The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:07 - 00:00:37:01
Kevin Eikenberry
The perspective that we can gain from a leader who has been there and done that is exquisite, especially when they have for so many years taught others what they've learned today. This is one of those days. Sit back and enjoy, but have a pen and paper ready to. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger difference for their teams, organizations and the world.

00:00:37:03 - 00:00:57:16
Kevin Eikenberry
If you are listening to this podcast, you could have been with us live well, you could be with us live in the future. And to find out when we're going live and what's up with all of that, you can join us on one of our two social media channels. You can join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Just go to remarkable podcast.com/facebook or remarkable podcast.

00:00:57:19 - 00:01:24:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Com slash LinkedIn to get all of that inside info and to join us in the future. Today's episode is brought to you by the second edition of our new book, The Long Distance Leader Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership. If you lead a team that is distributed in any way, this book will give you new skills, insight, and the confidence to lead more effectively in this new and still changing world of work.

00:01:24:03 - 00:01:50:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Learn more and order your copy by going to remarkable podcast.com small D. And with that I'm going to bring in my guest. And here he is. I will introduce him and then I will kind of get out of the way a little bit so we can have a conversation. Willie Peterson was raised in South Africa, now lives in New York and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.

00:01:50:10 - 00:02:18:03
Kevin Eikenberry
The second person on this show to have been a Rhodes Scholar. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. Over a period of 20 years, he served as the CEO of multibillion dollar businesses such as Lever Brothers Foods division Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop's Custom consumer Health group. In 1998, he was named professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

00:02:18:07 - 00:02:40:07
Kevin Eikenberry
He specialized in strategy and the leadership of change. He has served as an advisor to many organizations in both the commercial and not for profit fields. He's with us today because of his brand new book, Leadership The Inside Story time tested prescriptions for those who Seek to leave. It is now available and really is our guest and welcome.

00:02:40:09 - 00:02:41:08
Kevin Eikenberry
Thanks for being here.

00:02:41:10 - 00:02:44:03
Willie Pietersen
Thank you Kevin. Thanks for having me on.

00:02:44:04 - 00:03:08:20
Kevin Eikenberry
It is my pleasure. And let's see, we've got someone. Oh, I know who that person is. Good morning to you as well. So, let's start here. So you you worked as a senior leader for many years, successfully. And then you decided to stop doing that and start teaching. How did you end up making that decision?

00:03:08:22 - 00:03:15:07
Kevin Eikenberry
And I guess, why did you decide that you wanted to teach what you had been so long practicing?

00:03:15:09 - 00:03:38:15
Willie Pietersen
I always had a passion for the learning. And I think that, teaching is the most powerful way ever invented to learn. So that's number one, just as a kind of a a passion that I had. And the second is that sometimes when you have a passion for something, opportunities land in your lap and you have to recognize them.

00:03:38:17 - 00:04:06:18
Willie Pietersen
So the company I was running was a subsidiary of Kodak and Kodak, eventually, as you might know, went insolvent. But before they did, they asked us to sell this subsidiary, which was a thriving business. And we did. We sold it successfully, having then run businesses for 20 years. The next question arose. You know that you often like to, to pose as, now what?

00:04:06:19 - 00:04:26:18
Willie Pietersen
Now what? And so I, I sold back a little bit to a visit that the dean at Columbia Business School had paid when I was running Seagram's USA business, and he was he came to lunch on a fundraising visit, and he said, by the way, we'd love to have executives teach on our program from time to time.

00:04:26:18 - 00:04:56:00
Willie Pietersen
Would you show up and run a case study? And I said, well, sure. And I did a few of those. So when the moment came that I thought, what? What happens next? I thought back on that experience and called up the dean. We had coffee and he said, why don't you come aboard and have a go? And I got a little warning from a colleague there because he said, well, meet some of these seasoned professionals, professors and get some guidance on what you might expect.

00:04:56:02 - 00:05:07:05
Willie Pietersen
And the first thing that was said to me was, you know, when senior executives come in here and try and teach. 80% of them fail. And I said, well, thank you for the warning, right.

00:05:07:07 - 00:05:09:03
Kevin Eikenberry
I'm going to be in the 20%.

