EXPERIENCE 49 | Stephen Morris, Former World Cup Yacht Designer & EOS Implementer

On this episode of the local experience podcast, my guest was Steve Morris and Steve is an EOS implementer and business coach. EOS stands for the entrepreneur's operating system and it's featured in the book Traction by Gina Wickham and we talk a little bit about the traction principles. Steve's journey has been an interesting one in that he was part of world-class yachting teams, designers, worked for a world-leading design firm in that industry and eventually ascended to be a second generation leadership from the founders of that company. So building racing yachts for people like Larry Ellison is in his background and after that chapter of life, he really got passionate about building teams and building businesses to be sustainable and so we talk a lot about the principles of life and business in this one as well as just general principles of traction and how to find accountability and fitment and a shared vision with your team. So there's a lot of good stuff in this one as well as just an interesting journey of a New Zealander to America via the yachting world. Let's have some fun. Welcome to the local experience podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Bear. This show is produced by me and my team and sponsored by my small business local think tank and sometimes others. Episodes feature a range of local and regional business and community leaders as guests in a conversational interview format. Our guests are interesting and successful people with unique business journeys and the more business education and unbarnished truth we can uncover the better. You'll feel like you really know our guests after each episode and if I'm doing my job well, listeners will find business principles and tips from their journey and a greater appreciation for each of our guests. Woven into these long format experience episodes are occasional thought bubbles episodes. Topically focused snippets of five to fifteen minutes where our guests unfold important and timely business truths. And also I'll read the local perspective blog post because I'm lazy to infer to listen and read and maybe you do too. Thanks for tuning in and if you'd like to show a please subscribe, review and share it with your favorite people. Welcome back to the local experience podcast. My guest today is Steve Morris and Steve's a professional EOS implementer and business coach and we met just recently relatively new acquaintance and I thought his journey was just really fascinating and I asked him to come on the show so Steve tell us about EOS let's set a baseline there. Sure well EOS is just a complete proven system of a simple set of practical tools and what it's all about is about business execution and you know I've been around in business a lot through my life and and done a whole bunch of different things MBA and all the rest of that stuff and people talk a lot about strategy right you know for a business and where is the business going and things like that but the important important thing is you can have all the strategy in the world you want but if you don't execute on it well you're just wasting your time. It reminds me of that isn't there Chinese philosopher with that line a perfect plan left on the shelf doesn't get much done but a flawed plan fully executed will win every time. Yeah because you know things change right business out there you know life happens we get pandemics come upon us and all sorts of stuff and all of a sudden everybody's working at home well you know what happened to your strategy plan you know what's sitting on the shelf and all that happens right so when we talk about business execution we're really talking about getting a group of people together to be able to perform at their very best to be able to reach their maximum potential and to take the business forward and I love doing that and you know working with clients they get so relieved and so happy when we get you know through our sessions and like oh my gosh we've got a plan in place now we know what we're doing I know what I'm supposed to be working on next week all of that sort of cool stuff yeah floats my boat gets me out of bed in the morning the things that I love doing and I remember that you were a business coach for some years before either coming across or really becoming a believer in EOS of the system can we talk about that transition a little bit we'll jump in the way back here eventually and learn more about Steve but tell me about that yeah so I've been running my own business doing this for the past seven years and in the beginning I was you know I have an engineering background a design background and I love working with people with teams and groups and helping them really get their creative ideas out of their heads and how they're going to work together and how do they actually make things in the world and then that's sort of morphed into working with business leadership teams you know in a larger sort of sense about how do we actually work together to be able to take the business forward and then along the way I was introduced to traction in EOS and I immediately fell in love because you know here was a complete system a system of tools that I you know saw really made sense and really addressed the larger business and part of you know what really excited me about it is if you want to go the real way back you know I used to be a leader in a yacht design company the top yacht design company in the world for many years and you know growing that business wasn't easy and the thing that I we've loved about traction in EOS is I finally found a set of tools I wished I'd had 20 years ago right right and EOS is that's sort for entrepreneurs operating system entrepreneurial operating system yeah okay developed by Gina Wakeman in Detroit about 15 years ago and Gina's had a very interesting story in his life he was entrepreneur from the age of 21 and about 25 he came and joined his father and his father's business which wasn't doing too well but he joined his father you know they ended up executing a turnaround on the business the grew the business and ended up selling it so you know Gina got a lot of sort of experience out of that then he became one of the first 10 founding members at the Detroit chapter of entrepreneurs organization and there he really you know found that he loved helping his fellow entrepreneurs you know building their business and he really found that he kind of had you know something about the the the nat for the art and science of growing an entrepreneurial business so he cobbled together a set of tools over about a five-year period tried stuff tested stuff figured out what worked and ended up developing that into EOS and wrote a book about it wrote traction sold over a million copies now and you know there's never a look back from there yeah well it's a it's a book that changed the way I think about business for sure and so although we're not a official traction company we certainly take a lot of the principles and we've used some of the tools here and there yeah well there's no magic pills or silver bullets in EOS and which is what I love about it it's just a complete proven system of a simple set of practical tools genome you know brought some of those tools in from from other people like Jim Carlin's right you know good to great Patrick Lensioni with the five dysfunctions of a team bring these things together but his brilliance is really kind of putting it together into a tangible and executable framework to go into a business yeah because the thing I sort of see you know with all my clients is everybody's busy right no one's kind of really sitting around these days saying you know what what the heck am I going to do today people are out there you know working extremely hard to take their businesses forward so you know the idea that we're going to transform things and put it on operating system can be a concern for some people but the beauty of of the system is that it saves you time yeah right and then when you've got more time now you can like start being more strategic well and what I see a lot of times is all of the the team members in a business you know they know their job but sometimes they lose sight of what the the big picture is and traction really helps to zoom up and help everybody understand where their contribution to the greater enterprise fits and and what the whole what that what that organism is doing yeah what it eats for lunch what you know yeah I know that one of our three unique are what we call vision traction and healthy and that's what I love about EOS because it's addressing all of these three things so vision you know is about getting everybody a hundred percent on the same page about like where are you going with the business what is your vision and it's not just the leadership team we're talking about having that vision shared by everybody in the business and then traction is about the execution right the discipline the accountability that's make sure we're getting stuff done becoming masters of execution bring that vision to reality and then healthy is making sure that everybody's working together as a healthy functional cohesive leadership team because I'm sure you've experienced stuff in your life Kurt I certainly have yeah sometimes the leadership team sitting around the table was a lot of different opinions there and not everybody's got the skills to be able to bring those together and to make sure everybody's being heard so we don't guess what we have people we have conflict yeah you know and it's just how you address that and take a while it's got me reflecting on a prior boss in my banking industry path and aside from me he had a blow up with every single person on the staff and especially with some of the leadership team and I'm apparently just a perfect employee so he never but but he had a real challenge with those with not talking to people about things that were bothering him until it was like overflowing right and we all have those little nicks and nacks from our past life or history our relationship with our mom or our first girlfriend whatever yeah and things that I think you know when I look back I think business has changed right and I'm talking about like over the last 30 years right and I think in the old days what I'd say is the old days you know that sort of command and control where running a business you know just do what I say and get on with it you know that sort of flew back then it doesn't fly anymore yeah right people are looking around people want to have meaning and purpose and why they're showing up and doing things like why do we do stuff it's different because I pay you it doesn't seem to work anymore yeah people are like well you know you know yes I want to go somewhere else because you know this doesn't float my boat this doesn't do it for me it's a people you know you have we have to change we have to dress that and you know talking to somebody recently and who was sort of perhaps more in that sort of command and control sort of mentality and you know that we're doing it right there they're getting their results and they're happy about that but to me it's like what what could you be achieving right I mean if you really bring the team together and you're addressing like getting the most out of everybody as individuals but then also everybody as a team which has an exponential you know multiply on the individuals what what could you be achieving yeah and that's I think that's the beauty of where we are now is having that sort of insight into you know how do we really get you know teams and groups of people to to go together and maximize their potential you're kind of an intriguing personality because you've got that engineering design systems thinking element but it's clear to me that you're also very people motivated and people engaged and so let's jump in the way back and just learn more about Steve we'll dig out some more traction concepts as we unfold the business journey sure well it's it's a very good segue you know that you're making because like why did I why did I end up being the way I am so I started my career I had a really cool and interesting start to my career in professional sailing and actually you know designing and multi-million dollar racing boats and building and coaching teams to help our clients win some of the world's most demanding yacht races so I was doing that as an engineer but at the same time I was immersed in these high performing teams and some of them were