Sean Sheppard, Co-Founder of growthX, on Learning, Scale, and Effective Change Management
Concepts
Systems thinking
Learn from the best in the world - even if it’s a different domain (Sean was a professional golfer;)
Look for the places where you can have the biggest impact
Use science to simplify and reverse engineer what you want you to want to happen; In golf, it was physics + cognitive research (learning styles/cognition modes)
Have a systematic approach for applying the science: diagnose, explain, correct was the 3 step approach Sean was taught that served in many different domains
Grade your skill as an instructor/track your progress
“Anything done well at scale is done in a systematic way”
How those ideas translate to business and innovation
Apply science and data
The data says, place a focus on looking at-and listening to- customers versus talking
Measure what you do
Break apart the other components of learning what value to provide, and providing that value
Helping large companies go from slow-moving to innovators
Change comes from small steps - small incremental learning creates the actual transformation
Big changes tend not to work (see Catalyst book recommendation)
Engage in a process and move step by step in tiny changes
Think in terms of being an organization with functional learning
Track incremental progress
Make the above a priority
Get a framework to make it possible to can execute on the above
Innovation
Remember that you are asking strangers to go with you to strange places and do strange things
3 situations: you are taking a new product to a new place; an old product new place, or a new product to an old place
Build your hypothesis and learn with your customer
Mindset is critically important
The most successful change agents don’t push anything; they remove barriers; reduce friction, lower barriers - that’s design thinking in a nutshell
Change, focus, and grit ideas from a father who was a ret. Navy SEAL and Silicon Valley CEO
Become aware of how we change, and our ability to change
Keep the outcome in mind and keep working toward it
Again: think on the outcome, then reverse engineer success; for Sean, it’s about understanding the psychology of change
Go big on removing barriers that are in the way of your outcome
Remember your brain wants you to stop when you get to 40%
Links
Book recommendation: The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind
David Goggins web site
Other Sessions
Will Bunker, Co-founder OneAndOnly (now Match.com), VChatter, President; GrowthX co-founder; investor in 160+ tech companies, 5 exits
TK Kader, Founder and CEO of Unstoppable, ToutApp (A16z), SVP Strategy at Marketo, Adobe;
Jason McCann, CEO of Vari
Andy Petranek, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Whole Life Challenge
Arjun Dev Aurora, Founder and CEO Retargeter; Founder, Valence; Nike, Investment Committee
Lori Williams-Peters, VP Business Excellence, InvisionApp Inc.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Hey everyone, welcome to the new economy. I'm Scott Levy, CEO and Founder of ResultMaps, where we're on a mission to help the world be its inspired best. That means helping CEOs and leaders build healthy cultures of relentless execution so you hit your numbers and thrive no matter where your people are or what challenges come your way. One way we do that is bringing you these sessions with leaders who've learned to thrive even as they navigated uncharted territory and thorny challenges. The idea is to get you actionable learning you can put into practice immediately to lead and navigate at your best as you thrive forward.
Today's session is with Sean Sheppard. Sean co-founded and scaled sales at multiple companies by developing a repeatable system that helps companies learn fast and execute methodically at the same time. He used it to co-found GrowthX and GrowthX Academy, and it's been licensed to incubators from Canada to Asia. You can find him speaking at sales conferences or places like the London Business School and the NASDAQ, and helping establish companies become disruptors by developing new markets. I'm excited to share this session with you today as we talk about building systems that learn and adapt in a disciplined way, even in rapidly changing environments.
There has been some light editing for readability.
INTERVIEW
Scott:
One of the things we've talked about in the past is how your life before sales and GrowthX and tech was in golf as a professional, and you have a really interesting story about how you became a big believer in spotting the core things that were really important to help someone or a system improve. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sean:
There was a time of my life, you know, I played college golf and then there was a time where I wanted to play. Then there was a time where I found out that I was just as interested in teaching others how to play as I was in playing myself. And so I said, “all right, if I want to be the best, I want to learn from the best and who's the best?” And I looked around, I did my research and I found out that there was this golf school - the world's largest golf school. It was a…45, 50 locations around the globe. And I learned what made them the best was number one, they had a systematic way of making the complex understandable and then getting others to learn that quickly and then be able to do it in a scalable way to where their students would have a similar experience and outcomes no matter who they got their golf lessons from at what school in what location.
