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 firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. 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 forward slash resume PDF. And today we have with us Keith Ferrazzi. Many of you will know Keith. He’s an entrepreneur, global thought leader. He’s the author of the number one New York Times best seller who is got your back. And also best sellers like Never Eat Alone. That’s how I learned about you kid many, many years ago and then leading without authority, competing in the new world of work. And his frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Keith, welcome.

Keith Ferrazzi  01:44

Thanks so much, Kris. I’m excited to be here, looking forward to the conversation.

Kris Safarova  01:48

So I wanted to start with a question from your book, page 53 your latest book, what experience from your past has most contributed to who you are today?

Keith Ferrazzi  01:57

Wow, that’s a great way to start. Thank you very much. Just to give your folks context who are listening, the book never lead alone really defines the 10 critical shifts that a team needs to make to go from mediocre to high performing. And we’ve benchmarked over 3000 teams to identify the practices one of the critical shifts is from going from a team where trust is serendipitous, where relationships might be in pockets, but not the whole team has each other’s back and to accelerate the bondedness and the connectedness of a team. So every chapter of the book has a shift from accidental relationship building to purposeful relationship building is this particular chapter. It’s chapter four and and then there are some practices. Kris just gave me a question that I suggest that you as a team leader or you as a team member could potentially curate with your team to accelerate the excuse me, to accelerate the connectedness and the bondedness of your team, and therefore the empathy and the trust and the care and the perspective of having each other’s back. And the question is, what experience of your past Do you think really impacts who you are today. Look, if you read my first book, never get alone. There’s no question that, having been brought up in a poor family in southwestern Pennsylvania, immigrant family from Italy focused on trying to make it good in the steel industry while the steel industry was crashing down around us really gave me so much of who I am today. One I gotta admit it gave me scarcity, not being able to pay for gas to get into town, not having any money as a kid for the new shoes and those kind of things, and my dad having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, and then being unemployed and my mom having to become a cleaning lady. Overcoming adversity has made me resilient. I thank God and my blessings all the time for the resilience that I have. However, as I said, It breeds scarcity. It breeds fear. It’s got a tape that plays in my head all the time that says what’s going to go wrong next. And you know that, of course, creates a sense of leadership that is not always the best form of leadership, you know, the perfectionist mindset, etc. So I’ve had to work really hard at that. Now I could go on and on on that story, and what I encourage in a team is that you do spend a good five minutes talking about that, and I could give you texture to it, etc, but then it lets the team understand who each other is. It lets the team have some empathy for why behaviors are what they are, and and it builds a bondedness among. The team, some forgiveness factor when people aren’t behaving in the best way that they should behave, and some understanding. So it’s a What a clever and beautiful way to start this dialog. And hopefully I put it into context a little bit with with your organization, with the folks listening,

Kris Safarova  05:17

Yes, cute, and I thought that will be your answer for me, it is a moment when I was around three years old and we were living in a rental apartment. I just became assisted to twin brothers, and we were asked to leave by the end of the day. We were asked to live in the morning, and we had to live within hours. And I remember that moment, Russia, snow, winter, tall, snow, tiny legs, and how hard it was to lift my legs to walk, and I knew that they could not ask for help, because my parents could not help me, and they had to carry our staff and my brothers. And I remember that I was thinking, I don’t know if I can do it. It’s so hard, and they just kept working.

Keith Ferrazzi  05:56

It’s beautiful and sad and lovely, and obviously you and I share a resilience, a fortitude as a result of those moments. But I also suspect, like anybody you know, you probably have that tape that plays in your head that says, I never want to go back there again.

Kris Safarova  06:13

Definitely, and they never want anyone to experience this as well.

