Leadership Book Club: The Go-Giver Leader by Bob Burg and John David Mann

Kristen: Welcome to Love and Leadership, the podcast that helps you lead with both your head and your heart, plus a bit of humor. I'm Kristen Brun Sharkey, a leadership coach and facilitator.

Mike: And I'm Mike Sharkey, a senior living and hospitality executive. We're a couple of leadership nerds who also happen to be a couple.

Kristen: Join us each week as we share our unfiltered opinions, break down influential books, and interview inspiring guests.

Mike: Whether you're a seasoned executive or a rising star, we're here to help you level up your leadership game and amplify your impact.

Kristen: \ Hello and welcome back to Love and Leadership. I'm Kristen.

Mike: And I'm Mike.

Kristen: And we are doing another LBC 

Mike: cbu boom.

Kristen: And today

Mike: Glad you find that funny.

Kristen: Yeah. Even though like I, I use it as a placeholder basically, but

No, I know. I never make it. no, you've, that, that sound effect has appeared many times from you.

Mike: Okay. Well, I'm glad you find me humorous in general, because I guess that bodes well for our marriage. Sometimes I make you laugh and I'm like, okay, all right. Everything's working.

Kristen: Yeah. it'd be a long life if you married somebody who you don't find funny, But, but yeah, today 

we are doing the book, the Go-Giver Leader

Mike: by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

We didn't do the Go-Giver.

We have not done the original Go-Giver, so I'll talk a little bit about that book. The original series versus the prequels. Oh my God. Where are we at? This? Okay. It's a good book.

It's a great, I'm sorry.

It's a great book.

I thought the Go-Giver was a great book. I thought the Go-Giver Leader was a good book.

fair. Yeah. 

Kristen: I, yeah,

Mike: It's a little, it's a good book for sure.

Kristen: Yeah. I think the Well here, I'll give background and then we can talk a little bit more about

Mike: the, No, I want to jump to the ending first as I am want to do,when I was a musician, I would always learn, I would start, I would learn the beginning of the piece.

I'd learn like a minute or two, and then I'd learn the ending. And then I somehow piece them together. don't know why, but I always learned the last couple bars. Yeah.

Before learned the middle, I guess there's probably some therapy that needs to happen based on that.

Kristen: See, I was never, I did it very methodically.

Mike: Oh, I was methodical.

Kristen: But it was like start to finish.

Mike: I would force memorize things. I would memorize the first bar, then I would memorize the second bar. Then I would memorize the first and second bar together and I add the third bar and the fourth bar and the fifth bar. And I could memorize like a, the movement of a Bach Sonata in one day doing that, or one very painful night illegally spent in the, on the stage of the Shepherd School of Music.

Mm-hmm. Sorry guys. they've moved on, Cool story. Right. Okay.

Kristen: So like I said, there's two authors, these books. There's Bob Burg. He's written a lot of like sales books Previously, including the book, Endless Referrals was probably what he was best known for before the Go-Giver. And John David Mann, who hadn't written as many books before they original Go-Giver came out, but he's written several other, or like co-authored several other leadership books since then. So the original book in this series already referenced is The Go-Giver. So that was published in 2007. And it's more about like how you do business. So I found it like a little more tailored to owning a business, but versus the Go-Giver Leader's more about like leadership.

But I personally, I love the original Go-Giver book. I read it when I was pretty early in starting my business and it's really influenced the way I do business and my approach to it. So I wanted to just read out the, from both of these books, they're the format of a parable.

And then as you go through them, you get these five laws or keys, depending which book you're reading. And so for the Go-Giver, it's the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success. So the five laws are the law of value. Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.

The law of compensation, or your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. The law of influence, your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first. The law of authenticity, the most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself and the law of ru of, I was gonna say reciprocity, receptivity

Mike: That sounds aggressive.

Kristen: The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving. So those are the, like the summary basically of the first book, which is a format of a parable where you get these laws as you go and they've been very influential for me and how I approach my business and really focusing on giving people value first and

Mike: Yeah, these are, I don't wanna say counterintuitive, but the one that's your income is determined by how many people you serve and how will you serve them? Well,that's, it's a very different mentality thanLike the capitalist manifesto, which is extracting value from things.

Extracting. Yes.

Kristen: Yes.

Mike: But it's kind of true. And I thought about, like in, in the original book, somebody asks, I can't remember the guy's name, but he asked the guru, how do I make a lot of money quickly? And he's you have to find a lot of people to serve, quickly. And that's true when you think about it.

And we've, even manufacturing businesses, and I, when I thought of that, I thought of Tesla, right? Like,whatever we think of Mr. Musk, right? He found a way to serve a lot of people and give them something that they wanted,andhe's got compensation for that. Is he doing other things?

Who knows? But, he's definitely providing a service to people that are looking for something I specific that he can provide, that he can,only he can provide, or only as the companies can provide at the moment. Even on the,the space side of things, NASA and would not be in a very good situation without his company's,service.

Right? So he found people to serve. And I know you're looking at me like, why are we talking about Elon?? But, I kind of take it as my own, one of my own core principles that I can learn from anybody.

Kristen: Yes. No, that's right. You can learn from his 

Mike: Yeah.

I mean, to think he's not successful is like crazy, right? Yeah.

Kristen: business without thinking he's a good

Mike: person. No, for sure. I, and I don't know. I mean, I mean, I, I, I'm not here to judge anybody, right? That's not my role. And if I can steal, I told you I'm an amateur. Like I, I can steal ideas from him and use them for good.

Why not? Even the whole like give me five things you did last week, right? That he, and the government was up and it's, it's, I don't think it's smart to completely demonize people or say everything someone thinks or does is bad. That's how we get polarization in politics.

This, the left is bad, the right is bad. Saying hey, just I need, tell me the five things you accomplished last week. I do that every day. We do that every night. We're like, what?

What were your wins today? Well, I accomplished this, I accomplished this, I accomplished this. And tomorrow I plan to accomplish that. That's not that big a deal, but the government, yeah, it wasn't

No, there's a lot of bad parts, but the go, and I kind of stole that and I was like that, and I thought about, I, I report to the board all the time, and every week I'm keeping track of what my wins were and what I accomplished.

And like in the private sector, if you can't demonstrate your worth, you're gonna go bye-bye. Or you should go byebye because you're there to provide value to the people that you're there to provide value to. And I don't think that's like antithetical to, but I. I just remember thinking about that with the serve them.

It's like, how do I, because I'm in the service business and like, I wanna be rich, and how do I get from, being a waiter, which is serving people to being actually rich. Well, okay, that's a big leap, but the concept isn't different. 

Kristen: Yeah. A little bit of a tangent, but.

Mike: But we kind of made it back.

I'm trying. I could just keep going.

Kristen: I know

Mike: it's on brand.

Kristen: Um, yeah. And then so yeah, so that's the first book, the Go-Giver. The book that we're talking about today is the Go-Giver Leader, which is part of their series of, I think there's five books out at this point.

Mike: it's like the Fast and Furious series.

Kristen: So

One of them is the Go-Giver Marriage.

Mike: Oh God, I wanna read the Boundaries books for couples or boundaries books for children, because that seems pertinent, but

Kristen: Well, yeah. Those are also written by a psychologist, but yeah.

