hey everybody so we all know me and tech problems it will be fascinating to see how many we have today so far it looks good though so i don't see anyone screaming oh my god the echo i think i muted everything i got everything hooked back up right uh yeah i did i brought my whole set sure i streamed from italy i brought my whole up uh it's about the only thing i did with it um i did some coaching calls to help people um uh to help them make money
no well to help them make money but also to help me make money so i did some of that too no i don't have a high tower decked out pc i just use a big fat laptop that's purposely for portability So I realized I completely unintentionally made a perfectly topically appropriate incidental but perfect joke for this. So for those of you who watch the chat.
I can pop up what I'm drinking and you can see what I wrote. And then this show is about rules, breaking rules and exceptions. Can anyone point out? where in this i incidentally revealed that i might have broken a few rules um it's funny because i didn't even think about it i wrote it and then i was starting up the show and i'm like oh shit I probably shouldn't have said that. But hey, maybe it's only a device and it's not really true.
that's so funny well maximus good to see you here i will say so far i'm not really impressed by it truly um but it sells well and for what maximus is doing i was in italy i'm back now so i'm back in america i came back a week a week ago and so i'm back on this time zone and i'm eager to chat with you all uh to the degree that even though i never do sunday shows i always do weekday shows because i do business topics i just decided what the hell
And I also didn't put on fancy clothes. Tomorrow I'll be wearing a nice shirt to talk to General Hughes because we have a show tomorrow at two o'clock Pacific time where. I'll have retired U.S. Army General Chris Hughes on. He's an impressive individual who has experience. I don't. He's led a team. um well several teams but teams that total well over 100 000 people
If you're all familiar with the U.S. Army base Fort Knox, where we store the gold bullion that backs our currency, in theory, we could have a whole debate on gold standard.
we won't but we could uh anyway uh general hughes ran that base with 49 000 soldiers on it um and he also ran the u.s army rotc program at both the college and high school level which has 36 000 college cadets and like 300 000 high school students in it uh and of course thousands of schools thousands of faculty teaching those students that's that's crazy those are um you know i have good leadership experience but
Very, very few business leaders get to the scale of the U.S. Army generals. You know, there are just relatively few people in the world who have hundreds of thousands of people. yes there is in fact a national war college yeah uh and then there's also of course the academies things like west point but i don't think he was responsible for west point although i actually don't know
In any case, he'll be on tomorrow, and we might have a special guest show up for that. I'm not going to drop any additional secrets, but... Even if you can't stick around today or if you're catching the VOD of this later today, you want to see the show with General Hughes just because he's got experience that's rare. And yet...
He's used to training leaders at all levels because he's responsible for training new lieutenants who lead a platoon, which like 32 people. And so he's run the gamut across all of that.
so we'll jump into the main topic here in a few minutes but some other updates i want to share maybe i'll talk about these some at the end of the show to catch people up who join later number one i'm back in the u.s so i'm doing some hiking so i put on i'll move the mic here i put on uh the shirt from the washington trails association the group i'm on the board of they have a neat slogan
And I finally got a shirt with a slogan on it. Here it is. So they say trails for everyone. I helped them write the actual organization mission. And we got it down to just four words, which is good for focus. So the Washington Trails Association, their mission is trails for everyone forever. So they're trying to make access better, equality better.
equity better so that people get out on the trails from different backgrounds and then they're also trying to preserve the lands and trail network for the future but it's it's always good when you can get something down to just a short phrase because it's memorable um and particularly if it's actionable it can be hard but um i i need to do some posting i went on a hike a couple days ago i went to a local ghost town
and i have a couple other hikes planned and so actually if you're interested i may ask for some crowdsource help after the show I volunteered to go hunt down some trails that haven't had any hikers file a trip report on them in at least a year. And sometimes it's several years.
So I have this list of obscure trails. And they're so obscure, I'm not sure I can find the damn things to go hike them. And so I'm going to head off once on Wednesday and once... on saturday to try and hike these trails that are kind of lost and they're so lost i'm hoping i am i'm hoping uh some of those can help me out yeah i was never found after that i'm gone use the buddy system i will have people with me i am not going alone so yes it's dangerous to go alone take this
all right the last quick thing i'll talk about before we get into breaking rules judgment etc is i want to talk briefly about the future of this show is this stream's stream sponsored by truly not yet um that's up to maximus he's got the ball on that so maybe he can handle it but no it's just uh Well, I could never say my 19-year-old stepson drinks this because that would be illegal in breaking a rule. But I've heard that people like him.
like this and i've never had one and we had some for some reason so i thought i should try one um so we can actually talk about this case in breaking rules because Of course, what I'm doing is indicating that... Sometimes you might want to bend a rule and not publicly admit that you're bending the rule because that can cause problems.
i love it all right anyway so maximus owns that um i just assigned it to him he didn't know before he got here uh but look going back to the previous topic the future of the show i've been broadcasting a little bit less and i want to share with you what i see the show doing in the future number one i'm looking um at some partnerships that will
broaden what i do and that's all i'll say right now but specific stuff as you know i'm trying to write a book and so i'm probably going to do more shows like this one where when i'm working on a concept for the book i share it here to get your feedback and so what i see this community doing which is great is helping validate ideas and help
point out to me when i'm full of shit because sometimes i have an idea that comes from my perspective as a leader of large teams and i'm disconnected with the reality of you in the trenches And so sometimes I need your feedback on that. And I basically am going to do shows to help.
perfect the content i'm going to share with others so for example in our community there's a bunch of reports right now in the career success channel of people who have applied the magic loop and have had tremendous success with it And so what that lets me do is it gives me validation I can share with others, including book publishers, to say, you know, this works and I know it works. It's a matter of writing it up.
in a way that we can publish and make a book out of so that other people can use it but i know it works because here are these reports of people who did it and the results they've gotten well i want to do the same for other stuff the second thing is i have a lot of guests General Hughes may be one of the most impressive title-wise, but I have a lot of guests who want to come on the show that I think can really add to the conversation. And so I'm going to see if I can recruit some of them.
um and schedule more of them but i have a big list of people uh that i want to bring on and so i'll do some guest shows so those are the two things you can expect in the future as well as me being a little more laid back I used to be really uptight about the growth of this channel. I've realized that like Twitch is a hard place to grow a channel about leadership.
and career and so i'd rather just talk to those of you who come and the fact is the average post i do on linkedin reaches 15 to 20 000 people and twitch is never going to be that way for this kind of content and so i'm going to stop stressing about it you all come we're part of a small community that i invest in i help succeed and that's good enough because There's no real path for a career channel to end up with 20,000 viewers on Twitch. And every post I put out on LinkedIn hits that many.
i am in the same field as devin nash broadly sub brief devin is currently off twitch he and i stream together sometimes but he's currently uh having his own discussion um yes and maximus has the right idea this is where the content is made and it gets used elsewhere so you all helped me make it and i appreciate that so now let me roll over to trying to give you value
First, we have run and we're soon going to draw to a close the official pilot of our mentor network. And while we have some surveying to do, for those of you who know. We co-designed a mentorship network, and then we ran a pilot to see if it would work. We recruited about a dozen mentors, about 40 mentees. We ran for about three months. And now we're in the process of collecting the feedback to see how did that go? What did people think?