Keith Ferrazzi  06:16

Oh, that’s beautiful. So you’re bringing bring your support to others, yeah. I mean, for me, it precipitated a desire to really fix the way companies work. Because the steel industry crashed in the United States because of a lack of curiosity among American industrialists, the Japanese adopted new ways of working. They adopted a belief system in believing in frontline people to re engineer every single day their ways of working. Total Quality Management powered teams, and yet the big steel industries got crushed because of it. And I felt, you know, that’s not fair. I want to grow up and I want to make sure I fix American manufacturing as my head as a kid. But in reality, I just wanted to make sure that the stupid mistakes of the steel industry weren’t replicated more than they need to be, that we always focus on the future of work. We always focus on being curious, getting better in our organization. So yeah, it became my mission. It became my driver.

Kris Safarova  07:20

No question, Keith, many of our listeners are working at ledge consulting firms, and they are somewhere on the path to partnership. Many of them are very close, or just were promoted to partner, or have been a partner for a few years, and you have been incredibly successful at Deloitte. So I wanted to ask for your advice for our listeners, what would be advice for someone who really wants to succeed and be someone instrumental to the success of the organization.

Keith Ferrazzi  07:44

So the first thing, and I’m going to walk you through my book and how it can be used as a tool. The first thing in chapters one and two of the book is help you understand your team has nothing to do with your authority org chart. When I first came on board to Deloitte, I saw that we as a firm were not managing our brand and our marketing as we should have. We were lowest to the Big Eight of the consulting firms and and I I saw that as a vision. So my team became other people in the organization who were looking for re engineering the marketing organization. Some of them were marketers. Some of them were practitioners. Some of them were people leading service lines, etc. And I got I kept talking to them about what we needed to do differently. I went out and I did my own research, proactively brought it back to the firm, and I started to become a leader in the thinking of the re engineering, of marketing for the firm, without even being the leader. And that’s that’s your opportunity in a consulting firm. Wonderful thing about being in a consulting firm, first of all, you need to make sure that you keep your billing strong. You need to make sure that you’re you’re financially successful in the business for the business, but then you need to show yourself as a leader as early as possible. Now I can also suggest that how you use the book to team with your clients is equally as important. So when you have a client relationship and you’ve got a an active client engagement, I’m working with one particular consulting firm right now on this where I’m helping them re engineer the team, which is them and the client, as a team, I introduce in the book something called a social contract. What’s the social contract among that team? What’s its agreements among that team? How does it work together with what degree of having each other’s back, with what degree of candor, with what degree of transparency? How does it use processes like Agile to get the job done? You can use this book as a Bible for the team that you’re leading inside of the team within the corporation that you’re serving. So you. The what I would highly recommend is that you serve richly that group of people who are critical to your success, and you do so in the format of a team and bringing people together with a shared vision. And I introduce a word in the book called co elevation. It’s a commitment to a vision, but also a commitment that the group will get each other, there together, will go higher together. And I think it’s a perfect book. I actually think that most consulting firms do this organically. They the best partners do this well, but this is now a formula for how to do it better.

Kris Safarova  10:39

What you just said makes me think about how in consulting, so I used to be a management consultant as well, how in consulting you have dinners with clients. So what kind of questions you think would be appropriate when you’re meeting with a client versus when you’re meeting with the team? What adjustments would you make to the questions?

Keith Ferrazzi  10:56

No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Um, I am just next month, next week, I’m sorry, I’m going to be with one of the largest software firms in the world coaching that executive team, and I’m going to be working with that executive team about being much more inclusive, being much more candid, being much more transparent, being much more bold, but at the same time, I’m going to build the psychological safety by taking them to dinner around this engagement, to build their commitment to each other’s success. So the question I asked you, you asked me, and you then answered is the same question I would ask that team, because it builds empathy, it builds strength. But you might also, on a regular basis, ask the following question. There’s one chapter in the book about how does the team build each other’s energy, own each other’s energy, have a sense of strength with each other, that it cares about each other, and it keeps lifting each other up, resilience and being able to do something as simple as an energy check, this is what I’ll be doing with that software firm next week, where everybody is going to share what has been bringing their energy down lately, personally and professionally, but they’re going to be listening with an ear to having each other’s back to calling each other a week later and asking each other how they’re doing, or how their mother happens to be doing, who is going in for surgery, or how’s that project doing your you’re struggling with, etc. So it’s a real social contract to lift each other’s energy up, and in the process of doing that, making sure that people own and are willing to be transparently sharing what their energy levels are and why,

