 Aloha, welcome to Figments, The Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Leif, I go by Fig, thus the name. And I'm glad you're joining us today because I've got a really special guest. And I think you'll find a very intriguing conversation for you. Remember, if you're watching this and have the opportunity to click like, please do. Even if you don't like it, not for the algorithms that drive YouTube and other media, but it makes me feel better. That's a good thing, right? So my goal on Figments, The Power of Imagination is to entertain and inspire. I think this episode will inspire you to maybe think a little more deeply about leadership, not necessarily from a personal sense, but from an organizational sense. And my guest today is an amazing leader who I have known since birth. My daughter, Yateng, Ola, Yateng. Ola and Aloha. Yeah, how are things in Virginia? They're getting chilly. I'm jealous of your weather, as always. Yeah, it's a little toasty, but we'll tolerate that here in Hawaii. I should point out that Yateng is in a leadership role at Google and what she's going to say today does not reflect any official Google policy or anything else like that. So she's appearing as my daughter and one of the best leaders I've ever known. And I've known that you are a leader almost since birth. And that's not much of an overstatement. Once you came home from the hospital, we finally had a mature person in the room and got a few pictures of our life together. I think I skipped over our title slide, but that's okay, you don't need that. So the one on the left, you're already giving me guidance. And then in the middle, I commissioned you as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force at UC Berkeley. And that was noteworthy because I stumbled on your commissioning. Oh, do you remember that? I do, because when I pulled that photo, there was a caption from my friend that said, her dad said he was more nervous than she was. Well, I was more nervous than you were, but as I stumbled in one part of it, instead of repeating the misordered and I don't remember what I got wrong, you corrected me quietly and I got it right and you gave the oath correctly. And that was leadership. And then the third picture was you and I at the end of the Honolulu marathon. And to lead your old man to participate in a marathon, we'll call it running. That's extraordinary leadership. I mean, I don't know how you did that, but I think you've always been a leader. Have you always felt like a leader? No, I suppose I took some cues from you. I'll give you some credit there. Who? But I've always enjoyed observing other people. And I suppose that in those observations, that's led me to look at how other people are influencing to drive an agenda forward or to make something happen. And I would say the Honolulu marathon was my psychological operations with you at its finest. Absolutely, yeah. And I wish we had time for the entire story, but it worked and I'm glad I did it once. I'm good, thanks, Dunn. I remember a couple other times where I saw your leadership and seriously, I often tell people you're the best leader I know. Don't let that go to your head out too late. The one when you were 10 or 11 and we shared this story on the phone the other day, you were in gymnastics in Korea and the coach did something that was just a bad way of leading young girls who were learning gymnastics. And you left the team and you didn't leave in a pouch or anything like that, but my sense as your old man was that, you didn't meet your standard, so you're out and you were out. You don't remember that though, do you? I don't, but it's interesting that you brought that to the forefront because when you asked me to do this segment with you, I was thinking about my own leadership journey and I think that my real interest in leadership actually started around that time and I didn't associate it with this gymnastics incident. I actually associated it more with picking up, I think it was 250 North Korean propaganda pamphlets around Busan and I was captivated by the fact that North Korea was pushing out these paper cartoons and trying to push a particular agenda. And it was at that point that you started showing me and teaching me a bit more about Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and how they shaped an entire nation. And it seemed wild to me that one family could do that. So that's when your dream of being a dictator was born. Absolutely not, but it gave me pause. It gave you pause, it made you reflect. It did, it was very powerful. I saw you lead with your friends quietly, you weren't a big rah rah leader and within the family through good times and not so good times. And then you went to the University of California, Berkeley, Go Bears and joined ROTC. That's another story that we won't share. And became the top cadets, the cadet wing commander. And that was probably your first formal designation as a leader. Definitely, yes. And I would say on my UC Berkeley time, that was my unrebellious rebellion against your efforts to send me to the Air Force Academy. But it was an interesting economy and laboratory to learn leadership. And an environment that had such a reputation for being anti-establishment. And I would say I have probably a very similar experience in ROTC at the University of Wisconsin. Similar environments, but you can't just lead by dictate or eat it, whatever the correct best word is. So, but this really isn't about being your leader, being a leader and how you lead and how you help others lead in a sort of a sense of leadership skills and principles. When we talked, I became more aware of your work because when we're together, we're doing family stuff, especially with your two beautiful kiddos. It's about the fact that you're really now, Google and word Deloitte, a leadership enabler working in the organizational environment that allows people to be the best leader they can. Did I describe that right? I think that's a pretty accurate description. I would say even broader and in addition to that, it's about helping organizations get their people to execute and elevate their strategy, whatever that strategy may be. Did this come to you in a dream, this