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 another 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 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Annalisa Parent Tony: Welcome, I’m your host Tony DUrso I broadcast every Friday at 2:00 PM Pacific on VoiceAmerica Influencers from the steady growth of my large audience. I can tell you love my interviews with some very successful people and I love hearing about the inspiration you get from their life as you learn more about being a great entrepreneur. There’s a lot of great advice and guidance in these interviews for you. Thanks for listening. Also, you can listen to all of our shows on most podcast platforms. If you have apple podcast, please subscribe. Now, before we get going, here’s a big thank you to some amazing sponsors of our show. Please stay tuned for an important message from Rothys about women’s shoes, which my wife says are the best she ever wore. And listen for a vital message from LinkedIn on how the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. More info on them just ahead, so please stay tuned. Today’s show is about publishing books and social wealth with an AnnalisaParent and Jason Treu. All right, here’s some info on Annalisa. Annalisa Parent helps entrepreneurs finish, publish and sell their expert books. She’s the CEO of Laurel Elite Book’s, a two-time teacher of the year nominee and a recipient of the French congressional medal of honor. Here we go. Welcome to the show. Annalisa, I am honored to have such a well-published author with us. Annalisa: Well, thank you, Tony. It’s a pleasure to be here with you as well. Tony: Annalisa, I am very excited to speak with you on what we’re going to go over because I am a fellow author and I am voraciously interested in anything that will help me in my book. But before we get into writing books and all that first things first, I’d love to know how did it all start for you? What’s your backstory? Annalisa: Yeah, well thanks for asking that it goes way back to whenever I can talk I think. So a very early age. I was a storyteller just from the beginning and my poor mom and she lived to tell. Uh, I always love to tell stories as soon as I can write and write. Well, I created a family magazine. Writing and storytelling had me hooked from the beginning. So I published my first poem when I was nine years old. I get to read it at the State House in my home state of New Hampshire and published; several times throughout my childhood and became a journalist and a teacher of writing. And it was a natural progression into helping other people to tell their story. And my focus is on helping them to tell it well so that other people can read it and understand it and that it’s making an impact in the world. That’s what I care about because I feel like we all have a story, and I’m very, very passionate about helping people to tell it and engage in a conversation, getting us all talking and sharing. Tony: I like that. And I know that you’re part Italian and I think that’s also perhaps a good reason. I’m trying to be a little, a little silly here. It’s part of the gift of gab. I think it comes naturally to Italians and I think you got that essence. Annalisa: I sure did. And you know, I can even talk to you over the airwaves and do so without waving my hands most of the time. Tony: Interesting, Annalisa, one thing I want to ask is you’re a two-time teacher of the year nominee. Can you give us a little more on what that is all about and what you teach and so forth? Annalisa: Absolutely; So I was very honored to be nominated twice, and to win a governor’s Institute award for excellence in teaching because of my ability to meet every student’s need back in the day. So I have actually taught every grade from pre k through graduate school. And not only that, but I studied neuroscience and specifically its application to how the brain learns and creates the best. So I was able to take that knowledge into the classroom and help all learners interface with content and do so in a way that was meaningful to them and brought them to a point of understanding. And these days when I work with my writers, I use that same neuroscience knowledge to help them find their best writer, to never have writer’s block to always feel like it’s coming so very easily. And they don’t know why. It’s because I’ve put the neuroscience spell on them and they don’t even know it. They’re really in a creative flow where they should be to get the words out, to communicate their ideas well and to feel confident as they’re doing it. Those are all really important to me. Tony: I like that, Very good on that. I don’t have writer’s block, I just could write like the wind. It must be Italian. Annalisa: Well, you know, as far as that’s concerned, I think there are two kinds of writers. There are the kinds who, you know, write a word and erase it Oscar Wilde said this morning, I put in a coma this afternoon. I took it out, pause. They’re those kinds of writers and then there are the verbose writers whose task it is later to then reduce. Tony: Yeah. Actually, another thing before we get into writing, you may have mentioned this, but you won, you received the French Congressional Medal of honor. Can you tell us about that? Annalisa: Yeah, that was an amazing moment of my life. First, I was selected to be a member of a five-person team. We went to France and we spent four weeks touring around France on a peace-promoting tour. So we were speaking in French to large groups of people about American and Quebec culture. And as part of that tour, during a ceremony, much to our surprise, each of us, each of the five members of the research team were awarded the French Congressional Medal of honor. So I have a plaque, it’s the equivalent of the French congressional of our Congress. So I have a plaque with my name on it and it’s