The Transformation First-Mile: Preparing for Market and Industry Disruptions, with Gregg Garrett

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molotour.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molotor Group, Ed. Ed Molitore. What an episode we have for you today with our special guest, Greg Garrett. Greg is the CEO and Managing Director of CGS Advisors. And what is CGS Advisors, you might ask? They are a boutique strategy and innovation advisory firm. As such, Greg and his team pushes the limits of corporate cultures by developing and implementing unique strategies that capitalize on technology oriented disruptions to industries and markets. As you can imagine, Greg has a ton of value to share.

We're going to talk about a number of things, some of them being why starting his first company at age 16 set Greg on the path to lifelong entrepreneurship, why he chose to leave his previous employer and create CGS Advisors, why Greg titled his book Competing in the Connecting World. The future of your industry is already here. And inside of that book, one of the things Greg talks about is why focusing their clients on the transformation first mile. I love this. The transformation first mile is so important to helping firms see where the future in their industry is going, disruption in the industry and then helping them get there. And Greg takes that transformation first mile and he breaks it down into three steps.

First step is to envision the disruptive potential, understand what's going on in the industry and what capabilities are necessary to succeed in it. Then the second part, as you can imagine, is assessing your capability gaps and the magnitude of them. With the last piece being investing and the response, Greg will also talk about why it's important to prepare and not predict, why speed is critical to success in moving forward and how inertia makes people change slowly. Why as a leader, it is necessary to be able to pull people away from one role to put them in a better position to succeed in a different position. And this is where the coaching comes in and then how rewarding it is when you see they realize that it was the correct move despite their initial pushback.

Now, in full disclosure, before we get started here, there are a few moments of challenging sound quality. Just a couple little glitches. Not for an extended period of time. Stay with it though, because I'm telling you, every single thing Greg has to say has an incredible amount of value. Enjoy the episode. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today on the Athletics of business podcast. I am humbled and fired up to have you with us.

Thanks so much for having me.

So, Greg, let's really just jump right into. You are the CEO and managing director of CGS Advisors. Can you tell us what you do at cgs. Tell us how CGS came to be about what it is. Absolutely. That your singleness of purpose there.

Yeah, sure. CGS Advisors is a transformation advisory forum. We do advisory work, we do consulting work. We break those two into two different categories. Advisory, really helping leaders at corporations, mostly large enterprise, but some smaller, medium size as well, advising them on where the future is going, what's happening, disruption industry, where they need to take their firm, and then consulting, helping them to get there. We call that whole thing the transformation first mile. Recognizing and doing some of the planning, mostly advisory work, and then helping them to kind of walk the first portions of the change, removing inertia, etc. More consulting work. Having a team there to handhold them a bit as they start that process.

I love the transformation first mile. Can you talk a little bit about how, A, how significant it is and B, someone could be listening right now and saying, well, you know what, my first mile really sucked. It didn't go real well. How do I bounce back? You know, how do I kind of catch up a little bit? Can you talk into those two things a little?

Yeah, happy to. This is a big part of. We put a book out last year called Competing in the Connecting World. We think that competition in the connected world is different from the unconnected world. Not disconnected, but the unconnected world. Meaning before all this, digital data was flowing from products and people and throughout basically that first mile, we break into three parts. We want to make this super easy for the executive. We say the first step is to envision the disruptive potential, understand what's going on industry and what capabilities are necessary to succeed in it. The second part is assessing your capability gaps, the magnitude of them. Leaders that see a huge gap see risk. Those that see a very small gap see opportunity. And if you're on either end of those likely, there's motivation to do something.

If you're in the middle and you're just kind of running around thinking, well, maybe it's a little bit of a change, you're probably not going to do anything. So that's really where the motivation drives. And then last piece is investing to implement the response. Those first two things happen in small conference rooms, closed doors, white paper, strategy offices, etcetera. The hard part is actually investing and taking the time. And we call that the first mile because we do use the marathon reference there. I'm not a marathon runner myself. My wife happens to be. But a lot of marathon runners say you need to really set your pace in that first mile. Your success over the long haul will be set in the first mile of the long run. And that's kind of the same metaphor we play with.

I love that now, you know, for someone like me, like when I jump into something, I jump into it. Right. So if it's a change, if it's transformation, I'm going to go full bowl, you know, just full blown into it. So are you saying that first mile, not so much pacing yourself, but figuring out your rhythm, your cadence, what you know, how exactly the process you go about getting things done?

