Join Dean and Dan as they check in on the progression of procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep051
Dean: Mister Sullivan.
Dan: Mister Who'd Up Jackson.
Dean: That's me. Who'd up. I'm Who'd up and free. How was your week?
Dan: Let me think. We went to Phoenix, actually. I spent two days in Phoenix was Kathy Kolbe gave Babs and me a founder's award for the organization that had been most a partner in the growth of Kolbe.
Dean: I saw something about that on Facebook. Congratulations. That's great.
Dan: Yeah and it was interesting because she was enormously appreciative when she was introducing us for the award and one thing she came across is that we had never asked for any deals. We started doing the Kolbe profile for those listeners who don't know what Kolbe is, just go to K-O-L-B-E dot com and take the test. There's a great test there that kind of tells you.
Dean: We often talk about it. Yeah. It's one of the most valuable ones. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. It's been a collaboration where she's created a great approach, a great tool, a great system and we just bought one for every one of our clients, which is now approaching 20,000, and then the average spin off from there is probably about 25 so it's probably about a half a million people have taken Kolbe as a result of that. The introduction's through Strategic Coach but ...
Dean: That's awesome.
Dan: I consider it to be one of our cornerstones of our unique ability concept.
Dean: I do, too. It's one of those that when you really understand it, you get that. I was really interested in this most recent one that we did, the print, What do you call it?
Dan: Yeah, print.
Dean: Print.
Dan: P-R-I-N-T. Yeah.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I like them for different reasons. The Kolbe for me is the key to understanding teamwork, so the who-not-how approach that we're now developing and you came up actually with the words, who-not-how, on podcast. Print was introduced to us by Adrian Duffy who's now in her 23rd year, I think 22nd, 23rd year as one of our coaches. She has the Canadian franchise for this. It's out of Porta.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: Boca Raton, I think the founder, the people who traded this, the man who is the lead person on print worked with Deming.
Dean: Oh, wow.
Dan: A management consultant who went to Stanford.
Dean: Yeah, I know all about Deming. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. He developed it and basically it's like anything else. You take it online, 30 questions or so, and what it does, it gives you a chart that's got a line down the middle. On the one side the who you are when you're in your best self and who you are when you're in your shadow self.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I loved it right off because I just got it right away and when I got the report back, which comes back immediately, I said, "You know, this is really useful." We've now trained about 30 people in the company to actually be a certified trainer for this and we're taking it through our entire company and we're recommending it, gave it to all the game changers.
Dean: Yes. That's how I did it. It was really interesting to come out that my top two were to live out a happy life and get some joy and happiness and the second was peace and harmony.
Dan: I have your first one. I'm the same as you, a seven. My number three is success and achievement, success and achievement. The way I look at it is that I keep expanding my success so I can pay for bigger parties.
Dean: Right, I like that, everybody'd be happy around you.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Seven, be happy and have a good time is the number one number that came up for our entire company.
Dean: Is that right?
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Everybody wants to just be happy.
Dan: Yeah. You got to work for it. It doesn't come for free. Yeah, but I love it because before we do workshops, we have the one page, the page seven that has the division between your best self and shadow self. They call it shadow self. I just pick five, five on the best side that that's who I'm going to be during the workshop. Then each of the team members who are in the workshop also does it. They pick five that they're going to work on. In other words, they're going to be conscious throughout the entire workshop of these five qualities and be that way.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Want to know what my five are?
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Energetic.
Dean: I like that.
Dan: Walk in with energy, keep the energy going all day. Number two is be adaptable, so I've got a plan for the day but the clients are 50% partners with me so I've got a 50% flexibility that what they're going to contribute, I'm going to build into the plan of the day. Then number three, you have to be quick thinking in order to do that. Number four, be spontaneous. Just respond very quickly when someone comes up with something you hadn't planned on and then in the final analysis, be charming.
Dean: Boy, that's a-
Dan: That's a trump card. If all else fails, be charming.
Dean: Yes, I like that. That's quite a stacked tool kit here.
Dan: It's kind of a stack.
