December 9, 2025 • 49 mins
Excellence today is not achieved through one-off transformations, but through the ongoing discipline of honing. Leaders who champion this mindset foster a culture of precision, resilience, and elevated performance. By continuously refining their approach and making constant micro-adjustments, they not only meet challenges head-on but also inspire their organizations to perform at the highest level. Continuous honing is the true path to enduring excellence in uncertain times.
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Working on Purpose is broadcast live Tuesdays at 6PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Working on Purpose is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:20):
choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome back to the Working in Purpose program, which has
been brought to you with passionate pride since February of
twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great
to have you. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes. If
we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm
a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker
and author. My team and I at gusto Now help
companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic,
(01:26):
high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by
meaning and purpose. You can learn more about us about
us now. We can work together at gustodashnow dot com
or my personal site at last Coortes dot com. Getting
into today's program we had with us today two dynamic
men from Deloitte, Jeff Tuff and Steven Goldbach. Jeff Toff
is a principal at Deloitte and holds various positions across
(01:49):
the firm's sustainability, innovation and strategy practices. Those include leadership
of the US Hydrogen Practice and all sectors excuse me,
and all sectors related to energy. Jeff's work centers on
helping clients transform their businesses to grow and compete in
non traditional ways. Also with US is Stephen Goldbach. Goldbach
(02:10):
who leads deloitte Sustainability business in the US, which serves
the complex and novel challenges their clients face across issues
such as climate adaptation and other challenges associated with creating
a more sustainable future. Previously, he served as Deloitte's US
Chief Strategy Officer for eight years. They have written three
books together. Today we're talking about their latest, hon How
(02:30):
Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Gentlemen, welcome back to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
Yeah, thanks for having us again.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You guys are crazy and amazing at the same time, right,
Can we just start with that? Can we level set
that you're both crazy and amazing? Can we agree on that?
Speaker 6 (02:46):
Well, I thought you were going to call one of
us crazy and one of us amazing and then just
leave it, leave it out there that figure out which
one is.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
With for us for you to choose.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
No, no, no, no, I'm giving you both both of
these labels here. So you know, as I was thinking
about this and I was reading your book, let's just
lasses for people who haven't ready yet, It's just gorgeous.
I was just thinking to myself, you know, I know
you know what goes on at Deloitte. You guys are
really really busy humans, and so here you are. You've
unplanned and accidentally written a trilogy of books here. So
(03:14):
let's just start with how how in the world, first
do you do you find time to do that? What's
the inspiration? I know a little something about this, but
our listeners and viewers don't craziness explained, please.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
Well, I'll say it has been an interesting journey, and
I'm sure Steve has his own version of the journey
as well. Over the course of the I guess it's eight,
maybe even close to nine years now that Steve and
I have been writing books together, and we've learned a
lot about each other over time. And one of the
things we've learned is that we're actually very different writers
in terms of how we approach it, the times that
(03:49):
we try to take it on, the joy or lack
of joy that we get from it at certain points
in time, and so we you know, we each have
our own style. I will say for myself, finding the
time i'm is hard, but when I find it, I
can really concentrate a lot of effort and bang out
a lot of content all at once, which I'm not
(04:10):
saying is the same for Steve necessarily. But the good
news here is that the stuff we write about is
entirely consistent with what we experience in our work lives.
It's not like two different lives here that we're somehow
trying to live. We're actually taking lessons that we take
from our client work day in day out, and then
trying to generalize them in a way that helps others
that may be struggling with some of the same issues.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Awesome, anything to add Steve.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Look, it's just I think it takes. One of the
things that's forced me to do is I love writing,
and I love engaging with people about the ideas even more.
That's the thing that I kind of enjoy about this process.
And the writing process for me is about getting the
best and most concise version of what we're seeing onto
(04:59):
a piece of paper, and that makes our ideas crisper
and easier to easier to understand when we work with clients.
So I think that that's sort of the synergistic aspect
of it to our work, and so I don't find
it a burden. It's one of those things where you
just have to make the time to write and I
find having a good outline makes the writing process a
(05:20):
little easier. I'm not as natural a writer as Jeff.
Jeff had the benefit of a upbringing and writing and
I've kind of new to this over time.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I forget which one of you had the idea first
of just maybe doing an article, then the other one said, no, no, no,
I've got bigger aspirations. Let's do a book. Which way
did it go?
Speaker 6 (05:40):
That's a good memory telling the story.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
I do read your books, guys.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Yeah, So I had been writing for some time, As
Steve said, I have a history in writing. I actually
way back when I studied to be a creative writing
that was my major in college. And I had always
dabbled with trying to get thoughts out down on ear
in a variety of different formats, from plays to poetry
to fiction to what have you.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
But I did.
Speaker 6 (06:06):
I guess my serious business writing career really started about
fifteen or twenty years ago, when I started writing articles
for the likes of Harvard Business Review and other magazines,
which were thankfully well received and became reasonably well circulated.
And you know, Steve and I had worked together at
the same firm for some time then we ran in
the same circles, and it was it was after that
(06:29):
firm actually joined up with Deloitte and we both came
to Deloitte. We were at a session together and Steve said, hey,
you know, I've read some of your stuff, and actually
Steve had published some pieces as well. One I was
just telling him two days ago that one has stuck
in my head ever since it came out about the
difference between hockey and football applied to business, which I'll
leave that out to Linger. And he said, hey, you know,
(06:50):
we should do some writing together at some point, and
I made what I thought was a very gracious offer
to come and be a guest blogger on the blog
that I was writing for a huff Post at the time.
And Steve had bigger aspirations than that, didn't you, Steve.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
But it was, but my aspirations was not a book.
So the aspiration was we could write something together in
HBr or something like that. And then it was Jeff
that said, well, actually, you know this book publisher Wiley's
been chasing us for a follow up to The Ten
Types of Innovation, and that was the origin story for Debtonate.
(07:25):
And then it just flourished from there.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Well, let's talk about that briefly. So, since you have
now written the Accidental trilogy, you say unplanned, but I
like the idea of calling it accidental. Let's just if
we can sketch the ideas from meach you have deton first,
and then Provoke, which we talked about in the last
conversation we had together. And now, of course tone give
us a little understanding of how maybe the ideas stitch together.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
For those three maybe I'll give us a head start
and Jeff can add so I think debtonate if we're
giving the users sort of the behind the scenes story
at NATE was we had an observation or several observations
about the world that there was just a bunch of
things that businesses did in the name of best practices
(08:12):
that when you take a jaundiced eye a skeptics eye,
to have made no sense and we needed to change
those supposed best practices. And then Provoke is really about
how you you know, how you shape the future to
your advantage early by identifying trends that are a matter
(08:33):
of when they'll come to fruition rather than a matter
of if we tend to wait as managers far too long.
And then hone is really about how do you on
a more ongoing basis manage the system to your advantage.
If I'm going back and saying, like, what's the common
threat and how would I explain it today? Not necessarily
(08:54):
like when we say unplanned or accidental, I think that's
because we didn't set out with this. I think part
of this is a recognition that you don't usually know
the future. You've got to manage companies more from a
perspective of first principles, i e. Satisfying customer needs. You know,
changing human behavior is the most basic some atomic particle
(09:18):
in business, Really constantly looking to the future for what's
coming next, and then trying to shape your surroundings towards that.
But then being vigilant is really where we get to,
and hone being vigilant about not just believing that you're
good once you said it. You have to be carefully
managing your environment because it's constantly changing, whether it's competition
(09:41):
or technology. And that's where we get to with Home.
But I'm sure Jeff would add to that, as I
see him chopping at the bit.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
I didn't know it was that obvious after eight years together, Steve.
But I think that's a good summary. We can obviously
go a lot deeper on each book, but I will
say that we have taken pay age from our own
quote unquote teachings or writings over time. And one of
the themes that we come back to time and again
in all all three books is, and this is an
overstatement for effect, but things are always better if you
(10:11):
pay really keen attention to the markets you serve and
the quote unquote customers or users you serve. And I
will say that we've found after each book that we
did leave our readers wanting a little bit more, not
necessarily of our writing, but of the kind of what
comes next. So Detonate was about blowing up the playbooks,
and after you've blown up the playbooks, and you know,
(10:32):
we did suggest at that point some principles of how
managers can work effectively or lead effectively in an age
of uncertainty, but it wasn't really the okay, so what's next?
So provoke then was the logical follow up to that
after you've blown up the playbooks, to say, how do
you actually create the future in which you have advantage
when you actually need to start rebuilding things, and hone
(10:53):
again was a logical follow up to provoke because we
create the future, but then how do you manage differently
than you have in the past once you're once you
start to approach that future. And so, even though it
has been accidental, I am proud at how all three
of the books hold together, and at this point actually
do feel somewhat complete.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Delightful. Now, speaking of delightful, I really love it since
I do read a book every single week for this
for this podcast, cover two cover, and I take the
notes and everything else that's my research. I get delighted
when authors do something a little bit different and compelling.
And so in your case, of course, you have helped
us learn from four distinct artisans in your book about
(11:34):
this idea of honing, and I think it's just delightful.
So will you introduce us briefly to your four artisans
that give us inspiration and direction in the book.
Speaker 5 (11:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (11:43):
Why don't we do it in rough order of their
appearance in the book? Steve, So, what do you lead
us off with Flannery?
