 I'm Carol Monly, I'm your host today on Think Tech Global. My special guest is Matt Stone, who's a graduate of the Richardson School of Law, but who's now based in Japan. And he is the CEO of a company called Temenos Inc. And so welcome, Matt. Well, thanks for having me on the show. We're really looking forward to talking about Temenos Inc. and what you are doing there. So tell us a little bit about Temenos and the work that you're doing. Sure. Well, I think it's important to mention right off the bat that Temenos started here in Hawaii in 1985, we incorporated. And Dr. Irv Rubin started the company and was doing management consulting from here around the U.S., particularly on the East Coast, but around the U.S. and globally, and in particular places like New Zealand and Australia and Singapore. I joined the company roughly five years ago. I took over as COO and now CEO a few years ago. And so now what we're doing is we're still offering, you know, management and training and consulting, but we're moving into the next sort of phase of the company's existence. And we do leadership development solutions with both software and data enabled and in-person coaching and training. So your audience are organizations and what else, leaders, governments? That's right. Leadership, we usually start pretty high up at the top, but leadership on down to, you know, mid-level management in governments and corporations around the world. Okay. So let's dig a little deeper into actually what these tools are that Dr. Irv Rubin developed. What are they called? Well, the tools are built on a behavior model that Dr. Rubin, Dr. Rubin came out of MIT. He's kind of a, I guess you'd call him a guru in the organization development world. And there's some other famous names, Dr. McGregor, Doug McGregor, and Ed Shine, who's the culture guru. And then there's Dr. Rubin, who was really the feedback guru. And so years and years ago, Dr. Rubin went out to figure out what were the common behaviors, specific observable behaviors that all people around the world recognize as what he called win-win. In other words, behaviors that when they happen empower both people in a relationship. So he spent years researching it, and then he developed a model. And that model is now our source code for all of the solutions that we do. And what's the model called? It's called the Rubin 48 behaviors. Okay, the Rubin 48 behaviors. That's right. Not familiar? Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality test, right? So this is kind of an extension that is going deeper into analysis for a broader audience, right? In this case, organizations. Is that? Well, for many, many years, a lot of the solutions, disk, MBTI, a lot of them are self-assessment based. They're me reflecting on my preferences. And that's fine. There's actually value in that. It's a great starting point for a lot of people in terms of building self-awareness is starting to think about myself differently. And then as you think about yourself, if we can have a conversation about that, that might help us. But where they kind of stop and where our solutions kind of go the next mile is helping us sort of tune our currency, our behavioral currency, the words that we use and the behaviors we associate with the values that are important to us. So if we use our tools and our model, we can kind of speed up that process and allow people to have feedback conversations they would never have otherwise. Okay. So first of all, let's understand what the Rubin-48 is and then how that translates to business because I understand that's great. Sure. Well, whether it's business or organizations, now more than ever, communication is critical to success. And the issue is that we're seeing, and it's going on here in Hawaii, it's going on around the world, is that leaders and teams have to change faster than ever. They have to innovate faster, they have to collaborate, they've got people all over the world, many remote people. So communication is a bigger challenge than it's ever been. And yet we don't stay in jobs a long, long time to develop their relationships. So what happens is if I work on a team, I have a set of values. You want to say that trustworthiness is a big value for me or respect. And you would, likewise, if you're on the team, maybe you're my manager, you would also have a set of values. And if we stay at the values level, you say that I want you to act respectfully, for example. Well, I might have a different definition behaviorally of what respect looks like in a given situation. And that can be informed by my unique personality, my background, things that have happened around me in my life, just as you would have your own unique currency. So the model is a common language that helps us see if we're on the same page. So the model being, in this case, the Rubin 48. And so describe how that works. How does that look? Are there 48 items? There are. Actually, what Dr. Rubin did is he figured out that there was this common behavioral language around the world, and he would ask people, what kind of behavior do you need to experience to feel like you've had a win-win, right? And he got all of thousands and thousands of answers from people around the world. And he figured out that there were a lot of commonalities in them, and then he edited them down into 48. And there are 24, what we call push behaviors, and 