Hi there. This is gift biz on rap episode 110 Fundamentally artists I think are a little more comfortable with ambiguity, and that does give you an advantage in today's new world. Hi, this is John Lee Dumas of entrepreneur on fire, and you're listening to unwrap and now it's time to light it up. Welcome Nick gift biz, unwrapped your source for industry specific insights and advice to develop and grow your business. And now here's your host Sue Mona height. Hi there.
It's Sue and welcome back to the gift biz unwrap podcast, whether you own a brick and mortar shop sell online or are just getting started, you'll discover new insight to gain traction and to grow your business today. I have the pleasure of introducing you to Jonathan David Lewis. Johnathan is the author of a brand vs wild building resilient brands for harsh business environments.
He is an engaging and authoritative speaker on shaping a brand that can survive and thrive in today's often serve as partner and strategy director at McKee Wallwork and company. Jonathan led this park to be recognized by industry purveyor, advertise Nate as a national leader in branding and marketing. They are also named the Southwest small agency of the year and received a national B to B campaign of the year and the national best places to work. They have a lot going on.
I am so excited to share with you a topic that I think is really, really going to be important for all of us. So we're going to get right into it. And Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks Sue. Happy to be here. I start off in a little bit of a different way because most of our listeners are artisans of one sort or another. So if you would describe yourself as a motivational candle, what would resonate with you in terms of a candle with a color and a quote, A color and a quote?
That's a very interesting question. Let's see color. I would have to say the color of the candle would be blue and that actually goes back a few years. A number of years ago. I didn't think it mattered much how I dressed. I met some people that really taught me a lot about style and a lot about how to present myself and really taught me that how you dress is even more than about you. It's about respecting others.
And during that time I created a color palette for myself and blue was the main color. So I think my candle would be blue. And I think the quote would say give. And the reason I say that is the people in my life has meant a lot and has influenced me a lot is our creative director here at McKee. Wallwork his name's Dave Ortega, a fascinating person, very creative. And he has this really cool thing. He does every year. He picks a word for his year. It kind of sums up what he wants to achieve that
year. And so he's done this of course for many years and it inspired me. So this year, my word is give and it's really just something I've learned in life that we're all to get something. But at the end of the day, it's not so much about getting as much as how much you can give in order to get. And I think if you focus on the getting, you get some, but you don't get as much as you can, if you focus on the giving. So my color would be blue and my quote would be give Perfect.
And I think this whole concept of giving really resonates with the audience because as artisans, that's a lot of what we're doing. We're creating things that then we are giving. So perfect. We're right in line. We're in sync here today, Jonathan, and I'm guessing you're in a blue suit over there. Maybe I Am in a blue suit. Blue is my main color. All Right, there you go. All right. I am so intrigued by the title of your book and specifically the word wild.
Give me a feel for how you identify with that word and what that all means. What brand vs wild is all about. Wild sums up this environment. We all find ourselves in. When you look around all of us, when you look at politics, you look at technology, you look at business, the economy and everything is just out of control. It feels like there's so much uncertainty. It's only growing. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. The headlines are just insane day after day.
And then you add in the new technologies of artificial intelligence and automation, all of this disruption for me, for most of us and certainly for my clients, the environment out there feels wild and it's overwhelming. No one person can keep up with it or completely understand what's going on. So brand vs wild is really all about how do you manage, build a business and a brand in the midst of this incredible situation we find ourselves in that I've called the
wild. Yeah, because I think just once you feel like, okay, I've got it all together, things are going well, then something happens. Like you say, it's totally unpredictable. What's going to be around the corner. And that makes us all uncomfortable. That is our reality. So you're talking about helping businesses learn. What do you do about that? This is reality. This is our environment today and moving into the future. How do you work within that reality Completely.
And, and you know, it's funny, you see these memes all the time of what technology we were all using five years ago or 10 years ago. And it's incredible how much the world has changed even in, in a short amount of time. And it's only changing quicker and we're seeing it now affecting other areas in other fields in the world around us politics, the Brexit, et cetera.
So when you look at the pace of change, you have to really change how you look at business for new principals are required to succeed at business. And something that I think is really important for all business leaders, all business people of any kind it's to understand that the new principles for success are not the same as the old principles of success that many of us have followed for well over a hundred years and Probably had our education and to exactly.