part, this organizational structure, is it part of your Air Force experience or maybe while you were studying at UCLA Anderson School of Business? But how did this happen? How do you wind up doing this? It goes back to 2011, there I was in the, I mean the very air conditioned chaos of value deed. I was in a role where I was supporting the transition of assets from Iraq to Afghanistan. And in addition to that, I was watching and supporting a lot of quick reaction capability go into Afghanistan. And I saw some really cool technology being rolled out into the battle space. I felt like I had a decent understanding of the strategy. But where I saw a gap was in bringing people along on that journey, both on the ground and at different layers of leadership. Because even though the technology was really cool, people were grappling with, how do I even use this fancy new thing you just threw at me? And it was there that I realized you can have the best strategy, you can have the best technology, but if people aren't along for the journey and they don't know how to use the things or make the technology work for the strategy, then you're not going to accomplish your goals. You've wasted a lot of money, time, et cetera, et cetera. And even worse, you probably let down your mission. And shortly after that deployment, I was dragged, if you will, to do a tour of Zappos, which is headquartered in Las Vegas by my friend who is visiting me and getting her MBA. And at Zappos, they had a few people. The shoe people, they had a very intentional culture where it was all about delivering happiness to the customer through their people. And they created systems that were so intentional that were aligned to this objective, like everybody, no matter what level you're at, sits in the call center for the first 30 days and interacts with customers. And that is how you learn the organization. Then at the end of that onboarding, you get paid a few thousand dollars to leave, so that if you don't want to be there, if you don't want to work in that type of environment, you get to opt out early on. And they designed a series of other reinforcing mechanisms to tell their story, to create this culture. And it was compelling to me because it anchored in the concept of happiness for employees and customers. And that's not something that I had been conditioned to anchor to as an objective. You're not talking about me and home, I'm sure, but you're talking about work. Yes. Yeah, that's interesting. And when I think back to my time as a commander in the Air Force at the squad, even at the flight level, I tried to create that culture, but it's pretty easy to do that in a military environment where you're the boss, you're the commander, and you can say, this is how we are, this is what we're doing. It isn't as draconian as it sounds, you have to encourage and nudge and all that, but you have a lot of leeway. But now you're trying to do that in business. You did that at Deloitte, you worked at Deloitte for five years, and I know I had a great experience there. Can you describe what you did there and then maybe compare and contrast it to what you're doing to take that enablement to business, please? Sure. So my first few years at Deloitte, I focused on supporting our clients for going through mergers acquisitions and divestitures from the standpoint of how do they guide their people through that major transformation journey so that they buy into the strategy and so that the organization is thinking about how systems need to change with the change in the business structure. So that looks like helping create talking points in the narrative for the leadership team, helping managers to tell a story and then guiding our clients through how do they think about the shape of the new organization in terms of organization design, in terms of performance management, et cetera. What are the things about the legacy organizations to bring forward to the new combined organization versus create net? Yeah, change is hard and that structure of the change is really important. You want to disrupt as little as possible and yet change, I think. Right, and it's important to keep in mind that humans are naturally pre-wired to resist change for good reason and a lot of my leadership philosophy and how I approach guiding clients through these types of changes is fully accepting that and trying to meet them where they are and acknowledge that skepticism that might be inherent with a major transformation or the fear of having to go through these steps that feel very unfamiliar. People don't like doing things in new ways when what has gotten them to the point of success before has just worked. There's a tendency to want to rinse and repeat and hope for the best that it takes to you carries you into the future, but in today's world, it doesn't. And then now at Google, are you doing the same thing, different, slightly different, really different? It's a spin, so one important piece that I missed from my Deloitte times is that I was part of a major Deloitte culture transformation project where we revamped how we incentivized our top 6,000 leaders of the firm. It was a very ambitious program, but it was in the service of shaping a culture of development and courage so that we could continue to be relevant and excellent players in our market and deliver excellent client service. And so that work I would see as the launching pad to my work at Google. So I am on a transformation team within Google Cloud and we are helping guide the organization through shifting the way people think, behave, and the systems are designed so that we can serve enterprise customers more effectively versus prior to our career. I'm gonna interrupt to say that I'm struck by the use of your word courage. That's something that you usually hear in or think about in the business world. I guess you're trying to give people the courage to not just accept the change in a passive sense, but embark on being participants in the change. Being leaders of the change. Leaders of the change. And also having the courage to give each other feedback that is meaningful and not simply superficial. Blah, blah, blah. That you did it. How do you actually help others guide