00:05:09:05 - 00:05:31:09
Willie Pietersen
Right. So kind of where do I belong? But I realized it's a shift. And you can't just say, because I was successful, you know, we all have setbacks along the way. As a CEO, I would automatically be successful as a teacher. You have to learn your way to success. And that was a kind of an interesting journey for me as well.

00:05:31:09 - 00:05:38:01
Willie Pietersen
And then it began to work out pretty well. And, I've certainly enjoyed that new journey.

00:05:38:03 - 00:05:55:14
Kevin Eikenberry
And so now there's another journey, because now you've written a book and it's so tell us a little bit about that. And, and obviously we're going to spend our conversation talking about some of the stuff in the book, the leadership, leadership, the inside story, time tested prescriptions for those who seek to lead. We're going to go into that.

00:05:55:14 - 00:06:13:04
Kevin Eikenberry
But I'm curious why that journey? Yeah, because it's another set of skills. You and I talked about that a little bit before we went live. Yeah, right. So do the work of leading teach the work of leading and now write about it. Why did you decide to write the book?

00:06:13:06 - 00:06:36:20
Willie Pietersen
Well, I'd written two prior books. They were concentrated on strategy because I've done a lot of strategy work, I teach strategy, etc. as a basic skill. And I began to realize, first of all, that strategy is an essential part of leadership. It's not a separate activity. It's an integral part of the way we lead, but it's only one part of it, not the totality.

00:06:36:22 - 00:06:57:02
Willie Pietersen
So that's that was one kind of realization that I needed to broaden the perspective that I offer to put strategy into its proper context as like at the moment, the domain of leadership at lunch. Now, the second thing that happened is I'd been running. I've been writing a number of blogs that have been running on Columbia platforms.

00:06:57:04 - 00:07:14:16
Willie Pietersen
There were about 20 of them. And one day at lunch, my wife, who's a writer and a very creative spirit, said to me, you know, you've already written a book. I said, no, I haven't, I mean not, she said, that's all in those blogs, those ideas that you've laid out in your blogs, you need to thread them together.

00:07:14:18 - 00:07:31:11
Willie Pietersen
There are some rich ideas there and offer them and I you know, I look back and I said, well, maybe there is. And I went to work on it and, the book was born that way. My wife was my cheerleader. I guess that was it. And I don't find writing. I don't know about you. I know you've written a book.

00:07:31:11 - 00:07:43:18
Willie Pietersen
At least one. It's not. It's not a natural skill to me. I find it hard work, to do when I pour over sentences and words and meanings, etc..

00:07:43:20 - 00:07:46:13
Kevin Eikenberry
And we had this whole conversation about grammar, you and I.

00:07:46:15 - 00:08:14:15
Willie Pietersen
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I would say it's like giving birth to an elephant. It's it's much more enjoyable to see the end product than actually go through the process of writing it. But anyway, there or there it is. It's done. And it captured all those material from what I call my lifelong learning laboratory. What I learned growing up in South Africa, what I learned about growing up under the apartheid regime there.

00:08:14:17 - 00:08:38:22
Willie Pietersen
What I learned about kind of viewing something with a mind that had been imprinted at the beginning, as a child, was what seemed to be. That's the way the world worked. Separation of the races and then learning gradually and overcoming that kind of locked in bias. That was one sort of learning laboratory and gained a lot of inspiration and learning from Nelson Mandela.

00:08:38:22 - 00:09:11:16
Willie Pietersen
And what he did, to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy in that troubled, race driven, riven country. Then the next learning journal, journey, of course, part of my learning laboratory was being in the action field like you were when you worked at Chevron. So, yeah, and actually doing it and running into realities, figuring out how to do it better, realizing you don't know it all and you have to keep learning and learning from other perspectives.

00:09:11:18 - 00:09:36:07
Willie Pietersen
And then, of course, that learning laboratory of actually teaching and consulting with a number of businesses. So, you know, there's I've been lucky to have that kind of laboratory of learning that is kind of like a kaleidoscope encompassing a broad range of perspectives and issues, and then bringing that together in and in the book.

