Inside Strategic Coach Podcast: Bureaucracies vs. Heroes

[Music] hi this is Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan I am really excited about what we're going to talk about today and that is a comment that you made which I thought was really intriguing and what you said is that bureaucracies eliminate the need for Heroes and I think that is such an interesting idea and one of our latest books is who do you want to be a hero to so I would love to dive deep into that because I don't know I was really inspired by hearing that comment so what do you mean when you say bureaucracies eliminate the need for Heroes I find that really interesting yeah well bureaucracies first of all are necessary in society where you have predictable things that are very complex so you want to create processes and systems and procedures which only requires human beings to actually follow and do a really really good job of following existing processes that have been test it out I mean if it's a good bureaucracy and what bureaucracy comes from you know it's a French word and it's the rule of the desk so the word for desk in French is Bureau and Acy is Rule of so it's the people who have the desks and generally in bureaucracies the head of a bureaucracy whether it's true or not but this is the image they have the biggest office they have the corner office and they have the biggest they have the biggest desk but it's the notion that as population increases and societies become more complex in the different kinds of activities there's a part that just needs to be more or less made predictable you know if you just follow the rules this is going to work and there's no need for people to exhibit extraordinary capability or they save the day the whole point of bureaucracy is that there should be no days in the future that have to be saved there should be no C species okay and the whole point is that our world even within my lifetime so I'm 75 years old this year and 2019 I'm 75 but when I was born in 1944 the global population was 2.2 billion and now it's 7.7 billion so in my lifetime the population of the planet has tripled more than tripled and it'll go for times it might go five times in my lifetime and there's a lot of complexity to managing things so that water supplies are good and you know all sorts thousand different daily things that we take for granted if we live in modern society which really require automated systems and bureaucracies to run them the whole point is you don't want those vital things depending that someone's going to be heroic okay so generally speaking I think that it's the very idea of a bureaucracy and the way bureaucracies plan out their future and the way that they manage things is actually designed that there's no need for heroism there's no need for Heroes and it's my experience and I'm you know I'm an outsider because the only bureaucracies that I've ever actually been in were I worked for the FBI for two years right out of high school I needed a job you know my family didn't really have money and through my high school principal whose brother was the agent in charge of the FBI in Cleveland Ohio I was able to get a job at the identification Bureau in Washington DC and this is right on the mall in downtown Washington DC we're about a half mile from the capol building the big issue still then was Communist Party USA so I had a job for two years pulling files for investigative agents and it was all very bureaucratic you know you don't want your file clerk to be a hero you don't want your file clerk you don't want your agents necessarily to be heroes and I don't know if a lot of people know this but to be an FBI agent you either have to have a law degree or an accounting degree because they're investigators you know and legal training and accounting training really trains you to have an investigative mind you know the numbers have to be right the facts have to be right basically in your future planning of a large organization like that you want to eliminate all situations that would require someone being heroic there should be rules and regulations that handle everything and if there's a breakdown you don't go out and higher Heroes what you do is you fix the bureaucracy and then the second one I was in the Army for two years and the Army is a big bureaucracy it has to be you know there's a couple million people in the armed forces and you know the complexity of everything the Army touches and what it's involved with you can't have the future of of the country or the defense of the country dependent upon Heroes to most part you want to eliminate all Need for heroism having said that I'm going to swing over to the non-bureaucratic world and this is the entrepreneurial world where new things are being created and in the world of entrepreneurism there's enormous rewards for being a hero and the heroism that comes through for entrepreneurs is that they're Heroes to their clients their hero to their customers so I think the natural most fundamental powerful activity at the center of entrepreneurial value creation is really being a hero so this is why these two worlds are very separate from each other and I've never seen an entrepreneur having been a hero in the marketplace who went into a bureaucracy and was happy with the experience and by the same token I've never seen someone whose lifetime was in a bureaucratic setting who decided to go to work in an Entre entrepreneurial firm who was happy with the experience these are two separate worlds you know these are two very very distinct and separate worlds and I think you know there's all sorts of profiles that you can do like Colby and there's like strength finder and you know any Myers Briggs and disc and all the different profiles we have which would kind of tell you someone wants predictable activities that they can get better they like operating within a system where the structure is guaranteed and some people like to operate where things get made up and there's a lot of trial and error and there's risk and everything that's the world of the hero and that's not the world of bureaucracy that's really interesting my one political science course that I ever took was actually on bureaucracy and then I thought that was really fun having met you who was kind of anti- bureaucracy and one of the things that they talked about and one thing I remember from this is that bureaucracies will outlive their original purpose and they will find another reason to survive so they won't just fulfill a purpose they'll actually