My Quest for the Best with Bill Ringle - the podcast for ambitious business owners.

Social Media Expert Mitch Joel talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about brand recognition, Walmart, and the biggest changes in the industry since the 1990s.

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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• How when you help brands stay on the leading edge, you often have to stay on the bleeding edge
• Changes that are occurring between the pure play ad agencies vs. the digital agencies
• Impact of reaching customers when they have many choices of screens, from desktop to iPad/tablet to mobile
• Fundamental tenets of customer engagement that still guide online marketing strategies
• What Walmart did differently to engage customers around a Mother’s Day campaign led by Twist Image

• 1:07 How Joel started his career as a rock journalist and how that experience allowed him to “cut his teeth” on writing and marketing.
• 2:23 “My real role is business development, everything I do is sort of filtered back to the agency.”
• 2:45 “I thought, well, I love to write and I love to publish and communicate so why don’t I put my thoughts about the marketing and media landscape out there and see if that attracts a certain type of client?”
• 3:51 “Helping brands stay at the leading edge forces us to be at the bleeding edge.”
• 4:26 “Brands want to connect more to their consumers, they want to build more loyalty, they want to create more attention, they want to get customers to spread the gospel for them.”
• 5:06 Joel recounts the biggest changes in the agency world since the 90s.
• 5:52 “I think for us it’s been the exploration of other interesting areas of products and services that we can bring to clients.”
• 7:23 [On engaging customers] – “It’s not just about putting a marketing message in front of them with these tools. These tools allow them to be hyperconnected, completely untethered, and they’re doing things in different environments.”
• 8:15 How a change in platform allowed Walmart to do a successful Mother’s Day marketing push that effectively engaged its audience.
• 10:31 “If we do everything right, we have to be prepared for success. Most brands aren’t prepared for success.”
• 11:26 “Anyone can have an idea and publish that idea in text, images, audio, and video – and what that means is that suddenly you have the ability to publish content, because you can, but to connect in a very real way.”
• 11:50 “While everybody’s getting more connected in more and more places, brands are still trying to disrupt or jump in on it, versus trying to figure out how to connect within it.”
• 12:30 “I believe that the winners are the people doing compelling things, and actually it’s a very slow, long, hard, and arduous process to build connections.”
• 13:21 “Instead of chasing how many likes people have of your company, why not go out and like your customers?”
• 14:25 “There seems to be a friction between the B2B world and social media, which to me is somewhat quizzical. I think the primary driver of B2B sales is driven by relationships and white papers and testimonials and that sort of more robust marketing endeavors. [It] seems to me that social media is a more compelling platform to share and distribute that type of content in a much more personal way.”
• 16:05 Joel discusses visions of a future world with products without brands.
• 16:57 “There seems to me like there’s this interest and burgeoning trend around indie brands and people connecting to things that are less about the logo…and more about the individual.”
• 17:26 “I think all trends are worthy of paying attention to.”
• 17:48 “The lessons for me are really about just being aware of new things and I think it’s the new things and how they connect to one another that makes branding and marketing and communications that much more interesting.”
• 18:28 “I get really excited about the possibility about what it means to have a relationship with a consumer.”
• 18:58 “Marketers can create things.”
• 19:22 The phenomena of “Utilitarianism Marketing.”
• 20:10 “It is staggering to me what one person with a laptop can do.”

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

See all listening options (Overcast, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and more)

Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image, an award-winning Digital Marketing, and Communications agency. He is also a blogger, podcaster, passionate entrepreneur, and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media.

Marketing Magazine dubbed Mitch the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and called him “one of North America’s leading digital visionaries.” In 2006 he was named one of the most influential authorities on Blog Marketing in the world. In 2008, Mitch was named Canada’s Most Influential Male in Social Media, one of the top 100 online marketers in the world, and was awarded the highly prestigious Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Most recently, Mitch was named one of iMedia’s 25 Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators in the world.

His first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his successful Blog and Podcast, is a business and marketing bestseller. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL, will be out in Spring 2013. Mitch is frequently called upon to be a subject matter expert for BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and many other media outlets. His newspaper business column, New Business – Six Pixels of Separation, runs bi-monthly in both The Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun and he also has a regular column, Media Hacker, on The Huffington Post.

Business Phone: 514-987-9992

• Web address: TwistImage.com
• Blog: TwistImage.com/Blog
• Travels From: Montréal, Canada
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth.

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Michael Bungay Stanier talks with Bill Ringle about practical ways to do more great work instead of only good work.

