 Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines. I hope that you are having a great start to your new year of 2019. We are broadcasting live from the beautiful Think Tech Hawaii TV studio in the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Honolulu. This show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, which is about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. Today's special guest is Corey Campbell. He is a great friend of mine and is the CEO and founder of Akamai Training and Consulting. Corey is one of the best executive performance coaches in Hawaii who works with over 50 local companies and their leaders to improve their leadership style, communication and customer service skills, and their aptitude to lead through change with the ability to motivate and drive the organization. And today, we are going beyond leadership. Corey! Hey, Rusty. Great to see you today. Good to see you, man. Nice to be here. Nice to be here. You and I, we've talked for hours and hours and hours about leadership and the book and all of those things. But before we get into all of that, I want to know more about your background. Where did you grow up at? Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, Rusty, thanks for letting me be here. It's been a pleasure working with you and seeing this book come to fruition. Thank you. And as I hope to get to talk about, I love what you've done with this book because it connects to everything that I know from my past. I grew up a pretty hyperactive child. Playing a lot of sports. I grew up with basketball, tennis, soccer. Started in Oregon when I was 13. My family moved to Virginia. I was there through my teenage years. I went to Virginia Tech, majored in psychology. And in my sophomore year of college, I got a thing in the mail saying National Student Exchange and University of Hawaii was on there. And I said, well, I can go to Hawaii. And I went in and the lady said, nobody gets Hawaii. She said it's got to be a one-to-one ratio. Someone's got to come to Virginia Tech. Somebody must have because I got it. I spent my sophomore year at UH, fell in love with Hawaii. I did a trans-personal psychology class, just fell in love with the people and the culture and the connection to the environment here. I went home and I graduated Virginia Tech. And then I knew I was going to move back here. And I did. Now, I also heard that you were like a basketball star. I mean, opinions vary. No, I chased a basketball dream, Rusty. I'll say that. I left my parents when I was actually a freshman in high school. And I went to a boarding school for two years. I followed an AAU coach there. And in my last two years, I left my family entirely. And I moved up to New Jersey. And I played for one of the top basketball schools in the nation. I played with guys like Shaheen Holloway and Al Harrington, who went straight to the NBA. Amazing. And at some stage, I realized, may not be tall enough and be able to jump high enough to make it to the next level. But chasing the dream was really profound and a great experience. Corey, I want to ask you, because I'm curious about this. What was your first job that you ever had? Oh, my first job. I was a server at Texas, a restaurant called Texas Steakhouse in Saloon in Stanton, Virginia. And I got to say, I think every human should be a server at some stage of their career. Because you learn how to take care of people. You go on the challenge of that role as well. You know, whenever I go to eat now, I'm so appreciative of everyone who's doing that. Because it's not easy. But it was great. I served steaks and beers and learned how to connect with people, I think, actually. OK. And since then, since that job, what kinds of varieties of jobs have you had since? Man, I've kind of been all over. So I've done data entry in college. When I got out of college, I came back here. Let's see. I got my first job doing serving. I was a bartender, a bubblegum, shrimp company in Alamoana. Amazing. I learned from that role just have fun every single day. And help people have fun. And life is great. I moved to Japan. I taught English for three years. My last year there, I was the prefectural advisor. So I was kind of helping onboard new English teachers to Japan. Then I came back to Hawaii. And I got my first role in hotels. And I was a guest services manager at Sheridan Waikiki, basically getting yelled at for about 12 hours a day and trying to help people overcome their obstacles to enjoy their experience and their stay. And then I moved. And I opened up Rum Fire back in 2008. That was a phenomenal experience. And then I moved to the Royal Hawaiian. And I was a learning and development manager. And basically upgraded that hotel. We shifted from a Sheridan brand to the luxury collection brand. And I got to help kind of put together all the pre-opening and post-opening training to elevate that brand. Then I joined Starwood's corporate learning and development team. And for about three years, I traveled and did leadership training across North America, which was a phenomenal experience. But I missed Hawaii. And I ran into my old boss, Kelly Sanders. And I said, I really want to come back to Hawaii. This was in San Francisco at a sales kickoff. And he said, we'd love to have you back. He helped create a role back here, working with the four at that time Starwood properties in Waikiki. And then the rest is history until I started Akamai. It's amazing how many jobs you've had. I mean, since that Texas restaurant job. I'm a worker. Put me to work, Rusty. I'll do it. I'll chase balls for you, whatever you need. I'm done