Mort Aaronson: Renowned Coach & Mentor

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee - Mort Aaronson

(interview blurb)

Mort: As a CEO, I believe that I’ve been hit in the head by every pitch you can throw at a CEO and I get a real kick out of helping somebody avoid those. I can’t do it myself. None of us can really do it ourselves. But I can see it in other people and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of it.

(intro)

Stephen: Hi, I am Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a former Fortune 200 CEO and a self-proclaimed startup junkie that has been coaching over the past 10 years. He’s currently CEO of QlipCast, an enterprise podcast marketing platform, and board director of Essential Extractions, bringing CO2-based essential oil extraction to research, enterprise, and consumers. Additionally, he volunteers his time at Forefront, an MG 100 sponsored program to mentor the next generation of coaching leaders. 

(interview)

Stephen: Please welcome Mort Aronson. Hi, Mort.

Mort: Hey, Alex. How are you? 

Stephen: Good. It’s great to see you. 

Mort: Good to see you too. 

Stephen: So, we usually start our podcast by asking our guests what we’re drinking today. So, Mort, what are we drinking?

Mort: This is a little like Coaches on Couches having some kind of beverage, right?

Stephen: That’s exactly it.

Mort: I was getting coffee so you and I are going to be sharing jokes. So, I start each day with a carrot, beet, celery, cucumber, lemon juice. I make it myself. It is an absolute alkaline blast to the day and when you start getting older and you start thinking about inflammation and stuff, this is the detox to the beginning of the day that sets your body off going.

Stephen: Love it.

Mort: And drinking this about two and a half years ago and you certainly get all of your vegetable potion, but I find this to be very satisfying and kind of like Popeye. I feel like gives me strength and energy. So, cheers. 

Stephen: Cheers. 

Mort: I wish we could clink together but we’ll do that soon.

Stephen: I know, I know, and I’ll tell you about mine after I taste it.

Mort: Delicious. Now, what my red lips go on for the rest of the show.

Stephen: Mine will be green so I think I’d rather go red than green. But, mine, I didn’t make mine because I tried to juice once and the cleanup scared me. Yeah, I don’t do it anymore. So, mine is from Erewhon, this great market here in LA, and it has organic cucumbers, spinach, romaine, mint, and lemon, so kind of like the green version of yours, essentially.

Mort: It’s the green version of mine. The beet is an extra special touch.

Stephen: I like beet. It’s good for blood pressure, which is good for entrepreneurship and all sorts of great things.

Mort: Also, I don’t eat red meat, so beet and green vegetables are a really great way to get some iron into my system.

Stephen: Absolutely. I’m actually doing a mercury detox at the moment, which is interesting. I don’t eat really a lot of tuna, like I love sushi, but I guess my body doesn’t process it well so the accumulation over the years, I was getting muscle twitches and I was like this is very strange. So, for a year, we didn’t know what was going on, so I was just ignoring it, and then my mom is really good with these kinds of things and she’s like, “Tell your doctor to do an analysis for heavy metals,” and turns out mercury. So I’m going through, so this is helpful for the detox so thank you, Mort, for juicing juice.

Mort: And how are taking up mercury, tuna, swordfish, things like that?

Stephen: I never eat swordfish because I know it has a lot of mercury so I’ve always been very thoughtful about mercury in food but I guess my body doesn’t really process it very well. So now I’m learning how to detox from it and I’ll probably have tuna once a year and that’ll be it. But I’m sure that coaches really — well, maybe this will lead some people to test for mercury and it’s really interesting, I did so much research.

Mort: The fish supply system, it’s prevalent. My last doctor told me, “You know, your mercury rating is a little,” I said, “Well, I eat a lot of seafood and fish,” he goes, “You need to cut down on this.”

Stephen: I know and my favorite fish is sole which has very low mercury levels but, typically, I would get shrimp as the protein and while it has very low mercury levels compared to other fish, it still has mercury so I think just thinking about like choices and maybe limiting seafood to once a week is probably what I’m doing now. I do live in LA so anything that’s health conscious is easy to achieve here but also the opposite, there’s so many really good things here.

Mort: This is very earthy crunchy here in Denver, but there’s no water.