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: But yeah. So anyway, so the Go-Giver leader was originally published in 2011.

Mike: It was originally published under the title, it's Not About You, but I guess they, that didn't really resonate with people. They Shocking.

Thought that was like, oh, this book isn't for me. book is not for you. Actually, that's a great title. This

Kristen: Yeah. That actually is like the reverse

Mike: People will be like, add to cart, don't tell me what to do.

Kristen: Yes. So they retitled it to the Go-Giver Leader in 2016. But it does, it has some common threads to the first book.All of these books are written as like short parables that teach these like core lessons that are really nicely summarized. So it's,

Mike: Yeah. I love the, I love the shortness of it, like they're short, but it doesn't take away in any way from their power.

Kristen: Yeah. This book is like a very reasonable, I think 167 pages or something like that. Yeah. So take

Mike: note, authors around the world, you can't. It's, and I already know our attention spans are getting less and less.

Like I can barely focus for a Yahoo News article. Let alone War and Peace levels. Yeah.

Kristen: So let's go ahead and jump into the book. This is like 14 very short chapters.

So the first chapter, chapter one, Taking Leadership. So this chapter basically introduces us to the hero of this book, Ben. He's a driven and ambitious young mergers and acquisitions executive from the Marden Group, and he's been tasked with a mission of persuading the 500 employee slash owners of the company, Allen and Augustine, which is, chair manufacturing company that is like very honored and been around a long time. And like people absolutely love it

Mike: One mind even say 

Kristen: Venerable. perhaps. And they have all of their employees basically own, like co-own the company. So he has to convince them for a vote to agree to a merger.

Mike: I remember he's kind of insecure about it all too.

Kristen: Like even doing the first initial, like speaking to everybody is he's trying to psych himself up. And get him, get himself. yep.

Mike: how am I gonna convince, how am I gonna influence these people? 

Kristen: Yeah, that's how it begins when he's like psyching himself up and he's coming in.

Like his approach that has always worked for him in the past has been like very like command and control, take charge leadership. So he kinda goes in with that attitude, because that's what he knows. And on paper, this company's not doing well, very, not very well financially. So it's in strategic acquisition, it could rescue the company from financial distress.

But he quickly learns throughout this book that logic and spreadsheets are not how you win hearts and minds lines. And so he gives this kinda whole initial speech. There's a very strong but used in there where it's basically like, you guys are such a great company, but, and everybody really picks up on that.

Like it kind of reappears multiple times in the book,

Yeah. Yes but. Yeah.and then he asked at the, this is a meeting with the executives. I should clarify. The four executives who're gonna get to know a little better in this parable. And he asked at the end, who would say yes to a merger if they had to vote right now?

And not a single person raises their hand. So he realizes he has his work cut

Mike: Lack of merger means they're going out of business also to give it some like they're Yeah, they're very stubborn.

Kristen: Yeah. I mean it's, they're definitely not in doing well financially. I think it's not like completely clear that like this is the only, it's not like so drastic.

Mike: I thought it was was like they're, yeah, they're on a,

Kristen: they're headed down, They're definitely not doing well financially. I mean, I think they also have the attitude a little bit of oh, we are, we've been around a long time.

Mike: We'll survive. Yeah.

Yeah. But, 

Kristen: Because nobody is like, oh, this is overwhelmingly the right thing to do financially.

It's it's probably the right thing to do financially for sure.

Mike: For sure It is. Yeah.

yeah. 

Kristen: So Chapter Two, The Question. So he goes to a restaurant nearby that was recommended by his friend Claire, and he sees Claire and her elderly companion named who she refers to as Aunt Elle. she's not actually her aunt, we find out later, but she, so he like, sits with them and Aunt Elle is very wise, has a lot.

She becomes the,the wise mentor figure of this parable. There's a different one in the first book she, He's telling them about the situation he's in and she gives him the advice. The less you say, the more influence you'll have and the more you yield, the more power you have.

And he kind of dismisses it is like, oh, like that's very zen. But she also offers him, or she also asks him, and she will repeat this many times, what do you really have to offer these people? And he, of course, gives her his rehearsed explanation, talking about like economies of scale, market footprint, et cetera.

But like even to him, it feels flat. And then he, later that evening, he tells his wife, Melanie, about the encounter and she gives him a, leather cover notebook with titled Ben's Manifesto. And then the first page is titled like, Ben's Keys to Legendary Leadership for him to fill in as he's thinking about this. So Chapter Three, The Top Floor. So this is Ben meets with the first of the four executives, which is Allen, one of the two co-founding brothers of Allen and Augustine. And they go to his office and Allen tells him that his office is on the top floor. He's like, why do you think my office is on the top floor?

And Ben's like, because it reminds everybody, you're the boss. And Allen's like, no, actually, he points like out the window. And he's like, this is where Augustine and I grew up, and this is where we started our first like timber management program. And I, he says like for anybody who wants to lead any or any kind of organization, I think that may be the most important thing to never forget where you came from. And he then kinda goes on to tell him he's not in favor of the merger because he worries that, the Marden Group doesn't have this same view with the same like history and background. He tells the story of how their original building burned down with, I think it was arson and they had issues with their insurance.

So like it was not covered. So they basically lost everything. Which comes up a few more times in this book too. Like part of the company lore. Not that it was fictional, it actually happened, but, and then he talks about this notion of holding a vision and he says the hard part is not coming up with the vision, it's the holding of it.

He said building a business is an act of faith because you're creating something out of nothing.

Mike: I it's hard to like build a business.

Kristen: Oh, yeah.

Mike: It's soAnd we, I think we're a little desensitized to it nowadays, but there were founders of IBM and Costco and all these businesses that are,multinational and billions and billions of, that they started with somebody's idea.

Mm-hmm.And I, I don't know that I've ever been like, super inspired to start a business, but I get it. I do get it. You want to leave a legacy, you want to contribute something, maybe you wanna be rich. I don't know. I'm sure I think that's an okay goal, but it's having watched people start businesses, And, I guess I'm familiar with people like opening restaurants, that. But even, you know, Hilton, it's

also 

Kristen: very hard,

Mike: It's super hard. But you know, it's the kind of business you can open as a person, you can get enough money together to open a restaurant. That's, and that's the business i, I originally come from.

Right. But, Hilton started out as just a dude who bought a kind of a ramshackle hotel in Texas and he went through a lot of difficult trials and tribulations to keep the funding and to grow. And it, eventually it takes on a life of its own right.

And that's what we see now. But it's very hard to put your vision into something and then keep that vision. 'Cause everything's gonna. Come at you change, wanting to change the way you do things quick and easy. What is it? I've been watching Star Wars. The path to the dark side is the quick and easy road, 

And geez, that's, I respect, I do, I really do respect people who can do that. it's, it's a big deal. 

Kristen: Yeah. Well, that, that segues nicely into Allen's other quote from this chapter. He says, the single biggest challenge to any organization is the constant cloud of fear and doubt that swirls around the heads of the people involved.

As a leader, your job is to hold fast to the big picture, to keep seeing in your mind's eye with crystal clarity where it is you're going, especially when nobody else does.

Mike: Yeah. 