00:09:36:09 - 00:09:55:04
Kevin Eikenberry
With that context, that tells us a little bit about the book. We know we've gotten to know a little bit about you really in the last few minutes, which is fantastic. And and what I'm going to do is and is just sort of pick out a few of the things in the book that I thought were interesting and useful, but I thought that would lead to a fruitful conversation with the two of us.

00:09:55:04 - 00:10:14:12
Kevin Eikenberry
So I'm just going to sort of poke around and pick around it some ideas there. But before we do that, and I don't know that you I don't know that you answered this question in the book. I don't call it specifically. So I'm just going to ask you the sort of big picture question first, what do you believe the most important work of a leader is?

00:10:14:12 - 00:10:16:15
Kevin Eikenberry
What's the most important work of a leader?

00:10:16:17 - 00:10:42:17
Willie Pietersen
People work. Leadership is about people. Management is about things. I, I learned a key lesson early on in my very first appointment as a CEO. I was young, I was part of the Unilever group. I was put in charge of the foods business in South Africa. I practiced law prior to that, and I had a kind of very logical way of thinking.

00:10:42:19 - 00:11:15:20
Willie Pietersen
And, I started off with a kind of a theory of how it all should work. I regarded running a business like a game of chess making all the right moves, doing all the all the analytical works work, thinking about brand positioning, profitability ratios and all of those kinds of analytical issues, bringing the logic together and believing that if you just express the logic to everybody, they would simply get very excited and follow the logic.

00:11:15:22 - 00:11:33:23
Willie Pietersen
After three months doing this role, my boss said, Jason, you asked for a wonderful guy. He was the chairman of the group, called me into his office and said, Peterson, what a surprise to you in your first three months as a CEO.

00:11:34:01 - 00:11:35:22
Kevin Eikenberry
What a great question, by the way. Go ahead.

00:11:36:02 - 00:12:10:11
Willie Pietersen
Question. Yeah. Wonderful question. And I said, CJI, I was really amazed at how much time I've needed to spend on people issues, motivating them, making them feel relevant and important, including them, engaging them and what we're doing, getting buy in from them, inspire ING them. And I realized that just logic doesn't get me there. And, first of all, he looked at me in a kind of a lingering way, and then a smile broke out on his face and he said, Peterson, welcome to leadership.

00:12:10:13 - 00:12:31:18
Willie Pietersen
I was my first, and I feel like monumental lesson that it's not the people. And, if we don't understand that it's not about exercising power. Leadership is about service. And it's not about just making great decisions and expecting people to follow them. It doesn't work like that.

00:12:31:20 - 00:12:55:05
Kevin Eikenberry
So everybody he's listening will say that. And this is a guy who's who teaches strategic work. So like that. So so put those two things together, right. Because you start out by saying, hey, it's about playing chess. It's about making the right moves. It's about the strategy. And and that's where you spend a lot of your time teaching and consulting.

00:12:55:07 - 00:13:02:01
Kevin Eikenberry
And yet, connect that back to the people, to it is.

00:13:02:05 - 00:13:33:07
Willie Pietersen
Now, that leads me to the next step here. Realizing the importance of the people issue. Realizing that you also need to be a good strategic leader. I began to construct a model. A few, like, of what leadership essentially consists of. And this is under the kind of heading that if we want to be really good at something, we must really understand what it is and give people a kind of a good fundamental understanding of what leadership is.

00:13:33:09 - 00:14:03:16
Willie Pietersen
And this is a Venn diagram which explains that leadership really consists of three essential domains. There it is in the book. I try to thank you very much, Kevin. Yeah, you have it up for and the first domain of leadership is leadership of self is deep self-knowledge and being grounded in a and a set of principles that have that are morally sound, but drive your actions and inspire others.

00:14:03:18 - 00:14:31:16
Willie Pietersen
And this is the source of your leadership. It's kind of permission to lead. And this is, if you like, the foundation of your character. This is about self and understanding who you are, what you really believe in, and being steadfast about your principles. Second domain of leadership is strategic leadership, giving the organization a clear sense of direction, a winning way, and a shared set of priorities for success.

