Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 107 – David Komlos

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What’s the formula for “powering up” when faced with complexity? How can you differentiate between difficult and complex challenges?

Our guest in this episode is David Komlos, co-author of the upcoming book, “Cracking Complexity,” and CEO & Co-Founder of Syntegrity, an organization that guides Fortune 100 companies through difficult transformations and teaches them to solve truly complex problems.

David shares with us his unique process of writing, and how he worked through a 40% change in the book over a two-week period – and came out winning! Also, Peter and David discuss why content marketing is an indispensable way to amplify your impact, and why it helps to be really aggressive when going after your goals.

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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.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is David Komlos. David is the CEO and co-founder of Integrity. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s an early-stage investor. He is an author with a book that’s coming out, focuses his time on working with Fortune 100 organizations on transformation, large scale problem solving and issues related to complexity. David lives in Toronto with his family. So welcome aboard, David.

David Komlos Thank you. Peter, thanks for a great introduction.

Peter Winick Here we go. It’s all true. So. So let’s you know, your story is an interesting one because you and your partner, David, started a business together that’s grown into a really nice size midsize consultancy up in Toronto. And you worked with amazing clients for world renowned names that we all know. And you’re sort of the complexity organization. And now it’s sort of at this stage of the career. Good sized company, lots of great clients doing this for 12, 14 years based on an algorithm, their science underneath it. Now you’re sort of diving into, more broadly speaking, the world of content and thought leadership. You’ve got the book coming out, you’re speaking more. So let me just sort of get under that a little bit. What’s that? What’s the why underneath that first?

David Komlos Yeah, the last 15 years or so have been an incredible journey, starting with highly inaccessible approaches to complexity that we’ve honed over time. We’ve had incredible customers, CEOs of major corporations, leaders in government, non-governmental organizations around the world, a broad application. And we’ve learned a ton. We’ve honed it into what really is a formula for powering up in the face of complexity. And we felt a responsibility. We feel a profound responsibility to share it with leaders around the world. We’ve put it into a book. It’s easily accessible and it should have a very big impact on the way people think about their biggest challenges, their biggest priorities, their biggest threats, how they go about seizing them with speed and much, much greater effectiveness. While we didn’t invent many of the things that are encapsulated in the formula, we did create that formula. And really, what we what we refer to is pull it over the finish line and it’s available.

Peter Winick So your current model is very high touch in terms of the way that this is the formula, if you will, is deployed. It requires getting a lot of people in the room and solving the problems over time, etc.. But what you said is interesting to me in terms of the reason to deploy thought leadership now. It sounds somewhere between sort of democratizing the content, getting it out to all and evangelizing. Is that a fair statement?

David Komlos Yeah, Let’s spend time on democratizing it. You very rightly point out that we work at the highest levels of organizations, most organizations with the CEOs, the CFOs, the CEOs and so forth, strategy leaders. We do go deeper into the organizations at a business unit level and a product level. But generally speaking, it’s an important investment in top priorities. Now, there’s so much more that folks at the manager level, the director level, the vice president level can leverage in the formula. And what we’re doing now is everything to do with fully digitizing aspects of what we do and really helping other people who don’t have quarter million dollar budgets make use of what is very, very powerful.

Peter Winick So it’s obviously based on the same IP and the same formula, but able to serve two different segments of the corporate market at different price points with different expectations, right? So you can’t sell a product for $10,000 that has the same outcome is one that has a million, but it’s same. Same heart and soul, though.

David Komlos Yeah. As you said earlier, we’re bringing large groups of people together to tackle issues like how do we grow faster, how do we merge, how do we take cost out, you know, what should the customer experience be? And we’ll bring 40, 50 people together several times around the world to tackle one of those challenges for a multinational. But there’s lots of smaller, complex challenges that can be tackled much faster with smaller groups, smaller ambitions, different kinds of timelines, different kinds of priority. And that’s what we’re trying to make available to everyone.

Peter Winick Right? And I would imagine the quantity or frequency of the occurrence of smaller than the biggest problem the company has out there is pretty large, right?