manifest something else but I appreciate what you said because in my mind bureaucracies are bad but when you talk about the Army you talk about the FBI you talk about our systems you know we do need things that can feed and clothe millions of people that can make sure highways are running and so that makes a lot of sense and you don't want to have disasters where you need a hero to jump in although when that does happen and we Heroes do show up we're very appreciative but that's not something you can plan for that's not something you want to have to count on is how that strikes me yeah I'll give you a great example which points out exactly what you're talking here let's talk about the Space Program when it first started everybody has to remember say why can't we have the Space Program like we had you have to understand you know the mission to lay Demand on the moon had actually nothing to do with space it had to do with beating the Russians M beating the Soviets this was part of the Cold War and the fact is that the key players in the American Space Program were actually Nazis they were the experts in rocketry that the Germans had developed for weapons wer Von Brown and quite frankly these people you know the way they killed thousands and thousands of slave laborers to push through their rocketry expertise they were kind of were criminals and we gave them a clean bill of health because the Russians also had captured Nazis you know and they're Nazis I mean these were actual people who were very much for the Nazi movement and so you had the Russian Nazis and we had the American Nazis and we beat the Russians to the Moon because our Nazis were better than their Nazis okay but they were Heroes because this was entirely new so wherever you have something new that's being created bureaucracy is the worst possible thing you can have for it because it requires very sudden decisions it requires the ability to completely reverse something at a moment because something's not working chance for new talent to enter into the picture so very interesting the first astronauts were actually combat pilots and test pilots two very very dangerous activities so they had fought in the second world war they had fought in the Korean War then they were testing these very very risky the rocket planes so where the space program was new and it was all unexplored and everything was trial and error and often times the error ended up in death and there were astronauts killed and everything else you wanted people who really got excited about that type of activity but not only that they had proven their whole life that they were really good at that so wherever something's new and risky and experimental you want people who have a natural Instinct for being Heroes but now the astronauts you don't want your astronauts to be heroes 60 years later and it's the same thing like you would not want fighter pilots to be airline pilots and actually the kby Kathy kby of course has done extensive Kobes with major airlines she says the last thing in the world that you want is a 10 quick start airline pilot you know you want somebody who's a law FactFinder law follow through especially a checklist person you know you want seven and eight follow throughs who get enjoyment of checking into the cockpit on every flight and going through every checklist someone with a long quick start and not much follow through often I've done this example if you have your pilot who's actually a 10 quick start and probably on the the add scale and he said folks uh we were scheduled to come in on Runway number five but just for kicks I'm going to put the raid radio the tower on the PA system and I'm going to come in at on Runway 3 and just watch his reaction it's going to be a lot of fun you know this is going to be a lot of fun hey hey you know I I've done this three or four times and it always produces the same amazing results you know and this is why I fly it's just from one day to the next you never know what's going to come up well you know as a passenger on a scheduled Airline you just don't want that excitement in your life and therefore you know airline pilots tend to be bureaucratic employees really good bureaucratic employees and there's a danger in that that they are so unused to taking over and the planes are becoming you know robot controlled and automatic AI controlled that there are certain situations like the famous scullen bger who landed the plane on the Hudson River and they said probably if no other pilot at the control of that plane under that circumstances would have done what he did but he was used to being a hero he was a fighter pilot and the other thing he was a glider pilot he was a competitive glider pilot and he figured out what the gliding capability you have a plane doesn't have any engines can you Glide a plane and because he had this gliding experience he knew he had to keep it just at a certain angle or it would topple when it hit the ground so that experience in that situation a crisy situation he was a hero but you don't want the plane to be in that situation you know you don't want to be in that situation so there's two sides of it and first of all bureaucracies are going to be with us forever and entrepreneurism is going to be with us forever but if you want to be a hero don't join your bureaucracy and if you want things totally predictable don't join a entrepreneurial company yeah it really strikes me this provides a lot of Direction about where decide who you are you know profiles and it really comes down to values cuz we have people that that really enjoy putting processes in and they back us up and quite often they're are heroes which we really appreciate but there's a point if you want to completely eliminate all risk bureaucracy would be a much better place for you to spend your time but certainly for entrepreneurs I think really appreciating that they're not bureaucratic and to keep as far away from that as possible and to be very conscious about not getting involved in that and I see it when people sell their companies and they're retained for like 3 years or something like that and all of a sudden they've gone G from being a hero and they're sucked into that much more bureaucratic hierarchical way of doing things and they're very not happppy campers yeah this is why there's such uniqueness in human behavior because the world needs new entrepreneurs and quite frankly as the world gets more complicated and the populations get bigger we need bureaucracies that actually work and you