Leading with Gratitude with Chester Elton

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Today, Chester Interview's Garry Ridge, Chairman of the Board and chief executive officer of the WD-40 Company headquartered in San Diego, California.

When Garry Ridge became CEO of WD-40 Company in 1997, his mandate was to transform a popular, successful US brand into a globally beloved, go-to spray to remove “squeaks” around the world. Today, his customer success stories include a driver in India who used WD-40 to remove a python from the undercarriage of his bus. 

99% of his employees, or “tribe members,” report they’re proud to tell people they work for WD-40 Company. The secret to his success? He created and sustains a global culture in which tribe members feel happy, safe and supported to learn and try new things.

“One of the greatest joys people get out of life is learning things and then putting that new knowledge into practice,” he says. “The learning environment, as we have developed it at the WD-40 Company, creates a feeling of safety because it takes out the element of fear.”

At WD-40 Company, tribe members don’t make mistakes. They have “learning moments,” which Garry defines as experiences – both negative and positive – that they can then safely report back to their colleagues.

WD-40 Company employees consider themselves a “tribe” – a concept inspired by Garry’s Australian background and interest in Aboriginal culture. He also draws influence from great thinkers like Marshall Goldsmith, Ken Blanchard, Simon Sinek, and the Dalai Lama.

“I was particularly struck by [the Dalai Lama’s] line, ‘The purpose of life is to make people happy. If you can’t make them happy, at least don’t hurt them’,” Garry says.

He also admires Aristotle’s maxim, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

“As leaders, our job is to make sure we create an environment where tribe members wake up each day looking forward to going to work, feel safe while they are there, [and] return home at the end of the day fulfilled by the work they do, feeling like they’ve learned something new and contributed to something bigger than themselves,” he says.

In March 2003 Garry was awarded Director of the Year for Enhancement of Economic Value by the Corporate Directors forum. In April 2004 Garry received the Arthur E Hughes Career Achievement Award from the University of San Diego. In 2009, he co-authored a book with Ken Blanchard titled Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy called Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A.

Find out more about Garry Ridge

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

Chester's guest today Is Dr. Natalie Baumgartner, Chief Workforce Scientist at Achievers.
Achievers is an award-winning employee voice and recognition solution, creating a workplace environment that accelerates employee engagement and performance — every single day.

Dr. Natalie's passion and profession is serving as an engagement and culture thought leader and evangelist.

She has spent over a decade focused on driving the translation of engagement/culture research and theory into SaaS based software, working to help make it possible for organizations to solve problems and achieve goals that advance their performance.

Prior to joining Achievers, she co-founded and served as Chief Psychologist at RoundPegg, a culture and engagement SaaS based platform that uses scientific metrics and insights to every organization to manage the most critical business drivers that exist. RoundPegg was acquired by Achievers in 2017 to further their mission to Change the Way the World Works.

Throughout her career, Natalie has focused on understanding how culture and values alignment drive employee engagement and impact strategic business outcomes. Natalie holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in Strength-Based Psychology. She serves on several boards – including the board of the Consulting Psychology division of the American Psychological Association, and has spent much of her career advising leaders from companies of all sizes, from entrepreneurial start-ups to Fortune 500 firms, on issues related to culture and engagement.

Natalie is dedicated to helping organizations leverage and manage engagement and culture to transform their business and achieve strategic aspirations. She enjoys speaking regularly about the power that engagement and culture have to revolutionize how we work – and she presented a TED talk in June 2012 - 9 minutes on the importance of Culture Fit.

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Chester Elton's "Leading with Gratitude" Newsletter - I hope you will subscribe and become part of the Gratitude Community.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

In this episode of Leading with Gratitude, Chester Elton talks with Best-selling Author, Entrepreneur, and two-time TEDx speaker Anne Grady.

Anne has spent the last two decades working with Fortune 500 companies, associations, non-profits, government agencies, and school districts, to teach resilience as a skill that can be learned, practiced, and honed.

Anne began studying the brain and neurodevelopment to find answers while searching for treatment options for her son, Evan, after he was diagnosed with severe mental illness and Autism. Then, after being diagnosed with an avocado-sized tumor in her salivary gland in 2014, she had to lean on the tools she learned with her son to help her through this difficult time.

Now, she wants to help others cultivate the habits and skills to build strength through struggle with the science behind resilience.

With a master’s degree in organizational communication, Anne shows people how to harness the power of resilience to break out of reactivity so they can communicate, lead, and live on purpose. Not only is Anne recognized as a leading expert in the fields of leadership, communication, and resilience by Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Inc., Fast Company, FOX Business, CNN, and more, she is also a living testimonial.