24 pull behaviors. So give us some examples of push behaviors and pull behaviors. Oh, so, well, they're broken down into styles. So each push and pull have four styles each. And in the push side, you have describe, prescribe, appreciate, and inspire. Describe? Describe. Mm-hmm. Prescribe. Prescribe. Appreciate. Appreciate. And inspire. OK. So, for example, describe is about facts. It's about things that are factual. The purest form of a describe would be listening to Spock and Star Trek, if you remember Star Trek. And Spock was always very factual, right? This is what's happening, or this is what happened. That's describe. So explaining, for example, explaining the bases for your decisions is a describe behavior. Mm-hmm. For some people, that's a really important behavior. For others, it's not as important as another behavior. So if we're using our model, whether it's the feedback tool or in the other solutions that are derivatives of that, it helps people to point to a behavior and tune their behavior much more quickly. OK. So you're identifying these push behaviors, and then the pull behaviors, tell us about those. Well, the first style of the pull behaviors is attend. Like what you're doing right now, you're listening to me, you're nodding, you're making me feel like I can push information toward you. So pulling energy is about making it possible and OK for someone else to push information and thoughts and facts toward you. And so attend is the first one. It's foundational. It's a gateway. If I'm not looking at you or not paying attention to you. And whatever you're pushing toward me is meaningless. That's right. OK. That's right. Now, there are some cultural things that go on here. So I'm based in Japan, and culturally, the pull behaviors can be very different in Japan. So it's very common for Japanese business people to look down when you're telling them something, to cross their arms and make noises that maybe we may not associate with them being receptive. And I learned this years ago that I thought, oh gosh, I'm in this business meeting and someone's looking down and they're not paying attention. Actually they were, I found out later, they were thinking deeply about what I was saying. So again, my assumption about behavior is my own. And with our tools, we can more quickly understand where the differences are behaviorally. So that brings up a good point. So you mentioned you're in Japan, you're based in Japan, but of course your tool is used worldwide, right? So how do you account for the cultural differences in determining how to measure somebody's behavior? Well, the beauty is the measurement comes from the person. So the tools that we have really enable a conversation that would be very hard to have otherwise. So it's essentially a catalyst. So if I'm sitting with you and we're talking about how I'm treating you as, you know, well, we'll go back to you being my manager. Let's say we have a feedback conversation using our system. We would have a behavior model to look at. And you would be able to tell me, Matt, this is the behavior I want from you more. And from this behavior, I'd like to see less frequency in this behavior. Uh-huh. OK, so I'm taking a leap. So you and I work in the same company. OK, I'm your manager. You're my employee. I have now adopted a we as a company have adopted Rubin 48, right? So you're you're saying that with this understanding of how the tools work and adopting the tools that you and I can be more productive for our company because I can communicate with you better. You can communicate with me better. And we're on the same page. Boy, that's exactly right. I mean, we essentially have a common language that helps us accelerate our relationship and move to a place of higher trust and understanding. You know, one of the big problems that we have, we all have it, is that no matter, you know, who you are, we are operating because it's biological on assumptions, our own assumptions, our own assumptions about what something means. And we're so often wrong. I mean, how many times in your life have you found out later that a behavior that someone did at work or at home anywhere that you took it one way, but actually they meant it a completely different way? Well, I know one thing that I always think about is that and I think it is a Japanese style, which is always to nod, which to us in the Western world might mean yes, but really, as I understand the Japanese, by nodding means I hear you. That doesn't necessarily mean I agree with you. That's exactly right. The body language of nodding means I'm paying attention to you. And then when you say, for example, aso, aso, it's like acknowledging verbally, OK, but it does not guarantee that the person understands even anything you're saying agrees to give you a million dollars for your project or anything like that. You can walk away thinking, wow, we've got a great partnership. The deal is linked and then no, no, no deposit is made of your account. And you're wondering why. So we all have assumptions. And so often the way we treat other people in a given moment is really our own. It's the golden rule. Even if I treat you the way I want to be treated, that'll never get us to where we need to be. Ultimately, I need to understand what you need. Right. So do you have some examples of some major changes that you've seen in the organizations or the