From Navy SEAL to CEO: Leadership, Resilience, and Vision | Marty Strong

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Welcome to another episode of the Executive Connect,

where we explore the intersection of leadership, innovation, and personal development. Today I'm excited to have Marty Strong with us here today. He is a retired Navy SEAL CEO, author and motivational speaker, Welcome Marty. How are you doing, Melissa? Good. I'm excited to hear about your journey from being a Navy SEAL to becoming a successful CEO and author. It's absolutely fascinating.

Can you share a little bit about your transition from military to civilian life and what motivated you to pursue a career in business? I'll try to make it sound fascinating. It didn't seem as fascinating during the trip, but I guess it's not too bad looking back at it. I joined the Navy. I was 17 years old. We had about 125 pounds soaked in wet and ended up at the SEAL selection course in Coronado, California.

There was a bunch of errors that got me there. I didn't initially want to go there, but when I got there, a bunch of the older enlisted people talked me into staying. It's a volunteer program. I volunteered and said, "Hey, if it doesn't work out, the Navy will send you where you're supposed to go." I put one foot in front of the other, and along with another 126 students that started, six months later, 13 of us graduated. That started a 20-year career in the SEAL teams.

I spent half of it as an enlisted SEAL, and got an undergraduate degree in business administration while I was in the first 10 years of my service. Then I went to Oswars-Canett School, came right back into the SEAL team. My Navy experience was always in the SEAL teams, half enlisted, and half officer. Then I retired, went into the financial services industry.

It's been eight years as a portfolio manager, primarily with UBS, United Bank of Switzerland, and then left that and got into some government work, and eventually ended up somehow ended up as a CEO of a healthcare company. That's what I am right now. That's kind of a quick nutshell. I love it. So many different hats. Now, you've written not one, not two,

but three best selling books on leadership and strategy. What inspired you to start writing, and how do you balance your writing with your other professional responsibilities as CEO? I probably read about 60 books a year, and say probably 20 of the books are fiction, and the rest of them are non-fiction. I read every possible category you can think of. I really read things about religion, philosophy, and sociology, and geopolitical issues.

I read lots, lots of biographies. That's something I've been doing ever since I was in my teens. Most people tell you if you want to write, read it. The more you read, the more you're comfortable with the way the pros, the explanation on paper, different writers, different styles, different ways of communicating, inspiring, informing, whatever is that you're trying to get across.

In the military, you have the right mission plans, and you have to get up and present for people explain exactly what you think is going to happen, where all the assumptions are, how your plan is going to deal with all the different issues and mitigate those issues, and how you think it's going to turn out, which I could tell you at 90% of the time, that's not the way it turns out.

But you still have to go through that exercise, and that all gives you a sense of structure between experiencing good writing, and doing lots and lots of storyboard style program management style planning processes as a CEO. So it wasn't that hard to decide to write something and put pen to paper. So it was, I was doing lots of consulting, lots of coaching and mentoring, as it kind of a side thing to my normal job,

and somebody said, "Well, why don't you do this, you know, for money? Why don't you actually put a shingle out there and try to do this?" And I didn't really think about it much, but eventually I thought, "Well, okay, if I did that, what would I have to do?" And if it was a two or three or four year plan, kind of if I want to get away from being a CEO someday,

and I read, you know, "It's good to have a book. It's good to have a platform of your thoughts, your philosophy, whatever it is, because you can always point to it, you can give it to people, they can get halfway to whatever it is you're trying to convey." And that's how I wrote the first book, Being Emble. I basically sat down and said, "I'm going to codify all the things I've been saying to people for years about different aspects of leadership."

And I'll tell you that, it's a daunting task. I have four or five other business leaders write their first books. And I feel good because every one of them had that same freeze moment that I had, which is nobody is going to want to read anything I have to say.

And you stare at the screen and you go, "What am I doing? Nobody is going to want to know what Marty Strong, what he has to say, what his opinions are, is a gazillion leadership books, I stopped and started, I stopped and started like 15 times." And finally I sat down and said, "You know, I'm just going to write it and see what happens." And it was turning into a manual or something. And that's how I started with the first book.

And eventually, once you started getting the rhythm of it, it's very humbling because you have to really look into what it is. And this is what you think in how you conduct yourself as a leader, as a manager, as a creative person, planning and thinking in the future. But you start to realize how many people influenced you. You start to realize that you're the sum total of all these different influences, mentors, different education events, experiences, good, bad, good, and bad experiences.

I realized that I learned a lot and had a lot of core thoughts about business from observing bad examples. Actually, I seemed like that was a bigger contributor to my personal philosophies was seeing things go wrong. Because then when things go wrong, you get to see how everybody reacts. Intellectually and emotionally and professionally. And it's crazy, right? Everybody's like, it's like COVID. It's like some people cry, some people crawl in the corner and hope it all goes away.

