Author: Jeffrey Hayzlett

 

“Adapt, change, or die.”

It’s one of my favorite mantras and couldn’t be more accurate during the challenging world of COVID.

We’ve all heard stories about how businesses from the largest-enterprise-sized corporations to the smallest ‘mom and pop’ shops have found new markets or completely reinvented themselves to stay afloat during these times.

In essence, they pivoted.

While that word has become a cliché of the COVID era, we can’t overstate the pivoting power of entrepreneurs. It’s something that’s in the blood and one of my recent guests is a perfect example of that ingenuity and malleability.

Eva Sadej knows a thing or two about reinventing yourself.  She is the founder and CEO of Medbar, a company bringing COVID tests wherever they’re needed. Except, that’s not what her company was doing pre-pandemic. It started as Flossbar, a mobile business bringing dental services to companies across the country. Flossbar was so successful; it had backing from Colgate and contracts with major corporations.

“Our dental idea was working fine. It was like 38% quarter-on-quarter growth,” Eva said during her recent interview on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett. “A good pace for our sector.”

 

Flossbar was so successful, Eva found herself on the Forbes 30 under 30 in healthcare list last year.  

 

Then COVID hit. 

 

“April’s revenue was zero. It was bad, and we were going for the next fundraise, so it was sink or swim,” Eva recalls.  

 

Her team had several ideas to keep the business going during the tough times ahead – among them what Eva called “hibernating,” which referred to laying low and laying people off until the pandemic passed. Instead of suspending operations, the team had another idea. 

 

“We thought about what do we fundamentally provide? Who are we? What’s our exact service?” Eva said. “We realized we’re doing four things to get a service into the workplace. We’re doing compliance. Humans moving around. Stuff moving around and technology backbone for the customer journey. That means we can do other things.” 

 

Eva’s team then went about pivoting from mobile dentistry to mobile COVID testing, but it was not without the challenges a brand-new industry can present.

 

“Diversified supply lines, that was an early problem. You can’t get access to COVID tests,” Eva said. “You couldn’t get access to it if you’ve got two suppliers. If you’re contacting 60 of them and bugging them every single day, you’re bound to get COVID tests.” 

 

“What we found is actually a lot of red tape, and we are great at figuring out ways to get around red tape, that’s still in the spirit of the law.” Tenacity was the name of the game.

 

While regulations became a speed bump, Eva and the team encountered another roadblock. They quickly found out medical testing and dentistry played by an entirely different set of rules. For example, to run a COVID testing lab, Medbar needed a high complexity laboratory license and expand its staff.  

 

“So, what did we do? We hired a pathologist and got a high complexity laboratory certificate as fast as possible,” Eva said. “You learn what you need to do, and you just execute. It’s about execution and knowledge IP. Taking your fundamental things and assets you have and applying them to something somebody actually wants to buy now.” 

 

While Medbar is an East Coast-based company, they service they provide is available across the United States.  

 

“We’ve got a flyer program as we call it,” Eva said. “(A team of people with) a packed suitcase and they’re ready to go next day to fly to a client that has a pandemic outbreak.” 

 

You could argue Eva is nimble from experience. Her parents immigrated from Poland to Brooklyn when she was young. She graduated from Harvard and dropped out of Wharton to start what became Flossbar. While Eva has a self-proclaimed “science nerd” background, she comes from a family of doctors, nurses, and therapists. She admittedly knew nothing about dentistry when she hatched the idea for Flossbar.  

 

“I’ve got teeth,” Eva joked. “I learned about how the mouth is so connected to the body. It’s ridiculous that we’re not learning about it.” 

 

Eva found dentistry was behind the rest of healthcare in terms of innovation and thought creating a new dental care model would be “low hanging fruit.”  

 

So, she came up with a dental business idea she called the “Airbnb model.” 

 

She would take over dentists’ offices during the off-hours, using primary dental care as a feeder system for more advanced patient needs. 

 

“It was actually taking over dental offices in the evenings and weekends,” Eva said. “Getting hygienists to go in there to do the basics, cleaning, x-rays, whitening, and then the doctor or dentist is going to be looking at those x-rays the next day.” 

 

Eva quickly found the cost of acquiring those customers during the off hours was high. The margins didn’t work. Plus, dentists didn’t like the idea of renting out their offices. 

 

“Their offices, it’s their baby, it’s their kingdom, their investment,” Eva said. 

 

So, she pivoted to the business model Flossbar became before COVID hit. 

 

I enjoyed my conversation with Eva, always great to talk to other successful entrepreneurs. She has a great business mind and seems to be continually working towards success. During the interview, we got into what made Flossbar successful, her other business ideas that didn’t work, and her advice to other young entrepreneurs.  

 

Listen to our full conversation here.  

 

With more than half of U.S. consumers, or 55 percent, subscribing to paid streaming video services, the way we consume content has changed considerably.

 

COVID became an accelerant for streaming content – whether it’s Netflix, watching a Twitch stream, and clicking through YouTube. 

 

How popular is YouTube?  

 

It is the 2^nd most popular website in the U.S., behind its parent company Google. It has an estimated 2 billion monthly active users who watch 500 million hours of video every day. According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more adults (18-35 year olds) than any traditional cable network. Needless to say, it’s become a go-to for marketers of all sizes.  

 

Every business is ripe for disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic, including marketing. 

YouTube has also become an even hotter property during the pandemic.  

 

“The move from a more traditional TV environment to streaming clearly exploded in COVID,” Tara Walpert Levy, Vice President, Agency and Brand Solutions for YouTube and Google, said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. “We saw five times the viewership of YouTube during (the early days of COVID) than we had prior and literally 100 million people watching YouTube on their TV screens.” 