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot about, number one, understanding what the race is. Right, Getting the right perspective set, understanding what is happening, that this is likely. When we talk about this connectivity, at least this digitization, this catalyst for change, it's what academics would call a technological discontinuity. It is technology that is making what normal was discontinuous from what it is tomorrow. And it's that technological discontinuities always, 100% always result industry disruption. So when people are looking at change, a lot of times we spend time speaking to them about what type of change. Are you imagining this technology, this change, or this catalyst is only going to force a small improvement? Or are you really thinking that the whole industry structure around you is shifting? Maybe you're going to be in a different business. Maybe this is a corporate strategy.

What business are you in kind of conversation, or perhaps it's a business strategy. How are you going to compete in the business you're already in differently? Most of the time people think of strategic change at the functional level. How's this going to affect marketing? How's this going to affect it? How is this going to affect something? So we try to get them up first. Think about, are you in the same business tomorrow? If you are or if you're not, how are you going to compete in it? And then eventually bring them back down and drive them out. So that's most of the time that's what we're looking for. How much they jump in is definitely their decision, but we want to make sure they're thinking about that jump, you know, with the right context around them.

Can we talk a little bit? I'm just sitting here picturing a listener Thinking, okay, disruption. Some folks look at disruption and disruption disrupting, excuse me, industries with a negative connotation. But truth be told, what we're talking about is change. And we're living in a time where the pace and range of change is unlike anything we've ever seen. So can you talk about the significance of the understanding of what disruption really is?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're real intentional or I'm real intentional with the words that we choose. We use that word disruption to only be applying to the industrial level change. The industry disruption and disruption for us and for some academics would be stable markets. You can pretty much say who the leaders in those markets are. Think of a company, here's your top five companies, here's your next five companies, here's your next 5 companies. And there might be minor change year to year of two overtakes 1, 3 overtakes 4, 3 drops below 4, etc. But for the most part you have stable markets, especially folks in the financial markets, they like that, they like understanding long term hold type of buys and long term growth. Disruption means probably many new entrants.

It probably means something has changed in the environment where you may have startups, you may have new entrants from other industries coming in, you might have consolidation in the market, but over the course of a fairly short period of time, maybe measured in years or five or six, seven years, you have major shakeups. You're seeing that more and more. You can look at the retail market and see what's happened with companies like Sears or Kmarts or Toys R Us. They're completely going out of business or being rebranded or relaunched as online stores. You can see that a decade ago in the media industry of how the distribution of at the time CDs were done in a brick and mortar kind of way and driven out.

You can see it in an industry I know pretty well, automotive moving more towards a mobility market instead of just selling hardware, selling these steel made cars. A lot of the valuation out there and a lot of the money being spent currently is about moving goods and people and ideas. It's mobility, it's the movement of things, not so much the hardware that's going to do it. So, so it's this kind of level of change that we're talking about, industrial industry level disruption. And then we talk about at the firm level, firms to respond to that have to transform. That's the change that we use at the company level. So what will the company do? It needs to transform in response or in preparation for the industry. Disruption.

So how important is preparation?

Well, it's everything. You use a lot of sports metaphors on this podcast and if you don't practice, you're not going to be able to play well. Right? And so it's a. Preparation can be practicing the skills and preparation can be understanding the plays. So take away from the metaphor, it's extremely important. I would say that the only caveat I'd give to it is you can't prepare for too long. In fact, we have a chapter in the book that we talk about is prepare, don't predict. So preparation for a lot of stable companies has been forecasting what will growth look like, how many units will you sell, what percentage of the market will you take? And in stable times, you probably can forecast pretty accurately. When you start thinking about how all this stuff is changing, industries may be shifting. You can start preparing.

You can absolutely prepare and get some of the capabilities necessary. And you can say things like, well, data is more important than it was yesterday. I'm going to start getting data scientists or I read all about artificial intelligence and that's starting to become a big trend. I better start dabbling in AI in order to be relevant in the future. But really understanding a forecastable level is probably not there. So that's part of the preparation. Preparation is super important and you may need to think about preparation different than prediction. And that's what we spend a lot of time helping clients try to get comfortable with.

So tying that into the athletics of business and the mindset that the traits and behaviors of high performing teams, elite athletes, are key to your success in business as you prepare for the disruption and for the change. And sometimes things don't come to fruition and don't evolve in the way that you think they might. How significant are those behavior skills and leadership skills that you and I have talked about managing those situations?

