Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey- and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And today we have with us Dave Durand, who is a nine-figure founder. He has built and sold multiple businesses which have collectively done over $1 billion in sales in industries including media, digital services and leadership training, and he has been named most respected CEO three times by glass door and Entrepreneur of the Year by E&Y. Dave, welcome.

Dave Durand  01:39

It’s great to be with you. Kris, thank you.

Kris Safarova  01:43

So maybe we could start with what was the single most pivotal decision you made early in your career that set you on the path to building a very successful career and ultimately achieving all the things that you achieved.

Dave Durand  01:56

I think the biggest decision was the decision to live life as an adventure, and to not be afraid to make mistakes, which, by the way, wasn’t a very conscious decision initially. It was one that was a little bit beaten into me through experience, and I accepted that and then formalized it. And that’s really I think, allowed me to do pretty well is not being afraid to make mistakes, because I make plenty of them.

Kris Safarova  02:23

You mentioned it was beaten into you. What did you change in the way you lived life before and after making this decision?

Dave Durand  02:32

So I think one of the things that happens, and this is an evolution for most young people into older people, although some younger people are a little bit more mature right to begin with, but I think most people would rather be right to their own demise than wrong about something to their own prosperity. So they go to a meeting, and instead of going to the meeting wanting what is best for the organization or for the best idea to come out and support that most often, people go and they’re just wanting to be right or heard or respected. And that also happens when it comes to doubt about things. You know, I don’t think I can do that, or if I should do it, maybe I should do it this way, and we have to basically just step away and say, there are going to be other people with better ideas, and I need to be docile to what I’m being trained to do, or docile to what the data says I should do until we can find prosperity. Now it’s interesting though, Kris, because that is there’s a paradox to it too, in that you shouldn’t just always accept what everyone always says all the time just because, but at the same time, the only thing that unites the paradoxical idea of rejecting certain things and then accepting things also is that you’re seeking what is true and best. So that’s why I always challenge our people to go to a meeting and to be a hero of the best idea by supporting it, not necessarily coming up with it.

Kris Safarova  03:57

So look for the truth for what is the best idea, what is best for the organization, versus focusing on yourself, being in your head, how do I look good in a meeting?

Dave Durand  04:07

Yeah. And by the way, knowing that there’s two different things out there, there’s an actual objective truth, and some people kind of struggle with that today, which is, you know, a little bit difficult when you apply it philosophically, and that’s not what this topic is about. They’ll say things like, well, although I write about this in my book, Leading giants, but they’ll, they’ll say, you can’t know truth. There is no you can’t know truth. Everything is relative. Well, the irony in that, of course, is that that that statement is false if you can’t know truth. So it’s, it’s, there’s a struggle, and the struggle is that the person doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to know that by stating there is no absolute truth, they’re stating the truth. So there’s kind of a ability to rationalize that’s not there. But secondly, when you’re working with a person that is afraid of identifying what’s true, they’re not going to accept data. They’re going to be much more interested in accepting. Their viewpoint about something, as opposed to, well, the data actually, literally says this. So that’s a challenge in it. But the other thing about it too is that there are some things that aren’t really objective, like that. They’re a little bit more like if you’re picking out tile for your house, I’m in my home here, right? If you’re picking out tile for your house, you may say to yourself, well, there’s the perfect tile out there there’s like the one answer, the truth there isn’t, not when it comes to a tile, it’s probably 100 different ones that could work, and 100 different people that look at them all might find each one a little bit better or worse. But in general, they’ll say yes, these are good, and in general, these are bad. Kind of like beauty itself. People universally say, Yes, this person is beautiful, and universally, they would say that this is not, you know, a sunset is beautiful. A cold, moist cave is not and so when we know there’s an objective truth, we have to find that actual truth. And when there is something that’s subjective, we can’t over stress about it as though there is an actual truth in that, because we do, we’ll never get anything done and we’ll be paralyzed with examining things.

Kris Safarova  06:12

Dave, you have built multiple very successful businesses for our listeners right now, and obviously not the majority of them, but for few listeners who are either running their own organization or they are part of organization that is currently really struggling because of how the world is changing and what is happening with technology and the business is getting outdated by the hour. What would you recommend?

Dave Durand  06:38

So the answer to keeping up with technology is culture, and if an organization has a culture, so you the famous Peter Drucker saying is that, you know, Culture eats a strategy for breakfast. Is very true. If you’ve got a great strategy and a bad culture, your company is on life support, the strategy is going to erode to a bad one. If you have a great culture, though, and not a very good strategy, you’re going to eventually get to a good strategy. So if your culture is built effectively, people aren’t going to get behind they’re going to always be looking for how to be on the edge. Oftentimes, I would be invited when I was younger, and I was doing a lot of speaking before I was running my businesses, more involved, people would say, Hey, Dave, you know, we want you to talk to this organization. You’re going to talk to several different levels, the key executives, the middle managers. They’re going to talk to the the kind of general organization at large is going there, into the general organization at large. And I’d say, I know they’re asking you to do you’re in a tough spot. They’re asking you to do more in a shorter period of time with less resources. And they’re always like, yes, you totally understand. And I say, Well, they didn’t tell me that. I just know that’s business. If you’re going to run a great business, you’re going to get more done in a shorter period of time with less resources. That’s efficiency, and that has to happen. And if that’s something you’re continually striving to do, you’re going to go from the Model T as a resource for your company, delivering your products and goods, to a Tesla, metaphorically speaking, as opposed just sitting there and saying, Well, we’re gonna improve everything else, but that part, we’re not always get more done in a shorter period of time with less resources or effort to do that. And if that is the case, you just stay on the cutting edge. And instead of running around saying, well, let’s always chase the best technology, you’re saying you we build the right culture, and we will be in a perpetual mode, always looking for those things and staying ahead of the curve.