• The importance of structuring training that includes objectives for employee self-sufficiency
• Understand what it means to great work vs. good work
• Criteria for asking great questions
• What effective coaching most resembles
• How to overcome “hacking your own productivity systems”
• When it makes sense NOT to coach as a manager

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. On the way to founding Box of Crayons ten years ago, Michael lived in Australia, England, the US and now Canada. As an innovation expert he helped invent new products and services, and as a change management consultant he supported companies as they evolved.

He’s written a number of books, the best known of which are Do More Great Work and the philanthropic project End Malaria; created a series of short internet videos, such as The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun; and designed a wide range of training programs that are being used around the world.

He was the first Canadian Coach of the Year and a Rhodes Scholar. An internationally acclaimed professional keynote speaker, Michael is a popular speaker at business and coaching conferences around the world, including International Coaching Federation conferences, the OD Network, the International Association of Facilitators, CSTD and SHRM. He’s also Thinker in Residence at Knowledge Blocks, a resource for readers of business books. He’s been the Creativity Coach for David Allen’s Getting Things Done online community.

For more information, visit Michael’s website.

Business Phone: 416-532-1322

Web address: BoxofCrayons.biz

Travels From: Toronto, Canada

Follow Michael:

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth.

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Bestselling Author Russell Bishop talks to Bill Ringle about how selective focus allows you to stay on track and be productive.

• What it means to have a solo focus rather than an organizational focus
• Why strategy and objectives DON’T matter
• A perspective on complaining that can transform the conversation into one of contribution
• How good questions provoke clear thinking
• Two simple questions to ask yourself to stay on track and productive

Russell Bishop talks with Bill Ringle about alignment and empowerment within organizations as key growth drivers.

Russell Bishop is Managing Partner for Bishop & Bishop, a boutique consulting and coaching company. His seminars, coaching, and consulting expertise offer individuals and organizations a new approach to integrating personal and spiritual values into their personal and professional lives. As an internationally regarded speaker, educator, and consultant, his corporate clients include Fortune 500 executives in aerospace, healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, information technology, telecommunications and oil and gas.

Having started five different organizations in his career, Russell is well versed in the growth and expansion challenges faced by founding entrepreneurs and CEO’s. Executives and senior teams frequently engage his services on issues of leadership, growth and work-life balance. In 1978, he created Insight Seminars, one of the largest and most successful personal transformation programs in the world, with well over one million graduates in 34 countries.

In addition to his bestselling book, Workarounds That Work: How to Overcome Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work, he is the author of hundreds of articles on the power of choice and awareness and a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post. He has also lectured on productivity for the executive MBA programs at UCLA, University of Texas and Washington University in St. Louis.

For more information, visit Russell’s website.

Web address: RussellBishop.com

Travels From: Los Angeles, CA

Follow Russell:

In this interview, Mike Figliuolo discusses the components that help good managers become great leaders, and why the focus of leaders should always be on the people they’re leading. 

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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• The distinction between managing and leading, advocated by Admiral Grace Mary Hopper
• Stages to building a profitable, scalable training company
• What leaders did to deepen trust and improve communications at a Fortune 100 company
• Why boundaries are so elusive for leaders and how to make them work better
• The mindset needed to grow your company in a short period of time

