Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 160 – Steve Farber

Peter Winick

Thought Leadership doesn’t have to be about brand new content. It is about adding a unique and different perspective to the conversation.

In this episode, our guest is Steve Farber, Founder of Extreme Leadership Institute and author of the best-selling book Greater than Yourself. His newest release is Love Is Just Damn Good Business. Steve is a subject-matter expert in business leadership and one of Inc’s global Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts.

Steve has been working with organizations that are devoted to cultivation and development of extreme leaders in the business community. He discusses how mentors can give us access to a platform and how your viewpoint can elevate the conversation. Steve explains why love is a fundamental part of quality leadership.

Thought Leaders often get hung up on getting their content out. They fret over the tone and message. Will come across as intended? Peter has some great advice for getting your content just right!

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m excited today about our guest, who is Steve Farber. I’ll give you his bio real quick, and then we’ll dive right into it. So Steve is the president of Extreme Leadership and the founder of the Extreme Leadership Institute. They work with organizations that are devoted to cultivation and development of extreme leaders in the business community, nonprofit and education. His third book, Greater Than Yourself, The Ultimate Lesson in Leadership was a Wall Street Journal and USAID bestseller. His second book, The Radical Edge, was held as a playbook for harnessing the power of the human spirit. And his first book, The Radicle Leap, A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership, is a classic in the leadership field. And Steve just released, earlier this month, his fourth book, which is Love is Just Damn Good Business. And to give you a little background on Steve, he’s been in this game for a long time. He was the director of service programs at TMI. He served as, and this is probably one of the oddest titles I’ve ever seen, VP and official mouthpiece of the Tom Peters company for a long time, and has been mentored by Tom, Jim Kousas, and Terry Pierce. So welcome aboard, Steve, and congrats with the launch of the new book.

Steve Farber Well, thank you for that, and thank you for that as well. It’s great to be here with you.

Peter Winick So I want to just sort of dive right in, because obviously you’ve gone from being on the business side, right? So Tom Peters and TMI, and then launching yourself as a thought leader very successfully for almost 20 years now, multiple books, got your book rights back. So talk to us about sort of the Farber journey and basically answer the question of how the hell did you get?

Steve Farber Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s a great question. And one that doesn’t get asked often enough of any of us actually. Well, you know, I, if I rewind the clock, just a little bit, a little further back, I started out in business. I was an entrepreneur or I was 30 years old. I had my own commodities brokerage firm. So that’s where I learned about business. I also learned that I hated that business. That is a very odd, a very place to be when it’s your own business. And you hate it, despise it really. So, you know, I started using my business background combined with my, just kind of have a talent and a knack for communicating, I guess, is the way you can say it. Uh, and, um, I, I began doing consulting and training and facilitating and all that back in the late eighties. And, and through, through a series of, of experiences with various consulting companies, I was given the opportunity to get exposure to probably the widest array of. businesses and industries that any human being can get exposure to. It was really broad based. And then in 1994, I landed at the Tom Peters company. And, you know, unfortunately for your listeners who I’m going to say are under 50 years old, you might not even know who that is.

Peter Winick I was going to say, contextualize for folks how big of a rock star Tom was in 1990. I mean, he’s a legend today, obviously, but in 94, put that in perspective.

Steve Farber Yeah. So, you know, Tom’s original claim to fame, of course, was at search of excellence, which came out mid eighties. And in the mid nineties, when I joined Tom was, I mean, he was the guy, man. He was the, the preeminent management thinker of our day. And I, and I believe still is. And so we had, you, a professional services firm, uh, built around Tom’s name, but funnily enough, not so much built around his work. In fact, the Tom Peters Company’s main kind of flagship workshop and program and approach was the Leadership Challenge, which is Jim Kousas and Barry Pose. Because Jim was the vice president of the Tom Peter, no, he was the president of Tom Peters company, sorry. I was vice president. I get us confused all the time. So Jim actually hired me at the Tom Peterson company, but that’s how I got exposure to my most significant mentors, which of course would be, first and foremost, I’d say Jim Kouzas, And then. Tom, of course, and Terry Pierce, who is a phenomenal executive coach, unfortunately just passed away a few weeks ago. And so here’s what happened. I got really immersed in in their bodies of work. I got a really good at facilitating their work, at consulting around it, helping our clients to apply it. And it really informed my view of leadership and my view of the business in particular. And then there came a point where I decided that I wanted to pursue my own thing.