others to perform in ways that are more effective? So one of the, you mentioned a performance assessment in the things you did at Deloitte. But one of my career long frustrations was the limitations of the assessment system, the rating and feedback process. And the fact that so few leaders had the courage to give real meaningful feedback, both directly to the person they were rating and to the system that was going to select whom to promote. Doesn't mean that horrible people were promoted. I think by and large the system was effective, but people do better with honesty, I think. They do and they appreciate it where I think people struggle with honesty is when it feels candid just for the sake of sticking it to them. And I think this is where it's important to coach leaders and I'm getting ahead of one of your questions, what can their force learn from the business world? One of the things that has come from Google that I think is quite powerful is the research around team effectiveness where the number one predictor of an effective team is psychological safety. And so if you don't create this environment where people are comfortable speaking the truth and feeling included and being able to challenge the status quo, then if you come out of left field with something that might be very honest feedback, you might be perceived as a jerk. But if you do that in the context of our norm, our ritual is to give each other feedback on an ongoing basis, people are in a better headspace to accept it. They're able to kind of counterbalance what might be an amygdala hijack of their brain saying warning, warning, I'm about to get something I don't like to, okay, you know what, I'm expecting that we have these types of conversations in this organization. Okay, because this is so intriguing to me, I'm going to quickly give your book recommendations to our viewers, and I'm sure we'll want to write this down. So here are books that Yateng recommends. Yateng, you don't have a chance to talk about them because we're gonna use up all the time talking. And let's go quickly through some of the other principles I asked you for, what are your leadership principles? But briefly, because I want to come back to this conversation on courage and safety. And compared to our lives, you served as a fighter squadron intel officer, and I served in fighter squadrons throughout my career, which is an interesting but safe environment. So regarding your philosophy, what principles are important to you here? Talk about this slide for a minute, if you would. So I will cut to the great leadership points. I put on here that great leadership is guiding people to get something done by enabling other humans to thrive. And this human's thriving piece is particularly important to me personally because it ties to one of the longest Harvard longitudinal studies where they tried to, I understand what predicts health and happiness in human beings and they followed people for 80 years or whatever it was and found that close relationships were the number one factor. So when I think about being a good leader and doing something that's meaningful, you are hopefully creating connections with your team, creating meaningful relationships with your team to contribute to their long-term happiness factor and then doing something, having a mission that enables other humans to thrive. And this is one of the reasons I love working at Google because our mission statement is so clear around helping others get information in ways that are accessible and our leadership constantly talks about being helpful. Helpful is probably the most commonly used term I hear within Google because it's what we aspire to do and how we aspire to treat each other. How do you balance all that with personal ambition because people do have ego and they are ambitious? I would say that that's why the underlying belief to be successful is that if you want to achieve your ambition, it should be through the help and by lifting each other up. So doing it with other people gets you farther than attempting to do it yourself. Yeah, I was being the devil's advocate there because I could relate at a certain time in my career where I became more concerned about the success of folks I led than my own success. Doesn't mean I was unconcerned about being successful maybe getting promoted, maybe getting the next job but the real reward and the real ambition shifted to those who enabled my success and I figured if they were successful, I'd be successful and it sounds silly but it felt better. Hopefully most people find that it feels better if they wear that mindset but I think it ties to one of my other leadership principles that I know you'll pop up here around being clear on what your end goal is. What is your ambition for? Hopefully it's not just for self advancement though that may be the case. We've known people like that. Yes, definitely. I think if you ask those people to peel the layers of their own onion back they could probably find something or they are searching for something that's more compelling just than the sake of playing their own game. Yeah, those who play their own game or are self-serving long thought don't have much courage and now that you've introduced that in the leadership conversation it does take courage to rely on others to enable others and let them bring organizational success and not look to take personal credit for it. So I gotta take a quick break, feel a quick plug. Next week, Monday, 10 a.m. of Hawaii Standard Time. Those of you who suffer under daylight savings time please figure it out. We don't here in Hawaii. I'm gonna talk about China, Taiwan and the U.S. what you should know. I think this is a very important issue in Taiwan and Tang and I both have interest in this for not so but maybe obvious reasons. So that will be my next non-political discussion of current events. Let's get back to leadership. And Tang, I'd like to go back to your three areas. Humble curiosity, I'm curious about that. How does humble curiosity fit into business leadership? Some leaders have the preconception that to be a great leader you have to know everything and you have to be able to show up with all the answers. What I've learned over