Did the mentees get value? Did the mentors get value? I'll share the formal stats, but the cliff note answer, the short answer is yes, it worked. So now what we're doing is we have a set of people, volunteers, who are developing a system to allow us to scale that mentor network, to allow us to recruit more mentors, allow more mentees in to scale that network. so that we can open it up to more people because if we had more mentors there's more people who'd like mentorship
So here what I want to do is just publicly thank those volunteers. They've just really gotten started. The UX team, the design team has done some work.
but the dev team is just now really getting started coding up a tool to allow us to bring in mentors and match them to people who want to be mentored and scale the program so i want to thank them and that's the kind of value i want to test and pilot here that we then take out bigger so questions about that you can put them in the question tool comments on this show they're always welcome
and let's jump in so why do i want to talk to you about rules exceptions and judgment well my coach i had a coach when i was working at twitch Her name is Sue. I posted this, I think, in the general chat. She wrote an article and part of that article was about exceptions. And she was specifically thinking about exceptions to the work at home slash come to the office rules. How do you decide?
if your company has a rule that says oh now we're going to work three days a week in the office and two days at home how do you decide if somebody says well i want an exception how do you decide and she wrote some things about that And she had a bigger meta point that prompted me to want to have this conversation. Her bigger point was that leadership is all about exceptions. And by definition, exceptions are not scalable.
If you want to make an exception to the rule, like should you buy alcohol for your 19-year-old, that's an individual judgment that doesn't scale. And so you have to decide.
what are you going to do there and what you do for one person you might not do for another and that's what makes exceptions delicate before i go deeper into that though i want to talk about the general principle so let's define the word rule to include everything laws regulations procedures guidelines standard operating procedures i'm using it in a broad sense
anything that someone else refers to usually on a piece of paper or electronic paper and says well this is how we do things here this is this is our our tenants our rules our our fill in the blank our constitution we're going to talk about that right
the u.s government rules um these are our rules i'm using the word to cover all of those now why do people make rules well in the best case um and yeah it is true what someone in chat just said exceptions don't scale because if you scale them they become a rule in a way um why do people make rules well in the best case what they're trying to do is lay out positive guidance good definitions that shortcut things for others
And so they say, look, you may be new here, whatever new means. You may be a new citizen. You may have just joined our company. You may have just joined this department. You may have just been born. So you don't know everything yet. And we're going to help you. And to help you, we've. laid out these things that keep you out of danger.
And that allow you to accomplish positive ends So don't drive 300 miles an hour In your 1979 Honda Accord That's a rule designed to keep you and others safe on the other hand you can have a positive rule that is designed to guide you towards a good outcome that says you know If you're going to buy a house, be aware that it can cost up to 20% of the house to put furniture in it.
And so as a good rule, when you budget for a house, budget for like furniture, fixtures, repairs. And so that's a rule, a rule of thumb in that case.
that is meant to guide you towards a positive outcome allow you to accomplish something successfully so rules can be ideally they're there to help they're there to keep you safe and they're there to give you guidance this is a perfect world it is also a very rare world in my opinion now so i'm going to spend most of my show talking about why rules suck why they still exist and what to do about the fact they're always broken so the problem with the rule is it gets written down and
Problem number one is as soon as it's written down, it's out of date because things change. So to be slightly topically political here. there have been all kinds of mask rules in all kinds of countries wear masks don't wear masks wear them indoors wear them outdoors wear them with this kind of crowd wear them that kind of crowd wear them on airplanes on buses not on buses etc etc and
All of those rules at some point or another have proven to be out of date. So originally, for example, there were a lot of rules, even very strict rules about wearing masks outdoors. Most people now agree. Most scientists seem to agree that COVID doesn't spread easily outdoors. And so rules that required strict mask wearing outdoors have less value now.
And we learned that. But the problem is the rule got written down and until somebody updated it, the rule was the rule. And so the science moved forward and the rules didn't always keep up. So that's a straightforward example. Whether you agree with COVID rules and mask rules or not is the political point. The practical point is the rules rarely kept up with the science. So they claim to be science-based.
Again, you can argue that yourself. But the problem with the rule is once it's written down, it starts to go stale immediately. And there are lots of these. I'll tell you about a funny law from my hometown. that i learned about when i was a kid um yeah minimum wage is another one uh when i was a kid there was apparently a law on the books in my hometown that had been written somewhere back in time near the civil war when photographs first started to exist and the people at the time
felt that they needed to have a law against what they saw as a moral problem. And that law said that it was against the law. It was illegal. It was a crime against the rules. For a woman to get undressed in front of a picture of a man other than her father or her husband. To keep a morally clean society in my hometown sometime in the 1800s, it was codified into law that women shouldn't change clothes in front of non-family member males.
Now, the thing is, nobody ever got around to updating or deleting this law as times changed and as pictures became more common. So this is an extreme example, but it gets to the point that laws don't tend to age well. rules don't tend to age well so problem number one with rules and why we get into exceptions and what leaders have to do is to realize rules don't age well now A great example of this we'll use in more places is the U.S. Constitution.
Yes, Maximus is hit on something some libertarians say that I happen to agree with, which is we call our politicians in some contexts lawmakers, but we don't call them law editors or law deleters. And if you look at the U.S. Constitution, on the plus side, the U.S. Constitution was written by some relatively smart men, admittedly all white men, basically. But that was a long time ago when all white men in America was pretty much all there was in leadership.
