Episode 166 - The Decisions That Define Successful Companies with Verne Harnish
Today’s guest is Verne Harnish. Verne is a world-leading expert, speaker, author, and entrepreneur in the field of business growth. He has spent more than 30 years educating entrepreneurial teams.
As part of his personal mission to support entrepreneurs, he co-founded Growth Institute, a premier online training company that has helped mid-market companies in over 50 countries learn and implement the latest business methodologies.
Today, he’s sharing with us some of his top tips for entrepreneurs, his personal stories, and the ups and downs that every entrepreneur is familiar with.
Episode Transcript
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Verne Harnish: Our biggest constraints are our own beliefs and our own self talk in terms of the restrictions we put on ourselves, and it's this need to continue to learn otherwise. If you're not growing, you're dying.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, we have a special guest today who is on the phone and actually on video zoom as well, the best dressed guest we've ever had out of one hundred and forty episodes, I think Rusty. Can we agree to that?
Rusty Rueff: Without a doubt. I mean, if you saw Henry and I right now, you know, at least Henry shave today, I don't think I got around to that.
Henry Kaestner: No, no. You know, we got into this podcast business because I've got a face made for radio. And Justin has said he wanted to do some of these video outtakes and I didn't get the message. I'm clearly not dressed for it. But Verne is for really, really good so far. And thank you for being with us from Wilmington, Delaware.
Verne Harnish: Thank you, Henry. Glad to be on.
Henry Kaestner: And there's a whole bunch of different things that we want to get into today and lots of different things that God has done through you and Ito. But before we get into that and some of the lessons that we'd love for you to share with our Faith driven entrepreneurs, give us a background. Who are you? Where do you come from?
Verne Harnish: Well, originally, Denver, Colorado, and then ended up in Kansas through an accident of my dad's company failing and he himself really plunging into depression and alcoholism. And it really is the riches to rags story and ended up from Colorado and Kansas and from there, helping grow a company and landed really is an associate of a really successful entrepreneur, their doctor friend, Jabarah. And we launched the Center for Entrepreneurship. I built a group called Associates, including Entrepreneurs, then White Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Then we all got old. So we got rid of the Y and now it's e0. Today we're about fourteen thousand members on our way to twenty five thousand worldwide. And it's been great that we've been able to, I think, touch so many entrepreneurs because as you and I were talking about before the broadcast started, we know within our community that depression, especially in the West, is one of the highest rates among entrepreneurs and those are leading companies. Just because the unbelievable pressure that we're under
Henry Kaestner: now, I want to get into that. We've had another podcast guest that really helped us to understand the challenges with depression and tragically, of course, suicide among entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial journey is a lonely one. It's full of isolation. And we don't spend nearly enough time talking about that on the show. So we're going to get into that before we get into Ito and ask you a little bit more about I'm particularly interested in your experience with collegiate entrepreneurs. I started a business in college and loved it and ended up doing something different with my career. But there's something special about this kind of formative years, and I'd love to learn a little bit more about that. But give us a round out the personal story a little bit and just mention the fact that you've got kids before you in. You mentioned the fact that you have been on the Compostella road with Rusty, our co-host. So there's some other cool things going on in your life, too. But also you're a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
Verne Harnish: I am. And it happened to be my minister when I was in high school. They got me involved in magic. I was the church organist in the Congregational Church there, Kingsley, Kansas, along with Faye. And so we would switch off Sundays. And so it's been interesting. I've always been very close to my spiritual leaders. We literally have always been dear friends. I would just spent the weekend with my present pastor, Dave Norman and his wife Kathy, and we were getting ready back in the late 70s there to do the junior prom. And it was all around that theme of magic. And Rod, my minister said, hey, I got my start in the insurance business and I used to do these kind of remember the insurance guys used to visit your home. And so we had some sleight of hand things that he would do to entertain the children while I was talking to the parents. So he takes me down his basement and he has this whole menagerie of magic equipment. So he got me started in it and I've kept it up since.
Henry Kaestner: That's super cool. That's super cool. I'm not going to put you on the spot and ask you to do a magic trick, but that is different. You're the first day you're the first guest we've had.
Rusty Rueff: Has anybody Vern, can you do magic tricks like audio wise?
Verne Harnish: You know, it's been interesting that we've been hosting some magicians on our virtual summits and there are some really amazing magicians that have made a pivot to this particular medium. I am not one of them. And all my stuff was big stage illusions, which in some sense is a lot easier than the sleight of hand.
