The Compassion Within: How to Grow a Business That Reflects Your Values with Robert Glazer

Robert: What is the impact that you want people to say that they've had on their life, right? And that that will be the thing that was most important to you. Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib.

Today I've got with me Robert Glazer. Robert is a serial entrepreneur. He's an author, he's a speaker, and he's an expert in core values, in people, in how to retain staff, how to scale your business, especially from the people side of things. It's something that I think I've struggled with a lot over the years.

I've certainly gotten better. I don't think I'm where I need to be. And so, somewhat selfishly, perhaps I've got one of the leading experts here with me. Robert.

Robert, welcome to the show. Robert: Thanks for having me. And we're on different days here, so, you'll have to gimme some stock tips from Thursday morning. Allan: I'm in the Future baby.

Robert Glazer's Background and Expertise - Allan: Um, Robert for those who don't know who you are what do you do and who do you do it for? Robert: That's still a little bit of a complicated question, so I, as you said, I started a couple companies, the largest of which is Acceleration Partners. It's a global partner marketing agency. I'm the executive chair of that business now.

I'm not really involved in the day-to-day, more kind of on a board role and m and a and working with developing our leaders in the organization.~ I started spending a lot more time. ~There were a lot of things as we built that organization that we tried differently or figured out. And I started kind of similarly you rotor marketing book about our industry and then started writing some books about people and leadership.

And so I'm spending more and my time these days writing on Substack and speaking and the Elevate podcast. So that, takes up a lot of my time, kind of, and my sort of purpose is to find these ideas that help people in organizations grow. Allan: I've certainly enjoyed your content. I, I get Friday forward every week and I've listened to your podcast.

You talk a lot about. The Importance of Core Values in Business - Allan: I guess practical things like retaining staff, scaling up your capability using people, and then, you kind of get into some softer, I guess, areas well, or maybe seemingly softer areas like core values and things like that. And I know you've got a book coming out about core values. I've kind of fluctuated over the years from.

You know, this core value stuff, it's a bunch of nonsense. You do it on an offsite where, you know, waste a lot of staff time and all of this sort of stuff. People really just want a job that they're happy with, that they've got career progression with, and they get paid fairly for. And then, I've kind of fluctuated to the other end.

I'm like, no. Look, I do see that people work better when they're mission driven, when they feel like, you know, we are working for something bigger as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. I mean, you are one of the leading experts on this, and you've seen it both as an entrepreneur and as someone who advisors entrepreneurs.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on how this kind of fits into the day to day of a business of various advisors. Robert: Look like you on the and, you know, we can talk about, I'm gonna separate business core values and personal, there's some similarities, but there's some strong differences. And like you, as I was building my business, I would just go into these companies and I would see the stuff on the wall and integrity and respect. And when I was like, this is such garbage, like, you know, and, and I, I just.

and I actually was like really down on the whole thing and didn't believe in it. And then I started meeting these like really great companies. Uh, And I started, you know, I read the Netflix culture deck by Patty McCord. And I knew a lot about Southwest Airlines and I, all this stuff that their employees did without kind of operating manuals and learned about that company and the CEO I knew all their strategic things that were different.

And he said, what is it that made you, and he said. The, it's the culture. And so, I came around to that, you know, very few companies had it, but when you had real core values ones that were sort of differentiated and not the table stake thing that, that's sort of the common reason why people wanna join this company. I agree with you.

They need a good pay and they need. You know, there's some basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs and work that they like, but they wanna feel like they're doing, you know, what's aligned. And ~what I ended up, once we got the,~ I figured out my personal core values and as the founder, I realized the company's core values were gonna be very tied to that. For example, you know, you mentioned my tech talk and we were talking before about sort of ending two weeks notice.

I have a personal core value of respectful authenticity. Like, I think trying to be authentic and direct but also like being respectful, like can't stand sort of disrespect. And like that program came completely out of that value of like, how do we change this on his head and tell people the truth, but give them a way to move on in kind of a different way. But I moved on to the personal side when we started to do leadership development stuff and realized that look like Allan and Bob are gonna lead differently.

Like even if we work at Acme Company and the company says Here's what we want good leaders to do, we're gonna lead very differently. We have different experiences, we have different childhood stuff that like has helped us really like form who we are and we tend to overcompensate on those things. I found that leaders either knew it and identified what it was and was leading from that point of strength, or it was like an other steering wheel that someone else was driving and it's why they were fighting with people and stuff because they couldn't put a label on these things that were really in important to them.

And just one example, I've seen like a lot of leaders who have a core value of trust that often comes from some violation of trust in their life. I've done this enough to know, to ask that question. I don't ask them what happened. I said, did you have this?

