 Steve Shepard. So the nation we knew, tell us about your new book and why you wrote it and then we'll get into what it's about. About eight years ago, I started on this idea that wouldn't it be nice if politicians could set aside party line and just think about the country instead of making decisions based on what they think the party needed, make a decision based on what the nation needed. And I do a lot of leadership training and I started thinking about the phrase I use all the time in my sessions, which is what could be, not what is, but what could be. And I began to think about all the things that we could work on. So if you think about the things that people talk about in terms of what's broken in this country, that's the common conversation. There are problems with everything, as there always are. Education is perceived to be broken, healthcare is perceived to be broken, the way the government operates is perceived to be broken, infrastructures falling apart, the prison system, the so-called Department of Corrections corrects nothing. I mean, it was all those kinds of thoughts. And I was becoming increasingly disenchanted by the polarization going on in the country. So I started thinking, what would happen if we actually started thinking about what we could do and then took steps to actually do it? In other words, if education was really, really, really the best in the world and really doing what it should do, what would that look like? And what could we do to make healthcare better? It'll never be perfect. It can't be, but we can make these things better. What does good infrastructure look like? What would we have to do to the prison system so that when people come out, they don't immediately re-offend and go back in and they're set up to fail? So I knew that we'd never do this using the traditional means because people are too sort of set in their ways. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is the way it's always been done. It'll never change. So I decided to come up with an idea that said, what if something remarkable were to happen that caused everybody to kind of reset mentally? And I won't give it away. It's sort of encapsulated in the subtitle of the book how a bizarre geophysical event sort of caused things to change. But after I invented that, I discovered that in fact it's quite possible. And again, I'll let you read it in the book. This new president came in and I created this character eight years ago. So we're now in April of 2021. So eight years ago, I started creating characters and making bullet lists of the things I wanted to fix in this book. The book is essentially a retrospective, an interview between a reporter who has been assigned the task of writing a retrospective 10 years after this president left office. And the way the timing works out, this president is the person who actually follows Biden. Now keep in mind, I wrote these characters eight years ago. This president who is now 10 years out of office and being interviewed is an African-American woman, which I find rather interesting that that's the character I chose for this character. And she decides that rather than doing things in the traditional status quo kind of way, she's gonna do things differently. So for example, instead of having a secretary of education, she's gonna find somebody that actually knows something about education, because they've been a teacher or a professor or an administrator and they're going to work on behalf of education everywhere. Instead of having a chief transportation officer, I mean, a transportation secretary, we're gonna have a chief transportation officer who worries about not just do we have enough roads in place and is infrastructure correct and so on, but also what kind of jobs do we have to enable to make that happen? If we're gonna put in better roads and bridges and tunnels and other infrastructure, we need technicians and welders and electricians and road builders and surveyors and all these other craftspeople, the trades as we call them. So she wants to drive a renaissance in the trades and she does. Anyway, the whole process of the book is this interview between this reporter and this former president about what happened that caused all these things to get fixed. And really what it is, Lauren Glenn, it's a thinly veiled exercise in leadership because to me, what leadership is about is the fine art of showing people what could be rather than what is and then enrolling them to help you achieve whatever it is you're attempting to achieve. And so the book is, as I say in the forward, I tell readers, I say, do me a favor and just set aside for the next couple of hours or however long it takes you to read this book, just play along with me and play a game of fantasy United States of America for a little while and let's see where it takes us. And that's the story. I'm sort of stuck on this, what you said that leadership is essentially the art of describing what could be rather than what is and then recruiting people to get there. You've worked with a lot of organizational leaders in a time of extreme disruption, I mean, particularly in the technology realm. And I think you found out that most problems are not technological, they're leadership issues, right? So can you talk a little bit about examples maybe beyond what's in the book of people have been very effective in articulating what could be and we're able to mobilize a team