Read the 5-minute summary for this episode and many others at owl.ceo. The OWL (Owner Wisdom Library) turns insights from more than 1,200 Exit Coach Radio interviews into short, practical lessons for business owners on growth, leadership, operations, and exit planning.
Morrie Shechtman is a Chairman of Fifth Wave Leadership, a company that deals the Human Capital Consulting. Today, he will discuss the topic of ending mediocrity in business.
Questions Answered: 1) What's the only competitive advantage left? 2) Why do most leaders and their companies underachieve? 3) Why are there no "business problems"? Contact Info: Website: www.fifthwaveleadership.com
Email: morrie.shechtman@gmail.com
Exit Coach Bill Black interviews Top Advisors for Tips, Ideas & Precautions for Business Owners who want to grow and protect their company value and plan for a successful Business Sale or Transfer. Listen daily so you can be well-planned!
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Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. Their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Welcome back, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. You know, it's always a pleasure to have back guests that have been on the show before they bring such a wealth of knowledge that we ask them back, and our next guest is no exception, Maury Schechtman, and he's joining us from 5th Wave Leadership in Kalispell, Montana. And Maury is a sought after speaker. He talks about the end of mediocrity and creating a meritocracy, and he's got a couple of books out. One is called Working Without a Net. And the other one is called 5th Wave Leadership, and it's always a pleasure to have Maury on the show. Maury, welcome back. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, glad to be back, Bill. Good to talk to you again. Hey, Maury, uh, it's been, uh, several weeks since you were on last. What's been happening? What have you been up to? I've been doing a lot of my retainer consulting with high growth companies. I'm doing some interesting work with an area that I originally came out of and I'm now working with, and that's healthcare, which is booming and being run more like a business than ever before. It's been fascinating to see that transition as people get the idea that they have to run everything like a business, including health care provision. So it's been been interesting work working on another book called The End of Mediocrity and seeing that that's probably one of the biggest challenges that companies have now because information has made mediocrity a greater liability than ever before. You just can't afford to have average people around anymore. They will kill your business. And you talked about uh what you need to do is to create a meritocracy out of that, of course, we talked about that in the past, but uh give our listeners a sense of how they move from mediocrity to a meritocracy. Well, the first thing they have to do is decide that average performers have to either dramatically up their game or they need to leave. That what we have done over the years is accept average as the norm. That's essentially what it means, and we've been able to get away with that for a long time. Information no longer makes that viable because it kicks up competition so fiercely that you can't have people who just do the job at an average level. You'll be surpassed by top performers, and top performers are people who take risks. We give people feedback all the time and are very open to change, and that doesn't describe a lot of the workforce that we currently have. So they need to start making some changes or they need to find somewhere else to work, which is going to be harder and harder for average people to do. Um, you know, there's a great book out by Tyler Collin. The Average is over, and he makes the point from an economic point of view that uh that the average performer will just kill you. that they're just a drain on resources. So first you have to decide in terms of who you want to work with in the company, who are the people open to constant change, absolutely constant change, and who will take the risks of telling you what's really going on instead of holding, you know, keeping their mouth shut to hold on to their jobs. And wrapped all around that is all kinds of technology to both measure the performance and the efficiency of existing employees and weed out the ones that aren't strong, but also when you're onboarding someone, there's so much technology that I would call human engineering technology that really Uh, it takes away the, the, you know, it's, we're going to figure out what, what you're made up of and and whether you're a performer. Do you see a lot of people using that technology to identify what a keep a top performer looks like and then hire to that those characteristics? Yeah, I do, Bill, but you raise a fascinating point. Too many business owners get seduced by the idea of analytics, you know, it's a real, real word that everyone likes using these days, a hot word. The problem is that there are two technologies now in business. One is practical and it's analytics, taking every form of data, integrating them, and making decisions on. Technical performance. That's great. That's half the picture. The other half is people technology, and that is what characteristics are you looking for in people that you can be assured they're going to fit into your culture and in fact challenge your culture and then raise the bar. That's been neglected by in particular and they get so enamored of analytics. That they think that's the whole story, so they end up hiring right technically as two people who nobody can work with. And then they get very disillusioned and say, wait a minute, this guy