In his 2020 account of his 15 years as CEO of the Disney empire, The Ride of a Lifetime, Roger Iger proclaimed the maxim, “Innovate or Die”. It quickly became a mantra for business executives and would-be executives hoping to emulate Disney’s phenomenal success. Whether or not you share the same sense of passion and urgency for innovation as Iger does, the fact is that some degree of innovation is needed for any business to maintain competitiveness and move forward. Knowing how to apply innovation to your business can be a strategic advantage.

In this episode, Gail talks with consultant Jeff Standridge, based in Conway, Arkansas. Jeff also teaches in the College of Business at The University of Arkansas. He is the author of The Innovator’s Field Guide: Accelerators for Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Change Agents and The Top Performers Field Guide: Catalysts for Leaders, Innovators and All Who Aspire to Be.

Innovation, as Jeff defines it, is “planned change directed at better ways than we are currently doing things today.” He identified three types of innovation that occur in businesses: incremental, breakthrough, and disruptive. Innovation, he said, is happening exponentially in today’s businesses. Much of it is driven by new technologies, such as the digital revolution and AI.

Gail asked Jeff how owners can apply innovation to their businesses. He said designers already have expertise in one of the main tools for innovation, design thinking. Beyond that, he said, first learn what innovation is and how it can impact a business, utilize an innovation process, conduct quantitative and qualitative research to determine what things in your business could be done better than how they’re being done today. Having identified those things and confirmed that they are things that are negatively impacting the business, develop solutions and implement them.

Gail also asked Jeff what key messages from his book he would like to share with listeners. He offered the following:

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• Sustained success comes from the ability to balance results and relationships.
  
• Failure is only failure if you quit.
  
• The only thing required for innovation to occur is a constraint.
  

To hear why Jeff believes innovation and leadership are inseparable and other insights, listen to the entire podcast.

If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, view the full shownotes here: https://thepearlcollective.com/s11e9-shownotes

Mentioned in This Podcast

To learn more about Jeff and to contact him, go to the firm’s website at jeffstandridge.com.

You will also find information about his books and a page with a list of his podcasts and videos. You can also message Jeff through his page on LinkedIn.

Jeff recommended the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni. Both Jeff and Gail recommended another book by the same author, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. Both are available from online booksellers.

Gail mentioned the book The Obstacle Is the Way: the Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday.

In speaking about their use of AI, Gail and Jeff mentioned a couple of AI tools they are currently using. Gail mentioned one called Granola, a self-described AI notepad for meetings. Jeff recommended a site called Auxigen, a library of AI-driven tools that bills itself as the “the world’s first Entrepreneurial Support Platform.”

Note: Transcript is created automatically and may contain errors.

Well, welcome to the Creative Genius podcast. this we have today, our guest, Jeff Standridge, and he is from Arkansas. And we were just sharing with each other before we started the recording today that I also lived in Arkansas for about 10 years of my life. So I’m glad to meet with another Arkansan. There you go. That’s right. How are you doing, Gail? It’s good to be here today. It’s my pleasure to have you. So why don’t you share a little bit about your background with us?

Sure. Well, I grew up in a very rural part of Arkansas, down in Pike County. It’s a very small County. The town was about 1200 people had 28 people in my graduating class in the public school, the local public school. it was not a one room school, but it was a one campus school. So, first grade through 12th grade, we’re all on the same campus. Came to the university of central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas in the mid eighties and, and, after cramming a four year degree and almost six years.

I actually got into the healthcare world, spent about 10 years as a paramedic respiratory therapist on the helicopter team at Children’s Hospital as a professor at the University of Arkansas for medical sciences. And I knew academically, I didn’t want to get another graduate clinical graduate degree. So I got a degree in organizational behavior and that led me into the business world. I spent about 20 years with a company called Axiom Corporation, which was a publicly traded.