David Komlos That’s right.

Peter Winick That’s right. Okay. So at some point, you and your partner, David Benjamin, decide, hey, we’re busy, we’re running this great business, we’re serving our clients, Let’s take on another full time job and be authors and thought leaders and speakers. Right? How did that come to be? Like, what was the spark that ignited that?

David Komlos It was this deep sense of responsibility and opportunity to capture, document, make accessible what we feel is the single most important competitive advantage a leader can have, whether you’re a manager or whether you’re the CEO, whether you’re working for a commercial organization or government. It really is the ability to power up in the face of complexity, right? And so it was this deep sense of responsibility. Having cracked the nut formulaic. What are the ten steps, What are the mindsets, What are the actual how to’s? We said, we’ve got to document this. And of course, it’s been having a very profound impact on the growth of the organization. We’ve been growing very nicely, but now we’re sort of at an inflection point and that’s through thought leadership and content marketing.

Peter Winick Got it. And given the fact that your methodology is process based and replicable and not dependent on your or your partner’s personal insight, intuition, experience, it enables you to scale that beyond the two of you in a big way. You’ve already done that prior to this?

David Komlos Yeah, we’ve already done that. And now we can really, instead of doing it for organizations at scale, we can equip organizations to do it at scale for themselves.

Peter Winick Got it. So just so folks understand sort of where you are in the journey, the book is done and it’s going to be out shortly very shortly. So I’d like if we could spend a little bit of time on the last year or so, the journey that you went into this world of publishing and PR and social media and thought leadership, because you’re you and your partner were thoughtful guys. And I imagine that you’ve learned a lot along the way and you’ve made some decisions along the way. So you speak as if you were talking to you and David two years ago, what you would have liked to have known or learned or understood earlier as you sort of went down this path.

David Komlos There’s you know, it’s been a fairly enjoyable, yet arduous process, this journey since determining that we’re going to write this book and then understanding the lay of the land and what does get published and what doesn’t get published and how to go about getting published. We’ve had incredible partners, our agent as we Harmsworth Yep. We’ve had really good publicity with Cape Hendricks and other firms that have helped us really bring it all together. But next time we do this will understand that we have to bring on these partners sooner. That the challenge of expressing something that’s clear in one’s mind is not necessarily as straightforward as one might think just by writing it down. You know, we hear the music folks on the receiving end of what we’re saying don’t necessarily hear the same music. And so there really is an art and science to getting that right in a way that’s understandable. That goes beyond just writing a book, but really communicating effectively and then knowing how to distribute, how to get this to market, how to tap into social, which is not something that we are masters of in any way, shape or form. Right. You know, and you know, because you can write, the best thing is what we’re learning. And if you don’t have the distribution and the savvy around how to reach the folks who are going to really, really be able to benefit from this, then you know you’re going to miss the mark. We’ve been very fortunate to have brought on the right partners who are top notch and are making that happen in real time. That’s what we’re living through right now.

Peter Winick Right. So I want to talk a little bit about the picking those partners, the decision making. Right. Because neither you nor your partner come from a world of publishing or any of it’s a whole it’s a it’s a foreign world, right, to say, okay, what are the three things I need to do to get a book out? It’s a little bit more complex than that. So given that you’re like most of our audience and folks that listen smart, how did you make those decisions? How did you who did you listen to? How did you do the research? How did you decide that sounds like a better partner for me than that one. And we don’t need this, but we do need that.

David Komlos You know, we’re good at differentiating between complex challenges and complicated challenges. And this is this is what’s in our book. Partly the complicated challenges are very difficult for the person who’s experiencing them for the first time. Like if your car breaks down or if you’re putting in a new accounting system. But the right approach to take is take an expert centric approach. Go find the experts. We recognize that writing a book and bringing it to market effectively has been done many times before. We don’t know what we’re doing, but there are many, many experts out there who do know what they’re doing, and we sought to find the best ones. And so we found a really incredible agent. We found through research and interviewing and referrals, a really good editor. We found an amazing PR publicist who works with authors like us and authors who are way more well renowned, who took interest in us, and we were able to narrow down which ones to work with based on the kind of niche that we’re in. So we took an expert centric approach and found the best experts and let them tell us what we need to do, as opposed to us trying to figure it out on our own behalf.