Rusty Rueff: Well, we're missing our co-host, William, so we could just say, hey, Vern made him disappear.
Henry Kaestner: Yes, yes, yes. That poof, just like that. That's funny. Plenty better than Sunim and half burnt. So come back to you mentioned something. There is. We're just getting started. It's just super, super important. And I think it's obviously very, very timely. And it's the loneliness and it's the isolation of an entrepreneur. I don't know that there's a more lonely spot in the marketplace because there's some extent that you're selling something to somebody all the time. You're selling people to join your firm. Sometimes you're selling them to stay employed at your firm. You're selling to venture capital, you're selling to partners, vendors, customers, and then you come home at night and sometimes you get to sell your spouse who thinks you should have kept your job at Deloitte. She says, you know, how are things going? And if you just feel like you have to say things are going well to her, too, and every time you do that, it just furthers the isolation. And that's the cross that you bear sometimes as an entrepreneur. And of course, there's answers to this. None of them are easy, but riff on that a bit. What do you see? And maybe, first of all, let's acknowledge it and then maybe we can collectively talk about what we do with it.
Verne Harnish: Yeah, well, it was interesting when I launched my very first speaker was Joe Mancuso. And Joe has been around for decades with the CEO clubs. And he had a phrase that I asked them we could borrow really is the mantra for Ace and White? Yeah. And he said it's OK to be independent, but no reason to be alone. And today, I'm actually a co-founder of an organization out of Panama with Nathan Gray. And Nathan worked directly with Mother Theresa. And he tells the story, as many of them have heard versions of it, that when she came to the United States, when she left, she said, wow, that country has got quite an affliction. And she said it was loneliness. And I really do think it's interestingly more unique to the US than I saw in Europe. One of the reasons I loved living in Barcelona for eight years was the sense of community and the sense that you are not alone. We had our flatcar group, as you know, Rusty, which were a lot of the group that went on the Camino, you know, for Doug's fiftieth birthday. But you come back here and it's interesting, particularly men over the age of fifty five, you ask them who's their best friend and they normally respond their spouse or significant other. And by the way, that doesn't match what they report. And I've often shared with men as part of our one page personal plan. Hey, you know, who would be your eight pallbearers? And I tell you, they struggle with that question. And I did. And I said, look, I need to make it really a priority to be in small group. And so really at the heart, I think of the great churches. We did it and we've done it in our congregation. And I think it's about the heart to be on. Why success is the thing called for its small group where I'm having a reunion of my Barcelona have formed literally tomorrow. And it's this safe place where you can be in community and share some of your deepest, darkest thoughts in a very safe environment so that you're not alone.
Henry Kaestner: As you have had your own entrepreneurial journey and you see this burden that entrepreneurs bear in knowing that being a community and being in a real relationship with others is so much of a big piece of fulfillment and joy. How do you see faith working in to that? Because you've seen so many different entrepreneurs out there and seen entrepreneurs battle with mental illness. Do you see faith having any advantage at all?
Verne Harnish: Yeah, it's actually huge. And it was the revelation for me was one day in church, Dave was given a sermon and he pointed to some passages in the Bible where really basically said the folks are going to let you down the most are those closest to you, starting with your family. And we often, if I ever pivot away from that for a moment, we've been talking a lot to companies about how they're always saying they want to be like a family. But, look, I wouldn't wish my family experience on anyone, including their company, that whole idea that dysfunctional family is a redundant term. I think it's true. And I know it's been that case in my life that has been the closest to me that I've actually betrayed me. And how critical it is that you have that deeper, broader faith in God that's not going to let you down. And to know that is how you're able to kind of get through all the pain and issues that you've got to navigate, because no one has had an easy path, particularly in the entrepreneurial world that I've seen. And so that's why I think faith is so critical as a foundational component so that you can weather the storms, particularly those that you're closest to.
Rusty Rueff: So take that vision into an area of expertize which you have written about and you talk about all the time, which is decision making. So, so many times we have to make decisions. We come to the fork in the road and our entrepreneurial journey. I was on the phone this morning with, you know, a couple of entrepreneurs that are looking at multiple term sheets, which is great. Right. And they're sitting there going, which one? Which one? Because they're close enough. So maybe take us through decision making and then applying our faith into that decision making.
