 When you have that kind of leadership out there that's pointing forward and also pointing to each individual and saying, you're part of moving us forward, I think it's an enormous difference maker. And I think that's what's going to be the key to whether or not we move towards collapse or we move further into collaboration and something short of collapse. Larry Robertson is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Larry has advised leaders in growth, strategy, adaptability and innovation for nearly three decades. He's been described as a big firm consulting brain without all the worthless baggage. His knowledge is deep and his style direct, passionate and creative. The results and nearly 30 years in business speak for themselves. He's the founder and president of strategy and innovation advisory firm Lighthouse Consulting, a frequent board member and a sought after keynote speaker as engaging impactful and memorable in one-on-one podcasts as he is in front of 3,000 plus audiences all the time. Larry is the author of The Language of Man and a Deliberate Pause, two award-winning books that share 18 distinct honors. He's a popular columnist for Ink Magazine and a creative post and a contributor to Fast Company, Thrive, Global, Smart Brief, CEO World, Productive Flourishing and other respected publications. He's a proud graduate of Stanford University as we can tell from the football helmet behind him and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and a former adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Welcome to the show. It's so good that you can make it. Larry, thanks for being here. Oh, it's my pleasure and my privilege, Mark. I appreciate you having me. I am so glad that you found the time and I've had your book for a while now. We set the appointment almost two months ago to have this talk and you gave me plenty of time to review your book and I did. I reviewed it a few times and was very happy with what I found and also am going to poke you a little bit on what I wished would have been there a little bit more. I believe there is a distinct reason for a lot of direction of how you went. It's a book that's needed. It's a book that was missing in the industry, so I'm glad that it's there. Before we get too deep into it, one, we're going to tickle it and tease it as much as possible. I don't want to give it away. I want people to go out and buy the book, so I don't want to give them too much of cliff notes and read the book for them, but I want to give them enough to be interested to go out there and get it. From your biography, we can see you have a long history of not only authors and being author in three books. The posters are behind you on the wall and also teaching at universities and a long business history and consulting and advising. You've been down the path. You've been on the road. You've been doing this for some time. Brings me to the question, how in the hell have you weathered this crazy time we're going through and kind of, I hope, let's cross our fingers emerging from, did any of this experience your writing, your knowledge about leadership, your knowledge as a professor and as a speaker say, hey, there's some better business models out here. Not only am I talking about them, but I've applied them into my life and wow, they've really shown me that there's a better model out there to get through these hard times, these complex, uncertain, ambiguous, and volatile times we're still currently experiencing, still going to experience, and even experience before the pandemic. I kind of want to know how have you weathered it and what learning lessons that you could share with us, maybe if we haven't applied them to our life yet and what we should be looking for. Sure. So it's an interesting question for me in particular because my newest book, which you referenced a couple of times, Rebel Leadership, and the subtitle of that is How to Thrive in Uncertain Times, was something that I had actually been working on for several years before the pandemic started. And the premise of that book was, it is, that the pandemic is not uncertainty. The pandemic is one extreme example of uncertainty. But the uncertainty that I talk about in this book is for the past 20 years, for all of this century to date, and as far into the future as we can see. And it was really, the idea of the book was to say, we see this sort of, but we really need to see what the nature of this uncertainty is because it's very different from uncertainty that any of us have known in any other time. So strangely, and I guess looking for a silver lining in an awful 14 plus months here with the pandemic, the pandemic made my argument real to everyone because whatever it was and whatever level it was, there was no one that was untouched or unaffected by this pandemic. Sometimes it was more direct, sometimes it was more indirect, but no matter what, whether it was your life or a system that you count on in your life or in your work, somehow you were affected by this. And so what I hope is that it's a wake-up call to say, huh, we really are living in these uncertain times. And as much as we want to round the corner and return as many people say to normal again, what we're really living in these days is a new abnormal. And so that was the premise of the book, but the build from that mark, from that describing this uncertainty that's dominated the last 20 years and will continue was, okay, why is it that some organizations really wide in nature, meaning many different sectors across the world? So why is it that some organizations and some leaders are actually thriving in these uncertain times have been thriving over the past 20 years? So to answer your question, what I had found and what I had known was that there were models out there that were working, there were approaches that were effective. In the book, I focused on the patterns across them. I'm not a big fan of highlighting one particular organization or person or even industry and saying, look at them, they're the poster child, everybody should follow suit, everybody should follow the formula. I don't really believe in that. But when you see patterns that emerge across sectors, across organizations, across time, and they're consistent, that's something to pay attention to. Those are the kinds of things that when you can call them out and they're clear because they're occurring everywhere, because there's a consistency, they're transferable anywhere. And so the book really focuses on that, including highlighting specific organizations and what they've been doing. So exactly, I totally spaced out mentioning the book Rebel Leadership, How to Thrive in Uncertain Times. So I'm glad you mentioned that because that is the premise and why we're here to speak today. So you succinctly said that on the cover of the book, How to Thrive in Uncertain Times, there's a tornado. So one of many, okay, we've got hurricanes, we've got pandemics, we've got many, many things going on in these uncertain, complex and ambiguous times that we really need to deal with. But there has been this pattern of leadership actually being even stronger during these hard times. And I'm not going to give an example from your book right away, although we will touch on upon that in a moment. During this time of the pandemic, a lot of organizations already had social distancing, already had mechanization and automation, they already had their corporate structure, their business structure in such a way that they could pivot on a dime and start delivering essential services to respirators, start delivering other things. They still kept their doors open. It wasn't business as usual. But because of that foresight and also how they structured their business, they were able to really give back to the community and give back to the culture and add value back to society to thrive on. Now, the oldest business wisdom that I've learned in all the business books that I've read, many, many really start with Napoleon Hill and all his great wisdom, thinking girl rich and some of the great models from Tony Robbins and Good to Great books. And just on and on, this rebel leadership topic or this title that you've chosen is something that's begun to emerge a little bit more and more in the last two decades. One book that I had to think of immediately as I was reading it, and I don't know if you've ever heard of it, was to Be More Pirate. It's this pirate book from Sam Conniff and Alexandra Barker that's really also a little bit on these lines. It's like a big history of pirates almost, but how does it relate to business and activism and different things, which has a little rebel leadership and what that looks like and what things that emerged from this piracy. And then there's guerrilla marketing and there's Attila the Hun marketing and many others that we see out there. But your book is totally different. It's not, I mean, you give the examples, as you mentioned, but it's not so much focused in on one. It's this, how can I personalize this to the culture, the country, the organization, the type of business they do, and make something that is still this rebellious type of disruptor or this type of way of thinking, but gets into something else. And so this leads me nicely to the question, really, are you a global citizen? How do you feel about a world without nations and borders and divisions of humanity, one from another, and in this time of disruption and uncertain times where we're kind of social distance and that we really don't realize that a business has always been a global citizen. Food, water, air, essential services are always global citizens. And that's an emerging theme tied to what you have. And so I want to know your feelings on this and then also how those prior leaders who've written kind of different things on how they influenced you and why is this emerging at this time, even though you've been working on it for some time? Sure. So