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Yeah, I'll take Flannery, you take On, I'll take Sam,
you take our lady Peace. So this is a good
example lease of where you know, we have to come
up with creative ways to tell stories. We're we're in
a business where we're not able to divulge any of
(12:10):
the work we do with clients, and so part of
it is we look for stories that would share the
same benefit that are you know, wonderful to share with
the world. And flannery story is has been sort of
We made it the centerpiece of chapter one because it
was a conversation with her that led us to the
(12:31):
title of hon And it basically is, you know, she's
a wonderful chef. She works in people's homes. She doesn't
have a restaurant, and she comes over and she'll do special,
special gigs and parties and things like that. And we
had the benefit of knowing her for the last fifteen
years and I noticed that she's just always I thought
(12:54):
she was sharpening her knives before every gig. And I said, like, Flannery,
what do you what do you? What do you? Why
do you do that every time? And She's like, I'm
not sharpening them, Steve. She's got this, she's got this
you know, crazy uh, you know way to talk. She's like,
I'm not sharpening them I'm honing them. There's a big difference. Honing,
(13:16):
you know, doesn't Honing doesn't take away any of the steel.
Sharpening actually takes steel off the blade. You're actually thinning
the blade, You're making it more brittle, and honing is
realigning the steel that exists to make it cut the
way it was originally intended to the last time it
was sharpened. And she was saying, this is just keeping
(13:37):
the knives sharp the way I want them to be, because
a sharp knife is actually a safer knife inside the kitchen.
And but then the thing she said also was honing
is a maintenance and a meditation, and so it was
also not just about maintaining the knives. It was also
about reminding her herself right before an event. But this
(14:02):
is what I'm trying to do. It's like a way
to focus ourselves. So we thought that was a great
metaphor for keeping an organization sharp the last time they
made you made made your changes to making sure it's
doing what you're wanting it to do, but also reminding
you to focus on the things that are super important
your customers, your employees, what what's your elemental purpose in business?
(14:23):
And how do how do you do that. So that's
the lessons we took away from from Flannery.
Speaker 6 (14:30):
And then the second artisan we profiled on A Vonda
Wall is actually best known out in the world as
probably one of the most, if not the most prolific
and well known marine photographers. So he's he's become famous
shooting shooting photos of sailboats and sail races and what
have you. But he's got a really interesting life story
(14:53):
about and it was born in born in South Africa,
grew up around boats, But most of what he has
learned over time and that he's been able to apply
to his photography is came from him tinkering in first
a machine shop and then on boats. He's a world
class sailor himself. He's actually had a number of different
(15:15):
He's had a number of different documentaries made about him
that ultimately come back to him rebuilding some old boats
from scratch. And what fascinated us about on A as
we got into it was not just the way he
constructed the pictures he makes, but what he did in
his off time and the fact that he is ultimately
the consummate tinkerer, and what we're trying to teach business
(15:35):
executives is to be consummate tinkerers at aircraft.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Love it you guys. Okay, let's go ahead and get
the last two and then we'll go and break.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Sam Pollard So Sam is a film editor and a
documentary filmmaker himself. He is famous as an editor for
editing a number of Spike Lee's films in the nineteen nineties.
He is a an Oscar nominated filmmaker. He's won a
(16:05):
number of other awards. He's made a number of amazing
documentaries as well, some together with Spike and some on
his own. He is just what I found compelling about
his evolution is he has to some extent softened his
(16:26):
approach over the years, and now what he really just
focuses on is making his subjects in his interviews feel
super comfortable, feel super at ease, so that they are
sharing his stories. He feels like his job is to
get the story out into the world, and he wants
(16:48):
to put as little between the documentary subject and the
camera as possible, so he looks to make them super comfortable.
Whereas before, as an editor and an early director, he
you know, was trying to almost too hard too in
his words, to to sort of force a vision onto
(17:09):
his team and to the subjects. And now he's become,
you know, a little bit more relaxed over the years
and realizes the way to bring a subject to life
is just sort of let it paint itself. And so
he's honed his own craft over the over the years
and his his work is amazing.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
And then the fourth Artisans.
Speaker 6 (17:26):
Anyone that knows me would not be surprised that I
somehow figured out a way to get a rock band
in the book. But Our Lady Piece is a very
well known Canadian rock band. We are both Canadian gentlemen
of a certain age who grew up listening to Canadian
indie rock, well, indie rock from everywhere, but Canadian indie
(17:48):
rock in particular. Our Lady Piece was always one of
the standout acts at that time, and.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
We had the.
Speaker 6 (17:54):
We had the great benefit of speaking with two of
the members of Our Lady Peace to the original members,
rain Mata, who is the lead singer, and Duncan Coots,
who has been a longtime bass player, and there was
just a there was a fascinating metaphor for business all
through Our Lady Piece's story. They've been around for over
thirty years. At this point, they think of Rain and
(18:15):
duncan think of themselves as the CEO and COO, respectively
of the band. Rain has got a very successful side
gig as a tech entrepreneur, and he's brought a lot
of what he's learned about business over time into the
music business and the way that they've grown the band.
But actually it's been just all the disruptions to the
music industry over time and the way that they as
(18:36):
individuals and the band itself have had to shift and
hone themselves to stay relevant over that course of that
thirty years that we found to be a great way
to learn some lessons from what would otherwise be a
pretty strange couple of folks to profile in a business book.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Well again, I really appreciate that it made for a
very interesting read, and I get delighted whenever we can
take ideas and lessons from one very different area into another.
So love it, guys, let's grab our first break. I'm
your host, doctor e Release Cortes. We got an air
with Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach of Deloitte, who each
have long spanning careers as principles and sustainability innovation and strategy.
(19:14):
We've been talking a bit about their first there are
three books in total. How they weave together the opportunity
for us to learn from some of these artisans about
how to hone. After the break, we're going to talk
about our over reliant focus on transformation in the world
of business. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose
inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance,
and commit within the workforce. To learn more or to
invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her
(20:05):
at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
Elise A. L Se at eliscortes dot com. Now back
(20:29):
to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If you are just
joining us. My guests are Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach,
the authors of hone, How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. So
one of the benning delightful things that I get out
of your books, all of your books actually, but this
one in particular, was this notion of we have this
(20:56):
tendency to over rely on transformation in business. And I
think if anybody's listening to this, they might find that
a little bit surprising. I know I did. Now I know,
for what you guys do on a day day basis,
it's not surprising. But lead us in help us understand
why do we over rely on transformation?
Speaker 5 (21:13):
So, Steve, I think you got to go first.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
I'm I'm loving the way that you've further crafted your
metaphor around working out, So why don't you set.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
Up the whole notion of transmission using that?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
Alise, have you ever made a New Year's resolution to
work out more frequently?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yes? I have?
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Oka So I mean that means you're a human being,
because I figure that almost every human being has done
that at least once in their lives. And you know
you see that all the time. I go to the
gym pretty regularly and January is just a you know
what show. You can't get you can't get a machine,
you can't get a squad rack, you can't get on
a treadmill because it's littered with everybody trying to get
(21:53):
back in shape. But then it's pretty quick, you know,
into towards the end of January, where where the gym
starts to you know, become pretty uh pretty empty again.
And I think that transformation is basically the same. It's
really hard to change a lot of behaviors at once.
(22:13):
You can't go from being you know, sedentary to all
of a sudden training like an Olympic athlete overnight. But
that's sort of what transformation asks of organizations. And that's
just really hard. And because it's really hard, it fails frequently.
Is it's expensive, and it just do it doesn't It
(22:34):
doesn't work out in the way that it's intended to.
Now Jeff and I are not anti transformation. We just
would say like transformation should be used when it's really needed,
and that's when there's a major competitive disruction, disruption, you know,
something external, there's a really important new technology that you
(22:56):
only have moments to uh implement that there is a
really competitive disruption, a merger in your industry, then perhaps
that's that's a good reason. But what tends to happen
is that we rely on transformation because we've been sedentary,
we haven't been reacting over time, and our so our
(23:17):
view on hone is that we don't ever want that
to be the reason for transformation. And so we're saying,
you've got to be honing because there are going to
be times where you might need to use transformation. And
so we've got to be paying attention day over you know,
day over day, month over month to what the world
is evolving towards so that we can be making minimally
(23:38):
viable moves in order to address the change in surroundings.
Speaker 6 (23:42):
And then the only thing I'd add to that, Steve, is,
you know, the big, the big danger in the transformation myth,
the transformation myth being that it works and it's not
expensive what have you, is that.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
It feeds upon itself.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
So if if you believe that it's okay to not
make too much changes, because somewhere down the line, we're
going to be able to transform and take care of
all the you know, the stuff that's accumulated over time,
and and and the bad behaviors and the drifting off course,
which is obviously one of the central metaphors that.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
We use in the book.
Speaker 6 (24:14):
Then you are going to wait for that transformation, and
you're going to when you actually go try to execute
the transformation, you're going to find out that it's too late,
which just leads to even more herculean efforts to try
to get the metaphorical ship back on track.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
And so we probably.
Speaker 6 (24:32):
Come across in the book as being more overtly against
transformation than we actually are practically speaking when we're working
with our clients, because we understand sometimes it's necessary, but
that sort of overstatement is I think necessary to combat
the conventional wisdom right now out in the out in
the world.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
That it's all about transformation.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can go a
day without hearing the word transformation, and it's it's everywhere.
