I think that what the books do fundamentally,

if we read them to my point about the Bible, if we

actually read them, is they challenge us on our pride,

they challenge us on our ego, and they challenge us on our identity, too.

And I think that's the hardest thing for people to.

Particularly leaders to come to, because

if I'm already. If I've already got the status

and I've got the office, what more. I mean,

what more could I possibly need? John.

I'll let John sit with that. There's a.

As you're talking about this, one of my favorite shows is Brooklyn Nine. Nine, right?

Oh, we've never talked about. I love

Andre Brower on that show. I do, too. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Phenomenal. Like, he's like my spirit animal because I saw him. I

watched on Homicide, Life on the Street. That's how I first sort

of interacted with him. Just again, like

the guy in the Wire, just a phenomenal character actor.

And I don't want to step on your point about Brooklyn 99, because I have

an impression about that show, but I want to hear what you have to say

first. There's this one character who's

like the very hard detective, right. Is played by a

woman and, and she's like, well, I don't understand why. Why people are making this

stuff so hard. And it cuts to her reading Sophie's Choice, right? And she

puts the book down and she's like, easy. Pick the daughter, right? And then just

like, you know, so I think. I think there's a lot of room to

go through. Oh, you

know, we do these personality assessments, right? Because this was like the beginning of the

change for me, right? Realized I wasn't the only person with my own

issues and concerns and the. In questions. And also realizing that

because I'm not a completely unique individual with these things, I can go

find other people with similar situations and learn from them.

And people will be like, can you just send me the results? No, not just

going to send you the results. And they're. And they're like, why? And I'm like,

because you're going to look at it and be like, yep, that's exactly what I

thought. See? Yep. Right? And there's no, there's no. You

don't write if you're just going through it to confirm your own biases, to confirm

your own thinking, to confirm you're like, yep, I'm perfect. Like, there's.

There's a whole lot of room to read and not learn anything, you

know? And so when one of the lines that I've changed

on a lot was this idea, right? If.

If I'm not feeling a book, I can put it down, right?

And then. And sometimes it's hard for me to do because, man, I love. I

love completing things. Like, I love chalking things off the to do

list, right? My wife is the same way and I've changed a lot, right? Because

one of the people who I, who I really respect, he talks about the. The

rule is a hundred page 100 pages minus your age,

okay? So at 45, right? So if I'm not into it BY

like page 55, okay, I have a little. I have a little. Okay, Is this,

is this really all that important, right? And then also, maybe I should come back

to this thing later, right? There's a, there's a stoic line

of, you know, when, when. Whenever a man, you know, steps foot on

the same river twice, it's not the same river because he's not the same man

kind of situation, right? Because we're. We are all capable of change, you know?

And so I think about that all the time because I've got some books on

my shelf, right? And I'm a big nerdy reader. Everybody, like, I. I Read

a lot, right? And most of it is for development these days, right? I don't

really read all that much for entertainment until, you know, Hyon calls me and, you

know, he wants to go read something weird. But a lot of

his business books, right? Philosophy books and marketing and sales stuff and leadership stuff

and everything. And Thinking

Fast and Slow by Kahneman, right? Everyone's talking about that book. I picked

it up and was like, oh, this is tough. I wasn't ready to read that

book. And so there is a. We have to

be at the right place at the right plane, right? To be able

to kind of get any knowledge out of it. Or we're just like, yep, knew

Shakespeare was garbage, right? And toss it over the shoulder and put all the blame

on him, right? Whenever there's thousands of. Of other people that have. That have seen

those plays, right? And we also need to remember, like, this is a thing that

I talk about with my wife all the time because she loves Shakespeare, and she's

like, it's not meant to be read. It's meant to be watched. It's meant to

be a play, right? So all of these. All these books and stuff like

this are really great, but, like, really what you should be doing is, like, you

know, watching, you know, three or four versions of Hamlet and how are they different?

And what are those interpretations of it? Don't just try to, like, bludgeon yourself. And

just. And especially not for, like, status. Like, look how great I am. Like, look

at these books on our. On our shelves. Like, I love that our. Our

big library downstairs has got everything from Highline to

Stephen King to Atwood to

Scalzi to, like. But they're things that we really read

and find value in. And, you know, they're. They're there for a reason. They're not

there for the display, you know,

and so I think it's very easy to go into it with. And this goes

back to intentions. Like, intention is my. Is my favorite word. It's my daughter's least

favorite word because she hears it from me way too often. But, like, what

is your intention when you're going through this book? Is it to, like, be like,

ah, I knew they were idiots, right? Or is it to go through and potentially

learn something, right? And maybe find a gap within yourself, right? Remove one of your

blind spots, you know, so that way you can be a better. Whatever it

is you're going after. Well, and as we. We're gonna.