Kris Safarova  08:32

And then this brings up the question, how do you build the right culture?

Dave Durand  08:36

Yes, well, so this also, that is a very good question. There’s a lot of people that build culture the wrong way. They see some bumper stickers, or they watch one seminar, and so they run out there and saying, We have a culture of excellence. Everybody be excellent. So what they’re trying to do is good they want an excellent culture. But what they’re doing is they’re actually being off putting, because it’s kind of like presuming that we are all excellent, we are all amazing. All we want are excellent people. And if you mess up, you’re not part of our culture. The best way to build a culture is to basically acknowledge the fact that you have a bunch of flawed people that are working toward excellence and that they have a commitment to it, which allows for mistakes, but it’s not it’s not to stay in those mistakes. It’s to move forward. Sometimes I give the analogy that when I was young, my parents used to say, God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you so much he doesn’t want you to stay that way. Well, whether somebody has a religious belief or not in that, the metaphor definitely works in a culture. We love you just the way you are, but we love you so much we don’t want you to stay like that. So let’s get better every single day. And when I make mistakes, you forgive them. You make mistakes, I forgive them, and we keep getting better and better and better. Now, of course, even those have guard rails and limits like you know total gross negligence is something that you know. You can’t be working with a person who’s like that, or a person who’s whimsical about mistakes because they’re so accepted. So it’s not that type of mistake. It’s an earnest effort to do a good thing and to constantly improve, knowing that everybody does make mistakes, and I think if we set that, we do better with it. But I think we also have to remember that if we don’t market and work on and establish and define our culture on a daily basis, it can erode 1% a day, and in 100 days, all of a sudden a great culture becomes a bad one, and it takes way longer than that to re establish a good culture. So people spend time on mission statements, or, you know, core values, or you know, key result areas. These are good things, but frankly speaking, if you really define your culture and you talk about it regularly, all of those other things that you’re trying to spend time on will manifest when you understood it for yourself and you started figuring out.

Kris Safarova  10:47

Okay, what should be our culture? What was the process like?

Dave Durand  10:54

So what I did is I looked at companies that really had great cultures, and one of the ways you can recognize that a company has a great culture is that it actually produces a really good return to its investors or stakeholders. Now some people might say, well, that’s not really a culture. Well, that’s very true. I understand that. But if you have a bad culture, you’re not going to have be innovative. You’re going to have a high turnover rate, and the people are going to feel it, are your customers. And so generally speaking. Now there are some exceptions, by the way, there are some exceptions where the financial numbers behind something, or the technology, or maybe even the relationship that they have with you know, I can tell you right now, there are companies right now that are in technology that might even be providing what we are watching through their service right now, that are so big and so monopolized that they could have a bad culture, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. Very companies get to that. Few companies get to that point. For the most part, they have to do the right thing in the right way for a long period of time to have a great culture. Southwest Airlines, 50 some years was the number one investment you could have had, you know, in the stock market. So I looked at that, and I discovered, what did they do in their culture? And it was quite amazing. I looked at other organizations that I was just a part of, or that I consulted in, and I said, Well, what I like about them? What’s that not like? In order to to decipher it, and I came up with a formula. It’s simple. The culture and all the organizations that I will ever build or run will be the same. It will be three pillars on one foundation. Pillar number one, strong professional will, and that is that you have no right to your successes if you don’t own your weaknesses or your failures. You have to own those first, to own your successes. Can’t run around going, their fault, their fault, their fault, and have a victory and say, Oh, that was all me. That doesn’t work that way. Second thing is a compassionate heart. You’re going to make mistakes. I’m going to make mistakes as long as we’re earnest. What we’re going to do is we’re going to get past those and not be petty. We’re gonna be magnanimous. The third thing is a fun loving spirit. So you gotta be at work. Might as well enjoy it. So if it can be fun, can be energetic. You ask yourself this question, when people say, Oh, the culture is toxic, are they talking about you? That’s the first place you check. And if you brought something good to that culture today, then you don’t have to worry about it. And all of that is on a foundation of humility, and humility is best defined as precision, truth about yourself. And so it’s not just, Oh, I’m not so I’m not good at that, but it’s also I am good at that. If I’m not good at it, I’m going to defer to somebody else. If I am good at that, I’m not going to be afraid to step in and do it and accept the responsibility if it doesn’t go well, but to corral people around, to make it go right.

Kris Safarova  13:26

True. And then, once you started implementing it, what was your experience like? How open people were to embrace it?

