Explore transformative change with Tony Lockwood and me on The Transformation Leaders Podcast. We explore change in both personal and organizational transformation. Both Tony and David explore the importance of understanding why change is needed.
David shares his journey from working in a tech startup to becoming a business coach. He emphasizes the importance of continuous transformation in business, citing his own experience of driving 20-25% revenue growth by constantly innovating and simplifying processes.
David also discusses how organizational transformation involves changing belief systems that lead to new behaviors, similar to personal transformation.
The conversation touches on Southwest Airlines’ decision to pre-assign seats, which David considers a major transformation that challenges long-standing industry beliefs. The discussion also highlights the need for leaders to foster belief changes in their teams to support long-term transformation. David advises that organizations and individuals often underestimate their ability to transform. That even small, incremental improvements can lead to significant change over time. Give the podcast a listen.
Audio
Transformation Leaders: https://thetransformationleadershub.com/changing-belief-systems-to-create-transformative-change-a-discussion-with-coach-david-greer/
Transcript
Tony (00:04):
Welcome to the Transformation Leaders Podcast. I’m Tony Lockwood, your host, and today we have a great show for you. But before I introduce my guest, I’d like to introduce you to a resource that you’ll just have to get your hands on, whether you’re a senior executive steering complex transformations, or a mid-level manager looking to make a significant impact. The transformation Leader’s Body of Knowledge is your go-to guide this comprehensive resource covers best practices, strategies and tools that will help you navigate change management challenges and drive successful outcomes in your organization. Grab a copy and let me know what you think today. Hello David. Welcome to the Transformation Leaders Podcast. Thank you for joining me today. We start these episodes in the same way, each one by asking you just to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you, your background, what you’ve been involved in, but more importantly, how did you get first involved in organizational change and transformation?
David (01:05):
Hi everyone. I’m Coach David J. Greer and I’m a 45 plus year entrepreneur and a business coach and facilitator. When I was still at university getting my computer science degree, I joined a young software startup as the first employee after the founders. And I liked the place and stayed 20 years and eventually became co-owner. And so a lot of my experience in transformation and Change is leading that company. Robelle was the name, it was named for the two founders, Robert and Annabelle, a concatenation of their name. And obviously especially in high tech, the pace of change and the change in the technology that you’re working with, you can’t stand still or you’ll go out of business. It’s your market. What you’re doing forces you to be constantly doing that. And then in addition, we were growing company at a very fast pace, so we had to figure out how are we going to grow this business and not blow it up and how are we going to look after our customers the first, so another woman was hired, Kerry Lathwell was hired the same month as me and Bob and Annabelle and Kerry and I, we were the business from that point for five years and we grew probably 20 to 25% top line revenue growth per year.
(02:47):
And the only way we could do that is we kept transforming. Like for example, my former partner, Bob and I, we would actually engineer out client questions like client tech support calls. We’d like, you know what we’ve had in the last two months, this same call, how could we change the product? It just never came up. And we also transformed how we did administration and simplified things so that we could set a level of growth with only four employees. And so again, every year there was stuff that changed and then there was a transformation when we added our first new tech support person. And then we continued to add employees and grow the business till eventually we had twenty employees,
Tony (03:36):
Many, what’s that?
David (03:39):
20 employees in the end. So still a relatively small organization, especially compared I think to who a lot of your listeners and to the work that you do. But on the other hand, the software that we were selling was being sold to major divisions, including Fortune 500 divisions that were then going to implement and create change for thousands and thousands of users. We were always involved with the IT people to enable the change that they were bringing to the table, purchasing and implementing our software. There was that aspect as well.
Tony (04:20):
When did you leave that company and move into the coaching arena?
David (04:26):
In 2001, I unexpectedly ended up out of the business. My former partner and I had a major disagreement and we settled it by him buying me out. And the year before, my wife had sold her physiotherapy clinic and someone smarter than me sat me down and said, your kids will never be 11, nine, and five again. And I had literally, if your listeners can imagine the most cheesy, cartoonish light bulb over my head moment. I had it sitting in the chair when this woman asked me that question. And from that we decided to commission a sailboat in the south of France and take our three kids and homeschool them for two years while sailing more than 10,000 kilometers in the Mediterranean.
Tony (05:12):
Wow. What an experience for you and the children.
