Perseverance, Personal Agility, and Passion

Episode Transcript

Kelly: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I’m Kelly Ryan Bailey, and this season we’re talking all about The Great Resignation. The global pandemic disrupted so much for so many, and one of the largest effects has been on where, when, why, and how we make a living. We’re taking a look at why people have been shifting jobs, paths, and careers at such an accelerated rate and how leaders from different industries are navigating this challenging time. Hope you enjoy this episode.

 Hey skills nerds. With me today is Bill Jensen. Bill is the CEO of the Jensen Group, a best-selling author eight times over, a global speaker, thought leader, futurist and simpleton. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Bill: Thank you for having me, Kelly. I’m thrilled.

Kelly: Me too. So this conversation [00:01:00] came about because a good friend of ours, Colleen Jenkins, suggested that we meet. You had kindly gifted me a copy of your book, The Day Tomorrow Said No, I was blown away at how you described in this book something like the future of work in such a simple way.

Actually, I wondered why you had simpleton listed in your bio and I was like, I get it now. I actually even showed my husband and my kids this book, and I was like, can you guys please read this because you might actually know what I do now. I could never figure out the best way to describe it, I’ve tried a million different ways.

But in all honesty, I just really also thought that the listeners of this podcast would really love to learn and hear from you just as much as I did. So I’m just really pleased that we get to jump in and have this conversation.

Bill: Yay.

Kelly: So let’s start off with, why do you do what you do?

Bill: There are two reasons. One [00:02:00] is from the head, the other is from the heart. From the head, I was in undergraduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology and I was taking a logic course. If, then, PQ, and/or statements, those kinds of things. And I was lucky that I had aced it in high school and they were actually, I was in my junior year, they were using the same book that I used in high school.

So I made a choice. I didn’t go to any of the classes. I was just going to take the final exam. When I was blowing off the midterm, I went around the lake, there’s Rochester, then there’s a big lake.

Then there’s north of that, is Toronto. I went to Toronto and I did all sorts of things, legal and illegal to my body. And I stumbled into the Ontario Science Center. It was one of the first interactive science kids museums, like the Exploratorium in San Francisco or for New Jersey it’s the Liberty Science Center. And I went to the back of the museum and there were these kids playing with a [00:03:00] maze. There were about 20 ping pong balls at the top, and it was about 12 feet wide, 10 feet high. And the goal was with a limited number of levers to get one ball to drop. And I watched these fifth or sixth graders do it and they blew it the first time, they blew it the second time, the third time they got it and it was like, it dawned on me at that moment, they were taking my college level midterm in logic.

Or like binary programming for some of the techies that would be familiar with it. For an and statement in logic, two halves of the statement needed to be true. That meant two gates. For an and/or statement, only one half of the statement had it to be true for it to work. That could mean one gate.

They figured out, two gates, one gate, two gates, one gate. They figured out what limited number of levers to get the ball to drop to the bottom. The challenge was, if my college level professor gave them the college book, they would never figure that out. It was a game designed at their level. [00:04:00]

So what I learned about simplicity at that moment that I’ve carried through the rest of my life, simplicity is really easy. Another word for it is empathy. You put yourself in the audience’s shoes and design backwards for their needs. You don’t design a college level textbook for college, you design it for fifth or sixth graders. So what I learned is we can make everything simple if we designed backwards from the receivers or audiences or users needs. That’s a discipline called design thinking now. So that was the dawn of why I do what I do.

I try to make things as simple as possible for everyone. And by the way, another lesson that I got to fit in a third besides my other story, the other way we learn throughout human history is we tell stories. That makes things simple. That makes things easy to understand. We tell a story. So I started with one story and I’ll tell you another, why do I do what I do?

I went back to school. I got a [00:05:00] master’s in organizational development and something happened in the middle of that that changed the course of my life. It was July 14th, 1994. My mom died. My two sisters and I rushed to the hospital. She actually died in the same hospital where she gave birth to me in Rockville Center, New York. Mercy Hospital. And we were in the emergency room and the doctor said, I’m sorry, she just had a massive stroke, there’s nothing more we can do for her. She’s only going to live a few more hours, go up to the family waiting room on the ICU, the intensive care unit on the fourth floor and go wait for her. So we waited five minutes, 10 minutes, 15, 20, I’m waiting for my father.