incredible some of them we we we got together you know we worked together we reached incredible goals winning races others we spent a lot of time and despite having the resources we we you know we that we needed we didn't make it yeah and I didn't have the tools to figure out that then like why some things worked and some things frankly just sucked yeah didn't have that I was just in the middle of it and knowing that I was devoting you know in some cases years of my life and along with other people too and trying to reach these goals and not getting there so it's like the NFL team that buys all the free agents right and they still don't win the Super Bowl yeah you know sort of like how do we how do we bring a group of people together and so that really informed this deep passion and curiosity in me because I didn't want to you know spend years of my life trying to reach a goal not get there and you know seeing that we went the the reason why we weren't getting there was not necessarily technical but it's about people and you know in some cases you know it was on these incredible teams where you know like in the NFL and a lot of other sporting teams you know you can go and buy all of the top people and get them onto your team but putting them in the room together putting one on the team doesn't mean they work together doesn't mean they pass the ball you know that sort of thing and I'm just such a huge believer in teams and teamwork and I think you know the records really showing now that you know that's how you get that's how you succeed that's how you succeed you know one individual can push things so far that a team can go further so that's the beginning of my career you know it was this real deep experiential being there seeing teams that work seeing teams that didn't and then not having the tools that I now have and I bring to my clients you know that really do inform like how do we get a team to work as well well let's uh I want to unfold part more of the yacht stuff if you don't mind um you grew up sailing it was a New Zealand in New Zealand yeah long long long way away from Colorado here and like tell me about like that family environment um yeah let's let's let's do a little Steve yeah my my parents bought our first yacht when I was nine years old okay and so you know used to go out with sailors of family and then I so you know it goes sailing with my dad you know we go racing or things but summer holidays were getting on the boat and um going off cruising you know up and down the coast of New Zealand going diving for scallops and fishing and just kind of feeding ourselves yeah out of the sea tell me about your father like was he a businessman an entrepreneur is that way he could afford a yacht eventually um so he was a doctor okay he was an ophthalmologist and um yeah I think uh the interesting thing sort of looking at my dad was that he had the medical side but he also had the business side too and um you know sort of in the middle of his career managed to find a couple of really great partners and they put together a practice uh doing ophthalmology doing laser surgery um you know they brought the first laser into New Zealand for doing laser surgery and stuff like that so I saw that about him that he was very business minded as good as his medical work but he was um very focused on building a solid business and um you know we enjoyed the benefits of that right right success yeah and are you a only child you've got a bunch of uh I have a sister younger sister okay still down there in New Zealand and so you guys were scalloping and and sailing and climbing you kind of live the amazing existence right yeah and it was a um marvelous way to grow up and you know a great privilege I think and and childhood and you know a lot of sort of growing up in New Zealand as the outdoors and New Zealand's this tiny island and the south Pacific I think everybody's rich and beautiful there is that accurate apparently yeah nearly except around Hobbit and Hobbit and stuff like that and uh go watch out for the walks and things when you go up into the mountains tell me about New Zealand just a little bit because I think many of us like dream of traveling to New Zealand but like those that have have been there and especially those that grew up there and traveled about a bunch and stuff like what's it like on a comparative basis to our Colorado experience or whatever US well um you know geographically so one of the reasons why I've moved here to Colorado is because like the front range here the mountains uh um you know we have mountains in New Zealand as well especially in the south island and that same sort of structure where we you know the wind sort of blowing from the west and the rain falls on the western slopes and then the eastern slopes are drier and you have sunnier there and sunnier and everything like that and that's a lot of what's drawn me to Colorado is that similar sort of experience but New Zealand's also an island and it's um surrounded by the oceans so you're never really that far away from the water and there's a lot of different climates there I think the interesting things I mean about New Zealand is um the incredible amount of rainfall there so it's very green right so it's incredibly different from my experience here right right you know in Colorado and things um and then geographically it's very active um geographically yes very active so one part of New Zealand's actually moving past the other part of New Zealand at four inches a year well four inches right so you can actually like you know visualise it not just right creeping past like you're dancing like I remember where that was where we're there stuff like that yeah so New Zealand's kind of it's it's on the edges of of two plates I mean it's sort of been over you know millions of years in and out of the ocean a few times but you know so there's volcanoes there's hot springs there's you know mountains getting pushed up out of the sea yeah all of that stuff it was a British colony I gather yeah yeah um you know 1840 a queen Victoria you know arrived whatever yeah yeah yeah the form of the uh britain claiming it uh for um for uh as a colony and um they're native people yeah they're engaged in the community and yeah um the marry people um had arrived there Polynesian people who arrived a few hundred years before um I'm not I guess they figured out where marry people have come from so Polynesia and they look like someone's kind of whatever yeah summer um you know arrived in New Zealand and colonise it there are some people who had been there before the marries as well so this sort of like this is sort of history of a lot of different uh epochs of evolution I guess people coming to to New Zealand and um you know that the history has been rocky right of course in the you know colonial it's a standard colonial story that you know the British arrived and claimed everything for themselves and eventually they were like getting a lot of here yeah there's been that but I think now there's been sort of um you know some sort of reproach more whatever the word is that you know that the um marries have claimed back you know the heritage and their land and there's a sort of like there's a balancing there of what's been going on so you know the tribal culture has been very strong and um you know they're sort of supporting um you know how they're moving forward from an economic perspective in the country and things like that um New Zealand's a very multicultural society I mean Auckland itself the largest city in New Zealand is the largest Polynesian cities so there's not any Europeans there but people have come from the Pacific islands and the big thing in my you know sort of lifetime so I left New Zealand in the late 1980s okay it was you know boy I think the population was about three million people and um you know fairly sort of advanced country but nevertheless it's a small island at the bottom of the Pacific and so there weren't a lot of opportunities and things um a lot changed I think in the you know through the 90s and 2000s um particularly you know when Hong Kong uh went back to mainland China a lot of people left Hong Kong and immigrated to other places you know in the world a lot came to New Zealand and it really has changed the character um you know of particularly Auckland but of the whole country and sort of you know that sort of enterprise more metropolitan kind of yeah the business you know business focus and things on entrepreneurial sort of let's build a business that's do stuff yeah um it's really kind of changed the character so now when I go back to New Zealand I find it sort of extremely multicultural a lot of different um influences and you know the country is really kind of moving forward and I think it's up to like five million people now so there's been a lot of popular I heard it was really difficult to to immigrate immigrate to New Zealand that's imagined so yeah there's something I don't know the precise rules I have to look them up but uh you need to be able to support yourself and you know bring some money and things like that right right of course are these stories you read in the paper are about some of these Silicon Valley uh billionaires like you know being able to find their way in there right and uh make a little hideaway at the bottom of the Pacific just in case everything yeah yeah goes pay a shaped up yes fair enough fair enough so you left New Zealand so so bring me I guess you went to college there yeah winter college I did a uh bachelor's animators degree in mechanical engineering okay and then like for what I remember from our phone call kind of landed on this yacht team yeah yeah my first job out of college was working on a professional sailing team so you know I went from you know studying hard and you know being a good student and everything like that to really um getting up at six o'clock in the morning and going to the gym and having to lift a lot of iron off the floor to you know get fit and get ready to sail on this team and which I did for a year and a half helping them get this boat ready to actually sail around the world and from that um I didn't sail around the world myself but I got to meet the boats designer yeah he was up here in America and uh it was lucky to be able to come up here and start designing boats okay so it wasn't a racing boat per se oh what okay is that what the is it around the world when you say that's what the world cup is well so there's a lot of different types of races in the you know professional sailing scene um this particular boat I was working on was sailing yeah in around the world yacht race the race started in Europe and went all the way down through the bottom of the Atlantic around Antarctica and back up again okay um it was a crude race in other words um uh there's a you know multiple people on the boat I mean there's a ton of these different types of races and depending on how big the boat is how many people are sailing and all that sort of stuff a lot of rules around whatever yeah yeah so I guess the the punchline is like win with staying within the rules kind of right as far as designer talk to me about like I mean big sail small boat that seems like the kind of basic formula for for a yacht but I don't really quite understand you know I know that all the tacking I've not sailed so I'm on a rookie here yeah no um designing sail boats was incredibly interesting because you're working in two mediums like half the boat is is above the water right in the air right and the other half is below the water uh below the surface of the water so you're combining aerodynamics and hydrodynamics and you know the interface between air and water you have waves right and which are highly nonlinear unpredictable all of that disruptive yeah disruptive so you know we're having to bring all of those things together and it's all about balance it's about streamlining it's about balance it's about being able to get that right sort of combination um together and that's what you know with all of the engineering um you know and we'd work on these teams where I was lucky to be able to bring in PhD researchers and we've been bringing people from the aerospace industry and everything like that but often they were amazed because you know people who design aeroplanes well aeroplanes exist in one medium right yeah right and then we might bring in you know navy researchers it worked on submarines but you know submarines are largely in the water and stuff and and we're trying to bring this together in the middle and I think it makes