let me go back just a couple steps and then return to that question. So there's a purpose to, not surprisingly, there's a purpose to the title, Rebel Leadership. And it's this idea that especially in uncertain times where adaptation isn't just a one-off, it's a regular pattern. It needs to become an embedded skill set of every organization. We need to be good at innovating ideas, creative thinking, being able to adapt. That's the rebel part that we think of. But there are also negative associations with being the rebel, sometimes just being rebellious for the sake of rebellion. And there's a similarity for leadership. We think of leadership as just somebody standing in front and leading others forward. But really, when leadership is an exercise in developing other leaders across an organization, it becomes something more distinct and more special. So this new term, Rebel Leadership, is a way of saying the way we have traditionally thought about leadership doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, doesn't mean there aren't great leaders out there doing great things. But the way we've traditionally been taught to think about leadership is a single person, a single title, almost a superhero type image. This person is going to come up with the best ideas. They're going to have all the solutions. They're going to dictate to others how to do things. And while, I'll put it this way, while we may have been able to get away with that in a past environment, in this environment, it's a recipe for failure because no one is going to succeed in this volatile environment going forward by going it alone. So this really ties back to what you're saying. You referenced in your comments that some organizations were actually well positioned and they did well when this pandemic came around. They were able to respond quickly and so on, which is true. But it's also interesting to note that a lot of those organizations were ready to be flexible within their own borders, within their own organization, within their own people, but had not thought about, well, what about the rest of the supply chain? What about our customers? What about the market around us in general, even if we don't think about connecting to them on a daily basis? What if they experience volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that ripples back towards us? How do we incorporate that into our strategy, how we think about ourselves, our shared purpose, everything? So I would say that even among some of the best, there's been a failure to look more globally, whether it's the literal globe or it's the globe of just the universe in which they operate every day. And what I think this pandemic is teaching us is that if we're not looking at that broader sense, if we're not seriously playing and orienting ourselves towards that broader thinking in every moment, not just at a shareholders meeting when we stand up and say, we should be more global in our inner thing. Now, when you're thinking about it in every decision, every day, and you're asking every person in your organization to think that way, then you're truly acting in a global fashion. And I would argue that even among the best, there's still a long way to go in thinking that way. So in the book, you really interview a broad range of people for the book. Was that purposeful? Was it important to do that? The 100s of the wisest and most accomplished innovators, I guess you've talked to, but what are their commonalities? Why was that important? And what did you learn in that process? Yeah, it's a great question. So for me, it was critical. So as I said before, while I'm on the one hand a believer that there isn't a formula out there for everybody. And if you think about, you're referencing a lot of those books. And I'm not picking on anyone in particular, but the leadership secrets of Attila the Hun works for certain leaders. But it is not a recipe or a formula for leadership in its totality. And so to me, it's not just looking across all that different insight on leadership and saying, what are the common patterns here that are most important? For me, it's also looking at that in the context of this new environment and saying, what is the most effective thing? But to your point about interviewing all these diverse individuals from different sectors and different organizations, I want readers to have an entry point. And for every individual reader, it's going to be different. So for some, when I write about Airbnb, that's a great entry point. Oh, I know that company. I want to know more about it. Terrific. For others, it's not going to be that way. So I write about a smaller company like a Warby Parker. I write about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I write about the Icelandic men's national soccer team and continue out in that pattern of saying two things. One, this applies to everybody. Two, there's an entry point for everybody. And three, if these patterns are occurring across all that diversity, there's something worth paying attention to. So it was very, very conscious. And in my previous books, I've done the same thing. I've tried to give that, you know, I guess I'll borrow the term from our earlier part of the conversation, global access as much as possible to different readers to see themselves in it. And hopefully then to open up their minds from there to say, huh, well, if that applies to me, maybe some of this other stuff does too. So you mentioned the right people. We are connected through Robert Eggers, who's a mutual friend of ours. He was on the podcast. He wrote a beautiful book Begging for Change. And one of my favorite books of all time. And if people haven't read it, I mean, it's timeless. It's fabulous. And he's just a great, great man, great guy. He has a thing, a saying in his website as fucking shit up. And he, he just says it how it is. He doesn't pull the punches. He's not a foul or shrewd or crude, but he's just honest. And I really like that insight. But you actually have a section in your book that you speak about him, the DC central kitchen, world central kitchen and his affiliations and that and all the wonderful things he does. And I really like seeing that among the others that you just mentioned, that kind of the insights and the examples that you use of really wonderful abilities to pry this rebel leadership. And Robert's mantra, so to say is there is no profit without nonprofits. And that's a big mantra of his and among many other whiz, wise things that he's done, you know, where you never, we're talking about a central kitchen that is making food for homeless and drug addicts and all different walks of life that are really struggling. But yet in that process, he's providing people jobs and has this model of business where the president will come down to the DC kitchen and help them cook. And then those, the homeless and drug addicts and those people who are there get to meet the president and serve food with him and they get to work in the same kitchen. And there are some other ways to do it in an efficient way without waste that it's can be a job that adds value to the community and some some great, great things that I really like. But throughout these examples that you give in the book, there's really five core insights. And I would really love you to address those if you don't mind if maybe speak to them a little bit. Yeah, sure. And so I love your bringing up Robert, not just because I love Robert and have just been a friend and a fan of his for forever. But Robert was actually featured in my first book as well. So that's where that book came out in 2009. So long, long time ago. And what I've always liked about Robert is that he perpetually sees beyond his own borders and beyond his own abilities. So, you know, with, again, it's, I would encourage people to read Begging for Change is because it's terrific. And without stealing that that story and, you know, telling it all here, he, the one, one simple part of it was that right before he was going to get married, in order for the church that that he and his fiance wanted to get married in, that to get married there, they had to go out and do some community service. And the community service involved feeding the homeless. And without getting into the story, when he went out for that experience, it just it baffled him in every way. They were buying the food at the most expensive place that that they could buy food in this area. They were going out and they were feeding the homeless, but they weren't interacting with the homeless. They weren't getting to know them as people. They weren't fixing the problem in any way. And at first, looking at all of this, Robert's reaction was outrage. How can this possibly be someone should fix this? And he went to various groups and people and said, you should fix this. And they all said, ah, no, we have our own approach or we're not interested in that. And so he decided he had to fix it. He's never one to look at an opportunity like that, look at a problem, but he sees it an opportunity and say it's got to be done in some way. That's how he founded DC Central Kitchen. Even more, he not only founded it, as you said, to feed the homeless, but to help them, to get to know them, to understand the other parts of their life that we're contributing to their homelessness and their hunger. And instead of trying to become an expert in all those areas, he partnered with other organizations who handled addiction, who handled job training, who handled home, finding a place for people to live and said, I need you as partners. I'm not trying to replace you. What I'm doing is unique. So I think he's a perfect example of the kind of leader who sees that it takes many to solve a complex problem and that it takes many ongoing to really continue to create value that is lasting even as circumstances change. So I just, I wanted to borrow that little side journey because Robert's story is really powerful, a