So so a couple of things really quick. I want
to situate for our listener and viewers who haven't read
the book yet that I have, like I have, you
say that the book is a call for action for
leaders to build a capability and mindset to hone their organizations,
minimizing but not eliminating, as you say, the need for transformation.
(25:12):
And so really, when you talk about honing, for listeners
and viewers are like, how do I stitch all this together,
the artisans and everything else. Just I want to give
a quick definition, and if you want to add to
it as well. But what you say in the book
about what honing really is, it's the idea of making
conscious micro changes consistently over time to keep the organization
on track. Is there more to it than that that
(25:34):
we would define honing?
Speaker 6 (25:37):
No, I think it sounds brilliant to us at these
If it came out of the book, it must be
right on.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
But I told you guys were brilliant already.
Speaker 6 (25:45):
We're good at using many words to describe something much
more simple than are needed. But that one I think
is actually pretty succinct. But you know, as I mentioned before,
the central metaphor, one of the central metaphors we use
in the book is the whole notion of drift, and
it comes from i'd like to think both of our
love for being out on boats in the ocean. It
may have been born more with me than it was
(26:05):
with Steve, but I'm trying to help him learn the
joy as well. And the metaphor is, you know, if
you've got a fixed point you're trying to head to,
whether it's something you can see on the horizon, or
it's a it's a it's a location you're trying to
get to the plan that you've charted a course to.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
You.
Speaker 6 (26:23):
Inevitably, if you're on the water, you're going to drift
off that course because of the wind or the waves
of the current or tide or what have you. But
in boating and sailing, you have the mechanisms to recognize
when you're off course and make slight adjustments to counteract
the forces that are hitting you, and so most of
the time you are able to stay on course. In business,
that's not the case. There are things coming at you
(26:44):
every single day. You have to respond to a competitive threat,
you have to do something about a new regular regulation,
you need to take advantage of some sort of technology.
And there is no fixed point on the horizon that
you know you're heading towards. And so you can be
dealing with all these data today pressures and not actually
realize that you've drifted off your path towards what Steve
(27:05):
and I call your elemental purpose, what you're trying to achieve,
and so what those micro adjustments are do that you
talked about before, is not only help you stay on track,
but they force you to always be looking for the
ways in which you might have drifted. If you know
that that's your central job to make those micro adjustments.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Mm hm, so so important. So since drift is part
of your subtitle, I wanted to make sure that you
hit that, So thank you. Now, another thing that I
applaud about your book and really also align with is
you have a strong focus on the idea of systems
and that's how I was as educated was in the
world of thinking about things and systems. And then specifically
you're talking about management systems in the book, but you
(27:45):
also situate that the CEO needs to be the chief
system designer. Can you say a bit more about that?
Speaker 4 (27:51):
Well, why don't I? Why don't I start with what
is a management system?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (27:55):
And then because I don't think that's an obvious it's
not a word that has a shared definition, and then
Jeff can talk about why the CEO needs to play
the role of chief system designer. So a management system
is the collection of formal and informal processes, decision rights,
(28:20):
infrastructure in an organization that motivates human behavior. So think
about things like formal performance evaluation or formal organization design,
or budgets or those are like example, those are examples
of formal elements that motivate how people behave. So for example,
(28:43):
you've got a performance evaluation, a set of key performance indicators.
Those are the things that your organization is telling you
this is what success looks like. But there's also informal
management systems. And informal management systems are things like the
questions that a key leader asks in meetings. Oftentimes that
(29:06):
leads to a response. There's a famous story about j
Edgar Hoover who got a memo and then wrote in
the margins of the memo watched the borders, and his
underlings took that to mean we should be deploying, you know,
troops to the borders to make to check the borders.
(29:26):
And really what he meant was like, your margins in
the in the memo are too large, and so people
you know, the little questions that people ask that people
ask our management systems in and by themselves, or just
what people perceive gets people promoted. So those are management
systems and collectively they shape and motivate all the behavior
(29:49):
that all the behavior that takes place in an organization. Now,
if you want to be honing, those are your tools
for how to, you know, change ever so slightly what
your people are doing so that your organization can do
slightly different things over time. But those are the tools
that you use. It's not inspirational posters on a wall
(30:10):
talking about culture. It's actual changing what people succeed. And
the reason we say, and I'll set Jeff up here
the CEO needs to do it is because they like
they're the only one that can see the whole see
the whole system. But Jeff, why don't you expand on that? Well?
Speaker 6 (30:27):
Yeah, and I feel like it may be helpful to
just anchor this and one of the core beliefs and
Steve and I have about strategy, one of the core methodologies.
It actually seems to pop up in all of our
books something called the strategy choice cascade. This is actually
something that was developed by Roger Martin and a number
of our.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
Colleagues at Monitored Group and a number of years ago.
Speaker 6 (30:49):
Is popularized in Roger's book with ag Lafley call playing
to Win and I won't take you into all the
detail of it, but it stipulates that, amongst other things,
good strategy doesn't happen unless you've made choices. And there
are five broad clusters of choices that are that are
that are all interlinked, that make up a sound strategy.
You need to make choices around your goals and aspirations,
(31:11):
around where you're going to play in the market, around
how you're going to win in those markets via your
business models, around the capabilities you need to run those
business models, and then the management systems you need to
have in place to support those capabilities. And there's all
sorts of as I said before, inter relationship and laddering
up and laddering down and what have you. And one
of the observations that actually led to hone and I
(31:33):
will say, this is an obsession of Steve's and he
would call the management systems cluster of those choices to
be the pinky toe of the choice cascade. It was.
It's the thing that is always assumed to actually not
matter that much that but that actually provides balance to
the entire system. And so our observation is that most
senior executives, most CEOs conceive of their job as being
(31:56):
in those first few buckets. It's their job to lay
out the goals now aspirations. It's their job to set
out the bold vision around where to plan, how to win,
and then it's everyone else's job to execute. But the
challenge to that is if you believe like we do,
that management systems ultimately are the things that will that
will that will determine whether you either succeed or fail
at executing your strategy. Those should be the things that
(32:19):
get the vast majority of the tension of the people
who actually control what happens in companies. So we're trying
to flip this orthodoxy on its head a little bit
that that CEOs are about setting the vision but not
necessarily executing it, and we're saying, actually, yeah, you can
set the vision, but you absolutely have to be involved
in the execution because if you're not, then it's not
going to happen. And that does not mean, by the way,
(32:40):
that the CEOs need to personally take responsibility for working
on every single management system, but they do need to
understand the breadth of them that are at the company's disposal,
the ones that matter most because they are so related
to the behaviors that will drive towards the objectives that
the company has, and then they need to be able
(33:01):
to empower those that control those management systems to work
on them relentlessly, to execute in the way that they
need to to achieve the strategy. And that's as I said,
it sounds like, yeah, that sounds pretty logical, but it's
it's not the way that many companies run.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
It's not the way that many senior executives think.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Right, And this show is very much educational and inspirational
that people listen to the show to become better leaders,
to become better at running their companies. So that's tremendous
contribution right there. And I don't know that I would
have distinguished that even from having read your book. So
I'll take it. Let's grab our last break. I'm your host,
doctor a Leasee Cortez. We've went on air with Jeff
Tuff and Stephen Goldbach from Deloitte, who each have long
(33:39):
spending careers as principles and sustainability, innovation and strategy. We've
been talking a bit about the importance of not hyper
focusing on transformation, but the opportunity for honing. After the break,
We're going to talk about overcoming the systemic imbalance and
share the shareholder focus to start, We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite
Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at
(34:32):
elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your
employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with
doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to
open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise
A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working
(34:56):
on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Thankteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Releie Cortes. If you're just joining us,
My guests are Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach, the authors
of hone, How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. So as somebody
who has spent a good portion of time as a
conscious capitalist and certainly studying stakeholder capitalism or other things
like that. I understand the need not to focus on
(35:25):
just solely the shareholders in terms of an organizational operation.
But when you add in the element with what the
two of you about just really thinking about that, when
you do that, that creates a systemic imbalance for the
organization That is very very interesting. Can you share a
bit more about that perspective.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Well, I'd love to take this one and then and
see if Jeff wants to add.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
So.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
I think part of it is, let's recognize where most
shareholder value comes from in a commercial for profit organization.
So most of the value comes from being around a
long time. The so called terminal value of a free
(36:06):
cash flow valuation, right, it comes from that assumption that
the company is going to be generating profits for a
long time. If you do any kind of a valuation exercise,
at the end of a five or seven year or
ten year forecast, you make this assumption that we're going
to freeze the business in in laminate for at that moment,
(36:28):
and then we apply a multiple to that. That's a
really important assumption. And it's and and and when you
think about it, the only way that companies can survive
forever is by also being relevant to other stakeholders. You
won't have an organization that is relevant if you're not
(36:50):
serving customers well, if you're not taking care of them,
if you're cutting costs out of the product, out of
your product that that that could be better put into
continue to create customer loyalty, you will not be able
to serve your customer as well. If you don't attract
great employees, you will not be able to serve your
customer as well. If you're not investing in technology, if
(37:12):
you're not engaging with your local communities and being relevant.