Well, the management of management skills are going to be important today as they are the future leadership, you know, may be a little different than management. At least that's the, it's pretty talked about these days of the difference between leading and managing. If were to throw it on this kind of transformation and disruption space, leading needs to be able to get out in front a little bit more. They need to help maybe remove some of the barriers that then managers can manage through. I'd say that maybe management isn't changing as much. I'd say leadership is probably coming more and more into focus and one of the skills, one of the capabilities that we talk about A lot is bravery, is being able to be brave enough to support these change.

Inertia inside of corporations, especially ones that have had success, is a difficult thing to overcome. Inertia comes in several flavors. We can certainly talk about it if you'd like, but inertia is what makes people change slowly. And if you look at these times in the past of disruption, we use examples like imagine the world before the internal combustion engine and then after. Or imagine before electrical power generation and distribution and then after. This is the kind of technological change that we think is happening right now with data, with what we broadly refer to as the connected world technologies. You add all these different micro technologies up together and it's a massive change.

Well, if you study those patterns, getting to the point, if you study those patterns in the past, firms that move more quickly are the ones that have a higher chance to succeed. So how important is leadership? How important are these skills? Extremely important, because you have to. Have to be brave enough to move forward, build some space and let the managers manage into it. But you have to motivate them to say, hey, this is a safe thing to do, to try something new that's going to break the patterns of the old.

And I don't think I worded the question properly, but that was a great answer what I was getting at. So building that level of authenticity as a leader and becoming a resilient leader.

Right.

Like accepting reality, not settling for it, and having the ability to respond in a way where you don't fall victim to inertia. You can still, you know, your decision making is still quick. It is. You're still. You still make decisions with conviction. That's, that's sort of. That's what I was getting at.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know it from the courts, you know it from. From your, you know, from your business life as well as. You can't make quick decisions irresponsibly, but breaking down large decisions into small micro decisions that you can make on a much more rapid pace, checking decisions to make sure they were the right ones as you go. But absolutely, the importance of leadership and speed to decision making is absolutely critical.

So let's shift gears a little bit here. On episode 39, I had Jason Bay from Donpe on and just an unwelcome, believable episode. And he talked about when he is bringing on, as he's. As he's building this business here in the United States, Adam Pay, the number one thing he looks for and the people that he's going to bring on board is the entrepreneur spirit. And I'm not sure that I can come up with another guest that has and embodies the entrepreneur spirit quite as much as you seeing that. Did you not start your first firm when you were only 14 years old?

Well, I was 16. Yeah, it was in the teens.

Tell us where all that came from and tell us what that, what that's about.

Yeah, I mean my entrepreneur, I guess my entire career I've probably been labeled either an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur side. 16 years old, I was playing lacrosse was a pretty new sport to me. I'd grown up playing baseball as a pitcher. And when I reached that 14 year old level, I was told that I was no longer going to be a pitcher. I was going to be a great contributor to the team in the outfield. And no disrespect to the outfielders, but that's a different game. Baseball is different from the outfield than it is from the mound. And I just, I realized I wasn't in love with baseball, I was in love with pitching. And so when that happened, I crossed over sports my freshman year of high school, started playing some lacrosse.

And at the time lacrosse in Michigan, which is where I'm from, was really a new sport. And in order to get equipment, it was a real pain in the butt. And so a few. One of my friends had a great skill at stringing sticks. If you're a lacrosse fan at all, you know that the pocket and your stick is extremely. And he had incredible ability to do that. I was patient enough to be able to dye plastic and have big bats of rit dye in my basement. And we dyed heads and customized things and basically, long story short, a few of us got together and said, well, we've got some demand for ourselves, we got demand on our team and really the small number of teams around Michigan all need this stuff.

And we launched a business, we incorporated with the state, all took officer roles, started wholesaling the equipment in from the east coast, the hotbed of lacrosse, and started redistributing here. So it was basically a distribution and customization shop around La Crosse. Ran that for a few years, learned a tremendous amount of lessons, shut it down when I was in my early 20s. And then I became the intrapreneur for a bunch of years before founding CGS and doing some entrepreneurial things again.

That's awesome. That's a great story. And you weren't quite done with founding things in lacrosse. Tell us about founding the La Crosse program. Program at Oakland University.