David (05:17):
Exactly. A lot of growth and change in that. And then I came back, I did three years of angel investing, investing in startups, working for options. I didn’t realize how unfulfilling that was until I met an amazing coach in 2007 and I hired him and then he helped me get back into a series of executive roles where I was principally a senior sales and marketing leader, but I was usually working directly with an entrepreneur friend of mine and helping behind the scenes with the strategy and some of the bigger picture things. My last gig there was with a telematics company, that’s a company that has devices, you bolt to trucks and cars and tracks them in real time and then provide information to better use the fleets, the people. And that was a 35 million a year, 160 employee publicly traded company. But more importantly, the coach I hired coach Kevin, I built the trust relationship with him. And 18 months after we started working together, I told him my biggest secret. And that was that I had a challenge with drinking. And my challenge was actually that I was an alcoholic, and he coached me to 12 step recovery and I’ve now been sober for 15 and a half years. And that personally has been the single biggest transformation of my life.
(06:59):
But to get to the final piece, which you’re, I know it’s a long answer, but I’m an old guy, the coaching bit. When I came out of Webtech Wireless, which was the telematics company, I realized that I had worked as hard in the previous three years as I probably had in any time in my career, and now I’m in my mid fifties and I did not need to prove to anyone I could work hard. And so I worked with coach Kevin and decided to become an entrepreneurial coach and facilitator largely to give back to entrepreneurs the gifts that Kevin had given to me. And so I launched that practice nine years ago. I launched a book Wind Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth. Then about four years ago, I decided to become public about my recovery and I specialize in helping entrepreneurs who are challenged by alcoholism or addiction.
Tony (07:59):
Wow, I do appreciate that. That’s really interesting. Thank you for that.
David (08:03):
There’s just a few transformations in that 40 plus year journey.
Tony (08:11):
Absolutely. Which leads me on to the next question, which is how do you define transformation? Probably with what you’ve just said, there’s two types of transformation. There’s the personal transformation, but also then there’s the organization business transformation. We’re more focused on the organizational side rather than the personal transformations. But it’d be useful just to get your perspective on that question.
David (08:39):
Since you and I first talked, I have a reflected on this question. I think it’s a fantastic question. I have the same answer for both personal and organizational, which I believe transformation is a change in belief systems.
(08:54):
It’s a change in some belief, a belief that you have yourself or the personal transformation side, or it’s a belief that an organization or the people in the organization have that needs to change in order to create the transformation. And those beliefs lead to behaviors personally, and those beliefs at the organizational level lead to organizational behavior. And I think you have to start with changing those belief systems to create change. Now, I did want to share with your listeners a really interesting corporate example, which is in process, it’s not done yet, it’s more applicable to our American listeners, but I think all of us can relate to it, which is Southwest Airlines has been in business for I believe 50 plus years. And they took a page of Jim Collins book, which Jim talks about SMAC, which is specific, methodical and consistent operations and really boiling it in. And Southwest is a master at this and a big part of their branding and their SMAC is that they don’t pre-assign seats.
(10:14):
The management, the senior leadership at Southwest have decided they’ve changed their belief around how they compete and they believe they no longer in the current airline environment without having premium seats and pre-assigned seats. They have announced that they’re going to do this, and there’s already been a lot of that from clients. A lot of us in the leadership space are really watching. This is so transformative to take something that was core, it was a founding principle of the airline 50 years ago, and to have the courage to make the decision that things have fundamentally changed enough in the market that you need to make this change. And then of course there’s tens of thousands of employees at Southwest and hundreds of thousands of repeat customers. This is in process. They’ve made the announcement, they haven’t actually made the change yet. And this is one, a lot of us in the leadership and coaching space are really watching with interest because it’s going to be really interesting to see how Southwest manages to do this and what it’s going to look like a year from now.
Tony (11:31):
Absolutely. And it’s interesting actually that you raised that example and the fact that it is so new in terms of the announcement, because the first question that I would have and the logical question back to you, I think is the question that a lot of organizations should have when they’re thinking about transformation, why? What’s behind that decision? And it’d be interesting to see how Southwestern communicate that. Why? Because I think that’s probably the first part of helping to change those beliefs within the customers, within their employees. Ultimately the behaviors,
David (12:23):
To answer it more broadly, I do a lot of work around strategic planning and I work with, and I also coach, I only have high performing clients as a general rule, right? They’re high performing entrepreneurs and these entrepreneurs, it’s high performing people in general are all onto the next challenge and they’re often onto the next challenge and already rolling up their sleeves and figuring out how to go solve this. I often pause the conversation just the way you did, which is why or can we take this challenge and can we flip it over and see it as an opportunity? So rather than solving the actual challenge, could we somehow operate the business in a different way that would give us new opportunities and why would that be important? And I often ask that why? I focus more on why and much less on how, and also a lot of high performers and I come from the high tech background, so we’re engineers, right? We’re computer scientists, so everything’s about how there is no other question. It takes a lot to remind. And I have some high tech entrepreneurs as clients, and I got to take them back to why’d you start the business? Why is this important? What impact will this have, make this change? Whereas they’re already two thirds of the way down the road of actually implementing it.
