Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

Show Notes

Transcript

My guest today is Charles Spinosa.

Charles has a doctorate in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and three decades of experience as a management consultant, working with Fortune 1000 companies and startups in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, specializing in leadership.

He's the author of two books, Disclosing New Worlds, and his most recent, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities, About Moral Risk-Taking.

A conversation today is likely to include talk about philosophy, morals, and the type of leadership Charles believes is required to build what he calls business masterpieces.

Welcome to my show, Charles.

Thank you very much, Daniel.

I really appreciate being here.

So your book opens with, this is a problem solution thing.

The world is not in a good state.

We have climate crisis, threat of nuclear war, pandemics, inflation, fentanyl, displacement by artificial intelligence, and the decay of truth-seeking.

And then it goes on to explain our desire for convenience, and efficiency, and safety standard in the way of genuine solutions.

So the way I read this is, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

How did your background lead you to integrate philosophy into this moral risk-taking and this, your style of teaching for leadership and what you believe is really needed to be done to solve the problems facing businesses in the world today?

Okay, big question.

Let me see if I can, let me see if I can answer it simply and just as follow up questions.

So the first thing that the values that I give is our highest values in the current age, namely convenience, efficiency, flexibility, and safety.

They come directly from the thinking of Martin Heidegger, who described our age as a technological age, and exactly as you put it, although he puts it in much more complicated words, the more that goes around the same thing happens over and over again.

He calls that the eternal return of the same, but he says that's what's happening with us in technology.

We're getting better and better convenience, more and more efficiency, more and more safety.

Think of it when you think of mountain climbing or camping, there's constantly technological change that makes it safer and safer to do it, more efficient to do it, and more flexibility.

We can present ourselves in different flexible ways over and over again.

And it's more of that all the time.

And you don't get any huge breakthroughs.

You might think, or people like Peter T will point to Elon Musk as someone who's trying to break through by saying, let's go to Mars.

And that would be a breakthrough if we became an interplanetary people.

But by and large, we are living inside those values.

And the point of the preface of the book, which you reference, is that those values are not the kinds of values that we can live by and overcome the crises that we have.

So where are we going to get the gumption?

Where are we going to get the spirit to overcome those crises and move out of more convenience, more efficiency?

When you say the values we have, you means the ones about convenience.

I needed to ask you that.

I'm sorry.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

And frequently in the book, for those who read it, I call those goods, I call those moral goods.

But that's just the Aristotelian philosophical talk.

Don't get confused.

So they're not sufficient to get us through these things.

But what strikes me and what I see in leaders, business leaders, is they want to create businesses that people are committed to for reasons other than they're safe, they're convenient, they're efficient, and they're flexible.

They want businesses that people love, that people admire, and they work for to admire.

And that strikes me if we can unleash that power as the way to overcome what's the kind of lethargy of safety, convenience, efficiency, and flexibility.

And so out of that came the sense that our business leaders today can be the moral artists that lead us out of the problem.

Now, moral artistry is something that comes from philosophy and the way people look at what leaders have done, and historians as well.

Think of the Greek city states, think of the Italian city states during the Renaissance, where the leaders were creating morally distinctive little worlds.

Yeah, that's the other thing I've got from your book, is it sounds like to solve the problems today, you might ask what they did in the Renaissance period.

What would Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo do?

Yeah, and that's one of the things that's in the background of the book.

So the answer to your question is, what do we get from philosophy and history and the humanities in general?

I get the history has been different.

There hasn't been a kind of universal set of moral goods, and they've been richer moral goods.

So universal set, I'm saying we have now, is convenience, flexibility, and so forth.

They've been richer moral goods.

And you take something like Amazon, Asus' Amazon, which by the way has one foot obviously inside convenience, one foot inside flexibility, one foot inside efficiency.

But the organizational goods for Asus' Amazon are what?

Relentlessness.

People decry that.

He works with people relentlessly.

Well, he does, and he thinks it's a great thing, and people who've lasted Amazon think it's a great thing.

Raising the bar on work requirements all the time.

He does.

It's exhausting.

Brugality and fanaticism about the customer.

Those are his four highest values for goods.

People who live in that organization have a deeper, thicker commitment, relentlessness.

I'm going to go to work every day and work the hardest I can.

Well, I think maybe, I don't know if that's the best example.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

I recall he was getting, because working people relentlessly for profit, he was kind of like in the steel days, and I'm Andrew Karn, you know, the founder of the railroad.

Yeah, the steel mills in the railroad.

