Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsh. Welcome to another episode of Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience with some goats who are now running to find seats.

And of course, they're gonna find that there are no seats. And we're gonna talk today about adaptive leadership, which is a phrase, quite frankly, I kind of just came up with.

And, Ted, it reflects a, I think, a need for what we have to deal with in our times, adaptive leadership. But to give you a heads up, I try to structure every episode based on three pillars or three themes for our conversation.

In your case, I've chosen uncertainty, complexity, and reinvention. And these are generally meant to be a guiding poles, where the conversation goes, I don't know.

But as a show, we're kind of evolving with every episode. And we're now at a point of almost becoming a game show where we start every episode with the news, partly to promote our own newsletter.

Today's episode, we were looking at the cryptocurrency reserve that the Trump administration has announced, as well as their threats to Mexico and Canada with regard to tariffs. But, Ted, look, our primary purpose of our news segment is to throw to our guest and say, what news are you looking at? This could be personal news.

This could be industry news. This could be world news. It's really meant to give our guests a sense of what's on your mind and what you think they should be paying attention to.

Well, I can't thank you enough for that introduction. I think you said it with uncertainty, complexity, and reinvention. That's sort of the word of the day. It used to be we did this on an annual basis.

Right. New Year's resolutions. Then that became too long. Maybe quarterly. I think it's weekly, if not daily, if not momentarily.

Absolutely. Now, again, this is the test in order to pass this segment of the show. What is the news that you are paying attention to?

And we're using a very flexible definition of news. But in order to advance in the episode, we've actually had a guest not make it past the news segment.

And it happens to be our most popular episode at the moment, which is why we're evolving into a kind of game show. So, Ted, let us know, what are you paying attention to out there in the world or within your own personal life?

Well, it is only too appropriate that it's a world news environment, but as a metaphor for what's going on in our own individual worlds. And that is, of course, the US Leadership in the world. I'm a leadership coach. And what we Are seeing is not what you would typically call leadership.

And this is what I mean in today's environment, and it spent since the beginning of time, leadership people think is, you know, leading other people, and they follow and then exactly to your authority principle. The. The world, the innate. The world of nature evolves as a complex dynamic system. And you can't lead as an authoritarian in.

In a complex environment where the individuals actually have a sense of agency. Right.

And that was a laugh in the honoring the wisdom of what you just said. That was an absolutely brilliant insight. Care to unpack it a little?

Well, yes.

This idea of capitalism, or even democracy was based on the idea of opportunity within the context of a stable and civil environment that operated by rules of engagement. Right. And there was a gentleman's handshake or gentlewoman's handshake as to how we would behave when we break those norms.

We no longer have a common context of how we are going to exchange information.

So imagine nature suddenly decided, hey, let's stop communicating via, you know, electron gradients or whatever it is, and suddenly we're going to change those rules. I think you're going to have some very aberrant effects.

A and B, we've got a world where we're trying to dictate and, you know, at an authoritarian type level of that can work short term. The problem is we know in nature, and I pull a lot from nature in my work. Resilience happens through variety.

And the more we all line up and say yes to one person's view, it doesn't matter what the view is or who it is. We actually put ourselves at risk of instability and being blindsided. That's what I see. What's going on?

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So let us proceed then to the second segment of every Meta Views episode. Congratulations there, Ted. Which is wtf? As in what's the future?

And this is partly because we are a future centric podcast.

We encourage a kind of inclusive futurism that everybody has a view of the future and that the more we share those diverse perspectives, the better we are able to make sense not just of the present, but where we want to go and how we can get there. So this is fundamentally an intuitive question. We kind of want your gut response.

But what do you see on the event horizon, like when you try to look forward in your future, whether good, whether bad, whether curious, whether fearful, even, what is the future? That again, you think other people should know about that you'd like to share with our audience.

Great. Well, thank you. I would say it's glass, glass more half full than empty.