met all the analytics that we were looking for, but nobody can stand working with him. So we invest a lot of money now and we have to go looking again. So it's really important to keep in mind there is a people technology that is we know the kind of people who will work in this business climate and the one in the future, and we need to nail down the characteristics like risk taking and understand what I mean by risk taking is telling the truth 100% of the time to everybody in your environment. Risk taking is not. Putting a lot of money at stake. It's not jumping off the buildings or climbing Mount Everest. The highest risk we take is to level with people all the time. Tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. That's, that's a mouthful. That's huge. That's huge, Maury. That's great information. And you know, when I think about it, in my own practice I've seen several instances where people say this is going to be our successor, this is going to be our new president, we're going to step aside and let him run things and then 6 months later, 12 months later, they're saying it's not going well. Why? Because although like you said, they're technically they're they're good with vendors, they're horrible with our employees. That we can't program in that caring and and so that the the owners are saying and now we're back, you know, trying to uh uh massage the employees how do we program in uh caring into someone and that's very difficult to do. Yeah, it is. It is. It's hard to fundamentally change people. It reminds me, the first thing he said reminds me of a CEO I worked with once who fell in love with every senior executive he hired who had certain analytic characteristics, and then within literally weeks he fell out of love with him real fast. So you get the hero to zero phenomenon. Which I've seen a lot in my work with companies where people are enamored with a person. They're the best thing they've ever hired and in as short as a couple of weeks they're a nightmare for the company because they didn't, they didn't really press on the personal characteristics, and that brings up the whole area of recruiting. Recruiting now in American business is a disaster area. They were recruiting for the 1970s. We are not recruiting for 2015. I, we're doing the asking the same stupid questions, getting the same stupid responses, and going through a checklist of questions, which if you do that, you've just wasted everybody's time. And the second point is a recruiting interview is not meant to be comfortable. It's meant to be very uncomfortable. If you don't make the candidate uncomfortable, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. So at the heart of a lot of what businesses are challenged by now is their recruiting methodology, particularly the interview, is absolutely archaic. It does not fit our times. I'm amazed by, by, you know, by a number of people who say it was a great, great interview and everybody felt good about it. Well, if everybody felt good about it, you blew it. You did a lousy interview. You know if you were if you were to waive your your consulting wand over over the process, what would you say needs to change in general and and what's missing there? OK, good, good question. A couple of things need to change. One of which is the whole concept of the interview needs to be altered from a Q&A session to building a relationship quickly and deeply, seeing if the candidate's capable of doing that. So this is not going through a checklist of questions, the same stupid questions we traditionally asked. Like I don't really care where you went to school. I don't care what your grade point was. I don't care what activities you were involved in. That's absolutely irrelevant to me. I don't even care how many jobs you've had before. What I want to know is, can you connect with me, the interviewer, within minutes and build a deep relationship, and can you absolutely engage in a dialogue, not just answer prepared questions? So one is changing the whole point of the interviews to see, can you build a relationship with this man or woman. Quickly, do they open up or do they just give you conversation killer answers to questions where there's nowhere to go from there? And the second thing is you've got to change the the questions that you ask, and you know it doesn't matter that you ask a lot of questions. You just need to ask two or three questions that really challenge the candidate at a gut level. So, let me give you an example. We teach our clients to always ask these two questions if they ask nothing else. Number 1, up to today's date, what have been the two most stressful experiences in your life? I follow up questions are why were they stressful? What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about the rest of the world, right? Question number 2. Up to today's date, what have been the two greatest losses in your life, personal or professional, doesn't matter. Same follow-up questions. Why were they losses? What did you learn from it? Why are we asking those questions? Number one, because no one's prepared to answer them. No one's done that. No one has their script in front of them. Answering those questions, which is absolutely essential in the interview. Don't ask people questions that they've they answered 100 times before. Secondly, that will tell you right away a couple of things. Does a person have a value system? You create your values in the crucible of loss and stress, not in the crucible of gain and comfort. OK, uh, so secondly, are they learners? Do they learn from life experience or do they have the same experience over and over again and learn nothing? So that that gives, you know, hopefully it'll give you some sense of very different interaction. I