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Best of 2021 | Thought Leadership Podcast Guests
A compilation of some of our best guests in 2021.
Clips from interviews with Doug Conant, John Warrillow, Lisa Bodell, and Tom Schwab.
It has become a tradition to start the new year off with a look back at a few of the great episodes and most inspiring guests of our previous year’s podcast. For 2021, we hope you’ll enjoy great advice from:
Doug Conant, best-selling author of The Blueprint and CEO of Conant Leadership. Doug shares insights about balancing his time as a thought leader and a CEO, and ways to make time for self-reflection. It’s important to ensure that the things which matter most are never forgotten in the press of less-important burdens.
John Warrillow is the Founder of the Value Builder System and Best-selling author of Built to Sell. John talks about the best parts of coaching, and opens up about the psychology of selling to entrepreneurs vs. enterprise, and the need to find the niche that works best for you.
Lisa Bodell is the CEO of FutureThink and author of the best-selling book Kill the Company. In our conversation, we explore the meaning of her term “futurist,” and how Lisa found a way to guide people to their potential and teach change through a structured format.
Tom Schwab is the founder of Interview Valet and the author of PODCAST GUEST PROFITS. Tom sheds light on proper etiquette as a podcast guest, and talks about ways to turn guest speaking on an episode into a relationship that can help you attract and keep engaged customers.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick Hey there. It’s Peter Winick. And I just want to thank each and every one of you for being loyal listeners and followers of the podcast. 2021 was an amazing year for the podcast. We did a ton of new episodes. Viewership is up or listenership, I should say downloads are up. But most importantly, the caliber and the quality of the guests continue to go up and up, and the caliber and the quality of the conversations continue to go up. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s the best of episode. That includes Doug Connett. That includes John Barolo, Lisa Bodell and Tom Schwab. Love to hear what you think about it. Thank you so much. Even to be a thought leader today, it’s so easy to be pulled in a thousand directions or distracted or not focused or whatever, but that pragmatism of Here’s how am I going to allocate my time to research, here’s how I’m going to allocate my time to serving clients, here’s to allocate my time to speaking. How do you sort of deal with that, given that you’re. And I love the way you frame sort of the Maslow piece and sort of at that the luxury of that highest, highest level of the pyramid. So how do you pragmatically balance that time issue?
Doug Connett Even Covey had a lot of great lines, but the one that I remember, the two that I remember that pertain to this discussion is the first one is things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. And it’s up to you as a leader to figure out what matters most. The other line that connects to that is it’s easy to say no to things if there’s a greater yes burning within. In both those cases, it’s focusing on what’s the greater yes within you that’s burning within that you want to say yes to. And I think it takes reflection and study in moderate doses to get to a place where you know yourself well enough. So that you know what matters most. And then all of a sudden it gets very easy to say no to all these other things because they’re so great.
Peter Winick So let me push on that in a good way. So I agree with everything that you said and reflection and study at a minimum in moderate ways. Sometimes if you have the luxury to be more than moderate, great.
Doug Connett And the more the better. But you’ve got to you’ve also got to walk in the world with other people.
Peter Winick Exactly. But my point is, if you look at your typical hypo or middle manager or, you know, emerging leader or whatever, taking that time to reflect and study, when you look at your calendar, there’s not 32 calls booked and seven flights here. If we weren’t living in Covid, you know, people typically don’t put on their calendar, you know, Tuesday afternoon from 2 to 5. Leave me alone. I’m reflecting like, how do you find the time to do that? And it sounds trivial, but I think it’s something that through but it’s real and people do themselves get to it, you know.
Doug Connett Well, if all the work on habits if you read James Clear work and or Meg.
Peter Winick Or yeah.
Doug Connett Several others they talk about tiny habits can have enormous death. So what we I wrote I wrote the book on this. That’s what the movement’s all about. It’s how do you fit this leadership development component into the middle of your cockamamie life when you have no time to do anything right, but you hunger to do better. You hunger to do better, but you don’t know how. It’s, you know. It doesn’t fit into my life. And so that’s the whole point of this book, the blueprint, because if it this is the pragmatism part. If it doesn’t fit into your cockamamie life, if it doesn’t nest perfectly cockamamie life, you’re not going to sustain it. It’s like when you talk about I’m going to go on a diet in January. Right. And the diet doesn’t quite fit your lifestyle. Right. It may be. Hang on through February. By March, you’ve given up.
Peter Winick Yeah, totally. Okay. But what do you think? That that reflection piece. So I think that we’re all we’ve all gotten good, if not too good at being so productive and so efficient. I could multitask and I could, you know, juggle one writing a unicycle and, you know, doing the balance sheet or whatever, whatever the equivalent is. Reflection is hard because it’s almost the antithesis of the way most of us are working most of the time, just really stopping. And, you know, there isn’t a word for unity asking you to be more reflective.
