Every leader must stay relevant in order to serve well in this episode, the mindset and tactics that will help us lead in an ever-changing world. This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 705. Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders that I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.
One of the things that we all want, both as leaders and also as human beings, is to be relevant. To do things that are going to be helpful for others, to help our organizations, and to serve in a way that I know so many of us have a heart to do. And yet, it's more challenging than ever to stay relevant, to know what's happening, to not miss the next thing.
In a world where so many of us and our work is being disrupted in new ways, I'm so glad today to welcome a guest expert who's going to help us to really look at the perspective on this, of how we can stay relevant and what we can do that will serve others more effectively. I'm so pleased to welcome Steve Dennis to the show. He's a strategy consultant, advisor, speaker, and author focused on transformational leadership and the impact of digital disruption.
He's the president of sageberry consulting and host of the remarkable retail podcast. He's the author of the book, remarkable retail and his newest book, Leaders Leap, transforming your company at the speed of disruption. Steve, what a pleasure to have you. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on day.
Earlier in your career, you were in executive at Sears and you and I are of the age that we know exactly what Sears is and how relevant it was as an organization. And some people listening are going to say Sears, what's that? I wondered if you could just maybe briefly paint a picture of Sears and what it was, what it is today. But I'm curious like what that experience was like at being an executive and organization that was becoming less relevant at the time you were there.
Yeah, well, it's a lot of a long strange trip. It's been I think in a lot of regards. But yeah, I started my career, my reach out career at Sears in 1991. And just a few years earlier, Sears was the biggest retailer on the planet, most noted for having these large department stores, mostly in regional malls. And not only being huge in general, but also being really dominant in several major categories like major home appliances and home improvement.
And pretty steadily starting with first with the ascent of Walmart and some of the discount mass merchant types as well as some of the some folks will know that this term category killers, but folks like Home Depot, lows, best buy that were focused on particular merchandise categories, largely not tied to the traditional malls. Sears started to lose pretty steadily over many, many years market share and started to have the profitability eroded.
So when I joined, I actually kind of went back and forth between more operating roles and more kind of strategy business development roles, but pretty much my entire time there my 12 years there. We were really dealing with trying to figure out how to turn the business around how to stop the leakage of market share to various competitors and flash forward to today.
Sears is technically still in business, but you know, it's gone from being 40 billion or something in revenues 30 years ago to well, well under a billion dollars and essentially not being part of the discussion anymore, I guess in retail. And in terms of your question of being there and really affected a lot of my work since then because it was really blindingly obvious in the early 90s and ever more obvious as time went on that Sears was on a kind of slow slide to oblivion.
You could argue about how fast and how hard that fall is going to occur, but it was pretty clear that there were things about our business model that were once quite powerful that were no longer so powerful and that if we didn't start to change quite dramatically and do things very differently.
We were going to continue to lose market share and yet we did really when you look back on it with the benefit of hindsight, we did very little that really was meaningful in terms of starting or stopping I should say the descent so it's affected me in terms of thinking about how is it that so many companies because certainly Sears is not the only player that has gone from lofty heights to either being extinct or irrelevant.
How is it that powerful companies with all these advantages are unable to get themselves back on the right track? Yeah, and I was really struck reading through your book on all the names of companies you cite that it there certainly times when an organization something changes in regulatory environments or there's a massive event. But those are really the minority when you think about the organizations and so many mentioned in the book that become irrelevant.
It's often a slow decline that in a lot of ways like a lot of people saw coming like you all did in the 90s, you know, we're looking at Sears, right? And I'm quoting you now you write in its 2023 disruption index study Alex partners found that 78% of the CEO survey indicated that their companies faced serious disruption in the past year. 98% say their business model must change in the next three years, but 85% say they find it hard to know where to start.
Those are huge percentages. This is just reality of where we are today, isn't it? Well, it is and I think part of the motivation for writing leaders lead was there's I'm sure some folks listening will be familiar with Clayton Christianson's book, the innovators dilemma and this idea and his book came out in the 90s, but this idea that big successful companies are often slow to change because they spend so much to be protecting the core business.
And that allows disruptor that companies to to come up and start to steal market share away, and then you know, or time sometimes these disruptors become more powerful than the so called legacy players are incumbent players. So this is this is not a new idea. What I think is really scary and part of the reasons why those CEOs feel that way is the pace of change is only accelerating.