there. Now, Corey, we've all been on teams in sports and business before. Have you ever had a bad coach or a bad boss? Ooh. You know, I've had bad coaches. I've had more than I would say my fair share of bad bosses. And the most critical element, I think, in a coach or a boss is to build trust and to have support. And I've had both coaches and bosses that when things weren't going really well for them, they kind of severed the connection to the team. And to me at times and said, I'm going to just throw this on you. And I'm going to take credit over here and try to make myself look good while the rest of the team may suffer. Unfortunately, I think that's more prevalent than we know. When I do training off and ask people, have you ranked your last five bosses? And how many would you say was a great leader? And it's crazy, Rusty. But I usually hear about 20% as people rank their previous bosses out there. Yeah. Trust and respect is so important in everything you do. And that's one of the things, I mean, ever since we started talking, and how did you build a culture that won 22 straight state championships, yours was a culture where they trust you and you have mutual accountability to the team. I've always loved that message of yours. Oh, thanks. Now, Corey, I want to know when and why did you start Akamai training and consulting? Yeah, it was scary. I'm still scared. I started in 2015, May, and I started it because I actually had a conversation with a friend, Craig Loveit, and he told me his one regret in life was not starting his own business. And I was at the stage where I thought, I had all these ideas, and I had this passion for what I really wanted to build and develop, but I was scared, and we had that conversation and it triggered me to just make the jump to start it. And I started it because I think the greatest thing you can uncover in life is what is your purpose. And my purpose, I believe, is to ignite the spirits of every person I touch, to live an inspired, energize, and engage life. And that's the origins of Akamai. It's about doing things the right way. It's about helping people understand that their perception of maybe their team and what's happening may not be the perception that those following them have, and how can I help connect that to where, and here's the end goal, Rusty. I want everyone to come to work to life happy. That's it, right? It's life is tough and it's gonna throw you obstacles a lot and so we need to shift how we live and the purpose of which we live to do that and that's really the vision for Akamai. I like that because when you said about that you were scared, I mean, that's like fear in a great way because it's something meaningful, but sometimes, I mean, that causes you to do something different, something maybe better. Yeah, well one of your key concepts that I love, the difference between excited and nervous and I was nervous and when I read your book, it really hit home to me, if you just shift the wording in your head to I'm excited and I didn't know that at the time that I started Akamai, there was a lot of nervousness, but it's so true and the way that I like to approach everything now and one of my key workshops that I do is called Creating an Inspired Mindset because I've realized every day we wake up and it's very easy to focus on what's wrong in our lives or we can focus on what's right and ultimately there's a great quote everyone knows which is if you wake up expecting to have a bad day, you'll rarely disappoint yourself and so if you just shift nervousness to excited, all of a sudden your day looks entirely different. I totally agree, I mean, it's all about the mindset and the mindset is huge and you have been such a amazing executive performance coach. Why do you love that so much? There's a moment in every time when you're working with someone where you see the light kind of go off and I always tell people leadership is a value perception. It's not how you think of yourself as a leader, it's ultimately how the people who are being led by you feel about you and I think it is really, really hard to be totally self-aware and I think it's because people don't tell you. You know, at Starwood Hotels, I used to be the guy who'd go in after an associate satisfaction survey and I'd get to talk to the team and say, hey, how do you feel about your leader and we'd send their leader out of the room and I'd say if there's anything you want them to know, confidentially, I'll communicate what you've said but I'll be the medium to do it and a lot of times people would give in great scores and then they had all these issues that they wanted their leader to work on and I'd always ask, you guys told the leader this yet? Nearly every time they go, no, no way man, absolutely not and that's what I've realized so as a performance coach, what my goal is is I'm gonna interview your people and I'm gonna find out what's really happening and then I'm gonna help just steer you, steer you to figure out, are you leading the right way to where your team really wants to be around you and when you have those moments where they kinda go, you know what, I probably need to change what I'm doing and start doing things differently. That to me is like gold, it's just, it's a phenomenal feeling. And you and I have talked hours and hours about the concept that I wrote about in the book about boss versus leader. Such a key concept and one of the hardest ones to achieve because I think here's another big challenge in life. If you wanna learn sports, we give you a coach, we teach you. If you need to learn Excel, we give you a coach, we teach you. However, for whatever reason, when