Announcer:

Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game-changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview elite entrepreneurs and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on the Voice America Network. Today we're going to talk about "Lead the Change” with Nick Jankel. As you know, my interviews with the world's elite entrepreneurs are all about helping you launch your new business or take your business to the next level. Sometimes the penny drops with the right information for you to start something profitable yourself, or help you do your job a whole lot better. I love to help you and I love to hear how these world-class interviews are helping you. If you want to help me help more people and help get my show to those that need to hear this in the world, please consider giving me a review. The easy way is to go to Apple podcasts or go to ratethispodcast.com/tony.. A kind five-star review helps grow and support the show, and I thank you so much. Today's show is about "Lead the Change” with Nick Jankel. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Nick Jankel is the author of “Now Lead the Change” and creator of the neuroscience-driven leadership methodology Bio-Transformation Theory. He holds an MA in Medicine and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. Here we go. Hi, Nick. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. So good to have you on with us today.

Nick:

Great to be here with you.

Tony:

Nick, I am looking forward to leading the change and learning about the change and how to deal with crisis, and post- and maybe even pre-, and how to transform, and there's some really important questions that I want to tackle because of especially what's going on and where we think we're headed. So let's kind of go back and introduce you to our audience and tell us how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Nick:

So, I have a very dotted journey, which makes perfect sense in hindsight, but it didn't make sense at the time. It's one of the important things for entrepreneurship is to make sense of it as you go along so you can actually understand who you are and who you're becoming. So quick story - I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I studied medicine originally so I understand biology and human minds. Ended up studying philosophy for a bit too, which was very important for my story because I understood that science can only take you so far in understanding human beings. Ended up working a big ad agency developing brands and customer propositions, products, new ideas, whatever, that kind of stuff - creative thinking. And then the dotcom thing sort of hit in the late '90s and I was in my early '20s. Never wanted to be an entrepreneur, never considered it, and suddenly I found myself running a startup in 1999 in London, flying off to San Francisco, LA, New York, being part of the scene that was sort of snowballing really. When this dotcom scenario died down, we pivoted our company from being a sort of startup accelerator to an innovation consultancy, which is what you would call it now, working with Fortune 500 companies on how to develop new products that serve the future, not the past. Amazing stuff, brilliant clients, brilliant companies, but what I learned over and over and over is innovation is not enough because you can have the most perfect idea. Someone could show up to your company and go, this is the business model of the future. It's going to be billion-dollar business. Here it is. If the leaders in the business don't have the capacity to see it and the courage to go on the journey, which is never straightforward, nothing will happen. And that brought me into leadership work, and now the majority of my time is spent working with leaders, helping them transform themselves so they can transform their companies and their industries. And I also work with my wife on individual transformation in life - life, love and relationships. So, transformation is the core of everything I do, and I use a lot of the science that I had in my science background, but I also bring a chunk of wisdom into it too and bring it all together. And that's how I arrived with a book called Now Lead the Change.

Tony:

Nick, you've done quite a bit in your journey as you've mentioned. You're a keynote speaker. You talk about transformation and biotransformation, which I want to ask you about. Where in this life journey did you realize, Hey, I'm good at helping people with transformation? Hey, I can do this or how did that come about?

Nick:

Well again, looking back in hindsight, I think it was quite early. I think it was in my teenage time. I think that's what was drawing me into psychiatry. I didn't know that coaching existed. It wasn't a thing that was around when I was growing up. Business coaching, life coaching, entrepreneurial coaching. If I'd known that maybe that's what I would have wanted to have been, but all I knew was if you wanted to do work with people and help them change their minds, you became a psychiatrist. I think I knew early, but it didn't become a life purpose and a business model ultimately until a lot later. And I think actually you can't really work with people until you've had some life experience and some pain and some frustration and some difficult times, because you need to draw on your own experiences as well as all the theories that are out there, which are many.

Tony:

Why do you do this? What's your purpose behind all this?

Nick:

The deepest purpose is to regenerate our world with better ideas and better people. Ultimately, I think that's what I'm working towards. I think we've got some big problems ahead. Crises, multiple crises on the horizon. I talk about 4 in the book and I don't think continuing doing what we're doing is going to solve the crises and potentially solve the bigger crisis, which is, will us as a species be able to exist on this planet with 7 or 8 billion people? So, if you can work back from a hundred years from now in order to make our grandchildren's lives work, flourish we have to change our businesses a little bit, and new businesses will arrive and arise and old ones will die that we don't need anymore. And I am, I guess, at the edge of that conversation, the death of the old and the rebirth and regeneration of the new.