If you look at sears downfall or blockbusters downfall or any number of retailers that were once really powerful, it's not so much because of Amazon or e-commerce. In many cases it was because of brick and mortar competitors and when you're building stores like Home Depot has been doing for 30 years. That takes a long time to go from 100 stores to 300 stores to 500 stores to 1000 stores. So in some cases, you know, I often say that sears was slow motion crisis.
So if you could see this coming from quite a long ways away and yet we mostly watched over 20 plus years as this happened to us. If you think about today where certain business models that aren't relying on brick and mortar stores largely using technology, you can go from a relatively small business to a quite substantial business in a year or two.
You just look at the spread of social media networks. Look at the spread of AI. Look at, I don't know how many of your listeners will be familiar with Tameu and she and these Chinese direct from factory models which have grown from basically nothing to tens of billions of dollars in revenue in just two or three years.
So I think that really puts extra pressure on companies needing to really pay attention to what's happening and find ways to respond much more quickly and powerfully than then I would say we had to even four or five years ago.
So much of leading well or leading poorly comes down to mindset right of the people who have the responsibility to guide the organization forward whatever that organization is and and you point out some of the obstacles in the book that tend to get leaders in trouble a bit and one of them you point out is self-sufficiency and I think a lot of us think about self-sufficiency as a virtue in many ways and of course it is.
But it also can get us in trouble can't do sure I think you know the risk of stating the obvious I think almost any behavior added to take into the extreme can be harmful. But I know I grew up in an era where at least most of the companies I worked for or had worked with there's kind of a command and control structure where the leader whether we're talking about.
A team leader or VP or ultimately the CEO is supposed to have all the answers and that to be vulnerable to ask for help is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness and so I think in an era I don't know that that was ever really a great way to run businesses or organizations but I think in this.
This era we're in where disruption is unrelenting often comes out of unexpected places to think that any one person no matter how gifted is going to be able to cope and respond to everything that's going on I think that's that's really very much a dysfunctional kind of ego so I think we have to really be not open not only open to see how businesses evolving and how new business models can can disrupt us or you know I'm not going to be able to go back to the end of the day.
I think sometimes I frame things too much in the negative there's certainly want to try to avoid going out of business or you know being an endless years of struggle but but the other thing is the more agile you are the more open you are to see things in different ways the more you can see these opportunities and perhaps get ahead of the competition in a powerful way.
I came across a video online not that long ago of jensen Huang who's the CEO of Nvidia and he was giving a presentation at Stanford and he made the point that people with high expectations have tend to have very low resilience and he said and I'm quoting him I hope suffering happens to you and the context of that might seem that might sound a little blunt but the context of it was he's not.
Advocating for people to like suffer for suffering sake but that he made the point I don't know how to like help you to have more resilience and to to do that in a way where you don't suffer someone and there's a part of this which is the attitude sometimes that I deserve this I've gotten a good degree I've gotten a lot of training I have a certain title I have a certain number of years of experience and I sense that that is an obstacle often.
I think there's a lot I think I'm potentially going to unpack there one of the things I talk about in the book which is not an original idea is really very much stolen from Ryan holiday and some others about how ego gets in the way a lot of times and I think you know if if either we've had certain kind of education or we've had certain kind of jobs and I can speak but from my own experience that they can start to believe you're on press and I think that's a good thing.
I think you can start to believe you're on press and you start to think that you can do no wrong and that that often causes you to miss things or to lean too heavily into a particular set of skills that have always served you well and one of the things I say in the book is that and I've been saying this for many years wasn't particular to this book is that that that what got you here is not likely to get you there in fact if you think or you're really locked in on a certain set of skills or kind of a playbook of how you've done that.
That have brought you incredible success. It often may make you blind and get in the way of you making the changes you need to I can give many examples many of them firsthand where we kept doing the same thing.
I mean hoping it would work better but in fact it was we were just really optimizing a losing business modeling and doubling down on losing and but it was very comfortable for us culturally or we're in the case of some particular leaders to go back to that thing that had made them successful in the past but it just turned out that that set of skills that perspective was not super helpful in the way the world was evolving.
Yeah and it's so hard to it sometimes really easy for someone who's not in the middle of it to see the distinction and yet it is so hard when we're either us or team are in the middle of that to notice when are we doubling down on an idea of path a strategy that is maybe not the right thing long term but and when is it that we're finding something that's new and different and I was struck by something you wrote in the book.