And that's one of the challenges with education today is that once you're in there being taught, whatever you're being taught often, it's a few years old. And with the new pace of change, once you graduate, even that current knowledge is going to be outmoded very soon, Right? And now you've worked with brand somewhat similar to who our audience is, but on a big scale, like Lego and Disney, et cetera, what do you do? How do you coach them? And what advice do you have for us?
What are the new business rules? I think the first place that we all should start is to understand that there's actually a very predictable reaction to disruption that we all have from a psychological standpoint. And one of the interesting things we found in the book was that there's very little difference between a group of people who crash land on top of a mountain psychologically, and a group of people who are dealing with some sort of disruption in a boardroom.
You're going to go through the same process in the same order. And you can get out of that situation in a very similar way as well. So what we discovered is that there are certain things that tend to dislodge companies or make us feel lost. These are the things that disrupt us. So the economy, when the economy is down, we all suffer a competition. When a competition rises or a competitor gets aggressive, we all suffer or just disruption in general, things are disrupting faster and faster.
So those things dislodge us, but there are internal things that we all deal with, whether we're working with a partner or a team, or even in ourselves, and these are the things we have control over. And we know now based on the research that led to the book that we all follow a very predictable path. First, what we're dealing with disruption, we become afraid. And often that fear is paralyzing.
Then we start to drift as a person and as a company and we lose our focus about what we were all about in the first place. Then we start acting wildly. We look for silver bullet solutions or easy answers. And then finally, and unfortunately, many companies, many people at the end of the day can turn Savage and there can be politics or immoral practices, et cetera, that can arise whenever we are dealing with disruption.
So let me ask you a question, hearing you talk through how we, as people go through this being afraid, drifting, et cetera. What about the person who stands his ground? I'm thinking of something where there's a product. The only thing that comes to mind for me right now is an old rotary telephone. What if the maker of old rotary telephone at and T whoever you'd want to say stood their ground? I mean, they were just going to say, this is my product. The world was clearly changing.
Where does that fall are people sometimes just adamant like they're blinded. They don't even see that things are changing. Exactly. One of the most fascinating case studies is actually Kodak because Kodak who was really this enormous company, they employ hundreds of thousands of people. And we're one of the biggest brands in the world. They actually invented their own disruption. They invented digital photography. They knew that the disruption was coming.
They went and filtered this research to look at when the digital photography would start to change their industry and takeover. So they had all the knowledge they needed in the world. They even had the technology itself yet. They still were not able to adapt, to innovate and to change the underpinnings of their company, to deal with this new world.
They were paralyzed by the fear of the disruption itself of all this digital photography kind of cannibalizing the film industry that they were on top of the heap. So I think one of the main emotions that we deal with when we're disrupted or we're overwhelmed by this wild is fear and fear. As we all know, it causes the fight flight or freeze response. And often, most of us freeze, we're paralyzed by fear. And we just don't move because we're afraid to move.
And in a business sense, if you're paralyzed, if you're frozen, you're going to decline. Businesses have to keep moving. So what would you suggest to our listeners to be watching for in their businesses so that they don't miss it? The world passes them by and they're just stuck. Are there any tips in that end, just acknowledging that the concept exists in the first place, I guess would be one, but is there any other advice that you would offer? Yeah. I mean, I think the numbers speak.
So if your numbers are declining, then there can be a variety of things that are wrong, but one of the causes can be that your product just isn't relevant anymore. And that doesn't mean you're not relevant anymore. It just means you may need to rethink your product or how you're going to market. And so listen to the numbers.
And if you act like often, many of these big brands have acted when their product has become irrelevant, like Kodak and others, then you're stagnant, you're paralyzed, you're stubborn and you don't adapt, but if you can learn and if you're willing to change how you do things, not necessarily why. I mean, we all have a why, and we all have a passion that can stay true.
But if you're willing to change how you do things, alter your product, perhaps get it to market in a different way, then you can stay relevant. You can adapt as the world changes, Right? So listening to your numbers, all important for multiple reasons, but that could be the trigger that if your numbers are going down, there's something that you need to change.