Kristen: I think that really speaks to that. Like you have to, it's hard. You're gonna run into all these obstacles. People are gonna be feeling and seeing different, all sorts of different things, and you have to like stick with that vision and have it crystal clear in your mind's eye, which is, I think is very true.

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: So Chapter Four, The Substance of Influence. So after this we get into this pattern where Ben will meet with somebody. Or multiple people from the company. And then he goes back to this restaurant, and meets with Claire and or Aunt Elle or some combination of the two of them. And so after this, he meets Claire for lunch.

And his original idea of this lunch was he wanted to like, get her insights. She had worked with Allen and Augustine before on a consulting basis, so he wanted to get her insights on the company. And then like much to his dismay Aunt Elle is also there, he's like still I don't know what, how helpful this woman's gonna be.

But then he's updating them on how his meeting went and like why, why, what he wants to accomplish. And, Aunt Elle is like, you're using a lot of personal pronouns and he's like, what? He's yeah. Like in what you just talked about for not that long, you said I, me or my 15 times. And what kind of meta message, the message underneath the message does that send? Oh, I think this is interesting. We've talked kind kinda about like pronouns, how they

Mike: for sure impact, Yeah. I want

Kristen: Making it all about you, I

Mike: I envision. 

Kristen: Mm-hmm. 

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: And then he's using the word convince a lot when he's talking about this challenge.

Like he needs to convince them and she points out that influence and convincing are two different things. So like, influence is like an unseen flow of power. So you're like pulling people versus pushing. It's like a gravitational force versus forcing them to come around to your way of mind. By the way, the Aunt Elle,I thought of you a lot because she spends a lot of time talking about the roots of words.

I think

Mike: I think it's important, that, in the same way that like, we forget how Hilton became Hilton. We forget how words became words. And in that route you will find a lot of information that is, is germane to understanding how it's used, how it's perceived, how it's misperceived, how it's misused, and how people's perception has changed over time to forget the truth of where things came from.

Kristen: Yeah, that's Aunt Elle says a lot of 

Mike: Well, Aunt Elle 

Kristen: I mean,

She turns out she's very smart. Yeah. But it's just funny. I feel like that's something you do a lot of and it's very, she does it throughout this whole book.

Mike: So interesting. When you break down the word a lot, it's actually not one word.

We know that it's a lot and it's not meaning much. It's a lot like LOT is, I bought a lot of, barrels. Right. And it's, it doesn't mean,at some point it picked up the meaning of many. Yeah. But it's a lot in the way that you would go for a auction and, you know.

Kristen: Buy a lot of, something,

Mike: lot like Yeah.

Yeah. Where

Kristen: It's like a dozen

yeah. something, 

Mike: You know, a certain, a certain portion. 

Kristen: Yeah.

Oh, 

Mike: Anyway, it's important to knowwhat you're communicating. Yeah. And why

Kristen: Why maybe Aunt Elle is you like 40 years from

now. Oh my God.I hope I'm not like hanging out in coffee shops dealing out like quasi Indian guru wisdom and, you knowYeah.So at this point, Aunt Elle has to go to an appointment and Claire tells Ben that she was an extremely successful business woman, which is not the image of her that he had.

And he's like, oh, okay. Maybe I should listen to

Mike: Yeah, she's some kooky old

Kristen: What this woman is telling me. Yeah. He goes home that night and then he adds his first of five keys to the manifesto book that his wife gave him. So the first key is Hold the Vision, and he summarizes this as lead with your mind. Anyone can come up with a vision.

The hard part is the holding, building a business, building anything is an act of faith. Keep seeing your mind's eye where it is you're going, even when, and especially when nobody else does. Never forget where you came from and watch your personal pronouns.

So Chapter Five, The Heart of the Operation.

So from there, like the next day he goes to the company and then he meets with Augustine, who's the other co-founder, co-founding brother. And while he's there, he hears like some murmurs from other employees. Like somebody's like, oh, that's the guy who says we're such a great company. So he's like feeling like there's, it's not like a super warm welcome at the company, but Augustine is very warm and effusive and he gives him a tour of the facilities with a lot of pride.

He talks about how like the people really are this place,people think they just build chairs. They really build people. And he says give people something good to live up, to something great. And they usually will, in fact, they'll often exceed those expectations. And he then talks about how.

Because, Ben looks at a bench that's all the, it's kinda like a rainbow of colors. And he is like, oh, do you like paint that? And he's like, no, we don't paint anything. We just get things out of the wood. They discovered this with the fire that there were certain pieces of wood that were steamed in the right way and they turned these beautiful colors.

So that process really helped him figure out like the right way of like heating wood that would cause these beautiful colors to emerge. And he says it's just like people, like with the wood, it's knowing how to apply heat with people. It's applying your belief. And he also says they've never fired a single employee, and this is his major concern with the merger, is that they're gonna cut the staff in half. 

Mike: Never fired a single employee.

Okay.

Kristen: Yeah, I, I mean, yes, obviously.

I'm like, okay,

Mike: We're making

Kristen: 500 people

Mike: Yeah. We're making shares in fairy land over here. showing up late. Huh? Nobody's stealing from, okay. Yeah. I don't know. It's a little, the allegory goes hard on

Kristen: It does. Yeah. I mean, that's when we get into what didn't resonate, that's my, it gets a little cheesy, it gets a little,

Mike: it's fine.

Kristen: it's fine. Yeah, you just you need some suspension of disbelief and it's a parable.

It's not supposed to be a true story necessarily.

Mike: It takes it a little ad absurdum,

Kristen: But yeah, there were some points where you were like, okay, I guess I'll,

I'll move on. So once again, he meets up with Claire and Aunt Elle, and he's walking to the table they're at in the restaurant and he bumps into a very gruff man accidentally.

They just kinda have the perfect, he's pulling out his chair as Ben is walking by, coffee spills, the guy's really pissed and Aunt Elle like steps in and really resolves it pretty swiftly. She apologizes. She's like, oh, I'm so sorry I distracted him. Can I pay for your dry cleaning? And the guy's like, oh no, that's not necessary.

And it just calms him down and he leaves. And they talk about this is an example of where she yielded and ended up having more power as a result. And it was because she responded instead of reacting. Whereas Ben was very much reacting in the moment. So it was just escalating. And they're talking more of course about what Ben is going through with this merger.

And she points out are you going into these meetings like you're engaging the enemy? Like you're like suiting for battle. And he's like, yeah, that's actually exactly how I am going into these. So she talks more about this concept of yielding is giving but not giving up.

And Lincoln comes in as an example, like of like in many of the books we read, where he didn't take the bait when a reporter told him about another government official criticizing him. And he responded with respect for the other person. And he is like, yeah, maybe I need to talk to him, or maybe I have something to learn.

But and then she compared this to in boxing a parry, do you know this

Mike: Well, you don't really say parry, that's more like in sword fighting.

you come at me with your sword and I move it out of the way.

That's a parry.

Kristen: Okay. Yeah. Well, that's what she's talking about though. She says it's in boxing, but, where it's basically like

Mike: In boxing, that's called a slip.

Kristen: okay.

Mike: Okay. And pairing doesn't necessarily, but I get it. 

Kristen: Yeah, I mean it's obviously a metaphor.

