Keith Ferrazzi: Why Great Leaders Never Lead Alone

Guy Kawasaki:
Good morning, everybody. This is Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. And as you know, we're on a mission to make you remarkable. So we go out and we find the most remarkable people we can to inspire you and inform you. And of course, today we hit it out of the ballpark.
We have Keith Ferrazzi. Can it get any more remarkable than that? And many of you may remember him for this great book that he wrote called, Never Eat Alone, and wow, that was a fantastic book. And now, he's with us for the second time because he's got another great book, and now instead of not eating alone, we're going to talk about not leading alone. Right, Keith?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Guy, it's extraordinary to be here, and I'll just mirror right back to you. You are remarkable, my friend. It's been amazing to watch all that you give to the world.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I don't know about that. You probably tell that to every podcaster.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I don't, actually. Nobody else is called the Remarkable Podcast, so this was my unique opportunity.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have kind of a weird question to start off. I read the foreword of your book and I thought, and this is true for me too, "Do you ever wonder where would we be if our parents were rich?"

Keith Ferrazzi:
Oh, my God.

Guy Kawasaki:
Because you came from a poor family and I did too, and I'm not trying to say that we would be better off. I'm saying, maybe we would be worse off if we came from a rich family.

Keith Ferrazzi:
It's interesting. There's somebody out there with a name similar to yours that wrote this book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I've had a chance to talk to him a bit about this. I thought you were going somewhere else with a question, which I'll come back to.
I'm obviously blessed to have the drive, the inspiration, the desire to make an impact in this world that was infused in me in a very early age from my father, and also the gumption that it took for me to get where I am today, and the resilience as a result of coming from real abject poverty in the United States. My old man was unemployed, and it gave me that drive and ambition.
Not only did it give me a drive and ambition to be successful and to dig out of the economic hole we were in, but it also gave me a mission, which is, we grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the crash of the steel industry, and I saw how poor management made families destitute, and that's what I've been on for twenty, thirty years, is that desire to try to make sure that corporations stay ahead of the pack so that families like ours all over the world can thrive.
But thanks for that question. You know where I thought you were going to go with it, by the way? I thought you were going to go with it as, if we knew when we were younger, what we know now, I wish I was the leader that led this way all of my life, and that was the big lesson for me, which is writing this book and researching this book, it's woken me up to my own leadership needs.

Guy Kawasaki:
And you know what? I would make the case that it's better late than never first of all, but also, it may take fifty or sixty or seventy years to figure out what's in that book. I don't think you can figure that out at twenty.

Keith Ferrazzi:
No, you're right. In fact, I wrote Never Eat Alone, and it was about my life and how I achieved success through and with opening doors in relationships, networking, one might say. And then I kept on that relationship thread, and I started doing more and more research about how small groups of people support each other through transformation, which really evolved my passion for high-performing teams.
So for twenty years now, I've been researching, how does a small group of people perform disproportionately more than others? And it has been twenty years of research, twenty years of coaching, some of the most extraordinary turnarounds like at General Motors, some of the fastest growth unicorns now, even governments.
We're working with the country of Bhutan to infuse the principles of co-elevation and teamship and how they govern as they double their GDP and keep their Happiness Index. It's been twenty years of work.

Guy Kawasaki:
So first of all, could you define for the audience your concept? I think you invented this word, teamship. I love the word teamship. So what does it mean from Keith Ferrazzi?

Keith Ferrazzi:
I want to give credit, one of my teammates that designed the word teamship and woke that up in me. A teamship is the recognition, and I feel, I know this is going to sound heretical, I think we've over-indexed on leadership, under-indexed on teamship.
Now, leadership of course is important, and I think it deserves all the credit it's been getting. How do you be a great leader? But there were no guidebooks out there on what to expect from a high-performing team. Lencioni's book, twenty years old now, was a book about what are the dysfunctions of a team?
I wanted to give a very prescriptive roadmap on how a team becomes exceptional. And what we did was, we recognized that if you look at a good leader, they give feedback, but a great team gives each other feedback. If you look at, a good leader makes sure that the team has good energy, a great team makes sure each other has energy, a great team holds each other accountable.
A great team is responsible for each other's resilience, is responsible for each other's ideas and fortitude, and giving them what I call co-elevation, a purposeful mission but forcing to lift each other up in the process. Now, if a leader can unleash that, it is asymptotic in terms of what can be achieved.

Guy Kawasaki:
I was about to ask you, what are the tells of a lack of teamship? But you just listed them there. Is there anything you left out?