And I think it's great for our listeners too, because it gives you an idea of how your product can change, which then offers you yet something else you can be presenting to your customers to enhancement of your product or revision of a product. So it's a great way to go back to existing business or existing customers, I should say, and get more business out of the afraid zone. We see that there's something that might need to change.
Talk a little bit more about drifting and where we should be going. If we're identifying that possibly our product is becoming irrelevant. The first things that we do as business people when we drift is we actually try to be all things to all people. We've all heard that saying. And when you try to be all things to all people, you're nothing to everybody. And so you've lost your focus in the analogy.
If you're in the wilderness, one of the first things you'll learn to do, if you're in the boy, Scouts is you have to stop. And it's an acronym for stop think, observe, and plan. And so the first thing you need to do, if you're lost in the wilderness is stop. And it's the last thing you want to do when you're nervous. When you think something's wrong, you want to jump into action. You want it to go away. You want things to be better. Yeah. And you'll do anything to it better.
And so often you start acting wildly, you lose your focus, you start pursuing business. You shouldn't pursue, it's not your original vision or your original passion. So you need to stop and just let yourself breathe for a moment. And then you need to orient yourself to the marketplace. What is the marketplace saying? What does the marketplace want? And something that's interesting. If you look at some of these case studies is an example like blockbuster.
When you look at Blockbuster's path to irrelevance, it wasn't that people didn't want entertainment. I mean, certainly argue that people wanted more entertainment than ever. The issue for blockbuster was that people wanted entertainment even more. They wanted to in an even more convenient way, when they discovered they didn't have to get in the car and drive to a brick and mortar, then the world changed for everybody. So it wasn't that people didn't want what blockbuster provided.
They didn't want it in the way blockbuster provided. So if you can orient yourself to the marketplace, you can begin to become relevant. Again, Let me stop you here for a second. And this is a great example because I think everybody saw the path blockbuster was running down. Everyone could see that their future was going to be that direction unless they changed. But how does someone who has, let's say two or three retail shops, how do you orient to your marketplace? How do you figure that out?
If it's not as obvious as a blockbuster, There are so many more resources today than ever before for businesses of all stripes, whether you're a giant national brand or even you own a location or two, there are so many resources that not only provide research and insight into your company, but you can actually for a couple of hundred dollars conduct your own surveys. Now through Google surveys and others, there's these resources that used to be pretty difficult.
You'd have to pay thousands to get this information that now as a small business owner or an entrepreneur, you can spend a couple hundred dollars and start testing your theories with the public. So I think the access is there, the knowledge is there it's first and foremost about stopping and listening. What is the marketplace saying to you or finding the resource because it's there find the resource, use the resource, ask the smart questions. What do people want? What are people asking for?
Look beneath the wild. Look beneath the noise and look for that signal. Good point. And would you say also Jonathan, that don't just assume that your thoughts are right test, what you're thinking you should be doing with your community before you start going down a path. That's not actually the right path. Absolutely. I think piloting whatever product or new direction that somebody might take is absolutely the wisest thing you can do. Even more than just asking somebody what they think.
Creating, create a proof of concept with the smallest amount of investment, create the thing you want to create and see how people react in the real world, which can often be far more interesting and far more informative than just asking somebody if they want something. Right. And don't ask a person, you know, is going to give you the answer you want to hear. Exactly. And then say, okay, we're done moving on. Yeah. That's never helpful. You need the cold hard truth when you're the wilderness.
Yeah, for Sure. Because any pivot that you do, if it's a product enhancement, adding to your core product line is Jonathan sane, making sure to stay in, focus, stay with your core business, but any of that costs money, both in product development and advertising and just the time put in. So you want to make sure to the extent that you can, that you're creating the right thing, that's going to allow you to pivot and stay relevant Completely.
And I think another tactic to stay relevant and to test ideas and to see what's going on out there is to connect with others. And one of the results of the wild of this feeling of being overwhelmed and there's just too much noise out there is, it can be very isolating. Many times. It just feels like you're alone. And I don't know what's going on. I don't have anybody to talk to when in reality, we're all feeling that way and it's okay to feel that
way. And it's okay to acknowledge that you feel that way to get out of that, to advance and to adapt and to innovate. You need to connect. You have to be around other innovators, other business, people, other entrepreneurs, other people, of course, that are in your industry or that are experts in your craft, but also experts in other craft. In other industries, you need variety, you need connection.