• 1:12 How Figliuolo’s experiences at WestPoint launched him into a career in leadership.
• 2:52 “I think the biggest realization in terms of people leadership is getting to know people as individuals and treating them that way.”
• 3:23 “To lead [people] effectively you couldn’t treat them like a cog in the machine, you needed to understand who they were, what motivated them, who inspired them in order to get the best out of them.”
• 4:47 “I say to them, ‘Tell me what you’re spending your time on,’ and invariably a lot of that time is spent in meetings, on email, on powerpoint, or in excel. The question I then ask is, ‘Help me understand how replying to e-mails and clearing out your inbox is more important and more impactful than sitting down with a member of your team for ten minutes or fifteen minutes trying to figure out what they’re working on or what they care about.”
• 5:50 [On the biggest myths in leadership] – “We confuse management and leadership.”
• 6:22 [Paraphrasing Admiral Grace Mary Hopper] – “You manage things and you lead people.”
• 7:07 “If you didn’t understand your people and you burn them out in the process and your people felt like you didn’t care about them as you got all these things done and managed well, I would think that you’re not really a good leader, you’re a poor one.”
• 7:24 “The best leaders I know are the ones who do both. To be a great leader you also have to be a really good manager.”
• 8:08 The importance of giving people room to make mistakes, and also to stand up for them.
• 9:20 [On Figliuolo’s Ideal Client] – “Most of our clients tend to be large corporations, Fortune 1000’s types of organizations, because we spend a lot of time with their executives as well as their learning development professionals.”
• 10:06 [On problem-solving communication issues] – “We tend to go in and teach people a method for being clearer, being more succinct, and being more impactful.”
• 11:00 [On decision-making issues] – “We all see the analysis paralysis which can grip an organization, and we help them understand how they can make decisions more quickly, how can they reduce the risk in the decisions they’re making, and how can they break that gridlock.”
• 11:45 “The reason I built the course was: I was seeing a lot of folks who were spending more time managing than they were leading, and I was seeing some confusion around that. I was seeing folks miss major aspects of leadership, which were causing major problems.”
• 12:55 What leaders did to deepen trust and improve communications at a Fortune 100 company.
• 13:05 “When people really understood a lot better what drove the other members of the team, you could see the connections happening in the classroom.”
• 14:30 [On leadership skills] – “One thing that I see as a need is being able to let go and give people space.”
• 15:17 “As companies grow, we might outgrow our leaders. And the very mature organizations I’ve seen and the successful ones I’ve seen have a recognition of: we need that next level of talent and how do we get there?”
• 16:05 “I think the role of that senior executive is really setting that direction first and foremost, because the pressing needs of the daily operations tend to pull us down and we focus on the minutiae in front of us.”
• 16:55 “You have plenty of people on your team who can solve those day to operational issues, but you have very few people on your team who are doing that longer range look at where you’re taking the organization.”
• 17:36 “One of the reasons we don’t have balance in our work or in our lives is that we don’t set those boundaries, we don’t think about them. Or even if we do think about them we don’t always articulate them to the people around us and share what those boundaries are.”
• 20:09 [On the Leadership Maxim] – “It’s that individuals responsibility to spend that time reflecting and being introspective on what is important.”
• 20:55 Why it’s important for employees to talk to leaders to ascertain how to be better aligned with the company’s goals, and why leaders should create space for these conversations to happen.
• 21:45 “If you don’t know what motivates and inspires your people, it’s really hard to motivate and inspire them.”
• 22:39 “Once you understand what that person wants, you’re better able to get that higher performance out of them, because you have an understanding of what’s important to them.”
• 23:08 [Challenges of owning your own company] – “You are fully responsible for the success or failure of your organization as an entrepreneur. I like to say, ‘If I don’t sell, I don’t eat.’”
• 23:50 [On benefits of owning your own company] – “When your organization is extremely successful, you know it’s because of all of your hard work, and there’s a direct correlation between the input and the output of the organization.”
• 24:31 [On letting go] – “If I send one of these senior people out, I need to be comfortable that they’re going to conduct the training in a manner that’s most effective for them.”
• 26:15 Figliuolo’s path from part-time consultant to full-time entrepreneur.
• 28:09 How Figliuolo is inspired by his clients.
• 29:02 “We get to ask ourselves, ‘Is what we’re building and delivering meeting the needs, meeting the latest challenges of our clients?’”
• 30:23 “We’re always trying to make that what we’re delivering is going to help the organization at a broader level.”
• 31:00 What Figliuolo looks at to gauge progress in his organization.

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

See all listening options (Overcast, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and more)

Mike Figliuolo is the Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC, which he founded because he believes practitioners make the best instructors and because he has a passion for people development and organizational improvement. Mike’s book, One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership, is designed to help leaders define who they are and what their personal leadership philosophy is.

Before founding thoughtLEADERS, Mike was a United States Army Officer, a management consultant at McKinsey and Company, a Group Manager at Capital One Financial, and Vice President of Strategic Planning at The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. He was named the Columbus, Ohio Small Business Leader of the Year for 2010 by the Columbus Chamber of Commerce and Business First.

• Business Phone: 804-241-9757
• Web address: ThoughtLeadersLLC.com
• Travels From: Columbus, OH
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

Courage Crafters co-founders Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton talk to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about learning to love the word “no.”

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com  for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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• How they started their business by “burning their ship”
• A clever approach to expanding business within a client company
• Understanding that each of us has a “relationship” with the word “no”
• When it makes sense to celebrate a “no” to encourage positive behavior
• Getting off the roller coaster of reactivity