And so I made it my mission to go to work for these folks, and I found a way to do it. And I went to work to learn and apprentice at their largest golf school in the world in Scottsdale, Arizona, where all of their best people would concentrate every winter. And I'll never forget, I made a very first winter working for them. I worked 122 straight days. And I did everything - whether it was setting up range balls and picking range balls up and cleaning clubs and raking bunkers and just listening and watching and learning from these folks while also spending time with the best instructors before and after. They would be before and after the lesson window sessions and having lunch with them and just sucking in as much as I could as a sponge.
And they had this system that was developed called Golf Simplified that was based on physics. And it was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that, and they really tried to bring the science to an art - or what people to that point had always just assumed to be an art, because I've always felt like people just call things art because they don't understand it. And that's okay. It's not a knock on art. I just think that art is science that has to be fully understood in a lot of ways, if that makes sense. So eventually we start to understand how things work and how they operate and then they usually come back to this physical world. So it really made a lot of sense to me because when I was growing up, physics was one of my favorite subjects.
Even though I didn't love biology, wasn't a big fan of math, I was a big fan of history, big fan of physics, big fan of communications - anything to do with the spoken word, the written word, the expression of it - psychology, economics, how humans behave. Those things were always interesting to me. So when I recognized and understood that, look, the golf ball could only do nine things. It can only fly in nine different ways. It can start at your target left of it or right of it, and then it can continue straight or it can curve right or left. And when you think about that, it's called the ball flight tree. So it could only do those nine things. And then when you understand that you can reverse engineer what factors impact those nine things. And there are these five impact factors of what happens when the club beats the ball, the position of the face, the angle of attack, the path of that club coming in, the speed at which it arrives at it. And then the centerdness of contact, how close it is to what's called the sweet spot or the absolute center of the club where the force and the mass together meet and create the greatest rebound or what's called COR - coefficient of restitution. I'm saying things I haven't said in 20 years. This is so funny I’m having this conversation.
Scott:
That’s awesome!
Sean:
It's cracking me up. But these were all the things that do it. So there's the ball can only do nine things. There's five impact factors that affect it, and now you've got the human body and its ability to manipulate that tool around those five things to affect it and get it to do what it does. And this isn't any different than any other sort of club ball sport, right? This is true in baseball to a degree. This is true in tennis to a degree. This is true with throwing a football or baseball with your arm as the tool. So the whole point is that there's physics - a physical answer that can be reverse engineered and understood quickly. And then what do you do with that?
So say you're their instructor. Now that you know these things, what's your methodology, your systematic approach towards towards helping others? And they had a very simple three-step methodology at the John Jacobs Golf Schools, which was DEC: diagnose, explain and correct. So the first thing you have to do is diagnose the issues and you use the ball flight tree and the impact factors that I just mentioned to diagnose those in a very physical way. Then you have to explain that back to the students in a way that they understand, which is the hardest thing to do because everybody learns differently. And part of the philosophy that they followed was everybody has three different components of learning styles, but one of them is always dominant, dominant, kinesthetic, auditory, and visual. It's what I feel. It's what I see. And it's what I hear. And one of those three is typically dominant. And you can tell oftentimes the best instructors in the world. They're almost like psychics in a certain way.
When you're first watching them do this, it's very mystical because you don't know the science behind it. But they have a way of understanding somebody who is very kinesthetic versus somebody who's very auditory versus somebody who's very visual based on the type of work that they do, how they live their lives. I mean, they ask some questions. So you're an engineer? Okay, you're very analytical. So I need to walk you through this in a very analytical way. You have to see all the steps and you have to understand them. And until you do, until you understand step A, you won't move to step B. So there's no point in even talking to you about it versus somebody who's very visual like me, where he says, hit it there or says, make this move and manipulate the club this way and shows me, right? Or somebody who's very feel and kinesthetic, which is - I need to put you in certain positions that you can to allow you to understand what we're trying to accomplish. You can see me do it, but it's different if you can feel it yourself, right?
Everybody has their own way of learning. So when you apply that to the E in DEC, now you have to explain to people what you've noticed, what it is and why it matters. And then you have to explain to them the C correction, how to correct it, what we're going to do to actually correct what we've diagnosed. So it's diagnose, explain and correct. Right? So you put all that together and you're like, okay, this makes sense. But what's really crazy is the standard that you're upheld to if you are to be someone who is qualified to deliver this methodology at scale.