a you know marvelous sort of metaphor for business as well because there's all of these it's all about balance right you've always got these different things and if you go too far in one direction like you think okay well put more salary area on more sales makers go faster right well but more sales also you know pushes deeper right so then you've got to put some more balance in there to stop the boat tipping overall now the boat weighs more so now you've actually got to make the hull bigger to stop it sinking the larger hull now has more drag associated with it so oh my gosh we've got to put more salary area onto overcome the drag right so you go sort of around around chasing your tail around these circles so that's oftentimes why you end up with you know actually rules and regulations around the actual you know how you put the boat together and then like you're saying before now we've got to figure out how do we you know maximize what we can do within the box yeah I kind of feel like that's an interesting subject because it's sort of like you know you can be you know people say think outside the box right you know all of that sort of stuff but I think sometimes the bigger challenge and the harder thing to do is to be creative inside a box you know because oftentimes if you're within a set of rules you know people are saying well we can't do this because of you know the rules or you can't do that because of the rules but you know there's a way of saying well there's the boundary of the rules now how can we maximize right how do we fill up that whole box yeah kind of well I'm just thinking to myself that you know these are teams of probably dozens even in some cases of designers and and coaches and things like because it because it not only matters how that interface works on the in under the water and above the water and then you've got that 20% of surface areas that are sometimes under the water sometimes above the water and each of those kind of realms of design has its own kind of expert and then you need somebody to knit that whole thing together and find consensus about you know do we actually make the whole bigger do we make the sales smaller yeah all of that and then of course you know working with the crews on the boats right so these are in the time in the my career working on this we went from sailing being a largely amateur sport so people like had day jobs and then they used to like go do these things as they they take time off from work to go crew on these boats then through the 90s and into the 2000s the sport became professionals everybody got really popular yeah yeah so now we have teams the sailors on the boats wet full-time sailors and you know highly skilled highly trained athletes and of course you know they're now pushing our designs even harder trying to get that last you know 10th of a sand out of the performance and coming back and giving us feedback you know sometimes it wasn't that polite right I'm thinking to myself like most of us when we think about vehicular travel you know it isn't really a physical activity like kind of like writing a off-road motorcycle is kind of a physical activity but for the most part things that move us we don't really have to be involved but it sounds like the physical endurance and just how fast you can pull these ropes to shift that sail or things like that talk to me about that notion all of it yeah so it's sort of the interesting thing I mean things are changing a little bit now in sailing but I mean certainly there are a lot of rules around you know you can't use artificial power to power the boat right so then it comes down to human strength to and you know you're gearing and winches and now how do we now harness these incredible forces that we're you know generating out of the sails and how do we actually allow the sailors to be able to you know adjust sails to control this to harness or sure because you know a human being can has a limited I mean even strong people have a limited amount of strength and endurance right and you know winding a winch or something like that you know people train they can get fitted doing it but there's still there's a there's a limit so then you've got to be able to take human strength and you've better got to multiply it through a winch system or a purchase system or something like that so now you can deal with much larger loads and do it safely as well and I think you know in the last 40 years there's been a huge number of advances in terms of how you can go about controlling loads and things like that safely and then the other thing is to sort of one of these sort of paradigm shifts so for example like when you have a displacement boat you know when I was talking about this model before of more sailing area now you've got to put more ballast in which makes the you know to counter the sailing area which makes the boat way more yeah when you follow that path you end up with a lot more load because things are heavier right and there's a lot more force running in the system to pull the boat forward right which makes the human element more challenging can yeah so and yeah and how do we do you know how do we control all of that and now more recently so in the in the highest levels of the sport is the America's Cup which is a trophy that's sailed about every four years approximately and a little bit dependent yeah um yes well yes there's a lot of complications in there but in the America's Cup they've sort of being able to because it's like the formula one of yacht racing they've been able to really like come on some different ideas and they've got the boats up onto foils until like wings that run underneath the water and now instead of like traveling around it about 10 miles an hour like 10 knots they're going up 40 or 50 knots um because they've been able to reduce the drag on the system and then it allows you to harness some self-force and go so much faster well and I love that and I did a whole talk to a business group about that sort of idea of um when you can reduce the things that drag on your business then you can like just literally get yourself into elevating to a different mode of operation and like getting the hull out of the water and flying above the water you can go from 10 knots to 40 knots of speed right in the same wind speed now you're going four times faster and so I love that you know I met a whole talk to a business group about all those things that are holding you back weighing you down getting in the way in the business let's get rid of those right and then when you can get rid of those now all of a sudden you sound you find your business going twice as fast with the same propulsion tell me about like what are those things for business people like what's that hole that's dragging them uh do you know Whitman says there's only 27 issues in business which is a universe like which does 27 it's just a matter for you know it's things like communication or rather I would say miscommunication right when people say one thing and people hear something different and go off and do a third thing right those are things that drag down on the business um when we talk about teamwork uh you know the foundation of good teamwork is trust and having that incredible trust in the team when you don't have trust you know that's something that weighs down the business because when people don't trust each other they don't bring their false they don't bring their false selves they don't share their ideas they don't share their ideas right I mean it's the classic thing you've seen in a meeting where people are kind of lean back in their chairs they've got their arms folded they kind of got that look on their face like I am not going to say a damn word in this meeting right because no one's going to listen to me anyway right and we lose so much we lose so much when people are holding themselves back like that if they don't bring their passion to the table they don't bring their ideas if they don't debate stuff then we've lost stuff right and the business isn't moving forward and then and I'm sort of following in this I'm following along Patrick when Cioni's model and from five dysfunctions of a team because the the next thing that happens when people don't bring their ideas to the table is that whatever decisions are made don't necessarily get fully supported right there's no commitment and that's the classic thing and people talk about this all the time right we decide one thing in a meeting and then what really happens is after the meeting there is the sidebars the other discussions right stuff gets remade and that drags a business because you know people like we just spent two hours in a meeting trying to decide all this stuff and now we've got something else happening and now I don't know what's going on I had a former boss that used to say no good deed goes unpunished and and I was thinking about that person that's that's got a good idea in a in a meeting and it's going to be useful to everybody and make a difference for the business and the meeting gets over in the the chair or the leader of the meeting it's like that was a really good idea you should do that yeah and it's just like left there right with no action about how do we and with them to implement it no buy in things like that yeah yeah and so if you don't have the commitment two decisions or stuff's getting remade or there's you know there's politics or there's other discussions you know that are going on then it's very hard for the people to hold each other accountable and that is just like when I talk with business owners it's so funny it's sort of like so what's you know one of your biggest challenges in the business well I can't you know keep people accountable right I you know people don't I ask them to do stuff they don't do it accountability becomes a huge obstacle and so you know in the paradigm you know that Lencioni's talked about and that we use in EOS like you know accountability is a result it's not you know like we can't wave a magic wand and just sort of like you know suddenly you're going to have more accountability there's like several steps that you actually there's some work that you have to do first to get the accountability you want yeah and when you've got all of that I mean when you do have a team that trusts each other a team has got each other's backs supporting each other and they're bringing their passion to meetings and they're debating stuff and through that they're being heard and and they're then committing to decisions and everybody's on the same page about where we're going and the teams holding each other accountable and that magic world when all that happens then people can focus on results and that's to me that's the getting the boat hull out of the water that's now going four times faster than used to because everybody's focused on results not politicking or not worrying right who's right yeah all that winning arguments right for the sake of winning arguments so take me back to your your world cup kind of experience you get a job with this American yacht designer from from that first foray is that right yeah that's what moved you over here yeah to Annapolis Maryland so it's over on the east coast on the Chesapeake Bay it was actually a group of New Zealanders who had come up here to the US in the early 1980s to be closer they wanted to be somewhere between sort of New Zealand and Europe and yes I was incredibly lucky I got a job I came up here with you know everything I owned in life just fit into two suitcases right you know early 20s it's like okay I'm off here I am here I am let's go and you know had an incredible experience you know just really being able to work on these high profile designs you know with these incredible clients who wanted to win and you know in the arena that we were working in you know we had these clients who were very very successful in business millionaires billionaires in some cases and you know it's no mystery as to why some of these people like reach you know those stellar heights in business they have drive they have commitment to what they're doing that skills to be able to put it in place and overall you know this incredible commitment to winning yeah and you know like some you know I'm a competitive person when I when I get out there on the water but you know these individuals who are our clients were just you know at a 10x level as far as that drive to win which they would then turn around and look at us right and say okay what are you doing about it yeah you know or I'll write you a check you know you get the