Kind, soft-spoken, and self-deprecating, Marshall Goldsmith is just about the opposite of every hard-charging businessman stereotype. And yet he’s both found phenomenal success himself and inspired it in countless others. Discover his secrets this week on Perspectives from the Top.
Bringing Buddhism to Business (ft. Marshall Goldsmith)
Marshall Goldsmith has found and inspired success by doing everything differently
OPENING QUOTE:
My name is Marshall Goldsmith. I am too cowardly and undisciplined to do any of this stuff by myself. I need help. And you know what? It's okay. Once we get over that macho, I can do it on their own nonsense, everybody gets better.
—Marshall Goldsmith
GUEST BIO:
Marshall Goldsmith’s first degree was in Mathematical Economics, but he quickly moved to the study of people— earning a PhD and professorship of Management Practice at Dartmouth Tuck. Since then, Marshall has been successful as an entrepreneur, business owner, and leadership & executive coach. He’s been ranked among the top of business thinkers and as the number-one global executive coach, receiving the Harvard Institute of Coaching Lifetime Award.
Marshall is also the author of many bestselling books. His new book, The Earned Life, channels Marshall’s Buddhist philosophy to help readers be more fulfilled and focused in life.
CORE TOPICS + DETAILS:
[3:19] - 100 Coaches
The ultimate example of ‘doing unto others’
Inspired by a question about his heroes, Marshall Goldsmith embarked on a quest to coach 100 people for free— under the condition that they one day do the same. The results were astonishing, showing that the world is filled with people eager and willing to impart what they know and give of themselves to others.
[14:18] - Learning by Coaching
How coaches get more out of mentorship than their mentees
One of the most successful people Marshall ever mentored told him, “You have one job as a coach: client selection. You work with great people, your coaching process always works.” Along those lines, Marshall has also found that when he selects great clients, he learns incredible lessons himself along the way.
[22:28] - The Hidden Power of Mentorship
It’s not about coaching— it’s about not judging
Across the many people in various backgrounds that Marshall has coached, one thing he has found is that when they’re being mentored, they’ve expressed that the most meaningful aspect of it for them is that they’re not competing, being judged, being laughed at, or being put down. It’s a sense of community, a group of people all simply trying to be better. That’s a powerful thing.
[32:29] - Getting Lost in Ambition
Sometimes, what you have is enough
Marshall mentions the classic study on delayed gratification that involved asking children to wait to eat a marshmallow, then rewarding them with a second marshmallow if they were able to control themselves. But, Marshall says, if you take that idea to an extreme, “you end up with an old man who needs to die in a room surrounded by uneaten marshmallows. Sometimes, you’ve got to eat the damn marshmallow.”
[40:40] - Empathy & Peace in Work
Deeper lessons than how to succeed
In his most recent book, Marshall applies Buddhist-inspired principles to a range of scenarios and life decisions. He stresses empathy over ambition, encouraging all of us to begin with a mindset of helping others, rather than focusing on how they can help us get to where we want to go. It’s a lesson we all can remember even as we strive to reach the top.
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CREDITS:
Marshall Goldsmith:
My name is Marshall Goldsmith. I am too cowardly and undisciplined to do any of this stuff by myself. I need help. And you know what? It's okay. Once we get over that macho, I can do it on their own nonsense, everybody gets better.
Chris Roebuck:
Welcome to Perspectives from the Top I'm Chris Roebuck, global keynote speaker with unique leadership experience from military, business and government, bestselling offer and your guide to greater success. Together, we'll discover powerful insights from the world's leading thinkers, doers, and trailblazers. The must know trends, thought provoking rev relations and practical actions you can use immediately. This is your exclusive and personal shot of insight and inspiration to help you get to the top.
Chris Roebuck:
Welcome to you and all of our Perspectives from the Top community of listeners, now in 46 countries around the world. It's great to share the insights of such successful people with you to help you get to where you want to be. Today's guest is Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall's first degree was in mathematical economics, but then he moved into studying people via his PhD and as professor of management practice at Dartmouth Tuck. He then moved into the world of executive education as an entrepreneur, building a business.
Chris Roebuck:
Now, Marshall has so many accolades since then. I don't have time to cover them. They are for business, leadership and executive coaching. Amongst them, top ranked business thinker for 10 years, number one global executive coach, Harvard Institute of coaching Lifetime Award. Plus he's the author of numerous bestselling books, each helping people get the best out of themselves, their work and their lives. Now his new book, The Earned Life, really helps people focus in on the latter and is based on his Buddhist philosophy, showing readers how to be better fulfilled and have fewer regrets.
Chris Roebuck:
Marshall, great to see you again and thanks for taking time to join Perspectives from the Top. One of the things that our guests really like to know, is who has inspired the guests that they're listening to, in terms of how they got to where they got to. Sometimes it's a family member, sometimes it's a mentor, sometimes it's just somebody they met at work. When you look back, was there one or two people that had a significant impact on where you ended up getting to now?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, I think so. In my case, it's pretty straightforward. My heroes were people like Paul Hersey, my old mentor; Peter Drucker, Frances Hesselbein, Warren Bennis. Just great people in our field who inspired me and they really gave me everything for free, and really my whole goal is to grow up and be like them, which I kind of did.
Chris Roebuck:
Which it goes to the point about the importance of sharing, of doing good by other people and then good will come back to you.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, your question kind inspired my 100 Coaches program. These people were so nice to me. I went to a program called Design the Life You Love, and the woman said, "Who are your heroes?" My heroes were kind and generous people. The people I just mentioned, and they always gave me everything. She said, "You should be more like them." So I decided I was going to adopt 100 people teach them all for free, and in practice, when they get old, they had to do the same thing. I made a little video, put it on LinkedIn, very primitive selfie video. I'm thinking 100 people would apply. I'll be a nice old man stumbling through life and they'll laugh at my jokes and then they get old and do the same thing. It turned out over 18,000 people have applied. Now we're up to 370 people. So it's been an amazing project. So your question kind of changed my life.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, but good things come to people who are good. What I find interesting in terms of the way your career has gone. You started as effectively, you did your first degree in mathematical economics, which is a pretty non people, sorry, people based subject. And then you did the MBA and then you did your PhD at Anderson. There must have been, in that process, a growing fascination with people and how they interacted. So give us a feeling of how you made that move because at the end of it, you became professor of management practice at Dartmouth. So what inspired you to move from mathematically economics to management practice?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, it's interesting because I think I just got burned out. I took nine courses of math past calculus, when you get into differential equations three, it's very abstract and I just like more practical real things with real people, and it just seems so abstract.