We're gonna. We're gonna turn the corner here a little bit. Because we're, we're gonna

have to wrap up here. I got a hard stop here at the top of

the hour and John has been, has been very gracious with me,

with me today. So we're gonna skip over a section of the script and we're

gonna go right to this idea of what do we do with all of this.

Right? And we've kind of talked a little bit about this today,

by the way. Brooklyn 9. 9. Just as a side note,

so I have watched, I've watched like the first like two or three seasons on

Netflix. I can't remember where I, where I stopped at, where I put it out

and then went off to go do other stuff. I'll go back and pick it

up. But Andre Brower is the perfect example of

the phrase that I always tell my kids, which is, if you open up the

door of a clown car, don't be surprised when clowns fall out.

And he's, he's, he's constantly opening the door of that clown

car and then looking around like, I can't believe I'm surrounded by clowns. And

that's, that's the thing that like,

that like catches me all the time. That for me that's the giggle worthy thing

in the, in the show because it is, it's

all, it's all clowns. And you're just like, I don't know what you expected, dude.

I mean you're, you're very Shakespearean in your approach. You're like

Othello there. These people are like 499

pizza from Domino's.

I don't know what you expected. Well, I

mean, not to cut you off real quick, but like this happens in sales all

the time, right? Yeah, let's, let's have sky high goals, let's

not pay them what they're worth, right? Because salespeople don't come into

their full value, right. They come in for a haircut, they have to earn the

rest through, through performance and merit in getting things across the line.

And some people take massive advantage of this, right. $40,000 base, but

you're going to make 250 if you really go after it. And then, and then

you're frustrated that they're sending bad deals over the wall. Like

what you get, what you incentivize for is the old business lesson, right?

So you know, once again, like you did it to yourself sometimes

because you didn't think all the way through the problem. Correct? Exactly. Well,

what you, what you subsidize, you, what you tax

you get less of and what you subsidize you get more of

to sort of tie back to economic thinking. So

sort of a, sort of a law of life. So, okay,

a model can't work without a vision. Right? And a vision can't work without a

model. I would, I would assert that, I think we've kind of maybe come to

that conclusion. And

I, I, I want to talk touch on this area because I think this is

the place where we get most confused over the last 25 years. And I also

think this is the place where we're going to have to do some really yeoman's

work to rebuild visions and models.

Because so far what we've talked about are very,

for lack of a better idea, they're very 18th and 19th century ideas.

Right? I mean, yeah, we mentioned TV shows and we've thrown in cinema and we've

mentioned movies, but in reality we're talking about. And that has been the

focus of this show and will continue to be the focus of this show. Going

backwards to a discipline that

many people have abandoned. We do live in a post

literate, highly visual culture driven

by algorithms and social media.

Now I'm going to bring this idea over from another conversation that we

were having, John and I were having before I press record. There are people

who are perpetually online and then there's a whole bunch of other people who are

not. And I made a conscious decision starting last year

to begin to build a wall between myself and the,

and the, or between the online people and myself. I began

to consciously do that and intentionally do that and then

to go out and not necessarily explore, but to go out and meet the people

who are not perpetually online and talk with them and find

out what they're actually seeing and then to start building projects with them and

doing things with them as I sometimes frame it in the real world.

And that's been, that's been an interesting, it's been an interesting adventure because we talk

with people who are not perpetually online. They see a totally different reality

than the people who are perpetually online.

And you do begin to see the, the gaps, as we

mentioned before, between those two, those two

lack of a better term worldviews or visions. Right

now I'm not saying one's good or one's bad. I'm really saying that there's gaps.

Okay, yeah.

We've talked about what literature maybe speaks best to creating

that vision. We've talked about the Peloponnesian wars and we talked about

Seneca. We've cut up The Bible a little bit, which is okay. That book can

handle it. Yeah, it's fine.

I mean, any. Any solid book can handle it. Any solid book. If you

can't stand up to a little bit of pushback, like. Yeah.