Data analytics company, worked all over the world, ran global operations, acquired multiple companies on five continents. And then about eight years ago, I left to focus on growing entrepreneurs in the state of Arkansas. And that’s where I spend some of my time today and created a venture fund to also invest in some of those entrepreneurs and then do some billable consulting with,

larger companies around the world as well. So that’s kind of my story. I’m a granddad of two and a daughter of a granddad of two and a dad of two daughters. And so all I can do is raise girls. So I’m a girl dad, girl granddad. Well, that’s good because we have about 80 % of the people on this podcast that are listening are females. So you’re speaking to the right people. Awesome. Awesome. Well,

I want to start with one of the questions that I thought would be very interesting, which is what is the biggest challenge that you’ve overcome and how did that drive you to what you’re doing now?

I may have two for you, right? So I mentioned in my, in my intro that I crammed a four year degree into six years. I had the academic underpinnings from, from my days at, a very small rural school, but it took me three or four years to actually become a good student, to develop the academic skills. So I had the foundation, but I didn’t have the skills. So I,

First course I ever took was an intro to finance and economics thinking I was going to be a finance major because I had an interest in finance and I made the only D I’ve ever made in my life. Went to college on a music scholarship because I was an all-state instrument player, all-state musician in one instrument, the baritone or the euphonium, a brass instrument. And when I decided I couldn’t major in finance, I thought I would major in music.

And I did that until I learned and everyone at the university learned that I wasn’t particularly talented. I just worked hard. And then after I graduated high school, rather after I graduated college, I purchased the business that I had worked at all through junior high and high school, which was a gas station muffler shop where I learned to change the oil service, the vehicles, fixed flats.

weld mufflers mufflers on. I bought that business and hired someone to run it for me while I was working on the helicopter team at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. And I lost that business after a couple of years and had to dig out from under the the stigma of that but also the debt that was associated with it because I couldn’t once I liquidated everything I didn’t have enough money to pay off.

all of the debt that had been incurred in that business. So I spent the next eight or 10 years doing that. So those three, two or three different stories, led me to this concept that being gritty, being resilient, that failure’s only failure if you quit. Probably the greatest realization I’ve come out with in that regard, went on to get a master’s and a doctorate and.

literally work around the world on five continents doing business. And I now teach entrepreneurial finance in that same university where the only course I ever took there in business, I received a D in. I love that because I think sometimes you have to have those failures. I have plenty of them. I can tell you multiple ones. But I think that really gives you that grit and

Ironically, the name of our company is Pearl Collective and pearls are made from sand or grit. And so it really is appropriate to, or the name of our company, to what you have to go through as an entrepreneur, in my view. Don’t you think it’s interesting that two precious stones, so to speak, in the terms of diamonds and pearls are created with grit and pressure and resistance and heat and what have you? It teaches us a lot about

what it really takes to be successful in all aspects of life. Agreed. So let’s talk a little bit about innovation because that is one of your areas of focus. I noticed that on your website. So what exactly is innovation as it applies to business? Well, innovation, and I have a definition that I like to use and there are parts of that definition I think that are important. First of all, it is planned change. It’s planned or orchestrated change.

that’s directed at better ways, better can be more effective, more efficient, more profitable, easier, but better ways at doing things than we’re currently doing them today or have done them in the past. So plan change that drives better ways of doing things. There are three different types of innovations that we see kind of on a day-to-day basis. One of those is we’re probably all most familiar with, which is incremental innovation.

which sometimes gets described as process improvement or continuous improvement. It’s making those incremental changes that if we make incremental improvements over a period of time could result in massive outcome differences, but it’s incremental nonetheless. There’s breakthrough innovation that is where we take an existing business model and we apply new technology to it, right? So Uber,

Taxis have been around for a long time, but we applied a new technology to it to make it better. Or we take an existing technology and we apply a new business model to it, the Dollar Shave Club, for instance, right? So we take razors and sharpeners and facial lotions and what have you, and we put it in a new business model called a subscription box, and we send you those things on a monthly basis. So those are breakthrough innovations. And then there’s disruptive innovation where something actually gets

displaced, something gets replaced. YouTube, Hulu, Roku, and all of the streaming that’s happening that’s replacing cable TV is an example of disruptive innovations where someone or something gets disrupted. And there are so many examples right now. It’s just mind blowing. How many things, how many industries are being affected by it?