• 1:22 Waltz tells about her first real job working for LensCrafters: how she met Fenton and launched into her own business at a young age.
• 2:44 Fenton –  “From my earliest memories, my earliest ages, I had always had a desire to be a professional speaker and to write books.”
• 3:29 Fenton – Tells about meeting Fenton and meshing on what it meant to be a high performer and achiever.
• 4:50 Waltz – [On quitting their jobs to start the new company] – “We knew that in order to really make the business work and to burn our ships…we knew that we had to leave and be completely dedicated and completely focused.”
• 5:44 Waltz – On getting their first client JC Penney.
• 6:25 Fenton – [On working with JC Penney] – “We worked for them over the course of the next 10 years, we probably did over 25 different projects for them, and over the course of time we did well in excess of $250,000 worth of business.”
• 7:58 Waltz talks about her and Fenton’s self-published book The Secrets of Retail Magic and how their “Go For No” concept allowed them to become an essential resource to JCP.
• 9:03 Waltz tells how Fenton’s boldness got them their first client.
• 11:08 Waltz – “Our ideal client has a sales force and, ideally, we like working with companies with large sales forces. Right now we focus on doing keynote presentations at the annual conferences. We don’t focus on a specific industry, although we’re very popular in the direct sales and network marketing industry.”
• 12:00 Waltz – “The problem is that people have a fear of hearing the word ‘No.’ They have a fear of failing, looking like a failure, a fear of rejection. And that’s the problem that we solve.”
• 12:35 Waltz – “All of the great sales skills that [employees] get trained on are a waste if they are still too scared to use them.”
• 13:10 Fenton – “It’s far easier to spread your wings within an organization and to expand your reach working from the top down than it is from the bottom up.”
• 13:55 Fenton describes how changing their positioning to keynoters gave them a better footing with decision-makers at an organization.
• 14:52 Waltz-  “The first thing that we do is that we help people see that they are probably avoiding hearing the word ‘No,’ and we have them identify the facts that they actually have a relationship with the word No. Because one of the things we always ask is that when you get a no, how do you respond?”
• 15:23 Waltz“80% of our audiences, when they heard the word no they stop, or they assume that they’ve done something wrong or that they are a failure.”
• 15:53 Waltz discusses the creation of “No Awareness.”
• 16:17 Fenton – “We try to get people within organizations to do something which is completely counterintuitive, and what we do is teach people to stop setting, at least exclusively, what we call ‘yes goals.’”
• 16:52 Fenton – “Instead of setting ‘yes’ goals for your business, what if you were to set ‘no’ goals instead?”
• 17:37 Fenton – “When we work with companies to set ‘No’ goals, we say ‘Ok, what if you were, instead of setting the goal to sell 1 copy machine, what if you were to set the goal to have 10 companies tell you ‘No?”
• 18:04 Fenton – “In a ‘Go for Yes’ world, most companies slow down when they hit their quota. In a ‘Go for No’ world, if you made your first call and they said ‘Yes’ to you, you still have 10 ‘No’s’ to get.”
• 18:43 Waltz – “To have no become a positive rather than a negative, so when you do achieve a  goal, like hitting your ‘no goals,’ it does become positive and it is something that you can celebrate.”
• 19:06 Waltz – “When you only reward yourself for the yes’s, the no’s do become so deflating, depressing, and that ultimately slows people down.”
• 20:05 Fenton – [On their process] – “It was a shifting in our mental attitude about how we rewarded ourselves for our performance. Traditionally, most people when they set a goal and hit the goal they reward themselves for hitting the goal. Well, Andrea and I realized that we were kind of telling people to do that, but in our real-world, we weren’t doing that.”
• 20:37 Fenton – “We said, ‘What if we started celebrating and rewarding ourselves every time we heard the word ‘No.’ And we stopped celebrating and rewarding ourselves every time we heard a ‘Yes?”
• 21:57 Fenton – “If the shortest distance between you and success is a straight line, the last thing you need is to be going up and down.”
• 22:00 Waltz and Fenton discuss what they do to overcome the emotional rollercoaster.

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

See all listening options (Overcast, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and more)

Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton are the co-founders of Courage Crafters, Inc., through which they teach people how to reprogram the way they think about the word NO, and to fail their way to success. They have brought their message to many organizations over the last 15 years, including American Express, Kodak, Pep Boys, Harry & David, and more.

Richard’s background includes working in Distribution Sales for Disney and as Training Director for Hart, Schaffner & Marx, and LensCrafters. Andrea originally wanted to work with George Lucas, but after getting rejected (she was 8 years old) she went on to build a career in sales and management at LensCrafters, where was the youngest General Manager in company history.

Together Richard and Andrea have written four books, the most popular of which is Go for No!, which has been on #1 on Amazon’s ‘Sales & Selling’ Best Seller list and has remained in the top 20 for the last two years. Their articles have been published in Success Magazine and hundreds of online and offline journals. They are members of the National Speakers Association and the Direct Selling Association U.K.