That is just what is good for broader stakeholders. Usually
makes a company more resilient and leads to more shareholder
value over the long run. Usually the notion of being
shareholder focused tends to come with things where we're maximizing
(37:34):
profit in the short run, which usually comes with trading
off long term competitive position. It's not always the case,
but it is the case that you can maximize shareholder
value by simply making sure that you're a durable entity
over time.
Speaker 6 (37:53):
Yeah, and I think again, we try to be somewhat
consistent through our books and this principle in somebody ties
to some of what we talked about and provoked that
the only way to manage in a world in which
uncertainty is increasing, and we both fundamentally believe it is,
whether that's due for technological reasons or other reasons, is
by widening the aperture in terms of what you pay
(38:15):
attention to. And by definition, if you only pay attention
to a subset of your stakeholders i e. Your shareholders
when you're trying to think about how to drive performance,
then you are by definition narrowing the aperture. But there's
nothing in what we're suggesting that in keeping consideration of
all stakeholders in the decisions you make day and doubt,
(38:37):
there's nothing in that that is fundamentally value destroying or
intended to be value destroying. In fact, we believe that
in the face of all this uncertainty, taking the long view,
taking the wide aperture is going to lead to both
long term value but more short term value as well,
especially as cycles accelerate.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Beautifully said thank you. One of the other things that
I found delightful about your book that I did not
know at all was the history of how the Big
Four came to be. I didn't know that. I know
I have so many friends and people connected to the
Big Four, but I didn't realize how they were born.
Can you share that history?
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Well, you should do this one. You're more of a history.
You're more of a history buff, I am. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
Well, the Big Four generally have been the product of
lots of mergers and acquisitions over the over the years.
Deloitte was was born nearly one hundred and eighty years ago,
and you know, just there was a challenge in the
railroad industry and William Walsh Deloitte was our founder and
(39:41):
then But the I think you might be referring to
the idea that many of our businesses have been local
accounting firms that have been built up over the years
at least.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Is that that which, yes, I'm where I was riveting on.
It was just an ocean after Starbin Oxley active two
thousand and two when they you had to separate your
account your accounting audits from your consulting.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Well that that actually so the Big Four had existed
before then, and they were there were they were the
Big eight, the Big Seven in different different ways. What
ended up happening around the Sarbanes Oxley was for in
later and I won't get into the specifics is basically
(40:24):
it said there needs to be a separation between the
business of providing attestation services or audit services and the
business of also providing consulting services to those companies. Many
of the companies that were in the auditing business around
that time all decided to jettison their consulting practices. For
(40:46):
the most part, Deloitte did not. Deloitte chose not to
do that, and instead we followed the regulation and we
said there are certain things that we can do for
our audit clients, and we will serve them as our
audit clients, and then there are other clients that we
will serve in a consulting capacity. Interestingly, the industry has
(41:10):
come back and sort of rebuilt itself around a model
that is more consistent with the model that the model
that we've chosen, and the thing that we feel like
it's advantaged us over the years is that we are
able to having a broad breadth of services bring lots
of different capabilities to a set of clients that have
(41:34):
complex and novel needs, and those needs don't neatly fit
into boxes that are on our org charts. It's about
the deployment of multiple of those capabilities, in particular to
the world that Jeff and I now sit in, which
is sustainability and infrastructure, where it's hard to imagine how
you might do a project like Jeff does in the
(41:55):
world in the world of energy without having you risk
x spurts, without having financial advisory experts, without having regulatory expertise,
without having tax expertise. And so we've been blessed by
not having in some respects made the choice that others
made back at the turn of the two thousands.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
So for any listeners and viewers who also are kind
of rivetted on this, I want to just situate what
the names that I learned to associate here from your books.
So I'm going to say them, and you tell me
if I have these right. But so Deloitte remained, it
stayed if all the regulation kept itself as a consultant
consulting arm as well as the audience services. But Ey,
(42:40):
you say, became cap Gemini and KPMG spun out its
consulting business into an IPO which eventually went by the
name of Bearing Point, which of course we all know
these names in PwC sold it's consulting business to IBM,
creating IBM business consulting services. Do I have this right?
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Yep?
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Okay, So I think that's interesting because we all know
these names, but I didn't understand their their their forefathers,
if you will.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
Yeah, it was that was the that was the consequence
of the Sarbanes Oxley or the some of it was
part of that at that at that time, in and
around the two thousands, as folks started to, you know,
deal with the consequences of the change regulation.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
But now, of course everything and everything's getting mixed back
together again, and different brands are parts of different companies.
And I don't blame you at least for not being
able to keep track, but it certainly is a dynamic space.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Well it's it's just really helpful to understand since I'm
in the consulting world too. I'm not in that space
at all what you guys are doing. But this is
this is important history to know, I think. So. Okay,
so you already been talking a bit about the idea
of the minimally viable thoughts toward honing. So the minimum
viable thought toward honing for the future, I don't know
if you want to say more about that. I think
(43:57):
in the bit of time that we have together here,
I would love for each of you maybe just to
share a couple of key takeaways that you've learned from
your years of working with these large companies to help
them navigate complex problems. If there's any patterns or key
insights that you've been noticing beyond what we've already talked
about today. WOULD definitely love to hear from both of
you on that before we have to close.
Speaker 6 (44:18):
Sure, why why don't we trade off a little bit here? Steve,
I'll do one, you do one, and then and then
we'll go till we run out of steam, which may
actually take several more shows. But the one one inside
and I you know it was we got it early
in exploring Detonate and it's carried through HUD to hone
as well, is that you have to strike balance and
(44:41):
you know the I think there's an over interpretation sometimes
of what Steve and I write about to assume that
we're when we talk about, for example, blowing up the playbooks,
that it means blowing up the entire company, or when
we talk about, you know, provoking the future in which
you have advantage. It means turning away from the path
that you're on right now, and that's that that has
not been our tent from the beginning. It's really what
(45:01):
we're trying to have people do is redeploy their capital
in a way where they take more ambitious bets in
shifting the way things have been done in the past.
And what we're finding, I think, especially as technology in
particular and even more particularly AI these days, as it
accelerates the pace of change and creates an ever more
(45:24):
uncertain world. Again, another theme I'd come back to is
that the balance, the shift in the balance, is changing,
and we're finding that. And actually, one of the things
we often say when we talk about the books is that,
you know, it used to be, even at the beginning
of writing Deadnate, it used to be that the status
quo felt quite safe and change felt quite risky. And
(45:45):
now actually we're finding that in many circumstances it's flipped
where the safe thing to do is actually go try
to change something, and the risky thing is to remain
with the status quot. But it always is a matter
of balance, and whether you get that balance right will
depend a lot on the nature of this face in
which you play what you're trying to achieve, et cetera.
But that that is definitely one key theme that I've
taken away and I hope our readers have taken away
(46:06):
as well.
Speaker 4 (46:08):
Yeah, and I'll build on that and share my own
and we'll probably uh, this will probably take us to
the end. I'm guessing the it's it's one A in
one B so one as human beings have this capacity
to fundamentally believe that the future, the future is going
to be continued from the from the past, and in particular,
(46:32):
an assumption that is terrible in business is that you know,
you even see it happening. Now with AI, we're saying,
will we get the return from our investments in AI?
And it kind of fails the smell test because if
we don't invest in AI, the likelihood that your business
is going to be competitive in the future is almost
(46:53):
a probability of zero, right, if you choose not to
invest in AI. And so when people people say, you know,
I can't generate a return on AI, it's like you
have to compare it to the alternative, right, and not
not what you've got today that is done? Right, You
either have a choice now I can invest or not
invest in. The not investment path doesn't look very good.
(47:17):
And so if you're investing to avoid a downside, that's
as good of a return as investing to create an
upside from today. But people have this innate capacity to
just presume that we're safe in whatever we have today,
which is so not the case. And that's why I
think the thing that I've learned the most is the
(47:38):
importance of always going back to first principles and whenever
you're doing something like making an incremental management decision, it's
not about just extending the past. It's about what's the
investment choice of, like do I do it or do
I not do it? And you have to then think
about what the consequences of not doing it are. We're
just not very we're just not very good at that
(48:01):
more generally, more generally than we are.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Very helpful gentlemen. Yes, you're right, we have come to
the close here. However, we do enough time for each
of you to say, maybe fifteen seconds each, what would
you like to leave our listeners and viewers with around
the world.
Speaker 6 (48:16):
Move before you think you have to, or said differently,
don't overthink it.
Speaker 4 (48:21):
Yeah, go check out our book hone The Book dot com.
We'd love to hear what you think. Catch us both
on LinkedIn. The nicest thing that an author can have
is engagement with their ideas, so we love to engage
and hit us up.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Delightful. I'm so happy to know both of you. You're
both inspiring, you both teach me a lot, and you're
delightful to engage with. Thanks for coming back on Working
on Purpose.
Speaker 5 (48:46):
Thanks for having us. It was fun having us again.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Absolutely, listeners and viewers you want to you're gonna learn
more about these guys in their books. The best way
to start is to find them both on LinkedIn and
then also check out their book at hone the book
dot com. So h O n E thebook dot com.
Last week, if you missed the live show, you can
always catch it via recorded podcast. See you next week
for another nourishing and elevating conversation together. Let's lean in
(49:11):
and learn how to make workplaces that work for everyone
and find way to do business that betters the world.