Verne Harnish: Yeah, well, I don't know why it came to me, but the minute you were saying that I was thinking about the story, you pray but roll away from the rocks. And it's one of those kind of things where at the end of the day, you've got to trust your gut, your own judgment with faith, I think feeds into that. But you need to verify. And so it's so important to go out there and do the work and to gather the information. I again, it's a little off topic, but decades ago I read this book about Swiss bankers and how they make decisions. And it really was back to this. Trust your gut, but verify and go out and get firsthand information yourself before you make any kind of decision. And then we literally had this Russian FDE who was kind of at MIT for a while, and she was studying the executive decision making and she really talked about the importance of going inward as the labyrinth experience that I just did Sunday at my pastor's place, where you have to go in first before you can come out. And part of that was once you feel like you've gathered all the information you can, it really is a process of getting quiet in a meditative state and truly listening to your gut. And if it feels wrong, don't do it. And you can trust that.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I grew up in Indiana and was a big fan of Bobby Knight's motion offense. Right. And he he said, you always, always pass the ball four times before you take a shot. Right. And that just by doing that every single time your percentages go up. So also, I think what you're saying is surround ourselves with godly advisers so that we pass that ball. But at the end of the day, we have to make the decision as to whether or not to take the shot all on our own.
Verne Harnish: Yeah, yeah. It's a journey inward that you have to take in order for you to come, I think, properly to the world externally.
Henry Kaestner: So I love that we've gone here. I think that decision making is another topic Rusty that we don't spend enough time talking about on the program. And we've got a guy that's written a book on it and talked about it a lot. What are some of the mistakes that you see entrepreneurs make? What are just some common mistakes like, oh, my goodness, that's so you could have seen that one coming a mile ahead.
Verne Harnish: You know, I have a chapter called Barriers. Really, the three things that get in the way of scaling. I'm not as much as an expert on the startup as I am the scale up. And the first one is right between your ears. Our biggest constraints are our own beliefs and our own self talk in terms of the restrictions we put on ourselves. And it's this need to continue to learn otherwise. If you're not growing, you're dying. The second one is a very practical one, which is just being able to get the infrastructure in place to be able to scale. And it's not easy because you're dealing with humans and everything was going great until humans showed up, it seems. And then the third one is very practical, which is around marketing. So those are the three that unless those are addressed properly, I find folks really get solved if they want to scale
Henry Kaestner: going a little bit. So there are a fair amount of startups that are on this podcast, no doubt, but they're also a fair amount of scale ups. The startups want to be scalable. So we're all going to be confronting these three issues in the course of our business career. And even better to be able to talk about these before people are even scaling so they can start thinking about these things, go through all three of them. And I'm particularly interested in the decisions on marketing. But just walk us through the framework, please.
Verne Harnish: Well, let's start with marketing. Since you did so, I saw that you had mentioned Steve Jobs on one of the other podcasts, and I saw him as the original young entrepreneur. It was not cool to be an entrepreneur back when we were doing it. As you know, Henry, our parents view was, when are you going to get a real job doctor, lawyer, accountant kind of thing? And then Steve came along and he showed a guy in his 20s could get to two billion. And so I wanted to understand and the key guy was Regis McKenna. You know, he's a fixture there in Silicon Valley. And he taught Steve an intelligent and tech. And so in nineteen eighty three, as I was launching a look, I thought, hey, if he's good enough for Steve, he's good enough for me. So I called him, reached out to him. We did have email or any of that other stuff. And I had a good purpose, which was really to build an organization for guys like Steve Jobs, who I had hosting an event for. And I saw him literally standing alone in the corner. And I thought, wow, Joe Mancuso said it's OK to be independent, but no reason to be alone was playing itself out. So we Regis agreed to help me in. And the idea that he shared and strange he comes back to small group again is he said, all right, I'm going to try to talk to Steve. And he said, take a piece of paper out and make a list of all the key people that you need to kind of bolt on to this venture that you need to get bought in. And he said the bigger the names, the fashion scale. So, look, I'm young, dumb and broke because that song would say at Wichita State and I wrote down President Ronald Reagan, it's nineteen eighty three. I want to be the first president to utter the word entrepreneur. Well, later on I did and got invited to the White House. And number two, I put Steve Jobs. And thirty six months later, I hosted his first public speech after being fired from Apple and Michael Dell. And then I put down and Venture magazine. I didn't know who the founders were, but I became their friends and dear friends are there, are still alive. And I visit him and go at least once a year. And it was crazy. We worked through that list and within thirty six months we were global. Took the first group of young entrepreneurs hosted by the government to China in nineteen eighty six, and we're talking about three years before Tiananmen Square. And so it was an unbelievable run and that has been really the tool is to others that we are able to achieve what it is that we need to achieve and not alone. We were met, I think, to be in community and that was the process that he taught. And we still use it today in marketing. We had a startup out of Austin. First thing you do is you put a list of 50 together. You didn't know anybody on the list, by the way, but he found a couple of guys that did. And within about three months, he had forty of those fifty on board. And everybody saw his venture was global because everybody was talking about it. And so that's really the marketing piece.