Some people step up and suddenly, you know, they're the proverbial lifting up the car to get the person up from one of the cars.

They suddenly have superhuman strength. All these weird reactions happen. And I remember all that. And I started, I started thinking, okay, I can put this into my, my discussion here. And that led to the second book, which was more about looking at the horizon, thinking about strategy and then the third book that's coming out here in December about creativity and innovation.

That's great. I, you said something I love. I think we learned so much from failing or mistakes we made or witnessing, like you said, the way that people do it wrongly. I have to imagine being a Navy seal you've seen a lot that's scary, ways of things that have failed. And so I want to switch a little bit to talk about defeating the fear of failure. And not just for yourself, personally, but both professionally and personally.

So kind of going on what you were saying about your book, be nimble. You talked about a little bit about the creative mindset of a Navy seal. How does that mindset help you overcome fear? And what did you learn at your time being a seal that has helped you professionally? So I'll start with the definition of fear. I mean, most people think of fears physical fear like being attacked on the street, that's everything.

I discuss more of the psychological and intellectual fear of failure. And it's a fear of failure. It's not a fear of bodily harm and or death or anything like that. So, you know, it's a little bit less in the consequence scale, but still anybody that is listening to me knows exactly what it means because this can be debilitating.

You can have an event happen to you professionally or personally that basically strips away your sense of confidence. And you just kind of stand there, what are you going to do? And or can you ever do anything again that it'll make a difference. So in the seal teams, it's all about preparation.

So you constantly trained. And I just watched a Joe Rogan podcast with a Navy fighter pilot and all I kept talking about is all we do is train, train, train, train. The training was harder than the real combat. It was more stressful than the real combat, real combat. And that's exactly the way we would train. We would throw so many things at each other that we would fail every single time in practice.

And it's think of it like if you're a boxer and every time you got in the ring for two years, trained to become a professional boxer, you've got your butt kicked. But the point of that is when you're getting your butt kicked, you're learning. And I think of any any Navy seal or special ops professional would tell you that somebody tells you that they had always perfect missions that lying to you because even even after you actually get out there and do a real combat mission.

Nine times out of 10, a lot of it starts to fall apart. The assumptions start to crumble. The intelligence is a snapshot of time. There's five people at the place. You get there are 50 people to play with with guard dogs. You know, they were right when you when you took off in the plane, you had to wherever you were going to go to, but now it's a whole different situation.

So you start to learn that the practice is important. It tells you how to intellectually and emotionally and competently deal with the constantly changing situation. The context changing all the time. So you're not relying relying on perfection of outcome. You know, we're always going to get there. We're always going to know we have enough gas to get get to where we need to get you know if you always do that. You run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, our lonely highway. You freak out.

But if you practice for that. And if you prep for that, you've got to get tank and gas in the trunk. You get some other fallback plan. The fear factor starts to shrink because you prepare new advance for that situation that would possibly hits you with the debilitating fear. So in business, you can do the same thing in business. You can you can look at look at these situations. You can storyboard out.

A loss of your major, your biggest customer loss of a major market, a failure penetrated a market the way you plan to the loss of a key employee or leader. These are all things that you shouldn't just go a lot, a lot down that road waiting for that thing to happen and then suddenly be caught, you know, flat footed. You should be thinking them through as a senior leader. You should be thinking it through as a leader and manager of a lot of different groups.

The different divisions of labor should all be sitting there every day saying, are we going to have enough gas or are we going to have enough money or we can have the right people. What happens if we don't what happens if we don't what happens if you don't. Okay, what how do we prepare for that day and in advance when we do it that day comes.

What's our fallback? What are what are allies look like? You know, what kind of resources can we cap into again? You're lowering the actual true impact of the failure and the fear of failure by preparing for that failure way in advance. And then the last thing in both cases is you just have to personally prepare yourself for the moment and know that when you're practicing failure, how did you react personally as a leader and then be very honest with yourself.

It's okay. I need to call more. I need to take a deeper breath and not get old jacked up with all everybody else's emotions. I need to calm down. My function is to gather everybody get them calm down and the more you think about that the day it happens. You can surprise yourself. You only realize you're doing it later on two weeks later, somebody said, yeah, when that happened, you were just calm and cool as ice and you were just saying, you know, everybody get in here.

Let's figure out how to reinvent the company. Let's figure out how we have to do what to do to get this thing done. So those are all the kind of the things that feed into both business and being a seal. I love it. I want to talk about maybe one of your experiences during your time in the Navy that you had a confront and really overcome fear that you can share with our listeners. Maybe an example.

So again, it's not physical fear, but I'll send it up because I've used this example in speeches. I was on, I guess it was about 13th mission, combat mission. I had 36 and for 12 combat missions in a row, everything had basically worked. The plans pretty much worked and even when the plan fell apart, we came up with a plan like a pick up basketball game in the moment in the dark and we executed it.

