How Stephen Shapiro Turned Away From Downsizing And Started Helping Companies Grow

[00:00:00] This podcast is a Roifield Brown production. Find others on iTunes. All right. Yeah. Instead of helping companies shrink, I wanted to help them grow. In Twin, we say never leave serendipity to chance. Mobilizing people is only useful if you can channel it to influence institutions.

[00:00:20] If I want to change that person's mind, it's much more useful for me to find a way to have a one-on-one conversation with them. And then that becomes this positive loop. I wasn't even the smartest kid in my neighborhood. One death is a tragedy.

[00:00:31] Ten thousand is a statistic. I was hungry. I was really hungry. I'm Greg Satell, author of Mapping Innovation and Cascades. And I'm with Roifield Brown, producer. What will it take for you to... Hey Roifield, this is our first podcast.

[00:00:51] I've done them as a guest, but I've never done them as a host. You're the professional. You're going to have to show me the ropes. When you say professional, I feel somewhat exposed here because we're about to talk about

[00:01:01] topics which are new to me and which are a bit of a gentle skeptic about. So we'll see how this goes. I wouldn't call you a skeptic. I mean, you're always talking about that artificial intelligence stuff. I've never seen anything like this where it's such a gold rush.

[00:01:19] You look at NVIDIA stock, it's like tripled in six months. And this is a company that's been around for a long time. Absolutely. And the very fact that regular folk that I know who wouldn't claim to be any experts in

[00:01:34] stocks, let alone AI are telling me I have NVIDIA stocks. I think I'm going to be the next billionaire. It tells you that it really has permeated not only the tech world, but also the financial markets. I've never seen this mixture of excitement and ab- abject fear.

[00:01:54] Not even back in the early dot com days. Almost nobody knows what direction they should go or what they should do. And the ones that think they do are almost definitely wrong. Well, Greg, as the change expert, what do you think they should do?

[00:02:10] Well, that's why I invited Steve Shapiro to be our very first guest. He's got this mantra that he's used for a long time. You innovate where you differentiate, meaning that it's not so important what the technology is, but what problems you can solve for people. Hey, Steve.

[00:02:35] Good to see you. So tell me about your seventh book. So it's called Pivotal, and the subtitle is Creating Stability in an Uncertain World. And the general idea is we're coming out of a period of pivoting and spinning

[00:02:48] and uncertainty and chaos, and actually we're not coming out of it. We're actually getting more into it as there's more bright, shiny objects and distractions. And so the purpose of the book is to help people get clarity on what's most important for their business

[00:03:02] rather than trying to chase every single opportunity that's really just a distraction. You know how much I love your last book, which was about 25 different lenses to solve the problem. But one of the things I love about your work is it's always about frameworks

[00:03:19] that practically help people to solve problems. So rather than telling people about innovation, you're actually giving them tools to do it better. Is that an approach that just you came to naturally? To being a consultant by background, so as with Accenture for 15 years,

[00:03:38] I'm always thinking about the practical application of everything I do. I'm not like I'm an engineer. That is my education. I'm an industrial engineer by education. Well, you start off as a math nerd, right? In math. I love math. Yeah. I was a math nerd.

[00:03:53] I actually don't tell many people this, but I got an 800 on my math SAT English SAT. We won't talk about. So I love math. I love engineering. I love science. I love all those things. And that's really what is part of my makeup.

[00:04:08] And so when it comes to my writing, it tends to be very pragmatic. I realize sometimes the bestselling books are the ones that tell great stories and you don't know what to do with them when you're done. But it's just not my style.

[00:04:19] My style is to be able to give somebody something that they can actually go do and implement. So let's start from the beginning. You were a math nerd. You grew up outside of Boston. And then and then you went to school at Cornell,

[00:04:34] which is where the first place where our paths crossed in a strange way because your college roommate was I'm sure I told you this. He helped recruit my brother to Cornell for the wrestling team and then was my wrestling coach in college.

[00:04:48] And then we coached together for a couple of years after I got out of college. So I'm sure Pete's not going to be listening to this, but he's somehow here with us in spirit. And he'd be probably angry for some reason that we mentioned him.