really powerful example of the kind of leadership that I'm calling rebel leadership. And that's only continued exponentially in his role at World Central Kitchen, which he is one of the founding board members of. So you asked about the five insights of the book. And what I'll do is I'll just step through them really quickly. But let me say this first. These five insights represent those five key patterns that I saw across these very diverse organizations. And in the book, in the core chapters, I dedicate a chapter to each one of these insights. And as you saw, the way I title the chapters is a little different. And that is also purposeful. I use the words that these leaders used with me when I talk to them about what's important, how are you thriving in these uncertain times. So as I step through them, you'll hear that it's really how they say that. And so like the first insight is soul matters most. And the story that I love to tell about that is actually occurred in a previous book for a deliberate pause. I interviewed about 220 really diverse individuals across the entrepreneurial universe. So entrepreneurs, people who worked in startups, people who advise startups, invested in them and so on. And at the end of each of those interviews, I would say, was there anything along the way that consistently stood out and made a difference in your ability to succeed, to adapt when things change, to create value ongoing? And the experience of asking that question was really unique too, but I'll leave that for people to read about, but consistently across almost every single one of them, they asked me, do you really want to know? And when I would say, yes, they would say soul. That's what matters most. And they weren't talking about a religious experience, although the way they talked about it almost felt like one. They were talking about that sense of identity. And in the context of rebel leadership, it's that sense of who you are in the context of what you do and how that connects to or impacts others. So what these entrepreneurs were saying, what the leaders I interviewed for the most recent book were saying is that that sense of identity in that context of what you do and how it connects to and impacts others is the most vital thing that you need to get a handle on if you want to thrive in uncertain times. When everything else goes to hell in a handbasket, if you know that, then you can connect and build it to other things. So soul matters most. The second insight is, and by the way, feel free to stop me along the way, but I'll just know you're fine. Please, please do. The second insight is leadership moves. And this is the idea that this belief we have, this training we get from the time we're children and we go to the classroom and the teacher is in charge. That person standing up at the front of the room has all the answers and makes all the judgments and directs everything. We are taught from there all the way through college, if we're lucky enough to go into our first jobs and the training we get there, that one individual sits at the top, one individual leads, one individual is heroic and all powerful. And this idea that leadership moves says, no, that's not true. The most powerful leadership is a culture of leadership. And it doesn't mean that occasionally you tap somebody on the shoulder and say, well, you're the leader of this small project. It's this encouragement of everybody understanding what it is we're all after, asking hard questions, putting forth ideas. It doesn't matter whether they turn out to be great or faulty in some way, but asking everybody to step up to that ability of being a leader. It turns out that there's a lot of terrific research in addition to a lot of terrific examples that show when you allow leadership to move in the truest sense, it actually is really successful. But the immediate reaction most people have is we're going to lose control. If we allow everybody to lead, we are going to lose control. And that's why another subset of this chapter is the importance of shared purpose. So shared purpose is something that's talked about a lot and it has been talked about for many years now. The problem is most organizations never act on it. They may say we have a shared purpose and they're just stating it as another way of saying this is our mission going forward. But a shared purpose attended where you allow every individual in that organization to be part of shaping it and applying it and calling it out when it's not being pursued by what you're doing. That is what allows everybody to stay together even as leadership moves. So that's the second insight. The third insight is it's the culture stupid. And that is exactly how these leaders said it to me. There is so much talk about the importance of culture. And in fact, in a survey about two years ago, Deloitte did a study of almost 3000 leaders, managers, and what they would call lower level employees across the organization. 94% of executives said culture was absolutely important. 88% of managers and other employees said, yes, culture is vital to the health of an organization. But the facts about how they operated didn't match with that. So we do a great job talking about culture. What we don't do is make culture a strategic imperative to make it the competitive advantage it can be. And much like leadership moving, what that means is inviting everybody into the culture to shape it to define it and to use it as a tool for how you shape the organization overall. I'm going to give you two quick definitions of culture that came out of interviews for the book that I think bring this point home. One was from Russell Schaefer. He's the, I want to get his title right, the senior director of global culture diversity and inclusion at Walmart. And he said it's pretty simple. Culture is the things we're doing right now. Not the things we did, not the things we aspire to, but how our actions and our values are materializing in this moment. And if everybody treated culture that way, if they thought about it as a check-in point to see if you're really tending to culture, I think we would see a very different version of it and a very different level of effectiveness. And I want to add to that. Another person I interviewed is Melissa Thomas Hunt. And I'm going to look at her title again too. She's the head of global diversity and belonging at Airbnb. And she added to Russell's definition in a wonderful way. She said culture comes from the way people behave, its behavior, how they engage, what they give currency to, the markers of their language, what's sanctioned and taboo. And all of this to the smallest parts and the smallest places in any organization. I'm going to just tell you, Mark, and I know you know it yourself. As much as we talk about the importance of culture, most of us do not treat it that way. Why? Because culture is hard work. But when you put the work into it, it actually becomes a competitive advantage. That's the third insight of this book. The fourth is find your power source and make it your superpower. This is this simple idea that there is something deeper that drives every organization, nonprofit, for-profit, no matter where they exist on the planet. Something deeper than purpose, then mission, then their operating plan, then their strategy. It's this source of power for them long-term that they continue to tap. They tap it in trouble times and the best, look at it and say, is this action we're about to take, tapping that power source in the right way? When you tap your power source consistently, it actually does become your superpower. I'll give you a couple quick examples of what a power source is for different organizations. And it's going to sound loose, almost detached from the organization, but it turns out to be pretty vital. So let's start with World Central Kitchen, which Robert is a part of, but so is Jose Andreas, who founded it, modeled it off DC Central Kitchen. For World Central Kitchen, food is power. Everything they do is about taking the power of food and putting it on the plates of and in the hands of people who need a hot meal. That's what they think about. World Central Kitchen is in total less than two dozen people. And then what they do is go into these areas like Puerto Rico when it was wiped out by a hurricane or during the pandemic across the country addressing the needs of healthcare workers and people who weren't getting meals that used to be delivered to them. They marshaled the resources of dozens of organizations, governments, businesses, non-profit, for-profit. In every one of those situations, they marshal them in the moment to come together and deliver those plates of hot food. How the heck do they do that? Because there's no structure. The plan can never be the same, because the circumstances are never the same. The key is they always remind themselves that food is power. And each one of them is tapped into that in a different way. And if they combine to leverage the power of food, they solve those difficulties almost overnight. I mean, it's really quite a miracle to look at what they're able to do. For Grameen Bank, this is Mohamed Yenis' microlending organization. Yes. Mohamed Yenis' book, Social Business, A World of Three Zeroes. He's been on the podcast. Absolutely fabulous. Please tell us about him. And he's a terrific human being. His first book, The Banker to the Poor, describes his story. And like Robert's book, it is so worth a read if you've never read Banker to the Poor. I was lucky enough to interview him for my first book. And what Mohamed Yenis realized was even though he came up with this idea of microlending, to make it work took more than the idea and it took more than him. And what he realized early on was that for what became Grameen Bank, community is power. And in fact, they have a document that they use every time they deploy a new project, every time they open up a new branch of Grameen Bank, every