 

To put that in perspective, about 100 million people watch the Super Bowl every year.   

 

But advertising on YouTube isn’t like buying a spot on the Super Bowl. YouTube ads may not be memorable, but they are able to make a connection with savvy viewers.  

 

“I think what it has led to is, for the most part, more personalized content that you still might call an ad as you traditionally define it, but we’re seeing those ads perform way better and clients getting much more sophisticated,” Tara said.  

 

Through the YouTube way of doing business, marketers can look at analytics to see how well an ad has performed. They can also track engagement, knowing when viewers are hitting the “skip ad” button and adjust their campaigns accordingly. 

 

“It is mostly about making content simply better and making sure that it is put in the environments where consumers are engaging,” Tara said.  

If it’s good content, it will stand out. The trouble is making memorable content, whether it’s an ad or a blog post and Tara pointed out that people might be surprised to what attracts the most views on YouTube. 

 

“Typically, every year, three or four of the top 10 most-watched, most engaged, most loved videos on YouTube are from brands,” Tara said. “Consumers don’t care. If you are really good (at creating content), I think you can have a huge impact.”  

 

You hear a lot about keeping content short because of people’s attention span. While short content ingestion might be right for some, I think viewers want engaging content, regardless of length. Ask yourself, why do so many people binge-watch entire seasons of their favorite new shows? 

 

Despite that, it can be challenging for brands to get their message out in the digital environment.  

 

“I think digital allows for a degree of performance-based advertising, meaning you can literally say, ‘I’d like to generate excellent leads at this cost.’ Even better yet, you know what your customer lifetime value is, you know what your target profit is,” Tara said. 

 

Brand managers find that moving parts of their marketing budgets from traditional media to digital platforms find the flexibility digital provides appealing. 

 

“What that does is two-fold. One, it typically maximizes growth for a brand well beyond what they do in traditional advertising because it gives you faster info to optimize against,” Tara said. “Even more importantly, in this environment, it lets you manage variability. When you think about the (COVID-19) crisis that hit, when you think about recovery, what we saw across the board was that brands that leaned into automation, which by definition is happening in the digital world. Those brands did better because the machines could more rapidly keep up with the rapid swings in consumer demand and interest with the ability to personalize.”  

 

According to Tara, marketers being nimble with their campaigns and content have created a lot of opportunities, helping some companies retain their loyal customers and attract new ones. 

 

“I love to be able to break down, in this moment, new customer acquisition and their behavior and existing customer retention and their behavior,” Tara Said. “We’re seeing a lot of businesses that are getting many more new customer segments than they ever have before.” 

 

Tara says this is where the data matters for marketers. Through most digital platforms, you can track brand performance in real-time. 

 

“(Businesses) don’t have the time right now to do a lot of the more traditional modes of research, but they are able to get rich data that behavior without having much or qualitative hypothetical around it, they’ve got real-world info,” Tara said. 

 

Even armed with technology, not every campaign is a home run. Tara reiterated that YouTube is transparent with its partners, helping them manage expectations and marketing budgets. 

 

“With a fundamentally new strategy, it’s going to take a couple of weeks to look at really knowing for sure what’s happening,” Tara said. “One of the things you get to see is when you have on average tens of thousands of an ad, you can see immediately which ones are working better for which audiences. Then you can simply adjust the mix to do more of that.” 

 

Digital platforms allow you to easily change what ad runs at what time of day, the specific audience, and other factors, according to Tara. Moving to digital is a total mindset change for marketers who are used to buying mass media and hoping to reach the right audience. 

 

“The mental shift of having the guardrail be ‘my marketing budget is X, and I’m not going to spend more than that,’ the guardrail instead is ‘I will not pay for an ad that does not deliver against this target return on ad spend,” Tara said. “That tends to give us and our clients together a lot more room to freely optimize, to freely find the most growth without stressing that there’s going to be an uncomfortable CFO.” 

 

I’d like to thank Tara for her insight and expertise into a way of doing business many of us don’t know much about, but we all need to learn more. 

 

If you’d like to listen to the entire conversation, click here. You’ll also hear the insightful Q & A from our audience. Not part of the C-Suite Network community? For additional information on the C-Suite Network or how to gain access to one-of-a-kind content, click here to learn more.   

 

Every business leader wishes he or she could predict the future.  

 

For every success story, we all have a lot more stories of failure. 

  

That’s why noted technology futurist and New York Times best-selling author, Daniel Burrus, says we need to look at the trends. Daniel is not talking about pet rocks and skinny jeans, instead hard and soft trends we all can see.  

 

“All trends are either hard trends based on future facts that will happen. You can’t stop them, or they’re soft trends, not based on future facts. They’re based on assumptions that may or may not happen.” Daniel said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Leadership Discussion.  

 

“I like both because a hard trend, I know that disruption…that change is going to happen. If I know, it’s going to happen beforehand. I can make disruption and change my competitive advantage with low risk.” 

 

He continued, “With a soft trend, you don’t like it. Your business is going down. Sales are going down. Guess what? That’s up to you to change it.” 

Whether we’re talking hard trends or soft trends, Daniel says you want to be a disruptor, not be disrupted.

“We all see disruption as negative. Why? Because we have to do something. We have to manage another crisis,” Daniel said. “I want you to become a positive disruptor. Creating the transformations that need to happen to elevate your relevancy because you’re either going to be more or less relevant. You’re not going to be coasting. You’re either going to be either the disruptor or the disrupted. But you do have a choice when you learn to separate the two.”