have to have the right mindsets in charge of both those activities well it strikes me too this is where technology actually can really leverage and hopefully simplify bureaucracies because they do tend to be very hierarchical in paper pushing and some of the negative connotations that technology is one way where we can actually make it much more efficient yeah well the one thing there's very unequal Futures here because the easiest place to actually have Robotics and artificial intelligence takeover is actually the bureaucratic world not the entrepreneurial world so entrepreneur are much safer in a technological future than bureaucrats are oh tell me more about that well you know if you have a bureaucracy and it's got seven levels of management with proper technology programs can we reduce the Seven Levels down to three levels okay and then you know they call it the flattening of the organization and quite frankly if it's predictable humans aren't great even predictable people aren't that great at predict they certainly can't match a machine that is more or less guaranteed to do the same thing every day humans not so much you know we're Wayward creatures you know we're mistak prone and it's actually our genius that we can make mistakes and learn from them because so many breakthroughs actually come from failures and setbacks and mistakes and disasters and we completely reorganize our thought about going into the future as a result of negative experience bureaucracies don't handle negative experience well entrepreneurs actually have it as raw material so what do entrepreneurs do that bureaucrats don't well when something doesn't work you get to start all over and because they have short deadline the other thing is that entrepreneurs have very very short deadlines and the other thing is they don't operate well in processes they operate in projects which have a beginning a middle and end and my feeling is the best entrepreneurial projects are ones where it can be completed within a 90-day period beginning middle and end in a 90-day period you get the idea at the beginning of a quarter by the end of the quarter you have a new result when people are in bureaucracies they can go their entire career inside the same process and there was no beginning of it because it started before they actually joined the bureaucracy throughout their entire lifetime a 30 or 40 years they're in the same process and when they're finished it was like they were never there that sounds so depressing well yeah but you're only saying that because you would never go there no never yeah but for some people that would be wonderful they're Protected Their income is more or less guaranteed and the other thing is it's very hard to tell whether they're doing a good job or a bad job bureaucracies is not so easy to tell whether people are actually good or not because there aren't any endings where you could actually say well that was a bad ending bureaucracy for the most part doesn't like endings well it was interesting when I was first looking for a job not unlike your FBI I was trying to figure out where could I possibly fit how could I add value how is I going to make a living after University and I realized I had to be somewhere this was a conscious thought well before I met you I knew I needed to be somewhere where I could see the results of my work I had to know that it made a difference or it did not without that feedback I knew I would be useless and probably very unhappy which dramatically limited my selection to es ironically I remember I did apply to some government agencies that I thought were doing some interesting work fortunately none of them accepted me and I ended up in an entrepreneural company which led me to strategic coach I had that fortunately Instinct early on that I need that feedback mechanism from the marketplace or I was not going to be successful yeah and I think it's important you know that the world has gotten better with an increased population okay you know actually the quality of life around the planet the levels of accomplishment and the levels of individual striving and actually achievement has gone up with the number of people on the planet and this is incontestable you know and the world is much safer with 7.7 billion people than it was when I was born and it was 2.2 billion I often say you know when I was born Hitler was alive Stalin was alive Roosevelt was alive Churchill was alive Tojo who was the head of the Japanese war machine was alive and there were tens of thousands of people being killed every day when I was born that doesn't happen today when I'm 75 and the population is three times part of the reason is there's really good heroism and there's really bad heroism and I think that human beings want a certain amount of heroism but quite frankly most people's experience of heroism today is reading novels and going to movies they don't actually experience heroism live I tell you you say back in the old days you know life was heroic and I said yeah it was very dangerous and it was very short well that's when you need Heroes yeah you need Heroes but you can only take so much of that but here's the thing the fact that a situation or a circumstance is bad for you doesn't mean it's bad it just means it would be bad for you to spend your time there okay but I don't want my garbage man I don't want my mailman I don't want those people to be heroes MH I just want them to do what they're supposed to do every day and actually it doesn't bother them to do the same thing every day so Dan how can people take action on this because one of the things that strikes me is that we don't fortunately need people risking their lives as much and or dying or those sorts of things but we do have a lot of opportunities to be heroes to our clients and to our teams and to really pay attention to what makes a difference especially in that Realm of the new the creative the transforming so I think heroism fortunately has come much much closer to home and it's safer safer to be a hero in some ways so talk about how people can take this idea well it's 10 times more difficult to be a creative hero than it is to be a reactive hero okay so you know there's a threat to society or to people's lives and it requires heroism on the part of certain people but you're simply reacting to something that was created outside of you you know War you didn't create the war it's reactive you know crime you know you're heroic in situations fires your reactive I mean heroism is heroism and not everybody's capable