And to come to try to project into a future that's related to our past would be a bit of a mistake. So the quick answer to your question is, I think humanity is smarter than they realize. We realize.

I think the future is about people starting to truly think for themselves, which doesn't have to be difficult. We've just been trained especially to your authority principle, you know, to take the word of authority authorities.

You know, they used to be parents and then it used to be the news, but now there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, and we have to learn how to interpret information. Well, that's actually great training. What we'd lack then is a model to make sense of it all. And here's what I mean.

We have wonderful information from philosophers, we have wonderful information from psychologists, futurists, scientists. But the individuals left trying to put these all together and make sense of it, and they don't have a integrating framework to make sense of it all.

Not to mention back to the previous conversation, if we don't have a common way of exchanging and exchanging ideas. I don't quite know if you mean the same thing as I do when I say X.

So the future, I believe, is going to be a common language, and it's a common conceptual language.

And I think within that common language will be agency of the individual to actually express and exchange on a much more sophisticated metaphorical level than this literal world of ideas and content without common context. And I'm bullish that when humankind actually does this, it's almost like an emergent property.

You look at ants, they are small in themselves, but collectively as an organization, there's an emergent intelligence. And I believe the future is a transcendent, I'll say being, which is in this conscious space of words and ideas.

And once we learn to have a common, what I might call operating system in that regard, look out, we might actually be smarter than we think we.

Are, which I do believe, and I'd love to get deeper into that as part of our feature conversation.

But to quickly respond, sort of hear in both of your answers to the news segment and the what's the future Segment is we're seeing kind of the last gasps of authoritarianism, that fundamentally it doesn't work, that it's almost like the last hurrah.

The 20th century is rearing its head to kind of remind us that history has a rhyme to it, but at the same time, where the battlefield is really is in Media in language, in how we communicate with each other. And the way in which this last gasp of authoritarianism is playing out is this divergence of meaning, which is unsustainable. Right.

Fundamentally there's going to be a reconciliation where we are able to communicate and resolve whatever issues we need to deal with on a daily basis. I see in that a hope. To your point, a glass being more than full. Am I reading you wrong or is that kind of close to what you're arguing here?

Yeah, and the yes. And to that 100% is a lot of people you saw on your program talking about AI. And you know, we could look at that as a, you know, a threat.

I think it's a threat to more commoditized functionality.

But you know, so we've gone from a industrial age to a sort of knowledge age and we thought we were knowledge workers, but trafficking knowledge is just content.

The thing that, you know, humans can do that machines can't, is not only reason, but you know, reason with perspective and vision and creativity and the synthesis of ideas in a way that quite frankly, I invite taking away 80, 90% of my crap work, right, so that we can be released to really truly give the gifts that we have of insight, creativity and co creation. So yeah, it's a future of creativity, quite frankly.

And I'll use that as an opportunity to segue into our feature conversation. And you're doing quite stellar here on the Metaview show.

Ted, you made me reflect there for a moment that on some level in advance of AI, I've shed 80 to 90% of the crap work in my life at the expense of income, but the result of happiness and well being and a sense of purpose. And your points about what makes us human in the context of AI I think is really profound.

And one of the positions that I've come to is a combination of a, that thinking is inherently emotional, that there is no distinction between rationality and emotions, that we do our best thinking when we are emotional. And I mean emotional in the sense of at balance. And the best example I give is being hungry versus well fed.

I have terrible thoughts when I'm hungry and I have my best thoughts after a really good meal spent with good people. And there are countless other examples to that. But AI does not, will not have emotions.

And the extent to which our thoughts are inherently tied to emotions is something an area of. And these aren't my ideas.

There's really smart social psychologists who are getting into this and I'm just appropriating their work and Translating it.

But I'm using this to start on the topic of uncertainty because certainly in the world of leadership, but I would argue even across society, most people do not respond to uncertainty well. And it triggers an emotional response.

