Webcast transcript:
Willy Walker: Thank you Susan and welcome everyone to another Walker Webcast. It's a beautiful day here in Denver, Colorado and we can actually see the front range, which is very nice after weeks and months of smoke sitting in the front range from the fires to our West.
I had Steven DeFrancis of Cortland Partners on last week for what I thought was a fantastic conversation about what makes Cortland such a special company and why Steven and his team have been so successful. We turned around this weekend did an extremely large financing on a portfolio that Cortland acquired a number of months ago. It was great to see our two teams work so well together on an exceedingly large transaction and I know those assets are now in great hands with Cortland.
I typically would spend a little bit more time giving people an update on the markets, but the markets just continue to move forward. Equity markets at all-time highs, debt markets still incredibly cheap, relatively speaking, and many of the inflationary pressures that everyone continues to talk about in some areas seem to be abating.
Our three boys headed back to high school this morning here in Colorado and they were wearing masks but, as everyone deals with the new frontier of kids back in either daycare or schools or out of the nest and companies push to get back into the office; communication, culture, and quite honestly leadership is needed now more than ever and it's one of the reasons I’m so excited to have Bob Glazer joining me today to talk about those issues as well as many more.
The one other thing I would note on that is that it seems like the Wall Street banks are leading the charge as it relates to getting back to work and getting back to the office, particularly in Manhattan. Goldman Sachs announced yesterday that employees will be expected back in the office on September 7th and that only vaccinated employees will be welcome back into their offices. Interesting to see how all that plays out as the large banks push to get people back into their office space in New York.
So, let me introduce Bob and then we'll dive into our conversation. Bob Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency. He is also the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s employee’s choice award two years in a row. He is the author of the inspirational newsletter Friday Forward; he is also turned Friday forward into a bestselling book and he is also the author of another international bestsellers Performance Partnerships and Elevate. Outside of work, Bob can likely be found skiing, cycling, reading, traveling, spending quality time with his family or overseeing some type of home renovation project if you can find the materials at Home Depot today.
So, Bob first thing I want to go into because I want to there's so much to explore with you you're such a renaissance man in the sense of what you have read, what you have written, how you have led your company, how you built your company. But I want to start, so that people get an understanding of what you do on a day-to-day basis as it relates to running Acceleration Partners. Can you explain, for us, what affiliate marketing is and what Acceleration Partners does to create relationships between merchant’s, affiliate networks, publishers, and the consumer?
Robert Glazer: Yeah, I’ve been trying to explain this to my parents for over a decade now, so I’ll try that. Look at its simplest, affiliate marketing is sort of paying for an outcome. I think we're aware of digital marketing. It’s a form of digital marketing where people pay for impressions, or they pay for clicks. This is a form where you can get a whole bunch of partners to join your program, agree to a commission percentage, which I know a lot of people in real estate will understand and they drive traffic from whatever it is that they do. When something is purchased on the site or a service, or a product they are paid a commission, so the risk is split, but all that is tracked using technology. It's a big part of digital marketing and increasingly with all the direct to consumer brands, who want to go more directly, because you're paying for your marketing after you get your revenue. Super simple example, you could join Amazon's affiliate program, you could be writing up on your blog a recap of this post and link to Bob’s four books and you could sign up as an affiliate of Amazon and Amazon would pay you a 5% commission for anyone you drove to buy that book from Amazon that day. Plus, if I added my groceries to the order you get paid for that, too. So yeah, it's just really a way to pay partners for delivering an outcome.
Willy Walker: What's, the most important piece to the value that your team creates? In the sense that it seems like there's a whole kind of sector of the marketing/publicity world that many people don't even know exists and so you're opening their eyes to that. You're also having to develop content. You're also finding the affiliate networks. What's the what's the special sauce that Acceleration Partners provides when someone comes in and says we at Walker & Dunlop want to head into this space?
Robert Glazer: Yeah, so let's say you're selling online leases right, you are signing up people for leases online, you said look we'll give anyone who could drive people to a lease at our building will give them 10% of the lease value. Kind of like you would to a broker, but this is, you know direct to consumer. There's some software that that needs to manage a program like that and we're experts in those platforms. A lot of companies don't know how to use them. They know how they want to use them, but they don't know the nuances of those platforms and how to set up those campaigns and manage them. And then also you must be recruiting partners every day and keeping them up to date. When you have a program with 500 or 1,000 partners there's a lot of people who need stuff, so we act as sort of the client service team to those partners. I think what makes these programs scalable is the digital aspect of being able to track, measure, and pay using technology. However, there are still humans and businesses behind those who have needs, want deals, want to work out a campaign with you, and our team just knows how to find them, engage them, and get the best out of them.
Willy Walker: You work with some big brands Adidas, Target, LinkedIn to name a couple. If you're comfortable naming one of them what's the what's a fun company to work with? What is it that you sit there with your team and say man, we've got a great opportunity here to really change the way that xyz company goes to market and sells what they're doing?
Robert Glazer: Yeah, I mean we helped Uber build their partner program for years and its sort of mimics the business, right. From let's get a bunch of riders, to how do we get more drivers, and where are people looking for jobs or otherwise, they become drivers to then a pandemic and focused on eats, and how do we get more people driving for eats. Then going into this country and trying to build up the ecosystem there. Our work there really sorts of mimic their pace and where they were operating so it's always been an interesting program and client to work with. Unfortunately, I think there's about three rocket ship ones that were my head, but I’m embargoed. A lot of our clients want us to build their program but don't want their competitors to know that we're building their program.
Willy Walker: And you mentioned about Uber who went global while you were working with them. Any difference in affiliate marketing between the US, AMEA, and APAC? You have offices around the globe. Anything different as it relates to the way to either find the customers or the way that technology is being used as you move around the globe?