want to push this candidate. I'm amazed at the number of people who I ask, are you hiring this person to do easy work or difficult work? Oh, no, no, work around here is difficult. It's challenging. Then why would you have an easy interview? It makes no sense at all. So hiring you to do difficult work. I want to see how you deal with a difficult interview. Because if you can't do a difficult interview, why would I assume you can deal with a difficult job, any addict, you know, that's what politicians do. Why would I do it in business? It makes a ton of sense because you know everybody's everybody's great when when the wind's blowing and you're sailing down, you know, downstream. It's, it's when you're against the wind and you have to row. That's when you really need to find your team to come into work and really pull you out of that. So what I hear you saying is that there are, there are learners and there are, there are blamers, people that they might say, well this is a horrible loss and I blame it all on somebody else and. Uh, you know that you're gonna find out if they take responsibility for something that happened. Um, that that's fascinating information. Now there's a huge number of baby boomer business owners who are transitioning their leadership in the next few years, and that might be to insiders, to to managers or employees or even family members that they have already in their purvey, or they might be looking for that outside leader to come in. And so these kind of skills will be fantastic. What happens when When the owner has already chosen their successor manager from inside and and you come in and say that person's not gonna work and and they're are they in denial or what kind of training or what what happens in a situation like that because I see that a lot, you know, you walk in and they say, well this person, I want them to take over and you interview them and you go, you're gonna have a problem here. What do you do? Yeah, yeah, that's a great point, Bill. I've been in that situation many, many times, and it raises a real good point. I tell someone when I walk in and assess the person who's going to succeed them, and I just, I just tell the person who owns the company right then you've made a colossal mistake. And here are the 1234 reasons for it. And if you go down that path, this guy could put you out of business. Now you would think that anybody doing assessment would tell a CEO that 1 out of 100 does, and I'm usually that guy. So one thing you know that owners need to look at is who you're bringing in as an adviser. But most advisors are sophisticated ass kissers. Right, and they just don't want to lose the gig, so they don't level with the client. They just move, you know, it's the old thing about moving the chairs around the Titanic. That's all they do. And the big consulting firms make millions doing that. You know, they just try to tell you in a nice way you screwed up. Well, I'm not there to tell you in a nice way because if I tell you in a nice way, you're going to ignore the input. And so I want to see how this CEO takes the news. He's not going to like it. That's a given. But the issue is, does he learn from it? Does he say, you know, I don't like what you're telling me, but I understand the reasons and I understand your point of view. So a key issue for the amount of people transitioning out of businesses now is get yourself an honest adviser. Cause uh if you don't, they'll go down they'll help you take the company down. Oh, and and it's difficult. I'm dealing with a company now that's transitioning from the leadership, the 80 year old founder who is sharp as attack, and he's transitioning the business to his middle son. And we have gone through a lot because when I first arrived there, those two guys were not talking to each other. And that's fairly typical family businesses, you know, they did just cursory talking around practical issues, but they never really talked to each other. There's a lot of unsaid stuff in there, and one thing may be important to your listeners is every business owner is disappointed in one or more of his children. You say give it, take it to the bank. And if they don't get that disappointment out on the table, then the transition will be a disaster. That's why so many family businesses struggle and fail. Right, because every entrepreneur, every founder is disappointed in one or more of his children. It isn't because they're bad people, because they're not him. So he'd like him to be like him. So I was disappointed. As soon as I get the disappointments out on the table, the transition goes smoother. It's not right? No, it's, it's not, and you're right. I mean, it's, it's amazing to me that a lot of times the, the owner doesn't even trust the son or the daughter to drive their nice car. Yeah and yet and yet they're talking about we're gonna we're gonna. We're going to put the business in their hands, and, and that is really the owner's retirement plan is I'm going to put the business into their hands. Now you see a lot of situations where it's frustrating for the the employee or the child because the owner is driving one of those cars that the driver's ed guys drive with two steering wheels, right? I'll sit in the passenger seat, but I'm going to grab the steering wheel as soon as you start to veer off the road a little bit. Um, there's a transition point where it's very awkward for everybody in a situation like that. Um, what advice would you give to an owner who's who's considering, you know, choosing their, their leader, especially if it's multiple candidates within their business, um, and obviously there there's going to be some difficult decisions to make on what do they make their decision for it to be