Described as “authentic, hilarious, inspirational, and a ‘dropper of truth bombs!’”, she quickly connects with audiences, sharing inspiring personal stories, cutting edge, research-based content, and implementation tools to transfer learning into real life.

Anne will challenge you to get out of your comfort zone, inspire you to break through barriers keeping you stuck, and help you build an arsenal full of actionable strategies that you can use immediately to build unstoppable resilience.

She is the author of 52 Strategies for Life, Love & Work: Transforming Your Life One Week at a Time and its best-selling follow-up book, Strong Enough. In her newest book, Mind Over Moment: Harness the Power of Resilience and the companion journal, Anne delivers a collection of actionable, practical, and timely takeaways for the challenging world we find ourselves in today.

Anne is a passionate mental health advocate and a portion of all her book proceeds go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness Central Texas (NAMI).

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

After graduating with honors in business management economics and psychology from the University of California Santa Cruz, Jacob was excited to join the corporate world.

At his first job he was told that he’d be traveling the country, meeting with executives and entrepreneurs, and doing all sorts of exciting work. A few months in, he was stuck doing data entry, cold calling, and PowerPoint presentations. One day the CEO came out of his nice corner office, handed Jacob a $10 bill and said, “I’m late for a meeting, go grab me a cup of coffee, and get something for yourself as well.” That was the last corporate job he ever had.

Today, Jacob Morgan is a trained futurist and one of the world’s leading authorities on leadership, the future of work, employee experience, and leadership. He speaks in front of tens of thousands of people each year and his content is seen over a million times a year. Jacob is the best-selling author of four books: The Future Leader (Wiley 2020) The Employee Experience Advantage (Wiley, 2017), The Future of Work (Wiley, 2014), and The Collaborative Organization (McGraw Hill, 2012). He speaks at over 50 conferences a year including TED Academy which is one of the largest TED events in the world. In addition Jacob provides advisory and thought leadership services to various organizations around the world.

He is the founder of The Future of Work University at FutureOfWorkUniversity.com, an online education and training platform that helps individuals and organizations thrive in the rapidly changing world of work. Courses explore topics such as employee experience, the future of work, and leadership skills. Jacob also created “The Future If,” a global community of business leaders, authors and futurists who explore what our future can look like IF certain technologies, ideas, approaches and trends actually happen. The community looks at everything from AI and automation to leadership and management practices to augmented reality and virtual reality, the 4th industrial revolution and everything in between.

His work has been endorsed by the CEOs of:

Nestle, Best Buy, Cisco, SAP, Unilever, Mastercard, KPMG, Schneider Electric, T-Mobile, Whirlpool, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Zappos, Atari, Yum! Brands, Audi, and many others.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

https://www.johnstrelecky.com/

When I sat down and started typing what became my first book, I didn’t really know why I was doing itWhen I sat down and started typing what became my first book, I didn’t really know why I was doing it. It was a calling of sorts, like something was flowing through me. I didn’t plan on being a writer, it just happened.

I remember thinking during the twenty-one days of that experience, that if whatever was coming through me inspired just one person, I’d consider the whole thing to be a success.

Here we are more than six million copies later and I find when I sit down to write, it’s still about one person. I think it always will be. Doing my best to help inspire one reader, through one word, one sentence, at a time.

#writer

#ponderer

#traveler

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

Leading with Gratitude Live with Chester Elton. 
Our guest is Nick Bradley, a world-renowned business growth and scale-up specialist, who helps exceptional business leaders unlock their full potential.

Nick Bradley. Nick founded The Fielding Group in 2016 after a successful executive career in the technology, media and professional services industries, holding Board-level leadership roles in companies across the world. He has worked extensively with a number of high-growth businesses in the UK, the US and Australia. He is a Venture Capitalist  who co-founded  Fielding Group, a growth accelerator and investing company. He's been a business owner & investor who has built, bought, & sold multiple businesses over the last decade.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

Scott Schimmel is the President and Chief Guide of The YouSchool, an organization that believes every student deserves the opportunity to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Scott is the co-host of the Dream Big Podcast with Bob Goff & Friends, and a frequent guest speaker at schools, faith communities, retreats, and conferences. He's a speaker, writer, curriculum designer, and consultant, and has spent 20 years studying human flourishing in young adults.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

I am beyond delighted to be joined by Hartmut Esslinger to talk about "Design for Life"

In 1969, Hartmut started design agency, Frogdesign. He created the first "full plastics" color TV and HiFi series "Wega system 3000". His work for Wega won him instant international fame. In 1974, Esslinger was hired by Sony and was instrumental in creating a global design image for Sony, especially with the Sony Trinitron and personal music products. The Sony-Wega Music System Concept 51K was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  In December 1990 Esslinger was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek, the only living designer thus honored since Raymond Loewy in 1934.