people get into leadership, we often go, hey, you're great at what you do. Wanna lead some people? And then you go, yeah. And they go, great, you're our guy or you're our lady. And then they don't really coach you on leadership. So oftentimes, the first step is just, is really just blowing it back to the basics. And it's kinda, sometimes you have these people get the epiphany of like, I've never thought about a lot of these just very core leadership traits that I need to do. What are, Corey, what are some mistakes you often see leaders make? Oh. You know, the biggest one, actually, and this ties into the book, Rusty, is not setting up the right culture. And a culture has trust and it has support and it has purpose. And I think we need to talk about purpose every single day. And leaders, I think, inherently talk about goals. Here's what we wanna achieve. And honestly, that's not really motivating because when we don't hit those goals, what happens? Now I'm gone. Whereas if we talk about purpose, here's what we're doing. Elite parking, Ryan Chun, when I first met with him, he didn't say, he said, in fact, we're not a, they're valets, we're not parking cars. We are an organization that builds people and changes the way that people view their arrival experience. That's purpose, right? And when leaders communicate purpose and passion and then support, and the last one I'll add to that, and there's many, but is if I fail, what happens? If you walk in and you make me feel terrible that I've failed, then you may lose me forever. If you walk in when I fail and you say, hey Corey, try again, what'd you learn? I've failed many times myself. You know, I always laugh like leaders. We make mistakes all the time and we don't get held accountable for them. But sometimes our team makes mistakes and right away we wanna go and say, I told you, I told you not to do it this way. Really, we gotta give people that realm of support. If I think you believe in me, I'll do amazing work for you. Now I love hearing that, Corey. And I wanna know Corey, you know, you've dealt with so many companies and leaders. What are some common challenges you see in business leadership? Sure. You know, one of the biggest ones is a lack of development. And here's what I mean by that. I often meet with a company and maybe things aren't going well for whatever reason. And I say, okay, well let's talk about what have you done to develop the skill sets for these people. And a lot of times that looks like, I mean we do onboarding when they got hired, you know, and that could have been 15 years ago. So in business leadership, people, when they feel an investment in themselves personally, like with every executive retreat I do, I like to say we need to do something where they feel there's a development and educational purpose, that they walk away going, I'm just a better person because I got to learn this. When there's that investment, people thrive on it. So, you know, financially, training costs money, right? And it's, we all know this, it's the first thing cut. A lot of times places will go for the last five years we've planned on doing some development, but our, you know, our GOP was down and we couldn't do it. So I think really dedicated energy and focus on people's development is probably the number one thing that'll lead to great success for business leadership. Corey, that's why we can talk for hours and hours. That's true. Yeah, when all your stories, Rusty, the stories in the book about how did you get your players to perform? There was always an investment in them. A lot of times from what you've told me, it was your time. That's the greatest thing in it. You can give anybody time. Totally. Corey, we're gonna take a quick break and then when we come back, we're gonna continue going beyond leadership. Excellent. You are watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii with my special guest, Corey Campbell. We will be back in a quick 60 seconds. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We wanna teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters, Aloha. Welcome back to Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My special guest today is the one and only Corey Campbell who is the CEO and founder of Akamai Training and Consulting. And today we are going beyond leadership. Corey, After School All-Stars is a fantastic organization led by Kimmy Takazawa. I know you're a big part of it and I was a guest speaker there as well, but tell me briefly about After School All-Stars. I was really lucky. Greg Dickens got me onto that board about four years ago. The organization itself is a national, actually sponsored by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nice. And it helps put children that are at risk for doing things after school and it puts them in sports and study hall. And I love it because it kinda connects my past with sports. It connects my past going up to New Jersey and living in some rough areas and basically giving kids an avenue to do something productive and positive in their life. And for me, I mean, I told you before, I really like to help people and there's nothing more satisfying than just being with children and helping them shape their vision of life before maybe life puts some tough stuff in and then starts to send it on a downward track, just keep it going upward. Sure. No, I love all of that too. I love that. Working with kids and the coaches, the leaders that influence the kids. Right, yeah, because it's immense. People remember their coaches for their entire life. For sure. Now, Cory. Yeah, if yours do. Yeah. Cory, let's talk about the book Beyond the