people, leaders who have adopted your behavioral tool? Boy, we ever. I mean, we work with the Department of Defense at the Pentagon. We do regular trainings there. We work with hospital systems and private corporations. And across the board, what we see when leaders use these tools, at first, they're a little bit hesitant. Many people in leadership have experienced what's called a 360. And a 360, if people don't know, is often an anonymous aggregated feedback loop. So here's a leader and they will interview or poll or survey anywhere from a few people to a lot of people. And then they aggregate this data. So you get this data back and it says, 22% of the people surveyed think you're horrible in this area, for example. Well, what happens is now, instead of probably a lot of valuable feedback that you might get, a lot of times it causes so much fear and anxiety and distrust. And the person who is evaluated, right? The value of that feedback can often not be ever reach a point of behavioral change. And so what we see is, as people come to our system, they hear feedback. There's immediately fear. Direct open dialogue, that can be kind of scary. But then they find out that our model is all positive. We operate on frequency perception and desire for frequency change of positive behaviors. And we have a methodology that makes it a lot easier to have a more constructive, positive conversation. So what happens is, and this just happened literally two weeks ago, we had a leadership team that is using our system and told us that it has just revolutionized the way that they're communicating with each other. OK. Well, so exactly how do they adopt? How do they find you? And how do they adopt the behavioral tool? Well, we're online. We have lots of connections and friends and partners. It depends on where you are in the world, in terms of how to find us. What's the feedback tool called? It's called Behavior Tuner. Aha, I think we have a little logo of the Behavior Tuner. Right. So the Behavior Tuner, and that is the name of the feedback tool. And how does that relate to the Rubin 48? So like all of our solutions, we also they're similar to an engagement survey that's built on the same Rubin 48 behaviors. Think of the Rubin 48 as our source code. And we have a suite of solutions that we call behavioral OS, behavioral operating system. And so Behavior Tuner lives on a site called behavioralos.com. And so it's our signature one-on-one feedback tool. And it's used by leaders around the world. And so a lot of times, if we're working with a leadership team, we'll start off by having those leaders do a few feedback sessions with other leaders. And we'll debrief them. And we have something called the Relationship 360 Journey. And that's over a three to four month process, where we do before and after assessments, so they can measure the change that happens very quickly. So I don't know if that answers your question. OK, well good. Well, we're going to go into a break. This is my guest, Matt Stone, who's the CEO of Temenos, Inc. based out of Japan, but a global company that works with our organizations and leaders in behavioral tools. We'll be right back. This is Carol Monly on Think Tech Global. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 AM. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaiiana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hello, and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly. Today we are playing Two Truths and a Lie, and I will tell you Two Truths, and you will tell me which one is the lie. Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1 PM. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly with Out of the Comfort Zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. Welcome back. This is Carol Monly on Think Tech Global with my special guest, Matt Stone, who is the CEO of Temenos Inc. So Matt, we were talking about basically how this behavioral tuner works and the Rubin 48. So tell us exactly how now does an organization or a company or a leader who might be interested in learning more about this and how to meet you and how to contact you and exactly what are we talking about in terms of maybe cost and time and follow-up. Wow, OK, that's a big bite. I'll try and tackle those one at a time. In terms of contacting Temenos, we're online at temenosink.com. Temenosink.com. Of course, you can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Just look for Matt Stone, Temenos Inc. You'll probably recognize my face on there now, so you'll find me easily. And I love connecting with more people on LinkedIn. So that's a great way, and I'm always happy to talk to people directly. Again, we talk to people all over the world. And I'd love to connect with more and more people here in Hawaii as well. We are a Hawaii corporation. This is home. So we're committed to Hawaii forever and ever. As far as how we work and how we deliver the solutions, the first thing is the diagnosis stage. So we talk with our clients. It's usually senior management, C-suite level, or senior, depending on the size of the organization. They may not have a corporate suite. But regardless, we talk to the top leaders. And because leadership sets the tone for everything. So even if they perceive that the problem might be lower down the ranks, there needs to be some stuff starting at the top. And then these days, everything's