Leading@google - Brett johnson

Mike Brazil: My name is Mike Brazil. I'm an associate manager in finance operations on Google Checkout. And it's my pleasure to welcome Brett Johnson today as part of our Leading@Google series. For those of you who may not be familiar with the series, it's designed to bring in experts from around the world to help us learn about leadership and how we can apply it to our unique context here at Google. Just to give you a little bit of background on Brett. Brett Johnson is the founder and current president of the Institute for Innovation, Integration & Impact. That's a Silicon Valley think tank that specializes in aligning corporations behind a compelling purpose that then drives innovation and results in sustainable impact. The Institute works with leaders and corporations to discover their-- and implement personal and corporate callings in order to have a positive effect on society. Previously, Brett was a partner at KPMG Peat Marwick and Computer Sciences Corporation. Before that, he spent 14 years at Price Waterhouse working in United States and South Africa. He has worked extensively with leaders around the world and is the author of "LEMON Leadership: Radically Fresh Leadership," which he'll be speaking about today. His first book, "Convergence," looks at issues of work/life balance and the integration of all facets of life. Brett coauthored "I-Operations: the Impact of Internet on Operating Models" with Gary Daichendt, the former EVP of Worldwide Operations at Cisco Systems. He also has a few handful of books in the works. When life gives you lemons, you write a book. And he'll let us know more about his book. I'd like to welcome Brett Johnson. Thank you. [applause] Brett Johnson: Thanks very much, Mike. Appreciate the introduction. Today, I'll be chatting with you a little bit about LEMON Leadership. And I will take questions at the end, although I'm happy to be interrupted. I was wondering, "What if there were more than just two types of leaders?" [laughter] And you can do the search yourself. Some of you will be tempted to do it now. But, the reality is, there are many descriptors of leaders out there. For years and years, I worked in executive information systems starting about 30 years ago. And our challenge was to design systems that were tailored to the way individual executives were wired. And so, we try to get inside their heads and then figure out what would work for them and wouldn't work. But at the end of the day, when you went to the body of literature that was out there, you would have descriptors of "dogs" and "otters" and, you know, "Labradors" and all sorts of stuff like that. And of course, the DISCs and the Myers-Briggs stuff. But, it all boiled down to two things: Managers -- this guy doesn't work at Google -- and Entrepreneurs. And occasionally, you might find a third category of person, which was what we'd call a "Visionary." And a "visionary" in Silicon Valley -- as you know -- is basically somebody who has great ideas, but when the company gets going, you stick him in a corner office, you feed them the food under the door, and you hope that they don't come out and disrupt things. So, you know, when you looked at the literature, basically it was entrepreneurs and managers is what you are left with. But, in my dealings with leaders, I found that that just wasn't enough in terms of the categories of people. So I began to do some research -- work with people, understand their characteristics -- and determined that there are actually five types of leaders. Now here, I'm not talking about styles. I'm not talking about preferences. I'm not talking about introvert or extrovert, or whether they are direct or indirect -- concrete or abstract. I'm talking about how they're wired -- Leadership DNA. And my contention is that there are not just two, but five styles. "Luminaries" lead with ideas primarily. They see the world through constructs of thinking thoughts long-term. "Entrepreneurs" are driven by opportunities. And "Managers" are driven by policies, procedures, systems, structure. They understand organizational capital, whereas the Luminaries understand intellectual capital, and Entrepreneurs -- real, hard capital -- finances, assets, and so on. Then, you get "Organizers" and "Networkers," and I'll chat a little bit about those. But these five types of leaders. In each one of us is a combination of these five slices of the lemon, if you like. Now, I'll put your mind at rest -- for the Managers in the room. I was teaching this out of the university in Hawaii many years ago. And some guy came in the next day, and he said "I have just one problem with your model." I said, "What is it?" He said, "It should be called MELON Leadership." I said, "Let me guess -- you're a Manager, right?" [laughter] And, yeah. I'll explain why the Managers are in the middle in a moment. So it's LEMON Leadership -- not MELON Leadership, not VENOM Leadership, as if we had Visionaries, you know, instead of Luminaries. But mostly, we'd be left with Entrepreneurs and Managers. And the sad part about that -- if you remember the book, "The E-Myth" -- there are many people who think they're Entrepreneurs, but they're not. So if you look in college campuses, about 75 percent of people at college campus say they're going to start their own business, and