Lines. You wrote an endorsement on the back cover and I'm glad everyone gets to see your face now. They can put the name to what you wrote on the back cover and you were involved in the process of me really putting the book out. Tell me what you like about the book. I mean, Rusty, first of all, it was so cool to be brought in early when you were still in writing phase and just brainstorm with you about it. And I remember when we would talk about things, everything you said, I was like jumping out of my seat. I'm like, Rusty, this is what I talk about every single day in leadership training. I think the way that you put it together is so incredibly well organized. I mean, I was almost like, thank you, Rusty. You wrote the blueprint for the leadership training that I've been trying to build and develop. And I mean, I brought it here because I carry this with me every single place I go and when I need a new thought or a new idea or I just wanna trigger something inside my brain, I look into this book and the messages are clear, they're simple, they're precise, and they're impactful. Every single thing and every single title, I was like, is he reading my brain and my reading his? I don't know what's happening here, but I love this book. Well, I feel so honored and grateful that you love it and you wanna use it as a tool in your upcoming trainings but you're almost finished putting together a workbook that relates to it. Can you tell our viewers about that? Yeah, so I'm super excited. March is my target rollout date to roll out the Akamai Training and Consulting leadership series and we are gonna be using Beyond the Lines as one of the core curriculum for the book because it follows every single thing that I think leaders need to be successful and it's done in such a way that, so basically I'm taking the lessons that are in there combined with my experiences from years and we're building a workbook that will allow people to expand on the topics in there to really start to develop what is my culture. The one thing I ask leaders never to do is just adopt the culture of their leader because sometimes it's not the right culture and sometimes they may be in a toxic culture and in fact I hear this all the time. They go, I love what we talked about today but I'm incapable of implementing it because of my leader and my feeling is this, that may be tough but you always have the power to set the tone to your direct team and ultimately that has the power to move into the entire organization so this book is going to help them and the series itself will help them uncover and perhaps discover who they are and what their leadership culture is going to be. No, when I was writing it, my whole goal was to make sure that it was simple, relatable where people who read the book feel like, you know what, I can do it right here, right now today and have that impact, a positive impact to inspire them. Yeah, absolutely, we talked about this numerous times. I said, I think one of the most successful parts of the book is that I can pick it up, read a chapter, put it down and walk away going, I learned something really, really great and I don't feel like I have to continue reading in that moment and I don't even have to necessarily reference back to the last chapter. I can pick it up as I do. I pick it up some days and I just go, let me just read one paragraph and I get something for that day that impacts me so it's very, very easily understandable and easily digestible which is what I think in today's world, we have so much data everywhere. I mean, I watch things on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram and it's like how do I incorporate this into who I am? Your book's given a great model for that. All right, I like hearing all that Corey, I'm glad it has that impact. Now, everybody wants to be successful but everyone has different definitions of success. How do you define success? Ooh, that's a big question. The first thing I would say is success can easily become ego which means the things that I want to feel good about myself I then put on to success and I think that's a fallacy in life. Like I think success ultimately is measured by the people around us. So I'm a big believer in like the kind of 360 degree kind of feedback to say I'm only successful if those around me, friends, relationships, family, if they think I'm successful so let's find out what it is they feel about me and how, no matter what role I am, as a friend, as a, hopefully one day as a father, as a boss, success should be looked at through the eyes of the people around you. That's what I really believe. I like that, I like hearing that Corey and you're so awesome as a performance coach. I mean, one of the most popular, one of the best in the state. I know that for sure because I know what you do and I wanna know why are you successful? Well, I tell everyone I know Rusty Komori. That's a great question. I think I would sort of tie the same strategy to it. I don't ever base my success on how I feel I've done. I base my success on the feedback that I get afterwards and go has this helped you? Has this impacted you in any type of way? And if it hasn't, I'm doing a good job. And if it hasn't, that's okay. If it hasn't, okay, I failed. I'm totally fine saying I've failed in this and I'm gonna reorient. I mean, to me, failure is the greatest direction we receive in life. As long as you've heard this concept fail forward, we don't let it knock us down, we let it move us forward. And so I try as much as possible to constantly listen and I think it's what leads me to my success. And then the other portion of that is I'm just deeply