Marshall Goldsmith:
The other thing is in college, I started studying Buddhism. So I've been a philosophical Buddhist for many, many years, since I was a kid and 19, 20 years old. I really like Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy, so that got me thinking about Buddhism and people and philosophy and that's where I ended up getting a PhD.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Also, I got an MBA at Indiana. Then I had a choice I could have gone and been an IBM data process marketing rep, which was a great job, but actually that was part of the "real world," and I thought, "I can avoid reality five more years." I got a four year fellowship, five year fellowship to UCLA to get a PhD, they're paying me to go to school. I thought, "What the heck, I'm going to go to UCLA, avoid reality another four or five years? Sounds good to me."
Chris Roebuck:
You know as well as I do, from the academic world, there is always a rush of PhD candidates when the economic situation isn't that good because people don't want to go out and face reality exactly like you did.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Oh, of course. Yeah, the academic world is, as you know, brutal. My daughter is in this world. She has a PhD from Yale and she's a full professor now at Vanderbilt, but she's one of the few actual survivors in that otherwise incredibly brutal process.
Chris Roebuck:
You mentioned Paul Hersey before. After that, you knew him and you sort of interacted, so it's worth those people who are listening, who haven't heard about Paul Hersey, Google him, the Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership model, have a dive into that because you might find that interesting. So was it him who spurred you into the move perhaps from the sort of academic world more into then executive education and the really practical hands-on stuff?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, first, if people look him up as H E R S E Y, Hersey. So, when they look him up, just know the spelling. Now what happened is I went to one of his programs and he was so good and he was kind enough to let me go for free. I sat in the back and then I said, "Look, I'll follow you around. I'll serve the coffee. I was just carrying the bags and I just watched him and tried to learn to do what he did. He was such a great teacher, so much better than any of the teachers I'd ever had before and then one day he became double booked and he said, "Can you do what I do?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Look, I'll pay you $1,000 for one day."
Marshall Goldsmith:
I was making $15,000 for one year. You got to realize I was 28 years old, that was a long time, 44 years ago. $1,000 for a day with a lot of money to a kid who's making 15,000 a year. You know what I said? "Sign me up, coach." So I go to this program for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. They are incredibly pissed off when I show up because I'm not him. But then I got ranked first place of all his teachers.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So they said, "Well, this guy, Marshall is good. Send him again." So he calls me up and says, "Do you want to do this again?" I said, "Wait a minute." That degree in mathematical economics kicked in, "$1,000 a day, $15,000 a year. Do I want to do this again? "Sir, yes sir," and that's how I got into leadership development and basically that's how I met you many years ago and a teacher.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah. For listeners, I was global head of leadership at UBS and Marshall was one of the regular facilitators on our most senior leadership program for those who were potential board successors and we had some great, great three day programs, which you then kindly concluded to send everybody off inspired and motivated to go and do whatever they needed to do to make the organization successful. So, yeah, it was great working with Marshall.
Chris Roebuck:
So over, over the years since then, and working with me at UBS you've had some amazing success with multiple accolades in terms of top global coach, top business thinker, you've written numerous books, numerous other awards, and we haven't got enough time to list them all. So you did Triggers. You did What Got You Here Won't Get You There. That's an amazing journey. What are some of the things that you've enjoyed about it most, because certainly having been in leadership development myself as well, it's so rewarding to work with some people and then see a positive change, not only in their work, but the positive change in their work creates a positive change in their life. So have you seen that?
Marshall Goldsmith:
I completely agree. Basically over the years I've done three things. One is, like I did with you, give talks or teach classes and that's actually what I enjoy doing the most. All those times you'd tell me I wasn't pretending to enjoy it, I actually enjoyed it. I wasn't faking having a good time. I had a good time. I love doing that. I love speaking and teaching.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Then the second thing is doing coaching. What I like about coaching is I learn so much. In theory, coaching, I'm supposed to teach them and practice. I learn far more from them than they learn from me. So coaching is wonderful for me, because that's really where I learn everything and then finally writing. Writing is a way you reach people. So I've now written or edited 49... this new one will be number 49 books, I think, and I've done six best sellers and then hopefully this next one will be a best seller. And then the other 42 were purchased only by my mother, my father and relatives.
Chris Roebuck:
And as soon as long as you take, as long as you keep the family happy, who cares about the market?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, whatever. I wrote six books that sold about 3 million copies and 42 books that sold about 12 copies.
Chris Roebuck:
In the end, success comes to those who wait, Marshall, but picking up on your comment about coaching, I think listeners should pay attention to that because you said that one of the great things about you as a coach is that you learn as well. And one of the things, I can't remember if you remember that I did this, one of the things I did at UBS was to set up a mentoring program between some of the most senior people and their direct reports across business area boundaries.
Chris Roebuck:
I want to emphasize to listeners that one of the most powerful things that we got in the feedback was that those people who were mentors or coaches, depending how you want to term it, were absolutely astonished by the fact that they learnt just as much as the people they were supposed to be coaching about what was going on in the organization, about how people at that level perceived senior leaders. So I would say, and please add your comments, I would say if you get the opportunity to be a coach or a mentor for somebody else, one, make sure you are trained to do it properly, but then do it and just in the value that you get back. Do you want to say something about that?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, I completely agree with you. Over the years had a very unique coaching system. I didn't get paid if my clients didn't get better and better wasn't judged by me or them, it was judged right around them. So you learned a lot of humility when you get paid for results. So the client I coach, and this is going to go back to your point, the client I coach that I spent the most amount of time with didn't improve at all and I did not get paid and I learned nothing. The client I coached that I spent the least amount of time with, improved more than anyone I've ever coached, 200 people got better and I did get paid and he was great to start with.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So I go talk to the client who improved the most. His name is Alan Mulally. Alan went on to be the CEO of the year in the United States, CEO Ford and then he was ranked number three greatest leader in the world, he's on the board of Google now. Just an amazing guy and we're doing the book together now. So I love Alan. He's the lead author and I'm just helping him.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So I go to Alan, I said, "Alan, of all the people I've coached you improved the most. I spent the least amount of time with you and you are great to start with." So I said, "Alan," back to my mathematics, "Alan, I made a chart. On one dimension it was called Time Spent With the Executive Coach, Marshall Goldsmith, the other dimension is called Improvement." I said, "There's a clear negative correlation between spending time with me and improving. Now," I said, "the way this chart looks, had you never met me, you would really be good."