Mike: it's. it's a little wing chunky, I'm letting you come close to me and they're just batting your thing out of the way.

Kristen: Yeah. 

of the wrist, the, this is not true. The harder the punch, the less effort it takes to par it, that, that's not really true. but, I get the idea.it's, she's not meeting force with force, she's yielding to the force mm-hmm. Of that's, yeah. That's good martial arts,Yeah. Like she describes it as the target waits until the punch almost hits him, and then he deflects it away with the flick of a wrist.

And like the harder the punch, the less effort it takes to parry it.

Oh,

Mike: I haven't heard anybody use, I could be wrong. I'm not a boxing coach, but I've never heard anyone use the word parry in boxing.

But the concept is there Yeah. Okay. in, In judothey'll let you walk into them and you let them keep walking into you as you absorb and redirect them to go flying. It's cool. I'm not, I wish I had, of all the things I wish I had done when I was young, Judo, I wish I had studied Judo when I was young.

Kristen: Well.yeah, so that's one. There's a couple martial artsy references in

Mike: Sure. Of course there is. Why not?

Kristen: But then she kinda gets in, she had talked about like how you define influence at the last time they met and then convinced she says from the roots it means to overcome by argument. And of course like overcoming by argument, force like is not going to be as effective. Right.And she talks about expecting somebody to be helpful, doesn't change them, it changes you and that is what ultimately changes them.And she gets into tact and she like specifying like tact is not the same thing as compromise.

It's also like you can be blunt without being tactless.These are like different things. She says tact is actually the language of strength because having tact, like from the roots, come literally means being in touch with the other person. Like they share it shares like a Latin root with tactile.

Mike: So the, yeah, the root of convinced is convincer. So conant means with, which is I think the same root of like compassion. Calm is with, and passion is suffering. So as I suffer with you, but vinceri looks like it means conquer. So in the mid 16th century, overcome or defeat in argument convince. Nice. Yeah.It's good to know you're, it's good to know Latin, actually. Like I, sometimes I think maybe I'll, that's not happening.

Kristen: Yeah. And I like this, like when you, you treat someone with tact, it allows 'em to stay intact.

Mike: Oh my God. These guys are, must be lots of fun at parties.

And I mean that sincerely. They're probably actually fun at parties.

Kristen: You

Mike: know, they're probably actually fun at parties because they just like,they don't take anything too seriously. It's tact the origin means to touch. Tan, tangi, Sense of touch.

Kristen: Yeah. And this kind of leads into getting people to do what you want them

to do, whether or not they want it for themselves is just manipulation. Getting people to do what they truly want is an achievement.

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: Ben

Mike: Ben's building his manifesto.

Kristen: Ben is building his manifesto with key number two, Build Your People. so he summarizes this as lead from the heart, give people something great to live up to, and they usually will. The more you yield, the more power you have. The substance of influence is pull, not push.

Tact is the language of strength and don't react, respond.

Mike: Incidentally, human beings have far more power pulling than they do pushing even on a physical, 

Kristen: Like physically.

Mike: Like the number one deadlift of all time is, I don't know, like 1100, 1200, I'm probably wrong now. Pounds. Right? And the best push the bench press or overhead press, bench press is probably like 700 pounds, maybe, something like that.

I'm not up on all that stuff, but your pull is almost twice as strong as your push. All of the strangles and jiu-jitsu are really some kind of pull. 

But yes, humans are much stronger pulling than they are pushing much stronger. Interesting. Yeah. If you want to, if you watch, like strongman stuff and they're pulling like a tractor, they pull it. They don't push it as hard pull it.

They know I can move a tractor trailer without if I pull it. Little might be hard, but I could push it all day and twice on Sunday. It's not going anywhere. Yeah.

Don't react, respond. That's smart. I think, what does that mean? Reaction is like you lose your equilibrium and you have some sort of emotional reaction to it. 

That right there is like the key to life, 

Kristen: Yeah.

It's like taking the moment to

Mike: Well, and when you're in charge, people bring you things all the time with so much emotion that they're already experiencing.

Kristen: Yeah.

Mike: And they're not only saying fix this, but they're saying have this emotional reaction that I'm also having.

Kristen: And if you do that, you will not be very successful or Or if you do that regularly,

Mike: if you do that regularly,

Kristen: you're human

Mike: For sure.

Kristen: But yeah, we've talked kind of a lot about what are tactics that you

Mike: Well, because they're in, they're exerting a kind of influence on you that is actually making you not make the decision that you want to or would come to now you are, roiled up in, in the emotion of it as well.

that's so hard. Yeah. But 

Kristen: So in the next chapter seven, the work, Ben meets with the third of four executives, who is Frank. He's the VP of production. 

Mike: This is like the ghost of Christmas past and something like

Kristen: It does gonna sound

Mike: Like they're being revealed to him one after another to teach him the lessons to

Kristen: have a lesson for

Mike: Oh my God. I,

Kristen: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's cheesy, but it's it's 

Mike: But it's, no, it's 

Kristen: but it's also, yeah. I like cheese. I like some cheese. Yeah. In the right context.So yeah, so Frank shows him around the factory floor. It's this chapter's very short and Frank doesn't even really say that much, but it's established, that Frank is really like the grounding force on this company.

He's been there from the beginning. He runs everything production. And he talks about like, you, you can't run a tight operation unless your people trust you. Not the boardroom, not the market research, but you. And they won't trust you unless you trust yourself.And Ben asked him at the end, what does your gut say?

'Cause he is talking about like his intuition, what does your gut say about the vote on Monday? And Frank says, it hasn't decided yet. So then we go back to the cafe

Mike: dun, dun, dun.

Kristen: Just like every other. They're all like every other pretty much. And it's just Claire this time and she. Or at least at first. And she tells Ben about the connection between Aunt Elle and Pindar, who was the guy who was like the guiding mentor character.

Mike: Pindar. Yes. He

Kristen: He was the guiding mentor character in the original book, the Go Giver. and an incredibly successful businessman as you talks about, like his key to success has always been taking an enormous amount of time to make sure he understood what it was his clients would need, and exactly how his product or service would fulfill that need.

So he would learn like as much as he could about the business of his clients.

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: And then they kinda get, I think Aunt Elle shows up and they end up getting into humility. And this is what, this is also from like Pindar. if you wanna be hugely successful, you have to stay hugely humble.

And he's like hugely humble. Isn't that like a contradiction?

Mike: I wish that was true.

Kristen: I mean, unfortunately, yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

That is unfortunately not,

Mike: Well, I think it depends on the timeframe that you look at people. If you look at them in the short term, they may look successful, in the long term they will not. 

Kristen: It's also like if you're defining success just by money, it's a little bit different versus there's a lot of ways to define success. Right. But, Aunt Elle says, humility is very misunderstood. 

Mike: Like 

Kristen: people equate it with a lack of confidence or self-esteem. Or think that being humble means being weak.

Humility shares a common root with humus, or being humble means being aware of your connection with the dust of the earth. So it's just remember your muddy beginnings and you can accomplish anything. 

Mike: What is that word?

Kristen: Humus. H-U-M-U-S, unless I wrote it wrong.

Mike: I have no idea what I'm curious.