Keith Ferrazzi:
No, I did. The book is, what we found, our research is a 3,000 team dataset over twenty years, and that's what you get when you get this book. And what we've done is, we've broken it down into ten critical shifts that a team needs to make. Each chapter is a shift. Each chapter starts with a hero story, and then right after that, around that particular shift, real simple practices that the team can try on. The intention is to use it as a book club and the book becomes your coach.
I wanted to put myself into every team out there in the world that I couldn't get to, using the book. So there are ten shifts, and I just mentioned a few that are really important. One of them is candor and the willingness for a team to move from conflict avoidance to real courage.
Another one is very purposeful bonding and having each other's back, the connectivity of a team. Those two are very important. I would say of the ten shifts, there's probably three or four that I can say are disproportionately predictive of a team's outcomes.

Guy Kawasaki:
So back up for a second for me. Let's say I'm listening to this and I even bought the book. Give me the gist of, how do I conduct team diagnostics? How do I assess the level of teamship on my team?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Yep. Let me just use one chapter. The first two chapters are the foreword to the book and the awakening that you should expect more from a team. That's chapters one and two but let me dive right into a practical chapter three, and chapter three has a couple of questions that you ask your team.
One of them is a diagnostic question that I have done with thousands of teams and it's a simple question, "Do we challenge each other in the room when it's risky to do, even when it's outside of our swim lanes or areas of expertise?" That's a complicated question, but the bottom line is, do we challenge each other actively here, even when it's risky? Now, the average team on a scale of zero to five is actually only about two, or less than two.
I can give you a couple simple practices. One practice is actually called a candor break. Put onto your agendas of your meetings, a simple line that says, "We're going to do a candor break." That's when you stop in the middle of the meeting and you ask the team, "What's not being said in here that needs to be said?"
Now, you don't just do it in an open forum with eight people. You have them go into groups of two, and you have them chat for even thirty seconds. What's not being said that should be said? Then you restart the conversation. In that small group of two, psychological safety goes up by 85 percent and people will begin to have a very different conversation afterward.
That's one of four of the practices in chapter three called a candor break. Now, there are a few others, and we can get into them if you'd like to because they're really useful for your listeners to dive into, but the first thing you do is, you diagnose where you are, you do a couple of the practices, and then a couple of months later you diagnose again.
And I promise you that what we find is, the average candor score of a team is usually in the low twos, high ones, and then that goes up to the low threes in less than a few months, and it goes up into the high threes, low fours within six months if you do the practices regularly. So the intention is, you do the practices, you change your culture, and you get different outcomes.

Guy Kawasaki:
I understand what these teammates are doing, but now, what mental framework does the leader have to ensure the success of a teamship?

Keith Ferrazzi:
There's a phrase I love to use, and I might've used it the last time we're together, but we're behavioral scientists. We just study practices. Like I said, I think we've over-indexed on leadership. I'm going to say I think we over-indexed on mindsets. I believe that you don't think your way to a new way of acting, you act your way to a new way of thinking.
I don't need a leader to adopt a different mindset in order to read my book and start to practice it. I just want a leader to have the courage to try a few of the practices, and if you try a few of the practices, you'll wake up and realize how much pent-up value is in your team that you're letting sit there. So there's one of the practices, it's called a stress test. A stress test, a lot of us do these things called report-outs in our team meetings.
Somebody will show up and they'll say, worst case, they're going through a twenty-page deck, "Here's where we are in this thing, and oh, my God, it's horrible." I'm sure you've never seen that before. So instead, we go through something called a stress test where the person shows up and on one page says, "Here's what I've achieved, here's where I'm struggling, and here's where I'm going."
Now, everybody knows what each other is doing anyway, but this initiative is now summarized this way. And you pause, and you once again go into small groups of two or three, and in those groups you open up a Google Doc, and in the Google Doc you write, "Here's where I challenge you. You might be missing this. Here's an idea I'm going to give you, and here's some support I'd like to offer." A simple assignment has now rebooted your culture. I wrote an article about this in Fortune magazine a couple of weeks ago.
If you want to just go look up my name in Fortune, you'll see this article and it talks about how one simple practice can totally reboot a culture. This stress testing, if you regularly practice stress testing and every associate shows up and is willing to get feedback from the team directly, you're priming the pump to open up the value that this team can give each other without you always being the hub and spoke.