And they’re happening exponentially, right? So you think about AI that’s come online, you know, people have, I’ve heard people lamenting AI is going to take over our jobs. And my response is no, AI is not going to take your job. People who know how to leverage AI, they’re going to take your job. Exactly. Yeah. I use AI literally every day. Every day. Every day. I think we all do. And we don’t necessarily know what we’re using it. Even if you have Alexa, you’ve got AI. So.

Yeah, it’s there and we use it without being aware. I’m surprised. I’m surprised she’s not answering you back here. Maybe she is. Maybe she decided to be quiet since we’re on the podcast. All right. Well, most of our listeners or I would probably say all of them are creative entrepreneurs and they’re essentially innovators in design. So how can designers apply innovation to their businesses? So it’s interesting. One of the

pervasive thoughts in innovation and maybe one of the best models, pervasive models in innovation is a model that originated with creative designers called design thinking. I actually went to an executive course at MIT, postgraduate course that was focused on design thinking for entrepreneurs and innovators. And so it is a

It is a process that is steeped in what’s called empathetic design, which is really deeply understanding the needs of the customer for that, or the stakeholders for that particular innovation and designing it from the outset such that it serves to meet those needs precisely and specifically for those target customers. So I think the creative design world has already

contributed a significant amount to the world of innovation just through the model design thinking. And I use that in all of our innovation sprints and all of our consulting engagements. I’m constantly referring to the design thinking or what’s sometimes called human-centered design that originated with creative design types. Interesting. Well, what do you think the future holds for entrepreneurs? You mentioned AI, so of course that’s going to be a

very, very big for us in the future, but what else? Well, you know, it’s interesting that I think entrepreneurship is only going to proliferate in the coming years. The fact of the matter is already today, 50 % of the world’s employees are employed by small, medium businesses, startups and small businesses. 99 % of all employers

are startups and small businesses. They already account for about 65 % of all new job creation, but about 85 % of all net new job creation. And I only see that increasing over time. You know, the vast majority of business owners today, over 50 % of business owners today are 55 years of age and older. And 10,000 of them are retiring every day. Same.

10,000 of them are retiring every day. And so there’s going to be a massive transition of businesses from first generation owners to second and third generation owners over the course of the next decade or so. And then you, so that’s just the macro economic landscape of entrepreneurship. Then you begin to think about the, the surgeons of technologies that are transforming the way work gets done, where work gets done.

I think the sky’s the limit, quite frankly. Yeah, it’s really interesting, because when we started this business, it’s been 16 and half years, and at year 15 and a half, we went completely remote. So it was really interesting, because people thought it was very odd that we did what we did at that early stage. And I think that, for me, think innovation is just part of my DNA, and I think it’s really essential for our clients.

and the people listening to be thinking about how can you take something and disrupt it? How can you look at things differently? How can you just put a different twist on things? Because that’s what’s going to keep you ahead. No, I completely agree with you. You know, it’s interesting. I worked for that publicly traded data analytics company starting in the nineties. We had a work from home policy then in 1998. Wow. And it was very forward thinking. You had to be a

strong contributor within the organization. You had to be selected to go remote or to go home based. And we reserve the right to call you back into the office if your performance suffered. And there was also a contract that you signed that clarified the working conditions within which you could work remotely. In other words, you couldn’t care for your children and work at the same time for a full day. Now maybe after school is different, but you had to have something.

some type of care option for your kids during the majority of the work day. You had to have an ergonomic chair and a specific area set up with an office and a printer and a telephone and those kinds of things. So we were doing this back in the nineties and it was very, very forward thinking at that time, very innovative at that time. And we didn’t have the Zoom tools, the online virtual kinds of things. We barely had teleconferencing. Even cell phones were not prolific at that time.