Yeah, I guess I've somebody along the way, probably my mother or somebody, said, you know, if you put your mind to it, you can do it. And anytime I reached a place that I just saw a need, I decided to do things. So, yeah, when I went to a university called Oakland University here in Southeast Michigan, at the time it was smaller school than it is today. I went there because I was running the company and didn't want to give that company up. So instead of going to a big school away. But this university did not have a lacrosse team. And I just asked some questions of the student organization leadership saying, can we do this? And there was a lot of rumors at the time that there was not allowed to have any contact sports at the university. It was only a rumor.

Went into the archives and got some librarians to help me out looking at some of the records and contact sports were allowed. They just hadn't really taken off at ou. So back in the day before the Internet, we hung up some flyers and had a first meeting and I was blown away. We had 78 people come out for the first meeting. First team had 45 people on it. And it really had a pretty nice history. Since that point, people have continued to play ball there and on the national championship level for the club program. Never won varsity, but I was fortunate to be at the right place at the right time.

So did you coach the team as well?

Yeah, I was kind of captain coach at the beginning. And then when I graduated, prior to starting to travel a lot from my first job, I was. The coach wasn't playing any longer. And then I handed the reins to Dwayne Hicks, who was a storied lacrosse guy here in southeast Michigan, who was an all American at Notre Dame and grew up on the east coast. And he really helped take it to the next level. And then I went back and was his assistant for a few years once they reached the national level.

So how about all those experiences? Those two experiences, I should say, how have those helped you as you have scaled and had this significant success with cgs?

Well, there's a really direct one of actually founding cgs, and that's my wife, if I'm able to tell the story quickly. When I left Volkswagen with a nice title and a fairly decent job, chief strategy officer for IT and innovation, and was flying around the world doing a lot of things that were pretty important to me at the time and maybe impactful, you know, I left and decided, started taking interviews for the next gig at probably some Type of similar job. And my wife said to me, you know, are you really going to do this again? I said, well, yeah, I'm fairly young and we need some money. And she said, no, I don't mean that.

She said, when you tell the story, you know, over a cocktail or something to your friends about starting that company when you were 16 years old, your eyes glow. When you tell the stories of the work you do at large firms, you're proud of it, but your eyes don't glow. And so I want, she challenged me, she said, you're either going to try this entrepreneurial thing again so you can stop talking about the history, the ancient history, or you're going to be quiet about it because I just don't want to hear about when you were 16 anymore. So there was a very direct of my past that nudged me to get into it.

But then in addition to that, I think kind of being a person who has had found some success and a few failures along the way, but mostly I've been fortunate to find some successes or versions of success with starting things. It's given me an opportunity, working with large companies to be that intrapreneur, either in the official capacity or the advisor and maybe coach a little differently. The leaders that haven't had those opportunities to tell them, hey, it's okay to redefine what failure is called a pivot. That's what entrepreneurs call it. Entrepreneurs startups fail every day. And the funny thing is people are proud of that. They celebrate it in the entrepreneurial community. In a large firm, stability is celebrated more. And so failures, even though they're small in comparison, oftentimes they're looked down upon.

And so just little lessons like that have been extremely helpful as I've continued to navigate my career.

So let's talk about that because that's really significant what you just said and seeing failure as, you know, growing through failure, not getting through failure, right in learning from it and pivoting. And you talk about stability in the corporate culture, what were some of the ways that you would change the way people looked at that?

Well, when I was in it, doing it myself, I mean it wasn't just me helping to change it. You know, I had incredible air cover I senior leadership that basically said we believe in this and the day to day stumbles, the day to day sideways looks the day to day swimming upstream against the corporate culture. We get it, just keep the faith. Because it's not about today's revenue, it's not about even tomorrow's revenue. It's about changing the culture of this place and letting us compete differently. And so that at the end of the day, if people are listening and want to. That's an easy thing to say and really hard to do. Really hard to do. But lose focus on the importance of either the founder if you're a small company, or the executive leadership if you're a more established company.

Believing in that level of change and having your back, maybe taking it down a couple notches from that I said earlier, kind of calling it pivots instead of failures. There's a whole cultural aspect of redefining what success looks like. And I'm a big one for KPIs. I really believe that if you don't measure, you can't manage it. If you don't know what to measure, you're probably not working towards the same goals. And so as you're defining your KPIs, if you take stable company KPIs and try to immediately push those onto entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial or innovative kind of ideas, they're going to look a lot like failures because they're going to be small revenue probably, or lower cost impacts or take too much time.