team you know what can we do to come up with the best design and then we would do that right we would we would design this incredible design or get built and put in the water and then they turn around and say okay now how are you going to make it faster and that's the the challenge as well you're thinking well I've just done everything yeah yeah I just put everything I had into your design and now I've got to figure out how we're going to improve it and how are you going to make it faster and and so that I you know I love those sort of challenges and I think that really you know drives a lot of what I do now is just sort of you know having that experience and seeing that you know getting the team around the table doing your best and now being you know being challenged again to do better this episode is sponsored by Loco Think Tank Loco Think Tank provides clear collaboration for business owners we build smart safe places to help business leaders navigate every stage of the business journey and we love what we do and who we do it with our model features gift back minded business veterans and the role of Loco facilitators we're always looking for abundance minded individuals to add to our membership facilitator team local community or to feature on this podcast listeners of this podcast who go on to become members of Loco Think Tank get their sixth month of membership for free just mention the local experience podcast on your application to learn more visit our website at localthinktank.com that's l-o-c-o thinktank.com yeah yeah I'll hold that question for now well actually I'll just throw it out there since I got it that transition from the traditional hulls to the foils was like was that within the rules and like all of a sudden some of these teams started coming up with these these uh airfoil type yachts and they're going 40 miles an hour everybody else is going 15 and it's game-changer how does that come about um and when um it's being progressive incremental yeah there's well there's also it's a different arenas in which sailing happens and and some of them are more regulated than others and have more rules so there's some of the more freer um scenarios are where you know people start experimenting and they try this and they push and they get you know a little advantage and then people kind of and then becomes it is it's iterative because you start seeing oh you know look what that person did there look what happened with that design that's an interesting thing what would it look like if we you know took that the next step yeah and so people start seeing what's possible and you know if I look back you know over a period of time um if we took one of our modern boats right now like uh one of our 2020 designs um now and took it back 30 years ago we wouldn't have had the materials to actually probably really physically build it right and you know those skills wouldn't have existed and sailing skills probably wouldn't have existed to be able to sail a boat like that so you know the we come up with a better design the sailors get better and then they say you know we want to push this further and that pushes us as designers to go a little further and then the sailors get better and so over a period of time you know you have that evolution to now we are flying above the surface of the water yeah yeah like that it's really testimony to two thoughts the collective intelligence of humans you know there's a few people like like Edison for example he seemed to just really keep coming out with new stuff in his niche and but most things it's like this iterative slow thing by different people strapping on new ideas to the old ones and it's over you know some decades often yeah a lot of time and I just sort of so I had an interesting experience recently that sort of provides a little bit of a counterpoint to that too which is so I met somebody recently who worked with Elon Musk 20 years ago when Tesla was first starting and on SpaceX and read told me these stories and talked about the fact that 20 years ago Elon Musk had this vision for the fact that there should be satellites in space and you know beaming down internet access to us at the stage where most of us mortals were kind of running around with a 28k dial-up modem right and thinking that's all why would we need anything more from that right yeah stuff like that but but Elon Musk had that vision like no this this is just like some other world and you know 20 years ago and and I guess the you know the difference is then you know having that vision then having the the long ability to be able to finally end up executing that and not just sort of like giving up on that or just saying well sure you know satellites in space with internet yeah sounds like a great idea but meanwhile I'm going to get back to you know I'm mowing my lawn where you know people like that you know we've sort of I think there's this tendency to look at some of those individuals and say you know how can you be the you know a richest person on the planet right but this is did you can't like you're not Elon Musk and either am I and almost none of us really have that muscle where we can like see something 20 years from now no we don't but you know at the same time like I sort of like that story and learning those things about them sort of gave me that insight as to why somebody might like end up like that and sort of tied together with you know some of these clients that I was working with in the yacht design world and just sort of seeing like why you become so successful because that people are different they do have this internal different drive they have this ability to have these visions and then they have the ability to be able to execute on them and actually make them happen so you know it changed my mind a little bit about it and I now have a little bit more of an attitude of you know you know all power to them because they have been able to do that yeah yeah I'm not you know and I know that myself I'll work hard but I'm I'm no 120 hour about you know weak person like Elon Musk for sure for sure supposed to be so I was just an interesting insight it really is yeah there's a lot of people that if they were the richest man in the world they would take their foot off the gas right yeah it's like okay he's not programmed that way sit on my sit on the beach now or whatever New Zealand yeah so you go to work for this this design firm and I remember from our conversation that you kind of worked your way up but eventually become the leader of that firm like talk to me about that journey and maybe any particular like key learning lessons from others or mentors or things like that but also why you a little bit so I feel like looking at that journey and we talk about this in EOS when we're talking about people too there's the sense of we in EOS we call it GWC which stands for Getsit once it has the capacity for it and this is when we're talking about people being in the right seat in an organization and so when I look back and I take that paradigm and I kind of look back at my career it's it's I had this sense you know like once I kind of had mastered the engineering side of things is you know like this business is kind of an interesting thing like running a business and I was kind of had this affinity towards it and I got drawn towards it feeling like I wanted to be a you know just a design engineer I wanted to have a seat at the table and I felt that I had some ideas and that I liked you know this idea of being able to execute the business and grow it so you know started having some conversations with founders of the business and then eventually you know they opened up the shareholding and the partnership and the business and which was great and of course they you know once that they had built their careers and was sort of looking at that next step of wanting to you know what that transition is yeah step back a little bit and talking about that business as a business just like I can imagine architects like that's about as deep and you know involved as I get like as there's architecture firms but was there a few dozen engineers and things like that it was a small firm and like what's the that engagement look like because you like with an architecture like well I'm going to draw this thing but with a yacht you're like you know it's kind of fresh each one is custom of sorts is that right yeah well we had a lot of different designs but yeah so you know structurally from you know the time I started working at the business to the time I ended there we grew from 2010 to 22 staffs okay you know so and that was large for a yacht design business and really is that same sense again too of you know taking a business from being sort of like maybe a couple of original you know founders you know sitting in a room together to how do we actually make a sustainable business out of this so we had a lot of different sort of lines of work in the business and she had these very very high profile you know these racing your sultans and stuff yeah designs and things that took a lot of hours you know design time a lot of development a lot of research putting these things together so those are sort of like the big shiny projects that we got to work on but in the meantime to build a sustainable business you need to have you know regular revenue coming in because those big shiny projects would sort of come and go depending on the whims of you know whoever wanted to have some new toy in their stable or whatever so to make a sustainable business we designed boats that were mass produced if you like so sort of production boats and so this is where we would have a design contract with a builder that was going to make you know 535 foot boats that you know yeah we're best in your fresh design or whatever yeah and so we would get a royalty stream for that and that provided regular steady income to the business oh interesting your design would actually be a royalty so they pay you some for the design but to a certain extent you were participating in the risk by you know kicking in a royalty fashion instead yeah so and the reward yeah risk in reward but just being able to the point was once again with balance to be able to look and see like how do we actually make this a sustainable business and how do we be able to keep growing it's right so to be able to bring on more stuff and things like that and it was tricky with these you know big shiny high profile projects because we'd have to bring on a lot of people but then it was for a defined period of time you know and then unfortunately having built that team got them to perform together it was the end of the project and then the team would disband long as they know that going in I guess it's okay yeah but you know oftentimes you know having built that really great team we would want to you know try to retain that and you know get them to work on another project but that was the sort of more of the art of trying to really kind of figure out how do we keep stringing all these projects together and yeah growing the business interesting like that so yeah I got to live you know working through all of that and you know being able to talk with our clients and figure out what they wanted and then to be able to pull together groups and assemble teams you know to be able to deliver on those things that our clients were looking for so was this kind of a circumstance where the was it two founders there was a two original founders two original and they're like kind of looking for an exit ramp you're like whatever mid 30s or something like that by that time early 40s and you're like you know I can I can run this thing maybe better than you guys if you just get that out of here yeah I'm not sure I made that claim that's it Lee yeah it's sort of like this desire that I could do more and I wanted to participate more and and you know and I see that with the clients that I work with with now it's sort of like it's a it can be a lonely thing being that business founder that business leader with all that you know decisions on your shoulders and trying to you know grow the business and push it forward um but oftentimes if you look around there's a whole group of people in your business that are like hey you know I'd like to have a piece of this I'd like to contribute I've got some opinions um I'd be happy to work more if I you know I was able to um you know reap some reward you know out of what's going on and so um to realize that and then to be able to structure that and to get that team um correct you know to to to be able to