Kristen: Yeah, you should give the, written copy of this book a quick scan just so you can pick up all the word the root for like e etymology stuff. I did not include all of it, so there's a lot of it.

Mike: I read. I don't read them. I listen

Kristen: I know you listen to 'em, but that's like harder to

Mike: It's funny. I can, it is harder. I can e I'll try and take notes, but I can even remember like where I was listening to this, which lane I was in on the 1 0 1 coming home when I listened to this. Stuck in traffic.

Kristen: Yeah. 

Mike: Latin, humus, soil.

Kristen: Re remember your muddy beginnings and you can accomplish anything. And yeah. She says, people who achieve great things that the world will never forget, start out by accomplishing small things that the world will never see.

Mike: It's all true, but it's all true.

Yeah, it's all true.

Kristen: all true. Yeah. It's all true. Yeah. I mean, that's basically down to like, great leaders don't expect other people to do anything that they haven't done themselves.

Mike: Got, yeah, we've seen that a

Kristen: It's like be willing to roll sleeves up when needed

Mike: Or like I, I think that vibe is a little over hyped, because do you, it looks good, but it's really like, have you done those jobs?

Yeah. It's in the military, right? The best officers were enlisted generally were enlisted people and the best chefs like started out washing dishes, 

Kristen: sure. And I think there's ways to get that, even if that wasn't your background, if you did not start on the front line of whatever business you're a leader in, there's ways

Mike: I think it's just a question of like, were you born on third base and thinking you hit a triple, like so many of our political leaders today, they, they really like, yeah, you did not hit the triple.

it's fine, but you know. 

Kristen: Yeah. And then Claire also encourages him to trust himself in this process. She's like, you can be genuinely humble and have enormous self-respect because self-respect is where every other kind of respect comes from.

People's respect for you is a reflection of your own self-respect.

Mike: Yeah. And I wanna go back to humility,this's definitely something I've been working on, but ego is an overcompensation. Both it's an overcompensation of your self-worth because you actually don't feel confident in yourself. Humility, when I feel humble from time to time, I actually, it, those are moments I feel more self-assured about my experience and my abilities to the point where like, I don't need to make a show of it.

I don't need to tell people, I don't need to go look at me. The humility comes from confidence. It doesn't come from self-doubt.

Kristen: Yeah. So, yeah, Ben goes home.

He adds key number three, Do the Work to his manifesto and his notes on that are lead from your gut, know your pegs and shims, which is like knowing the business. Stay hugely humble, stay grounded, hugely humble is funny. Yeah. Stay grounded. Get mud on your boots and trust yourself. So Chapter Nine is Birth and Death. And this is when he meets the fourth executive, Karen, VP of Finance and Personnel. And she asked him to meet her at the hospital and he's like, okay, why? Well,there's actually two reasons. One of their customer service agents went who was pregnant, went into labor way too early, and now has like baby in critical care, baby's in the nicu.

Though she can't see any visitors at this point 'cause she's in critical care. And there's also an employee's grandmother, like a different employee's grandmother who is in the oncology ward dying and not getting many visitors, so she's alone. Ben asked her like, and also asleep, like she's basically, I think on, in a medically induced coma at that point.

So Ben asked her like, why she's there when one of these patients she can't see and the other one is asleep. And she's like, it's not about doing, it's about being here. So it's not about doing something. And then they chat after for a little bit about the merger. She's not sure it's the right thing.

She's like, I look at the numbers all day. I know we need to stop the bleeding, but I'm still not sure this is the way. And then she she says that if he wants her vote and for her to encourage others to vote, yes, they need to know where he stands and what he stands for.

Mike: Hmm. I just wanna go back to the chief being the VI VP of finance and personnel. That's an unlikely combination.

Kristen: You know, it's actually in star. I think it's for a company this size. It is, it's actually pretty common

Mike: in Oh, really? Yeah. Finance. And those are

Kristen: VP like finance and HR are like often the same person at first.

Mike: Those seem like the most opposite possible skills

Kristen: They actually do address this directly.

I forget exactly what she says about it, but she's like, money is the lifeblood of the company. People are the lifeblood of, like she, she makes some connection within it. But yeah, no, inter a company of this size, it would not make sense, but, for startups that's actually very common.

Mike: That's why I'm not a startup leader.

Kristen: So at this point she has to go take a call. So she leaves him there and they had been waiting to see the patient in the oncology wing, and then the nurse is she's ready to be seen. So Ben goes in by himself and he sits holding the hand of this employee's grandmother for a while while he contemplates what he really stands for. So chapter 10 An Imprint on the Soul. So this time he's at the cafe again, it's only Aunt Elle this time. And she tells him about like when she first was giving a speech for the first time, her father tells her like, don't let anybody see your nerves. You have to control it. And it was like disastrous 'cause she was super nervous and it just did not go well.

The next time she spoke, she like, let the audience know upfront that she was like petrified and it really got everybody on her side.And she says that leadership is not something you can put on and take off like a set of clothes. Your capacity to influence is not something you can rehearse. People are not fools no matter what front you put on, they will read the you behind the words.

Mike: You know, who talks about this a lot?

Kristen: Oh my god. Here we go. Here we go.

Mike: I'm just saying. Yeah.

To be honest though, like that really, it went in Extreme Ownership: How Navy Seals Lead and Win. he Jocko, he's like,

Kristen: episode

Mike: Well, you know, I, again, that book

Kristen: It's in our show notes of like every episode, I swear, because it always gets mentioned.

Mike: Yeah. I guess my dream is to be on Jocko's podcast

Kristen: It does seem that way,

Mike: inter, as an interviewee.

Kristen: So Jocko, if you're listening,

Mike: I wish he was. Man, he's too busy. Like, he's got his,

Kristen: well, he's recording all these three hour podcasts. 

Mike: He also, he also started a company like he, they're trying to grow this very, and they have a vision, right?

But anyway, their vision is like American made stuff. They're like making denim in Maine. It's pretty cool. Anyway,he really says you can pretend anything you want in public. You, your team knows your real intention.You can go out there and say, Hey, this is for your own good.

And they know right away whether you're full of it or not. You're not fooling anyone but yourself. 

Kristen: Yeah. 

Mike: You better be clear with what your intention is. 

Kristen: Yep. 

Mike: People are not fools. Even if they don't consciously,

Kristen: They know it on some level. Yeah.

Mike: They know it on some level, and they react to you in that way. And the more genuine you are, the more genuine, people will respond to your influence. That's in, Good to Great. You wanna be a level five leader. It is not a job that you just show up and then you take off that mantle when you go home.

Kristen: It's something about you, your unique, genuine, authenticity. I don't know, but, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then she goes on to say, which I find this a little clunky in the wording, but I like the concept of it.

What you have to give you offer least of all through what you say, in greater part through what you do, but in greatest part through who you are. Heavy sigh

Mike: it's just a book of you could be like, take all these one liners out and put them in a book of Zen

of Cohen. Yeah, Proverbs for sure.

Kristen: for sure. Yeah.

There's a lot of that. It's true.

Mike: That, and you know, like, we talk about that a lot. What am I'm reading? 