Dean: You look at that-
Dan: Yeah. It's kind of like the Scott Adams. Scott Adams has this concept of talent stack and he said, "You don't have to be the best at everything. It's taking your best capabilities and stack them on each other and then use them as a whole." He created that in reference to Donald Trump being the most persuasive leader in the world not for any one quality but for a stack of different qualities.
Dean: Yes, yes.
Dan: Yeah. It was very interesting. I think charming goes a long way. There's a new book out called "Charming" by a writer by the name of Joseph Epstein and I'm about halfway through it and it's a very good book. Not a big book. If it was a big book, it wouldn't be charming.
Dean: No, exactly.
Dan: He just shows that it's not charisma. It's not being cool. It's not being sophisticated. There's a quality called charming and he said, "There isn't much of it in today's world, in media world."
Dean: That's an interesting word. When you think about, because as soon as you say charisma, leads to the charismatic and that feels like that's something that you are or are not but charming feels like something you can do.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Charming doesn't feel like an inherent quality. It feels like a learned skill.
Dan: Yeah and one of the qualities of charming is that you disarm other people, in other words. You take the tension out of the situations. You take the tension out of situations and that's what I try to do and I know that you do ... It's hard for me to imagine in your breakthrough blueprint workshops that real tension develops, a real tension develops but I can imagine that if anything shows up like someone's having difficulty, you have a way of disarming things.
Dean: That fits because that's my second thing is peace and harmony that are raised.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, it's kind of like I want to have a joyful and happy life. I want everybody else to have that, too, in my presence. I don't want it to be stressful or anything around me.
Dan: Yeah. I've never heard of your reputation where you're on Facebook and Twitter attacking people. I've never heard your name associated with that.
Dean: I'm a truth teller, Dan. I'm a truth teller.
Dan: Yeah, in person, yeah, he's great and everything but wait till about three o'clock in the morning when Dean Jackson...
Dean: Wait till he's tweeting.
Dan: When Dean Jackson's shadow self comes out and pulls... No, I can't imagine you doing that.
Dean: That's so funny.
Dan: I remember, can I tell you the closest that I've ever seen you being critical of someone?
Dean: Tell me.
Dan: It was at Genius Network and there was a speaker up there and the speaker didn't do a good job and it was like 10-minute talk and I think he kind of knew he wasn't doing a good job so everybody was kind of happy when the speech ended. I walked back to you and I looked at you and I said, "What'd you think?" Your comment was the closest that you've ever come to being negative and you said, "Well, that just shows you how long 10 minutes can really be."
Dean: That's right. I remember that. Oh, that's so funny but that's the truth.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I've been having a really interesting week, couple of weeks here, wrapping my mind around this venture collaboration role and this currency. It's almost like newfound wealth of my thousand Who'd-up hours to invest, my investable hours. There's some couple of just interesting things that may sound on the surface, when I say them, just very so super obvious but they're super profound, too, at the same time. When I realize that putting 1,000 hours on something, using it, stacking it and that makes me visualize them as tickets, like a stack of 1,000 investable hours in something that I can portion out. I can allocate them to this. I can allocate them to something else. That alone was a really very interesting experiment, just a thought focuser.
Then the other realization that I cannot spend them or invest them all at once, that I can only invest them, at the most, the way I do it, in three or four a day or a full day if you're doing eight-hour day. The most you can really invest is eight at a time, eight of these hours. That really, it was an interesting thought bomb because I realized that, first of all, that is a lot of time no matter how you slice it. When you put into the context of the entire time allocation for my base business is 417 hours for the year. When you think about that, now that is the totality of it kind of thing, that the available time is more than double what I'm doing right now in my business, just that investable time. I have twice as much time available to invest as I have already allocated to anything and even that, adding the two together is still 500 hours a year less than the standard 2,000-hour a year work allocation for most people, right?
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking it's 6,000 Jacksons.
Dean: Yes and what an abundance, right?
Dan: Yeah. The interesting thing is you had created a new time unit, which was a 19-minute unit, and I had whimsically named it a Jackson and then it got picked up among our listenership and I get this repeated back to me. How many Jacksons was that?
Dean: Yes.