Stephen: Yeah, I like Denver. It’s a little dry, but it’s a good hub for — I visited Ken Wilber there, he lives in Denver, that was the last time I was in Denver. It was 2017. I spent a couple hours with Ken and he’s like my favorite thinker, as many of our listeners know, so that was really fun. So that was the last time I was in Denver. But I’m really excited to have you here today. We met through the MG, the Marshall Goldsmith 100. We spent some time together in person in Nashville a couple months ago, and you have such an interesting background. You were a Fortune 200 CEO back in the day and you’ve been exposed then to coaching for many decades and now you’ve been doing coaching for a long time and you’re an entrepreneur. So, I’m excited for our conversation today. So, do you remember the first time that you got acquainted, exposed to coaching?

Mort: Yes. I was a young man, I was probably in my late 20s, and even though I got to run big companies at high levels of corporate America, I didn’t take a business class, I didn’t go to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, and I wanted to get better at what I did. So I hired a personal coach, oh, it must have been — I think I was 26 years old and I worked with him for nine years and I got to achieve great levels of corporate success. When the path in front of me was not the path that I had chosen, it wasn’t the direction I was going to go and since I was on it, it was important to have some help in doing it. And he was great. He taught me how to do things I would have never done on my own. He was a sounding board to me on almost everything. And, eventually, we ended up parting but that rise in corporate America I attribute a great deal to him. The funny part of the story is once I got to that place in corporate America, I also realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do. 

Stephen: So maybe you should have started with a career coach in your 20s.

Mort: Maybe I should have started with a career coach instead of a personal coach, but he was quite emphatic about certain things I needed to do and certain ways I needed to be and they were unusual to me and I became that person and I said, “All right, I succeeded at that, maybe I’ll do something else.”

Stephen: That’s interesting. Your exposure to coaching came very early on and like at a very early time for coaching profession as well.

Mort: Yeah, it was very unusual at that point. He was very early on in being a corporate coach and I found it to be fascinating. I’ve gone back to it many times over the years. I had the luxury of being at large corporations that invested in my training so there were coaches on top of coaches doing other things so I learned a lot from it and that’s why I like so much doing it because I’m able to give it back.

Stephen: It’s such a cool thing that emerged, coaching, it’s like not that long ago, I think some of the coaches that are known for being some of the first ones who do it professionally probably started doing it about 30 to 40 years ago and probably closer to 30. Even the creation of the International Coach Federation in the mid-90s. I mean, it’s a really novel thing to do. And it wasn’t really until like over the last 10 years that really coaching gained mainstream attention and understanding, like even 10 years ago, I remember when I started CoachLogix that became coaching.com, I would go and talk to investors and they’d say like, “Well, you really have a definite perspective on what this industry needs but is it really an industry? Why coaching?” And that wouldn’t happen today. There’s something that really clicked and changed over the last 10 years.

Mort: Without question. When I did it, it was something that you didn’t really talk about with anybody else. It was almost like you were hiding it the same way as if you needed to go see some mental health professional. And, in the early days in corporate America, it was remedial. You go to coaching because you weren’t good at something. And it was great that a corporation invested in you but it was a little bit like going to the assistant principal’s office in school. It’s like, well, you need some more leadership training. It’s changed since then. Now people are embracing it and it’s wonderful.

Stephen: Yeah, it was a great tool for aggressive sales leaders on their way out. I was like, “Well, we really wanna retain you for a couple more quarters because you bring in the dough but everyone hates working with you and it’s not really gonna work out so let’s protect ourselves by giving you a little bit more time and also having a legal pathway to be able to fire you,” and that transitioned into —

Mort: Right, practice behavior but it didn’t really work. 

Stephen: Exactly. I mean, it’s really helpful for that but it is really cool that we’ve transitioned to really look at coaching as a foundational element for people development. And I think it also ties to the strategic nature of HR. I mean, we’ve been talking about strategic HR for a really long time and it used to be something that would look nice in the name of a textbook for grad students or something like that, but it didn’t really mean anything operationally. And over the last couple decades, there’s really been a shift towards really thinking about talent management as a strategic imperative and I think in this post-pandemic world or what we hope is a post-pandemic world with the remote work approach, I think, really like there’s a shift focus on people, how do you develop people, how do you keep them engaged, and also how do you allowed them to even flourish through work, which is really exciting.