Robert Glazer: Yeah, the techs being used in a similar way, but one of our core things in our business is publisher relationships. Like relationship with these people who produce the content or have the business that's driving you know the traffic to you. There are cultural differences. There are language differences. So part of our going global was realizing that yeah, the technologies kind of global, and the strategy can be global, but we are going to need context in each of these markets to truly run a global program. So yeah, we've seen a lot of differences. There are some countries where they won’t talk to someone outside of their country and you need to go meet face to face and have a discussion with them.
Willy Walker: As you grew Acceleration and went global any growing pains moving it out of the United States and going to Europe and going to Asia, and how much that either distracted you as the leader to having to travel to London to meet with your team or go to Shanghai to meet with your team? Or is it all pretty much scaled sort of like when you moved from Boston to San Francisco?
Robert Glazer: My whole life is growing pains. So, I think there are two things when you build a company globally. I’ve seen people that are too far of one of the mistakes spectrums and we've tried to stay in the middle. First is you got to find the right people. So, I think companies make two mistakes. One is they go find the right local team, but there's no connection to the company or the culture, overall, and you end up having all these unintegrated fiefdoms, so that’s one extreme. The other extreme is you send a bunch of ex-pats over to a market who understand the company, but don't understand the context and local and otherwise. So we've always tried to spend some time in the market, learn it, find the best person that we can who can then lead in that market and then but make sure that they are aligned to our culture and that it is one company. We certainly have regional nuances and we've learned things around how people like to communicate and otherwise, but we don't want to have multiple cultures. All the companies I’ve talked to, great global businesses, I think they felt like there were some true values that they had that were universal that should have been across culture. It might be harder to find some of them in some cultures. If you want people that really challenged the status quo, you might find that harder in some Asian cultures to find people that's just not the natural. But they're there. Or people who that's who have worked in an environment where they weren't allowed to challenge anything, but they wanted to. So, putting them in the right system. I’ve had some really interesting discussions with some colleagues abroad that were saying look I know you've worked in environments like this, but is that actually how you believe it should go from a humanistic standpoint? And their answer is no, I don't think we should be different to people that don't know what they're talking about and never say something. So, I mean I’ve learned a lot as we've made plenty of mistakes and expanded globally. But I do think it is that combination of finding the right local team and leaders who understand the market but there's a shared vision globally.
Willy Walker: And as it relates to expansion during the pandemic has the ability to interact with people via Zoom in such a sort of easy way made sort of bringing on new team members around the globe easier or more difficult in the sense that the old way would be for you to hop on a plane, go over, take them to dinner, get to really know them and you don't have the opportunity to do that without being able to hop on the airplane?
Robert Glazer: We've been a remote for 14 years. So, we were remote and had to hide it from our clients, because we had these Fortune 100 clients and we didn't want them to know we were remote. For us it was a talent play initially. We were working with big clients and the industry did not have enough talent. We needed to get it, where we could get it so. With that said, our team likes to see each other. They like to get together. We don't work in office, every day, but we are not anti-social. We just had our first local hub meetings in 18 months and people were like ecstatic to get together and they're missing that. So, I think we've learned good systems for remote but yeah, I’m overdue to go to London. I’m overdue to go to Asia. As much as it's not day to day, you know sitting down with that team for a day, I think is important and that's the stuff that that's really hard to do on Zoom. I’m a big fan of distributed work, like executive off sites. I never had to do one online again like there's just some things that don't work. There’re some things where a dinner, really is important and so we've done the best that we could give, given the environment.
Willy Walker: So, you started writing Friday Forward as an email to your colleagues to sort of talk about what was on your mind and communicate on a weekly basis and Friday Forward went from I think it's being sent to 30 people to now over 200,000 people on a weekly basis. Beyond the fact that it obviously has great content and, at the end of the day, if it didn't have great content, it wouldn't be out there it wouldn't be read. So that all goes back to you and how you've gone about picking topics to write on and what you have written about them. But beyond that what is made Friday Forward accelerate and I didn’t say that on purpose, but accelerate?
Robert Glazer: I really tried to focus. I think a lot of people who get into content have very obvious ulterior motives, right. They have a real estate firm and they want to sell real estate. I always felt like I think back to I had a client years ago, that was an online retailer their blog was so good about design like it just could have stood on its own. It wasn't pitching their products, it was a great blog on design, and they're brought a lot of people into their sphere of influence, who would then realize that this blog was published by an online retailer. So, a couple things. I think quality matters. I tried to focus on how do I add value for other people and in adding value for other people I think people shared it a lot, right. Just figuring out the formula of what's the right length. Not making it look like a newsletter. Making it look like an email that you would get, so people read it. But really, I do think it was having not an ulterior motive. I started doing it because it was part of my morning routine. There were some interesting things I wanted to share. I wanted to share some stuff with our team that was not about work that I thought would be interesting and I didn't even realize for six or eight weeks that people were sharing them outside the company that might have value outside the company. So, yeah much to the chagrin of our marketing team earlier on they're like, “why don't you put this on the company.” I’m like I think this is the way to connect with people so I do think that that focus on does this have value for the reader, versus I think a lot of people create things where, how can I get value out of this? My friend John Ruhlin is the guru on this. If you haven't had him on sort of gifting as a business strategy. I think you get more value if you give them more value first because you establish that trust in that relationship. Look you've never seen nothing in a Friday Forward ever talked about affiliate marketing, but I find it interesting is sometimes when people are introducing me to a potential prospect or otherwise, they're doing it from a Friday Forward that had nothing to do with affiliate marketing at all. So, there's some trust that's been established, or some understanding that these might be good people to work with.