Tony:

Nick, you created a thesis if I'm saying that right, a theory, the biotransformation theory as part of this leadership methodology. Can you give us a little bit of information on that?

Nick:

I'm a geek, basically if I'm be honest, and if I wasn't doing what I do now, I'd probably be an academic in a university psychology department, beavering away on something. And so, while I've been actually practicing change and helping people, coaching people, and I work with hundreds of people a year - one-to-one, groups, whatever - while I've been doing that, I've also been thinking, well, what am I doing? What's the theory underneath all this, and how does it all work together? And as far as my research has been to date, there isn't a theory that really explains how to change human beings with all the completeness I think we now have from science. So you've got theories about mindset change, you've got theories about behavior change, you've got theories about emotional change, and you even have theories about body change, and biotransformation theory wraps it all up and makes it a coherent whole that you can go, okay, you want to transform yourself? You want to transform from your relationships? You want to transform your business? There is only one process you need to understand, and if you understand that process, it will make your life unbelievably simpler. It will take the pain out of change, and you can start to embrace change rather than fight it and you can accelerate it and make it happen much quicker and enjoy the process of constant renewal that occurs when you allow change to happen. And when you allow crises to make you change, rather than fight it and run away and hope it all goes away, which as we know, it doesn't.

Tony:

When I hear the word bio - BIO - I think of something changing or affecting us biologically, something affecting human beings and so forth. What kind of change are we talking about within the person itself, I guess, on a physical level?

Nick:

So the reason we call the theory biotransformation theory is this truism that it's easy to forget when you're reading in a business book or the latest Malcolm Gladwell bestseller. In order for change to happen, it's ultimately nerves in your body have to fire differently. And if you want to think new thoughts, you have to have new neuronal connections; new neurons have to grow and fire differently. And very few of us spend any time learning about that stuff or being taught about that stuff. Often, I'll do a keynote, 500 people in a room and I'll say, who has spent more than 10 hours of their life being taught how to change their own mind and their own brain? Very few. And these are leaders of industry. These are people who have spent 20 years in one industry. They're masters of their space, and yet we don't get taught how to change our own minds, our own emotions and our own behaviors. And that's what ultimately, I help people understand them. What I am now moving towards doing is teaching people how to change themselves rather than doing the change for them. Coaching is really kind of doing it for someone, and what I'm much more interested in is saying, here's the theory. Here's how it works. Here's how your emotions work. Here's how your minds and stories and narratives work. Here's how your behaviors and addictions and habits work, and this is a process for changing them. Go and practice, and if you do it regularly, you'll be a master at self-transformation.

Tony:

We're talking about lead the change with Nick Jankel, and that's the title of his new book. Also lead the change and you can find him at switchonnow.com..

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about lead the change with Nick Jankel, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