down into 30 percent do. And so, "The E-Myth" says, "There's not that many entrepreneurs." In fact, you might be interested to know, "What are the percentages?" And you guys are pretty data-driven. So, here's the results -- globally first -- and then, I'll give you the Silicon Valley split, as to what percentage we see out there based on thousands of assessments of Leaders. So world population -- 9% are Luminaries. When you get the combinations, like "What percent are Luminary/Organizers?" for example -- primary Luminary, secondary Organizers -- the numbers will drop lower. But 9% are Luminaries. Then, about 14 percent only are Entrepreneurs -- pretty small number. Then, Managers are about 22 percent. And Organizers -- 35 percent. And Networkers -- 20 percent. The interesting thing about this is that, in traditional leadership literature, we're missing half of the pie. Organizers and Networkers are not even classified as Leaders usually. So, we need to see why that's a problem. Here in Silicon Valley, we have slightly higher percentage of Luminaries, [laughter] which is good. And then, we have not much difference in the Entrepreneur quotient, which is quite interesting. Of course, there's a confluence of factors here with the universities, venture capital, and so on -- that cause the Entrepreneurs to have a better likelihood of success than if they were elsewhere in the world. But the percentage-wise is not much different -- 1 percent different. We have a higher degree of Managers over here. Fewer Organizers and a lower number of Networkers. Those are the guys who are in New York calling you at night when you're having your meal. That's where the Networkers are. So, you might say, "We have more nerds than nice guys" in Silicon Valley. But, as the saying goes, "The geeks shall inherit the earth." So, that shouldn't be a problem. So let's look at this a little bit more. Of course, the issue is, "What do we do about the missing percent?" So, LEMON is fresh. It's a little bit different. It's not about styles. It's not about what your style is. It's also not about your strengths and how do you just make the most of your strengths or your weaknesses and how to avoid your weaknesses. It's also not about what you do under pressure. So LEMON Leadership is radically different, and we'll get into a that in a moment. So firstly, throughout the book, we have these LEMON truisms scattered. And one of them is that you lead from your identity -- not from your function, not from your personality, not from your style so much, or even your role. Although it is possible for your role to squeeze you a particular way. I'll give you an example. I was down the road at a semiconductor company, shall we say, and most of the people in the room -- directors, vice presidents -- indicated that the CEO was a Luminary/Entrepreneur, which he was. And they were paid just to do stuff. They weren't paid to think, basically. But when we got their LEMON assessments results back, they had a smattering of people. And it took me about a half a day to convince them that they could do more than just implement what the CEO thought about last night. And so, sometimes our function -- or our role -- will squeeze us into a particular way of operating. But here's another truism -- "If you work in a manner where who you are is consistent with how you're wired on an ongoing basis, you'll burn out." So we have to watch out for that. What I'm going to do is, there's a chapter on each of these characteristics -- Luminaries, Entrepreneurs -- and so on. But I'm just going to give you a summary right now of all five. And chat through those at just the high level. This is just an abstract of some of the things that are out of the book. So first -- and this is by the way -- each of these on a good day. Each of us has good days and bad days. And here's a difference between LEMON Leadership and other leadership stuff that I've read. If, for example, you're going with color coding and you're a red leader, under pressure, you're bright red. You know, you're burning red. With LEMON Leadership, what I contend is that, on a good day, you have the positive aspects -- the strengths of your primary slice. On a bad day, you will exhibit the negative characteristics, or the weaknesses of your secondary slice. So these are the lemons on a good day. And we'll look at them on a bad day in a moment. So Luminaries -- they lead with ideas. They have sayings like, "Ideas Have Consequences." There was a Chinese chap and a Frenchman on a plane flying. And the Frenchman said to the Chinese guy, "What do you think of the French Revolution?" The Chinese guy said, "Too soon to tell." Right? Luminaries have long-term thinking. Think about long-term consequences. And they can -- on a good day -- blend their passion and their principles. So they will connect with people -- the person might be missing part of their faculties, but if they connect on ideas, they connect. And so, Luminaries embrace people who have the same sort of ideas as them. At a "hands" level, they can do stuff well first time. Second time, not so good. Third time, bit of a disaster. Okay. The Entrepreneurs -- we know a lot about Entrepreneurs, but they're driven by intuition and opportunities. They are action-oriented. They can pull stuff together early on. And they generate a