And they were pretty smart guys, and they tried to draw on historical precedent from the French Revolution and the Magna Carta and things they knew about and write the best set of rules they could. And then, because their rules were incomplete... They had to immediately start having a Bill of Rights, which added new rules. So they were immediately editing their rules.
But here's the interesting thing. 200 years later, we're still debating those rules and we still have a whole court system and ultimately a Supreme Court that has to interpret those rules and say what they really meant. So this comes the second problem of rules. Rules are written by humans with the context they have at the time. And they can't.
no rule writer no matter how smart or well-intentioned can perfectly anticipate the future so example this is super hot button i'm not trying to be political simply an example The U.S. has something called the Second Amendment, which talks about the right to keep and bear arms. Very hotly debated. Has to do with personal ownership of guns or not. Well, whatever else is true, whether you...
come down to one side of that or not which i'm not going to go into the fact is that what counted as a personally transportable firearm in the 1780s and 1790s which was the context the authors and what is now possible as a personally transportable weapon are very very different right so uh the authors had no contacts for machine guns or um grenade launchers it wasn't or flamethrowers none of these things were in their vocabulary
So again, I'm not actually taking a political stance on that. I'm staying away from it. But yeah, Danny here, right? Our forefathers never considered the internet. Certainly. These were people who got around with horses or no telegraph, etc. And so how do you update those rules? Well, this is the problem with rules. Now, the other problem with rules I'm going to get at is purely a motivational one.
So rules don't age well. They're written with limited scope of understanding. They're inflexible by definition. And then the third problem is they're usually written in response to some crisis. They're written in response to something that just went wrong. Example, we all take our shoes off when we go through the airport because some jackass after 9-11 tried to get on the plane and light a shoe bomb on fire. So...
A rule was made exactly because one guy tried to do one thing one time. By the way, he failed. But we still all take our shoes off in airports if we don't have... the ability to go around that process with another process that got created another set of rules because one guy did this one time and this is how most rules get created so you have a small company it doesn't have an expense policy
everyone you know it starts out small the founder spends money the way he wants he has a couple people with him when they travel they buy a few beers uh whatever and then some jackass decides he's going to book a first class flight And when he gets to the far end, he's going to take a bunch of people out for steak and $1,000 a bottle of wine. And he comes back and submits an expense report. And suddenly there's a new rule. This is how most rules get created. And so someone here says.
Beck City says, do you think most laws are reactionary because they're overall easier to determine as necessary? I think yes. Look.
there's an unlimited number of things you could make laws about and they're always being debated the things that get the effort and get passed are usually driven by a crisis so again i happen to think climate change is a problem you may not um but You're seeing a lot of regulation on the environment debated and some things passed as laws or regulation, what I'm calling rules here, because other people perceive it as a crisis.
similarly you're seeing a lot of laws and regulation passed around say transgender equity or equality because in the past people didn't consider that one way or the other as a problem uh to the same degree and now they do so whether you have people who are saying oh transgender you know these these
uh there's no such thing or these people can't use this restroom or that restroom and you have people making laws saying no you can't blah blah blah or you have other people in other places making a lot say yes you can it's in response to something that has arisen and so there's usually a forcing function well what that does is it creates reactionary laws that are about what you
They're very narrow because they have one purpose. We want to stop transgender people from going into this restroom or that restroom. Or we want to make sure anybody can go to any damn restroom they want. And so they're agenda driven. And again. In this case, I am not taking a perspective on either side of that debate. I'm just saying you can quickly see that people on each side.
Whether it's voting regulation, which is really popular right now, or transgender, or health, they're crisis-driven environment. And that results in short sighted rules that are about telling you what you can't do and about forcing behavior. Right. And so the rules aren't.
the good case of hey i want to guide you i want to keep you safe they're about i want to make you do what i want to make you do so yeah and so then we get to the so let's go back to being a leader here though what's a leader to do well leaders have three roles um sometimes leaders make the rules Sometimes leaders challenge or change the rules, and sometimes leaders need to make exceptions, either above board or below board, to the rules. And so advising him as a leader, here's the first thing.
When someone proposes that you should make a rule, one of the first things you should ask is do we really need a rule?
Because it's really easy to go do, and then I have all these problems that come downstream. Or is the real issue that someone behaved like a jackass, and we actually just need to go tell that person, stop being a jackass? So... 15 years ago no 20 years ago before i went to amazon i had the opportunity to help build a startup and i owned hr that was part of my responsibility and so i owned the company handbook
and i actually wrote a very short handbook that said we believe in the real it had a few like here's how you sign up for health care and stuff in it and then it said um we have only one rule we call it the reasonable person rule We expect you to behave like a reasonable person, which we do not define. And the lack of a specific definition of every term of reasonable will not prevent us.
from speaking to you and asking you to change your behavior if we feel it's unreasonable now it was a startup so we could get away with that vagueness and it's an incredibly broad term i don't know if awesome's comment is reasonable is very broad it was intentionally broad that company grew to 150 people and that format worked pretty well because
At that scale, we could have consensus about what reasonable looked like. And nobody sued us because there never arose a case where someone did something we said that's unreasonable and then ended up firing them and they sued us. that's the problem of big companies right why do people love rules we haven't talked about this yet big companies love rules because they even if the rules suck and are restrictive
They seek to give a shield and say, well, we wrote it down. That's our policy. They look. They give the illusion of uniformity and fairness. Even when that may not be true. So this is a great one if Danny Mac wants to say more or anybody else. It's easy to hide behind a rule. So if there's a rule against working from home.
Or working from home full time. And someone wants to work from home full time. I can either have a debate with them about. Is that a good thing for them? Are they the right person to do that? Do they have the right.
experience and maturity and productivity or i can say yeah it's against our rules um i once faced a really dumb situation i was traveling executive with a laptop so i had a power supply in my office where my docking station was i had a power supply in my work chair at home which is over here in this corner where i would plug in my laptop at night and then i would go on the road
well they gave me two power supplies and i went and asked for a third and they said oh our policy is two power supplies a person so I could either always be unplugging one and hopefully not forgetting it when I went on the road, or I could buy my own, or I could ask for an exception to the policy.
but the idea is policies make it really easy see i can't say well you're an asshole mr person you know mr it guy for not giving me a third power supply because he can say hey wait that's the rule i'm just following the rule people like rules somebody's here yeah awesome says homeowners associations rules allow you to hide behind
blaming someone other than just saying actually this is what i want and i'm in charge or this is my judgment and i have that authority because see people can argue with you and your judgment but the rules we don't argue with as much Note, by the way, I consider this, and I wanted to talk to all of you, I consider this to be a fundamental flaw in American education from day one. What do we teach people?