And as you grow your network, as you grow your relationships, you will find that those inputs will make you more creative and allow you to have a real pulse on what's going on. Right. I agree with you. And would you agree that connections can be online connections, just what we're doing here. We're learning different things each week from different industries because we bring in all different types of people and then so important in-person connections to do.
So you feel like all of that is required. Absolutely. I mean, I'm a huge fan of podcasts. I listen to podcasts all the time when I'm working out, when I'm driving to work. Whenever I have a free moment, it's usually my preferred method to connect when I'm not in a personal setting. So podcasts are huge. And I think there's something unique about podcasts in that they're very intimate. You're kind of part of this conversation that it's really meaningful.
So podcasts, as well as the people in your life, the professional connections you have just grabbing coffee and, and being curious, asking this other professional, what's going on in your world, what's going on in your industry? What challenges are you dealing with? And that kind of goes back to that. The word on the candle, give, be curious. People love to explore themselves their own environment.
So be curious, ask them, and then if they need something, be willing to give and you'll find out in the long run, you'll get a lot more if you're willing to give, I totally agree with you 100%. So I want to talk a little bit more about you set up a new product. You start going and connecting with people and it's uncomfortable, you know, and a lot of people talk about this, right? Stepping outside your comfort zone, all of that.
But I know you are a big fan and believe that that place of ambiguity and being a little uncertain and being a little bit uncomfortable is actually a good thing. Why do you think that It's this whole idea that we're dealing with so much uncertainty and ambiguity in the world around us and just our human nature hates it. Our human nature hates uncertainty. I think we spend the majority of our life trying to reduce or get rid of uncertainty everywhere we go.
And the fact of the matter is when you just step back and look at the world we live in not only is uncertainty ever present, it's only growing. And the good news is that if you look around us, there are actually systems that thrive on ambiguity. There are systems that actually don't exist without ambiguity and they're systems like jazz, for instance. And if anybody saw Lala land so wonderful ode to jazz, it's a really fun movie.
The thing I took from that is that jazz doesn't exist without ambiguity. In fact, if you want to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, go listen to an orchestra. But if you want to see a system that is built for today's world, then go listen to a jazz band. As the different musicians are interacting with each other. At one moment, the basis is taking front stage. And the next moment maybe the trumpet takes front stage. They're riffing off of each other's vibe off of the vibe of the audience.
They're not using sheet music, they're using their memory. And in many, many ways, this reflects how we have to operate in today's world, where instead of looking at uncertainty and ambiguity as this enemy, as this thing that we have to get rid of, look at it as an opportunity, if you are uncertain and you don't know what's going to happen, it's very, very likely that the next person is uncertain. It doesn't know what's going to happen. And that means there's an opportunity.
If you, by connecting by innovating, by piloting ideas and products can get a little bit ahead of the game and figure it out. You can be the winner in this very uncertain environment. So it's not so much this enemy, the scary thing can actually be an opportunity. And that's what I mean by embrace ambiguity, just as a jazz band, embraces ambiguity. I love that example. It's perfect. And I just want to underline what Jonathan's talking about here.
We are all coming from the same place because it's innate, I guess, in us as human beings, that we don't like that ambiguity and uncertainty. So recognize that you're not alone in this. Every single person is going through something like this. And the idea of ambiguity, it kind of, the word comes to me. It's a catalyst because it kind of prompts you to be creative and there in lies and opportunity that others might never take advantage of Exactly.
When you think about art, when you think about creativity, it really is based on this idea of creating clarity out of ambiguity. So even as an artist, fundamentally artists I think are a little more comfortable with ambiguity and that does give you an advantage in today's new world. Good point. Really good point.
So if you were to break this down in maybe three steps, what are three things that you would advise our listeners to look at in this whole realm of why Yourself, if you understand that your reaction to disruption is very predictable, then you can really diagnose where you are. If you look at your company today, are you acting, are you just trying things because you're desperate and don't know what else to do. Have you lost your focus? Did you have an original vision?
