 Hey welcome to part two of my show with Greg McKeon. We are continuing our conversation about his book Effortless. Particularly on this episode we are going to be focusing on how to scale the idea of effortless, how to make business more effortless, how to bring the idea of effortlessness into a more of a corporate world, a corporate experience. Again, a great conversation, a great guy. Thanks for being here. Enjoy. I think that humans primary need, you know, like that it is to be seen and to be heard. Right. And so if people aren't then that tends to come out in uglier ways because it's not just a want. And for reasons that aren't entirely obvious to me and I've spent years and years thinking about it, it's not just shallow thinking to it, but like why it is that it's such a life-changing, healing, powerful thing to be heard. Right. You know, to be seen. In some ways that's still an oddity to me. I mean, I just was reading Carl Rogers book. I mean, he's sort of the father of active listening and he wasn't teaching just the skill of active listening. What he was observing was as a psychotherapist at a time when, you know, Freudian psychotherapy was the norm. He says, because he wasn't trusting that just the theories and concepts he was being taught, he was trusting his own experience with patients in front of him. What do you mean? It was itself powerful and transformational and better than anything that had come before it. But nevertheless, it was quite a quite an aggressive form of taught therapy. And he came along and he's like, what I found is that if I really deeply listened, if I could really let in a very sincere way, be myself, be present, and they could get to talk without fear of being judged and interrupted and so on, that it would naturally spontaneously bring forward something whole and better and stronger and their potential would just come forward and they would start to want to take better action. All of that's just fascinating to me. Like why that is the case? Why is talking openly such an unwinding of all of that, that the knots inside of us that they should naturally find themselves more free to change and to improve and to grow is fascinating. And so if you take that positive perspective and then you say, okay, well, what's happened to people's ability to be heard over the last you know, even the last like year and a half, like just a pandemic period, non-scientific poll that I just did on LinkedIn, but maybe had two or three thousand responses. But I said, do you, how do you feel now? Are you more than before the pandemic? Same or less? And we have probably maybe 43% said less. Okay, so that's the 43%. Let's take that as, you know, that as being about the truth for everybody. There's a big problem, right? Like if you haven't, so and it's not surprising to us, right? People are more isolated now and they, you know, they do feel more separate. And that does have a cost because all those benefits that Rodgers is identifying in psychotherapy, suddenly not being met when the needs aren't being met. Then when you get together with other people, when you are interacting, you want to be heard more than before, because the needs not being met. And so now you can't meet each other's needs in the conversation. You're trying to just be heard first. And so I do think it puts us, I do think it puts us as quite a major inflection point in society because people are trying to be heard in social media. It's not, you don't really get that it's scratched, but you become more and more bombastic in your statements and people become more and more polarized. And so there's tremendous opportunity in this moment that we're in. But it means, among other things, it means that somebody like Trump and it doesn't have to be Trump, but the next Trump, that if they are good at voicing what people are feeling, sort of a sort of societal restate. And I think he was exceptionally talented at that. I mean, the idea that he was just stupid or something, I think is so unacceptably blind. And of course he was good at doing that. I mean, you don't get thousands of thousands and tens of thousands of people coming and massively supporting what you're saying. If you can't, it's not because of you being persuasive. That's the wrong way to think of it. It's that you is that a leader that can do that is able to say what people already are feeling and are frustrated by. And it's that collective restate that leaders can do. Now the, yeah, I mean, I'm riffing all over, but the point is, is that you've got this, you've got this need that must be met. If you don't meet needs, they come out later in uglier ways. They can be taken advantage of, they can destroy politicians, they can make others rise to the top is your ability to sense that, to hear it, to understand it. And when you don't do it, you're going to have more revolutionary type experiences. Add to that, you know, recently, these whistleblowers that have come forward from Google or Facebook, that are now speaking, you know, the Netflix social dilemma documentary, you know, that we are now all feel within this attention economy and it's their job to make sure we keep scrolling. And if we're not on our devices, they ain't making money. It's as simple as that. And the negativity travels better. And we are more engaged with it for longer than positivity. All of these things that I worry about for my grandchildren growing up, I have eight grandkids growing up in a very different world to me at 64. And certainly to you too. I mean, I grew up in Yorkshire in a in a real community. I mean, we were the, we were the borough of a cup of sugar from the neighbor. That's how we lived. And it wasn't, it wasn't a government food bank. We were each