We found everybody we were supposed to fly and we got, you know, we got the materials we were supposed to get off the street weapons, all kinds of other things. We did everything we were supposed to do. And essentially, I had like a 12 and no record as a leader. So I was a guy in command and my men, you know, thought, I'm pretty smart. I seem to be thinking through all this stuff and I was very calm and things weren't going exactly right.

And then we had a really big mission where everybody in the world was looking at us. There were planes, planes intelligence collection planes that were looking down at us. There were people in the states that were paying attention to us on screens. There were large forces that were staged to come in when we took a compound to come rushing in and they were all sitting there waiting for us and everybody was on radios and everybody is communicating.

And there's a checklist as you're going through all the steps and phases of the mission. And they said it's a separate these steps left to the actual completion of the mission and I think started really going bad. And we were stuck in mud in 18 foot title change. We had to abandon our boats and we had to slog through this huge swamp and we were basically covered in mud from the top of our head to our feet.

So we probably with combat equipment on and everything we all probably had about 150 pounds of dead weight on our bodies while we were trying to climb through the swamp. And we got lost in there, I mean, I got lost in there because I was in charge of the navigation is the leader. And after about three or four hours of being in the swamp, which was two or three hours after we left the, the both that dropped us off in the ocean. We popped out and there was the beach.

We had actually gone in a huge U term for three and a half hours suffered all that pain and we were only about 50 yards away from where we landed on the beach. So, and this is a time when GPS wasn't reliable and you definitely couldn't use it in what we were doing. You can use it on boats and things to the big batteries, but we didn't have handheld GPS is so.

I sat down and I'm thinking, OK, and we're going after a really high value target a guy an intelligence officer that they were trying to try to nap. So everybody's watching and I felt like the entire seal community was going to get a black eye. If I had to pick up the phone and call and say, Hey, I got lost. And I'm not going to get there in time because I had to be there exactly five o'clock in the morning.

Take the compound down. Grab this guy and then give an execution code word that brought the whole world in to take the compound and start, you know, wrapping the guy up in. I guess, you know, digging around trying to see what was in the compound. So. It's a long story, but I sat there and I was kind of full of the the fair failure and I was very close to sending the work code and my chief area officer came over and kind of picked me up.

Because we're all kind of kneeling, pulled me off the side and said, we know those things inland. We know the beaches here. So our backs to the beach. Let's just go straight in and try to keep the swamp to our side. Maybe we'll get there. And I looked down and he goes, come on. Let's just do it. That's all right. So we hit a road and it was going the exactly the same way that wasn't on the map.

So we started running and we ran for about two, two and a half hours with all that weight on us and all that mud on us. And but no kidding about one minute before five, five AM. My point element ran into the compound fence. So we deployed around it. I sent out the code word saying in position and taking the thing down. And then the rest of the world thought we were like super genius mission impossible seal guys, right? As far as they were concerned, we were we did it everything perfectly.

But the problem was what was all done and everybody's in there. We had a hundred army guys in there and they had big helicopters and they say you guys want to ride back. And my chief looked at me said the boats. No, we had to go back into the swamp and go find where we left the boats. So we weren't we weren't done. It ended up being like about a 20 hour nonstop mission with all that drama in the middle of it and everything. So, but what it did is it humbled me from that point forward because.

I mean, I tried to figure out everything I could have possibly done differently. And you can second guess yourself to death, but sometimes the only lesson you can pull out of there is sometimes you are going to fail flat out.

There's no way you're going to fix it. And you just have to figure how am I going to deal with that. And move on from that. And if you're leading other people. You know, they are looking to you for leadership. They're not looking to watch you go through some kind of psychological trauma. Yeah, and really it's just going through it, right? The only way to go is just to go through it and it sounds like that was, you know, you're really leading through crisis and chaos and.

Something I want to kind of pull back a little bit is you emphasize the importance of preparing for like the worst case like the boxers preparing for what could happen. I like that, like kind of having a plan DC for what could would happen. So I want to get kind of your thoughts on what you recommend for leaders to really prepare for the unexpected that could happen like a company that's gone public like what could happen if it fails and.

Just kind of some of the things you've learned across that in your journey that you can share with our listeners. So let's stick with the comparison with boxing. So in the ultimate fighting. It was an ultimate fighting UFC ultimate fighting combat, whatever. There used to be a time where it was like regular boxing professional boxing where you had a lot of lead time you were told, OK, you're going to box a certain person.

You got eight months to prepare and so everybody would prepare and in that case, which you're preparing for is that specific competitor that opponent. They're tall, they have long arms, they're short, they're in the UFC that get a wrestling, they're not going to wrestling. And so you've got this profile that your coaches and your trainers put together. And just like in any other sport where there's a competitor on competitor engagement.