time and what I've observed from the best leaders I've worked with and observed in the leaders where I've seen pitfalls is this ability to ask great questions so that you can guide people to a better answer. And I like the framing of humble curiosity which is a little bit of a play on Adam Grant's phrase from Think Again of Confident Humility to give humility a little bit of a moment to shine because many people misinterpret humility as being self-deprecating but the origin of the word is more of from the earth like of the earth being able to recognize that you don't actually have all the answers. And if you pair that word humility or humble with curiosity that leads you to go into conversations not assuming that you already have the answer and guiding you to ask for input that you need or for getting people to talk so that you might uncover risks that you might not have seen and get to a better solution. Yeah, a good leader doesn't have to know everything shouldn't because their brain would be full and they'd be confused. They don't have to do everything or be involved in the doing of everything but what a good leader has to do is make some key decisions at the right point and then those decisions are left only to him or her. That's kind of how I oversimplified but there's no, I don't think a leader should feel uncomfortable about not knowing everything but I can't. I was not an engine mechanic when I was no 16 pod I didn't have to beat the engine mechanics who worked in my wing. And then I was curious about what they did learned enough to make good decisions. I think it seemed to work out okay. And agility, I mentioned this in our warmup here and this was from a conversation that Alejandra and I had another key part of my show prep by the way for pigments, the power of imagination is do you see differences in the agility of different demographics? Are old people less agile? I can say that because I'm old or our organizations what do you do in an organization to give this agility to deal with change and to become better? The way I think about our agility doesn't quite lend itself to that level of stereotyping. Well, that might be true in some dimensions of adoption of technology. How I'm thinking about our principle standpoint is having the agility to dance across being a player on the field with your team and being the captain of the team leading while you're on the field and being a coach, being on the sidelines and letting the team shine and letting somebody else serve as a captain. So as a leader, you need to be able to figure out in these moments, when do you need to roll your sleeves up and create slides with your team or are you scrubbing the toilets with your team? When do you need to be the team captain rallying and giving the rah-rah? And when do you need to be the coach? And I don't see a significant enough difference across generations to say that yes, definitively, younger folks are more agile than older folks. I would say in this case, perhaps those with a bit more experience have a little more leadership agility because they understand and they've been around to see and experience the right times to do this. The other aspect of agility that, again, goes beyond technology adoption is knowing when to stay the course and knowing when to pivot. And this I don't think is a generational construct. This is something that perhaps somebody has been coached to or somebody has been an astute enough observer through multiple experiences that they do. And there are of course people who might be young who are intuitively very good at this for one reason or another. Yeah, I found that when I went to Aviano's Wing Commander, you remember that? The team was very slow to adapt a new automated mission planning system not automated but computerized. And once the old man dove in and did it because you know I'm a geek, that inspired a lot of people not to be less technologically savvy than the old man. So that's one of those roll up your sleeves and clean the toilet moments. And clarity isn't clear. We're almost at time. So you got to be clear on clarity really quickly. Clarity is what is your bigger purpose? The mission that you're rallying people to and guiding toward. It's knowing who is on point for what and creating that clarity for your team. So people are duplicating work, wasting time or toiling an oblivion. And it is having the clarity of do I have enough information in this moment to move forward or do I need to get more data? And being confident and taking a step forward because one of the perils I see with leaders especially today when we have more data than ever is the tendency to get into analysis paralysis and the desire to create a picture and over minimize risk. The perfection is still not possible. So I'm gonna go over on time just a couple of minutes probably. I'm giving that heads up to Eric, our erstwhile engineer because I really do want to hear about this part. What can the Air Force learn from business and your observation, whether it's both organizational design, assessment, with Dr. Co. What would you take, give back to the Air Force from your six years on active? I would give back to the Air Force adjusting the way we do performance management and career development. And it's been a while I'll admit since I was in... They change, they tweak it every year it seems. But it incentivizes checklist behavior and a lot of business performance management systems do that. So it's not that the grass is 100% greener. But one of the things I loved about that delayed project I referred to where we are tinkering with performance management overhauling it was that we took a very balanced approach. We said, there's one part that looks at what you deliver this year. And there's one part that looks at your two to three year contributions. And on that two to three year horizon, there was an element, a measurement for agility. And it is very challenging to define what good looks like for agility. But that was part of our work. And I think that shifted mindsets of our leadership to recognize and embrace and take more smart, like more risks that are smart and well measured because they knew it was something that was being looked at for them. And