No, I agree with you. If I come to the world of innovation from the world of being a corporate change agent, change, organizational change has kind of been my specialty over the years of my corporate life. And it was a very easy transition into innovation because many of the skills, disciplines and processes are very, similar. Well, I think design, you have to be open to change because that’s what it is. Design is change.

But on the other side of this, when it comes to running businesses, a lot of our clients find it very difficult to change what they’re doing in order to have a better business. And it’s not because they don’t want to, it’s just that it’s a little bit scary to make the changes and learn some of the things they have to learn that they did not get in design school. Yeah, most people that have 10 years of experience in doing whatever they’re doing in the business world don’t really have 10 years of experience. They have

one year of experience 10 times or they have two years of experience five times and that’s about it. Yeah, yeah. It’s different. And so I guess I would ask you the question to follow, which is how do you apply innovation if it’s something that you’ve never really thought about before? You know, great question. think learning about what innovation is, maybe doing some rudimentary study on

one or two of the different models or processes for innovation. See, innovation is a process. When we go and run an innovation sprint for a large multinational or a small business, we follow the same process. We start by identifying the one or two business problems that they really need to solve or the one or two opportunities that they really need to seize and move forward.

And then we begin the process of quantifying those. So if it’s a business problem, let’s create a business problem statement. Let’s be very clear of the problem we’re trying to solve. Let’s do some quantitative validation, some credible facts and statistics to make sure that the problem is in fact a problem, number one, and that it’s big enough to be worth the effort to solve it. Then we begin to do some more qualitative customer discovery.

validation where we get out and talk to the people who experienced the problem to the greatest degree and we get feedback from them on that. what we find is once we do that quantitative and qualitative validation, we find that about 60 % of our original assumptions were correct, but about 40 % of them were incorrect. And we re-pivot our problem statement or opportunity statement. And so now we’re pretty crystal clear.

This is what we’re trying to accomplish and these will be the outcomes if we accomplishment. Then and only then do we actually move over into the design phase of designing solutions because we now have a better understanding of what the problem or opportunity is. So many times in my past careers, I would see someone come up with a great idea. I’ve got a great idea. And then they would launch throngs of people behind that idea and.

and tens of millions of dollars to try to bring that idea to fruition only to figure out down the road and dollars and human expenditure of time later that it really wasn’t a problem after all or the way they articulated it was not a problem that could really be solved. Interesting. Well, I think there’s some merit to that and certainly I think your process, I think it’s great to know that it is a process that you follow.

because then it means that it’s something that everybody can use. Everyone can use, learn and apply, absolutely. love that. I love that. What do you think AI will do to the process of innovation?

You know, what I have found and you know, we’ve talked about, we use AI every day, you use it every day, I use it every day. Many times I’m using it, I don’t know, but even more so, I’m using it and I know, I’m specifically using whether it’s chat GPT or some derivative of chat GPT that’s been trained on a particular niche of something. What I have found to the greatest degree is that chat GPT and AI

can really help someone move beyond the blank page syndrome of I don’t really know where to get started. every minute that one can spend learning about prompt engineering or prompt articulation, it really is garbage in, garbage out. And so understanding what it is that you’re asking the AI to do,

communicating to it the expert that you’re needing it to be and precisely the outcomes that you’re looking in its response back to your prompt or your question really overcomes this concept of I’m staring at a blank page and I don’t even know where to start. My experience is things that I’ve I’ve known nothing about where I’ve spent a little bit of time writing the prompt to get it to give me the right outputs. It gets me 75 % of the way there.

with the very first iteration in 15 minutes. And by the way, 14 and a half of those minutes are me architecting the right prompt. And 30 seconds is the AI actually giving me a response. It’s just in terms of efficiency and return on the invested time from me, I think it’s phenomenal.