In Wondery's newest series Business Movers, host Lindsay Graham dives deep into the inner workings of some of the most successful companies of all time. From the origin stories of their famed leaders to the million-dollar idea that catapulted them to success, how exactly did these companies grow from an idea and a dream to multi-billion-dollar corporations? Hear the landmark decisions, the scandals and the stunning triumphs that made them who they are. First up, Walt Disney. The first season features a name that's been synonymous with the entertainment industry since the early 20th century - Walt Disney. Learn how even when faced with harrowing obstacles and wide-ranging skepticism, he remained true to his vision and brought his world of magic to life. You're about to hear a preview of Business Movers. While you're listening, subscribe to Business Movers on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or listen early and ad-free in the Wondery app. Lindsay: Behind every successful business is a story. It begins with a vision and then a leap of faith. Along the way, people make bold decisions, ride through booms and busts, and sometimes they find success. Before I began hosting shows like American Scandal, American History Tellers, and producing audio dramas like 1865, I got my master's in business because I've always been interested in how businesses work, how they grow, how they thrive. In business school, we looked at case studies. How did this business succeed? Why did that business fail? On Business Movers, we'll ask those same questions and we'll dive into the true stories of the brilliant, but all too human business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that led to their triumph or failure, and the ideas that transformed the way we live our lives. We begin with a four-episode series about Walt Disney and what drove his desire to build a bigger and better theme park in Orlando, Florida. Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but it's also a business and Walt, the shrewd entrepreneur was a cutthroat businessman driven by a bold vision and a relentless pursuit of a better bottom line. While Walt's movies were critically acclaimed, they didn't always make money, but after Disneyland got over its rocky start, it made money - and a lot of it. In 1957 alone, the park grossed more than $11 million, well over $100 million today, but Walt was not motivated by dollars alone. He was also driven by a desire for perfection. Once at a showing of Fantasia when a journalist asked Walt why he was rearranging chairs at his own movie screening, Walt replied 'because I liked things just so. Walt's desire for perfection drove him to improve on Disneyland and create a second theme park. As he searched for the perfect location, Walt envisioned something bigger and better than Disneyland, something new and something perfect. A total destination resort, a city of tomorrow. This is episode one: Project Future. It's November 1963 in St. Louis, Missouri. Walt Disney has come to town 9 months after construction began on the Gateway Arch, America's tallest manmade monument. St. Louis is a town on the rise, and today Disney brings with him the potential for another massive project - a second Disney theme park. The finances are sorted. The paperwork's been drafted. All that's left is to put pen to paper, which is why Walt Disney, his executives and a group of local politicians and business leaders have gathered for a celebratory dinner. Walt sits at the head of the table. He looks dapper with his neatly groomed mustache and slick graying hair. All smiles, Walt proposes a toast. "Here's to a bright and successful future, and a fruitful partnership." After considering upwards of a dozen cities, Walt chose St. Louis in no small part because the locals have been easy to work with. But that's all about to change because there's one dinner guest who is not smiling. August "Gussie" Busch Jr., successful St. Louis beer magnate. Gussie is clearly skeptical of Walt Disney's theme park and he's about to blow the deal. "Well, Mr. Disney. It looks like everything's in place, but what about liquor? "I beg your pardon?" "You heard me." Gussie's blunt question sucks the air out of the room and steals the smile off Walt's face. "Booze is my business and St. Louis is my town. If you're going to be coming here, I'd at least like to know what your distribution plan is." Sitting nearby, the local mayor tries to intervene. "Well now, Mr. Busch, I believe that question has already been answered, hasn't it Walt?" It has. Walt's position on liquor is non-negotiable. As long as he's around, it will never be sold on Disney property. Walt believes liquor would cheapen the Disney image and the family-friendly Disney brand. But Walt doesn't say a word to Gussie. He quietly listens as the brash Mr. Busch presses the issue. "I think liquor is critical." "Like I said, the question's already been answered." "Then we ought to revisit the issue, Mr. Mayor. The fact is any man who thinks he can design an attraction that is going to be a success in this city and not serve beer or liquor ought to have his head examined." It's an outrageous taunt, but Walt doesn't blow his top. He hardly shows any emotion at all. He simply raises his right eyebrow. The Disney executives in the room have seen this look before and they know exactly what it means. Walt is livid. Later that night, Walt returns to his hotel suite across town. One of his executives walks into his room. "Goodnight, Mr. Disney." "What time can we have the plane in the morning?" "The plane?" "We have a meeting in the morning. We're supposed to get..." "Forget about that. It's finished. We're not going to that meeting. Have the plane ready first thing." Whether or not Walt Disney abandoned St. Louis because of Gussie Busch's offensive comment is not entirely known, but what is known by all of us is that no Disney theme park was built in St. Louis, and the story about Disney and Gussie Busch illustrates a critical fact about the man many called Uncle Walt. He was a hard-nosed businessman who did not back down. Walt was determined that Disneyworld would eventually eclipse Disneyland, and to achieve that goal, he would embrace what worked the first time and improve on what didn't. The liquor policy was essential. The family friendly Disney brand was more precious to Walt than any possible location for the park, no matter how accommodating. But the most important lesson Walter had learned the first time around was not about booze. It was about the importance of keeping a secret.

Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is lead the change with Nick Jankel. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. With his partner & wife, Alison McAulay, they share a vision of a society and world regenerated by the power of individual and collective transformation. All right, and now back to the chat with Nick. Nick, let's get into your vision path. We talked about a lot of points here on transformation, and let's kind of bring things together now. Let's talk about crises or crisis. How do people stay resilient on anything that happens? You don't know what's going to happen. So let's talk about - I believe this is your term - to bounce back better and braver.