Do we mostly teach them how to reason and think about intent and ethics and outcomes? Or do we teach them follow the rules? There's a great criticism in our school system that it's all about how many days you'll attend.
where you'll sit, what classes you'll go to, what time you'll go, the bells will ring, where you'll walk in the hallways, what you'll wear, follow the rules, follow the rules, follow the rules. And we basically... teach kids stand in straight lines don't talk out of turn it's all about conformity and look i'm not for anarchy
but we don't do a very good job teaching people when to look for exceptions and when to ask for exceptions so i'm going to do that here in a minute i'm going to talk about as a leader how to think about making an exception and as an employee or someone else how to ask for an exception and then we'll also talk about when do you just break rules right because there are all kinds of rules that have
established exceptions they're very interesting um for example killing people is called murder unless it's self-defense then it's called self-defense unless it's in a military context then it's called war Speeding gets you a ticket unless you're taking an injured person to a hospital, in which case it's okay. And these examples go on and on of.
uh where you can refuse unethical requests or where you can violate written rules for special circumstances now interestingly here's a good question for you how many great innovations came from people following the rules procedures and practices they do There are lab researchers and great companies that have invented things working according to scientific method and strict regulation, drug companies, etc. I will not say no innovation comes from following the rules, but...
Many, many innovations come from either challenging the de facto cultural rules or the actual written rules. Whether you like it or not, the weed industry.
arose from druggies wanting to smoke and pushing for it yes also people wanting medicine i'm not discounting that but let's be honest a lot of it was people who wanted their damn pot pushing to have their pot whole new industry whether you like it or not many examples of this someone in chat may be able to come come up with a better example but there are whole new industries that get created again elon musk and electric cars
It's challenging the status quo, and status quo is gas engines. You make cars with gas, and that's how you think. Similarly, you make cars that are not software products. i don't own a tesla but i have a bunch of friends who want me to own a tesla and have been evangelizing them to me they're essentially a software product you get inside of it the damn thing is an upgradable rolling computer with a big battery
Also a drivetrain, but a big battery. So going back to the point, most success comes from knowing when to break the rules, to challenge the rules, to change. uh the status quo hefestus talks about money lending being illegal um there's another good historical example i'm not thinking of but obviously for example america the revolution came from a group of people deciding they were going to challenge the rules. The rule was King George in England ruled America and he could tax the people.
And the people decided at some point, no, we're going to make an exception to that rule. We're going to change the rule. And this is called rebellion. Leaders have to decide how to make good rules, when to make one-time exceptions of the rules, and when to change them, even if that requires rebellion.
and the understanding that you may be killed for doing the last one or fired so tough or even the middle one exceptions all right so when you're making a rule consider if you need it try not to make it if you don't have to if you're using it in lieu of simply speaking to someone under the reasonable person principle who just needs to be told off have the balls the guts have have
willingness to just go tell the person that's not okay and when they say well there's no rule against it be willing to address that with them too and say you're right there's only common sense and here we actually require common sense well that's not common to me that's not how i see it you know what be willing to face people down when you're a leader and say
That shit doesn't fly with me. If you want to whine and say it wasn't written down, get lost. Go find another team. Go find another company. Be willing. to stand up for what you believe and it sucks okay people argue with you oh it wasn't written down i'm gonna sue you that's not fair leaders care a lot about true fairness and care nothing about whiners and we have to talk about this for a minute judgment is imperfect
the challenge of being a leader is you have to decide when is somebody actually got a real point and they sincerely believe differently than you maybe for good reason and when are they exploiting the rules and whining looking for loopholes Twitch is a gaming site. People deal with this all the time in the sense that there are people who cheat at games and they use bots or clients and there are people who don't.
exploiting happens all the time and how are you going to fight back about it a whole can of worms which i am not qualified to get into but that all the twitch folks know about is of course anything to do with clothing or behavior policy on the site and what we know this is a problem with rules is that there's an unresolvable context problem What I wear on screen may be appropriate in one circumstance or context and inappropriate in another circumstance or context.
words i say can be appropriate in one context and inappropriate in another do you have this problem it was pointed out to me someone says well just kill yourself well In one place, that's dangerous bullying that can lead to a suicide. In another place, that's perfectly valid advice in a game. Your character's hosed. Might as well get out of the game and just restart.
Same words, very different context. And people hide behind and say, well, that's not banned language. These are unwinnable. Marilyn, thank you for... following and the sub leaders have the guts to stand up and say you know what we made a judgment call this person is behaving inappropriately and they're using the rules as a shield for bad behavior fuck them get them off our site and you can rage about it all you want and this person had similar behaviors in a different context and they're welcome
Now that's super hard to do corporately. Why? Because reasonable people can disagree. And because people lie about their agendas. some people want to see a lot of nudity and soft porn on twitch so they say oh that person's following the rules some people don't want to see any of it and they're prudes and they're all over like people differ as a leader you're going to have to take a lot of shit from people who have agendas this show is never about telling you
how you can always be liked or always win it is about telling you what it means to be a leader and you're gonna have to sometimes make hard choices that people aren't gonna like by the way it works great at least in part bezos richest man in the world got rich no doubt because he partly knew what the hell he was doing he has said for 20 years be willing
to be misunderstood for a long period of time so what he specifically meant was be willing to have people not like what you've said or done or chosen and ridicule you in the press because if you have a vision and a mission sometimes you've got to be willing to stick to it and not worry about what people think very hard to do made him very rich
whether you like that his wealth or not is not the point it worked so let's talk about specific advice exceptions leaders sometimes are asked about rules and they have the power to make an exception yeah our rule says you have to come to the office you can still work from home our rule says no business class flights you can take a business class flight our rule says file all this paperwork to do this thing we're going to shortcut it
Our rule says this or that or our best practice. We're going to not do it that way. Leaders have to make that choice. And here's some concrete advice. Number one.
well-written rules had an intention the first thing you can ask is what was the intention of this rule and how does that intention how is this circumstance relevant to that intention so why is there a speed limit of 65 in a lot of places 65 miles an hour for those of you in the u.s a very common speed limit on highways why is the speed limit 65 well there's a number of reasons but normally one of the reasons is the idea that driving faster than that
becomes unsafe at some level now maybe yeah first all drivers are different the 90 year old half blind guy with no reaction speed is probably not safe as much of a speed as the 30 year old but number two again i talked about emergency vehicles or cops they go faster than the speed limit all the time they're not unsafe or maybe they are when a ambulance speeds through traffic is it unsafe well it's a danger in some ways it's moving not at the flow of traffic
Why does it do that? Because there's a higher cause. The ambulance is going to treat an injured person. And so the thought is that takes precedence. The risk of going slow is bigger.
than the risks to people of going fast so in any of these cases you have to deal with the risk and what was the intention how does it compare so first thing you can do as a leader is say what was this rule intended to do and is following the letter of the rule going to enhance the intention or not the intention or not And if it's not, you may want to consider an exception. The second thing to consider about exceptions is this is really actionable advice you can take away.