In 1982 he entered into an exclusive $2,000,000 per year contract with Apple Computer to create a design strategy which transformed Apple from a "Silicon Valley Start-Up" into a global brand. Esslinger and Frogdesign created the "Snow White design language" which was applied to all Apple product lines from 1984 to 1990. Soon after Steve Jobs' departure, Esslinger broke his own contract with Apple and followed Jobs to NeXT. Other major client engagements include Lufthansa's global design and brand strategy, SAP's corporate identity and software user interface, Microsoft Windows branding and user interface design, Siemens, NEC, Olympus, HP, Motorola and General Electric. Esslinger also worked for Louis Vuitton. 

Esslinger is founding Professor of the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany and since 2006 he is Professor for convergent industrial design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. In 1996, Esslinger was awarded an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts by the Parsons School of Design, New York City. Since 2012 Esslinger has served as a DeTao Master of Industrial Design with The Beijing DeTao Masters Academy (DTMA) in Shanghai, China.

In 2009 Esslinger published A Fine Line in which he explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

Jonah Paquette - Mental Health Training. Clinical Psychologist, and author of "Real Happiness: Proven Paths for Contentment, Peace and Well-Being," and "The Happiness Toolbox." 3rd book, “Awestruck,” will be released in 2020, and will focus on the science of awe and wonder

Jonah was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived until my early twenties. With much of his family remaining there, and growing up a die-hard Knicks and Yankees fan, it was difficult leaving the Big Apple. But like many people, he felt drawn to the West Coast, where new adventures awaited. After graduating college at Columbia University in 2004, he moved to California to start graduate school at the PGSP-Stanford Psy.D. Consortium in Palo Alto. For the next five years, he had the privilege of training in a variety of clinical settings, including VA hospitals, college counseling centers, and community mental health agencies. he also had the good fortune of being mentored by some of the leading psychiatrists and psychologists in the field. 

Although the training Jonah received during these years was invaluable, he couldn't help but feel that there was something missing from mainstream mental health approaches. Namely, there was (and remains) an incredible emphasis on illness, pathology, and suffering. But what about the other side of the coin? During graduate school, he began to supplement my traditional training by learning more about wellness, happiness, and psychological well-being. he stumbled across the burgeoning field of "positive psychology," which studies these topics as well as things like character strengths, virtue, and happiness. This interest soon developed into his passion, and remains so to this day. 

​Today, Jonah wears two hats in his professional life. First, he is the Assistant Regional Director of Mental Health Training at a large HMO in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he helps oversee the mental health training programs across twenty medical centers in Northern California. And secondly, he provide trainings, consultations, and seminars on topics related to wellness, happiness, and reaching your full potential. In 2015, he released his first book, entitled "Real Happiness", a self-help book outlining seven proven paths to happiness and well-being. More recently in 2018, he released by second self-help booked, entitled "The Happiness Toolbox", which provides an array of tools and handouts for both readers and practitioners alike. On June 9, 2020, his third book will be released. Entitled "Awestruck," it will focus on the science of awe and how we can cultivate more awe and wonder in our lives. For further updates and information about Jonah's work In Awe, please visit: https://www.awestruck.us

Check out Real Happiness:

https://amzn.to/2GAoNZt

​​Check out The Happiness Toolbox:

https://amzn.to/2GAoNZt

​Check out Awestruck: 

shorturl.at/tNV14

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you. 

In this episode, Chester Elton and Connie Dieken discuss Influence.

Learn more about Connie at http://conniedieken.com/

Influence in all directions and thrive as a high-profile leader

When you have influence, you have the ability to transform minds, behaviors, and outcomes.  Connie will help you be the influential presence you are meant to be so that people respect your opinions, trust your judgment, and listen for your voice above all others.

Connie is the president of The Dieken Group, a strategic advisory firm to C-suite executives on five continents. She guides leaders to their highest performance.

She’s also the founder of Influence360˚™, the first and only validated influence instrument  to help leaders become strong influencers, regardless of the conditions.

 LifeGuides is a peer-to-peer community that helps people navigate through their day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you.