Doug Connett Of the you know, the concept here is pretty simple. Most of us lead our leadership lives by the seat of our pants.
Peter Winick Yeah. That’s from God.
Doug Connett And that’s not good enough. You owe people more than that. We’re talking about sacred ground, trying to help people live lives that are meaningful. And we’re doing all of this by the seat of our pants. I guarantee you when you started your first podcast, you were doing it by the seat of your pants.
Peter Winick Maybe the 10th or 20th.
Doug Connett But now you’ve gotten good at it. You’ve worked at it. Write with intention. You see what’s working here? What’s not working? How can I do this a little bit better tomorrow than I did today? And you’ve become really proficient at it. The same thing’s true about leadership. You have to find a way to reflect in ways that work for you. And we go through this in the blueprint that you have to find a way to bring it to life in small increments that you can handle in the middle of your cockamamie life. And intense in a in a more intentional way. Now, all of us, myself included, 75% of my day is by the seat of my pants just reacting to all the crap that’s coming at me. But I got to tell you, I got 25% of my day, conceptually of my energy anyway, that where I have the rudder in the water and I know where I’m headed.
Peter Winick You know, I’m always fascinated with the underlying business models. Right. And this is software to coaching, coaching the software to unpack the business model here, because you’re really more in the software business with sort of a side of thought leadership.
John Warrillow Yeah, no, for sure. So that’s right. So we had built a software called Value Builder, which is essentially inspired by a lot of the IP that I developed in a book prior to the automatic customer called Build to Sell. So I wrote a book called Build to Sell, which had some IP on creating a business that can kind of succeed without the owner and then try to codify that into software which became Value Builder. And originally, Peter, I don’t know if they were talking about this. Originally we tried to go direct to consumer, so we tried to go direct to business owners with.
Peter Winick Tell me about what a nightmare that is because I have so many clients that we’ll go direct to. There’s so many millions of entrepreneurs. Let’s go direct to them. And I’m like, Yeah, but you don’t have the budget of Coca-Cola at P&G. So tell me. No bias here, but what a nightmare it is going direct to the consumer.
John Warrillow Yeah, it’s tough because it’s very expensive. And to be honest, Peter, it’s just not my wheelhouse. Like, I grew up a business to business marketer, working large enterprise organizations. And so this concept of marketing to small business owners who are this sort of weird hybrid of in one way, they’re a consumer, in other way, they’re a business owner.
Peter Winick Can I pause you there for a minute? Because I it’s funny. I feel like you’re stealing my words at some point in a good way is I think the mistake and this is what I try to explain to clients is that people mistake when they go after beta SMB, that it’s a real B to B, but it’s not a real B to B in terms of an enterprise sale, right? If you’re selling technology into enterprise, that’s A straight up B to B full stop. Yet when you’re selling B to B into the SMB, what you don’t realize is you’re competing with, I’m renovating the kitchen. Taking the kids to Disney World. Got a kid. And there’s all this. And the flip side, the positive side of that, you’re also sometimes riding the wave of an emotional connection, like, my God, I fell in love with this guy world. I’m going to buy everything he’s got. So it’s a totally different game and it is much more B2C and it’s psychology than it is B2B.
John Warrillow You’re absolutely right. And we actually did some research into the different types of entrepreneurs. We discovered there was this series of three psychographic profiles. We call them mountain climbers, freedom fighters and cross people. And the third group in particular, crafts people, are the ones you describe where they’re making that Disney World decision along with like, do I buy the new computer for the office or do I take the kids to Disney World? They’re the most price sensitive of the three segments, the toughest to market to, because, again, they’re very price sensitive mountain climbers and freedom fighters, a little bit more business oriented. But still, you know, in many ways, business owners and consumers clothing in the way you market to them. And so to go back to the original question, what’s the business model, the idea was to originally go to direct to SMB, went pivoted pretty early and decided that we would go to the people that trust they trust the most, which is their professional advisor. So their accountant. Yeah, their coaches and consultants. And we licensed the platform to them essentially.
Peter Winick Got it. So I want to touch on something you said a bit earlier where in order to and I would say this is the highest level of difficulty, one of the things that a lot of folks have trouble doing is to codify their content. What I mean by that is, you know, in its loosest form, you start to write an article, you’re doing a blog, maybe doing some speaking, and it kind of changes every time you do it just a little bit, right? It’s not perfect, but it’s not the equivalent of, you know, a flight plan checklist where a pilot every time they it’s not that regimented. And the reality is that when you’re moving into scalable, you can’t do that until you codify the content down to sort of the Lego piece level. And obviously to do that for software really, really, really matters. But tell me about how difficult or easy it was for you to really codify it because a lot of people get stuck there.