successful. OK, uh, number one, to realize that business transitions are simply deep and protracted grieving processes. That's all they are. This has very little to do with practical or tactical business. Every time a business has transitioned from one owner, say, to a child or an associate, there's deep grief in there for everybody, but particularly for the owner stepping back from that. And that's where you start helping that owner literally go through the grieving process. Right, you look at their denial, which is the first stage, then you help deal with their anger. They're very angry about giving up this business, even though it may be the best thing in the world for them to do. Then they go into bargaining. How do we mitigate the damage? Then they're depressed and they say everything sucks, you know, this is not what I wanted to happen. And then finally they move new acceptance of the transition, and acceptance means identifying the option that sucks the least. Right, and that's the, that's the process that every business owner goes through who's moving back from his business, absolutely guaranteed, and most business consultants are clueless about that, and they think it's an intellectual process that people go through. There's nothing intellectual about giving up your business. It's a gut-wrenching, emotional process. And very few business owners get that counseling during that process, you know, get that input, but that, that's what's involved in it. I, and then you need to do the same thing with the person taking over the business is what are your, what are your real feelings, particularly, but every kid that takes over his or her father's business is very critical of the way it was run in many respects. I and that needs to get out on the table. If they hide that they just get angry they just stay angry and cynical. So all the the untalked about stuff needs to be talked about essentially what I'm saying. It's a lot of it's a lot of information um and a lot of like you said, emotion, and of course, of course the younger generation, you know, I've, I've been in situations like that where the younger generation thought they had the next great idea, but they've never in some situations they had not been through a tough, a tough cycle there and again that's where like you say, that's where the, the, the battle is, is either won or lost when it when. Um, when it moves into a tough cycle, that's really where it gets difficult to. Um, to, to run and manage and grow a business, and that's where they fall apart now, now in, in a situation where um you have an an owner and they don't have any outside interest outside of the business. Um, do you find that that that makes it more difficult for them if they don't know what they're going to say, retire to or move on to, does it make it that much more difficult than if they have outside interests developed and they really have developed a sense of the purpose of their life after business? Mhm mhm. Yeah, yeah, that a great point. and for for a number of reasons. Number one, get rid of this notion, all business owner, get rid of this notion that they need hobbies. Hobbies is an industrial revolution concept. I don't have any hobbies. I've never had any hobbies. My clients don't have hobbies. They love their business. They love doing business. You know what they love about it? They make impact on people. The question I ask CEOs when they're about to retire from the business is, where's the next area of your life where you want to make impact? Like if you don't make impact, you literally start to die. Physically and emotionally we live for impact. We're an impact-driven species. So the question isn't, do you like golf or do you like sailing or whatever. I've dealt with a lot of people who made more money from selling the business than they could ever spend. So they started out doing what I call fro fro things in their life. They get tired of it in 3 to 6 months and they look to start another business somewhere. They live for impact and it doesn't necessarily not do business. It can be a charitable organization, but they've got to feel like they're making impact. That's where a lot of business owners don't get good advice. You know, someone, and just talks to them about silly stuff. But the real issue is where do you want to make impact next? And most business owners don't think that they have transferable skills. It's fascinating how many men and women I've talked to where I say, where else could you use these skills? They say, Wow, there's nowhere else. I just know the printing business or I just know the car business. And I say, no, no, you don't get it. You're good. You've been successful because you have a number of transferable skills, but no one's ever helped you identify what those are. So you think there's only one thing you can do. And it's, it's a shame. It, it really is too bad that too many very, very talented business owners don't understand the transferability of their skills to a whole bunch of ventures. Oh, that that's what they need to know and they need to get some good advice on. That's, that's fascinating and I love the way you put that is uh it's really identifying where's the next area of your life where you want to make impact. Where's Not just what you know how are you gonna fill up your time in and around the house because that's not what drives these individuals um now you know in some situations you know um a business owner is transitioning out and they're letting management take over and let's say they have let go of that second wheel, uh, things can change in a hurry and, and some. business owners can come back to a business without now recognizing what they left in a very short period of time because so many things have