lot of excitement. You've probably met people here in Silicon Valley who will move from one company to the next just following an Entrepreneur. "What's he or she doing? I don't know, but I'm going, because I think it's going to be fun." Entrepreneurs are sometimes more heat than light, but still, people want them, they love them, and they can get stuff going. Managers. Managers are the folks that people love to hate. But the reality is, many of the corporations -- the bigger corporations -- are run by Managers. That's what keeps the board happy. That's what keeps things stable, if you want a "Steady Eddy" kind of environment. So, Managers -- they're good at long-term planning. They're patient. You can give them a mess, and they can fix it -- doesn't faze them. They understand the competencies that are needed. While a Manager is building a team, an Entrepreneur and Organizer is just doing it themselves. But the Manager's thinking, "I don't want to have to do this a year from now." So they'll slowly build a team to get something done. And some people say that, "Managers have no heart." That's not true. They connect with people through consistency. It might not be the brilliance of the Luminary, or the excitement of the Entrepreneur, but through consistency. These are the folks who actually do your annual reviews on time. The other guys don't necessarily do it. You know, they'll talk about it, they'll think they've done it if they're a Luminary, they imagine they did it. [laughter] They sold somebody else on doing it, like Huckleberry Finn. But Managers do it themselves. So let's chat about Organizers and Networkers. Organizers are highly intuitive. And here's the challenge with Organizers. They're hard to spot because of their high level of intuition. They just do stuff. Give them an objective. Don't tell them how to get there. Get out of the way. "An objective plus permission" is what they like. And they don't like the rules, the structure, or the stricture of the Managers, because they can see how to do it without having to read the manual. And so, they're highly instinctive. And they can also spot what's going to go wrong. So you can put something in front of them, and they'll say, "It's not going to work." And you ask them why, and they'll say, "I don't know -- it's not going to work." Now, actually, in a moment, I'll mention -- let me just talk about it now. When you'll see the Networkers -- the Networkers are highly intuitive around people. They can come into a room, and they can look out and they can see who's getting it, who isn't getting it, who's connecting. They're great communicators. They're kind of chameleons. In the first edition of the book, there's a section on "How to Communicate with Different Lemons" -- how to adjust what you say, the pace of what you say, the medium of what you say. With Networkers, there's no advice for them, because they do it automatically. It took some people awhile to figure that out. So in the second edition, I've explained why that's the case. I didn't forget to finish the chapter. Networkers just know how to communicate. And the cool part about the Networkers is, they make you feel like you're their best friend. For example, a friend of mine was CFO out at Sears, and John Chambers from Cisco went to see him. And he says, "Chambers makes you feel like you're the only customer," right? And you know it's not true, but you still kind of feel good when he comes around. Speaking about Chambers for a moment, you'll notice what happened with Cisco -- they got to a stage in their business where they had gaps in their product line. And Chambers was the next perfect CEO, because all he did is, he went out and acquired companies to fill the holes in the product architecture. And he could do a billion-dollar deal before you'd buttered your toast in the morning -- a lot of out of instinct and high networker. So Networkers make you feel like their best friend. Of course, they have 279 best friends. They think that they're all actually their best friends. If you go on their Facebook, they're up in the thousands over there. Actually, we ran a LEMON Assessment recently, and a guy from Microsoft came to me, and it showed up that he was something like a Manager or an Entrepreneur or a Luminary. And he came to me, and he said, "I think I'm a Networker. I think I'm a Networker." I said, "Look. The scores are accurate. You're not a Networker." "But, I have more than a thousand friends on Facebook," he said. I said, "Let me go over." So I took him over to some real Networkers, and I said, "Is this guy a Networker?" They looked at him, and they said, "No, you're not a Networker." [laughter] Networkers know who the Networkers are. Okay. What I was going to say was a little bit about product development. In product development, there's often arguments about who's on point: Is it engineering? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it development? Who's carrying the ball at any point in time? You can scrap all of that so long as you follow the LEMON sequence. You've got to have Luminaries involved up front. Then, Entrepreneurs to figure out if anybody's going to buy this thing. Then, Managers to actually work on the build. Then, Organizers to see what's going to go wrong. So you put them in the test function. They like to break stuff. And Networkers to see if anybody will buy it. Doesn't matter which department they come from. I'll give you a practical example. A company in South Africa was asked to put together a curriculum around ***/AIDS for the government in South Africa. And they were given the project with a fairly short timeline. Now, ordinarily, what they would have done is, take a manager, get the project manager, begin to build out the team. And it would have been a long project. It would have been about a 4-month project by their estimate. What they decided to do, because they'd come to understand LEMON Leadership was, switch things around. And immediately, they put a Luminary on the team. And the Luminary scanned through lots of other curriculum that was out there -- with an Entrepreneur. So they had a Luminary and an Entrepreneur first. Then, they got a Networker to see if the rough ideas would be bought by anybody. Then, they added their Manager to bring stability to the team, and they delivered the project in seven-and-a-half weeks. And the client said they'd never seen anything like that before. So just getting the right mix makes a huge difference. Moving along. This is a quote from a guy who's a Manager. You can see by the length of the quote, it's not a very ***-bingy kind of quote. He's a nice guy, but he's a Manager. You know, when he got married, he had a spreadsheet, you know? The potential fiancŽe -- she had to kind of get the scores up, and it was a systematic approach. Okay. [laughter] All right. Doesn't sound romantic, but she is married. Okay. Let's talk about the weaknesses. On a bad day, the Luminaries narrowly focus on their own ideas. They get stuck on something -- you've met them, right? The technology changed ten years ago. They're still beating the same dead horse, you know? Then, at the "hands" level, they can easily become disconnected from the organization. So, Luminaries think they've given a clear hand-off. "You know? I had this idea in the shower, and I just thought we should do this -- if we strung that together, put that with that, got it?" Right? I mean, it's just -- it's so vague, it's 50,000-foot level. And then, you're supposed to pick it up and run with it. So they often disconnect there. And if you don't track with their ideas, they'll just hit the "eject" button and find somebody else who does like their ideas -- on a bad day. The Entrepreneurs -- they can chase stuff that are nonexistent opportunities -- not real opportunities. And one of the things about Entrepreneurs is, they don't have failures. They just have "learning experiences." That's what they call them. So they don't learn from their mistakes. And, they can also fake it on the "skills" front. Managers don't like to fake it; they like to at least have one skill. "I can do finance. I can do project management." Entrepreneurs and some of the others can do "anything," and then, they'll go and figure out how to do it afterwards. Okay. Managers -- they can sometimes lack spontaneity. The other thing they can do is, they can become a little bit rigid. You see, here's the deal -- Managers write the manuals, like the HR manual. You go along, and you say, "I'd like to take vacation to go to the Bahamas and then visit my cousin over here. It's like going to look like a 6-weeks [inaudible]." "Paragraph 43, Subsection 2, you know, says, 'You can't do that until you've been at Google for nine years.'" And you didn't even know there was such a thing. Now, hint for the other people -- the Managers write the rule books, but they don't necessarily keep them themselves. On a bad day, they just know when to bring them out just to beat on the other people. Okay. Organizers -- there's nothing that an Organizer hates more than a calm pond. So they get their excitement out of fighting fires. So if there isn't a fire, start one, right? [laughter] So when you go along and you've got a project that's going fine, who needs an Organizer? So they'll just create an issue, right? And they'll just raise a problem. If you've been out of the office for three weeks and you want to know what's going on and you got one phone call to make, like off the island -- call the Organizer. Because on a bad day, they're like the office Velcro -- all the dirt sticks to them as they go through. And they can tell you exactly what's going on. And that's the counter-side of their intuition. So, a little bit on the Networkers -- they can have a poor Reality Index. And I should mention the Reality Index briefly. The Managers are at the middle, because they have the best grasp of reality. They're dead in the middle. I remember one day, I was at home, and my son was sitting at a computer looking at a picture of his sister. Off to the other side was my youngest son, and my wife Lynn was making an urchin outfit for him for "Oliver" for the play. So he's dressed in rags. I was exercising, which consisted of pulling a rope over a door through a pulley -- a mechanism designed for astronauts, because there was no gravity up there, so they needed something with resistance. And my middle son announces, "This family is whacked." [laughter] And my wife, who's got a lot of Networker in her -- Networkers like to be liked -- she was aghast. "What do you mean? What do you mean?" I said, "Hold on. Hold on. James -- explain to me, what do you have in mind?" He