It triggers an emotional framework that does not allow them to do their best thinking versus I kind of react the opposite. Uncertainty is actually what triggers my learning, zealotry and my desire to understand things. That's neurodivergence there.

But I'm curious to start on the issue of uncertainty.

How do you deal with the emotional aspects when you deal with leaders, when you deal with audiences, clients that you are engaged with, part of your message is around uncertainty.

But I'm curious how you deal with their emotional response, because I assume it's often there and that it is often something you have to deal with either as a group where you're dealing with an audience, or one on one when you're coaching and dealing with people directly.

So a lot of things. And I appreciate your point of view, I do feel that. Well, I'll back it up with this.

You probably heard of the belief cycle where, see, if I get this right. Your beliefs give you your thoughts, which tend to give you your feelings, right?

From those feelings, we engage in actions that are consistent with them, which give us our results. And that of course reinforces a belief. So kind of behind the feelings is a worldview. And I'll say this context is everything.

Forgive me, on your show, the famous speaker Zig Ziglar, who, you know, most of us probably don't know, but I do. He was my hero as a kid. He said something like this in one, one program. I heard of my dad's car while I was washing his car.

I put it in this tape and he says, you know, you can tell a woman she looks like the first day of spring. You can also tell her she looks like the last day of a long, hard winter. You see, it's the same day. It's all how you frame it. But isn't that true?

And so the framing is given by how we interpret events, which goes back to our beliefs and our mental models of the world. So behind even emotion is our ability to, quite frankly, plastically. Right. Adapt that thing to listen from a different place.

And I give you credit for what you just said. From a place of learning comes a very different relation to uncertainty than a place of fear and control.

But to circle back on that and to briefly take a tangent, George Lakoff, who has done a lot of work around framing and metaphors, one of His I think really brilliant insights is we often have multiple worldviews that will have the worldview maybe when we're at our parents house for Thanksgiving, but we might have a different worldview when we're, you know, playing sports with friends or having drinks. And I find to where we were talking about how language is diverging.

I think these multiple worldviews can be conflicting for people, difficult internally and externally. And I agree that learning is the antidote to a lot of those emotions.

But again, this is where I'm kind of asking you as a practitioner, people must still resist that. No, like again, I don't believe that emotionals are irrational.

But to your point, I do believe that people hold on to those emotions, hold onto those beliefs, often at their detriment.

Yeah, well we are.

How do you engage that? How do you deal with that? Especially in the context of leadership.

So I hear you. Of course we are human and I'm sure this goes back to our, you know, cave person days, right. Because the amygdala basically saved us.

So our first, you know, that root brainstem is that you could say that's our firmware and that's everything's built on that. So kind of hard to circumvent. However, we do have this executive function that can kind of try to steer the truck.

And you know, it's sort of again, context. If I don't know what's going on and everything's coming at me, that's new and I have no orientation. Yeah, I feel out of control. If I can put it in a.

And again I focus on a systems context. If I can kind of see, okay, things are interacting in ways that are unpredictable, they're dynamic, they're non linear. Right.

And then they even have emergent effects. For instance, there's me, there's you and then there's this whole conversation between us. Right.

And if I can come to see that there are emergent effects in teams and organizations that are curious. Right. We can, we can start to coax those effects versus trying to coax the actions. And I think once we get into the letting go of control.

You've heard of the, the, the acronym VUCA V U C A volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Heisenberg said it. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You can know A or you can know B, but you can never know both.

And that really is the way of the world. There's often strategic thinking, there's execution thinking and there's the dance between them.

So let me just ask a Brief kind of double down there.

What I'm hearing you say, and this goes back to what you were earlier, talking terms of control and specifically within the organization, that this is more about creating opportunities for emergence, opportunities for things to happen, rather than trying to engineer something that might never happen. Is that correct?

Yes. And I often called the guardrails give the kids enough room to play safely.

So I almost think leadership is about creating guardrails, right, the parameters, and then empowering the individuals to collaborate within that.