other's food bank. And every single parent could discipline each other's children. I got clipped around the ear so many times by other mothers. And my mother would thank them for doing it. They're all being jailed now. But that was how we were raised. You know, it takes a village kind of thing. So I felt as I got older, my dad would mainly stand on the bus for women when I was a kid. Me and my three brothers, any woman, not just elderly or a pregnant woman, he would make us carry the shopping bags home from the bus terminus for these women. He would send us out to shovel snow for the elderly and the disabled in winter. So I carried that into my adulthood. And I remember being on a plane a while back, helping a woman put her bag in the overhead locker. And she looked at me and said, do you think I can't do that myself? And I thought, wow, chivalry is dead. That simple, that simple attempt to, to walk in that value in that encounter on that plane became complex and awkward and uncomfortable and potentially confrontational with her attitude. And I thought, wow, what happened to all of that stuff that just makes life, it brings the oil of our relationships and smooths things out. But a simple gesture of kindness was misinterpreted and seemed to be a statement about how weak she perhaps was and so on. I want to look at my grandkids coming up in that one. And I've got eight grandkids, as I said, at least two of them, Greg, are weird. What I mean by weird is they don't fit the mold. And one of them in the, she's 10. The education system is already trying to fix her. And she's not broken. So she feels she's a naughty child or there's something badly wrong with her. And she's probably on the spectrum, as they say now. And I worry for her because this one-size-fits-all industrial approach to our kids is killing our kids, as you know, I mentioned earlier. So the effortless idea, yeah, I'm an evangelist for it, since I read the book, and lots of my friends that are reading it now that are loving it, that concept. And I can see it can work between you and I, but it can work at scale too, is what I'm talking about with these guys. Why can't it work at government level and at corporate level? I know it all happens, individuals, and it's the person you need to deal with on the phone today, I get that. So I think it's a book and it's time, I really do. Well, I love what you're saying. And I think part of the key is, I mean, again, so many places we could go with that. But I think about this, that you use the term oil, and that's a metaphor I use in the book for trust, that if you want a high-performing team, you've got to build, it's like the oil in an engine of a car. If the oil goes down for a bit, nothing happens, it's okay. The oil, the trust level can go down for a bit and the engine works fine, but if the oil ever gets too low, that thing will start, every part of the machine, the friction will increase, the heating will increase. In fact, it can completely stop working at some point. And all for once of just keeping up, topping up the oil. And so I do think that when you, I mean, I do think that everyone's experienced this. If you're in a relationship with anyone, where the trust gets low enough, everything is hard. Every, just sending a text might take you 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, ask lots of people's opinion, well, how do I say, and was that the right word? And what does that mean? And that's just one little text, it's so hard, it's so expensive. And then, and then as soon as they get it back to us, you know, it hits us hard and we have to, well, what does that mean? And, and it's like, you know, that's the expensive way to do it. Yes. Contrast that, when you're talking about a scale, but contrast that with Warren Buffett, when he, Berkshire Hathaway buys McLean Industries, right? This is a $23 billion business, but even for Berkshire Hathaway, it's still a major business acquisition. And they're buying it from Walmart. And, you know, what would the, under typical circumstances, you might spend six months or more, millions of dollars with just your attorneys and going through doing your due diligence just to make sure that everything is what it's supposed to be, which is what makes it so striking how he operated with that. He had, you know, this was, he said it was a two hour meeting and a handshake. And he said, we knew that, that, that Walmart would have everything as they said they would and they did. And so there was no need for all of that six months and all of that due diligence you'd normally do. It was a handshake. That's, that's effortless. What else can you call it when you contrast six months or millions of dollars to a handshake in two hours? And so, of course, you have to invest in a variety of ways to get to the point where trust is that high. But it's such a bargain. It's such a high, you know, not just ROI, but ROI, right? Return on effort. It's such a high return on effort because as you, as you build the trust, then it works for you again and again and again and again. And you're able to then make decisions so much faster together. And if you're in a high trust relationship, I mean, everything's easy. Yeah, everything. And, and, and that's true for, you know, it's true for one-on-one relationships. It's true with me and my wife. If our trust gets low, everything starts to be hard. If it's high, everything's easy. But I think these are scalable to your, to your general premise. I think it's scalable across society. And, and of course, if the trust gets low enough, I mean, that's when you start having these, these massive discombobulating experiences. I mean, that's what civil war ultimately is. Right. And three years ago, any