Dan: That's how things take off in the world but that's a good example of how something simple will just get out there into the talk-iverse and people will start using it. You begin to appreciate that you have done significant things in 10-minute periods. You've certainly done them in six 10-minute periods and we've all done it in a day's work for hours and Jackson units. Very, very significant changes, breakthroughs in our life have happened in very, very short periods of time if we felt freed up to do it.
Dean: Yes. Then the interesting thing is to detach it from its market value has been an interesting experiment for me. I don't know whether I'm articulating that right but we all can do this math backwards, if you think about the total revenue to generate from your time and allocate a dollar, productive thing. Every time you raise the bar on that. You were mentioning with the game changer workshop, for instance, that each day is your day rate effectively went up by having more and more revenue associated to the day there but that's not to say that you will only invest your time in things that have that level of immediate payoff. How do you think about that? That would be a better way to put this for me to understand if I'm getting selfishly some coaching on this.
Dan: There's two things, actually three steps to this. From around 1974... Are you there?
Dean: I am.
Dan: Yeah. From 1974 to 1982, I was just someone who went out with big sheets of paper and asked people questions and then I'd do drawings of visualizing what they were saying and then getting them to choose certain objectives, being a coach and then saying what would be the first actions towards this and then putting it into a timeframe for them. Didn't really know what I was doing and I was doing one-offs each time but around 1980, after doing this for six years, I got a sense that there was an overall pattern that doing it 60 or 70 times had indicated that almost everybody was doing exactly the same thing but they were using different objectives, different goals. They had different obstacles. They had different strategies that you could actually create a structure, which I called the strategy circle. Up until that point, the most money that I had actually made in a year of going out and coaching was about $25,000.
Dean: In 1974 dollars or '76 dollars or whatever.
Dan: In 1982, I'd gotten up to $25,000. In today's terms that would probably be somewhere with inflation, that's probably in the neighborhood of about $60,000.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: Then I created this common sheet and I actually had to go to blueprint shops because nobody could print. They were 17 by 22 sheets, big almost like an art pad sheet but I got a typesetter to actually put in the lines and everything so it looked like it was an official business and then I got them run off in a blueprint shop. Then you could write on them so I would do this. First eight years, I got to $25,000 but just by doing these sessions where I was using the structure, so everybody was going through the same structure and there were five boxes for goals that was a point to put the deadline. I used a three-year framework. Then come back and you write down the obstacles, write down what the next quarter would be and that's where I got my quarterly structure. Move forward from 1982 to 1989 and I got up to $200,000 in a year just doing that.
Dean: 10 X.
Dan: 1982 at 25,000, I was using up all my time practically and 1982 to 1989 went eight times and I was using up all my time again but I was getting eight times more value out of the same amount of time just by having this structure.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: There's the big jump that you're talking about. There's that real multiplier of time. You're putting in the same hours but because you have a structure. Then people talked about me because of the structure in a way they had never talked about me just going out, Dan just shows up and he's got an art pad and he does all sorts of drawings but once I had the structure they would show other people the structure and it was almost like…
Dean: There was something unique about that. I think that's one of the things that's always been, I think, one of the very important elements of strategic coaching is the design around the tool. It's tough, right, to put a thought and then create the tool with it?
Dan: Yeah. Then I'd run out of time in 1989 and I said, "You know, I bet I could do this not just in a room with one person but I bet I could do it in a room with a lot of people." We kicked it off. Actually, it'll be in about three weeks it'll be 29 years November 13th and then in '98 or '89 I should say.
Dean: '89.
Dan: '89 so the next November, it'll be 30 years we had our first workshop. I had six people in the room and I was making about two and a half times more with the first room but the room got bigger really quickly. At the same time, I told all the people that I had been doing it just on a single basis, on a one-on-one basis, I told them that I wasn't going to do that type of one-on-one coaching anymore. It'd have to be in workshop coaching. In the first year, I more or less matched the 200,000 that I did the previous year but I did it in about a third of the time.
Dean: When you think about just these leaps that you're outlining here.