Mort: It is a transition. I think, when we hear about the resignation economy and people quitting in place, there’s never been a more important time to really invest in the human capital in businesses because the cat’s out of the bag. We’ve all seen that there’s a life other than going to an office 60 hours a week, for all the pros and cons to that. And in doing that, we’ve lost that connection and we need other people to help us do that. We spend an enormous amount of time in this society at work and get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of it. It’s not an individual sport, it’s a team sport.

Stephen: Yeah, and there’s something about being in person that is different and it energizes you, I think it’s great for creative, I think research supports that, for creativity, team creativity, organizational creativity, being in person is great but we’re I think finding ways to be able to find the right balance and going to the office 60 hours a week was probably not the right balance so this really changed the landscape of the workplace for the foreseeable future forever. 

Mort: And how can it not? 

Stephen: How can it not? A lot of people and the younger generations that were exposed to this early on in their careers, I mean, it’s just the advent of technology and the capabilities that we have now, it makes it so that we can do it. But I think finding the right balance is going to be the optimal thing, like how often should people get in person, what teams need to get in person versus other teams that perhaps because of the nature of their work, they don’t need to. I mean, I can see software developers not really needing to meet in person ever, which will make them very happy and probably won’t then necessarily detract too much from their work. And I work with a lot of software engineers so, hopefully, they won’t get offended by that but I think they’ll actually celebrate it. 

Mort: I’ve been a part of this hybrid workforce now for 21 years and it wasn’t very popular and it all started, I spent a nine-year period of time in my career at MCI before it became WorldCom, thank goodness, and I traveled 220 nights a year. So I was never in an office on a regular basis on a day to day. I was in airplanes and meeting with teams all around the country and all around the world. And MCI was an all email company in 1987. 

Stephen: Oh, wow. 

Mort: I mean, just a million email messages internally a day in 1987.

Stephen: That’s wild, like people were not really using email in the 80s. 

Mort: As a matter of fact, when we automated our salesforce in 1992, we bought 8,500 IBM ThinkPads. 

Stephen: Wow.

Mort: Really automated everything long before any of these things were even approached. So I got used to being a digital warrior. I plugged my laptop in with the screaming sound of the modem, download my email, answered the stuff, and go on to the next city. I did determine during that period of time that traveling 220 nights a year and having a family was a misguided kind of thing and that’s when we moved to Colorado and I ended up running a publicly traded utility company. And I was always jealous that my wife and kids would spend the summer in East Hampton and I was in the office. So, the second summer of that job, I said, “You know, I’m pretty good at working from on the road.” Now, mind you, this is 1997. I started to spend the entire month of August in each town, running a public corporation, there was no video calls —

Stephen: You sound like you’re European. 

Mort: At least Europeans were honest about it.

Stephen: Honestly, I love that. It’s actually a really good thing.

Mort: Take the month off and they know they’re taking the month off, they don’t pretend. I didn’t take the month off. I worked from my house at the beach every single day, I was on every meeting I needed to be in, I was on the analyst calls, I flew back for one board meeting, but I spent the month with my kids.

Stephen: That’s awesome.

Mort: I never wanted to leave that job. Now, at the end of the month, my boss said to me, “This really isn’t good. We like to have you here,” and I said, “Yeah, but I got everything done. I’m so much happier and I got to spend time with my wife and kids. I worked 60, 80 hours a week.” He said, “Yeah, next summer, take the jet back and forth. Monday to Thursday, we’ll fly you back.” So your answer is like $50,000 of jet fuel rather than letting me be productive there? I think people going through the pandemic who’ve had that cat out of the bag and say, “You know, I really can be productive,” I don’t believe it’s 100 and 0 the other way, but I can be productive and once that cat’s out of the bag, you’re never going back into it. I left that job and ended up running a venture-backed company where I could have some more flexibility and I never went back to an office full time again in 21 years.

Stephen: That’s awesome. And it has implications for coaches. I remember people flying coaches to have coaching sessions and that sounds just absurd right now, doesn’t it? But the idea of working with a coach with high rates and understanding that you wanted to have it be a high impact relationship, to have it through phone or video, all the research has supported that coaching is as effective at distance, it was kind of like a preposterous idea. I always welcomed the format of meeting in person for the first time and then subsequently being able to work remote. There is something about working in person but I think the cost and the logistics to enable that is just, even when you live in the same city, it’s just very cost effective and you can build a relationship remotely.