You have out your strengths against their weaknesses and then they they state their strengths and try to figure out how to mitigate your weaknesses against their strengths. And so then you train to those elements, right? It's very, very specific. Now, the problem is as the UFC got more mature and there were more fighters and there's a lot more money involved and a lot more opportunity to fight.

So you started calling up people and saying, hey, so and so just got hurt in training five days before the big competition, you know, pay per view, everything and see if you want to fight. So people were out of shape because there used to this big long preparatory period. And some of them said no, but a lot of them said yes and they went in there and there were so used to being perfectly dialed in to the exact person, the exact scenario that they didn't do so well.

So it changed the mindset of the entire population of professional fighters. One, they couldn't get out of shape in between. They had to stay in close to fighting shape. Two, yeah, sure, you can really hone in and specialize your game plan to a very, very specific opponent.

But three, what if that's not your opponent? So you need to have a basic set of skills that are about adaptability. They're a general strengths and things like speed and anti coordination and ground game, you have them all those things all ready for you in case you have to adapt in the moment to something that you didn't anticipate perfectly.

So in business, the skills that a leader can can be working on all the times, communications, the ability to mechanically think through the operations that they're going to be doing or the operations they are doing going back and doing a diagnostic walkthrough. So they're very familiar with how the how the bread is made.

These are things that the more they understand about the mechanics, the easier it is when things start to fall apart to understand all the potential impact those mechanics, those systems, those integrated processes that supply chain, feeding the organization, the markets, customers, opinions and attitudes, all these things. If you if you're detached from that, if you specialize your job as a leader to just say, my job is to just focus on this one thing or if you're picking leaders.

If you're a board and you're trying to pick a leader, you think, oh, what we need is somebody who's really good at international market expansion. So you put that person at the top of the organization. All right, what if all the rest of the stuff, the real part of day to day business is falling apart.

So you've got somebody who's over specialized and over focused looking at a tunnel vision and unaware and maybe incapable of understanding what the people are telling them has to be done because of what's falling apart under the hood. You got to do both. You got to build up these skills, communications, psychological resiliency, mechanical, basic understanding awareness of all the key processes and systems, understanding your market.

So if you get it sufficiently, you could explain it to somebody, understand how your customers are thinking about your product or services so that when somebody tells you there's a change in that you get it, you don't have to be completely brief from scratch. That's all the basic skills we call standard operating procedures and the seal teams, this move shoot and communicate.

Those are just those are giving you have to be able to do that because in everything falls apart, you have to be able to move shoot and communicate.

And we do the scenario stuff and prepare for specific targets in very specific situations. So it's not an either or you have to kind of have a layer cake with the first part being your your strong basic kind of conditional skills and then your ability to kind of focus in and aim on the specifics and unique aspects of any challenge or potential challenge.

Yeah, I think when I think of the Navy too, I think I love the way that they look at leadership and collaboration and working together and building a strategy and executing a plan and being prepared and all of those great pieces of leadership and teamwork. How do you think as a CEO now of a company, how do you think being in the Navy seal being a Navy seal has helped you and the business world from a leader leadership perspective.

Well, a lot of what I've mentioned is part of the basic training in the military. Everybody's trained to be a leader to some of the level the difference in the military that requires this of the military and the training from day one to the day retire is the military expects somebody to step up into your place because the military is about combat.

The lieutenant gets killed the sergeant steps up the sergeant gets killed the corporal steps up the corporal gets killed the private steps up and everybody knows what the role is they only have to take that hill or the whole battle plans are the fall apart and you train everybody for that expectation you train and in training they actually come up.

The instructors and stuff will come up and say they'll just point to somebody they'll point to the the medic and say okay you just got shot he's down and now we also have to try to fix the medic so they better have been paying attention during all the combat Toronto medical classes right because if you just think the medic's going to do it all for you well then you've missed one of the big points of of reality and combat.

They'll do the same thing with the leader. They'll just say okay Mr. so and so just got shot sergeant you're in charge or in case of seals chief you got it well if the chief hasn't been paying attention or trying to become a good leader.

He's certainly been made aware that this is one of his roles and responsibilities and I'm talking about all kinds of leadership including tactical leadership he can say well the officer is going to handle all that and I'll just worry about this stuff over here everybody has to be tuned in.

There's something that you learn in every military branch that's something that's really really important in small units like the seals the green berets there's not enough people to backfill people got five or six people in a mission. You know it's it's your five or six people full of capabilities and one person goes down that's like five capabilities going down because everybody can do multiple things so everybody has to do everything else and real stuff like the medical example.