I’ve been using it especially lately to take notes. And so I’ll do it on Zoom. I’ll set the AI for that. And I also use another product called Granola. So I am able to use both of those differently and merge those together. And I’ve found those to be really helpful. those are, that’s one of my tips for the day. There’s an AI tool out there right now that I’ve actually invested some money into called Oxygen, A-U-X-I-G-E-N.

Aux standing for auxiliary and Jen meaning generative AI. it’s a, what they’ve done basically is they’ve trained the language model on 20 of the top business frameworks that exist out there. And whether it’s the lean canvas or it’s the customer discovery or it’s the, a variety key performance indicators and several other, there are 20 tools out there that are based on some of the best business models and frameworks and

I can spend 15 minutes putting my company in and some of our core products and services, the industry that we serve, who our ideal customers are, and then it will populate the rest of those business frameworks and provide them back to me in a model that can be edited. So in other words, recognizing that it may not get 100 % of the way there with the first iteration, it may get 50, 75 or 80 % of the way there.

It’s fully customizable by the entrepreneur. And it’s been pretty phenomenal at watching these early stage entrepreneurs catapult themselves forward with Oxygen.ai. I’m going to write that down. A-U-X-I-G-E-N dot A-I. All right. I’ll be checking it out as soon as we get off this call today. Very good. All right.

Well, on your website, you talk about innovation and leadership and you say they’re inseparable. And what do you mean by that? Great, great question. I have observed over a number of years of doing this work that if that if I think I’m leading and I think I’m doing a great job of leading, but I’m not innovating, I’m not challenging the status quo. I’m not looking for constantly looking for better ways to do things. I’m not going to be leading for long.

because someone will come and do a better job of what I’m doing than what I’m doing. By the same token, if I think I’m doing a good job at innovation, but I’m really not a great leader, innovation requires change. Change involves people. People have emotions and loyalties and habits. And so if I’m not a great leader, then the likelihood that I’m going to get people to adopt my innovations

and for those innovations to actually stick, it’s not very great. And so this concept of I have to innovate to consistently be a good leader and I have to lead to be a consistently good innovator. And that’s why I’ve kind of articulated the sentiment that leadership and innovation are inseparable. I truly believe they are. That makes sense. I like the concept behind that.

I’ve been reading your book and it’s called Top Performers Field Guide, Catalyst for Leaders, Superstars, and All Who Want to Be or Aspire to Be. And I would love for you to pick out maybe four or five different key messages in there that you’d like to share from the book. Sure. And by the way, there are two that are very similar. One’s called the Top Performers Field Guide and one’s called the Innovators Field Guide. They’re written very, very similarly in terms of short snippets of

tangible information that’s usually told in the form of an illustration, followed by three or four thought provoking questions that guide you individually to the outcomes that that particular passage might be driving you toward. So early in my career, one of the outcomes of the Top Performers Field Guide, and one of the reasons that I labeled it such, is early in my career as a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, I was studying top performers.

What is the difference between top 1 % of performers and the middle 50 % of performers? So middle 50 % of performers are not unsuccessful people. They’re successful people. In fact, they’re the vast majority of the workforce. But what is it that differentiates those top performers from those middle performers? And ultimately came down to this concept of,

sustained success either individually or as a leader really revolves around my ability to balance results and relationships. If I focus on results at the expense of relationships, I’ll be wildly successful very, very quickly. That is until I alienate everyone around me who’s responsible for helping me create and maintain those results and then I lose them both. But by the same token, if I focus on relationships at the expense of results,

People will love me for a period of time until they lose respect for me because I can’t deliver that which I need and am expected to deliver on a consistent basis. so results and relationships are the difference in sustained success. Now, under each of those, there are a number of behaviors, knowledge, skills, abilities and habits.