Mort: You know, you’re not going to coach in a specific geography, certainly I don’t, but I always start every coaching engagement, even if I have to pay for the trip myself, I fly and spend the first sessions with the team.

Stephen: Love that. I think that’s the best way to do it.

Mort: I mean, you and I got to spend three days together so we feel like we know each other a little bit better now and we’re able to emote and relate better. It’s the same thing with them. If I sit down with them for a day or two, my client and with the senior team, it makes all the difference in the world going forwards. 

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely.

Mort: I had a client here for dinner last night. 

Stephen: Oh, wow. That’s awesome. 

Mort: You know, I cook as a hobby and wrote a cookbook. 

Stephen: We’ll talk about that. 

Mort: My client is at Momofuku.

Stephen: Oh, love Momofuku. Best short ribs. Best short ribs ever.

Mort: So I ate those short ribs, it was the first time I’d eaten beef in 30 years.

Stephen: We actually talked about it, in Momofuku in LA, right? 

Mort: It was just before we were in Nashville together. But I had his head of all restaurant operations here for dinner with one of the other MG 100 and it’s like — and I’ve gotten to meet him in person a couple of times, he lives in New York, I live here and we go back and forth a number of times, but it was just nice to have him here. We had lunch together in Denver. We had a very nice dinner with my wife and this other couple. And it cements the relationship. I can actually see and feel what he’s going through and it was great. We had a great time.

Stephen: That’s great. And I know coaches treat this differently, like boundaries with clients, like some people have therapeutic backgrounds so they apply that approach. So, I’ve never really spent time with a client outside of just the coaching work but I’d totally be open to that and I think with the right client when we have the right chemistry, it could actually be conducive to an even better coaching.

Mort: I have one that likes to play golf, and I played competitively a long, long time ago, I don’t really play very much anymore, but I played with him and we’re together in a golf cart for five hours in a day. 

Stephen: Absolutely. 

Mort: That’s three months of sessions.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t take a client golfing because I would lose the client since I don’t really golf, but maybe tennis or something?

Mort: Tennis, pickleball, deep sea fishing.

Stephen: I don’t know why I can’t get into pickleball, it’s like when I’m playing tennis and people now they repurpose one court typically, like in the public courts here in LA for pickleball and just the sound drives me nuts because you’re playing tennis and the pickleball is pretty loud. Exactly. I think of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, like this could be like an episode where Larry’s upset that people are playing pickleball next to him playing tennis.

Mort: Well, he actually could do a whole season on it, I’m sure, if he chose.

Stephen: I actually just ran into him at a restaurant, a brunch place in LA a couple months ago. If I was going to see a celebrity, the one that I would want to see is Larry David so that was great. My mom was like, “Hi, Larry.” I’m like, “Mom, please don’t.”

Mort: It’s embarrassing but it’s your mother. It’s her job.

Stephen: Larry was very kindly. He was like, “Hi.”

Mort: Yeah. One of my idols too. And you and I have talked about this, there hasn’t been a Seinfeld or a Curb Your Enthusiasm that I haven’t memorized at this point in my life.

Stephen: Seriously, same, and Seinfeld is just — I have a hard time going to bed without watching an episode of Seinfeld. It just gets me in that perfect sleep mode.

Mort: You and I should offer an article together on the Seinfeld book of coaching.

Stephen: Honestly, there’s a lot to be extracted. That’s the genius of the show. Every situation that you’ll encounter in life, there’s an episode. In nine seasons, they covered the whole spectrum of the human condition in the 20th century.

Mort: Yeah, I have no idea how often I invoke “Summer of George.” I wake, I think exactly what your best instincts are and do the opposite. Sometimes, in coaching, that’s a very effective strategy.

Stephen: Actually, you could run, just like Larry could do a whole season of Curb on the tennis pickleball issue, I think you could do a whole program, maybe we’ll do a coaching.com program. 

Mort: Yeah, absolutely.

Stephen: Yeah, around “Summer of Georgia.” I mean, it’s interesting to put yourself in the different perspectives, like, “Okay, I wanna try to do the opposite of everything that I would do,” and to see the results and I’m sure you’d be surprised in some ways.