Very rarely did I ever see somebody get shot blown up hurt or anything like that where the medic was the first person to be on that that person treating them. It was always the closest person to them because they knew how to do it because we trained everybody to do it. So they knew how to stabilize them they needed a prepare for evacuation they knew how to drop you know put IDs and they know how to do all that stuff and and they did it so fast because we trained to it all the time.

So the different things that we were trained to are skills that are part of that so that standard operating that basic requirement condition. So if you learn all that in the military and you go into a non military environment it could be a nonprofit or it could be you know a business. The hard thing for a military person in that situation is that everybody around who wasn't trained that way.

If I went to Fort Bragg or if I went to a Marimar in California or Fort Bliss Texas and I walked into a unit I would be surrounded by people that were trained to do all the things I just told you. I didn't train them. That's just the way the culture is. That's the strategy. Right, but if I walked into any company you know within driving distance of my house 99 times of 100 if I walked in there they would all be pigeon hold and stov piped into very specific technical areas.

Yes. And even if the bosses gave lip service to it or the organizational chart made it look like they were all interacting and matricing and everything human beings left their own desserts will go to the thing that they do best because they want to be treated well. And the experts they are in order to consider the single point of expertise to hire their value. And so that's what they tend to generate and gravitate towards.

So it's hard, but you have to do as a leader and military leaders know this yet to constantly throw them in together. You have to talk to each other. You have to meet each other. You have to interact. You have to be empathetic about what's going on and accounting even though you're over here in marketing because everything is connected. And then things got some type of.

That's that's making you know if finances and doing well there's not enough money that marketing doesn't have enough money for their next promotional campaign. They're not sure why they're just upset, but they don't know realize that there's a problem over here. And you know production's got a problem and you see what I mean everybody if there's still pipe nobody knows why anybody's in that situation.

And then the top leaders of those different those different divisions or departments, but then that means somebody else in those in those positions have to turn around and communicate all these. This reality to everybody else and try to get empathy that way really hard to do much better to get multi disciplinary teams project groups put them in a room. And when you start hearing what everybody else has to do for it for their day and what the problems that they were running into.

You have an account and talk about what site to go through an audit to somebody who doesn't even know what an audit is right and and I browse will go off really you know somebody who comes in and stops your whole day for like two weeks and does this to you. Yeah, they do it every year and you guys don't really know thing about it and meanwhile you're screaming at me through emails. Why isn't this why this information my hand.

Right, they only have their perspective right I think we're all kind of siloed if you're marketing or sales or finance everybody's pretty pretty siloed in their role and I love kind of what you were saying about you know if one leader is something that they had a step out or something happened to them the next one steps up and I think kind of going back to what you were saying about your first 12. And how they were easy and then you get to your 13 to run it wasn't easy.

I want to talk a little bit about staying engaged and motivated I think like a lot of times people show up to work they go to work for kind of going through the motions if you will and they're showing up at eight leaving it five and so I want to talk about how to keep people.

Motivated engaged and continuing forward for whatever the mission whether it's you know the mission for the Navy or a business really staying engaged during challenging times I know if you know the one thing I would say during the pandemic a lot of companies no matter what industry had a lot of challenges and a lot of struggles and really keeping.

You know leaders focused and engaged towards the mission is really key during really challenging times I want to get kind of your perspective on keeping people motivated and engaged on whatever the mission is. So let's start by saying it's it's very difficult. And the private sector compared to the military.

Everybody in the military is mission focused everybody in the military is told what their mission is almost every single solitary day multiple different ways everybody in the military practices their mission or missions they have multiple missions. Probably about every month and then they're also judged and measured and graded and critiqued and then they go back and let their wounds and try to figure out how to do it better and then happens all over again non stop.

The consequences of failure in the military or life and limb so you don't want to let people around you down because it can be it can be really bad it's not just losing a job it's not just losing a contract with somebody it's a big deal.

So I say that because I was the beneficiary that anybody has been a military leader was the beneficiary of that against a cultural thing but it's a developed cultural thing doesn't just happen when they come into boot camp those you know those those kids are not that way. Well they're practicing and being coached consistently right and training training.

But shows you there is a training element to it it was a trained mindset it's not a mind we didn't go through high schools and pick people up thought this way and created a military with them it's a mindset that's cultivated and and sustained so now you go to the commercial side. You can't expect anybody to stay and work non stop because they believe that if they don't somebody's going to die or lose a leg it's a whole different level of commitment right.

A lot of guys that I know in the military when they first come out they just don't know how to step it down because the you know they're just going to transfer that level of intensity and in commitment and just they get super frustrated and when they talk to me I'll say, when am I.

These guys are coming to the pain their bills with this job this isn't their life this they're not this isn't you know they're not like you know warrior monks that have committed you know their their body and soul to the nation kind of thing that's a whole different that's a whole different you know requirement whole different job description so.