of it but people are always searching for dangerous or situations that other people created and then they react to them to actually have things safe and abundant and be creative a creative hero where you create something brand new requires 10 times more more intentionality and the reason is because nobody cares whether you created it or not right you know it's not needed it's just that after you created people want it that's what Steve Jobs said well nobody needed the iPod it's just that after we created the iPod everybody wanted it same thing with the iPhone same thing with iTunes so his whole point was nobody needs the thing that we created but after we created it they all wanted it and and that's creative heroism that's not reactive heroism I love you know I mean Henry Ford said if I had given people what they needed it would have been 20 foot horses so they'd have 20 horsepower and they didn't eat they didn't eat and you didn't have to clean up the manure but it wouldn't have been an automobile it would have been a bigger better version of what people already needed right so creative heroism is is kind of intuiting down the road if I create this thing and I present it to people there's a chance that after they see it they can't live without it but I'm not responding to any need I'm just creating a new reality which people find very attractive that's fascinating I mean I love the term creative heroism I that's very powerful and the fact that it is actually harder but has come from the inside you're not responding to something from the outside exactly and usually there's a lot of questions and doubt and hopefully testing I love your expression always test on check writers to see whether or not if it's useful for one person make sure it's useful for one person before you think it's going to be useful for everybody you know there's so much wisdom we have in coach about how to do that so I really love this distinction Dan and you've given me a new insight that bureaucracies aren't always bad certainly when they lack all creativity then they get that way for me well I can tell you when a bureaucracy in modern light fails you really know about it and it's an unpleasant day for a large number of people when the lights go out it's very unpleasant okay so we tend to take good bureaucracies for granted we only respond to bad bureaucracies or where they're not doing their job but there would be a thousand massive bureaucratic systems that's supporting our daily life here that we never have to think about and that's the whole point that we can go about doing what we want to do individually and these systems are taken care of well and this infrastructure really creates a lot of room and abundance as you said for more creative heroism yeah you can't have creative heroism unless you have good bureaucracies taking care of everything else in life so that you don't have to think about it on that note no I mean everybody knows I have certain political views and one of them is about the environmental movement and earthour you know so Earth hour it's usually in March and it's still dark and you turn all your lights but we have lots of lights and I turn every single light on during Earth hour and I call it electricity hour I sit there for an hour and I'm just so thankful for all the human beings before me who tested and tried out and some got electrocuted and everything else that I have electricity I said boy electricity what a thing you know I really love electricity you know and I always appreciate it cuz I grew up when the strongest light bulb we had in our house with 60 watts and there weren't many of them you know and there were very few plugs and as a matter of fact I was born in 1944 and our farm had only been electrified 16 years before I was born and I could talk to people what the farm was like without electricity I can tell you Farms are a lot better with electricity yeah so you can't have creative entrepreneurism without really good bureaucracies and no one's asking you to actually be in that life they're saying these things are taken care of but don't sit there and knock them because without electricity and a thousand other guarantees every day you can't be a creative entrepreneur so I'm kind of evenhanded about this you know well I think what I appreciate is you've really kind of described the polarity between bureaucracy and entrepreneurism and the fact that you know there's an upside and a downside to both and we can appreciate the upside of bureaucracy because that really frees us to do what we do as entrepreneurs yeah and plumbing I mean Plumbing you know somebody said you know this is one of the American Presidents said this I don't know who it was but he said if you think that a country is going to be your competitor in the future go to their capital city and travel 100 miles from the capitol city and if they're still pooping in a hole in the ground they're not a competitor that's a good distinction he says Plumbing really counts for a lot in the world yep I and that takes bureaucracy entrepreneurs can create breakthroughs but for them to become systems requires bureaucracy great and that really is the process where something new gets created and then it gets systematized and made consistent at which point that hero that breakthrough person needs to go back and do another one A different one because if they stay involved in it they'll just want to keep changing it and that's the point to hand it over to someone who can actually make it real and make it recur as we talk about it coach that's there's a whole process there implied in what we're talking that's exactly right great thanks Dan this was so interesting and I appreciate being clear about where I belong thank you you're welcome at strategic coach we focus on growth in every area of your business and life leading to Freedom that entrepreneurs dream of join Dan Sullivan founder of strategic coach for a brand new OnDemand web presentation it's a breakthrough hour of wisdom insight and proven strategies over 18,000 entrepreneurs can't be wrong watch today at Dan webinar.com [Music]