Rusty Rueff: You know, now, Vern, back when you wrote that list, if you actually would have written down to be on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, you could have actually been prophetic, too.
Verne Harnish: You know, I just I was clueless there in my cast.
Henry Kaestner: Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Rusty RWF.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, exactly. It could have been really something.
Verne Harnish: Well, but now I am. And I suffered tremendously. And we're getting ready to find. 10X the influence that we want to have around the world over the next decade. So you're kicking it off for me properly here.
Rusty Rueff: I want to take seriously a little further into discernment. So when you talked about surrounding yourself with these people and the things, the entrepreneurial journey, as we know, can also be lonely because everybody around you is depending on you, right? You're the founder of a company. Everyone's depending on you to capitalize it, to grow it. They've thrown their livelihood, their family's future into your basket. And you have to be able to discern the voices that are around you as to whether or not they are speaking truth or speaking the truth that you want to hear. Do you have any advice on how to get to that discernment?
Verne Harnish: Yeah, well, first, I love the word I had written Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and had moved to Ashland, Virginia and joined a new church, Crossroads Methodist. And Dave, the pastor, immediately said, hey, Vern, why don't you kind of take us through your process? And it was interesting you said, though, but I want to add something that's different. I'd never done up to that point, a planning session for a church, let alone my own. And that's when I learned about discernment. And I thought this is a process that we ought to be bringing more in to business in terms of getting quiet. And all that discernment involves in order to get clear about the decisions you ought to be making moving forward. And so first, I just love that you brought up that term. And I don't think we talk about it enough in just our strategic planning process that a lot of folks are going into right now as we get ready to try to hope that twenty, twenty one is going to be a different animal than what we've been through this year.
Rusty Rueff: Oh, that's good. I think it is an important you know, you don't learn it in business school. Right. And no one really coaches you into it. So to have to rely on it being an innate quality is risky because you run into people and you just go, gosh, they're listening to the wrong people or they're taking the wrong advice. And you wonder why, I guess.
Verne Harnish: Well, and by the way, it's very personal. I had a very tough personal decision to be making right now. And so it's one of the reasons I stopped in to see Kathy and Dave this weekend. And Dave and I went out on about a two mile hike. And that's why through all my difficult periods, I even have a rabbi, Dr Steven, Rabbi Barres, as one of my spiritual advisors. And when I get in a crunch and I need to make some of these tough decisions, I go walk with them and I literally try to walk with them. And because they've got a depth of spirituality that I haven't come close to achieving, but I recognize that's their gift. I really enjoy tapping into it. And it's crazy. On that two mile walk, as we were coming back in silence, something came to me and they've then shared it, came to him right at exactly the same time. And I shared it with him and he confirmed it. And it was crazy, the calmness that came over me, because it was the thing that was causing the most angst here in the last couple of weeks. And I got clear on the decision. So that's why I think part of your team, your set of advisors absolutely has to be someone that you're close to on the spiritual side that can bring that perspective particularly to the toughest really human decisions that you have to make.
Henry Kaestner: I think that's really profound and I think it's a good bridge over to the question I have. But let me just underscore that for a second. I think that a mistake that many entrepreneurs will make is seeking counsel for other people that have been further along on the journey and scaling up than they are right now and then overemphasizing some of the feedback that they get on some things that are maybe human or personal in the fact that you went to your pastor who presumably doesn't know as much about business as you do or others you might seek counsel from, and asking him for discernment on a particular human issue I think is important. And and one of the human issues, of course, it's the most important for any actor is building a team. Yeah. Making decisions on hiring. And I'd love to get your take and then Rusty, I'd love for you to chime in, too, because you spent so many years in human resources as an entrepreneur is looking to make decisions about who might join their team, senior management, maybe even a partner, but just anybody on their team. What are some mistakes you see or what are some of the tools that you think are most helpful for an entrepreneur who wants to build a great culture and build a great team?