Let's work on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host doctor Elise
Cortes each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create
a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion
performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the
meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work
(49:41):
on purpose.
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests and not
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make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
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should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for
(00:20):
choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome back to the Working in Purpose program, which has
been brought to you with passionate pride since February of
twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great
to have you. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes. If
we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm
a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker
and author. My team and I at gusto Now help
companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic,
(01:26):
high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by
meaning and purpose. You can learn more about us about
us now. We can work together at gustodashnow dot com
or my personal site at last Coortes dot com. Getting
into today's program we had with us today two dynamic
men from Deloitte, Jeff Tuff and Steven Goldbach. Jeff Toff
is a principal at Deloitte and holds various positions across
(01:49):
the firm's sustainability, innovation and strategy practices. Those include leadership
of the US Hydrogen Practice and all sectors excuse me,
and all sectors related to energy. Jeff's work centers on
helping clients transform their businesses to grow and compete in
non traditional ways. Also with US is Stephen Goldbach. Goldbach
(02:10):
who leads deloitte Sustainability business in the US, which serves
the complex and novel challenges their clients face across issues
such as climate adaptation and other challenges associated with creating
a more sustainable future. Previously, he served as Deloitte's US
Chief Strategy Officer for eight years. They have written three
books together. Today we're talking about their latest, hon How
(02:30):
Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Gentlemen, welcome back to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
Yeah, thanks for having us again.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You guys are crazy and amazing at the same time, right,
Can we just start with that? Can we level set
that you're both crazy and amazing? Can we agree on that?
Speaker 6 (02:46):
Well, I thought you were going to call one of
us crazy and one of us amazing and then just
leave it, leave it out there that figure out which
one is.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
With for us for you to choose.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
No, no, no, no, I'm giving you both both of
these labels here. So you know, as I was thinking
about this and I was reading your book, let's just
lasses for people who haven't ready yet, It's just gorgeous.
I was just thinking to myself, you know, I know
you know what goes on at Deloitte. You guys are
really really busy humans, and so here you are. You've
unplanned and accidentally written a trilogy of books here. So
(03:14):
let's just start with how how in the world, first
do you do you find time to do that? What's
the inspiration? I know a little something about this, but
our listeners and viewers don't craziness explained, please.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
Well, I'll say it has been an interesting journey, and
I'm sure Steve has his own version of the journey
as well. Over the course of the I guess it's eight,
maybe even close to nine years now that Steve and
I have been writing books together, and we've learned a
lot about each other over time. And one of the
things we've learned is that we're actually very different writers
in terms of how we approach it, the times that
(03:49):
we try to take it on, the joy or lack
of joy that we get from it at certain points
in time, and so we you know, we each have
our own style. I will say for myself, finding the
time i'm is hard, but when I find it, I
can really concentrate a lot of effort and bang out
a lot of content all at once, which I'm not
(04:10):
saying is the same for Steve necessarily. But the good
news here is that the stuff we write about is
entirely consistent with what we experience in our work lives.
It's not like two different lives here that we're somehow
trying to live. We're actually taking lessons that we take
from our client work day in day out, and then
trying to generalize them in a way that helps others
that may be struggling with some of the same issues.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Awesome, anything to add Steve.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
Look, it's just I think it takes. One of the
things that's forced me to do is I love writing,
and I love engaging with people about the ideas even more.
That's the thing that I kind of enjoy about this process.
And the writing process for me is about getting the
best and most concise version of what we're seeing onto
(04:59):
a piece of paper, and that makes our ideas crisper
and easier to easier to understand when we work with clients.
So I think that that's sort of the synergistic aspect
of it to our work, and so I don't find
it a burden. It's one of those things where you
just have to make the time to write and I
find having a good outline makes the writing process a
(05:20):
little easier. I'm not as natural a writer as Jeff.
Jeff had the benefit of a upbringing and writing and
I've kind of new to this over time.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I forget which one of you had the idea first
of just maybe doing an article, then the other one said, no, no, no,
I've got bigger aspirations. Let's do a book. Which way
did it go?
Speaker 6 (05:40):
That's a good memory telling the story.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
I do read your books, guys.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Yeah, So I had been writing for some time, As
Steve said, I have a history in writing. I actually
way back when I studied to be a creative writing
that was my major in college. And I had always
dabbled with trying to get thoughts out down on ear
in a variety of different formats, from plays to poetry
to fiction to what have you.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
But I did.
Speaker 6 (06:06):
I guess my serious business writing career really started about
fifteen or twenty years ago, when I started writing articles
for the likes of Harvard Business Review and other magazines,
which were thankfully well received and became reasonably well circulated.
And you know, Steve and I had worked together at
the same firm for some time then we ran in
the same circles, and it was it was after that
(06:29):
firm actually joined up with Deloitte and we both came
to Deloitte. We were at a session together and Steve said, hey,
you know, I've read some of your stuff, and actually
Steve had published some pieces as well. One I was
just telling him two days ago that one has stuck
in my head ever since it came out about the
difference between hockey and football applied to business, which I'll
leave that out to Linger. And he said, hey, you know,
(06:50):
we should do some writing together at some point, and
I made what I thought was a very gracious offer
to come and be a guest blogger on the blog
that I was writing for a huff Post at the time.
And Steve had bigger aspirations than that, didn't you, Steve.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
But it was, but my aspirations was not a book.
So the aspiration was we could write something together in
HBr or something like that. And then it was Jeff
that said, well, actually, you know this book publisher Wiley's
been chasing us for a follow up to The Ten
Types of Innovation, and that was the origin story for Debtonate.
(07:25):
And then it just flourished from there.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Well, let's talk about that briefly. So, since you have
now written the Accidental trilogy, you say unplanned, but I
like the idea of calling it accidental. Let's just if
we can sketch the ideas from meach you have deton first,
and then Provoke, which we talked about in the last
conversation we had together. And now, of course tone give
us a little understanding of how maybe the ideas stitch together.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
For those three maybe I'll give us a head start
and Jeff can add so I think debtonate if we're
giving the users sort of the behind the scenes story
at NATE was we had an observation or several observations
about the world that there was just a bunch of
things that businesses did in the name of best practices
(08:12):
that when you take a jaundiced eye a skeptics eye,
to have made no sense and we needed to change
those supposed best practices. And then Provoke is really about
how you you know, how you shape the future to
your advantage early by identifying trends that are a matter
(08:33):
of when they'll come to fruition rather than a matter
of if we tend to wait as managers far too long.
And then hone is really about how do you on
a more ongoing basis manage the system to your advantage.
If I'm going back and saying, like, what's the common
threat and how would I explain it today? Not necessarily
(08:54):
like when we say unplanned or accidental, I think that's
because we didn't set out with this. I think part
of this is a recognition that you don't usually know
the future. You've got to manage companies more from a
perspective of first principles, i e. Satisfying customer needs. You know,
changing human behavior is the most basic some atomic particle
(09:18):
in business, Really constantly looking to the future for what's
coming next, and then trying to shape your surroundings towards that.
But then being vigilant is really where we get to,
and hone being vigilant about not just believing that you're
good once you said it. You have to be carefully
managing your environment because it's constantly changing, whether it's competition
(09:41):
or technology. And that's where we get to with Home.
But I'm sure Jeff would add to that, as I
see him chopping at the bit.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
I didn't know it was that obvious after eight years together, Steve.
But I think that's a good summary. We can obviously
go a lot deeper on each book, but I will
say that we have taken pay age from our own
quote unquote teachings or writings over time. And one of
the themes that we come back to time and again
in all all three books is, and this is an
overstatement for effect, but things are always better if you
(10:11):
pay really keen attention to the markets you serve and
the quote unquote customers or users you serve. And I
will say that we've found after each book that we
did leave our readers wanting a little bit more, not
necessarily of our writing, but of the kind of what
comes next. So Detonate was about blowing up the playbooks,
and after you've blown up the playbooks, and you know,
(10:32):
we did suggest at that point some principles of how
managers can work effectively or lead effectively in an age
of uncertainty, but it wasn't really the okay, so what's next?
So provoke then was the logical follow up to that
after you've blown up the playbooks, to say, how do
you actually create the future in which you have advantage
when you actually need to start rebuilding things, and hone
(10:53):
again was a logical follow up to provoke because we
create the future, but then how do you manage differently
than you have in the past once you're once you
start to approach that future. And so, even though it
has been accidental, I am proud at how all three
of the books hold together, and at this point actually
do feel somewhat complete.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
Delightful. Now, speaking of delightful, I really love it since
I do read a book every single week for this
for this podcast, cover two cover, and I take the
notes and everything else that's my research. I get delighted
when authors do something a little bit different and compelling.
And so in your case, of course, you have helped
us learn from four distinct artisans in your book about
(11:34):
this idea of honing, and I think it's just delightful.
So will you introduce us briefly to your four artisans
that give us inspiration and direction in the book.
Speaker 5 (11:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (11:43):
Why don't we do it in rough order of their
appearance in the book? Steve, So, what do you lead
us off with Flannery?