Nick:

Well, actually I think entrepreneurs of all the types of people in the world are usually the best at dealing with crisis because they've had to already. And if you're sat in a corporate and you've been protected by a nice pay packet and a decent deal, those corporate walls prevent what you might call evolutionary pressures coming in and making the crisis occur for you, because you've got a corporate team and you've got a team who buy up a small company so you don't really get a lot of pressure, a lot of crisis. But entrepreneurs are constantly dealing with crisis. So, every day is basically a long experience of a crisis, some tiny, some massive, and so entrepreneurs tend to be more resilient. Small business owners tend to be more resilient. What we're dealing with now though is a series of crises which have hit us in unexpected ways, but they could have been predicted. There is a whole chapter about some of the crises in my book, and one of them is about the pandemic crisis. You could predict it would happen at some point if you understood how systems change and how travel works and how supply chains work in the modern age. But the reality is this is not the first or the last. It's not going to be the last crisis we're going to face. There are going to be quite a few coming along over the next 10 years. I think we're going to go through a very tough 10 years if I'm honest. In my work as a futurist for want of that term, we've got a lot of challenges ahead, and so what are we going to do? Are we going to run away? We can try and pretend it's not there. We can put a pillow under our head and hope it goes away. It isn't going to go away. So, what's the alternative? The alternative is to look for the opportunity in crisis, and there is always opportunity in crisis, and actually crisis the Greek term, the Greek word crisis means in the original Greek, ancient Greek, a turning point. It doesn't mean good or bad. It's not a horrible thing or a happy thing. It's just a moment where you can change tack and so if you look at every crisis as, okay, there's going to be stuff that's going to hurt, there's going to be stuff that's going to be painful, and there's going to be stuff that's going to die. And I mean, business models stuff, revenue stuff, all the things that change in a crisis. There's also going to be an opportunity or multiple opportunities within this crisis. So, let's look for them. If you think about entrepreneurship as the seeking of new problems to solve yourself, rather than waiting for someone else to do it, then as an entrepreneur who has a freedom to change tack when you want to, then a crisis is really an opportunity for us. But if we try and hold on to the old thing that was kind of nice for a while, confident convenience for our business model or revenue streams, then we won't adapt quick enough and other people will snip in there and do it. So even in the last year, I've seen people adapt very quickly to crises and I've seen people really struggle and it's already made a difference. The Delta between the two extends. So, the sort of message for leading change is to follow the discomfort and don't try and ignore or repress or deny the discomfort. Follow it because in the discomfort is the breakthrough, is the new idea, is the innovation, is the creative thought. This is on the small to the large. I have a client who runs a very small food services business, so for weddings and brand events and then a little food truck type idea. And suddenly in a lockdown people aren't having events. That just died; literally dead overnight. People can't go to restaurants. And in that moment, this colleague-friend of mine invented a whole new delivery business, which is now thriving. And that opens up a future that was not available a year ago and probably would never have done it. Likewise myself, we're launching a new leadership program, which will be totally virtual, so it'd be online like this. We've also got loads of other things you can do, not just live zoom calls, but lots of other things and recordings and audio and toolkits and little exercises, and we probably would never have really developed that if we just carried on doing what we usually do, which is big workshop-based programs. And so, it's been an amazing journey -terrifying, knuckle ride, wake at three in the morning stuff, but also really interesting and exciting, and that's the choice you make in the crisis, the turning point. Do you want it to be a turning point, or do you try and turn away from the future and try and run back to the past? We know one thing - you can't do that. It's literally impossible, but it doesn't stop us trying.

Tony:

Yes. This crisis has actually made a lot of millionaires. People that for example, would have, they would do an event for example, it might have 20 people, 30 people at an event, and now they're doing webinars and zoom calls and meetings with people having 300. And for the entrepreneur, the opportunity has skyrocketed in terms of the income. And I've spoken to quite a few entrepreneurs and business is absolutely better than ever because of what they do, and because of being able to capitalize the internet, the digital media and everything that's available technologically today. Now on the flip side as if 180-degree juxtaposition, I pulled up a couple of stats. You know Yelp - YELP. Yelp is one business out there, a business that services businesses, and I looked at some of their stats because it kind of gives you a little idea of what has happened in the world. This is just one company reporting on their businesses. From April to August, 100,000 businesses closed permanently, and we've got restaurants, retail, beauty, and bars. Over almost 60% of beauty type stores, shops, and services closed permanently. We've got millions of people displaced. So, one side we've got people making millions and thriving like crazy and hiring because business has never been better. And on the other side, we have people suffering really bad and there are entrepreneurs in there. They're small business owners and they're out of business and they have to learn to adapt. And I want to talk about that a little bit more, but what I think and I'd like your point of view is it's a shock when something like this happens. You don't expect it and I think this is why everybody in the audience needs to read your book and buy it and give it out as gifts. Lead the change, because it's a huge shock. Let's talk about why does this happen and how come people just can't run with it?