Tony (14:03):
Yeah, no, absolutely. And that happens all the time, doesn’t it? Someone gets an idea, they run with it because they think it’s a really good idea, but not really clarity around what it is that they’re doing. But as you say, why is it important? What’s the impact upon and everybody else then is it being driven by the customer? Is it being driven by internal efficiency? All of that stuff. It almost gets ignored because actually I’ve got a really good idea and go with it. It’s that sort of net shiny object syndrome, isn’t it?
David (14:41):
Or I had a client yesterday, a very successful family business, and he has, they’re in the wholesale seafood business and they have a certain number of mistakes and he was, well, what do you think if I hire checkers and this? And finally I left. He was so kind of entrenched in solving the problem his way. I finally said, could you take the driver manager and the drivers and maybe and a couple other pickers and could you just put ’em in a room and could you just facilitate a discussion around, here’s a problem and I want to see less of it.
(15:25):
Right? And don’t offer any of your solutions, just listen. I said, first of all, they probably have better ideas, the ones who do it. They’re experiencing it every day. And even if they come up with your idea, they will implement it and buy into it way more when they feel it’s their idea. The ownership. Yeah, and the ownership piece. And again, as leaders, we so often and often we do have the experience that it is likely the best solution, but I think it’s really important that we be open, that we’re wrong and that we go to the source. I think in organizations, it’s probably one of the things most organizations could improve is going lower down in the organization to the people actually have the interactions with customers who actually build things,
(16:26):
Who actually move things around a warehouse, like you can say, again, our goal is to be the top 20% most profitable business in our sector, and right now we’re at 50%. I’m challenging all of us to find a way to be more profitable because I’m the owner of the company and I want us to be more profitable. And that is an owner’s prerogative. And as an employee, you don’t necessarily get to agree or disagree with that. That is the owner’s prerogative, but at least the owner’s being clear of what the goal is and what has to happen. And then is looking for individuals to come up with, and I did this at my time at Robelle, we had a little flat turn one year, and I challenged the company to find a hundred thousand dollars savings without laying anyone off in one year. And they hit, and I didn’t say, I offered no advice as to where you’re going to find it. And they found a hundred thousand dollars plus of savings
Tony (17:28):
Nine times out of 10. I find that if there’s a problem within the organization, the people that are most likely to understand that problem and have a good idea of how to resolve it are those frontline staff that are dealing with it daily. And it’s that upside down management, that belief that actually the most important people in the organization are the people that are interfacing with your customers and everybody, everybody else within the organization is there to support them and support the people that are supporting them. And as managing directors, CEO or whatever you are there to support the people that are supporting the people that are supporting the people that are supporting the frontline people and having that mindset and that mentality is delivers significant added value rather than the traditional and the big cheese. And you’ll do, as I said,
David (18:30):
Yeah, and it’s probably just nuance, but instead of support, I use the word how do we make that individual successful in their role? Again, is really about focusing on their success. How will they know that they’re successful? I work in a framework by a guy, Verne Harnish, his books are the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, and one of his, he believes that really well-managed companies, every person at the end of every day can say whether they had a good day or a bad day objectively because they hit a number. Again, you’ve figured it out. Now to actually figure this out in an organization is really hard, but is well worth it.
Tony (19:26):
But I think the challenge is coming into, back into the general change in transformation world is giving people and helping people to get clarity around their role and the way that they will get measured and giving them and allowing them to understand what that means as they go through whatever change you’re trying to get through. But one of the challenges, I think a lot of transformation leaders or consultants who are working in this space, and I was talking to someone this morning, the easy option for a consultant who’s working with a firm or an organization or someone that’s leading the transformation is to see an issue, talk about that issue and then take ownership of that issue and come back with this is what we should be doing. The real skill is to identify that issue, engage the people to take ownership of that issue or that problem, and facilitate that discussion so that they come as you’ve just so that they come up with a solution and then help them and support them to put that solution in place. Because as you just said, they’ve got ownership of it, they believe in it, and the change management piece will be so much easier. But it is a mindset change for a lot of people who are working in this consulting throughout changing transformation world.