that enable me to generate sustained results or to create long lasting relationships. And so it goes a little deeper than that, but at the high level results and relationships are the tight rope that we must walk on a day to day basis in order to consistently perform at a high level. The next one I would say is, and I mentioned this one earlier, failure is only failure if you quit. Otherwise, it’s just feedback. And every…

failure if viewed not as a failure but as a temporary setback that is giving us valuable feedback that we can use to adjust our approach in order to produce greater success in round two or round three or round four, then there really is no such thing as failure. So that would be probably number two. I like that, I like that. I think it’s very interesting that you say that because I think about all of the…

Pivots that we’ve made in our business and pivot is a word that’s a little overused these days. But I think that just the reality is we cannot pivot. We can’t really innovate and solve problems unless we have a problem, right? We have to have something to work from. usually it’s not, we’re not trying to fix something that’s going well. We’re usually trying to fix something that’s broken. Yeah, that probably leads me to number three.

in that the only thing required for innovation to occur is a constraint. So think about that. If we have no constraint, there’s no need to innovate. We just keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing forever. But generally, some type of constraint enters the picture, either the market changes, a competitor, the competitive landscape changes, the economics of our business change.

Maybe we lose two top employees. And so those constraints get forced upon us and we have to think about better ways of doing things and that is the definition. Plan change that guides us toward better ways of doing things. That is in fact the definition of innovation. I think those are some great tips. I’m just fascinated by it and I’ve read about the theory of constraints and I find that to be really interesting. there’s a book

I don’t know if you’ve read it. It was probably 2014 when I read it. can even remember. I think it was August. And it was The Obstacles, Way. And if you haven’t read that book, it’s a very nice book written by somebody who is a stoic, really. And it really made me rethink my business. And it made me rethink. And at that time, we came out with a different brand. We literally shifted.

and switch what we were doing and we rebranded our company as a result of reading that. Very good. That’s a good book for everybody to read, which brings me to another thing, is a book that you’ve read and I’ve read and I love, and it’s Patrick Lentzionis, The Advantage. So tell me why you like that so much.

You know, the book, The Advantage, everything about the book screams three things. And they’re the three things that my entire practice has been developed around even before I read Lynchione’s The Advantage. And so it was really validating to me to read that book. And it also fine-tuned some of the more rugged and rudimentary thoughts that I’d had on the subject previously.

But the three things that the book screams around my entire practices built is number one, cohesive leadership. That’s a very clear element of his book, The Advantage. Clarity, clarity, clarity, clarity, clarity. So creating clarity, over communicating clarity, reinforcing clarity. So he talks about that over and over. So leadership, I call, mine’s strong leadership.

Clarity and Focus, which is one of mine, which he talks on. And then the other one is culture. you know, a lot of CEOs and senior executives in the 80s, 90s, prior to probably the mid 2000s, really saw culture as something HR did and saw it as kind of fluff. It’s kind of a necessary evil. We got to talk about it, but we don’t really believe in it.

And I have spent a career watching organizations, researching in organizations, leading organizations all around the world. And I’ve observed that organizations that truly innovate, that truly achieve this track record of sustained strategic growth have cultivated within their organization a culture of excellence. And a lot of people think that culture is just the core values that we put on the wall.

That’s the way we articulate kind of our desired culture a lot of times, but culture is really everything. It is those core values. It is the shared norms, unwritten behaviors and norms in the organization that no one really talks about. It’s the degree to which we’re process oriented or non-process oriented. It’s the feeling I have on a Sunday night when I’m getting ready to go to work on Monday morning. And it’s the feeling I have on a Friday afternoon when I’m in my car leaving the business.

All of those things drive, point toward the concept of what the culture is. And we may have this thing we call the espoused culture, the culture we say we have, but the culture in use is never identical. Sometimes it’s close, but at various times throughout the year or two year period or what have you, it kind of ebbs and flows. The culture we say we have versus the culture we actually have kind of eb and flow.