[Music] hi this is Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan I am really excited about what we&#39;re going to talk about today and that is a comment that you made which I thought was really intriguing and what you said is that bureaucracies eliminate the need for Heroes and I think that is such an interesting idea and one of our latest books is who do you want to be a hero to so I would love to dive deep into that because I don&#39;t know I was really inspired by hearing that comment so what do you mean when you say bureaucracies eliminate the need for Heroes I find that really interesting yeah well bureaucracies first of all are necessary in society where you have predictable things that are very complex so you want to create processes and systems and procedures which only requires human beings to actually follow and do a really really good job of following existing processes that have been test it out I mean if it&#39;s a good bureaucracy and what bureaucracy comes from you know it&#39;s a French word and it&#39;s the rule of the desk so the word for desk in French is Bureau and Acy is Rule of so it&#39;s the people who have the desks and generally in bureaucracies the head of a bureaucracy whether it&#39;s true or not but this is the image they have the biggest office they have the corner office and they have the biggest they have the biggest desk but it&#39;s the notion that as population increases and societies become more complex in the different kinds of activities there&#39;s a part that just needs to be more or less made predictable you know if you just follow the rules this is going to work and there&#39;s no need for people to exhibit extraordinary capability or they save the day the whole point of bureaucracy is that there should be no days in the future that have to be saved there should be no C species okay and the whole point is that our world even within my lifetime so I&#39;m 75 years old this year and 2019 I&#39;m 75 but when I was born in 1944 the global population was 2.2 billion and now it&#39;s 7.7 billion so in my lifetime the population of the planet has tripled more than tripled and it&#39;ll go for times it might go five times in my lifetime and there&#39;s a lot of complexity to managing things so that water supplies are good and you know all sorts thousand different daily things that we take for granted if we live in modern society which really require automated systems and bureaucracies to run them the whole point is you don&#39;t want those vital things depending that someone&#39;s going to be heroic okay so generally speaking I think that it&#39;s the very idea of a bureaucracy and the way bureaucracies plan out their future and the way that they manage things is actually designed that there&#39;s no need for heroism there&#39;s no need for Heroes and it&#39;s my experience and I&#39;m you know I&#39;m an outsider because the only bureaucracies that I&#39;ve ever actually been in were I worked for the FBI for two years right out of high school I needed a job you know my family didn&#39;t really have money and through my high school principal whose brother was the agent in charge of the FBI in Cleveland Ohio I was able to get a job at the identification Bureau in Washington DC and this is right on the mall in downtown Washington DC we&#39;re about a half mile from the capol building the big issue still then was Communist Party USA so I had a job for two years pulling files for investigative agents and it was all very bureaucratic you know you don&#39;t want your file clerk to be a hero you don&#39;t want your file clerk you don&#39;t want your agents necessarily to be heroes and I don&#39;t know if a lot of people know this but to be an FBI agent you either have to have a law degree or an accounting degree because they&#39;re investigators you know and legal training and accounting training really trains you to have an investigative mind you know the numbers have to be right the facts have to be right basically in your future planning of a large organization like that you want to eliminate all situations that would require someone being heroic there should be rules and regulations that handle everything and if there&#39;s a breakdown you don&#39;t go out and higher Heroes what you do is you fix the bureaucracy and then the second one I was in the Army for two years and the Army is a big bureaucracy it has to be you know there&#39;s a couple million people in the armed forces and you know the complexity of everything the Army touches and what it&#39;s involved with you can&#39;t have the future of of the country or the defense of the country dependent upon Heroes to most part you want to eliminate all Need for heroism having said that I&#39;m going to swing over to the non-bureaucratic world and this is the entrepreneurial world where new things are being created and in the world of entrepreneurism there&#39;s enormous rewards for being a hero and the heroism that comes through for entrepreneurs is that they&#39;re Heroes to their clients their hero to their customers so I think the natural most fundamental powerful activity at the center of entrepreneurial value creation is really being a hero so this is why these two worlds are very separate from each other and I&#39;ve never seen an entrepreneur having been a hero in the marketplace who went into a bureaucracy and was happy with the experience and by the same token I&#39;ve never seen someone whose lifetime was in a bureaucratic setting who decided to go to work in an Entre entrepreneurial firm who was happy with the experience these are two separate worlds you know these are two very very distinct and separate worlds and I think you know there&#39;s all sorts of profiles that you can do like Colby and there&#39;s like strength finder and you know any Myers Briggs and disc and all the different profiles we have which would kind of tell you someone wants predictable activities that they can get better they like operating within a system where the structure is guaranteed and some people like to operate where things get made up and there&#39;s a lot of trial and error and there&#39;s risk and everything that&#39;s the world of the hero and that&#39;s not the world of bureaucracy that&#39;s really interesting my one political science course that I ever took was actually on bureaucracy and then I thought that was really fun having met you who was kind of anti- bureaucracy and one of the things that they talked about and one thing I remember from this is that bureaucracies will outlive their original purpose and they will find another reason to survive so they won&#39;t just fulfill a purpose they&#39;ll actually manifest something else but I appreciate what you said because in my mind bureaucracies are bad but when you talk about the Army you talk about the FBI you talk about our systems you know we do need things that can feed and clothe millions of people that can make sure highways are