time they extend a new loan to the poorest of the poorest, as he calls them. They have this document called the 16 Decisions. And these 16 decisions are about how are we going to go about being in the business of these loans or getting them repaid or whatever. Only two of them refer to anything financial in nature. All of them, including those two that loosely refer to that, are about the power and importance of community. So every time Grameen Bank turns back towards that power source, they super power their ability to do what they do. Those are just two examples, but there are many examples out there of organizations who get this, who understand their power source and continue to return to it. And it powers everything else. It powers the ability of leadership to move. It powers the ability to attend to shared purpose. And it powers culture to become something that truly is an advantage. The last of the insights is the long view matters right now. And it's a simple idea. It's this idea that we all know the long view is important in some way. We set goals, we set missions about where we want to arrive. But if we're not incorporating those into this minute, again, into every decision by every individual every day, we dramatically lower our chances of reaching that endpoint. The more we do it, the opposite happens. We raise the odds that we're not only going to reach that place somewhere in the distance, but, and this is most important, we're going to be more tuned into opportunities and changes along the way that ask us to recalculate where we're headed or how we're going to get there. So this idea of bringing the long view into the immediate is the fifth and final lesson of rebel leadership and the fifth and final insight. The most important thing I want to say at the end here is that while each of these is super powerful, it's using them in combination that makes the difference. And these organizations that I write about that stand out as rebel leadership organizations, they get that they understand that you can't just look at the list and say, I'm going to pick one, I'm going to do that. And that should make everything better. No, they all are incorporated with one another. And that's what makes for the most effective organizations in uncertain times. I really love that. And you summarize that so nicely because it is true that this linear or siloed approach to solving business issues or global grand challenges, human suffering just doesn't work. But if we take this systemic approach, we see these five as a system that all need to be occurring at the same time, all facets of that system need to be addressed at the same time. That then is when we make those experimental leaps and bounds. That's when we solve problems that actually address the issues at hand for fabulous results. As we began out and what you've learned through this entire process as well as your other books is basically this book almost feels like a trilogy and something that's a common thread on all. It's a nice culmination of your other books and how the insights of your interviewing and the stories that you tell that you've done over these times, which is found in most wisdoms of teaching academic or non-academic books that you go out there, you pound the pavement, you interview, you go to the Airbnbs, you go to the General Motors, you go to the organizations to find out how are they doing it, what's going on, what are they seeing? And so I really love that you did that. But also as you mentioned in the beginning, for the last two decades, we've really seen this changing landscape of leadership period. Things are so vuca, volatile, uncertain, changing. It's just unbelievable what's going on. So we need a different model. We need a different way to see better results. And the two that you've already described, so I don't want to go too much over them, but that really stood out for me, which was really important. And I've seen in other situations is the culture stupid, really, is so powerful because I have a lot of authors and expect experts and business leaders on the podcast who really been there and done that and have almost repeated in different ways some of the same things that you're saying. I had an evolutionary biologist on the show and he says, you know, evolution takes millions to billions of years. It's a very slow, long process. But if we can get cultural evolution, it still probably takes a long time, but it's a lot faster results. It's a lot better model when we have this culture behind it. And in business, we see that on a different level and scale obviously. But it's such a vital facet to really address our exponentially growing world, address the needs of our clients and of our colleagues and those who we do business and associate with to offer planetary services and things. And so culture is so vital. And I love that you address that. And you had some very beautiful stories there. Going into the power is so true because not only is for the world's central kitchen, food is their power and as well as their superpower. But let's talk all humanity. The basic of human needs is food. If we think of any energy source, the basic energy source of life, it is food. It's a caloric intake or a calorie is a measurement of energy, which is food, which is the basic for us to regulate our body heat. It's our battery, it's our energy source, so to say. And I really love where you talk about that in the book and how important food is, but that we think about where does our power source come from and how do we turn that into superpower? How do we do that in our business? What's the most vital power source? And we really use that. And it's infathomable how many organizations are out there functioning and their power source is left up to someone else and they don't even grasp it. They don't even say, oh, well, we've really got to make sure we're in control of that. We own that superpower. And those businesses you don't really hear much about or they never really make it over the leap. I mentioned that I was a little bit concerned or I wanted to hear more of something. So in your book, you talk about environment quite a bit, but it's a different type of environment than what I talk about. It's an environment of organization and structure. And as you know, I'm a sustainable developmental advocate. I'm an environmentalist. I'm an activist. I really believe in the future of movement of all business really needs to address environmental, social governance, ESG, that we need to rethink our business models that we're offering more planetary services that we're offering. We're actually making the planet better than we found it doing planetary services, giving back more and doing more for the planet, leaving it better than we found it. And that those type of models are really functioning and working well, as well as these platform systems dynamic models of business organizations that we see emerging. And so I want, if you don't mind, if I'm not throwing you off, I want you kind of to address and tell me in what context you used environment in your book and how, in your opinion, moving forward, does environment and ESG sustainability reporting and kind of this different model that really has true costs, natural capital, and these environmental issues addressed in the core functions of what all businesses do. And I see it touched upon in culture. I see it touched upon in the power. So I see it there. But I'm just even asking you more. I would like to have seen a couple one, two punches a little bit stronger in that aspect. Yeah. So this is this is really interesting, Mark. And I'm really glad you touched on it. So in my past two, my previous two books, I talked a lot about environmental organizations and nonprofits as well. And in both cases, I had so so in my my first book, a deliberate pause, it was it was talking to a lot of a lot of organizations as well as individuals that that book was focused on entrepreneurship. And I focused on those things so much so that the reaction I got from some people in the for profit space was, Oh, well, you're only talking about, you know, nonprofit and environmental organizations and so on and so forth. So it's always interesting, you know, what what your audience takes away from what you write in my second book, you know, you were talking about having an evolutionary biologist on for my second book, which was focused on creativity. I interviewed nearly 70 MacArthur fellows. And the range of zones that they came from and that they did their work in that their creative ideas were applied to was far more encompassing than this. So the leaning in rebel leadership was to say, let me talk about a different kind of environment. And the environment is how we exist with one another every day as we try to execute in the space of a business. And what we are getting wrong or might be getting wrong about how we individually think about it, how we collectively think of it as a group and how we interact with one another and and who gets to lead at the base of all this. So I decided to make the book shorter number one and two to really emphasize those things and to try to show as best I could that like you said, as I read about culture, as I read about a power source, I see these applying in my world. So in my mind, that's a victory. You you saw it, whether I gave you an example or not. And the idea was also to make it these these insights tangible enough actionable enough that you could port them elsewhere funny side story. When I was first pitching this book, there was a time when it was being considered by Island Press. And as you know, Island Press only does things in the environmental space, and they could see the crossover and the applicability. But they wanted me to be completely in that environmental space rather than talking about these other organizations. And part of what I'm after in this book is to say, it's that global citizen element. I want everybody