And now you're way over here and you're not sure what you're doing anymore. Look at yourself, have some self-reflection that's part of the idea of stopping. Think about where you are and where you are in that very predictable response to disruption. Then I would go back to what I said before you need to stop, and then you need to orient yourself to the marketplace. And this is done in a variety of ways.
Test your products in real world scenarios, with real customers, you need to get access to those easy resources that are out there to test ideas. And to Google surveys is a great example of that. And then once you've stopped, you've really discovered yourself and you oriented yourself to the marketplace. It's time to do something.
And this is another mistake we see a lot in our practice is that when people are afraid and they're dealing with disruption, if they can get past just the feeling of being paralyzed, they'll start talking and reflecting, but it can be another battle to go do something it's a lot easier to keep talking and keep planning. But once you've done that, you need to set aside the plan, put it down and go do something, get into the marketplace, build that thing, test it.
And if you're following these pretty simple steps of reflection, orientation, and then doing, and then keep repeating that and be okay with failure, go back to the drawing board and try again. You're going to get ahead. You're going to find something that works and begin to discover what adaption really does mean in the midst of this uncertainty. Beautiful. You have summarized this wonderfully, and I want to expand a little bit on your 0.3, which is do something take action.
You Jonathan are working with national large brands. And I would suggest to our listeners that we have such a bigger opportunity. And Jonathan has it much harder convincing some of the larger brands because he has the whole hierarchy. He has to go through to get approval, to spend money, make changes in product marketing, whatever it is. We are so much more nimble as small and medium sized business owners. We either just report to ourself or we run the business and control all the shots.
So in terms of being able to be timely, to make changes, just saying yes to making changes is totally in our favor. And that is just a short step away from actually taking action. And that's where all the difference is. I talked about this in my intro to this podcast, like two years ago, what an opportunity we have as small business owners. And we haven't talked about it Jonathan, since just right now. So thank you so much for bringing this up And I don't want to underline that point.
So I think that is extremely important, extremely true. And the problem with that truth is that it doesn't feel that way. If you're one of the smaller companies, it feels the wild feels overwhelming and it feels isolating. When in reality, you are completely correct. You have so much more room to innovate and change. And if you look at the innovators, the disruptors in the world right now, they all start small because that enables them to be innovative.
And one of the topics I discussed in the book is there's a whole chapter on adaption. I pull from Mark Parker. Who's the CEO of Nike who discusses this concept a lot because he's very, very honest about this. He has recognized that size is actually now a vulnerability, because if you have been successful in the past, then you can start to believe the lie that, that success and the way you did it will make you successful in the future. And that's just not the case anymore.
So those of us who do own and operate small businesses, we completely have an advantage. If we can get past this feeling of being overwhelmed and isolated and break out and connect and start to do and start to test our ideas, we really do have the opportunity and the advantage to innovate where a lot of these bigger companies, they're just paralyzed by their size. Absolutely. I totally agree with you there.
And I think another concept I've been hearing a lot about lately, I think it came from James Wedmore, but I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure it was James Wedmore. And he talks about what got you to where you are now is not necessarily the same thing. That's going to get you to where you should be in a few years back to your point about having to continually adapt and change.
As we're closing this portion out, Jonathan, talk a little bit more about what the golden nuggets are that are inside your book that we haven't addressed here. Because again, this is a topic that I think all of our listeners should really be very aware of. And I'm sure there's some things we haven't covered everything in your book, but just give us a feel for what else is in there so that we can think about taking a further look at it.
Certainly. Well, the book is a lot of fun simply because I've taken our 10 years of proprietary research and correlated it with the latest in survival, psychology and looked at all of these fascinating stories of survival. So we have stories of Teddy Roosevelt going down a tributary of the Amazon river or Ernest Shackleton, trying to traverse Antarctica and many, many more. And there are these fascinating stories in that these group of people confront some amazing challenge.
They have all this hardship and all of these psychological processes underway and their successes and failures are very much correlated with our own research, into the factors that affect business success and what we see in all the case studies of some of the biggest companies who have faced hardship and made it through like Lego and Marvel and other companies who have faced hardship like blockbuster and Kodak and have declined and really become irrelevant.