Nobody’s coming, nobody’s coming in. I’m waiting for my father to do something, but he’s not a take charge kind of guy. So finally at 40 minutes I went ballistic. I confess, I was an asshole. I kicked, I screamed, I cursed. But I got the doctors and nurses attention, they all came over. They all were wonderful.

Back to that word, empathy. They were empathetic and caring. But the [00:06:00] gist of what happened was, there was a miscommunication between the ER and the ICU. Nobody knew to go get mom in the ICU. She was dying alone for 40 minutes. Nobody was holding her hand. She was in the corner of the ER, nobody was with her. She was abandoned. And fortunately, I say this that way, we were with her when she died. I’m glad for that even though she had to pass. Not immediately, but a year or so after the grieving process, I realized that hospital stole 40 of the last minutes that I’m ever going to get with my mom and I never get those minutes back.

So why I do what I do, is the time and attention each of us has are the most precious assets we have every day. Most of us are wasting them. The most important number in business is 1,440. You may have remembered it was in the book, but it’s the number of minutes in a day,[00:07:00] and none of us get any more than that. None of us get 1441. And most of us piss away those minutes on meaningless, stupid stuff. What we discovered during the pandemic was, “oh my gosh, family is important”, but we’ve been killing ourselves away from our families to earn a buck.

All of us sit in stupid meetings, respond to stupid emails, waste time. We give our time to everybody else. So one of the reasons I do what I do is, whether it’s a speaking engagement or a consulting or a book, I try to somehow wrap in the realization that everything you do, Kelly, that I do, that everybody who’s watching or listening, the only way we get our work is we use a portion of someone else’s life.

We repeat that. The only way we get our work done is we use a portion of someone else’s life. So I’m on a lifelong quest now to raise the bar on how we respect each [00:08:00] other. I have no doubt that everybody listening and watching is unbelievably respectful, but let’s take it to a new level. How much value do you pack in for the other person when you use a portion of their life? That’s what we all owe to everybody we work with.

Kelly: That’s absolutely amazing. I love the concept of thinking about the other person’s time. It is surprising how many times people ask for, I just laugh about this, like ask for little favors. Those little favors aren’t always so little. Or you have stuff going on in life and adding in one more little favor could be the one that breaks everything else.

We just don’t necessarily think about it from the other person’s perspective.

Bill: And favors are okay. That’s how we all get through the day and all kinds of relationships, business, personal. But that favor also [00:09:00] needs to be returned back to that person. What value do they get after they do that favor for you?

Kelly: It’s so true. And thank you so much for sharing your story about your mom. I recently just lost my father. So the emotion is high on that, but also having this experience has really for me, the the time that you just described is so prevalent and real right now in this perspective, in this moment.

I thought about it all the time. I am a working mom, three kids. Time is precious, but you never thought about it in this way, in this final way. And you’re right.

 I just want to ask, what really led you to start the Jensen Group?

Bill: I am my own worst enemy at times. When I coach people and mentor people, I say learn from my mistakes, not the things that I’ve done right cause I’ve done far more mistakes. But [00:10:00] I could’ve made a lot more money had I gone the normal path of corporate work. I’ve always needed to tell my own story. I’ve always needed to have an impact on the world the way I needed to have it. Sometimes that’s worked out wonderfully. I’ve had a wildly successful life. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve spoken and coached to people all over the world. And there’s been horrific valleys.

There’s been great peaks and there’s been horrific valleys. So why I did what I did, you know 35 plus years ago was I needed to follow my own passion. I couldn’t do it any other way.

Kelly: That’s amazing.

Bill: My father once asked me, we had a penthouse in New York and I was throwing a party to open the business. And my father came to me and he said, where’s your security Bill? And I said to him, now he didn’t mean physical security, he meant financial. He was a cop for 20 years, he [00:11:00] retired from that. He was a fleet service clerk for American airlines. Who’s going to pay for your retirement? Is was what he meant. I said here, dad. Here. And I pointed to my chest. Me. I’m the security. And that’s something he never got. Not all of us, but many of us need to point to ourselves and say, this is how I need to go.