to look through a lens you might not normally look through, even if you're going to then take that lens and turn it on what you know. So so my environment is more talking about that leadership environment that that work environment in a general sense. However, let me get to yours. Um, the uncertainty that's out there, the vulcaness that's out there in every sense. If we don't think that includes environmental systems, if we don't think it not only includes it, if we don't see that as number one or two on the list for how it's going to impact our ability to make decisions in terms of what resources are available to us, how long lasting our decisions can be, even if we have the resources to make that, even if whether or not people are going to want to come work for us. If we're not considering those things and employing them in the core of what we're doing, then that's the next boat we're missing. I mean, it's wonderful to know how to lead differently in this environment. But you also then need to be aware of the kinds of uncertainties that are threatening every shore. And I'll go a little bit further than that. So there is an interesting research report that came out about a month ago. This one also was by Deloitte and they were talking to leaders across industries, across the globe and asking them, how were they coming out of this pandemic? How are they done within it? What did they find was most important? And all of them had this heightened recognition that uncertainty is here to stay. And the way Deloitte described it is that in the past, we saw uncertainty in one of two forms. Typically, we would see uncertainty as a like a tide, slowly rising. When it got here, it might have been unfamiliar. We might not have known what to do with it right away, but pretty soon we could get our minds around it and then we could get our arms around it. And then guess what our goal was? Return to some kind of status quo and build an efficiency model around that, rather than building a model that was aimed at both efficiency and resiliency for the next change. The second kind of change we would see was sometimes in the form of a storm surge. It didn't come often, but it could come quickly devastating. It could wipe a business out or even a community out or something like that. But in general, we were going to rebound from that too. And occasionally we might see both. And what Deloitte was pointing out is now we not only are seeing both, we're seeing them happen more frequently, often intertwined with one another, both tide and storm surge, and creating these monsters of complexity out there that we not only are not used to, we have not trained ourselves to deal with. And one of the most high impact of those is the environmental impact on every single business out there. If we don't get our brains around, we got to do this differently, you know, that we only have one planet. And if we don't start using it in the correct way that maintains it, when it goes, it's going to go away in a big storm surge of uncertainty. So I completely agree with you. And this is more a choice from a writing standpoint to say, I'm just going to focus on the leadership part here. But then we can aim it not only at things like the environment that you as you define it, but even certain industries. I mean, if we're not talking about rebel leadership in the healthcare industry, especially in the United States, then we're missing the boat there too, because that is that is a dinosaur of an industry. And as much as it's had an incentive to catch up for the past 20 years at least, it really hasn't shifted in the way they lead and think and innovate in that. And you could you could list a whole, you know, come up with your own laundry list of other organizations and industries that ought to get that attention. So the goal of this book was to say, okay, if you're going to lead that thought exchange, and if you're going to lead these organizations, here's how here are the five insights. I'm glad you addressed that question for me about the environment. And I all all my reading that that I do, regardless of what type of book, it all says through the lens of sustainability and environment, how can I apply that into my actions, my activism, what I'm doing, because it's still a good model. And I believe most of my readers also apply it through that through that lens as well. And so I'm glad that you clarified that and you expressed that. Sometimes businesses need a little extra nudge, because they don't want to hear that. And during this time, actually during this crazy time that we've been talking about, even even before the pandemic, those organizations, those companies, those businesses that didn't invest in sustainability, the sustainable development goals or transfer their business model into one that has strong holds and environmental social governance and change their models there, really suffered have had some big impacts during this time, during the first, second, third and fourth quarter of 2020. And even now, in 2021, all ESG and sustainable index funds have outperformed their conventional counterparts. Morningstar review, the Nikki, the Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange. Morningstar review 25 out of 28 in the first quarter of 2020. By the end of the quarter, it was 27 out of 28. I'll perform the conventional counterparts. All these reviews and reports are just showing sustainable index funds ESG funds are just outperforming they're not going anywhere. So it's just a better business model, not only for people on planet profit, but for the environment and for the way moving forward that most organizations that we might hear of in the past that all they're doing greenwashing or they're kind of half-hearted in this whole movement, they're just doing it because it's a regulatory process, it's a requirement to do certain things. Even those who are greenwashing and faking it until they're making it have come to the realization, wow, there's something to this. Our clients, our customers, our consumers are loving this that we've put forward this greenwashing campaign. I think there's something to this. I think we should switch our model to ESG or to something to do with the sustainable development goals that we need to take the environment into consideration. And so the model, the trend is there. And so hopefully in your future books, you won't run into those giving you advice that says, you know, why is this so heavy here? I can't read it or let's look at it through the right eyes with that view. But I appreciate you doing that. An interesting fact is Island Press is one of my partners and sponsors. So all their authors, they always send me their books and their authors and I have them on the podcast. So either way, you're in good company, you're in alignment. I really appreciate the read and it was so fabulous and how you surmised it as well. There's a lot of nuggets of wisdom, well written. It's not a long read. So I think you've hit the points on all of those. But you did it in a crazy time. You did it during the pandemic. You're kind of launching it now at the end of as we emerge out of it in the US. I think we're kind of emerging fully in Europe where I'm at. We're still kind of emerging out of lockdown. It's not really back to anything normal at all. And I don't want us to go back to normal. I want us to go forward with some new models and some new wisdoms. I believe the business like Mariana Matsukatu, who wrote the wonderful book, Michigan Economy, said is that business is really a powerful movement for change for environment. And in the beginning of 2020, we saw Delta Airlines come out with some great ambitions. We saw historical precedents and ambitions from Microsoft where they said they're going to have a climate fund. They're going to remove their historical carbon emissions. And I think most people kind of totally miss that since they've been in business, they're going to remove their historical carbon emissions. That's the best step in the right direction. And when businesses bring out a culture like that, say we care about that, we're sorry, we're going to fix it. And then Jeff Bezos and on and on. And so we're seeing those stories emerge that have these principles, these pillars that you talk about in culture and power sources that they're emerging more and more. But tools like your book Rebel Leadership are really needed so that we can really understand and make this transition. You have received a wonderful honor and award as a full, full bright scholarship for Latin America, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras. Congratulations. First of all, can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing and what these next chapters moving forward are, which actually has a lot to do with environment and kind of getting other economic models and Latin American countries into a better place Yeah. So thank you very much for mentioning that. It was a wonderful honor. I just, I mean, I can't say that a humbling honor. So the work that I will be doing is with a partner down in Costa Rica at Earth University. And Earth University is a really interesting place. It's four year university where all four years are the curriculum is built around entrepreneurship. And so it's teaching how do you identify opportunities? How do you identify problems? How do you build ideas into something of value? How do you keep that value going over time? How do you spread your knowledge to other people? It's a very, very interesting place. It actually was originally, I wouldn't, I guess I could say co-founded, they had founding support from USAID 30 years ago. So they are also out in the rainforest by and large. And their students come from all across Latin America. And their students come from all across Latin America in places where agriculture is the dominant pursuit, the dominant source of the economy, at least for those parts of the country. So there's