[00:05:02] But tell us about that. So when you went to Cornell, why did you choose Cornell? Was it because it was a strong engineering school? And what did you think you were going to do? So here's the crazy thing is I think this is the case

[00:05:15] with so many people as you get out of high school and you really don't know what you want to do. You have a sense. So what I really loved in high school was chemistry. And so what I was going to Cornell to become as a chemical engineer.

[00:05:30] And I just realized I'm a terrible chemical engineer. I just I couldn't do it. I couldn't figure it out. It was too complicated for me. So I became a material science engineer, which is all around materials and tensile strengths. And that was too complicated for me.

[00:05:45] And then I discovered something called industrial engineering at Cornell. It was operations research and industrial engineering. And it was a lot about mathematics. It was about manufacturing productivity. But what I liked about is it wasn't just hardcore engineering. It was also the balance of business work.

[00:06:00] And I really liked it. And I gravitated towards that. And basically, that's how I ended up where I was. I thought I was going to be wearing a hard hat and manufacturing plants with chemicals, and I went down a completely different path.

[00:06:11] But it worked out great for me. So you thought you were going to be an engineer. But then when you went into this sort of more industrial process engineering, that ended up smoothly segwaying into the career at Accenture, which at the time was just Anderson consulting, I believe.

[00:06:29] Actually, I joined them when there were Arthur Anderson. So it goes that far back. We were the Man of Information Consulting Division for Arthur Anderson. And yeah, it worked out great. The first few years back then everybody had to do computer programming.

[00:06:41] But very quickly, I gravitated towards something called business process re-engineering back in the days. Dr. Michael Hammer, the father of business re-engineering. And I was co-leading this practice, which was interesting because basically all we did was we took the techniques from manufacturing productivity and we applied them to

[00:07:02] organizations. How do we optimize a manufacturing plant? We can optimize teams the same way. We optimize software development using the same techniques. We optimize hospitals using the same techniques. And so it was just fascinating how the industrial engineering

[00:07:15] mindset could be applied to so many different areas of business. And that I stayed there for several years and then eventually I decided that wasn't right for me. And I made a pretty big shift. Before that, you built like a 20,000 person innovation practice.

[00:07:31] So could it was actually after that? That was after that. OK. Yeah. So what happened was so in the early 90s, I was co-leading this business process re-engineering practice. And it was great. Look, I'd go around and help companies. I give speeches and do workshops.

[00:07:46] I really enjoyed the work. But then I discovered that when we optimized the company's processes, the company would downsize the workforce. And a short version of the story is I was working with a client out of town. And the CEO announced that 10,000 people would lose their jobs

[00:08:04] in a large number. But I had rationalized that number in the past. I figured if I don't do it, someone else will do it. And one night I go back to the hotel, I turn on the TV and there was a news story about three executives

[00:08:16] from the company that I was working with that had lost their job a year before. And these were three top executives. The first person was the most optimistic because he had an inheritance that he was living off of, but still didn't have a job a year later.

[00:08:31] The second person cried throughout the entire interview because he, again, an executive had a mow lawns to feed his family and the third person committed suicide. And so I went back to the client the next day and said, hey, I saw this news story.

[00:08:46] It was that true. And they said, yeah, it was true. And I walked off the project. I took a six month leave of absence. And basically that's when I decided I will never be responsible for one person losing a job. So instead of helping company shrink,

[00:08:58] I wanted to help them grow in 1995, 96. Innovation wasn't a popular topic, but that's what I wanted to do. It's help companies grow through innovation. And that's when I worked with a number of people and we grew this 20,000 person practice. That's an amazing story.

[00:09:12] But then you did that for what, four or five years? Did that for about five years. And then I left Accenture. Yeah, that to me seems to be like another important pivot point. Yeah, I would say that a couple of points I'll report

[00:09:25] and was that large project where people lost jobs that had me shift from helping company shrink to helping companies grow. The second big shift actually came around the same time because I was working with Dr. Michael Hammer, who at that time had the second best selling business

[00:09:40] book in history called Reengineering the Corporation. And I got to work with him and he was giving keynote speeches around the world. He had his books and he was really popular. And I wrote down in a notebook. This was November of 1996.