said, "Well, I see every picture of my sister -- she's smiling, but she's the most complex person I know." Then, there's Davy, who has no defense, because he's wearing the rags. And then, he looks at me -- I'm also, you know, in a precarious situation. I say to him, "James, you think you're the only sane one in the family." "Yep." Now, he's the air force pilot. He's the jock. He's the 97-percent left brain -- Steady Eddy. And he thinks the rest of the people are whackos. And that's the way Managers see things. Their view of the world is reality, and out in left field are the Networkers, er, Luminaries and out in right field are the Networkers -- and they're somewhat right. [referring to projection] So [referring to screen projection], this is just a quote from one of our companies we work with and from somebody at Cisco. I'm going to move right along. We have a LEMON Assessment. It's pretty simple. We take 75 spots. You don't have to write anything. No handwriting analysis. No references from your doctor. All you do is put in the x's and we run the analytics and what pops up is somebody like "Ned Morgan" -- not his real name. He's a Networker/Manager. Okay? And what you understand about this person is, when you look at their profile, you'll get a sense as to how they think, what their time horizons are, how they hear things when you speak to them. I'll give you an example in a moment. You can also stack up the scores for a department. So, this department is fine, if you're in customer service. If this department is R & D, you've got a problem, because they don't have enough from the Luminary side of things. Obviously, you have to weight the data for teams, and you can see somebody might be high on scoring themselves, and somebody might be low, but you can weight the data for the teams. The other thing that we look at is, What are the primary and secondary slices? So in a room such as this, if you ran the assessment, there would be some people who are primary Luminaries. So over here, four primary Luminaries and three secondary Luminaries. We were working with an executive team once, and out of 40-plus execs, not one primary Entrepreneur. Another company we worked with -- this was in Indonesia -- they had a head office staff of 120 people and this field, direct sales staff of 250,000. And they had one Entrepreneur in the head office. And out in the field, close to 250,000 Entrepreneurs. You can imagine what the problems are going to be. They speak a different language. They do different things. So we had to teach the head office folks how to speak like Entrepreneurs and Networkers. You can't change how somebody's wired, but you can change the way they speak. So the next day, it was quite cute. We had some of the corporate office staff and the execs were manning the phones. And there was the product development lead -- VP of Product Development -- who's a Luminary, talking like a real schmoozer on the phone to somebody out there, because he figured out how to speak their language and connect with them. So, let me give you a simple example. When you ask somebody, "Is the project done?" And they say to you, "It's finished," what do they really mean? Well, you better know who you're talking to. Because, if a Luminary says, "It's finished." Then what he means is, "I've thought about it quite a bit. You know, I might have written a white paper. I e-mailed a few friends. Conceptually, there's nothing standing in the way of this thing getting done. It's quite conceptually possible. In fact, it's as good as done." When you say to an Entrepreneur, "Is it finished?" And they say, "Oh yeah, it's finished," what they mean is, "It's like one of five things that I'm working on at the moment. If it stays up close to the top of the pile, I'll probably push it through, but if a better opportunity comes along, you're dead -- I'm not going to finish it." Now, when a Manager says, "It's finished," what does a Manager mean? It's finished -- yeah. Otherwise, they'll tell you, "It's 95 percent complete. And over the next two weeks, if you give me additional resources, I'll finish it." That's what the Manager says. Now, when an Organizer says, "It's finished." What they mean is, "It's about 70 percent done, and that's all I'm going to do. I'm not going to do anymore." Because the other 30 percent, for an Organizer, is a complete waste of time. It's the last like 20 percent of a project that takes 80 percent of your resources. They learn that by instinct. So when an Organizer says, "It's done" -- We moved office once, and the whole move was planned by two organizers. I was in Hawaii. I got back, and it was incredible. The whole thing was done in two days. Except that, when you leaned against the cubes, they weren't attached to the wall. Everything looked like it was in place. So I waited a week -- two weeks -- three weeks. I figured, "At some point, somebody is going to bolt the brackets to the wall, connect everything, finish up all the stuff." I was deluded. I had two organizers working on the thing. From their perspective, it was done -- the phones worked, the printers worked -- that's it. Networkers -- when a Networker says, "It's done," what he means is, "I got a friend. My friend has a cousin, Billy. And Billy -- Billy knows a lot of people, and those -- I have five people that could