changed. How important is it for a transitioning owner or maybe someone who's going to be an absentee owner to understand and identify the key performance indicators of that, the dashboard indicators of that business so they can kind of keep tabs on it until they're completely out? Well, yeah, I think it's really important to know what what essentially is going on that works and, and, and how to measure that for sure. But, but you raise an interesting point. Other than making sure that the business is going ahead in a positive direction and it's going to meet their financial needs, they need to cut all of their ties, right? And that's very hard for them to do. When you leave a business, you leave a business. Hanging around, coming in, looking around, talking with people is just a form of harassment. And that's how it's experienced by the new leader. So you know, make sure you have, you get data that you need and that reassures you the business is being run well in terms of result, practical results, and then that's it. You cut your ties entirely and people who don't go through the grieving process hang in there trying to control things indirectly, and they just become a pain in the ass to the new people running the company. And, and understand that as soon as a new person takes over the helm of the company, guess what the first thing is that they find out? Everything the original owner did wrong. And that that's the very first thing, and that's what they need to get out on the table with their management team. These things were not done the way I think they ought to be done. So our first initiative is to make these kind of changes, and the person needs to say to a management team, I'm not bringing up these issues to criticize my father, make him look like a bad guy. I'm just saying under my leadership, we need to do things differently in these 345 areas. So I just want to be clear about that. Uh, and again, it's not to make someone into a bad guy. But that's the first thing they're going to notice is from their perspective everything was done wrong. And, and so the old owner is still hanging around and he feels like people are turning him into a boogeyman. So, so he needs to be gone, really gone. Well, you do, yeah, and you're gonna have the the key employees who have been there maybe even as long as the owner was that probably should be thinking about their retirement as well, but they're the old guard, you know, hold the, hold the line kind of old guard that's gotta go too, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, and a lot of the old timers. have been performing mediocrely for a while. No, and nobody, and, and the owner, original owner, founder, it doesn't confront them, so they leave it to the new person coming in so they have to confront some very tough issues, you know, like a guy who helped build the business, been there 35, 40 years and is now making zero contribution to the organization, so. That that that has to be dealt with, you know, hard to do. So, so we're in an age when they're calling it the age of the brain drain. I don't know if you've heard that terminology, but it means that the, the baby boomers are reaching retirement in record numbers. 10,000 a day turn age 65 and or and 50 and 55 too. So it's a huge number of milestone birthdays that are happening. People are really starting to think about leaving companies, but not all, not all key employees have done a good job at setting themselves up for retirement. Um, and there's also another phenomenon, and that is most of the key employees that are in those age brackets have been around, let's say in an engineering firm they were around before computers and they, they know what to do if the power goes out, let's put it that way, where a lot of the younger workers, if the power goes out, they're like, I guess we go home. So how important is mentorship to uh and. Uh, helping, um, employees that normally would have been considered at retirement age, which of course 65 isn't that old these days to, to ease out and to to slow down to a productive job and mentor some of these younger employees. How important is that today? Yeah, great point. It's very important, you know, a couple of reactions to that. I understand that in today's culture, the problem is not young bright people who don't understand business. The problem is young, bright people who've been raised to be comfortable in a culture of entitlement. So they were, they get very little feedback and how disappointing they can be, uh, because that isn't those enough families they, they grew up in. So they need to start getting a lot of feedback. Secondly, uh, mentorship is different than coaching. A mentoring people means you teach them essentially what are the politics of this organization and how do you survive and grow in it, you know, valuable information that's mentoring people. Coaching is this, these are the things about you as a person that you need to work on changing. So many, many companies do a good job of mentorship, which is practical, often technical stuff, and a terrible job of coaching. So that they have people coming up the ranks who have never been told that, for example, they don't listen, they don't know how to listen to people. Listening is a lost skill in America now, but it's particularly lost in a lot of small and medium sized businesses, or that, you know, you are really a dominating in any meeting you try to dominate the meeting and no one else can get a word in edgewise. Are you aware that you do that? Uh, so you have to differentiate coaching from mentoring, and then you've got to raise Johnny and Jamie at work. You know, one of the things my clients are really pissed off about is that they have bright young people who they'd