You know, you're probably not writing anything in the first place.

Correct, Right, exactly. So when we look at

these models, how does technology.

How do we take this, this vision, Right. Whether it's constrained or unconstrained.

Okay, we're gonna have a model, right? We're gonna get a

model from a model of leadership from. From. Let's say

we're going to get a model of leadership from the Iliad. And our model of

leadership is going to be based around a mythic story that we tell ourselves as

a team. Cool. That's fine. I have no problem with any of that.

How does technology factor into this? How do we pull

technology in? Because what I often see is

the technologists and their story

becoming the dominant story and driving a whole bunch of other

reactions. Whereas I think if you have a vision

first from the leadership that is consistent and coherent,

which is two other things, but that you get there with clarity, hinder, and courage,

right? You cross that bridge, the three Cs, bridge to the model.

Now, the technology serves the model rather than

driving the model, and it serves the vision rather than driving the

vision. Am I looking at this incorrectly, or is there a better

way to sort of frame this for leaders? Well, I

think that's a. That's an interesting topic,

right? The. The thing that I really appreciate

about the Internet is there's no real need. There's

there in, you know, coming up as a kid in the 80s, right. I'm

45. You know, I was kind of nerdy, right. You know, and I wasn't

so nerdy that I. I couldn't, you know, you know, have

conversations with other people. But, like, I wasn't really a big football guy,

right. Nerd. You know, and so, right, there, there's. But then, you know,

the Internet is really great at, like, you can find your people, right? You can

find your tribe, right. You can find your community. And

I think if you just go, like, looking for the people who are

like me, right? The people who, who already agree with everything that you

agree with. You. You build yourself this, like, echo chamber, right?

And algorithms are really good at giving you more

of what you've already kind of voted for, if that makes

sense. Right? And so I think that the. I think. I think

that the, the danger is, well,

you know, these five people, I see them all over LinkedIn, right? And so

they were like, man, that's five people. Like, holy

smokes. You know, and so I think, I think it's, I think it's as

helpful as it is hurtful, right? Because then people don't do their own

fact finding. You know, we were talking about this, this conversation on

Friday before Snowpocalypse, and I was kind of like, man,

like, I've got a lot of gray area on this, right? Because I've kind of

moved and I've shifted and I think that most people are just running around on,

on autopilot. I don't really think that most people have done enough reading and reflection

to really kind of understand their own how and their why. And

so then it's like, you know,

you know, people are just looking for people who believe something

similar, right? And that's where, you know, the, the, the whole

guru thing comes into play, right? And you know, the influencer gurus are just

like, well, you know, and, and the algorithms feed into this, right?

You're going to get one polarizing opinion, you're going to get the other one. If

you like the other one. Okay, great, right. It's just going to bottle feed you

more of that. And so our capacity, I think, for being able to kind of

think through the problem. Why do I feel these things? What are the trade offs

of thinking this way, of believing this way? Like,

does this actually get all the way through the gauntlet,

Right? You know, going back to the, the,

you know, the, the Christian, you know, the Christianity conversation, right?

I know a bunch of people who are very, you know, they talk

about being, being very Christian and everything. And they're so competitive that they

would chop their, like, mother's legs out to like, get ahead of them and stuff

like this. And it's like, it's like, I'm not saying

that that's necessarily a bad thing, but like, when you're putting yourself out

there, that you're this kind of person, but your, your, your actions do not align

with that stuff. At a certain point, you've not ran the gauntlet completely,

right? You know, and there's a version of this, like in

stoicism, right? Because like in, you know, I talk with a lot of people who,

you know, stoicism is very popular in business circles. It's very popular in like,

sales and entrepreneurship circles and stuff like this. And then I'll start asking about, like,

okay, what are your thoughts on like, you know,

temperance? Oh,

not, not super worried about that, you know, and Ryan Holiday talks about this

all the time, right? That like certain, you know, there's four main virtues,

right? And there, there' popular ones. And then the other

pop. The, the other two are just skipped over by most people,

right? And, and there's a version of that in Christianity. There's a version of

that in Islam. There's a version of that, I'm sure in, in every like,

philosophy, you know, that the people can go through. And it's like

if you don't go deep enough, you're probably cherry

picking.

Well, and if you can't, if you can't see the world through your enemy's

eyes, whatever that may mean, you

probably are not seeing the world fully.