engraved and no, it’s, it’s quite an honor and it’s a beautiful piece. Tony: I loved that. Very interesting and fascinating what a career you have. And now the moment we’re all waiting for, I want to get into books and writing and perhaps let’s start at the very basic, we speak to a lot of entrepreneurs on my show, solopreneurs, medium-sized businesses and so forth. Let’s start from what does a book really do for a person, for an entrepreneur? Why write a book? Annalisa: That’s a great question. And I’m just gonna back it up and talk a little bit about the different types of entrepreneur books there are. So we’ve got the business card book, which is a brief introduction. We’ve got the quote books that people put together. We have blog compilations. All of those are different types of books entrepreneurs might put together. That’s not what I recommend or specialize in. The kind of book that I do as a client magnet book. It’s the kind of book that starts the conversation with that potential client. And Tony, I like to call it a time machine because this book acts for you when you’re not there, across the world at two in the morning when you’re asleep you’re still able to have this conversation with someone. And we all know in business that they know, like trust factor, is extremely important. And you’re starting that conversation creating the know, like, and trust factor before you even met the person. And I can tell you just empirically from my own experience with my book, by the time I get people on the phone, they’re on the phone because they already love me. They’re already eager to work with me. And the other awesome thing that it does is that all the people who read my book and say, man, not for me, they’re not going to get on the phone with me. So it’s a time saver. The conversations are a lot easier around how I can help people. And I end up with people who resonate with the way that I interface in the world. So those are just a few of the benefits that a well-written book can offer to an entrepreneur, small business owner out there in the world. Tony: I’d like you to educate me, correct me. I’m willing to be corrected as well as perhaps any other entrepreneurs and businessmen out there. When I write a book, I’ve written several. I write to educate, to give some information, to impart some wisdom and I’ve got more books coming out to do the same. I personally never think of a book and I know I should like an expanded business card or anything like that, but I already know that my books would have that. If someone likes the information that I am imparting and the wisdom that I have in the book, they would want to do business with me or whatever. Is that important these days? Is that a new trend or is this a new trend you see starting? Why write a book to be an expanded business card as opposed to explaining and detailing out how to perform some action or activity? Annalisa: Well, Tony, I wish I knew the answer to that question and I say that because it is something that I see out there a lot. Some coach somewhere is recommending this. I don’t know who it is. And I ended up frequently cleaning up the mess of the Business Card Book that the entrepreneur thought was going to launch them and get them all of this business. They were told, nobody ever throws away a book. This is going to be a valuable commodity in the marketplace and it isn’t, 50% of any books that are purchased or even read. And so if you think about that it’s a little scary first of all, but secondly, you want a book that’s readable, but people are going to want to get the information from. That they’re going to get valuable content and a conversation from. So you stumped me there, Tony. I don’t know, and I don’t necessarily want to know. And I don’t mean that in a rude way. I just, I’ve seen that it doesn’t work. I understand why it doesn’t work. I feel like maybe people are encouraged to write them because they’re shorter. Maybe they’re a little easier. And you know, writing can be intimidating. You and I have no problem talking and writing. We’re very verbal people. Not all people feel that way. And so they might feel like this business card book is an interesting interface or a way to get their toes wet before they jumped in the water. But, just because you got your toes wet, you’re still not swimming. So if you’re want to swim with the big fish, look at this extended metaphor, they need the right kind of book. Tony: I liked that. Great answer. I appreciate your candor and honesty here. Alright. We write a book because we want to introduce someone to who we are, what we know and open up to doing business with people. So far, so good. Annalisa: Exactly. Tony: All right. Are there any major components that are needed in this type of book? What do we want to call it? A conversation starter. An introduction to me type of book. Annalisa: Yeah. I think that it does all of those things. A conversation starter and introduction to me and our system walk people through. How do you create that book? And I think that’s important. We understand not all entrepreneurs are necessarily writers. Yes, we have to write memos and things, but that doesn’t mean that we’re writers. And number two, we’re all often dang busy mining our businesses. We don’t necessarily have time to sit down leisurely in the backyard and a hammock and write a book. And so I think setting aside the time, having the right support to engage that person, that potential client in conversation, how do we do that with the kind of content that’s interesting. So Tony if you think about a cocktail party. You walk into the cocktail party and you say, hi, I’m Tony, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Well, pretty soon the throngs of people are hitting the table. That what happens? So it’s a, it’s about a balance of, you know, how do I talk about myself enough