love to groom to take over the company at some point, certainly going in executive management, uh, and they act like adolescents, like children. Yeah, you know, one of the points I made in my first book was that all human development has been pushed back at least 10 years by technology, affluence, and education, which has slowed down life experience. The problem with a lot of our young people now is they've had minimal life experience. So adolescence in America occurs now between 20 and 30, not between 13 and 19. So you got a 25 year old whiz kid, he or she functions like a 15-year-old. I, uh, and you got to understand you are raising young people at work. I don't care if they went to Harvard, have a Yale MBA. They are still retarded in their development. And I see it all the time in in the workplace, and a lot of managers, senior managers get really angry about it, like, you know, I come to work every day and I feel like a babysitter. You say no kidding, you are. Right, and yeah, and understand we're gonna help you become a good babysitter. I, but if you're so pissed off about having to babysit these whiz kids, then you need to go somewhere else. Cause you're not gonna do a good job of, of coaching it. But it's a very different culture. Uh, personal development is a very different ballgame. I mean, my CEOs like probably week doesn't go by before a business owner telling me, uh, uh, when is my son going to grow up? He's 27. He still lives with us. He can't seem to hold a job for a long time. He's got no relationships. Uh, I, when is this kid gonna get it? And I say between about 30 and 35. So don't hold your breath. Well, uh, young people now don't get, you know, first birth age in, in the middle upper middle class population is now 30 years old. We never saw that before. That's when people start having kids. So their children, you know, they're like teenagers before that. And you know, it's very frustrating for business owners to deal with that. They don't get it. That in itself is is a fascinating topic. Now that was that that was in working without a net was that netbook without a net, yeah, yeah, I introduced that notion to the business community in that book, yeah. I, I would, that is an aha moment, and you just, you, you said a tremendous amount of, of knowledge in that area that explains a lot to a lot of people. So working without a net that's available on Amazon and, and then you also wrote a, yeah, tell, tell us a little bit more about that book. Yeah, no, I just want to add one thing to that because a lot of people when I lecture, hear that point and they say, Well, God, that makes a lot of sense. So what do I practically do with that information? Here's, here's what you do when you get a group of mid-20s employees together to talk to them about what they need to be doing differently. Every interaction is a one-issue interaction, number one, you never sit down with mid-20 people with a list of 10 things they need to fix, because after the first one, you're talking to yourself. They have checked out. Right, so no multi-issue conversations with, with young people now. They, they, they just don't, don't listen, uh, and they have an attention span of a flea. So you, you're not going to get a whole lot across. So it's absolutely one issue. And number 2, you have then feedback to you. What did you just hear me say to you? Because you'll be blown away by what they heard as opposed to what you said. So you always with, with that group say, just tell me what you heard me, heard me say. And the third thing is, uh, uh, are you, how do you feel about doing what I just said you need to do? Right, because if you just say, what do you think about this, you're going to get a nonsense answer. These are not intellectual issues. These are gut level issues. And if I ask you to change something that's harming the business, I want to know how you feel about it because if it doesn't feel right to you, you ain't going to do it. Yeah, you'll just figure out, you'll figure out a 100 ways around trying to do it. So literally changes the way you interact with your younger people, and that's all in working without a net. Fascinating. That's fascinating information and I think uh very valuable for most of our listeners. Then then the second book was 5th Wave Leadership also available on Amazon. Um, what's the gist of 5th wave leadership? The gist of 5th wave leadership is the role that the familiar plays in people's success and failure. Right, so what, what that book says essentially is, uh, here's what the familiar is. The familiar is the drive to reproduce the feelings you had earliest in life. And if you don't know what it is, you'll automatically keep reproducing it, and it's not action, it's the feelings that you're left with after the action takes place. So for example, if you grew up in a family where your father or mother or both were never ever satisfied with what you did, they were always disappointed in you. Your life will be about making sure that the people around you are always disappointed in you. And you won't sit down in the morning and rationally figure this out. You'll automatically do it. So you know, if you, if you were an athlete in high school and you scored a touchdown and the first thing your dad said was good run for a short kid, then that feeling left you like, what do I have to do to please this guy? Well, he's never pleased or you get, you know, 3 A's and a B, and your mother says, What the hell's the story with the B? No. You know, that, that kind of stuff, it's life saving. And I can't tell you how many business owners I've dealt with who spend their whole life trying to figure out how not to be disappointing but always making sure they are. to their direct reports, to