When you want to become an instructor and the John Jacobs program, they have these levels. You start with simple things like rules and quality of life stuff that you teach to new golfers with the brand new people that come. Oftentimes, it was the children or the spouses of avid golfers would come - they'd never played golf before, they’d never picked it up. Okay. So your entry-level role after slinging golf balls and washing clubs and moving bags back and forth and working for tips was to do the Introduction to Golf Etiquette class. So the first thing you have to do, you teach them flow, you teach them the rules of the road, you teach them all this stuff. Then after that, you get to go into short game area, which means you can teach putting and you can teach chipping and you can teach pitching and then eventually bunker and then you go from bunker to full swing. And so you have these like, six levels that you have to go through. It's like Bruce Lee in Game of Death.
Scott:
I mean this is very much like the martial arts system I came up in. I mean that's the funny thing about it, right? So I'll let you continue that.
Sean:
Yeah, you're absolutely right! And I recognize that here we are 25 years later, that anything that's done well at scale is done in a very systematic way. And there's a methodology, there's a process, there's an approach for executing it and then doing it for people, then doing it with them, and then eventually teaching them, right? So you get to the top level, the ultimate goal in the John Jacobs environment where you were actually considered there and one of the world's best was when you could teach the full swing. And in order to be able to teach the full swing, you had to, as part of your exam, if you will, you had to be able to demonstrate to your peers in a live setting with a golfer you've never seen, heard or talked to before, that you can diagnose, explain and show improvement through correction in three swings of the club.
So you have three swings to diagnose them, and then you have three swings for them to correct based on your explanation of that correction and show improvement. And you have to do that consistently over and over and over again. Because if you can't, you are not able to teach the full swing. Why? Because their customer base were people that came to have a good time and learn something and there were a lot of them and they were only there for a couple of days. And when you are an instructor, you have five students and you have one hour with five students, which means you only have 10 minutes, roughly 12 minutes per day. It was 12 minutes with each student. And you basically had to break that up into two six-minute increments.
So you'd start with a person, spend six minutes with them, and then you go to the next and the next, the next. And before you know it, by the time you get back to the other person, 30 minutes are up. Now you've got to do it again and the whole hour's gone so you only get 12 total minutes and across two interactions with a student when you're getting the full swing, and you have to give them an experience that keeps them coming back and telling other people how amazing it is, which means they have to like you, they have to understand you, and they have to get better and they have to do it in that timeframe. If you think about that, that's nuts. If you don't know this world, but even when you're in it for the first time, you're like…there's no way I can do this. But once you understand the system, nine ball flight laws, five impact factors, how someone learns, how you use that to diagnose, explain and correct and then you repeat that over and over and over again, you find out that it doesn't matter who the golfer is or what their skill level is or what their experience is or what their body type is or what equipment they're using or what they want to get out of it, et cetera, beyond what your job is. You can apply this and help everyone all the time. And that was my first sort of experience with a systematic approach towards solving a problem at scale.
Scott:
What's fascinating to me about that is we met because I was listening to you speak, and I was listening to you basically explain how I'd gotten a product market fit with a company where I just brute forced and blundered my way through. And each of the principles you just talked about was on display. You were diagnosing it, you were charming the audience, you reduced it to the essentials in a way that made it easy for everybody to understand. You had the visuals, you had the explanations. It's really interesting to hear that because it sounds like the playbook you've used as you've built what's now the GrowthX methodology. Can you talk a little bit about how you applied this idea when you got into the sales world? How did you realize that you could use the same ideas, the same principles to apply that to selling?
Sean:
So in my younger years of moving out of golf and into selling, I didn't. I didn't have any sense of this. None of what I just shared with you could I articulate for years, maybe even a decade or longer until later in life. What I applied immediately was a lot of the practices that I had learned around business and market acumen from my father who was a very successful – and you knew him - Silicon Valley CEO in tech. I watched how he behaved and I watched how he worked and I asked him questions and I tried to stay focused on understanding what someone's business is and who they are, who their customers are and what they care about and how they run their business and how they make money and what the impact is and how they're measured.
And then I tried to really just focus my efforts on having conversations with them around the things that are related to that and then learning how to connect what I can do to help them. Once again to diagnose it, explain it together so that we gain neutral agreement on yes, this is a thing. And I think mutual agreement is super critical across all these things. And I find myself saying more of that and reminding myself and other people of that more and more and more the more I do this and the more I talk about it because we get so focused on our own stuff and what we want to accomplish that sometimes we lose sight of what our customers see and believe and realize and understand and what they don't. And so I think it's really critical at every step of diagnose, explain and correct to gain mutual agreement and get the other person to explicitly acknowledge and state to you “Yes, I understand. And I agree.” If not, you don't get to an end, a mutually beneficial outcome, it just doesn't happen.