Nobody wants to be a Luddite and watch technology or competition eat away at the businesses we’ve built and the skills we’ve developed over time. But let’s face it, change is a constant in life and while it might be tempting to hide from it, we must face it head on. If I’m going to fail, fail fast and move on. It’s normal to establish a routine and get comfortable, but to me, that’s a clear sign that things must change again. That’s how you innovate.

However, there are some thing that even those not as averse to change couldn’t predicted. Factor in once in a lifetime events like the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s hard to adjust.

“(In 2020), everyone on the planet was forced to change. Businesses don’t change over unless they have to because they’re run by humans, and humans don’t like change,” Daniel said. “However, you’re forced to change when you’re forced to go digital.”

Daniel has outlined the 25 technology-driven hard trends he sees on his website. Some seem obvious to most of us, some of them will seem new. They’re all worth reading, no matter your industry.

“A trend by itself is boring until you attach an opportunity to it.” He said.

One of those trends that’s never going away is the idea of ‘X as a service.’ Daniel introduced me to that idea years ago, and it’s accelerated even more since then. X as a service is a phrase Daniel says he coined during a speech in Beijing and describes it like this:

“Anything can be a service, and the opportunity to redefine and reinvent is amazingly powerful,” Daniel explained. “HR could be a service. How about banking? If I want to disrupt, I have to ask myself, ‘what isn’t a virtual service right now?’ Because if it can be, it will be. Why don’t I do it?”

He went on to say, “Look in your industry that you’re already in, already familiar with and ask yourself, how can I redefine, reinvent it using anything can be a service. Innovation can be a service. Pick something, make it a service.”

We all know being a first mover in an industry comes with its fair share of risk, but the rewards can be huge.

“I would like you to be on the blade, but you don’t have to be the part that bleeds. I’d like you to be on the leading part of the blade,” Daniel said.

One of those places where you can be leading, and not bleeding, is office space. After years of making excuses, the pandemic taught companies of all sizes working from home is possible and productive. However, they have invested millions into buildings, equipment, and other essential business tools. Daniel says the future of office work is one of the hottest topics among the CEOs he works with on a regular basis. What will office work look like in a post-pandemic world?

“We are going to go back (to the office) in a different way,” Daniel said. “Instead of  (offices) being a place to house employees. It’s going to be a place to maximize innovation, productivity, and the things that humans do best when they’re together. Otherwise, why are we together? We know how to work remote right now.”

When we do get back into the office, Daniel says business leaders need to think about ways to get their teams to collaborate and communicate better. If they’re not, they’re missing a huge opportunity.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘what does that office look like?’” Daniel said. “There’s going to be billions made on redefining what we do when we go in the office and what do we need in there. It’s going to be huge.”

“So yeah, we’re going back into the office. But if you’re going back to do it how you used to do it, it will fail.”

It’s really got me thinking about how to help my team transition back to the office when the time comes.

I’d like to thank Daniel for his insight and expertise. Listen to our full conversation if you want to hear gems like the three hard trends you should be paying attention to, what it means to be an anticipatory leader, how to be a dynamic planner, and Daniel’s thoughts on the future of several industries post-pandemic.

I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to predict the future, but we’ll have a better idea of how to prepare for it.

If you enjoyed reading this content, consider becoming a member of the C-Suite Network. For less than the cost of a business lunch a month you’ll have access to content and community that will help you become the most strategic person in any room.

Every child dreams of what they want to be when they grow up. While most kids choose jobs like teacher, doctor, or president, there’s one powerful position usually left off the list. 

 

“I actually decided early in life that I wanted to be a CEO and not because I know what that even meant,” Shellye Archambeau, said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. 

 

Shellye not only became a CEO, but she also broke through several glass ceilings along the way. She was Silicon Valley’s first female, African American CEO. Today she is a board director at Verizon and sits on the board at Nordstrom, Roper Technologies, and Okta. A conversation with a high school guidance counselor introduced her to the idea of going into business. Shellye told the counselor she liked to run clubs, and the counselor said business is like running clubs. With that, she began planning her life after high school. 

“I decided then I’ll run a business, but I had no idea what that actually meant,” Shellye recalled. “It became my goal. Literally, I spent my career trying to be very intentional, paying attention to who are the CEOs. What do they do? What were their background experience? And then mapped out a plan for myself.” 

 

Through her research and planning, Shellye found many CEOs had one thing in common.   

 

“Turns out they all start out in sales. So, I said, ‘You know what, I gotta start out in sales,'” Shellye said. “It wasn’t because I suddenly love sales. It was just obviously the skill set and the path to power.” 

 

“The key is really figuring out what’s required (and) asked myself what has to be true, and then how do I make it true.” 

 

She added, “By starting out in sales, you start out right in the beginning understanding how money comes into the company. Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” 

 

“No matter what you want to do, because all the skills you learn in sales you can leverage personally because you learn how to handle a ‘no.’ You learn how to qualify. You learn how to negotiate. You learn how to communicate effectively. You learn how to read a room. I mean, I could go on and on.” 

 

In the 1980s, Shellye worked her way up the ranks at IBM over 14 years, becoming the highest-ranked African American woman in the company, running multi-billion-dollar divisions, taking international assignments, and not shying away from any opportunities that came her way. While Shellye admits she had done well for herself, she wanted more. So, she worked her way to the Silicon Valley, where she got the opportunity to become CEO of MetricStream. While it took years for Shellye to get to the job she dreamed of back in high school, she never gave up. 

 

“That’s one thing that my mother literally drummed into me growing up. Something happens to you as a kid, and you come home, you say, ‘Mom, it’s not fair,'” Shellye said. “Mom would basically look at me and say, ‘You’re right. Life’s not fair.'” 