easily -- and if we had a party and brought those people over, probably" -- It's, you know, it's not done. It's not even close to done. So that's the way the Networkers think. [laughter] So you got to know what you're thinking about. So when you're speaking to somebody, you have to figure out, How do they speak? How do they hear things? How do they communicate? so that you can put the communication in the right context. Okay. We had a situation with one company -- large, huge IT organization within a large insurance company. And I saw, during the day-long discussion, that two people were kind of looking at each other. Clearly, there'd been past issues. So I invited them up for a role play. They agreed. And one was a Luminary/Organizer, uh, Luminary/Entrepreneur. And the other was a Manager/Organizer. And the guy -- I said, "Replay what happened." He said to her, "I got this great idea for a new business. It's a brilliant idea. It's going to be fantastic. Don't worry about the details." He says to her. I said, "Pause right there." I said to her, "What did you hear when he said 'Don't worry about the details'?" She said, "I heard 'There aren't any details.'" Yeah. So I said, "What was your response?" She said, "Well, give me the functional specs and the business plan -- the cost-benefit analysis." I said, "Hold on. Mr. Luminary, what did you hear when she said that?" "Oh, you know, you may as well have told me to walk on nails, jump in the fire, pour cold water on myself. It was like the kiss of death." We went back and forth, and I tried to get them to speak each other's languages, which they did. You know, eventually, they killed the project and it was a new business opportunity that they killed. But here was the telling thing -- I asked the Manager/Organizer, "What probability of success did you put on this venture?" I had asked him the question first, Luminary/Entrepreneur. He said, "85 percent." She said, "0 to 1 percent." That's the gap when we don't understand how people are wired and we don't adjust the communications. Okay. So I'm not going to speak about all the communications overview. Just to say -- before I take some questions -- that there's multiple branches to the LEMON Tree. There's the LEMON Basics -- your characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, how you're wired, what you do for work. There's also LEMON Communications -- I hinted at that. Product Development is another one. If you're in HR, how do you make sure you hire the right people? Here's the thesis. On any major project or on a leadership team, you need all five slices of the lemon. The problem is, we hire people who are like us, for the most part. We had a company in Texas, brought in a new VP of Compliance. You can guess, she's a Manager. And what did she want to do? Fire all of the non-Managers, because they weren't like her. Who did she need to turn the place around? Not the Managers. She needed the Entrepreneurs and the Organizers. And so, hiring is important. Team Building -- some other facets to the LEMON Tree. Now, just to sum up from a different angle -- the LEMONs care about different things. So what do Luminaries care about? They care about ideas -- "Why?" "Why?" The Entrepreneurs don't give a hoot about "why," because ideas are a dime a dozen. You can get those -- just go up the road to Stanford or whatever. You can get tons of ideas. The question is, can you turn it into an opportunity? And so, they care about "What?" And then, "When?" The Managers care about "How?" Any fool can come up with an idea, but can you actually implement? Things haven't begun until there's a plan. Now, Organizers -- they care about costs and crises. They care about "When/What." So the best solution for an Organizer is the quick solution. And they like -- when you're talking to an Organizer, they always want to bring things to a close. They hate loose ends. I know some Organizers who can't go to bed at night unless their unread e-mail is less than one screen. Whereas, that doesn't bother the Luminaries. They have hundreds of them, right? Networkers -- they care about "Who." Look, they don't like people more than other people. But, they understand the people dynamics. They understand that kind of relational capital. So, in summary -- from your friends at Wertle -- that's the summary of the whole book. And -- oh, yeah -- here's a little quiz for you. You've got it if you understand how to ruin the day of a LEMON. It's pretty easy. How would you ruin the day of a Luminary? Any suggestions? Audience: Details. Brett Johnson: Oh yeah, give them a lot of details -- that'll be good. Audience: Invite them to a [inaudible] planning session. Yeah, okay -- so long as they don't have to do too much, they wouldn't mind being there for awhile. Okay. How else would you ruin the day of a Luminary? Audience: Kill their ideas. Brett Johnson: Kill their ideas. There's a better way. What else would you do? Steal their ideas, right? [laughter] That's great. You can kill it, but if you can just take it, put your name on the white paper. Right? They've slaved there three years thinking in all their Google spare time, come up with stuff, and you just say, "I've got a few friends over here -- can we kind of add our names on there?" We had a guy who lived with us -- an intern -- and then, we had a second intern. And