their spouse, to their friends, and if you don't know what familiar is, you're on autopilot your whole life, and it's a destructive autopilot fly you right in the side of a mountain. So this wave leadership takes the reader through a whole series of very practical examples of how this plays out in people's lives and then how to start changing your familiars. Because understand the familiar is the strongest drive in life, even greater than the drive to live, to succeed. You know, this is why, you know, when you see on the news that a person lives with a spouse who beats them all the time and this is the 13th time they've been beaten, you know, what's the first question you have? Why is he there? Yeah, why are you still there? Yeah, why, why are you still there? Or people tell me, come up to me and say, boy, I'm glad, I'm glad you're here to work with this company because it's been a loony bin as long as I've been here. I said, really, how long have you worked here? Oh, I've been here 20 years. It's been terrible. Well, that's interesting. What kept you here for 20 years? You know, you must love to suffer. So, and that's what we see in business a lot. And and that takes us back around to the uh to what you said earlier on the the only you know the true uh. Uh, I believe you said the true risk is telling the truth and being honest and making the changes that need to be made in spite of the fact that it's going to be very uncomfortable for you and maybe others. Right, right, right, yeah, uh, uh, absolutely, yeah, if, yeah, if people listening to this need to change one thing or look at one thing, it would be a question do you tell the people closest to you the absolute truth 100% of the time? Well, that that will change your business more than anything else and ultimately change your life. That if you're selling a business, leaving, starting something new, and you don't tell people the truth, you're gonna be very unhappy the rest of your life. Maury, it's, it's fascinating to talk with you. I'm so glad that we extended this interview and and got even more information from you today. Uh, again, it's, it's Maury Shekman from Fifth Wave Leadership and what you know you obviously you give um compelling speeches, keynotes, uh, besides being a noted author, um, how often do you get out and speak to groups and what, what, uh, kind of feedback do you get? I like a couple of times a month I do keynotes to professional groups, professional organizations or companies that have an annual meeting or quarterly meeting, and I get a great feedback from the vast majority of people, and then a small number of people are just really pissed off. You know, that they don't want to hear this. It's not about them, it's about everything else. So it's, uh, you know, I think with most people who give talks, you get a split in terms of the reaction. I, I don't get many people having a neutral reaction. I'm not a neutral guy. So, and, and that, that's fine with me. Um, so they do the talks, get a, get a, you know, a profound reaction because I'm, I'm talking about stuff that in one sense is common sense, and I, I take that as a compliment. No, uh, but I put it in a way that business people can hear it. He and the rest of my work is really ongoing work with uh corporation with businesses, small and medium sized businesses. You know, where I come in and work with the CEO and the management team. And that's the, that's the fun work. That's what I like the most about what I do. I'm a problem solver. I'm not a theoretician, you know, I, I, I did my, I'm a recovering academic. I did my 5 years at university, and that was, uh, I love teaching, but there's zero accountability at university. It is the most accountable institution in America right now. So I like on the job work. So if, if a listener wants to hire you to be a keynote speaker or to talk to you about coming in and and helping to uh to manage change in their organization, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? Uh, go to the website fifthwave Leadership.com, F I F T H uh fifth wave. Uh and there's, you know, then you can see right on there how to contact me for either a lecture or ongoing consulting or just send me an email directly. Maurie M O R R I E dotcheckman. Make sure it's S H E C H T M A N. If it's S C H, it won't get to me. There's a guy, he'll get to a guy in Milwaukee at uh at uh gmail.com. OK, so that's Maury.Shechtman@gmail.com or fifthwave Leadership.com. Obviously someone who can help you to to uh create and and have a meaningful meeting or to take your company in a new direction and won't pull the punches when it's time to talk about change and what you need to hear. Maurice, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure and uh you're welcome back any time and uh we look forward to the next time that we speak. OK, well thanks for talking with me. I appreciate it. We're gonna take a short alright take care Maury we're gonna take a short break we'll be right back after this, so please stay with us. You're listening to Exitoachradio.com, the information station for age 50 plus business owners, where we're interviewing top advisors for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. We upload new one minute tips every day. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Business owners, if you came back from lunch and there was a resignation letter on your desk, which employee would you really, really not want it to be from? What are you doing to prevent this from happening? At Exit and Retirement Strategies we design plans that attract, motivate, and retain key employees for a free consultation, called Bill Black, the exit coach at 866-370-3774. Call today. 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