Dave Durand  13:33

They were very open to embracing and in fact, one of the things now i this, these are, like, there’s politically charged things all over there. Okay, I don’t really bring politics into the workplace at all. And ironically, when you don’t bring politics into the workplace, a lot of people make that a political statement. They say, that’s a political statement. I’ll tell you what I mean by that. I don’t care who you are. I will work with you as long as you are good at the job. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what your background is, what your religion is, who you vote for, who you go home to at night. None of that matters to me. One thing matters. Can you do the job so people? And by the way, that that philosophy is very anti woke. It’s also the only fair philosophy out there, but it’s very not the way woke agendas work. So I’m I never got involved in are we woke? Are we not woke? I was just totally disinterested in that. I didn’t want to take a political stance on business because it was just completely irrelevant. So people would come to my orientations when the organization was younger, and I was able to greet everybody at that point, I would say, what do you look look around, what do you notice? And they would all say the same thing. They’d say, it’s very diverse. And I’d say, yes, but do you know why it’s diverse? And they’d say, why? And I’d say, because we don’t, we don’t care about diversity. And there was always like this, whoa, cringe moment, like, wait a second, what’s about to say? And I said, there’s only. One reason you’re all here, one reason you are all here because we believe you’re the best End of story. That is it. You’re not here because of your age or your height or who you go home to, or how you vote, or what color your skin is, or where you’re a man or a woman. You’re here because we think you’re awesome. Now what you notice is, if you go after the best people, by default, you are almost always going to be diverse, because you will find the best people everywhere. And then when you’re in a room, everybody in that room says, I feel great about being here, and I can be confident in this person my left and to my right, and I know that they’re here not because of any other reason other than the best fact you see airlines now backing away from some of their dei policies for pilots. I, by the way, happen to be a pilot. I have a private pilot license and own part of an airline. I can tell you the last reason I would ever hire anyone to get behind the yoke and fly an airplane, if I’m in the back of it, is just because of something that has nothing to do with being a pilot. You have to be a great pilot. And if you are a great pilot, and you’re three feet tall and you have green skin and purple hair coming out to there and an extra arm, I’ll hire you as a pilot. But if you can’t fly an airplane, I don’t care what you look like, that policy started to scare passengers, and they said, Okay, well, let’s back away from this. This is not going to be popular. Anyone in their right mind knows it is ridiculous to give somebody a role on a non meritorious circumstance. You have to know how to do the job, and if you don’t know how to do the job, you shouldn’t have the job. I’ve never met a rational person on the left, on the right, anywhere who doesn’t agree with that, except a person who has no merit and wants a job anyway, those people, they like to make the argument. So we never got into those debates. We just never did. We just didn’t even make it about anything. Everybody was like, uh, how should I take that? You think I’m gonna be awesome at this? Okay, I love that. I love this culture. I’m a part of it, and by the way, I’m telling you, we were totally diverse, and people, they had radically different lifestyles, and they all felt good about working with each other.

Kris Safarova  17:13

Dave, and would you hire someone who is very good at their job but you don’t feel they have good values?

Dave Durand  17:19

No, I wouldn’t, and that’s a really good question. If a person has all the qualifications in the world, but they don’t meet, they don’t fit the culture, that’s also bad. Or if they have all the qualifications in the world, but they have low virtue. So when I bring people on, the first thing that I do when I bring something Newport is as I look at the virtue that they may or may not have. And that’s hard to do because, you know, you’re talking about good decision making. A lot of people understand what the virtues are, but the basic ones, the foundational ones that the rest build on, are prudence, which is a master of decision making and a master decision making. You have to do three things. You have to desire what is good, know what is real, and then pursue what is good. We can get into that later, if you’d like then from there, it’s justice. So if you think about it, nobody has ever said I loved working there because people couldn’t make a good decision. So again, we just talked about prudence there. Nobody’s ever said what I loved about working there is they were all totally unfair. So you can’t have fairness or justice without prudence. They literally build on each other, if you think about this, if you’re a judge, AKA a person who needs justice, a sense of justice, and you don’t know how to make a good decision. And again, making a good decision has three foundational things, desire what’s good, know what’s real, and then pursue what it’s good. If you don’t desire what’s good and know what’s real, and you’re going to be a judge, you’re not going to be able to provide a just outcome. Then from there, after that, it’s fortitude. We call that stick to itiveness, or the grind, that sort of thing. It’s not giving up, right? So if you don’t make good decisions and you don’t have fairness, you will give up. You will give up on things. And then ultimately, after that, you’ve got self control, you know, your ability to temper things through temperance. So you’ve got prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, the basic foundational virtues that all the rest of those virtues build on. And so I try to identify that in the interview. And again, a lot of people are just good at saying certain things. But if you find a person with high virtue, you can, generally speaking, teach them any skill that you need to teach them if they don’t have it. Now, there are certain areas where the qualifications, just by way of skill or by way of education or certification, must be there. So they need a combination of both.

Kris Safarova  19:33

Could you share with us maybe one or two of your favorite questions to ask?

Dave Durand  19:37

I love that question, Kris, and the reason I love it is because I think this is where culture begins to go wrong for many people when they’re in their business or they’re building something so they start off and in the interview they say things like, what’s your five year plan? Well, most people don’t know their five year plan. And I can tell you for sure the person running the interview they don’t know. A five year plan either. So they’re asking a question they won’t even be able to answer, and everybody knows it. So why are you asking a question well as an interviewer? So if I feel powerful and you feel small, I know that I’m asking a question I can answer. I know an answer. You don’t actually have an answer. So you’re about to lie to me, and I’m going to nod my head like I’m impressed by your lie. So our culture is beginning this way. I’m going to ask you a question. Make me feel powerful. You’re going to feel small. You’re going to lie to me. I’m going to accept my lie, and we’re going to really trust each other. It’s the same thing, like, if somebody says, What’s your biggest weakness in an interview, nobody’s going to tell you their biggest weakness. They’re just not going to do it. They’re not going to say, I I drink until 230 in the morning and I watch things on the internet, I’m not supposed to see. They’re not going to do that. They’re going to say, Oh, my biggest weakness probably perfectionism, and sometimes a little too loyal. You know? Well, nobody believes that perfectionism and loyalty are their problem, but they say that. So again, ask a question to intimidate you, to make you feel small, make me feel powerful. You’re going to lie to me on your answer. I’m going to pretend I accept your lie. You know that I’m not actually accepting the lie. We’re lying to each other, intimidating each other. I mean, what a ridiculous way to start. So I would rather say things like, tell me about your last experience. And I like to hear stories, because in the story, if I hear things like, Well, my last bosses were all stupid. I didn’t like the other people that I worked with. Nobody was fair. I don’t know why I’ve had such but bad luck at every job. Everything is toxic. You know that the common denominator is probably that person?

