collaboration

095: Steve Goldstein: You don’t get 30 mulligans

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynote don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I’ll help your attendees get over the hump now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more.

Jim Rembach:     Okay, Fast Leader Legion today I’m excited because when I read the title of this person’s book I knew I had have him on the show. Steve Goldstein, was a middle child born in the Bronx Borough in New York City and had an older sister and younger brother. His mom was a teacher and his father was a bridge operator. Always a big thinker and explorer as a child, he knew, even with growing up in the city of New York that there was more to life and he was willing to go get it. Like as a youth, when he worked two jobs just that he can buy a used car. Steve eventually graduated from the City College in New York and NYU Stern for business school. He’s had the good fortune to have worked for three Fortune 500 companies, American Express, Citigroup and Sears, in various senior-level positions including chairman and CEO of American Express Bank.

Steve has also worked in a venture-capital arena investing and helping lead startup companies to transform ideas into viable businesses. Being a non-conformist at heart he’s always been challenging the status quo both and his professional and personal life and deriving a lot of satisfaction and breaking the China and seeing what happens next. Steve is a pioneer at hear. Currently, he’s working with several private equity firms as a senior adviser, speaking to large groups and small corporate groups about engagement and leadership and out promoting his new book, “Why are There Snow Blowers in Miami? Transform your business Using Five Principles of Engagement.” Steve currently lives in New York City with his wife and has two grown kids both who also live in New York City. Steve Goldstein, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Steve Goldstein:  I am. Good morning, Jim. Nice to be with you. 

Jim Rembach:     I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we get to know you even better?

Steve Goldstein:  My current passion is really around engagement. And it’s interesting when you go on Google to look at engagement the first hundred listings or so about weddings and party planners and how to buy a wedding dress and things like that, it’s really not a word that has really gone into the Lexicon of business. But to me engagement is really where it starts because if you’re not engaged it’s very hard to be an effective leader. And I’ve really been fascinated over the last 20 years about leadership because at the end of the day that’s what makes the company work, more so than its products it’s the leaders in the company who actually are responsible for the results. And I found that most leaders are not as good as they need to be and that’s part of what I’ve been working on for the last 20 years.  Eventually I decided I wanted to share my experiences and write a book about that so I could help other leaders improve. 

Jim Rembach:    When you say engagement, for me, it’s kind of funny when you’re talking from your perspective saying how it’s not part of the Lexicon of business and all of that. Gosh! I’ve been so immersed in customer care and engagement of customers and employees for 20 years so for me it’s kind of like—what do you mean it’s not part of the Lexicon? But when you talk about the book and the five principles, to me I think I’m reading it and I’m saying, “Well, of course this is common sense” but you’re saying, “no way it’s not common. Can you share the five principles?

Steve Goldstein:  Yes. You know, it’s funny, when I finish writing the book and I read probably for the 30th time my first reaction was, this is so obvious who’s going to buy this book? And I realize that because it’s so obvious, is why the book needs to be written. Everybody’s looking for the shiny new object or the latest buzzwords or things of that nature, but the reality is that sometimes doing the basics, not sometimes most times, it’s executing on the basics that really makes the difference between success and failure. So, I codify these five principles basically to give people lanes in which to operate. These are not rules that you have to memorize, these are really sort of flashcards in a way that people can utilize to sort of be aware and observe and then act. 

So the first one is called, fresh eyes. And it’s exactly what it means, it means looking at things as if you are a new person coming into a situation. A consultant by definition has fresh eyes, he’s coming in to a company, he’s tail a lot a money and he looks at things and he asks lots of crazy question. A new CEO comes in to a company does the same thing. But if you’ve been the president of the company for five years a lot of what is happening in your company is actually hiding in plain sight and you don’t see it. And it’s in those areas that there’s gold but you have to look for it. 