You say in the months before I began writing the book and earnest I lost count to the number of times I heard someone put forth what they thought was a keen insight when it really was something that just about anyone who'd been immersed in the necessary work has known for years and I think like I think about how many times I have had that thought like I've read someone's book or been in conversation or someone like said something I'm like oh wow you know I've been here in that point for like seven or eight years.
And then I also think about like how many times I've been that person right to you know the other side and it's part of this is like I'm all like we all should be for discovery new things and coming to things for the first time and yet we can easily miss stuff that we really should be paying attention to and I I don't know if I have a clear question here Steve but I wonder like how do we like get out of that path of you know missing stuff that I'm not going to be able to do that.
I think that I've missed something that is really so obvious to the people around us. Well I think a lot of this is just what you choose to focus on and what practices habits processes what have you developed one of the things which I don't exactly phrase this way in the book but I found myself saying this often when I've been speaking about the book or working with clients is if the world is changed so much because I think everybody will agree.
Obviously I spent a lot of time in retail but I've talked to plenty of other people in other industries and I think both people's experience is that the competitive environment the technology environment the customer environments continue to evolve quite quite dramatically I'm sure there's a few people listening where their their businesses are relatively stable but for the most part we've seen a tremendous amount of disruption and just about every aspect of society and business so if the world has changed so much.
Why have you or your organization changed so little and when I speak about that it often times makes people uncomfortable because they all not all but many recognize that yeah why why have we changed so little and I think that gets to that gets to a lot of things one is you have to and I talk about this one of the chapters I think you have to open the aperture by that I mean cast a wider view in terms of the impact.
In terms of the inputs you're bringing into your decision making and so that will play out differently for different organizations but I but I can say for sure in retail that's taking a look at a wider set of competitors in many cases it's looking at impact of new technology so you know a lot of companies and definitely my experience for a good chunk of my career.
And I'm back to what I say about sears things didn't really change all that quickly for a long time so if you're trying to understand I don't know a new point of sale system or new marketing strategy or something it wasn't necessarily that complex now today if you just want to talk about marketing and see how a tick-tock video can can have huge impact on sales or start to change what consumers are interested in you know it's just a different environment so you have to be willing to let go.
Of many things that serve you well in the past you have to open the aperture to bring more data more perspectives in and that could mean working with different people you know it's really very self serving as a consultant you should bring in different perspectives but but things people that are going to challenge the status quo make you see things in different ways but the other thing I think is really important is just how different.
You know like when I was first doing strategic planning and we would talk about things like best practices or whatever and benchmarking you know those kinds of things the field of companies we would talk about for benchmarking purposes was usually pretty narrow we were looking at our directors or people with relatively similar business models well I think today consumers customers are often comparing what we do to their last great experience.
And that may be an experience that has nothing to do with the exact business model or in so an example of this that I mentioned the book is you know if you can check out super easily on Amazon why can't you do that anywhere you know if you can check into a room in a hotel on your mobile phone why can't you complete the same kind of activity in a doctor's office or whatever because people are experiencing leading edge customer experience and
technology solutions and I think this is very common to apply it to our own situation so you really have to have a practice of looking much more widely at how consumer behavior is changing how technology can be used and at least consider how that applies to your business.
And this is what you're saying for me is sounding way beyond you know I may have looked at three or four benchmark competitors before it's not that I'm adding a fourth or a fifth it's that I'm vastly expanding how I think about just what's going on in the world and getting inspiration from different experiences other industries leaders who are in disciplines that are totally different than mine and the people you see who do that well who you have that conversation with or on that path and they say
that they are on that path and they sort of get it and they start looking elsewhere and seeing diverse perspectives what is it that you hear from them what's the language they're using what's the minds that they have that others don't.
I think they first of all just buy into this this just becomes a principle that they need to seek inside everywhere are not everywhere but you know very wide from a very wide range of perspectives but the other thing and I think this is really critical is it just because the way most these bigger organizations tend to operate is you have the budget for exploration you know that whether you call it an R&D budget or.
What have you but I think companies that don't do this well they tend to be very locked in on processes that don't have a lot of agility and getting money or getting resources to go explore is tough to do so you have to make a proactive decision and set up mechanisms to have enough time and you know the amount of time you need to do will certainly vary by competitive situations and your particular industry dynamics
but if it's like for example I talk about a company I worked with a few years ago when they were working to or starting to really look at a different way of going to market or at least be open to pretty significant change in the way they go to market when they started that process they spend a bunch of money with consultants but they also spend a bunch of money in time going around the world and visiting and speaking to people that were innovating and cutting the market.