Marshall Goldsmith:
So I said, "What should I learn about coaching from you?" This goes to your point and he said, "You have one job as a coach, client selection. You work with great people, your coaching process always works. You work with the wrong people, it never works. Don't make coaching about yourself and your own ego and how smart you think you are. Make it about the great people you coach and how great they are." That totally changed my life. That one conversation changed my life and changed the field of coaching. One thing I'm very proud of is my book Triggers, 27 major CEOs endorsed the book. Why am I so proud of that? Well, I'm so proud of that because 30 years ago, no CEO would have a coach.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, absolutely.
Marshall Goldsmith:
They would've been ashamed to have had a coach and Barrett, I'm proud of my new book, let me just say some of the people have endorsed the book, Jim Kim, 12th President of the World Bank; Albert Bourla, the CEO Pfizer, he had a pretty big year last year. Then I have Alan, who's a former CEO of Ford; Frances Hesselbein, Presidential medal of Freedom winner. Hubert Joly, turned around Best Buy; one of the great leaders of America, Jim Downing, he's the head of St. Jude's Children's Hospital, on and on and on. Well, what I'm proud about is these are great people. Today they'll all stand up and say, "I need help," and then I'm proud of that because they wouldn't have said, "I need help." Well, who we kidding? We all need help. I need help, you need help, we all need help. How many of the top 10 tennis players have a coach? 10.
Chris Roebuck:
Absolutely. It's the very bizarre psychology that we've seen in business leaders. Not so much now, but, but certainly 10, 20 years ago, and particularly in certain industries, investment banking or whatever, where if your boss said, "Would you like a coach?" You'd go, "No, no, no, no, no, because this is a sign of weakness. I must be perfect. I'm perfect, therefore, I don't need a coach," which is, as you know, complete and utter garbage. And it's obviously the people who say they don't need a coach who probably do need a coach because they have little or no self awareness about what they're doing.
Chris Roebuck:
But going to that point, what is interesting is that the work we did coming up 20 years ago now, your coaching concept has spread around the world. We are hoping that executive development, leadership development, however you want to term it, in organizations, has got more effective since then. But sometimes when I look at some of the examples I see, I'm not really that sure that we have moved on because of those attitudes that you have just mentioned. What's your view of how much we truly have moved on in the last 20 years?
Marshall Goldsmith:
I'd say, well, number one, leadership in general is so much better than it used to be. People ask me, "Are leaders worse than they ever lived in history?" Give a break. Do you ever read a history book?
Chris Roebuck:
Exactly.
Marshall Goldsmith:
What did it used to be like? "Oh, Kaa-kaa," You know, yeah, what happened when you mess with the king? "Ink," So leaders used to be complete bullies, do whatever they want to and you had no rights. So leadership is much better than ever before. On the other hand, the standards are much higher. I wrote an article about this in Chief Executive magazine and I said, "Why are leaders getting worse feedback when they become better leaders?" Well, the bar is higher. In the old days, people would put up with stuff because they didn't have a choice. Today... By the way, especially after COVID, it's even more true, people leave. You're a bad leader. You know what they say? "Bye-bye." They just walk.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So the bar is higher and higher and higher. I think actually leaders are better, but the bar is higher. The key that I've learned for leadership development is you got to stick with it. You don't get better because you just have a one time event. You need follow up. I wrote an article called Leadership is a Contact Sport. So if anyone wants to read it, send me an email. Marshall@marshallgoldsmith.com, any article, it just clearly points out when people follow up and stick with a plan over them they get better, but they don't just get better. Look, you and I did great courses, but if people did nothing from the course, they didn't improve much.
Chris Roebuck:
Correct. Yeah. Seriously, we had a great time in Schloss Marbach. We had some great food, but we'll now just go back and carry on what we were doing before.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah and a lot of the people took it quite seriously and some didn't and the ones that actually did the stuff got better, the ones that didn't... I've got good news about all the stuff we did. I've done research on this. The people that did nothing did not get worse.
Chris Roebuck:
Which is...
Marshall Goldsmith:
They stayed the same.
Chris Roebuck:
Or they think they know better and go back and actually make people's lives worse because they assume that they're better than they were before they arrived, but we can see... But see, I find that comment of yours really interesting about the bar being higher and I think you're absolutely right that. It's that question, in any organization, whether the quality of leadership is going up faster than the bar or slower than the bar and that COVID has fundamentally, because it's made people rethink what is important in their lives, because of their experiences, because of the tragedies they've seen and all the rest of it, I believe that leadership bar, in terms of open, honest, supportive, empathetic leadership that you and I have talked about has now shot up on that particular area of leadership since COVID. What are your thoughts? What have you seen?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, number one, completely agree with you. I think that leadership has gone up, the bar has gone up faster. You don't see less complaints about leaders today than ever before, you see more complaints than ever before. Why? Because leadership is better and the bar has gone up faster than the leadership has gone up. So that's why you see so many complaints about leadership. Look, you see complaints about things today that no one would bring up. I'm working in a company in the U.S. and the CEO "raised his voice" to a direct report and the guy filed a toxic workplace complaint. 30 years ago? The CEO was from France. He goes, "This is wacky land," right? Well, 30 years ago, that would never have happened. Today though you have to be sensitive.
Marshall Goldsmith:
The other thing is anything you say as a leader can be taken out of context and put on the internet.
Chris Roebuck:
Of course.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And you can get killed today for saying almost anything. So, it's a different world out there and the degree of sensitivity is very high. I spent COVID... And this is one of the things I talk about my new book The Earned Life, over the COVID period, my friend Mark Thompson and I spent 400 or 500 hours every weekend. We would talk with six people, six hours each weekend, 50 people. They would rotate in little groups and talk about life and these were amazingly successful leaders. I can mention their names. People like Curtis Martin and the Football League Hall of Fame; Pau Gasol, famous basketball player. We had Telly Leung, Broadway star. We had the head of the Olympic Committee, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, the head of the World... on and on and on, amazing leaders. Every week we would spend every weekend with these people and they'd talk about their lives. And you know, there's an old saying, "It's lonely at the top?" It used to be lonely at the top. It is lonelier at the top today. It is really lonely. Why? They don't have anyone to talk to.
Chris Roebuck:
And I think that's a problem, but I'd also... For those listeners who are in the C-suite yeah, you will feel lonely at the top, but as you would say, Marshall and I will concur, if you are feeling lonely at the top, the most important thing you can do is get yourself an executive coach and have someone who you can openly talk to.
Marshall Goldsmith:
You know what? And what else I find really they loved is being able to talk to other CEOs. They're not competing and a lot of times they're in totally different industries or backgrounds, like learning from the Broadway star or the basketball star or the head of the Olympic Committee or for them, learning from a corporate executive. They loved it and what they liked about it is accountability because they were pretty accountable every week with no judgment though. They weren't being judged, they weren't being laughed at, they weren't being put down. It was kind of like a... It is, it's kind of like a community. It's nice. One of the guys said, "You know, it's nice that one hour a week I get to act like a human being."