Willy Walker: It's interesting. I’ve called it lateral marketing and the reason I use that is because at Walker & Dunlop before we started doing the webcast all of our marketing was directed at a client. We can do X, Y and Z for you. We're good at doing that and that's why you ought to come hire us. To exactly what you just said, when we started doing the webcast it wasn't that we were trying to promote W&D and what we do here. We were in the midst of a pandemic, we wanted to get information out to people as it relates to the markets and all the other things that were going on in the world around us. By doing that lateral marketing we picked up a huge amount of direct marketing, but it was never with the idea to be doing direct, it was lateral from the very beginning.
Robert Glazer: The easier test is if it could stand alone. If you detach it from your business someone would be like “that's an interesting interview, that's an interesting podcast,” it would just stand on its own two feet. One of the things that John says about gifting is… So, John sends gifts where he inscribes the person or the family's name into things. If I send you a jacket with my company's name on, it is a promotional piece, that is not a gift. John has helped all these companies grow their client base by sending these crazy lucrative gifts that are engraved with their family name that have no hidden objective to them and again it's just a very different approach.
Willy Walker: I would say on that, it reminds me of Steve Jobs saying, “the best camera you'll ever have is the one you actually have.” It's sort of like a gift that you give somebody that has your logo on it that they never wear isn't going to do you any good. It's something that they think of you when they use it, but it doesn't necessarily have to have your brand on the outside of it. It's really interesting.
Robert Glazer: You really think of it as a gift. I was just on a guy's podcast and then he was pitching me on sending a gift to your podcast guests. He sent me a sample and it was this big T-shirt with a podcast name, which I’m never gonna wear and then a mug with a podcast name. I was thinking that's not at all what I would send my guests as a thank you. Again, it feels like I’m asking them to market for me and not that I’m actually thanking them.
Willy Walker: Well, I hope you'll enjoy the wine we send you after this and it is not Walker & Dunlop branded wine.
Robert Glazer: Well, you consume that.
Willy Walker: I’ll give a plug for Jordan wine, so if you enjoy Jordan wine, enjoy it and have a good evening with it.
On that topic, I want to talk about how you just wrote recently on revenue equaling reputation and reach and how many people have fantastic reputations but never figure out how to expand their reach. You want to talk about that for a moment because obviously Friday Forward has expanded your personal reach and the reach of acceleration partners tremendously. What other things can people do as it relates to expanding their reach when they have really good reputations?
Robert Glazer: This is a law of nature and I think someone would get frustrated on it. By saying “just because you do something well means that everyone should know who you are.” Some firms intentionally want to be a well-kept secret. They want to be one location of a restaurant, they're not interested in two, three or four and I totally appreciate that. But we tend to get really frustrated. I feel everyone in their industry knows the competitor that they think is crappy work but great reach. They just kind of fume and get indignant about it rather than being like, “how do I get better reach, if my products are better than theirs.” We just talked about some of those tactics on how you can expand your universe. How do you expand your known business, but I think if you're doing great work you've got to share that? Making sure you have case studies and examples, a lot of us get business from referrals. I just sent a multi hundred-thousand-dollar referral to someone who told me they signed the deal with them. I never heard from that person. I never received a “hey, thanks for that.” These are people who I think aren't used to this in professional services but that would be a better way to expand. They're really good at what they do but just even acknowledging that, sending me a note would make me much more likely to do it next time. Taking the people out in the world who are our net promoters and making sure that we thank them and that they are rewarded for the job that they're doing. There's nothing worse you can do than not acknowledge a very lucrative referral that someone sent to you because I think you might be likely not to get it the next time.
Willy Walker: As it relates to that, in this world of social media whether it's Yelp or any of the other services out there that are constantly ranking and giving reviews on products.
Robert Glazer: A lot of those are pay for play. I wrote about that last week too.
Willy Walker: Talk about that, because I think a lot of people don't understand that a lot of that is pay for play and as a result of it you can actually manipulate/manufacturer the reputation that you're getting.
Robert Glazer: I posted this thing on LinkedIn about how I am asked five times a week to pay for some CEO of the year, amazing leader award. I finally put all these letters on LinkedIn and said, “this is ridiculous,” if you need this to validate your own existence, then you need to kind of look in the mirror but it's a huge industry. But you should apply, if you have happy employees don't let the one on Glassdoor who is angry and who leaves, ask your happy employees to contribute reviews. If you think you have a good company, apply for industry awards. I’m not saying the pay for play stuff, but you should have someone on your team that is focused on outreach and awareness and following up on leads or understanding. One of the things that most companies don't do is just ask new clients how they found them, where they heard about them. Again, it could be a referral to be somewhere else but may realize oh, I need to double down on that source. You've seen this in law firms, noticeably in the last decade. They now have COOs and CMOs. I’m not sure that other professional services firms have caught on to this as much in terms of “hey, we should be marketing.” Even though we're good at what we do, we should be marketing. Marketing is a skill and a talent and, obviously, if you don't have any marketing people, then you probably shouldn't be surprised that the firm that does is getting a lot more reach than you do.
Willy Walker: Do you ever find that, particularly in the professional services space, and right now my mind goes to the large law firms, accounting firms, investment banking firms, those real white shoe firms. Goldman Sachs doesn't even have a its own name on the outside of its headquarters you just have to show up at the building and know that it's Goldman Sachs headquarters. They've done a lot of marketing over the years that it's kind of a top down if the CEO or the CFO likes working with Goldman Sachs or KPMG or Cravath, to pick three names out of the out of sky, that's kind of the firm's that they work with. Are you seeing now with the way that social media is out there that the decisions on those types of professional services relationships are coming from bottom up, or from middle in rather than from top down?
