People and Pivots and all about China with Albert Wolfe - Adaptive Leadership Coach & Author

In May, I got an email from Albert Wolf, sharing that he's traveling to the Fort Collins area visiting family soon from Guangzhou, China, and that he loves what I'm doing with Loco Think Tank and has been listening to and enjoying the Loco Experience podcast, and would I be interested in having him on as a guest. Flattery will get you everywhere with me. And so, of course, I said yes, and we had one opening during his stay here on the night before he left back for China. In the meantime, we shared a pair of lunches, one with my other China expert, Kim O'Neill, and we shared a podcast conversation full of more twists and turns than a road course in Formula One. The biggest pivot in Albert's career was when he left a career in education as director and associate professor of an English language department at university in Guangzhou to become the GM of a long-established brand, a retail brand, Healthy Household Limited, which had been a catalog company much like the Sears catalog in the old time USA. He oversaw a transition to e-commerce and also shifted the use of the real estate, some of the real estate, to become a high-end bilingual kindergarten where he became the founding principal. The school grew quickly and Albert exited after about three years and took something of a sabbatical. But his contacts kept calling him to do consultancy work for their businesses, and now, six years later, Albert has joined the team at International Coaching and Training Company Adaptive Leaders and co-authored a book, Performance Leadership, Four Keys to Extraordinary Results. I doubled my knowledge of China during Albert's stay in Fort Collins and also learned that not very good at ping pong in China is better than most, including me, in America. There's a ton of great business insight in this one and a lot of laughs. So please enjoy my conversation with Albert Wolf. Welcome to the local experience podcast on this show. You'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond our guests share their stories and through it all. You'll be inspired and entertained. These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. My guest today is Albert Wolf, and he is a business executive coach with, oh gosh, Adaptive Leaders. Yeah. I remembered. And they are based out of Guangzhou, China, but serve a global audience. And he is visiting family in northern Colorado and... We connected on LinkedIn and I was like, yeah, I want to learn more. So we've had lunch a couple of times already. So I know quite a bit about you and have enjoyed. I've learned so much about, I probably learned as much about China in the last three weeks through those two lunches with you. And then with Kim O'Neill, as I knew from the 40, from the 50 years before. Yeah, so you can pretend to be surprised if I say it again. I'm an expert now. Yeah. So let's get started with why are you here? Well, I'm visiting family. Okay. My family moved around a lot growing up in the U.S., and Colorado was one of those places. So we still have family here. Yeah. My sister and her lovely family are here. My aunt and uncle are here just north of Fort Collins. And your sister's got similar age children as well. Is that true? Yeah, it's fun. We have three girls. I have one girl. She has one. And my brother has one, all born in 2020. We call them the COVID cousins. Nice. So they all have a really good relationship. And then there's various boys as well. But they're sprinkled in throughout. Yeah. What a neat thing to have three little girls that will be, how old are they now? They're all like five, six, depending on what month their birthday was in. So really kind of blossoming into the young ladies that the kindergarten and first graders always are. That's right. They have very strong opinions. And so let's talk about your firm and what your firm does. Are you in particular industries and who do you coach and how do you coach? Do you do team stuff? And what's it like? Well, we'll save the what's it like in Guangzhou. Yeah. Who are your clients? Sure. Well, we work with a range of industries and a range of company sizes because the main thing we do is adaptive leadership. So adaptivity and senior and middle leadership teams. And it turns out most industries have those kinds of people. And so we've even worked with startups all the way to Fortune 500. So is it almost like a traditional change management organization where you're helping the leadership change the way they do things? To a certain extent, a lot of times change management is sort of top down. Here's the new software. Get used to it. Right. And we'll divide everybody into groups. These are the people that are fine with it. These are the people that will never be fine with it. And these are the people in the middle. It's a little bit connected to that, but it's more about how you lead. So you yourself are a business leader. And you have your various organizations, and you've got lots of experience. Mostly persuasion and charisma, I think, is how I lead. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. You're very winsome. You get to witness my relationship with Kim, who was a facilitator and now a member as well. Yeah, yeah. You're very winsome, you're very personable, you're a great listener, and you are very strong. You have like this, it's almost like your dominant hand. You have your dominant leadership things that you are awesome at. Where you probably run into trouble is where there's that other side where you can do it, but you're not great at it. Or maybe you just hate doing things in this certain realm. I wouldn't know what those are for you. Email management is a significant one. But also, if people aren't instantly ready to come along for the ride, I'm like, eh, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. To leave you behind. Right. And that's probably fine some of the time. But there are times where that might work against you. Sure. And so actually changing the way that you think about those email management or when people are kind of don't get it, don't get you right away. If you can expand your repertoire and you can sort of build up that side of your leadership, you actually become way more effective very quickly. So you're most often engaging with people on a one-on-one basis, that leader that recognizes a need for them to change the way they're leading right now. Yeah, I think we probably started with more one-on-one stuff because that's a sort of traditional executive coaching approach. And then we just found those leaders were saying, you know what, I would like my whole team to imagine what would happen if everybody on my team was... introspective and examining some of the assumptions that are holding them in place. Wow, what could our team do differently? And so we actually now we're doing a lot more team coaching and even sort of focused workshops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More of a leveraged application of that. It's interesting. We didn't really get a chance to talk too much about the Halos relational intelligence that I've studied a little bit and dabbled in and I've... I've been actually working today on a presentation for a workshop for that. Tell me. And, you know, the core thesis is kind of like built on polarity, and every person has kind of different strengths and weaknesses, and you're developed kind of by this stereo lens. But relationally, if you can understand that other people think differently than you and are valuable because of that, not despite of that, that you can really – both have stronger relationships and stronger outcomes. Yeah. And this chapter that I'm working with tomorrow, the chapter I'm a member of, and Kim is as well, is everybody except for me is orange, as they're either dominant or secondary. which is the achiever entrepreneur personality. And almost all of them are blue as the other thing. So there's all these orange and blue people, which is the organizer planner. I stick out like a sore thumb. I'm a white type with green, which is the thinker, the innovator, kind of the classic visionary idea guy. And the green is the social relational kind of that has connection and good listening skills and whatnot. And so we've got kind of a lopsided room where everybody's this kind of driven achiever and very organized as part of their success in building these multimillion-dollar businesses, except for myself. And it leaves us with kind of some gaps in our community. thinking as a collective chapter. Yeah. Because that's kind of what local think tank is about, is kind of building that collective brain in one room. So anyway, we probably nerd out on team stuff like that. And a lot of the Hallows thing is based on introspection of your type, your particular strengths, and your associated kind of the negative polarity of your type. Yeah. The messy inbox is a signal. Yeah, and I think there's a few things in your story there. One is you've done what we call a team map. So you've said, here we all are in the room. There's 10 of us, 12 of us, whatever. And wow, I'm the only one that fits this profile or has these strengths. That's already so valuable because then it probably helps explain why. you may have felt a little bit like that from time to time. For sure. And so a team map of whatever model you use is a super great starting point for a conversation with people. And have you already talked as a team about it? No, my presentation is tomorrow. Oh, it's just tomorrow. So for most of them, it's relatively new content. Oh, it'll be so great. Yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be super fun. Are these companies you're working with, are they American companies working in China? Is your team all English first? You're like multilingual as well, right? Yeah, we're all bilingual or multilingual at the minimum. So we all speak English. And then we have one guy from Malaysia speaks like five languages. But I would say our... Our primary client base is multinational companies. So they could be American companies. It might be French, German. They could be based... But they've all got mixed nationalities working within them as well. Right. Kind of the best of the best to some extent. Right. And they also have highly complicated cultural situations. Right. You've got Indians working with Chinese, working with Australians. Exactly. Exactly. And so we like to say the more complicated, the better. Okay. That's your special side. That's where we thrive. Interesting. We love highly complex situations and teams. And that really helps me understand how you fit in so easily with the team. Because you told me you kind of coached on your individual basis a little bit. We just brushed on this in our conversation. Right. But your background in linguistics and such. made you, and your experience in business, of course, but that broad background in linguistics helped, I assume, like to understand language, you got to kind of understand culture a decent amount as well, right? Yes, definitely. You sort of end up understanding the culture to a certain extent. But it's also a credibility piece. It sort of gets you a seat at the table. When you're working with a multinational team and maybe they're all kind of struggling with English, there are teams where English is none of their first language. Right. It's the language of the office. But then if it's, for example, I speak Mandarin, if there's a Mandarin speaking teammate, and they get really stuck on something, I said, go ahead and say it in Chinese. And they're just so happy that they can do that. And it just changes the environment. And that's an encouragement I like to give to the listeners, actually, as we're moving to the age of... unlimited apps on your phone and AI translation actually in the headphones, right? You don't even need an internet connection with some of these because yeah, they're just shipping with AI in the headphones to translate. I really want to encourage the listeners, I think moving forward, if you want to differentiate yourself, you will still learn a foreign language to a very high level. That in the global marketplace... Even despite having access to that... Exactly. Because of that extra insight. It's not just AI telling you the words. You have to have some context to make it really... And I don't know if it's especially Asian or if it's just every culture, but it's a sign of respect. Yeah. And so there will always be struggling with the question, what can AI do and what's left for us people? And I just want to encourage people, even though AI is darn good at translation by now, still learning that foreign language to a very high level is a special contribution that us humans can make in this world. Let's, uh, I think to do your journey justice, it actually might be more fun to unfold it from closer to the start. Can we do that? Sure. I was going to ask about kind of that first time in China. Sure. But I think I want to go all the way back to five-year-old Albert. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, if you go back to two-year-old Albert, you actually get... You remember it? I don't, but this has become a legend in our family. I was apparently already a linguist because I was correcting another two-year-old's pronunciation. He was saying, you know, that's my plate. And I was saying, it's no, no, it's a plate, actually. And my mom, she would have captured it on video if such things had been possible back then. But she still tells this story. And so I guess I was doomed to be a linguist from a very early age. Yes. And where were you? No, that was in Boulder. In Boulder, Colorado. Yeah. And were you first born? I was and still am, yep. Then we moved to Kansas for a few years, and then I grew up, high school was in Arizona. Okay. And I went back to California, which is actually where I was born. We moved very quickly after that. Okay. I went back for university. And what was your family up to? Was your dad a professor or something like that? Yes. He alternated between, yeah, he was teaching in universities and then working in church, in churches. Okay. So he would sort of alternate back and forth between the- With ministry and was he like a pastor at church? Yeah. He's a piano player and a musician. A worship pastor of sorts. A choir director and composer, arranger. Oh, wow. So he would do that at the universities and then he would do that at the churches. You know, it seems like I'm neither a songwriter or music. You know, I can sing a little bit, but the connection between language and piano music and even mathematics, it all seems so interesting if one could really peel that orange properly. And I haven't really delved in. I could describe myself as an inch deep and a mile wide. I know a little bit about a lot of things, but I have to think that was an influence on your path as well. Yeah, I've given a lot of thought to this because Chinese is a notoriously difficult language because of something called the tones. So if you say the same word, but you say it when you're angry, you actually said a different word now. So I've coached lots of people on their Mandarin over the years, and the musicians pick it up faster. That's just a trend, but I don't have an explanation for it. Yeah, that's kind of my sense. It feels like that's... Woodworkers are special people too. I don't know quite what makes them tick, but they're always a little more kind and interesting and introspective than everybody else. So tell me about that Albert. Were you a great student? Were you in football? What were kind of your main things in that middle school, high school kind of season? Well, one of the greatest gifts my dad gave his four children was we all learned piano. Oh. And so we all had this sort of very solid musical foundation. I then took that and went almost as far the opposite direction in high school and played in the drumline. Okay. So it's, you know, not pitched because it's just banging things really loud and really cool. So I was in the drumline, high school drumline, marching band. I was in the drama club, sort of the improv comedy and musical theater and things like that. So that was high school and a little bit of college too. We had a traveling rock band in college. And were you guitar? Were you drummer still? I was, we all, each of us played at least two instruments. So I was mostly on the piano, keyboard, and then I would go to drums if necessary for whatever crazy thing we were up to. Dig it. And where were you? Where did you go to college? I was in Fullerton, California, which nobody's ever heard of, so I just say it's a suburb of Disneyland. Nice. My mother grew up around Anaheim. Oh, yeah. Glendale? Glendale, yeah. So it's right next to Anaheim. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. And so... studious as well? Or was the music and the fun, the play more your style? I sort of grew into being a student. The thing I hated most in high school was foreign language. It's so ironic now. And learning about other cultures, I was just so bored with that. I don't know why it was not drumline, maybe. So, yeah, I ended up majoring in English literature, and that really was different. I hated English and writing and reading when I was in high school. So a couple of podcasts ago, Kelly Sage and I found, like, 15 things where we were, like, the same on. And I'm kind of the same. Like, my third... No, not third. Like seventh and eighth grade English teacher was hated by all, including me. And the foundations that she built in me during those couple of years have turned me into a grammar Nazi today. OK. And I love writing. And I do it for fun every month. You know? And it's one of those things where you're just like, huh. Yeah. What did you hate about her? I don't think I did. Oh. I think the kids all hated her. And so I went along for the ride. Okay. You know? And, you know, she pushed kids to read and explain their thoughts better and stuff like that. That's what they hated about her. I thought it was probably interesting, but I couldn't. be the only kid that liked her wasn't cool that was too dangerous yeah it wasn't cool anyway i digress um but you fell in love also with literature i also had some really good literature teachers in my final years of high school okay and really spark to spark yeah and and i was i was i think i've always been My learning is very person-based. So if I, and maybe everybody's like this, but I feel very much like this. If I like the person and I'm intrigued by the person, and if they're a little quirky, then I'm gonna pay more attention and be very interested. Yeah, yeah. To the extreme extent that when I was in college, I actually had two sets of notes, just crazy things that my professors said that maybe weren't even attached to. The subject matter and then the stuff you need for the test. Right, right. I had an economics professor that in describing marginal revenue considerations for a keg party really kind of flipped me from kind of not understanding economics through the first two years to like, oh, I kind of get it now. Yeah. And the same kind of thing. Yeah, and he was kind of quirky. Well, the stories. And he's got a keg party as part of his class. Right. So that's quirky. Right, exactly. That's great. And I think that's when you say it's people and it's quirky, but it's also the quirky people and it's the quirky stories because you remember those stories. Yeah. And so that's how those lessons get learned. And I'm thinking ahead a bit to your current work, but I'm imagining even in doing what you do, there's a lot of story-based elements to it. Yeah, I think that's certainly a core way I think about the world. I think we relate to each other through stories very easily. And you can even notice it if you're at a conference or if you're listening to somebody speak, and they're going on and on about their idea, which is very important to them. They maybe even have a big graph about it on the screen. And then all of a sudden you hear the phrase, The other day, everything changes in the room. People sit up straighter, they put their phones down. Or if somebody says, there's this one time, then you can totally feel the shift even now on the show. It's like, was he actually going to tell a story just then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty interesting. I've never really thought it through on, because I emcee events and stuff occasionally. you know, ways to get the crowd's attention, and there's ways to definitely not get the crowd's attention at times. And it's probably one of the more effective ways is to start telling a story. Yeah. Nobody wants to miss out. The fear of missing out is a big element of people. It's a big element of people, but I think we're just wired to remember. We have, it seems to me, an almost infinite capacity to experience and remember stories. And so, yeah, the next time you're emceeing, I wonder if you can squeeze in a, I mean, it doesn't even have to be, if you're telling people where the emergency exits are. Sure. You could just, you could just say, there's this one time we had an event and this guy. And I forgot to say what. And this guy didn't know where the emergency exits were. And it turned out he was fine, but I don't want you guys to run that risk. It's like not even a story, but everybody's totally on the edge of their seat. That's the funniest nod story ever, honestly. Yeah. He was confused for 30 seconds, and then it really didn't matter. Yeah, there was this one time, there was this guy walking down the street doing something, I don't remember what, but the emergency exits are over there. Right. It should probably connect, but there is. I love that. I could get a little more quirky in my delivery, I think, if I add some of those elements to it. Yeah. So... Like college graduation is coming if you want to move back to the timeline. Okay. Are you still in California? Yep. Still doing music. By the way, you've got great piano hands. Oh, thank you. Your fingers have got kind of that heavy, the mass on the end so you can really get a little boing, boing, boing. Years of training, I'm sure. Yeah. So, yeah, anyway, get back to the journey. So I did one semester overseas at Oxford in the middle. Oh. And it was really my first time living overseas. It was a... International experience, really. Yeah, it was a crazy international. I mean, I'd been to Europe for a quick tour. I'd been to Mexico loads of times living in Arizona. Sure. But then to actually go and live for, you know, half a year in the UK. Yeah. was really crazy. And I came back, and then I graduated from college, and that was harder than moving to China, actually. Finishing college? Oxford. Or coming back from Oxford, or doing Oxford. Living in the UK was harder than living in China. Like more culture shock? Yeah. Really? Because I was unprepared for it. I had this sort of false sense of security. Just like college? We all speak English. I'm still going to be in college. There was so much that was different. Tell me more. Like... Well, Oxford by itself is a crazy place. Right. It's very intense, very high academic standards. It's Harvard-y kind of, right, or whatever. Yeah, but there's a lot of one-on-one classes. You don't sit in a big lecture hall at Oxford. I still remember I would go in every week to my professor's office, and it was just him and me, and I was doing English literature, so we had picked together some things that I was going to read. Okay. But I had to read it every week and write like