And you know, they look really emotional. Well, those leaders tend to just sort people on their team into, can I trust them or can I not trust them? And if you're five minutes late to a meeting and they don't know why or they can't find you in the afternoon, you're like, put in jail and the key is thrown away and you don't even know why. So, we show up with all this stuff and over the years and the new book realize like, wow, if people could actually figure this out and articulate this stuff, I think they could really lead better.

And a lot of my work is really about how do we grow organizations by growing the people. Allan: I've always had the view that a business brand is very much derivative of the personal brand of the founder. Like we see a lot of Steve Jobs in Apple, even still he passed away decades ago. We see a lot of Richard Branson in the Virgin brands, and we see Elon Musk in the Teslas Robert: You see the pro and the con of Elon Allan: pro, but yeah, exactly.

Can be a pro or a con. Building and Maintaining Company Culture - Allan: That's uh, but either way, do you think that the company culture is derivative of the leaders way of being or core values or whatever it is, and is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? And can that change without changing the leader?

What are your thoughts there? Robert: Yeah. It probably does change eventually as you go through, but yeah, I think the DNA, you're gonna be able to look at the company DNA and~ it shouldn't rhyme, but it should have patterns. You know,~ it should rhyme.

It wouldn't be identical with the founder because you're trying to say, Hey, what are all these people, you know, a personal core values, what are the things that I hold near and dear that are my non-negotiables? In a company, it's what are the things that we sort of all agree to that are our thresholds. Right. I think about universities, right?

And they're, you know, a small liberal arts university has a certain value proposition that's maybe more rural and it's very different from a campus, large city one. ~they're not,~ they can both be great schools, but they're not pretending to be different things. And I think in these organizations, you can't be everything to everyone and I think this is where organizations fail. And you know, so a culture at a place like Tesla that says we work crazy hour and we do hard things, but we accomplish things that no one does.

That's really appealing to some people and it's really not to others. And that's the point I think if an organization doesn't have some common threshold or rules or reasons why we're all here. It's hard to hold that together. I think a lot of organizations loses it.

A lot of them don't have. ~The values aren't~ look Enron when they went down for their scam and everything, their core stated core values were integrity, respect, and something else. The, the, The real values at Enron were take huge risk, stab other people in the back and like do it without asking. Right.

~Like those, ~because those were the behaviors that are rewarded. we have a puppy. We just had the dog trainer over for an hour before I did this. It's all about what you reward and what you know, slap their hand on.

And adults are like that too. So in an organization, if you're saying one thing, but you're either economically or emotionally rewarding another behavior that becomes the culture. If you celebrate the person who works 18 hours, you get a culture that, you know, says that the hours matter. We make a whole statement at our company.

We don't want you to work 18 hours, rather than ask the client what they actually need and figure out how to do it in six. Right? So, that stuff determines very much I think, how people behave. Allan: So, as the business grows, so let's say you're, you are the founder, you've kind of set the company culture.

You are clear on what gets rewarded, whether it's long hours or hard work or whatever, taking Robert: Or maybe you're not clear, but other people are clear. Right? You haven't said it. Yeah.

Yeah. Allan: Either way. Either way. And presumably you, you obviously want to do that as intentionally as possible.

You wanna be like, look, this is what we stand for. This is what gets rewarded. This is what'll get you promoted. As the business grows and maybe as a founder, and I mean, you've obviously had that experience with Elevate where you move out of the day-to-day leadership role and you're more.

Maybe on the board or whatever else. Is it just that you've gotta accept that the company culture's going to change and shift, or is there a way to transfer that to the new leadership team? Robert: I think it's a great question and I think, look there's a founder who held up the whole thing and it falls down under them because no one believed it. And then there's the founder, you know, who really sort of built the next levels and trained them and hired the people with the share of values and built that culture so that it's consistent in that it stays and that it goes on beyond them.

So. I've seen both kinds. We've done a couple projects this year for companies that are, either done some acquisitions or had a new leader and felt that like their core values and their culture were a little off. And one of the things that comes up a lot in talking to them when we've done these projects is, look, there's a say do gap, right?

So some of the problems are, you're saying things that aren't true, right? You're saying we value X and it's not true, and so everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know like, you know, be excellent. Like I can look around and find a hundred examples where we've rewarded fast and not excellent.

But on the flip side, there's some things that are really endemic to the culture that, that people really value that aren't being said or stated explicitly. So what they're trying to do is like close that gap, as you said, like the easiest thing in the world, Gandhi, the I life is happiness, you know, is what when you think, say and do are all aligned. Like think about that a great culture. What if it was just what we are thinking in our heads is what we're saying is what we're doing and rewarding.