Dan: Yeah. Just put two multipliers together. Just by having the structure in '82, I went eight times in seven years. Then in the very first year, I matched that income in a third of the time so I had done eight and there was another three so essentially in about nine years I had multiplied the effectiveness, the moneymaking effectiveness versus time by about 24 times. That's the essence of entrepreneurism right there. You're an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. The universe of our clients is an entrepreneur but it's that getting huge results with less and less effort and less and less time. That's really entrepreneurism. Entrepreneurs are the masters of time and result breakthroughs.
Dean: That's something that I think it depends what you're investing that time into because when you really look at it, if I take these 1,000 hours, you can invest them in a way that is completely original work with no other value of it, that it's just you're doing something there, or you can go all the way where you're investing that time in something that has no immediate value but big long term value. You're creating something, creating a tool
Dan: I was thinking about this yesterday afternoon because I don't do any work on Saturdays. Generally Saturdays are a free floating day for me. Actually having lunchtime conversations with you periodically throughout the year is the only time I might come under the category of work.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Except now that I know that you're just about fun and a good time and peace and harmony, it doesn't really qualify as work if I'm talking to you.
Dean: That's right, because I'm not trying to achieve anything.
Dan: No, no.
Dean: That's it, achievement granted just by we're having a good time, a nice lunch.
Dan: With my best effort, I can't get you to achieve anything.
Dean: Right. Oh man.
Dan: I don't care what kind of tricks I have up my sleeve, I can't get you to achieve anything. Then, long story short, within about four years with me just putting in more or less the same amount of time as in my last year of one-on-one coaching which was 200,000, we got to 2 million. We got to 2 million and it was just me so we were up 10 times. First year, there was about a third of my time involved and that was because I hadn't actually created more customers. If I had created more customers, it would've been full time but then we built a marketing team and a sales team around it and a marketing team. We got up to '95 so it was six years we got up to 2 million. Then I brought in the coaches and I said, "The way I can multiply now, I proved that I can do this in large rooms with a large number of people," and then I brought in other coaches so now we have 15 coaches. This year will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million. 40 million so up 20 times since then.
You can see the jumps from me just being the guy out there with the questions and an art pad in the '70s and then creating a process through the '80s and then creating a workshop with a lot of people in it and then creating the coaches. I'd say there's about four jumps there. It's interesting but you know, Dean, one of the things that really strikes me is I worked in a fully engaged way in the '70s. I worked in a fully engaged way into '80s, the '90s, the teens, in the ohs, I guess you call them.
Dean: The aughts, yeah.
Dan: The aughts and then the teens but it doesn't strike me that during any of that period I worked too much harder than previously. I just got much bigger results.
Dean: Yeah. This is the thing is that you only had the same hundred Jacksons every day to work with.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
Dean: That's the whole thing. That's what it really comes down to is that you only have that going on in the first place. I think that the big thing that you... What you've done or what happened is that you were leaving a wake behind your work. You're forging ahead but you're leaving this wake behind that is allowing you to impact more and more and having other people because right now you just said the number of people, if you think about the few thousand people that are part of Strategic Coach as members, clients. There's far more multipliers, there's far more multipliers that you don't know than you do know.
Dan: Yes. Far more-
Dean: You're having an impact, yeah, more on people that-
Dan: Yeah. Yeah and it's really interesting. Increasingly, during the last couple of years, I'm running into 20-year members of the Strategic Coach who have been coming quarterly for their Strategic Coach workshop but I'm meeting them for the first time so they put in 70 or 80 workshops inside the Strategic Coach program but this is actually the first time I'm meeting the person.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. It's kind of interesting because I don't see anything lacking when I talk to the person. They're really clear. They know the concepts. It's very pleasing, actually. One of the decisions I made, and you'll appreciate this, is I started watching the self-improvement world because I think that's what you and I are in. We're in the self-improvement world. I was watching the direction that other individuals were taking and one of the dominant ways that people were becoming bigger and better, according to their goals, in the '70s and '80s was by building it around their personality. I think of someone like Zig Ziglar, if you think of Zig Ziglar. There were a lot of big names out there, very famous individuals but it was all built around their personality so they got big crowds and then they would make some of their money by producing books. Then as part of showing up, people would pay a certain amount of money for a day with them and then they would buy books.