a... six-page essay about it. And then he would sit there like this with his eyes closed, leaning back, and he would always ask the same thing, have you written something? And I would always say, well, yeah, that was, you know, the assignment was to write something. Of course I did. Would you like to read it? Yes. Every week. Have you written something? Would you like to read it? And I would always say yes to both. And then I would read it from top to bottom, the whole essay, and he would listen with his eyes closed. And then the minute I finished it, he would open his eyes, lean forward, and start discussing what I'd written. He remembered the whole thing. And then we discussed it and sort of debated it. And he pushed me and he discovered that I didn't know what I was talking about. Right. And he assigned me some more reading or we sort of collaborated. And then I would do it all again the next week. That's what class was. Wow. That's really different than what I was used to. I guess. I've always said I was an auditory learner. Like what flipped me from a crappy student that went out partying too much was dedicating to just, I never bought any textbooks after a season, and I always went to class. I went to every class, and I took copious notes at every class. Yeah. And just kind of remembering the stories and the lessons and reviewing my notes before the tests was enough for me to mostly get Dean's List. But I think it was because it was coming into my ear hole that... Even now, I listen to a lot more podcasts than I watch videos of things to learn with, even though I'm sure there's learning to be done with pictures. You know, Geography by Jeff, I like that on YouTube because I can't really quite get it if I was just listening to it in my ear hole. But that's pretty fascinating. So this is what we're talking about. probably maybe like a five to ten minute thing that you would read him. Is that right? Yeah. Something like that? And then we'd have another 50 minutes of discussion and planning the next thing that I would do. And then how are grades established? Was there testing? Well, no. The tutor, they're called tutors, gave you a grade. And the grades are not the normal ABC that we're used to. They have their own system. And this was the other real light bulb to me at the time was I thought that I really enjoyed learning for learning. But I was finding myself a little nervous about the grading and wondering what's coming. And so it was about halfway through the semester, I asked this professor. I actually had several professors, but he was the main one. I said, um... How am I doing, by the way? Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? And he said, yes, you Americans are so into feedback, but I just don't do that. And there was a sort of long pause. And I think the time was up anyway. And I sort of said, okay. And, you know, I got up and, you know, I imagined myself backing out of the door slowly. And so I actually never knew. I got my grades later. It turns out I wasn't doing very well. Okay. Because I was so different. You know, it was all very different than I was used to. And my depth... But the Oxford system in particular, maybe the UK education in general, is more into depth than breadth. You were accustomed to doing book reports and getting A's. I was accustomed to sort of skimming along, which was working for me. But my essays weren't very good. I didn't really understand what I was reading. And so I think it was appropriate. I probably got the grades that I deserved. But it was still very valuable. Do you think his interaction with every student was give or take the same? Yes, probably. But he was not my only professor over there, and so I had a few. Everybody had their own style. It's very, it's up to the professor. Fascinating. And you don't even call them professors. I'm saying that because this is, we're recording it in America. Yeah, otherwise nobody, what do they call them? Yeah. Um, tutors. Counselors. Yeah. You mentioned that. Yeah. Cool. Well, we better, uh, get back to the storyline. Otherwise we're going to spend three hours today. Uh, you come back, you graduate. Yep. And I went straight to China. Why? Yeah. I had met international students from China studying in California. And Circa Meat, if you don't mind, what year was this? This is 2005. Okay. This is when I went to China. Yep. And so I had already met international students. So kind of leading up to the Great Recession years and stuff like that, right? Yeah. That was kind of a change in the whole global patterns. But a lot of growth in those years, a lot of dynamics, a lot of new companies, call centers, programming. Exactly. I was shopping for a country because I was an English major. I was planning to go overseas and teach English. I knew that was a good way to sort of pay your own way. But where? Where should I go? I wanted to learn a new language. I never really learned a language. And so I just settled on China because a huge population. If I can learn Mandarin, I can speak to a bunch more people. Yeah. China had just won the bid for the 2008 Olympics. So they were like, they were the next big. Yeah, it was definitely rising, China rising at that time. There's this guy I know, he has this great phrase, China is the next China. Well, back then, China was also the next China. And so it was just an exciting place to think about and a little scary. I'm sure. Back then, not very many people had gone to China. Now it seems like you can find everybody has a, it's usually a nephew or somebody who's going to China. One degree of separation. Yeah. But back then it was fairly unusual. And I remember that there was a little bit of nervousness around my decision to go. And you're like 22 or something like that. Early 20s. Yeah. And so how did you decide where to land? And what, did you just get a job teaching English somehow? And then you moved there. Or did you move somewhere first? No, I was working at a tutoring language center right next to my college in California. And one of the guys there, they'd all been overseas. This guy's worked in Korea, this one in Egypt, this guy worked in China. I said, China, that's where I want to go. And he said, oh, well, I still know a bunch of universities there. I could just email your resume for you. And he did. And I got five contracts. Oh, wow. No job interview. No job interview. They emailed five different email addresses, sent me contracts. I printed them out, and I went back to Scott, and I said, Scott, and I laid them on the table. Which of these should I take? And he's like, yeah, I've heard of this place. This place pays the best, but I don't think it's a very nice place to work. And so he sort of helped me pick. It was really, really valuable. And I just went to where Scott told me to go. Yeah, yeah. And that was this city I'd never heard of. There was no other way to get more data than that, really. This is a city I'd never heard of. And was that Greg Joe? Nope. Or is it someplace else? It's called Nanchang. Nanchang. Yeah, N-A-N-C-H-A-N-G. And then I'd go back and I'd tell my Chinese friends at the college, yeah, I'm going to China. Oh, where are you going? I'm going to Nanchang. They'd look at me like, you're going where? They'd heard of it, but like, why would you go there? Right. I don't know what it would be like the equivalent in the U.S., but it's not L.A., New York. Memphis or something. Yeah, or even, you know, we've heard of it. It's Little Rock or something. It's like, yeah, I guess you'll have a good time there, but it's not where normally people go. Fair. And so I went there, and that was my first year. I only stayed one year there. Okay. I moved to another city after that, and then my third city was where I am now, Guangzhou. Oh, I see. Okay. And you worked as an English teacher for quite a while, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, I went straight into teaching university with only a bachelor's degree at that point. And no Chinese. And no Chinese. No, I was desperately... So how did you... You didn't have any pocket translators back then. How did you get around? Well, I had this little blue Oxford dictionary that I called chubby. And I had a CD called Learn In Your Car Chinese, which I was desperately listening to whenever I would drive anywhere for about three, four weeks before I left. Okay. But I basically knew the numbers. I didn't really know. That's what I know of German still. Right. And Mexican or Spanish. That's a great place to start. Right. But I basically didn't know Chinese. And so I had to learn it when I got there. And everyone was so surprised I could go without knowing Chinese. But the thing is, I was teaching English. I was hired as an English teacher in the English department. with a bunch of Chinese people who spoke good English and students who were trying to speak English. So they didn't have any... It's almost your job to kind of speak English, at least at work, mostly. Right. And so... Just when it comes time to go to the supermarket, you're like, uh... That's right. That's exactly right. And to this day, most people who go to China to work in an English environment, they don't learn Chinese. Right, because they probably have an English supermarket close to where they are or things like that. Yeah, or they can get by. Right, without even having to. With the basics. Okay. With the basics. But you were focused on learning Chinese because that was part of your motivation for going there. Right. Right. It was originally just three years in China, learned Chinese, then moved to another country, learned another language. And so that first year, all my free time, I was just... writing things in my notebook. I read that probably that whole dictionary several times and memorized flashcards, very old school. I still think that's a great way to learn a language because it's slow. People want to do things fast. And so you can have an app that makes flashcards for you. And that's really cool. But there's something about using your hand and writing the word. I didn't learn the characters. I just wrote it out in kind of a romanized alphabet. Yeah. And I flip it over and write the English. Oh, sweet. And that would take ages. And I had like thousands of flashcards by the end. And does it, in Chinese, is a character a word sometimes? That's typically the way to, so those strings of characters that we see when we see Chinese writing, it's like word, word, word, word, word, word, word. Yeah, for the most part. Some are compound, some you need two characters for. Sure. Or three. But for the most part, every character is its own word. Interesting. But that was really hard, and so I skipped that. I just learned to speak and listen, not to write the characters. So auditory more for you too. Right. And that really accelerated my learning. And then later, much later, when we'll get to it in the story, when I was managing a company of all Chinese people, that's when I really learned their reading and writing. So let's go to that transition. Circa me again as far as a timeline. And are you a single guy during most of this journey? I met your wife for lunch as well. So how long have you been together? Yeah, we've been married about eight years. Okay. And so for my first 10 years in China, I was single doing the university teaching thing. And what's the dating life like as a single man living in China for 10 years? Like, were there other Americans around Guangzhou and stuff or hardly at all? And you had to... Yeah. There's, um, I didn't do much dating, but that was just my choice. Wasn't your focus? You were learning Chinese? I was learning and working and writing books and playing tennis and doing all kinds of stuff. I guess what's the social scene? I guess it's probably more of the better