[00:09:57] And in that notebook, I said, in five years, I want to be the Michael Hammer of the next wave, whatever is beyond reengineering. And I wrote that in a notebook. I totally forgot about it. I found the notebook like a decade later and almost to the day

[00:10:14] five years after I wrote that my first book was published. I left Accenture and I became a keynote speaker. So basically what I had wanted to achieve. I had achieved in the five year timeframe and maybe not as famous

[00:10:31] as Dr. Hammer and certainly not charging as much as he charged because we paid him a ton, but it's been a really great life. So that was a pretty big shift for me, obviously. Stephen, I want to just take you back what you said about

[00:10:45] downsizing companies as a consultant and the effect that has on people, some of which you hadn't realized before. How quickly did you realize you said you walked off immediately? But it must have made you think about your home life,

[00:11:01] the security which you need to provide for your loved ones. Talk just a little bit about that process of you have to change and you need to be as focused on people as you do the bottom line. I guess I've always been someone who wanted to make

[00:11:15] a positive impact on the world, not just a positive impact for companies. And it wasn't like this was the first time I knew people were losing their jobs. It was something which I saw, but there was I always have this

[00:11:27] quote quoting Stalin isn't exactly the greatest thing in the world, but he had a great quote, which I think really summarizes. He says one death is a tragedy. Ten thousand is a statistic. And so when it was like, I thought that I thought that was

[00:11:41] Mao that said that. OK, well go for Mao. I've always thought it was Stalin, but somebody said something like that and it's true. Here's the thing is when we're dealing with large numbers, it's hard for us to see the details and therefore we can't have that emotional connection.

[00:11:58] And when I watched that TV show and I saw people crying, I saw the loss of life. I saw this negative impact. I just realized for me, I couldn't do it. And it's one of the things which I'm also working on right now is I just turned 60.

[00:12:11] What's my purpose? What am I going to do with my life for the next 60 years? What am I going to do that's next? And I'm always going through these evaluation times where I say one, he's great. Being a provider is great.

[00:12:24] But at the same time, I need to make sure I'm living my life and I feel good about what I do. And when I saw the negative impact, I just knew even if it impacted me negatively financially,

[00:12:37] I knew it was something I had to do because I couldn't live with myself. Other people don't have a problem with that. I do. Why do you think you have a problem and other people don't? What's so different about you and your East for your background?

[00:12:51] I think part of it is I've always been sort of a sensitive person in some respects. Like I feel things and to me, I was like almost in tears when I saw the impact that I was having and knowing that I was doing that

[00:13:04] to not just three people, but 10,000 people in that project and hundreds of thousands of people over many projects. And it just, I don't know. I just I have these existential crises from time to time. Sometimes they used to pop up like every 18 months

[00:13:21] and I would just stop, take some time and reevaluate where I am and where I'm going. And sometimes it just continued on the path with a minor correction. And then there are times where I say I can't go down that path anymore.

[00:13:33] I need to make a choose a different path to have a different type of impact. Just, I guess, I'm very contemplative for an engineer. If I can just jump in, I think you're also a pleaser. You have this kind of penchant for doing magic tricks

[00:13:51] and you're a natural entertainer. I remember you with my daughter and the trick you did with the spoon. And I never see you as joyful as when you're making somebody happy, even in a small sort of entertaining way.

[00:14:10] And it seems to me that newscast you saw was the exact opposite of that. So that pleasing you did for your client did the exact opposite for other people. Does that make sense? Yeah, and that's a fantastic observation.

[00:14:24] And thank you for seeing that in me because it is true. Like when I do magic, hardly I like the intellectual stimulation of magic because an innovator we're always trying to figure out how to solve complicated problems and magicians have to do the same thing.

[00:14:36] And so I love that mindset. But the joy that comes on somebody's face when they get to do a magic trick or get to see something in a way that they never saw it before. That to me is just that's when I have the greatest fun.

[00:14:50] And that's really where I'm trying to go now with my business as I move forward, spending more time doing things that make a positive impact in the world. But they're also fun at the same time. I don't think it's an either or.

[00:15:03] And I think what's happened is over a period of time I've gotten more and more serious and my books have become more and more serious about more and more serious topics. And I felt to be taken seriously.

[00:15:12] I had to be serious and I'm just realizing now the times when my clients light up the most and love my work the most is when we're having a great time. And so I'm trying to add more of that back in.