Yes.

Yeah, just not paying people enough.

And then, yeah, you get these nice, we have a railroad today, but who suffered to build that kind of thing?

It sounds like you're okay with that value.

I actually, I am.

I'm making the book distinction between organizations that we can admire and ones we can embrace.

I've interviewed a number of people that worked with Amazon, now mostly in the management ranks, a number of them who were burnt out.

And this is what they say to me, basically across the board.

Charles, I worked enormously hard at Amazon.

I gave it everything I got.

It ended up burning me out.

But I have to say, I look back at that as the time when I produced the best work of my life and I wouldn't take it back.

That's from the management ranks.

And I think that's by and large what you get from the management ranks.

I think when you push it down to the warehouse workers, you run into some trouble.

I think in most businesses I have worked at, there's always been a place where they push what they're about a little bit too strong in a little in one area or another.

And I should be clear, I'm not criticizing working hard.

Building I watched a documentary on them building the first 747 jumbo jet.

And they were just like two years from now, you got to have something like this.

And we got nothing on paper right now.

And they didn't have the engines for it.

You know, it was crashing and did not crashing, but the engines are blowing out.

And it is, you know, as an engineer myself, you got to work hard sometime.

We're going to put a man on the moon.

I think with the Amazon thing, it was more that as long as you pay people well, and hey, you know what?

I need a day off.

I've been working six days in a week.

Okay, yeah, fine.

And then you need a break.

Yeah.

Burnout.

I mean, it is burnout.

You need to recharge.

This is his moral distinctiveness.

Frugality is one of the other values of Amazon.

So yeah, you're right.

They don't pay.

When he first opened it, you had to pay for parking.

You had to pay for the snacks that you got.

Now, it's no longer that crazy.

And I think Amazon is paying people better.

These are the kinks you have to work out if you're going to be morally distinctive.

And I think being morally distinctive is critical to have industries that break us out of convenience, flexibility, efficiency, and safety.

And he's going to have to work some of them out.

But it is a quite distinctive place.

When you talk to people from Amazon, yeah, they talk about a culture that's very, very distinctive.

Some people don't like it.

Some people hate it.

I've talked before groups where people walk out because they think it's so evil.

I don't happen to think it's so evil.

I think it's quite distinctive.

I think the people who work there generally find a way to get along there.

There are obviously some tough cases where the person shouldn't be there, or they've gone overboard with relentlessness or gone overboard with frugality.

From reading your book, you're an English major, so I'm trying to do the speed reading like I would do a math book, so it takes me a lot of process.

So I haven't quite got it yet.

I'm grasping with this idea of morals.

I think I'm getting the definition wrong in terms of morals.

I think good or bad.

You just said a keyword distinction.

I think what you mean is you stick to your morals or your values, however you build your company and you stick to that.

Is that what you're implying by the morals?

Yeah.

Basically, you do that and you refine as you go along.

But let me just say something about morals because it can be a confusing word and I use it in a way that certain philosophers follow Nietzsche and Bernard Williams and others use it and others don't.

So frequently when people talk about morals, they believe that they're universal ways in which we treat each other that are just.

And it's all about how we treat each other.

My point and the point of philosophers like me is that's insufficient for understanding morality.

You can imagine ways in which we treat each other justly that don't enable anybody to have a good life.

We treat everybody equally the same poor way, and nobody can have a good life.

I want to bring into morality what some people call ethics, I call it morality, the capacity to have a good life.

And that's critical to have moral distinctiveness.

So at Amazon, if you're constantly raising your bar of the work you do, if you're working relentlessly and producing great stuff, that's going to feel to you like a good life.

And you're going to have a lot of pride in that.

One of the, from working for a, I worked for a Fortune 50 company, I think for 11 years, is the engineer.

What we found was there are people who still just want to make a paycheck living, take it home to their family, and maybe they don't even order anything from Amazon.

They don't read books.

Now you can order everything from Amazon.

For example, they never ordered a book from Amazon.

How is all that supposed to work out?

If you have morally distinct companies, they're going to attract people to work for them.

They care about those goods, and people who don't care about those goods, people who just want to work for a paycheck, people who want an easier life, they should work in another company.

In this way, I'm a pluralist.

I mean, the opposite company in a certain way is Google.

Google hires lots of engineers as well, but what does Google take pride in?

Well, they want you to pursue your dreams, and it used to be they paid you a certain amount of time to pursue your dream independent of whatever Google wants you to do.

They go back and forth on that, but it's still something in their hearts, and they promise psychological safety.