 

She didn’t let fairness deter her from her goals. In fact, she used that as a catapult instead.

 

“I know the odds aren’t in my favor, so what can I do to improve the odds for me to get what I want to make something happen. To turn around a company. To build a business. It was always how do we improve the odds and then trying to execute against those things to improve the odds to actually make things happen.” 

 

“I had no idea what it really meant (to be a CEO), but I absolutely enjoyed it. I enjoyed the impact. I enjoyed developing people, creating new leaders, solving problems. All those things.” 

 

Despite all her success, Shellye said she still had those little voices in her head, reminding her of her past failures and trying to sabotage her next step. It happens to everyone. Psychologists call it impostor syndrome, meaning you are always worried about being called a fraud. If you find yourself falling into that trap, Shellye has some advice for you. 

 

“It turns out most people suffer from impostor syndrome at some point or another,” Shellye said. “Women more than men, but women of color the most.” 

“When you hear that voice, it’s like TV. Sounds real, looks real, feels real. It’s not real. So, you have to learn how to do deal with it and overcome it. Frankly, I’ve been dealing with it my entire life. Don’t let it stop you. Don’t let it stop you when people offer you opportunities. They obviously believe you can do it. Believe them if you can’t believe in yourself.”  

 

When things get tough, Shelley says, don’t be afraid to lean on people with more experience.  

 

“People think asking for help is a sign of weakness. I believe it’s a sign of strength. It means you know what you know, and you know what you don’t,” Shellye said. “Go out and find people who can help you, who have been there, done that, because the good news is almost anything you try to do somebody’s done in some shape, form, industry, whatever. Go find them and learn from them. It turns out that if you ask in the right way, people actually want to be helpful, so you’ll get the help.” 

 

I want to thank Shellye for being helpful and gracious with her advice and her time. If you’d like to hear more about her road to the c-suite, how she turned around MetricStream, how serving on corporate boards helps her stay in the business game and insightful questions from our community, click here. 

 

As busy executives, we all seem to be in a constant race against time.   

Time is both our most precious resource and our enemy.    

We wonder why projects don’t get done on time. We’re always looking for more time in our schedules and wonder when we can find time to get the team together for a meeting. Then comes our personal time, but that is an entirely different story.     

Managing time was a big theme during a conversation Tricia Benn, Chief Community Officer of the C-Suite Network and General Manager of The Hero Club, had with Josh Kaufman. He is best known as the author of the best-selling book, The Personal MBA, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.  

Josh says the first thing you need to do to get control of your time is focus. While it may sound simple, there is some complex psychology involved.  

“There’s this idea in cognitive psychology called monoidealism, where you have one, and only one thing, on your mind at any given time,” Josh said. “Your full focus and attention is on what you’re doing and nothing else. If you think of Nike’s brand slogan, “Just do it,” that’s a very nice encapsulation of what monoidealism is. What it feels like. The question is how to get there.”  

How do you get there?  

Josh says it takes an organizational shift. Managers and executives need to change the structure of the workday. He recommends blocking off specific times for specific things, like focusing on getting work done in the mornings and scheduling meetings for the afternoon.   

“Blocking out time is the best thing you can do for yourself personally. Organizationally it gets even more effective,” Josh said. “Some of the most effective organizations that I’ve worked with have made large-scale changes in making this sort of behavior, having a period of time for focus, a period of time for communication.”    

Nobody reading is guilty of over-communication. While communication is essential, it can bog a company down. Josh introduced to us the idea of communication overhead. Simply put, it’s the idea that the more people you communicate with within your organization, the more time it takes away from focusing on your work. Josh says this is why big companies tend to react slowly. There are many people, at different levels, in various departments, that need to know about the progress of a project. In the book, Josh recommends keeping your team as small as possible, so you don’t spend a lot of time communicating with others.   

So now that we know how to structure our days, how should we get work done?  

It doesn’t matter if we use fancy task-management software or an old-fashioned to-do list, we all use different metrics to track our work. No matter your method, there are times those lists can be overwhelming. With this in mind, Josh recommends breaking your day down into MITs – which stands for Most Important Tasks.   

“The general idea is you have your big system, and at the beginning of the day or the evening before go through that system and pick three things that would make the biggest difference in moving your projects forward, getting things off your plate, helping you maintain a positive sense of momentum,” Josh said.  

He continued, “Take a 3×5 index card, write those things down then as you’re working, you don’t work from the big system. That’s distracting. You work from the 3×5 index card.”  

While organizing yourself is crucial, so is organizing your team. Josh says to not only make these practices company-wide, but you should share them with your peers.  

“Anything you can do to help them manage their attention, energy, effort well as well as bake into the organization as much as possible — practices, systems, procedures that make it much easier for the folks you work with to do the same, that is going to be beneficial,” Josh said.  

Practice in any discipline is essential, so making a conscious effort to make those changes. Not only do these time management skills take practice, so does the art of business. While book learning is important, it doesn’t make up for real-world experience. Josh says this was one of the original motivations behind The Personal MBA. The book focuses on what Josh calls “a small set of techniques that can make an enormous difference” in three areas:  

 

• Principles of business – these are the basics of business, no matter what the size 
• Understanding people – People make up businesses, and businesses exist for people. Josh says a little knowledge of psychology can go a long way towards making your business and decision-making better 
• Understanding Systems – Josh says businesses are complex systems that operate inside other complex systems, like industries, governments, and societies

 “There’s a big difference between credentialing and knowledge, skill, and experience. Just sitting in a classroom doesn’t really get you there. You have to fully understand what’s going on, what’s important, how to make things better,” Josh said.   