Kelly: I think that’s such an important message, especially for those out there considering the route of entrepreneurship. I feel it sometimes too so I know exactly what you mean. It is a question that you often get from folks. Everyone has a different mindset as we’ll talk about from the book.

And so some people just don’t fully understand that, but I’m glad you pointed that out. So in your journey starting the company, becoming the CEO of your own organization, all of the things. If you had to list, what are the three top skills of yours that [00:12:00] lead you to success?

Bill: Perseverance, personal agility, and passion.

Passion is an all-inclusive word. Vision. How am I going to make a difference in the world?

So passion is the driving force inside of oneself, that when all things have gone fluid and nothing is going right, and you’re depressed and you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills and all of that stuff. When everything that’s going wrong can go wrong, there’s an inner drive. So passion is vision, the drive to make a difference. It’s all of those things.

 Personal agility, that’s the biggest thing that will keep all of us going forward, is we need to be very adaptable. And for any of you that think you can’t or are not keeping up with it, a little while ago, March 2020, the entire world shut down and had to change everything, the way we work [00:13:00] completely. And everybody went. And somehow we all got figured it out. It was hard, it was difficult, but we figured it out.

You were born out of the womb to change every single day. We forget that after we’re 9, 10, 11, 12, we start getting robotized. We’d become part of something that says there’s THE way, and the only way to do things. You were born to change constantly. That’s how we were born. So that’s personal agility. Remembering to forget things and move on and grow and learn.

And the perseverance is just, whether it’s entrepreneurship or a corporate environment or life or deaths in the family or whatever it is, there’s going to be sucky days. There’s going to be sucky years. But rely on the passion, the drive. My drive since 1994 is to continue my mom’s [00:14:00] legacy of what she taught me. And so whenever I’m having a rough day, that’s what I draw on.

Kelly: Do you do anything, out of curiosity, because I love those three things and what you’ve just described, it’s just so inspiring and wonderful reminders. Because I often feel like when you’re in the trenches so to speak, of life, you sometimes you just forget because things do get hard. Is there anything that you do that helps you remember those on those down days?

Bill: If you gave me four, I would have added curiosity. So number four is curiosity.

What I do, I try to practice what I preach. I talked about empathy, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. So my entire consulting career is when I’m asked to do transformation, I get my marching orders from the C-suite. I have to keep them happy, but then I go talk to the frontline people. And I say, what are you doing? What are you struggling with? How is it?

An example of that in a consulting gig that I had, I was working with one of the world’s largest battery [00:15:00] manufacturers that go and flashlights and toys. And it happened to be the company’s worst performing plant in South Carolina, we turned it around to their best. But the very first thing I did when I started working with the plant manager was I went and I talked to the people on the floor.

And yes, it was pay. Yes, it was working conditions. Yes, it was the tools. And I asked them, what’s the most important thing you need done? And I reported back to the plant manager. The most important thing you can do today is paint the bathrooms. Because the bathrooms being in disrepair and constantly shoddy or whatever, never cleaned up, felt disrespectful. They felt disrespected. They felt not honored. So if you took care of the bathrooms, we’re taught that in change. There’s something called hygiene factors. Well, there’s literally a hygiene factor. If you’re walking into a messy bathroom, how good do you feel about your workplace? How do good to feel about you?

How do I personally stay [00:16:00] curious? I’m constantly researching something new that I don’t understand. Richard Saul Wurman, who founded the TED conferences and then sold them, said the TED conferences were all about him trying to learn things he didn’t know about. So I always put myself in other people’s shoes. During the pandemic, I did two jobs. Well, let me backtrack.

Two of my most admired writers that really taught me a lot about work were Studs Terkel, who wrote in the sixties and seventies, he was a radio announcer and an interviewer, and he wrote many books. One of his books, Working, turned into a play. But he always went out and he interviewed the waitresses, the bus drivers. He found the joy and heroes among the working class.