Robert Glazer: I think there's an age break on this. A lot of firms are going to influencers, people with influence are seeing huge results. People under 35 buy totally different than people over 35 and that bar may move around a little bit. In fact, when I launched my books it was almost like, here's the strategy for this demographic and here's the playbook for the different demographic and they're totally different. The younger generations have sort of a distrust of this higher-level pervasive marketing, they want to know what their friends are doing and what their peers are doing or what people they trust are doing. I know that's more in the consumer segment, but I think you're going to see that sort of spill over more. One of the things we've seen in our industry, just as an example, if you weren't paying attention to our industry is the top three or four rankings for our services started to be these directory businesses that had figured out how to optimize reviews and directories and we weren't listed in them. Suddenly we noticed those were all the top rankings and our competitors were. That was a change that we had to make, and the markets is changing way too fast to assume that whatever you did yesterday it's going to work tomorrow.
Willy Walker: One of your Friday Forwards, which I loved, talked a little bit about time and time moving quickly. There was a quote that you put in there by Benjamin Franklin saying, “lost time is never found again.” You wrote a Friday Forward on a on a summer Friday as you were heading out for vacation with your family, and you reference Tim Urban's math from looking at your life and how many days you have and how many days you have with your kids. Talk for a moment about how you've oriented your life as it relates to running Acceleration Partners yet spending time with family and really being focused on where you're spending your time and how you're spending your time.
Robert Glazer: I was really influenced by Tim Ferriss book The 4-Hour Workweek and I think that book is mislabeled as sort of a productivity hack. I think for a whole bunch of people, it was a philosophical book on don't wait until you're 65 and retire to go then do things that are interesting because you might not make it that long and how do you integrate. I think work life balance is the wrong term. I think it stresses us out to think about how does this work in perfect balance everyday versus how do I have good work, family, personal experiences and they all fit together in my life? I work a lot but then I’ve decided where are my grounds. I’ve used my flexibility to never miss a birthday for one of my kids. We really try to incorporate travel into our family. I remember years ago, and right before that email, I had to be at a conference in Europe in our industry. Well I didn't have to be, but it was an important conference. It was right before my son went to camp, I think it was his first or second year of sleep over camp, he was going to be gone for seven weeks and I really didn’t want to be gone before he was there. So, I suggested we turn this into a family trip to Paris and we can hang out for the week and then I’ll go to the conference for a day, and I’ll fly back a day later and that's what we did. I remember my wife at the time suggested we do Paris another time, but my thing is, if you can do it then do it. You never know when someone in your family is going to get sick, when we're going to have a global pandemic, we never would have all gone to Paris together. Now my kids are all in their teens and we just lost two years of some of the vacations we wanted to do before my daughter went to college. So that's sort of become my philosophy. There's never a great time for anything but if you can do it, do it. I’m not around for everything, but again I tried to make that one of my key priorities and plan those trips and activities where we can have that quality time.
Willy Walker: You wrote about being in an off site where one of your team members said to the facilitators “I don't have enough time.” The facilitator said back to that person, “as a leader, not enough time cannot be in your lexicon because you're clearly not managing your own time well enough because you're the one who defines your time.” Clearly, we'd all love to do everything, but how do you manage that, as it relates to finding the time to do all the things that you need to do? Is there some trick when you’re really focused that you've been able to apply consistently?
Robert Glazer: I think most people, including myself, are not honest with themselves about how they spend their time either intentionally or they don't realize. They don't realize that they spent four hours that week looking at other people's food on Facebook after telling someone else they didn't have the time to do something important. If any executive has ever worked with a coach or been through a time audit you learn quickly through a calendar audit how that’s not true. I through one of my mentors, I follow a system called time blocking. I don't have a free calendar that people can just jump onto. I have designated what is work time, family time, exercise time, time to do meetings. It's planned out three to four weeks in advance of the things that are my priorities. If you just assume, you're going to have this random free time to work out then you're never going to work out. If exercise is a priority, you’ve got to calendar that in. No one can just grab time on my calendar, they can grab the time for open meetings, but I even have time that’s just no meetings, this is the actual time when I must do all the work that people have asked me to do. It's a rare exception, unless someone calls with a massive opportunity or something, I just tried to protect that. Time blocking is the inverse of just letting other people fill in your calendar with their priorities and, specifically, going two three to four weeks out and saying, if my priority is my family than I’m going to book dinner with each kid one night a week, we're going to book a family trip. These are all the things that are going into my calendar first, it's kind of the analogy of the rock in the sand in the jar. If you put all the sand in first the rocks won't fit, but if you put the rocks in, they'll fit if the sand goes around it. What are the things that you want first, before all the other stuff starts dribbling in and filling up the time?
Willy Walker: That's such a good analogy about the rocks in the jar and that they've got to stay in the jar.
Robert Glazer: They’ve got to go in first or else they won't fit.
Willy Walker: So, talk about your Stop Doing List. You talk about weeding out people and projects and clients on an annual basis. How do you systematize the Stop Doing List?
Robert Glazer: I’m not a more for more person. I’m kind of like a one in, one out. So even in my annual planning every year it's like here's what I want to accomplish and what am I going to stop doing? So, I think there's a bunch of stops doing. There’re people you need to stop doing. There’re things that don't add a lot of value that can be outsourced and then there's other things you got to look at that are more systemic. Back to are you being honest about your time? There’s was a great episode that Tim Ferriss did on this, on saying no, and I think I’ve become a big fan of just a Stop Doing List. I don't assume that if I want to do something new, I can just do it. I have almost like a one in, one out rule, and I think it's a good way to approach things and then you start to be honest about the things that you have been holding on to that probably don't serve your purpose anymore. Look, a lot of those may be people. Just think about how many times we catch up with dinner with someone that we don't want to have dinner with and then afterwards we're like we should do that again, you don't even mean it. So, you don't have to break up. Someone gave me advice on this, one of my favorite episodes of the podcast, most popular, a guy named Dandapani on my Elevate podcast. He's a Hindu priest and a Buddhist monk and just listening to him talk about how he doesn't let other people take his energy, is really interesting coming from that. He's like, you don't need to blow up these relationships, you just need to stop giving them energy. Like don't say stuff you don't mean. You know the people in your life, where every time you say how are you doing, they're like oh well and they list out a whole thing of problems. He's like I just don't ask them how they're doing, and I just found it funny to hear a monk say that. But he's like I just don't want the drain of energy in my life.
