The Great Conversation

Imagine there will be four eulogies at your funeral. One will come from a family member. One will come from a friend. One will come from someone you worked with. And another will be delivered by someone who represented how you gave back to the world (Perhaps a charity or ministry).

Now write what they might say today. You might discover something about yourself. It might change the course of your life. You might want to write them again with your new aspirations in mind.

This conversation ends on that note. But where my guest takes us is through a journey of self-discovery intersecting our unique powers, purpose, and passions. If we seek, we shall find, and it will change how our lives flow and flourish.

Tony Davis is the Founder and Chairman of Dovetail Business Solutions (Pty) Ltd and Next Level Insights Group. He is an entrepreneur, consultant, advisor, and a passionate evangelist of “Living your Life on Purpose", which happens to be the book he is currently writing.

You don’t have to be waiting for the week to end (TGIF) or for retirement to begin living.

Enjoy a purpose-filled great conversation!

Scott Lindahl, VP Corporate Services & Chief Security Officer, at Kellogg Company sat down with me in a great conversation around his journey that led him to begin using this language and adopting the behavior of a corporate leader.

Scott’s journey entailed working in manufacturing, retail, financial services as well as a small security services firm. Along the way he studied how salespeople interacted with clients. And he found the best ones had a way of creating a conversation through the power of great questions.

He adopted this as his career matured and, as a result, began to learn not only the business but also the personal and professional drivers of his corporate customers. This approach became the framework that guided his own behavior and those that worked under him. He would call this “freedom within a framework”

With this basic understanding of his journey, we then began to talk about the future. Leaders in every part of an organization are dealing with the same macro and micro issues. The speed of change is accelerating and impacting the way we get things done. Technology, in many cases, is acting as the lever. Scott believes that one of the keys is how to see the whole picture. This will naturally lead us to better ways of gathering and harnessing information that is critical to our organization’s risk and opportunity.

If CSO’s do this well, they can help the CEO and their executive team navigate the road ahead.

Enjoy the conversation.

I tracked down an incredible thought leader on systems and practices. I thought we would be exploring how to execute. Instead, I found a set of ideas that can be put into action. This is important. A set of ideas is not a task list or a set of commands.

If they become that, you are in danger of not finding out what works and what doesn’t. Because you have given them the recipe but not the authority to let them cook.

Dr. Thom Mayer is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BestPractices, Inc., Executive Vice President of EmCare, the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association and Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University and a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University.

He is one of the most widely-sought speakers on healthcare customer service, trauma and emergency care, pediatric emergency care, medical leadership, and sports medicine. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, 75 book chapters, and has edited or written 12 textbooks on emergency medicine, including Leadership for Great Customer Service: Satisfied Patients, Satisfied Employees, Leadership for Smooth Patient Flow, Hardwiring Flow, and Strauss and Mayer’s Emergency Department Leadership: Principles and Applications. Tom Peters, the internationally acclaimed leadership guru, has referred to his work as “gaspworthy.” Dr. Mayer was named the ACEP Outstanding Speaker of the Year in the second year the award was given and has twice been named ACEP’s “Over-the-Top” award winner.

On September 11, 2001 Dr. Mayer served as one of the Command Physicians at the Pentagon Rescue Operation, coordinating medical assets at the site. The BestPractices physicians at Inova Fairfax Hospital were the first to successfully diagnose and treat inhalational anthrax victims during the fall 2001 anthrax crises, and Dr. Mayer has served on the Department of Defense on Defense Science Board Task Forces on Bioterrorism, Homeland Security and Consequences of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dr. Mayer also serves as a Medical Director for the Studer Group.

What I learned:

Leadership is worthless but leading is priceless. Leadership is a noun. Leading is a verb delivered with an active voice. You are already a leader.

Every team member is a leader.

Every team member is a performance athlete. Invest in yourself and your team.

The work begins within.

If I take these and hardwire them into my life. I would practice the following:

I would wake up every morning and say “I am a leader”

Invest in myself. Spend time getting better at leading.

Review every day what is working and what is not.

Find a way to help others leveraging what I have learned.

Celebrate with “3 Good Things” that are happening. Connect it to an action; that is, what did I do that helped make those 3 good things happen?

Enjoy the conversation.

I met a leader who is a Doctor of Law (JD), is certified on the Essentials of Workplace Violence and Intervention through ASIS, an Instructor at a world-renowned Advanced Threat Assessment Academy, and is a strategic partner in the vision and mission of her organization.

In her role as instructor, she teaches representatives from government, law enforcement, higher education and K12, mental/brhavioral health professionals, and Fortune-500 companies.

I was curious how she pulled all these disciplines together as a leader and as a person.

Melissa Muir, is Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development at the City of Shoreline in Washington State,

The conversation starts with a question: “What does it mean to be in Human Resources these days? And where is it going in the future.?

We hear about a great re-imagining what it means to be at work. What we want to keep, foster, and what is no longer important as the world changes. And I ultimately ask: “How do you get to courage and trust with teams? To call out the elephant in the room.”

Melissa calls it “Bringing to the Surface what is below the Surface”

And through the conversation we learn we have an essential and great power to direct the story of our organization and the people within it.

Enjoy this great conversation.

The power of story. It influences our lives. We have a personal story, fed by the evolutionary stages of story from our culture, our tribes, and our family. Story describes our core values and the why of our journey.

If you built a business model to help people, companies, and governments understand their identity through story as well as the stories of others you might be able to create a powerful and sustainable engagement that could lead to constructive relationships throughout our world. You might be able to avoid war. You might be able to solve some of the world’s largest problems.