And what you, but you have to understand is that doesn't appeal to everyone. I always say at Acceleration Partners, like if we did that right, it appealed to like the 2% of people we're trying to find that align to our work and our culture. So many people are trying to be everything to everyone versus saying no, like. Look, we're a fast moving digital agency.

One of our core values was own it. ~You just can't be.~ You can be in a lot of different industries. You can't be in this industry and someone who needs consensus around everything and to move slowly.

That's just not the job. It's not what clients want. They want people who think fast and move fast, and are willing to take ownership of that. That might be great, you know, at a nuclear facility, like, you know, consensus on everything.

Check it twice, but that's just not. That's not what the clients or the culture values. So that's what a lot of companies I think are trying to do. How do you figure out the stuff that is actually in the culture that you're not explicitly saying, and you said it before, this stuff lives when you hire on it, fire on it, give out awards on it, talk about it in performance reviews.

Then people are like, oh they're serious about this. Allan: Yeah, I mean, as a. As a business, you're essentially running kind of like a two-sided marketplace and the skills are pretty similar. So, on one side of the marketplace, you're attracting clients.

On the other side, you're attracting employees and contractors and things like that. And just like from a marketing perspective, being all things to all people is a losing strategy. So you wanna be. Very clear about, Hey, this stuff is for, such and it'll get you this specific result.

And a lot of people kind of fear kind of, you know, they wanna widen the net. They feel like if I widen the net, I'll get Robert: everyone, everyone wants the social media has caused us to want to be liked and broad approval. So we have this core value of Own it, allan. I'm interviewing you.

What happens is if I say, well, what do you think about our core value of Own it. You go Love it. Love, own it great. Right?

Like, like 'cause, you know, but it's different if I go, okay. Allan, can you tell me about a time, like in your, one of your last couple jobs when you completely screwed something up and how did you handle it and how did you deal with it? Well, these stories are gonna tell me like how you own it, right? Rather than you just saying, oh, I love that value.

So that's the problem is that a lot of people just you know, the interviewee sees the values they say that. ~I've had a,~ it's funny, I've had a lot of people ask me, if I'm interviewing, how do I know that a company like lives their values? I'm like, that's super easy. Ask the interviewer what the values are and see if they can name more than one of them, you know, without pulling out a card.

And then ask them the last time that someone got called out for violating that or how were they rewarded for? For doing it. Right. And if you, if you ask that question to my friend's, Eric's company, one of his employees would be like, we have these monthly core value awards.

The person who wins them gets this thing. There's a ceremony, there's a parking space out front like we do. Like it. Would those are the answers that you want to hear.

Not that someone wrote them on a wall, you know, five years ago. Allan: Yeah. The world ones with the uh, with the lion, uh, Robert: Yeah, Allan: image of the lion Robert: respect. I have this funny story that I show in my presentations where I wrote an article on LinkedIn that these are not core values.

These are fake core values, and it was an office that was like everyone you could think of, respect, humility, whatever, is like 25 of them. And some woman from London I think commented on the post and said, this is so great. This looks just like my company's values. Where did I get it?

I was like, oh, you may wanna read the article. I was kind of making fun of them, like, Allan: That's funny. Company culture is one of those things that, you know, you know it when you see it but kind of hard to define beyond like ping pong tables and free snacks in the break room and things like that. How do you build a strong company culture?

~How do you ~maybe start it, how do you define it? And then how do you build one. Robert: Well, Silicon Valley has totally distorted our definition of culture. 'cause as you said, like those are perks, right?

And free coffee and a free flu shot at your desk. So you won't leave the office like is not. Culture. It's a perk.

And a lot of time the perks are meant to hide, you know, defects in the culture. So cultures really is easy. it's what are the behaviors that are being rewarded? And so when I see well-written core values, they should describe ideal behaviors, and that's the behavior you should look around.

And that's how people are acting and that's how they're behaving. I really think that's the simplest definition of culture, and it's great if you have perks and all that stuff but again, why are we here and What are our red lines as an organization, right? I, you know, if someone has a core value in their company or their family like we do, hard things like that has a very definitive meaning and that's a means a lot more to me than something like honesty. Allan: Yeah.

I've always been of the view that you can't really turn B and C players into A players. And I've also been of the view that a players are very contextual. Like someone can be an A player in this business, but then move to another company or another role or whatever. And b, a C player or a B player what are your thoughts?

Am I on track, off track. Robert: Yeah, you have a very similar line to mine. I actually think people think like players become this sort of pejorative thing, like you are born with it or not. So I've added to the Jim Collins definition, I think a right player is the right person in the right seat, in the right time.