We're innovating and customer experience quite broadly so even though they are a primarily manufacture of apparel athletic wear and so forth and have some of their own stores they were they were visiting you know bakeries they were visiting hotels they were talking to universities about some of the early stage work and looking at different membership programs and things like that because they were really open to aperture to the range of possibilities and trying to say okay well
is it can we adapt perhaps something that we're seeing that's going on in Brazil maybe and and start to stand up some experiments or proof of concepts for own business so but you know you have to have the openness to allow your top 30 executives or whatever exactly it was to go around the world for two or three weeks to devote time to these meetings to spend money that's not going to pay off or three four or five years maybe
longer so so that's you know if you don't if you don't have the the resource allocation mechanism and you don't have mechanisms to test more stuff and you don't have skill sets of people that know how to experiment and you don't put that agility in your system it's very unlikely you're going to do anything substantive then this is kind of like a hobby project one of our pastors years ago made the point that if you want to know what's
important to a person look at their bank statement and their calendar and the the distinction I'm hearing from you in which you just said is that you know a lot of people espouse innovation a lot of people espouse like wanting to get inside from different sources
big difference maker is though the people who are really doing that are actually making the time in their schedule and they're putting budget behind it and that is if that's happening that's a that's an indicator that you're on the right path and my experience it is for sure the other thing going back to what you're saying earlier about what I wrote about people getting up in conferences and and saying stuff that was years old
it's also revealing that they haven't been doing the work to stay current because it's not possible because this is what I do for a living you know looking at trends and seeing patterns you know I mean we can have different
interpretations and different insights will apply to different organizations in different ways for sure but some things are just not possible to have missed if you were doing the work so part of what I mean by that is and it gets back to what we're just talking about is you know if you're going to be serious about the work of transformation
it's important that you understand what you're signing up for not only are you signing up for being courageous and being willing to take more risks and things like that but you're also signing up for doing the work and doing the work often means investing in research hiring people in a different way
putting putting money against things that perhaps you haven't because you're just not going to get a really different outcome without I mean it's very unlikely you might get lucky but I would say in general you're not going to get very good outcomes if you don't do something fundamentally different and do so in a serious manner and that typically means changing processes changing resources to voting energy and and dollars to it
yeah indeed and you you point out as well by the way there's there's a whole bunch of mind leaps that you invite us to take of being better at handling disruption and innovation and you know we're zeroing on mostly one of them but one of the themes that comes out clearly in your work is being able to ask for help and the willingness to do that and you talk about your own journey on getting better at this
what work to get better at asking for help because I think a lot of us struggle with that well in my case it turns out I guess for better but I wish it had been easier is things had to get pretty bad for me to really ask for help and I you know I think this happens with a lot of people if we talk about it kind of like in the context of addiction where people have bottom or they get arrested or something awful happens and then suddenly they wake up and realize they got to do something
much more dramatically or people get fired or whatever I mean something bad some consequence significant consequence has to happen before people make changes and I think you know we see that individually as well as with with companies unfortunately particularly for companies but sometimes for people you may wake up too late right
or things about too bad and you can't recover from it but I think for me you know I just had to see evidence that what I was doing was not working as well as I wanted it to and I was making I would say incremental changes in the way I was leading in the way I was approaching my life and then I just kind of set up on a set off I should say on a on a path to look at trying something fundamentally different
and I think the takeaway message whether we're talking about an organization or we're talking about our individual leadership as business people or our own personal life is you know if what you're doing I mean it sounds super obvious I almost has to take the say it but if what you're doing isn't working why not try something else like I think that's the that kind of take away message particularly if you've been trying doing things in it like I'll give
you a little bit about putting just in a business context I'm sure most listeners will know the least in the United States the department store of business has been suffering for 20 plus years not just years but may season
to see penny and a bunch of others and yet mostly what they've done is a slightly better version of what they've always done and none of that has made any meaningful difference so I think if I ask yourself the question well is a slightly better version of what you're you've been doing for 20 years the answer
or is there something radically different and tie it back to the radical acceptance idea is to see if the world is very different if different things are important consumers a different technology is working whatever that might be you have to accept that as a truth and then take action against it as opposed to kind of living in this this kind of zone of denial