So you need to redefine the KPIs, talk about the number of ideas generated, talk about the number of proof of concepts of those ideas that drove forward. Eventually you need to get to the hard metrics, the money and whatnot. But you can't do that in the first month probably you probably can't do that in the first six months or first year. So KPI selection is also another extremely important piece to kind of control the storyline around innovation and change.

What along those lines, what are some of the bigger challenges that you have faced? Not, you know, with Volkswagen, with cgs, what are some of the biggest, bigger challenges you have faced and what was the process of turning those around?

Well, I mean there's been plenty of challenges, both small and large. I'm not sure that any even the size of them matter, but I'd say broad stating. I mean, I can give some specific example, but the broadest piece of the challenges always come down to people. I've always said that people are the best and worst part of a job and people not so much as in we had a terrible employee, we had to fire them. Not those. Luckily I've been very good, knock on wood, that I haven't had that kind of thing. More, much more that people are tough. The hardest part of organizations is typically the human beings that make them up. That's really where the culture gets hardened for the most part. And so culture and the people that live the culture are the hardest part of change. There's all kinds.

We stem this back to inertia and that kind of cultural type of change that's oftentimes referred to as dominant logic inertia. It's the dominant logic of the leadership of how they see the world. And most of the time they're not doing anything bad. Most of the time they're doing everything right for their history. But convincing them to do something different has been a stumbling block. You know, I. A big part of the reason I left Volkswagen was because I was doing a lot of the right stuff at the wrong time. And I've had. I've been very fortunate. VW has been a client of ours for years and I've got a lot of good friends there still.

And so I've had some be able to come in retrospect, since it's ancient history in some ways now, we can have real conversations about that and that works out all right. We've been able to say that so much of the stuff were doing wasn't the wrong stuff. It was maybe just at the wrong time under the wrong. Under leaders that weren't ready for that kind of change. And so people, I would say, is probably the. In a nutshell are some of the hardest challenges and lots of different examples of those.

I love doing the right stuff at the wrong time, but let's say you're right in the middle of it and you know you're doing the right stuff, but you know it's the wrong time. What do you do?

I don't know if there's a one fit answer, but some of the things that you certainly can do is you can be brave enough to shut it down, which is probably one of the hardest things to do, especially if you have sunk cost into it. But if the way that I would suggest shutting it down is using some of that language, some of those pivot types of language, but actually talk about that. It was a success in learning. This is really difficult depending on how you sold the project in the first place. The second thing is split it up, find some of the parts of the right thing at the wrong time and try to adjust that into what are the parts that could be right now versus the parts that might be later.

I guess the thing that's the hardest for me to suggest has been some of the hardest for us to advise on, but it's very Difficult to. To advise, to just keep going. That's a difficult thing. But I think that what I would suggest to those that are listening to this, they have to really understand why it's the wrong time. Is it the wrong time because the market is saying it's the wrong time, or is it the wrong time because the leaders above you or the sponsors of the program aren't brave enough? And depending on the answer to that, I think that what you do is different. And that's a pretty complex one probably. But that's. That's again, here I go. It's a no.

But I love that because really, you think about that. Why is it the wrong time? And is it the market? Well, how long is it going to stay like that? Right. Is it the top leadership? Well, you know, and the thing I really. I like that you said was splitting it up. Okay, what is right for right now and why don't we do that? And I guess that almost goes to playing to your strengths, does it not?

Yeah. And your strengths being your as a human, but probably more appropriately for in this context, your as an organization, what is the organization's strengths? Where can they be successful? Can they truly make that pivot? If they launch that new product, will it have success? So, yeah, absolutely. Playing to the strengths, knowing what your differentiators are and likely deciding if those differentiators are going to matter in the next time phase, three years, five years, whatever your time horizon is, and really focusing on those differentiators. Because at the end of the day, that's all that really matters is the differentiation.

Right.

Right.

I'm going to read something from your bio if that's okay with you, because I.

Sure. I'm nervous, but yeah, I get after.

Don't. Don't be nervous. But I love this. I mean, and this really talks about probably why your wife says you glow when you talked about the company you found him when you're 16 years old. But Greg is often referred to as a visionary leader who prides himself in recognizing common sense solutions for complex problems and motivating teams to reach well beyond the typical boundaries to achieve greatness. Where. Where did that come from? And how do you do that?