have the right people in the right seats relieves the business owner then of so much your responsibility I mean they're not doing it by themselves sure you have a business that you actually want to own now yeah one I you know that's I I feel like that that's an important thing like you know people get in and start a business because they have a passion because they want to do something and then they find that they're now mired and you know like people issues or they're worried about cash flow like all of that all right and HR complaint yeah all of this little legal and you know all of these things had nothing to do with why they wanted to get into business in the first place and so it's not fun anymore because yes yeah dealing with HR issues and everything like that um isn't what they wanted to do so what we do is we're really focusing on helping that business owner structure things so that they can really reach their unique ability and then you know to do the things that they're really great at and love doing all at the time and to be in that space and to delegate everything else all the stuff they don't like doing or they're not good at you know there's other people who could be better at it delegate it delegate it delegate it get it off your plate get other people doing that stuff and then to free up the business owner to be looking out you know thinking about the next market thinking about focusing on those key relationships most of the time they're still the best salesperson on the team yeah all that so I was thinking to myself there's a big trend um at least here in Colorado especially but I think across the country in an exit that's a sale to the employees an ESOP or or similar um there's programs and the state of Colorado that can really give you some great supportive access so that kind of thing and and some really positive tax consequences which the libertarian me thinks that's kind of bullshit but whatever um but like to me I was just thinking about that traction element and really preparing that team because I have seen some ESOPs go through where the owners like all right I'm out of here and then this leaderless organization like runs into a wall or whatever and most of that's the last time I saw that was back at the last financial crisis but we probably got another one coming so like how do you stabilize an organization well enough or I guess EOS is one answer but like at that clarity like it seems like that would be a great exercise for a for a company to go through on the way to doing an employee thing yeah no and and it takes time so um you know these conversations about you know the founder wanting to exit the business um you know in that situation we're rolling back you know like three years two or three years at least and being in stone to have that conversation of saying what's the right structure for the business yeah and to be able to and this is what I love about EOS is that we're very focused on that idea of what's the right structure for the business so structure first and then people second and it's a difficult thing for leadership teams to do sometimes but you know we go through this exercise of saying you know put your ego aside step back a little bit look at the business and what's the right structure for the business and particularly having that idea of you know the founders going to step out well okay but there's a number of functions that I require in this business right I mean we need to have a visionary we need to have an integrated to keep all the trains running on time you know we need to have marketing on sales right somebody's got to go out there and and do that uh we need to have operations because we're making a product we do something yeah we do something right and then we need to have you know some sort of a finance function somebody's got to be tracking the money coming out of the business and and things like that so what are those functions what's required uh for the business and then we go about putting the right people into the right seats and so you know I touched a little bit before on what the right seat concept is you know this is all from Jim Collins from from good to great so right people are people who fit your organizations um core values your culture you know like really fit into the organization and their right seats are people who GWC the seat get it want to have the capacity to do it so they're good at their job you can go to have both yeah and oftentimes I think the conversation is much more around sort of you know just looking at people's resume and do they have the technical skills to fill the job whereas you know what I've experienced in my life and what we do in EOS is the right people aspect like do they fit the culture of your organization um so putting those two things together so we have that right team that's in place so that when the you know founder you know does step out of the business that there is a functioning cohesive well coordinated leadership team with the skills with the culture with the trust able to carry the business forward and it's not you know if that's not an overnight process it takes time yeah yeah takes time and oftentimes people are a little impatient but it's not there's there's no substitute for like we got to build this thing solid so I just had a thought about that culture thing you know you can really say if does somebody fit our culture and but kind of the headlines in business today is diversity you know and so are those forces counterbalanced I mean you have to have like certain specific cultural markers that still allow you to you know open the doors to non-New Zealand white guys for example exactly well so you know I think that this is um so when I work with my clients I'm really defining you know core values and culture um this is really about not just creating more clones of you know the people around the table but it's um saying you know and looking at the business and saying like you know who are the employees that you have in this business that you know if you if you did have a hundred of them you'd be able to take over the world right but not from you know not from these external characteristics like you know color of the skin and things like that but just from deep inside yeah you know what do they do are they they show up early they you know people who look after each other are they people who go above and beyond you know they customer service oriented people like what are those what's their special sauce yeah yeah what's their special sauce and then I think um you know then I think um that actually opens up the the door for diversity because you are now saying like the type of person here fits this business is a person who shows up who's got everybody else's back whose team or even whatever those things are yeah yeah and it doesn't matter then yeah what sort of package yeah yeah that comes in right I've actually thinking of a specific person right now um at lucky's market here in Fort Collins they've been open for a couple years now uh and I think he's a lead of some sort a cashier type but they've got this guy that he's always like like black fingernails and really unusual look and he's got facial piercings and tattoos and and he is the friendliest nicest guy and he exudes the values of lucky's market like he is their man and it's obvious and but to look at him you'd be like well that guy's kind of weird right yeah it doesn't look like everybody else here in the business so yeah but I mean it's but if you can get past the the looks and you can look at you know inside and see what's in people's heart right what are they bringing to the business and things like and how they care themselves in their work you know I think he's a great employee because every interaction I've ever had with him is very positive yeah and so look you know you're telling me that story right about lucky's market and that's the the thing that I'm really trying to um you know get my clients to see is those stories that characterize your business and then to you know part of what we do is we get those stories brought out onto the table and get the leadership team to share those stories and then get everybody else in the company to share those stories because every employee in your company is an ambassador right for your brand for your company because they're out there not only if they're you know on the front lines of customer service like they're you know running the cashier or you know being a teller or something like that but it's people who go home and tell their relatives you know stories about the business or people like you know you're a customer you're telling this really positive story about lucky's market right because there's a person there and this person's done you know some things that have really been remarkable for you yeah and these stories um provide the richness you know because we are you know whatever tribal human totally well and for me to say you know one of our core values is integrity so have integrity well that doesn't mean much to anybody one of in runs Corvette right totally right but but if but if I you know bring up a story where Alma shared with me that she didn't actually post that event to the website like she was supposed to before she sent out that marketing email and you know says I screwed up sorry or whatever like that's integrity right that's a bad story because she didn't do that but but I mean those are like like it has to actually have some meat on the bone for words to make it a meaning in some ways yes and so part of the one of the core parts of the EOS process is we get the leadership team to do a quarterly state of the company address and to do a core value speech and the reason why we do that is because you know oftentimes a lot of you know business owners leadership teams they have a very clear picture in their mind about you know what's going on in the business um but you know that that's great that it's in their mind but it doesn't help um if it's just there it needs to be communicated but the core value speech is then you know a component of that so not just you know having core values written on a chart on the wall or paste it on the door or something but to tell stories about how those core values are showing up in the company and you know like for example I've got some clients that told the story about you know it was raining one day and and this delivery truck showed up and you know there was one person who was asked to go and unload the truck in the rain and said well it's not my job you know and then there's uh you know somebody in admin who's like fine you know puts on a raincoat and goes and unloads you know the truck in the rain and you know when the CEO tells that story about going above and beyond like that's a core value of their business it's a characteristic they're looking for in their employees and tells that story of what going above and beyond looks like in that business you know about this young lady went and unloaded a truck in the rain then everybody can see that and they're like oh got it right that's what going above and beyond means in this business so I need to go do that same thing right that's I'll go above and beyond but the story sticks yeah instead of just saying well you know so and so company here where you go above and beyond and everybody's like okay well yeah yeah what does that mean but to tell a story and then people have you know attached meaning to what you're talking about well I think it's probably probably the way that humans learn best in a lot of ways it's their story right yeah like it leaves it home like it ties it to you well I find that you know like I read a lot of business books as a part of my job so it's an occupational hazard in my job right and you know you have these business books that are can be dry you know a lot of theory page after page of you know the five things you should be doing here right right and then you have other business books that are kind of written I you know as a fable or something like the e-meth is the one that comes to mind yeah you know I still haven't read that oh really oh that's a classic it's like this I was a bakery that he can't do it all himself yeah yeah so there's ones in Patrick Mincioni you know with the five dysfunctions of it sure and I see you've got the advantage up there on your your stack good grade is there somewhere too I think good to great yeah so they're you know built around stories and and I think that it really sort of helps you know understand the the principles that have been talked about in