Mort: Well, he used it as a joke but it’s actually quite appropriate for some people. You have this mental muscle memory of X situation happens, this is how I react, well, perhaps that’s not working for you, evidenced by our friend George Costanza, and you got to get them to change.

Stephen: I mean, you connected it to one of the I think most popular questions that coaches ask, which is, “How’s that working for you?”

Mort: Right.

Stephen: Some spouses may be very happy with this coaching approach. Suddenly, you start doing all the opposite and like, suddenly, you’re not as annoying anymore. I don’t have a spouse so I don’t know but I’ve heard that happens sometimes.

Mort: Are you plants okay with you? You and the plants are happy these days? 

Stephen: Mort knows that I’m on plant guy. They’re looking very healthy. My video is in my monitor in this specific location so I can’t really show you but I think they’re — they seem to be thriving.

Mort: Well coached?

Stephen: Yeah, plants respond well if you talk to them and if you ask them questions, then it just takes it to the next level.

Mort: That’s just like coaching. You practice with the plants?

Stephen: I don’t but I will definitely think about it. No, I love our passion for Seinfeld but I like that connection with coaching. Maybe there’s something to be explored there. But just such a genius show. We’ve spent, you and I, countless conversations just talking about different episodes. So, yeah, I do think we’re in the top 1 percent of Seinfeld knowledge in the world.

Mort: My wife told me that I have the greatest capacity for watching Seinfeld of anyone she’s ever met her life.

Stephen: Yeah, I’ve heard that as well but I’m not married yet so I should probably tone it down a little bit. I don’t think the millennial women that I date are very into Seinfeld. I think they always thinking like, “Oh, my grandparents watched that.”

Mort: That’s always a good thing to hear. Oh —

Stephen: Yeah, exactly. 

Mort: My grandfather. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Stephen: Nothing sets the tone for a successful courtship as like, “Yeah, yeah, you have the same taste as my grandpa.”

Mort: Yeah. You listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary as well?

Stephen: That’s so funny. So, tell me more about your coaching practice and how did you go from being an executive, you were talking about being an executive at a publicly traded company, then went more the venture route, how did you ultimately start really doing coaching as the professional?

Mort: Good question. I was always a player coach and my style of leadership was very much a servant style of leadership. And I mostly enjoyed my interactions with people versus the thrill of the hunt and all of the other things making the numbers in corporate America, though I did that for a very, very long time. And after the two big companies and the big venture-backed startup were kind of like the story of the three bears. The first I traveled too much. The second one as an environmentalist, I was frack drilling in the western United States, that might have been somewhat of a conflict in my head. The third one I thought was I’m going back to my entrepreneurial roots but venture capital isn’t entrepreneurism, it’s indentured servitude in a lot of ways and I decided I was going to come be with Sue and the kids and I reinvented myself. And I didn’t go home solely because I was so smart that I’ve learned that those three situations didn’t work for me. My mom and my dad and my best friend died in a very short period of time and I said, “You know what, I’m gonna go home and spend a little time with Sue and the kids,” and what I thought was going to be six months turned out to be years. And I sat and thought about what do I really want to do with my time and I went back first to entrepreneurism, which I still do, I run a couple of startups. I started advising and sitting on boards. And all of my interaction was really in the development of the people I was working with and it’s like, “Wow, I really like this.” And as a CEO, I believe that I’ve been hit in the head by every pitch you can throw at a CEO and I get a real kick out of helping somebody avoid those. I can’t do it myself. None of us can really do it ourselves. But I can see it in other people and I get a great deal of satisfaction out of it. So I started slowly, maybe about 10 years ago, where I didn’t call it coaching, I was still advising or sitting on boards but, predominantly, all the work I was doing was coaching and a very good friend of mine as a member of MG 100 and he said, “You know, you really should think about this,” and that was about two years ago now where I kind of hung out the shingle and said, “I’m a coach,” and so I’ve kind of been at it at a pretty intense level now for about two years and I just really enjoy it. Really enjoy it.

Stephen: That’s really cool. And did you have other coaches when you were an executive? You mentioned the first coach that you hired into your 20s. Was that a repeat offense that you had?