this wonderful knowledge at Earth, and with my partner down there on entrepreneurship as she has pursued it, on these agricultural elements and sustainability elements around that, which they take very, very seriously. And what we're doing is we're combining our knowledge. So my expertise and experience in entrepreneurship, leadership and creativity with hers and the universities, with other outside resources and saying what to you, it would probably be the obvious, which is it isn't just one view. It isn't just one approach that you should take. You got to look at these things together. That's what makes them really powerful. And bringing those things together not only in a model and in training and a toolkit, but taking them to a place that they don't typically get to. And that is the very, very rural communities of Latin America, many of them indigenous communities that are by and large cut off from the services and the economies of their home countries. And so the idea is not to parachute in and say, we know what your problem is and here's how to fix it and you need to do it our way, quite the opposite. It's to be invited into these communities by building a relationship ahead of time to have those communities identify a challenge that they want to meet or an opportunity that they want to pursue. And then to expose them to this kind of broader mindset and thinking around co-creation and innovation around inclusion, even within their communities, including in ways that they hadn't before that taps the full power of the community to expose them to this enough that they know how to not only solve their own problems and pursue their own opportunities, but how to replicate that forward without us. We can leave all of that knowledge with them and they not only can replicate it forward in their communities, but they can teach it to other communities. So it's really to just give this exposure that quite honestly isn't there. It's not just not there in parts of Latin America. I mean, it's there in parts of the rural United States and communities that just are more cut off than we would expect from ideas that we consider basic. And so the scholarship is focused on letting us come in and experiment with that idea in a few communities and see if we're right, see if it goes anywhere. It'll go somewhere. The question is, will it go this way? Will it go that way? But it's a really exciting opportunity. I'm sure with your wisdom and years of experience, it will go in the right way that you'll be the right type of mentor and teacher for this. I'm excited for you and congratulations. I want to get into a little bit more questions that maybe you can address through the lens of your book if you would like to, but they're kind of bigger societal questions. So we have this thing not only in business, but in life for quite some time of neo-Darwinism, neo-liberalism, where it's a natural selection, only the strong survive, severe competition, survival of the fittest, I think you get where I'm going, that has really been turned on its head in the last two decades. I mean, even longer back, people have been discussing it, but now it's kind of bubbled to the surface that there's this growing consciousness or collective where people are realizing, no, that's not how the world works. The world works as a symbiotic or in symbiosis that cooperation and collaboration are the ways to go fast and far and for multiple generations to be a part of this symbiotic earth. And I would just love to know kind of how it either ties or your thoughts and feelings on this. And really my realization came from Carl Sagan's first wife, Lynn Margolis, who Carl Sagan did the cosmos, I'm sure you've heard of that, but his wife, Lynn Margolis, is a famous scientist that she's set the entire scientific community on its head and actually went against Dawkins and many others. Good friend of James Lovelock, who is 101, wrote the Nova Scene book that just came out, but she wrote a book called The Microcosmos, or oops, the backside, Microcosmos, and it's all about this symbiotic earth and symbiosis and how really how life works more in a regenerative way. Yeah, so a couple of interesting thoughts back to you on that. The first one is it's interesting what people see in my writing and where many of them have taken it. So for example, with my first book, A Deliberate Pause, which again was focused on entrepreneurship, I've been wonderfully surprised by the number of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit or for-profit specifically environmental organizations that have picked up those themes and said, okay, we get this idea of the symbiotic relationship of life on earth here. We get this idea of a zero sum of strategy is not realistic and is not lasting, right? But there's still a sense that, and I have this sense that the vast majority of people do not get that in the same way we do. And when we live steeped in this, my wife is a sustainability consultant. Some of my clients, I'm consulting them on the issues we've been talking about. So I live in that world too, not as deeply as you do or my wife does, but I also pop out of it. And I know that that knowledge is not as widespread as it should be, even though, I'll just put it bluntly, even though it's obvious, even though it's advantageous to take that knowledge and do what you do in a different way. So I've been really humbled to see how people are taking some of these thoughts in my books and saying, maybe that's the approach to turning more minds to see that this is really where their power could come from, that this is really where they can be sustainable, no matter what the environment is, by abandoning those thoughts of, I think of it in terms of the zero sum game and the zero sum attitude, whether it's competition or it's just your business plan in general, or it's your personal philosophy in life, it's a very, very damaging thought pattern to have. But I don't feel yet that it's widespread enough understanding what the dangers of that are. So to go directly to your question, I'm terribly concerned about that. I've also written a lot in articles about this whole idea of a zero sum mentality and how it's working against us. But I also have a lot of confidence that the environment around us right now, which is only whipping up in terms of its volatility and uncertainty, is going to beat the crap out of people who don't get that quickly. It's going to hit them hard and they're going to wonder why they didn't embrace it further. We also have a lot of leaders around us who get a lot of airtime and they still talk in those old terms that don't reflect some of the forward thinking that we're talking about now, but it's been out there for the last two decades and more. So it's a concern for me that it's not spreading far enough, fast enough. But I do think the environment is going to put the pedal to the metal on that. So we've been around for a while. We've seen a lot of different things and even before the pandemic, we're seeing more, more volatility, uncertainty, anxiety, different things going on in the world. The ones that usually come up are the the Putin's, the Shays, the Bolts and Arrows, the Duarte's, the Erd ones. There's always someone to point your finger at and complain about with what's going on in the world. But in reality, what those are, are kind of civilization frameworks or models for governance that aren't working in our world anymore. And especially during this pandemic, there's been this bubbling, this uprising, kind of dis-ease, uncomfortableness of humanity, no matter where you live. We're saying, boy, this system, this way of governance, this way I'm living is just not working for me anymore. It's not doing me good. It's not, it's not very nice. It's, I don't see it going anywhere. And in some respects, I think, and I want to call it civilization framework, in some respects, people are saying, okay, let's take this model of this place where I live, no matter where it is in the world. And let's push that model out into the future, do a little forecasting of foresight for five years, for 10 years, for 15 years, for 20 years. How is it working then in that five and 10 and 15 years? Is it still working? If we take this same model, what does it look like in the future? Just kind of as a mind experiment, but also just naturally. So during this time in the U.S., I was caught in the U.S. during the beginning of the pandemic. So I'm going to kind of just put it under the guise of the United States. It was different. It was crazy. In Europe, it was very tight, a lot of social distancing, a lot of masks, a lot of people very cautious and concerned, very much holding to the rules and the laws, self-regulating in many respects. But let's take, for example, the face masks and the social distancing. So now if we push that model out during this pandemic to the next pandemic or to the next catastrophe, is the next step more social distancing and instead of a face mask, it's a gas mask or an oxygen mask or a spacesuit. What are our models doing to not just keep business as usual, but to better the world that we live in, to better and start solving some of the problems instead of just saying, we know there's some problems coming. We're not really doing anything about it. When they come, they're going to get worse. And so the question is, do you feel that our current civilization framework is working for you wherever you're at in the U.S.? And do you feel like it could be facing a collapse? And are we maybe seeing some new frameworks evolving or emerging that we can transition or that can transition us into some better futures for the world or even just for the nation where you're at? Yeah. It's a wonderful question. And it's a texture question, or at least exploring it and answering it. As I listen to you, Mark, and when I think about all of this, you were describing a general sense that a lot of people have. It's a