or an entire population around them? Yeah, that's a really good question. So all too often what happens is that a company is here and through a variety of mechanisms, growing competition, a change in the marketplace, a shift in economic status, new technology, innovation, whatever it may be. They know that they're here and they need to be here. And all too often what they try to do is they head down the road toward the future and trying to accomplish things. And the first thing they run into is, well, that's very nice but you see, that's not how we do things here. And everything kind of squeaches to a halt and it's common, it's human nature, people don't like change, it's hard. It's scary, it requires you to walk up to the precipice and maybe jump off. So what this technique does is it says, rather than start in the present and extrapolate into the future, why don't we start in the future, build an image, a really detailed image of what we'd like to see and then reverse engineer back. And the reverse engineering process is nothing more than identifying all the potential obstacles that are gonna get in your way on the way to achieving whatever this organizational nirvana is that you're attempting to reach. And that gives you a much better chance of succeeding because it's a form of scenario planning, it's nothing new. The hardest part of the process is getting leaders to dream a little bit, to fantasize, to let go of their current reality and imagine what could be if they were to try something different. Once they do it, then things start to move very, very quickly. So for example, I've worked with organizations in the technology space who realized that they're extraordinarily good at making this widget because that's what they've always done. What they've never done though is they've never created the services that that widget enables, but they could. Now, their first argument is we're a tech company, we don't do software, we make things, we make physical objects. Well, why don't you partner with a company that does do software but doesn't understand your hardware and working together you could create this super set of capability. Let me paint you a picture of what that might look like. You build a go-to-market strategy together. You are now much greater than just the sum of the two companies that have come together. You are now this super set that can do all kinds of amazing things and the customer only has to talk to one company or one representative. And I've had numerous successes with organizations that have in fact embraced that, frightened to their core, but once they got past that process, it worked. And in fact, there's a little indicative factor that I watch for because when we first start out this process, everybody's got their heels dug in, they don't wanna be the first to change. And what I hear a lot of is this phrase, well, yeah, but, yeah, but, and what happens is that as they grow and as they start to accept that this could happen, the, yeah, but changes too, yeah. And suddenly instead of trying to stop it, they're building it, they're adding to it. And what has really happened is that it has become their new reality. And I mean, I have gone so far, I may have told you this in some of our conversations over the years. I've had leaders send me drawings of what their office is gonna look like 10 years from now. It's become so real to them that, the picture of my dog is on this corner of the desk and my kids are over here and I've got this family picture up here and I've got, and I mean, as far as they're concerned, it's a done deal. They're in, they're doing it. So the process works if you can get people to do that most human of all things, which is to dream a little bit, right? And that's all I'm trying to get people to do with this story. Because I've seen it in the real world if you'll allow me to use that phrase. Well, I remember you talking about walking the cat backwards that really if you could clarify where you're trying to go as opposed to hoping that what you're setting out to do will get you there, which sort of my metaphor is like pushing spaghetti uphill. I mean, really, you need to start with the result, not the things you wanna do. That's absolutely correct. We often tell people in some of the sessions that if you want something different, you have to do something different because hope is not a strategy, right? And a lot of people think it is. If we hope for it long enough, maybe it'll happen. Yeah, well, maybe even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and again. How do you, how do you engage people in that process of ideation, the kind of the generative work of thinking about a different future? So step number one is to help them overcome the sort of dogmatic belief that this is business, it's serious, so we don't play games here. The first thing I start doing is poking holes in that. So don't you do scenario planning? Don't military groups do war games? I mean, do you ever play office fantasy football? I mean, those are fantasies, those are all games. That's all that it's games. And one of the most powerful things companies are doing today is the gamification of many of their activities and of course, the use of game theory because it's a way, again, of predicting all the possible outcomes of potential scenario. So first thing I do is gently poke holes in that part of the process. And then because they often have a