Peter Winick So let me, let me go back a half a step, Steve, because many of the folks that we work with and a lot of folks out there are attempting to move from a place where you are with, with the Tom Peters company years ago, where they’ve got their stuff, they’ve got their methodology, their processes, their frameworks, and they want others to deliver it. So you just sort of fast forward and I was delivering his stuff. Talk about sort of just for a brief moment. what it takes to get the content into a format so that it is teachable to others to be teachable to others. Cause that’s not an easy thing to do.

Steve Farber No, it’s really not, but they are very closely related. So this exposure that I had to my mentor’s bodies of work is what gave me the platform to develop my own platform. Correct. So, and you know, very few of us just started, you know we were hatched out of the egg and we’ve got this great content. We’re all, you know on the proverbial shoulders of giants, right? So the process that I went through and that I recommend everybody really consider no matter where you are on this journey for yourself is there’s some point where you step back, I’ll speak for myself, I step back and I said, okay, given everything that I’ve learned from my mentors and from my clients and from this work that I have been doing, what do I think about all this? What’s my point of view?

Peter Winick And to me, they weren’t using the term in the early 90s, thought leadership, but it’s that, that’s what it is, right? So people ask me, well, what’s your definition of thought leadership? And it’s like, okay, it’s not about brand new total creative, no one’s ever thought of this before, is what are you adding to a conversation, to a body of work, to a buddy of knowledge that’s unique, that is different, that is bringing the entire body to the next level? So I love the way you sort of articulate that because it is ultimately evolved into this huge planet of thought-leadership.

Steve Farber Absolutely. And, and I think, so I think the question to ask is, is what do I think about all this and, and try to articulate that. So then that’s going to be informed by everything you’ve learned from your mentors and from your experience. So that’s the way it was for me. And what I found was I had my own, my own emphasis to add to this equation. You know, the new book is called love is just damn good business. And that is really kind of it. That’s the conclusion that I came to as a result of all of this. But then… there’s something else that I think all of us need to remind ourselves and all of us in this, in this space. We think oftentimes that thought leadership it means I have created something entirely new. Nobody’s ever thought about it before. And can I swear on this podcast? Steve, I’ve seen you speak.

Peter Winick I’d expect nothing less.

Steve Farber Cause I’m going to tell you the greatest bit of advice I ever got from another of my dear friends and kind of mentor back in the early days of writing my own stuff. So I don’t know if you ever met Carl Hammerschlag.

Peter Winick No, I couldn’t spell his name if you paid me.

Steve Farber Yeah, I probably could, but we can spend our time otherwise. But Carl is a he’s an author. He wrote a book called Theft of the Spirit many years ago. And he’s also a psychiatrist. And I had come to know him fairly, you know, in the in the late, I’m gonna say 1998, 99 2000, something like that. So when I sat down to write, to start writing for the first time, I wrote maybe 10 pages, and then I just hit the wall. Right. And so I called Carl, and I said, Carl, I, I don’t know. I don’ I’m frozen. I don’t know what to do. And he said, he put on a psychiatrist hat and he said what seems to be the issue? What do you think the problem is? And I said, well, Carl, honestly, I’m terrified that I have nothing new to say. Right. And he and I quote, who the fuck do you think you are that you would have something new to day.

Peter Winick Well, you know, and first of all, nothing could be further, I mean, that is as true as it gets. Yeah. And I think the reality of that is once you come to accept that, it probably became far easier for you to write.

Steve Farber Oh, absolutely. It busted me right through because the idea is look, the desire to be the only person who’s ever thought of this is completely ego driven, right? The fact of the matter is we need to bring our own unique perspective and voice to bear on what’s we’re joining in a conversation, right. We’re adding to a conversation. We not, we’re not, you know, creating a new language from scratch. So when we get our ego out of it, and it’s a little bit paradoxical, I think, for some people who like to consider themselves thought leaders, because that is a very, if you think about it, egotistical sort of a label, right? But in order, paradoxically, in order to be a really effective thought leader, my ego really needs to be as detached from it as possible, right. So it, the thought, the ideas, the, the strategies, the uh, the body of work that we’re putting forth needs to be much bigger than, than ourselves. Otherwise, it’s never going to have an impact.