[00:15:24] So I'm going through one of those contemplative moments right now and evaluating things. So, Steve, Stephen, just trying to understand how you've arrived at what way you are. And obviously your book is called Pivot. But are we missing another pivot point, which is really important as to

[00:15:43] getting you to Steven Shapiro in 2024? Yes. There was that moment when you realized that you were impacting negatively the lives of so many people. But is there another pivot point emotionally? So my first book came out in 2001 and that was called 24 7 Innovation is a great snoozer.

[00:16:03] I've recommended it to anybody who has insomnia. And I wanted to write another book because my desire has always been to do things that positively impact people. Now, as a consultant, we were always focused on the company in the bottom line.

[00:16:18] And I wanted to find a way of trying to impact people in a positive way. So for my second book, I actually traveled the country by car, drove 11,000 miles over the course of 90 days and interviewed 150 really creative people who are different than the average corporate person.

[00:16:35] And what came from that was my book called Goal Free Living, which was how to live a life where you're not obsessed by goals. It's not that you don't have goals, but your relationship to goals are different.

[00:16:47] And what I realized was is that there were times where I, like many people, became goal obsessed. We set our targets and we put all of our energy there. And there's a cost to that. There's a cost to not just our happiness and self-expression,

[00:17:02] but there's actually a cost to our ability to see opportunities that might be in our peripheral vision that when we're so laser focused on the future, we miss these things that are right in front of our face. But they're just off to the side a little bit.

[00:17:14] And so when I wrote that book, that was a major shift for me, because what I realized was is I wanted to live a life that was more goal free, one that was more experiential, one where I would live

[00:17:25] each day and learn from each day and then make decisions on where the next day is going to go based on the previous day, rather than trying to reverse engineer where I need to go in five years. That almost sounds anti-American to be goal free.

[00:17:42] I thought you people had to strive and always needed to have some point to reach you. You're almost sounding European, dare I say it, Italian even. Well, you know, Steve, I always say that the jealousy is such an ugly emotion

[00:17:58] and you can definitely see it when our former overlords across the world speak about our very substantial achievements on what many people call the right side of the Atlantic Ocean. I don't know about that, but I do know that Americans are typically

[00:18:18] obsessed with goals because that's what we've been taught. When I wrote the book, I thought this is going to be a manifesto for the universe. Everybody's going to love this. And what I realized is that this book is actually for a subset of people

[00:18:31] who have been told that they should be focused on goals, but that's not really the right path for them. And so some people love goals. They eat them up. That's the way they need to operate. That gets them jazzed up and energized.

[00:18:44] But for others, it's not that way. And it'll be clear. There's a difference between being goal free and being goal less. You still have a sense of direction when you're goal free. You have a sense of direction. It's just not a specific destination.

[00:18:58] And what you do is you have that sense of direction and then you meander with purpose. So basically you're still you have a direction, but you allow yourself to course correct as you get new information. So instead of laser focused on a highway going at 100 miles an hour

[00:19:13] from point A to point B, you're taking the back roads and you're meandering a little bit. You say, well, this is cool. Let's go do more of this. I don't like this. Let's do less of that.

[00:19:22] And so you don't end up where you thought you were going to end up, but you end up probably somewhere that's much more aligned with who you are as a human being and what your inner desires are.

[00:19:30] Because let's face it, most of us have no clue what the world will be like in five years. And most of us, when we make decisions about where we want to be in five years, we don't even know like our understanding of the universe is so small.

[00:19:43] What's possible? What we could do that if we make those decisions, we're really just limiting our options. When you decide to frame your life in such a way, most of us adults have dependence. We have children. We have a partner. There's other people it impacts on.

[00:20:02] Do you have a strategy for co-opting others so that we still have this kind of broad landscape canvas of potential freedom? Again, it's not about just sitting around on your butt eating bond bonds and watching TV.

[00:20:18] I mean, it is about taking purposeful steps each day in a direction. The difference is we have aspirations rather than goals. Goals are somewhat related to the word jail. If we look at the etymology of the word, it goes back to the whole idea

[00:20:34] of a goal line is the barrier. It's the obstacle. It's the thing which we're trying to get past. And so we're dealing with obstacles, barriers and hindrances. Whereas aspirations come from the word spirit or inspire. And it's all about breathing life into something.