David (21:11):
And again, I go back to my opening about what transformation is to me is about changing belief systems. So first of all, you have to change the leadership belief, which is, I have the answers and I’ll tell you how to do it. But then there’s the broader in order to get buy-in and to work with those people, well for example, if you’re going to go to people and ask them for their advice, well first of all, you need to actually take it and implement something. You never can implement all employees ideas. If you can do five or 10%, you’re probably doing pretty well. But if you don’t do any, then people are like, why should we give you feedback? Because you’re not going to listen, which again gets back to belief systems about a leader. You have to actually believe, you have to have a behavior that’s consistent with listening and taking what you’re being told.
(22:01):
But you also may have to work pretty hard on the belief systems in the organization. You hear a lot of the, we’ve always done it this way, which then gets back to your opening question of, you got to be very clear on why that’s true. We’ve always done it this way. And our goal now in Southwest Airlines, our goal is to become more competitive against our competitors. And we’ve identified that this is what customers want. And so yes, we’ve always done it that way and we need to do it differently in the future if we’re going to survive as an airline. And so again, it’s working with people’s belief systems and showing them that the current belief system is not going to work going forward and what the new system needs to be.
Tony (22:52):
Absolutely. We talk about within the transformation world, and I talk about the transformation canvas and one element of the nine pillars within the canvas is the business model. And the key question when you’re looking around the business model is how do you deliver value to your clients or your customers? And all too often coming back to the point about the next shiny thing, come in with an idea that can actually start to detract very quickly the value that you’re delivering to your customers, but they think it’s a good thing to do.
(23:32):
You’ve got to step back and say, okay, look at these nine areas and where is it? But is it going to have an impact to any negative impact on any of these areas or do we need to make some adjustments in these areas to allow that to happen at the optimum? It’s quite interesting that Southwest have come out and said, actually, we’re driving this change because it’s being demanded by our customers, and if we’re going to survive as an airline, we’ve got to adapt and we’ve got to change. They understand that value that the customer is driving towards.
David (24:11):
And I would say Southwest, more than most airlines, truly understood a lot of its value, and it also understood how it could deliver very low cost tickets. It fundamentally built structures, for example, their average turnaround on time on the ground is lower than almost all other airlines. It’s baked into their smack and that’s one of the pushbacks, it’s going to take longer to load the plane, so they’ll have to figure that out. And in the current environment, I’d say the biggest shiny red ball that we keep hearing about is artificial, right? And it’s the latest, greatest new thing on the block and will it cause transformation for some industries and businesses? Absolutely. And does everybody need to look at it right away? Probably not. You’re a big enough organization, you probably need a senior leader that’s looking at its potential, especially as what would happen if your competitors took it up in a big way and would it give them competitive advantage?
(25:26):
But again, the value is question to me, I do a lot of work around strategic marketing and looking where people fit in their market space. To me, you have to get the intersection of the market problem. You’re trying to solve the competitive space, so you can’t operate in a vacuum and pretend like there’s no competitors. And then what are you really, really good at? Because I think your sweet spot is the intersection, that Venn diagram intersection of what the market pain is, what your competitors are doing and what you are really good at, especially that you are good at that your competitors through your sweet spot. And that’s where the value can have. The other way I describe it to entrepreneurs and their teams is the bigger the headache and the better your pain pill, the more value you deliver. And you often deliver value in places you don’t, you may not be paying attention to. One of the examples that’s in my book is we have a local security company and it turns out that the security industry has really a dirty secret they don’t tell us about, which is an alarm goes off, nothing happens.
(26:58):
What happens is in some call centers somewhere probably thousands of miles or kilometers from where you are, something goes off in someone’s console and they call you, hello Mr. Greer, your alarm is going off, and I might be halfway around the world at that time, it’s not really that useful to get a phone call. So Mike Jagger founder, his company on the Brand Promise, five minutes to your door or your money back, and then he built a system to actually show up at your door if an alarm goes off and is one of the very few people in that whole industry, which actually does something when an alarm goes off. For people who really appreciate that, there’s huge value in that. Not everybody cares about that, but the ones that do tend to care a lot and are willing to pay a high premium to get that level of service. Again, you have a whole industry and where the whole action of the industry changes what value you can deliver.