Peter Winick Well, and if I would relate that to your work, so I’ve seen you speak several times, read all your books, etc. You know, there’s clearly a strong leadership foundation in everything that you do, obviously with the relationship with Tom and Jim. So that’s it’s there. You can see it, you can smell it, and you can feel it. And what I would call sort of the the Farber flavor is adding the love to that, right? So if it was a movie, It’s sort of like, you know. love child of, you know, sort of Tom Peters and Tony Robbins is probably a bad example, but what you’re making unique about it is, yes, there are fundamental principles and leadership that are what they are, period, full stop. How do you bring that to life in a way that’s unique and different and forces and creates the resonance? And what you’ve done is you’ve pulled love through that. And then obviously, you have the sort of the personal style of the way you get it out there. But that to me is a great example of thought leadership because you could have sounded like what you originally tried to do is, let me go reinvent this leadership thing, right? And said, oh, shit, like probably not gonna happen. And then you found sort of the love path. And that was way more than enough to differentiate you from hundreds of others in the market.

Steve Farber Yeah. And, and, you know, to just dive into that a little bit, a little bit more, it’s not that I’m the only person that’s ever identified love as being critical leadership. I mean, in fact, you know, Jim Cousas and Barry Posner, they have their five practices of exemplary leaders, and one of them is encouraging the heart. And Jim was the first person that I ever heard talk about love as the foundation of leadership. And for me, it just, it rang, it rang through It rang through as being, did you see how that rang? That rang was like.

Peter Winick Our special effects team is so good!

Steve Farber I know. I said it was amazing. If everything in my life worked that way, it would be phenomenal. Six million dollars. Okay, anyway. So what I found was that for me, that resonated so deeply and it made me start looking at that element in particular, this love thing. How prevalent is that really, and. So my work has really been around giving it a fuller focus and, you know, fleshing it out more so we can really take that as an overt challenge, not kind of a, oh, by the way. Right, you’re putting it out there. Yeah, it’s the thing. So yes, that’s right. It’s not, certainly I didn’t invent love and it’s not an entirely new thought in the context of business. I mean, Tim Sanders wrote Love is the Killer app two years before the radical leap came out. It was like 2001 or 2002 or something.

Peter Winick Well, I was just gonna mention Tim because when Tim did it, it was a much higher hill to climb, if you think about it in the context of timing. And so you’re standing a little bit on his shoulders, but it’s more acceptable to use that language today.

Steve Farber No doubt about it, and yeah, it has. And we’ve been, you know, we’ve all been collectively priming that pump for quite some time. But still, what really surprises me about this continues to surprise me about this, Peter, is that see, how can I put this? There’s a weird dynamic that happens, particularly around this love thing. There is in my experience, I can’t prove this scientifically, but most people really already think this way. most successful people really think this already. There’s this collective, so there’s this kind of unspoken acknowledgement that this is really important. And yet there’s also this collective belief that most people don’t feel this way. So most of us feel this and most people think, and we all think that everybody’s gonna be resistant to this.

Peter Winick Well, and it’s about giving ourselves the permission to express this in the workplace in an appropriate way, things that we do in our personal lives and with our friends and with their families and all that other stuff. Those are the relationships that are most valuable, right? Absolutely.

Steve Farber And listen, we all know that employee engagement is something that we should be chasing after. We all know collaboration and teamwork, and we’ve been using this language all the time. Well, love is what brings all that together and really takes it to its highest possible level in my opinion. So what happened for me then was I began to ask myself that question, what do I think about all this? And in answering that question, the LEAP framework was the first thing. merge love, energy, audacity, and proof, which I wrote about originally in the radical. And it’s a methodology now that’s been out there for quite some time and people are having great results with it. But once that that kind of framework was established, and I wrote a couple of books around it, then of course, it leads to, well, how do we, how did we teach people? How do we help people apply these things, you know, beyond being up on stage, and in the pages of a book?