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Yeah, I'll take Flannery, you take On, I'll take Sam,
you take our lady Peace. So this is a good
example lease of where you know, we have to come
up with creative ways to tell stories. We're we're in
a business where we're not able to divulge any of
(12:10):
the work we do with clients, and so part of
it is we look for stories that would share the
same benefit that are you know, wonderful to share with
the world. And flannery story is has been sort of
We made it the centerpiece of chapter one because it
was a conversation with her that led us to the
(12:31):
title of hon And it basically is, you know, she's
a wonderful chef. She works in people's homes. She doesn't
have a restaurant, and she comes over and she'll do special,
special gigs and parties and things like that. And we
had the benefit of knowing her for the last fifteen
years and I noticed that she's just always I thought
(12:54):
she was sharpening her knives before every gig. And I said, like, Flannery,
what do you what do you? What do you? Why
do you do that every time? And She's like, I'm
not sharpening them, Steve. She's got this, she's got this
you know, crazy uh, you know way to talk. She's like,
I'm not sharpening them I'm honing them. There's a big difference. Honing,
(13:16):
you know, doesn't Honing doesn't take away any of the steel.
Sharpening actually takes steel off the blade. You're actually thinning
the blade, You're making it more brittle, and honing is
realigning the steel that exists to make it cut the
way it was originally intended to the last time it
was sharpened. And she was saying, this is just keeping
(13:37):
the knives sharp the way I want them to be, because
a sharp knife is actually a safer knife inside the kitchen.
And but then the thing she said also was honing
is a maintenance and a meditation, and so it was
also not just about maintaining the knives. It was also
about reminding her herself right before an event. But this
(14:02):
is what I'm trying to do. It's like a way
to focus ourselves. So we thought that was a great
metaphor for keeping an organization sharp the last time they
made you made made your changes to making sure it's
doing what you're wanting it to do, but also reminding
you to focus on the things that are super important
your customers, your employees, what what's your elemental purpose in business?
(14:23):
And how do how do you do that. So that's
the lessons we took away from from Flannery.
Speaker 6 (14:30):
And then the second artisan we profiled on A Vonda
Wall is actually best known out in the world as
probably one of the most, if not the most prolific
and well known marine photographers. So he's he's become famous
shooting shooting photos of sailboats and sail races and what
have you. But he's got a really interesting life story
(14:53):
about and it was born in born in South Africa,
grew up around boats, But most of what he has
learned over time and that he's been able to apply
to his photography is came from him tinkering in first
a machine shop and then on boats. He's a world
class sailor himself. He's actually had a number of different
(15:15):
He's had a number of different documentaries made about him
that ultimately come back to him rebuilding some old boats
from scratch. And what fascinated us about on A as
we got into it was not just the way he
constructed the pictures he makes, but what he did in
his off time and the fact that he is ultimately
the consummate tinkerer, and what we're trying to teach business
(15:35):
executives is to be consummate tinkerers at aircraft.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Love it you guys. Okay, let's go ahead and get
the last two and then we'll go and break.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Sam Pollard So Sam is a film editor and a
documentary filmmaker himself. He is famous as an editor for
editing a number of Spike Lee's films in the nineteen nineties.
He is a an Oscar nominated filmmaker. He's won a
(16:05):
number of other awards. He's made a number of amazing
documentaries as well, some together with Spike and some on
his own. He is just what I found compelling about
his evolution is he has to some extent softened his
(16:26):
approach over the years, and now what he really just
focuses on is making his subjects in his interviews feel
super comfortable, feel super at ease, so that they are
sharing his stories. He feels like his job is to
get the story out into the world, and he wants
(16:48):
to put as little between the documentary subject and the
camera as possible, so he looks to make them super comfortable.
Whereas before, as an editor and an early director, he
you know, was trying to almost too hard too in
his words, to to sort of force a vision onto
(17:09):
his team and to the subjects. And now he's become,
you know, a little bit more relaxed over the years
and realizes the way to bring a subject to life
is just sort of let it paint itself. And so
he's honed his own craft over the over the years
and his his work is amazing.
Speaker 5 (17:25):
And then the fourth Artisans.
Speaker 6 (17:26):
Anyone that knows me would not be surprised that I
somehow figured out a way to get a rock band
in the book. But Our Lady Piece is a very
well known Canadian rock band. We are both Canadian gentlemen
of a certain age who grew up listening to Canadian
indie rock, well, indie rock from everywhere, but Canadian indie
(17:48):
rock in particular. Our Lady Piece was always one of
the standout acts at that time, and.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
We had the.
Speaker 6 (17:54):
We had the great benefit of speaking with two of
the members of Our Lady Peace to the original members,
rain Mata, who is the lead singer, and Duncan Coots,
who has been a longtime bass player, and there was
just a there was a fascinating metaphor for business all
through Our Lady Piece's story. They've been around for over
thirty years. At this point, they think of Rain and
(18:15):
duncan think of themselves as the CEO and COO, respectively
of the band. Rain has got a very successful side
gig as a tech entrepreneur, and he's brought a lot
of what he's learned about business over time into the
music business and the way that they've grown the band.
But actually it's been just all the disruptions to the
music industry over time and the way that they as
(18:36):
individuals and the band itself have had to shift and
hone themselves to stay relevant over that course of that
thirty years that we found to be a great way
to learn some lessons from what would otherwise be a
pretty strange couple of folks to profile in a business book.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Well again, I really appreciate that it made for a
very interesting read, and I get delighted whenever we can
take ideas and lessons from one very different area into another.
So love it, guys, let's grab our first break. I'm
your host, doctor e Release Cortes. We got an air
with Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach of Deloitte, who each
have long spanning careers as principles and sustainability innovation and strategy.
(19:14):
We've been talking a bit about their first there are
three books in total. How they weave together the opportunity
for us to learn from some of these artisans about
how to hone. After the break, we're going to talk
about our over reliant focus on transformation in the world
of business. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose
inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance,
and commit within the workforce. To learn more or to
invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her
(20:05):
at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
Elise A. L Se at eliscortes dot com. Now back
(20:29):
to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If you are just
joining us. My guests are Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach,
the authors of hone, How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. So
one of the benning delightful things that I get out
of your books, all of your books actually, but this
one in particular, was this notion of we have this
(20:56):
tendency to over rely on transformation in business. And I
think if anybody's listening to this, they might find that
a little bit surprising. I know I did. Now I know,
for what you guys do on a day day basis,
it's not surprising. But lead us in help us understand
why do we over rely on transformation?
Speaker 5 (21:13):
So, Steve, I think you got to go first.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
I'm I'm loving the way that you've further crafted your
metaphor around working out, So why don't you set.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
Up the whole notion of transmission using that?
Speaker 4 (21:22):
Alise, have you ever made a New Year's resolution to
work out more frequently?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yes? I have?
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Oka So I mean that means you're a human being,
because I figure that almost every human being has done
that at least once in their lives. And you know
you see that all the time. I go to the
gym pretty regularly and January is just a you know
what show. You can't get you can't get a machine,
you can't get a squad rack, you can't get on
a treadmill because it's littered with everybody trying to get
(21:53):
back in shape. But then it's pretty quick, you know,
into towards the end of January, where where the gym
starts to you know, become pretty uh pretty empty again.
And I think that transformation is basically the same. It's
really hard to change a lot of behaviors at once.
(22:13):
You can't go from being you know, sedentary to all
of a sudden training like an Olympic athlete overnight. But
that's sort of what transformation asks of organizations. And that's
just really hard. And because it's really hard, it fails frequently.
Is it's expensive, and it just do it doesn't It
(22:34):
doesn't work out in the way that it's intended to.
Now Jeff and I are not anti transformation. We just
would say like transformation should be used when it's really needed,
and that's when there's a major competitive disruction, disruption, you know,
something external, there's a really important new technology that you
(22:56):
only have moments to uh implement that there is a
really competitive disruption, a merger in your industry, then perhaps
that's that's a good reason. But what tends to happen
is that we rely on transformation because we've been sedentary,
we haven't been reacting over time, and our so our
(23:17):
view on hone is that we don't ever want that
to be the reason for transformation. And so we're saying,
you've got to be honing because there are going to
be times where you might need to use transformation. And
so we've got to be paying attention day over you know,
day over day, month over month to what the world
is evolving towards so that we can be making minimally
(23:38):
viable moves in order to address the change in surroundings.
Speaker 6 (23:42):
And then the only thing I'd add to that, Steve, is,
you know, the big, the big danger in the transformation myth,
the transformation myth being that it works and it's not
expensive what have you, is that.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
It feeds upon itself.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
So if if you believe that it's okay to not
make too much changes, because somewhere down the line, we're
going to be able to transform and take care of
all the you know, the stuff that's accumulated over time,
and and and the bad behaviors and the drifting off course,
which is obviously one of the central metaphors that.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
We use in the book.
Speaker 6 (24:14):
Then you are going to wait for that transformation, and
you're going to when you actually go try to execute
the transformation, you're going to find out that it's too late,
which just leads to even more herculean efforts to try
to get the metaphorical ship back on track.
Speaker 5 (24:28):
And so we probably.
Speaker 6 (24:32):
Come across in the book as being more overtly against
transformation than we actually are practically speaking when we're working
with our clients, because we understand sometimes it's necessary, but
that sort of overstatement is I think necessary to combat
the conventional wisdom right now out in the out in
the world.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
That it's all about transformation.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can go a
day without hearing the word transformation, and it's it's everywhere.
So so a couple of things really quick. I want
to situate for our listener and viewers who haven't read
the book yet that I have, like I have, you
say that the book is a call for action for
leaders to build a capability and mindset to hone their organizations,
minimizing but not eliminating, as you say, the need for transformation.