combination of things of, God, that was horrible what we just went through. I really hope I don't need to go through that again. And thinking, what could we do about that? Is there a way that even if something horrible happened again, could we go through it in a way that was better somehow? There's that feeling of, well, I didn't like the pandemic, but the pandemic taught me things about what I really needed and what I don't necessarily need, what I really liked about life before the pandemic, and what maybe I didn't. And I don't want to go totally back to what I had before. So there's a whole range of feelings like that. And then you were describing the difference around just social distancing and PPE and so on, just between the United States and in Europe. And a lot of this comes down to leadership, doesn't it? If I'm part of that broader population that is sensing these things, even if I can't articulate it, even if I wouldn't use the words that Mark uses or that Larry uses or whatever, but I have this sense that there's something better out there, that I have this sense that if we're not careful, there's collapse out there in some way. The next thing I do after that is I look to some place or somebody for ideas, for examples, for even pilot answers to what I do. Even if those answers turn out to be wrong and we need to change it again, I'm looking for some sense of leadership. And ideally, once I'm in the presence of that, I want to lead too. So I'm looking for leadership that is pointing forward and I'm looking for leadership that wants me to go forward as well and to be a leader in my own right. I don't have to sit at the top, but I want to lead in whatever zone I am. So you look at the example of what happened in Europe versus what happened in the United States and no matter where you sit on the political divide, I think we can comfortably say that during the early months of the pandemic, six, nine months of the pandemic, there was a lack of leadership in this country, no matter where it was going. It was inconsistent. It was all over the place. It felt like it was last minute in its thinking. And the results, I think, made people nervous to say the very least, made them wonder, well, where do I look and do I just have to come up with my own answers versus in other countries where the leadership was clearly there. It wasn't necessarily what everybody wanted, but everybody did it because they were part of a community. And once they were doing that, they also saw the range within it to do other things, to add to the conversation about what was working and what wasn't. So I mean, I'm talking in broad brushstrokes here, but when you have that kind of leadership out there that's pointing forward and also pointing to each individual and saying, you're part of moving us forward, I think it's an enormous difference maker. And I think that's what's going to be the key to whether or not we move towards collapse or we move further into collaboration and something short of collapse. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm sorry I put you on the spot if I did on such a big question, because it's a little bit, it's a little bit of a far stretch from from your book and that, but leadership is such an important role in our political leaders and our leaders of our communities and of our cultures. And when it's not there, and we're in crisis, we're in state of hook, no matter where we are, we're looking somewhere for some guidance for some help for some direction. And when we can't find it, then we look within and we really, you know, it can go either way. So I really appreciate your insight and kind of unpacking that for us. You did the perfect thing, Mark. I mean, so in my culture chapter is as you know, I write about the fact that especially in a VUCA environment, creativity is critical to culture and cultures need to be creative. That's the core that leads to adaptability that leads to innovating the next idea that leads to resiliency and flexibility. And there are three things that I write about that are critical to that. One of them is inquiry. So just asking me that question, inviting me into the conversation, not expecting me to be the expert, but just what are your thoughts on this? Where do you stand on that? That habit is critical. The second thing is diversity. So asking that question, not just of people who live in that zone and know it well, but of people like me who are on the edge of that zone, but still might have something relevant to contribute, that's another critical power source within a culture to allow it to become what it needs to become to adapt and change and go forward. And the third and final thing is co-creation. And so somewhere in between what you know, what you've said in previous podcasts, what I contribute here, what other guests contribute, there's a co-creation that leads to good answers. So I love that you asked me that question because it really taps into those things that are so vital to a strong culture, whether we're talking a company culture, you know, a community or a global culture. Yeah, and there are all learning lessons for us to kind of advance in our culture, in our civilization and there where we're at because we're all at different stages of learning and our own little cultural evolution and journey and life. And so it's really nice to collaborate and learn because as I said, you know, political will is a renewable resource and we can learn, we can advance and realize, oh, we made some mistakes. And one of the questions I'll ask you at the end is really for my guests, it's about that, what have you learned in your journey so far that you wish you would have known from the start or is it the journey in and of itself? But I'm not going to have you answer that yet. This next question is the hardest question that I have for you today. And it's really the burning question WTF and no, it's not the swear word, although I'm sure sometime during this craziness or maybe even before you said that, but it's really what's the futures from your perspective, not from country governments or the US, but really what's the futures? Can you elaborate a little bit? I'm not sure. You bet. So it's really this, what's the roadmap? What's the plan? What for you, do you have kind of a future forecast of what you're going to do? What your plan is? Are you adhering to the donut economics, mission economy, circular economy? Are you doing planetary boundaries? Are you the new Green Deal? Do you have some other personal maps for your own future that you're kind of saying this is what I think and where I believe that the future is going besides your trilogy of wonderful books and all the wisdom? I kind of hear the future with your Fulbright, where you're going to be going to Latin America, that's a whole probably going to be a whole new chapter of excitement and not only great departing of wisdom, but learning as well. So I really want to know, what's the future? Yeah. So thank you for expanding on that because it makes it easier for me to answer. You talked about learning and you almost said what I'm about to say, which is the reality is that in any environment, but particularly when you want to thrive in any environment, the learning never stops. So I like to believe that in each of my books, I was learning myself, but then I was bringing this new learning and insight to my audience that I was helping them to take a look at topics they might mention often. I mean, think about it, entrepreneurship, creativity and leadership are words we throw around all the time, but I had never really seen anybody take a serious step back and then take a broader view across and say, well, what are the patterns that apply to all of us? And so I like to think that each of those books define some of what the future looks like. My hope in each one of those is that people will explore how to really think about those three topics because I think of the mindset that we associate with successful entrepreneurs. I think about creativity and I think about leadership as human abilities. And it's not that anybody lacks them. It's that many of us are out of practice in using them. So part of my model for the future is always to help people see the fullness of what they're capable of and to also help them see that not only do I hope they tap that, but that in tapping it, they're going to tap it in a very individual way. There is no poster child for creativity out there. There is no poster child for leader or whatever it is. It's something that's very individual, but we live in societies that say no, no, this is what you need to look like physically. This is how you need to operate mentally. This is the right kind of it. And so I think in that sense, it's that ongoing individual learning that's critical to the future, but with a twist on it, where you apply it and what your outcome is has to be collaborative. I'm a huge believer that if we are not seeing everything we do as having to happen in a collaborative way, we're always going to come up short. I would tie those two things to some trends that are being seen right now. There's some research that was done by Microsoft and LinkedIn and I mentioned some Deloitte research earlier that's just come out in the last month. And I think these trends are telling about what the future is and why we need to continue to learn what are we individually capable of and how can we collaborate with others to bring out the best of that, the most of it. And some of the trends are flexibility is here to stay. Most of us are not built to be flexible by our training, but by our factory-issued componentry, we absolutely are if we practice that. The second trend that they're seeing out there is that leaders are out of touch with their employees. That comes to this collaboration thing. They are clearly out of touch with their employees in many respects, but one of the ways they're most out of touch is they're not collaborating