John Warrillow Yeah. And I think the secret is to. Niche down. You know, just to your point, I speak to audiences of plumbers and patricians and all kinds of different business owners, and they’re all very different. And so what we’ve really discovered is the secret to creating a software piece or effectively monetizing your IP in a in a in a product of some sort is to niche way, way down. Because if we’re if we’re still if we’re selling a speech or we’re doing consulting, you know, you had the luxury, as you point out, to tailor it a little bit for the audience that doesn’t exist when you’re selling a product. So that in order to have a product resonate, I think you’ve got to just pick one niche that you are very comfortable resonating with. And I think that’s the sauce.
Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.
Peter Winick You know, there’s lots of job titles that you go, I know exactly what a futurist does on like this. You know, my friends are accountants and it’s tax season and they’re like, What does a day in the life of a futurist? What is a futurist?
Lisa Bodell Well, it’s funny you said that because it’s, you know, everyone thinks it’s like a corporate psychic or something. Like. Yeah, right, right. So a futurist, that’s a great example of, you know, it’s about you’re lucky, but then you know what to do with it when you get the chance. Like you can recognize an opportunity that’s strategic luck to me. But so, for example, I met the guy who was a futurist. He was a Dow Chemical, and my family’s from Midland, Michigan. And I happen that’s where Dow Chemical is. And this guy said, Hey, you should come meet me. I’m in Midland, Michigan, dinner, that is. And I thought, what a weird quote. No one knows where Midland, Michigan, is. So I said, Sure, I’ll come up, visit my grandfather and I’ll happen to have a coffee with you. And I saw the potential in being able to teach people, you know, potential and change it in a structured way. But I wanted to take what futurists did right. This is the opportunity and make it more tangible and more business like. So rather than science and voodoo and big, big trendsetting, I wanted to break it down into tools that people could use. So I, I took that meeting and I made an opportunity out of it and future think was born.
Peter Winick So stay there for a minute because I think it’s a critical piece. So it’s not that whether it’s a futurist or an innovation expert or a leadership manager or whatever, you don’t live in a sort of guru world, meaning I have to bring you in, because what happens is here’s what I think and I love you. You push on. This is large organizations come across like someone like you and they’re going to put you into one of two buckets. Holy cow, brain on a stick. She’s amazing. She’s brilliant. Throw all the money at her, bring her into the board, and she’s going to, you know, shake her magic eight ball and tell us what’s next.
Lisa Bodell Right, Right. Corporate psychic.
Peter Winick Yeah. Corp Well, whether it’s corporates, I mean, it could be in innovation or creativity or DNA. It doesn’t matter what the expertise is. But we need her in a room or in a room to impart her brilliance and knowledge on it. Right. And that’s a brain on a stick. You’ve done both where you’re clearly the brain on the stick, but you put a lot of energy and effort and resources into taking what you’ve got and making it teachable to others so others could think like it. And that’s really the magic, because it’s not about the listen, you have charisma and you’re a good speaker. All those things are lovely. But moving into the capabilities development business is where the money is from. So can you touch on that for a bit?
Lisa Bodell Well, so there’s a there’s a strategic love thing right there. So which is like take what you’re good at and then do something with it, right? Because then you’ll be passionate about it. And everyone knows, you know, this, Peter, being an entrepreneur is you better be passionate about what you’re doing because you’re going to work really, really hard at it if you’re going to be successful. So, you know, two things in my background is I’m a midwesterner, which if you want to follow a stereotype, I’m very practical. I’m a very, very practical person. So, you know, head in the clouds is not my thing. I love the creativity, but it’s got to be grounded in something. So I, I really believe in the teaching part of it, right? So that’s that was one piece of how I got to future think versus, you know, brain on a stick. And then the other piece of it to me is that I’m impatient and so I really like accelerated. I didn’t I really hate.
Peter Winick That’s why you moved to New York. Yeah.
Lisa Bodell Everyone is so patient and calm, right? Yeah. So. Right. So it’s I like the fast pace, but I recognize that everyone has A.D.D. and so that’s why I think the accelerated part of all my stuff came in. If it’s a 12 step program, I don’t have time for it. If it teaches me, if I got to learn it all day, I don’t have time for it. So getting really bite size and micro so people can learn things fast practically was my shtick. And right now, guess what, Peter? It’s the right time for that. So again, like sometimes you’re a little ahead of the curve. Sometimes you get you hit it, right? But those were the things I was good at, so I created the business in that way.