Well, someone helped me write that bio at one point, so it was probably somebody that was trying to. Well, there has to be some truth to it. Come on.

I think that's awesome, though.

Thank you very much. You know, I've. It came from the corporate setting, but people are made up of their experiences. And as you and I have spoken before Ed, I've had the great fortune of coaching sports for a long while. I said I started playing lacrosse when I was 14 and I started coaching lacrosse that same year because of some circumstances. I started coaching some really young kids. And I've been coaching ever since. And so I think motivating people and trying to be a leader versus a manager has been really in my blood for a long while. And I think that some of that probably comes out in the way that I approach things in work. I really do believe that I'm good at some things and there's a lot of things that I'm not that fantastic at.

And trying to bring some people in to my organization and surround myself with people that are good, that can parallel me, in some instances, be little mini me's if you will, that help with scaling, but maybe more importantly, bring people in that are better than me at a whole bunch of stuff. No matter if that's communication or if that's some of the analysis work or certainly these days in age around technology itself, there's a tremendous amount that I'm not any good at in there. So I think that trying to motivate those people and make them a team and realize that half the fun is just being part of a fantastic team and going on the journey is part of what I'm at least I pride myself in enough to try it. And I think just trying it, sometimes.

It works out that's great. And we know, and you and I have talked about this, but people want managers that coach. They want, they want to know that their work's important. Right? They want to know that they're needed and they want someone that can embrace their growth. Not just they'll tolerate being told what to do, but they really embrace when they have someone that's going to lead them versus manage them. And I know you've mentioned it a couple times, but can you talk into how significant the, not only the ability but the willingness for leaders to coach their people is?

Yeah, I'm so glad that you didn't ask me how I do it or why I'm something, because it's something I worry about. I mean it's extremely important. And I said, I guess one of the things I would just say about it is I think that leaders that are good at this, I think are intentional about it. And I've talked about, I've had the great fortune of speaking to other leaders that I feel are also good leaders or coaches or making space for people to succeed and fail. But the safe failure zones that type of thing. And I think that the one common factor that I've. The pattern I've picked up is we all worry about it, maybe it's become second nature, but none of us that I've spoken to take it for granted.

And most of us worry about are we making enough space, et cetera. And that's what I've tried to do. I can't say. I bet if you interviewed, if you got some of my team members to be super honest and not and truly realize they would never get back to me or something, they might say that I'm not always so fantastic. And sometimes it does feel like I've got my thumb on them. And I like to think that sometimes when I do that, it's actually to protect them. But I'm sure I've got my faults as well. But making space for people, giving them room to try things even when you know how to do it better, approaching the conversations in ways that are more coaching and asking them questions and drawing things out and then once in a while showing them how it's done.

These are some of the, you know, the small tools that I think go into a coach's toolkit.

Right. You know, when you say those things, I think back to, you know, when I was a college basketball coach, I think back to the coaches that I had, and we talked a little bit about this earlier was the joy you see in people all of a sudden realizing their upside, realizing their potential, and really working towards that and moving towards that. And one of the things that keeps coming back to me with this is as a coach, you try to figure out a way, two things, how to get your people and how to put them in position to be successful. And is that something that, as the CEO, is that something that you talk to on a consistent basis about with your leadership team?

I do, I do. And I would say that, you know this, I'll turn it back, not ask you the question, project to you as a coach. I think one of the hardest things to do is take someone who thinks they're a particular position and put them in a different position because you can see in them what they've got. And luckily for me, CGS is a boutique sized firm. We're 20ish people. And so everybody's got to be a little bit of everything. So even when I move people around, it's not ripping them away from what they think they are and putting them to a totally different division, if you will. But even recently in this year, we had some really rough Times going into this 2019 year, coming out of 2018, we lost some two contracts that we shouldn't have.

And we've reflected on that, determined all the. But in that process, I had to put some people in places that I had known for a long while that they probably should be, but they didn't think they should be. And it was a challenging road. No one left. Everybody's, I think, turned the corner on it. But those two to three months in that change process of ourselves, we're experts in change. That's what people hire us for.

Right.