You're never going to feel humiliated for whatever you say at Google.

It's a safe environment, completely different from the relentlessness of Amazon.

So give me an example of a non-moral.

The company today that is going to come to mind that we spoke about Amazon and Google being maybe respectable corporations, business models.

What's one that we can use as a non-moral one?

That's a great question.

Nobody's ever asked that for me, but it's a fair question.

Well, it helps me think and understand better if I can get a picture of the opposite of.

I get it.

You're asking for a contrast class and I am duty-bound.

I am morally bound to answer you.

So I'm not trying to wave you off.

Well, first of all, the biggest, simplest opposite is something like a government organization.

A government organization tries to be able to hire everybody, tries to reflect the nature of the economy.

It's inclusive, it includes everybody, it includes all sorts of styles of working, and it follows minimal rules.

If you do this, this, and this, you earn your money and you can stay.

Now, the question is, is there a famous private industry company like that?

That's where I am stuck.

By immoral, remind me of your definition of immoral.

My definition of a moral company, a distinctive moral company is one that provides you a good life.

A company that simply provides you a paycheck.

The long as you come in, you punch the time clock, you do what you do, and you go home.

That would be a company that's not more distinctive to me.

That company is one where you have to provide your good life.

I come up with it.

I cannot name it because people don't like, but there's a utility, a water utility in the UK.

When you go into that company and you talk to people about what's important to them, they talk about what they did on the weekend, they talk about their upcoming holidays.

When you ask them what's good about work, what's good about work is it's relatively stress-free.

They don't feel like so long as they do their job and they know what their job is, they're not going to be fired, and everybody treats them with collegiality.

It's a super nice company.

Now, and it's a law-abiding company and it reports to Par...

Oh, I can't say more.

Sure.

I get the picture though.

They're just, they're okay with their work.

It's like working for the post office in America.

You're going to retire, you got benefits, it's not too bad a work.

But the water people, don't they see the value of water?

My gosh, we can't live without water and they still don't appreciate what they do for it.

See, the point is, if you see the value of water, you're really going to be very careful about what you do with waste, how you purify it.

You're going to want the best technology, you're going to want tomorrow's technology today.

You really care about water, you're going to want to put robots in all your pipes, sensing devices in all your pipes, so you don't lose any water.

If you really care about water, you're going to be hyper vigilant about any time you have to let pollutants out into the rivers, and you are going to clean them up.

If you really care about water, you're going to be in a mood of hope where you're looking to make breakthroughs in water treatment, or a mood of zeal where you're looking to beat all the government standards and have water that tastes the best on the planet, and is the cleanest on the planet, and keeps the rivers around you the best on the planet.

Starting to sound like a great place to work.

Well, yeah, but that's not this company.

That is what the consulting companies I work with, try to turn water companies into.

In this case, it's just like an old non-maintained, let's just put the minimum standard water out.

You don't need to be here any longer because, oh yeah, don't worry about if it leaks a little bit, it always does.

Same, that was the kind of.

Yeah, that's what happens if it's just you go and you collect your paycheck, and your vacation, your holidays are most important.

If, on the other hand, you work with a company that we're working with, what's going to be most important is you love your customers, you want to be able to brag that you have no polluting events, or the polluting events that you had absolutely had to happen because something worse would have happened, and you're going to issue apologies to your customers and have that kind of relationship with your customers when you have polluting events.

You're going to be looking for the best type of good technology to go through and keep leaks from happening, close them in, and certainly flooding, you are going to be spending hours and hours and hours during the rainy season, all hands on deck, preventing floods from happening and destroying people's property.

That is a different kind of water company.

That is one where you're going to be really proud in the morning that you get up.

That's one that offers you not just a fair way of being treated, but a good life.

So you brought it.

You made me think now, okay, how come we don't have that?

What are the cultural obstacles?

In this case, the water, you have a regulation company, the government.

How does some of that prohibit us, make it difficult for us to be innovative and do what you're speaking of?

Okay, okay.

Because they could say you can't charge more than 10 cents a gallon for your toilet water, and therefore, we can't pay the workers anything and they can't stay and worry about the pollution and the water leaking because they can only charge so much for water.

You're exactly right.

I mean, in the parts of the world that I'm talking about, water is a highly regulated industry and the prices are regulated.

And there are a series of variables that the regulator looks at, and you have to hit good numbers in each of those in order to get paid a fair amount of money.

And it's very hard to switch and say, we want to put our priority this year on cutting pollution events, next year on quality of the water.