where you're just kind of talking yourself into this is going to be fine when I think you know if we're really open and honest with ourselves then you see like you know it's not there's really no chance very little chance that what I'm doing is going to result in the kind of success I want so I mean that's I think that's a it takes a lot of courage to be willing to both see your situation in a different light to maybe realize that the things you've been doing are not really working
really working and then to really try something which could be pretty radically different again depends a little bit on your situation how radical the change has to be but in my case personally the way I was doing things you know I felt like I really had to do things in a pretty different way you know keep keep things that were working well but but let go of things that weren't you've had your work out in the world in so many substantial ways you host a podcast you do a ton of speaking I know you've been talking to people so many people about your work
and I'm curious as you put this book together and have now shared it with others and folks are interacting with these ideas what if anything have you changed your mind on well I don't know if this is a a complete change has been a little bit of an evolution but one of the struggles I've had I guess it's just inherent to the choice
that made about doing what I do is there's there's a lot of being consultants of being quote unquote a thought leader content creator whatever that is a lot around look at me look how good my ideas are you know pay attention to me very kind of ego
affirming as well as this kind of shameless self promotion and I I started to really reframe the way I share things which is very much a work in progress I will say but it turns out thinking about it as a gift or an act of generosity as opposed to more the ego driven kind of like I have a bunch of good ideas and you should listen to them and I need to convince you that I'm right
like I say that's been an evolution for me in a lot of respects but I think really with this book I've kind of flipped the script a little bit to say here is here's my experience here things that I found I'm not trying to have it be a PhD level thesis exhaustive survey of all the thinking in the world that's not that kind of book and I'm trying not to speak about it in that way but really think about it as as a gift that some people will receive and get benefit out of it
and others won't for whatever reason and I can be okay with that Steve Dennis is the author of leaders leap transforming your company at the speed of disruption Steve thank you so much for your time and your work well thank you I really appreciate the opportunity
if this conversation was helpful to you three related episodes I'd recommend one of them is episode 550 how to win the long game when the short term seems bleak Dory Clark was my guest on that episode and we talked about the reality that all of us run into in our careers maybe you are right now
where you know where you're heading big picture but short term things aren't working maybe it was a position that didn't work out maybe it's a career path that you thought was right but turns out is not or maybe it was waiting on a prospect or a donor to come through and they didn't for whatever reason for you or your organization
how do you respond in those moments how do you win even when you lose that was part of our conversation and we wanted to great detail on how to actually have the right mindset and strategy so we'll help you through some of those most difficult times
episode 550 for that also recommended the conversation with Whitney Johnson on episode 576 how to help people engage in growth almost all of us in our roles are charged with helping others to grow Whitney and I talked about the S curve in that conversation and especially at the early stages of growth how we can help set others up for success and yes how we can do that better for ourselves to episode 5 76 for that
and then of course I'd recommend the recent conversation with Maurice Ashley episode 6 97 how to keep improving Maurice's chess's first black grandmaster he talked in that conversation about how he has worked to keep improving in his work and of course so much of his work as a grandmaster supporting other players and really working at the highest levels of competitive chess and how he thinks about improving how he helps other people to do that a fascinating conversation
episode 6 97 for that all of those episodes you can find on the coaching for leaders dot com website if you have not yet set up your free membership I am inviting you to do that today your free membership opens up access to you for all of the
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and one of those is my weekly journal entry I write a weekly entry every single week I send it out on email to all of our plus members and one of my recent entries I talked about the trap of deifying or demonizing a lot of times when we work for someone or we work with someone we have a tendency to put people in a boxes either this person's great I love them they've supported my career and sometimes that we don't see some of the struggles
the blind spots and then demonizing we all tend to do that too well someone wronged me or I didn't like the way they gave me feedback and I discount much of what they say in the future in that journal entry I talk about how in most situations it's actually helpful to land somewhere in between what are the good things we can find in everyone what are the things that we see from others that we don't care for ourselves and that we use as learning opportunities
for us that's one of the recent journal entries every single week I'm publishing another journal entry coming to you on email it's one of the benefits inside of coaching for leaders plus to go find out more go over to coaching for leaders dot plus to find more details coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger production support is provided by Sierra priest this next week two additional episodes coming your way one of them is this Saturday a Saturday cast coming
with one of our coaching for leaders fellows shandy welch we're talking about how to talk to people who intimidate you reality we all face in our careers and then next Monday our next regular episode is with Stephen MR Covey on the beliefs of inspirational leaders join me for both of those conversations in the next week have a great week and see you on Friday have for the conversation with shandy take care