Kris Safarova  21:33

I agree. I loved what you said that you need to be careful about questions you ask as an interviewer, and you should never be asking questions you yourself cannot answer, or you know that other person will not be able to give you a truthful answer, such as, What is your weakness? And then the common answer would be, I care too much, as you mentioned, perfectionism. So let’s talk about another topic that I really want to get your input on for our listeners, but all the changes that are happening right now with technology. Ai, world is just changing by the hour. What do you think leaders need to focus on in terms of skills development to stay relevant in this new world?

Dave Durand  22:12

That’s a great question. The number one thing that they need is adaptability. So a lot of people are like, hey, you know it’s what about AI? You know, how is AI a strategic advantage? It’s not, and I’ll tell you why it’s not a strategic advantage, because a strategic advantage is something that’s going to get you ahead of everybody else. Everyone is going to know how to use AI. I mean, the nature of AI is that it does the thinking for you, it’s the easiest form of new technology to use or apply, because it does the problem solving. So, you know, it’s, it’s an and it’s, by the way, it’s going to become like a common use for everyone. Now, in the short term, some people will adapt it early, and others will be hesitant to adapt it. Some people adapt it a little bit more effectively, but pretty much anyone can figure out, for most companies, how to use AI and how to use it effectively. So it’s it’s going to be more like an airplane or a car or just a computer itself. I mean, nobody’s going to say, Well, my strategic advantage in our industry is that we have computers or we have access to airplanes? No, that’s not because everyone does. Everyone has access to AI. That’s the whole point of it. Because these things become, of course, you know, open open code, obviously. So we have to look at it as adaptability. To say, Okay, I’m going to enter into this space. I’m not going to sit behind whatever those new technologies that are available, we’re going to try them. We’re going to experiment with them. And I actually recommend that people in organizations have a team of people that are called a horizon team. Now the horizon team can be just kind of a cultural attitude where everybody takes this on in their own self, but it can also be where you take particular people in each one of the departments, and you’re always asking them to look for what is the latest thing? What is the latest thing? What is the newest technology? What is competition doing now, if the average person spent time on that, they can be distracted, and they’re not doing what they need to do today, but to specifically designate people from certain areas of each business, and you can rotate that responsibility, by the way, so that you don’t have one person looking the same things and giving the same answer and not finding innovation. So you have three people in one department, and, you know, for one month, and you go on a rotating schedule. Hey, every time we come to a meeting, you’re going to present innovation, what’s taking place in the industry. So they’re going to read trade information. They’re going to they’re going to just, you know, dive in. Because if you sit down on your financial team versus your marketing team, versus your production team, okay, or your sales team, and you say, what are the new technologies that people in our particular disciplines are using? The answer. Are going to be similar, but different. They’re going to all say, AI, but how is it applied, and what particular artificial intelligence program was adapted by another vendor that they’re using to make a better product that we can actually then, you know, license, or whatever it might be. So these are good ways to do it.

Kris Safarova  25:19

What would be your advice on understanding clients problems that they really want to solve. Many companies now face in situation that their business is becoming outdated and clients needs a changing. How would you recommend someone go about figuring out what clients want now that maybe something new that they didn’t want it before?

Dave Durand  25:40

Sure. Well, this is an interesting thing, because we have a tendency to believe that the reason that companies become outdated is because of technology, and by the way, ultimately, technology is maybe the the tool that is needed to stay ahead, but, but the thing that becomes, that makes that happen, is a person’s decision to use the technology. So here’s, here’s my, my take on this, and this comes from talking to actually myself and my own organizations as well, but talking to many turnaround experts that will go into organizations that are maybe a few 100 million in size. They’ll turn them around. They’ll build them to a billion, and then they’ll sell them and all the way up to Fortune 10 lead executives who are given new divisions that are 1020, 30, $40, billion divisions, with how many 10s of 1000s of employees in them, and they have to move that behemoth thing around. And in every single circumstance, what happens is, you had somebody who is leading the people in the organization asleep at the wheel. So they would say something like, we need to make a change. We need to capture this much market space. These are three clients that we need to go after, and we need to make sure that we’re satisfying their needs in order to get the outcome we want. And you would think that the answer is, yes, I know, but our products don’t offer this, and our products don’t offer that, and so we need to make this change, or whatever. And it’s like some technical thing, it maybe is, but it always begins with somebody saying this, well, that’s impossible, because there’s always somebody who says the growth and the change is impossible, because I like it here. I’m comfortable here. If you ask me to innovate or to make a change in the organization, it means that I personally am going to have to give up golf on Thursdays, which I like, or that extra week in so and so, or the four o’clock leaving that I do on Tuesdays, and I’m not willing to do it. So instead of me actually telling me the truth, which is, I have gotten too complacent and too lazy to be innovative and do my job, I’m going to sell still. I’m going to make instead, I’m going to say it’s bigger than me. It just can’t happen in every one of those circumstances, a new leader comes in, and they present the challenge. Hey, we need to grow the business. Here’s how we need to grow the business. You need to find answers in your division or your department. I expect you to find those answers. Let’s meet in 30 days, and then we’re going to start applying those answers. So come up with a good plan. And the person who refuses to come up with a good plan, or says it’s impossible to have a good plan, they’re out, and they should be out because they’re no good for the culture. And all they’re doing is taking up space. Now, you put somebody else in who is willing to, first and foremost, say, I desire what is good. I want to grow this. I know what is real. What’s real is we need to innovate. Okay, what are we going to do? We’re going to do that. So that’s prudence, and then they start acting upon that. So, so it’s very, very important that if you’re going to lead, you’re holding your people accountable to the growth metrics that they need to have. Because they’re going to come up with a they’re just going to come up with a better mouse trap, a better hammer. They’re going to go from, you know, a basic wheel with a horse drawn carriage to, you know, a 0 to 61.7, second, you know, DC motor.