The Advice Trap, and he talks about like one of the pitfalls of being the advice giver. When I, I'm always tell one of the, your advice, we will do this in a week or two, you have an advice monster that has three different heads that has tell it, control it and save it. And, those are all like short term solutions to problems and the tell it.

And you get a win. That's not a win. And the win is you get to, to act like you know what you're doing and always be adding value to every situation. But the downside of that is that feels like that's your only way to be valuable. Mm-hmm. You knowthat's probably not true. and I, yeah.

I don't how to get too existential, but humans like,

Kristen: It's Yeah. It's like, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. It's stop adding too much value.

Mike: Adding so much value. And it's, it's the way you perceive yourself too. It's like the only way I can be valuable. Is to add as much value at every moment.

And that's,are you letting your people do their thing? Are you growing their capacity? You know

Kristen: Yeah, we're all definitely at the mercy of our own insecurities.

Mike: And we get in habits. It works a little bit. I am,I'm a notorious Tell, tell it, I feel like

Kristen: it works really well up until a certain point in your career.

Mike: Yeah.

Kristen: Yeah. And then it doesn't, 

Mike: and into people's like growth. if that's why starting a business is so hard, right? It's I can tell you how to work at the front desk of a hotel. But I don't know if I can tell you how to start a hotel company. know what the vision is for that, why you would do it.

I can tell you how to incorporate, I can hook you up with a lawyer, the technical side of things,there's a more, aspect of profundity that can only come from within from everyone.

Kristen: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I feel it's interesting where this chapter goes from here.

So she asked Ben if he's lost someone and he talks about how he and his wife lost their, one of their sons 10 years ago, and he's like, did Claire, tell you about this? And she's like, no, I can see it on you. Life leaves a mark and we can try to cover it up, but it usually makes us bitter on the inside, embracing who we are, who we are in the process of becoming, embracing the hurt, deepens you and makes you a richer person. Denying it simply hardened you. Either way, it engraves itself onto your soul, which is deep.

Mike: Deep, man.

Kristen: Yeah. Yeah. And then she gets into this idea of like competence versus character and what people care about in a leader.

And she says, competence matters. So she's not like trying to say it doesn't matter, but it's simply the baseline. People mostly need to trust your character. And we've talked about this kinda idea before. Like you can judge someone's character by what they do when no one's watching. And she says, character is created by the choices you make.

How you choose to respond to what life throws at you.

You can lead only as far as you can grow, and you will grow only as far as you let yourself. And then finally, like she talks about character comes from an old Greek word for scrape or scratch. Mike is now Googling

Mike: Of course I am.I wish I learned. Uh,

Kristen: So characters, what happens when life?

Mike: Greek and Latin

Kristen: Character is what happens when life scratches itself upon your soul.

Mike: Well, yeah, the ancient Greek, I'm not gonna try and pronounce, but it means a, it's a stamping tool.

That's fascinating.

Kristen: Yeah. Some, she has

Mike: carra, kaar, something like that. old French car sorry french people. I'm not even gonna try. Yeah.

Embarrassed.

I'm sorry. Yeah.

Kristen: Yeah. we're always embarrassing when we try to pronounce French.

Yeah,

they 

Mike: they love that though. Doing gets wrong.

Okay. Yeah, of course we are, I guess the French are the, like the cats of, of humanity. 

Kristen: The cats of humanity.

Mike: Pets cat, you're doing it wrong. Feeds Cat. You're doing it wrong.

Kristen: That came up when we were watching Andor too, and they.

French, the Gorman, or like space French, like

Mike: You're doing the revolution wrong. Okay. All right.

Kristen: Anyway, they, they didn't. Well, we will say spoiler free here. 

Mike: Too bad if you, if it's a week old. But I just, I want to go back to like the meanings of, how interesting it is to find out that the word character started out as a Greek word for the st a stamping tool.

It makes your experience of communication so much richer than if you're just using the linear program language of English that we get growing up. because we don't have a character based language. Like in Chinese, your, the tree looks a little like a tree. Mm-hmm. And the older generations of character was actually a tree, you know?

And the word itself is not just the written word, but the way it sounds, can have relationship to the character, to the relationship to the meaning. And there's this interactive, iterative process that goes on when you're speaking and it's engaging a different, much more like colorful, if you will, part of the brain than a simple like black and white language like English,

But it's not, it's actually there. if you, roots. It's all in all the roots. Yeah.

Kristen: Yep. That's awesome.

Mike: That's awesome.

Kristen: So that leads to him going home and adding key number four, Stand for Something, which his notes are lead with your soul. What you have to give you offer in greatest part through who you are.

Competence matters, character matters more. Character is what happens when life scratches itself onto your soul. And you can lead only as far as you grow, and you will grow only as far as you let yourself. As

Mike corrects a typo.

Mike: I was wondering if you would see

Kristen: Yes, I saw that.

Mike: I love you. That's part of my Life has scratched the compulsive need to be perfect.

Kristen: I mean, I do get that. Yeah.

yeah.

So yeah, so four more short chapters in here. So there's, and we're getting into the end of this. So chapter 11, Robbie, which is the name of his son. So this chapter covers the weekend, the Saturday, Sunday before the Monday vote. And he's spending both of these mornings really determined to build a case of data to convince them that this isn't their best interest.

But in the afternoons on Saturday, he drives his son to a martial arts tournament and his son receives a black belt, is a huge accomplishment. And he listens to like the pep talk that the instructor is giving the kids before their tournament and talking about like the four pillars of their dojo, which are mind, connection, flow, and honor.

And then the next day he takes a walk with his wife who tells him that Robbie actually wants to quit martial arts and was like afraid to tell him that he thinks he wants to become a chef instead. And Ben is horrified that he didn't know this. And he talks to Robbie that night and gives him encouragement. Basically. 

Mike: This is where I tell you that the same word for your martial arts teacher in Chinese is the same word for a chef. 

Kristen: Oh Interesting. Chapter 12, Chaos. So he, this brings us to Monday, which is like the vote is happening Monday night. And he originally planned to walk the floor and talk to various employees and convince them of his viewpoint, but he actually just ends up spending most of the time listening to them talk about their roles, what they do at the company, life at the company, and then like their personal lives in general too.

And he gets just so caught up in listening he doesn't really spend any time convincing and convince being the key word. And then he meets the woman whose grandma he had sat with at the hospital, and she tells him that her grandma passed later that night and thanks him profusely for holding her hand for that time.So he then goes away and works on his speech for the night and he's really inspired by four pillars that his son's dojo.So he like boils his manifesto down to four words, vision, empathy, grounding, and soul, and uses that as an outline to his speech. But he's really getting stuck on this, what do you really have to offer them?

And he goes on a little bit crazy with it. He is like feeling less and less sure about his speech. He watches a flock of Canadian geese and V formation thinking about like, how did they do that? And then it's time for him to go give a speech. So,they open up the employee meeting. Allen and Augustine each give a talk and he, Ben is just really tuning into the audience and he is noticing that like the employees have such a deep fondness for those two men, but they're not necessarily in sync with their messages.

There's like more speakers follow, most of them say the merger would be a mistake, and Ben is barely listening. He's actually just like focusing on what he's sensing in the audience. And his take charge leader is feeling like, oh, there's an opening here, there's some vulnerability. People are open to being swayed.