question. So, yeah. So Guangzhou is the third largest city in China. So you've got Shanghai number. Literally like 10 million people or something. Yeah, or even more. 12, 15, whatever. It's like three states of Colorado in that one city. Yeah, 40 square miles. Yes. So you got Shanghai is the most cosmopolitan, biggest city. Very exciting. If you want to map it onto a U.S. city, it'd be like New York. Okay. It's sort of a finance business center. Yep. Then number two is Beijing. We're going just by size. Sure. Beijing is... if you want to map it, that'd be like Washington, D.C. That's the political headquarters, political capital. Also the real estate's the highest prices. The salary's the highest. Could be, could be. Also very big. Very, very cool. The dirty laundry is the dirtiest. Could be. Anyway, It's very cool. Yeah, yeah. That's what I think of the most often. Yeah. Beijing's got the Forbidden City. It's got the Great Wall very close by just outside. Yeah. Shanghai's there on the ocean. And then you've got this third city that doesn't get much press called Guangzhou. Yeah. And it's down in the south. And so it's tropical climate. Is it kind of the portal to like the South China Sea and the Indonesia region and stuff? Yep. Is that why it's big, partly? Yes. And a lot of manufacturing down there. And you've got to bring those resources in from other places. China's got some resources, but for most of the things that they build, they have to bring other stuff in as well. Yeah. And that's sort of laid back. People are walking around in flip-flops. Oh, really? Yeah. Because it's like island life. A little bit. Yeah, or maybe California vibe. Yeah, yeah. You know, that sort of thing. Okay. And so I felt most comfortable there. Yeah, makes sense. It's just a little bit slower paced, a little more relaxed. Yeah. And it's... Well, even a little bit like the Fort Collins vibe is a little more chill than Denver, for example. Exactly. Exactly. So there are quite a few foreign companies in all three of those places. But Guangzhou would have... They might have their headquarters in Shanghai, but they have a Guangzhou office. Sure. Okay. So there's a vibrant expat community, as they say. And yeah, Guangzhou's cool. But anybody who lives in Shanghai will say Guangzhou's not cool. Right. Yeah. You mentioned tennis, which also means you might have some game on the ping pong table. Is that true? I did play a little bit of ping pong in my early years in China because it was a cool thing to do with the students and could just practice more Chinese too. Yeah, yeah. But you haven't played it. You're a little rusty. Well, yeah. And by Chinese standards, I was never anything. Right. Well, I'm sure by Chinese standards, I'm terrible. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about this transition. You're a teacher for most of 10 years. Is that what you said? Yep. So 10 years teaching at universities and then sort of transitioning into kind of against my will into management. Okay. And so. Describe. Well, at the last teaching job, a place called Peijong College there outside of Guangzhou. It's kind of the middle of nowhere. It's outside the city limits. Beautiful. I describe it like a resort campus. 80 foreign teachers, 80 expat teachers, which is a very high number, especially for living out in the middle of nowhere. And so they did a very smart thing. Like a learning resort with a cultural infusion. Right. And so... It's not all American expats either, probably. No, no. It's Brits and French and whatever. All sorts. But they're all teaching English. Oh. Because this college had built themselves, they'd sort of marketed themselves as no matter what you major in, you're going to have... an English, a native speaking English teacher. So you're going to get, it's kind of like having a double major, basically. Yeah, yeah. So less French teachers, but all English natives, right? Teaching these kids the best English they can. Right. And so you basically end up with a double major. You'll have whatever you choose, computer science, or there's a law department even. But you're going to have a whole lot of English classes, speaking classes. Yeah. With a real. So if you're an engineer, you can not only just be a really good engineer, you can also talk to the people that need really good engineers. Right. And so they. And therefore triple your income potential. So that was how they, that was their market position. Yeah. And so they just needed a huge number of teachers because every student had a class with an English teacher, a speaking class. And so they did a really smart thing. As I said, we have so many foreign teachers, we're going to actually have some of them be directors. So there was three directors. I was on the director's team of managing these 60 to 80 foreign teachers, which was like herding cats. I'm sure. Yeah. And so I was doing that, and the reason that I was, I think one of the big reasons I was successful at that was my Mandarin was already at such a high level, I could interface with any department at the university. Sure, yeah, yeah. And everybody loved talking to me about how, you know, what a headache these foreign teachers are or whatever. And you're like the only one that can really speak Mandarin. Right, right. I wasn't the only, only one, but I was the only one in that director's team. Yeah, yeah. And so I would go and, you know, sort things out and sort of smooth things over. And everybody thought that was great. So... By my 10th year, I sort of got headhunted by a friend of mine who owned his own business, his own retail business. Okay. Right there in Guangzhou. We had met at church, and he was looking for a new spin on the business, basically. Okay. Retail of what? What's retailing? Well, they had a very interesting company called Healthy Household. And in the early 90s, so this is going way back before I was there. They were printing and shipping catalogs all over China and saying, do you want anything in this catalog? And people were riveted. They were turning pages and they were seeing things they'd never seen before. They were seeing Tupperware. They were seeing Swiss Army knives. Like the actual Sears catalogs were for us as kids, kind of. Exactly. They got remote control cars in there. Exactly. And do you remember how riveted we were? Oh, yeah. When the new one came out, it was like... Give me that. Yes. You got to share. We would read every page over and over, right? Even looking at like furniture and stuff. Yeah. You know, we don't need any of that, but we'll get to the good stuff again here soon. Yeah. And that's how I experienced Legos. as a kid, was Lego catalogs would get mailed to my house because somehow we were on their mailing list. Right, right. And so their business was that, but for cool stuff for your house. Yeah. And in the early 90s, that's the way. Well, in China in the early 90s through the 90s, really, there was this huge migration of... farmers really becoming factory workers and stuff, right? And having discretionary income for the first time in their lives. That's right. And they didn't have any stuff before. That's right. Now I can get some stuff, and it's Tupperware, baby. It's American, you know, or whatever. Exactly. And so the standard of living is rising. And this company, Healthy Household, said, well, don't you think you should treat yourself to some cool stuff? And so they, this American couple, started this company, and it was huge. It was hugely successful, and the paper catalogs, and they had their own call center and everything. And so then, you know, fast forward to my story, where it's now the 2000s, and the Internet has been invented, and e-commerce has been invented. And they've been like, it's probably a fair... They need to pivot, basically. The paper catalogs thing isn't going to work anymore. It's not. And so I got brought in for this because he knew me, he trusted me, and I spoke Mandarin. Like you were the one that had to lead this change? Yeah. Or be part of a team? Yeah. They knew they wanted to make the change, and you were the one that could communicate better in some ways. Yeah, I was the one. I was going to be the general manager for this. This venture. With this venture, yeah. And they already had a very good general manager who was very good at the old style of doing the business. Wow. And so they brought me in and said, we want to reinvent. We're going to build this new thing. dock to hitch our boat to because this other one isn't is not going to be here for long yeah wow and so and i was an opportunity it was a once in a lifetime opportunity yeah the timing and everything like that yeah and so um i i went and we worked on it together and it was it was tricky it was hard yeah i'm sure i'm sure it was did it was it lucrative like did it pay more than being a teacher at that time or was it yeah yeah It was a big opportunity to really kind of change your impact in some ways and income profile as well, but also just the complexity. Like you were just, you were teaching words and concept, but you weren't even really using your English literature because you can't go that deep. Right. You know, your professor at Oxford would have been embarrassed by how shallow you stayed with your English after that first 10 years. I'm sure he was embarrassed no matter what I would do, but... I think the real appeal of it was the chance to do something really different that I knew would push me into the deep end and I'd have to just learn a whole bunch. Yeah, yeah. And so that was... The learning really attracted me. Had you... attracted a mentor or anything like that? Or who was your, where did you, like when you didn't know what to do next as you're trying to make this transformation of this business, what did you lean into? Or what did you resource yourself with? The internet's kind of doing stuff by now or whatever? Right. So the owner of the company was my main mentor. But this was the big light bulb years later when I finally transitioned out of this job was I was missing that outside perspective. I was missing the... And there's a phrase in Chinese, people outside the field can see clearly, like off the playing field. We call it industry think at Loco Think Tank. Like if you're a plumbing company, you pretty much think like all the other plumbing companies, but maybe it would actually be good to be in a room with a manufacturer. Yeah. Or whatever, a pizza shop or a maid service agency. Yeah. That cross-pollination, that outside perspective. My mentor, the owner of the company, Paul Condrell, dear friend, even to this day. Yeah, shout out to Paul. Dear friend, even to this day, he gave me a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Cool. The problem Paul and I ran into together was we were both so steeped in the company. We were both in the weeds, sort of. We didn't have what I later became, which is an executive coach, outside the company. So you brute strengthed it, and you were successful, it sounds like. Yeah, we made it work. Painfully and slowly. A funny thing is that they had this amazing resource that was being underused, which was their land. They were on this beautiful garden. property with a zip line and a barbecue pit. And it was an event center that they had built where the company was. But it was just very occasionally there'd be a wedding. The church might- And you're like, you don't even have a gift shop here? You got all the cool as shit. Right. You put it in there. Right. The church would use it on a Sunday sometimes. Yeah. Interesting. But Paul actually had the idea, said, we should turn this into a school. Oh. And so halfway through my, you know, I'm... hands up to my elbows in the real estate transformation. He goes, what do you think about using all this? And immediately