These are just the highlights of a great in-depth conversation guest host, Tricia Benn, had with Josh.    

If you’d like to hear more about getting your team aligned and managing your time, listen to the complete interview here.  

 

Businesspeople love to use war analogies when talking about their companies. 

 

We all have people “in the trenches” fighting hard “on the frontlines” of our organizations with “boots on the ground” moving our missions forward. How many times have you had to “bite the bullet” and take a hit to profits after a deal that you were counting on didn’t work out? 

 

While we’re quick to adapt military jargon, there’s a good chance your company isn’t moving fast enough to hire military veterans. Everyone finds itself in a war to recruit top talent. While hiring managers are quick to put the word out with at the local university with an MBA program, you’re probably not expanding their searches to an often-overlooked talent pool: Veterans. 

 

“The U.S. Military is the world’s greatest leadership incubator,” said George Randle, author of the new book, The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent. “In the military, you are trusted with millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment. Hundreds of troops. Complex and everchanging situations all across the globe, for which many times there is no book solution. You’re constantly in this fishbowl of learning.” 

 

He continued, “All of my success is rooted in the coaching and mentorship and council that I got from so many noncommissioned officers and officers over my time in the military. It’s like a debt I can’t repay.” 

 

George was a recent guest on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett. He teamed up with his business partner, Mike Sarraille, to pen The Talent War. They also help run the executive search firm, EF Overwatch, a company specializing in getting military veterans into business leadership positions.  

 

Through EF Overwatch, George and his partners have placed veterans into the c-suite and other vital roles in companies. He has spent his non-military career in talent acquisition and human resources pointing out the one thing veterans don’t realize when they’re on the mission of finding a job after military service. 

 

“It’s really a case of you don’t know what you don’t know,” George said. “With that overwhelming information (social media, websites), how much you don’t know about how to market yourself and how to articulate what actually made you successful in the military. (Those skills) made me, and it made every other veteran successful in corporate America.” 

 

To help veterans out, George and Mike deploy their special operations training and came up nine attributes that military leaders have: drive, resiliency, adaptability, humility, integrity, effective intelligence, team ability, curiosity, and emotional strength.  

 

George says most companies tend to think experience is the best way to predict success, but that’s not always the case. While there are minimum qualifications for the job(s) companies is hiring for, don’t “over rotate on experience.” Instead, George believes hiring managers need to look beyond the resume and consider other skills such as the applicant’s character.  

 

“When we get into situations, much like COVID, that haven’t been predicted or haven’t been foreseen or haven’t been planned for, it’s the character that enables your success, more so than the experience and the hard skills. If you’re hiring for character, you’re more prepared for whatever comes your way than just relying upon skill.” 

 

One stereotype many veterans face have to overcome is that a regular desk job won’t be enough for them. Potential employers make the assumptions that making life and death decisions every day and exist in extreme situations might not be enough. George says that’s not the case. He calls it “empathy on a dimmer switch,” meaning military veterans can turn specific skills up and down depending on the situation.  

 

He expands, “You’re only changing the environment. Now the environments are not as extreme, but it can be extreme in business. We’re finding (veterans) are making that transition with our coaching even easier than people would normally think.”  

 

“It makes veterans all that much better under pressure situations with business. They’re like, ‘Yeah, no factor. Okay, they’re not shooting at me. I’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll figure this out.’” 

 

George also adds military training helps equip veterans in the workplace to handle stress better in challenging situations like layoffs. 

 

They also understand how to deal with conflict and co-workers who aren’t pulling their weight. George thinks we all need to get away from the military stereotype of commanders yelling at their troops. He says there’s a lot more sensitivity than you realize among the ranks. 

 

“The military is the most diverse set of backgrounds. To be a leader there means you have to be able to build relationships across the entire suite of human nature and personalities and backgrounds and ethnicities and religions. You have to be able to communicate. You have to be able to relate. You have to be able to set the standard for those people, and you have to be able to lead and create vision and motivation across the broadest section,” George said. 

 

A real challenge for military men and women in the civilian world is what George referred to as ‘the military’s all-consuming nature.’ No matter what branch you’re in, you are dependent on the military for everything — from shopping, to where you socialize. After leaving the military, many veterans struggle with filling their non-work time.  

 

“One of the things we coach is you get to go build your life. You get to have that family life. You get to have those professional and personal interests that you get to balance. It takes a little bit of time to assimilate,” George said. 

 

Let’s be honest work-life balance can be a difficult thing to achieve for those of us in business as well. 

 

I’d like to thank George for the eye-opening conversation. Accounting for character is a hero value we must not overlook when we’re hiring – or even in life.  

 

If you’d like to hear more of our conversation, click here.  

Go with your gut.

You hear that all the time, but it turns out; it might not be the best advice.

“Unfortunately, this message is so flawed,” Dr. Gleb Tsipursky told me during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. “It feels very comfortable, intuitively, but it often leads to disastrous decisions.”

He continued, “Your feelings, your intuitions are unfortunately going to lead you astray.”

Dr. Tsipursky is CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, a consulting firm that helps companies with decision making, risk management, and strategic planning. He is also the author of the appropriately titled, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. I was so impressed with his insights; I spoke with him twice in 2020 – first on my All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett podcast, then the aforementioned Digital Discussion.

If you’re wondering why you shouldn’t trust your gut instincts, Dr. Tsipursky points to the science.

“Our guts are evolved, not for the modern world, they’re evolved for the ancient savanna,” he said. “The modern world with the Internet and so on (has) really been around since 1990. Do you think we’ve had time to evolve for it?”