The second one is, connecting. What I mean by connecting is, it’s really engaging at the most intimate level with your employees and your customers. If you think about a story like the Gap, the number of levels between the CEO of a Gap and a part-time sales clerk in San Francisco selling you a T-shirt is in excess of 20. The issue is that the part-time person who’s making $9 an hour is the only person who’s interacting with the customer and the leaders sit meetings all day reviewing numbers and presentations and they really don’t have a clue as to what’s actually going on at the point-of-sale. And the and the and the amazing thing is that these people who are interacting with customers they know exactly what’s going, they know what’s working, they know what’s not working. The things that are not working they know how to fix,  they know what the customers want because they’re hearing from them in real-time what they need and want, but no one’s asking them. So, the whole part of connecting is getting out of your office—I was giving a speech the other day and someone says, “what do you mean get out of your office?” I said, “Nothing good happens in your office, nothing.” I use to spend as little there as possible. So that’s the second principle. 

The third principle is transparency. Actually on the on the door of my high school carved in stone was a saying. “Knowledge is power.” And I didn’t know what it meant when I was going to high school, but I do now. I’m a firm believer that the more people know the more successful and effective they can be. We suffer from two problems. We either suffer from not giving people enough information because we don’t trust them or it’s a power thing where you have to ask me for stuff that makes me more powerful because you don’t know the information and it stand in a very sort of subconscious weight. So, one problem is you don’t have enough information to do your job properly. The flipside of that situation is your bury the information. You don’t know what report to look at, you know what’s important, okay. So, the whole thing about transparency is really being open and trusting your employees and communicating with them in a way where they can actually do a great job.

The fourth one is speed. Mario Andretti the famous race car driver has a great quotes, he says, if your car’s under control you’re not going fast enough. And the problem, and this is particularly true with larger companies, larger companies move at glacial pace. They express things in terms of months, quarters and years. I was in a meeting in June with C-Suite of this very large company and in this meeting we came up collectively with a great idea, and it was really a tremendous idea, and the CEO said, “Oh, let’s put that into our planning process for 2017, we’ll bake it in to next year’s plan.” And they’re all saying great. And I said, “Wait a minute, if this is really a great idea why don’t we have someone start it next week because you have to believe that there were three other meetings like this going on around the world or that they all think I’ve come up with the next brilliant idea which is the same one as we just came up with, right? And one of those companies is going to start it next week and they may have it in a marketplace by the end of this year. So if you put it in a plan for next year by the time this actually hits the market it could be the summer of 2017 and this other company could’ve walked away with all the winds.” And they said, “Oh, do you really think that’s going to happen?” I said, “Of course it’s going to happen.” 

The fifth principle I call hot buttons. And it’s fascinating to go through this process. None of the ideas are stupid. None of the initiatives are dumb but they’re nice to do, they’re nice to have but are not jugular. I’m talking about things, like we don’t do this we’re dead. If we don’t do this we’re going to lose market share. If we don’t do this we can’t grow at 15% compounded for the next three years. So, going through the process of really figuring out what’s absolutely essential from what is nice to do is really the important thing. So that’s a brief summary of the five principles. 

Jim Rembach:     Okay, so one thing that really stood out to me, and like you said a lot of them speak for themselves, you use hot buttons a little bit differently than what most people do in regards to thinking about hot buttons, hot buttons there are referring to—hey, that really upset me, that really tick me off. But you’re talking about hot buttons in a different way.

Steve Goldstein:  Right.

Jim Rembach:     So your hot buttons are really things that are going to ignite people to do something different.

Steve Goldstein:  Yes, exactly. And they’re expressed in a way that doesn’t use jargon. It’s done in way where someone in the third grade would understand what the item is so that everyone in the company is very clear on what these three items are. Oftentimes, what happens is the leader will say something in a manner that makes sense to him but if it doesn’t resonate throughout the organization people may have slightly different interpretations about what that means so part of the hot button component is to be very precise with the words. So that whether you’re in 30 states or 30 countries, everyone in the organization knows exactly what those mean and why they’re important.

Jim Rembach:     Also it seems to me like you have to really look towards the operating or the functional position because you give an example on the book where you talked about a used car company and their financing expenses and saying how a used car sitting on a lot cost two bucks a day just an interest.