[00:20:49] And so it doesn't mean we sit around and do nothing, but we find what inspires us and creates value. And we move forward in that direction. So we're being hyper aware of our surroundings, being very hyper aware of what's going on in the world and what's going

[00:21:04] on with us internally. And then we make decisions. And I'm convinced that when you do that, you enjoy life more. You make a bigger impact in the world. You're doing things that are more on the flow because they're more effortless, because they're aligned with who we are.

[00:21:20] So it still is about being extremely responsible, but you're being responsible to yourself, others and the world by really getting that alignment between what you love and what the world needs. The reason why I asked is because when in the north

[00:21:34] when I was running this kind of small tech company, the woman who ended up marrying, she's incredibly attracted to the lifestyle that went around that and five, six, seven years into our marriage. She decided to call time on it, but that gave me a massive amount of freedom.

[00:21:58] And I then started living in the United States for at least six months of the year. And it really expanded my own personal horizons, whether it's to do with work or culture, travel, just whatever. But one of the difficulties now is finding somebody who

[00:22:17] aligns with my view, my lifestyle. And so that I can actually, dare I say it, go through life with that person together because it's a very peculiar path which I've personally taken. So I'll just really touched on, I know that your book

[00:22:37] is called Pivotal, but it's also about digging deeper. But that just really did resonate with me because it's something which without my marriage ending, I would have ended up doing what I did for the last 10 years. And I think that happens.

[00:22:53] One thing which was pretty powerful for me was I moved to England and in the process of moving to England, I sold my house and I got rid of all my belongings. Everything that I owned at that point when I moved to London, it into two boxes.

[00:23:08] And there was an incredible freedom in that. So people in our lives, our belongings, all those things are going to enhance or restrict our freedom. In some cases, if you're with the right person, like my wife enhances my life in incredible ways.

[00:23:27] Helps me actually be more of me because she's so supportive of my living, my life the way I want to live my life, not the way somebody else feels like I should be living my life. So if you're with the right people and the right environment, that's incredible.

[00:23:42] On the flip side, obviously it can be at hindrance and I guess it always comes down to questions and decisions. How do in a relationship, obviously you have to make sure that you have an alignment of where you want to go. And these are all just conversations that

[00:23:57] people need to have. And I think everybody has to make decisions. And sometimes we have these moments like they said when I moved to England and I got rid of all my belongings, that was another moment. It was a chance for me to just say, OK, I have

[00:24:11] nothing. I have nothing physical other than what fit into two boxes. How can I reinvent my life now? And we have those opportunities potentially. So it reminds me of something else that Stalin said. I remember correctly. It is. It's. Oh, yes.

[00:24:31] That quantity has a quality all its own. And you learn to do the opposite. Yes. But the freedom. But going along with this continuing theme is that you've always taken joy out of helping people solve problems. And just knowing you personally, I there are

[00:24:57] certain people who want to do it themselves. And I've never seen you get more joy than when you're enabling somebody else to do something. And it just seems to me very, very similar. If you go to your first book, which was 24 7 innovation and your second one was best

[00:25:19] practices are stupid, right? Actually, goal free living was to personality poker. Little book of big innovation ideas was three. Personally, poker is for best practices are stupid was five. There's five. Right. But your last two books seem to be decluttering in a similar way where the invisible solutions

[00:25:42] allowed people to take just one problem and apply different lenses, which helped them focus on that one problem. And this book seems almost like a sequel in that you're taking the entire organization and you're trying to find what that one or two

[00:26:05] or three really poor problems of the organization are before we close out. Is that about right? You think I think first of all, I think it's a great observation because when I did write best practices are stupid. It was 40 different strategies for innovation.

[00:26:22] And there was one which was called don't think outside the box, find a better box. People gravitated toward this and they said, we like this, but how do you do it? So invisible solutions, which was the book that came after that was all around that one.

[00:26:38] I mean, basically, you said took it from forty down to one and whole book on that one pivotal in some respects is actually the prequel to invisible solutions, because if invisible solutions is around solving problems, pivotal is all around knowing which problems to solve.

[00:26:55] And it again is one very narrow part of the innovation process. Yeah, I decided to go deep. I decided to declutter. And I think a lot of times the best thing we can do is get that level of focus, get rid of whatever is not serving us.