The best thing you can do to answer your question or directly is what I was saying before I believe you have to kind of try to give an impression when you're hiring people what they're getting into if you have an organization it's going to be like this you know a measure twice cut once up front don't just go with the specs in the alignment from the resume and don't just do an interview that just regards to chase the resume as a set of questions.

Are they going to fit in in a dynamic organization if you have one that that's what you're trying to create are they going to fit in in project work can they work with other people do they seem to be willing to take some risks professionally or they are aware that you know saying what they think is not professional risk it shouldn't be perceived that really an a good open minded organization you shouldn't keep your mouth shut and keep you know.

The information about what's what's critical to yourself because you're afraid if you say something you're going to get trouble use your job set upset somebody leaders have to make sure that's the that's the environment it's friendly to that type of thing you know go ahead and fail out you know in public with your with your thoughts and your ideas no harm no foul any ideas worth listening to you have to then what you've got those people in there you have to get them in those groups I was telling you about you have to bring in and multidisciplinary scenarios

because that empathy most people just good people and if you're sitting there and you realize if you walk out at four o'clock and there's four other people in there turn an umbrella because they're up against a deadline if you don't know about it and you don't know those people maybe don't care about it.

Yeah, maybe you come over there say there anywhere I can help now they may say no it's an accounting audit in your marketing but they may say can you go get some pizzas because we're going to be here till 11 o'clock tonight and that's the beginning of everybody kind of it's across cultural understanding that we're all in it together again not not a high military god in country kind of bar purpose but it does give everybody a human reason to stick around and to help each other out and then the

technical informational kind of empathy of what you do what I do what they do you don't want to complain and jump up and down when you don't get your way so much because you know there's something else that's bigger and maybe more more critical going on right now. And that's a really great point Marty is helping until the job is done whether it's the pizza's like you mentioned or organizing the papers off the coffee machine to get the audit done or whatever you can do.

It is really being all in in a team because really it's a mission it's it may not be life or death but it's a mission that's going to drive the business forward and it so it takes all hands on deck to get the missions done so I want to talk a little bit I like like the Navy and other branches they and I haven't been in but from your perspective I think I always feel like there's you know creative thinking or better ways to do things and they really

harness like different ways to do better and to maybe engineer things better and create new realities or new ways new processes of doing things and it's kind of feels like it's always getting better with our military and Navy I feel like they're just really on their A game all the time so I want to talk a little bit about thinking big and being creative maybe engineering your new reality and going back to your book.

The visionary you discuss the importance of strategic leadership and how leaders can develop and implement a vision for their organization on what those goals what the mission is can you share a little bit about maybe some obstacles that prevent leaders from thinking big and maybe how they can also overcome them.

So the be visionary it started out as a kind of a self help book for people who should already be visionary I was looking at and this came out of one of the chapters in B nimble I said a little bit about strategy when my thoughts were on strategy for the lack of strategy being exercise and practice in business today

and I have beta readers to read my books they reach out to my chapter for these four or five CEOs that were reading chapter by chapter giving me feedback which you know I was talking about you know keep me humble so they know this is stupid this doesn't make sense this resonates. Well I remember doing this I forgot this lesson learned I'm a I took notes the whole time during this chapter and I'm going to have my my direct reports come in tomorrow morning when I talk about some of these things.

One of the things they brought up was you should write a whole book on strategy because they don't teach strategy high school they don't teach strategy in college and they don't teach strategy in American business.

What they expect everybody to do is work work at the operational and technical levels keep their nose clean put their 10 year in whether it's in one company or in an industry and then they get to a point where there's suddenly that they're the cherry on the top of the old chart and they go do it think big and walk out the door.

And you're like think big okay and all you do is what you've been doing which is operational planning so you take your normal operational history and you add four or five percent to it for next year and you just flop that whole thing for in a linear fashion and go that's my strategy and that's not strategy and this is what they were all saying was critically messing from always different you know sources of education and influence in society and business up and education.

So the first part of the be very just says hey you know it's okay to dream and there's a certain point in your in your your maturation where somebody tells you it's stupid when you tell me how to dream.

You know they so you stop telling people about your dreams and I'm not talking about nightmare dreams I'm talking about hey maybe I want to be a lead lead singer in the rock band or maybe I want to you know go to board or a canoe or you know and if you say these things right you're thinking of it you have a sense of wonder and all and.

Mystery about life and in everything around you and anybody say that to family friends institutions you know schools everybody is like you're that you're that proverbial nail that sticking up out of the board because that's not going to help you kid that kind of thinking is not going to get you anywhere you need to study you need to get a job you need to get good grades you get you a good college so you can get a good job.

You know keep your nose clean you know don't take off anybody do what you're told to do until you work up there in your person in charge. That's the form of a success not thinking of all these dumb thoughts and so it's drilled and pushed and slammed until you stop thinking that dreaming is okay.