Steve Goldstein:  Yes. 

Jim Rembach:     And just by communicating the fact that that two bucks a day was something that was occurring cause people to act and behave quite differently than they did previously.

Steve Goldstein:  Exactly. And what was interesting is if you think about that example the people who this was directed to we’re the people who responded to this, I should say, were mechanics, they were auto mechanics. These are people who basically, probably don’t have more than a high school education, they surely don’t have college degrees, I’m not saying that in a derogatory sense what I’m saying is these guys are master mechanics, they know how to fix cars better than anybody else. But now when they understood there was a financial consequence for every day the car was sitting there and not out on the lot to be sold they themselves figured out how to change their work processes to move the cars faster through the shop. 

They came up with this because they understood it was a consequence to not getting the cars out a day or two or 30 days sooner. And that was the beauty of this hot button, that people at all levels in the company could take away from it what was essential for them to do their own jobs better and then working in teams, they brainstormed and came up with 20 ideas about how individually and collectively they could change the way they behaved in order to recognize this two dollars a day. It frankly was amazing to me to see how they responded way beyond what I ever might’ve expected and that’s the beauty of that.

Jim Rembach:     And so for me, I think it’s kind of like using fresh eyes in order to find out what’s the right hot button, I think we have to do that. Obviously, you’re a tenured—a person who has accumulated a wealth of wisdom and I’m sure it’s being leveraged by the venture capitalist that you’re working with but we need inspiration, this book is inspirational and the five principles, I would love to even get in the conversation about difference between principles and rules, but we’ve got to move on. And so, when you start talking about quotes, we love quotes on the show and I’m sure you have a lot that you’ve accumulated over the years, but is there one or two that you can share with us the gives you inspiration?

Steve Goldstein:  There’s one quote that I came across, I think it was the late 70’s in a BusinessWeek article, and it was said by a guy named Edward Cole who was an executive at General Motors, he had been a lifelong employee of General Motors and I think at this point he was running the engine in one of the divisions, and this is what he said, “Leadership is the courage to admit mistakes, the vision to welcome change, the enthusiasm to motivate others, and the confidence to stay out of step when everyone is marching to the wrong tune.” And that to me sort of epitomized what a great leader should. Actually I try to follow this, I mean I really do my best to follow this and it’s not always the most popular way to behave but I think this quote really sums up what I believe a leader should be.

Steve Goldstein:  Well I think even reading your bio when you started talking about breaking the China and seen what happens, I can see why that quote means a lot to you. And obviously in order for you to get to the point of being that young kid in the Bronx, who is that constant explorer and wanting more knowing there was more, being the CEO of some large division for some very large organizations, there’s had to be a lot of humps along the way that you had to get over that cause you to get the place where you are now and being able to write this book and help others move forward. Is there a story that you can share with us when you had to get over the hump? 

Well, the most, I think, profound story is really the story that became the title of the book. When I was at Sears running the credit card business, I’ll give you the short version of this the longer version’s in the book, I was based in Chicago obviously were Sears is headquartered and it was February a blustery cold winter like the polar vortex we just had. I had to go to Miami to give a speech, in February, so I was very excited to the warm weather and I always made a point to visit the stores to see what we could do to help improve sales. So, I went in to the store, I happen to go into the Lawn and Garden center entrance and I saw lawn mowers, rakes, shovels, patio furniture, barbecue grills, then I saw a show blowers and I thought I was hallucinating. And I went over to see them and there was an elderly salesman named Pete and it just came out to mouth I said, “Pete, why are there snow blowers in Miami?” Basically the short version of the story is every September the snow blowers were delivered, they were told to put on the floor every April they pack them back in Carnes and send them back to the distribution center. And when I said to him, “What do you do about it?” He says, “Well, my boss calls, his boss calls, the store manager calls, and they basically tell it’s part of the national allocation. I said, “You know what that means?” He said, “I have no idea what that means.” I said, “Have you ever sold any?” He said, “We sold one to a couple who is visiting their kids in Minnesota for Christmas, they put it in minivan, they drove up from Miami to Minnesota, and that was it.”