00:14:31:16 - 00:14:56:02
Willie Pietersen
You can't lead without that. And the third domain of leadership is interpersonal leadership is bringing out the best in others. What I found useful about this is it makes us very intentional and say, well, we need to integrate these three domains because our role is to be integrated leaders and have one of these domains of leadership is deficient in some way.

00:14:56:04 - 00:15:24:19
Willie Pietersen
It interferes with the totality. So makes us very intentional about it. It's also a great way I find a diagnostic tool to reflect on our own effectiveness. You know, where are we? Where are we falling short? Where should we put the pressure? And then we all need feedback, feedback from others because we've got blind spots. And rather than saying to somebody, listen, I mean, you know, please give me some honest feedback.

00:15:24:19 - 00:15:47:10
Willie Pietersen
How am I doing? It's a hopeless question. It's too big a question. How am I doing? Fine. All right. Thank you. So give them the structure. So could you tell me how am I doing on the personal leadership? Are my values clear and transparent to everybody? Am I consistent in my application of those? Am I very clear on strategic leadership?

00:15:47:10 - 00:16:03:03
Willie Pietersen
Is it expressed with simplicity that I engage people in creating the strategy? And the third is how about the interpersonal aspects of leadership? How am I doing it that so it enables people to give much more constructive feedback as well?

00:16:03:05 - 00:16:33:21
Kevin Eikenberry
100%. So there's been like three times now that you've hinted at one of the skills that takes be a highly effective leader. And that's asking the right questions. And we're just talking about that in terms of, asking questions to give, give you a better chance of actually getting useful feedback. But I'm curious when, there's a chapter in the book about this, but like, what are a couple things, pieces of advice you about asking the right questions in any given situation?

00:16:33:22 - 00:16:57:10
Willie Pietersen
Yeah. This is this is huge. And I'm a great fan of Socrates here because he turned the world upside down in terms of the way we love. Prior to Socrates, the Greek philosopher, there were these characters called the sophists who roamed around Greece and taught people the art of rhetoric, how to express yourself with, you know, very impressively and persuade others.

00:16:57:12 - 00:17:20:17
Willie Pietersen
Socrates had a look at this and said, that doesn't work for me. I don't learn anything by repeating what I already know, and the audience doesn't learn much from what I just push at them. His mother was a midwife, and he looked at that as a metaphor, and he realized that she didn't give birth to babies, but she facilitated that delivery.

00:17:20:19 - 00:17:48:10
Willie Pietersen
You know, and he said, well, we're all looking for the best ideas. I'm a facilitator of delivering the best ideas. I don't offer them myself. I facilitate them now. I think that's a huge idea. And stepping back, I think we can say that everything we know in the world, in science or in general knowledge, comes from a question somebody asked.

00:17:48:12 - 00:18:01:18
Willie Pietersen
It doesn't just drop out of the blue sky. Science learns that way. Runs with an hypothesis that says, I wonder whether this is true, and then test it through experimentation. Or we start with a question.

00:18:01:20 - 00:18:38:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Even if even if the apple falls on your head, there's which dropped out of the sky. There's still a question that has to be asked why did that happen? I love the I love the, the that metaphor of facilitating, so very much and, and and when you think about being a facilitator, whether it's a peer facilitator or facilitator leader, it all drives back to the process, making it easier for things to happen, which is the root word of facilitators to make easier and, and, and perhaps the single best way to do this was with the right kinds of questions.

00:18:38:20 - 00:18:59:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Is there a is there a specific. Situation where you think leaders could be better, generally speaking, and asking questions because there's lots of places we can do it right? Is there a is there a time or a place where you're seeing leaders aren't as good at it as they really need to be?

00:18:59:14 - 00:19:29:12
Willie Pietersen
Well, the right questions help people learn and give them enthusiasm for learning. They're not designed to trap people and expose ignorance. Now, I used to practice law and questions in a courtroom, a cross-examination. I used those weapons to expose this kind of inconsistency. Lying, whatever the case might be, lack of memory. Now, the kind of learning questions we talking about are the opposite of weapons.

00:19:29:13 - 00:19:53:19
Willie Pietersen
They're invitations to learn and having the skill and, you know, avoiding those kind of what I call gotcha questions. We're all familiar with them. You go to a meeting and you present something, and you've been working on it for weeks, and there's somewhere there's a little gap in the logic, and somebody wants to be outsmart you and says, but you haven't done an arrow calculation on this, and whoops, I'm sorry.