Willy Walker: You call them, I think, energy vampires.
Robert Glazer: Energy vampires, yeah, that was one of my favorite Friday Forwards and the most popular podcast and he just has some really great strategies. And when you hear it come from a monk and a priest, you're like well, I can do that. Again, I kept thinking I was gonna have to have all these breakups. Well it turns out, if you don't try to make plans with people, you don't want to get together, then they just don't happen and it just kind of runs its course.
Willy Walker: Talk about that, when I read that I thought you also do an annual process at Acceleration Partners focused on clients that you don't want to work with anymore. And I’ll be honest, at Walker & Dunlop we sat around from time to time, and said gosh, I wish we didn't have to work with that client. If they're paying good fees and the banker or the broker wants to keep working with them, we just sort of sit there and say okay, it's okay. It's very hard to sort of dismiss a client or just say we're not going to work with you anymore. Do you all sit down, look at your client list on an annual basis and sort of say okay these top 10 are more effort than they're worth and we're just gonna say sorry we're not here for you anymore?
Robert Glazer: Well, I don't think anyone should take unprofitable clients. So, a couple things, we do tell employees look, don't pull the fire alarm if someone's had a bad day. I say this in onboarding, but we just won't tolerate clients being jerks to our team and making their life miserable and it's too short. Now you can also be honest with the consequence if that if that's 30% of your revenue and you like we don't like this client, you can say great, are we willing to get rid of this client, are we willing to get rid of 30% of the jobs. Right so, there needs to be honest discussions around these and, obviously, the more diversification, you have the better. But one thing we do, and this happened several times when we get into situations where demand exceeds supply, we’re like look, we can't take on new clients and we're in the midst of rolling out start dates, we look around; we’re like which clients have run their course, seem really unhappy and why are we going to put off taking on new people who really want to work with us. So, we kind of just go to them and more mutually because again at that point if they're that frustrated, complaining, they probably wanted out. We’ll be like do you guys just want out of your contract because we're happy to let you do that and we're just moving up the timetable on something that's going to happen already.
Willy Walker: There's a quote that you use when you wrote about stop doing this and it's from Jim Rohn he says, “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” And I thought that was an amazing thing to read and think about for a moment and obviously I sat there and thought about the five people I spend the most time with. When you focused on that Bob, two things, first of all, did you make any adjustments to those five people and if you did, was there a particular either person or quality to that person that you brought into that group of five?
Robert Glazer: Yeah, I’ll be careful on answering these. But I will say that I’ve gotten very big on clarification around core values the next couple years, I know it’s something we’ll probably talk about. But for me, that is the ultimate test of someone. I’m in a lot of mastermind groups and peer groups, those are the type where you come out and everyone is helping each other and has ideas and you're like I want to do more of that. And then you catch up with someone and same complaint that's been going on for three years and your like God, that's sort of a bummer. So that's one of my favorite quotes of all time. I think if you really look around and think about it, you know, one of the biggest things around behavior change and habit change is actually environment. So, for example, if you want to stop drinking and your five best buddies go to the bar every night, you have a very low chance of stopping drinking, right? Your willpower is probably not gonna be good enough to go to the bar every night and not drink. So, if that's a priority for you, then you probably need some friends who don't go to the bar every day; environments really important to us. So, I think when you think about these folks who were sort of drain the energy or otherwise. But for me, I’ve gravitated towards people that are really aligned to my values and I think some of the people our businesses I moved away from where I just see a value mismatch. And what happens is, every time I’ve avoided a value mismatch on a small case, a year or two later it blows up into a much bigger thing and I just learned to not ignore the early warning signs. Particularly, poor judgment in someone. .I had a situation, I think I talked about someone with one of my kids where another families judgement I just really didn't trust and I thought my son was in danger one night and he wasn't, but that was the maddest I’ve ever been at myself, for ignoring that signal early on.
Willy Walker: So, in a Friday Forward somewhat related to what we're talking about you put a Lou Holtz quote in which was, I mean you just talked a moment ago about sitting down with a friend and having a friend kind of get all pessimistic and negative on stuff and you've been like, that I don't need in my life. And Lou Holtz quote goes “don't tell your problems to people, 80% don't care and the other 20% are happy to hear that you have them.” But the reason I raised this Bob, and I want to hear your perspective on it is, that in today's world there's a lot about emotional leadership. It's been a very difficult last 18 months, everybody's stressed out to some degree, there's kind of this survive mode that's going on in the back of all our minds as it relates to getting through the pandemic, being safe, who am I with, who am I not with, where am I traveling, where am I not traveling, how's my job, etc. etc. And so, with that behind the scenes, running through everyone's mind, it seems like everyone wants to emote. How have you worked, both inside Acceleration, as well as in the clients you’ve worked with on guiding leaders to both be empathetic and at the same time, keep that sort of Lou Holtz quote in the back of their mind?