about data. Everything's about information, right? And we want to measure of success. That's right. And one of the hard things in the learning and development and anyone working in learning and development knows this. The hardest thing is when clients say, well, how do we know we're going to be successful, right? So our tools, the way they're designed in and of themselves gives you data points from the beginning and data points towards the end of a particular journey so you can actually, at a minimum, you're going to have some pretty compelling data to look at. And what is the data going to show? The data is going to show, for example, when we do a team assessment where we survey a team based on our model, we ask them about the current state priority given a particular behavior. And then we say what would be the best, the most ideal priority given to that. Can you give us an example? Yeah, so for example, explain the basis for our decisions or talk from the heart about your ideals and values. There's another behavior. So if you survey a team, you would find out, oh gosh, of all the behaviors in the 48, this behavior talking from the heart about your values and ideals, this team has identified, 85% of the team says this should be a very high priority. And a majority of members say it is currently a low, low priority. So we look for gaps in current state versus perceived ideal state. And what that does is it says, oh, we know specifically behaviorally what we could focus on right now to improve engagement, to improve the overall health of the culture of a team. And about how much time does it take from the time they decide, let's say, to contact you to acquire or purchase or engage with your company to getting the first stage of results or data. Yeah. Well, the beauty of having online tools is that we can deploy them really, really fast. The longest period of time is always the diagnostic period of what is the problem, what is the issue you're trying to solve, and then the approval process. But once that happens, we can move very quickly. And what we like to do, in many cases, and not all, it depends, is we do a survey of a division, a team, of sort of the pool of people that were at issue. And then we move from group to individual work through behavior tuner with the individual feedback assessments that we do through that tool. The beauty is they're both built on the same behavior model. So we have a common language to reference from one solution to another, if that makes sense. So above what's the size, from your smallest to maybe your largest organizations that you've worked with as you process through? Yeah, I mean, everywhere from a 10-person kind of recruiting firm to multi-multi-thousands of people at hospital systems, the US government, where we do training. I think we're doing food and drug administration. Actually, we just wrapped up a program. I wasn't the one who did it. How big is your team? Your team at particular? We have a core member, about a half a dozen people around the world. And then we have partners and affiliates beyond that. We kind of have a business model. These days in the world, you have to have a networked model, because a lot of people are contractors and doing their coaches, their trainers. And so we create opportunities for them to partner with us in using our solution. And generally, is there a how expensive or what's the cost? Yeah. Well, I just said that we work with everything from small organizations to big ones. And I would say along those lines that our pricing really reflects the nature of the issue that we're dealing with. So if a company adopts our tool set, for example, and they go through the process of an investment upfront, moving forward, the investment goes really low. Because at that point, all they need to do is buy licenses to access the tools. And then they can use them on their own. So it could be a very low cost after an initial investment, but very, very doable, especially when you look at what other expenditures that you can make in learning development space. And what kind of follow-up do you provide to your clients? Follow-up data analysis, for example, customized aggregated reports. So we can say, gosh, let's look at not only changes over time, but let's look at differences in a large organization between departments. What's going on in the marketing department versus sales versus human resources? And what's the cultural health of each one? And what are the behavioral markers that are different or the same? It's hard to have a unified culture and to maintain that culture. And yet, that's so important for brand building. Do you have any major success stories you want to share with us? We do have to keep some of them sort of the names. Confidential. That's right. That's really important. But we just worked with a company recently where their leadership team, there's been sort of an elephant in the room. And they're all really good people. These are executives. And they're all really great people. But they've been avoiding talking about this thing. And it was literally to the point where you just don't know what decisions are going to get made as a result of, after a while, avoidance leads to some big changes, no matter what. That's just there's no other way. I mean, people leave hurt feelings, but it limits our potential to build something great together. And so