Sean: True that, and Patrick Lencioni always says there's no other way to do leadership than to serve others. Right?

And if your motive is to be served and to climb the ladder and get the perks, then don't lead because the world will be a worse place with you around. You mentioned earlier in the pre show that the book has four major topics. I don't want to preempt it here because it's your book. And I want you to be the one to tell the audience.

So can you run us by it one by one?

Tom: Sure. Just a little background again, the way I came across the four keys is as I started, you know, I've started writing all these stories down and then I said, I can write a book on it. I said, "well how can I frame all these stories into a book?"

And, and one of the things that upon reflection I came to was look, I've had some successes in my life and I had some failures in my life. And when I was successful, I found that these four key principles were all firing on all cylinders. So things were working. And then some of the times in my life where things were not working too well, I looked at it and said, well, Not all four of those keys were there, you know, some of those keys were missing, so I said, okay, well, there's obviously a pattern here.

Now let me ask a question and look at some successful companies and some successful leaders and, and to see, do they have those same four keys? So lo and behold, I said, yeah, they do. So that gave me the inspiration to actually write the book to say, well, these four keys not only worked for me, but they also worked for other successful companies and leaders.

So the four keys are, you have to have a very strong sense of who you are, what your character is. So as an individual, your character is extremely important. They're built on your values and if you're a company then your character is your culture. And in fact, if you're a startup company, the founder's character used to become a de facto culture for that organization until they start thinking about it, planning it and changing it.

All right. The second one I already shared with you, which is my vision, every great company, every great leader has a vision for themselves and a vision for their company. The third one is strategic growth. You know, strategy is always fueled by growth. Nobody wants to be worse off than they were yesterday.

They don't want to be poorer than they were yesterday. They want to be more out of shape than they were yesterday. They don't want to be worse looking than they were, you know, yesterday. So. It's all about improvement. So it's all about strategic growth. Growth is the key word and strategic growth really has to be aligned with your vision.

So don't be kind of distracted by the, the latest, shiny object and the, and the fourth one, which is very dear to my heart is the team. You have to have a great inner circle. So when you build your team, make sure that they balance you, they balance your weaknesses. So you surround yourself with people of strength and where you are weak. Surround yourself with diverse thinking.

That's also key, and diverse thinking really comes from diverse thinking, but also Latin Americans will think differently than Europeans and relativity, you know, than Americans or people from the far east. So diverse thinking, you know, also comes from, geographically where you are, it comes from socially where you are. That all adds to diverse thinking.

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