the intern would compose these flowing reports and send them back overseas. And Number 2 would just take them, change a few names, and send them off again, right? So, you can ruin a Luminary's day by stealing their ideas. Right. How about an Entrepreneur? How can you ruin their day? Okay? Audience: Steal their opportunities Brett Johnson: Steal their opportunities. Kind of great. You put a sales guy onto an account. "Okay, you're responsible for this." And they work six months. They get to know everybody -- their birthdays, their dog's names -- everything. Get the client in, and you reassign them, right? That's a great way to ruin. Managers -- you can mess with their systems, right? [laughter] Just for the heck of it. Now, Managers actually believe that other people understand systems and just don't obey them just to get up the manager's nose. That's what Managers really think. But, for the Managers -- I got to tell you -- the Networkers don't even see the expense reporting system unless they're really desperate for money, you know? And so, Organizers -- take away their leader. You've heard, "Take me to your leader." Organizers are most satisfied when they're supporting a leader, often in the background. But when you put a Manager between the Organizer and the Leader, you'll ruin their day. That's what happens in Washington, D.C. These people you've never heard of -- they get a Manager between themselves and the President, and they write the "Kiss and Tell" books, you know? About this president or that president. Networkers -- how can you ruin a Networker's day? Audience: Isolate them. Brett Johnson: Isolate them. That's a cool thing. Yeah. They love to be with people, right? Networkers have an uncanny ability to connect the dots. You're a normal person, and you think -- they'll come to you, and they'll say, "Oh, Jean -- you got to meet this friend of mine in London and the other guy in Houston. If the three of you get together, I know." See? Networkers have this belief, "If we get enough smart people together in the room, then the miracles are going to happen, you know?" No agenda, nothing, very exciting for the Networkers. And the fact is, they're intuitive about that. I hired my first intern. He was a Networker. He came to me, and he said, "Oh, I've got this friend. I met him playing soccer" and this, that. But this was his second opportunity. His first opportunity was so flaky -- some guy in Florida doing some harebrained thing. So the second time he came, [phht] I didn't even listen to him. Eighteen months later, Michael Yang sold my assignment for 685 million, you know? We could have had a piece of that if I listened to my Networker. So, okay. So, that's it. And I wanted to let you know that we do have some books here. And we're running low on the first edition. But just for you guys -- within about 24 hours -- as soon as Amazon gets their stuff together, there'll be a second edition up on Kindle. Just to let you know -- black and white and boring, but there you go. So, that's the story. Thank you very much. And I'll be happy to take questions at this point. [applause] Brett Johnson: Go ahead. Q: I'm wondering, you mentioned some of the other Myers-Briggs and colors and some other things, how do these five styles attract to those? Are there similarities or ...? Brett Johnson: Yeah. I see them as a complement. Okay, so to repeat, the question is -- what about DISC, Myers-Briggs, colors, dogs, otters, lions, bears, all that kind of stuff. How do they fit in? And the reality is that I tell people that "This is a complement to those things." This isn't about styles. So you can be an indirect Manager. You can be an abstract or a concrete Luminary. You can be an introverted Networker. And one of the things I'd have to catch myself doing is not judging a book by its color. Not saying, "Oh, she's introverted, so she can't be a Networker." I really have to run the tests to see. Or "He looks like my friend who's a Manager, so he's a Manager." No. And so, at the back of the book over here, as you go through the book, you can build up your own compass and profile. And so, I've got a way to build up a profile. And at the bottom are some of the complementary things. So I see it as a complement, not an "instead of." It's pretty simple to understand. There's a VP friend of mine who's Head of Product Development at a company down the road over here. And he sat down with his 5-year-old and 7-year-old and they talked through LEMON Leadership. And what they talked about is, "Is it fair for the parents to discipline the two kids the same, because one's a Luminary and one's a Manager?" You know? And stuff like that. So a kid can get it quite easily at a basic level. And at a more complex level, you know, there's other layers too. Other questions? [long pause] Going once... Alanna. Q: Give us another communication style. Brett Johnson: Yeah, sure. The issue of "communications" is that -- you'll be able to spot somebody somewhat by the way they communicate. Now, a friend of mine actually has come up with a concept of "LEMON Bait." So if you're in a room like this -- you're dealing with a group of people. You don't know what they are. So he throws out a little bit of Luminary bait. "This research thing that somebody's been working on in Google, and the screensavers go on." Nobody