everyone has good intent. Everyone wants the best. But there's this elephant in the room. And we first surveyed the whole team and gave that data. And the CEO of that company called me and said, we're already, this is already helping, just knowing this behavioral data and looking at the specific behaviors, not values, but behaviors, helped us start talking. Then we moved quickly to individual one-on-one feedback sessions between them using our system. And they just said it's totally revolutionized. And they're now talking. Immediately, it started, it broke open the doors. Pick your metaphor. But the elephant is in the room, but they're talking about the elephant. And they're moving towards solutions for the future. And all three of these people that were in this core leadership team are telling us individually that they're just thrilled with it. So how unique is this behavioral tool? I'm going to use the words of a very, very seasoned person in L&D in New York City who looked at our stuff. We're doing a pilot program for a very, very exciting company that's around the country. They're very big. And I can't reveal the name right now. But after five minutes of looking at the model and the behavioral OS system, she said to me, Matt, I've never seen anything like this. This is terrific. This is what the world needs. I want it. So we're hearing that more and more. And it's a really exciting time to be working in this field. Well, you mentioned, you and I talked earlier about going to New York and meeting an author of a particular book. Yes. Right? So I think we have a picture of the book Insights, right? Oh, yeah. Tell us a little bit about that and how that relates to what you're doing. Well, and actually I went to Denver. Tasha Yurik, Dr. Tasha Yurik is based out of Denver. She's just a tremendous, tremendous mind and a human being. And we connected because I was reading her book, gosh, maybe a year and a half ago, I forget. And I read it and I thought, man, this is the most terrific book on this subject. It really explains the why of why none of us are as self-aware as we think we are and how she talks about, she writes about the research that shows that self-awareness is the most important thing to leadership success. And yet, here we are and we're none of us. And it's not about how educated you are, how old you are, we're just not as self-aware. And the only way to become truly self-aware is to have direct, open conversations and honest conversations with people around us. And that's the hardest thing to do because we're all afraid of it, all of us. Right. And it's always important to get an outside, almost person to come in and help you become self-aware. External information, external feedback. We need it, but none of us, I mean, none of us like to do it. But if we do it, the benefits are amazing. And it leads to more success in business and a happier life because let's face it, our relationships are what, that is the real difference maker, its relationships. Well, I'm gonna step back for a moment and talk about your law degree because our audience may not know Matt was at the law school when I was there as an associate dean so many years ago. But so how has your law degree helped prepare you for this international business and being based in Japan? That skill set that you've developed in law school and I know in your prior work experience which was in business, marketing, entrepreneurial work, how has that prepared you for what you're doing now? Do we have another two hours? I mean, I would never, I will never regret getting a law degree. I also practiced law, I practiced in family law and actually that comes into the picture a lot because guess what? It's relationships you're dealing with and there's a lot of similarities to the issues that go on on leadership teams and in companies because we're human everywhere we go. But I will say this, law school and practicing law and here at Richardson, what an amazing place to be. There are the relationships that I got here. It's a diverse place where we need to check our assumptions about what behaviors mean for example. But the legal thinking and analysis is so important today being able to understand what are facts and what are not facts and speak in factual terms and prioritize things very quickly and spot the most important issues. I use my legal thinking and skills every single day. Right. Every single day. So I love Richardson, I love Hawaii. I, you know, this is home and it's always great to be back here. Well, we've had a really interesting talk Matt and I have a few seconds left and I'm gonna ask you to look into camera four and give to our audience some parting information about how to either reach you and find out more about Temenos and your other last thoughts. Well thanks Carol. Yeah, do reach out to us at temenosink.com that's T-E-M-E-N-O-S, ink.com and on LinkedIn, Matt Stone. You can find your Matt Stone, Temenos CEO. I really like, you know, connecting with people and even if it's just sharing information, we wanna be of service to the world so don't hesitate to reach out. Okay, well thank you. Well, this has been Carol Monly on Think Tech Global with my special guest Matt Stone who is the CEO of Temenos, ink, which is very involved in feedback tools for businesses, organizations and leaders. Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time Aloha.