And part of those parameters is this idea of a future vision, a future state we're trying to get to, enrolling and inspiring people into that and then bringing their own sense of purpose, direction and commitment to deliver that in ways that one leader could never have come up with. So it's aligning parameters, it's scope parameters. We're not going down that road.

But allowing guardrails gives the infrastructure and then allow the trees to flower. Flowers they will.

Right on. And I want to circle back to that, I guess, in particular when we get into reinvention.

But I want to talk about complexity a bit because I feel in our current moment, for cultural reasons, for technological reasons, for economic reasons, complexity and uncertainty really seem to be interlinked.

And a lot of, I think people's feeling of uncertainty and the emotions that they have to uncertainty is a response to, I would call a growing awareness of complexity. Complexity that's always existed, but that people have been able to tune out. You maybe can't tune out anymore. So how do you communicate complexity?

And I like that you use kind of systems language. And I like that you're sort of, you're using a much more, I think, novel approach in terms of this emergence concept.

But how do you communicate complexity? Because that seems to be a bit of a paradox that we can use the word, but actually communicating it is difficult.

Yeah. And this is. So I appreciate the question. I often differentiate, and I'm not the first complexity from complicated. Complicated is, you know, the body.

I mean, we're incredibly complicated machines. But as complex symptoms, we have homeostasis, we have regulating things, right.

And suddenly it's like, oh, well, if you understand the endocrine system and you understand has positive feedback loops and negative feedback, excuse me, loops and all that. Well, now I understand this system and that system. And then I can see that these are just systems of systems, right.

So I try to take the complexity part. Just like I said, there's you, me, and there's the conversation. Okay. We kind of get that. Well, how about there's the family.

And then there's the family dynamic. Oh, yeah, I can relate that. Well, now here's the organization and the organizational culture.

And you realize this thing that comes of complex dynamics, it's not, it's not foreseeable from those individual parts. It is an emergent thing.

And so it could appear as magical, but really when you allow and enable, for instance, we're having a civil conversation, we could be talking about politics. If we have certain ground rules that we agree, we could actually. Right.

It's when we don't have rules that then it goes from a complex, sophisticated, you know, evolving conversation to one where it's just. We're just not listening to each other.

And it reinforces your earlier point that if we're not even using the same words with the same meaning, then we can't even establish the rules upon which the protocol upon which we're going to have the conversation. And let me use that to circle back on what earlier. Your evocation of leadership within the organization.

To what extent, and this is kind of a half and half question, to what extent is learning the response to organizational complexity and how do organizations learn? I don't mean how do individuals in organizations learn or how do leaders within organizations learn, but how do organizations themselves learn?

Because this is a subject in my own personal life, I've had great difficulty getting organizations to pay any interest in whatsoever. So I'm really curious how you fared in this regard.

Well, thanks. Thanks for the hardest question of the day.

Yeah, we're just getting started here. To your point about a civil conversation.

Please continue doing so.

Well, Peter Senge wrote the Fifth discipline, and that was the first, I think, touching on what a learning organization is and that it's necessarily like it's part of complexity. Right. Is to understand this adaptivity. And I think you mentioned that earlier, the humans have this amazing ability to project into the future. Right.

And so we design, we have intentions, and then guess what? The system is never contained. If it's just my company, I'm impacted by external factors, by fires, by this and that.

And so there's always none predicted. What we do is we learn from these things, hopefully. So the learning organization doesn't make errors. Wrong. The learning organization. Right.

Failing to learn is the failure. And so that's number one.

Number two, unfortunately, organizations, I think we're speaking of economic organizations, are they're organized around profit and that's not necessarily organized, especially in the US where it's quarterly profit. You know, learning occurs over a longer term time frame. Than quarterly. So we have to embrace and look.

I'll take a relevant tangent there.