There's very little that you can do.

So there's the government regulation on the one hand.

But even inside that.

Well, it actually circles down to what people will pay.

Because the government is only regulating because they don't want the cost of the water to go up.

And there lies the problem.

What if it's legitimate?

Well, we can't still afford it because, you know, the people on welfare can't, still can't afford.

And you would change in their water.

We're like, we're chicken and the egg thing.

Actually, you know what?

You know, there's all sorts of room here.

It is whether you are desperate to be invented.

So I'll give you a couple of things that we came up with for helping companies in the water industry.

First of all, they want everybody to conserve water.

And they have, there's a basic amount of water that they agree everybody needs.

Make that for free.

Charge people above that basic amount of water that they need.

Suddenly, you've taken care of poor folks who need water.

If you want to have water like a rich person, well, then you got to pay like a rich person.

But if you want to have the minimum amount that you need...

You know what?

That's a great solution.

I don't like the clothes washers that are low water flow.

I shrink my clothes and they never make them clean.

You can't wash clothes without using water, in my opinion.

And why do I have this force down on me?

Because people are wasting water.

Let me choose to wash one load a week and fill it up, instead of giving me a washing machine where I limit it.

That's a perfect solution, because then the people who overuse, they will pay for it.

And if you don't, then it's taken care of.

Yeah.

And the water accountants have figured this out.

But actually nobody really wants to fight the government to build that way in the places where we've worked.

But again, if you're innovative, you can do another one.

Well, in lots of parts of the world where there are lots of cement surfaces, there's lots of flooding.

However, there is a way to avoid that flooding by engaging your customers.

If you engage your customers to collect their roof water and put it in a container that either waters your plants or just slowly lets the water leak out, they call it, I probably shouldn't say, they call it a water flood.

But if you do that and you engage your customers, you can cut millions out of the cost it takes you to renovate your wastewater plants.

With that money, you can upgrade other things and have fewer pollution.

Where's the city that has the concrete and the flooding problems?

Well, I know exactly where I am.

I'm just wondering if I'm going to be breaking confidentiality.

Yeah, it's okay.

Can I say it's in Europe?

Is that good enough?

Well, I was thinking it can't be in America because here, go figure, if you elect your water off the roof, the local utility owns it and it's technically illegal.

They don't enforce it, mind you, if you water your garden with it.

It's another, you own my roof water?

Who would have thought that?

Who would have thought?

Yeah.

But that's okay because you're working it out with the utility.

My point is that if you go into utilities, and in fact, one of the cases that led to the generation of the book was a gas utility.

If you go in and you change the mindset from safety and follow the rules which is really the primary mindset inside most of the utilities.

Always have an audit trail, always make sure that everybody can see that you've been following the rules.

Let's be safe.

You change the mindset, but let's innovate.

Let's do something cool for our customers.

Let's do something cool for the next generation.

You can change it.

You can change even the water utilities.

My big example, the example that led me to write the book.

One of the questions about my book, so I'm saying business leaders should be moral artists, and they should be creating morally distinctive companies.

I didn't leave study of literature and philosophy and get that idea right away.

It took me a long time.

People would say, why did it take you?

It took me about 15 years.

But when I got it, it was because I was working with a leader who ran a gas utility, a gas distribution utility, the pipes that leads to the gas that you use for your stove and other things.

It was in an urban area, and the worst thing possible happened to him.

And that was he had a gas leak that burst into flame, fire in a multi-story building.

And not only was that bad, lives get lost, but all the nearby shutoff valves were under meters and meters of cement.

And the next thing was the maps of the pipes were old and ancient and inaccurate.

Now, and so this disaster was happening.

And they, you know, there are procedures, you go back and back and back and you shut off valves and shut off valves.

Pretty soon you're shutting over whole city in order to stop one building.

He called the senior team together and said, is there something we can come up with to stop the gas from feeding the fire?

And they thought for a while and they said, you know, and I'm not an engineer like you, Daniel, so please bear with me as I talk about it, as I understand it.

They came up with the idea essentially of blowing up balloons in the pipes that were feeding fire.

And he asked his team, they thought they said, there's a chance it would work.

There's a pretty good chance it will fail in any case.

If it succeeds, you're going to be in front of them.

Just because they couldn't shut the gas off?

Yeah, they couldn't shut it off.

So the idea was you blow something up in the pipes and it stops the gas from flowing.

If you're asking me any more engineering questions.

Oh, I'm just trying to get the whole picture of...