Chris Roebuck:
That's a really insightful comment I'd say. That just says so much. One of the interesting pieces of research I've seen you mention, the fact of that interaction between Broadway stars and business leaders and all the rest of it. Some of the research I've seen and you must have seen similar research effectively says that if you have a mentor or coach who has had almost exactly similar experiences to you and has come from the same industry as you and thinks like you, you probably think they're going to be a great person. The only problem is that you are not going to learn anything because you're going to agree with each other and you're going to think like each other. So you're going to have a great time, but you're not going to learn anything. Whereas the mentoring relationships I set up at UBS and in other places where you find somebody who has come from a different experience, background, thinks in a different way, you go, "How am I going to work with this nut case?" But in the end, the learning is just amazing.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I totally agree and people loved having the opportunity to learn from people who were from totally different from worlds.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah. So, so listeners, if you want to run ideas past people, have a thought about doing it with somebody from a completely different business area or sector. Just because you are in construction, doesn't necessarily mean that you can't speak to people who are in finance or are in telecoms.
Marshall Goldsmith:
That's right. A lot of us have quite parallel problems too. The other thing is when these people get up, I would say of all of the dialogue we had of the hundreds of hours, maybe half was work and half was home.
Chris Roebuck:
Interesting.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So the other thing is they could talk about their issues with the kids, with the family and all these people on paper are phenomenally successful people. They're still humans. One thing you learn from it, nobody gets a pass in life. Nobody gets a pass. You still got kids with drug problems, you got parents with Alzheimer's disease. You have tough personal issues to deal with and maybe their problems are sometimes different, nobody gets a pass, everybody's got stuff to deal with.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, absolutely. Which interestingly leads me onto one of the things that I keep hearing people saying is that leadership is completely different. The world is different. We have all this digital stuff. Leadership is different now to what it was five years ago. It's going to be different again in another five years. But one of the quotes I like to pull out when I'm talking to leaders is that, "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work," and I say to leaders, "That's pretty good modern employee engagement and stuff. Who do you think said it?" And they'll come out with Steve Jobs or Richard Branson or that sort of stuff. And then I turn around and I tell them, "No, no, no Aristotle, 500 BC. Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work."
Chris Roebuck:
And I say, "Look, we think about leadership, but one of the things about leadership is we're human. And what we want from life, what we want from work, what we want in terms of your new book Fulfillment And No Regrets, I don't think has really changed that much because we are wired as humans as we were in ancient Greece and as we will be in another 500 years. So perhaps from your perspective, do you think there are elements of leadership that deal with us as humans that are consistent going forward?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah. A lot in my new book, a lot of it is based on Hindu philosophy that's 5,000, 6,000 years old, the Bhagavad Gita, I build on that and it's hardly new. Let me tell you the connection I make between old and new, and that is one of the most powerful parts of all the new stuff I teach, that is I talk about three levels. First is our aspiration. What's our aspiration? That's the higher goal that doesn't have a target, it doesn't have a finish line. That's our purpose that's deeper. Then the next we have is our ambition. That's our achievement of goals. They do have finish lines.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And then the final ones, our actions, our day to day activities, our day to day life. Most humans in the history of the world have been kind of lost in the action phase. They show up, they go to work, they live a life, they watch TV, they go home. That's it for 99% of all of us. Some humans, more like academics or ministers perhaps live up in the aspiration land. They're so focused on the big picture and life. They don't do much, but they're kind of lost in their heads. The people that I work with get lost in ambition and achievement. They tend to be achievers and one of the great traps they fall into is everything's going to be okay after I achieve something. They're so driven to achieve that number one, and you've talked about this, They're so driven to achieve they can forget, "Why am I doing this? I'm working 90 hours a week. Oh, I forgot, is there a reason? Why am I working 90 hours a week?"
Marshall Goldsmith:
And then number two, they cannot enjoy life because they can get so lost in the chasing of things they forget to enjoy life. And one thing I talk about is this never get fixated on the results of what you do for two reasons. One, you don't control the results. I mean, nobody I coach totally controls the outcomes, number two, what if you achieve the results now? How long is that going to make you happy? A week, two weeks? And that's it.
Marshall Goldsmith:
One of the guys in our group, his name Safi Bahcall, and Safi wrote a book called lo Loonshots, he has a PhD from Stanford in physics, he's worth tens of millions of dollars, he started companies, he's consulted with presidents, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know what he said? He learned one thing and he talks like a scientist. He said, "I used to think happiness and achievement, I used to think happiness was a dependent variable based on achievement. And then I finally realized, no, you can achieve all kinds of things and be happy. You can achieve all kinds of things and be miserable. You can achieve nothing and be happy and you achieve nothing and be miserable." He said, "Happiness and achievement are independent variables." He finally realized that, be happy to be happy, achieve to achieve, but don't think achievement is going to make you happy.
Marshall Goldsmith:
By the way, there's an art form in the West. Chris, you may have seen it before, it really hammers this in our head. It goes like this. It's a very popular art form. I don't know if you've seen it. There, is a person, the person is sad. Ooh. They spend money. They buy a product and they become happy. This is called a commercial. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those before.
Chris Roebuck:
Yes. I have seen this.
Marshall Goldsmith:
A couple times, yeah. How many times has that message been hammered in our head over and... It's out there., it's out there, spend the money, buy the product, everything is going to be okay when. Well, a big part of the book is, no it won't. There's one type of book that always has the same ending, "And they lived happily ever after." That book is called a fairytale. That's not life.
Chris Roebuck:
But seriously, for our listeners, just that phrase of yours getting lost in achievement and ambition and I think what you and I have seen over the years and particularly in really tough pressurized industries like investment banking or whatever, but anywhere where people are on a hamster wheel, once they're on that hamster wheel of ambition... And I would just say to listeners, just take a step back and think about what you are going for in terms of your objectives. Are you starting to get lost in ambition and just missing the whole point of fulfillment? I think your point about happiness, it isn't just about achievement. There are moments where... You live in California, you can just walk down onto the beach and just look at the Pacific at sunrise and just be happy. That isn't down to achievement.