hard time getting off of top dead center, where they're sort of stuck in this current belief structure, I paint a picture. I tell them, well, here, let me show you, let me show you what happened. I recently did a project with an organization that does, they do mapping of varied infrastructure. So conduit, cables, water mains, all that kind of stuff. And imagine you're a builder and you're gonna put a building here, but you don't wanna start digging until you know what's down there. So imagine the following scenario, you hire this company to come in and they come in in their truck and the driver gets out and opens the back of the truck and retrieves this set of 3D goggles like an Oculus Rift headset, okay? And inside the truck, they boot up this application and the truck now knows where it is because it's GPS, it knows it's exact physical location and up comes this scene inside the headset. And when the technician looks down at the ground, they don't see the asphalt. What they see is all the varied infrastructure labeled, this is a cable company cable, this is an optical fiber, this is a gas line, don't even think about digging here. Here's who you call if you want information or imagine that same company being able to hand that headset to their customer, the person that's gonna buy the building, they put it on and they're standing in a vacant lot full of weeds, but now what they see is what their building is gonna look like. They can even take a walk through the building and they want to, they can see what it'll be like inside, how the light's gonna fall, where the furniture's gonna go or imagine a scenario where you have a horrific event like the big earthquake in Japan and you need to know where people might be in terms of survivors. And you've got an application that based on the architecture of the building, the structural integrity of the building, you know where the most likely places might be but you can't do that in this pile of rubble but you can if you've got the goggles on, you see the building, not the pile of rubble. So there are all kinds of techniques where you can basically say to the person, stop thinking for a minute, stop thinking about the now and imagine the following. This is what every children's book does. It's what every movie does. I mean, why do people watch Hobbits and Jedi Knights and Harry Potter? These are fantasies and yet they're among the most popular movies ever made. Why? Because people like to fantasize. They love the what if scenario. And that's all this is. It's a variation on the theme. You know, I think of kind of a classic example of Nokia, you know, we made phones, right? And then at a certain point someone figured out, actually these are lifestyle devices, right? And then they put them in colors and they, you know, they just recontextualized the phone from being this, I mean, and even then when it was a landline, there was the princess phone, you know, there were different things, but this clearly was a pivot for a company that made phones to then think about a new place for that device to sit in the culture and therefore they could commodify it in a different way. That's exactly right. And you and I have talked about organizations that, you know, get it. I mean, a classic example that I like to use a lot is Disney. I've done a lot of work with Disney over the years. Their technology people used to come to some of the leadership programs I taught in LA. And I've always been fascinated by the fact that Disney's mission statement is very simple. It's make people happy. So it doesn't matter what your job is, you know, your job may be to dress up like Goofy in the park or cook hot dogs or clean up trash or operate, you know, the Alice in Wonderland ride. No, no, your job is to make people happy. How you do that through the execution of your responsibilities is a whole other story. And it also reminds me of that great story when Walter Cronkite went to NASA to Cape Canaveral and he was interviewing people because the moon landing was coming up. And there was a janitor sweeping the floor and he walked up to him and he said, you know, what role do you play in this place? He said, I'm sending a man, pardon the gender specificity, but he said, I'm sending a man to the moon. He felt part of the team because they had a common goal, a common mission. Whether you were, you know, Capcom in mission control or you were the guy pushing the broom in the hallway, didn't matter, we're putting a man on the moon. And that's powerful stuff, you know? If you can see that, if you can envision that, you can make things happen. Which is, again, why I wrote the book. I just want people to go, wow, what if we did that? Wouldn't that be cool? Well, why don't we do it? We'll have to lose. Yeah, I like that you've contextualized it in a story as opposed to here's my manifesto of everything that could be different, right? I mean, it is your manifesto, but you've couched it in a form people can consume. You know, one of the basic tenets of good storytelling is don't tell them, show them. I mean, you're absolutely right. I could write a prescriptive book that said, here's everything broken. And I sound like my grandfather, you know? You're going to hell in a hand basket. Well, okay, got it, all right? But what are you going to do about it? I mean, that's the ultimate challenge, right? And so here, instead of what are you going to do about it? I say, look