bites, you know? Then, he throws out something about an opportunity. "If we did this project together, we could do a joint market and collaborate." Nothing, right? Then, you throw out and you say, "Our policies and procedures, this is our budget, our timelines..." and all the lights go on -- you're talking to Managers, right? And so, then the communication piece is -- you can see over here the content, the format, in other words the media that they use, the way in which they express things. Whether they talk about issues, opportunities -- when I'm talking to somebody, I'm looking out generally to see when their eyes light up. When I talk about ideas, do they light up? When I talk about issues, do they light up? When I talk about people? For example, the language of Networkers is stories. So if you're talking to Networkers, you've got to talk stories. You know, they cry during the dog commercials. They love a story. They love an underdog, an overdog. Any kind of stuff. They love -- so long as there's a story over there, right? Managers like facts. So if you're a salesperson who's a Networker and you're trying to convince a Manager, and you tell more and more and more stories, their credibility index just starts going down, because the Manager is thinking, "This person doesn't have the facts, right?" If you're a Luminary, and you go in and somebody doesn't buy what you're saying, you know? You just make the vision bigger. You make the searches intergalactic. You know? You make the response times submilliseconds. And so, you throw more vision at it, rather than giving the person exactly what they need. They just want to know, "What's the start date, end date, resources," or whatever. And so, on the communication front, you can see by the way that people communicate -- if you have a short amount of time with somebody, you can pick up verbal cues which will tell you how they're wired. And that can be a super-useful thing. And then, what you have to do is, rotate the lemon. As a leader, you have to figure out, "What does this situation call for?" because you might be a Manager/Networker, and the situation calls for a Luminary/Entrepreneur. Rotate the lemon. It'll hurt a little bit, but you can do it. This is a huge difference between LEMON Leadership and other stuff where we say "Avoid your weaknesses." I'm saying, "No, each of us can make an adjustment." The only thing that's going to stop me behaving more like one of the other slices is actually me thinking my slice is better than their slice. "All LEMONS are equal, but some LEMONS are more equal than others" -- That kind of mindset will stop your rotating, you know? And I'm saying, on any team, "Even if you're missing -- you look at your team -- there's six of you in a row, and you're missing an Entrepreneur." You can all put on your Entrepreneur hat, and say, "How would an Entrepreneur look at this? How would an Entrepreneur communicate this? Etcetera." Okay. One more, yeah. Q: [inaudible] Brett Johnson: Yeah. Okay -- so, are there combinations that pose more challenges than others? Yeah. Well, at a broad level, if you're developing people, or if you are one, one of the hardest challenges is the growth part for an Organizer, because they're so intuitive. They function so highly out of intuition. So how to get them to grow beyond their intuition is a challenge. It's also hard to follow Organizers when they're at the head of a corporation. Jack Welsh, for example, when he took over at GE, I think he was an Organizer/Entrepreneur. And his vision was pretty simple -- "Number 1 or Number 2 in any market -- otherwise, you're out. End of story." But at least he communicated that clearly. If you're functioning highly off intuition, a bit of a challenge there. Other combinations, no. There's no right or wrong answers. You just have to understand your primary and secondary slice. And make sure you know when you're having a bad day. Because when you're having a bad day, you can see -- you begin to function out of the negatives -- the weaknesses of your secondary slice -- and you just have to make adjustments. That's super helpful to me. On a good day, I'm a bright Luminary -- good ideas, and so on. On a bad day, I'm the Manager from hell, right? And, you know, and I know what they should be doing and I nitpick. I don't build people up. I don't foster them. I just kind of get nitpicky on the details. But if I know I'm having a bad day, I can go off and get a latte -- do something different -- go take a walk or something, you know? Yeah. I had a husband-wife combination. He's an expert -- both of them -- in Myers-Briggs, DISC, and all of that stuff in another country. So I can talk about them. And, they run a leadership development institute. That's what they do. He's a Luminary/Organizer. She's a Manager/Organizer. The problem was, they were about to become a statistic of couples that couldn't work together. Why? She thought she was doing all the work and he was just having ideas. And then, they would have a bad day and they would both be in the negatives of Organizers. Now, what they do is, they'll go play golf if they're both having a bad day. They'll stop the work. It's a waste of time. And they figured out how to complement each other and get the job done. Good. Alanna, I think we're done on time. Thank you very much. [applause]