Guy Kawasaki:
And in this world, does all of this have to be done in person or can we use digital collaboration?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Chapter six. Chapter six recognizes that the tools that we have been sitting on, Microsoft Teams, Google, Webex, Zoom, there's a robust set of tools. Now, having AI complement those tools, your teammates are now expanded to include AI and these collaborative tools that are available to us are extraordinary. Project management software, knowledge management software, the stuff that Drew Houston's doing over at Dropbox is amazing.
Now, I want to make sure that we start to become what I call twenty-first century collaborators. Stop using damn meetings as the primary form of collaboration. If you're a leader that sees a problem, and actually there's a wonderful example of this. I don't know if you ever met Gil West who was at United Airlines, went over to Cruise, the self-driving car company. He went over there and he was looking around and he's, "You know what? I see a problem here. Let's have a meeting on it."
And these kids out of Stanford, which is where most of these kids that birthed these companies, they looked at Gil, this westerner, this guy from the South, the southerner, and he said, "Gil, how do we have a meeting on it? We haven't collaborated yet." So these kids collaborate in the cloud, multiple cycles.
They figure out what the big problems are we're trying to solve, what the big barriers are, what innovative solutions we have. Then they have meetings to land the plane if they need it. So we've got to do what I call meeting shifting, where we ignore this idea that meetings are the primary form of our collaboration. This book has been able to reduce the number of meetings by 30 percent in most teams.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm almost afraid to ask, what do you think of these companies who are mandating return to office then?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Okay, look, I've got some very good friendships with some of these executives who are very well-known right now for bringing everybody back to the office. So here's what I'll say. I don't want to have a dog in the hunt as to whether or not we need to be in the office or out of the office for a moment, but here's what I can tell you. I'm going to use two folks you probably know, Drew Houston, Matt Mullenweg, Drew from Dropbox, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress.
The two of those folks, during the pandemic found that they were feeling that their companies were suffering from a drain in energy, relationships. They sensed that the culture was eroding because they were virtual. Now, some CEOs, when they felt that, their natural reaction was, "Let's get everybody back to the office as soon as we can."
And I'm going to put words in their mouth, they're not saying this, but it's how they're acting. They're basically saying, "Let's get everybody back to the office to practice serendipity bonding, which is how we build our culture. We want people to bump into each other in hallways, et cetera."
Drew and Matt decided to say, "You know what we're going to do? We're going to not practice serendipity bonding. We're going to practice purposeful bonding. Every week, we're going to do energy checks. These energy checks are going to act as a safety net, where everybody's going to go around and say, 'Here's what's draining my energy. On a scale of zero to five, here's where I am and here's what's draining my energy.'"
These energy checks, the average relationship score of a team prior to the pandemic when they were doing serendipity bonding was in the mid to high twos. When you went into the pandemic, it went down into the low twos because people didn't see each other. When you started practicing purposeful bonding, it ended up going up into the mid to high threes.
The point that I would make is, if you're going to be virtual or hybrid, which any global company is anyway, then you need to use twenty-first century collaboration and you need to use purposeful cultural-building tactics and practices that will actually get you on a steady state. You can actually do a better job in a hybrid virtual world than you did just using accidental, serendipitous ways of connecting and collaborating.
If you want to bring everybody back into the office because there's an extra esprit de corps and you can recruit people who want to be in that office and still have that kind of an energy, I would still recommend you'd read chapter six. You still build that sort of purposeful collaboration tools, and you build in chapter four, those purposeful bonding skills and you'll crush it either way.

Guy Kawasaki:
The people that I know that are being forced to return to office, it's not this spirit of serendipity. It's more, we're going to check your badge on the way in and we're going to know exactly when you came and when you left, and you need to be there for such-and-such many days per week, per minute. It's like punching a time clock for knowledge workers. I wouldn't say there's anything to do with serendipity.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I'll riff for a moment, and I do in the book, one of the things that I realized when I finished writing the book, as I looked back on all the heroes that I celebrated in the book, almost all of them were engineers, and it made me realize something, and that was that the people who put their mind to re-engineering ways of working ended up thriving as leaders, versus those who left the ways of working to be more accidental or legacy oriented.
I'll say it a slightly different way. When the pandemic hit, we looked over at the HR department and we said, "It's your job to figure this work thing out." And so HR people, like governance people, put a hat on around policy, so it was about checking the boxes of being in the office, or how much Zoom time do you actually have? Could we possibly measure how much fingers are on keyboards during the day?
All of a sudden, it was policy and auditing for it. But there was another group of people that said, "Wait a second. We're in a different world today. We have technologies we didn't have before. We have opportunity and potential to reinvent working. What would that look like if we reinvented collaboration?" And that's what I've documented here, and that's a re-engineering.
Ask yourself, in the average company, who is re-engineering work today? Whose job is it? Software engineers did Agile, manufacturing engineers did Six Sigma and TQM. Both of those were new ways of working that got re-engineered. Now we need to re-engineer collaboration and white collar teaming. And look, I started out my life as an industrial engineer. That's what I'm trying to bring as a behavioral scientist, as an engineer, new ways of working, new ways of teaming that'll help us crush it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but in reading your book, and even just listening to you now, it seems that the concept of this lone genius, this superstar visionary cowboy, the obvious examples are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I don't remember much teamship in the Macintosh division. So are these two people just outliers, or should they be our heroes or our anti-heroes?