00:19:53:21 - 00:20:25:23
Willie Pietersen
And now I know I'm on the defensive. I'm not going to learn anything. So instead of saying something more open ended and inviting just to say what more do you think we need to know about this to enrich the information that we've got to make a better decision? What more do you think we might do here? And invite people to have a discussion and gently lead somebody towards that conclusion, to make them feel a part of finding it so it becomes a kind of a joint effort, a participative process.

00:20:26:01 - 00:20:52:17
Willie Pietersen
Now I'll give you an example of a kind of question like that. And it's another example from, the American War of Independence for non-Americans on this podcast. My apologies, but it's a brief example. America fought a war of independence against the British rule. There were 13 independent colonies here at the at the time. They're now 50 states and a republic.

00:20:52:19 - 00:21:20:22
Willie Pietersen
And, George Washington was given the role of leading this disparate set of forces that all had their own militias that never trained together, didn't even have the same uniforms. He pulled them together, but they were heavily outmatched because the British were the most formidable fighting force in the world at the time. And, not surprisingly, in the early stages of this war of independence, the American forces were on the back foot and kind of losing rather badly.

00:21:21:00 - 00:21:43:04
Willie Pietersen
So he sat down to take stock of this with his senior officers. This has all been expressed in journals for people involved at the time. Apparently they sat around a campfire and they said, okay, we have to address this question. We're we're losing right now. We're not winning now. You asked the question. You said, how can we defeat the British?

00:21:43:05 - 00:22:07:16
Willie Pietersen
We tried this, we tried that, we tried. The next thing I want ideas. And the ideas came and people challenged each other, but none of them were practical. Each idea that came up, people said, that can't work because of this or that. And then eventually, after all this intense mental engagement and creative process, somebody said, I think we're asking the wrong question.

00:22:07:18 - 00:22:38:04
Willie Pietersen
How can we defeat the British has no good answer. The right question is how can we avoid losing? And that's the question that won a war, because that gave rise to a whole new strategy of commando raids, surprise raids on the British columns and rapid withdrawals before taking losses on the on this on the assumption, with the expectation that the British would get exhausted and go home.

00:22:38:06 - 00:22:39:07
Willie Pietersen
And they did.

00:22:39:09 - 00:22:41:14
Kevin Eikenberry
Pretty much what happened at the end of the day.

00:22:41:16 - 00:23:01:11
Willie Pietersen
With the help of the French in the final push, sent you to France. But it was that strategy. Now, there are many other examples of this kind of good question that leads to great examples of great outcomes, but that's one that sticks in my mind and it doesn't. It didn't just come. You know, what question to we ask ourselves?

00:23:01:12 - 00:23:17:10
Willie Pietersen
Well, the question is this. It came from a lot of intense engagement and thought and creativity got the juices going. And then ultimately at pop, this breakthrough question, if you like, that's the process of learning.

00:23:17:12 - 00:23:23:05
Kevin Eikenberry
The the leader doesn't necessarily have to have the question. The leader has to create the environment.

00:23:23:05 - 00:23:24:08
Willie Pietersen
Area.

00:23:24:10 - 00:23:27:21
Kevin Eikenberry
And the opportunity yes question to emerge.

00:23:27:23 - 00:23:35:21
Willie Pietersen
Yeah, Washington was the midwife. He didn't come up with the question. One of the others that he was the midwife, the facility waited. The delivery of the question.

00:23:35:23 - 00:23:47:00
Kevin Eikenberry
I didn't know George clearly. I'm not sure he would have loved that, that that analogy. I mean, I'm sure he would have loved where you had it ended. But calling him a midwife. I don't know about that. Exactly.

00:23:47:01 - 00:23:50:12
Willie Pietersen
Let me with that comment, George. Yeah.

00:23:50:14 - 00:24:03:18
Kevin Eikenberry
So you I want to ask you a question, because when you write about this, we are in complete lockstep. And I'd like for you to talk about this for a second. The word the word is priorities.