Even though political organizations are not specifically driven by profit, they have a similar culture of risk aversion and failure aversion when instead they need to be a learning organization.

They need to the same way that I think it's more profitable to be a learning organization, but it involves loss and it involves things that do not have an roi. So they are difficult to justify in the current economic climate, even if you could demonstrate they lead to greater prosperity.

And I think in our contemporary political crisis, the fact that political organizations are not in and of themselves learning organizations, although they can be, is a similar kind of cultural fault. I'm curious to get your reaction on that.

Well, you are exactly correct and it's a great, great point. I think I might what I get here from your comment, which is very apt. Look, humans are brilliant and individually we know we're in our own way, right?

We want to find our pur. But then we're afraid, right? So I think one of the answers to your previous question is we could talk about vulnerability.

But there's like, I don't know, is a really great place to start, I think. What do you think? And then together we come up with something. To your point, the learning organization, I think what happens is a collective.

There's a great website, I will give a plug to them. I don't get any money from them, but it's called despair.com and they are anti motivational posters.

And the point is, you know, sometimes humor is really just telling the truth. There's a poster of all these hands, you know, linked arms, and the frame says none of us is as dumb as all of us.

And there's something that happens when we get in collectives, we get dumb. And it's because to your other recent article, the Emperor's got no Clothes, people become afraid to say, you know, the emperor's got no clothes.

Now Trump has it set up now where he demands that unfortunately, to your point, there's no interjection of a mutation of idea to say, hey, I had this issue here and then that, you know, confirmation bias is another human dynamic. And look, we have to get this speech done by tonight. We don't have time to discuss this. There's those forces.

But I think to your point, it's vulnerability, it's listening and it's considering what has changed in the environment since we last formed our platform, belief or whatever. And that's the problem, is that we think nothing has changed and of course, everything has changed as we started on a daily basis.

Well, and to go back to, you know, where we were casting a narrative of hope that these are the last gasps of authoritarianism.

I think the politician who is vulnerable and adaptive, who changes in front of everyone's eyes, but in a way that the audience wants to change with as well, that we're all going on a journey to a better world with them. That would be a very, very powerful, I think, political message or political archetype.

I want to still, within the complexity frame, before we get into reinvention, I want to kind of tease out something you just referred to.

It strikes me that another consequence of complexity, and I don't know if this is cultural or if this is economic or even entirely unnecessary and atypical, but it strikes me that I feel one of the responses as a society we've had to increase in complexity, is growing individualism and narcissism.

And I'm not saying that's a causation, that could just be a correlation, but I am finding it anecdotally, but I think this is true generally that it's harder for people to organize, it's harder for groups to get things together, it's harder for people to come together, maybe because it's way easier to deal with boredom, way easier to entertain yourself on your own. So you don't need to organize with other people.

But social change always has been a small group of people getting together around an issue and trying to change the world. So here's the question, a bit of a longer preamble there.

To what extent can the model of organization that you're describing, the model of leadership that you are encouraging, to what extent does it enable greater coordination or greater collective action to understand complexity, to your point about diversity and that the more perspectives, the more we're looking at something, the better we're going to be able to understand it. So where is that link between complexity and collective action, for lack of a better phrase?

So, wow, couple of thoughts there. Yes, I hear you. Unfortunately, technology has amplified our ability to be the unsophisticated humans that we are. Me, me, me. Right.

We've also unfortunately set it up, for whatever reason, to think that each of us has to go out and survive on our own. I'm an independent person and so are many others. Right. And the idea of us actually linking arms, we haven't gotten there.

So, for instance, let's say you're a fantastic artist, and let's say I'm a fantastic, you know, marketing person and someone else is a fantastic financial type. Neither of us have the entire picture, but together we can create a loose knit. I don't know what you'd call it.

It's an organization of sorts where it's the contributor economy and we have common objectives. Now, that's the theory. The problem is often in the execution. But I'll take it down to the studs on this.