Kris Safarova  12:45

Makes a lot of sense. So you mentioned being financially successful, kind of as a given. You have to be financially successful, then you can do those other things. It makes me think of people who are working in management consulting terms, some of my clients as well, that I speak to who are partners at major consulting firms, and they have so much on the plate, they don’t have time for anything, and they really have a lot of pressure to deliver sales. How can someone use your book to deliver sales? Because then the book becomes a priority.

Keith Ferrazzi  13:15

Yeah. So there’s one consulting firm that I know is using the book right now. It’s a prominent consulting firm, and one of the practices that it has is accelerating the success of supply chain, supply chain, so they’ve decided to go out and bring a group of Supply Chain Leaders of different companies together in a community, and that community is adopting the principles of the book and how they work together. So it’s a group of Supply Chain Leaders from different companies committed to teamship, committed to giving each other feedback, committed to pushing each other, holding each other accountable, lifting each other up, building the relationships. They do dinners around the country, and they do a couple of summits where they all come together, and they’re committing to reinvent the supply chain forward, looking five years, but doing it today, enabling it with AI. So you can be a community leader, a powerful community leader, and you can do that in in a fashion that allows you to be successful and sell at the same time by hosting a community. You’re, you’re you’re building a rich reservoir that you can sell into, that people will be inclined to want to build those relationships with you.

Kris Safarova  14:34

So when you love Deloitte and join starboard hotels as cmo and Head of Global Sales, you mentioned that at Deloitte, you were a strong team on a shared mission, which I know exactly what you mean. I had the same experience and the same culture shock going from consulting to banking. Tell us about what was different at Deloitte versus at starboard,

Keith Ferrazzi  14:54

You know. And thank you for that. That’s a great question. It was actually one of the reasons that I got into this work. So it’s. Starwood. It was a very competitive place. It was a bit of a fear based culture. The CEO was brilliant. The CEO was innovative. He drove, he was financially an engineer, and drove high degrees of financial success from the balance sheet. Understood real estate, etc, but in the in the trenches of the business, there was competitiveness, there was fear, there was silos, and it was a bit of a viper pit. And that was because there was really no focus on a team. It was very much. And I think you find this sometimes in finance organizations, financially driven organizations, it was focused really on the individual. Now at Deloitte, we were a band of brothers and sisters taking a hill together, you know, going higher, going stronger, working, collaborating, arguing, debating, but it was all of love, so beautiful. And today you look at it in Deloitte, is highly successful. It had an aspiration of achievement. We were the lowest of the big eight in the consultancies, and now we’re clearly tied. And that was our aspiration to be, you know, one of the best. And it clearly is. We always hoped to someday be as good as Accenture, and I don’t think anybody would deny that today, whereas at Starwood, unfortunately, despite all the innovations like the W Hotel, the heavenly bed, the star Preferred Guest program, etc, we had to sell to Marriott at very much below industry multiples, and It was very disappointing. So the success of those the the success of one of those teams, and the failure in the other really made me realize how powerful and important team and Chip was.

Kris Safarova  16:50

So teamship, you mentioned that word. Let’s explain it. What do you mean by teamship?