Imagine you're going to have to explain that exception in public to your team and your leadership. You may not have to, but imagine you are going to have to. Can you do it? So I can easily stand up in front of people and say, yes i can explain why ambulances go faster than the speed limit i don't have any problem with that work from home let's say right uh
an office has a hybrid policy where they want you in the office three days a week somebody wants to work from home you grant that exception how are you going to explain it what makes that person able to work from home all the time and other people not able to um can you look the other people in the face and tell them this is why susan can stay home and fred you need to be here
right uh and people you know as it says everyone's going to be pissed why is that because this is important exceptions are dangerous why it's worth me standing up to get this point clear Stupid Mike. If. We have in America, at least a deep seated belief in equality.
One person, one vote, one set of rights. We're all equal under the law. We pound away just like we pound away follow the rules. We pound away. We're all equal. We're all equal. We all deserve equality. We all have equal rights. Equal rights. So treating people differently with exceptions is dangerous because if I say this person can work from home and this person needs to be in the office, well, that's unfair.
so i've got to be able to answer to that now i may need to look someone in the eyes and say you know what i've forgotten which names i use but sarah has 20 years of experience and during the pandemic her productivity went provably up i'm afraid yours didn't now you want to see people pissed i got to be willing to own that or i may have to look at them and say you know what Ralph is our top producing salesperson, not only in our group, but I've ever seen. He was going to leave to our competitor.
if he couldn't work from home i made a decision that his economic value to your and my stock price merits an exception so you some sometimes it's as simple as money some people yeah and some people do quit okay remember this is important exceptions are earned usually in a good workplace with a good boss ideally some people do get treatment others don't and they get it because they merit it now that pisses other people off and you may lose them but if you have to pick you lose the people
who weren't performing that well anyway um so this is all super hard though how are you going to explain that exception and this is why by the way sometimes you Don't advertise your exceptions. When we acquired these beverages, if they were for use by anyone that the state doesn't agree should have them, We certainly didn't run around the liquor store talking about that. So, and Hephaestus has a great point here.
which is it's worth checking for yourself if you're making exceptions all the time there's a problem with the rule right it the it's a great question just like i said if you're asked to make a rule you should ask do you really need a rule if you're asked to make an exception or frequently asked to make an exception you better wonder what's wrong with the rule what's incomplete what's missing what should we do now the challenge here
is that rules tend to just get more and more voluminous and more complex and more in convoluted and involuted and bigger look at our tax code look at all the supreme court decisions and what it takes to be a lawyer expense reports are a good place to look at that example.
So it starts with no travel policy. Then somebody overspends. You say, OK, it's this many dollars a day for food and this many dollars for a hotel. But then you have the problem that there's a sold out convention and all the hotels are expensive. So you need an exception.
And you have the problem that hotels in New York that you can get for $200 are flea bags that are disgusting. And hotels you can get in Des Moines for $200 are great. So you need rules for different cities or different cost structures. And you need more and more complexity to the rules. None of these rules.
ideally would be needed if people could be reasonable at scale and say you know i stay in a nice clean hotel but i don't stay at the waldorf astoria and i don't stay in a four-room suite penthouse suite when i'm working but people don't do that because they're like well there is this mindset see are teaching people always follow the rules as opposed to do what's right we teach them fault we teach them that those are the same thing
We teach them that if you follow the rules, you're a good person and you're right. And the problem that creates is if there's no rule against it, then doing it's okay. Well, there was no rule that said don't spend $1,000 on wine at dinner. There was no rule that said don't get a four-bedroom penthouse suite in New York City for $10,000 a night, so I did it. There's no rule. This is how we teach people and we need to change that.
going backwards to the point of when you're asked to make an exception you need to think about the intent of the rule think about how you're going to explain it and then you need to think about um Should you change the rule? On the other side, what you need to also think about is, am I being biased because I personally don't like this rule or because I personally like or do not like this person?
And I will say, here's a place where I think I learned something from my coach in the article she published that I put in our Discord and general chat. i probably have been biased without realizing without being conscious of it particularly by rules i don't like so if i don't like a rule i'm looking for any excuse to make an exception to it if i do like a rule i'm looking for any excuse to enforce it
That probably, I'm guessing, is bad leadership on my part. So I picked an example of something I never had to make a decision on. I personally am not that fond of pets in the office. So some people love it and I get it. It just doesn't happen to fit me. And so I don't necessarily like other people's dogs running around my office.
uh you know coming up to me or i don't like having to get in an elevator with an unknown dog and wondering just how stable is this dog but that's me some people are like oh fido i love it oh right And that's cool. It's just not me. The result of this is, if I had ever been called upon to make a decision of some kind or an exception about dogs in the office,
I probably would have been really eager to say send Fido home. That's a bias, though. It's at least worth stepping back and saying, well, at least know your own biases. same thing with people you have friends in the office you have people you like you have people who annoy you i probably and i think all of us but i probably would have been much quicker to enforce rules with people i didn't like or struggled with and much quicker to look a little bit the other way with people i did like
That's not good leadership behavior. Consistency and fairness is fairness, even if it's not equality, is good leadership behavior. So I'm being transparent about that because I got a lesson.
um that if i'm in a leadership context again i will try to do differently and realize you know i should judge this on its merits not on the fact that this person drives me up the fucking wall so this gets better as you drink it it's probably a scary thought okay um because i would have rated it like a three star out of ten when i started now i'd give it like a five which isn't great but it's going up probably four more of them i think it's fantastic um okay last thing is
when you change the rules, when you break the rules. I'm a big advocate that the... Rules exist to support and enhance a business, and if they're in the way, you find a way to achieve the business end. That can sound dangerously close to the ends justify the means. I'm not talking about unethical activities. I'm not talking about, I'm definitely not talking about unethical activities. By the way, we could do a sidelight.