If you’re thinking, ‘what about your experiences?’ then you’re not alone. I thought the same. Dr. Tsipursky said not to confuse the two. Your experience comes from what could be years of practice. He used the example of looking at your inbox and differentiating the critical messages from the spam. The same goes for your business experience. If you’ve been in a similar situation before, you have the information you need to make the right decision.

The other reason you shouldn’t trust your gut is rooted in psychology. Dr. Tsipursky says our cognitive biases also get in the way. For anyone without a psychology degree, cognitive biases are flaws in the way we think. Some scientists believe these biases may be hardwired in our brains. There are many types of these biases, but Dr. Tsipursky focused on three:

• Normalcy Bias: The idea things will continue as normal – such as believing things will return to “normal” when the pandemic is over
• Confirmation Bias: This is looking for information that confirms our beliefs and feelings. “When you get information that doesn’t (confirm your beliefs), you tend to reject it because it doesn’t feel comfortable,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “You’re letting your emotions drive you in business, and that leads you to make bad mistakes.”
• Planning Fallacy: This is when we make plans and stick to them but don’t pivot quickly enough when the environment or situation changes.“You need to be aware that your plans
  will be screwed up sometimes. They will not go according to plan and build in a lot of extra resources, time, money, and so on for things that you don’t anticipate,” Dr. Tsipursky said.

One method businesses use to plan for the future is through a SWOT analysis, a system where companies evaluate their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Dr. Tsipursky says companies that use ‘SWOT’ gives management false comfort.

“You don’t account for all the weaknesses. You don’t account for all the threats,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “One of the fundamental things about SWOT that people look for is information that goes along with what they think.”

“What (companies) should always be doing when they go through a process is try(ing) to prove themselves wrong. That’s not what SWOT is. SWOT is proving yourself right. What you should be doing is trying disconfirm what’s going wrong.”

In place of SWOT, Dr. Tsipursky developed five questions your company needs to ask to avoid decision disasters. He says you can use these 5 questions daily for situations that pop up or in strategic planning sessions:

1. What important information did I not yet fully consider?
2. What dangerous judgment errors did I not yet address?
3. What would a trusted and objective adviser suggest I do?
4. How have I addressed the ways this could fail?
5. What new information would cause me to revisit this decision?

“These five questions can be used for any decision. Any decision you don’t want to screw up,” Dr. Tsipursky emphasized. “Especially for a team decision because you can get together, have all members of the team answer this in advance, and have a team decision meeting where you structure the agenda around these five questions.”

He says working on the questions in advance makes for more productive and efficient meetings.

Another bias companies find themselves trapped under is the Sunken Cost Fallacy, or as you hear it referred to sometimes in business, chasing good money after bad. Companies put so much effort into a failing project, and they continue to pour money into it, hoping it will turn around. These costly projects not only damage a company’s bottom line, but it can hurt reputations as well. Dr. Tsipursky used the Boeing 737 Max as an example. Boeing grounded the plane in March 2019, after two fatal crashes. They has also had trouble with its 787 Dreamliner, blamed for engine fires and battery problems.

While Boeing may be an extreme example of sunken costs, every business goes through its version of it in some form or another. So, why does it happen?

“We don’t want to be wrong,” Dr. Tsipursky said. “That feeling of being wrong, it’s driving a lot of egos.”

“One of the most dangerous things to have in business is not (to) have a sense of humility.”

Dr. Tsipursky says trading ego for humility is the driver behind question five: What new information would cause me to revisit this decision? He designed the question to address sunken costs.

“It’s one of the biggest reasons why businesses fail. They don’t pivot in a quickly enough manner. You need to be oriented towards pivoting. You need to be oriented towards humility,” he advised.

There’s another bias Dr. Tsipursky says humility will help you overcome, but you’ll have to listen to our full conversation to hear what it is. You’ll also hear the excellent Q & A from our community as well.

I’d like to thank Dr. Gleb Tsipursky for his eye-opening insight. He never disappoints.  

 

I’ll be sure to think twice next time I’m tempted to go with my gut.

 

You hear about the importance of data all the time — terms like big data, data as currency, and data is the new oil is certainly a catchphrase in the media and on blog posts. 

 

Many fear the repercussion of data breaches; however, data also provides a portal for companies to better serve their customers, reward loyalty, and provide that personalized service many crave.

  

One person who is using data to help transform a traditional business is Chris Silcock, Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Hilton Worldwide.  

 

“The most challenging journey we’ve been on, and we are on, is the data and analytics journey,” Chris said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. “There’s so much gold in them hills. There’s so much promise bringing it to life. We’ve started to achieve and make good strides forward, but there’s a long way (to go), and it’s (a) really difficult ride.” 

 

Chris helped create the hotel chain’s first data and analytics team. Under his leadership, Hilton has transitioned from what he calls a “transactional environment to a real-time, event-based architecture.” This shift enables Hilton to better adapt to changes and predict what a customer needs or wants next.  

 

“You can start to personalize the experience based on common attributes of the customer — where they’re coming in from, what they’ve shopped in the past,” Chris stated.   

 

While all this work sounds like it happens in an instant, it actually takes place in stages. Chris says it helps Hilton get to know its customers better and ultimately provide better service.  

 

“We can’t do this yet, but the architecture we’re setting up will enable us to, (when) somebody arrives in the hotel, the customer service agent to be able to talk to them with context,” Chris said. “They know that your flight’s being delayed. So, you’re likely in a bad mood. So, I’m going to do X to make the experience (better) and relieve stress for you.” 

 

The analytics team’s work paid off when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Because Hilton was collecting so much data, Chris’s team was able to see which segments of the business were getting ready to rebound and which may take a while to return. 