Kris Safarova  29:13

Dave. And if you were landed now at an organization that is struggling in terms of that, the clients are not buying the products they used to buy. Something changed with the target market. They’re no longer interested in what the company has to offer as much. What would you do to figure out clients needs?

Dave Durand  29:31

Well, you need to be in dialog with you need to be so I’m going to give you a parallel. So the answer to that question is similar to how you have to take care of the needs of your employees. This is somewhat it’s actually not controversial in concept. I’ve never met a person who disagrees with it. It’s controversial in policy within certain organizations, because a lot of organizations just have policy for policy’s sake, which is silly. I don’t believe in policy for policy sake first policy. Every one of my companies is that we don’t do policy for policy sake. So if the policy doesn’t make sense, we’re not going to do it anymore. One of the policies that people have internally, and it parallels finding the needs of satisfying the customers, is they have annual reviews. I find an annual review with an employee a sign of a failure, and the reason, I think, is a sign of failure is if you have to wait for one year to sit down with your supervisor to find out how you’re doing and whether or not you’re going to get a pay raise, you’ve already failed. Now, if there’s an annual review, which is really just kind of technically that, and you’re just going through some papers. This is how an annual review, if you have to do them for whatever HR, reasons should sound. Kris, how do you feel the year went? Awesome. You like your job? Yeah. I like it feel like you could pay good, yeah. Well, me too. Okay, thanks. Bye, or even simply, it would just sound like this. Hey, Kris, how you doing good? Anything to talk about? No, how about you? Nah. Okay, bye. That’s the that’s the that’s a sign of great leadership throughout the year, if you’re sweating when you come into your job review, or you as the boss, are like all nervous about how they’re gonna react to this shocking news, you failed in leadership from the beginning in customer service and market needs. It’s the same thing. The only reason that you start to lose market share is that you stop listening, or stop paying attention, or you think that the customer and one of the things that’s not true is the customer is always right. There’s one thing that customers always write about, and it’s that their opinion is their opinion. They’re right about that. Okay? They if they say, nobody likes Lacroix, that’s wrong. You can have data, you know, studies have shown they’re actually wrong about that. But if they say we, as a company, we don’t like La Croix, they’re right about that. That’s the type of listening you need to do. And if you’re paying attention to where they’re moving and kind of what they want, and we’re looking a little bit more for this. When we buy a product from you and then we sell it to our customers, we’re finding out that our customers are leaning a little bit more toward this. Do you have anything like that that would satisfy their need? Those are the things that people usually miss early on, when somebody else, their competitor, listened, and now they get a foothold, and they take a little market from them, and so now they got to catch up.

Kris Safarova  32:36

One of the spaces you focus on is leadership training. And I know a lot of people in the space, and things people say from both sides, from the client side and from people who run the company side. How do you think this space will change?