Robert Glazer: The context is important here, because I think leaders need to be empathetic, they need to listen, they need to understand, and that Friday Forward was about how do you reposition things to not be about your problem. So, because I think particularly someone who butters your bread, like in a client service role or otherwise when they're just asking for more and you're exhausted. Instead of saying I just can't do it, or otherwise, how do you reposition in a way they can understand. So, let's pretend I was canceling on you for this podcast last night, and I just said hey Willy, I’m sorry, but I just got so busy and all this stuff and I know I said I’d do it but I’m just exhausted, I’m tired and I just told you all of my problems. I’m not sure that would deeply resonate with you. You're like look, I did a ton of research on this stuff. But if I just changed that approach to again, why is it bad for you? So, hey Willy a bunch of stuff went on this week, like my head is just not in it, I can go forward tomorrow but I’m just afraid I’m not going to give you what you're looking for, for your audience, right. I’m now talking a little bit more about how it would impact you or what's the impact on you, not just a list of my problems. So, I think it's a balance, I think this is the hardest stretch of leadership I’ve ever had because I’m used to business problems are solved with business solutions. And the stress that people have and the stuff going on outside of work that's coming into work cannot be totally relieved by fixing work. Look, I’ve seen all these gurus and stuff, everyone just needs a month off and it's like I agree with you, but like who's going to pay for that. The governments already printed enough so if the answer is to give everyone a month off, or say everyone saying look what I really need is half the amount of work right now, but I need 100% of my pay there aren't many businesses margins that can support that. So, I think we need to listen, to understand what's going on, we need to communicate really well about the business objectives. I think when things were stressful during COVID and for a while and people were saying look, I would like to help you as much as we can, I want to give you as much flexibility, let's see if we can, but understand if we just go dark on this client and lose them it is not going to make things better. Then we're gonna have a whole different number of stresses, where now we don't have enough money to pay people, and I think we've needed a lot of these real discussions. But look, understanding the mental health is almost a requirement these days of a leader and it wasn't a big part of their job prior to March 2020.
Willy Walker: On the flip side of how to lead through it, you wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal recently on How to Thrive in a Virtual Workplace. Can you give people some of the synopsis of how to thrive in a virtual workplace?
Robert Glazer: So, that's my newest book that came out a few months ago. I think it was Wall Street Journal bestseller. There are a couple of tips, both for understanding that businesses will choose a bunch of different types of workplaces, but they need to choose. At least the banks have chosen. I think everyone else is kind of being wussies, not telling their employees what they're going back to and their employees are pretty stressed out and frustrated from it. Because I used to work for you in the office in Denver, and I moved to Montana, you know, during COVID and I’m not sure whether you're going to call me back into the office and I have a job. So, on the employee side, people need a couple of things, they need the right setup, the right tools, you know I’m sitting here with a good $80 mic, a $60 camera, a light and a green screen. That makes it looks like I’m in this fancy room so that obviously looks a lot better and more professional than being in my table with my dog running around in the background. Employees also need, if they're working from home, they need to delineate the space somehow; like set a workday. You know, they kind of switch from Clark Kent to Superman and have different identities in the same space, or else they're gonna work too much. And they need to find the integration that works for them. I think one of the things that people working from home are missing is the commute. And I’ve encouraged them to put a virtual commute in at the beginning of the day, and the end of the day. Like don't start the day looking at email, have your coffee, read the paper, work out, do something. Then turn it on, similarly shut it down at 5:30pm, go for a walk, do something before you get to the table. I think people are missing that transition time. On the employer side, a lot of the principles of good management and hybrid remote work are actually just good management principles overall. So, leaders that communicate really well, that set KPI’s. The biggest shift is moving from managing inputs to outcomes, we understand this in sales. If I say, Willy, who would you hire a salesperson A. that makes 100 phone calls a day and sells $1,000 a day, salesperson 2. makes 10 phone calls a day and sells $10,000 a day. Which one would you rather have?
Willy Walker:
Robert Glazer: Right! Everyone in sales gets that answer right. In the rest of their business, they're focused on well Gene was an hour late today or you know Steve wasn't in that meeting; because they haven't set the outcome objectives that should make the inputs irrelevant. I think you dig into the inputs when the outputs aren't working. So, if the salesperson’s not selling at all, I dig in. I go dude you're not making any phone calls, like no wonder you're not making any sales. But this is a huge shift to outcome orientation, setting KPI’s, communicating, delegating better, understanding the cadence. Look I would much rather say to everyone, here's what good looks like in all these situations and if I can help you, let me help you and here's the clear, but I don't want to watch you every hour of the day or kind of stress that you're into the office late or out of the office late, because then I’m rewarding salesperson A and not salesperson B.
Willy Walker: it’s so interesting. Do you think Bob, that having fixed cost in office space is driving a lot of corporate America’s desire to get back into the office versus the softer skills of teamwork and collaboration and creativity?
Robert Glazer: I mean the fact that it's largely old males that have come out railing with millions of square feet of office space that have come out, making opinion as fact statements about remote work. So, you've got Goldman Sachs, the CEO coming out and calling it an absolute aberration that we're going to fix as soon as possible. Two weeks later, Goldman reports record revenue and quarter and earnings in the company's history with everyone working from home. Do you think that reads a little disingenuously for the team?
Now look, people need to get together, there are things; if Goldman’s pitching a multimillion-dollar client, they should be in the conference room. But, if the junior analyst has to do a model for 17 hours that day and doesn't have time to eat or shower, does, he really need to come in and do that or can he do it from home or can she do it from home? I am not someone who is saying office space is going to go away. I think there are a lot of trends that are going to change how it's used, but I will say that I do respect the banks and the businesses in one sense, who have said you're coming back to the office by September 5th or you're fired. Because at least they are putting a stake in the ground.