that you understand who I am, but also understand that we’re having a conversation, which means that this is a little bit about me and a little bit about you Tony: Annalisa, I’m getting this and it makes sense. And I see that there are obviously different types of books for different purposes. And having that book that introduces one and establishes and brings about that relationship with someone is vital. I see that that’s important. And I understand that your company and you specialize in doing that for people. But you mentioned something about co-leading blogs, compilations and so forth. And I see this more and more writer putting together interviews and different things that they’ve had and it seems to be getting popular. And I think, well if it imparts wisdom and knowledge, it’s good. But do you see any side effect or ill after effect on that? Annalisa: Great question. So the way that I look at a book, one, I call it a scaling tool. So technically it’s a book. You know if you ask a scientist, they’re going to tell you it’s a book, but it’s an important tool and anytime that we’re using a tool, then we’re targeted to what the goals of that tool are. Tony: This is the Tony DUrso show just the head. 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She’s been featured on Huffington Post Live for her novels, CBS Associated Press and Korean Broadcast Systems as well as many podcasts and radio programs. All right, and now back to the chat with Annalisa Annalisa: And if the goal is to scale your business, if the goal is to engage in meaningful conversation that increases the number of people entering your funnel, staying and hiring you, then your book should target that goal. If your goal is to get your name out into the marketplace or just to have a book that has your name on it, well then certainly compiling blog entries or interview questions or something, will do that. But you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, thinking about that, just consider would you read somebody else’s compilation blog post? What would it require for you to want to read those? And I will share with your audience Tony that the biggest problem I see there is that it reads like a bunch of things that were thrown together that weren’t meant to be together. So that’s clunky and that’s difficult for the reader. We are busy and busier every single day in our lives. People have 80 million choices on what they can do in the very limited free time. If they’re bothering to pick up your book, you want to make it something that they’re going to stick with to the end. Tony: I love that answer. Thank you, and now I know why I don’t buy any co-leading blog books or anything like that. It’s exactly correct. If I buy a book and I do buy books, it’s because I want to get that wisdom and that knowledge because you know, we can’t learn everything from everybody in one lifetime. It’s impossible. So we select who we learn from, who’s an expert in what field, and we get that book from that person to get that knowledge a lot faster because yes, we are smart and we can eventually learn all that, but it can take years. So if we get the book, we can learn all this knowledge in about a week or so. Annalisa: Exactly, and the really fun thing, I’m sure that you’ve read books like this, Tony, where you get the knowledge that you want to be. Also, feel like you just sat down and had coffee with the guy or the gal who wrote it and there’s a connection there that happened. How did that happen? All you were doing were turning bits of paper and yet there’s a connection. That for me is the real beauty of a well-written book. Tony: You know, I get that feeling, yes. And some books, I don’t get that feeling. I want to know how to get that feeling. And I have other questions, but I want to know if there’s anything else you can share on how we can put together a book that does convey that and puts that rapport with the person as well as giving them actionable advice and information. How to put together a book. Annalisa: Sure. I’m going to give you an answer that starts as an eye roll answer, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it. So one of the buzz words right now is authenticity. And this gets thrown around a whole lot. And yet people ask the question and how can I be authentic? Well, there’s no real answer to that. And really that’s the answer to this question. And there’s a lot of fear there, right? So, my book, I’m kind of a brainiac and I’m a little bit silly and my book is very brainy and very silly at the same time. No. Some people are going to pick that up and be like, wow, this person’s Lulu. I don’t want to read this book. And I think when people look at that prospect, it’s scary. None of us want to be rejected. That doesn’t feel good. And yet in the business sphere, choosing to be authentic and accepting the consequence of rejection means that you’re present and available to the people who are going to love exactly what it is that you’re doing. So in my sphere, I’m not the only publisher out there. I’m certainly not the only publisher for entrepreneurs, but I do things in the way that I do things. So I want people to come to me who want the thing that I have to offer. People who want to write a book in 24 hours and just ship it out. Well, there are programs for that. It’s not mine. Those aren’t my priorities. So those people, those clients should find their space and the people who want a quality message, who want a legacy, who wants something that’s going to start a conversation, those people should find me. Tony: I love it. Great answer. I’ve interviewed many authors and I’ve interviewed publishers, a lot of them, and that is a great authentic answer. I liked that a lot. I’ll just leave it at that. Annalisa, did we discuss everything on a book being a scaling tool? You had mentioned that because I wanted to