And the other was George Plimpton, who was a famous author who constantly took the role of other people. He wrote a book called The Paper Lion where this author/writer tried out for and worked on the [00:17:00] Detroit Lions as a football player.

So two of the things that I did in the past year, I did a brief stint as a census taker. I went out and I interviewed people in poor parts of our country, in Alabama and upstate New York, in New Jersey, about how are you dealing with things?

 And I asked these census interviews that I was required to ask, but I also said how are you doing? And I’ve recently finished a stint as a contact tracer, so I understand how the pandemic is impacting people. Try interviewing a mom whose four year old kid is in the hospital, possibly dying of COVID and collecting that information about how did he come in contact with COVID, et cetera. So I try to walk the talk of whatever I do, put myself in the other person’s shoes.

And the best lesson that I learned from that, this is not my original idea, empathy is obviously not my original idea, [00:18:00] but in my career when I was going for my masters, it was in the nineties around the time my mom died. And we were focused on the future of work being now. Being the twenties. 2020s to 2010s, the 2000’s.

 One of my cohorts did something absolutely brilliant. She brought in a bunch of kids from 12 years old to 18 year olds as a panel and said, interview them. There’s your future of work, talk to them. So, how do I try to stay curious? I try to always talk to somebody who’s going through change that I’m trying to help and say, how are you doing? What’s going on? What’s what are you really struggling with? And what I found, like the bathroom story, most changes that need to be done are what I call pebble in the shoe problems. They’re not vastly costly. They’re not major. [00:19:00] It’s just, I can’t do my job because of this. Can you help me with this little thing? But you only hear that when you go talk to them.

Kelly: Right. I was reading an article about burnout, I don’t know if it was yesterday, whenever at some point this week. And they were just sharing a story about, I feel like it was probably a high school or something, music class and no one asked, right.

It was like one of those situations, they put in this brand new gorgeous expensive studio and all of a sudden they started losing their best faculty members. All of these things started happening over the next year, and what they found out was all they wanted was new music stands. Like $300, less than $300 music stands because the music kept falling.

Nobody asked, so they did something crazy. And then it caused all of this disarray, like you said, this pebble, like this one thing just because they didn’t ask. But that’s been coming up a lot and I think it is so important so thank you for sharing that. [00:20:00] The other thing I wanted to ask you was along the way, these four most important skills, how did you develop them? Because you’ve talked about going for your masters, you’ve talked about different ways that you’ve practiced. Do you feel like that it’s a combination of those things? If someone else was saying, how do I do that?

Bill: I was stupid. I learned them the hard way. I always paint myself in a corner and then say, okay, how do you get yourself out of it? I always took on problems that were bigger then I could do, and then I figured my way through it. I would not advise anybody to follow my path. There were as many downsides as there were upsides. What I would say is how most of us should get through it is find mentors and find multiple mentors. Someone who has lots of experience.

One of my slides and in many of my presentations is find two mentors, one to half your age, one twice your age. The twice your age is age of [00:21:00] wisdom. The half your age is the person that can jump off the couch and fly. They have no inhibitions. They’re going to go do things. You need people who are risk-takers to coach you, who push you and say go for it. You need people who will rise and say, be cautious. You need a spectrum of coaches and mentors. Put together a full spectrum of half a dozen people, and by the way they can just be close friends that you talk to, it doesn’t have to be a hired coach.

But I would say the best way to do it is contract with those people to constantly take you out of your comfort zone. Everything you want to do, including your best life, including your best self, is always, always outside of your comfort zone. If you don’t want to do it my stupid way of it’s a hard knock life, make it easier for yourself. Put together a pool of advisors, coaches, mentors, [00:22:00] and contract with them to push you. To challenge you. To take you out of your comfort.

Kelly: That’s great advice. Yes.

So I also wanted to jump into the book, Bill, because this is something that really changed my perspective. One of the things in this book was that you actually, you just described these mentors, with different perspectives. And I love that you actually included that in the book. This had perspective from different angles, it was fascinating by the way, you guys should all go and read this book, but I know it was published in 2020. Was this book because of what was happening?