“While business travel (and) group business dropped incredibly fast and has remained quite low, we started to see signals from leisure travelers, even during the height of the pandemic they were desperate to get out, although they were traveling with different patterns,” Chris said. “Whereas they used to go to big resorts or big cities, we saw a migration within 200-300 miles from their home. They just wanted at the very last minute the ability to drive, stay overnight have a different environment, a slightly different experience to have a break from what had become the monotony of home.” 

Seeing these patterns, Hilton began offering travelers custom products that offered flexibility if their plans changed and other perks like early check-in or later check-out.  

 

Like all businesses during the pandemic, the hospitality industry suffered a major economic impact. Only three short years ago, the industry generated more than $1.6 trillion in economic output. After the pandemic, people stopped traveling, and business grinded to a halt. Chris said the data is allowing his team to focus on when business will start picking up again.  

 

“During the pandemic, our data team put together this model that both predicted and also monitored 190 markets around the world and how they moved through five different stages — from crisis to early recovery to stabilization,” Chris said. “That was a huge thing for us because that enabled us to suddenly personalize our action on a global basis.” 

  

While this is allowing Hilton to forecast more in-depth, one trend is showing that the meeting business is slowly coming back. However, Hilton isn’t expecting anything even close to business as usual until the third quarter of 2021. Even so, Chris admits the data his team is collecting now will be null and void once economies stabilize worldwide unless we see another significant downturn. 

 

Collecting all these personalized data-points on specific customers across the world many people leery and suspicious. Chris says he’s aware of all the concerns, and Hilton is conscientious of how it shares its information. 

 

“We have the benefit in some degree that customers for 100 years have trusted us with where they sleep at night,” Chris said. “The great thing about data is you get to work out if they like it really quickly. Because if they like it, you see further engagement and further share of wallet and if they don’t, they tell you or stop engaging.” 

 

I have to say it was fun engaging with Chris, and he opened my eyes to the role data will play during my next hotel stay.  

 

This post barely touches our conversation during the Digital Discussion and doesn’t even get into the very insightful questions from our C-Suite Network community.  

 

Chris’s interview was so popular, it barely missed out on making our Top 10 downloads for the year.  If you’d like to hear it all for yourself, click the player below.  

Mindfulness is an age-old practice that permeates every aspect of life. In fact, modern technology has become a helpful tool for people to be more ‘zen.’ While many think of mindfulness as a solitary person meditating on a hill with a gentle breeze flowing over them, few understand what it actually is.   

 

“Mindfulness is simply ‘mirror mind,’ or the opposite of mindlessness,” said expert George Mumford during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion. He adds, “Mindfulness is a process that allows us to see things clearly.” 

 

“(mindfulness is) Being present is being in this moment right now with no pre-conceived notions of what you think’s going to happen versus letting what happens, happen, and then you can think about it afterward. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s huge.” 

 

George definitely knows. As The Mindfulness Performance Whisperer, he has helped NBA teams win championships – like the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers, and business leaders gain an edge.  

 

We all need to practice being more present. How many times have you sat in on a meeting, or zoom call, and not paid any attention to what anyone is saying? You’re checking e-mail, glancing at social media, or thinking about lunch. Simply put, your mind was elsewhere.  

 

George says it’s time for that to change. His specialty is to “talk about the things that matter and get to the heart of the matter.” 

 

While he is known for helping top athletes, his techniques can help anyone “be authentically yourself and being able to authentically perform in the immediacy of the experience regardless of the amount of tension, pressure, and stress.” That same tension and stress affects our perception process, or how our minds and bodies work together to understand what’s happening around us in a matter of seconds. 

 

George used sound as an example — imagine you hear a siren, and it interrupts your conversation. What does the sound of a siren mean to you? Does it make you mad? Frightened? Annoyed?  

 

“We can create space to just hear the sound, let it speak to us, and let it go by,” George said. “We can’t keep it in our mind. Now we’re cluttered, and we can’t be present for the conversation. It’s really more about how do we create the space between stimulus and response. How do we see things in fresh ways where we’re not relating to them based on what we know but allowing it to speak to us in its own language and in the immediacy of the experience. It takes this ability to being vulnerable or be open to seeing things in fresh, new ways.” 

 

George’s path to becoming a mindfulness expert stems from a career-ending basketball injury. He was a walk-on at the University of Massachusetts, alongside Hall of Famer, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, when he was injured his sophomore year. George found himself with chronic pain, mainly back issues and migraines, or as he put it, “my ass was on fire.” George said dealing with the pain for years made him dependent on pain killers.  

 

“I was at a point where I was going to do whatever I needed to do to change my quality of life and change my whole way of being,” George said.  

 

He got lucky and the HMO he had at the time enrolled him in a stress management study. Along with traditional western medical techniques, George learned about meditation and how the mind and body connect in hopes of relieving stress. It wasn’t the first time George had heard about mindfulness. In fact, he was introduced to the idea in college but wasn’t interested. As he got older, that changed. 

 

“Some people are just not ready. I wasn’t ready in college for these teachings that I actually received at some point. There has to be a sense of urgency or a sense where they realize that the status quo just won’t make it. If you stay with the status quo, you got to go,” George said. 

Now that he was ready to learn more about mindfulness, George dived into the subject. As a self-proclaimed “recovering perfectionist,” George read every book possible on the subject and still reads about it today. Thirty-six years later, he still reads a book a week about the mind and body connection and consumes other content on the subject. He also started sharing his knowledge almost immediately.  

 

“I started teaching it because in my mind, the best way to learn something is to teach it and the best way to keep something is to give it away, connecting with your reciprocity,” George said. 