I was looking at that model I said, "It seems to me the weakness there is that people won't show up for your ideas unless the actual individual is there." What I began to think of, let's build this system and my first strategy circle, because I would teach somebody how to do a strategy circle as a client and then I'd say, "Why don't you... " At a certain point we got them printed off and I'd say to them, "Now, in your business, why didn't you take the strategy circle out and do strategic circles with your clients?" I kept experimenting that a tool that I created that was really useful for someone I was working with personally in a very short time acquired the skill to take the same tool out. I said, "As far as I can see, I think this is the way to the future, not to build it around my personality but build it out of a... "
Dean: System.
Dan: Build it with a growing structure and system of tools." That's the route I've taken for the last 35 years.
Dean: I had a really profound, real example of that several years ago and I wrote about it in the newsletter. This is what's really kind of weird about the situation is I was flying on a ... I had written the newsletter about the difference between Siegfried and Roy and the Blue Man Group.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: The difference was that I was flying on a plane and I was looking through the "Forbes Magazine" where they list the op entertainers. I saw on the list Siegfried and Roy were on the list and they had just signed a new contract with the Mirage for $35 million and they were going to finish out their career there but for that $35 million they had to do eight shows a week for 40 weeks a year. That means they got three months of vacation but they did four nights a week, two shows a night and I thought that's a busy kind of schedule, doing the same thing. Then I kept reading and higher up the list there was the Blue Man Group, who had done $69 million that year and there was a kind of feature story about them that the original guys who formed the Blue Man Group don't perform anymore but there's this group of ... There were 34 blue men at the time that do all these concurrent shows in Las Vegas and Chicago and Toronto at the time. I don't know whether they still do it in Toronto.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, no. I saw the Toronto show. That's right.
Dean: What struck me about that was exactly what you were just saying, that it struck me that the reason that they started the Blue Man Group with four guys, it's a three-man show, was because they always wanted in case somebody couldn't make it, they would have at least three of the four of them could do it and they started this idea of just painting their faces blue and it just evolved that now they realize, hey, we could put anybody in here. As long as you know the moves and you know the system and the show, you could be a blue man and if they train up more blue men, they could have another show going on.
They got all the way up, 11 concurrent shows, and really realized that I thought about it and thought how precarious it is that when you're building your business on your name, just the way you were describing. This is before Roy was mauled by the tiger but I was saying that when you're doing it that way, when people go to see Siegfried and Roy, they're expecting to see Siegfried and Roy, not two guys and a tiger and that's the difference.
Dan: Yeah. It's very interesting. The day after the incident with the tiger where Roy said that he talked afterwards and the tiger lived another eight years after that. They put him in the Las Vegas Zoo. They had a sanctuary there that Siegfried and Roy actually purchased because they loved the Vegas zoo. As soon as he was out of the hospital, Roy went and visited with the tiger every day and he said that he thinks that the tiger actually sensed some danger from a member of the audience and was actually trying to save Roy from the danger. He didn't attack him.
Dean: Oh, interesting.
Dan: Tigers are kind of rough when they try to save you. They actually don't go to saving class.
Dean: Right, right, right, right. Yes.
Dan: Yeah. He just grabbed him and pulled him off stage and everybody thought he was being attacked in that but he was actually, Roy thinks that that's what the issue was but they had 400 employees and ...
Dean: Yeah, that was.
Dan: Siegfried and Roy. They were out of business. The next day they were out of business. A tiger eats one of the blue men, actually eats one of the blue men, doesn't matter. You just put another blue man in.
Dean: That's it.
Dan: Drop the tiger. Don't have a tiger in your show.
Dean: No, tiger's not good for anybody.
Dan: No.
Dean: That's why I was saying, then it was the whole thing of is your business tiger-proof? What would happen if you were mauled by a tiger in your business?