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 podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcast and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com forward slash podcast. So I want to pivot for a couple of minutes, if we could, to some of the business side of this, right? So you, you, like everybody else have made decisions around the business you’d like to have, the life you’d liked to lead, et cetera, what you will do, what you won’t do. You spend a lot of your time on the keynote circuit. So let’s, let’s talk for a moment around what you’ve seen change on the business side, of keynote, in terms of the moving from the dominance of the agencies to not so much, I mean, you’ve been around long enough to see that total. transformation that that whole industry has gone through from the business side and how, what have you done to remain on top of your game? Because I would argue that you’re, I don’t know what the actual number is, but I think of you as, you know, clearly in the top 25 speakers out Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one. Oh wait, this just ended. Michelle Obama just knocked you down on the list, sorry, you’re now 33.

Steve Farber OK, I’m fine with that. So it’s a it’s a really great question, because it’s one that that I never stop asking myself. So the business. So just put it in context. I I when I left the Tom Peters company, I was in 2000. Right. So I’ve been on my own being as a as a speaker and a writer and all that for what years this.

Peter Winick We’ll call it 20 years, because my math isn’t that great.

Steve Farber Okay, let’s say 20 years. And the speaking industry has definitely changed a lot. I mean, I used to do most of my work used to come from the bureau channels. And now most of it comes directly, although I still, you know, have great relationships with a lot of bureaus and do a fair amount of work with them. But I’ll say this about the speaking industry in general, and relying on speaking as your primary source of income is a it’s a technical term. It’s a It’s a dumb ass business model. because it’s such a fickle industry. And honestly, I haven’t gotten it figured out. I mean, there are times, and I’m sure, everybody who’s listening to this that we’re speaking as at least part of their business model, there’re times where it’s like, wow, man, everybody’s calling, I’m on a plane every week, you know, in a couple of cities a week. And then there are time where it was like, why are the crickets so loud? Where am I? I’m in the middle of some freaking desert and there’s no

Peter Winick Well, and there’s seasonality and spikiness on top of the individual supply and demand, so it could look like a bad EKG.

Steve Farber Yeah. So it’s really, it’s really interesting because people that have a really thriving kind of, you know, professional services practice or they’re doing consulting and, and, uh, you know facilitation and all that good stuff, you know, it seems that they’re always looking over the fence at the, at the. You know, the, the higher end or, or, you know, medium to high end page speakers and going, Oh, how do I do that? And then so, you know a lots of people who’ve been speaking for many years are looking back at them and going create that because. I don’t want to be on a plane for the rest of my life. And I don’ want to in that situation where I always want to on a plain.

Peter Winick I’m convinced after being in this space for 15 plus years that there’s really only two types of speakers out there if you believe in there are two types of anything, right? One is those that wanna speak more and those that want to speak less. I’ve never met a speaker that said, how are you doing? Oh, I did 81 gigs last year and I really wanted to do 100 or someone else did, I didn’t know. 81 gigs, last year. Jeez, I’d rather have only done 40. It’s never just, it’s the Goldilocks problem.

Steve Farber Right. Right. Yeah. I think that’s very true. And I’ve always been in the category of I don’t want to speak more. Always. And never had an exception to that. I mean, there are times where I said, I’d like to be home for a little while and just, you know, watch TV. But the thing is that and this is going to sound obvious, the desire to speak more is not the same thing as creating the reality where you’re speaking more. that can be very painful. Right. So what we’ve been doing in our business, you know, we have the extreme leadership Institute and we’re, you know, we have a core team and then a pretty significant virtual team of people that have been certified in my work and all of that. But it’s like a 20 year old startup. Right. For us. I mean, the, the ideas have been in place for a long time. It was the experiment that here are there, and now we’re just trying to get our shit together and, and really grow this.