Nick:

So they use the word shock, which is a really important word to use because when the crisis hits, it's literally shock in medical sense. We are shocked by what's happened and that shock is in our nervous system, and if we don't know how to process it, and we just were running around. I remember I recorded a video at the very beginning of lockdown back in February '20 saying, don't just react. Don't just start running, trying to do 50 new businesses. You've got to take time to process the shock, got to take time to deal with the change and try and find what the change means for you, and it's not going to happen probably in 24 hours. So if you've already been developing some new stuff, which we had, and you realize that this crisis is going to accelerate that trend that you were already sort of riding, then that's great because that's what Amazon has done. They've already been moving onto a digital. People aren't going to go out to retail. People aren't going to go and buy food in the store if they can avoid it. They already knew that that was a long-term trend. They had already been developing stuff to do that and suddenly that's been accelerated. Great! Bully for them. Another billion made this second for Jeff. So if you already got something that you know is kind of crisis positive, it's future forging as I would call it, it's already kind of becoming more valuable as time goes on, then great. But if you know that what you do already was difficult and already was sort of fighting the future, the march of the future, then you've got some thinking to do, and the key to do good adaptive thinking is not to do it in panic, not to do it in shock because you've got no capacity. And in my book, I talk about this. You're actually in the wrong brain network for creativity if you're in shock and fear and worry and anxiety. You literally cannot think new thoughts. So you have to find a way to process the shock, to deal with it, to think through it with a buddy, with a family member, with a colleague, with someone you work with, with someone who's in the same industry, someone who's in a different industry. Talk to lots of people. So you're going to have to take some time for you. If you've got a coach, wonderful. Therapist, counselor, whatever, someone you can talk it through. We tend to need to talk things through with people. It's very hard to pivot a business sitting on your own. Part of this is because when you tell people your ideas for how you might pivot or adapt, they give you feedback whether they feel like it's a good idea. Not just from what they think, they can tell from how you speak about it, whether you feel that something strong there, or if it's actually just a pipe dream or crazy idea. I don't mean crazy in a not a good way, as opposed to the crazy in a good way ideas, which are also awesome.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about lead the change with Nick Jankel, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

Do you like to zone in sometimes on a good story that just takes you away from this world? We all need that sometimes, right? Here's a good book recommendation for you. I'm announcing a book that I've worked on for years with my coauthor S.K.R, and the title is Imen of Atlantis: Bitten. It's the first book, volume one. We've spent years on this. It's been a labor of love. Get it now at tonydurso.com/imen. It's a fictional story of what happened in Atlantis once upon a time, and there are multiple storylines that merge and converge together. Some of the key players are Bomo, the woodcutter who's huge and is usually referred to as the ogre. Another character is Roni of Imen-Hera. As an analogy, picture the most fierce and formidable samurai warriors imaginable, who laid down their weapons in order to serve mankind and in exchange for ending their fighting ways, the Creator gave them healing powers and very special abilities. And now the Imen are just a myth, a rumor, a legend, with most people not really sure if they're real or not. Then there's Crown Prince Eyvind, Raidon, Prince Korin, and it involves the main kingdoms of Carron, Carthinia and a plot against Bodon. But you really need to look out for Queen Tara. I don't think you've ever run into anyone so cunning, crafty, and evil. Have you? Well, aside from Prince Korin, perhaps and maybe some people you read about in the news, but I digress. You would think this has to do with contemporary times, but it was never written for that purpose. This first book is about the love of money, especially gold, and what people or rulers will do to get as much as they can, and a lot more stuff that you have to read to find out about. Get it now at tonydurso.com/imen. Enjoy a good read. Check it out and let me know how much you love it. tonydurso.com/imen.

Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is lead the change with Nick Jankel. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that.