Yeah, no, please.

Somewhere there was a pipe that cracked, burst or something, and an ignition source to start it off.

Yeah, that was in the building.

And then they needed to shut off the gas to it.

All the valves, they couldn't reach or they had to shut off the system.

The system was old basically.

Yeah, very old, very old, very old.

An old European system.

And they said, don't do it.

You'll be before judicial boards for the rest of your life.

He made the decision to do it.

He said, I've believed in innovation all my life.

Let's innovate.

Let's do it.

He did it.

It worked.

As it turned out, I started working for him at London, in a separate engagement about a couple of weeks later.

And he said to me, Charles, this is what I did.

I'm going to be before judicial hearings at least one day a week, for the next five years, maybe more.

And I did it because I thought innovation would be good for this industry.

Should I stick with this or should I just apologize?

Say never again.

And I said, you want innovation.

This is your dream.

You want to make this industry innovative.

You're never going to like your work if you don't.

I said, so go do it.

And he did it.

And he was, in fact, called before judicial boards time and time again.

But there are only two companies that have robots in most of their pipes, checking for leaks, for gas leaks.

There are only two companies in Europe that have cars driving around, sniffing for gas all over the place.

He's got one of the most innovative gas distribution companies ever.

And this is a utility.

It's under all the regulations, but it's really changing the way people look at gas utilities.

Obviously, they're moving from natural gas to biomethane.

Yeah, do fight to justify change at all?

Is that what basically...

Because it's such a scary thing to some people, gas.

Oh, we can't change it because it works.

Well, didn't because it started building on fire.

Well, that was a one up.

We're not going to change anything.

Other than that one building blowing up, it's pretty safe.

Is that what he was up against?

He was, he was...

No, he didn't follow the procedures when something goes wrong.

But it wasn't working though.

What the procedures don't seem to help.

It doesn't matter the procedure, you follow the procedures no matter what in this industry.

In a rule following industry, the rules are there to say, you were doing the right thing.

Except my brother who's a CEO, won't name which company, he won't want me to.

He pointed out to me because he runs into this.

As a manager, actually, you were put there to change the rules.

Because somebody else made the rules before you, and you don't even know why they're there anymore, and that's your job, why are you here?

He pointed it out that way, like, you're supposed to change the rules if you're a manager.

This is why your brother is a CEO.

This is exactly right, this is exactly what I find.

And when you change the rule, sometimes you can't get everybody's agreement, sometimes you have to push the change through.

And whenever you push the change through, you're taking a risk because if it doesn't work, people will condemn you and they won't condemn you for just making a simple calculative mistake, they will condemn you for moral reasons.

Well, that's why you make the big money.

That's why you make the big money.

Why you're the manager, the CEO.

This is my client.

Most of what we train managers to do and CEOs to do is just talk about operational efficiency.

What they're really doing when they get honest, as your brother was with you, and I don't know if he's as honest with his own board of directors as he is with you, is he says, I take-

He tries and they often, he called it the Fred and Barney.

He's like, you know what I mean?

There's him speaking to these people and they all go, but that's not the way we do it and that's not how we're supposed to do it, and that's how they do it and he's like his eyes roll over him.

It's going to be a long day.

Yes, exactly, that's what they face.

What I've tried to do, what my whole book is about is to give leaders like your brother permission to say, yes, what I am about is changing the rules to create a more admirable, better organization.

And many times changing the rules means pushing through a change against opposition, calculating as best I can for a good outcome, but taking a chance, taking a moral risk, as I call it, in order to make this change.

And when your brother or other leaders like the one I was describing, do that, and choose, make the company more innovative, make it different in some other way, more customer friendly, make it deliver things faster, whatever it is.

One of the things, help me with this, because I'm not a CEO except for my own company, which you call your CEO of your own company doesn't really count.

One thing he runs into, he tells me, is the bean counters, the accountants who will do or someone new comes in to finance people, and they play with the money to make it look better for next year, while he's worried about that he can't do this year what he needs to, and they're trying to make it look good on paper.

I don't know if I'm describing this right.

Exactly.

Yeah, financial engineering.

It helped me.

Give me an example of that, and then what we can do as a solution to try to encourage change with the way we do that.

Okay.

Wow.

A couple of examples come to mind.

One I have in the book, in the strategy chapter of the book, it's chapter 8.

It was a woman named Julia Robertson, and this one I can talk about freely.

She ran in Pelham.

It's a recruitment company in the recruitment industry.