passionate about what I do. I'm extremely lucky that I uncovered what I feel is my purpose in this world, which is to dedicate all my energy to helping other people succeed in their lives. And by doing that, I feel great. I'll give you a quick example. I teach people this Miracle Morning Concert that was written by a guy named Hal Alrod. And I have this whole idea about changing the way you view your day by grabbing the door handle. And I've been making a competition, not a competition, but a game and said if anybody for 40 straight days implements this way to enhance your productivity in the morning, I'll take you out for ice cream. You gotta do it 40 straight days, right? Cause research shows that creates a habit. And I always tell people, if we get to go to ice cream, I will get more from it than you will cause I wanna hear how it's impacted your life. And that energizes me, that inspires me. Corey, what's an important lesson that you've learned in your life? There are many. You know, Rusty, I'm gonna give you an example that I use a lot in training. And it comes from a quote, it was a quote by Abraham Lincoln. He said, apparently, I don't like that man very much. I should get to know him better. And I saw that at first and I was like, what does that mean? I don't wanna understand that. And here's what I've come to realize. This world, we judge people rapidly. I went from an all white high school to an all black high school. And I saw how quickly people judge based on the color of skin. And when I was at Sheridan Waikiki, I was working with a guy at one stage. We generally were there about 10 to 12 hours for a shift. And this guy was out in eight hours. And I remember I got really upset. And I, cause I had to work longer. I was usually there 12 to 14 hours to pick up the extra work. And I stopped talking to this person. And I remember judging them and thinking they're lazy. And I went through a training at Starwood Hotels in 2007. It was an emotional intelligence training. And they said, there's another story here. Find out the bigger story. We only see a very microscopic view of everything. And I thought, okay, what can I ask this guy that will get the story? Cause I wanted to say, why are you so lazy? And it took me a while to come up with a question. And I went up to him and I said, hey, I noticed you tend to bounce out of here at eight hours every day. How come? And I'll never forget what he told me. He said, my mother has cancer and I go home and I help her. I cook for her. I help her bathe. I take care of her. And he said, honestly, man, I don't really care about this job that much right now. I care about my mother. And I'm sorry if this impacts you, but I don't really care. And I still get chicken skin every time I tell this story because I could have gone my whole life disliking this person, hating this person perhaps, thinking they were lazy. And it took me one question to get the other side of the story. And to this day, I often think maybe that he's a greater human being than I am. Would I be willing to give up my entire life, social life to take care of my parents? And I hope that I would. But he was doing it and it took one question. And I often wonder all the time in life when we see these people just being judged for whatever reason. It's not to say I was happy that he was out at eight hours, right? That's not the lesson here. The lesson is there's a reason every human does everything that they do. It may be just be that they had a tortured life and now they're struggling to compensate in some way. We can always develop empathy through that question. That's what I learned from that experience is never to just assume I know what's happening and to dig deeper. And misunderstandings and misperceptions, they cause so many problems in the world. And Corey, you have been inspiring tons of people. Before we wrap, I want to know who inspires you. You know, the easy answer, my parents and my brother, they inspire me every single day. But that's the easy answer. Well, I'll go a little deeper. Rusty, you inspire me. The way that we've had so many moments to talk about how you coach for 22 straight seasons and made championships. And the way that you constantly thought about your team and interacted differently with each team member, I think about that all the time. And the last one I have to mention him because he continues to inspire me this day. My first boss in the hotel is Kelly Sanders. He has limitless energy and passion. But what he does the best of any human being I've ever met is he genuinely cares about his people and he genuinely supports you. If you make a mistake, he's the one coming in there going, OK, what are we doing next? How do you build from this? And he inspires me in how he lives his life and treats the people around him. Well, I like that. And Corey, you inspire me too because you're so positive. And I love your insights that you shared about leadership and everything else on the show today. I really want to thank you for your time. Thank you for letting me be here. This was awesome. This was over a year we were talking about this book and over a year. So it's neat to be on here and talk a little bit about it. Awesome. Thank you, Corey. Absolutely. Anytime. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. And a special thank you to my clothing sponsor, Eolani Incorporated. For more information about my book and TV show, please visit my website, RustyKamori.com. And my book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all Costco stores in Hawaii. I hope that this show inspires you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.