Mort: No, the other coaches were the repeat offenders. I’ll tell you my greatest coaching story, and this was remedial and I was an executive at MCI, I was head of marketing, and I had some early hubris and arrogance problems as a high flying young executive and they decided, you always had to take two weeks a year to go, as they called it, executive charm school. And I was on a fast track, top 50 executive, and they invested really great time and money in us. In its day, it was a wonderful, wonderful company and experience. And I had just taken over a division for a president and integrated it into ours and let’s just say I went about the integration in a way that was demeaning to the people that were being integrated versus the victors, as I mistakenly referred to us, and my HR coach inside the company, “You know, Mort, we have an interesting class we want you to take.” Really? They sent me to get his Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the winter to take this, and I still remember it to this day, I even saved the books, Lessons in Leadership, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and I had to walk in Lincoln’s steps for the five days leading up to the Gettysburg Address learning what he had to go through to come to that short speech. Changed my perspective of leadership forever. And it was like, “Really? You’re sending me to a bad Holiday Inn in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the winter?” and in an all email company, I’m going to be from eight to six in classes, I’m going to be doing emails until four o’clock in the morning. But I learned a great deal from it. So it changed my mind about charm school at that point. I say, “Hey, why would I resist this? Somebody’s investing time and money in me to make me better at what I do,” and I started leaning into it a great deal more.

Stephen: That’s wonderful. And you had other coaching experiences throughout your career?

Mort: Yeah. Coaches and mentors. I’ve had two very important mentors in my career. Both of them I met at the same time, both of very different ages. One of them is now a member of MG 100 as well.

Stephen: Oh, cool. 

Mort: Who I was able to bring in, but I’ve always had — there always were coaches. There was a coach that predominantly I hired myself and then I’ve kind of established two or three mentors in business that not a pure coaching relationship, it’s more of a mentor-mentee relationship but I’ve employed all the above.

Stephen: And has your experience, we met through MG 100 and I’ve had a lot of coaches asked me about it and I’ve never talked about it in the podcast and we’ve had Marshall, actually, he was our first guest, so tell me more about your experience with MG 100, especially as someone that is relatively new to the coaching profession.

Mort: Well, it’s a tough audience to break into. A social science researcher, I’m not a psychologist, I haven’t been a chief people or chief HR officer, I was the executive they were coaching so I’m a little bit unique from the group in that I’m more hands on than theoretical. It came at an unbelievably important time. Marshall hosted Monday Mornings with Marshall throughout the pandemic and when I joined about two years ago, I started attending those Monday morning sessions, probably attended 60 of them. I looked forward to it every Monday morning. We were all living in our home offices and not getting out very much in the world and the camaraderie and the community and the connection were just off the charts. And still is. I found myself volunteering and you were part of my connect group that I facilitated, got to do that again now. And I’ve made more friends in the last two years than I did in the 20 years previous.

Stephen: I know. That’s incredible.

Mort: When you’re CEO and I’ve been here in Denver for 27 years, virtually everyone I met other than if my wife introduced me to someone or a friend of one of my children’s parents, everyone I met worked for me. It’s a difficult place to be. This is the most extensive colleague peer group I’ve ever been involved in in my life and I’m grateful every day to be a part of it. I really think it’s wonderful.

Stephen: That is wonderful. And, yeah, like they say, it is lonely at the top. You can’t really be hanging out with your rapport after work, it’s just really not — no one wants to do that, at the end of the day, you’re tired, you don’t want to continue that, plus sometimes it’s not really the most appropriate thing either. So, those peer groups are important. I recently joined YPO and I just — I’m finding it just like a great source for making great connections. So important for people, in general, to just to have an outlet into — when you’re an adult, it’s not easy to make new friends, so finding peer groups that you can connect with. And that’s part of really a lot of what our focus is going to be in 2023 with coaching.com. We are going to have this incredible opportunity where we have the WBECS by coaching.com community and we never talked about these things in the podcast because it’s not really — we don’t do it for commercial purposes, but talking about these peer groups, part of what we really want to focus on next year is to embed more of the community element to what we do because we see that coaches love connecting. As part of the programs, we have our online community and those opportunities to do that now with technology at scale and create these peer groups, I think could be very powerful for coaches. So, more on that at some point but I find those peer groups incredibly valuable as well.