So it's a fun book that uses all of these real life survival stories. And it pulls from the research to bring it down to practical level. Many people have called it a survival guide for business, just because we take a high level concepts and then bring them down to a practical level, things that you can use, tips that you can use in your everyday business to help you through the wild, this uncertainty we're all dealing with. Perfect. Thank you. You've piqued my curiosity now for sure.
And I'm going to challenge now, Jonathan. I can't wait. Oh, okay. Here you go. What has been wild or what has that done for you in your life or in your career? Well, it's interesting. My career has really been made and molded during what I would consider one of the most wild times in recent history for our country and that's through the great recession. So most of my career has really grown dealing with clients and helping clients who don't have very much resource.
Their budgets are being slashed. Neurology is changing so much what used to work in the past. Isn't working as effectively now and we're being tasked with doing so much more with so much less. And so I really feel like my whole career has been in the wild and even the company that we built here, McKee Wallwork, we're celebrating 20 years. And when you think about a marketing firm, that's a pretty amazing feat in how much this industry changes. And so the wild is really it's part of this company.
It's part of me, it's how we operate. We understand it. And this book brand vs wild is just kind of the natural conclusion of many years of experience and research. That explains how to deal with it. Perfect. All right. Moving on here a little bit. I want to get into our reflection section, which is talking a little bit more about you and how you work your day. We might find some gold nuggets that would also help our
listeners. Is there a natural trait that you have, that's helped you overcome the wild, if you will. You know, I think one of the natural traits I have is simply connecting dots. There's nothing, super human going on. It is something that comes naturally to me.
And whether that's something like reading a book or watching a movie and kind of seeing how it all fits together, all the way to business and economics and seeing how all of these seemingly disparate points of contact and actions and activities really do come together to form some sort of narrative. So connecting the dots has helped me a lot because you know, our company Makua, we actually work with brands who would call themselves stalled, stuck or stale.
So they're facing some pretty particular challenge. And often it's a disruption in their industry or a new competitor causing a lot of trouble and figuring out what to do. Isn't easy. I mean, it's, it's pretty complicated. You have to really look at a lot of information and find what is the story here? What point are we going to act on? And so connecting the dots has helped me a lot in my career in my life.
But I also think that I've been told, you know, it's kind of awkward talking about yourself, but I've been told that I do listen before I speak. And I think listening is more important than ever today. There's a lot of people talking. There's a lot of people that are happy to give you their opinion, but there's very, very few that are willing to really just listen.
And if you're willing to stop and listen and see what is your customer actually want and kind of peel back the layers of not just what they're saying, but really what their deeper desires are. You can make it a long way. You can use that information to be more creative and to try new products. So I think connecting the dots and listening has helped me lock perfect, Perfect, really valuable information there.
Is there a tool like a technological tool or something you are using that you just could not get through your day without Technological tool? I wish I didn't rely on my phone so much. I tell people if they can steal my car before they steal my phone, period, I completely agree with that. What are you using your phone for? Let's go with that. Well, a variety of things. So I'm constantly on email. I'm constantly using it for my calendar. I use Google calendar.
I'm constantly using it for my social platforms on four different social platforms. And then I use it for beyond that. It's more consumption. So what's the latest in advertising. What's the latest from wired or fast company. What's the new innovation that I need to be aware of. And when you're traveling, do you still bring a computer or do you rely solely on your phone? Like so many people are starting to do No. I always bring my MacBook air with me. I love it. It's So light. And so portable.
I used to carry this five pound giant laptop with me and MacBook air is amazing when I travel. It's kind of, you know, I don't like me to wait for my family. I miss my kids. It's not my favorite thing to do on the world, but I do travel quite a bit. And so I do appreciate those little moments on the plane or sometimes in the corner of an airport where it's just me and I can put on my headphones and I pull out my laptop. I can just write. It's a moment of quiet and silence.
That just isn't in the rest of my life. Being on the road a lot is being able to pull out my MacBook air. And I will say, it's not the same. I mean, I take a lot of notes on my phone when something strikes me, but it's not the same as having a keyboard in front of you. I'm right with you. Totally agree. Besides your book, which of course we're going to have in the show notes and all. Is there another book that you would recommend to our listeners?
Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of books, but I think one of my favorite books of all time that has really changed how I do business and reinforce how I do business is a business book called getting naked by Patrick Lencioni. And it's actually written as a parable of business parable. And then it kind of explains it in more business terms, following the parable, but it really just dives into the heart of business.
And he has several concepts in it that have changed my world and really focused how I try to help people and serve my clients. And one of those concepts is entering the danger. And you'll find that if you're sitting in a meeting with several people and something awkward comes up, usually the group tries to move past it. Or maybe somebody doesn't agree and is passive aggressively undermining a decision, but nobody's going to bring it up because it's awkward.
Well in this book getting naked, he says, enter that danger. If you see something awkward, if somebody is offended, if there's something going on, you need to enter that and deal with it for responding with that is this concept of the kind truth. And this is something we talk about a lot in my company because without kindness, truth can just be harsh and not helpful, but without truth, kindness is completely unhelpful. You need the kind of truth you need, those things put together.
So if you have the kind truth in what I think, you know, all businesses relationship, if you have the kind of truth and you're entering the danger, having the hard conversations, focusing on giving and relationship over just products and profit, then you will get a lot farther in life. And so getting naked by Patrick Lencioni has meant a lot in my career. You've got a couple of quotes there that you should be promoting out, or I'm going to do it for you because that is also true.
And I can just see it in a board room or with friends or wherever someone says something awkward and people will just, it's like pushing the elephant out of the door, not addressing it at all, but the shadow is still there. It's still sitting there. It was never addressed. I can't say it anywhere near as eloquently as you did, but really, really great. And give biz listeners just as you're listening to the podcast today, you can also listen to audio books with ease.
I've teamed up with audible for you to be able to get an audio book. I don't know if getting naked is audible is your book brand vs. Wild Bread versus wild will be available on audible on May 2nd. Perfect. So you'll be able to get either of these books for free on me if you haven't done so already, all you need to do is go to gift biz, book.com and make your selection. Okay, Jonathan, we're winding down to the end and now I would like to have you dare to dream.
I'd like to present you with a virtual gift. It's a magical box containing unlimited possibilities for your future. So this is your dream or your goal of almost unreachable Heights that you would wish to obtain. Please accept this gift and open it in our presence. What is inside your box? Wow. Okay. This is a big one. I'm excited drum roll drum roll. Besides joining Elon Musk on a trip around the moon, which would be amazing.
I think this kind of goes back to the idea of give and, and sort of just the general ethos of my company and my career. Of course, I have goals in life. Writing a book was a goal writing. Another book is another goal growing my business. There's a variety of things I want to do, but this is a big question.
And so I think at the end of the day, if I'm opening up this box and inside there's this thing, I think it might be a picture or even a video of me on my death bed and my hope and my dream would be that I'm not alone. That there are a lot of people around me and my hope and my dream would be that there's not just a lot of people that the hallways filled the rooms feel they're standing room only.
And that my life has been more than just a series of accomplishments that I've really taken the time to focus on what matters and that at the end of it all, that has been reflected in the relationships around me. So that's what I hope I see when I open this magical box. Wonderful, perfect. And give biz listeners, you know, that over on the show notes page, there will be links to everything for Jonathan, including his book. So go over there and check that out.
And Jonathan, I'm not going to say that. I hope your dream comes true any time too soon. But when that time comes, I do hope that that's the case. And in the meantime, I know you're going to continue going on and affecting people's lives. Your concepts, your thoughts, your direction has been so helpful for us here. And I know my listeners join me in saying, may your candle always burn,
right? Where are you in your business building journey, whether you're just starting out or already running a business, and you want to know your setup for success, find out why taking the gift biz quiz, access the quiz from your computer at Vic dot L Y slash gift biz quiz or from your phone by texting gift biz quiz to four four two, two, two. Thanks for listening and be sure to join us for the next episode. Today's show is sponsored by the ribbon print company, looking for a new income source.
When your gift business customization is more popular now than ever branded products, have your logo or print a happy birthday, Jessica ribbon to add to a gift, right at checkout, it's all done right in your shop or across studio. And second check off the ribbon print company.com for more information, after you listened to the show, if you like what you're hearing, make sure to jump over and subscribe to the show on iTunes. That way you'll automatically get the newest episodes when they go live.
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