She's based in the UK, but it's really a global business.

She wanted to change the nature of recruitment.

Basically was getting people in chairs fast, getting them out of chairs fast, it's temporary workers, moving them in and moving them out, and doing it at as low a cost as possible.

That means not treating them very well, not treating them like human beings, and she wanted to break that.

She did that by creating company that was going to be on the high road, treat these people like they were really valuable employees, continually train them and put them in places where they were going to be treated like really valuable employees.

She took some moral risks in doing that, and she got to the point where she looked at her own company, and it was pointed out to her by the CFO that a good third of her profits were made through financial engineering.

It was really all sorts of financial trickery.

For instance, in the country, well, in the UK, I can say it, if a temporary employee doesn't ask for vacation money, you don't have to give the vacation money to the temporary employee.

Obviously, to make more money, you keep this as much of a secret as you possibly can.

Another thing, if you hire the employee at your company, your recruitment company, and every once in a while, send the employee out to other companies, you don't have to pay a fair wage that the other company has to pay.

And all sorts of financial trickery like that.

And this is very hard because the people who do it, who come up with it, are really ingenious people.

And you close down one piece of trickery and they come up with two or three more.

So what was the solution?

She went through, I believe it was five CFOs, until she found one.

The personal agreed wizard to get rid of all these great profits.

That's what she called them, great profits.

And be able to stay ahead of all the managers that were coming up with new ways to do it.

The problem with financial engineering is...

It's temporary.

Next year, you got the same problem.

Well, and then they come up with another piece of trickery and another piece of trickery.

If it gets really bad, you get to Enron.

Where Andy Fast, the CFO of Enron, fascinating case, this is a case of somebody who took a moral risk that backfired, that didn't work.

But the year before he did all this crazy financial accounting, he won the CFO of the year award because of his financial genius.

He fell in love with his own genius and it got out of control and that's what can happen.

I know there's examples where people get awards for all of a sudden they turn the company around.

How did they do that?

It's only on paper.

They get an award, they get a lot of money, they're going to move on and the next year we'll be back to square one or worse because now in worse shape as things are on the books.

But that's also a cultural thing because they're trying to get the stock price in many cases to go up for that.

So you're battling, I have to make the stock price look good.

And so in my career, I've run into three or four different variants.

Moving the stock price up temporarily is not the worst form of this.

Because as you say, it can come back to haunt you.

And what you want to do is if you're a CEO, you want to have something that you have control over.

You don't want, if you're a CEO, to have financial wizardry taking control away from you.

So most CEOs I know, you can back them into a corner, and they can go along with playing with numbers for a short time.

But it's usually a short time.

The cases that are the worst cases that I've found, and we saw it before 2008, are where people become in love with financial wizardry.

I was working in investment banks in 2008, and in those years and years before, people were in love with coming up with one fancy derivative after another, after another, after another.

I would talk to these financial people, and they were more interested in publishing the article on how they're using tensor calculus to come up with this financial instrument, than they were with what it was practically going to do.

Well, back to the Amazon and the Google.

Okay.

Do we forget, our mission is to put stuff out on the Amazon truck next day for free, if you get prime.

That's what we're here for, not to, you don't work on Wall Street to work at Amazon or Google.

Yeah.

Well, and it's when people get carried away with a narrow part of the mission, and forget customers, primarily forget customers, they can also forget colleagues, they can forget suppliers.

But when you forget customers and just try to do one cool thing after another, after another and get carried away with it, that is where I see the biggest financial crises coming from and it certainly happens and I've seen it.

It's the hardest to stop because they're so ingenious.

You could say, I love that.

Who would have thought of that?

Of course, we'll try it.

It's just such an ingenious idea.

Especially if I own stock.

You have your book and you do management consulting.

For listeners, especially the young emerging leaders, the young people, what are some practical tips you would give them?

We have this philosophy, but something I can remember.

Oh yeah, Charles said that.

Remember one or two things most important.

What would those be?

Young people?

Yeah.

By the way, my son is one of those young people.

I'll say something that comes out of the conversation that he and I are having.

And that is, tell truth to power.

It's hard.

It's not easy.

It requires courage, but more than courage, it requires learning how to compose the difficult truth you want to tell people.

And so it's not a matter of waiting for somebody to create a safe space for you.

You go out and number.

So this is my advice is, as much as you can tell truth to power, that will make your life more inventive and rich and worth living, and make you more valuable at work.

Tell truth to power.

That is, and that is anybody who can affect your career roughly.