for those of you who here you can sound off and chat who here and i'm sure danny's one of them but who here has seen the lawsuit filed against blizzard entertainment by the state of california or reddit um holy gods uh if any of the stuff in there is true and innocent until proven guilty um but if some of the stuff in there is true wow unethical oh my god like who's just such terrible judgment and it's wide enough and deep enough right it's it's
The allegations are broad enough that people had to know. I mean, holy smokes. The stuff in the allegation is just, who could have thought it's a good idea?
you know and they had to know there's there's i won't go into the graphic details but there's allegations of a group passing around pictures um you know uh it looks like a man and a woman in the group were together and the man took some revealing pictures of the woman and then shared them with his teammates there is no way anything about that is a good idea on any of their parts
right why did he do it why did she let the pictures be taken why did the other people look and not send him down the river for it like man yeah i know danny and then she killed herself as a result But a bunch of people knew. If this is true, again, innocent until proven guilty. I don't know the facts. But as the real Jessica says, what the actual fuck? If you read this complaint.
activision blizzard yes it's one of those things that if it's true wow total absent absence of any kind of morals and judgment so when i talk about breaking the rules I am not talking about anything like that. I'm talking about getting things done by streamlining policy, going around policy.
and how do you tell the difference well number one if you're harming someone or exploiting someone probably bad number two break laws more carefully than you break rules i won't say never break a law but think two or three times and be willing to accept the consequences right when i speed i am breaking the law i feel confident that everyone here who is who drives has at some point in their life sped well speeding has a ticket and so
I am willing to accept the small risk of a ticket in order to sometimes speed. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe in your eyes. I don't know. I can live with it. I can live with you not liking it too. At the same time, I normally drive around the speed limit, but sometimes I speed. And interestingly, we obviously don't consider speeding.
such a bad crime this the fine for speeding there's a country i think it's sweden but i think one of the norwegian country well norway's a place sorry one of the scandinavian countries has a law where the fine for speeding is one percent of your income now that's enforcement right that fine scales
and uh holy shit you won't speak too much if it's yeah it might be finland i i don't uh i believe there's a scandinavian country with that law i may be wrong it may be outdated it may be urban legend one of you can find out But the point is, even the people who wrote the law said, well, this law is moderately important. We want you to follow the law, but we understand.
you'll be imperfect at it so we have a fine and point system not one percent of your income and not we haul you out of the car and shoot you on the roadside um so When you're going to break a rule, consider what is the end aim and what harm are you going to do? And what is the guidance on how severe bending this rule is?
That's where leaders have to have judgment and a word we call nuance. You've got to look at the nuance of the situation. You've got to look at the details. Look, I've talked a lot today. I've been live an hour, probably a little more. If all of this talk comes down to leaders have to exercise judgment.
And that requires thinking about the reasons for something and then being willing to take flack if the reasons and the logic goes against the written rules. That's a quick summary that's an hour in. Alright. What else? Last point. How do you ask for an exception? You're one of these people. There's a bunch of rules. You're not the boss. You're not the leader. How do you ask for an exception? Well, same way. You've got to understand.
What was the purpose of the rule? And can you approach the leader who can grant the exception with a line of reasoning that talks? To the purpose rather than the rule. Second, frankly, can you help them not have to defend it in public? A public exception.
is harder than a private exception and all kinds of things get done under the table off the books that make sense for a business and getting good at making clear we can i can do this i need this help and know you know this can be something that's over and done with and we get the benefits quickly Now, another good point is, is it better to ask forgiveness than permission? A good friend of mine, some of you know him, helped me set up this dream, a guy named Dave.
I sometimes call him Awesome Dave, but then we have an awesome here already. He once showed me a photo of a soldier. He was in the U.S. Army Reserve. He showed me a photo of a soldier on a bulldozer clearing a log jam from a flooded creek so the floodwaters could drain away from this area of houses. And he said, yeah, we gave everyone orders not to risk their bulldozers, not to risk government equipment. And he broke that rule, clearing the stream.
If he'd have lost the dozer, we would have court-martialed him. But since it worked, we're going to give him a medal. This was unironically what the Army was going to do in that case. The guy broke the standing orders, but it worked and he saved a bunch of people's houses, so they're going to give him a medal instead. This is fairly common, right? If the rules exist...
Because companies don't want you to do bad things that cost them money or cause them to fail. But the rules... are flexible when you get enough results um and that's understanding reality
But if you choose to break those rules, you've got to be willing to pay the cost. So that guy who took the bulldozer into the creek, he had to... know or at least be willing to accept you know if i screw this up and lose the bulldozer i'm gonna be court-martialed for it because i was told not to so he made a decision and it worked out
good for him but don't break a rule where you can't live with the consequences so when i talk about speeding when all of you talk about speeding why do we speed let's be really honest about this because if the fine was 50 percent of your income or a year in jail none of us would speed we'd be begging people to install things on our cars that prevented us from accidentally speeding
not because we wanted to go slower but because we didn't want the punishment so why do we speed we speed because we can accept the consequences if you're going to break a rule or ask for an exception Be willing to accept the consequences. Be willing to stand up and say, you know, grant me this opportunity to work from home. i will prove to you it's worth it so work from home argument you want to make this argument oh the company has a back to office policy i want to stay working from home fine
Allow me to work from home for three months. I will show you XYZ results or productivity. If I don't, I will either come to the office or accept you terminating me and I'll go find work elsewhere. Make a deal. Make a deal with teeth. Make a deal where you accept the consequences in your bargain. All right, I've talked a lot. It's been fun. Y'all have been great listeners. I've loved watching the chat. What?
questions do you have and i will go see if you put anything in our q a tool i'm going there right now it doesn't look like anybody has but i'm double checking yeah nobody is asking any questions there but if you have questions for me because this has been a good topic i would love to hear your questions
and yes Hephaestus is a leader on our team he says it's 100 it's easier to get exceptions if you will put skin in the game totally recommend doing that because if you want an exception there must be a reason right i wanted a third power supply for my um laptop so i could travel well i traveled a lot and i did good work so i can ask for the exception and say look
Give me this because I travel 60 nights a year. And you want to enable my traveling. Make sure I never end up with a laptop. That's a stupid small example. But you always give a reason for the exception. You don't just say, well, I don't like it. I want it to be different. All right. Any other questions, comments, things you want to talk about?