• Business Phone: 800-290-5028
• Web address: GoForNo.com
• Travel From: Orlando, FL
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit, talks with Bill Ringle about how to strengthen your management effectiveness by giving less advice.

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com  for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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• What it means when managers create an environment to stay focused, engaged, and learning as the standard
• How to avoid being an advice-giving maniac
• Tactics to get beyond the first answer to a deeper question (which is not the only answer and rarely the best answer)
• Why your organization will become more productive when there is less of a rush to action
• What makes up 50% of our waking behavior and rarely gets the attention it deserves

• 1:23 Stanier describes how his high school peers’ teenage angst inspired him to begin coaching.
• 1:51 “The typical thing was we’d go out dancing, or something like that, and on the drive home I’d be sort of listening to somebody in the car…I remember feeling right there at the time going ‘you know what? I am obviously ok with this whole listening thing.”
• 2:34 “When I went to university one of the things I did was I took a telephone crisis counseling course, so effectively a suicide hotline for teens, and that was my first kind of formal training in this area. So I had a sense of how you might respond when somebody’s struggling.”
• 3:28 [On transitioning from coaching to training] – “But of course these days I actually don’t do very much coaching anymore myself. My real focus is training managers and leaders to be more effective coaches in their day to day working lives.”
• 4:20 [On the negative connotations of coaching] – “If you’re getting coaching you’re probably broken, you know you’ve screwed up somehow. You know coaching, it’s just a code word for ‘We’re going to fire you in three months time but we’re going to do this token thing before we get to the year 2000.”
• 4:37 Stanier discusses Daniel Goleman’s HBR article about Emotional Intelligence: Leadership Against Results.
• 5:00 “You can identify coaching as a style of leadership but [Goleman] said you know even though it really has a great job driving engagement and driving kind of cultural change and driving even bottom-line success, it’s perceived as taking too long and too much effort for it to be a much used leadership style.”
• 5:24 [On the importance of engaging employees with meaningful work] “What I’ve noticed over the time is that the focus now has turned into: ‘We know that we need to keep our people focused on the stuff that matters and we need to keep people engaged so that they’re doing work that’s meaningful for them.”
• 6:40 [On John Whitmore’s view of Coaching] – “Its not you unlocking a potential but helping others unlock their own potential and then [Whitmore] says it’s about helping people learn rather than teaching them.”
• 6:53 Stanier discusses the key distinction between teaching someone and helping them learn.
• 7:10 [On what really helps people learn] – “Helping them learn is when you help them make their own connections and that’s when new neural pathways kind of happen in the brain that’s when people with potential and capacity and self-sufficiency all increase.”
• 8:11 Stanier’s tools for leaders in helping their employees get to the next level.
• 8:19 [On the benefits of offering curiosity] “[The tool] to make your life more effective is to give a little less advice and to offer up a little more curiosity.”
• 9:07 [The focus question] – “The focus question acknowledges that in many organizations people are very busily, very creatively, with best of intentions coming up with answers to solve the wrong problems.”
• 9:26: “The focus question is about helping slow down the rush to action and actually spend time trying to figure out what the real challenge might be. So what is that question? Well, it’s pretty simple: it’s simply to ask, ‘What’s the real challenge here for you?”
• 10:43 [On persisting with the focus question] – “If we stick with that question for a little bit you’re going to find you’ve got better focus on what really needs to be done, but you’re also going to walk away with some insight as to how you’re part of the issue and what you need to do to overcome your own challenges so that you can better answer this problem that’s in front of you.”
• 12:05 How asking your people the right questions can help them change their behavior.
• 12:37 [On the benefits of employees taking ownership] – “It’s a very sweet thing when, actually, the person you’re working with understands what’s happening as well as you do because it makes the system even more effective and more efficient.”
• 13:08 Stanier discusses his company Box of Crayons and its role in managerial training.
• 13:42: [On why most training programs don’t work] – “Most training programs don’t think hard enough about the behavior change that’s required. How do you shift from new insights into new actions? How do you help people do things differently when they walk out the door? But the other key sites where these things fall short, in my opinion, is that they’re often, I would say, non-strategic; meaning there’s a kind of ad-hoc ‘let’s just throw some training at people and hope that works.’
• 14:32: How a Canadian company upped their bench strength for better problem solving.
• 15:42: The best coaching question in the world.
• 16:38 “The first answer somebody gives you is never the only answer, and it’s rarely the best answer.”
• 16:59: [On the importance of slowing down] – “The other thing we’re trying to achieve is a
  little less rush to action just slow down the action a little bit so that when you move you move more effectively and more efficiently.
• 17:55 [On the benefits of strategic laziness for managers] “We actually want people to be lazy so that they’re better able to coach the other person. The other person gets to do the work and gets the benefit of the learning, increasing their own capacity, increasing their own potential.”
• 18:13: “[If] manager finds him or herself working too hard the focus is probably back on them providing [their employees] with the solution rather than helping develop and cultivate the kind of thinking that will make them a more valuable asset to the company.”
• 19:18 [On helping people use the tools Box of Crayons provides] – “if there’s one thing at the very heart of it all…it’s about teaching people how to build new habits because habits are the building blocks of our behavior.”
• 19:38 “At least 50% of our waking behavior is purely habitual.”
• 20:08 Best of the available information concerning habit building.
• 20:36 The three parts of Stanier’s new habit forming formula.
• 21:41 [On asking instead of telling] – “Asking a question always takes less than a minute.”
• 23:17 [On the practical nature of the formula] – “It’s not mystical you don’t have to go up on a retreat you don’t have to sacrifice a small animal, you don’t have to entice a life coach or do anything like that. It’s really practical it feels like this is accessible to anybody.”
• 23:31 The difficulty of forming new habits to replace old ones.
• 25:24 “There’s definitely a role for [managers] to play to support and encourage and
  help and hold accountable and check in with people, but I wouldn’t write their habits for them…nobody wins from that.”
• 26:17 “If you’ve got the discipline and the courage and the willingness to be in service to the people who you lead and influence, then you’ll have that greater commitment to be able to. at the moment, be more coach-like – which is where the power lies.”
• 26:53 The characteristics of organizations that are ready to adopt behavioral change.
• 27:30 “If you were a culture which is massively disengaged, where people have kind of opted out, then this behavior change won’t in itself be sufficient to shift things.”
• 28:15 Stanier discusses the process of writing the book, and how hiring an editing “coach” helped him create the best version of it.
• 31:05 “I’m not saying give anybody any advice ever again, I’m just saying slow down the rush to [give] advice until you really know what the challenge is.”
• 32:42 “Often advice creates resistance so the very help that you’re offering…it really creates a breakdown in trust and influence when you go for authority first rather than truly looking to understand a problem.”
• 33:08 [On Edgar Schein’s Helping] “The more you try and thrust help upon people the more you create resistance.”
• 33:53 The research process for the books – testing with real people.
• 35:30 The miracle question.
• 36:08 “I don’t imagine it being 10% better, I imagine it being 10x better.”
• 36:46 [On the most powerful question: What do you want?] “Once people are clear on what they want that’s actually a strong foundation for some really interesting action.”
• 37:10 [On the lazy question] – ‘It’s a bit of a paradox of a title because the question is, ‘How can I help?’ And when people hear that they go, ‘That doesn’t sound like a lazy question at all that sounds like it’s more work for me…but [the lazy question] forces them to make an explicit request rather than an implied request.”
• 37:54 Why explicit requests are far better than implied requests.
• 41:00 The importance of being clear of what you want in your own mind before asking for it.