And you have to learn how to compose what you're going to say.

You have to figure out what they would think ahead of time, and what they would say.

You have to show them that you are wise and that you're a truth seeker, so that you're not just blurting something out.

And you have to show them how you care for them and the company, and caring for them personally and the company.

And if you can combine that into the difficult thing you're telling them, you can effectively tell truth to power.

If you can tell truth to power, you can advance your career, and you can look at yourself far more easily in the mirror in the morning.

And you're also doing the thing that leaders do.

Every time you tell truth to power, you're putting yourself at some risk, and you're learning moral risk taking.

So that's...

By truth to power, you mean the power being the upper management, tell truth to...

Normally, it's upper management, but it can be anybody that affects your career.

Sometimes it's a colleague.

Sometimes there's an employee who is critically important, who could walk out on you.

That person has power at that point.

Telling the truth to that person, even if that person reports to you, is difficult.

I like the second part of what you said, which is you're trying to...

It's like empathy or what is good for them.

I lead with that.

For example, you're having a dispute with your partner or your wife.

Honey, I need you to do this.

Instead, start with, honey, you know I appreciate your way or love you do with this, but wouldn't it be better if we did this instead, like lead with the positive or lead with that?

Well, lead with care.

I always, if you're telling somebody an ugly truth, a difficult truth, and they don't know you care for them, the first question they're going to ask is, what's the agenda?

What is he or she trying to get from me?

Your wife would too.

When you tell it to your wife, she has to believe that you do care for her, you do love her, that you wouldn't be saying this if you didn't.

So that's number one.

I try to go beyond empathy in trying to figure out how it is they're going to respond and how it is they're going to think.

Empathy, for me, is too narrow.

When we talk about empathy, we sort of-

Maybe that wasn't the best word.

It was just my vocabulary at the moment.

Okay, fine.

You want to know how the world's going to look to them when you say this to them.

If that's empathy, that's fine.

That's what you want to-

How is it going to change the way they see the world?

Are they going to feel beaten up?

Does it mean that some part of the world that they thought was great, you're now telling them is not so great and their whole life is a little bit worse?

If so, when you tell them that, when you tell them this side of your family, they're pulling you into the sinkhole, but I love my Uncle John.

I guess you do love your Uncle John, but it's going to cause some real problems for you.

It's very painful.

Let's see how we can maintain that love only keep it, make it different.

You have to be able to think.

Can we give listeners like a made up example, of course, a scenario, made up scenario, you're a CEO of how this might happen.

Actually, why don't I give you a real life scenario?

I was working with a manager at a high-tech company, and in many high-tech companies, in fact, maybe your listeners are in such a place.

She was a digital scientist and she was developing the next generation digital security device.

Now, digital scientists have to work with engineering, they have to work with product, they have to work with sales.

Here she was, she had a design for the next generation.

Sales went out and told the customers that it would be ready in a year.

Engineering told her that there was no way they could do it in five years.

They'd have to change all the platforms.

She thought that was wrong.

Product said with a few tweaks, you can do this, this, and this, but she knew it wasn't going to make the customers happy.

She, as a digital engineer, was fortunate enough to be able to talk to the customer.

She had a sense of the whole.

In any case, everybody was lying to the CEO.

And the CEO went out and told the board that the device would be ready way before it could be.

What do you do?

Well, in most companies, what you do is you protect your silo.

And you protect your silo by saying, yeah, we can do it and be in preparing your way to blame the other silos.

Sales sold the wrong thing.

Product told us to make the wrong tweaks.

Engineering was too slow.

She didn't have a design, a real design, working with design for the next generation.

You develop your blame game.

I advised her to go tell the CEO what was going on.

Tell him in plain terms as much as she could.

I advised her to get an ally first in one of these other areas.

She tried sales.

She actually got the guy in sales after he went apoplectic and told her she was lying to him first.

Got him to say, okay, they went to the CEO together, took them two tries to get the truth out.

They told the CEO, he at first was apoplectic, but then he evaluated it, and found out she was right.

In the end, she got a promotion.

She was given authority over engineering.

They're working at producing a next generation digital safety tool.

The point is, if nobody had told the CEO what was what, they would be in this endless blame game and paralyzed and not moving forward.

Now, in speaking truth to power, she faced three or four apoplectically angry responses.

It takes courage.

And each time she had thought through what was going to make them angry.

I got the picture of the parts about engineering, said it can't be done.

Sales said it would be done to the customer.

I lost where her position, and then the CEO is completely ignorant.