Narrative Strategies has done that. We sat down and talked with the Vice President of Strategy, Paul Cobaugh to help us understand story’s place and its potential. What we found is a different language to describe how stories feed a larger narrative identity, with story being a puzzle piece.

The puzzle creates a picture that tells you something. The stories tell only a piece. Assemble them together and it becomes a narrative of a family, culture, or company.

Since Paul is a veteran, he pulls examples of how he intuitively understood this in his work around the world.

It seems so simple. So simple that it is largely ignored by people in power. But a few are listening. And that is good. The future of our country may depend on it.

Someone needs to be in place to understand the collective stories of our enemies, so we can articulate our ideas and touch their narrative identities. That someone is a “narrator”. The narrator needs to be in it for the long game because relationships based on narrative identity require sustained engagement. And the narrator needs to have a sense of urgency so that our ideas can help shape the future narrative identities of the world. The story is unfolding right now. And we have a front row seat.

Time to have a great conversation!

I am always looking for the seeds of a disruptive new way of thinking. This often is the genesis of a new model for doing business or a new model for governance within a family, association, community, or nation.

From this, new tools are provided to affect the idea and the model. New technologies are created.

In this great conversation, we speak with Marisa Randazzo, Ph.D, Executive Director for the Ontic Center of Excellence,

Through the convergence of her academic experience and her applied research in the field, she became known as an international expert in behavioral threat assessment and protective intelligence, specializing in preventing school shootings, workplace violence, stalking, and assassinations. Before joining forces with Ontic, she was the CEO of SIGMA Threat Management Associates.

She helps me understand the pathway to violence and its potential at stopping violent crimes before they happen. And we explore the ways we can train people be active ‘sensors’ in picking up the signals of a potential threat before it happens. These people sensors are now being augmented by technology that can help collect, manage, and communicate the data creating the means to stop an incident before it happens.

We learn that most potential perpetrators are human beings crying for help. They are not sociopaths or psychopaths or monsters. They are not intrinsically evil. Their acts are.

This basic logic ladder called the pathway to violence is a useful construct for creating innovation and change that our country desperately requires.

Enjoy the conversation.

Voracious Learners!

When we sat down to have a great conversation, she immediately drew me into her path to creating a team.

What we find is a deep understanding that developing people and teams takes an investment in knowing who they are. From there you can begin to create partnerships that take the one-on-one relationships and the collaborative team relationships to the next level.

You can hear it in her voice. She is what she preaches: self-aware, authentic, caring, and collaborative. A great foundation for leading people on their path to value.

Enjoy the conversation.

If a CEO’s primary role is navigating risk and opportunity, then they must have a risk, resilience, and security team who is prepared to be at the table.

To be prepared, the Chief Security Officer (CSO) and their team must understand the unique value of their role in supporting the mission and vision of the company. Then they must organize around the interconnected relationships of others who are attempting to create outcomes that matter to the business. And they must find a way to leverage intelligence locally and globally that provides them insights that support the contextual application of risk for the leaders of their company. This is also where the core values of the culture will be engendered and supported.

I find this to be rare.

Because of this, I was absolutely engaged when Debbie Maples, the Vice President of Global Safety & Security: Security Operations, Investigations & Protection at Salesforce, sat down with me in a great conversation around the heart, mind, discipline, and tools of the leadership of the risk, safety, and security leadership of her company.

Just as her company, Salesforce, is in the pursuit of being the premier cloud-based software designed to help businesses find more prospects, close more deals, and wow customers with amazing service, their safety and security team seeks to be premier in risk intelligence, investigations, travel safety and security. Their mindset: the foundation of finding great people, keeping them engaged in the business, and supporting their felt needs, takes a unique blend of leadership, business process, data aggregation platforms, and a passion for service within risk, resilience, safety, and security.

This was truly a great conversation. Enjoy!

One of the leaders in our Great Conversation community sent me a brief but compelling message:

I want to introduce you to Hans Nyamie for your next Great Conversation. Hans is one of the most interesting people I have spoken with in a long time. He is focused on facility space planning and technology.

When I went to his LinkedIn it told me very little

Workplace and FM Systems Specialist (incl: Agile/Activity Based Working,Space Management & Administration)

Not a lot to go on. But I arranged a call with him although our time differential was significant. London vs. Seattle!

What I found is the anthropomorphic version of glue-ware. Hans seeks to integrate and harmonize the interests of the user, the integrator, and the business around the form, function, and purpose of space.

More importantly, when he is not focused on his existing projects, he is exploring the future meaning of the spaces we occupy. Because the continuous and accelerating change we are experiencing requires a degree of agility and adaptation that the current built environments we have today are not equipped to handle.

In 2021, Facebook announced its future focus on the Metaverse. And our spaces must reflect this new digital transformation. We have a great conversation around space, place, and the future.

Enjoy.

I meet many people who are unconscious competents. They intuitively know what to do, and largely are successful at doing it.

And then there are the conscious competents. They took the time to understand what they do including the why of it, and the value of it. They document, teach, and, most importantly for any leader competing for funds, sell their program to their stakeholders.

I met Bill Marcisz when he was the Executive Director of Security, Safety, and Emergency Management at AdventHealth in Central Florida. AdventHealth is known as a trailblazer in their research and their use of emerging technology.

Bill not only ran this critically acclaimed program, but he also was called upon as a nationally recognized and Board-Certified Security Expert. After all he has over 40-Years of Security & Legal Experience.

He retired from AdventHealth to devote his energies as the President & Chief Consultant for Strategic Security Management Consulting, Inc. (SSMC)

Bill shared with us his thoughts on the key components of a strategic security program and what it takes to position it for value.

Enjoy the conversation.