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

See all listening options (Overcast, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and more)

Michael founded Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations all over the world do less Good Work and more Great Work. The Box of Crayons company is well known for its coaching programs that help time-crunched managers coach in 10 minutes or less.

Michael left Australia 22 years ago to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he fell in love with a Canadian and explains why he now lives in Toronto. He is the author of Do More Great Work, which has sold over 100,000 copies, and several other books, including his most recent, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever.

For more information, visit Michael’s website

• Primary Website
• Travels from: Toronto, ON
• Phone: (416) 532-1322
• Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

Below are key people, places, books, quotes, websites, and other resources that we discussed so you can explore further.

• Daniel Goleman – Leadership Against Results, HBR
• Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
• Tiny Habits with Dr. BJ Fogg
• Edgar Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help 

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Michael Tchong talks with Bill Ringle about Ubertrends and how they are shaping our business opportunities and personal lives.

Michael Tchong is an innovation specialist, change agent, entrepreneur, and speaker. He is the founder of five startups, including MacWEEK and ICONOCAST, and has pioneered ventures in desktop publishing, personal information management, internet analytics, and online marketing. His latest startup is Social Revolution®, which aims to reinvent America by crowdsourcing innovative solutions.

As a speaker, Michael uses his knowledge of marketing, media, and technology to help audiences better grasp how massive waves, which he calls “Ubertrends,” are reshaping society, as well as the opportunities and innovations these Ubertrends propel. His ability to identify emerging trends was refined at such prestigious ad agencies as DDB and Chiat/Day. He is the author of Social Engagement Marketing, an easy-to-navigate guide to the world of social media.

For more information, visit Michael’s website.