~And so we had people.~ A lot of fast growing organizations, the seed is changing, right? So if you don't adapt and do what needs to be done and you can't get better, you can fall out of being an A player. You can be in the wrong area.

Your skills could not be used. So, I think that generally the highest performers or people who have what I talked about in the ability to build their capacity, the ability to improve and get better, and learn from their mistakes, and sort of rise along that curve. And those are the people that can, become a players. The problem is if the organization's growing like this and the person comes in and they have no ability to get better, right?

They're gonna fall below the bar like the acceptable bar pretty quickly. And if the organization's growing 50% and they are getting better 10% a year, like, you know, they're also gonna sort of slide down. for me it's how do you find people who have demonstrated sort of high capacity in the building and how do you create an environment that around learning and building people's capacity holistically so that they get. Better.

Otherwise you just have to keep, you know, what we've done in the zero interest rate period. Growth is like, let's just grow and just keep changing out the bodies. Right? The, this to me is the equivalent.

I always say NASA, but it's probably gonna be Elon Musk. if NASA or Elon Musk went to put a thing on Mars and the thing lands on Mars and it opens up and all the crew's dead. Like you don't expect everyone to clap for that and be excited that the ship made it to Mars, but all the crew's dead. That sort of feels like how high growth startups have been over the last five or 10 years.

Allan: Yeah. I mean, there is that Peter principle where people kind of get promoted to their level of incompetence where someone will be like, you know, they're great at this role. Great, let's promote them. Great.

They nailed that role Next promotion. Next promotion. And then they get to a stage where maybe they've tapped out at their capacity or their level or, or Robert: hard for them to accept that. Like it's a really hard thing to accept.

Allan: And it's hard from a business and leadership perspective because you know that, this is a good person. They're not doing anything wrong. They've actually been integral to your growth and they've been you know, someone who's helped you along the way and now they're just no longer a right Robert: Yeah. Allan: fit for where where we need to go.

So that's, that can be difficult conversations. So, how do you think about handling that Robert: Well, I'm glad you asked that question because it brings up a psychological principle that I have not named yet, but is a, it's a cousin of cognitive dissonance. Lemme tell you what I think happens. So Allan's on my team, as you just described, right?

Allan's like, been with me and he is grown. He is grown, but we're growing like crazy. And Allan's just sort of, you know, tapped out and he is starting to struggle and you know, he, he's having a hard time realizing it Well. Here's what happens.

I kind of know that I'm gonna have to fire Allan or move on from Allan. So what I do is I start to get annoyed at Allan make, my brain can't handle this. Allan's good guy and I have to do something bad to Allan. So what I start to do is I get frustrated, Allan, oh, Allan screwed up again, and I make Allan into this bad guy so that I can make myself feel better firing Allan.

That is the default thing that people do. I'm encouraging them, and in my book, rethinking two weeks notice to flip that around, which is. Use the relationship. Allan, you're a great guy.

Like, but let's just say you're in sales. You've been at 50% of your quota over the last three quarters. Like you and I both know, this isn't working ~Like, it's not like, ~can we help you find something else? Can we help you find a different job?

Like lean into the relationship, but don't avoid the reality of where Allan is and where the performance sitting is. I think like, use those together rather than separate it. But I see a lot of people do that former thing, which is they have to like make Allan a bad person so that they can do the bad thing. You know, we have transitioned a lot of people found them different roles, found them new jobs by just saying like, Hey look, ~this isn't, this is, ~you and I both know this isn't working anymore, but I care about you as a person and I want you to land.

So like. You can go start looking for your new job. I'll make referrals for you. Do you wanna, I know you've tried sales, but do you wanna go back to marketing?

You seem to like marketing better than sales. It just, you know, when we put off having a hard conversations, they're only harder conversations, and I think a lot of these things are solvable if we're willing to have an honest conversation a little earlier. Allan: Yeah they're not like red wine. They don't get better with age.

Robert: no, my son just had this he was transferring schools and he was just had to call his friends and tell them about it. And he was sleepless night. And I was like, look, It's gonna be so much better when you just do it right. It doesn't, I've never had a difficult conversation that I put off where it got better because then the lie gets bigger, the problem gets bigger.

If you're in a relationship, you know how this works. You put off something that they were driving you nuts, and so what happened? Six months later it all comes out and then you start saying, and then three months ago you did this, and six months ago you did this. And then they're like, this has been bothering you for six months.

So, yeah we think we're gonna wait. And ~it's almost it,~ in my experience, it never gets better. Allan: The voice in the back of your mind is though, you know what? They've stepped up every other time.