And so I’ve observed organizations that are very clear on what is the culture they’re trying to create. They articulate those in a set of clearly defined core values and other cultural documentation. And they use those core values and other cultural elements and behavioral standards and what have you to recruit and select new employees, to onboard and train those new employees, to promote leaders from

the population of people who embody that culture and who fire people who are blatantly violating the desired culture. Those are the organizations that have truly created a culture of excellence. there are five or six elements, actually six elements that we begin to observe when we’re working with clients about that culture of excellence. And so I think that’s why like Lynne Cioni’s book so much is because it really screams.

screams culture of excellence to me. That’s a great book. I enjoy all of his books. We spend a lot of time talking about the five dysfunctions of a team and we’ve worked with a number of our clients on that. We talked about it extensively. I think it’s very important in culture. You’re right, it’s everything. If you don’t have it or if it’s not a strong culture or if it’s toxic then your company cannot be efficient. There’s just no way.

So strong culture, strong positive cultures through multiple research studies have been associated with increased revenue growth to the tune of about 400 or four times 400%. Greater degrees of profitability, greater degrees of employee performance, productivity and satisfaction, less turnover, negative weak cultures have been associated with greater turnover rates, greater degrees of disengaged employees, that’s employees who quit and leave versus employees who quit and.

or who quit and stay versus employees who quit and leave. More accidents, more errors, et cetera. So the research is very clear about the importance of culture. It is a business discipline, just like finance, just like operations, where early in my career, I would have said that the pervasive belief across companies would be that culture is just kind of something that’s just fluffy.

and it’s relegated to the HR department. I hear you. Well, and I appreciate that you’re sharing that. And I think all of our listeners, if you want to read a book that’s great about culture, I think the advantage is a great one to read. Sure. Well, let’s talk a little bit about who or what inspires you. You know, I was asked this question a few weeks ago on a podcast out of the UK, I believe. you know, I’m

I’m inspired a lot by a lot of people, but I have to say my mother’s probably one of my most inspiring figures. She will be 80 in November. She still works. She was, she still works two jobs, quite frankly, not, not because she has to, but because she, she’s a travel club coordinator for a local community bank. So she takes groups of people on trips all over the country and all over the world for that matter.

and still works three days a week as kind of a business development officer to that group of golden travelies, kind of so to speak. And she’s a realtor, a part-time realtor and a great grandmother, know, et cetera. And, you know, her work ethic is impeccable, but she’s decided she wants to retire in a couple of years.

So anyway, I would say that. And I would also say definitely the women in my life, my wife, my daughters, all three are nurses and or nurse practitioners. my older daughter who has two grand babies, has two babies, grand babies of mine, two daughters, one’s three months old, one’s two years old, works as a neonatal nurse practitioner and she’s a wonder woman, just a wonder woman. Well, not surprising.

comes from a good tree. So in 10 years, what will you have contributed or accomplished and who will you be? So I went through a crisis of calling back several years ago when I was an executive for this publicly traded company. And I asked myself the question, you know, I was going to work every day. had about 500 people in the organization that I led across five continents. And I was, I said, you know, I’m pretty sure

that my creator didn’t create or call me to sell data to marketers trying to better target their consumers. But that’s how I earn my living every day. And so what is my calling? At that time, I was teaching an adult Sunday school class that I’d taught for 15 or 18 years at that time. I was speaking occasionally around the state and the chamber world and what have you on leadership and team development and what have you. And I’d been a professor at the medical school.

I’d gotten some feedback on my teaching then and, and, and, you know, pretty sure I wasn’t called to sell data to marketers, but that’s what I was doing. And so I, I had someone who, was in one of my classes. One time she said, Jeff, you’re a revealer. And I said, I don’t, I don’t understand what that means. And she said, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in your Sunday school class or I’m listening to you speak down at the chamber on leadership or Mark and I are out with you and Lori for dinner.