Keith Ferrazzi:
I love that question, and I earnestly asked that question myself, because I went through and what I did was, I studied people like Tarang over at elf Beauty, who has been absolutely crushing it. This is a small organization that is now eating market share significantly against the big beauty companies, and its entire culture is bred from teamship.
It was chapter ten, and I can share a little bit more about it, but I just went and looked at companies that were crushing it and extracted their practices and I found teamship was embedded. I started doing the same thing for Elon Musk. About six months ago, I assigned a research team of two people to really go and scour, what are the practices of Elon Musk and why has he been successful? I finished that research and was ready to actually consider writing a book on it, because I thought it was really intriguing.
And I found out that a friend of mine, Dennis Kneale, is also just releasing a book and was already going to press on the exact same subject. What makes this man exceptional? And I do think that we can do both. The social contract at a place like elf Beauty from Tarang is, "Come here. You will thrive. You will grow faster and further than you ever have, but you have to be willing to let your team push you higher.
Your team needs to give you feedback. Your team needs to lift you up. You're going to love on each other, and you're going to grow and we're going to kick ass." That's the Tarang social contract at elf Beauty. The social contract over at a place like SpaceX or anywhere else that Elon Musk is purveying is, "Come here. You're going to get your ass kicked and we're going to do extraordinary fucking things."
That's a social contract that some people buy into, but I think you're quite limited to the number of people who want to be in that social contract. If you want to scale, if you want to create extraordinary products, yes, you could have an extraordinary visionary like Elon or like Jobs, and you can count on them to dictate the answer.
Or we can start looking at innovations and crowdsourcing of insights where we can get inspired from diverse inputs like things like XPRIZE, and our friend Peter Diamandis espouses, which is the wisdom of the crowds to inspire great innovation. There's two different philosophies, and I think there's things we can learn from both.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to ask you a question that maybe you don't want to answer.

Keith Ferrazzi:
From you, I'm not intimidated. Bring it on.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so let's say that Donald Trump's nominations all go through, and Donald Trump's chief of staff calls you up and says, "Keith, I want you to help me make a teamship out of this cabinet." What do you do?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Did you just pull that out of the air, or did you do some research? Okay, interesting.

Guy Kawasaki:
What do you mean? What kind of research do you need to do to ask that question?

Keith Ferrazzi:
The research is that at the beginning of the Biden administration, exactly this time at the transfer of power from the prior administration to the Biden administration, I wrote an article in Fast Company, which is my advice to the Biden administration for how he should run his cabinet, and how his cabinet should treat the Hill.
Now, they took none of it and I didn't get any calls, but I'll tell you, look, very interesting. I did study this and as a result of writing this piece, you can go back and find it in Fast Company four years ago, and what I recognized was, the cabinet is a bunch of very high-powered, brilliant people and whether you like their politics, et cetera, they are what they are. And each of those individuals run their domains. There is no interdependency among that group of people.
The simple practice of stress testing, imagine Dr. Oz showing up in that cabinet and asking, "Here's my analysis so far of what I think Medicare and Medicaid has got to do. Here's where I'm struggling to figure this out and here's where I'm planning to go." And then the team, the cabinet would go into small groups and say, "Here's what you're missing. Here's an idea. Call me here if you'd like some help." That simple practice of stress testing would make that group so much more effective.
Then the next question is, and this is the first thing I ask in this book, is, "Who's your team?" Look, the reality of government and the reality of business is that our teams have nothing to do with org charts. If you want to get something done, you need the people up on the Hill, you need the bureaucrats, you need the congressmen, the senators, they're your team. And yet, we think and we treat each other as these silos in business and in government.
The work that I'm doing with the country of Bhutan is interesting because in Bhutan, you've got a very small country that is revered by people all over the world for being one of the happiest places in the world. They're looking to make leaps forward in their economic growth, and like every other government, they were traditionally thinking about it in silos.
You've got the secretaries, you've got the ministers, one politic, one bureaucrat, very separate, and then you've got the private sector. We're looking at how those groups can come together as one team, one team, which allows the government officials to truly what I call teaming out, and crush it in terms of innovative new ideas that they would've never been able to do before.
So the answer to your question is, if I got that call, I would be surprised, but if I got that call, of course, I grew up as a kid wanting to make a difference in this world. When the steel industry was crashing, I wanted to be a politician and I wanted to grow up and be governor of Pennsylvania, president of the United States and fix American manufacturing.
I'm doing it from a different lens today. I'm doing it from the perspective of thought leadership and the perspective of behavioral science around teams. I would, of course serve my country in any way that I could.

Guy Kawasaki:
So you would say yes.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I would say yes. I would love that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Just invite me when you tell Dr. Oz to have this conversation with, I don't know, I can't say Matt Gaetz anymore because he dropped out, but that would've been a conversation I would like to hear.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I can't say that these practices are easy to implement everywhere. If you've got a tin-eared narcissistic leader that is unwilling to open themselves to critique and open dialogue, which I have sometimes seen in my career, it's more difficult to get the team to be psychologically safe to do this.
Although, I remember a leader of a large telecom company, international telecom company, that was exactly that kind of person, and what ended up happening is the team applied these principles out of salvation for themselves.
The leader was narcissistic, difficult, challenging, and the team rallied together to be the kind of leaders that they were all were asking, for each other. They were able to, I would say, not thrive because it was difficult, but they were certainly able to co-elevate as a team. But imagine if the leader embraces that journey.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I'll let you off the hook now.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Told you I didn't mind. You can ask anything, my friend. Love it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Would you explain the difference between candor and conflict? Because I think many people don't differentiate the two.