Dave Durand  32:50

I think what’s happening right now, particularly with a lot of the online training there’s, there’s a lot more talent out there that people know of, and this is what I would call the rebellion of sincerity, and this is what I mean by it. So the greatest Well, I’ll tell you, a bad trainer does, and unfortunately, it’s most trainers. Most trainers do not train people with the idea of making them really great at what they do, and highly effective. Most trainers walk into the room to train or turn on the camera to train, and their objective is to have everybody in the room think they’re the smartest person. So instead of saying, hey, it’s quite simple, all you need to do is, if you want to move one book to here to there, you just pick up the book and you place it right there. The reason they don’t do that is because that’s way too simple sounding, and it doesn’t make them sound that important. So instead, they want to go, Well, what do you have to do is you have to pick up the book, which is not always easy, because the books are really heavy and, like, it took me 10 years to learn how to do it. Look how amazing I am. I can pick up the book, and you can’t just pick it up. You have to pick it up the right way, exactly like this. And they just add these steps and these ridiculous things to how’s it like that? By the way, with this organically throwing in my meetings, I wasn’t even actually trying to do that. Was just literally trying to come up with an analogy. And there we go. So it’s shameful promote, shameless promotion. But what happens is, they’re trying to make things sound so complex, so that everybody in the room just thinks they’re amazing. But they cut the person off then and they say, Well, I don’t know if I’m capable of it, because I’m not quite as amazing as this particular trainer or the smart people who recognize that’s not that complicated, but you’re just trying to make yourself look amazing. Are turned off by the person, because you can tell they’re just being egotistical. What happens is this is taking place online a lot now, online training and online experts are different than corporate trainers and corporate experts, and also different than like, if you think of McKinsey or something like that, where you’re hiring actual consultant that has, like, a pretty good pedigree or whatnot. But online, you. Trainers do something very, very interesting. There’s this huge industry of people who will teach you how to be a good business coach, and they don’t actually teach you anything about business coaching, and they don’t care if you have any history in business and you have the ability to teach people anything. What they’re doing is they’re saying, I had 1000 followers, and now I’ve got 2 million followers. Let me show you how to run a coaching business like I run a coaching business, and the only thing they teach people to do is how to teach people how to run a coaching business, to teach people how to run a coaching business, to run a coaching business, but not actually teach any company how to solve any problem other than how to make an individual person popular by telling other people that they can make them also popular. So it’s like a Ponzi scheme. Well, that’s a microcosm of things that happen other places in training. So the revolt, the revolution is going to be a revolution of results. It’s going to be the type of thing where a person says, I don’t really care how much noise you make. What I care about is what you’ve delivered to me. And what makes you great is not how many followers you have, but what makes you great is the results you get for the people you’re talking to. And the reason that I know that you’re willing to do that is that you are vulnerable in how you train. You are. You are not a vanity trainer who trains people for the purpose of pumping their ego. You train people to drive a result with them, and you put things in the most simple form for them to understand. So when you walk away, you don’t walk away from training confused. You feel you walk away from the training feel empowered and feeling capable. Now again, unless we’re talking specifically about what company and what type of training and at what level, it’s hard to go more specific than that, but in general terms, it’s a revolt and a revolution of sincerity, because the trainers and coaches and consultants are a dime a dozen and they don’t make consequential decisions. It’s one of the reasons that I was built my own companies, so that when I actually worked with people, I wasn’t just some guy who read about leadership, but I’ve had to lead.

Kris Safarova  37:09

I agree. And do you feel that this issue is also prevalent when it comes to corporate training, or only online training?

Dave Durand  37:16

I think in corporate training, it is prevalent, but in a different way. In corporate training, it’s not about how many followers you get, but in corporate training, which is where I learned this early on for the most part, is there’s a lot of ego in corporate training. It is. It’s great. Trainers basically communicate, hey, if a guy like me can do it, then you can do it too. Let me show you the simple steps. You’ve got this okay. Now, again, you can be training in a lot of different things, in a lot of capacities, but that’s the essence of how the training goes along. The other person is different. There they say, I am exceptional. This is highly complicated. Low odds of you succeeding, because you’re not nearly as amazing as me. Now, neither one of them actually directly say those things, but there’s a an essence of the training that takes place and in a lot of corporate leadership that happens. Now, there’s another thing that happens too, as opposed to this heavy, intense ego, there’s a lot of personality. So there are people who maybe didn’t perform very well and don’t have a very good articulation or understanding of what they’re training at a deeper level, but they’re very good in front of others. They’ve got a great ability to communicate. So they can communicate points one, two and three pretty well, with a lot of enthusiasm, but if you go to points four through 10, they don’t have enough intellect behind it. So you need to find a good trainer, somebody who has low ego but high confidence, somebody with great communication skills, and somebody that’s got an intellect to back up what they’re talking about.

Kris Safarova  38:52

Powerful words. We started our discussion today with you saying that you’ve made the decision to live life as an adventure. Could you expand on that for some of our listeners who may not know what you mean by that and how they could do that?

Dave Durand  39:05

Sure. So there’s, there’s a lot of fear in the world today, and I would give kind of a an example. And by the way, I’m the father of nine, and I have nine grandkids, okay, so I’m, I’m not just the CEO of several companies, but I know what it’s like to just be in the world and to raise children. My oldest is 32 my youngest is 13, so six out of nine are out of the house. What I have seen in a lot of their contemporaries and just in people in general, is fear. Young people today are oftentimes raised on apps like helicopter parenting was not a term that was used when I was a kid. My contemporaries became the helicopter parents. Okay, peers of mine, in a helicopter parent, we know is something that just hovers right over the kid and protects them from all. Pain. That’s what a helicopter parent does. So it begins by they say, Listen, there are no grades. Okay, you can just whatever you do that’s there’s no grading, or you can grade your own papers. Why? Well, because we don’t want the kid to experience the pain of getting a bad grade that would hurt and devastate them so poorly that we have to protect them. Then you go out on the soccer field and you say, well, there’s going to be no going to be no keeping score. Every kid, by the way, on the field does keep the score. They all know who won and lost, even when the parents said, there’s no keeping a score, and everybody gets the trophy. And people make fun of that as a metaphor, but it’s true. This really did happen in a lot of circles. And what are you teaching the kid? Because the kid has enough intellect to know somebody did lose, or my artwork is horrible, or my math doesn’t add up, but that person’s did so I actually didn’t merit what I got. You’re teaching that kid that the pain of losing, or the pain of needing to improve because you got an F before you got an A, that pain is so devastating and so bad that you have to avoid it at all costs, up to including watching your parents or your teachers lie to you to protect you from pain. So you say, well, lying is okay, as long as lying what you’re lying about is what’s true in order to protect people from failure. Wow. That makes failure sound really, really, really scary. So now they get into high school and they go to college, and their parents put them on the three life, 360 app. And I’m not fully condemning this. I can see what this app does Do you know where the kid is, wherever they go, at whatever time they go, how much they spend, how fast they drive, you know, everything about them within three feet. Well, I mean, sure if my daughter, who is single, said, Dad, I’m moving to New York City, can you put me on life six, 360, because I don’t have anybody there. And you can know where I am sure, why, because she as an adult, would want to do this, and I would be happy to make her feel safe that way. That’s very different than putting her 18 year old son on life 360 and keeping him on it until he’s 26 years old, and now he’s afraid to do anything. Why is he afraid? Because I don’t have my mom or my dad. They’re protecting me from all the dangers. Oh, don’t buy that. Don’t spend that. Oh, I’m going to go on your job interview with you, just so you don’t mess it up, and so you don’t have to experience the pain of rejection from your boss. I mean, my goodness, you can’t possibly live life that way. You have to be able to say, pain, suffering, loss. These things are a normal part of life, and if I don’t experience them, they’re going to really, really, really hurt. So why don’t I start experiencing them when I’m young? Oh, I lost, oh, I got a bad grade. That person’s was better than mine. I need to improve. Wow, I did improve. They liked it. I got recognition. I liked the recognition. I didn’t like the failure. So I’m going to go for the recognition more, on and on and on and on. But if you want to play it safe, you’re gonna be 35 years old in your parents basement playing video games and unemployed, and we see way too much of that. And then people say, Listen, Dave, it’s, you know, you’re picking on my kid, because he does have mental illness. Listen, I have total empathy for that, but that’s why he has it. That’s why he has mental illness. That’s why he has anxiety. He has anxiety because from the beginning, you told him, I am never going to let you experience pain. I’m never going to let you experience loss. And it is so bad to experience pain and loss or hard work, by the way, literally lifting something up, moving, sweating. Okay, that is so bad for you that I’m going to never let you experience it, and then you’re going to become anxious and mentally ill, and I’m going to wonder why. Well, that’s why. So like, how about let’s not do that to young people.