Oh, like I saw this on

LinkedIn today and this woman was talking about that she had to go block

someone because he was being very, very antagonistic and

just very aggressive and everything. And so he followed her over to another

social media platform. Oh my. And he was like, you

blocked me? Like. And then he goes, what, you don't like

logic? And it's like the idea that

like your version of whatever you were pushing and touting is the

only logical conversation. Everyone else must therefore be an

idiot and not lined up with logic because they don't agree with you

is the whole problem that everyone has with like crossfitters and vegans.

Exactly.

Oh my gosh. I think

that's a good place for us to begin to, for us to begin to

wrap up one of the things that we have

to do and one of the things we're going to be doing actually as a

show, as listeners, as our guests, and even myself as a host

over the course of this year, is we really going to be focusing on

doing and talking about what are the

various intersections of literature and leadership? What can we

pull from literature? What can we pull from leadership in more

of these intentional kinds of conversations, these

intentional kinds of what I call mashup conversations.

A mashup is mixing everything together and pushing on it and

poking it and pressing it and stress testing in and

seeing what works and what doesn't. We do

mashups because A, I don't know everything, I can't

possibly know everything, B, there's more than one

perspective in the world, and C, just because I could see the world

through my enemy's eyes doesn't mean I have to agree with what I'm seeing. It

just means I have to see the perspective from where that person

is standing. Now, I want to be very clear. None of my co

hosts are my enemies. They're all my friends. We're all in this

boat together. We're all rowing in the same direction. And by the way,

we've invited new folks into the boat who want to join us. It's interesting

that John mentioned that his, his wife is into Shakespeare. We actually got a

referral from one of our guests to a. To a person who has

done their thesis work in Shakespeare, had a conversation with her. We're going to

be bringing her on. She's going to be talking with us about Macabeth because we're

doing Macbeth this year finally, and

Troilus and Cressida. So we have to figure out which one of those two we're

going to. We're going to land her on, and it's going to be great.

The, the. The whole point of this show, the whole point of

this is to drive the intersection of literature and

leadership. It's to drive that intersection into a sharp point and to

be the tip of the spear on this.

This is a valuable and I think, worthwhile

quest. It is a quest myth. It's a story.

Of course, I'm telling myself, just like the Iliad, just like the

Odyssey. And yes, I do have a vision for it.

And now I've got a model, and now I've got a quest.

And so I would never, and none of my guests would, but especially

myself, I would never ask you to do something as a listener that I wouldn't

do myself. I eat my own dog food, or at least I try

as much as I possibly can to eat my own dog food. And that is

a statement that I'm making with as much humility as I can possibly muster, because

it's true. We do have to worry about

engagement. We do have to worry about connections.

The fact of the matter is we do have to worry about which way the

pendulum is swinging. Is our vision constrained or unconstrained,

not just as leaders in our families, in our communities,

in our civic organizations, but also as

leaders on our teams and in our businesses, small,

medium or large, in the places where people look to us

and they are looking to see us as leaders.

I will. I've said this before, perhaps not a short episode,

but I want to say it again here.

These days, most people know who the President of the United States is.

Good, bad, ugly, or indifferent because we've nationalized a lot of this.

But there are still a good chunk of people and leaders.

It would be worthwhile for you to pay attention to this. Whose

example of leadership is not the President of the United States. It's

not even the mayor of the town that your organization, your

business or your family happens to be in. There's a whole bunch

of people that are surrounding you and their example of

leadership. The only example of leadership they are seeing

is you. What is your

vision, what is your model

and what are you going to do if it's broken

to restore that model or even to make that model

better. Literature can give you the why

but you're going to have to come up with the what and we're going

to explore all of that this year on the show.

So with that I'd like to close our episode, our first mashup

episode of the year today of the season. I guess I should say not year

but season. I guess I should say that my producer would probably like it if

I said that with John

Hill AKA Small Mountain and I would like to

thank him for coming on the show today. And with that well

we're out.

Creators and Guests

Host

Jesan Sorrells

CEO of HSCT Publishing, home of Leadership ToolBox and LeadingKeys

Guest

John Hill aka Small Mountain

Sales doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to make you feel gross.

Producer

Leadership Toolbox

The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

Mash Up Episode ft. Leadership Models w/John Hill

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Creators and Guests

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