I just have to come in with my amazing speech and convince them and take charge, like going back to that leadership style.so eventually everybody else talks. Frank ends with something like a very simple talk, and then he, Ben starts his planned speech and it just feels wrong right away. He realizes that it's ultimately about him, like the things that he's talking about.

So he puts aside his notes and he is saying he came on a mission to, to influence them, to steamroll and dazzle them, but in reality they dazzled him and just all these amazing things he's observed at this company. And then he finishes by saying, I came here with a job to do to get you to say yes.

I'm sorry to say I've failed. And it's not just that I failed to persuade you. Truth is I can't even say for sure whether I believe you should say yes. In any case, it's your decision and you're the ones I trust to make. What and what do I really have to offer you? It occurs to me that I just found the answer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you, you End of speech, quiet 

Mike: So profound.

Kristen: Cheesy. Yes,

Mike: But you know,

Kristen: yeah. Yeah.so

Mike: Authentic in a way, 

Kristen: Yep.

He's 

Mike: He's getting religion 

Kristen: So that brings us to the final Chapter 14, giving Leadership. So it's the next day, the next morning. he doesn't know what happened after he left the meeting. And his boss, who was at the meeting observing, wants to see him in his office. So he's like, okay, ready to get demoted or fired. So he walks into his boss's office and guess who else is in the room?

Aunt Elle. And he realizes that she is actually his boss's mother, 

Mike: boom

boom, boom.

Kristen: Which she says she didn't know when they first started talking, but figured it out eventually. And,his boss gestures him to sit in the chair and he realizes that it's like the same like original chair that was made for this company that he had sat in Allen's office.

Earlier on, he was like, what is that doing here? And he, his boss tells him, they were like, they were actually never planning to do mass layoffs. They didn't want

Mike: Yeah, right,

Kristen: Yeah, right. I know, Right. This is like the suspension of disbelief a little bit. They didn't wanna dismantle them

Mike: dispen slash and burn. come on.

Kristen: They wanted to give them the ground and space to grow. Yeah. And yeah,

Mike: Do you remember Pretty woman. 

Kristen: Which, Oh yeah. Like Richard Gere's like 

Mike: Yeah. Where like the whole thing. Like he just splitting up companies And yeah. Somehow she, oh

Kristen: yeah, she convinces him,

Mike: She changes his, worldview and he's like, we're gonna build ships.

Great big ships. No you're not.

Kristen: This is also the plot of every other Hallmark movie. Really? Yeah. Where somebody comes to the small town to, because they want, they're supposed to convince the owner that to buy the business and. Actually their company has all the evil plans for the business and then they fall in love with the small town and then they fall in love with the whoever the owner

Mike: Small town owners.

Yeah. Daughter or 

Kristen: Yeah. The genders switch up, but the plot does not,

They end up happily ever after there's this magical solution.

Mike: no navy seals in, there's romances though, right? That's a

Kristen: I don't think I've seen any Navy seal romances on Hallmark.

Mike: Genre of romance.

Yeah,

Kristen: Probably. Um, but yes.

So this, yeah, there, there's some Hallmark in these books,

Mike: I don't know. Hallmarks, you know, I can't watch it, but I see that it makes you happy and that makes me happy.

Kristen: It makes me happy in a very mindless way. Yeah. But mostly around Christmas.

Mike: I don't know, maybe this is like the way the world is supposed to be when you get this cynical power hungry people out of the way.

They've convinced us that the world has to be like that and it really doesn't.

Kristen: Yeah,

Mike: We have enough resources. We have enough resources for everyone on earth.If we knew how to share a little bit better.

Kristen: So, yeah. So Ben, so his boss is like, this was really our intent, but we couldn't convince them of this.

They didn't believe us.

Mike: Sure. I'm sorry,

Kristen: I, no, I also,

Mike: gonna get through this.

Kristen: I also, yeah. Had some challenges with that, but

Mike: Okay, sure.

Kristen: All, it's very, it's Hallmark.

Mike: Yeah. You wanna put that in writing, sir? Like,

Kristen: But he's like, Ben actually succeeded at convincing them of this. The brothers came to his boss. Like the previous night they told 'em, they realized that they were the ones holding back the company and trying to keep things the same.

Aunt Elle spells the word lead and then shows how like if you switch the letters it becomes deal very cheesy. Oh.

Mike: I mean, I don't know. They're New York Times bestselling authors. I'm here. Critiquing their work. But so because the joke's on me curmudgeonly New Yorker.

Kristen: But yeah, she used that, that example to kind of explain like so many leaders start getting it backwards. As a leader, you become the container of others' hopes.

They put their hopes and dreams, trust and faith, even their fears into your hands. And too often leaders start thinking that they not only hold the best of others, but that they are that best. They think they are the deal, they make it all about them, and they lose their capacity to positively influence others.

Mike: Yeah, mean, it's a lot of truth. It's cheesy, but there's a lot of

Kristen: There's a lot of truth in it. Yeah.

Mike: for sure,for

Kristen: Yeah. And then his boss tells Ben that Allen and Augustine as a company had voted to become part of the Marden Group and with a condition that they wanted Ben to be the one leading them.

Yeah. He 

Mike: a promotion.

Kristen: Got a promotion.And then Aunt Elle talks about it's all about giving leadership, not taking leadership. Giving leadership is about empowering others, holding them up, promoting them, championing them, respecting their ideas. It's not just a leadership style, it's a way of being.

Mike: I'm try, I am, I'm not good with cheese. There's a deep cynical side to me, but,it's really good stuff.

Kristen: We're basically done. The last part of this, it shows his kind of whole manifesto, which we've talked through most of. But, 

Mike: You can buy that manifesto on Amazon for 29 99. He monetized it,

Kristen: But it includes the final Key Number Five, Practice Giving Leadership. And the notes are don't get it backwards. Don't start thinking you're the deal. Great leadership is never about the leader, which is true. Great leadership is about holding people up. The best way to increase your influence is to give it away.

The more you give, the more you have.

Mike: I agree with that to some degree, and it was something that I think Michael Bungay Stanier talked about. Yeah. As a white dude, I give away power as much as I possibly can. That's not always the right advice. Agreed. For everybody. for me it is, Yeah. But for women leaders, for,

people who come from marginalized, it may not be your best move to give away power.

You have to make that call for yourself. It's not a one size fits all. But yeah, I think the concept is really good.

Kristen: Yeah, I think that's an important point. And I think with all of these books we do, none of this is this is what you should do a hundred percent right. You have, it's like taking in all the information and then you can pick out what works for you and your situation. 'Cause I agree it's not, that is definitely not true for everyone, good point.

Mike: But on, it's a great, it's a great book. It's definitely cheesy. It's a super easy read, but I think it's a good, it will shift your mindset. I think the Go-Giver, really, I don't know that this book was necessary after the Go-Giver, to be honest.

It's a retelling, but, I agree this, we said this last week, right? Leadership, you have a position of power, not for your own aggrandizement, but to serve others to, in some way, and to accomplish a task that is your responsibility. That's not your, you know,you don't get that position for your own enjoyment.