Kris Safarova  43:50

Dave, you are such an incredible person who is able to be successful in business world, and then you have nine kids, nine grandkids. Could you share with us some of the habits practices you follow that allow you to fit all of it into your life and succeed in all of those areas?

Dave Durand  44:09

Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. Kris, so I think that one of the things that people have to remember is that we have primary and secondary responsibilities in life. When we manage our primary responsibilities, we will always get to our secondary responsibilities. But if, if we go to our secondary responsibilities first, we won’t get to our primary so for example, I’ll use this as an example, because people use sports examples all the time in business, if you use a sales example, every every discipline gets it, even if they’re not in sales. So salespeople, generally speaking, they need to make phone calls. They need to prospect and get in front of customers. Salesperson that’s not in front of customers is a salesperson who can’t sell. Now, obviously, if you’re selling 747, airplanes, you’re going to be working on a whole lot of stuff, and you don’t have all sorts of prospecting you’re doing, because. Working with just a couple different clients, but for the most part, people need to get out there and see more people and see more people that can sell more that’s hard work, and most people in sales don’t like that part of the work. Now some people do, but most don’t. So what they’re going to do is they’re going to have some administrative, administrative responsibility that they need to do, that they’re going to put ahead of that, that they shouldn’t put ahead of that. And when their boss comes in and says, Hey, how many points you have this week? And they give a very low number, and the boss says, why? They’re gonna say, Well, how could I, I had to, you know, you give me all this admin work I need to do, by the way, sometimes it’s just file because people give too much admin work to people that need to be out there hunting but, but given the fact that maybe they don’t do that, the person still might use that experience. So they’re putting this secondary responsibility ahead of it. So in my own organization, I’ve known this because we keep it for our salespeople administrative work down to like two hours a week, so they’re in front of customers the rest of the time. But sometimes they’ll say, Well, I don’t have appointments because of all the administrative work. And I’m like, listen, I know that there’s not all that administrative work, because I know exactly what it is. So here’s the basic principle, if you start your secondary responsibilities before your primary responsibilities, you will never get to your primary responsibilities. And the reason is, you know that you’re you’re not doing your primary responsibilities because you don’t like them, or they’re more difficult, or they’re harder, and in order to justify not getting to them, you need to make your secondary responsibilities more complicated, so you need to take as much time by complicating them for as long as you possibly can, just to avoid what you’re doing and to justify why you didn’t get to those primary responsibilities. You can imagine if a parent said, Well, I don’t feed the kids because I need to clean the floors so I know I haven’t fed the kids in three days, but, my goodness, the cabinets are need to be dusted. No, that’s a secondary responsibility. You know, no matter how much you justify why you didn’t feed the kids. You have to feed the kids. It just comes right down to it. That’s a primary responsibility for the day. And so you do that first, and then you’ll have time to clean the floors. So that’s one of the ways, is keeping the primary primary. But the other thing too is that in life, in business, in countries in the world, and in a home, we all experience a pattern of responsibilities that really matter. In order for us to have prosperity, we need to have peace. So if I want personal prosperity, I need peace in my heart. I can’t have peace in my heart if I don’t have order in my life. So order brings peace, and pre peace can bring prosperity. Great for CEOs to recognize I don’t have order in my company. I cannot have peace in my organization. I therefore can’t have prosperity. So you got to get rid of the chaos. It to the degree you can. There’s a certain amount of healthy chaos, but you get rid of the non healthy chaos. So for me personally, what that entails is the first thing I do is praying, and I put my life in order because I know that I will die someday. And it’s always funny, I laugh. People are like, I’m working so hard. I’m, I’m staying in shape, I’m, I’m, I’m putting my retirement package. I’m doing all this and all these disciplines in life. I’m eating right and so that I can retire at 65 and get 20 years of playing pickleball and taking a couple of cruises, that’s silly. I mean, it’s a good idea, but it’s silly when you think about like there’s a lifelong ultimate retirement plan and what happens when I die. Now, I’m not telling people what happens when they die. This is evangelizing to them, but all human beings go through this. This is an existential crisis that we all have. Man’s Search for Meaning was a book by Viktor Frankl. Any any therapist or psychologist would have read that book, and he was suffered in Auschwitz, and he discovered that the people who did best in Auschwitz that made it through the worst circumstance any human could live in were people who saw as far out as possible. They kept thinking about as far out in life as they could, and they never stopped hope from there. So I order my day that way, and it’s great. And then I make sure that I take care of myself physically, which you know is requires a certain discipline. The beauty is you discipline yourself in prayer and meditation. You discipline yourself in your diet and exercise, and those disciplines translate to the other parts of your life, so that you can now have things in order. The other thing too is that I listen. You know, there’s it’s great when people go to a foreign country and feed poor people, that’s great. Should happen. I’m not, none of what I’m saying is speaking against that, but there’s a lot of people who do that? They walk right over their kids and right past their wife or husband who are suffering and need them, emotionally, mentally or for other things. They skip right past their needs. They skip past their neighbors needs who’s on the street, and they go all the way to Africa to feed the poor, and then they post on an Instagram totally insincere. You’re not doing it for the kids. Snap. Africa, then you’re doing it for you and how everybody perceives you do. You know how I know you’re doing it for the kids in Africa. That is, if you wake up and you take care of your kid, you take care of your spouse, you take care of your neighbor, to whatever degrees make sense and is responsible to do, and then you go feed them. That’s what I call the meter, the mile in the marathon. You can’t claim that you can run a marathon and then claim that you can’t run am I? You listen one one precedes the other. So when we build these disciplines in life, now, what do we have? We have the ability to walk into our office as a complete rock star. You walk in ready. You’re mentally ready, spiritually ready. You’re physically ready, your things in order. Your family’s behind you. No one can beat you when that’s the way you’re doing it. But if you’re going into work tired, lazy, over caffeinated, over alcohol, too much this, too much that family that’s frustrated, angry, kids with problems, having no idea what’s taking place in your own spiritual life, you’re gonna be a wreck. You can only provide so much. So you gotta get order in your life, peace in your heart, and then you find prosperity.