You say things that provoke me to think differently about my home, my life, my work, and how I approach those. So that kind of stuck in my mind and I started exploring where I was getting energy, where I was going home at the end of the day fulfilled and energized versus the kinds of things I was doing when I would go home and feel less than fulfilled and energized. And I started realizing that sitting across the table from…

people that worked in my organization or that worked across the enterprise and other organizations in the company. When I was sitting across the table from them, helping them solve challenges, that could have been work related or we were talking about parenting advice or personal financial advice or career advice, or I was speaking at the chamber, what have you. Those were the kinds of things where I was getting much more fulfilled. And so I came to the belief that everyone has a calling.

For some people, their vocation is their calling. In other words, they earn their living by fulfilling their calling, like my neonatal nurse practitioner daughter, or my pediatric oncology nurse daughter, or my physician son-in-law, or my pastor father-in-law, or whomever. They earn their living by fulfilling their calling. The other half of the world, their vocation supports their calling if they can figure out the connection between the two.

And I realized that that job gave me a great platform to fulfill my calling. And I’ve come to terms with the belief that my calling that I’ve been specifically gifted to create new insights that inspire people to better ways of living and working. so when I figured out the connection between that calling and what I did every day to earn my living, I went to work with a completely different attitude, a completely different perspective. And so,

So that was a long answer to a short question in 10 years. What will you have become eight years ago on my 50th birthday? I left that company to do what I do today. And I believe I made the shift from my vocation, supporting my calling to my vocation, being my calling in doing so. And so I think I’ve, I think I’m there and I can, I intend to continue doing that. I said, I made, spent the first half of my life making a living. want to spend the second half making more of a difference.

love that. Well, that’s great. And I feel like actually was 52 when I started this business and people can do the math. not young. So it was really good for me because this is my calling. And I agree with you because all the other stuff leading up to it was not my calling. And so I didn’t have the passion that I do for this. So I really think that was very beautifully said.

All right. So we always end with three takeaways that you would like people to use once they leave this podcast. Yep. And I’m going to just review a couple of things that we’ve already talked about. The first one would be just revisit that statement on calling. And I encourage everyone, if you haven’t connected with what your calling is, spend some time doing that.

Reach out to me and I’ll share my contact information in a moment. I’d be glad to provide you with a little exercise to talk you through that. But figure out what your calling is and then look for the connection between your vocation and your calling. That’s number one. Number two, if you’re experiencing failure, you’re experiencing temporary setbacks, you don’t seem to just be getting where you think you ought to be getting.

start examining the feedback that’s coming with those temporary setbacks and failures. What’s it trying to tell you about your approach? What’s it trying to tell you about your business? What’s it trying to tell you about your leadership? What’s it trying to tell you about your grit or lack thereof? And use that information to adapt your style and your approach. And the last thing that I would say is, and I don’t know if I said this earlier, but I’ll end with it. Top performers.

invariably have a future orientation. In other words, they look out three years, four years and five years down the road and they get crystal clear on what that five years, what it’s going to look like in three or four or five years. And they put a date to it. So 12 31 20 29 or 20 28 or what have you. I am, I will, I have, I do, right? So they get very, very clear on what the

their life, their business, their job is going to look like in that say five year period. And then they relentlessly work toward bringing that about. And so top performers have a future orientation. So if you don’t know where your life is going, architect it and start moving that direction. my gosh, that is so perfect. I just did another podcast recording with someone and he was talking about having a strategy session with himself 17 years ago.

And he has done all of those things that he envisioned 17 years ago. And I loved the way that he went about it. And he said, I guess it’s time for another strategy session with myself. And so thank you for sharing that. think that was beautifully said. you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. And we look forward to sharing this. And everyone be sure and check out.

Jeff’s book, Top Performer’s Field Guide or Innovator’s Field Guide. You’ve got both of those and they’re on Amazon and very good books. So thank you for sharing your expertise today and also wonderful books. Thank you. And folks can reach out to me directly. I’m very active on LinkedIn and it’s Jeff Standridge on LinkedIn. Jeff S as in standards, jeffs at innovationjunkie.com or jeffstandridge.com. Be happy to connect with any of your listeners. And we’ll put that in the show notes too.

Fantastic. right. you so much. It’s my pleasure.