 

“I have to understand how my mind, body, and soul are interacting in a way where I’m able to see and understand the situation. How am I going to relate to this situation? How can I create space between stimulus and response so I’m really reflecting on what I’m doing, what the consequences may be, so I’m not finding myself in the place where I didn’t want to be.”  

 

While he was teaching it to others, sharing his successes, George had one question lingering in his mind.  

 

“I wanted to know how,” George said. “Why is it I got clean and found the motivation to do something people can’t do? What is that about? How do we motivate ourselves? How do we communicate in a way that’s more authentic and we’re able to align what we say with what we do? This ability to be present. This ability to learn from our mistakes was huge for pure performance, being able to perform in a way where you’re not driven by greed or by fear.” 

 

“You’re just doing the thing because that’s the most important in the moment. Just being really present and doing what you can do in the moment without worrying about the results. That’s very challenging for us to do at any level, to not worry about ‘how am I doing?’ instead of focusing on what you’re doing in the moment.”  

 

Listen to the full episode of All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett, where George gives us the how and talks about his time with Dr. J.  

Finally, what about the people who don’t believe in mindfulness? George has a message for you.

“It’s one thing to be cynical, and it’s another thing to be resistant,” George said. “I don’t ask you to believe in what I say. I ask you to see if it’s true, in your own experience. Just check it out. Suspend disbelief and see what’s happening.”

 

There’s something in the water, and it’s a hint of success!”

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting Kara Goldin, the CEO of Hint on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett on C-Suite Radio. Kara recently released her first book, Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts + Doubters, telling the story behind the brand.

If you’ve never heard of Hint, it is a line of still water with just a “hint” of fruit flavor, without sugar or other sweeteners. You can find it just about everywhere your favorite sodas are sold.

Hint’s inspiration came from Kara’s affection for a particular diet soda she developed while working in the tech industry in the 1990s. Kara didn’t reveal how many she drank on a daily basis but did confess she was what the beverage industry calls a “heavy user.”

“Diet Coke was my thing, and I never thought there was anything wrong with drinking it until I stopped drinking it to try and change some health issues that I had,” Kara said.

“I’d gained a bunch of weight, had developed terrible adult acne that I didn’t even have as a kid, and my energy levels were down. I was looking at everything that I was eating, thinking that maybe that was the issue. I was continuing to work out. That wasn’t the issue. But one day, my diet soda was staring at me in the face, and I saw these ingredients that I thought were interesting. I didn’t know what they meant. So, I thought maybe I should put it to the side just like I’m doing with the food that I don’t really understand what I’m eating, and that’s when two and a half weeks later, I dropped 24 pounds. My energy levels were back. My skin got better.”

She had replaced her diet soda for water, but Kara thought water was boring. To jazz it up, she started slicing up fruit and putting it in water for herself. During that time, she searched the grocery store shelves for a soda alternative and all she could find was Vitamin Water, which at the time was loaded with more calories than a Diet Coke.

“That was when I really realized that there’s all these words that get us to actually think that things are healthier than they are, and that was the trap that I fell into,” Kara said. “I wasn’t a nutritionist, (I) wasn’t a beverage executive, but I was curious about why this was going on and how I had been fooled. And that’s when I said, ‘Gosh, how hard is it to get a beverage on the shelf at Whole Foods?’”

Kara found out it was a lot harder than she expected. She needed a product with a shelf life along with a distributor.

“What I didn’t realize, and part of what I talked about in the book is, it’s one thing to actually launch a company. You’ve got a new product, and you go launch a company that’s like climbing a mountain, but we launched a new category, which is climbing Everest,” Kara recalled.

Since Hint was one of the first in the unsweetened, flavored water category, Kara went work.

She relied on those closest to her as her family had experience inventing new categories in the food industry. Kara’s father was one of the minds behind Healthy Choice back in the 1980s. It was one of the first brands to introduce healthier ingredients to the frozen food section.

The first thing she found was there was no room at the stores for her new product. We all know about the big players in the soda industry, and they pay a premium for shelf space.

“In fact, so many investors were afraid of the big companies,” Kara said. “Investors were like, ‘let’s just say hypothetically that you really take off. What then? Ultimately the soda companies are going to crush you.’”

She continued, “I had tons of doubts. I had doubters. I had fears. I had plenty of failures.”

Hint also had to educate customers about their product, which was an easier sell than Kara thought.

“I had customers writing to me from day one, or calling into customer service saying ‘you’re really helping me drink water, you’re helping me control my Type-2 diabetes, all these things.’”

Hint found its way to the shelves of 10 stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, and sales were pretty good. Despite this early success, Kara still had some details to iron out. She had trouble figuring out shelf life and finding a distributor. That’s when a friend introduced her to an executive at Coca-Cola.

“He was nice enough to get on the phone with me,” Kara said. “I’m explaining for 15 minutes how great we’re doing. Then suddenly he interrupts me and said, “Sweetie, Americans love sweet this product isn’t going anywhere.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa! What just happened?’”

“I got off the phone, and I thought, I have a decision to make,” Kara remembered. “Either give up, which is what he wants me to do, or I put the gas on and find (more) customers. So, that’s what I did.”

Fifteen years later, Hint is still going strong and growing. Hint has ventured out into carbonated water, sunscreen, deodorant, even face masks. Like every other business, and industry in recent months, they’ve pivoted successfully and engaged different audience sectors.

Kara and I also talked about the need to innovate, how Hint has become a real family business and more stories about the early days of the company.

Not bad for someone who calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur.” She figured it all out. If you want to know how she did that, you can hear our full conversation here.