00:24:03:20 - 00:24:04:04
Willie Pietersen
Yes.

00:24:04:06 - 00:24:13:21
Kevin Eikenberry
And the question is, how many? How many is the right number? How many is maybe how many is too many?

00:24:13:23 - 00:24:37:20
Willie Pietersen
You know, we all talk about priorities and sometimes say to people in a seminar, what's more important than your priorities? And I talk about all kinds of things. And I said, look, the answer is nothing. Because if something else is more important, then that's a priority and not this. So this is a big deal when you say there's nothing more important than this in terms of creating leverage.

00:24:38:00 - 00:25:00:15
Willie Pietersen
And that's the 8020 rule typically. So it's a hard thing, but very, very few 20% of the the the strongest leverage points create 80% of the output, right? Not 5050. So, priorities are pretty important now. We have to have shared priorities if we're going to have a winning team. You can't just say to people, these are the priorities.

00:25:00:15 - 00:25:23:11
Willie Pietersen
Follow them. You have to engage people and to say has a winning game that comes first. Here are the priorities that help us to succeed. Now there was received wisdom that was alive and well. It's true in many quarters. I see it happening. People say I'm more than five priorities now. There's a whole history about where that came from, and I won't go into that.

00:25:23:11 - 00:25:44:03
Willie Pietersen
Right. But it gave rise to a kind of a myth that five priorities is the right number. You don't exceed five. And I found something in my workshops. But when I was working with a team on strategy and we came to the time to define the priorities, I say no more than five and they get to 3 or 4 and they say, what else is there?

00:25:44:04 - 00:26:06:15
Willie Pietersen
What else is there? I'm saying, what if no, no, that's not the issue here. Question. What's important? Nobody else is there. And I realized I was the sooner I had anchored their thinking on five. And when once I'd done that there, I thought, my work's not done till I get to five. So I began to fret about this.

00:26:06:17 - 00:26:43:13
Willie Pietersen
Then I read this tremendous piece of research by a guy called Nelson Cowan from, I think, Missouri State University, a very, very thorough piece of research. And he developed a concept called working memory is the number of things we can retain in our minds and function effectively at the same time. And the conclusion he arrived at, and this is pretty rigorous research, is it's three maximum four five is the wrong number, and it's not a linear decline in effectiveness.

00:26:43:15 - 00:27:04:22
Willie Pietersen
It's exponential. Yeah. So if you got more than four four attempts to be a wipeout now. Yes. The test I've seen it happen as a leader you say okay, this is a winning game. And you know what you'd like to say. Well now what? Yeah, these are the priorities for success. And if they say, well, it's one, it's two, it's three, it's four.

00:27:04:22 - 00:27:09:15
Willie Pietersen
And and and where are my notes? You've lost the plot.

00:27:09:17 - 00:27:10:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah.

00:27:10:07 - 00:27:32:13
Willie Pietersen
So the key thing is to have these I think three is great because it's separating the important from the unimportant. That's very hard to do. And if you go to five, you've copped out on that task. You're saying, oh, well, they're all important. That's just not true. So I now I'm now urged people three maximum four. And that's five.

00:27:32:13 - 00:27:34:19
Kevin Eikenberry
If you have six, seven you don't have any.

00:27:35:00 - 00:27:44:21
Willie Pietersen
You don't have any. Literally, literally you're in the jungle. You've you've made a statement that says I'm lost in the jungle. I don't know where the hell we are.

00:27:44:23 - 00:28:02:01
Kevin Eikenberry
If you go this week or any of seven directions, and that may or may not, it's probably not going to be the right answer. I'm pretty confident in having read the book. I was pretty confident this would be true, that you and I could have a long and enjoyable conversation, and yet neither of us had all day.

00:28:02:03 - 00:28:11:14
Kevin Eikenberry
Is there any thing that you hoped I would ask? Or you hoped that we would talk about that we didn't.

00:28:11:16 - 00:28:29:11
Willie Pietersen
Not really, but I guess if I step back, you know that you and I can talk about productively. What's the most important task of a leader? It's the most important task of a leader. I have a point of view. I mean, you know, this is not one of these things that I can prescribe and say, this is it.