We're also the shoemaker a little bit. Our shoes are ugly sometimes. And so we had to do it to ourselves a little bit. And that is absolutely incredibly important and incredibly difficult. As I said, that latter piece that you stated there of putting people in positions where you think they can succeed, where they may not yet recognize it. And here's the last part. It's extremely rewarding when they realize it. And if people are listening to say, I've got an employee just like that, or I've got a team member just like that, I've always thought they would better in. Fill in the blank, sales or delivery or product design or whatever it is, but that's not where they think that they are.

The one thing that I can say with pretty good certainty is once they figure it out, they're going to thank you for it. You know, that's what a great coach is. Let people realize, you know, their potential maybe before they realize it.

And, and to be able to see things, you know, great coaches see things in people that they might not see in themselves. And how I just to go back a little bit when you had that conversation where, you know, you're hoping they're going to be coachable in this situation. Right. But you have to just cut to the chase and explain to them, here's why we're putting you in this position. You know, here's why we're making this change and how do you handle. And I promise I'll stop using the how to questions. But I'm curious as to how you approach that conversation, knowing that there's probably going to be some pushback from their side.

Well, I guess I went to business school along the way, so it all. The right answer to everything is it depends. In this case, it depends. To me, it's very. When you get down to the change logic at the human level, at the firm level, it's easy. You take everything, you inventory it on walls and you say, hey, you need this capability, you should go buy it or build it. And it's all very analytical. You get down to the human level when we're talking about this, how it applies to a human being. This is not your job. It becomes a little, for me at least you have to inform it a little bit with what do I know about this individual? Where are they in their life? Are they just starting a family? Are they deep into their career? What motivates them?

Why are they here? And all that kind of blends in. And I'd say more direct versus less direct. It's really hard to do, but that's, you know, rip the band aid quickly. But how direct and how you deliver that direct message. For one party, it might be just five minute conversation, straight in, here's where you're going, it's good for you. Toughen up, step up our lip and let's go. Or another party. It might be a journey to help them understand and answer the why seven times before you really get to the punchline. But as direct as you can be with the individual, I think is absolutely the right way to get there because it gives them the benefit. In my mind at least it respects them enough to actually give them answer.

And number two, it starts to give them a chance for them to succeed in it because they actually understand most people. Most people, you didn't ask this, but I'll throw it out there as a little nugget at the end. Most folks, when it comes to change, they don't want to be told how to do things day to day, micromanage. But most of the time, people expect of leaders to tell them what success looks like. And you can apply that to the company level or you can apply to the individual. But if you're saying, hey, I want you to try this new thing, tell them what success in that role looks like and then say, I think you can really successfully, here's some space, go do it. I'm here to help.

I love that. So before we start wrapping up, there's a couple other things I want touch on. First, your book. Can you tell us about your book, the journey to writing it and just what's in there and all the value that folks can get from it.

Well, I appreciate that the book is called Competing in the Connecting World. It came out latter half of last year, been blown away with the people that have appreciated it. It is, as one reader said, it's a field, the Disruptors or for the innovators out there. It's intended to help people understand that first mile, think about some things around that change and give little stories along the way to make it real. The journey to writing it. Oh, boy. I've always enjoyed writing. I've never said I was good at it. And I had A co author, Dr. Warren Richie, Great friend, colleague, and has played many roles in my life, including mentor. The best and the worst part of the process was having Warren along. We wrote three.

We believe we probably wrote three books in the time that we wrote this one because we just weren't satisfied. And then it was more his style than more my style. Finally we got a publisher that was just fantastic to work with and helped us guide that plane to a landing and got it out there. So that's a bit about the journey.

That had to be pretty rewarding, though, working together on that.

Absolutely. I mean, a big part of that he decided to do it with me was because it was something that we could do together. And I think he's. In retrospect, I think he appreciates all. I'm not sure he was always appreciative during the process. It was definitely, as he says, it was more my project than his. But we've known each other since 2002. We've worked together in different capacities. And I wanted to ensure that some of the side conversations that he and I have had the luxury of having got cemented somewhere that others could take advantage. And as I said, some people have said some nice things about it. So I've been very appreciative.

That's great. Now, let's talk about the podcast. And you know, we've talked about this earlier. I love the title. You, me, your top three, where in the world. I mean, that is. I think that's brilliant.