go somewhere else, but I wanted to know, when I think of scaling, I’m thinking of rising and rising up and I guess readership, viewership, popularity. Is that what you, when you say a scaling tool? Annalisa: Yeah. And one of the things that makes it a powerful scaling tool, and you know, I’m a little biased, but I think it’s the most powerful scaling tool, is the whole conversation piece that we’ve already covered. But then what we haven’t covered, Tony, is the media aspect, right? So you can’t get onto quality radio shows, television shows. I just did four segments of PBS. Why did that happen? Because I had a high-quality book, the host, read it, Bada Bing, Bada boom. There I am on television. So you have to have that. It’s your ticket to entry. Can people get on television without books? Of course, they can. But if you’re just a no-name that nobody’s ever heard of, such as I and this very day, you know, you have to have the right ticket. You have to be able to open that gate to get there. So it opens this whole world to say nothing of the people who then find you on Google and Amazon and Barnes and noble. And I mean, any other of the major search engines while they’re looking for information. Tony: This is exciting because as an author I get very excited about books. I could keep talking about books for a very long time. And now the big one, people write books, Annalisa, I know people, they write books. And guess what happens? Nothing! It doesn’t go anywhere. Now you, I believe you’re top seller, you’ve sold like half a million books. Annalisa: Indeed. Tony: Please tell us, are there any tips or advice you can give us on how to market or get our book out there as well as of course hire you? Annalisa: Yeah, well absolutely. So 50% of the people who come to me say, I have an idea and I have no idea where to start. The other 50% say, yeah, this book that’s collecting dust in my garage, how come? No one bought it? And so you’re right. And the way that we solve that problem, Tony starts even before page one. So there’s, you know, the baseball movie, if you build it, they will come. Well, if you’re writing a book, pretty much no one, but your mom is going to read it; I’m sorry. And so you have to create that buzz and create that generation. You have to make people want to read your book, just because you wrote it, not because it’s an accomplishment to write a book. You may feel all those things as the author and they’re completely legitimate as the author, but you don’t have to remember your audience and what they’re looking for from your book. And so we have that as consideration right from the get-go. As I said, we’re working through those goals. If the goal is scaling the business, if the goal is being featured in the national media, if the goal is speaking on the corporate circuit, that’s what’s going to dictate everything from page one on what we do and how we put together that book. Tony: I got it. Very, very good. Well, I wanna thank you so much for giving us this information and for the audience you can find Annalisa at laurelelite.com and I’ll spell it. Laurel, L A U R E l- Elite – E L I T E laurelelite.com and Annalisa Parent. We talked about to be the expert. I love it. So we are the expert, we get a book out with you and then the book becomes a client magnet. Annalisa: There you go. Tony: I love it. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. I enjoyed this very much and I’d love to have you back when you have another update. Annalisa: That sounds great Tony. I’d love to come back. Tony: Thank you so much. This is the Tony DUrso show. Just the head the chat continues about publishing books and social wealth with Annalisa Parent and Jason Treu. But first it’s time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Jason Treu Change starts here. Change starts now. Join us VoiceAmerica Influencers channel. Hiring isn’t as simple as putting an ad in the paper or posting to a job board when you’re juggling hiring and everything it takes to grow your business. 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We’d love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony at tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guests. Tony: All right, we’re back on the Tony DUrso show. Today’s show is about publishing books and social wealth with Annalisa Parent and Jason Treu and now we have Jason Treu joining us. Jason Treu is an executive coach who helps executives, managers, and teams to maximize their leadership potential and performance along with building and executing their career blueprint. He also has ” In the trenches experience”, helping build a billion-dollar company and working with many fortune 100 companies. Here we go. Welcome to the show, Jason, so great to have you on once again with me. Jason: Hey, it’s great to be back on the show and spend some time catching up with you. Tony: Yeah, a lot happens. It’s been I think about two years that I had you on my former show Revenue Chat Radio, which is now merged with this show The Tony DUrso Show. And as we have more audience, I like to pick things up at the beginning and tell us, please. How did it all start for you, Jason? And what’s your backstory? Jason: Well, the backstory is like any entrepreneur, right? It’s a whiny road. I went to law school, I got my masters in communications. From there I decided I didn’t want to practice law. I went out to Silicon Valley, was out there in the gold rush of startup land. I got to work with Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, Mark Cubin Mark Hurd, who is the HP CEO. I got to work with Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital and big as VC Funds and Gray Lock. And I mean there was just so many opportunities and I meet so many great people. And then I went to one of the earliest software as a service company and we started competitive