[00:27:08] And the more we can go deep into what does have the greatest impact is going to be beneficial to everyone, not just ourselves, but the world. That is so awesome. And I think it's a reason why I really like your work, partly because it's so

[00:27:23] much different than my work, which which tends to be very much what I'm interested in. And I'm glad that it helps others, but my work tends to be around rabbit holes that I myself have jumped down where your work, I think is much more

[00:27:40] generous in that it's really much more other directed. And I do think that's why you are so popular because people just get an enormous amount of value from that. I appreciate that. And the good thing is with your work is Cascades is an absolutely brilliant book.

[00:27:59] And even if it's a passion project for you, I know it has a huge impact in the world. So look, there are times when the things that we love to do actually are 100 percent aligned with what the world needs. So it can work out beautifully when

[00:28:12] that's the case. Steve, thanks so much for coming on. Always love talking to you. And I think this in particular, because we get to have these conversations quite a bit. And I know they always help me. So now I feel like I'm taking a

[00:28:27] page out of Steve Shapiro's book and taking something and actually giving other people a tool that can help them, which is a conversation with Steve Shapiro. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. It's not often we get to have conversations that are this deep

[00:28:44] and profound about how we got to where we are. So I loved it. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. Thanks a lot, Steve. So what did I tell you? What do you feel? You seems pretty good. You know, I found him a really thoughtful soul. And that story about the

[00:29:05] impact of what he was doing for companies hit him hard. I think for many people, that is going to be one of the things that take away from that conversation. One of the biggest misconceptions about change makers were great innovators is that they're like

[00:29:21] Steve Jobs, that there are people run around with spouting a whole bunch of ideas. And I learned this when I was writing, researching my first book Mapping Innovation. And I got the opportunity to interview all these, you know, world class innovators. I mean, top scientists, entrepreneurs, executives,

[00:29:41] it, you know, huge multinational corporations. And it was a bit intimidating talking to these, you know, such incredibly accomplished you found people intimidating you the ex wrestler, the old brawler. Well, you know, one had won the Nobel Prize the year after I interviewed him. So really accomplished people.

[00:30:05] But when I actually talked to them, what I found was, was that they were like the nicest most generous people you could possibly imagine. The behavior was so consistent, I set out and I researched it further. And what I found was great change makers build better networks.

[00:30:24] And they do it by being generous. And I think that's what we saw in Steve. One of the best ways you can be a change maker and a huge part of the change maker mindset is that instinct to serve that desire to serve that that Steve so personifies.

[00:30:42] I suppose for me, there is a slight dissonance between somebody who is really driven and then somebody who wants to unalloyed good that if you're going to be driven in the way that he is and the amount of books that that he's done,

[00:30:58] you see, there has to be some level of kind of say cynicism, but that's completely the wrong work. You can't be a Mr. Nice guy in that echelon of business. You get to that kind of strategy. Most of the really successful ones are nice guys because

[00:31:13] you have to be serious about wanting to make an impact. There has to be a mission. It's it's the only way that you can truly build a network that can solve a problem is if you are mission and passion driven or else, how else can you

[00:31:34] inspire others to join that mission? As opposed to building that network is to gain the confidence of the trust of people are emotional networks as well. So it amplifies your voice and your messaging. Get that out. Well, what we're going to see

[00:31:52] because I've got a lot more guests lined up is that all of them have some element of what we saw in Steve that desire and passion to make an impact. Thank you for tuning in to the very first episode of Changemaker Mindset with Greg Sattel

[00:32:14] and Roy Field Brown. We hope you enjoyed our dive into the world of innovation and changemaking. Your support means the world to us. Please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues. To stay updated, follow

[00:32:32] us on social media. We also welcome your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Be sure to look out for episode two in two weeks where we'll be talking to the inspiring Alistair Martin. Does the struggle that I went through not grown up with my dad trying

[00:32:50] to figure out how to be a man in this in this society, a black man in this society on my own understanding how to process my own feelings of anger and all of these things, the setbacks that came along the way, nearly losing my mom.

[00:33:06] Watching her get sicker and almost waste away in front of me, right? Which is part of the reason why I'm a physician today. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time on Changemaker Mindset.