I'm glad it was just posted our next show tomorrow. I'll have retired U.S. Army General Chris Hughes on. He just goes by Chris. I'll end up calling him Chris some of the time, not just General Hughes all the time. This guy commanded... he led people in afghanistan he led them in iraq he wrote a book i'll show the book here in a second if you're curious you don't have to buy the book necessarily but to know what he's done he led 45 49 000 soldiers in fort knox kentucky
um he's an amazing guy and very very humble in the end he's uh both an impressive leader i respect and a kid from iowa he's both at the same time let me find this so i can put it up on screen i'm gonna blow this up a little and then i'll flip over hold on all right so this is his book
it's called war on two fronts um an infantry commander's war in iraq and the pentagon he wrote this back when he was still a colonel after he had just come back from fighting in iraq and i don't know if we will tell this story but
he did some very clever emotional intelligence things in iraq he did something incredibly ballsy um danny i see your question i'll get to it in a second the most interesting story in here and what launched i guess his career to become a general he was in a city in iraq he was leading his troops
in the direction of a mosque that was led where the home of a very high imam was with that mosque and even though there were no rebels involved it was early in the war and the people were kind of okay or not actively attacking or against the soldiers when they saw the soldiers heading in the direction of the mosque they started to become very upset and throw rocks and they were worried he did something
really ballsy which is when he realized there was a problem and the people felt threatened he had his soldiers point their guns down okay that's not a big deal and take a knee so go to one knee like you would on an athletic field to de-escalate the situation while his interpreters tried to explain that they were not seeking to disturb this mosque well to have your soldiers take a passive position in front of a crowd throwing rocks at them man
that's a leadership decision and one i probably wouldn't have made being honest i probably i hate to say this i probably would have screwed that up and ended up in a shooting war in front of a church effectively a mosque he pulled it off and i guess it was caught on film the next show is tomorrow tomorrow at 2 p.m pacific is when general hughes will join us oh and uh for all my loyal folks who are here a lot and will be here tomorrow um Chris Hughes lives in Iowa on a farm and uh he had I think
google fiber installed but i don't want to impugn google he had fiber installed to his farm and at least as of friday his zoom was cutting in and out it was freezing for short moments so if he's on zoom with me tomorrow and there's occasional freezes in his video there's nothing we he's trying to get it fixed before the show but if he doesn't we're gonna live with it
so if you see that tomorrow and people uh are having a cow about it in chat just tell them he's doing his best and it's an it problem with his new fiber installation and deal with it um so let's see danny asked a question how do you encourage others to demonstrate leadership in tough situations moral support and accountability it's two sides of a coin
The best way is to talk to them and say, look, you have an opportunity to step up here and I will help rally people behind you. Leaders are always afraid.
that if they make a bad decision they'll have a rebellion on their hands so king george right we were talking about the u.s um he made a bad decision he got himself a rebellion and eventually lost himself the colonies leaders always have to ask themselves if i make this decision will i be successful will it stick or will it will it hurt my career will i do something wrong will i lose my job will i fail in this role
And a lot of decisions are ambiguous. They can go either way. There are a few matters that many of us would call right and wrong, but a lot of things have gray areas. And so help the leader understand how you're gonna make it work out for them. That's the positive way. Hey, do this and we'll support you. We'll get you results. That's how you encourage them positively. Now, the negative way to encourage leaders.
is accountability and say you know what you need to take action on this and i'll support you but if you don't take action on it i gotta let you know i'm gonna shine a light on it it's not on you personally but Either you act on this or I will. So I was thinking about an example of this. I was thinking about this today. I'll tell this story.
many many years ago i went away to a leadership off-site for amazon a leadership training i was a younger leader earlier in my career and i went to a leadership training at a hotel an off-site hotel And after a long day of this training, we all went to the bar. And I was talking to the bartender and the bartender said, oh, fuck, basically. He may not have used that word. He said, oh, fuck, it's you Amazon guys. And I'm like.
whoa like we've never been here what's the issue he's like ah you haven't been here but there were a bunch of amazon people here a few weeks ago And when I got ready to close the bar for the night, they started threatening me and complaining, keep the bar open and abusing me. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is not the Amazon I want to work for. It's not the Amazon I believe in. I'm very sorry that happened to you.
and he's but he was edgy about it well son of a bitch if we don't get to the end of the time and one of the guys who's with us another leader from another part of amazon has gotten a little sloshed and when the guy says last call he goes up and tells you know kind of slurs his way at telling the guy screw you you need to keep it open no last call and abusing him well this is a double facepalm moment right this is
this guy has told me this happens that amazonians behave like assholes i've said oh boy that's not the amazon i know and not the amazon i want and i'm really sorry for that and i'm sure it won't happen tonight and then here's this guy son you know straight up well i intervened in that situation to a limited degree i i grabbed the guy i'm like hey wait wait this isn't right
you know he needs to close the bar kind of trying to talk him down with only mixed success and meanwhile the guy obviously is pretty irritated the bartender and i think justifiably so if i was thinking if i had that to do that again i'd have taken that guy on a lot more strongly and said your behavior is inappropriate you need to stop and you're gonna stop or i'm gonna make you stop
i was not the leader i am today today i would handle that hopefully differently but remember a lot of these situations arise in the instant and no one wants to be the first one to speak up so danny answering your question You've got to let the leader know that you're expecting action from them, that you've got their back, but you're also not, the action's going to happen whether they do it or not. So they have a chance to be a leader or to be the leader who didn't lead.
And that's the other way you encourage him. The question is, how are you going to make him stop? I think I would have... loudly called attention um loudly called attention there were 20 other people there who weren't quite sure of what's going on i think if i had just loudly run down
the situation and said hey everybody need your attention for a minute we have a little bit of a situation here our fine bartender who's been serving us all night told me that the last group of amazonians that were here abused him when he tried to close the bar
Now he's trying to close the bar and we have one member of our party who can't seem to get the message that the bar is closing and is being abusive to someone who's been good to us all night. I'm telling him that's not okay. Who is with me?