They've been able to you know, do a job that they weren't qualified for before. Maybe they'll be able to handle this job. Maybe they will be able to. You know, level up or whatever.

And sometimes it's just outside of their capability. Like a lot of times, especially with lower level roles, enthusiasm covers a lot, right? Navigating Employee Growth and Role Evolution - Allan: Being enthusiastic, being smart, being able to be a go-getter can do it. But some roles you've just gotta have deep experience in that.

And, you know, the jazz hands no longer, no longer cuts it. Robert: Look, and sometimes like they know it, right? They know it and they're already there and they they don't want to give up. And look, I give an example, part of the capacity building framework, I talk like, let's try our best to get these employees on the highest curve that they can get.

However, it's not gonna be enough. In some cases, I can put all the miracle grow. Do you have that in Australia? The, or on, on a.

Person, and I am not gonna turn a bookkeeper into a controller into a CFO for three years. But if my revenue's growing 400% a year and I go from 1 million to 10 million, I need a CFO. And I can't tell you the number of people who really love their controller. And felt bad about being, and I have a friend who felt bad about bringing a CFO and so he, he promoted the controller even though he knew it wasn't the right thing to do, and she made a million dollar mistake because she didn't understand international tax and finances.

There were just some requirements of that role that person didn't happen. Have and I, again, the hard conversation in that case is look. We're bringing in a CFO. You're a controller, you're gonna train under this person, you're gonna have a mentor, and I know if you want to be a CFO and they're still here in three years and we're holding you back, we will totally support you.

You know, going to look for that role elsewhere. But I can't, just to not hurt your feelings, give you a job that is A, you're not qualified for, and B, that you don't meet the objective metrics that we've stayed out. If we were really honest, right? If we wrote out the job spec, we did the thing, we were interviewing the person and we held them to the same standard as the external person, we'd say, oh, you know, we said we want 'em to have a $5 million book of business, and this person's only had a $1 million book of bus.

Like it'd be much easier to hold ourselves, you know, to that standard. Allan: Yeah. Adapting to Business Scaling Challenges - Allan: As the business is scaling, so like, let's say, I mean there, there's a world of difference between the people you need at startup level versus, you know, you've hit a million dollars in revenue, million dollars in revenue versus say, $5 million is revenues quite different. And then getting into eight figures, plus again it's quite different.

what do we need at each kind of stage? Robert: S Yeah. We had coaches once told me, every time you double your revenue, you break half your people and half your processes. And I think it's a, I think it's pretty close.

And sadly, and I came to this the hard way. You either need people who are voracious learners and who want to change and improve and understand that the job at one, including the CEO, right? I have to be like, look, being a CEO of a $10 million company is different. I have to reinvent myself or you need new people.

And it was really hard for me to sort of come to that conclusion. But you know, the reality is you start rewarding different things. So I distinctly remember that like when we kind of 30 is the magic number, where the first kind of culture change starts to happen because up to 30 you have everyone that does whatever the company does, and then a third you start having your first HR person or administrative or marketing or otherwise. And ~ I remember, you know, distinctly what,~ you know, this is a baseball analogy, but we have this notion of a utility player, someone who plays any position, right?

And that's what we rewarded. We rewarded people that could play any role, and we rewarded, you know, firefighters. And then at some point I was like, I need all stars. You know, at each of these position, and I need fire prevention people, and I understand that we've rewarded you for this.

And some of the people, they just can't do it. So what they should do is they should go back to that 1 million company again and grow them to 10, and then they should go do it again because they like that stage and that's the stage that they're comfortable with. And look for me as a CEO, I made that decision three times that the business doubled, or four. And then on the fifth I said.

I don't wanna be the CEO of a 5th. I'm looking at the job description and the CEO of a $50 million business. And I don't wanna do that job. I don't wanna manage all the people.

I wanna work on R&D. So I like, I had to do that for myself. Allan: Yeah, you get to a stage as you add team members. Like,~ like you, you know, you know~ in the beginning you know everyone, you know what their lives are like.

You're on Zoom meetings with them all day, ~and then one day there's.~ And I've found this myself. And we are not a huge company. We are maybe at about 20 people, but there are people who like you don't even know what they do there.

You see them in this, in the Slack channel. And yeah, so you go from really knowing everybody and connecting with everybody to there's people being hired and fired that you didn't even speak to once. So, it's. Robert: very different.

And you have to adjust, right? And I think if you're not willing to adjust, like there's a thing, you know, everyone loves progress, but no one likes change. And the only constant is change when you're growing a business, I. Allan: Yeah.