Dan: Yeah and you can see this principle being a founder principle where you have a system where there's a certain amount of interchangeability of talent. There's obviously sports operates on this. There's long-playing "Phantom of the Opera". I've been going to London since 1998 and it's still in the same theater 31 years and obviously hundreds of actors have gone through. The show goes on and my sense is that you have to have that principle that you have as a founding entrepreneur. You have the talent to create something that no one else would've created but in the first instance, you just created a great job for yourself that is successful. Then the question is do you want it to get any bigger than just you making a good living? Babs and I did. We've gotten much bigger. This year we'll be something like 650 times bigger than our first year.
Dean: Wow, isn't that amazing.
Dan: Income. Income wise. It felt normal back then and it feels normal today so it's just normal at a higher level.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. That's great. That-
Dan: I loved it back then and I love it today.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Something good has been created.
Dean: Yeah. That's the thing is that's been the profound thing really in thinking about this investing this 1,000 investable hours here is realizing that, A, I can only do it today and as soon as I always have 1,000 because as soon as I invest today's, I get a year from now's, that 1,000 or that day's added to it, too. You can't diminish it.
Dan: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things is that since the central principle, the operating dynamic is that you're the who who sets up the game for other people to do and therefore you avoid the thing of getting bogged down in all the details and the how or all the details of activities that are your how. I really don't do that anymore and I'm just amazed at how my sensitivity to anything that looks like a how activity has gone. It's really gone nuclear over the last year in the sense that I can see where I am and I can see where the result is. Then I just put my spidey sense out in the interim space between me and the thing. I say, "Oh, I'm picking up how activities." That's what you're doing and that becomes part of the game plan, to define where other people can play a part in actually doing those.
Dean: Yes. Isn't that interesting? I'm sorry to think this. We had a discussion today. I got a massage this morning. I have a massage.
Dan: Me, too.
Dean: ...therapist that comes...
Dan: Me, too.
Dean: ...to the house. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. I had one come at 9:30.
Dean: There we go. We were talking about she wants to start doing things online for her business and she wants to expand. She got an extra room in her spa. She's got two massage rooms. I just helped her just do the calculations of the potential that it's got, thinking about it like a business, and again, her delay has been how related things. She has no energy around trying to figure out how to do the things online with her website and all this stuff and I had that whole thought with her of you don't have to know how to do anything. Wouldn't it be great if you just had a who who knows how to do those things, right? It was really freeing for her to think that way.
Once she realized that the potential in her two rooms just as a minimum thing is $30,000 a month when you contrast that to what she's currently making, just her, just doing the massages, it was really a pretty wild revelation for her to start thinking like that, especially when I hit her with the idea that she's losing the difference between what she's making now and what the potential is, that she's losing that much money per month. Now it kind of lights a fire under you.
Dan: Yeah. The interesting thing, that was the business that Babs was in when I met her.
Dean: Oh really?
Dan: Yep. She had a really top notch. She was well known as a massage therapist and she was famous with air crews, the airline crews and also stunt people, people who were stunt people. They injured themselves in a million different ways and also ballet dancers.
Dean: Wow.
Dan: She had tremendous word of mouth but when I started developing I created my strategy circle structure almost exactly within the quarter when Babs and I got to know each other. I was about three years into it and she said, "You know, if I look at my business and I look at your business, your business has all the growth. Why don't I come over and start working with you and we can develop your business?" It was just that first of all, there's a big wear-out factor for massage therapists. It's hard for me to see the variety if you go out 10 years that you're going to be doing things remarkably different 10 years from now. You're probably going to be doing the same thing.
Dean: That is an interesting-
Dan: That's looking at it from my point of view.
Dean: What do you think has changed in the last, let's say 20 years, 40 years. If we go-
Dan: For massage.
Dean: No, not in massage. For your last 20 years. What has changed for you?
Dan: There's a lot of packaging exercises that I used to be solely writing, finish art work, getting stuff into multimedia. Once it involved technology, I didn't do that side of it but I had to do an enormous amount of prep work. Writing was one of the big things. I estimate probably about 3, 400 hours a year of writing and the books that I'm writing, last four quarters I've written four books. The average time's been 30 hours a book and it used to take me 250, 300 hours a book so I'm down 10. What I've done is I've just reduced my part of it to coming up with the idea and then doing a really great outline for the entire book. Also, just going for short books which you and I are kind of...