So I applied a lot of business acumen. I applied a lot of trying to learn. I applied a lot of market acumen, which is “okay, can I pick up the language of an industry?” Which I think is super important and where I see so many startups fail is in their inability to speak the same language as their customer. And I'm not talking about English, we all speak English, but that doesn't mean we speak the same language. There's a language of business in a particular domain that allows you to quickly wrap yourself up into talking to them the way that they understand and then putting yourself out there as a subject matter expert around that particular domain or use case.
So starting with mindset, you know, am I learner? Am I open to trying to figure things out to new ways of doing things. Am I actively seeking to get better as a person, not just to professional and business acumen? Do I understand how my customer and markets businesses work and how their customers and businesses work and how I can contribute to that and market? Can I talk to them in a way and show domain expertise and talk to them in a way that they understand that we understand?
So we'd be more efficient with that communication and then ultimately the communication level. It's “can I actively listen on top of creating opportunities to listen” because even the data shows now from conversational intelligence tools that the most effective sellers talk 25% of the time while their customers talk 75% of the time, so how do you create that environment to where you can tee them up to start going off on their particular issues or tangents in any direction they want so that you can do the things you need to do, which is build a rapport, establish trust, credibility, and then start to understand their problems, diagnose them, explain how you can correct them together and then actually work towards that.
Scott:
I want to make sure I talk through this idea of these principles applied in larger organizations that are going through changes, which everybody is now, but I know that you've done a lot of work in the innovation space in companies that are really a little older and they're trying to bring in different aspects of Silicon Valley culture. This relentless focus on how you scale and execute. What are some of the challenges you've seen and some of the ways you've seen be effective at overcoming those challenges when a company is trying to make this change - really focusing in a more agile way to learn faster and adapt to a changing market?
Sean:
Well, the first thing I've noticed, especially now with what's going on is that there's this famous quote of “the only constant in life is change.” I would add to that and say that there's a second constant and that is the resistance to it. But a basic - once again back to science homeostasis in equilibrium - proves that we are physically biased towards right where we are right now. We don't want to move, we don't want to change. And what I've learned about change is that there is this resistance to change that isn't associated. The resistance or lack of resistance is not associated with the amount of benefit that one person or one team or an organization or group can get from that change. The amount of resistance is tied to the frequency and scope of that change.
So how much change you introduce and how often is what really matters, not the value of it. You and I can say you have to change because if you don't, you're going to die. But that doesn't work the way we think it should, right? What works is small amounts of change in a frequent way, smaller wins that create momentum and new habits that get you to more smaller wins eventually build up. That's where successful change happens. And so knowing that the biggest challenge I've seen from, people is that they try to take on too much change at once.
So it's about creating, once again, a methodology or framework for small incremental learning that leads to change, that leads to transformation. I hate the word transformation, right? Because it just implies that you've got until tomorrow to go from 50 pounds overweight to a perfect body. That doesn't happen. You know that as well as I do. In order to get there, you've got to walk the journey. You've got to engage in a process and you've got to be consistent with that. And it happens in small bits. The journey to lose 50 pounds begins with the first down. So the first calorie and the first pound. You know there’s the old Jewish proverb how to eat an elephant, one bite at a time - you can't eat the whole damn thing. Even if you eat large amounts, you're going to get indigestion and it's going to discourage you from doing it again.
So don't try to take on too much change at once. I don't call it digital transformation or cultural transformation. I call it the functional learning organization. How do you start to function in a way that allows you to learn quickly about the things, the feedback from the change attempts that you're making. And then use that in a way that allows you to communicate that back out to your larger group, organization or community to show them that progress is being made. Even if it's really tiny, incremental progress. And I think that's really important.
And the other problem I see is people have not made any of this stuff a priority because they've got their core business and that's how they usually run it. And I respect that. But today they are forced to accept this change. Digital transformation accelerated by five to 10 years in some instances, depending on your perspective and where it was on the agenda in the C suite. And now they all have to do it. So because they have to do it, they're going to accept a certain degree of it.
The next big challenge I keep getting asked about is, “okay, how do we actually do this and do it well? Because the other challenges stand in our way is we've got a core team that's really good at core stuff that has a fixed mindset that's focused on core. How do we get them to change?” Well, they're being forced to accept change immediately now - by society. It’s no longer their choice. And humans do have the capacity to accept big change when they're forced to. That's also a known scientific fact, and we are forced to do it right.