Keith Ferrazzi:
It's actually a great question, and I think that there's conflict avoidance, which I find right in most companies, which is why the score about, can we challenge each other when it's risky to do so, is low. I think a lot of people think of conflict as disrespect, where there's disagreement. I think healthy conflict is necessary.
I would be curious, if you go back into the Macintosh days, was there ever a healthy conflict where people pushed in each other, or I don't know, if they felt psychologically safe to do that? That's obviously a ground foundation that you've got to give. There's two ways to get to psychological safety, by the way. You can hire for it.
Where Ray Dalio does that, I think Amazon tries to do that. You hire for people that are resilient and capable of arguing and challenging each other, not disrespectfully, but just able to be stressful in their interactions, sometimes even competitive, but it actually gets to a higher order product.
That's one solution. There's another solution, which is, you build it through a sense of trust, empathy, and care for each other. Most conflict avoidance companies would say, "We're not going to challenge our peers. That would be throwing them under the bus." Others would say, "Of course I'm going to challenge my peers. I wouldn't dare let them fail." So this perspective of care and commitment, conflict does not mean disrespect.
Conflict is healthy, to get to a better answer. I would always bet on a company that had healthy and even sometimes unhealthy conflict at its core, than a nice company that has political talking behind each other's backs, the meeting after the meetings, the conflict avoidance, and that's a lot of the Midwest nice companies that are mediocre and getting disrupted by these companies coming out of our area in the Bay.

Guy Kawasaki:
And how do you convince people that it's okay to be candorous if that's the word. How do you take them out of being avoiding and into candor and conflict?

Keith Ferrazzi:
It's so easy. I introduce a practice. Literally, when I say to a team, "Here's what we're going to do. Before the meeting, which I know is going to be contentious, here's a topic we're going to discuss, but before we go in to discuss it, I'm going to open a Google Doc and I'm going to have you all write down, what do you think is the real problem we're trying to solve here, and what do you think is a bold solution?
And I don't want any of you to be conflict avoidant about it. We need to have this on the table so we can have a good conversation and get to the root of it." So that's the pep talk I would give.
Now, what I do know is, you might still have some people holding back a little bit, but if you're in meeting conversation, if you had started the conversation in the meeting, the average meeting would be a two in terms of its candor and its willingness to be courageous and challenge.
This exercise increases psychological safety by 85 percent, and it puts people into a position where they've got time to think and be thoughtful, and they write into the document, and now we have a much more candid dialogue that happened asynchronously.
That's just one example, and that's a practice. It's called meeting shifting. Another practice is the candor break, where you're just telling people, "I want you to be candid. I'm going to turn what I want in my culture, which isn't present in most companies. I'm going to turn it into a simple assignment. Go talk in groups of two, be candid with each other. Come back. You may not get 100 percent, but you'll get 80 percent, and that's the powerful shift."
So the answer again is, "I don't need to change your mindsets. I don't need to help you grow a pair. I just need to have you do a simple practice. We've got all the practice as delineated in the book and it will bring the results you're looking for."

Guy Kawasaki:
You used this word mindsets a couple times. Are you saying that you believe that the work of Carol Dweck and the growth mindset is fundamentally wrong, or are you just saying that the way to get to the mindset change is to do these simple practical things?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Exactly, exactly. Look, if you want a growth mindset, one of the things to do a growth mindset is you need to be curious, and you need to open yourself for new inputs, you need to be more diverse. Well, in chapter one of the book, we teach you that your team is no longer your org chart. So if you're sitting in the marketing department or you're sitting in a division or sales department and you used to collaborate just with yourselves, you're not being very curious.
You don't have a growth mindset. But if you adopt a practice which is re-engineering and asking yourself, "Who is our real team here? Who's our core team and who is our extended engaged team? In other words, who do we need to get the job done?" And that all of a sudden becomes the team, that you call the team, then, now you've just done a practice that opens you up to be more inclusive, and that practice will build that growth mindset because you're going to start getting input.
You're like, "Wow, that was amazing. I never thought of that. Now I want more of that input. And now we can use asynchronous collaboration and go ask for more of this input in documentation instead of meetings. Now I can have faster, more inclusive, more innovative, bolder collaboration in a shorter period of time." And that is exactly what you would teach in the growth mindset. I'm just underlining the practices underneath it.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that an AI chatbot could be part of this collaboration team? You're talking about opening up Google Docs and letting people commenting into it. Could a chatbot be one of the team members and participate?