Marshall Goldsmith:
No. Well, it's interesting because there's research you probably know, the marshmallow research, and it is research and this is one of my favorite parts, the marshmallow research. So there's research, they take these kids and they give a kid a marshmallow and they tell kid, "Now, if you eat the marshmallow now you get one, but if you wait, kid, oh, oh, two." Well, according to the research, I think they exaggerate a little, but it sounds like the people that eat the marshmallow all become drug addicts and the people that wait for two all get PhDs from Harvard.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So it sounded a little farfetched, but the point that they make is delayed gratification is good. Delayed gratification is good. That has been every self-help book, delayed gratification is good. Here's what they didn't do in the research. They didn't take the kid that had two marshmallows and said, "You know, kid, wait a little bit more, three. Wait some more, four. Wait a little bit more, five, 10, 100." Where do you end up? You end up with an old man who needs to die in a room surrounded by uneaten marshmallows. Well, sometimes you got to eat the damn marshmallow.
Chris Roebuck:
Yes, but that phrase, that phrase getting lost in ambition I think is something that people should listen to. So all the work we've done around leadership development and actually working with day to day leaders, what I find interesting is that even now people are saying to me, "Oh, we had a leadership program, we did this and they turn around and I says, "Okay, fine. So how did it go?" And the comments I'm still getting back are, "Well, it was very, very complicated and I couldn't really make much sense of it because there were all these models," In terms of Hersey and Blanchard, there was a CEO who said, "Yeah, I remember having this leadership program and I remember there was box divided in four with a squiggle in the middle," and I said, "That's interesting. So what did that box with a squiggle in the middle tell you how to be a better leader?" And he said, "I can't remember, I just remember a box with a squiggle in the middle." So I just thought, "Well, that was where worth it then."
Chris Roebuck:
But, seriously, people say, "Yeah, they don't resonate with my needs. I can see how, if we all do this, the organization is going to be better, but it's not, I don't see the point for me in terms of, if I do this, what's the what's in it for me?" So do you really need to focus in on how to genuinely get people to understand what leadership is about rather than throwing complexity and models at them? You're going to your point, keep it simple.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah. Well, you've known me for years, I don't think I've ever said anything a nine year old could not understand.
Chris Roebuck:
It's true.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And somebody said, "Well, you know, I work with children," and I said, "Well, I work with adults that act like children." So I don't really think I say anything a nine year old kid that was a smart kid couldn't understand, it's pretty straightforward stuff. And if you give people complicated stuff, they're not going to do it anyway.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now let's talk about why they don't do it. So after we worked together, I did research at Johnson & Johnson and actually measured all the stuff I teach, who did it, who didn't, did they get better, did they not get better? So we did a big study and what I found out was 98% of people said they were going to do what I taught, 98%. Well, you've been in my class. Everybody says, they're going to do it, right?
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, you say, "Will you do it?" "Yeah, we'll go and do it."
Marshall Goldsmith:
98%. 70% did something and 30% did nothing. When I say nothing, not one minute, zero. So I followed up with people who did nothing and said, "Why'd you do nothing?" Well, it had nothing to do with intelligence. I mean, Johnson & Johnson, they're all smart people, those are top people in the company, they're smart. It had nothing with integrity. They won to award the year, most ethical company in the world and had no nothing to do with if they liked me. You've seen my feedback. Everybody likes me. I'm a likable guy, right? Had nothing to do with that. I said, "Why'd you'd do nothing?" and it had to do with the dream.
Marshall Goldsmith:
A dream sounds like this. "You know I'm incredibly busy right now, given work and home and pressures of new technology that follows me everywhere. I feel as busy as I ever have. Sometimes I feel over committed. Now I don't tell others this, but every now and again, my life feels just a little bit out of control, but you know, I'm working on some very unique and special challenges right now, and I think the worst of this is going to be over in about four or five months. And after that, I'm going to take two or three weeks and get organized and begin my new, healthy life program, and after that, everything is going to be different and it will not be crazy anymore." How many people have that dream, right? How people that have-
Chris Roebuck:
And how the executives have been saying that from 25 to retirement?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Of course, same dream.
Chris Roebuck:
Same dream, round, and round again, Groundhog Day strikes. But interestingly, I found that executives were saying that, and you know that I'm ex-military, and the military focuses on putting in place really, really basic stuff, so you can make sure the task is under control, then you have the bandwidth to be an inspirational leader. One of the things that I discovered, I did some research in the early 2000s just before we met and I've focused in on it again. Whenever I speak to an audience, anywhere in the world, I just asked a simple question, "How many of you senior executives... 600 senior executives in this room, how many of you who have ever been taught how to delegate effectively day to day, please put your hands up?"
Chris Roebuck:
And I am staggered. I have never, ever had more than 20% of the people put their hands up and I'm thinking, "So hang on. 80% of these people, who are leaders, who are supposed to be delegating every day, nobody has taught them how to delegate," and in some places where I have a little bit more time, I just run a simple two minute exercise, which is write down five jobs you do regularly, look at those jobs, work out if you could delegate them to a team member, if you could, put the name of the team member, and how much would you save per week if you did it?
Chris Roebuck:
And consistently that two to three minute exercise produces half a working day a week for the audience and you just think these organizations, "Yeah. Let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about talent management. Let's talk about custom." Don't worry about prioritization, time management, delegation, communication, and giving feedback. Let's just do the strategic stuff. Sorry, I'm rambling, but I'm so passionate that literally half a day on the basics could transform performance. Sorry, what is your view on that?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Oh, my view is if you do that people think you're somehow gifted and brilliant.
Chris Roebuck:
I've saved you half-
Marshall Goldsmith:
[crosstalk 00:39:20]
Chris Roebuck:
I've saved you half a working day in five minutes.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Exactly, you're brilliant. Yeah, and the reality is that, look, I'm not surprised at all. I don't anything that's complicated. I'm going to give an example. One thing I always talk about is a daily question process. That's pretty simple, every day you get out a spreadsheet and you write a bunch of questions to represent what's most important in your life and you answer them either yes, no, or a number and you fill it out every day and at the end of the week, you get a report card.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, this will help you get better at almost anything and it takes three or four minutes a day. I was working with, I won't mention the guy's name, one of the most famous leaders in the world and the last two weeks he didn't do it, he just chickened out. It's hard to do. It is very hard to have the courage to look in the mirror every day.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now, how do I do it? I have, I've had somebody call me personally on the phone almost every day for 25 years. Somebody asked me why do I have somebody call me on the phone, don't I know the theory about how to change behavior? I wrote the theory about how to change behavior. That's why I have somebody call me on the phone. "My name is Marshall Goldsmith. I am too cowardly and undisciplined do any of this stuff by myself. I need help. And you know what? It's okay." Once we get over that macho, "I can do it on my own," nonsense, everybody gets better.