talk of civil war would have just seemed ridiculous in the United States. Would have just been hyperbole and whatever. But you go through to some of the, the worst moments over the last two or three years and you go, actually now some of the most respected institutes at least are addressing that question. Right. Right. And you go, yeah, even now you, you want to believe it's unrealistic. And I still hope that it is and think that it is. But it's like, if you don't build trust, eventually you sign up for the absence of trust and all these things that functionally work will stop working. And you can't take it for granted unless you keep putting in that, that, that high trust oil. I remember being in Texas a while back doing one of my communication masterclasses and talking about team building. And this CEO in the room asked me about the problem he was having with his kind of core leaders of loyalty. And he asked me, how do you build loyalty in a team? And I said to him, you build loyalty by asking someone, how's your mum? And I think he was so, and then he waited for the real answer as if I was been telling a joke, you know? And I said, no, I'm serious. If you, I was coming back to what you said about seeing people. If you show an interest in the person as a human, and she did tell you about her mum two weeks ago, and that you remembered it two weeks later and asked, how's your mum? And you remembered the mum's name. You won't have a problem with loyalty if that's the culture. And he was seemed so disappointed that it wasn't a more organisational answer, more a more sexy answer than it's that that we're talking about here. It's that world that I want to live in. It's that culture that I want to create in everything I do. How's your mum, trust Bill, done? End of, you know? Yeah, I love the how's your mum question as an answer to that and the tangibility of it. I think about, I think about like, you know, back to back to our airplane discussions over Southwest. I mean, Herb Keller, the founder of Southwest, was, had built the how's your mum into institutional capability, right? Where they would know, absolutely, they would know, you know, how's your mum? And they would know, and if you partner or someone was dying from something, there would be specific things done for you. And there was, there was a real precision around that and institutional precision around it. And this is why, so then when he says, look, what our business is and we're like, we like love our employees and we love our employees. And so then they're able to go and love the customers and look after them and not, you know, not do stupid things. And, you know, I've flown Southwest enough to know, you know, you're not going to get every person getting that exactly right. But, but I have very rarely seen someone in Southwest do something that just made no sense at the point of interaction. You know, I've seen, I've seen, I've seen over, I just don't, I haven't seen a lot of power hungry moves or controlling kinds of things done. And I think that's a continuation of that, that culture that's been birthed. But then it's not just the Southwest, it's like, in some of the other world class cultures, right? Like, over at Apple, one of my pet peeves about the media's treatment, treatment, the media's way of communicating about Steve Jobs was lazy. And you know, whenever you read the media and you read about something you happen to know about, right? And you know the person they're talking about, you were there or you're part of that thing. And you go, my goodness, that is just like, so not what happened, you know, from a point of view, that's not accurate. And then you suddenly have this awful feeling of, oh my goodness, maybe everything in the media is that much off. And I just don't always know, because it's not an issue I personally am aware of, right? You know, like, so you've got that sort of problem that happened, I believe with Steve Jobs. Now, there's plenty of evidence, right, with the people who know him best that, yeah, I mean, he he there's plenty of things he did that weren't perfect. But he was so different than the media image of him. Among other things, it was very out of date that they had the version of him that got fired 10 years before he returned to Apple. Well, you have to probably be operating a certain way to get fired, right, from your own companies. So probably there were some things there. But to get rehired, and then to bring around this great transformation, but you think the same person did the first and the second, or do you think he evolved this 10 years? It's a decade. In that decade, he got married, he had a family, he'd been a Pixar, he'd learned a thing or two about the how's your mom. And even before this, and he could definitely, you know, be make some un, un, inhumane choices before that period. But he still wasn't even then as bad as the media image. Because that's how you're able to build the company and have people be loyal. He just he just hadn't got enough control over some of those forces within him. Some of the, but by the time he comes back, I mean, I know stories of people that that he, you know, went and bought himself a laptop and went and handed it to someone because he knew that they didn't have the money to get one and so on or for their teenager. And like, there's all sorts of stories like that behind the scenes. They didn't make it into the headline of Steve Jobs yelling at everyone kind of story. And the people that know him best, in fact, most people that know him best at Apple don't, don't particularly care for Isaacson's biography. And I enjoyed Isaacson's biography myself. But they, a lot of them that know him best don't care for it. And they weren't