Peter Winick So I get pitched all the time. From people directly, indirectly and via agencies. And I think somebody and maybe you did it in your book. I didn’t. I didn’t I only skimmed it. Somebody needs to brief folks on sort of proper guest etiquette for podcasting because so for me, here’s our process. Somebody will pitch us directly, indirectly, whatever, we’ll scan it. And to me, that might be interesting, right? But basically that person might meet the criteria, might be interesting to our audience, etc.. Let’s not put them on the air. Let’s do a prequel. Let’s get them to know about us. We’ll know about them because I don’t want to waste their time and I want to put out a quality episode and the first thing I’ll ask is, okay, you know what? If anything, do you know about us? And I don’t know, seven times out of ten, well, I get somebody to you know, they haven’t even done the basics of nothing. I’m expecting someone to invest days or hours. A cursory review. Take a look at the guest, maybe listen to ten minutes. And I’m shocked at the high percentage of people are paying good money and really just show up as sloppy guests, in my opinion. Look, to get your thoughts on that.
Tom Schwab I totally agree with you. And I. I loathe the word pitch because I think it’s dehumanizing. You introduce a person, you pitch a baseball, you pitch an idea. But yet so many people are doing that. They’re just the law of numbers. Well, I’ll just I’ll ask everybody, you know, I get pitch to be on my podcast and I don’t have a podcast, but everybody loves it, right? I think the word is guest. Right. So how would you show up as a guest if I invited you to my home for dinner? Right,.
Peter Winick Right.
Tom Schwab You would probably know who I am before, before you showed up, you would ask, what’s the what’s the attire or what’s you know, what can I do to bring value to service? Can I bring something? All the rest of that. And then you would show up there as you introduce me to all your friends. Your goal would make the host look like a genius. So having you so this is what being a guest and at being a gracious guest then just trying to use an abused somebody’s audience.
Peter Winick Yep! So here’s my second complaint and I feel like I’m beating up on you, but I’m just you’re in this space. Yes. The other piece is okay, So then we do a great episode. Awesome. And I make it really clear. Listen, this episode will come out in whatever our backlog is. Four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. Sometimes they want to hang back on an episode to time it again, something that’s fine, we’ll accommodate. And then when the episodes go live a day or two before my executive producer will present them or their people with a bunch of assets, Hey, here’s something you can put on Twitter. Here’s something from LinkedIn here. Blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah. Please help us support the program and, you know, post it to your followers. Because again, as a as a host, I’m going to get to my peeps. I also want to use the guests to get to their peeps. I mean, it’s a mutual beneficial piece. And I’m shocked that, I don’t know, maybe 50%, maybe 40% actually go through with the follow up promotion. And I’m like, Why did you give me a half an hour of your time? If you’re not going to promote like it just doesn’t make what were your goals in getting on this program? Why did you pay money, spend time, exert energy to do this?
Tom Schwab I couldn’t agree with you more on that. It’s like, why would you not promote it? Because that’s going to be powerful in actually moving people from being a passive listener to an active visitor and ultimately an engaged customer. And I see more and more people saying, Well, I want to do, you know, my goal is to do 100 interviews this year. What becomes a marathon number or something silly? 100 of what I have said, you know, publicly, I’ve done over 1200 interviews since 2014 and people are like, Wow, that’s amazing. I’m like, No, that is embarrassing, right? It helped us figure out the system and everything, but you should be more discerning on that. And I tell people and we get paid to get people on interviews and I will tell them, Why don’t you do less interviews and more with every interviews, Do better interviews, not more interviews. Right.
Peter Winick Because better interviews, to your point of being a guest, you would. I would send you a thank you note and say, hey, Tom, thank you so much for having me to dinner. I enjoyed meeting your friends that that that that that that’s just just being gracious. Right And the other piece is given, you know, again, we just broke 300 recently so we’re up to 300 and change. We constantly recycle them. And I don’t mean recycle in a bad way, but we’re re promoting. We’ll put together a bunch of them. And here’s, you know, five talks on authors, five talks on that, five, you know, whatever. We’ll here’s women speaking some of the best female guests we’ve had whatever and it’s not just a one and done because I want to keep putting it out there to the world and I hope that the guest would be a little bit more having the systems in place, whatever, to help on the promotion side. And I sometimes I don’t think they realize that that’s really part of an expectation of a good guest.
Tom Schwab Well, and I, I would say it’s a problem that we’ve got as a society as a whole, right? Everybody is focused on transactions, not relationships. And to me, one of our core values is relationships are the ultimate currency. So somebody just, you know invited you on their show? Why wouldn’t you build a relationship? If you wanted to talk to the audience once, why wouldn’t you want to talk to them more and more? That person is the gate is the gatekeeper to your customers.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.