Keith Ferrazzi  16:55

Yeah, so I want to mention it in relationship to what we think of as traditional leadership teamship is what the responsibility of the team is. It’s what it how a team should behave. It’s one thing to be a leader and to give feedback. Congratulations, that’s great. It’s another thing to be a leader and to lead a team that has the team giving each other feedback. You know, a good leader holds the team accountable. A great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable, but a great team holds each other accountable. So what’s the roadmap? And what we did is we broke down in the book, 10 shifts to team. Shift, 10 shifts to being a high performing team, and because we have data for 20 years that shows that most teams are mediocre, most teams are conflict avoidant, not courageously candid. Most teams are not each other’s coaches. They are they look upward for their coaching, but great teams are each other’s coaches. We look at the energy and the resilience of a team, and most teams think of it that as my responsibility. Great teams. We have each other’s back. We are taking care of each other’s energy, and we are making sure that the resilience of the team is strong. So 10 critical shifts. The way the book’s organized is that each shift is a chapter, each one has a hero’s story and then followed by really clear practices. So if the team wants you know you asked me that question that that was called a bonded dinner, a connectedness dinner, you have those kind of deep dinners with real rich questions that are answered, and that’s a critical practice that builds the relationship score higher in your team. If you feel that your team is more conflict avoidant and you need to make it more candid, then you practice something we call stress testing. Stress testing is where, instead of giving a normal report out and having a person say, you know, 20 pages, here’s what my project is. Instead, the person gives a very simple report out that says, here’s what I’ve achieved, here’s where I’m struggling, here’s where I’m going. And then the team goes into breakout rooms and stress tests what they just heard. They they are direct to the person and say, here’s where I challenge you. Here’s an idea or an innovation I might offer. Here’s a place where I’d like to help you those three questions aimed back at the person. And you can even write them down in a shared document of some sort of Google Doc and give them to the person. This is called stress testing, and it makes a team bring feedback right into the fabric of the team itself. It brings feedback into our daily practices. Report outs would normally be done and nobody would talk right but now a stress test with a simple assignment, a simple practice, you’ve shifted, you’ve shifted the culture of a team. You’ve made it supportive. You’ve made a challenge culture. You’ve made. It a team that is more innovative, all from a simple practice. So the book, in that chapter, it’s a chapter about moving from conflict avoidance to candor and then a practice like stress testing. That’s it. It actually is a game changing practice. And everything in the book is about practices. There’s actually 37 practices broken down into the 10 shifts.

Kris Safarova  20:22

And the good thing is, those questions are so powerful. You can use them with your spouse. You can use them with your friends to build deeper relationships, more trust.

Keith Ferrazzi  20:29

Yeah, you know, it’s like the principle of teamship and the principle of what we do, which is team coaching. It has changed families. I remember recently, a chief financial officer of one company said to me, Keith, your team coaching work changed my my life. I went home and I asked my wife for a candor break. What’s not being said in our relationship that should be said. And this is a candor break. Is another practice that I suggest teams. Do you ask a team just that question, what’s not being said? That should be said. And he said, My wife told me that the relationship wasn’t working, and she was just waiting for me to retire and then divorce me. And all of a sudden, this opened up a whole different dialog and saved their marriage. So again, the key is, let’s make sure that we are being transparent, listening, caring openly, and you’re right, the same practices, any body of people working together effectively is all that’s needed. And, yeah, it’s very exciting that you pointed that out. It’s it’ll change our lives, not just our work.

Kris Safarova  21:48

Keith, in your book, you mentioned the diagnostic exercise that determines teams current state and also gives them a glimpse of how things could be. Could you give some sense of how to complete an exercise like that.

Keith Ferrazzi  22:01

Yeah. So every chapter has a couple of diagnostic questions. So we were just talking about the candor chapter, the chapter of moving from conflict avoidance teams to candid and courageous teams. There’s a couple of questions in that chapter. So the idea would be, the team would read the chapter, there’d be a hero story, wonderful leader from the CEO of XFINITY, and what he does to build courage in the team, and then some very specific practices. But before you start doing the practices, you take the diagnostic quiz, and it’s you take it in the room, and one of the questions is, we challenge each other courageously when it’s risky to do so on a scale of zero to five, write your number. So we get to see that at the beginning, we’re in the low twos. You know, we’re probably at 2.4 in terms of our courage. Now let’s start using these practices. Let’s start using candle breaks. Let’s start using stress testing. And then we take the diagnostic again. Oh my gosh. We’re now on the low threes. Now we’re in the low fours, and we see ourselves moving in our social contract with each other. It’s very powerful,

Kris Safarova  23:05

Definitely. So let’s talk about shifting from a culture of leader, led race to peer celebration and recognition. That is a challenging area. I’m sure you have observed it throughout your career, that there’s just so much competition at your peer level, and people are competing for the same promotion. So how can we achieve pa celebration and recognition, given that issue?