Verne Harnish: Yeah, if it's OK, I'm going to take that question a little different direction. You know, I find interesting is that Gallup has been measuring engagement for like 50 years and the percentage of engagement hasn't moved a percent. It's been 19 percent for decades. Yeah, we've got six thousand business books that seem to be written every single year. My guess is that most of that that's been my experience is really not worth the paper it's printed on, as my dad would say. And what I think it comes down to, interestingly enough, is just the simple four letter word. And obviously the greatest of those is love. But it's hard to really know how to practice that on a day to day basis, if you would. And so the related four letter word, I think that's important is the word care. And then I'm going to give you the third one. But they're all related. We absolutely know that. There's no way that they're going to care for your customer, your company or you if they don't sense that you care for them. And that is so fundamental. And we can talk about some real activities that drive that, particularly something that the head of Cisco just before he retired, revealed to some of our editors at Fortune magazine, John Chambers. But if you say then, what does it mean to care? I know this may be an oversimplification, but I think at the end of the day, if we take the late claque Christiansen's, what I think most important strategy question ever popularized rest his soul. He passed away here at the beginning of twenty twenty as a great Harvard strategist. And that is what is the job to be done, you know, until you have a real deep understanding of the job. In his case, the four minute YouTube video, the job of a milkshake until that company understood what was the job a milkshake was doing for morning commuters, until you had to have that depth of understanding, you don't know what to do next. And so we've maintained that the number one job of all of our products and services is ultimately to make someone else's life for job easy versus hard. And that's our real job, is to go kind of person by person, customer by customer, and find every day. And I want to come back to that topic in a moment of whose lives you can help be just a little bit easier today. That's what I think it means to be in service or to be a servant leader. And then if you turn internally, if that's the job, your product or service, then the leader only has one job, and that is to make sure that his team's job in life is easy, that they feel cared for and thus feel locked out, of which, again, the greatest commandment is love. And so that's the thing that we I've got a big virtual summit next week and we've got almost 600 leaders and we're going to be digging into that very topic moving forward.
Rusty Rueff: It's a great point. The idea of so many entrepreneurs, they do use the word love. They say, I love my job, I love my company. But then, you know, how does that translate? And I think care is a great is a great bridge, you know, between your emotion and your actions. So I love that. And in fact, I was talking to somebody other day. I said we need more caring practices. You know, we talk about benefits and perks. Well, no, no, no. Maybe they need to be caring practices because, you know, in this world that we're now in with distributed work, you know, the hub and spoke model is gone. We're all a bunch of nodes. You know, we're just nodes out here on our own working. And we've got to be mesh together and the caring practices are going to become really, really important. But you know, Henry, to your point on building teams, you know, this taking a caring attitude towards the hiring process means, you know, taking it more than serious, taking it, as you know. Would I inflict upon people that I care about, a team member that I'm not absolutely sure is going to be great into? Vernes words make life easier for them because they're they're you know, I find one of the mistakes that a lot of entrepreneurs make because we are going at breakneck speed is that we hire at breakneck speed. Right. We just like, oh, it's OK, get them hired. They're in here. If they don't work out, that's OK. Well, you know, that's not OK because there's a life on the other end of that's not OK. It's called somebody who just, you know, didn't work out. And now there's a problem in their career forever. But it's. Also, the fact that the damage that someone can do who is a bad hire because we just hurried up and we didn't take our time and we didn't do our diligence and we didn't check the background and we should have paid more attention in the interview. We should have looked a little deeper at their experience, can have long term repercussions. So that, to me, Henry, is, you know, take it seriously. Someone said, well, how serious should it be? I said, well, think about sitting a Supreme Court justice. Imagine you couldn't fire the person that you hired. Would you hire them? Think about that, would you hire that person if you knew you could not fire them? We'd make a different decision.
Verne Harnish: You've got to love about Southwest Airlines. You know, through all of this thing, they've not let anyone go very United and American Airlines have and they take that fiduciary responsibility seriously. But what that story reminded me of, you don't mind me sharing it is it goes back to making the list. So I had a chance to serve on a board in New York on a nonprofit helping inner city youth called Nifty with the infamous John White Hat. John was co sure Goldman Sachs.