And I used to what I'm fascinated with ants and emergence because they're about four. There are four basic roles that ants play in a hive and whatever. Soldier, builder, whatever the four roles are. They know them as they go around.

You see them touching each other with their. They're exchanging pheromones or whatever it is they're doing.

But they're also sort of saying, we want to, you know, 25% of each of these roles that makes our hive work. Okay.

And as they go along, if an anteater happened to raid the thing and kill a bunch of soldiers or a bunch of builder ants and they detect, hey, we are down on this type, they will change their role. So instead of us coming at this saying, I'm a square and let me find my place to insert my square, what is needed from me?

Yes.

And what can I offer? And then what is needed? And how can I morph with that? So it's a system commitment, individual second.

Now, this is where I want to pivot to reinvention.

But I want to interrupt you briefly in doing so and share this fantasy I have, which is I would love to be able to go to the grocery store and spend an hour working there to earn 20% off my final grocery bill.

I would love to imagine that they would have a labor system in which, rather than rely upon rigid scheduling that alienates everybody, would allow me to incentivize coming in, do the training ahead of time or whatever. But I got time. I'll come and do the work. Reward me appropriately.

That level of atomized flexibility, organization of labor has always been a fantasy of mine. And that's what I'm hearing in the way in which you're describing this. But I.

Especially after the lockdowns around the pandemic, I really don't have that faith in organizations. Their incompetence and dysfunction overwhelms me. So let us talk about reinvention, because if I may. Please, go ahead.

Your brilliant idea. How about this? How about I give you a tax break of whatever, $5,000, if you will spend a week of your time at.

And you name it, the local Recycling place, the local water waste place, so that you can see the impacts of your actions. It's not that people are bad.

They just don't know if they could understand how their actions connect to this greater hole, they would then say, oh, now I get it. And that's.

So I agree with you 100%.

And this is where I will respond to your response and say, now you're getting into the great, I think, political tension of our moment, which is urban versus rural. Because to your point, I live in a rural community, I'm a farmer. You cannot hide it. So everyone sees it like you go to the dump, right.

And you are so much closer to that loop. Now, there are still many people who don't care, right. And still have a terrible. But there are many more who do because of that transparency.

But I agree with you around the public service model that we should have excellent incentives. And that's a whole separate conversation. But we can come back to it if you feel in the reinvention.

But on the topic of reinvention, because we have been using a leadership and organizational frame, and I kind of want to stay consistent on that so that our metaphors follow through. How do you advise leaders who up to this point, right.

Like they've been listening to you talk, they've been spending time hanging out the same way that you're sort of sharing your worldviews, plural. To me and our audience, the leaders like, okay, Ted, I get it.

You know, I really want to create this new resilient organization that can adapt to this moment of uncertainty and leverage complexity to really kick ass out in the marketplace and in society. But how do I do it? Like, you got me as the leader. How do I translate that to the rest of the organization?

What is that framework for reinvention or that strategy for how. Even assuming, like most organizations there are resource limited, where does that conversation go?

So to your point, we say reinvention. And I love that word. I almost think every day is a reinvention, but maybe it's a. It's a re. Framing.

I remember taking a golf lesson, they said, okay, put your head down. Now keep your arms straight. Now do this. Now swing. And it's like, you know, I couldn't move. And the guy stepped back and he said, you need a new idea.

Yeah.

So it's a new idea about what you're trying to accomplish and how to get there. Now, my answer is this. A lot of people think leaders lead. In other words, I'll lead, you follow. Wrong. That's your Authoritarian model.

I say true leaders cause leaders.

Well, there's a shift and my clients I work with, suddenly their head does this and they, you know, I don't want to say it's not about you anymore, but it is about you causing and inspiring and having others connect to there. Right.

And when we do that, we almost create like a fractal leadership where leadership is replicated at all levels, everyone understanding how each level impacts every other. And it's, it is that sort of hive, like almost balanced.