Keith Ferrazzi:
100 percent. Yeah, I don't have a tool that does this, but here's what I might imagine would happen soon. Somebody would take this book and it would actually open up and suggest to a team if in the agenda there's a report out, it would say, "Why don't we do this as a stress test?"
Or one might recommend prior to a meeting, "Hey, the last time you were together in this meeting, John, you spoke 80 percent of the time. Maybe this time before the meeting, it might be a good idea that you open yourself to hear other people's points of view and voices in this coming meeting." These are things AI can do, and I do believe that very soon we're going to have AI coaches that'll be just here on our shoulder at all times.

Guy Kawasaki:
So now let's say I bought into this teamship concept, and I want you to explain, how is hiring and onboarding and compensation different in a teamship?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Yeah, it's very interesting. In one of the chapters where I was talking to Enrique, the CEO of Hewlett Packard, he had a wonderful point of view, which is, "We need to hire for culture. We need to hire for diversity, and for people who say the slate isn't really available to us to do that, they're just being lazy and they're not waiting long enough. Wait to build the right slate."
Now, I think the interview tactics are going to differ. Next week on the third of, doesn't matter what month it is because I'm not sure when this will air, but next week, most likely I will have had a meeting by the time you hear this, and I'm having eighty executives, half are CIOs and half are CHROs, and I'm bringing them together in New York City to talk about how that partnership of technology and people has to change.
And one of the things I'm going to try to infuse in this group is, "Folks, you need to be curious with an engineering mindset to rethink work. And neither of you is really bringing the partnership between technology, engineering work, and human capital into a partnership as a group of three." One of the things we're going to look at is, what are the new skillsets that executives need to do all of this?
And obviously, I'm giving out my book, teamship because the idea is, they have to team differently. This idea that the three of these individuals, the actual work business engineers, the IT professionals, and the human capital professionals, we need to change our practices in how we collaborate. And that's going to be a really important area that I think, I hope this is my evangelization.
This is why I'm not having lunch right now, but I'm here talking to you, because I want to get out into the world this call to action that it's about time that we change work. We really do. It's about time that we change work and stop dragging ourselves through the old ways of working.

Guy Kawasaki:
If I'm the chief recruiting officer of a company that has bought into teamship, and I say to you, "Keith, okay, so tell me, what am I looking for? Am I looking for Ivy League background, relevant work experience? What am I looking for to foster the success of a teamship?"

Keith Ferrazzi:
I might say, "This is too easy. Start with somebody who has thrived in team sports, athletics, somebody who has an experience in it, not somebody who was a runner or an individual sports enthusiast. Try to find team sports enthusiasts." I also might suggest that you find people who've been in the military.
I understand that perspective of hierarchy in the military, but the military engineers for teamship, if the sergeant is killed in battle, I'm going to butcher the analogy here, but if the leader is killed in battle, the team steps up and the team knows how to step up.
I've often been told by General McChrystal, "You don't take a hill for your country. You take a hill for your buddy who's standing next to you." This sense of teamship is implicit in getting the most out of a group of young men and women where everything is at stake.
So I feel like there's experiences that you would look for. Interestingly enough, I didn't have those. I was a wrestler all my life, starting in fifth grade in Pittsburgh, all throughout school I was a wrestler, and I felt that I had to do a lot myself. I was just that, pull up by the bootstraps, believing in the American dream, and I've had to unpack a lot. My research is far out ahead of my natural instincts. My natural instincts is to be much more hub and spoke, control-oriented kind of a leader, and I have to fight it all the time.

Guy Kawasaki:
It's very funny because we have a lot of overlap data. When I was a CEO, I hired two people from the Stanford wrestling team, and you're right, that's not a "team sport," but I got to tell you, when you hire a wrestler, you're getting somebody who's greedy, because even if you're on a Division I wrestling team, it's not like you're going to get a professional wrestling contract. And it's not like basketball or baseball or football. It's pure grit. And wrestlers never give up.

Keith Ferrazzi:
They never give up. I was just going to say, the one thing that I can say about myself as a wrestler and as a leader, is they never give up. And people will say that the resilience and the grit, like you're suggesting. But the other thing is, I remember when I was a wrestler, I was the kid that if our heavyweight was sick or out, they'd put me in. That's like four weights above my weight class.
They would put me in because they knew I would never get pinned. I would rather dislocate my shoulder than get pinned. And that's the kind of individual that I think wrestler mores, but it's different by the way, than somebody who learns how to pass the ball to win. And that's the difference in teamship.

Guy Kawasaki:
Let's stay on the sports analogy for one more time.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Oh, you're going to lose me. You're going to lose me. Go ahead.

Guy Kawasaki:
I love sports analogies. When you say, "This uses sports team analogy," I just want to be clear for people, you're not referring to the quarterback, right? You're more referring to the offensive line.