Mort: Yeah. We got to do a peer group first on the phone on Zoom and then we got to meet in person. Back to the point of hybrid relationships, the combination of the two was really great. We felt like we knew each other much more than we would have not having the Zoom and not having that personal time together. So this has been a great opportunity to be part of this community. I’m mentoring pro bono young, socially conscious entrepreneurs which is really great as well. Marshall has sponsored something called Forefront and I am a Forefront mentor now in addition, and it’s been, as I said earlier, I made more friends in the last two years than I did in the 20 that preceded it.

Stephen: Yeah, no, that’s wonderful. Anything else you’d like to say about your experience as the coachee before you transitioned as a coach?

Mort: That’s a good question. I ended up having to fire my coach —

Stephen: Interesting. 

Mort: — from a public corporation. 

Stephen: What happened? 

Mort: Well, sometimes, coaches are not aware of themselves so as they’re doing something, everybody has their own ego involved in things they do, they have their own plan of attack of how they want to grow their practice and he was starting to grow in ways that were not particularly beneficial to the recipients. And, after a nine-year relationship, I had to fire him. He had come to coach at a big corporation and was coaching peers and other people around and really was off the reservation. So I think, as a coachee, the coach is not spitting out gospel. He or she is a human being as well and you have to always take something with a grain of salt. You have to take it think it through and just not accept things blindly. Coaches aren’t a beacon in the storm, they’re just another human being trying to get you from point A to point B.

Stephen: That reminded me of one of the lines in what I know it’s one of our favorite movies that we talked about, Annie Hall, and I know Woody Allen hasn’t really aged very well on a lot of the off-screen behavior but Annie Hall is an amazing movie and you and I both love it, reminded me of that scene when he’s meeting the parents and he’s talking about — or, actually, I think it may be a different theme but he’s asked if he’s in therapy and he’s like, “Yeah, I’ve been in therapy for 15 years. Pretty soon, I’m gonna be able to take off the lobster bib,” or something. So funny, yeah. I mean, nine years is a long time to work with a coach.

Mort: It was. I introduced him to many of my friends and he had a lot of us as clients and he was very early on in the game. I think he owns an ad agency now. I’m not really sure what that means as the moral to the story.

Stephen: No, that’s interesting. Well, I guess some people go from entrepreneurship and being executives to coaching and then some people go from coaching to marketing, I guess, so that maybe is an established pathway.

Mort: He was the first when I ever saw the employee 360 digital feedback loops, built a platform to do that. 

Stephen: Oh, wow. 

Mort: That was interesting in the young days before there was really any social contract to how you use that information.

Stephen: Well, I mean, that’s actually an evolving aspect, even like the use of data and digital coaching platforms actually is really just starting. I want to talk about your book because it’s so different than the typical books that we talk about in the podcast. So, tell us about what it is, tell us about how it came about. That’d be great.

Mort: I’m trying to think, 24 years ago, my son was two years old, I’m running a publicly traded utility company and my wife, who was my favorite person in the world, married for 37 years, is not the world’s most incredible cook. She doesn’t really care about food and if you don’t care about food, it’s really hard to make something great. So I decided I was going to make a big deal. The boss was going to leave the office at 5:30 and come home and cook dinner for Sue and the kids every night. And I did. I paid the penalty of going back into my office and working from nine ’til midnight after they went to sleep and, funny enough, I thought I was doing it for them. I was the greatest beneficiary of that experience. First of all, I learned that when the boss goes home, he’s not the boss of anything, number one, and I learned that cooking is a completely selfless thing. If I don’t ask you what you like to eat, how am I going to ever cook something that you’re going to enjoy? And like marketing, you’re never marketing to yourself, you’re never really cooking for yourself, you’re really cooking to delight others. And this became this wonderful thing between Sue and I and our kids. They were very picky eaters. My wife only eats protein that has no resemblance to the skeletal, epidermal, or vascular system whatsoever and needs to be overcooked. If I was making her tuna, it would be on yesterday. And I had a son who cried if you tried to serve him vegetables and I had a five-year-old daughter who was becoming a vegan, and the book is called Toughest Table, Cooking for Those You Love and that is the toughest table. And I wrote the book during the pandemic. I had wanted to write a cookbook for a long time. I have become the cook to all of our friends and family. You have a birthday party, Mort cooks for 20. It’s something I do every week and it became very much a part of our lives and our summers out of the east end of Long Island, I would host a dinner party every Saturday night. We host people still here every week for dinner. It’s one of my greatest pleasure. Some people meditate, you give me a knife and a pile of vegetables, I’m in a flow state. And it was originally supposed to be a business book, the journey of a young CEO who went home to cook dinner for his wife and family and all the wonderful lessons that I learned about being a boss, being a human, being a coach, being a friend, being a husband, being a parent as a result of that. Beginning of the pandemic, when I was board, I decided I wasn’t going to run companies anymore, I was going to transition into this advisory coaching life, I sat down to write it as a business book and I decided, “You know what, I’m gonna write it as a cookbook first,” and, lo and behold, the pandemic had happened, our son who’s, as you know, a New York Broadway actor, he was furloughed, his girlfriend was furloughed, and they lived with us for nine months in a two-year period of time. I made every single recipe in the book. We celebrated dinner every single night together when they were with us. And I wrote it, edited it, illustrated it during that first year of the pandemic. 