To your point earlier about, you know, having agency plus collective framework and it's an optimization in there. But to me that's how we reinvent is there's nothing to be done except to access that which is already there. And we seem to do everything but that.

So if, if you're off the mark from your values and your commitments to the world or the commitments to your customers, the reinvention is simply how do we get back on focus for what we're committed to causing? And that's just a continual path. There's nothing to reinvent except tune towards the core of who you are and where.

That seems self evident to me, especially the kind of each one teach one model that the role of the leader is to infect other leaders.

Right.

To create other leaders. What kind of pushback do you get there?

Because I suspect that there are some leaders, even if they've made it this far on the journey of wrapping their head around your work, I could still see them struggling with this because you are offering a revolutionary model, quite frankly, that is about bottom up rather than top down. Even if the top down finds itself in a new role, a new kind of responsibility that legitimizes its leadership.

Yeah, I even almost prefer. I totally hear you about top down up, but that's a hierarchical metaphor. It's almost like inside out versus outside in.

And fair enough, to your point, you know, the pushback I get is time. Yeah, we are so time pressed. I don't have time to, you know, gee, Jesse, you know, why do you think that's the case?

You know, what are three options that you can envision? Which one do you recommend and why? Well, it only takes a little longer to train people to think that way. But here's the difference, right?

Let's say it takes five times as long to develop people versus just tell them what to do. The problem is that as soon as you're out of the office, everything chokes up to you, Right?

If you don't do this, if you invest that time, guess what? They, if you do it correctly, they do the same with their people. Now these don't have to be direct reports. These can be stakeholders.

And what happens is you get this multiplicative factorial effect, let's just say where the amount of productivity, the amount of, you know, being able to loop faster than changes happening in the environment pays off so much more multifold than that linear time kind of thinking.

So you really have to sort of think of it in systems effects and the effects of exponentiation, which is hard for our brains compared to the linear thing of time, time, time. So that's the pushback the management is how do we deal with time? I'll let you know when I figure it out myself.

Because that is a hardwired piece and we just have to understand how we think differently about it.

I think it's part of the culture, right, that our relationship with time is really problematic in business culture. You're seeing that now as the, the failure to get people back to the office is now turning into, your point, an authoritarian approach.

To try to get people into the office now reinvent the future, I think is an excellent phrase and it does suggest, when we're talking about reinvention, I liked how you sort of brought a more humble approach of. I like the Bobby Dylan line, those not busy being born or busy dying. So really every day we're just trying something new.

Every day we're being curious, every day we're trying to get somewhere that we haven't been before. Is kind of my attitude. Now.

We have been talking about leaders and I kind of want to throw you the curveball which you can dodge because it is a complicated question, but a relevant question. What about the shareholders? Quote, unquote. Because you can fundamentally reach the leader.

And I think that is an excellent pivot point for you to target. But to your point about stakeholders, they are still responsible to others.

And I agree with you that what we are describing today is a more profitable, a more prosperous approach. But it does require a long term thinking, a long term view that shareholders today tend not to have. Right. It is a quarter to quarter culture.

How do you tackle that one?

Yeah. Oh, look, we're out of time. Gotta go. Yeah, well, you said it and I'm not sure you meant it or.

In other words, you're right, they're shareholder and that is how we're currently set up. Unfortunately, that's a unbalanced system. I liked the word you use, stakeholder. Now shareholders are a key and important. Stakeholder. Who else?

What else is A stakeholder. And I, you know, it's the leader who is able to. The word is not even persuade. It's enroll and inspire their financial.

Don't invest in us if you want a quick win and then want to get up. That's just not who we are. We won't take your money. Nice to say. Hard to do. But if we can enroll and engage part of our values is.

The word holistic comes off as a little bit airy fairy, unfortunately. But a system y view, maybe that sounds more logical. So I think that's the one thing is having a stakeholder perspective. Look, there's every.