against salesforce.com over on the customer service side of things. And I just took on a different job, went to HP and all along the way I loved working with people and I’m an extrovert in learning some great leaders and managers. I just picked up a lot of sayings that I could use and just started, coaching people really on the side. And I just wrote a book, Social Wealth on it. And then, went to, I did a Tedx speech and I just started working with successful people and helping them. And one of the things that I found out along the way is your self-awareness is a huge problem. And it’s people ceiling. And if you don’t understand your blind spots and what they specifically are and the patterns that are sabotaging your success, it will end up sinking your career. And that was the first breaks or I did, I had in coaching. And in the second one that I had later on as it was all about the relationships and your relationship networks. And so how do you build high performing teams? And I look at teams as not only something that’s internal, right but also teams of people that you might be working with like partners, customers, prospects, really any third parties and how do you build high levels of trust in these relationships and levels of rapport and vulnerability and communication and collaboration and all those things and how do you do it quickly to really in essence become a top 1% performer. Because that’s where the goal is, is when you can be at that level because then you can create game-changing things and it’s much more fun, too. Tony: Amazing and in the past couple of years since our last interview, you’ve done so much, I want to again applaud you 50,000 copies of your book. That’s quite something. Hats off to you. Jason: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I changed in doing the book and for people writing a book is a couple of things I did is I read a lot in the books or at least skim through the business relationship and networking books. And the second thing is, that weren’t, anyhow-to books out there. So I stripped out the stories and instead of making it 300 pages, I made it 120 so people could essentially get through the book and then use it and not have to flip through the stories to get to the information. And I think that helped it be significantly different. And then I spent a lot of time researching and talking to people and figuring out what worked and what didn’t work and leverage that and tested it out themselves. And so that was something I think that was helpful in the process. Tony: I got you. Let’s tell our audience about some strategies to build high performing and innovative teams. It’s quite something. What’s the number one on your list, please? Jason: Well, I think one of the things that people have to understand is that in order to build your team, you have to build a foundational layer and the foundational layer are Google, see you’re out. And it’s like a logical safety. And with they signed on in 2012 to 2014 they conducted a research project called Project Aristotle. And what they were doing is they wanted to find out one individual trait and qualities that the best performers in their company had globally because then they would hire, train, develop and promote, etc. On those individual traits that were happening, because they found the people that were the best performers, a company we’re exceeding their goals by at least 17% they were getting lauded by Google exacts twice as often. And there were a lot of other metrics. And so they realize that if we could do all this, we would significantly boost the bottom line without essentially any cost. And so they hired researchers to come in and look at the data. And one of the things that Google is known for is being able to look at their patterns and understand the data. And when they looked at all this data, they were completely lost. And they ended up finding is that it didn’t matter the individuals that were on the teams, it was how they socially interacted with other people in the cohesion in those groups. Strategy Number one Psychological Safety Psychological safety-And so the number one quality they found was psychological safety. And without that, they had no high performing teams globally, no matter where they were in the world. And really psychological safety is being able to speak up, share, collaborate and communicate freely. And it’s broken only down in three ways. One is that you know the people around you like you would know family and friends, except you have to strip out the family and friends, meaning that you know their experiences. You have a deep understanding of what makes them tick brain, you understand their hot buttons, pet peeves. And the second thing is risk-taking. And the way that psychologically safe teams risk-take is that they look at things objectively, not emotionally. And what I mean by that is that if something goes wrong, they don’t yell at people, they ask the questions, okay, well why did we get these results and what can we do to get better? And to have conversations such as like the navy seals do, I’ve got a friend of mine who was on Seal Team Six with Chris Kyle American Sniper and I heard a lot of great stories from them. And after every mission they’d go back and ask questions like what were the intended results, what were the actual results, what we do well, what didn’t we do well and what can we do better going forward? And they would look at that objectively not to try to blame anyone. And they got better. Pixar did that too, they call it the brain trust. And essentially their motto cause I worked inside a Pixar was every movie sucks in the beginning and everyone in these brain trust meetings is on equal footing, right? There was no one higher than anyone else. And they give feedback and they do this periodically on every movie. And what it does is that it