Tony (28:07):
Absolutely. Great example. And as I say, going back to the Southwest Airlines, they were one of the, I think maybe the first low cost airline that really created a whole industry globally for many years. I’m not too sure whether they still are, but for many years they were the most profitable airline. They globally, it was like, well, we are delivering the best ticket prices, but actually we’re creating the biggest profit. It was almost how could that possibly be? It’s counterintuitive, but because they were getting the fundamentals, they kept the cost down and they did the turnaround come through. And in Europe, there’s so many airlines that copied their, and what they did and what the European Airlines have done is got people flying that never flew before because it was,
(29:16):
There’s a story a good few years ago. So one of the European copycats is a company called Ryanair, and the chief Ryanair is a guy, oh, his name’s just gone completely out of my head. Anyway, the chief exec is a bit larger than life character early days. It was all about creating media coverage for saying silly things and doing silly things and just being plain devil’s advocate in lots of things. Michael Ryan, that’s his name. And there was a story that in the UK, one of the centers was at Luton at one of the hubs at Luton Airport just north of London, and he was flying out of Luton one day and this old guy grabbed hold of him and said, look, you, my flight’s been canceled at the last moment. I’m sick to death of it. This is happening and I’m going across to Ireland to see my daughter with my new grandchild and your company screwed my plans up and really, really quite aggressive.
(30:37):
My Ryan came back and said, okay, so I’m really sorry about that. I don’t know what’s happened, but all I can do is apologize, but let me just step back and say, what are you flying to Island for now? And he said, oh, I’m going to see my daughter. Oh, okay. And how often do you go and see your daughter? 4, 5, 6 times a year. Oh, okay. You, how have you managed to get there four or five, six times a year. Oh, well, because it’s cheaper now on Ryanair than it’s ever been before and you turns finger around really easily. They demonstrated the core values of, in that case, what Ryanair is all about and how it opened up a whole new market for them to get to and from point to point transfer,
David (31:33):
Little unknown sidebar note is that the software that was used to create the whole backend for Southwest Airlines, the was on the computing platform that my company Robelle specialized in. One of the products that I was chief architect of was at the core of their batch processing. And many of the other copycat airlines, including WestJet here in Canada and EasyJet in the UK were also, so there was a little, anyways, it’s a long time ago, but it was a pretty fundamental piece of their backend infrastructure.
Tony (32:15):
Yeah, yeah. Again, I love these stories where some relatively small element of innovation completely, radically changed as a whole sector. And that’s what that did, didn’t it? The previous it did. Ability to have differential pricing policies based upon the amount of purchases made and understanding how to optimize the revenue per flight just completely change the whole industry
David (32:59):
And the cost side, they specialized in the Boeing 737 and they made a commitment early on to only buy one kind of airplane and then only have stock of one kind of spare parts and have mechanics that only needed to know how to fix one kind of airplane again. And sometimes these transformation choices you can see in hindsight, but you don’t realize how radical they are. They were completely different than what was being done at the time.
Tony (33:33):
When you look back in hindsight on that, it’s like it’s obvious, isn’t it?
David (33:39):
But it always is. But the problem is it’s not obvious looking forward. It’s only obvious when you look backwards.
Tony (33:47):
Well, there’s so many lessons that people can learn from that approach of saying, let’s standardize, let’s stay with, let’s ensure that everybody understands that and let’s move forward, as opposed to going in lots and lots of different directions all at the same time. That power of one,
David (34:06):
Again, like Mike Jagger and an industry secret or an industry practice, again, it’s about belief systems like, oh, everyone in the industry does it this way. And then what happens if you are willing to actually challenge that and maybe you don’t get anywhere. Maybe there’s lots of good reasons why it’s that way, but maybe there’s a new path forward that really challenges the way it’s being done in that industry. And you can be a transformative player in a marketplace by doing things fundamentally different than they’ve always been done in that sector. Although again, it takes a lot of courage. The easy route is always just to do it like other. And so I want to remind your listeners, if you’re in the middle of any kind of transformation or you’re leading a transformation change, there’s a lot of personal, it takes personal courage to change your belief. My getting sober required me to radically look at my belief systems and what got me to that point, and I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and organizations to fundamentally change, as I say, you have to face the brutal facts. And oftentimes we are not willing to face the brutal facts like they’re there. But in my experience, 50% of the battle is recognizing the brutal fact.
Tony (35:40):
Absolutely.
David (35:42):
Right. It’s half the battle and almost anyone you can figure a way forward once you’ve admitted what the brutal, for me personally, the brutal fact was that I was a daily drinker for 20 years and I was an alcoholic, and that was the absolute brutal fact. I was in denial for 20 years, and at one point I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I couldn’t live in that denial anymore, and I had to face up to that brutal fact about myself.