It is tough that it does work. Money, quarterly earnings works. I sound like Gordon Gekko. It just doesn't work well and for long. Yes, and I think you're right.

Maybe that model is we're hitting a glass ceiling. We can't work people any harder. Right to your point of complexity. There's so much happening. We're burning out. We're not giving our best.

And it's sort of Taylorism. We still have this old manufacturing mindset of putting people into specialized roles.

It's going to take not just an organization, it's going to take a culture. Now, here's the good news. I think people are more good than bad. Call me an idealist. We all want to do better. We all want to enjoy our work. Right?

We all want each other to prosper. So exactly as you're doing this, bring this to the people who can bring it to the organizations who can say, hey, we want to work this way.

This makes sense to us. And then the bosses say, great, you can't shove this down to your point.

We do have to have it come from the base node of the system, which is every individual.

And this is where to go through our recurring argument.

Authoritarianism is good in the short term at seizing power, but it's crappy at holding on to power, and it's not able to do so in a legitimate manner.

So what you're really describing is a model of learning, a model of leadership, a model of investing in organizational capacity that not only provides an avenue for prosperity for organizations, it provides a means for revolution. Ted, I hope you're not one of the first up against the wall, as I suspect I may be.

But I think your vision for leadership and organizations is really quite remarkable and refreshing because I agree. I've always felt that people are inherently good. You just put them in shitty situations, they're going to do shitty things.

So we should focus on putting them in Good situations. Now I'm going to cut you off right there and say we are at the point in our program where we do shout outs and you have already made one shout out.

But as part of your bonus points that you earned for your stellar performance in the news and WTF rounds, you've earned another shout out.

Is there someone, some person, living or dead, organizational, but one only due to time constraints that you would like to let our audience know about because they should know more about this person, individual organization, living or dead.

Well, I will tell you this. If you want to ask someone like what's your passion? What do you care about? People will kind of like this.

But if you tell them like what pisses you off, they get super clear.

Yeah, right.

You know, you take a child's dream away and I will stomp on your head like woo. I am for the empowerment of people to live their dreams. Right. So I always think a negative sometimes informs the positive much more effectively.

To which point I would love to acknowledge the tired nurse on Etsy. So this woman got burned out. She created these novelty gifts and these are the best affirmations I've ever seen.

Right on.

Badass bitch. And forgive your clients, but badass motherfucker for men.

Right on.

And these give you an affirmation every day that are irreverent. But you know what, they kick your ass into Clarity real quick. So that's my shout out.

And this is the tired nurse on Etsy.

Correct?

Right on. And a shout out. Shout out to all nurses everywhere, active and those enough fortunate enough to retire and or cash out.

We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for nurses really being at the front line of healthcare everywhere. So way to go Ted. You have been stellar in your metaviews appearance today.

We don't have any major prizes unfortunately to let you go home with but why don't you tell our audience where they can learn more about you and connect with you as I bring your website back up.

You're fun. Thank you. Well, you know Ted, it's my TED Talk. You can remember that one.

But last name is Whetstone with an H and that is actually a sharpening stone. So all you have to remember is never a dull moment. Ted. Whetstone.com. thank you, Jesse.

Right on. Thank you Ted. I always have this tradition when I have a great guest of saying wow, that's a great show. I hope my next show doesn't suck.

But Ted, you are helping me have a streak. My last episode was fantastic. This episode was fantastic.

And I happen to have some inside information that the next episode of Meta Views is also going to be fantastic.

So I am euphoric, feeling great, thinking that as leaders, it is our job to create other leaders so that as we age, we have a large network of friends and loved ones to take care of us.

How about that As a work life Balance Metaviews is available on all the podcast platforms on YouTube, and we got a substack, but Harriet my dog is now here asking me, hey, let's go have some dinner. So that's it for today's episode. We'll see you again real soon. Thanks to Ted. Thanks to everybody. And yeah, stay fresh and we'll see you soon.