(25:12):
And so really, when you talk about honing, for listeners
and viewers are like, how do I stitch all this together,
the artisans and everything else. Just I want to give
a quick definition, and if you want to add to
it as well. But what you say in the book
about what honing really is, it's the idea of making
conscious micro changes consistently over time to keep the organization
on track. Is there more to it than that that
(25:34):
we would define honing?
Speaker 6 (25:37):
No, I think it sounds brilliant to us at these
If it came out of the book, it must be
right on.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
But I told you guys were brilliant already.
Speaker 6 (25:45):
We're good at using many words to describe something much
more simple than are needed. But that one I think
is actually pretty succinct. But you know, as I mentioned before,
the central metaphor, one of the central metaphors we use
in the book is the whole notion of drift, and
it comes from i'd like to think both of our
love for being out on boats in the ocean. It
may have been born more with me than it was
(26:05):
with Steve, but I'm trying to help him learn the
joy as well. And the metaphor is, you know, if
you've got a fixed point you're trying to head to,
whether it's something you can see on the horizon, or
it's a it's a it's a location you're trying to
get to the plan that you've charted a course to.
Speaker 4 (26:22):
You.
Speaker 6 (26:23):
Inevitably, if you're on the water, you're going to drift
off that course because of the wind or the waves
of the current or tide or what have you. But
in boating and sailing, you have the mechanisms to recognize
when you're off course and make slight adjustments to counteract
the forces that are hitting you, and so most of
the time you are able to stay on course. In business,
that's not the case. There are things coming at you
(26:44):
every single day. You have to respond to a competitive threat,
you have to do something about a new regular regulation,
you need to take advantage of some sort of technology.
And there is no fixed point on the horizon that
you know you're heading towards. And so you can be
dealing with all these data today pressures and not actually
realize that you've drifted off your path towards what Steve
(27:05):
and I call your elemental purpose, what you're trying to achieve,
and so what those micro adjustments are do that you
talked about before, is not only help you stay on track,
but they force you to always be looking for the
ways in which you might have drifted. If you know
that that's your central job to make those micro adjustments.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Mm hm, so so important. So since drift is part
of your subtitle, I wanted to make sure that you
hit that, So thank you. Now, another thing that I
applaud about your book and really also align with is
you have a strong focus on the idea of systems
and that's how I was as educated was in the
world of thinking about things and systems. And then specifically
you're talking about management systems in the book, but you
(27:45):
also situate that the CEO needs to be the chief
system designer. Can you say a bit more about that?
Speaker 4 (27:51):
Well, why don't I? Why don't I start with what
is a management system?
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Okay?
Speaker 4 (27:55):
And then because I don't think that's an obvious it's
not a word that has a shared definition, and then
Jeff can talk about why the CEO needs to play
the role of chief system designer. So a management system
is the collection of formal and informal processes, decision rights,
(28:20):
infrastructure in an organization that motivates human behavior. So think
about things like formal performance evaluation or formal organization design,
or budgets or those are like example, those are examples
of formal elements that motivate how people behave. So for example,
(28:43):
you've got a performance evaluation, a set of key performance indicators.
Those are the things that your organization is telling you
this is what success looks like. But there's also informal
management systems. And informal management systems are things like the
questions that a key leader asks in meetings. Oftentimes that
(29:06):
leads to a response. There's a famous story about j
Edgar Hoover who got a memo and then wrote in
the margins of the memo watched the borders, and his
underlings took that to mean we should be deploying, you know,
troops to the borders to make to check the borders.
(29:26):
And really what he meant was like, your margins in
the in the memo are too large, and so people
you know, the little questions that people ask that people
ask our management systems in and by themselves, or just
what people perceive gets people promoted. So those are management
systems and collectively they shape and motivate all the behavior
(29:49):
that all the behavior that takes place in an organization. Now,
if you want to be honing, those are your tools
for how to, you know, change ever so slightly what
your people are doing so that your organization can do
slightly different things over time. But those are the tools
that you use. It's not inspirational posters on a wall
(30:10):
talking about culture. It's actual changing what people succeed. And
the reason we say, and I'll set Jeff up here
the CEO needs to do it is because they like
they're the only one that can see the whole see
the whole system. But Jeff, why don't you expand on that? Well?
Speaker 6 (30:27):
Yeah, and I feel like it may be helpful to
just anchor this and one of the core beliefs and
Steve and I have about strategy, one of the core methodologies.
It actually seems to pop up in all of our
books something called the strategy choice cascade. This is actually
something that was developed by Roger Martin and a number
of our.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
Colleagues at Monitored Group and a number of years ago.
Speaker 6 (30:49):
Is popularized in Roger's book with ag Lafley call playing
to Win and I won't take you into all the
detail of it, but it stipulates that, amongst other things,
good strategy doesn't happen unless you've made choices. And there
are five broad clusters of choices that are that are
that are all interlinked, that make up a sound strategy.
You need to make choices around your goals and aspirations,
(31:11):
around where you're going to play in the market, around
how you're going to win in those markets via your
business models, around the capabilities you need to run those
business models, and then the management systems you need to
have in place to support those capabilities. And there's all
sorts of as I said before, inter relationship and laddering
up and laddering down and what have you. And one
of the observations that actually led to hone and I
(31:33):
will say, this is an obsession of Steve's and he
would call the management systems cluster of those choices to
be the pinky toe of the choice cascade. It was.
It's the thing that is always assumed to actually not
matter that much that but that actually provides balance to
the entire system. And so our observation is that most
senior executives, most CEOs conceive of their job as being
(31:56):
in those first few buckets. It's their job to lay
out the goals now aspirations. It's their job to set
out the bold vision around where to plan, how to win,
and then it's everyone else's job to execute. But the
challenge to that is if you believe like we do,
that management systems ultimately are the things that will that
will that will determine whether you either succeed or fail
at executing your strategy. Those should be the things that
(32:19):
get the vast majority of the tension of the people
who actually control what happens in companies. So we're trying
to flip this orthodoxy on its head a little bit
that that CEOs are about setting the vision but not
necessarily executing it, and we're saying, actually, yeah, you can
set the vision, but you absolutely have to be involved
in the execution because if you're not, then it's not
going to happen. And that does not mean, by the way,
(32:40):
that the CEOs need to personally take responsibility for working
on every single management system, but they do need to
understand the breadth of them that are at the company's disposal,
the ones that matter most because they are so related
to the behaviors that will drive towards the objectives that
the company has, and then they need to be able
(33:01):
to empower those that control those management systems to work
on them relentlessly, to execute in the way that they
need to to achieve the strategy. And that's as I said,
it sounds like, yeah, that sounds pretty logical, but it's
it's not the way that many companies run.
Speaker 5 (33:15):
It's not the way that many senior executives think.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Right, And this show is very much educational and inspirational
that people listen to the show to become better leaders,
to become better at running their companies. So that's tremendous
contribution right there. And I don't know that I would
have distinguished that even from having read your book. So
I'll take it. Let's grab our last break. I'm your host,
doctor a Leasee Cortez. We've went on air with Jeff
Tuff and Stephen Goldbach from Deloitte, who each have long
(33:39):
spending careers as principles and sustainability, innovation and strategy. We've
been talking a bit about the importance of not hyper
focusing on transformation, but the opportunity for honing. After the break,
We're going to talk about overcoming the systemic imbalance and
share the shareholder focus to start, We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite
Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at
(34:32):
elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your
employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with
doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to
open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise
A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working
(34:56):
on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Thankteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Releie Cortes. If you're just joining us,
My guests are Jeff Tuff and Stephen Goldbach, the authors
of hone, How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. So as somebody
who has spent a good portion of time as a
conscious capitalist and certainly studying stakeholder capitalism or other things
like that. I understand the need not to focus on
(35:25):
just solely the shareholders in terms of an organizational operation.
But when you add in the element with what the
two of you about just really thinking about that, when
you do that, that creates a systemic imbalance for the
organization That is very very interesting. Can you share a
bit more about that perspective.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
Well, I'd love to take this one and then and
see if Jeff wants to add.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
So.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
I think part of it is, let's recognize where most
shareholder value comes from in a commercial for profit organization.
So most of the value comes from being around a
long time. The so called terminal value of a free
(36:06):
cash flow valuation, right, it comes from that assumption that
the company is going to be generating profits for a
long time. If you do any kind of a valuation exercise,
at the end of a five or seven year or
ten year forecast, you make this assumption that we're going
to freeze the business in in laminate for at that moment,
(36:28):
and then we apply a multiple to that. That's a
really important assumption. And it's and and and when you
think about it, the only way that companies can survive
forever is by also being relevant to other stakeholders. You
won't have an organization that is relevant if you're not
(36:50):
serving customers well, if you're not taking care of them,
if you're cutting costs out of the product, out of
your product that that that could be better put into
continue to create customer loyalty, you will not be able
to serve your customer as well. If you don't attract
great employees, you will not be able to serve your
customer as well. If you're not investing in technology, if
(37:12):
you're not engaging with your local communities and being relevant.