Tony (36:14):
I think interestingly enough, isn’t it, if you translate that into the organizational context, we talk a lot within change in transformation, that change in transformation is much easier when you’ve got a cliff edge or you’ve got … Yes, to some extent. What I found is that even if you haven’t got a burning platform or a cliff edge, if you create one making some absolute commitment that actually this cannot continue in the way that you obviously did, came to the conclusion that actually I can’t continue to have a drink every day. If you create one burning platform within an organization that’s just as effective as if the burning platform was real. If you can create one and get people understanding as it drives that why, going back to what we were talking about earlier.
David (37:13):
Yeah. And senior leaders have to stick the course about the artificial one they created. That’s the other place where that breaks down.
Tony (37:22):
Totally agree
David (37:24):
Because, and you have to have generally some kind of consequence to not achieving it.
Tony (37:29):
No, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, just I suppose bringing it back to the business side and using a silly analogy, but I’ve got involved in the past with lots and lots of technology implementations, and the thing that you’ve got to ensure for success within any technology implementation is that you stop people from reverting back to where they were previously and what they used to do previously. Some people say, oh, well they won’t have that system. We switch that system off. But what they forget is that they used to take a load of data dumps and put it into Excel, and you’re still giving them the dumping data out of your new system into Excel. They continue to do it, and I just said, just turn off that switch to say that they can export into Excel because people like doing what they’ve always done, they don’t like change.
David (38:31):
Well, and it is a lot of work if you have built a lot of business process down, having that Excel spreadsheet and the data that it gives you and the insights that it gives you in a new system. And if you turn off that ability to download to Excel, you still need that information and it can be quite painful to figure out how to use the new system to give you that information that you needed. However, we still have the same core problems as once you take it out of the system and put it in Excel spreadsheet, it’s not up to date. No one else can see it, no one else can see the decisions that you’re making because of the data that you’ve got. And so again, some of it is helping educate people that it’s not just about you. That this system is intended to provide insight and efficiencies to a whole segment of the organization. And if you don’t buy in and help us keep it within the system, then we lose all of that benefit that we’re counting on.
Tony (39:36):
Absolutely. So going back to the start, you’re saying that you think it’s very much about belief changing and changing the behaviors off the back of that chain of belief. Taking that and bringing the decision to a close. In your experience, what’s the one thing that people need to do or have in place to enable that sort of belief change to happen and then ultimately the behavior change?
David (40:09):
Well, I reflected on that question too. I maybe phrase it just slightly different, but I think it’s the personal belief. I always underestimate my ability to change and transform, and there’s always that very significant resistance at the start because of that.
(40:33):
I was talking to someone this morning about James Clear and his book Atomic Habits that talks about if you make a 1% or even a half of 1% change every day, but you stay the course for a year or two years or five years, you’ll create unbelievable change. And my belief is we are all capable of this change. And so don’t underestimate yourself and your organization and the ability to change. And if you need to just get on the 1% path, I mean, often transformative change takes more than that, but if that’s what it takes to get started and to get going, then do it. Anyways, that, that’s my takeaway that I’d listeners to have is, are you underestimating your ability to change and transform yourself? And are you underestimating the ability of the organization to change its belief systems and its behaviors and what it’s truly capable of?
Tony (41:45):
Great example. And that sort of marginal gaze, that 1% improvement day in day out in the UK, there’s a guy called Dave Brailsford who was the chief coach for UK cycling, British chief cycling, and then went into Sky cycling. And we went from winning nothing in cycling to winning gold after gold after gold in the Olympics and Sky going from a brand new team to winning I think three or four tour fans on consecutive years. And on this marginal gain, it was, if I can improve every element by 1%, the cumulative effect of that is massive. And I’m hoping he has exactly the same impact because they’ve just come in and be part of the football team that I support, Manchester United in winning things as opposed to coming eighth in the league. But with that, thank you very much, David. It was a pleasure and really interesting conversation. Thank you.
David (43:02):
Thanks so much, Tony. It was really great to be here today.
Tony (43:07):
Thank you for listening to this podcast. We are always interested in hearing from you, what do you find useful from this pod? What would you want us to explore more in the future? Please do press the subscribe button. It helps us to reach more people, share the experiences of all my guests, and remember to check out my book, transformation Leaders Body of Knowledge. See the link in the show notes. See you soon.