Dean: Big fans of, yes.
Dan: We're thieves together in that venture.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: What I do is I just develop projects as far as soon else with much greater execution skills than I have to get the whole ... They get the strategy. They get the point. They get the context and then they just go for it. Then they do things that surprise me and I always go along with their surprises because I say, "Hey, this, it's not the way I would've done it but I'm going to go with it anyway." I almost never second guess them when they do it differently than what I had imagined. I say, "Oh, that's terrific. That's kind of like an innovation I hadn't thought about." As long as it's not incorrect, as long as the information is correct.
I just want to bring up one thing because I think we could talk about this forever but I was at the Kolbe conference and I had a panel discussion with three veterans both in the Kolbe work and the Strategic Coach and they were up on stage. Then I did the who-not-how diagram and then I had talked about how they used who-not-how and the breakthroughs that it's actually been. The next morning I got up and I'd been reading this book by George Gelder about how he feels that somehow the world has to find a replacement for the gold standard to back up the reality of economic value. We haven't had it for about 30 or 40 years. For 300 years gold was the standard on which you based paper money and transactions. You had a gold value and he's got some ideas about it. I don't think he's there but I came up with a concept and I'm just throwing it out to you. Is aid, "I think that the value for the future," and it's four words, it's teamwork value of technology.
Dean: The teamwork value of technology.
Dan: In other words, both teamwork and technology are exponentials. What I mean by that, it was the exponential of teamwork which is behind every technology. Usually a technology is not created by a single individual. It's created by an individual who has an idea and then accumulates various other capabilities around him or her and then they create a multiplier or impact. In other words, they create... First of all, their team is an exponential because they're able to do things together that produces an entirely new result. All entrepreneurism never starts with an individual. It's an individual in teamwork with a lot of other people that usually creates a breakthrough.
All through history we've been creating technologies. Language is a technology. Writing is a technology. Printing is a technology and now we're up to digital communication and we're always multiplying ourselves individually through teamwork with others and then certain kinds of team work will suggest a more automatic way of taking the impact of the teamwork and multiplying it much further and we call that technology. It becomes automatic. We use machines. For a long time we used animals or we used other human beings but we've used water power. We've used wind power. We've used fire power and we do it. Then technology, once it develops, can come back and multiply the teamwork even further.
What I'm saying is that you as the individual, right at the center of the system, so you've got an idea of bigger and better and then you say, "I want the bigger result." You're looking down the road half a year or a year and you say, "I want a bigger, better result. It'll be a version of myself in the future that's bigger and better than it is now and in order to do that I can't do the how. I'll find other people who I call who's who will do the how." Then you'll do this and you'll do it once and you'll do it twice and you'll do it three times and then you'll say, "Now we can automate part of this. We can use technology to actually automate a lot of it." This whole procedure, you've gone from your individual vision of the future and then describing it to others so that they could combine their teamwork. Then you have the execution and achievement, much bigger results, and then you start using technology to actually multiple it even further. Okay.
Just think about your first insight about one real estate neighborhood in Toronto where you had an idea. Then you began to break the neighborhood into seven or eight different possibilities of future house. That's a tremendous breakthrough but then gradually, and I'm making a long story short here, is that you got hundreds of other real estate agents to do the same thing with your idea but you used technology to train them and also the technology controls their access to the information. Okay.
Dean: That's right.
Dan: You went right from the beginning to where you are now when you first had the idea just in your mind before you put pencil to paper and where it is right now, there's been a phenomenal growth in the teamwork value of technology.
Dean: The teamwork capability of technology, there was a great article about Uber just recently and their unintentional restaurant business that they're getting into the whole ghost restaurant idea now. The examples that they gave where they are using their algorithms, their inside knowledge to predict what is the demand in a given neighborhood or in a given area for a particular thing. They went to one of the examples, and I don't remember exactly the thing but this one restaurant had, they were an ice cream and milkshake kind of place but they had a burger on the menu that they would sell maybe five burgers a day or something like that in the course of the ice cream shop. Uber showed them that, listen, there's a lot of demand for burgers delivered and they used that resource, the capability that they have of the kitchen space to create burgers that they're not using to its capacity right now, they partnered with them and they're selling 75 burgers a day that way just on that capitalizing on an underutilized capability.