Chris Roebuck:
I think that's so true, but that goes to a much wider context in terms of just talk to other people for heaven's sake. Talk to other people and this is so true about if you think you need help or if things aren't going well, don't ignore it, don't build it up, just talk to somebody because that's half the reason that people end up in Jamie Blaustein's clinic with mental health issues, because they haven't talked.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right. Yeah. I agree, and just the process I did over COVID with all these people, just having people to talk to, was fantastic.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah. That talking though, that goes back to the discussion about what leadership truly is about that gets the best from people. I ask leaders around the world, "What did the best boss you ever have do on a day to day basis that made them so special?" And it's always... interestingly, it doesn't matter where you go, it doesn't matter the culture, it doesn't matter the sector. It's always the same 10, 12 things, "Develop me, acted with integrity, asked me for my ideas, showed they cared about me. A few job things, set realistic and challenging targets." But what consistently comes out is things like "They supported me and knew when I needed it," and the one, "They showed, they cared about me."
Chris Roebuck:
And what appears to me to be that subtle difference between the leader who gets the job done and the leader who gets much more than the job done is the emotional bond. And I think that links to all the books you've done about where the leader can help create a sense of purpose and fulfillment, but that's fundamentally, to some degree, emotional more than rational, is it not?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, decisions are largely emotional, more than rational. One thing I didn't understand until I was 70, was this. Why is it that brilliant people, smarter than you or me, consistently do crazy irrational things? I can understand stupid people doing crazy things, because they're stupid, but I know brilliant people do totally irrational, crazy things. How could this be? And then I finally realized there's only a modest positive correlation between intelligence and rationality. Our decisions are seldom made based on rationality. Our decisions are almost always emotional. Yet we use our intellect to defend our emotional decisions and the more intellect we have, the better we are at defending our wacky decisions.
Chris Roebuck:
Which is true. But all the data that both who you and I have seen on employee engagement or whatever, corporate executive board and employee's decision to give high performance is 60% rational, 40% emotional. The fact that we are... I love it when senior leaders try at work to remove from their heads, the concept that we are all emotional human beings and that we will all act like rational computers when they know from their own experience of life that is complete nonsense.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Of course. Well, I'll tell who understands this, is marketing people. In America they have Budweiser beer. So Budweiser has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements with a little dog and a horse and the dog and horse have these relationships and dramas and all things. Now, billion dollars worth of beer is sold because of the dog and the horse. No human, no man is going to go and say, "Oh, you know, I'm buying this beer because I love the little doggie." No, that's why they're buying the beer. That's why they're buying the beer, it's not a rational decision. The dog and the horse? There's nothing rational about the dog and the horse. This is strictly a play for emotions and obviously it works. That's why people spend a billion dollars buying this beer because they love the dog and the horse.
Chris Roebuck:
Well, but the marketing world, I saw some stats. I think Martin Sorrell came out with and they basically said our decision, what we're going to buy, we decide is 80% rational and 20% emotional when we do the reviews at home and we look at the internet. The moment we walk into the shop or we see things that are slightly different to what we plan to buy on the internet, it flips and it suddenly becomes 80% emotional and 20% rational, which is exactly why everybody who is listening to this will have gone into a shop and bought something totally different to the thing they intended to buy when they walked.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Of course, yeah, and that's the way life is. My problem is my mathematical background, I was kind of lost in logic over the years, and it took me years to get over that mathematics stuff and realize that has little to do with decision making. Peter Drucker taught me a great lesson. We're he here on earth to make a positive difference, not to prove we're smart, not to prove we're right. That's a lot of my book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, is that one comment. Then he said, "Every decision in life is made by the person has the power to make the decision, not the smartest person or rational person or fair person or right person. Decision made by one variable, power. Who has the most power to make the decision makes the decision." This is life. If I need to influence you and you have the power to make the decision, there's one word to describe you, customer; one word to describe me, salesperson. You don't have to buy, I have to sell, that's about it.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, that point sounds obvious. I've had to repeat this literally thousands of times with CEOs, with MBAs from Harvard, who never got it. They didn't get it. I'd have to say things like, "You know... I love this one. KKR, private equity firm owns a company. 41 year old CEO. You know, he says? They can't tell me what to do. No. Oh, he's 41 years old. Henry Kravis cannot tell you, punk, what to do, "Err, err, err," wrong. I have to go talk to this kid and I give him this thing about the power and decision, but he says, "They can't tell me what to."
Marshall Goldsmith:
I said, "I'm going to help you. It's their money, you moron. It's their money. They can tell you exactly what to do." And then I said, "And now I'm going to tell you exactly what to do. And if you do exactly what I say, it may save your sorry butt, and if you don't, I got to go back to Daddy and tell him I can't help you. You need a better coach. Oops. There isn't a better coach. Goodbye." Well, this guy, all of a sudden he figured it out. He said, "Oh, I get it now." He stayed with the company 12 years, huge success, not a bad guy. He just was lost in his ego, "Yeah, they can't tell me what to do." Hello? Hello. They're the owners, fool.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Another one, I'm working with a woman, she owns the company 100%, and all of a sudden, one of her people is telling, "You can't do this. You can't do that. This is stupid." Insults her kids. I'm going, "Does she own 20% of the company?" "No." "50%?" Then you already said, "Well, if she did that it might cost her $30,000." She's worth $5 billion. I said, "You idiot. You insulted the owner over... $30,000 to her is like going to Starbucks for me, right? I said, "You insulted this woman. What is wrong with you?" Well, people just get lost. Like you say, they lost in their egos. They get lost in egos.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, that humility thing, but that links into beautifully into your book, The Earned Life, which is fundamentally about, I would say, the human condition and how we as humans and all those years ago, you spoke about your Buddhist philosophy and how that guides you, and I think particularly at this point with COVID and everybody reprioritizing their lives and what is important. I just add one comment out the great resignation. It isn't just the great resignation, it's the great, "I'm not going back to work for that idiot again." It's the people that didn't even go back. They didn't go back and then say, "Oh my God, it's worse than I thought." They knew how bad it was and they just didn't go back.
Chris Roebuck:
Talk about your book that's just come out and it just looks at the importance of achieving fulfillment and I think maybe one thing and comment on this, is that perhaps in the West, within Western economies and talking about the things we've talked about, about ego and all the rest of it, maybe we aren't really that good at looking at what's really important at finding fulfillment and maybe some of the guidance that you've gathered over your life from some of the Eastern philosophies can help us be better at doing that. So tell us about that and tell us about the book because it's amazing.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, thank you so much. The book talks about a lot of Buddhist concepts. One of them is every time I take a breath, it's a new me. And you've seen this. I teach people, don't stereotype yourself. As long as you say, "That's just the way I am," well, it's probably just the way you're going to stay.