with them as leaders to do it together. And that's a real difficulty when you hear that the third trend is high productivity, which many organizations have finally found as they've had to deal with the pandemic, as they've tried to come out, is masking an exhausted workforce. The task is only getting bigger. So if we aren't collaborating with others, if we aren't recognizing there's exhaustion there, we're setting ourselves up for failure. And one of the final things is shrinking networks, how we interact with others, not just within our organizations, but far beyond our organizations are endangering innovation and our ability to adapt. So if you think about those trends, being able to understand what you are fully capable of and then applying that in collaboration with others, to me, that's a pretty smart roadmap, no matter where you go from there. I absolutely love that. And there are so many nuggets of wisdom there. I mean, we could really unpack it and go deep because we're already seeing this big emergence of those who are now getting back into the workforce who may have been working at home, now going back to the office or that there's also this pushback where they don't want to go back to the office. They don't want to go back to the way they worked before because of that disconnection, because of the lack of flexibility, because of all the things you mentioned that are really weren't present there. And we're bringing people to the brink of burnout. And so we're seeing this, you know, I've been talking about the future of work humans of new work for a long time. Now we're actually seeing how it's emerging and how in Europe and in Germany, especially they're having a hard time getting people back to these nine to five, punching in, going to the office. They're really used to working at home, working remote, enjoying it, feeling a lot better. At first it was a learning curve. At first it was difficult because of they didn't have the environments, but there's a lot of learning lessons. And then the second thing that are really, we can impact this another conversation, because I don't want to go too deep off of what you said, but the other thing is, you mentioned almost this collective intelligence that we continue to learn. We can continue to kind of grow and evolve with where we need to be. But what you're adding, you're adding this wonderful new collective intelligence to human beings and to society and to our culture. Human beings are different from other species because we have that collective intelligence. This collective learning, we can pass on our writings, our books, our videos from word of mouth, but in many different forms to others to learn. We're in this age of fake news and misinformation, information overload, but also in fabulous information like your book and many others where we need that to go to the general pool of collective intelligence. I would like to see, and this is kind of my own kind of side note, I would love to see that collective intelligence somehow get connected to emerging technology and give humanity a real time update on a daily or however basis of all the collective intelligence growing throughout the world at that moment so that we don't repeat the same mistakes that we've already made and that we're not making the same mistakes decade and decade civilization over civilization over and over, but that we're getting that vital information to catapult us into the future and more so for my children, my grandchildren, those future generations to give them the type of not only work environment, but the lifestyles of the future that really will be regenerative economies. The last three questions, unless you want to make a comment to that. Yeah, the one other thing I would add to it is I'm trying to think of the author's name. It'll come to me, I'm sure, after we disconnect. But the other thing that's interesting to point out, you talk about the uniqueness of human beings and how they have the ability to collaborate and so on, we're also, as far as we know, the only species that thinks about the future. I mean, actually imagines a, not just what might happen tomorrow or where the next meal might come from and many, many creatures are able to do that, but thinks about a future that doesn't even exist, thinks about a possibility that it doesn't even might not even look realistic today, but we think about the possibility of a path there. I mean, think about the power of that when you collaborate to combine those two abilities. I think is enormously powerful and enormously important and much of what we've talked about is thinking about that future. And as I say in the new book, bringing it into the here and now, and the best way we can bring it into the here and the now is to do that in a collaborative way so that we not only have lots of different minds coming at it, but really have lots of different monitors, people who are going to keep us on track for saying that's important. We said that's important. What we're doing right now is not standing behind that. We should do something to change that. If you only have one leader, that doesn't tend to happen. If you've got a thousand leaders in your organization who do that, yeah, you might have a little conflict here and there, but you're going to get to good answers. I absolutely love that. Thank you. If there was one message that you could depart to our listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be your message? Gosh. I'm going to sound a little bit like I'm repeating here, but the message would be looking into this camera and saying to each person individually, you are powerful beyond beyond your knowledge to lead, to think about ways that we can do things better, to contribute to other people and what they're thinking about for ways that we can do better. We all have this desire to achieve and to advance. We all have a desire for gaining a sense of mastery in whatever it is we do. The thing is, is that we often find ourselves in environments where we don't feed that, but the data is off the charts that those are the things that are most important to us. The fact of the matter is, is that the power to tap that doesn't lie in what your boss allows you to do. It lies inside you in recognizing what you're capable of. That's really the message I would put out there, whether those things you think about yourself are the ones that I'm raising my hand and saying that's in you. You have that capability for leadership creativity or it's something else. It's knowing that you have far more power inside you than you likely know. What should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? Now I'm going to be biased. As I wrote Rebel Leadership, I'm thinking about all leaders across generations. In that sense, I'm thinking about it and saying this book is your reality check. This is reality now. This is what works. You really need to get on board with it, but I'm thinking particularly about younger generations. They're coming in and they're going to define what leadership is going forward. A lot of what we've talked about, these elements of Rebel Leadership align very closely with the priorities of younger generations among us right now. I hope that they see these insights and these lessons in Rebel Leadership as their opportunity, as their mandate to demand that we lead in a different way and that we go forward together in a different kind of way. Oftentimes it's left to the individual to say I don't like what's going on here and I want it to change, but they're also not exposed to enough ideas that say, well, how would I make that change in a bigger way? How could I change this organization that I'm working for? How could I change this organization that I started to be different from ones that are out there? My bias is completely in terms of I hope younger generations look at this and say, let's take college graduates who are graduating this month and next month. All the things that you've been taught up to this point in a formal education, not the other life exposures you might have had, are telling you that leadership is something other than what it is and what it needs to be. Look around you. See something different. See what you already know is in your heart and pursue that kind of leadership because it's going to be far more effective than just getting in the queue and following along with leadership as you've always heard it should be. The last question is one I already caveat it and that is what is what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? Well, I'll put it in the since we've talked a lot about my books and they go back, you know, 15, 17 years now that from the research and then launching the first one. I'll tell you one key lesson I learned early on and I have relearned over and over again and it has two parts. Ask people. Ask people that you don't even know what they think. Ask them about what they've learned. Ask them everything you think or you're told you're not allowed to ask them. Ask those people you think you're not allowed to ask. Just ask people and the second part of it is once you ask, once you put that question out there, shut up. I have learned so much by asking a question and not giving in to that desire to fill the silence and just listening to people, not just give their initial answer but giving them the space afterwards to see if they go on from there. Some of the most brilliant things people have said to me came from my continuing to be quiet. Love that. Thank you so much. Rebel leadership, how to thrive in uncertain times. Larry, it has been a sheer pleasure. Thank you for letting us inside of your ideas and sharing your mind and wisdom with us today. It's been a sheer pleasure. That's all I have for you and it's been a sheer pleasure. I thank you very much. You've been a great guide and it's been a pleasure for me too, Mark. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Take care. You too. Bye bye.