creates an environment where the people that are producing the movie get all this feedback. Now they don’t want to use this feedback, but they have it and it helps them produce a much better movie. And what you’ll find is that in the risk-taking part of it, there was a book called the CEO Next Door and they looked at 12,000 CEOs in their database and people that emotionally looked at failure and even use the word failure instead of talking about things that didn’t go well in a different way, got fired, 50% more often within the next two jobs as people did. So you have to look at the risks operationally. And then the third part of it is being able to ask questions and ask clarifying question. Because once you’re given a set of instructions or a strategy or tactics or launching a product or whatever, like, these the people on the team might be confused. And oftentimes just asking the questions, people don’t do it write. And also by asking questions, you might be able to change the process strategies, tactics because the person creating it or the team creating and may have missed something. So when you combine all three of those aspects in the psychological safety, you create a foundation that is built on a lot of trusts. Tony: I liked that the more that everyone trusts each other and feels safe inside the team with their life and what’s happening, the more they can work together and deal with any issues or frustrations or whatever and it just makes for a smoother team. That’s very smart. So that’s, that’s a very interesting strategy. What’s another one, please? Strategy Number Two Vulnerability Jason: Well I think that the one thing that people don’t understand is that vulnerability and trust are connected in a way that you probably don’t think about. And that the lever to really increase trust is a vulnerability. And it has been those powerful ones. And the challenge is most people think they have to trust someone before they can be vulnerable. But it’s just the opposite. And an example of this is I talked last year to the lead space astronaut who was leading the space mission and he was telling me that, you know, one of the biggest challenges NASA had over the last 10 years or so is actually people working together. Because one of the problems, when they go up in these space missions, is they’re getting a lot of private funding to do experiments and they have astronauts from all over the world who have different biases, bots, you know, everything else. And it’s very difficult to get along. And what happened on the last couple of space missions is there was an astronaut from Russia and he was very sexist and there was a woman, the only space restaurant that is a woman from Italy and they had a hard time just getting along because he fundamentally didn’t believe that she was on equal footing. So they had challenges running experiments and doing things. So when NASA did was some pretty radical things is they had them do some team-building exercises to go on dessert as well to go under stress testing. Do a lot of this Q and A to get to know each other. And what happened on the last space mission was that the male astronauts got the data wrong on an experiment and the female astronauts from Italy was pretty close to the right answer. And the lead astronauts, the astronaut who was leading this particular experiment from Russia said, we’re going to do it her way. And that’s pretty significant. And it’s very vulnerable to have to make all of those changes. So the key is is that you have got to open up and really share, and one of the challenges with vulnerability is that it is really dependent on events, right? You’ll hear people talk about it, well I had a health scare, right? And now they did something really incredible out of it. Or my company almost imploded when we took this massive action. Well, one part of vulnerability. Everyone has at their disposal is self-disclosure. Tony: This is the Tony DUrso show just the head. The chat continues about Publishing Books and Social Wealth with Annalisa Parent and Jason Treu. But first, it’s time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. We don’t follow; we lead. Join us the VoiceAmerica Influencers Channel. Would you like a lot of people checking out your sales page, your branding page, your podcast like a lot of us? Are you just trying to do it all yourself? Are you taking webinars, seminars, and workshops to learn how to grow your social media and how to bring visitors to your site? Are you downloading free ebooks, buying books, buying classes, doing this and that? Just to learn how to get more sales, more people, more exposure, been there, done that. 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You are listening to the Tony DUrso Show with key influencers. We’d love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony and tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guests. Tony: All right, we’re back on the Tony DUrso Show. Today’s show is about Publishing Books and Social Wealth with Annalisa Parent and Jason Treu. Jason Spent 15 plus years working in marketing leadership positions in Silicon Valley, working with influential leaders such as Steve Jobs, Apple, and Pixar, Reed Hastings, CEO at Netflix, Mark Cuban, Mark Hurd, CEO at HP, Paul Wall, President of SAP and many others. And now back to the chat with Jason. Strategy Number Two Continues Vulnerability Jason: #You can self disclose and share information proactively with people and that is extremely powerful and everyone’s done it. Who’s listening to this and how they’ve done it is everyone’s met someone at some point in their lives for five or 10 minutes and they felt like they’ve known them all their life. And what happened is, is how that happened is someone lead with vulnerability, If you get a video camera and watch it and what happened is you escalated it