Marshall Goldsmith:
So part of it is every time I take a breath, it's a new me, I have a choice. You don't have to being the way you've been in the past. Unless you have an incurable genetic defect, you can change. Yeah, we can all change. My clients change. So I talk about looking at life that way. I talk again a lot about the importance of focusing on these three things. The first is the higher purpose, why am I doing this stuff? Why am I doing this stuff and then the other one is, am I enjoying this stuff? And if you're not careful, this stuff is all there is, it just takes over.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I also talk about some... Another part I like, I talk about empathy. I think the chapter on empathy is very different. Most people think empathy is good. Well, sometimes it's good. I talk about in the book, empathy can be a disaster. For example, one type of empathy is the empathy of understanding. We've already talked about this with marketing people. I know where they're coming from. Great marketing people know where we're coming from better than we do, and use it to manipulate us. Empathy could be good, it could be bad. The next type of empathy is feeling. I had to deal with this one yesterday, "I feel your pain." That sounds good if you want to be in pain all the time. I work with the guy who's the head of St. Jude's Children's Hospital. He sees kids die every day, he can't carry that stuff home.
Marshall Goldsmith:
The next one was the empathy of caring. And here's a fun example from the book, the hedge fund manager. The last person in the world you'd think have a problem with the empathy of caring would be a hedge fund manager. So I'm watching this one guy who's worth a billion dollars and the other guy's worth $3 billion and this is many years ago when $3 billion was a lot of money and he says, "Why don't you have a fund?" And the guy said, "I started caring."
Marshall Goldsmith:
I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Before, look, I made my clients tens of billions of dollars, but I lost tens of billions. Saying I made 52, I lost 48 and you've been in banking, that's the way it works. Right, and I'm a hero, but," he said, "I grew older, I actually started caring and I think this is somebody's retirement account and this will hurt if they lose." You know what he said? "I became much less effective and what I started, now I only invest my own money." That's why parents can't operate on their kids. You got to block that out. You can actually care too much.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And then the final is the empathy of doing or acting, which sounds good, I'm doing something to help you. On the other hand, you can create dependency, you can make people like children, you do all this stuff for them. So in the book I talk about when empathy works and doesn't, and another thing I talk about though, I got from a the Broadway star, Telly, singular empathy, and that is you got to be who you need to be for that point in time with those people.
Marshall Goldsmith:
He played Aladdin on Broadway 1,000. Whoa, 1,000 times he had to go out there and he's gay and he has to fall in love with the same princess 1,000 times he goes out there. And I ask him, "How do you do it? How do you do it?" He said, "You know what? I was a little boy who was eight years old and went to a Broadway play. I just loved it and the music singing," and he said, "Every night I go out there, I think of that little boy." He said, "That's for the little boy," and then he said, "This might be the thousandth time I've done this show. It's the first time this kid's seen the show." So great attitude.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And to point on empathy is, empathy is not, "Aren't I sensitive?" showing off about how much you care about things. Empathy is sensitive to the actual human you're in front of right now, not what happened last week and last month and went to a funeral and all that stuff, that's thinking about yourself. The singular [inaudible 00:53:44] is what he talked me about is really thinking about them, and I actually had him talk to a children's hospital, which was great and he's teaching them about empathy.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And you mentioned about training, this is a children's hospital. So I said to the head of the hospital, "Gosh, you guys must have had tons of training in empathy and patients and all that." You know what he said? "Zero." Zero? Whoa. "None. No, no, no," and you're dealing with dying people every day. Yeah, about empathy, boom, didn't cover that topic.
Chris Roebuck:
Seriously Marshall, I can imagine it, this is the clinical procedure for someone who's dying, "There you go, that's it. Let's not worry about this empathy stuff too much," but that puts an amazing burden on the staff who have to deal with this sort of thing if the organization is not helping them understand how.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Of course it does and that's what happened during COVID. How many healthcare workers burned out? Huge, huge, huge problem. Huge problem. So that is another part and a lot of it is just teaching people to focus on now, not getting lost in the past, not getting lost in president, just focus on, "Where am I now? What am I doing now?
Marshall Goldsmith:
It's very hard to be present. One of the things I evaluate myself on is what percent of the day was I actually present. And on typical day I might get to 25% or 30%. I'm probably lying at that. I'm probably lying, I probably don't even deserve that. Most of the time we're on autopilot, we're just bumbling through life and not really with it and about aware of what we're doing. So it's really good to just say, "Am I actually even here?"
Chris Roebuck:
Which is, to be honest, I find interesting because since we last met, I did a neuroscience course and the neuroscience says, "Yeah, the moment it can, the brain will go onto autopilot and off we go."
Marshall Goldsmith:
Off we go. No, that's totally it. That's totally it and it takes a lot of discipline not to have that happen.
Chris Roebuck:
To get out of that.
Marshall Goldsmith:
It takes discipline. The other thing I talk, about, it's why it's called The Earned Life. We don't think about happiness, for example. So I'm interviewing these three medical doctors and I can mention their names. Jim Kim, who's President of World Bank has a simultaneous MD and PhD with honors from Harvard in anthropology in five years. Now a normal person to get a PhD in anthropology takes eight years. He got one in five years and an MD at the same time. Okay.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Then you got RA Shaw's head of the United States Agency for International Development at age 37 years old, who was reporting to Hillary Clinton. And then John Noseworthy is head of the Mayo Clinic. So they're not stupid people. All through the ask a question, on the average day, how would you rate yourself in the answer to this question? Did I do my best to be happy today? They all had the same answer independently, "It never dawned on me to try to be happy. Never thought about it." Well, they're all medical doctors. In medical school, did they cover death? Did that topic ever come up, death? And they say, "Yeah, they talked about death every now and again." I said, "Well, do you think this is a silly question?" They said, "No, it's an important question. I was too busy achieving stuff to think about it." I love this, "I forgot to try to be happy because I was too busy."
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, but that goes back to what we said right at the beginning, which is getting distracted and locked into ambition at the detriment of everything else. So what are the sort of three key messages that come out of your book, do you think, the highlights that will get people to dig in and get a copy and read it?
Marshall Goldsmith:
One message is the importance of having some overarching aspiration of life. Why am I here? And it doesn't have to be a religion. It just needs to be something, "Why am I doing this? Why are we on this Zoom call? Why are we doing this?" Well, you need some, what's the purpose? You're working all these hours, it kind of be nice to know why am I doing this? And then these people I coach, half the people I coach personally are billionaires. They're billionaires. Well, why are you working? You don't need money. Why are you doing it? Well, they need some reason why. "Why am I doing this?"