So the next day I go back to—again my speech was like this thing was bothering me the whole afternoon, we are at our weekly leadership meeting and not surprising we’re out of snow blowers because of the snowstorm and I pull at my pocket this guy’s business card and I say we’ll there are four in Miami, call Pete, you have them and they’re hysterically laughing. And I said, “Why is this funny?”  And now it’s hysterical, and I said, “No, it’s terrible.” And so, I then had my—this is free Internet, I had my assistant find out in the history of recorded weather, how much does it snowed in Miami. And then she came back 45 minutes later and said it’s snowed one time seven years ago a third of an inch. So you said to yourself, how the heck could this be part of a national allocation? And you know, to me it was a metaphor and I started to think at that moment, of all the other sort of experiences I had that were equally insane, and you know in golf you got a mulligan if you hit a bad shot, you don’t get a 30 mulligans. And so, this was not just a problem that someone sent snow blowers to Miami the problem was that no one was looking, no one cared, no one saw this things going back and forth for 30 years. No one was asking questions, no one was interested to talk to the store manager, it was a complete and utter breakdown in business processes. And by the way, it’s not unique to Sears every company has snow blowers. In fact, when I went to write a book I interviewed 15 CEO’s and I told them all the story because I wanted them to understand what I wanted from them in return and out of the 15 people I interviewed I had the same reaction a hundred percent of the time. First they laugh, then they said that’s crazy and then they said, oh, I’ve got 20 snow blower stories which one do you want to hear, became a noun because people have all seen this craziness.

Jim Rembach:     How could you not laugh? So I have to know—you went back and you had that meeting and what eventually happened with the whole snow blower thing in Miami? 

Steve Goldstein:  I don’t know what had happened but this December, just literally less than a year ago, I finished the book and I was going to go down to Miami to see if they’re still there. I said let me call. And I call the store and I said, “Can I—so it turns out they’re no longer there. So they weren’t there this December. I don’t know when in the prior 20 years they stop being shipped there but finally the practice was corrected. I thought I would have been hysterical if they were still there I could take a picture and put it the book, but fortunately they were no longer there. 

Jim Rembach:     If we all only had 20 years in order to fix problems I guess maybe they’ll all get fixed sometime, I don’t know or is it kind of run into an infinity, I have no idea. Okay, so, you had mentioned some of that working—as an advisor, working with a venture capital firms, working with a lot of different organizations in order to help them with these five principles and all of that. And you also talked about several other things you’re working on but what are some of your goals?

Steve Goldstein:  My goals now are really to—I have a few goals, one is to work with private equity firms to help them run their portfolio companies more effectively and that really comes from leadership. So, I’m spending a lot of time with them working with their individual companies as well as helping them evaluate new acquisitions. I’m spending a fair amount of time writing in part to promote the book but in part to just get my ideas down on paper or on blogs and promulgate some of those thoughts. I’m spending time promoting the book, now that I have the book out there I want to let people know about the book so that they can buy it and learn from it and apply some of the things that are in the book. And I spend a lot of time trying to keep fit, which I think is really important so you can enjoy your life. My wife and I like to travel so we’ve incorporated that we took a great trip almost a year ago to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it’s part of the world that I always wanted to see and so that was that was a lot of fun. And I’m recently, I haven’t had the time, but I’m trying to carve out the time to re-engage back to engagement playing the saxophone. I played the saxophone when I was a kid I just decided I want to for a long, long hiatus I want to get back in and start playing again. So, that’s keeping me pretty busy. 

Jim Rembach:    And the  Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor:

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Steve Goldstein:  Yes.

Jim Rembach:     Alright. So what do you think is holding you back from being even better leader today? 