Henry Kaestner: He featured in the book Liar's Poker, which is formative for kids coming out of school wanting to work on Wall Street in the early 90s.
Verne Harnish: Yeah, and he was then responsible for doing the redevelopment of downtown Manhattan after 9/11. And so I had a chance to chat with him briefly at a board meeting. And I always ask the question. All right, John, so what have you learned in life? And he thought about for a moment, he goes to always do a little bit of retail business every day. And he said, let me explain. He said, when I was a Goldman, even I was co-chair, I always made sure that every day I went down to the floor to see if I could sense one of our traders who was just having literally a bad day. And could I go there and provide some support. When he then was in the Reagan administration, deputy secretary of can't remember now but commerce. And he said, I instructed my team that even though we're working on all this big stuff, I want you to bring me every day somebody who a citizen of ours that's stuck somewhere on the planet and just needs a helping hand today. They've lost their passport and they can't get through our bureaucracy. And they'd love if somebody would just pull a string or two to get them out of this serious situation that they're in. And I thought that is so powerful. And it it is precisely what Jesus has professed, that usually the people that we need to help are right in front of us. And so one of the things that has given me such joy after John and shared that is I have reached out to every day by people who said, hey, could you just can I have a phone call with you? And and I'm busy. But I thought, you know, I'm going to let the folks who come to me be God's way of saying, hey, this is your chance to give. And as you know, the giver receives more than the receiver. And so I set aside purposely a half hour every day just to handle a situation like this. And it really was motivated by John's great piece of advice to always do a little bit of retail business every day. And I think if all of us can do that, then everyone's taking care of.
Henry Kaestner: That's a great lesson. That's a super encouragement, obviously, you see that all throughout scripture of Jesus taking care of the kids and talking about the people, trying to angle for the best seated banquet and just kind of reforming what status really looks like to have that discipline of a half hour a day, because I think that we're all super busy. And if it doesn't help us to accomplish our mission and we can see that clearly, we tend to just abandon those opportunities. And to your point, it helps us to understand the community and the culture better. And we're the ones who end up being blessed through that unexpectedly.
Verne Harnish: Yeah. And so that led to one of the initiatives that I've really enjoyed sharing was launched by my partner, John Rateliff. John built a business in the call center industry. You know, it's typically considered the sweatshops of the information age. They tend to burn through people to your point. Two hundred percent average turnover. Yeah, John took it to a record 18 percent. And he liked to brag that it was harder to get a job at Appletree than it was to get into Harvard. And that was true from a real numbers perspective in the turnaround really occurred when he launched. And I think it's this idea that charity starts at home is that I really want to address this issue, that we have such high turnover front line, but I have none among my salaried people. And they looked at the Make a Wish Foundation as a model and launched that inside the company called Dream On. And he said, look, you're helping me make my dreams come true. Let me do everything we can to make your dreams come true. And he put no limit on it. There wasn't like within a certain dollar amount or whatever. Just what are your dreams? And it was interesting when he first launched it, the employees were so skeptical, you know, what's the trick here that nobody would submit anything. Then finally, one of the women this company really submitted on behalf of another woman who had been beat up by her husband, had grabbed her child, got in the car and was living for the last two weeks out of her car with her child while coming to work every drop kid off at school and then come to work. And there's nothing will humble you more than to know the personal stories of the people around you. And so they kick into gear and they get her in a hotel that night and arranged then for her to get an apartment. And they pay that first and last month's rent. She made enough to get in there, but it was just that first and last in her situation and it was all anonymous. So they didn't tell anyone. And she's like, what do you mean not tell anyone? I'm going to tell everyone? And she did. And that unleashed the floodgates for question. What was interesting is most of their dreams were not big, and so many times they submitted dreams on behalf of others. The humanity that's there, a bond, particularly the front line is, I'm sorry, magnitudes greater than the senior leadership. And I could share a story where John, literally through this, saved someone's life. But it was interesting about two years ago when John Chambers retired from from Cisco, Alan Murray, our editor, asked him kind of a final question. Hey, John, is there anything you kind of did at Cisco that maybe most people aren't aware of that you felt was most important? And he said it very humbly and nonchalantly goes, yeah, any of our employees or their extended family had a health issue I wanted that brought directly to my desk. And we would kick in and we'd bring to bear every resource Cisco had in order to help them. And I remember him saying very nonchalantly, we saved a lot of lives. And I knew right then why he was such a beloved leader within Cisco and had driven that company so successfully, because at the end of the day, he had this such giving heart and he understood that people are going through a lot of pain and maybe it's not fair. But I feel like that we as leaders have a fiduciary responsibility for those who have been brought into our care because we do have to make sure that their families are OK. It's not just our own payroll we got to make we've got to make all the others. And that's why there's this high rate of depression then among entrepreneurs because of this pressure, they feel
Rusty Rueff: that's a great story. You know, and I mean, I don't know. You might know I don't know that John Chambers was driven by his faith. But yet, you know, those are good human values. Right. And principles, you know, in your line of business as you're consulting and you're speaking with others, I'm sure that you run into Faith driven entrepreneurs who seek you out. What about a story of encouragement about someone who because they live their faith out in either their decision making or how they ran their business? That could be very encouraging to our listeners. Do you have one of those for us?