Keith Ferrazzi:
What I'm referring to, a friend of mine owns a couple of teams. His name's Peter Guber, and he's one of the owners of the Warriors and he's one of the owners of the Dodgers. Anyway, that's a riff. But what I can say is that when I've talked to him and I've talked to his players, what happens in the locker room at halftime, not from what the coach does, but what the team does, what happens in the huddle and how the team gives feedback on plays and where they're going. It's extraordinary.
So that's what I'm talking about. I was talking to the woman who led to victory, the women's soccer team a few years ago, and just this idea of taking a group of exceptional individual talent and turning it into a team that won't let each other fail. There's a phrase that I use in the book, "Crossing the finish line together," to make a group of people realize that we don't win until we all win. And that's a different mindset than a lot of what companies have, and a lot of teams have, and we need to instill that.

Guy Kawasaki:
You mentioned the name Stanley McChrystal, and I take it you hold him in high regard.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I just know him. I remember he had just exited or been exited from the military, and he was at the TED Conference. I think he might've even been speaking, and my heart was touched by what he had gone through. I always like underdogs. I just always love people who are suffering through their remorse, and I like to be of service.
So he and I went for a long walk, and he was talking about starting a professional services firm, et cetera, and I learned a lot from him, and I've learned a lot from people in the military. But anyway, I do have an affinity to him, but you may have a different perspective.

Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, no, absolutely. Did you read his book, Risk?

Keith Ferrazzi:
Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
I love that book. I think it was like Peter Drucker quality book. I loved his book.

Keith Ferrazzi:
He's a brilliant guy. You can see his strategic mind put to business. Yeah, I'm a huge fan.

Guy Kawasaki:
I think if you read Risk and you read Never Lead Alone, you'd pretty much be covered. You don't need to read any more leadership books.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I appreciate that. But we're going to excerpt just that and use it.

Guy Kawasaki:
You can quote me.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Yeah, that's a great quote.

Guy Kawasaki:
I got two more questions for you. So first question is, how do you get people to break out of silos?

Keith Ferrazzi:
It's using this tool that I mentioned before, not to be stuck too much on it, of asynchronous collaboration and redefining team. So you put those two things together. So look at the other day, at a big insurance company, and they were going through a massive transformation. They were hoping to double their share price in less than five years, and they're on their way to doing that. They felt like there was some stuck in the wheels.
And I stood in front of this large group of folks, I said, "Pick one critical initiative that you believe will help significantly advantage the growth of this business. And I want you to ask yourself, and this is initiative that you think you could make impact on. First question is, who's your team?" And I really coached them to think about team not as an org chart, not as silos, just "Who's your team?"
Now, I was physically with this group. I said, "Tonight, do me a favor. I want you to find somebody outside of your organization who is a critical teammate that you haven't been treating as a teammate. I want you to go up to them at dinner tonight, and I want you to let them know the passion you have for this project and invite them in, not to your team, but invite them into a co-creation.
Invite them into their team with you. Invite them into their team and say, 'This initiative could be something, but we're not going to get from here to there without you.' And invite them into a different team. And when you do that, you give people that path. It just starts breaking down silos." People are lazy, they're busy. I shouldn't say lazy. People are busy. They're preoccupied.
The natural reaction is, "We're going to work in all ways of working. I'm going to work in my silo, I'm going to plug it in and it'll plug into some other silo. And when there's a problem that silos aren't working together, then I'm going to be resentful and I'm going to try to get what I want. But if I don't get what I want, it's going to turn into bad behavior."
That's old ways of working. And we got to, just simple new practices, will break down old traditional things that are crushing our organizations today. Now, I think AI is going to help. I really do think, I'm very hopeful that AI is going to change our lives, including take this book and engineer it into our work process as coaches.

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to back up about five minutes and ask you a question here. So you started off this example about this company, and they said that they wanted to double their share price as the goal. So do you ever hear a goal like that and you say, "That's the wrong kind of goal. The goal is not doubling your share price. The goal is, I don't know, excellence or leadership or something." But do you ever push back on that kind of, seems to me insipid goal?

Keith Ferrazzi:
If you're the CEO, and you've got shareholders that you're responsible to, having a goal of doubling shareholder value, I don't think the shareholders that you have to be accountable to are going to call it insipid. But that said, and also, I am newly a venture partner at a VC called Lightspeed, and I sit in these meetings now, these partner meetings that I'd never had exposure to, with such deep respect for what it takes to be a VC.
A lot of my friends are VCs, but they're not. They're just rich people spending money. That's different than a real VC, like the rigor of these organizations like Lightspeed that I see. But look, engineering value creation is important. But that said, what I can say is, this same organization has had a vision of being, like they've said, "We want to be the NVIDIA of insurance."
Okay, now what does that mean? How do you engineer a product? How do you engineer a level of customer experience and satisfaction and how do you re-engineer the business? And I literally spent an entire afternoon with these folks asking a simple question, "How does AI transform the customer experience and create extraordinary value?"
And of course, following that path, you'll get to shareholder value, but it really is about the customer experience. I would say that if any of these companies have a goal of re-engineering shareholder value, but they're looking at it only from finance, not looking at it from a perspective of re-engineering the customer experience, then I think you're right. That's insipid.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so we're both right.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I think we're both on the same target. Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I'm going to read you a quote from your book. When did you write this book? A year ago?