what happens when we did something about it? We think about this. How does that look to you, right? And there's all kinds of great surprises in there. There are a bunch of real people that you'll recognize that have agreed to be people in the story. A couple of them said, you know, I've always thought I should go into public office. Maybe this is what will push me over the edge. Great, well, I can't wait to read it. I know you're looking for some readers. So I'm looking forward to that. Just tell me, what else are you working on, Steve? I mean, people may not realize, but you're omnivorous. So you're writing a book, you're developing podcasts, you used to be flying around a lot more than you are now. So what's the current other project that you might share with us? So yeah, when the zombie apocalypse started with COVID, to your point, I mean, I was flying 150, 175,000 miles a year and I was afraid I was gonna go into a deep depression. I haven't been on a plane in 14 months and I'm loving every minute of it. So yes, I've been writing, I've been doing a lot of Zoom stuff like everybody has. I've been working on my public podcast, The Natural Curiosity Project. And the whole idea here is you make the most of what you're doing. So what have I been working on? Well, I'm doing some really interesting work right now for a major university looking at the expanding role of a bunch of these new technologies that we're hearing so much about. So things like robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, internet of things, cloud and edge technologies, broadband, 5G, all that stuff. And the whole idea is that, I really don't care about the technology. I have to know it because of what I do, but to be perfectly bluntly honest, it bores me to tears. I really don't care where the bits go. I really don't care. What I do care about is if I take this technology and apply it to some important thing in society or in government or in healthcare or education, how do I make it better? And so that's where my focus is, it always has been, right now we're working on a book. We've produced a series of podcasts. We're building some training programs for executives to help them think about what it means to be in this new tech-centric world. I'm spending a lot of time these days doing research on what's gonna happen when robotics and AI become increasingly commonly deployed in the workplace and what happens to jobs? I mean, there are good reasons for robotics to come in, for example, looking at things like dangerous jobs, repetitive jobs that can result in injury, both physical and mental. There's very good reasons to have machines do a lot of that, but where the gap sits right now and where I'm really kind of concerned is that people say, well, I can replace that person with a robot. Well, sure, but then that person can learn how to run a robot. The problem with that logic is true, but the problem with that logic is one person can run a hundred robots. What about the other 99 people that got moved out? My concern is I'm not seeing a lot of activity in the country or around the world to really study and really understand and then really do a good job of developing training and education for these new jobs that will be required to operate in this new tech-centric world. It'll happen and it's gonna be a good thing. It truly will, but it's gonna take a concerted and very deliberate effort on a lot of people's parts to make it successful. So I'm spending a lot of time there. And then on the podcast, the only theme in the podcast, it's very simple, is curiosity. I mean, I have this personal belief that curiosity is our sixth sense. And I think it's being ground out of existence for a lot of different reasons. And I want people to be curious. So my basic message is, I mean, every single episode is different. It's totally different. I interviewed a person just the other day about cloud technology and internet of things and how it's gonna be used in the great growing wine industry. The very next week, I did one, an interview with an old friend of mine who is, he's a very technical guy. He's worked on the Watson project at IBM. So he speaks fluent artificial intelligence. He worked for Cisco. He worked for Xerox. And he's a comedy writer for John Oliver and Saturday Night Live and Conan O'Brien. And we did an episode about the role of humor in the workplace. So anybody that watched that first one and then watched the second one is gonna wonder what mental hospital am I living in? Because this is clear, there's a schizophrenia here beyond anything I've ever seen. But my message is, this is stuff you should be curious about. You should ask questions. Get out there. And understand the world a little better. So I'm on my little quixotic mission tilting the windmills of our society to get people to wake up and pay a little bit more attention to the stuff that we've taught ourselves not to see. And that's the Natural Curiosity podcast? Yeah, the Natural Curiosity project podcast. Okay, excellent. That's good. Well, we'll direct people to that. Well, I'm so grateful for your time. I know you've probably got more things to write today. But I look forward to reading The Nation We Knew, your new upcoming book, Steve Shepard, and also to beam into that Natural Cure SV project podcast. Thanks, LG. Thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely, and I hope you enjoy the book. I can't wait. Great.