Keith Ferrazzi  23:28

Well, look, I mean, the I believe in most teens, I’m just looking right now the chapter eight is what you’re referring to, the culture of of scarce praise, where, frankly, in most organizations, there’s not nearly enough praise. And how do we move from scarce praise to abundant praise? We’ve got to allow the team to serve each other in that praise, simple practice, like a weekly gratitude circle, where everybody goes around and shares one person that they’re grateful for and why I don’t generally find that most teammates are particularly competitive when given a rich environment of care, of trust, of intimacy. They really are not it’s usually when there’s fear scarcity that’s created by the leader that this this exists, but if you start to breed these cultures of celebration, cultures of gratitude, cultures of relationship, culture of challenge, all of these things together create this sense of esprit de corps, where people are really what I call co elevating, where they’re committed to a mission, but they’re committed to pushing each other higher and and we can go all higher as a group. I don’t think there’s as much scarcity when you start to adopt these principles as there might be today.

Kris Safarova  24:54

I’m glad to hear that. So in your book, you talk about red flag rules, for example. We speak courageously and we are truly committed to one another. Could you tell us about red flag rules? Red flag plays anything that our listeners need to know.

Keith Ferrazzi  25:09

So every chapter has a red flag rule. I’ll just stick again with the you know we we speak courageously. Is the is the red flag rule. It’s the agreement for the candor. Chapter 10. Chapters 10 critical, transformational changes that we need to make. So in the relationship, chapter it’s we have each other’s back. We have each other’s back. They’re simple mantras. Now what’s interesting is the mantra alone wouldn’t be important. You could, you could decide, as a team, this is important. We challenge each other, we have each other’s back, blah, blah, blah, but if you don’t do the practices, you’ll never get to the red flag goal. But then there’s a thing we call red flag replay, where once a month as a team, you ask yourself, let’s look at these things we committed to we committed to challenging each other. Where have we violated that? We committed to have each other’s back. Where haven’t we? So we point out, not only are we celebrating, but we point out in this red flag replay where we’re off mark and we’re always looking to be seekers, trying to adjust ourselves back to being on mark as a high performing team. So the red flag rules play a very important role in the transformation, but not as not as important as the practices themselves.

Kris Safarova  26:31

Talk to us about personal, professional and structural trust that is so important. So let’s talk about those three types of trust.

Keith Ferrazzi  26:38

Yeah, so people always talk about trust. If I were to say to a large audience, write down the one thing that has to exist for a team to be successful, I bet 85% of the people would write the word Trust. But trust isn’t something that you do. It’s an outcome. It’s an outcome, or it’s broken down and and challenged through three different lenses, professional trust, structural trust, and personal trust. And when I say that the professional trust is is broken down and built through experience. You deliver you don’t deliver you. We see the world differently. I’m a finance person, you’re a marketing person. We don’t see eye to eye. And so these things in the professional world can be strengthened through the stress testing, through getting into the weeds with each other, so you understand why you’re thinking the way you’re thinking, et cetera, the structural trust exists through hierarchy. My I might trust my boss a little less because they control my pay, or I might trust HR or finance a little less because of there’s, there’s these structural breakdowns that occur based on positional authority, but then the personal trust, that’s the trump card. If I had a boss, even though there may be, you know, a structural trust impediment because they’re my boss, and maybe because we disagree on something professionally, we have a breakdown in trust. But if I had a really strong personal relationship, I can walk into the room, shut the door, and say, Hey, we really need to talk here. We can get through it. The personal trust building allows you to get through other attributes of trust breakdown. So that’s why we have the whole chapter on relationship building, building, you know, checking in with each other, what’s what’s your energy level, personally and professionally, what’s going on with you, the bonding effectiveness, dinners and those kind of things. The more you build that personal trust, that empathy, that care, then you know, the better everything works.