Verne Harnish: Well, you know, maybe I should just share my own, because that's what I great. Right, great authoritative to speak to versus someone else's journey. So anyway, I had mentioned my dad's scale successfully and then lost it all in the 70s through the recession. And it was really tragic on him and our family and the like. And so let's feed forward. I'm growing my company. Half million million, two million, four million, getting ready to do eight million. I'm going to be an INC 500 company and boom, 9/11 hit. And we were out of business in about 10 weeks because the airlines have shut down and people need to get to our and I lost like a million bucks and 10 weeks. I've been dutifully losing money as I was scaling up, which is what you did in the late 90s. And so I was broke and I thought I was going to lose our home. And right at that same time, our church, Dave had just launched it and decided to go out with the largest capital campaign in our church's history. And honestly, I'd throw a few dollars into the till every Sunday, but had never really made a commitment. And I thought it was interesting that we were hosting Richard Kurosaki The Rich Dad, poor dad guy who I always thought was this kind of get rich quick guy. But I thought, you know how to respect that. I read his book and he mentioned at the very end of it that folks, when they got in financial trouble, found that. And you've got to do it sincerely. You can't expect anything in return. You have to give with no expectation of return, found that they needed to kind of seed the pomp and give beyond what was comfortable. And, you know, my church has been putting out all of those vibes here at the end of the year for the giving season. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to try it. And I hate to say it's like this experiment, right? Maybe there should be more behind it than that. But, hey, I'm human. And I thought, all right, I'm going to pledge over the next thirty six months to our church's capital campaign, the largest set of gifts I've ever even contemplated. And I'm broke. I think I'm gonna lose the house. And all the scripture was clear. It's at that moment you must give the most. And I'm like, look, what do I have to lose? Because I've already lost it all. And so, again, often we don't find our Faith Hill. We're driven to our knees, which is a whole nother broadcast. But I did and it was crazy. Our results in two thousand to them the following year were exactly ten acts to the bottom line. What I committed to give that year and my only regret is I had not given more. You know, it's a very I'm sorry, very wrong reason. But again, I'm not perfect. But from that point forward, I always worked hard and we thought we were really going to have a really bad year this year because all of a sudden the covid mess and at the very beginning of that, when I think, oh, my gosh, what am I going to do to save all of our jobs? I also knew that there were some charities involved in that were hurting worse, and it came back to me in two thousand one, the importance of really digging deep and giving when you most don't want to. And it honestly has always been the right thing. It doesn't mean you get the financial fruits of that labor, but the lessons, I think, are super clear. And so we really work hard, even in our coaching organization, to tithe our time and say, hey, 10 percent of your coaching efforts should be donated out to those who need it and charities and others. And I, I think it is set the right tone.
Henry Kaestner: And that's a beautiful message to end on. And normally we would end there, except for the fact that after having done one hundred forty of these, we always ask our guests, is there something that you're hearing from God and his word, maybe this morning, maybe this week sometime that you would want to leave as an encouragement to our audience?
Verne Harnish: Oh. What came immediately to mind, as you said, that was a revelation I had two years ago and this is what came up again Sunday, and that is to always approach every situation in the way Jesus would. And I have a mantra. It's to be peaceful, playful and purposeful. And I didn't want to I admitted to my pastor I was angry and I wanted to lash out at this person and all of this. And, you know, he's a safe place where I can share all those bad things I was feeling. And that's the revelation that came to me right at that moment. And that's what's been speaking to me this week, is to go back and be peaceful.