very quickly. So what you did in one conversation is what most people do in 10 or 20 so when you shorten the cycle significantly. Another way to look at it too is to think about the best team that you’ve ever been on before. What were those emotions? What did you accomplish? What did you think was possible versus the team that you disliked the most that you were on successful on? Look at that motion as the stress, everything else. Well, the other team, you were very vulnerable and open with those people and they trusted you and vice versa. And because of that, you were able to do incredible things. And so you look at it Google found in their other studies that if you put all-star people on include versus B players, most of the time the B players actually outperform the all-stars; because all stars cant go on because of Egos and heading to the right and other things that happen in that environment. Tony: Very interesting Jason. And the takeaway is I get from this is to share about yourself with the team. It’s not just getting to know them, but share something personal so that everyone knows everyone a little bit more. And I think as a result of that becomes more understanding of the person. Not necessarily tolerant that they don’t do their job or anything, but more understanding of who they are, what they are and as a result can work better together. And as everyone I think knows a team is stronger. Even a team of two is far stronger than two individuals together or separate. So there is definitely something to be said about a team and by sharing something personal it’s sort of like almost the bonds are the glue that makes that team more effective. Jason: Yeah it is. And I mean a quick example is I was in Silicon Valley and I was in a marketing agency and we were probably 60 or 70 people and we went and pitched apple when Steve Jobs came back and we did work with him it at Pixar, so that definitely did help. We were going against global agencies that were hundreds of times bigger. I mean it was, it wasn’t Goliath versus David, it was Goliath versus like a molecule. I mean, and no one in our agency was over 35 other than the people that were running. And we went and pitches in your like seeing the who’s who of the marketing world, and bring in agencies everywhere and one are sitting there in silicon valley like one group of people and we ended up winning and getting that account and I realized at that point that it’s about the team and what you can do together versus having unlimited resources and unlimited amounts of people. Because if that were not true then that wouldn’t be possible for us to one that because that was, I mean you could probably not even call it a minor miracle and you recalled probably a major miracle. Tony: That is impressive Jason and I like that. Very, very good the power of a team. You just can’t say enough about that. We have time for one more strategy. What’s that one going to be? Strategy Number Three Curiosity Jason: I think it’s that modeling curiosity and asking a lot of questions because one of the things the people don’t do is create the environment where the leader asks questions and the team can ask questions and we don’t do that. You have disasters, you’ll have a Nokia which the managers in Nokia knew that Apple was coming out with the Iphone. And they knew they would get crushed, but they wouldn’t tell the management because the management didn’t want to hear about it. All they want to hear is they were going to be the leaders and their managers were going to able to find a way and they couldn’t. You saw this at Volkswagen as well, right? The president of Volkswagen told the engineer is that you will make a diesel engine that’s high performing and can pass the California emissions and that’s it. And I don’t want to hear anything other than that. Well, what happened in Volkswagen, which is crazy, is they ended up creating a software program, the engineers that masked the results and so they spent their time building a program. So essentially lie. And then when they ran the test, they didn’t want the back axle. And how they got away with that for as long as they did, I don’t know. But eventually they got caught and it was fraud, and when they interviewed them, they’re like, well, no one in my company would hear what we had to say. All right, so you as a leader have to ask questions because one, you don’t have all the answers and if you tell people you have all the answers, one, it’s a lie. And two, it’s disingenuous and it creates people who won’t speak up and if you won’t speak up. The problem with that is that silence is dangerous because it can be one way, meaning there are people that know is just not the people running the business and it creates an illusion that things are working when they’re actually broken. So you have to create an environment where people can talk and arrange things and willing, I think invite conversations. Tony: I haven’t been in the corporate world for quite some time, but I’ve never seen an environment where people could question their superiors and go that way. It was just the culture. I don’t know what it’s like now these days, but how does someone get around that? If they run into that culture where management just doesn’t want to hear it, it’s just doing this, do this, do this. That’s it. That’s what we’re paying you for. Go to work. How do you deal with that? Jason: Well, I think you find another job because you can’t change a structure on top of the business. I mean it’s not possible to be able to do that with other people because if it’s embedded in that point, now if it’s coming from one leader potentially, you can go and approach them and share data because there’s so much data out there, but oftentimes their self-awareness will be too low. Right. And you need data is out there is 95% of people think they’re