Kris Safarova  51:08

What advice would you give to our listeners who do not have kids yet and they’re trying to decide if they should have kids?

Dave Durand  51:15

Oh, my goodness, this is a funny one. I say something that I heard something else say, I repeat it out there, and it’s I say, get married before you’re ready and have kids before you can afford it. Now I don’t necessarily mean that, but the reason I say it is because it’s a stark contrast behind everybody saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. First of all, everyone has to live their own life. I’m not going to be the one to tell anybody how to live their life. But what I can say is that the joy that you have in your life and the energy that you can bring to it when you do have kids is pretty outstanding. And I think that when people ask themselves the question, should I wait? Or should I not? They have to remember what they’re saying. Should I wait? What should I wait for? Now, no parent that is a good parent would say, um, I mean, it’s maybe it’s happened, but I hate my kids. You know, the worst thing that ever happened to me that is not generally what you hear, generally what you hear from a parent is I love my kids and they’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, if that’s true, remember, that’s what you’re saying. Should I wait for? Should I wait for someone that I’m gonna love more than I loved anyone else, except for maybe my spouse, right? And the greatest thing in my life? Should I wait for the greatest thing in my life? Or should I have the greatest thing in my life? Now, well, I’d say, might as well have the greatest in your life.

Kris Safarova  52:47

Now, powerful words, last, very quick question, how do you develop yourself? How you invest in yourself continuously developing your skills?

Dave Durand  52:57

I think, um, it’s, it’s, um, much more important to do a little bit every day to improve than a ton in one big week of motivation. So for example, a lot of people the New Year’s is coming up. A lot of people will say, you know, I have this new New Year’s resolution and this new year’s resolution, the reason I tell them, hey, here’s why New Year’s resolutions fail? Because if it’s an important thing, why are you going to wait till the first of the year to do it? I mean, if you like, say, I have this really bad habit, I can do it for a little while longer. I’ll just wait till the first year. Listen, if it’s if it’s not important enough to do now and it’s unimportant enough to do after the first of the year. You’re not going to do it after the first of the year. So I think that’s a part of it is to say I don’t want to have like these. I’m not going to look at this massive growth spurt of professionalism or physical discipline or whatever it might be, but I’m going to improve just a tiny bit every day. I’m going to spend a little bit of time on this every day, and those are the people that, in my observation, become the greatest giants in the world that can lead other people to becoming giants too, because they’re not trying to eat an elephant in one meal, they’re taking one bite at a time.

Kris Safarova  54:17

Dave, thank you so much. I really appreciate everything you have said today. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

Dave Durand  54:26

Well, thank you. I appreciate you asking. They can buy the book on Amazon. It’s ready February 4, fourth. But if they want to order ahead of time, they can do that as well. I have a YouTube channel, which is Durand on demand. That’s another good place to find me. And then from there, you can find me at leading giants.giants.com and everything else but Kris, a real pleasure being with you today. Thanks for all the good work that you do.

Kris Safarova  54:47

Our guest today, again, has been Dave Durand. Check out Dave’s book. It’s called Leading Giants. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It’s a free download to be prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And another gift for you, McKinsey- and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. You can take a look at it as a template and see what you can improve on your resume, and having a great resume is very valuable thing to do at every level, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.