Thanks so much. The podcast is a bit of an extension of the book, not one for one, but the latter part of the book is about leadership. It's about being brave. And that's really what the podcast celebrates. It's a little context into disruption and transformation, but it's really speaking more to the leaders, saying, here's a little. Let's have a little nugget every week of speaking to leaders. So I interview folks. So it's. It's you as in the guest, it's me as in the host. And the top three are the guests, top three closest people that they surround themselves with. We call that the virtual advisory board. But who do they surround themselves with to give them the ability to be brave, to lead through disruption, to Find successes to stand up after failures. So it's very much a story conversation.

And most of the time I'm absolutely blown away by the people that they bring in, both because sometimes they're famous people. I just had a young 19 year old kid on who, his first mentor that he, well, his first mentor in the list of fame, let's put it that way, is Mark Cuban. You know, so I'm blown away by that. But I'm also blown away by the personal advice these mentors give. And the good interviews are the ones that people are opening up and sharing how that mentorship actually happens and how bravery flows and how they lean on these, these mentors, these close people in their lives.

I love it. And can you share the story about how you came up with that name? Because it's pretty cool.

Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I knew I wanted to do something on content. I decided to do podcasts because speaking is easier than writing for me. And I was having coffee with a buddy of mine, I think he was guest number two actually on the, on my podcast. And were talking about, you know, leadership and we got onto, you know, how do you interview great people? And he surprised me. I was kind of fell on my chair. He said, well, and he's an experienced guy. He said, I only asked one question. I said one question. I mean, come on, how can you do this? The only question I asked you, name the five closest people in your life. And I thought, and he went on to explain that because he's leading, he's hiring senior folks. He's looking.

The pattern he's looking for, that he was looking for was people who were surrounding themselves with people like, who they wanted to be. People that surround themselves with people from their past. People that surround themselves with, you know, maybe just their family and stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. But there are people that are already living the life, that they've already gotten to where they want. He was looking for leaders that were surrounding themselves with people like they wanted to be. So if it was a sales leader that he was hoping to see, five incredible sales leaders that they were surrounding themselves with to be his mentors. There was a tech leader, five incredible tech leaders.

And I just picked up on that, bolted it to a story or a saying that my grandfather used to say to me, which was, you're known by the company you keep. And I realized this has kind of been in my blood for a long while. It's probably why I have a success People used to call me a networker, and I used to think of it as kind of an offensive statement, like I'm just some slimy guy out constantly trying to get something out of people. But I realized as I've gotten older that it's actually my superpower. It's. I've. I've invested in relationships. I really care about people. And you know what, those relationships, they really return. So that's. That's my story on that.

That's great. That is a great story. Now, before I ask you the last question, where can people find more out and more from you as well as cgs?

Well, I'm hopeful I can pass a whole bunch of stuff to the show notes, but for the listeners that aren't going to click through, Gregory Garrett is spelled G R E G G O R Y. So double G in the middle. And Garrett's got two Rs and two Ts and that unique spelling, if you can remember. That second G kind of drives everything on all of in LinkedIn. Gregory Garrett on Twitter and Instagram and all these places. Greg with two GS. Garrett. And if you want the simple one, it's www.cgsadvisors. A-V I S O R S.com is the corporate address. And you can get my bio and everything there.

Fantastic. And that will be in the show notes as well. And to rate and rank this episode, please go to itunes for obviously for previous episodes. Also can go to Stitcher, Google Play, as well as theathletics of business.com and Greg, for your last question, I know you love to teach, right. And I know you love to give back. So you're sitting in front of a room full of young entrepreneurs, which I know you've done thousands of times over, and you're going to give them one piece of advice for them to go out there and be successful. What is that one piece of advice?

Oh, wow. Just only one is it?

No, I think you can go.

It's fine. It's fine. I've said it several times throughout the podcast, and it's become a little bit of a calling card for me at this point. But it's simply be brave. It's just those two words, and bravery to every person will mean something different. I run an exercise around this oftentimes in class to ask people to close their eyes and imagine brave souls. And most of the time they think of military or, you know, legends that have done tremendous things, and I just ask them to apply that to themselves. Maybe that means that they're going to be a soldier, maybe that means they're going to go defend the nation, et cetera, which is true bravery. Absolutely. Those are the images should come to mind. But how can they be brave in their life? How can they be brave in their workplace?

And I think that's so important as we face transformation is you have to be brave.

Wow, that's powerful. I love that. And so that is your one piece of advice. Be brave. Again, Greg, I cannot thank you enough. This was, this was fantastic. And I really appreciate you joining us today.

Ed, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it so much. Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, Visit TheAthletics of Business.com now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.