a way that's engaging yeah and not dry yeah yeah I like that notion yeah so um I guess to to kind of bring back to the journey and then we'll get into our closing segments but so you was it just you you were the only one that was allowed to become a stockholder or shareholder you had some other partners that were key designers and whatever yeah there are the people involved too I mean we really opened up the business to be able to take it forward kind of a leadership team approach and yeah and I I really love that but um you know unfortunately so there are a number of things that were sort of going on um you know with my career in terms and I was sort of talking about this way at the beginning like being on these teams some teams are amazing some teams aren't amazing and I didn't have the tools within that environment to be able to know that and figure that fix the broken ones yeah yeah and you know people like Larry Ellison who's one of our clients you know he'd spend a hundred million dollars trying to win the America's Cup right a lot of money and he wouldn't and I didn't I couldn't figure out why except I knew things were sort of not as smooth and balanced as they should be so I made a very difficult decision to leave the art design business I went into government contracting and Washington DC became a PMP certified project manager because here's I wanted to figure out like how do we get a large group of people moving forward in the same direction how do we organize people um so I spent a number of years sort of letting those techniques and skills and helping the US Navy launch ships into the fleet and you know no design role there no design now that was pure project management agent life where now we were able to you know make that transition from a number of sort of little little parts and components and life sort of fell into place and now we're like well maybe we can actually move to Colorado and have a different life and so my partner Kathy and I have actually ended up buying some land and we have this vision to put in a permaculture orchard to be able to grow food to learn to live more sustainably and to explore that and I'm I'm very big about that so you know in addition to sort of all the business coaching work I'm incredibly interested in ourselves as individuals and making ourselves more resilient and how we sort of get out of the a little bit of what I see you know we've been dragged into with society which is a lot of us staring at our phones and right and not you know taking care of ourselves physically mentally emotionally and that sort of thing so and it all ties together with my business work too because I think as you mentioned you know way back at the very beginning it's sort of like this idea of you know when you're working together in a business team and stuff happens and you know maybe something triggers you and you know this these sort of all-time scenes of you know like the boss you know just yelling at everything and stuff like that doesn't fly anymore so how do we get beyond that right and so one of the first things about you know becoming a really great leader in my mind is that you need to have self awareness and self control because you've got all of these employees in your business you know dealing with problems right and they bring their problems to you and it's your job as a leader to be able to help your employees metabolize their stress the things that are worrying them you that's your role to be able to do that but then you've got to be able to deal with your stress right you know with all that stuff landing on your plate and how do you do that right and you know these things that trigger us you know from the inside like you need to have some tools and techniques to be able to not fly off the handle not react not start yelling at people you know to have that self control to be measured you know mannered about how you go about building a business and it says there's a whole bunch of internal techniques as well that I'm fascinated. That's what I was going to say it it seems like that's if there's anything that I've seen as big differentiation from um like a lot of coaches I see and stuff you're very personal well-being focused maybe. Hmm well it's um you know it's so important about how we show up in the workplace right I mean I believe that we can achieve so much you look at Olympic athletes right all of the training that they do you know not only you know downhill skiers and things I mean that's number of reps right go downhill and things like that but it's also that the working on your mindset working on your ability to vision things working on your ability to be able to deal with stress and and um moderate it and things like that so you can perform at your very best well if an Olympic athlete is doing all of that why aren't business leaders doing all of that right because we're running businesses and generating millions of dollars in revenue dozens of jobs hundreds of jobs in some cases yeah and I have this deep you know deep philosophical grounding that you know building better businesses is so foundational because better businesses provide better jobs for people and better people you know provide better communities and and we all want to live in great communities yeah you go to these you know cities where um you know business can't thrive because they're just isn't the environment isn't the economics for it to happen and and that blight um expands outwards and it's so hard so hard to sort of tamp back and get the economic trait you know not trade loss yeah flywheel yeah that's what I want yep I was looking for it wrong way to flywheel get the economic flywheel going well so you're going 40 miles an hour on the surface of the waves instead of plowing water at 15 it all ties together for me like you know to to build a better business that leads to better lives that leads to better communities you need to be a better leader as yourself and there's you know all throughout this you know there are tools and there are frameworks that you can learn um as a business leader to do all of these things and you know so you show up in the workplace be that leader that people really want to come work for and um take your business forward so I'm just all of these things to me go together and you can't you know take one piece yeah yeah it's part of your kind of holistic effort to make the world a better place is to like the one of the high leverage points to that is to create better business leaders because they will create happier better gainfully employed people yeah you know the economic blight economic underperformance um affects us all we're all connected sure right you know and when we have things like um pandemics which set people you know set us back or we have uh economic crashes and things like that then stuff you know that we depend on in our lives stops happening all of a sudden and then you know I of course we we can go off on some other big tangent about you know the social unrest and things like that I mean that that come out of that little dip into their next segment I was just thinking to myself that uh it's probably not a coincidence that Gino Whitman came from Detroit and that crucible of pressure like sometimes creates some really good ideas and the need to be innovative and structured and whatever yeah and not to um I think there's something in there about the this self-reliance and sort of not really just sort of sitting back and and sort of blaming others or expecting others you know like expecting the government to come and just wave its magic wand and fix everything right the more time the government does wave its magic wand and fixes things the more harm it really causes and a lot of respects yes certainly certainly and you know gosh any knows you know the what's happened over the past couple of years is going to be a debt that you know our kids are going to be you know you're great kids you're great kids and kids and stuff like that I'm going to pause this and let's go take a party break and we'll wrap up okay addition I think to our kind of closing segments here we've got the uh faith family politics element to the show and and uh it sounded like we were drifting into politics there a little bit you want to know particular thoughts just share some thoughts on politics um so you're talking about politics not in nationalist state yeah all that kind of stuff it's part of my you know we can't talk about such things so we'll just talk a lot of here okay no fair enough um because we were talking about kind of the when government bails you out when bad things happen there could be consequences to that later yes and I think um so I've been very interested and I've I've just got a new book from Ray Dalio who's um you know manages the largest hedge fund in the world or whatever but um he's spent a lot of time sort of like looking back at history and seeing like these large economic and political you know where you go through history um I just listened to principles but I guess this is a new one that's just out yeah it's called what is it now uh the changing world order okay and so I think you know when I look at politics um you know I sort of I I guess I sort of share some of that sort of sense I haven't read his book yet I just got it but um you know what he talks about in this is sort of like you know just seeing politics is not separated from economy which is not separated from social issues and and um the interesting thing from his perspective is he sees patterns in history right and he's used that uh research that he's been doing looking at economic social and political um cycles to his advantage in terms of you know right financially wise yeah yeah financially right how does it and he he arrived at this from that uh having that question of like how do I make these decisions about you know running my hedge fund and things like that anyway so um I'm keen to read that book I'm sort of keen to look at that but I do sort of see you know that we're in this um you know I guess every uh generation always probably feels that they're in a period of change or something like that sure there just seems to be and the next generation is going to wreck the whole thing maybe yeah um I know what we're going to leave for the next generation that the way we're going is kind of one of those things but you know politics is um you know it's everybody says all right politics is broken um I worry about things like you know social media and the you know the effects of people getting um different news for different people seems like a really concerning thing yeah there's I think that that is you know so we're tribal like we you know we sort of glum onto these things that fit into our puzzle of what we already have you know these mental models that we have when uh we have to strive to be able to we actually have to put intentional effort into being open to seeing things that are outside of our little comfort zone and I feel like the social media uh world that Rin does not support that it runs hard in the opposite direction of taking us down the rabbit hole that we want to go down right right and then we come out of so that's not helping um I think that's going to get worse and uh until enough people like get off of it and say you know we've got some other way we need to have life go either than just following what Facebook do you listen to Joe Rogan ever yep so did you listen to his with Tristan Harris and another fellow just about a couple months ago I did not but I have had Tristan you should yeah the social dilemma sure yeah so Joe had Tristan and a guy that studies like cataclysmic events and the risks associated okay and those two are basically convinced that we're gonna wreck the whole country in the next 10 years if we don't change the way social media works yeah well I yeah that's the whole world not the country yeah and tiktok will be to blame it's a CCP plot well that's okay we'll get we'll go we'll go we'll go some other direction but but that you will be well informed by that conversation at least some things to think about no I mean I worry about it right and um you know because what I come back to is you know that we need to work together we need to be open-minded we you know diversity can be a loaded word uh you know in the society and things like that but we need to be diverse and what I've experienced in my life is when we want we've achieved great things on on the teams and the projects that I've worked on us because we've had a lot of different ideas come to the table so I believe in that