I know the Air Force is doing performance management at scale for hundreds that I don't even know how many people are there are these days but lots of people, hundreds of thousands is what I was going to say, but a lot of people. And so it's challenging to do that level of rigor and customization at the scale that the Air Force has. However, there's gotta be a better way to think about what is good for the future and how do we incentivize people to get in line for that versus do what has made us successful in the past. So let me shout get off my lawn and be a grumpy old man and say I couldn't agree more and I don't care how hard it is. It's most important work you do as a leader that it drives everything. Your performance assessment and feedback that you give is I always thought and said it's the most important work I did. And so spend less time on PowerPoint and more time on people. What could business learn from the military? I hope you're gonna say instant justice. I can say instant justice because. Okay, if you say that, that'll lead to my comment on an earlier comment of yours. The military and the Air Force in my experience had really great rituals and symbols that made it really clear what mattered and who was responsible for what, at what point. And so I like instant justice because it's instant and it's just but it's also a ritual that used appropriately. It creates a bit of psychological safety. And you alluded to this. Exactly. Earlier where in fire squadrons you do have an interestingly and perhaps ironic safe space to give very direct feedback but that culture for my observation experience didn't carry through the other parts of the Air Force. And so it was a microculture which many all organizations have. And it was something that I wish would be scaled and I still am a little nostalgic for instant justice. So I'm going to share with the audience very briefly, instant justice is a feedback methodology usually on Fridays in the heritage room which could look a lot like a squadron bar where any rank, any person gives direct feedback about things good and bad, mostly bad. And there you cannot describe a more direct feedback environment than a fighter squadron because you're flying single seat airplanes and if you screw up everybody's at risk, including you. But it does become a same space because you know what you're graded on. How do you fly? And then there are the other silly rituals of do you have the right name tag or t-shirt or whatever on. But it is strangely comfortable. Hey, we are out of time, we're over time. So let me go through a few quick pictures and talk about a little bit more of your life. You did go to Afghanistan, got a great picture of you in Kandahar there. We please watch my episodes thing and everybody else on Afghanistan. You have been to the Serengeti, you've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and you got your MBA, you're a businesswoman now and I'm very proud of you. And the one question that remains is all of this thinking and doing about leadership, do you do it as a parent? My children are the greatest leadership teachers I have ever encountered. Well, one of the greatest leadership books I've read is actually The Joyful Toddler and Preschooler, which talks about how you wrangle these very raw human desires that these little people have. And it talks about how healthy relationships require mutual responsiveness. And that's not giving into every whim of the person you're interacting with. It's acknowledging the whim and telling them, yes, I can help you right now or no, you're going to have to wait, but you're at least letting them know you heard them. And that's actually a principle I've applied to my work in a lot of conversations with people. And then the other piece of what I learned from that book is what people at their core really want is connection, purpose and mastery. And so I use those principles to guide my children through tantrums and find ways to perhaps influence them beyond the hard power of parenting. But it also shows up in the workplace. What I found hilarious was after I read this book, there was a Harvard Business Review article that said, how do you motivate in place its connection, purpose and mastery? And I was like, oh, I learned that from my toddler book. And so there are certain applications and I think the kids show me human psychology at its finest, most unfiltered view. And it's not a humanity in perspective because our brains are not that different as adults. We've just been able to, we've been trained to hide what we're seeking but it's really connection, purpose, mastery. And if you go back to that and you help lead others to that or through that lens it actually can make a really big difference. Well, I wish you'd taught me all this before I got to lead because this has been very interesting and thought-provoking and having just spent time with Stella and Hannah. You haven't mastered it yet, but they'll master you. I'd like to close with a thought that will stay with me when I talk to folks about leadership in kind of a more nuts and bolts sense. I'm very careful not to use analogies about treating the folks who work for you like children because they're not children. That's not the point, but they are human. And that human element is often underbellied. So, Tanya, you remain my favorite, my best and my only daughter. And I've learned a lot from you once again. So thanks for joining me. I'm Big Miss The Power of Imagination. Thanks for the opportunity. I've learned a lot from you too. Hugs to the kiddos. Good luck with the kitchen. Thank you. Thank you. All right, well, that is it. I'd like to remind you that Figments, The Power of Imagination and Figments on Reality are both brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii, a fine nonprofit company that brings incredible community content, very broad from a number of citizen journalists. They need your support, so please support them. I will see you next week on Figments, The Power of Imag, or I'm sorry, Figments on Reality where we'll talk China, Taiwan and the US. And thanks for staying longer after school today, the next six minutes. Please click like and join me again next week. Aloha.