McKinsey just found out that 40% of companies have not declared their post pandemic strategy and another 30% have been so ambiguous that the employees don't understand what it means. That's creating more problems than the Goldman Sachs. I think everyone's trying to make everyone happy by not picking a strategy. We're past that point. You need to pick a strategy. You need to start reinforcing it. I mean I’ve spoken to exec teams on this related to the book; these are large companies that are gonna be back to work in a month or two without a strategy for whether people; how they're going to be in the office or when they have to be in the office. I’ve heard 10 different versions of hybrid from you can do whatever you want to everyone's in on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, to everyone must be in 50% of the time, to everyone has to be in for these sorts of things. Those are totally different things that need; maybe people will be interested or not interested, so I, my overarching message is we are past the time to declare a strategy, whatever it is. Set it, support it, understand that 30% of your people won't like it, which is probably why we're seeing the most turnover ever in April and May in the history of the US. Let everyone recalibrate and find the environment that they want to be on, but I think if you're, you’re going to be worse off by failing to make a decision and kind of maybe confusing and frustrating everyone, rather than being clear about you know, irrespective of delta what your strategy is going to be.
I do give the banks credit. I think they're being clear, but I also think one of these banks is going to come out and be like look I know they’re throwing you $180 or whatever, but we're $150. And you can work 50% from home or do whatever you want, and if you’ve got to be in a spreadsheet for 14 hours, I don't care where you do it. I think people are gonna like that value proposition.
Willy Walker: That’s really interesting. You did a Ted talk on employee retention and in it, you underscore communication, you underscore the Jim Collins paradigm of get the right people on the bus and get them in the right seats on the bus, and interesting how we think about that, in the sense of office space, where the office space has gone and you can't sit there and move people around. But also, one of the things you talk about Bob that I found to be so interesting is those people who quit and stay; talk about quitting and stay.
Robert Glazer: So, these are the most dangerous people at your company. So, you know, the people that quit and leave are the easy ones. They raised their hands and they say, you know I’m out. The people that quit and stay, decided that they're getting a bonus in January, they're not vested or whatever; they are like mentally done and gone from your company, but they just haven't left yet. And so, they're kind of gutting you from the inside, and so that's where I think that, you know, having these open conversations, understand that people are not going to work at your company forever, and that it's making it okay to leave and saying, “look if you don't want to work here, we’ll actually make it safe to have a discussion and talk about that”. Let us help you find your next job.
Think about your business. McKinsey has always gotten this. People say “Oh, I want to go in-house, or I want to go do something”. Those your best future clients. In affiliate marketing, since we are one of the few people training a lot of folks, we have a lot of companies that are interested in hiring our employees to be their in-house manager. Those are our future clients. Now I prefer they not all leave at once, but we said look if being an in-house manager is a goal of yours, tell us. We find these opportunities; we know you're not going to stay here forever. If we think it's a good opportunity for you, we've gotten our employees other jobs. But that only comes from honest discussions. And honest discussions only come if you can create a company that has true psychological safety, where there are not repercussions to starting those discussions.
Willy Walker: So, you talk about that, of not wanting people to leave, but when they do leave, making it so that their transition is positive; that they're going to come back and be a client of yours and, as you rightfully say McKinsey has built an incredible business on that. People can tell McKinsey, “I want to take a year off, use your office space and go find my next gig” and they'll give them the office space and probably keep paying them through that period of time. It's amazing. But also, you talk, Bob, about culture and a culture of being able to fail and you set up a kind of juxtaposition between Volkswagen when they had their diesel engine emissions failure and cover up. And then Ray Dalio and what he writes about in Principles, is what he's done at Bridgewater as it relates to setting up a culture that embraces failure. Can you talk about those two ends of the spectrum, if you will?
Robert Glazer: Yeah so, I’m not sure everyone knows the Volkswagen story, so I’ll just give the 30 second. The CEO of Volkswagen was just this hard, charging, kind of German character of no failure, excellence, etc. and what Volkswagen had promised was they were going to deliver a high efficiency, low emission diesel engine. And when the engineers did all their work and came out, they were like, it doesn't work. We could get a little less emission or a little less efficiency. We could dial it down, but we basically couldn't deliver the spec. And these are brilliant engineers. But they were so scared of telling him this and figuring out how to reposition it or solving the problem that they put all that ingenuity in a software that would cheat the system. He didn't tell them to do that. Just the culture of a fear of failure made them use all their engineering resources to figure out how to make the engine look like it was doing something that it wasn't. I think that's what happens in the culture of failure. Ray Dalio at Bridgewater was the opposite. He had a guy make you know, a multimillion-dollar mistake. And he was like, “if I fire this guy over this mistake, I will never learn about a mistake again, like everyone will cover it up and hide it”. He had this concept of a mistake log, where every mistake and we've adapted a version of that in terms of writing and the military after action. When a mistake is made or something, we can learn from, everyone writes a write up, so everyone else can learn from it. That's part of our core value of excel and improve. So, they have a mistake log there and every mistake has to be logged. Making a mistake is not a fireable offense; you should not make the same mistake two or three times, because then you're not learning from it. But, actually failing to put a mistake in the mistake log is a fireable offense and I think that's an interesting behavior that you incentivize.
Willy Walker: So, you just talked about core values you spent a bunch of time working on both the core values at Acceleration Partners, as well as with a lot of your partner firms and you actually have a module on your website that allows people to go to www.corevaluescourse.com and use your tool. Can you explain why you're so focused on core values, right now, and why you think that core values are so important, given a number of the issues we just talked about. About back to office, about communication strategy, about why people leave companies, etc., etc.
Robert Glazer: Core values are ultimate decision-making rubric for your life. They are the things that you should do, or not do. Think about it, most of us only know our core values, we can't articulate them, but we know them when they're being violated. So, imagine a car driving through a tunnel. A nice car; let's pick a nice one, a Porsche. And the lights are off in the tunnel and it's driving through. Well, it's going to hit this wall on this side and scratch up the whole side. That's like kind of hitting your real life; crossing a core value. It's going to slide, scratch up. It's going to get through the tunnel but it’s going to be pretty beat up. If you turn on the lights and painted the lanes, you get through the tunnel without hitting all the guardrails. I mean to me it's the same thing around decisions you've made around people, jobs or otherwise, that are probably not aligned with your core values.