especially involved in it. Because they thought it reinforced a certain version of him. And they were sensitive to that. Because there's another biography about him that's less well known, it's called Becoming Steve Jobs, which I think captures much better. And they do too, that, you know, the Johnny Ives and Tim Cooks of the world that they prefer this other book, because it tells the evolution. And so, and so I think there's, there's, you know, there's, there's something in that to, to remember that, to sort of to recognize that like to be an essentialist, like to say it that way, to become an essentialist, you have to marry the focus and the elimination of non-essentials with a humanness, with it, with it, in order to create the kind of culture that can do great work. That's what they always say to me about Steve, they say that you really think we'd have done the very best work of our whole lives for someone who's just a jerk. Is that what you think? Is that what you think how it works, that human dynamics work like that, that you go above and beyond for someone who's just being mean? No one does that. And to do it when you could easily go and leave and be a CEO of almost any other major company, and you stick around for it and do it for years and love your work and so on. It's like, no, this, this media image doesn't, just doesn't do. And it's that kind of, you know, when you get behind it, you start to go, oh, this person, you know, Steve, he loved making it, the product simpler, not for the sake of it, but for some, someone, some customer somewhere, some person who was scared of technology would pick up that tool and just be able to do it, enjoy it and be empowered by it. And I mean, basically in a sense, Steve was like, maybe I can't say single-handedly, but it's sort of like he eliminated the need for user manuals in technology. It's a non-trivial achievement. You know, no one has a, you know, it gets a 50-page manual to use, to use an iPad. It exists. You can download it and use it, but it doesn't, he was interested in removing all this to make it effortless. Right. In fact, I remember sharing the title of effortless, the book effortless with a friend of mine at Apple, and his response was, made me laugh. His first response was like, well, I mean, I, he said, I really like it. He says, but it feels like maybe it's an oversell. And so immediately sent back to him several advertisements by Apple where literally the word was effortless on the advertisement was just, you know, like the AirPods where they came out, AirPods, effortless, you know, and I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm not the only one that in that, in that space. And he's like, yeah, to shave fair and fair enough, fair enough. And he's fascinating because one of the things that I've been very interested in over the years as a communicator is that to me, the best communicators in the world are the ones that have a very clear, consistent why. And when I began to research, as you have done too, I know from reading your book, into Apple and Amazon and Netflix and Uber and Airbnb, is what you become aware of and why they've had such a meteoric rise in a short space of time is that the, then the why is not the product they're delivering, but a problem that they are solving. And so Apple are not selling devices, they are selling simplicity. And Starbucks aren't selling coffee, they're selling, I think their branding was a third place between home and work. So they're selling a space and free wifi and a social experience while you work. And Uber aren't selling cab rise, they're selling empowerment to us because we fed up with the taxi companies having the control and Airbnb aren't selling accommodation and so on and so on. It's the genius of it. Yes. And I think you mentioned in the book and I was fascinated and I'm going to let you go on a minute, but that these are these massive disruptive businesses were started by outsiders, right? People. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, the Airbnb situation, I've done work with Airbnb and with Brian, one of the co-founders and there's lots that we could riff on with that if we had more time. But they originally, their vision for the company originally was a cereal company like breakfast cereal. But that's where they, that's what they were pitching to investors. And I know an investor that turned them down and I was like, oh, did you feel better about turning them down? And she's like, no, it's time it was cereal. It wasn't Airbnb and they create Airbnb, that's literally an air mattress inside of their apartment. And he said, Brian told me, we, the most, the most focused we've ever been was the first 90 days of the company where we call ourselves, as we said, our goal was to be ramen profitable. That is, if we ate ramen noodles three times a day, all three of us together, we could demonstrate we were technically profitable with our idea by the investor conference at the end of that 90 day period. And they could and they did it. And, and, you know, it grew up from there into something that at the time, of course, is just mad. That was such a, even now when you think back, it's like such a weird sounding idea. I'm going to rent out some bed over there in my, you know, rent out my couch. And yet, it's grown into this absolute phenomenon. And, and one of the Chip Connelly, who was one of the early executives in the company, I just interviewed him on the What's Essential podcast. And I loved it. I don't think we've released the episode yet. But, but I love talking to him about the insider inside the baseball of the growth of that company. Yeah, listen, it's not gone out yet. Yeah, I don't think it's gone out. Yeah, I think it's, I