That is just what is good for broader stakeholders. Usually
makes a company more resilient and leads to more shareholder
value over the long run. Usually the notion of being
shareholder focused tends to come with things where we're maximizing
(37:34):
profit in the short run, which usually comes with trading
off long term competitive position. It's not always the case,
but it is the case that you can maximize shareholder
value by simply making sure that you're a durable entity
over time.
Speaker 6 (37:53):
Yeah, and I think again, we try to be somewhat
consistent through our books and this principle in somebody ties
to some of what we talked about and provoked that
the only way to manage in a world in which
uncertainty is increasing, and we both fundamentally believe it is,
whether that's due for technological reasons or other reasons, is
by widening the aperture in terms of what you pay
(38:15):
attention to. And by definition, if you only pay attention
to a subset of your stakeholders i e. Your shareholders
when you're trying to think about how to drive performance,
then you are by definition narrowing the aperture. But there's
nothing in what we're suggesting that in keeping consideration of
all stakeholders in the decisions you make day and doubt,
(38:37):
there's nothing in that that is fundamentally value destroying or
intended to be value destroying. In fact, we believe that
in the face of all this uncertainty, taking the long view,
taking the wide aperture is going to lead to both
long term value but more short term value as well,
especially as cycles accelerate.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
Beautifully said thank you. One of the other things that
I found delightful about your book that I did not
know at all was the history of how the Big
Four came to be. I didn't know that. I know
I have so many friends and people connected to the
Big Four, but I didn't realize how they were born.
Can you share that history?
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Well, you should do this one. You're more of a history.
You're more of a history buff, I am. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:19):
Well, the Big Four generally have been the product of
lots of mergers and acquisitions over the over the years.
Deloitte was was born nearly one hundred and eighty years ago,
and you know, just there was a challenge in the
railroad industry and William Walsh Deloitte was our founder and
(39:41):
then But the I think you might be referring to
the idea that many of our businesses have been local
accounting firms that have been built up over the years
at least.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Is that that which, yes, I'm where I was riveting on.
It was just an ocean after Starbin Oxley active two
thousand and two when they you had to separate your
account your accounting audits from your consulting.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
Well that that actually so the Big Four had existed
before then, and they were there were they were the
Big eight, the Big Seven in different different ways. What
ended up happening around the Sarbanes Oxley was for in
later and I won't get into the specifics is basically
(40:24):
it said there needs to be a separation between the
business of providing attestation services or audit services and the
business of also providing consulting services to those companies. Many
of the companies that were in the auditing business around
that time all decided to jettison their consulting practices. For
(40:46):
the most part, Deloitte did not. Deloitte chose not to
do that, and instead we followed the regulation and we
said there are certain things that we can do for
our audit clients, and we will serve them as our
audit clients, and then there are other clients that we
will serve in a consulting capacity. Interestingly, the industry has
(41:10):
come back and sort of rebuilt itself around a model
that is more consistent with the model that the model
that we've chosen, and the thing that we feel like
it's advantaged us over the years is that we are
able to having a broad breadth of services bring lots
of different capabilities to a set of clients that have
(41:34):
complex and novel needs, and those needs don't neatly fit
into boxes that are on our org charts. It's about
the deployment of multiple of those capabilities, in particular to
the world that Jeff and I now sit in, which
is sustainability and infrastructure, where it's hard to imagine how
you might do a project like Jeff does in the
(41:55):
world in the world of energy without having you risk
x spurts, without having financial advisory experts, without having regulatory expertise,
without having tax expertise. And so we've been blessed by
not having in some respects made the choice that others
made back at the turn of the two thousands.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
So for any listeners and viewers who also are kind
of rivetted on this, I want to just situate what
the names that I learned to associate here from your books.
So I'm going to say them, and you tell me
if I have these right. But so Deloitte remained, it
stayed if all the regulation kept itself as a consultant
consulting arm as well as the audience services. But Ey,
(42:40):
you say, became cap Gemini and KPMG spun out its
consulting business into an IPO which eventually went by the
name of Bearing Point, which of course we all know
these names in PwC sold it's consulting business to IBM,
creating IBM business consulting services. Do I have this right?
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Yep?
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Okay, So I think that's interesting because we all know
these names, but I didn't understand their their their forefathers,
if you will.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
Yeah, it was that was the that was the consequence
of the Sarbanes Oxley or the some of it was
part of that at that at that time, in and
around the two thousands, as folks started to, you know,
deal with the consequences of the change regulation.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
But now, of course everything and everything's getting mixed back
together again, and different brands are parts of different companies.
And I don't blame you at least for not being
able to keep track, but it certainly is a dynamic space.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Well it's it's just really helpful to understand since I'm
in the consulting world too. I'm not in that space
at all what you guys are doing. But this is
this is important history to know, I think. So. Okay,
so you already been talking a bit about the idea
of the minimally viable thoughts toward honing. So the minimum
viable thought toward honing for the future, I don't know
if you want to say more about that. I think
(43:57):
in the bit of time that we have together here,
I would love for each of you maybe just to
share a couple of key takeaways that you've learned from
your years of working with these large companies to help
them navigate complex problems. If there's any patterns or key
insights that you've been noticing beyond what we've already talked
about today. WOULD definitely love to hear from both of
you on that before we have to close.
Speaker 6 (44:18):
Sure, why why don't we trade off a little bit here? Steve,
I'll do one, you do one, and then and then
we'll go till we run out of steam, which may
actually take several more shows. But the one one inside
and I you know it was we got it early
in exploring Detonate and it's carried through HUD to hone
as well, is that you have to strike balance and
(44:41):
you know the I think there's an over interpretation sometimes
of what Steve and I write about to assume that
we're when we talk about, for example, blowing up the playbooks,
that it means blowing up the entire company, or when
we talk about, you know, provoking the future in which
you have advantage. It means turning away from the path
that you're on right now, and that's that that has
not been our tent from the beginning. It's really what
(45:01):
we're trying to have people do is redeploy their capital
in a way where they take more ambitious bets in
shifting the way things have been done in the past.
And what we're finding, I think, especially as technology in
particular and even more particularly AI these days, as it
accelerates the pace of change and creates an ever more
(45:24):
uncertain world. Again, another theme I'd come back to is
that the balance, the shift in the balance, is changing,
and we're finding that. And actually, one of the things
we often say when we talk about the books is that,
you know, it used to be, even at the beginning
of writing Deadnate, it used to be that the status
quo felt quite safe and change felt quite risky. And
(45:45):
now actually we're finding that in many circumstances it's flipped
where the safe thing to do is actually go try
to change something, and the risky thing is to remain
with the status quot. But it always is a matter
of balance, and whether you get that balance right will
depend a lot on the nature of this face in
which you play what you're trying to achieve, et cetera.
But that that is definitely one key theme that I've
taken away and I hope our readers have taken away
(46:06):
as well.
Speaker 4 (46:08):
Yeah, and I'll build on that and share my own
and we'll probably uh, this will probably take us to
the end. I'm guessing the it's it's one A in
one B so one as human beings have this capacity
to fundamentally believe that the future, the future is going
to be continued from the from the past, and in particular,
(46:32):
an assumption that is terrible in business is that you know,
you even see it happening. Now with AI, we're saying,
will we get the return from our investments in AI?
And it kind of fails the smell test because if
we don't invest in AI, the likelihood that your business
is going to be competitive in the future is almost
(46:53):
a probability of zero, right, if you choose not to
invest in AI. And so when people people say, you know,
I can't generate a return on AI, it's like you
have to compare it to the alternative, right, and not
not what you've got today that is done? Right, You
either have a choice now I can invest or not
invest in. The not investment path doesn't look very good.
(47:17):
And so if you're investing to avoid a downside, that's
as good of a return as investing to create an
upside from today. But people have this innate capacity to
just presume that we're safe in whatever we have today,
which is so not the case. And that's why I
think the thing that I've learned the most is the
(47:38):
importance of always going back to first principles and whenever
you're doing something like making an incremental management decision, it's
not about just extending the past. It's about what's the
investment choice of, like do I do it or do
I not do it? And you have to then think
about what the consequences of not doing it are. We're
just not very we're just not very good at that
(48:01):
more generally, more generally than we are.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Very helpful gentlemen. Yes, you're right, we have come to
the close here. However, we do enough time for each
of you to say, maybe fifteen seconds each, what would
you like to leave our listeners and viewers with around
the world.
Speaker 6 (48:16):
Move before you think you have to, or said differently,
don't overthink it.
Speaker 4 (48:21):
Yeah, go check out our book hone The Book dot com.
We'd love to hear what you think. Catch us both
on LinkedIn. The nicest thing that an author can have
is engagement with their ideas, so we love to engage
and hit us up.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Delightful. I'm so happy to know both of you. You're
both inspiring, you both teach me a lot, and you're
delightful to engage with. Thanks for coming back on Working
on Purpose.
Speaker 5 (48:46):
Thanks for having us. It was fun having us again.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Absolutely, listeners and viewers you want to you're gonna learn
more about these guys in their books. The best way
to start is to find them both on LinkedIn and
then also check out their book at hone the book
dot com. So h O n E thebook dot com.
Last week, if you missed the live show, you can
always catch it via recorded podcast. See you next week
for another nourishing and elevating conversation together. Let's lean in
(49:11):
and learn how to make workplaces that work for everyone
and find way to do business that betters the world.
Let's work on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host doctor Elise
Cortes each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create
a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion
performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the
meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work
(49:41):
on purpose.
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