Web address: MichaelTchong.com

Web address: ubercool.com

Travels From: San Francisco, CA

Follow Michael:

Former CEO of Campbell Soup Co. Doug Conant talks to Bill Ringle about personal leadership and taking charge of the things you can actually control.

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com  for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.

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• How getting fired can lead to new and better opportunities
• What it means to “turn the coin over” when presented with a problem
• The two top qualities of mind that set exceptional leaders apart from well-intentioned leaders
• How you can use the criteria to win in the marketplace in your own business
• What resulted from combining the social agenda with the value agenda at Cambell’s Soup for employees and other stakeholders

• 1:12 Where Conant started his career, moving from Kellogg in Chicago to General Mills in Minnesota.
• 2:05 [On how to get things done] – “I learned very early on that most of the people I worked with had full lives. If they were going to be helpful to me, I generally needed to be helpful to them.”
• 2:53 How getting fired from General Mills played a pivotal role in Conant’s career, and how meeting executive outplacement counselor Neil McKenna helped get Conant made the difference in getting him back on his feet.
• 4:45 “It reaffirmed for me the importance of just trying to be helpful, to be helpful in a thoughtful caring way, with intentionality to move the enterprise forward.”
• 5:27 [Lessons learned: The Importance of Empathy] – “My first thought was one of betrayal and devastation, I had given everything to this company for nine years, and I felt it was incredibly insensitive the way it was handled. And that was a good thing too because I’ve had to make tough calls too, but I’ve made them in a caring way.”
• 6:45 Turning the coin over after devastating news.
• 8:09 [Paraphrasing Louis L’Amour on Perseverance] –  “He never knew when he was licked, so he never was.”
• 9:37 “Great things are having powerful incremental impacts in the moment with people.”
• 10:21 “Life is just a sequence of interactions. And if I’m really alert and thinking abundantly I find that I can be helpful in those small interactions, and cumulatively over time, I develop enormous credibility, which Stephen Covey might call a very positive emotional bank account with people. And as we build the emotional bank account up, it’s amazing what we find we are able to do collectively and individually.”
• 11:01 “It’s about making it personal. People are either at work or thinking about work, more than anything else they do, including spending time with their families. I think we sort of have to honor that as sacred ground, their work, and I think we have to take it personally.”
• 11:19 “I have found that if I make it personal and it I lean into creating a personally fulfilling work experience for people, they lean into the agenda of the company in a more personal and committed way.”
• 11:41 “Make it personal, be alert to the moment – be helpful in the moment, are two of the foundational ideas that I have…The third one would be that leadership, ultimately, it starts with personal leadership and getting comfortable with the things you can control.”
• 12:20 “If you really want to be good at leadership, my observation is that you have to treat it as a mastery model. You have to apprentice at it, you have to work at it, you have study it, you have to be thoughtful about it, you have to think through your philosophy of how you want to walk in the world and how you want to lead.”
• 13:06 “I take issue, for the most part, with this concept of born leaders. Some leaders have a capacity to lead at a certain level that may be above average, but to be great I guarantee you they all work at at.”
• 13:17 Jack Welch’s leadership work ethic.
• 14:14 Some of the problems Campbell’s faced internally and externally before Conant took leadership in the company.
• 16:33 “We were overpraising and under delivering and making bad decisions to patch up the performance.”
• 18:29 Conant lists the four criteria you need to win in the marketplace.
• 21:01 [On challenges in taking over leadership at Campbell’s] – “It literally took a few years to get the kind of traction we needed and get the company on solid footing.”
• 23:04 “I was going to bed thinking about all of the things we needed to do 365 days a year for the first three years.”
• 23:45 “Employees are not mind readers. You need to tell them what’s expected and how to expected to deliver that performance.”
• 24:25 “The more clear we could be, the more accessible the whole came to every employee.”
• 24:34 How Conant used the “Balanced Scorecard” create clarity and direction for employees.
• 25:50 “The single most important thing in any of these organizations is employee engagement.”
• 26:32 “I have found over time that if I just focus on the people, the people take care of the business. But if you have to put one over the other, you put the people first.”
• 27:02 The Campbell Success Model – metrics for management.
• 29:14 The Boston College reputation institute.
• 30:17 [Campbell’s success model] – “Winning in the workplace, winning in the marketplace, winning in the community, and winning with integrity.”
• 30:59 “It helps to have metrics, it helps to create focus for the organization that says, at a high level, this is what we stand for as a company.”
• 32:04 “The more engaged people can become in the work of the enterprise, the better you’ll do.”
• 32:15 Four things which drive employee engagement.
• 33:15 “Driving an aggressive social agenda, while we were driving an aggressive economic value creation agenda was very synergistic. Because we were saying, ‘Here’s how you can leave a legacy of contribution through your work that transcends your ordinary work experience while you’re making a living, while you’re feeling valued, and while you’re learning.”
• 33:44 “The more we leaned into building a better world, the more engaged our employees got, and the better we performed in the marketplace.”
• 35:14 “I think the challenge in the next decade is going to be for corporations to build this intuitively obvious practice more into the fabric of how they run their companies.”
• 36:01 Examples of companies building a better world by building better companies.
• 37:11 “All organizations aspire to be relevant in the world, to certainly create economic value, but they also are committed to enduring success. All leaders want to be associated with enduring success. And they see the value in being good citizens.”
• 38:12 “It’s important that once you declare yourself, you deliver on it.”
• 39:24 What Conant reads for inspiration.