Steve Goldstein:  I think I’m pretty good as a leader right now and I think what I’ve learned is it’s more about finesse which I think comes with practice. And I’m very conscious about this I work at this every day. I’m very I’m very careful about what I say, I’m very careful about how I listen and it’s all designed with the notion of how do I get the person I’m interacting with other people I’m interacting with to really understand what we need to do and to enable them to be more successful. I don’t think there’s end state here I think it’s just something—unlike being a great artist or anything else where it’s not something that’s measurable I think it’s just something that you keep finessing and doing and you just get a little better every day.

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Steve Goldstein:    The best leadership advice I’ve ever received which is actually from my first boss when I got out of graduate school is to treat everyone the same, whether it’s the cleaning lady or the president of the company.  I was in a meeting with him, I was only like 25 years old and we were doing an all-nighter because we had a big pitch we were making and I went in to his office at 11 o’clock to show him my work and to see how I was going to mark it up with a red pen. And so we’re in this heated discussion and the cleaning lady walks in to clean his office. And he starts talking to her like his best friend—how’s your kids, son had broken his leg and everything—and she leaves and I said, “You know the cleaning lady?” and he goes, “Yeah, she’s got a family, she’s got a life.” And I realized, and he was curious like…cause I didn’t know how you suppose to—I just had this—I don’t know I was stupid I thought because you’re an executive you don’t talk to certain people, that’s we saw on movies or on TV. And so I saw from him in a very human way that you really do treat people the same and so I’ve been doing this from that moment on, I became friends with the window washer when I lived in London in our building who all of my leadership team saw this crazy American is going out to the pub with the window washer, what’s wrong with him? And I told them, I learn more from this guy than I learned from them, about our company. Because he was in the building every day he knew everything that was going on. 

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Steve Goldstein:   I’m very inquisitive. I’ve always been this way and I think the question I asked most is why. I think a lot of people and I was talking to somebody about this the other day in a board meeting,  you know, everybody focuses on what and how and where and when and it’s all static but the real motivation for understanding why things happened no one asks. You know that if you made $20 this year and last quarter you made $10 you doubled your results. Great. But most people don’t know why and if you don’t know why, you have no reason to assume it’s going to be the same next month because you don’t know what caused it in the first place. I know this sounds silly I’m amazed that people really don’t dig. A lot of retailers when I have bad results they blame the weather. It’s amazing to me that a food like Walmart will say, we had great results. Macy’s will say, we didn’t have great results and it is attributable to the weather. Are they operating at a different weather system than Walmart? So, you have to laugh when you hear that because what it really means is they don’t know they’re just grasping at straws to come up with something that seemingly explains what is inexplicable because they really don’t know what the underlying reason for the outcome is.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Steve Goldstein: I think my best tool is to listen very hard and ask a lot of questions.

Jim Rembach:     What would be one book, and it could be from any genre, that you’d recommend to our listeners?

Steve Goldstein:  The book I would recommend is, why there’s snow blowers in Miami? Actually I would recommend a good book that I read recently which I thought was terrific, is David McCullough’s book about the Wright brothers. When you realize what these two guys did to learn how to fly to prove that man could fly it was one of the most inspiring books about persistence, sticktoitiveness, ingenuity, solving problems, working as a team, marching to their own beat when everybody was telling them they were marching to the wrong tune, it was just a fantastic book.

Jim Rembach:     Okay, Fast Leader listeners you can find links to that and other bonus information from today show by going to fastleader.net/Steve Goldstein. Okay, Steve this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything you only choose one. So, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Steve Goldstein:  I think the thing I would do differently is to learn how to collaborate better and work more effectively in teams. When I was younger it was more about proving myself and sort of creating my own space and seeing what I could do to move up in the business world. And I think I always was a good team player but I probably was a little bit more interested in moving myself forward that moving the team forward with being conscious about it, subconsciously I’m sure I was but not consciously and today I’m extremely conscious of that. I know that you really need to have an effective team to get great results just like in sports.

Jim Rembach:     Steve, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Steve Goldstein:  Yeah. The best way to connect with me is on my website, stevendgoldstein.com or on Twitter @stgoldstein or you can shoot me an e-mail at steve@stgoldstein.com.

Jim Rembach:     Steven Goldstein, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thank you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

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