running and so that makes a lot of sense and you don&#39;t want to have disasters where you need a hero to jump in although when that does happen and we Heroes do show up we&#39;re very appreciative but that&#39;s not something you can plan for that&#39;s not something you want to have to count on is how that strikes me yeah I&#39;ll give you a great example which points out exactly what you&#39;re talking here let&#39;s talk about the Space Program when it first started everybody has to remember say why can&#39;t we have the Space Program like we had you have to understand you know the mission to lay Demand on the moon had actually nothing to do with space it had to do with beating the Russians M beating the Soviets this was part of the Cold War and the fact is that the key players in the American Space Program were actually Nazis they were the experts in rocketry that the Germans had developed for weapons wer Von Brown and quite frankly these people you know the way they killed thousands and thousands of slave laborers to push through their rocketry expertise they were kind of were criminals and we gave them a clean bill of health because the Russians also had captured Nazis you know and they&#39;re Nazis I mean these were actual people who were very much for the Nazi movement and so you had the Russian Nazis and we had the American Nazis and we beat the Russians to the Moon because our Nazis were better than their Nazis okay but they were Heroes because this was entirely new so wherever you have something new that&#39;s being created bureaucracy is the worst possible thing you can have for it because it requires very sudden decisions it requires the ability to completely reverse something at a moment because something&#39;s not working chance for new talent to enter into the picture so very interesting the first astronauts were actually combat pilots and test pilots two very very dangerous activities so they had fought in the second world war they had fought in the Korean War then they were testing these very very risky the rocket planes so where the space program was new and it was all unexplored and everything was trial and error and often times the error ended up in death and there were astronauts killed and everything else you wanted people who really got excited about that type of activity but not only that they had proven their whole life that they were really good at that so wherever something&#39;s new and risky and experimental you want people who have a natural Instinct for being Heroes but now the astronauts you don&#39;t want your astronauts to be heroes 60 years later and it&#39;s the same thing like you would not want fighter pilots to be airline pilots and actually the kby Kathy kby of course has done extensive Kobes with major airlines she says the last thing in the world that you want is a 10 quick start airline pilot you know you want somebody who&#39;s a law FactFinder law follow through especially a checklist person you know you want seven and eight follow throughs who get enjoyment of checking into the cockpit on every flight and going through every checklist someone with a long quick start and not much follow through often I&#39;ve done this example if you have your pilot who&#39;s actually a 10 quick start and probably on the the add scale and he said folks uh we were scheduled to come in on Runway number five but just for kicks I&#39;m going to put the raid radio the tower on the PA system and I&#39;m going to come in at on Runway 3 and just watch his reaction it&#39;s going to be a lot of fun you know this is going to be a lot of fun hey hey you know I I&#39;ve done this three or four times and it always produces the same amazing results you know and this is why I fly it&#39;s just from one day to the next you never know what&#39;s going to come up well you know as a passenger on a scheduled Airline you just don&#39;t want that excitement in your life and therefore you know airline pilots tend to be bureaucratic employees really good bureaucratic employees and there&#39;s a danger in that that they are so unused to taking over and the planes are becoming you know robot controlled and automatic AI controlled that there are certain situations like the famous scullen bger who landed the plane on the Hudson River and they said probably if no other pilot at the control of that plane under that circumstances would have done what he did but he was used to being a hero he was a fighter pilot and the other thing he was a glider pilot he was a competitive glider pilot and he figured out what the gliding capability you have a plane doesn&#39;t have any engines can you Glide a plane and because he had this gliding experience he knew he had to keep it just at a certain angle or it would topple when it hit the ground so that experience in that situation a crisy situation he was a hero but you don&#39;t want the plane to be in that situation you know you don&#39;t want to be in that situation so there&#39;s two sides of it and first of all bureaucracies are going to be with us forever and entrepreneurism is going to be with us forever but if you want to be a hero don&#39;t join your bureaucracy and if you want things totally predictable don&#39;t join a entrepreneurial company yeah it really strikes me this provides a lot of Direction about where decide who you are you know profiles and it really comes down to values cuz we have people that that really enjoy putting processes in and they back us up and quite often they&#39;re are heroes which we really appreciate but there&#39;s a point if you want to completely eliminate all risk bureaucracy would be a much better place for you to spend your time but certainly for entrepreneurs I think really appreciating that they&#39;re not bureaucratic and to keep as far away from that as possible and to be very conscious about not getting involved in that and I see it when people sell their companies and they&#39;re retained for like 3 years or something like that and all of a sudden they&#39;ve gone G from being a hero and they&#39;re sucked into that much more bureaucratic hierarchical way of doing things and they&#39;re very not happppy campers yeah this is why there&#39;s such uniqueness in human behavior because the world needs new entrepreneurs and quite frankly as the world gets more complicated and the populations get bigger we need bureaucracies that actually work and you have to have the right mindsets in charge of both those activities well it strikes me too this is where technology actually can really