Stephen: That’s amazing. 

Mort: And, actually, it sold out the first printing. I actually have to order new books. 

Stephen: Oh, congrats. That’s amazing.

Mort: Yeah, so now I’m trying to write it into a business book and its working title is The Seasoning of an Executive. And it’s really my approach to coaching, which I call epic, and I have clients journal this, write down all your new experiences, indicate what your perspective was, what insight did you pull away from it and what courage do you need and confidence to make the change the next time that situation occurs. Cooking is very much like that. If I cook for you once and I get something wrong, he doesn’t eat liver and he doesn’t like dark leafy greens, that’s going to be your dinner, and I file that away in my head. I did the same thing in life experiences. Cooking taught me to do that. Someone says, “What’s your best meal?” I don’t really have one. “Well, what do you like to cook?” My answer always is, “What you wanna eat.”

Stephen: Love that. I mean, I would love to have someone like you at home to cook for me.

Mort: I cook for, it’s just Sue and I now, the kids are gone, the dog is unfortunately still eating dry food, at least that’s what I’m telling everybody. She did have a piece of the smoked chicken last night. It accidentally fell from my arm over my shoulder and onto the floor and she gobbled it up.

Stephen: I honestly have never had a dog. I wouldn’t even know what to feed a dog. So I don’t know if that’s good or bad, yeah.

Mort: You’re not supposed to give them people food because, I don’t know that it’s bad for them but would you eat dry kibble again after you had like an apple with smoked chicken? I don’t think so. Everybody wonders why she’s closer to me. Not very difficult to figure that out. I’m the cook.

Stephen: Yeah. I’ve seen that, for sure. I’ve seen that in homes where the cook is the most loved person by the dog. Cool. I love that book. We’re going to have to add a link to the podcast episode in case people are —

Mort: I published recipes, we’re just changing out the summer recipes into the fall recipes now, but I play a game with myself every day that we eat at home. I don’t shop ahead. I go to the store, I see what’s fresh, and I then give myself 20 minutes to shop and I come home and figure out how to make it. And it’s like my relaxation at the end of the day. Some people say, “Geez, Mort, ain’t you too tired to cook dinner?” No, it actually relaxes me and rejuvenates me. Some people paint, some people make pottery, some people write novels, I cook.

Stephen: I paint. I love painting. So, yeah, I can see that. I really want to — and now I want to really check out the book and so I’m going to have to do that at some point and, one day, you’re going to have to have me over for dinner because it sounds spectacular.

Mort: Yeah, I’ll make sure, I’ll check with you if you beat mercury the week before to know whether I can serve tuna on the menu.

Stephen: I will definitely let you know, but, for our listeners that are interested in that, you could actually always take three pills of activated c`harcoal before you eat sushi and then that will absorb a lot of it. 

Mort: Inoculate your day with alkaline boost to kill all the toxins.

Stephen: There you go. I finished my juice and, yeah, I love that you know this market in LA. It’s a great market. They just opened one right around the corner so it’s fantastic. Mort, it was so good to have you. Really always enjoy talking to you. It’s nice to have — I don’t think we ever had anyone at the podcast that was really a full-fledged public company CEO and you’ve transitioned to coaching and you’ve been exposed to it for a long time so your perspective was very interesting and different. So thank you so much for coming to our podcast today.

Mort: Thank you for having me and I can’t wait to see you again in the near future.

Stephen: Likewise, hopefully soon.