He's being told it's going to be done in a year.

Probably, there's no problem.

But what was the risk she took?

Was she in charge of actually making it happen, and now it's not happening, and whose fault is it?

She was in charge of the design.

She was going to be blamed for having a faulty design.

But the risk she took, I'm sorry I didn't say that, was basically each of these departments had a code of silence.

Be prepared to point the finger at another department, but hold off as long as you can.

And that was how they worked.

That's how it normally works.

She was the one that broke through the code of silence prematurely.

Actually, that's a great position to be in when no one else is doing it.

I'm just going to go two seats above and go, do you know what's going on over there?

And first, they're going to go, who are you and how do you know?

And no, that's not how it is, like you said, you're going to get to know, because I know everything.

I'm the CEO.

Okay, I'll be back in a week.

You go ask around and you go back and see.

It's like I told you, right?

Then you're in a great position because Daniel, how do I fix this mess?

And then, like you say, all of a sudden you have the promotion because you do know what's going on and how to fix it.

But the CEO is going to take the credit.

See, of course, the CEO takes credit, but what you've got is you have built some trust in an area of distrust.

And the way you describe it is an outline, right?

It's a little bit more emotionally wrenching than you describe, but that is the position.

And that's what happens if you tell truth to power.

If you do it wisely, that's what can happen.

You have to step out of your own department and realize, you know, we're all in this together.

We're going to go bankrupt or not sell product, get laid off.

It could be you, it could be me.

We need to work together.

And that is the second part of what I would advise.

And that is what I call seeking truth.

And people don't do that.

People stay within their silos.

They don't look at the whole.

They don't look at what it takes to deliver what you need to deliver to the customer.

And they don't look at the cost it takes to deliver what you need to deliver to your customer.

Wherever you are in the business, you should look at it as a whole.

And you learn from people as you go, because it's very hard when you're not at the top to see it as a whole.

That doesn't mean you can't find out how to see it as a whole.

You ask your manager, you ask colleagues, you ask people when you're working across units what it looks like there.

And that's how you learn.

And it's critical to be seeking truth so that you can say truth.

So, great conversation, Charles.

It didn't get to so deep philosophically, at least with the nomenclature and the words that you guys use in being a doctor of English literature is able to stay with you.

Is there anything we haven't spoken about that you'd like to talk about?

I'll mention your book in your website as we wrap up.

Okay.

Well, first of all, let me say thank you, Daniel.

I love the questions.

They're wonderful questions.

I can sort of describe what the book says in three bullet point phrases.

And we've covered most of it.

Number one, ask what always goes wrong here.

That's what I call the moral anomaly, but that's the thing that you would have to take a risk to solve that we've discussed.

We've discussed how managers see things that need to change, that they have to take risks to solve.

The fancy word for that is moral anomaly, something unusual that has a moral implication.

People can do that.

People can answer what always goes wrong in their business, I find.

The next thing which we didn't describe too much, although you heard it when I spoke about the guy who loved innovation.

What would you love to happen instead?

That is a question people have a hard time with.

If you're in a business, figure out what you would love to have happen instead in the way your job works.

When I say love, what you would love to happen not just for you, but for your customers and for your colleagues and for everybody.

It's still a business thing.

Then ask yourself what moral risks you have to take to get there and take them wisely.

That's basically the core of the book.

I think the book gives you permission to do that.

Everybody else is telling you, follow this recipe to get ahead, follow that recipe to get ahead, follow that recipe.

Ask what always goes wrong here, what would you love instead?

What risks do I have to take?

I like that because that's my focus on, I used to complain a lot.

And people are like, Dan, where's the solution?

Quit telling us what's wrong.

Don't open your mouth unless you have something better to...

It's kind of like when you're a kid come to think of it, when your mom tells you, don't open your mouth unless you have something good to say or...

Where do you want us to go?

So otherwise, what's the point?

I like that part and then take the risk.

And then take the risk.

The funny thing is, what would you love?

It's the hardest thing for people to answer.

That's a question you have to take seriously for the reasons you gave.

If you're just a complainer, you're going to be seen as just a complainer.

You have to at least be able to say what you would love instead.

Nice.

Charles' website is charlesspinozaspinosa.com.

It'll be in the show notes along with his latest book, Leadership as Masterpiece Creation, What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities About Moral Risk-Taking.

Charles, thanks so much for being on my show.

Thank you, Daniel.

It's a wonderful show.

I hope the listeners have found it really intriguing and fun.

Have a great day.