Bill: I adapted it later before it was fully published to come out because of the pandemic, but the core of it had been developing for decades. The reason for it, I was banging my head against the wall, trying to get senior execs to wake up. We need to change how we’re developing people, how [00:23:00] we’re changing, how we’re transforming our organizations.

We’re burning people out.

People are going to resign in mass if we don’t change. And by the way, the pandemic has forced that now. But, I kept trying to warn people so I thought about writing a book that was inspired by reading Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truths About Climate Change. I said, okay, I want to talk about inconvenient truths. And I wrote an entire typical business management book about inconvenient truths, and I realized nobody’s going to listen.

Because they’ve been ignoring these inconvenient truths forever. If I tell it to them in a business way, they’re going to keep ignoring it. So what I did was I took my own advice that I just gave a few minutes ago, storytelling. And I realized we all learned through storytelling. So I created a fable where the characters were the essence of the battle. One character was today. He’s Mr. More, better, faster, more, better, faster. We have to get it done. We have to get it done. The urgency of being efficient and effective.

Tomorrow [00:24:00] is our dreams, our possibilities, our futures. And little one is the workforce of the future is saying, Hey, wait a second. She’s Greta Thunburg, the ecologist environmentalist saying, Hey, wake up or you’re not going to leave us a planet. So the little one was the voice of passion and saying we have to change. The future was the voice of dreams and possibilities. And today was the voice of more, better, faster, get it done. And I allowed the three characters to essentially battle it out.

 One of the books that I was inspired by was Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle book where he took the Cold War of feuding, USSR and America with nuclear arms, and he translated it into are you going to butter it on this side or that side of the toast? And you know, it didn’t matter. Both were right. You just had to work together. So I had created a conversation between today, tomorrow, and little one.

Kelly: I love how you called [00:25:00] out that you adapted this book to the pandemic, but it had been in your mind for so long. Because I think, like you said earlier, people needing to not learning the hard way, like you did. I feel like, unfortunately, all of the things that you wanted to warn people about, they were not listening until they were pushed into this corner and into this moment.

Those things were happening all along. And people like you and I were like, hello, knock, knock. Just so you know! And then this moment happens, but you’ve written it in this way. Again, like you described this simple story with these characters where you can imagine this conversation happening at a corporate level, right.

I mean, it’s outstanding. One of my favorite things in the book is, besides the three characters and how they’re working through the challenges, these 3 B’s. [00:26:00] Can you tell us a little bit more about that without giving everything away? Cause I still want people to go out and read this book. It’s that powerful.

Bill: It’s in the telling of the story, it doesn’t matter. We’d say the 3 B’s are believer, breaker, or builder.

But what I did as a solution to how they went on a quest to figure out what are the secrets and the secrets are regardless of the details of your job, regardless of the fact that there are a billions of people on the planet, and millions and millions and millions of jobs, different kinds of jobs, all jobs come down to one of three things, or a mix of three things.

The believers are the passionate people who are dreamers who say let’s do something differently. And I believe we can do this.

The breakers are the ones who break things so that we can begin anew.

And the builders are the ones who build the systems to enable us to do that.

So all of us need more believers, but not just the [00:27:00] “I’m signed on to the culture. I’m going to do this because I’m a great teammate” but Hey, wait a second. This is wrong. This is not working. We need people who are passionately protesting what’s not working, that’s also a believer.

The breakers are, you know, Steve jobs narrated a commercial for the apple way back when that really talk about the misfits and the people who challenged the status quo. They broke things so that we could have a phone that is every single app on the planet. They break things every day so that we can do tele visits. Right now, my sister who is partially paralyzed and can’t speak is right at this moment having a tele visit with a doctor to see whether they’re going to change her meds. But the doctor doesn’t have to come to her and she can go to him.

Its amazing technology because somebody broke the systems. And the builders are the ones who build the systems for us to do that. Those are the [00:28:00] three basic job functions on the planet. There are only three and some of us do all three. Some of us do only one, but all of us do one or two or three of those jobs. And we simplified, going back to Mr. Simplicity and make it simple and simpleton, I simplified all jobs on the planet to just three.