leverage and hopefully simplify bureaucracies because they do tend to be very hierarchical in paper pushing and some of the negative connotations that technology is one way where we can actually make it much more efficient yeah well the one thing there&#39;s very unequal Futures here because the easiest place to actually have Robotics and artificial intelligence takeover is actually the bureaucratic world not the entrepreneurial world so entrepreneur are much safer in a technological future than bureaucrats are oh tell me more about that well you know if you have a bureaucracy and it&#39;s got seven levels of management with proper technology programs can we reduce the Seven Levels down to three levels okay and then you know they call it the flattening of the organization and quite frankly if it&#39;s predictable humans aren&#39;t great even predictable people aren&#39;t that great at predict they certainly can&#39;t match a machine that is more or less guaranteed to do the same thing every day humans not so much you know we&#39;re Wayward creatures you know we&#39;re mistak prone and it&#39;s actually our genius that we can make mistakes and learn from them because so many breakthroughs actually come from failures and setbacks and mistakes and disasters and we completely reorganize our thought about going into the future as a result of negative experience bureaucracies don&#39;t handle negative experience well entrepreneurs actually have it as raw material so what do entrepreneurs do that bureaucrats don&#39;t well when something doesn&#39;t work you get to start all over and because they have short deadline the other thing is that entrepreneurs have very very short deadlines and the other thing is they don&#39;t operate well in processes they operate in projects which have a beginning a middle and end and my feeling is the best entrepreneurial projects are ones where it can be completed within a 90-day period beginning middle and end in a 90-day period you get the idea at the beginning of a quarter by the end of the quarter you have a new result when people are in bureaucracies they can go their entire career inside the same process and there was no beginning of it because it started before they actually joined the bureaucracy throughout their entire lifetime a 30 or 40 years they&#39;re in the same process and when they&#39;re finished it was like they were never there that sounds so depressing well yeah but you&#39;re only saying that because you would never go there no never yeah but for some people that would be wonderful they&#39;re Protected Their income is more or less guaranteed and the other thing is it&#39;s very hard to tell whether they&#39;re doing a good job or a bad job bureaucracies is not so easy to tell whether people are actually good or not because there aren&#39;t any endings where you could actually say well that was a bad ending bureaucracy for the most part doesn&#39;t like endings well it was interesting when I was first looking for a job not unlike your FBI I was trying to figure out where could I possibly fit how could I add value how is I going to make a living after University and I realized I had to be somewhere this was a conscious thought well before I met you I knew I needed to be somewhere where I could see the results of my work I had to know that it made a difference or it did not without that feedback I knew I would be useless and probably very unhappy which dramatically limited my selection to es ironically I remember I did apply to some government agencies that I thought were doing some interesting work fortunately none of them accepted me and I ended up in an entrepreneural company which led me to strategic coach I had that fortunately Instinct early on that I need that feedback mechanism from the marketplace or I was not going to be successful yeah and I think it&#39;s important you know that the world has gotten better with an increased population okay you know actually the quality of life around the planet the levels of accomplishment and the levels of individual striving and actually achievement has gone up with the number of people on the planet and this is incontestable you know and the world is much safer with 7.7 billion people than it was when I was born and it was 2.2 billion I often say you know when I was born Hitler was alive Stalin was alive Roosevelt was alive Churchill was alive Tojo who was the head of the Japanese war machine was alive and there were tens of thousands of people being killed every day when I was born that doesn&#39;t happen today when I&#39;m 75 and the population is three times part of the reason is there&#39;s really good heroism and there&#39;s really bad heroism and I think that human beings want a certain amount of heroism but quite frankly most people&#39;s experience of heroism today is reading novels and going to movies they don&#39;t actually experience heroism live I tell you you say back in the old days you know life was heroic and I said yeah it was very dangerous and it was very short well that&#39;s when you need Heroes yeah you need Heroes but you can only take so much of that but here&#39;s the thing the fact that a situation or a circumstance is bad for you doesn&#39;t mean it&#39;s bad it just means it would be bad for you to spend your time there okay but I don&#39;t want my garbage man I don&#39;t want my mailman I don&#39;t want those people to be heroes MH I just want them to do what they&#39;re supposed to do every day and actually it doesn&#39;t bother them to do the same thing every day so Dan how can people take action on this because one of the things that strikes me is that we don&#39;t fortunately need people risking their lives as much and or dying or those sorts of things but we do have a lot of opportunities to be heroes to our clients and to our teams and to really pay attention to what makes a difference especially in that Realm of the new the creative the transforming so I think heroism fortunately has come much much closer to home and it&#39;s safer safer to be a hero in some ways so talk about how people can take this idea well it&#39;s 10 times more difficult to be a creative hero than it is to be a reactive hero okay so you know there&#39;s a threat to society or to people&#39;s lives and it requires heroism on the part of certain people but you&#39;re simply reacting to something that was created outside of you you know War you didn&#39;t create the war it&#39;s reactive you know crime you know you&#39;re heroic in situations fires your reactive