Kris Safarova  28:48

One of the practices you recommend in your book is a personal, professional check in, which is all connected to trust and building a bond, and part of it was sweet and sour. So you have this five minute check in at the beginning of the meeting, and you ask team members to share something that is going well and something that is not going well, something that is challenging in their life right now. Can you speak a little bit about it? And also, does it include personal items or only professional.

Keith Ferrazzi  29:15

No, it’s really important. We are more and more bringing our whole self to work, and I think the heyday of that was during the pandemic, when we would show up, and the first question everybody asked is, are you okay? And what they were meaning not was, how’s your work doing? What their meaning was, How’s mom, how’s the family? Is everybody safe? And we that was a really beautiful moment. For a short period of time, we’ve not kept that up, that idea of really bringing our whole selves to work in that way. I know different cultures have different belief systems in this, but universally, people long to be their whole self everywhere. So the idea, and not, by the way, you know, if I’m going to. If my son is having a particular struggle or a challenge, and right now, one of my boys is and I’m dealing with a caregiver, a therapist that is working with me, with my youngest son, if that’s going on that has it’s distracting me, and it’s present for the team to know that, but that’s what I’m going through right now. It’s important, and we can’t leave it behind. So the personal, professional check in is an opportunity. It’s like, what are you struggling with? What’s going on? What’s the most important thing right now? Personally, professionally, just a regular cadence of that is very important.

Kris Safarova  30:37

When you started working with clients using this work from this book. What surprised you?

Keith Ferrazzi  30:44

Well, so the book is coming out now, right? It’s out now, but the work has been going on for two decades, and what early on surprised me? Did it surprise me? Well, the practices were were really universal. You know, you mentioned Russia. I would go to Russia and be coaching one of the finance teams of one of the wealthiest people in Russia, and I would be scared to death that this wasn’t going to work there. And all of a sudden it the transformative practices worked. I’d go to the Middle East and work in a country where I was fearful that it wouldn’t work there. They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t get this. But this is really it’s about universality of how people connect and commit and how they are effective with each other. So I think the biggest thing that I would say is the universality of the practices. Worked everywhere. It was beautiful. The other thing that might have surprised me a little bit was that the research, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, because I, I have always been a research oriented person, and the numbers mattered so much. If I could say we have X number of teams, here’s the data, here’s the pre data, here’s the post data, yada yada, that just made everybody else comfortable. I get it. It makes sense. But you know, the practices are so intuitive as well that you would think that it would be acceptable that the research was critical.

Kris Safarova  32:21

So when you started applying this work with clients, what was most challenging for them

Keith Ferrazzi  32:26

chapter six. Chapter Six is adopting the process of 21st century collaboration for teams to really start leaning in and using the technology better, working in teams and Microsoft and Google documents, etc, not using meetings as the primary form of collaboration, shifting collaboration into asynchronous collaboration in documents, all of that we’re so habituated to throwing ourselves in a meeting, which not Everybody feels heard. It Dray. It draws out time. Most people shouldn’t even been in there. It’s unproductive. It’s horrible, horrible. We have the worst forms of collaboration, and we’re still clinging to them. And I would say that’s probably the thing that is most difficult for people to change, which is adopting 21st century collaboration tactics.

Kris Safarova  33:20

And they will need to do so much more adapting. Going forward, things are changing so fast now with one.

Keith Ferrazzi  33:25

I mean, how do you partner with AI? That’s so it’s going to be so different.

Kris Safarova  33:30

For our listeners who are going to buy the book and go through it and try to apply it. Where do you think they will get stuck?