and I've experienced that but I'm worried that the whole situation is actually not leading down that path I've heard politics described before as like the system that we developed so we didn't actually hack each other to pieces with swords over our differences of opinion and to me it seems like that that lack of ability to discuss new ideas and confront you know I one idea with a different idea it basically takes politics back off the table there isn't really barely such a thing anymore yeah I mean discussion you know propaganda but not politics so much right and you know so the same paradigm we were just talking about like so there's no trust right so that means that there's no you know passionate debate which means people aren't committing I mean it's exactly all of the things we've been talking about in a business sense are you know being you know very obviously lacking sort of at a you know national social level of being able to have these conversations and I you know I'm a you know cancel culture and things like that with you know having people fired from their jobs because they have a different opinion that's not fitting in with you know what it has been deemed as the latest thing that's not right you know we need to this one answer does not get us forward you know that's natural evolution you know the evolution of our society is all of these things are from diversity from trying different things from seeing what works and stuff you know improving on a iterating spinning things forward I mean that's that's how I believe the planning doesn't make it better I don't believe so I don't think so I think haven't we seen enough so talk to me about like is there like a couple few big levers that you would pull if you were the benevolent dictator of our nation or world hmm that would help to to shift it in the nudged in the other direction why is that a good question where would you start for the big levers um well so you know you know the first thing just comes to mind since you putting me on the spiders of course you know you've got to get the money out of politics out of Washington DC there's got to be some you know so this is the thing right so what is what is politics you know politics in a business means that there are all these sidebar discussions going on right that the that the open transparent way forward in the business is is not being followed but that the some other path is that that behind closed doors that's what politics is right I can take some other route I can you know take some hidden path that's what politics is in a business and so that's happening you know that's what's wrong with politics in my opinion here as well is that there's some hidden path that stuff happens by you know and this there's so many stories that we end up reading about in the newspaper right about you know why certain decisions are made and things like that and as long as there's a few people that have an undue influence on the thing then yeah you know there you go then the rest of us don't commit to it right because we haven't had that transparency so right and when we as a society I'm talking in general don't commit to things right and people don't feel like they're heard I'm going this way you're going that way and the nation isn't going forward unified I have a friend that like there's 100 senators and 450 year or whatever congressman but when the country was founded there was like one representative for every like 3000 people and so his opinion is that there should be like 10,000 representatives or 50 whatever and and each person should only represent like 5000 people this is your 15 square block radius of the people and so they can come knock on your freaking door when they think you're being a dumbass yes that makes a lot of sense I mean I do I mean you'd have to pay them less with more of them but I you know there are these you know things that were put as you know checks and balances in the system that now look now you know I'm not really sort of working you know I guess in some people's opinion they're not working the way they should be other people say no they're working just fine perfect yeah I don't know I just think that there are imbalances that you know are causing some consternation and unrest and until we address them it's gonna stay that way fair enough yeah anything else that you'd care to share in that broad topic of politics generally well you know I can understand it's a very difficult thing but yes I you know there's a there's a misalignment of you know this idea of where supposed to be represented I said you know and what's coming out of the system and you know Jared Mandering and what you know all these things yeah just to sort of lead to that lack of trust lack of trust and we don't have trust well and they're you know they're supposed to be public servants but like there's are they leaders or they servants and I'm pretty sure nine out of 10 americans would call them leaders at this point in time and that's and they would call themselves that too yeah and yes the things are I've got a little bit upside down there I know it seems like yeah accountability in this stuff oh my gosh there we are back on the back on the accountability everybody's least favorite thing but it's a very useful so we've got faith in families you can take one of those two on oh I'm faith will you go with that I don't know I mean by the Christians in New Zealand I presume a lot of them and stuff like that or do you have a background in that regard um so personally yes I had a very uh interesting background with that so I went to a Presbyterian private Presbyterian school okay I um I'm just gonna say they kind of cured me of yeah yeah there's a whole lot of people that would never go to church because of some real asshole Christian they met along the way or a school or whatever yeah you know I I guess I have to be a little bit careful about what I say but I just you know I I believe in what Jesus said I think Jesus said a whole bunch of really great things that if we actually followed them would be would be great but I you know there's the difference between what Jesus said and then the political religious instantiation of that to organizations that have lost the plot about so no thanks I don't need to be part of your thing yeah so um so I believe in you know Jesus had some principles that he talked about you know love for thy neighbor and things like that which I I think if we could actually execute that and show that in in life and society would be better off um you know Buddha had a bunch of really great things to talk about principles in terms of loving kindness and I've said several times I think Jesus and Buddha would have been budgies for sure you know and and all of the religion you know the great religions you know sort of have that philosophical foundation um that I believe in and I think that those are really great it's just I think they kind of run off the rails when they become you know bureaucratic institutions my my own politic of sorts or I guess core value is that power always corrupts and and that you know as those institutions organizations whether they were faith oriented or government or whatever they just always get yucky or in yucky or the more bigger and powerful they get yeah so I believe definitely that people should have a philosophical underpinning you know like what do you believe in yeah believe in something that's going to improve the world and take you forward and be a framework for making decisions and treat people right and all of that so I it doesn't matter to me which flavor of that it is do something do something and so would you call yours kind of an amalgamation of some of the the wisdom traditions is that your values framework I suppose so I mean I I read a lot of stoic philosophy and things like that so this idea of you know just really figuring out what there is in the world that you was within your control and what's outside of your control and then just focus on the stuff that's within your control and actually what's within your control what about the only thing that's really in your control is what goes on inside your head and how you react to things so just sort of coming to that realization and then what's your duty this stoic philosophy is very interesting to me because it's about philosophy that's embedded in action in the marketplace yeah like it's practical how do I actually go about making decisions in my day to day it's not as much as I like you know reading Buddhist philosophy and things like that but there's sort of that sense of sitting in a cave meditating that's interesting but what I do about it yeah that doesn't kind of help me tomorrow when somebody cuts me off on the on the freeway and you know and then my blood pressure's gone through the roots right right I'm seeing red right so you know what are these practical tools that help me deal with my day to day and I find that stoic philosophy is kind of more embedded in that but are you familiar with the obstacle is the way absolutely a great book huh great book yeah and I you know that's that's one of those mantras right is just sort of like wouldn't I reach these moments in my life and I'm like heck what's going on and just like to take that breath and to realize the obstacle is the way I'm going through this confront the dragon I like to say yeah and going through that is going to make me stronger and I'm going to learn some things from this and I'm going to come out the other side better for it and it helps it really helps because otherwise you have this deep resistance to an obstacle yeah yeah you'll do a lot of things to avoid it right oh yeah there's a whole bunch of people that if they hear there's a dragon they'll do everything to run away from that dragon but he needs to be killed if you're going to advance you know yeah right so I think I you know that's why I believe in these things and sort of like holding these things close because they really do provide that time when you're like you know you're being challenged yeah yeah triggers of being triggered and stuff like that sort of like to have that framework I think about stoicism as kind of a precursor to utilitarianism a little bit does that resonate with you at all I didn't know much about utilitarianism oh it's like I ran fountainhead at this shrugged kind of stuff yeah I probably read that probably about 30 years ago yeah that's about right stayed with me so much but I you know I think there's yeah it's about being practical what's the utility I mean that's basically utilitarianism what's the utility of this action what's the greatest good for the greatest people yeah and uh yeah am I leaving the world in a better place from from my actions stuff like that or how am I actually contributing to it's to us misery yeah exactly that sort of thing yeah so that's where I am on on faith I mean I believe in it I believe people should have a grounding philosophy they should have a principle or set of principles that they are using yeah otherwise you're just drifting kind of interesting you get tossed around pulled here pulled there oh what's popped up on my phone maybe I'll follow that you know stuff but you critical thinking right and being able to take that step back and to be able to look and see and say no I know who I am I know what I stand for this is what I'm doing and having principles yeah I think it's tremendously important well I think about like the different elements of religion or whatever and I think you know like to me prayer and manifesting are basically two different words I mean the same thing kind of like they they imply that ability of us little pions to actually impact the universe in some capacity for our own behalf um any thoughts on that yeah some manifesting has been an interesting it's it came up a lot um we're having discussion in the sort of family around that and this and I was trying to like unpack manifesting because I was like you know it's a some degree I guess the image I have of the concept of manifesting is is somebody is sort of like sitting there saying well I'm going to earn a million like Harry Potter yeah and I'm too much of a pragmatic engineer to sort of say why that doesn't make any sense to me but this to me what manifesting is is what you you do a bunch of actions and you do them consistently you do them over and over you keep showing up and then that puts you in a place right at position where things will start happening like Elon Musk has manifested Starlink right just just showing up doing it having the version executing executing