Peter Winick Well, and that’s a common, it’s such a common story, because I would argue that you’re a world class thought leader, you’re a great author, you are a great speaker, right? You owe me a cocktail for that. The other hat that you have to when you’re right, you want to say, yeah, you know, I argue, right. No, but that’s true, right, but the other side of that is, are you equally strong as a marketer as a CEO, as a finance guy as a product of like, here’s a long list of stuff that you probably okay, but not nearly as good as you or on the other side. And this is where we work with our clients and say, Okay, let’s build a moat around you. So you can do the stuff that you rock at, and figure out how to develop an organization, whether that’s a physical office with 50 people in it, virtual, however you want to do it, they can support you. And you’re not dabbling in like, you know, I’m sure you’re not spending your time trying to figure out what the way to jig the Instagram Instagram algorithm this week is because your head would explain

Steve Farber I’m still trying to figure out how to work the hashtags. So that’s what I have. Yeah, turn on the Google. Yeah, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. It’s, and it’s a classic entrepreneurial trap. Sure. Not the, you know, just a classic, you know, thought leader entrepreneur trap. It’s you start with a great idea and you start making some traction and then you want to expand it. And suddenly, you find that what’s necessary to expand exceeds either your desire or talent or both. Sure. And yeah, I am squarely in that boat. I’m fortunate in that I have a couple of folks, business partners who really phenomenal in areas that I am not. And still I’m deeply and painfully aware of the remaining gaps. And they are just what you said, the gaps for me are around the marketing side of things and around the biz dev side of thing. and uh… When you have something that, like my body of work, if I could just be completely, try to say this without sounding biased, it’s been field tested. It’s been out there for a long time. And I know, so I know that it’s powerful. So it can be very frustrating. And I’m sure, and I would argue all of us should feel that way about our work, that frustration between, it comes from the gap between what we know is possible through the application of our ideas and our ability to really actualize.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah. And therein lies the challenge. So as we start to wrap up here, Steve, could you tell us two or three things, one, two, three things that are really, really working well for you that might be a bit surprising? And then conversely, an item or two that used to be a, you know, money in the bank shot or whatever, that is not getting you the returns you used to.

Steve Farber Yeah. So I’m not sure this, this directly falls in the category of surprising, although it might. Okay. I, I am always surprised by the degree to which people in my community, people have been, you know, reading my books and coming to my events and following me online, whatever, their, their beautiful desire to help. And I have, I’m, not very good at asking for help. So the surprise to me is when I do ask for help, the kind of response that I get, for example, in launching this book, I just went out to my community and I said, hey, who’d like to just help get the word out about the book? I’m putting together a launch team. I’m not bribing anybody with anything other than a t-shirt. And who would like to help get the world out about love is just damn good business? We had 150 people sign up for that, like in a day. And, and it’s like… wow, that’s surprising to me. So what I’m taking away from that is I need to do that more. And I have to kind of reverse roles in it a little bit. When my mentors ask me for help, that’s like the greatest compliment somebody could pay me, right? But it’s hard for me to think of it the other way around. So that’s been surprising to me. The business model that’s not working like it used to is what we were just talking about is the reliance on the speaking industry. I mean, I’ve had years where I have, you know, earned over a million dollars in speaking fees. And I have years, let’s just say, where I haven’t had.

Peter Winick Let’s call those 2008, 2009, right?

Steve Farber So it just doesn’t, the dynamics are just not the same as they used to be. The exception to the rule is either when somebody is very, you know, they’re speaking for different reasons, they they’re more like, you know, business development opportunities, not about fees. You can do it. You could be speaking pretty much, I could be speaking every day if that’s what people have been saying, Hey, I’ll just come and speak at your event and let me, you know, pitch from the stage, but I don’t do that. Maybe I should, maybe I should. but I don’t. Or. Exposure. Yeah, that’s right. Or if you’re at the other end of the spectrum where you’re kind of celebrity, yeah, yeah, right. Like Tom Peters in his day or now, you know, you know, Gladwell or Michelle Obama, or when you’ve got that kind of visibility, that then it’s great. But for the rest of us, which of course, is the is most of us. It’s just not it’s just not the same as it used to be in terms of you know reliability for income.

Peter Winick I get it.

Steve Farber in my experience.

Peter Winick Yes. No, thank you for that. So I want to thank you for sharing your journey. It’s been an awesome one. It’s a great one. I want to wish you the best of luck with love is just damn good business. I’ve got my t-shirt. I’m going to put it up on social soon. So I’m gonna be the first time in my life at 51. I will be a chubby t- shirt model. So I think I’m for all your work and being transparent and sharing everything today Steve. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Steve Farber It was my pleasure. My pleasure, Peter. Thanks for having me.

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 Thought Leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.