Hey, it's Allan here, ready to dive deeper into today's marketing insights? Head over to lean marketing.com/podcast. To get a full summary of today's episode, including all of the resources mentioned, go to lean marketing.

com/podcast. Now, back to the show. Leveraging AI in Modern Workflows - Allan: Um, To switch gears a little bit, so I heard you talking about capacity a lot, increasing capacity increasing, kind of leveling up and all of those sorts of things. I can't help but think about, you know, how AI integrates into some of these things because I mean.

You know, you and I as writers I dunno, cer certainly myself are using large language models. I don't get it to do the writing for me Robert: Yeah. It's a great editor though. Allan: amazing editor, amazing thought partner, amazing.

Like sometimes I'll be on the verge Robert: researcher. Yeah. Allan: Great researcher. I just dunno how to finish this sentence and I'll get it to give me a few options or i'll, there's a word I'm looking for, I can't quite connect or whatever else.

And it's just made me a lot more productive as a writer. and this is the case in many roles in legal and accounting, in coding and all of that sort of thing. How are you seeing that being rolled out and, you know, what are the mistakes people are making versus how are people leveraging it really well? Robert: Yeah.

You know, I'm never a minimalist and I'm never a maximalist on these things. And so I'm always like, you know, the people that are like, everything's gonna be ai, whatever. And then the people are like, I don't know how to use chatGPT. I look at them incredulously.

I'm like, if you're not spending $20 a month on premium, like then your time isn't worth anything because it saves me two hours a day. So I wary. And you know, the first study came out like you and I know what we're good at. We have, presumably we're pretty baked at this point.

We have good critical reasoning skills, thinking skills, writing skills. They just came out with the first study this week from MIT that they sort of scan people's brains who are working pretty regularly with large language models over months. And like the more they worked with a model, the more their brain activity. Sort of decreased.

What I'm worried is like I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at the difference between learning, using it as an accelerant and using it as a crutch, I mean, everyone's cheating in universities here, it's hard to know. You know, the writing a sincere thank you note doesn't mean anything. So I, I worry about my kids and how it, it impacts their ability to develop these skills, right? Because the only advantage that we're gonna have at the end of the day.

Is our creativity and the things that make us human. And if if we ruin those by not building those muscles because we let the machine do it then we can't beat the machine. It's like a weird, it's sort of a weird circle. So I think that it's gonna be become bigger part of work, but I think there's gonna be a whole revolution of like I want to be offline.

I want to be with humans in person events. I think the premium on in person, we already see this in concerts, right? You can get any music in the world for free and I gotta go pay $500 to go see Coldplay in a couple weeks. I think that authenticity and I think in some way if people realize that someone is writing for real.

In the future, like that may come differently than someone who can tell it's all ai. As I was saying to someone, they were like, they were talking about ~art, mu~ music and art, and you know, it's producing stuff that's better. And I was like, well, yeah, but you know this thing of g Clay where you like take a art and then you reprint it. Like it's worth like a hundredth of the original, even if it's perfect.

So there's some, there's still some value of the human piece, so I think you can't not afford to be using it or figuring it out, but I also think we're gonna have to figure out where the human touch matters and where, look, you and we're marketers, right? You know that once you and I get 500 perfectly written outreach emails a day, the person who's gonna get our business is probably the young kid who picks up the phone and gets us on the phone, right? And with a real, not a real human, Allan: Well, there, there's this Japanese concept of wabisabi, which is kind of imperfect stuff, you know, like, you know, a Toyota is manufactured perfectly, every screw is in the exact right place.

All of those sorts of things. It's all machined to perfection to one, one 10th of a millimeter or whatever it is. Whereas a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari's assembled handmade, but, and you know, literally there, there's a guy who draws the, his whole job is drawing the coach line along the side of the Rolls Royce. And that's what makes the, those cars so valuable because, I mean, they're handmade, they're handcrafted.

Someone said you don't buy a Rolls Royce. You commission a Rolls Royce, right? So, Robert: so, right. So people value that.

I've heard people say you should make spelling mistakes in your emails now to let people know that it's, you know, that it's not ai. But I think there will be, look soon there'll be a detection on everything that was written before it, which, you know, you'll find newsletters and stuff that you liked and it'll say, oh, this was all written by the computer. And I just, I think there'll be some disappointment around that. I could be wrong but I think figuring out how to work with it, but not let it be the driver.

As you said, I write all my own stuff. I've never had to come up with an idea, but it's just a great editing partner. Right. I can I'll write the email or, now, these days I realize even faster, I, if I had to write you a long email, I do.

Terrible editor and a terrible typer. So now record the whole thing in a 82nd video and have it turn into the email and then send it. So it's my thoughts, it's my words. It's just cleaning up some typing and stuff for me.