00:28:29:11 - 00:29:07:07
Willie Pietersen
And I'm right. Okay. It's a point of view. And I think we all need to have a theory of success. And I think the most important role of a leader is to ensure the continuation and survival of the organization that he or she leads, which means the most important task, and it's a Darwinian imperative, is to create a learning organization that is constantly able to sense and understand the factors in the external environment, where that's where the that's where the competition occurs, and then mobilize your internal resources to create the external impact.

00:29:07:08 - 00:29:12:12
Willie Pietersen
So be a learning organization. And that's an outside in task, not inside that.

00:29:12:14 - 00:29:26:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, 100%. I'm going to shift gears before we finish and ask a question, a couple of questions that I ask all of my guests. And the first one is this what do you do for fun?

00:29:26:06 - 00:29:37:04
Willie Pietersen
I walk and I read a lot, and I love having my dogs with me when I walk. Dogs teach us all kinds of things.

00:29:37:06 - 00:29:55:00
Kevin Eikenberry
We didn't get there, everybody. But when you order and get your copy of Leadership The Inside Story, there's a whole chapter about what he learned about learned dogs. So if you are a dog lover, it's one more reason why you need a copy of this book. So you walk and you read. So what are you reading right now?

00:29:55:02 - 00:30:17:01
Willie Pietersen
I read a lot in philosophy. I read a lot in astrophysics and in, evolutionary science. So I read a few business books. Not many, to be honest with you. I get nourished by these other ideas. I love big history taking thing from the beginning, right through the sweep of history around the 14th century. History or British history, whatever it is.

00:30:17:03 - 00:30:49:18
Willie Pietersen
And I love the writings of a guy called Harari. I read Harari, I think it is Yuval Harari. I recommend the book called Sapiens that he wrote. And then he subsequently wrote 2021 prescriptions for the 21st century, which I've just finished reading. So those are books that I think would be great for anybody to look at. And then finally, if I can add one more thinking fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

00:30:49:20 - 00:30:58:20
Willie Pietersen
It's a big book to read, but it's a it's a great read if you want to understand the biases that can sometimes derail thinking or percent.

00:30:58:21 - 00:31:17:12
Kevin Eikenberry
I have not read 2021 prescriptions for the 21st century, but I have read the other two and they will all be in the show notes, everybody for you all as well as as well as new book leadership The Inside Story. Where? Kant? Where do you get to point people? Where can they learn more about what you're doing?

00:31:17:12 - 00:31:22:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Where can they get the book? Where do you want to point people? As we finish up?

00:31:22:12 - 00:31:42:09
Willie Pietersen
Well, the book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, and the other, retailers that sell books online, it's available from there. And, my website has got all the information on my various writings and blogs. It's really peterson.com. So.

00:31:42:11 - 00:31:42:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Watch.

00:31:43:01 - 00:31:43:08
Willie Pietersen
It's.

00:31:43:08 - 00:32:18:17
Kevin Eikenberry
All right up there. It's Peterson I etr s and Willie peterson.com. That's the South African spelling, I presume. Dan I in there. So, we'll yeah, we'll, we'll wrap up here in a second. But you you've mentioned it twice. The question that I always ask those who are here and the question is now what? Because you got I promised up on the front end everybody that you get the chance to, sort of bask in the wisdom of someone who's been there and done that multiple times for many years.

00:32:18:19 - 00:32:37:11
Kevin Eikenberry
And, and so my challenge to you is, what are you going to take action on from what you got in the last 30 minutes or so? Because if you don't take the action, the value of this drops exponentially. So I hope that you will do that. And Willie, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure to have you.

00:32:37:17 - 00:32:43:21
Kevin Eikenberry
I enjoyed our time immensely. And, I wish you all the best with the book and everything else.

00:32:43:23 - 00:32:47:14
Willie Pietersen
Many thanks, Ben. My pleasure. Thank you very much.

00:32:47:16 - 00:33:04:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Kevin. Answer. So everybody will be back next week with another another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Hope you'll be back. Join us. Hit the subscribe button wherever you are hearing this from so you don't miss the next episode. Tell someone else to join us and we'll see you there. Thanks so much, everybody.