executing and then you what's that phrase you become the you know the overnight um all like a 30 year overnight success or something yes I got that wrong that the spending 10 years becoming an overnight sensation right right whatever you know that sort of thing and and so you know I think once again this is sort of like the you know the Instagram version of manifesting means why I'm just going to wish it into right into happening whereas to me manifesting means no you you're getting up at six o'clock every day I'm one of you better have some perspiration and then having action yes every single day and after you've done that for 10 years maybe something might manifest I would tend to agree family is the last of our topics here um you mentioned was it Kathy yes she's my partner and how long have you guys been together uh 11 years now actually okay and do you have littles around um so yeah I have kids with so we're you know primary energy yeah um so I've got daughter who's back in Baltimore and she's about to have a baby so congratulations grandpa for the soon for the first time which kind of you know scares me yeah yeah um and a son in in Boston and uh you know they're both launched and doing great yeah and um and then Kathy has a son who's in Denver and going to college and uh learning you know his way through life and having an interesting time with that too so yeah well everybody's got an interesting chapter right yeah uh when you think about family like what's that been for you along your journey it seems like to some extent you kind of departed your family about as soon as you're out of the nest and so there's a little bit less influence there than many yeah um yeah it's it's been sort of an interesting you know all of us you know have these journeys that we go on through life and and things and yes I left New Zealand you know and went off to the other side of the world and in a time when we didn't actually have the internet in the email and stuff like that so it was um an international phone call and stuff like that made it sort of hard to stay in touch um but I went back to New Zealand you know saw my parents you know fairly regularly and things like that um and you know my father actually passed away in 2020 um in New Zealand lucky I'd got down there to see him before Covid had right right you know international phone call and I guess the Covid didn't get him because they haven't hardly had any of that down there no it didn't get him uh yeah unfortunately you know I guess fortunately yes um but um you know so um you know the relationship with our parents is um can be a tricky one sometimes and things like that and I think um recently I had this interesting experience um you know because when we're sort of growing up I sort of feel like perhaps people more of you know my generation I'm 55 years old now and you know parents change over time and you know when I was growing up of course you know parents have these expectations right right that you gain to be successful and achieve things and you know you bring home an A minus and how come it's not an A sort of thing um my parents are like you got an A minus wow well that's great um so you know those you sort of like you know internalise all of those messages that you get and things like that and figure out like you know where am I going in life and things like that but um so recently I um I had a psychedelic experience oh I'm going to put that out there sure let's hear it since we're in Colorado well and you know the last segment is the loco experience okay which is the craziest experience of your life if you want to just transition that's probably maybe that's uh probably yeah probably we'll account for that uh in in those two subjects but um it was very interesting and to sort of go on a journey where um you know you sort of take off the governors in your mind yeah and just sort of free wheel a little bit and is that you're talking mushrooms or you're talking about other things yeah yeah yeah and uh the experience was very interesting for me because I sort of felt that you know having that sort of the the the governors removed to be able to go on a journey and then to be able to invite situations from you know my life back into that experience and not necessarily we live them but just to sort of feel them again and to sort of feel what's there and um you know all this sort of interest as I talked about it about knowing myself better right I mean one of these things that that trigger me or yeah stories from your past and being able to you know come to terms of them to come to some piece with them and to be able to move on and um so that experience I was able to sort of uh bring my father you know back into that and sort of we live some of the things that we've gone through and stuff like that and really make a really good and solid piece for that kind of resolution to ever and um I've noticed that it's really changed like some of my mindset and self-talk and things like that are going forward so um but yeah talk about a crazy experience oh my gosh oh my gosh I just like nothing on it hey I guess you were you were a virgin to that kind of experience before no never never had done a psychedelic experience before and just going off on this fantastic roller coaster that was so beautiful the things and it's just amazing right because it's in my mind right I mean it was just in my mind but I was off um just having this experience of um you know these these wonderful images and and just feelings like I was on this roller coaster going through uh some fantastic world fun yeah it's been like maybe 20 years since the last time I took mushrooms but uh it's becoming more popular in my uh spheres of influence tell me about the environment did you by yourself with some friends with Kathy in the woods I did it with a guide somebody who's very experienced I haven't done it for a long time and um so you know they talk about you know having an intention right so this is not recreation or I it's not just sort of kind of doing it with a bunch of friends at a party it's I mostly done it at concerts uh you too and let's right yeah so this is about having an intention and so for me my intention was um you know moved out here to Colorado it's a new phase in my life sort of really I wanted to see like what do I want to let go of from the past what do I want to keep and take forward to this next stage of my life um so that was my intention and then there's a set in a setting to it right so it's creating that mindset of of going into things and particularly you know like the sense of the obstacle is the way like instead of shying away from stuff it's in your mind so just go into and explore it see what's there um in the setting of just having a guide so somebody you know who's creating this environment of trust and safety and you know everything's going to be okay um and then integrating that afterwards and so coming out of the experience and writing journaling yeah through it you know creating those memories and stuff like that I mean it was it was fantastic and I highly recommend it I'm imagining maybe that like your dad was kind of a high pressure guy and you felt a lot more stressed from your relationship with them and then love perhaps is that yeah but you know I think at the end of the so what I got out of going into that uh in my psychedelic experience is just to um realize that in some part of stoke philosophy epic Titus is one of the stoke philosophers and he talks about this concept that there's two handles that you can pick anything up from there's the heavy handle and the light handle and so the heavy handle is you know with my father's relationship that I could never you know was never good enough right right but the light handle is that you know he loved me and he was wanting the best for me and that's all he was trying to do in his way right and so to be able to see those two different sides of that and to choose to let go of one of them and to pick up the other yeah and to have that last you know not just to be sort of an intellectual exercise right there's something I don't know what it is that's come out of that psychedelic experience but it's deep in me and I've got that now and it's really cool yeah you can't even really pick up the heavy handle anymore no it's not there yeah yeah I think that's awesome so it sounds like you're a strong recommender of psychedelics yeah that the cops gonna come to you in Denver it's like uh uncriminalized or whatever it's like criminalized yeah no so yes I you know I believe and think like so you know these fundamental philosophical things I believe and I've like knowing yourself knowing he's stand for knowing what your values are you know knowing where your boundaries are pushing outside of your comfort zone right you don't know like you're gonna sit on the couch and you know drink beer and watch football or day that's right thing but you're not gonna find out where your boundaries are and I'm a believer in that and so I'm just game for for anything that's reasonably safe sounds like a trip for some ayahuasca in Peru or something is on your next list maybe yes probably get that from Joe Roganah as well and that and I've read a book there's an author down in Denver called Scott Carney who read a book called The Wedge he's also written a book called What Doesn't Kill Us which was all about sort of like the Wim Hof method and sure getting out and ice exposure and stuff but he also wrote this book called The Wedge and he's looking at this concept of like you know between stimulus and response right between something happening and how you respond to it can you drive in a wedge there to to pour separate those things to separate those things to be able to examine it to be able to choose to do something different and there's all of these different things that you can do that and say breath work with you know more sitting in an ice bath you know going and doing psychedelics what else did he do he he explored several different things to see like what sort of wedge does this drive into right right you know separation between stimulus and response and it's a it's a very interesting book to read yeah it sounds like it might one of my groups think tank groups had a speaker that was on that same topic and a conflict jujitsu was his book name and he described like going up onto the balcony so you can observe yourself in this situation more as a third party almost and then then respond rather than reacting in that same kind of thread yeah I think it's you know it's important right there's just going back to one of our earlier threads you know you getting these things you know Facebook's pop and stuff up or Instagram's pop and stuff up and that's pushing your buttons and you're not conscious of that and aware of that yeah then you're going to go do things that you might regret yeah fair enough and so the more awareness the more intentionality the more you know that you can sort of drive a wedge in and realize what's going on I think they're better off you're going to be I think we're about ready to wrap it up is there anything else that you would want our listeners know about Steve Morris and EOS I think you got most of it outside it's been really great no I've heard I've really loved this conversation that's it's very nice environment and to be able to cover you know a wide range of subjects but as you can sort of see I hope you've got this sort of sense like it all ties together for me right in this sort of you insight how you come out into the world how you come show up in the business and taking businesses for that's what I left doing so anybody who wants to talk about that stuff with me and how do they find you I guess look for the yeah so on on the web I'm at eosworldwide.com slash steven dash morris so you can find me there my email is also steve.morris at eosworldwide.com okay so they can people can reach out they can stock you on LinkedIn too stock me on LinkedIn yes good point yes thanks yep I'm on very active on LinkedIn so it's also a good place to thanks for listening to this episode of the LogExperience podcast if you enjoyed this program share with your favorite people and please leave us a review on your favorite listening platform subscribe to never miss a latest interview and check out blogexperience.com to learn more and find our library of episodes until next time stay local well I sure thank you for making the drive up and spending the time and uh right I look forward to my first sailing lesson yep absolutely okay thank you cat appreciate it