That would have been the power move. So, I wish... Now, I didn't... think to do that and have the courage to do that at that time i did intervene but not to that level and you know you don't have to bring out the tack nuke right away the guy i was talking to if he'd have said all right whatever you know we'll let it go i wouldn't need to do that he wasn't not only was he abusing the bartender he wasn't happy with me for getting involved well
Live and learn, right? Hey, what if the guy that's being the asshole of the bartender was your boss? It's obviously harder. You have to decide. How much is what's right worth your job? Or the other way to look at it is, is your job worth?
doing something or going along with something you don't agree with so i think you just got here but we were talking about the lawsuit against activision blizzard that lawsuit filed by the government of california alleges that among other things a group of employees at um activision blizzard were passing around nude photos that they got of a woman on their team
And that as a result, she committed suicide. Now, let's assume for a minute that's true, granting that it's alleged and unproven. If that guy... is my boss and he's doing that i need to make the decision that is so wrong that if it costs me my job telling him to stop that's totally fine because not being involved in degrading a woman and having her kill herself is more important to me than any given job so it depends now
If the guy is just kind of pestering the bartender and saying, hey, can't you stay open? Really wish you would. And the guy's like, man, I've told you this isn't how I do it. Maybe I let that go. You've got to make a decision where you're going to draw the line.
but there are lines that are jobs jobs come and go a boss of mine once said i was looking for a job when i found this one the point is you've been unemployed before you'll be unemployed again do i throw away jobs casually no but what is your self-esteem worth right what are what what do you want to live with because i'll tell you this when you're old really old older than me which i know for some of you you think is quite old what job you had will not be nearly as much
positive or haunting to you as people you hurt sleeping at night because you helped get someone killed because you didn't speak up man that kind of silence has got to cut right if you were in a situation where you said you know i was complicit in getting that woman killed i was gonna sleep a lot harder than yeah i stuck my neck out and the jerks at blizzard fired me so i went to work for whatever wizards of the coast or you know 2k like or twitch so
I don't know. So Mixer, you have a great question. In this case, first, your managers are assholes.
right generally like they should be leading by example um second i do feel however someone risking their own safety i am less eager to challenge on stuff right i think people who ride motorcycles without helmets are fools i'm not super eager to run around and tell people on motorcycles they must wear helmets now i feel the unfair part is they don't accept the consequences of that when they get hurt
they don't want to pay the medical bills they they want to be on kept on life support by the state but i digress to your point which is a fair question of where this stuff gets hard and nuanced and why you have to be a true leader I think you tell them, but unless it's your job to enforce the safety policy, you remind them once or twice, then you let it go, is my opinion.
and my the reason for that is in the end it's their eyes um now if you're the safety person you have to have a different conversation with them and say look you're undermining me doing my job put your damn glasses on sir, so that I can do my job so that all of us end up with zero recordable lost time incidents and we're better off. So please wear your glasses.
and if they don't do it then you gotta decide you're willing to quit over it you're not going to beat them over the head with a stick and force glasses onto their face but remember um you know there are other places you can work yeah so it's not your job then i would tell them but i wouldn't you know in the end that's between them and the regulations standing up for people who are being abused is not the same as being the person
who pedantically butts in and decides you're the rules lawyer so i don't know i wouldn't i wouldn't I wouldn't go looking for fights. They're mostly harming themselves, although they're setting a bad example. I probably wouldn't fight that one. Now. If they were doing something that risks others. All right, we'll make this the last question because I've covered a lot today and I have to be ready for tomorrow.
if you're blizzard how would you handle this stuff oh well the first thing their handling of it seemed bad if you read what they did they went and replied basically and said none of this happened and california is really mean to us and they shouldn't have sued us well holy shit your stuff sounds pretty bad i think the only way you can handle it is transparency um
first you're gonna have to weather some bad stuff but second you've got to be transparent about it and third transparent means open your books let it be seen the other thing you got to do is if some of these people really did this stuff you should be cleaning house um i will tell you a story it disgusts me um i was working in a company uh many many years ago long pre-amazon
And an employee came to me and he said, I'm concerned. I think our chief financial officer is sleeping with the office manager. uh basically it's a small company so like with the receptionist the office manager and i said well if that's true i was young and not as experienced i said if that's true why do you care like it's between them he said no no it's not see she may be getting special treatment it's first it's inappropriate and awkward in the office but second
um she may be getting special treatment raises privileges etc that we're not because of this relationship and i said okay i see your point i'm gonna fast forward this i went and talked to some people found out it was true
and the bottom line is when it got to our CEO his first question was oh my god how do we manage this in such a way that we don't lose any key employees well that is a terrible answer his interest was in oh we've got this problem how do we handle it so that we don't lose anybody valuable to us total total wrong answer right what blizzard needs to do is go clean house if anybody's been involved in this get them the hell out and if that means a couple people sue you for wrongful termination
because you like didn't process all the paperwork and you knew they were scum and you fired them but you didn't have all the like written proof i would take that chance i would clean house so yeah Crisis situations tell you where a company's values really are. Yeah. And that CEO's value certainly wasn't with the ethics of the employee situation because that situation ended up.
exactly as you would expect the executive stayed the office manager went you know shouldn't have been that way um but you know how to manage a pr there is no my god i don't know i'm not a pr person um there is no way to manage the pr on their situation i think what you do though the best you can do is you say here's what we're doing to work on it here's our plan so yeah it's showing my
I get that Amazon has my zip code. I don't hide the fact that I live in suburban Seattle, but whatever. I should go back to this. But people know I live in suburban Seattle, specifically in this case. the suburb of Puyallup. Um, so, but thank you mixer for telling me that. Um, anyway, all right, folks.
i'm gonna call it good i've been talking a while um can we do a stream q a about unions whether you're good or bad blah i'm not at all an expert on that so that would be a lot of me spouting my uninformed opinion which probably is not a good stream. So I don't think I can do that unless we could find guests who are really good.
who really have knowledge there so i've never managed union employees i've never been a part of a union um so that would not be i'm not an expert there and i try not to while i certainly have opinions not all of them perfectly informed i try not to just endlessly spout them so i hope you come back tomorrow 2 p.m pacific see the show uh with general chris hughes learn about specifically i ask him i want to talk to him about two things how do you lead
at such massive scale and what is the development path that gets a leader ready what are the steps that gets a leader ready to lead a hundred thousand people that's a huge question all right everybody thank you to the twitch staff who dropped by the long-term subs my moderators and all of you for helping me uh sharpen and learn um and uh i look forward to seeing you tomorrow until then Get outside, have some fun, be good to each other. And as always...