This is easy for you and me. We've been doing this digital work-from-home thing and flex thing for years, but for a lot of people it's new. But they're adapting and they will be okay. But they have to now get the right mindset and then they have to organize around this opportunity to identify how they serve their customers in this new normal. How do they take analog businesses and turn them into digital ones or augment them with the new digital reality to support it? The people they have in their organization typically don't have the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to make the transformation from the analog to the digital service or product. So where do they get that help?
I'm a good resource for that by the way. Shameless plug. And then how do they pick what to work on first and how they prioritize that? Um, so now you need a framework again. You need a methodology. You need a way to execute. Because the biggest problem I see is the same one we see in startups because it's not about the corporation to startup.
It's about taking something someplace new, taking a product to a new place for the first time. It's either taking a new product to a new place, an existing product to a new place, or a new product to an existing place. And in every instance, you still have that same dynamic of “I'm taking something someplace new,” which is very different than taking something to a familiar place with familiar people in familiar surroundings and familiar support.
I like to make the joke, especially with startups in the room: You're a stranger in it with a strange thing going to a strange place, talking to other strangers, asking them to do strange things with you. And if you think about it that way, it requires more than just the methodology. It requires a style and an approach that should be focused on constructing a hypothesis that “I think I can help you in this way.” And I'd like to know if that's true, and here's how we learn together. And if we learn together, we can grow together. If we grow together, we can profit together. And that's the concept of how you get there faster.
I grew up doing this with start ups with limited time, money and resources. And now I've learned how to apply that same framework to corporations that have a lot more resources and time and money. But what they don't have is that mindset and the knowledge, skills and experiences necessary on their team to move quickly and break things and learn together and profit together the way that we've learned in startups. So now it's about building that startup inside of a company that's a venture builder that says, this is what we do, right? We accelerate the path to product market fit for new products for our current customers. And big companies never had a better opportunity to leverage their current relationships to learn how they can continue to serve them in the new normal. And the time is now. It's a great time to think about those things and start to reinvent and restructure how you go after that.
Scott:
So we're talking about the role that Special Forces Veterans have played in our lives. For myself, it's a Grandmaster in TaeKwonDo who I'm very close with. For Sean, it was his father. How have these people enriched our lives and brought their experiences back to our world to help us.
Sean:
Yeah, I was just reading this book I just finished by a gentleman named Jonah Berger - a professor and specialist in change management in human behavior. It’s called The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind. And it's really fascinating because he talks about why we're not good, generally, at changing people's minds as humans and then the ways in which we can do it. And he's a Wharton school guy by the way. But he realized that in his work with big organizations and a whole bunch of other people that they all had something in common and that was they all wanted to change something. And as somebody who's always helped try to help, like I said, take a product to market, when you're selling, when you're introducing something, what you're really doing is you're asking people to change.
And these people are listening to you because they want to change. But most of them don't. And most of us aren't successful at getting them to change. And so, we want as sellers, we want to get people to buy something from us to actually change. As marketers, we want people to shift how they think so that they can move closer towards that sale and change. Leaders want to transform their organizations. Employees want to change their boss's mind. The parents want to change their children's behavior. Startups want to change industries and disrupt things. Nonprofits want to change the world. I mean, everybody's got this thing that they want to do. But they've not figured out and recognize that what they're really asking people for is to change something and to change their behavior. And one thing I have learned is that the number one competitor, the number one barrier that we all have as marketers and sellers and entrepreneurs is that resistance to change that we talked about a little earlier.
People just don't want to do it naturally. So the question is how do you get these folks to change? And so what Berger realized from his analysis and looking and talking to people of all different shapes and sizes, from big B2B sellers to BDC people, to marketers to gurus, even hostage negotiators, is that the most successful change agents - they don't push anything on anyone. They don't push people into a corner. They don't push them with ideas. It’s almost like when you go to a foreign country and you try to speak to somebody and they don't speak English and you tend to just speak louder even though you're still speaking English and you think that somehow those people are gonna understand you cause you're noisier than you were the first time you said it.
That's what pushing is. We don't change our behavior, we just get more aggressive or more assertive. What he’s saying is that these people don't push what they do. They don't add more facts and reasons and provide more information. They don't just keep doing that. That’s what I'm saying we're doing right. Like I don't understand what you're saying sir, cause I don't speak English well. I just say it louder. That doesn't make it easier for me to understand.