Does it come with some, does it come with the office with the view? Yeah, it does. But that's not the point. The point is the heavy responsibility that you're bearing. That's why it comes with the view. So you can remember all the people that are counting on and all the hopes and the dreams that you are, you're holding and trying to nurture.

Kristen: Yeah. Yeah. I actually found this to be less of a retelling of the Go-Giver than I was expecting. 'Cause so I had, this was my first read of this book.

Oh. I have, I've obviously read the Go-Giver, I think more than

Mike: You gave me that book too. Yeah. I love Yeah. About it.

Kristen: about it. Yeah. But the, this version I had not read before, so I was expecting it to be a more direct application of the laws of stratospheric success from the Go-Giver. But I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see the lessons did have their own leadership take on things.

But yeah, I do think, we can get into what didn't resonate. What did not resonate with you, Mike?

Mike: Well,I think, for me, I'm so curmudgeonly, like the toxic positivity of this is frustrating. No, I, the parable is a little cheesy. I'm surprised that you like this. You're generally not a narrative. Like I'm not, this is, so this is all narrative.

Kristen: I think it's because it has a, it's short and it has a solid structure

Mike: Yeah. Okay.

Kristen: I think that, that's what I was thinking about. This is so narrative. but it's, yeah, I think that's the key for me. It's not like overly long narrative and it's has clear

Mike: Yeah, it's very clear. It's very, it's a parable. I like parables

Kristen: that. And sometimes if the, yeah, if the narrative is good. I mean like Unreasonable Hospitality is heavy on narrative, but I really enjoyed reading that.

There

Mike: There were some other people at my company convention that knew that book that we're talking about it.

Kristen: Which one?

Oh, nice. Yeah. They should be.

Mike: Should be for sure.

what was your least, resonating?

Kristen: Yeah, I mean, kind of the same, like the, it's just, it's got a lot of cheese to it sounds

Mike: so cheesy.

Kristen: I don't mind it most of the time. Sometimes you need some suspension of disbelief to get through some of the passages. I think you, we had our reactions to that as we were reading through it. So,just kind of know that going in, this is not really meant to be like a very realistic telling.

But it's more there to teach these lessons like a parable. But yeah, there's cheese. 

Mike: There's cheese, 

Kristen: There's some high cheese alert. Yeah.The other caveat I wanted to just note in case, it comes up for anybody. When I was researching the background of this book and the original book, apparently the original book, the Go-Giver, is used by, MLM recruiters, specifically like Amway and their, their network of companies. It's actually used as a recruitment and they've been doing this for forever. I think that they mo really did it with Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Oh. In the beginning. There's a few other books they use, but yeah, like somebody will meet you and give you a copy of the book and then that's like their opening to recruit you essentially.

Mike: okay.

I 

Kristen: didn't see any associations. Like I looked briefly and I didn't see any associationsbetween Amway and the authors. And I think that's probably the case with like, all, most of the book we're talking about, right? They're not, Amway just uses them. 'cause it helps prime people towards their way of thinking and then makes them vulnerable.

And there's a reciprocity thing and, we don't need to spend an episode on MLM tactics. do. Maybe we do actually. It is a lot of using all this, some of the stuff we talk about for evil. yeah. But yeah. But I just wanted to note it just in case, if like somebody randomly gives you this book and then they start talking about Amway, you'll know what's going on.

Mike: 99% of people who join MLM companies lose money. 

Kristen: Uhhuh.

Oh 

Mike: Nonetheless.

MLM companies function because downline participants are encouraged to hold onto the belief that they can achieve large returns. While the statistical improbability of this is deemphasized.

Kristen: Yeah,it's, I mean, it's called a pyramid scheme for a reason.

Right? It's a scam. But yeah. Just wanted to note that. Just an FYI,

Mike: yi noted.

Kristen: What's your most life changing takeaway?

Mike: I think you know this, and the reason I see this as almost the same is that it's the overall message of, as a leader, you're there to serve and give not to take.

Kristen: Mm-hmm. 

Mike: And that's contradicted from the way we grow up thinking about leadership is positions of power. It's kind of the reverse. 

Kristen: Yeah.

Mike: So I think that's the thread that I really,the lessons themselves are legion, right? But that mindset is, for me, the most important thing in leadership, actually.

So that's why I think these are great books. Worth, sorting through the cheese. 

Kristen: Yeah.

No, there's good, definitely good stuff 

Mike: And Kristen, what was your most life changing takeaway?

Kristen: Well I wanted to note, I really liked that this book, brought in like personal loss and how it leaves like a mark on your soul that comes out in different ways, including in business.

That's just something I almost never seen mentioned in business books. And I, as somebody who has gone through some challenging loss, I. Always find it like really meaningful. But yeah, I think ul ultimately, like the message that leadership ultimately isn't about you is really helpful to remember in all sorts of different scenarios and really even, going into how I serve clients, like that's why I found the original book so helpful is to make it about them and how, what you offer them, how you can serve them.

Mike: Yeah. One of our speakers at the convention,

I think she does the sales, like she's in charge of sales She had some pretty vulnerable stories to share. Like she's having, she was talking about leadership and showing up as a leader as your best self, and that can be very hard when you're just, you live in your inbox and it's very task oriented and you have so much to get and she shared some pretty difficult moments that she was going through and when she had to bite her tongue with very difficult people and still show that kind of vulnerability is impressive.

Kristen: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You can take it back to Brene.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, that's the hard stuff, if you think the, that's leadership versus management, man, right? LikeI'm trying to learn how to pronounce the word character 

Kristen: Oh my God.

Mike: it's unrecognizable of course, to me in Greek character.

I wish I had a classical education. I really do.

Kristen: All right, well that's our Leadership Book Club on the Go-Giver Leader.

Mike: Oh, another meaning for character in ancient Greek is there we go to sharpen.

Kristen: Oh, okay.

Mike: I mean, it just, you learn so much by digging into

Kristen: You and Aunt Elle are just like this, like

Mike: I might be

Kristen: You might be Aunt Elle.

Mike: Might be Aunt Elle, who's the mother of the book. Come on guys.

I, don't know. They may, suspension

Kristen: of disbelief. Right.

Mike: Right. You know, but they. They found a way to serve a lot of people and do something, kind-hearted and warm-hearted, that should be applauded 

Kristen: oh. So with that, thank you everybody for listening. As always,

Mike: Thank you 

Kristen: and we'll catch you next time.

Mike: the starting a business is hard. Starting a podcast is also hard.

Kristen: Maintaining a podcast is

Mike: a podcast is hard. We're doing our best to stay relevant and bring you ideas and lessons and books that we think will be useful for you.

That's our service.

Kristen: Yeah. And we're also very open to requests and

Mike: Open to requests. You know, when people ask me like, what is my favorite part of my job? mentorship, helping other people grow thei, Capacity in their career and leadership. I love that stuff. So thanks for tuning in. 

Kristen: Thanks everyone.

Mike: Bye. 

Kristen: The Love and Leadership Podcast is produced and co-hosted by me, Kristen Brun Sharkey and co-hosted by Mike Sharkey. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We can't stress enough just how much these reviews help. You can follow us on LinkedIn under Kristen Brun Sharkey and Michael Sharkey, and on Instagram as loveleaderpod.

You can also find more information on our website, loveandleadershippod.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week.