I could see the sense in that because we were paying rent on it. Sure. And we might as well use it. At least make it a functional asset. And so I printed new business cards for myself that said principal. And I became the founding principal of a preschool. Curveball. Total curveball. Yeah. And I stayed the general manager. I had two business cards. I stayed the general manager of the retail business. Right, which was still developing, I guess, its online presence and transitioning. Yeah, I was still struggling along with that. But then it became obvious that, wow, if I were to focus all my energy on the school and we were marketing ourselves as sort of a higher-end school in that area. Yeah, like teach your Chinese kids English early kind of. Yeah, English Immersion Environment, and then, hello, look at our forest and our amazing grounds here. And the parents' jaws would drop. Right. They said, has this always been here? Because it's walled in. Upper middle class or even a little above that on the average kind of thing. Yeah. So basically just hired a whole new team and started a school. Yeah, total pivot. Wow. Sounds like it was successful, though. Yeah, it was more successful than the retail business. And so that was really fun. I ended up sort of passing that, handing off the retail arm to somebody else because I needed to focus on running the school. We had 12 kids at our startup, which was only about five weeks after we had the team in place. So the classrooms were not renovated, but we had people who were walking distance. And walking distance is a huge thing. Oh, and that was part of the, because the people that lived in walking distance had also nice estates outside of the city and stuff like that kind of? We were sort of in the city, but right next to a huge housing high-rise complex. Gotcha. Yeah. apartments of just thousands of people. Wow. And they were already going to take their kids to some school. Right. And this was right when that one child policy was loosening. So we're seeing families with two, maybe three children. Mm-hmm. And maybe there's not going to be enough seats for them at the school. And so a bunch of schools were popping up back then. Oh, interesting. And so it was very good timing for us. And so we started with 12 students very, very quickly. And we had a great team of the founding teachers, the director's team, we called it. Yeah. And then by year two, we had 120 students. Oh, wow. Yeah. You mentioned that it was sometimes used as a church and stuff, this event center. Right. It wasn't a faith-oriented school at all? No. English only? Okay. Okay. Yeah, you can't really do that in China. You can't really have a faith-based school. That's kind of what I had perceived. If you do, you have to keep it real underground, real unadvertised. And our school is the opposite. You're like, bring your kids, bring them here. We're huge, yeah, we're easy to find. Exactly. How many years did you serve in that school leadership then? Yeah, that's a good question. I should write this down at some point. It was five years total in that whole business environment. I think we did three or four years, and then COVID hit. Oh. And when COVID hit, it became obvious that this is the right time to sell the business. Like it was still worth? Yeah, absolutely. good money or whatever. And I was real tired after doing all this. And so I was ready for a little break. So 2020, I stepped down. The new owner was going to have new management and everything. So it was a good transition year. And it was the very beginning of COVID. It was looking like... China took a very structured, as is typical China, very structured approach to COVID, rules and systems. And one of the rules was schools can't open. Wow. And so that's a real struggle. So my wife was teaching university at the time, so she was teaching online. That's kind of OK for a university. But for five-year-olds, that's not OK. That's not going to work. You can't really teach them online. Did the people that bought the school face that consequence then, or did you sell? Like, how did that shake down? Yeah, I actually wasn't part of the negotiation or the selling discussion. But they worked it all out somehow. Does the school come back online? It's still there. School's still there. We're great friends with the new owner. Good, good, good. And we go back to visit all the time. Gotcha, gotcha. And so it's sort of a happy ending. It was a bit of a choppy transition of sorts, I'm sure. Yeah. And then are you just kind of cut loose? Did you take a sabbatical and figure out what the heck kind of crazy thing I'm going to do next? Sabbatical is a great word for it. I needed a couple of months to just sort of decompress and figure out what I wanted to do. And have you fallen in love by this time? Yep, we were already married. We were already married a couple, three years by then. So during this whole season of retail store becomes preschool, enters COVID, you're... I also welcomed my dear wife, Eva, to the story. And she joined me there. And yeah, and she was a great support through the whole thing. I'm sure. I think I would have been even more successful if I'd gotten married earlier. But I didn't. I didn't come to my senses in time. You know, there's a reason that there aren't that many lifetime bachelors that are really successful. Because I think it really does take a pair to really make a complete either person in some ways. I think there's something to that. I was one of the happiest bachelors I ever met. Very content, sounds like. Very content, very happy being single and having all my energy to focus on my little things. I was actually a bachelor until I was 25-ish or 26-ish. I liked it. Better being a bachelor than being with a crazy woman. You're not that easy to find the not crazy woman. Well, congratulations to both of us. Hi, Eva. Yes. Yes. So anyway, so give me that sabbatical. The sabbatical was a few months at the very beginning of COVID. And then I started getting calls from people that knew me, other business owners or senior leaders and said, we hear you're not doing anything. Would you come work with our team? Okay. And I thought, well, sure, I'll come. Why not? I'll come and have a look. Yeah. And very quickly I realized, oh, this is actually a job. Right. People do this. It hadn't occurred to me. Way different than a teacher. Right, right. And really very rewarding because that... this is a felt need. And I remember... I bet you're a systems thinker too, right? So yeah, somewhat. One of your natural talents is probably thinking through the whole complexity of an organization, like almost from soup to nuts. Sure. The thing I realized quickly was I could do that, but it would take time. And if I could coach the leaders who are already in the position... who already know all that, if I could coach them, that's way more efficient. Right. And faster for them. So you're really focused on their leadership and talent. Exactly. And their habits, their techniques. That's right. Their perceptions, how they uptake information from their teams. That's right. Exactly. All that stuff. All that stuff. Because I will never know as much about their business as they do. For sure. Even if I had a lot of time. And so, and that's the big... Oh, that's cool. That's the big switch from university to business. In university, nobody's really concerned about time. Right. You're on a semester system. These students are most likely going to graduate when they get to the end of the assembly line. But in business, everything's about time. Yeah. How fast... Can we turn this thing around? Right. Or make a change or learn something about whether this product's going to work or not. Right. And that was really exciting to me. And I thought, well, I don't think I can go back. I did go back. I ended up teaching some more classes at some universities on the side later. But the business environment is much more energizing. I've never really thought about it quite that way of the leverage on time. Like, you know, I've engaged with different consultants and stuff. And, you know, a lot of times they're like, okay, we've got to do all this research and it's going to take all this. And it's like, well, yeah, because you couldn't possibly know that much about the business until you do a bunch of research, right? Of course. But if you can... Just change that behavior. You might spend 10 hours with somebody in a one-on-one environment and really, you know, six months later, see real effective change in that person. That's right. And we always, because our focus is adaptivity, we always crank the time knob to 11. And we see like genuine shock. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this thing that you're working, let's just pick a classic example. Maybe some leader says, I know I need to delegate more, but I'm not. Right. I'm not doing it. Right. Say, okay, we're going to design some experiments for you to help you, basically to help you feel more relaxed about delegating. But don't go and delegate a bunch of stuff because you have good reason why you don't want to do that. You've been burned before. This project's too important. There's all kinds of reasons. So the goal is not to force yourself into doing something that you've been avoiding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The goal is to get new information. And so we design these little experiments. We call them adaptive experiments. Yeah. And we say... try to run these three experiments by Tuesday. And they go, Tuesday? You know, like, that's only a few days away. Yeah, because then by Tuesday, you're going to have new information and we can design some new experiments. And like, well, what if I can't get to it until next week? That's the latest. And it's such a small experiment. It's something like this, a hypothetical. Yeah. if I were to ask you to do this, what would you do first? You haven't delegated anything, but you've got new information from somebody that you think might do a good job. Oh, if you asked me to do that, I would do X, Y, and Z. That's very safe. You haven't forced yourself to delegate, but you've learned something that might actually not be so bad. Yeah. That's so interesting. You're basically kind of walking them toward a feeling of the joy of delegation and the effectiveness of it. That's a wonderful way to put that. Thank you. That's exactly what we're doing. Yeah, but you've got to persuade them. Let them persuade themselves even. Definitely let them persuade themselves. They have to be the deciders. They have to. Especially business leaders. Yes. Like they don't accept being told things, oftentimes even not by coaches and stuff, which is the style of coaching you're describing is really... setting the stage and letting them be the deciders of what works good. Yeah. Or whatever. I think what... You know, but if you tell them to do it, then it's harder. But I don't exactly know. That's the interesting thing because it's so personal. Right. And so whatever, you know, if you want to get better at your email management, for example... Right. I don't know all that's good. Why I avoid it. That's a big ball of wax. Right, right. And so you need to pick, we're not really suggesting you do this, but if you were to do it, you would have to pick a small enough experiment that you're actually kind of interested to try it. And that's a very good sign. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever listened to a podcast with the NVIDIA guy. I forget his name. Jensen? Wong. Yeah, Jensen Wong. And he was describing his work habits and stuff, and he's a driven maniac that thinks that the competition is going to put him out of business at any time, actually. And he does four hours of email every morning. Wow. Right? I'm like, dude, I don't even want your job. But apparently it's that important. Like if Jensen Wong can spend four hours of his every day doing email management, Kurt Bear can spend two, probably. Or 10 minutes. Or at least an hour, yeah, whatever, exactly. But it was a piece of data that I put into my brain and said, hey, you should probably put this into your feelings more on that. Because if Jensen Wong is going to do it, you could spend some time on your email. So did that help you? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Move me a little closer. A little nudge. A little nudge. A little nudge. Yeah. So you're, but you do accelerated nudging, sounds like, with your firm. Right. Accelerated nudging and very gentle. Yeah. Accelerated gentle nudging. That's right. You can trademark that if you like. Maybe we should change our company name. Accelerated gentle nudging. I'm not sure. You should probably brand test that before you make a big change. It sounds like there might be some issues with it. I can already predict. Yeah. So you, I remember from our lunch conversation that you were like an independent coach, consultant guy for a while before you joined the team. That's right. Just working around town in Guangzhou there or over Zoom with people I knew in the United States. But then, yeah, I was invited to join Adaptive Leaders. We often get asked, how do you get into this company? Invitation is how you get in. And I was delighted and greatly honored to be invited. And it has made all the difference. For those of you solopreneurs listening, if there's any way you can get a team going, even if it's a think tank, even if it's a peer group, The team has made a total difference. I always tell people that, especially in our smaller groups, and there are certain businesses that just don't make sense to build a team, I guess, or whatever, but it's so hard to add really good customer value as a one-person band. If you're a financial planner, you can only be so smart. And I know they have back offices and portfolio managers and all this kind of stuff, but it's still hard to be a really... multifaceted service business, whether it's professional services or what you're doing, executive coaching. If you don't have a few different kinds of thinkers in the room, the product isn't, you know, then it's just one guy's smartest thoughts all the time, or gal. Obviously, there's people who make it work. And so this is the message for those solopreneurs who are looking for what's the next step. And of course, they've thought of a team would be great. You have to choose your team really carefully. You have to have very... high trust, very similar ethics, ethical boundaries. Boundaries. And also a similar view of people, really. If you collaborate with someone who, if you see people as infinitely valuable and highly creative and a little bit messy, and that's great, but you collaborate with somebody who's really annoyed by- Anybody that's messy at all. Yeah. then it could be there's some complimentary stuff there, but you have to have sort of a general shared view of humanity, I think. Yeah, I think that's true. And so I was very privileged to get invited to join Adaptive Leaders. I felt like I moved into the passing lane, the HOV lane at that point. It was a lonely place to bang around, and it sounds like a network. You didn't have to put... ads in the paper and stuff to get more clients, but you kind of like you had people calling on you. Well, I think... But it's still a lonely job from job to job and day to day. Just to encourage those entrepreneurs listening, it wasn't quite as glamorous as you make it sound. My consulting coaching work was a small part of my work. I was still doing a few university teaching classes on the side. So, yes, I did have... So you were cobbling together kind of... I was very relaxed because I had a stable income while I was exploring this new business. Wow. But there's a really interesting thing. I have a friend in Guangzhou who's a Canadian who's an actor. And he said that when he first transitioned into acting, he had this great mentor and said, it's going to take you five years to be really established in this industry. And he did a similar thing. He started out with a few acting jobs, but a stable job on the side. And about year five, he said it was just incredible, not to the day, but very close. He was then a full-time actor. Yeah. And I also had a five-year period. Wow. It was five years. Interesting. And so just to make it full disclosure. Yeah. Yes. We use a phrase around here called perspavirance. Okay, yes. And Loco Think Tank was very similar. Actually, I would say because it was very much a side hustle while I tried to get a restaurant, ran a food trailer operation for two years, and then I was a financial advisor type person with Thrive and Financial for two more years and a little change with Loco on the side. And then finally, but I paid myself $2,000 a month salary when I first went full time. So it wasn't like it, you know, if I had two kids, it would have been a different story. Right. Or even just a wife that didn't make more money than me. Yeah. So I think it's a good time for us to take a break in the action. Okay. And we'll come back with a fresh cocktail for me. Thank you, Seed and Spirit Distilling. And a fresh bathroom break for you, perhaps. Thank you. You're welcome. I'd like to thank the bathroom sponsor. Yes, that is. No, we don't have one yet. Okay. But if you'd like to be a bathroom sponsor for the Local Experience Podcast, This episode is sponsored by Loco Think Tank. Loco Think Tank provides peer 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 in the role of Loco facilitators, And 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 Loco Experience podcast on your application. To learn more, visit our website at locothinktank.com. That's L-O-C-O thinktank.com. So I wanted to show off your book to our listeners, Performance Leadership. What are, do you know off the back of your hand, the four keys to extraordinary results? Oh, wow, great. A quiz on my own book. I love it. Yes, I like it. Yes. I assume you wrote something? Yes. Would you like to read it to me? Yes, let me just read this book to you. My Oxford professor would be proud. This is a great story, how we wrote this book. This is a team effort. And so I've co-authored a few other books, but this was the most intense process by far. This is all with the adaptive leaders, coaches. I think every coach has their fingerprints. A contributor. Yeah, on the book somewhere. But the idea is performance management is out there as a sort of system of, it's a lot of data. And we're talking about performance leadership, which is very people-focused. And so the four keys to... Yeah, the numbers really just say what the people did, right? Whether it's finances or... They do. And in the best case scenario, they're very helpful. And in a lot of scenarios, people are just kind of fudging them or trying to... They create unintended consequences. Yeah. Yes, I'm making a bunch of phone calls and having a lot of meetings with people, but it's actually all my old friends that I've already met with before. That's the worst of the worst case scenario. Exactly. So the performance leadership book is really about the human side of performance. And so the four keys are what we call Emma. If you want, and one of my favorite analogies is, if you want your team to perform better, you're basically like an orchestra conductor. You're the only guy not making a sound. And so many people who watch symphonies have the question, like, do we need that guy? Like, aren't these top musicians? Couldn't they play without him? They could probably play without him, but it would be real different. And here's the key. They would not outdo themselves. The best orchestra conductors get the musicians playing at a level that surprises even them. Yeah, yeah. And so in order to do that with your team, you need Emma. You need expectations, motivation, measurements, and accountability. In that order. And it's a sort of a cycle. I've failed to set expectations before, for sure. Yeah. Well, we can all think about... when we were leading teams, or even when we were on a team, and it wasn't working, there was probably, the expectations were probably not clear enough. The leader probably didn't know what was actually motivating the team, the person. They might not have been measuring the right stuff or anything. And even if they were doing all three of those things, maybe they weren't really holding people accountable to their commitments. If you can do all four of those things, or if you can analyze which of these four things needs more attention, then the performance of your team is going to improve very quickly. And so this book is a compilation, a condensation of all of that work that used to be. It's sort of like, you remember when Pirates of the Caribbean was just a ride at Disneyland? Yeah. And then they made a movie of it. Right. And then another movie. And then, right, right. Well, this used to just be a workshop or a training program. And now we've made a book of it. So you got a lot of people write back and say, hey, that was super good. You should really do more. We've over and over, we got the feedback that, you know, that Emma thing. That part. That Emma model. Yeah. That's, you know, we really need, you know, we needed that. That really helped us. And we're still talking about Emma. And we thought, oh, maybe we should, maybe we should share that with more people. And so we wrote this book. I was the main guy typing the keys, but I did not come up with this. at all their framework was there before you got to the team absolutely absolutely and hey new guy why don't you write a book for us yeah exactly they're like hey you you wrote another book before right yeah right you're the english literature guy it's right right it's actually a business degree for god's sake right do you have a business degree no you study finance or accounting or any of that kind of stuff no Are you good at that now after some years, or is that still not really what your focus is? A lot better than I was, but I'm definitely focused on the people side, the leadership side. Fair enough. And it was my colleague, JD, who called me up one day. I still remember where I was standing. I was in a train station in Shenzhen, China, on my way back to Guangzhou, and he said, I think we need a book of performance leadership, and I think you need to write it. And it blew my mind. And three months later... It was printed. Wow, bang. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And you said everybody kind of contributed to it. Was that like, hey, I set up the Google Drive. I need your stuff here. Sounds like you already had a presentation workshop, but you probably needed the stories. They had a lot of the stories because you weren't there yet? Yeah. So it was a really crazy process. So Mike and Ray, our two senior coaches, had really developed this. And then Beth had put together a facilitator's guide. And everybody had co-created this thing. And it was still evolving. And it was in progress with clients while the book was being written. And I interviewed people. I interviewed people internally and also externally. Yeah, yeah. And I just wrote down everything they said and put it all together and did some of my own research and then had a bunch of drafts out there that people were giving me feedback on and had to synthesize all of it. And it was very, very intense. Yeah. And then it was over. Well, I'm looking forward to reading past the first chapter. Yeah. As I told you, I would soon. Yeah. I've actually started investing in better reading glasses so that I can read again. The last, I hate to say it, but five, six years, I've read less and less and less because I can get information from podcasts in person or through my ear hole. But books... condensed, it's like a distilled spirit. You know, I like bourbon, partly because it's kind of a, it's an intense element of all the flavors that a beer would kind of have, or whatever, right? And books are kind of like that, too. You know, a book isn't just 15 essays strapped together, even though it's about as long as 15 essays strapped together. It has to be like 60 essays, boiled down and distilled until it's the length of 15 essays, but now it's a book. Yeah. And I don't know. I'm kind of feeling a bit of a loss for lack of books in my life lately. So yours will be the next book I read. Wow, I'm honored. Well, it's short, so that's nice. Yes. This is really bad. My wife will never bail on a book. It doesn't matter how bad it is. I'll bail after chapter three if it's not pretty engaging. Well, one of the things we heard about the book is it is very attainable. It's very short. And there's lots of icons. Yes. I kind of designed it like a website. And so that's... I'm an audiovisual guy. I hope you... We talked about audio learning. Yeah. You know, but I still love to see icons. I think everybody does. I think it's... Helps me put it in the right place. Yeah. Yeah. So I hope you enjoy it. And thanks for giving it a chance. Thanks for the gift. Oh, and if you want to get it out there, can people get it like online and stuff? Yep. So Performance Leadership, Albert Wolf and Mike Burns. That's right. So check it out. I want to ask this because... It seems like you guys have a really interesting team dynamic that's, if not quite familial, at least verging on that at your firm. And so I'd like to talk about that a little bit and how that shows up. How is that communicated in the leadership team? Is it part of only adding people that already kind of fit that vibe? And talk to me about that culture and what they've done to foster and cultivate it. Well, you mentioned Mike Burns. He's our founding partner, and we just lost him last year, sadly. Yeah. And he really set the tone. He's just a great, very loving, very trusting, and very authentic person. So he would never hide if he was having a struggle with something. And so... when your founding partner is behaving like that, it really sets the tone. Has that, has his absence Shaking the foundation at all? Or was it built pretty solid? No, absolutely. It's rippled through the... Is there a new leader that's emerged, kind of? Or is it the team and it's still stirring a little bit? Or how does that work? Yeah, so... Is it five, six, seven people? I don't remember quite. Yeah, it's a pretty big team globally. Okay. There's a smaller leadership team. X number of partners and then there's deliverable people more and stuff. Coaches, trainers. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But you're asking about the culture. So there's a smaller leadership team, and we meet fairly regularly. we're just also very open with each other. And I just want to reinforce that trust thing again, just very high trust. We, I actually remember there was kind of a rocky season I was going through and I was wondering, do I have to start filtering what I say in those team meetings? Like now that Mike's not here? Or early on? Not just that, not just because of that. Just, I was kind of having a tough time anyway. And I remember making a conscious decision. I'm not going to filter what I'm saying. I'm not going to hide how I'm doing. I'm not going to pretend. You can cuss on this podcast if you want to. Right. Thank you. Thank you. God dang it. I'm not going to do it. Gosh darn it. That's right. Heck yes. We're going to do this thing. And I remember telling another member of our team that Ray Chow is now our managing director. Okay. I said, I decided not to filter. And he thanked me. He said, that was the right choice. And that's just an example. That's a very, I'm trying to give you a snapshot of something that's hard to describe. Because there's this wonderful book, An Everyone Culture, by some people that we know over at Harvard University. Okay. And Robert Keegan and LaHaye. This book has a great premise, which is everybody at work is doing two jobs. You're doing the job you're paid for that's on your job description, and you're doing a second job, which is managing how people see you at work. And it's such a wonderful premise. And what would it be like if you really only had one job? Yeah. And how much energy? Some people are 50-50 split on this. Sure. You know, it's a lot of work to manage how you appear. Right. And how people perceive you. Right. And I feel like our team spends very little energy on that. You're like 5%ers on that at the max. Right, right, on that second job. I think that's a local think tank value as well, even within our chapters, but also whoever has been part of my team at headquarters here. You've got to confront the dragon. Like, that dragon will only grow and get bigger and stronger and scarier the longer you let it stay in the cave. And so being able to share whatever's bothering you, if it's a team environment, if it's a criticism, a critique, Got to be able to get that out there. So I appreciate that. But your think tank and our team enable that by having a high trust environment. And a high appreciation for different kinds of thinkers. That's right. That's right. That's probably crucial too. And so without that, so I don't want any listeners to go and say, I'm going to turn off that. That engine that's managing expectations because, yeah, that's true. I don't want to. It's like Emma and mine. It might not really work because of the bigger environment that you're in. So it's really up to the leaders to model that. Yeah. And if they can model that and make it safe to not have to manage your appearances, then the whole team will benefit from that. Yeah. I did that. Thank you to Purpose Driven Wealth of Thriven for sponsoring our Purpose Driven Questions segment. At Purpose Driven Wealth, they believe financial clarity leads to a life of contentment and purpose. Their mission is to help guide clients using a values-driven, stewardship-based approach focused on provision, contentment, and enjoyment. With more than a century of experience, Thriven helps individuals and families navigate life and business transitions and prepare for the future while creating space to live generously and give back in meaningful ways. To learn more about purpose-driven wealth, please call 970-330-7411 for a complimentary initial consultation. And now, on to the questions. I'm going to ask you a second question, if it's okay. Can you describe a business decision you've made that didn't make sense on paper at the time, and the result? Sure. There's been all kinds of those. We, on paper, typically... And this, I meet with a guy, we have a breakfast guys club in Guangzhou, all businessman. Cool. And we're talking about that question. That's your think tank of sorts. Sort of, yeah. And we're talking about that question every breakfast. Okay. And on paper, we've noticed, usually means money. Right. And so... Where are you willing to go the extra mile or maybe the different direction where there's no financial benefit to it? For that group, that's what on paper usually means. And so the reason that's tricky is because for my team, our paper actually includes doing stuff like that. We actually value doing things either pro bono work or supporting a non-profit or something that actually when it comes down to it maybe that didn't build our business in any direction that we've said we wanted to yeah yeah but it was just kind of the right thing to do yeah and so our paper looks a little different yeah that's cool It's like any attorney that would do a pro bono or whatever, but you'll take those clients from time to time. Yeah. I have a similar thing, I suppose, in that my calendar link is largely open. Anybody can book a 45-minute meeting with me just about. I noticed that. For years, I've been working. You know, probably 20%, 15% of my meetings are kind of booked out of the blue with somebody I don't know. And a lot of times they're a startup business that is years away from qualified for local think tank. And I love it. I'm really good at digesting all the most important things about a young business and what their market opportunity is, what their hallucinations are, if they're having any, their opportunities, and encouraging them if they're on a right path or maybe encouraging a pivot or a shift if they're maybe not, making introductions, connections that they need to know. And it doesn't make sense on paper. And occasionally, a couple years later, somebody's grown their business, and they become a chapter member at local Think Tank. Or a while back, somebody told me that, in a podcast even, actually that I helped them register their LLC when they were getting ready to quit their job at the electric company and start their own electric company kind of thing, and now they've got 60 employees or 47, I forget what. And it's so cool that I was like right there, and I didn't even... I just helped him. Yeah. You know, he was on my path and I did my best and tried to help him. And, uh... It's great. Yeah. It's kind of neat thing to be able to have that margin to be able to do. Yeah. So your paper actually includes that stuff. I suppose so. Yeah. It doesn't make... Well, it... Yeah. It doesn't make... Well, it... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... It doesn't make... I suppose it does. Like on paper, it's starting to. Even this podcast, I suppose, is on paper. Like on paper, there's thousands and thousands of dollars invested in this and hundreds of hours of time spent with interesting people. But I don't really count that as a, that's not on the spend side on the accounting, you know? At least not the time spent because it's a joy. Yeah. So anyway, I digress. I think we'll leave it there and be, we'll try the, so one of your gifts as you saw was the crazy ginger hot sauce. Crazy. Crazy ginger. You know any crazy gingers? I don't. Probably not. There's probably far fewer gingers in China. Very, very few. Do you know our local celebrity, Ginger Graham? I don't know. Ginger and Baker, have you been to their coffee shop over here? So Ginger was recently the interim CEO of Walgreens. She's been on their board. She was a big turnaround Harvard MBA gal back in the day, and she makes the best pies in town. Wow. And she's become a friend, at least in part because of being on the podcast. But when I came up with this name, Crazy Ginger, I felt like I needed to give her a disclaimer that I was not at all thinking of her when that happened. Any connection to real people is purely coincidence. Right, exactly. This is why this is like a cartoon character. She does not look like that. And if she wanted to carry this in her restaurant, I would be happy. It's really good hot sauce, but she's got her own over there, too. Yeah. How much hot sauce do you like? Are you kind of giving me two drops on a chip and I'm going to be happy? Pretty much, yeah. Okay, all right. I'm going to do that. We're going to dip into here. And then if you haven't already thought about the – oh, that one's mine. That's a lot. If you haven't already thought about the crazy story you're going to share, that one's mine. Let's just do this. All right. How's that? I'll lean over. I'm going to reach it over to you. That one's all ripped off. Yeah, good idea. Get away from the microphone for a moment. I'll take this heavy one. It's not crazy crazy. It's not that crazy. It should keep heating up a little bit. Yeah, it does. Here's a napkin if you feel like you want one. Oops. Excuse me. It's really good. Thank you. But my wife is going to love it even more. She's from a part of China that really values spicy food. Oh, good. I really care what she thinks about me more than I care about what you think about me. Well, you should. As with my wife and vice versa. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you like it. Yeah, thank you. So you have that as your homecoming. I should probably give you two bottles because it's so far for you to go to Batador Mexican Grill and restock. I'll have to put it in the check bag, though, because it's over however many ounces. Yes, it's got a sealed bottle of top on it, so it'll be fine, I think. It's got an ingredient list and everything like that. So I think you'll be all right. Love it. And reminding listeners to go get your own crazy ginger at Matador. Put it on your burrito, take a bottle home. Are you ready for the local experience? I'm ready. The craziest experience, story, perhaps, of your lifetime that you're willing to share with our listeners, and it might be a moment, a day, a day. All right. I'll tell you, in China, there's so many. That's one of the reasons I've stayed. You love that. I love it. But one of the craziest things I ever did was agree to go on a scavenger hunt style challenge trip. with my British friend, Adrian, and we went all over China. In 30 days, we had to do 15 challenges that our students made up for us. Okay. And the hardest one was appear on national TV. Oh. Somehow. This sounds like impractical jokers or something almost style thing. I like it. Why did we do this to ourselves? Yes, I want to hear a few more of these challenges. We were young and dynamic. We thought it would be fun. And it was fun, but it was a lot of work. And hanging over our head, we had these rules for the trip. We couldn't attempt more than one challenge. Oh, okay. But also you could get deported or something, right? Right. Well, like, are you a citizen now, I assume? Do you have legal rights to stay there? I can stay for, you know, fairly easily. Until the CCP says you're out. You can't really be a dual citizen with China. Gotcha. Hanging over our head the whole trip was, appear on national TV. How in the world are we going to do that? Right. And so we kept asking everybody, you know, we don't know. So let's try one of these other challenges, like work on a farm for a day. That was really hot. Walk on top of the Great Wall of China. We asked the students not to give us normal challenges that normal tourists would do. And so they did, like, attend a Chinese wedding. Learn to make noodles in a noodle kitchen. Mm-hmm. They gave us these really cool, interesting cultural challenges. And every place you stop, you're like, anybody got any ideas about how we could get on national television? Exactly. And nobody did. And then finally somebody said, well, there's this obstacle course TV game show. Oh. And it's filmed in this certain city. And we're just not really close to that city. But we ended up kind of in that area. We were trying to call them. And we tried to email them. We tried to figure out, can we get on this show or not? Right. We... Literally knocked on the front door of this huge skyscraper studio building and said, can we be on your show? And they said, not tomorrow because it's already booked. Come back the day after. Okay. That's already so crazy that they said yes. Right. They didn't even have to hear the story about our students tasked us with this. He's a British dude. I assume they don't have. We told them. Like English speaking. This is all in Mandarin. Right. This is all in Mandarin. Right. So they got these skinny white dudes running around out there on their obstacle course. We were. We were talking to the interns. You know how studios run. So the interns, you know, somehow pass the word up and the producer comes back and says, you know, wants to meet us and says, yeah, okay, fine. And so the next day we went, well, we better go watch the show being filmed. So we went and we watched it. It's darn hard. I don't want to do it anymore. We'd seen it. We were aware of this show on TV. I've seen like a Japanese one that's probably pretty similar. It was a little more mild than the Japanese Takeshi's Castle or something where it's real injuries. Right. But it was all this big pool of water and all this. You have to try to get through this obstacle course. And every turn, it's trying to throw you in the water. Right. You're trying to slip off. You've got to bounce from this to that or whatever. And so we did it. And the night before, I couldn't sleep. I was so nervous because it's like the triple threat. One, you're going to be on TV. That's already nerve-wracking. You're going to be on national TV. Everybody we knew. But you don't know any of those people. But everybody we knew knew this show. Right. This was a big show. Two, it's like sports. I'm not a confident athlete. I don't know how to, like, you know, pole vault across this, you know, pool. Right. And it's on TV. My long jump isn't nearly as long as it used to be. Right. And three, there's absolutely going to be a pregame interview in Mandarin. Yeah. And what are they going to talk to? They're fast-talking. Your friend speaks Mandarin decently? Pretty good, but it was really up to me. Right. And, I mean, this is fast-talking TV hosts who are quirky and, you know, what is... This is like J.D. Vance going on The View or something like that. How am I supposed to sleep? I don't know how to respond here. How am I supposed to sleep the night before this? And the only time it's ever happened to us... there's this rustling in the hotel room. And like, did you hear that? Yeah. Oh, you're not sleeping either? No. We're both like, we're both like on edge. Right. What in the world was that? And so it's a mouse. It took us forever to figure it out. But, you know, whenever we'd move, it would stop. And so we're doing battle with a mouse at midnight before our big TV appearance. It was crazy. And we went on the show, and it was just as crazy as it sounds. People prepared for this. Did you win? We did kind of, we each individually, we went individually. Okay. Adrian, I'm sorry to say, if you're listening, went down on the second obstacle. He fell off right away. Yeah. And it's in stages, so you have to get through various stages. We still have the video footage of this. Oh, I would. We saved it. I'd love to see it. Maybe we can find a link to it and we'll put it on this podcast. It's offline. I tried to put it on YouTube once just to share with my friend, and YouTube wouldn't publish it. It's copyrighted. Yeah, fair. So I don't know how to distribute it. But I got past the third phase, which is the minimum for the lowest prize. Oh. You want to guess what my prize was? It's not as good as the hot sauce. I'm going to say it's like a package of ramen noodles or some food-related prize. Very, very close. It's a gas-powered water heater for a shower. Oh. Oh, well, that's a lot more useful. Maybe not for you at the time. Very ditch. Like a huge box. I used one of those for my food trailer, actually. I hung it off the side of the trailer. Okay. It was one of those instant-on. Instant-on. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Got the little battery in it. Yeah, you can take camping, whatever. Well, I was living in university. You provided housing that had a shower already. I didn't need it. But they did. They sent it to me. It arrived six to eight weeks later. Just like they said. Just like they said. And the final detail I'll tell you is before going on the show, we had to sign something. And I'm thinking it's a waiver. Sure. I promise not to sue you if I get hurt. Nope. It's a one-day insurance policy because we know you will get hurt. Oh, gosh. For real? It was a one-day insurance policy. We didn't use it. I did get a little, my back kind of got a little tweaked from that. Really? But it was not a good. I feel like America could actually use more one-day insurance policies instead of waivers. Yeah. Get more lawyers involved and employed in this country. They do exist. They do exist, a one-day insurance policy. Albert, you are far more interesting than many of my guests over the years. You have interesting stories. I'm sure we could go much longer, but we can't. Nope, that's enough. And you're back to China. You're heading off to China tomorrow. Tomorrow. This is the last thing I'm doing. So tell me, I guess before we close off, tell me, like, what will you miss most? about northern Colorado when you're back in Guangzhou? The beautiful nature. Yeah. The sky is so blue. The air is so clean, except for the wildfires. But that's, we'll give them a pass. And this green everywhere and the beautiful lakes. I live in a metropolis. In a city, yeah. And so I don't get that. How do you? Right outside. Yeah, how do you touch grass? How do you build it into your room? You can. You can. But it's not absolutely everywhere like here. Right. And my kids have loved, like, that's a bunny. That's a deer. That's a squirrel. Right here where we're staying. In our yard, yes. They've loved all of that. That's just a very, it's such a charming thing about Colorado. I miss it from living here. Do you want to give a shout out to your two kiddos? Sure. While you're here. I've sometimes had a one-word description for the children. Would you like to attempt that task? All right. You have to boil it, distill it. So, Chloe, if you're listening in 10 years or whenever you look this up, she's five now. Yeah. You are still, right now, my one word for you is athletic. Yeah, she's really into her. That's unusual for a five-year-old to exhibit that. She loves to practice parkour. Oh, wow. You should probably get her into gymnastics so she can do the better flips off of the roofs on top of the trash cans. We do need her doing better flips. Right. If she's going to do it anyway, you might as well develop her skill set. Yeah. Yeah. So she's really into that. It's really cool to see. And you only have the one. No. No, you have the second. Her younger brother is named Kacen. Okay. He's three years old. It's up Kacen in 12 years. That's right. And Kacen, at this point, my word for you is passionate. And he's really into music. He's really into everything that he's into. And for a while... Don't you ever take it away from him? For a while, it was fountains, like watching a fountain. Yeah. And I remember in the housing complex, we live in Guangzhou. There's a bunch of fountains. Sure. But they all turn on at 5 p.m. It's really cool. And I remember we were outside playing one day, and the fountain turned on, which he loves. Yeah. And he burst into tears. He was so happy. He actually, he ran over, gave me a big hug. He burst into tears. His passion is just overflowing for everything. Do you have one in your home? A fountain? Yeah. No, just outside our building, no. So it's... I have one in my backyard that I keep some goldfish and some guppies in and stuff. And so I've, we live downtown, so I've got the train sounds and traffic sounds. Yeah. And the fountain erases all that. And so even if it was just a small one in your unit or whatever, you might consider giving him a birthday gift of a fountain. That's a really interesting idea. I love the sound of running water. Yeah. It changes the way we vibrate, I think, a little bit. And I think he would find joy in it for sure. So next time, we'll talk more about your children as well as China. So look me up in a couple years when you're back. Thank you, Kurt. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Albert. Appreciate you. Hi, this is Kurt Baer, host of the Loco Experience podcast and founder of Loco Think Tank. Every week, I explore intimate conversations with business founders and leaders. And so I hope you'll join us this week and every week for a new episode of the Loco Experience.