Kelly: Yeah.

Which are you?

Bill: Yeah.

Oh, where I am most passionate? I’m definitely the breaker, the provocatour. Where I’m pragmatic and I have to earn an income, I’m the builder for my clients to enable this, to achieve their dreams. But if it were up to me, I’d be Greta Thunburg, I’d be railing at the world saying we gotta change. We gotta change. I’ve just mixed in a little bit of pragmatist builder earning a living.

Kelly: Well, no, I know. I mean, I feel like it is funny that you described that. I often think of myself as this [00:29:00] breaker, but then I’m like, but when it comes to those kinds of things you just sort of have to mold yourself into a different way.

Bill: As it relates to skills, Skills Baby, with or without the book, I encourage you to go get the book, you can get it for free. I give it away for free. You just have to pay shipping on tomorrowsaidyes.com, you can go get it for free.

With or without the book, what I would ask all of you to think about is for skills, where are my skills? Am I truly the most skillful when I’m a builder? When I’m a breaker? Or I’m a builder? And start leveraging that and also building your other skills in the other two areas.

Kelly: Thank you. I know were getting close to the end of our time, but before I ask my final question, there is just something that I’m really thinking about and all that we’ve chatted about today, because you’ve talked about these skills. Do you feel like a degree is important?

That formal [00:30:00] education is important in whatever it is, whatever B you want to be?

Bill: The current cost of how far into debt your parents or you have to go to get it? Qualified? No. Learning is a lifelong journey. Don’t get sucked into education as the only path for learning. I spoke earlier about Richard Saul Wurman and the TED conferences. My son is now 35, when he was a teenager, I stole from his college education to take him to the TED conference.

He said, other than the becoming an Eagle boy scout and how his parents raised him, that was one of the biggest highlights of his life. It taught him so much about life, about people, about technology, about curiosity, about [00:31:00] passion. So there are many different ways to be a continuous learner.

Yes, absolutely. Be a lifelong continuous learner and challenge yourself to learn something new every day. And even if it’s minuscule, learn something new every day. But to your direct question, don’t confuse education with learning. There are many ways to achieve your goals of learning without going for the education.

Kelly: Sage advice. Okay. Last question for you, what’s the one thing that you learned from the pandemic that was most surprising to you?

Bill: Well, I’ve asked this in coaching others this question, I’ve coached leaders this question, and what came out when I asked others this question was they were surprised. Not surprised, but it’s finally had a major aha, wow family and relationships really matter. Oh my God. I’ve been dissing them for so long because I thought work mattered.

No family [00:32:00] and relationships matter.

And secondarily, wow, I am my job. I can change. I did it. I did. I changed in ways that I am capable of far more change. That’s what I coached other people to realization. Me? Why I moved back in with my sister and to help her with her problem? Family. Is the most important thing.

Kelly: Okay, I got a little emotional there. Very sweet. Thank you so much Bill, for joining us today as well. This has been absolutely amazing. I’m just so thrilled that our paths crossed. Huge thank you again to Coleen Jenkins for pushing us together because this has been absolutely amazing.

I’m sure that I would love to continue to learn from you more. But anyhow, I want everyone to know that if you want to purchase Bill’s books, he’s got more than the one we’ve talked about today by the way, or get more information on the Jensen Group, you’re going to go over to [00:33:00] simplerwork.com.

And then if you want to find Bill on social media, he is available on LinkedIn or @simpletonbill on Twitter. Is there anywhere else you’d like to hang out on social media bill that we should know about?

Bill: Twitter and LinkedIn are the primary ones.

Kelly: Okay, perfect. Perfect. So please go out, find those. I want you guys to read this book and please come back and let us know what you think about it, because it is just such an amazing read.

All right. Well, I hope you all have a wonderful day and talk to you soon.

Thanks for tuning in to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcast production. If any part of this episode resonated with you, we would love for you to share it with a friend or colleague who might feel the same. Feel free to reach out to me at Kelly Ryan Bailey on social and learn more about the events and initiatives we have coming up at skillsbaby.com.

 Thanks again for spending some [00:34:00] time with me and most importantly, have a great day.