Peter Winick So I want to just pause there for a minute, because finding the right experts, number one, takes a sense of humility, a beginner’s mind. Right. Just because you’re top of your game in your business doesn’t mean you know anything about others. And I think oftentimes experts move into foreign domain and say, well, I’m really smart and I’m a smart guy or gal, I’ll figure this out. Right? But I love that that you should have went to the experts. And I also know that when you’re working with some of your partners, you’re not leading them. You’re allowing them to lead you. You’re leading them direction. This is what I want to achieve. But you’re also communicating to them, listen, this is your domain. You tell me what to do. I haven’t you know, you know, you mentioned Barbara from 100 great firm. You know, you’re telling her, you tell me what to do because you’ve done this. I just. I want to be a good student. I want to be a good client. So tell me, because that’s from my perspective, doesn’t happen often enough. Let people hire the right people and stymie and stifle them, too.

David Komlos Yeah. Well, you know, the mindset comes from the law of requisite variety, which really informs the thinking we have around complexity in how we help our customers power up in the face of complexity. The law of requisite variety says only variety can destroy variety. So you’re dealing with a high variety challenge, like getting a book to market properly, or how to double the growth of your business or, you know, any of those other complex challenges that I mentioned. You have to bring together an equal amount of variety to bear on the challenge. And the way you do that is by tapping into the right diversity of talent, knowledge, experience, expertise. So that’s just our mindset. You know, we we have to.

Peter Winick I think I read that in the advance copy of your books. Or are you applying your own methodology to your own work that way?

David Komlos Well, we apply our own methodology all the time to our company with really great results. We have, you know, the right mindset in terms of applying the right mindset around. You have to bring the right talent around you. You do not necessarily have all the right talent in your organization. Outsourcing the thinking and doing, etc. in certain situations to external parties is also not the right approach. But you know, the hybrid, which is where you bring people from experts from outside your organization to inform your thinking. In certain cases, do the doing. Like I said, if you’re investing in the accounting system, you shouldn’t try and figure it out yourself. Just bring in the experts. In this case, getting a book to market, writing the book. I mean, we put pen to paper, so to speak. Sure. But we need we needed external parties, the experts, to tell us exactly what will work, what won’t work, how to distribute so forth. And we did not have that knowledge internally. And we approached the world with that kind of mindset. Got it. Where is the knowledge? Where’s the talent? Go get that. It’s all around you in abundance, but it’s latent. Just go tap into it.

Peter Winick So can you think of an example or two of something you totally would have done differently if you didn’t have this requisite variety of deep experts around you? As it relates to the book.

David Komlos I think in general we would have failed. I don’t know what we would have done differently. You may have had to self-publish, which we weren’t really that keen on doing. We didn’t really have strong belief in the reach and in our in in our ability to do that. I think this would have been a whole other decision and potentially a different outcome of whether to write a book or not. Had we not gone down the route of, you know, tapping into the right agent, the right publishing partner, the right thought leadership vendor, you know, etc., it just may not have come to fruition.

Peter Winick Interesting. And what you didn’t say, which I find really fascinating, is the content would have been the same, right? You would have told the story the way you told it because it’s told well, it’s written well, etc.. But you’re talking about sort of that next concentric circle around distribution, PR positioning, social. They all the all the other stuff that is beyond your core, beyond your expertise organizationally?

David Komlos That’s correct. I would even say that, you know, we applied our IP, our methodology to an early version of the book. We brought together 24 people, I believe, including people from customer organizations, people who work in our organization. They read the manuscript ahead of time, and we did a two day session using our methodology to figure out how do we take this from really a good product to a great product. And it really did improve the final outcome a lot.