Allan: Yeah, I think of it very much in, it's part of the e evolution writing. I mean, uh, you know, we went from ha scribes writing by hand to then the printing press. And you know, it's interesting if you look at the headlines at the time of every kind of major new technology there was a lot of concern people thought the printing press was gonna lead to a whole bunch of misinformation, a whole bunch of. Robert: Well, it sort of did, right?

And so did social media. Allan: It did. It, it did. But it that was a lot.

I mean, if you look at the headline from that time, which is somewhere in the 1700 that could be applied to today, like where people were concerned about social media misinformation, they're, I remember when, and this was probably dating me, but my parents and teachers were very concerned that spell check was gonna make us dumb. Right? That we weren't gonna be able to spell words Robert: not wrong about that though. Right.

You know, like in some ways. But I do, or Grammarly, you know, you wanna learn from these tools, like, it's a great tutor. I mean, I encourage my kids to have it, read their papers and tell it what grade it would give them and give them a critical analysis of their paper. Right.

That's like having a TA read it. So, I think it's gonna be a little tricky. I, I do think that. It's gonna put a premium on real and in person and look, I wouldn't do a contract or I wouldn't do a big deal with someone if I couldn't meet them in person.

I've seen these things where people can put on filters and change their look and 20% of job candidates now are fraudulent at every company. They're a fake bot. They're trying to get hired by the company to then get in the computer systems and infiltrate. The company.

So, so there's a lot. It's moving. I think it's moving faster than any technological innovation you or I have seen in our lifetime. Allan: Yeah, which is, you know, exciting as well.

I mean, I lean to the more positive side. I know a lot of people feel like it's all negative. And there's definitely, you know, pitfalls and things to watch out for. But more and more I'm excited by it.

Uh, I'm a tech geek from way back, but I haven't coded in decades, but I've started coding again, thanks to. Robert: Your vibe, coding. Allan: If I'm vibe coding, that is exactly right. So, and I, I, yeah, it's, Robert: yeah.

The ability to get good at anything or, you know, I, what was it last night I was trying to understand some geopolitical thing that's going on. I just kept asking you questions and it kept answering like, and it was like teaching me history. Yeah. Allan: Incredible.

Discovering and Implementing Core Values - Allan: Let's switch gears a little bit. So your new book is coming out, the Compass Within all about core values. Give us the TLDR and the preview of coming attractions. Robert: yeah, so, so the biggest change in, in my life by far was about 12 years ago, figuring out my personal core values and sort of orienting my business and my life around them and leadership.

And we ended up. Training our, like figuring out a process to do that, helping our leaders. I turned it into a course. Couple thousand people took the course and they were, it was making a meaningful difference and so I was like, how do I get this to more people?

Because a lot of people just don't go directly to a course. I could write a book on this. I get asked a lot about a lot from the spiritual capacity thing I talked about in Elevate and I just was like, I'm not sure that I'm gonna get people to read a book on core values. And I'm just not sure they'll pick it up.

And I love Patrick Lencioni's books. I like Bob Berg's parable The Goal. And so eventually I was like, huh, I wonder if this would work in sort of a parable where I could show this in the form of a character who's kind of going through these struggles. I call the big three, which is your vocation, your community, and your partner.

So, you know, his name is Jamie. He's the protagonist in the story. He's going through some career stuff, some relationship stuff, and some stuff figuring out where he wants to live, and he meets a mentor who walks him through this process to figure out his core values and decides to make changes in each of those areas. And then at the end, it sort of walks you through that framework.

So you got to to see it. And so I think it works. I, you know, it's short, it's easy to read and it kind of gets people, I've had a lot of people, friends and stuff who've read it in advance and they've been like, I feel like you wrote that about me. I'm going through this issue in my work or my relationship.

I was like, I. no, it's it, it, you know that exactly. We're all supposed to relate. We've had these problems.

But if I look at the world today and what one of the many problems are, is that I think we're just increasingly tribal. Tri, you know, the politics has become the new form of religion. We're finding ourselves taking very weird stances that don't make sense because this team did it and then this team did it. And I'm in both of those teams and I think we've kinda lost our mooring and I and I think getting back to some understanding our values, what's really important to us, and that we can stay.

Within that, as the circumstances change around us and do that consistently I, I think it's part of the way out of this and how people feel better about themselves and the decisions that they're making. So to me, your personal core value, sort of discovery is your ultimate decision making rubric. Should I do this? Should I marry this person?

Should I take this job? Should I do this layoff this way? Should I work for this boss? Like these are the big questions that these can help kind of help you answer.