So that's the first couple of chapters start up start up with is essentially letting you know that this is what's been happening to you and and actually what's happened is people have taken away a superpower that all human beings have.

And you need to re engage and re re ignite that superpower and start thinking that way which is simply just thinking out to the horizon and practicing it every single day you know think out a couple of months think out a year think out two years think about yourself personally what I want to be sort of picture yourself.

It's like visualization games that you know top athletes use visualized success visualize the future and then open up the aperture don't just look down the road but look all around you know what's going on in the community what's going around your industry your market.

I love the you said that I think that's a really fantastic point it's and you know my father is also a Navy man and so he used to say similar things where he would say things like how you play is how you practice if you're not practicing.

Right when you play in the actual game you're not going to play right so you've got to be you know building a plan and executing the plan in practicing and I work Marty in the cyber security fields a lot and I see people that have like a great plan it's supposed to work great but nobody's actually run the plan or run the play.

And so when something actually happens they have all these things in place but nobody's practice and so everybody's looking at each other like hey you know we're supposed to do or who we supposed to car where we're supposed to go so I think you're spot on with that and talking about being visionary I think that's another really great point is like you said like you're told to go to school get a good job work your job but what does it mean like what does that need right go to school get a good job follow these the strategy I think.

You know really like you said setting one year two year goals five year goals where do I want to be what do I want to do and holding yourself accountable and running your plan right so if your plan says I want to publish a book in five years and you're almost at that five year mark but you haven't started writing it's likely that you're not going to publish that book so I think you're spot on with really fostering that you know dream building for yourself and creating a plan.

And creating kind of visions of I love what you said about you know a lot of athletes like I said before multiple times and speaking Michael Jordan he threw that basket so many times in his brain even more than he actually practice the basket so really like you said visualizing and being creative running your plan and I also like you know want to get your perspective on you know encouraging leadership.

And encouraging leaders to create a culture of creativity and innovation and coming up with better ways to do things than just let's call it the status quo and so how do you get maybe like you said somebody that's leaving for the day and the CPAs are still working on their audit how do you get them to come up.

You know maybe they notice something how do you really foster that in an organization to get people to speak up with better ideas or creative ways of doing things inside of a company culture. Great question and great segue because my third book was an answer to the question the I'm on a board of two different technology companies and looking at the subject and actually the problem of creativity and the studies that are done about creativity and the it's like teams back in the 80s and 90s.

So many decided that teams was the way to win so everybody was going to have a team go be a team be a team and without really understanding what a team was and most of what they did they put together groups of people that are being committees. And the definition between those two and and and and I'm Alan Weiss wrote a book on consulting and he said, basically if you want to know whether you're in a committee or a team.

Look around and see if anybody's going to lose their job if this doesn't work right work out right because if you're on a sports team. Everybody's a loser if they lose not half the team sitting over there kind of sort of one where they died the the the lost they're all part of the loss if you're in a military unit and you get your butt kick your all part of your butt kick that's how you know you're a team you've got a stake in the outcome.

Yeah, your committee if everybody comes in says there are peace and walks out so that's the same problem with with creativity there there was a big push about a decade ago. You know we all need to be like Steve Jobs you all need to be you know like Bill Gates we'll we can all do this that's all be Elon Musk and this given you room would just be creative like go well yet you run into the same problems I talked about earlier with the idea of dreaming and vision because.

And their studies out that will show that from the ages six years old to the age of 40. Six years old most most six year olds have about a 95% score in creativity tests it's just it's an innate human capability at 40 they have like 5% 5% score they're in the very bottom right and the study showed nothing happened to them they didn't get dementia it's not it's not like.

Puberty they don't go for being super genius creative people and then one day when they're teenagers they aren't anymore it's it's not a law skill it's actually a biological capability of the human brain that hasn't changed because of age what's changed and and there's one study that I cited in my third book.

That points to separate clearly what what changes the education institutions in the United States said but I mentioned earlier you're not supposed to be thinking about the way things might be you're supposed to be studying the way things were. In every category of preschool and elementary and middle school and high school in college every category is a history lesson it's how engineering has been done how medicines have been done right so what happens is you were told not to.

Think those crazy thoughts there's there's a good reason why guys like gates and others dropped out of college became billionaires. It's a good reason why you know Einstein was in his early 20s when he came up with a special theory of relativity.

All of the great was in mid mid late 20s when he conquered the world these people in the poll was 23 when we came up with a general so this is youth and the reason these guys were doing this is because they didn't know anybody nobody is forced the rules down their throat and got them to adhere obey and and and. And comply.

Now I'm talking intellectually so basically what you have to do if you want to reignite creativity as an adult is you have to recognize this you have to recognize this is what's going on this has been happening to you it's not a physical problem it's not a physical deficit everybody can be creative and the main I have like a three step thing that I had to kind of break it down to something easy but you have to become intellectually humble which means you forget all the things.