Peter Winick Wow, That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s an interesting process. So you sort of did a a sneak preview and then went back to the drawing board. How much change was made to the book based on that process? 20%.

David Komlos 40 what I’d say I’d say at least 40% in terms significant. Yes, significant change. And, you know, yes, significant change around how to best convey what we’re trying to convey through stories, through archetypes, just the whole approach to the book. People recognize that the raw material and a lot of the good work had been done and that the raw material was in the book. But in terms of really landing it, I would say that we changed about 40% of our work at that point, and we did it in two weeks, which was really, really powerful for us because it wasn’t like we got this, you know, these notes back from individual reviewers that we had to then consolidate. We were able to bring 20, 24 people together, connect the dots together, and really hit the ground running on revising the manuscript.

Peter Winick So the book is really a product of your methodology at some level, which is fantastic.

David Komlos Yeah, at some level it is for sure.

Peter Winick Great. So what? What else might you share with someone? Or even if it was yourself going back in time, a year or two, that’s about to go down this path. Right. So, so either they they’ve really got a viable entity and they want to sort of integrate a stream of thought leadership to increase awareness and democratizing all that. What are the things that you would tell them to be thinking about?

David Komlos Well, I would you know, I would say to them, be aggressive about going down that path. That’s my general learning from this.

Peter Winick So what does that mean? What does that mean?

David Komlos What that means is go for it. You know, I don’t know if I can get granular enough for you, but in terms of my big takeaway is if you’re an organization like ours and you’ve got some really interesting and compelling intellectual property and just wisdom and lessons learned over years that can be brought to bear for individuals. Thought leadership content marketing is a great, indispensable way to amplify the impact you’re having and really scale. I love it. You know, and I don’t see any close second strategy. It’s not like do thought leadership, marketing, content marketing write a book? And if that doesn’t work, then, you know, take out a billboard. Right. You know, I just don’t see a close second to that.

Peter Winick Right. Well, and I would say the other side of that is, given your a good size firm, you know, you’re still not competing with the Accenture’s in the McKinsey’s at a size level. There are occasions where you might compete with them on an engagement level. You don’t have, you know, a $200 million marketing budget. So even if you wanted to experiment and buy billboards at every airport with the top ten airport in a market, that would be a bet. The house risk. Right. Could really have bad, bad outcomes.

David Komlos Yeah. And I think what I’ve learned is there’s a ton of content out there, but content still is king. And the general public and people who are interested can differentiate between good, compelling, strong content and same old, same old. And so if you do have the raw material for great content, you know, I would aggressively go after content marketing. That’s what I’m seeing bear fruit for us right now for the company and as us as authors. It’s extremely exciting.

Peter Winick Yeah. And are you how would you describe the process in the journey for you? Is it a root canal? Do you love it? Is it somewhere in the middle?

David Komlos It’s hard to describe. I mean, a CEO of integrity. I’ve got a ton of things going on. Sure. You know, I’ve got family life, lots of friends. And so this has been one additional element to life over the last 18 months. And I’d say that it’s been, generally speaking, exhilarating. It’s been very rewarding to put down in a concise way what it is that we’ve learned, what it is that we know what other people need. And yet it’s been it’s been hard. But what isn’t hard? What isn’t difficult. So it’s been extremely easy, everybody. Exactly. Exactly.

Peter Winick Got it. Awesome. Well, this has been great. I thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. And let’s I don’t recall if we named the book, so let’s give a shout out for the book and give us the title.

David Komlos Cracking Complexity The breakthrough formula for solving just about anything Fast.

Peter Winick And we’re going to put that in the show notes as well. So I thank you for sharing your journey. I think there’s a lot that folks that are considering diving in or are already in the midst of that could learn from your experience and where you’ve been. And I want to have you back on a couple of months after the book is out to talk about. Okay. So now what? What’s happened as a result? Because this is all sort of the getting ready for the big release, which is pretty exciting. So thank you so much, David. Thanks for joining us.

David Komlos Peter Thank you for having me on. I’ve enjoyed this a lot.

Peter Winick My pleasure. 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.