Marshall Goldsmith:
Then the second thing is you need to achieve something. Well, I'll use myself as an example. I don't have to be talking to you right now. You know what I could be doing? I'm missing the opportunity right now to play crappy golf with old men at the country club while eating chicken salad sandwiches and discussing gallbladder surgery. Yes, I could actually be doing that.
Chris Roebuck:
You could. You could.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I'd rather talk to you than eat chicken sandwiches and talk about gallbladder...
Chris Roebuck:
Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Marshall, deeply.
Marshall Goldsmith:
You're better than gallbladder surgery and chicken sandwich, right?
Chris Roebuck:
That's my win for today.
Marshall Goldsmith:
By way, why are you talking to me? Probably the same reason. Better than chicken sandwiches and gallbladder surgery.
Chris Roebuck:
Sandwiches... Absolutely.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And then finally, it's the enjoyment of the process of life because we get so wrapped up in this stuff, we forget to enjoy the process and we get into this, "I'll be happy when I take a vacation," or "I'll be happy when I get time off," or "When I make money," or some nonsense. But the reality is that time never comes.
Marshall Goldsmith:
By the way, there's some great examples. Albert Bourla, one of the people who endorsed the book was CO Pfizer. I said, "Albert, how's your year last year?" "Been pretty good. Came up with his vaccine, saved a billion lives or so. That's pretty good. I'm CEO of the year in the United States. Well, that's good. Employee engagement at an all time high, company stock, all time high." "Well, that's pretty good. What's the problem?" He said, "I have a huge problem. Next year. Next year."
Chris Roebuck:
And it always is.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Next year.
Chris Roebuck:
It's always next year.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Next year, and by the way, do you think any of the people that bought that stock care about what he did last year? No, they could care less, "Whst," next year. And if Albert's value as a human being is based on what he achieved last year and he has to beat that, wsht, call it a day, it's not going to happen. He's not going to have that year again.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Michael Phelps, 25 Olympic gold medals. What's he think about doing after winning the 25th medal? Killing himself? Why? He's focused on achievement. If that's all there is, you got to beat last year over and over. It's a fool's game. You can't win.
Chris Roebuck:
Exactly and it's that hamster wheel that once you get on it, can potentially destroy you. So finally, all your leadership expertise, to any of our listeners out there who is a leader, what's one thing that you think they should do more of as of tomorrow, just to help them be better at what they do as a leader?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Pick your key stakeholders and ask them a question, "How can I be a more effective leader?" Listen to what they have to say, develop a plan, pick one or two things that are most important and follow up on a regular basis and measure improvement. If they do that, guess what? They'll get better.
Chris Roebuck:
That's brilliant.
Marshall Goldsmith:
And by the way, not just at work, do the same thing at home. A lot of people I say, "Do you think customer satisfaction is important?" "Yes." "Should we ask our customers their feedback?" "Yes." "Should we listen?" "Yes." "Do you have a husband or wife at home?" "Yes." "Do ever ask them, 'How can we be a better partner?'" "No."
Chris Roebuck:
But also, for those listening, let's be clear. The word stakeholder does not just mean your boss, your customers, your suppliers, it also means your people as well.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right and it could mean the larger community.
Chris Roebuck:
Yeah, the wider community as well. Your professional peers and all the rest of it. Marshall, that's amazing. Tell us how people can learn more about you and your book.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, the book is pretty much available everywhere. I think in the UK, it's out May 12th, in the U.S. it's out in May 3. You can pre-order it now. It's [inaudible 01:02:14]. The book is going to be pretty widely distributed. So they did give me a million dollar advance on the book, so it is going to be available around the [crosstalk 01:02:21]
Chris Roebuck:
Everywhere, everywhere.
Marshall Goldsmith:
They're going to try to sell a couple of copies of the thing. So the other thing is my email is marshall@marshallgoldsmith.com. Go to LinkedIn. I put free stuff on LinkedIn constantly, Marshall Goldsmith. So I would say book should be pretty easy to find, just preorder it on Amazon and just preorder and then send me a note if you preorder the book, I'll send you something to say thank you.
Chris Roebuck:
Marshall, thank you. Thank you so much, and our listeners will have gained so much in insight into just these... I think it's about, we've covered everything, the practicalities of leadership to talking about fulfillment. So everybody that's listened, thank you to Marshall and just go away and think about what Marshall and I have discussed. And thank you, Marshall, for everything, it's been amazing.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Oh, thank you. You've been a good friend for many, many long years now. So thank you so much.
Chris Roebuck:
Thank you.
Chris Roebuck:
So from the interview, you'll know that Marshall and I have worked together on the development of senior leaders at UBS, The Global Bank, for a number of years. And what the interview shows clearly is Marshall's simple practical day to day approach in helping leaders, in particular, top global C-suite, get better. But as you might have picked up from the interview, when Marshall comments about the research he's done, do not think that this really simple down to earth approach to leadership has no hard foundation. It's based on significant experience, hard data and real world success stories he's been involved in. It's just that he expresses it in a simple way, rather than some people, who express things in a complicated way that confuses people. And that's one of Marshall's key lessons. And indeed one of my lessons from both my business and military experience, just keep it simple.
Chris Roebuck:
Also, I would say, just use common sense as Marshall does, because common sense is essentially a reflection of what we know happens day to day. For example, if you as a leader behave badly to your people, things won't go well. That's common sense, even though there are studies which confirm it. And that leads into the common thread that runs through the interview and indeed everything that Marshall does based on his Buddhist philosophy. That simply if you do good, good will happen to you. And obviously linking into the Christian philosophy, do unto others as you would wish them to do to you. All of us, me and all of you listening, no matter how senior you are in an organization, should always treat everyone with respect as a human being.
Chris Roebuck:
So in a week, I'll give you more in depth view of the key takeaways from Marshall's interview, my insights and ideas for action in my reflections on the top. If you've used any of the insights you've got from previous perspectives from the top guests, and they've helped you, please send me your success stories. I'd love to hear them. We've had a couple of really interesting ones that have come in.
Chris Roebuck:
Also, don't forget to sign up on the website, so you don't miss any of the great future guests over the next year. Thanks for tuning in. Check out the show notes from today's episodes at perspectivesfromthetop.com where you can not only enjoy additional resources from today's show, but all previous ones. If you haven't already subscribed to the show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your favorite podcast, so you don't miss any. And if you really enjoyed the show, please give us a five star rating and review.
Chris Roebuck:
Have a question or comment? Let's discuss it. Message me on LinkedIn Perspectives from the Top is produced in collaboration with Detroit Podcast Studios. So have a successful week, use today's new learnings and actions and remember it's onwards and upwards. See you next time on Perspectives from the Top.