Which means you forget all of your past victories and all your past failures because they are they are going to contribute to you channeling down and narrowing what you're going to do in the next challenge comes across your across your. Now your mind's clean of that clear that now you have to be intellectually curious.

And what that means is you have to look at every possible aspect every source of information asymmetrical intelligence gathering 360 degree awareness talk to everybody you haven't talked to talk to other other companies other even other industries about things and if you're a staffing company and you're having a problem with the pipeline go talk to somebody who manages pipelines all day at dhs or FedEx.

It's a plight chain management if you've got an angle to it you've never heard before but don't just sit there with the same four or five people and don't apply what you learned in college or what you did for the last four years and just flip that that football play for and say fast the solution that means you're not thinking or trying to learn at all. Intellectual curiosity which is almost impossible to do without that intellectual humility upfront.

And the last thing is that set you up for intellectual creativity that means whatever you're going to do now whatever solution you're going to set up whatever your solution design outcomes going to be is going to be the best thing you can do with the best available information that you could absorb and collect. And if you have a team of people thinking that way I mean you've got a powerhouse of creativity and innovation right there.

Yeah I love it so many so many good nuggets of wisdom already I love what you shared we've covered a lot right I think any final thoughts or anything that you want to share that we may have missed before we close up.

I think this is always always amazing to me so I work a lot with veterans they're leaving service and most of the ones that have stayed in for at least 20 years or so and they have difficulty trying to figure out what they want to do on the outside and then when they get into their first company they don't do well.

And I think that's because they can't they can't figure out a fit in it that disconnect between full mission focus you know the brotherhood you know everybody's doing the same way with the same with the same song and their hurt kind of thing they're not finding it right and so they get depressed and they get upset or they're very senior they work their way to the pinnacle of their of their profession.

And then they just squadron commander of fighter planes or their Navy SEAL river and they don't want to go out and be anything less than that they don't know how to be anything less than that they don't remember that they used to be less than that because they're whole life up to that point has been trying to progress up this.

And then the thing is to do list of getting ahead and getting advanced and getting promoted and all that and learning and becoming better promise if you wonder if you're an at 18 pilot combat vet and get a chest full of medals and you want to own a restaurant. They don't work. You have to you have to go out and become an apprentice learn how to how to run a restaurant.

You have to become an apprentice to learn how to finance the purchase of a restaurant you need to go out and become an apprentice on how to hire the right kind of people to be in there working for you in that restaurant. And that's going to be different than if you're going to run a warehouse operation or if you're going to run up a taxi taxi company. You can't just automatically assume that all this magnificence conveys.

I had a talk I gave I gave a walk away. I actually called it thank you for your service and I was giving it to military guys, but it was kind of a tongue in cheek. Like leave all that stuff behind it's kind of like your football trophy some high school. You know it all has value right but if you really want to go do something else and make this is what's the second part of your life and look like. You are going to put the same one of time in you did as a young fighter pilot or a young Navy seal.

In this new thing you want to do. That's so good that's so good Marty I think you're right I think if you're going to switch careers or you're going to pivot industries or you're going to become an entrepreneur. You got to start over you might have to take 10 steps back to take one step forward and you know I've always you know another you know one of my dad is is to be OK in the stock as you're learning and put in the time right to learn and to kind of undo.

You know maybe some of the you know knowledge you have that may not be correct in the new fields that you're in so I love that. That you mentioned that's such a good way to. A very good standpoint. I tell everybody try to figure this out early couple years before you switch switch professions. And start planning and experimenting in parallel or planning experimenting and learning training getting your certifications in parallel.

And then slowly start building up that side gig kind of flow and start aiming towards that day don't you know but in that of course hardly anybody does that right either they get let go. And they're staying on the street and they really hated the profession they really want to do something different but they haven't given one minute of thought to it or effort to it or I can the military.

One day you're you're in a desk with the conference table boys guys coming in you're making all these big decisions the next day you're saluting a flag and you're walking out the gate. And you're just seven eleven and you're standing over there is going do you do you're just you're just a regular dude. And that's a really good point.

You know I think back to when I was trying to decide you know what I quote unquote what it to be when I grew up I did like you said I spent some time learning the industry I spent some time job shadowing people I almost became a patent attorney and I.

Job shadows and patent attorneys and I said absolutely no way I want to be a patent attorney so you're right you got to put some time and effort into the switch and you know job shadow people call people that maybe be art that are in that field and they can tell you the good bad and ugly of what you're looking to get into. I think those are all really good nuggets so is Marty I want to thank you so much for being here today and sharing your time and with.

Get Marty's the connects with him there's so much good information in there thank you so much for being here today Marty and that's the executive connect podcast. [Music] [Music]