What they do is they take barriers away rather than adding pressure. They reduce friction and lower hurdles for action. And so when I read that I was like, Oh my God, this is exactly what we've been doing in the GrowthX methodology since the beginning was “how do we make it as easy as possible for people to say yes? How do we remove steps?”
And so you think about design thinking and you think about customer experience, and - I may have said this to you before - Amazon is the most valuable company in the world but they don't make anything except all of us happy and satisfied and they make it easy to do that one button order, boom, you're done right? The Apple experience, that's now the standard by which everyone needs to be and should be measured. And that comes from design thinking. How do we remove friction? How do we remove barriers? How do we bring down walls and hurdles to make it really easy for people to act? And we haven't traditionally done that. We tend to, once again, not think about how hard we make it for people to do business. I can't tell you the number of startups, although you probably understand cause you know me well enough, that when we do a customer experience review of how hard or easy they make it for customers to do business with them, they have so many unnecessary hurdles that they put in a customer's face. And that's hard enough as it is when you're a product that's already established and you're a known brand and you're in demand. But when you're a startup, when you're that stranger taking something strange to some stranger somewhere else, going to ask them to do strange things with them and you're putting up all these hurdles in order for them to do it, it's no surprise that you're not converting.
And so that message immediately resonated with me. And so he put the these five key barriers up, kind of five roadblocks that often get in everybody's way - I think calls them reactants, endowments, distance, uncertainty and corroborating evidence. And you take all those together, and he's got an acronym he calls REDUCE. And so when I read it, I was like, this could be kind of a new approach, a new sales methodology - this reduced conversation. I still think it's a little thick academically. I don't know if I love it, but I think there's so much in there about the science behind each of these barriers and why they prevent people from changing and how you as a seller or marketer or an influencer trying to get somebody to make change - what you can do to mitigate those things and reduce someone's likelihood - their natural state - of reacting with putting up more objections than more barriers.
It's sorta like how I always say buyers don't create objections. Sellers do. And they do that usually by offering up solutions way too early in the sales process because there's not mutual agreement between both parties yet to where there's an understanding of what the current situation is and the problem is and how that's affecting them and then what they might need to do to make that change.
So it's a really interesting book. I highly recommend it. And I think that sellers and marketers and change agents generally should do everything in their power to minimize the barriers and make it too easy for people to adopt the change that they're looking to ask them to make.
You and I've talked about like the 40% rule recently, which my father taught me about, which was a Navy seal Axiom that when you think you've reached your limit, that's your brain protecting you. And the reality is you only achieve 40% of your full potential mentally, physically, emotionally. And if you can break through that 40% barrier, your potential is limitless. I think a wonderful example of this in modern pop culture of great self-improvement gurus is David Goggins, who's an absolute maniac. I love him. But he's one of those guys that went from a very overweight, sort of depressed individual into this madman Navy Seal who runs these ultra-marathons and pushes himself to the limits that most people have never even considered because that part of his brain, he's been able to work and manipulate his way through and achieve those things.
That reminds me of this woman in Colorado and I can't remember her name…but I think 60 minutes or 2020 did a feature on her. She was in an accident and she was just a normal person. She liked to run and do 5ks and that sort of stuff. And is pretty active as a runner on top of being a mom and a professional and a wife. She had an accident where a part of her brain, the part that regulates that survival mechanism, the very thing that prevents most of us from getting beyond the 40% point, that was completely shut off and this woman now holds every world record for long distance running because she has no concept of when to stop and that there is an off button. That protection that the brain gave us for fight or flight, you know, in human nature - in her brain doesn't work. And so she just goes, she goes to the point where people have to stop her, make sure she drinks the water, gets some food or takes a break. Because that doesn't happen for her.
But that certainly was triggered by the experiences I've had around my father and Special Forces just generally. But I would like to say something about that with respect to this whole conversation. Organizations create their own special forces unit dedicated specifically to change - digital transformation, innovation, commercializing new products, testing new ideas, with the specific kind of individual that possesses the right mindset, the ability to embrace ambiguity, change on the fly and learn quickly, communicate effectively, influence others and execute like mad men and women and do that on behalf of the broader organization for the greater good. The same way that we've done that in Special Forces in our military.
Scott:
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things Grandmaster VAT explained to me was that's really the reason Special Forces came about. You've got to have these small mobile, relentless groups that can go into places where you can't send the big administrative.
Sean:
Yeah.
Scott:
Yeah. So this has been really great, Sean. Thank you. Really have enjoyed this.
Sean:
You bet, Scott. Anytime.