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

See all listening options (Overcast, Pocket Casts, TuneIn, and more)

Doug Conant is the founder and CEO of ConantLeadership, which is dedicated to helping improve the quality of leadership in the 21st century. He is passionate about employee engagement and firmly believes in the importance of coming up with your own leadership model.

Doug was appointed President and CEO of Campbell Soup Company in 2001. Under his leadership, Campbell reversed a precipitous decline in market value and employee engagement; the company has won many recognitions since, including the prestigious 2010 Catalyst Award. When Doug retired in 2011, he received the American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) 2011 Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance Award.

Doug joined Campbell with 25 years of experience from three of the world’s leading food companies: General Mills, Kraft, and Nabisco. He began his career in 1976 marketing at General Mills. After 10 years, he moved to Kraft where he held top management positions in marketing and strategy. Immediately prior to coming to Campbell, he was President of the $3.5 billion Nabisco Foods Company where he led his team to improved marketplace performance and five consecutive years of double-digit earnings growth.

During his tenure at Campbell, Doug established the Campbell CEO Institute to train the company’s future leaders and ensure that the company’s highest-potential employees were well-equipped to handle the challenges and surprises that inevitably create a leader’s impact and legacy.

He is now a sought-after speaker on leading with integrity and other business topics and is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments.

• Web address: ConantLeadership.com
• Travels From: Philadelphia, PA
• Connect on Twitter

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Mette Norgaard talks to Bill Ringle on My Quest for the Best about how you communicate with your team will make or break you as a leader.

Mette Norgaard, Ph. D., MBA, is an expert on strategic leadership and learning. She works with executives to design and deliver learning solutions that advance the company’s strategy. She has also designed and participated in executive dialogues and workshops with thought leaders such as Stephen Covey, Jim Collins, John Katzenbach, Rob Goffee, Margaret Wheatley, and Ram Charan.

Over the years, Mette has taught thousands of leaders from a wide range of organizations, including Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, GE Capital, Estée Lauder, the US Armed Forces, and Harley-Davidson. In addition, she has worked closely with the executive teams at companies like Metro International, Pandora Jewelry, and Finnish Broadcasting. Finally, she has been a long-term partner on the development of high-potential leaders at companies like Campbell and Microsoft.

Her latest book, co-authored with Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell, is TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments. She is also the author of the international bestseller The Ugly Duckling Goes to Work: Wisdom for the Workplace from the Classic Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which has been published in many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese.

Prior to starting her own practice, Mette worked with FranklinCovey Co for ten years. She was the director of Principle-Centered Leadership Week, an executive retreat at Sundance, UT. In addition, she was part of a small team of consultants who led large-scale change processes for Fortune 500 firms and the US Government. Before joining FranklinCovey Co, Mette served as a leader in both healthcare and manufacturing, and she knows first-hand the incessant pressures to do more with less and do it faster.

For more information, visit Mette’s website.

Web address: MetteNorgaard.com

Travels From: New York, NY

Follow Mette:

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New York, NY

Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in writing about careers and entrepreneurship. When she was a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine, she was twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her feature stories.

She went freelance in October 2007 and has since written for publications including Fortune Money Forbes and a variety of other print and online publications. At Crain’s New York Business, she is a contributing editor, focused on the weekly’s small business coverage. She writes a how-to column and one on startups, called Startup Scene. At Fortune, she writes a column called David vs. Goliath, looking at small companies that are taking on giant competitors.

Having built traffic Fortune Small Business Online from a fledgling site to one with 2 million to 5 million page views a month, she frequently draws on her experience to help clients improve their online presence. She also founded Fortune Small Business’s national Business Plan Competition and ran it for 5 years.

For more information, visit Elaine’s website.