think, I don't know why it hasn't actually to be honest, but it'll be scheduled the next few weeks. But, but he, he talked about where he was brought in because he's got all this experience in the hotel industry. And so he comes in as like sort of the, the, the, the wise man of the team. And one of the exercises he takes them to you just love this is he divided everyone in the executive team into, into a pair. So he was with Brian and then everyone else was in twos. And what they had to do is they had to write down in two words. You're like, what business are we in? In two words, right? Okay, so you write down your two words. Then you have to do it again, without sharing it with anyone, you just write it on your next two words. And those two words can't match the first two words. And then again, and then again, you do it five times and no words can repeat themselves. You share it with each other. You talk through and you can select from each other's list one, each that you like the most. And then they brought it back as a team. And this is how they, how they got to, to their belonging theme, you know, that that was their focus was, was what we're really in the business of. It isn't, you know, isn't selling space or an air mattress or a room. It's to help people to belong, anywhere, belong, belong anywhere. I think that's the term belong anywhere. And that's been very powerful centering focus for that company. And I think it's brilliant that they have it. It's a sort of infinite why I just had Simon Sinek on the show too. And he was talking about this, the distinction between having a goal that is temporary and this sort of the infinite why the thing that you're doing, you're always doing whatever other version of your world that you're, you know, whatever product or service you have, you're still doing the same core, you know, the same core vision of why. And, and that's helped with, with, with Airbnb, it helped them. I mean, you remember the pandemic is like bad for all sorts of industries, but it can't have been worse for any industry than the hotel and industry. And so that hit Marriott. I saw the Marriott CEO talk about it. He said, in 9-11, we, you know, the great recession, we lost maybe 15% of our bookings. We have areas that 90% in the pandemic suddenly 90% is lost. I mean, how do you even survive? Airbnb was the same. How they were about to do it IPO. They're going to be the biggest IPO of the year. And suddenly this all happens. They almost go bankrupt. He has to get, you know, one $2 billion of emergency funding to be able to make sure that they can survive this and live it out and go with thousands of employees. It is very intense, challenging period. But because they responded in a certain way, because they knew what they needed to try to create, they ended up running that IPO much, much bigger than it had been at their peak. And, and this was over them one year. It was a really phenomenal inside story. I'm not giving all the details. The old story of, you know, Henry Ford with the Model T Ford, if I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse. And I think and I think so many organizations politically, corporately, church wise, religious, they are, they are, it's their own version of trying to find a faster horse. And so I feel that we need these disruptors in all these walks of life to come with this zero gravity thinking about what could happen here. That is the effortless thing you're speaking about. Somebody effortlessly sees the problem because they don't have the baggage of not being able to see it because of closeness, familiarity, bombarded with systems and compliance. It's that, you know, the emperor's new clothes, you know, the kings and they all together. It's those people that we need in charge. Yes, I think there's some truth to that. What a pleasure it's been to be with you, Paul. Thank you so much for having me on here and making this. I could talk to you for longer and longer. This is very interesting. If we'd have been in a coffee shop, we'd have been ordering lunch now. That's right. That's what it is. We'd have been able to carry on. It's a nice feeling. You've still been on Yorkshire in the shire, me and you. That's what it is. That is what it is. It's common, it's common heritage and common vision. It's a combination here. Hey, listen, how can people find you, Greg? Oh, I think if people wanted to be involved in this conversation, I would just go to GregMcEwen.com and sign up for the One Minute Wednesday newsletter. Great. I think that's the simplest thing. It's free. It's every weekend. And there's lots of other assets and free assets that come with that, like the podcasts in Europe. You've become part of that community too. So that's what I'd say. That's great. Well, listen, I wish you all the best ongoing with the book and other things that you write. Thanks for writing. I loved it. My friends are loving it. Thanks for doing it. It's a labour of love sometimes, I know, but it's really helping people. Very kind of you. Thank you, Paul. Thanks, my friend. Well, I hope you enjoyed part two of my conversation with Greg McEwen. If you didn't get part one, then you can go and have a listen to that right now. I hope this has inspired you to get a hold of his book, Effortless. And again, thanks for being here and can encourage you. I know I do this every time, but it really helps the ratings of the podcasts. If you would leave a review about your experience here with me on my podcast platform. And if you don't subscribe, hit subscribe. Help me get the word out, share this podcast with others who you feel it may add value to. Cheers. Appreciate you all and I'll see you and speak with you all again on the next podcast. Thanks.