When people read my bio and achievements, I always say, almost everything on that list was after I actually came out of this leadership thing, determined I need to figure out my five core values, started putting them on my desk, align everything around them, make decisions based on them. I would have abandoned Friday Forward, if I didn't have that list because I would have said, “I don't know why I’m doing this; it doesn't make any money, it's stupid. Then I looked at it and it literally checks off every one of my core values therefore it's probably one of the things I should do. I found it so powerful that we started in our leadership training in our company. I didn't have a process that could follow. I went and found a million things and it took me six to 12 months, and there was not a good rubric. So, we started building a curriculum for our managers, and after four or five classes of, we'll spend a half a day helping our employees figure out their personal core values, not company, because I actually think some might realize they're not in the right company, which is probably good for them to know. Two, if they're going to lead and they're not clear on their core values, I don't think you can lead authentically. Interestingly, a couple people have had core values of trust come up and then you find out that leaders with trust have not known how to communicate to their team that being five minutes late, missing a deadline or whatever, permanently puts you in the penalty box for me, and usually, people who have a core value of trust had a real trust issue in their life. So that five minutes late to the meeting is like striking deeply and putting the penalty box. They actually understand these things; they go back to their team they explain it to them, what's important to them otherwise. We see their performance as leaders go up a lot more. And after about four classes and figuring wow, this curriculum really works, people were asking me after elevate. You talk about core values, talk about spiritual capacity, how do I do it? And elevate, well there's this key word; I can't really explain it, it’s complicated. But I was able to take that process after we got it really good and make it available to anyone. So, it's about an hour course. I think it's the most important work anyone can do. Particularly around what I would call the big three in your life, which is your chosen partner and your chosen vocation or place of work or the community you choose to live in. I think if those are made, not in alignment with your core values they have a very low chance of success.
Willy Walker: So, your book Friday Forward was on a Forbes list of the eight books, you should read to be a better leader in 2021. It was on that list, a year ago, and it was number one, by the way, and there were a lot of other great authors, who were down below you. But you also are in great company and put a number of other great books on your website, as it relates to things that you've read, and that people could benefit from reading. There are a couple there, everything from Bill George’s book True North to Victor Frankel's book Man's Search For Meaning, which I would say, you mentioned on the Tim Ferriss podcast. It seems like every time Tim sits around and asks one of his guests what book they would recommend; it comes up every single time. There are a bunch of others Ray Dalio’s book Principles is up there. If you have to kind of pick one Bob, what's the one that impacted you the most and then I guess probably more interestingly than that would be, what's the book that's not there that should be there?
Robert Glazer: That's a good question. The one that I think is pragmatically impacted me the most is on that list is, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). Which I would say is the definitive book on cognitive dissonance. I think we all know what cognitive dissonance is from like class or otherwise. But you when you really learn about cognitive dissonance, particularly as a leader, you see it absolutely everywhere. In people's decision making, their justification. It is such a powerful and pervasive force, that I think understanding that and knowing that is just incredibly powerful. I practically use the advice, not only advice, but the learnings from that book, all the time. So, that is my most gifted book if people were to ask me about that and the title is just great too.
Willy Walker: And the one that's not on the list or that you've read recently that should go up on the list?
Robert Glazer: I read it twice, It's a Big Job. I know it's more polarizing with people. I'll give you two answers to this; one that goes with one and then, but Atlas Shrugged. I think was one of the more...
Willy Walker: My wife and I were just talking about that last week.
Robert Glazer: I read it on a train in college and I didn't sleep, and I read it, all night long. And then I was training for this London to Paris bike ride, two years ago and I listened to it all on audio book again for hours, as I was doing it and it’s just brilliant. And you see in her characters the things that politicians say, and you hear them say it on the news every day and it's just, it's kind of amazing. Aligned with Frankel though, there's one I read more recently during the pandemic, you may have heard of it, it's called Chasing Daylight, and I think it's very alliance. A story of the former CMO of KPMG who found out he had four months to live and how he sort of planned his whole death and how he was going to leave the world in the same way that he sort of planned his life. Hard to read that book without being in tears at some point, but I found it an incredibly powerful book.
Willy Walker: I got about another three pages of notes for you but, we’re running out time.
Robert Glazer: I’ll have to come back again.
Willy Walker: I’ll tell you something; I usually check the time on these conversations and I’m usually pretty good at knowing where I am in my conversation, and today I thought we were about halfway through, and it was 21 past the hour so, I’ve clearly enjoyed our discussion a ton Bob and I’m deeply appreciative of your time.
I would say, as far as things you're reading and what I’m reading; I’m right now reading Change by John Kotter, because I have Kotter on next week. And he, being my HBS leadership Professor, I’m really excited to kind of, if you will, turn the questions towards him after he questioned me all the time when we were in Business School on various elements of change in leadership. That should be a good one, next week and it's a great book.
So, Bob, thank you so much. It's a real pleasure. To anybody who wants to learn more about Bob, go to Robertglaser.com and Acceleration Partners is out there, and then also in our show notes, there will be links to the website that we talked about as it relates to creating your core values and doing analysis on that. So, Bob, thanks very much, have a great Wednesday. And everyone who joined us, thank you and we'll see you again next week.
Robert Glazer: No problem, thank you very much. Someone just asking about the book in the questions, so I'll put the book list in the chat if people are interested.
Willy Walker: Wonderful. Thanks Bob.
Robert Glazer: Thank you. Take Care.
Willy Walker: Bye Bye.