self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are and that sort of baseline self-awareness, that’s not even high self-awareness. So I think you can try that. And as you show them the data and the research on this and the environment that will create successes. They could buy into it and if they don’t, well then you really don’t have an option because you don’t have control. Tony: Interesting. And Jason, would it, would it be conducive at all to have weekly or monthly staff group get together meetings where people could share and give information? Kind of maybe open up management to understanding more of what’s going on stuff that management doesn’t want to know about otherwise? Jason: Yeah, because I think, you know, companies like Warby Parker, that’s how they enter the data. The employees and the managers put together the things that they found wrong in the company and the business and other issues and highlighted them and they figured out what to do with them. And I think really good companies, that’s what they do because the front line workers and the managers are the people that are the closest to the business and the customers and they have the most. And so you need to do a lot of listening and asking a lot of questions because then the answers will come. And a lot of times what you’ll see is lead those people will give you the answers, the leaders to the questions because they know it. Or even if they don’t, they’ll give you a lot of suggestions and ideas and you can piece together a solution that will work much better than the one you had. And if you don’t, all you’re doing is you’re winning the delusion and illusion. And eventually what happens, like a poor foundation, a house that’s it’ll eventually crumble down. So I think these days it’s a requirement more than anything else. And if you don’t, you’ll be a Nokia, wells Fargo, Volkswagen, the the government and then the bank collapse. I mean, there are so many examples and a lot is going on today of a similar ilk. Tony: And I think that’s where you see an exodus or a high percentage of employees leaving a high percentage of employee turnover. It’s almost like things just go one way, but you got to have a two-way street to some degree to have a very good growing organization. It’s just part of how we have to do business today. It just can’t be one way. Jason: Yes, and I think that managers really have to be more leaders have to be more involved in this process and they have to be, the cultures are and they have to make it a priority and intentionally do the things that are necessary to create things like psychological safety, to be vulnerable, to listen or to get the data from people to speak to them. And there’s a lot of strategies that anyone can employ, right? There’s an address, one process or one way to get there, but most organizations are almost doing almost nothing a lot that. Or their lip service. They have culture, but they give it to a culture who has no power or they put it in HR and then no one listens to it. It’s the job of the CEO. It’s a job of the executive team, but they also have to model it as well. And there are a lot of times you know you put our values right in a company and no one’s living them. No one’s, you know, being accountable. No expectations are being set and people being held to them. And if that doesn’t happen, well then you have a hard time creating a high performing environment. And that’s why most teams and most companies are not performing. It’s not because they can’t, it’s not because they don’t have the people. It’s because the environment isn’t there to create people to work at that level on any sorts. I saw a garden group had a data point that I saw last year that only 16% of employees are working at their maximum work effort. Frank Gallup has a poll, they do every year and it’s now 66% of employees are essentially checked out they are not working. You know, they’re not engaged. I saw another thing, 80% of executives, sight communication, lack of communication. And collaboration is a reason their company’s not succeeding. Like 70% of teams are dysfunctional across all industries. I mean Adelman did a poll on trust and it’s the lowest where employees trust the senior leadership and the history of them doing it. So all these data points are out there and this is not about like creating some emotional, raw, raw culture. This is about bottom line profits, revenue, treating industry-leading products and services. And so if you don’t do it, you won’t have it. Right and if you don’t have the psychological safety is the point we talked about in the beginning. You won’t have high performing teams. I performing culture and have aligning business Tony: Jason these are great strategies to talk about the workplace for employees, managers, seniors, everyone, all levels. Great stuff. We’re definitely going to have to have you back on again. There’s so much more to talk about. I just loved it. And these are again Jason Treu strategies to build high performing and innovative teams. You can find him at jasontreu.com I’m going to spell that. Treu is T. R. E. U sounds like true, but it’s Treu, Jason, t r e u.com. Thank you so much, Jason, loved it. Jason: Hey, thanks. I appreciate being on the show. It was great to catch up and talk to you and glad things are going well and you’ve changed course, which is good, and got a lot of people that are wanting your help. So I like to hear that. Tony: That’s very good and we’ll definitely have you back again. Thank you for that. And for my amazing audience. Thanks so much for listening. Remember, success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds be righteous. Join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s edition of the Tony DUrs Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time, 1:00 PM Pacific Time on the Voice America Influencers Channel.