I think that's really there's something to all of that. Most people's unique ability, there's something maybe really valuable in this thought exercise that most people, we get to the point of who'ing up their hours, who'ing up their time is that what I did is I've who'd up myself from everything except my unique ability, which means that that 417 hours that I'm spending in my business are 100% unique ability time but that leaves me a surplus of these extra, these 1,000 hours of unique ability time that I could deploy at somebody else's or in collaboration with somebody, just the way these people are ...
Dan: Yeah, I would say-
Dean: ...doing with Uber.
Dan: Yeah. I would say since you're in a position to do it. You're unusual in the coach, that your great discovery about the who'd up hours is that you had already done it.
Dean: Yeah. That was what I was struggling with.
Dan: You were saying, "I can't free up anything more." I said, "You've already done it."
Dean: Yes.
Dan: In the course of the day we've already done it but because you hadn't understood that you were living a rarefied existence but now that you could have venture collaborations with a lot of people because you'd already done it. You weren't going to go back to any kind of who activity. You were just going to go directly to who-not-how activities with bigger and bigger collaboration ventures.
Dean: Yes, that's exactly right.
Dan: Yeah. The thing I'm trying to establish here is that a lot of people want to put technology as the primary thing here but it's actually you teamwork thing. It's actually the entrepreneur having the bigger and better idea and choosing not to do the how but to get who's involved that actually creates the team and that's what creates all the teamwork. Then the technology only becomes possible because the teamwork is exponentially successful. Then of course you want to take parts of it and automate it and then get a further multiplier from the technology being applied to the teamwork.
That original restaurant, the ghost restaurant you talked about, do you have an article on that?
Dean: I do. I'll send it to you. Actually the article that I found, the headline was nine restaurants, one kitchen, no dining room. If you just search, that was the thing I think it's called the Greenfield Group.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. It seems to me to be a perfect example of the game changer concept.
Dean: Yes, it is. That's exactly what I thought, that that's really the thing is like taking somebody's... Now this new Uber article, I'll send you that.
Dan: Yeah, if you have that, too, I would like that.
Dean: That is even more relative to what we're saying because Uber, who has this capability of delivering food right to people, right to their doorstep and also through technology has knowledge that there's demand for something, that they can now go to and seek out this ice cream and milkshake place that has this woefully underused capacity for burgers and collaborate with them on making that the big thing. It goes all the way down, even looking at my massage therapist today that we did the calculation with her two massage rooms at 10 slots.
Dan: Yeah and you know.
Dean: 10 slots a day. Yeah.
Dan: You know what I noticed just from a political standpoint, that people who have not made the crossover from how to who-not-how tend to start becoming very, very anticapitalist in their attitudes. They're saying, "We're just being left behind," and everything like that. They're like lonely, isolated, rugged individualists and they just keep feeling that the world is against them and-
Dean: They're taking our jobs.
Dan: Yeah, but they haven't gone far enough with their own thinking about what kind of life they'd like to see and it's their own lack of having a bigger and better future, which would actually invite them to choose between whether they want to do the how'ing or the who'ing. I noticed this about massage therapists because I'll be at Canyon Ranch next week and they have 80 massage therapists. Some of them, we've gone to for 10, 20 years and I noticed they all become kind of anti-marketplace, anticapitalist after a while because they just feel like they're stuck. They're kind of stuck and then they say, "I have to learn how to do something else." I said, "no, you have to learn who to do ... "
Dean: Yes.
Dan: There's no better how'ing in the future than the how'ing you're doing right now.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Very exciting.
Dan: Always great.
Dean: Always great. Dan, boy, I really enjoyed. That one went fast. I can't wait to keep that conversation going.
Dan: I'll be at Genius Network next Sunday.
Dean: Perfect.
Dan: All right. It'll be the week after next.
Dean: Perfect.
Dan: All right.
Dean: Okay. Bye.
Dan: Bye.