Keith Ferrazzi  33:38

Most likely, so probably the place when you get into the chapters where we’re dealing with applying it to your real work, and we’re talking about doing a there’s a particular practice called a collaborative problem solving practice, where we pick a question that is important to the business, and we put it out there, and we ask people to comment on it. Most people make those questions way too complex, and they make it like five different questions embedded in one. I’m always unbundling that and saying, Look, what’s the most important thing that we have to do here. So this, I’m working with a software firm right now, and they are struggling with adopting a new platform and and look, at the end of the day, it’s what’s gonna stop our platform from cascading and being universally accepted by our customers and our own employees, what’s, what’s, what’s, what are the biggest blockers? That’s a very simple question, but if I asked three different questions embedded in one question, people will get confused. So it’s trying to be elegant and simple and focused in our questions of our teams, so that we can really get to. To the meat of it. And, you know, we try to do a pretty good job in the book, in giving good examples of what’s a good question, what’s not a good question. But that’s probably one of the places where it takes more practice.

Kris Safarova  35:12

We only spoke about AI and how things are changing very fast. I feel I have to ask you this question, how do you think the way team separate will change in the next 510, years because of technological developments. That includes, of course, AI.

Keith Ferrazzi  35:27

Well, probably the most important change is that we are now in teams with technology. It wasn’t the same with software. If you were in sales, your teammate was not your CRM system. I know that the sales support would like it to be, but we barely interfaced with their CRM system effectively. But going forward, you have a sales assistant that’s an AI that is going to really either you know how you partner with that person? I just called it a person. How funny. How you partner with that technology, with that avatar, with that bot is going to make or break. What kind of a salesperson you are? Do you pause and before you go into a meeting? Do you say, you know, can you tell me the sentiment analysis of what you think this person feels about our product? And they can go through all your emails. They can pull, you know, downloads of of conversations that this person has previously had. But what if this person had conversations with other members of your organization that you didn’t know about? It could pull that information to or it can go on social media and look at that so, or it could just generically suggest this particular title is likely to feel this way about our products. So really, being able to be much more curious for information and have a partnership with your technology is a big deal. So again, chapter six is 21st century collaboration. We talk about how you have to collaborate with AI, not just your teammates.

Kris Safarova  37:00

And the last question for today, my favorite question to ask over the last few years, could you share with us, maybe two, three aha moments, realizations that really change the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

Keith Ferrazzi  37:15

Yeah, probably. I just got engaged this past year, and thank you. I’m very happy, and I think that love changes my perspective on a lot of things. It’s opened me to wanting to work differently. It’s wanting to work smarter. You know, when you’re running around the world, it’s exciting, but now, now all of a sudden, not so exciting, when really what you want to be is back home. And so it’s, I think, love, you know, love has been my medicine for the last couple of years that has really been giving me a lot. So I think that’s that’s probably the greatest fuel.

Kris Safarova  37:58

I’m so glad that you found someone to share your life with this is such an important part of life. It is thank you, instrumental for happiness and for feeling that you’re living a full life, really making the most of it while you’re here. Yeah, thank you. I agree, Keith. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your books, anything you want to share?

Keith Ferrazzi  38:17

Yeah. I mean, follow us on social. Follow me on social. But keithferazi.com has a lot more information about me. The consulting firm is Ferrazzi Greenlight, but you can navigate to it from keithferazi.com Also, if you want to buy the book for your whole team, I created a video series that we give out for free if you buy the book in bulk for your teams, and the team can follow along with my coaching on each chapter. So go to keithfrozzi.com and buy a bulk of the books and start becoming an incredibly high performing team that really crushes it.

Kris Safarova  38:55

Keith. Thank you so much for being a part of the session today. I really enjoyed our conversation, and thank you for all the work you’re doing. We haven’t even spoke about the personal things that you’re doing, kind of behind the scenes, and I know that you are person who is giving back a lot and helping a lot of people. So thank you for being a person like that.

Keith Ferrazzi  39:12

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Kris, thank you. Yeah, our work in philanthropy means a lot to us, and maybe that’ll be the context of our next conversation together.

Kris Safarova  39:21

I’m looking forward to it. Thanks, Kris, our guest today has been Keith varizzi. Check out his book, never lead alone, and all the other books. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used and well managed strategy studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG winning resume free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time you.