Keith Ferrazzi:
I shipped it a year ago, but I was writing it for the last twenty years. It's funny, when I wrote my first book, Never Eat Alone, people said, "How long did it take you to write that book?" I said, "thirty-five years."

Guy Kawasaki:
I tell people that too.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Yeah. Go ahead. What was the quote?

Guy Kawasaki:
"The most innovative teams relish and build greatness out of diverse perspectives." So basically you're supporting DEI, but DEI doesn't seem to be so popular anymore.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Oh, I love this question. You are so good.

Guy Kawasaki:
What's the deal here? You can't say that in Florida.

Keith Ferrazzi:
Now, it's funny, I was actually just in Florida the other day and had to ask myself, "Am I allowed to say this on stage here?" So here's what I did, and I love this. Lencioni's book inspired me twenty years ago to study this subject, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. But today, twenty years later, there's a lot of difference about teams. And one of the things I wanted to ask myself was, "Where is the DE&I journey in teams today? What does it look like?"
I was at Davos a few years ago, and I started this research there. I asked twenty-six heads of DE&I a simple question, "If you had a team that you were responsible for coaching for the next six months, what would you do with that team to make them a shining emblem of DE&I for your organization, for shareholder value, for the customer experience, for employee engagement? What would you do?"
None of them had an answer, not right away, because that's not the lens that they look at the world. DE&I looked at the world in terms of enterprise equity. They looked at policies, they looked at so many different things. But I was asking you to look at what the value creation opportunity was of DE&I at the team level.
And I found out a few things. I'd already written most of the book when I was having this conversation. And I found out that the diversity is born into chapter one when we really are asking ourselves, "Who's the real team, and what voices do we need to have heard? What diverse set of voices do we need to have heard that will give us a more exponential, a more breakthrough set of thinking?" Equity.
The equity that I got, the lesson that I heard from Enrique, the CEO of Hewlett Packard, he's like, "Listen, people say that you can't get a diverse slate. Bullshit. You wait until you have a diverse slate that's exceptional and inspires you. And that's why their equity is what it is." Inclusion, I found it peppered throughout the whole book.
If you make sure every voice is heard in a meeting, if you make sure that asynchronous collaboration is the primary form of collaboration, if you're reaching out to diverse, breaking down silos, getting inputs, all of that crushes it on the inclusion. So what we found was, most of the DE&I agenda is marbled into this book.
Then we added a chapter when I really interrogated them, I was like, "What about this thing called belonging? How do you get people to feel like belonging?" Well, that's chapter four when it comes to the intimacy and connection of having each other's back. How about otherness and sameness?
So I really got into it, and I marbled those in practices. And I do believe that anybody who wants to embrace a diverse and equitable agenda can find the roadmap in here. But it's not about checking a box, it's about making the work better, because it is listening to a diverse set of inputs that will inspire us to have better outputs.

Guy Kawasaki:
That's how I want to end. No, actually, I know you're going to do a world-class one of these, so I'm going to ask you to do this, not just for your own benefit, but so people can hear what a world-class thing you're going to do. You're on deck and I want you to just summarize and pitch your book to my listeners. This is it. Go for it, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi:
All right.

Guy Kawasaki:
I want to see your evangelism in action.

Keith Ferrazzi:
All right, thank you brother. Look, I believe we've over-indexed on leadership and we've under-indexed on teamship, the potential of asking a team to step up and meet you as a leader in the leadership. I think it's great that a leader gives feedback, but I want the team to give each other feedback.
I want the team to hold each other accountable. I want the team to lift each other's energy. The principle of teamship will allow you to achieve things you've never been able to achieve before because the team will be giving you so much more, and it's not just a roadmap for a leader, it's a roadmap for the team itself.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.

Keith Ferrazzi:
How'd I do?

Guy Kawasaki:
That is definitely a remarkable moment there. So Keith, thank you very much for giving up your lunch for me. I appreciate this very much.

Keith Ferrazzi:
I am so honored and grateful to be back here with you, and love following your journey and all the work that you do. Thank you very much.

Guy Kawasaki:
You're too kind. You've just got through listening to Keith Ferrazzi, and his new book is called, Never Lead Alone. And I promise you, it'll make you more remarkable. So this is the Remarkable People Podcast.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. My thanks to Madisun Nuismer, the producer and co-author of my book. Tessa Nuismer, who is our ace researcher, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, who's our audio team. And that's the Remarkable People team. Thank you, Keith, and until the third time we bring you back, just let us know what it can do. Thank you very much. Mahalo and Aloha.