And when most people say I, I know, like when I ask a hundred people like, do you know your personal core values? 40 or 50 will say, no, I don't really know it at all. You know, another 30, whatever will say, yeah, I've thought of some things. But usually like two out of a hundred are like, I have personal core values and I've written them down.

And those people are usually operating at a different level. Allan: Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and~ I know the, uh, the old. You know, back in,~ I mean, as far as I can remember the exercise for figuring out your core values was, you know, you've died, your wife is at your funeral. Your boss is at your funeral, your one of your friends is your funeral.

What do you want them to say about you? But, but I've always found a disconnect between that. I mean, obviously you want your wife to say he was a wonderful husband, your children to say he was a wonderful father, all of this sort of thing. Your friend to say he was a loyal friend and all of this sort of stuff.

But also how that translates to the day to day. Like I, I do feel like, hey, I want to achieve these big things. I want to do hard things. I want to get physically stronger.

I want to get I wanna become a New York Times bestseller. I want to do, you know, this revenue level or whatever. and maybe the answer is in your book how do you kind of marry those Robert: It. It is in there and it starts with these six questions, and that is one of them, the eulogy test.

But I asked these six behavioral based questions to think about times in your life when things have been going great, you were in flow time stood still, the times in your life and the things you're doing that you struggle, that you don't like the people that you're frustrated with. And then there's kind of an exercise to start to look at the common threads around those and they become consistent. And then you start realizing. The real answer to that eulogy question is like, what is the impact that you want people to say that they've had on their life, right?

And that that will be the thing that was most important to you. Because not that, oh, Allan was a New York Times bestseller, or that it was that Allan helped me become my best self, you know, or Allan helped me do this, or the impact he made on me. And that's why I'm showing up to the eulogy. And when you think about it in that sense, those were the things that, that you valued the most.

And so I think both identifying them, being able to word them in a way. I have this thing called the core validator so that I don't believe in one word values. It's gotta be a couple words or sentence in a way that you can say. I can measure myself on this, I can make a decision on this.

And the opposite of this drives me crazy. Like that's the ultimate test of a value, right? Because if it's broken, it should be, it should really bother you. And it should almost make you angry.

And so when we're doing this process with someone, and I, you know, I know if you get to the end and it seems like, you know, you're a trust person or whatever, and I, you know, I'm like, you're at a party and this person's just lying like crazy and making up stuff. Like how do you and like you're like. And I'm saying this to you and you're like, tense, and you're like, I have to, like, I have to get away from that person because they embody the opposite of that value. So the anti value test, ~which we kind of, ~which is part of the whole process in there.

It is probably one of the most instructive things for people to figure out what a value is because when I think I know what their value is and I make up a person at a cocktail party that has all the anti values, like I watch them get like viscerally uncomfortable out with it. Allan: I like the anti values. I, I I've heard anti golds, which is you know what, you know, what do you not Robert: Oh, it's a he bloom. Allan: Yeah, I think Sahil Bloom and I think maybe even Naval prior to him had talked about that.

But What do you not want? That's often a lot easier and I've, I've used that a lot with friends when we go out to dinner. 'cause if you say, Hey guys what do you feel like everyone's like, oh, I dunno. I don't know.

Or how about what Robert: do you not Allan: like, oh no, definitely not Indian or definitely not Mexican, or definitely not pizza or, or whatever. Whatever Robert: you tell people what's something you know, what's something that really drives you crazy about people? What's a quality? You can't stand in people.

It starts to illuminate some interesting answers. So in the exercise, we take all the negatives and we inverse them, and then you'll see that the inverses start lining up to other things you said to different questions. Allan: I love that. Is there another question that we can leave listeners with or viewers Robert: Yeah, well, if you want if they want all the six questions you can just get 'em for free.

Not even the book. You can go to robertglazer.com/six. So list all the six questions in a little video that coaches you through.

That's the start of the process. But yeah another question would be. in what professional situations that you've been in, have you been the most highly engaged and done your best work? And all answers are helpful, like when I was in this role.

Okay, but what about that role? Like, were you leading, what were you doing? Like that? That's one of the questions.

Allan: Love it. Robert, thank you so much. We'll definitely link to that resource. That sounds like a really valuable thing.

Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't ask you? Robert: No. Well, the book~ comes out October 14th. I think it'll be a month later in, in hardcover in Australia, but it should be on audio and paperback.

So, ~I think it's up now if people want to check it out and they can pre-order. Allan: Amazing. So that's the compass within. We'll link both to your six questions and to your book.

And thank you so much Robert. Appreciate your time and generosity here. Robert: Thank you for having me. Allan: Thanks for tuning in to the Lean Marketing Podcast.

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