I mean heroism is heroism and not everybody&#39;s capable of it but people are always searching for dangerous or situations that other people created and then they react to them to actually have things safe and abundant and be creative a creative hero where you create something brand new requires 10 times more more intentionality and the reason is because nobody cares whether you created it or not right you know it&#39;s not needed it&#39;s just that after you created people want it that&#39;s what Steve Jobs said well nobody needed the iPod it&#39;s just that after we created the iPod everybody wanted it same thing with the iPhone same thing with iTunes so his whole point was nobody needs the thing that we created but after we created it they all wanted it and and that&#39;s creative heroism that&#39;s not reactive heroism I love you know I mean Henry Ford said if I had given people what they needed it would have been 20 foot horses so they&#39;d have 20 horsepower and they didn&#39;t eat they didn&#39;t eat and you didn&#39;t have to clean up the manure but it wouldn&#39;t have been an automobile it would have been a bigger better version of what people already needed right so creative heroism is is kind of intuiting down the road if I create this thing and I present it to people there&#39;s a chance that after they see it they can&#39;t live without it but I&#39;m not responding to any need I&#39;m just creating a new reality which people find very attractive that&#39;s fascinating I mean I love the term creative heroism I that&#39;s very powerful and the fact that it is actually harder but has come from the inside you&#39;re not responding to something from the outside exactly and usually there&#39;s a lot of questions and doubt and hopefully testing I love your expression always test on check writers to see whether or not if it&#39;s useful for one person make sure it&#39;s useful for one person before you think it&#39;s going to be useful for everybody you know there&#39;s so much wisdom we have in coach about how to do that so I really love this distinction Dan and you&#39;ve given me a new insight that bureaucracies aren&#39;t always bad certainly when they lack all creativity then they get that way for me well I can tell you when a bureaucracy in modern light fails you really know about it and it&#39;s an unpleasant day for a large number of people when the lights go out it&#39;s very unpleasant okay so we tend to take good bureaucracies for granted we only respond to bad bureaucracies or where they&#39;re not doing their job but there would be a thousand massive bureaucratic systems that&#39;s supporting our daily life here that we never have to think about and that&#39;s the whole point that we can go about doing what we want to do individually and these systems are taken care of well and this infrastructure really creates a lot of room and abundance as you said for more creative heroism yeah you can&#39;t have creative heroism unless you have good bureaucracies taking care of everything else in life so that you don&#39;t have to think about it on that note no I mean everybody knows I have certain political views and one of them is about the environmental movement and earthour you know so Earth hour it&#39;s usually in March and it&#39;s still dark and you turn all your lights but we have lots of lights and I turn every single light on during Earth hour and I call it electricity hour I sit there for an hour and I&#39;m just so thankful for all the human beings before me who tested and tried out and some got electrocuted and everything else that I have electricity I said boy electricity what a thing you know I really love electricity you know and I always appreciate it cuz I grew up when the strongest light bulb we had in our house with 60 watts and there weren&#39;t many of them you know and there were very few plugs and as a matter of fact I was born in 1944 and our farm had only been electrified 16 years before I was born and I could talk to people what the farm was like without electricity I can tell you Farms are a lot better with electricity yeah so you can&#39;t have creative entrepreneurism without really good bureaucracies and no one&#39;s asking you to actually be in that life they&#39;re saying these things are taken care of but don&#39;t sit there and knock them because without electricity and a thousand other guarantees every day you can&#39;t be a creative entrepreneur so I&#39;m kind of evenhanded about this you know well I think what I appreciate is you&#39;ve really kind of described the polarity between bureaucracy and entrepreneurism and the fact that you know there&#39;s an upside and a downside to both and we can appreciate the upside of bureaucracy because that really frees us to do what we do as entrepreneurs yeah and plumbing I mean Plumbing you know somebody said you know this is one of the American Presidents said this I don&#39;t know who it was but he said if you think that a country is going to be your competitor in the future go to their capital city and travel 100 miles from the capitol city and if they&#39;re still pooping in a hole in the ground they&#39;re not a competitor that&#39;s a good distinction he says Plumbing really counts for a lot in the world yep I and that takes bureaucracy entrepreneurs can create breakthroughs but for them to become systems requires bureaucracy great and that really is the process where something new gets created and then it gets systematized and made consistent at which point that hero that breakthrough person needs to go back and do another one A different one because if they stay involved in it they&#39;ll just want to keep changing it and that&#39;s the point to hand it over to someone who can actually make it real and make it recur as we talk about it coach that&#39;s there&#39;s a whole process there implied in what we&#39;re talking that&#39;s exactly right great thanks Dan this was so interesting and I appreciate being clear about where I belong thank you you&#39;re welcome at strategic coach we focus on growth in every area of your business and life leading to Freedom that entrepreneurs dream of join Dan Sullivan founder of strategic coach for a brand new OnDemand web presentation it&#39;s a breakthrough hour of wisdom insight and proven strategies over 18,000 entrepreneurs can&#39;t be wrong watch today at Dan webinar.com [Music]

Transcript for:Inside Strategic Coach Podcast: Bureaucracies vs. Heroes

Transcript for:
Inside Strategic Coach Podcast: Bureaucracies vs. Heroes