Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and it's a great pleasure to have my great buddy, Peter Diamandis, the most plugged-in scout of high technology in the world, as a podcast partner on Exponential Wisdom. And Peter, a real shout-out, you know, we've... Been working as partners, collaborators since 2012 to create the Abundance 360, and it's really gone global. Love it, brother. First of all, it's such a treat to be part of this collaboration over 25 years. It's a treat just to have you as my coach and my friend and just dream and create together. Yeah. So, Peter, I've been coaching this year 45 years. I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 45 years, and this is the 30th year of the Strategic Coach Program. Amazing. And one of the things that I, because of who I am and also who I've generally coached, is that great entrepreneurs are not great managers. For sure.
I resemble those remarks. Yeah. And what I mean by that, but great entrepreneurs are great leaders. And that's where the power of someone who has a vision and is willing to bet personally on the vision and is willing to articulate it and sell the vision out there. But if you're going to be an important entrepreneur, you've got to have a company structure that actually supports you as a person. Any thoughts about that? Because you've been around this world, you know, since.
You're conniving days of actually getting a medical degree from Harvard University by promising that you would never practice. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, an entrepreneur is sort of by definition running after and creating and running as fast as you can and looking at opportunities and so forth. And unfortunately, the entrepreneur also expects everyone in his organization to be entrepreneurial as well. But you actually don't want an organization that's all entrepreneurs. Otherwise, you're never going to have a product that you're delivering on time and on schedule with a great product and so forth. Yeah. And so ultimately, I mean, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who fail because they don't succeed in bringing their team along.
And one of the things I've learned over the years is that my responsibility is to help my team do a great job. Can I just ask you a question in your mind what a great job is? Because that's a very useful term. From your perspective and who you are and how you like to operate, what's a great job on their part that supports you when you're at your best? That is an important question. And, you know, the immediate reaction is a selfish one to say the great job is that they're hitting their numbers and that they're fulfilling what they said they were going to do in some cases, or they are being creative and creating something amazing. But at the end of the day, one of the elements that is important that isn't.
properly dealt with is making sure that your team loves what they're doing, that they're having fun and that they're being fulfilled and that if they are doing a great job, they're not going to bolt because they're not having fun with you. So it's a mix. It's delivering what you need as the maestro. and what the company needs, but also making sure that they're being fulfilled in their world, in their life. Yeah, and I think from a presentation standpoint, from an integrity standpoint, what you're saying front stage has to be matched by backstage performance. In other words, that there's actually a congruity between the entrepreneur and the team that's backing up the entrepreneur. This is a realization that entrepreneurs are necessarily the best managers in the world that you've identified. And I mean, how much time do you spend managing?
Well, I'm going to give you the answer. In the last year, actually being in meetings that were devoted to management, I spent two meetings out of the last 365. And part of it is that we have a division of labor between Babs, Babs Smith, who's my partner in life. So Babs runs the company and I run the program. So in theater terms, I'm responsible for what's on stage and Babs is responsible for the theater. She's responsible for how the whole theater is put together. So my job is new material all the time, front stage. So my teamwork are people related to the actual front stage.
product, front stage presentation performance. So I have a whole team around me. And right now it's about 10 who every quarter have something to do with me. There's projects that I would have with 10 people. And I've decided to do this without any management meetings whatsoever. If I can go through an entire year without any management meetings. How in the world do you do that?
Yeah, so I created a thinking process that's a one printed page set of instructions. It's really my expectations. One of the biggest things that I think makes entrepreneurs disastrous in their organizations is that they have expectations of their team that they never express. In other words, they will have a job description, and the person comes in and does the job description 100%. But the entrepreneur fires the person after a year because the person drives them crazy because they didn't really live up to their expectations, which they never told the person that they hired. So I've got this thing. It's called the 4x4. And it's just four boxes on a sheet of paper. And the first thing has to do with performance, what your best performance has to be. The second one is what your best results have to be. And in a time period of three months or six months, how you can be a hero to me. There's four results that if you do these, you're a hero to me. And the fourth box, here's the place you never want to go. If you do these four things, it drives me crazy.
Amazing. Okay. And if you go anywhere near, it drives me crazy. I have to tell you, you're shortening your career with me. By the way, do you use this as a marital tool as well? Well, let's not go there. Can I ask you, have you ever seen entrepreneurial marriages that didn't work? Yeah, all the time. Yeah. And I would say that it's unspoken expectations that both sides had of the other that were never actually agreed on. Yeah. And that does it. So this is really what it is. So just really short, I hire with this.
So I actually bring people. And some of my hires are from other parts of the company. I bring them across from another area. But they're from, you know, the job market, too. And I just hired my overall podcast manager because the podcasts have really become a major thing for us.
And he came in from the radio industry and he was a studio manager. He's got 15 years of experience, but he's just applying that to the whole world of podcasts. Sure. Even before he came on board, he was down to a finalist. He got a piece of paper and it's called Podcast Manager 4x4. And it said, this is how you have to be alert. This is how you have to be curious. This is how you have to be responsive. And this is how you have to be resourceful. Anytime I'm in contact with you, this is how you have to show up. Okay. You can't have an off day with me. I mean, you can have an off day when I'm not here, but you can't have an off day with me. And then best results.
From quarter to quarter, you have to do things faster, easier, cheaper, and bigger. And we'll have metrics for these. I think your description, is it a number? Is it a sentence? Yeah, there's a little statement with each of them. For example, you have to be alert to all breakthroughs that are happening in the podcast world where other people are introducing new technologies and new techniques. You've got to be super alert about this. And so that one line item would get them to maybe do research once a week or once a month to look at what's going on. And then we would come down and there was a particular area that I want to see information on. For example, we had done a bad job of actually packaging and summarizing all the podcasts that I had done over a five or six year period. So the first project he did, he went back.
and he ran through every podcast and there were hundreds of them and created point forum summaries of all the podcasts, which was available when you got the podcast. He inserted a little thing and he knew a lot about social media. So he inserted a little teaser into social media, which would give a little 15 to 30 second taste of what's inside of a podcast. So the person goes, oh, that'd be interesting. I'll just tap on that. I mean, he knows dozens of things that I don't because that's his specialty. And then the being a hero, and I'll relate it back to you, Peter. We took a risk on each other for the first Marina del Rey. A360 event, yeah.
And that is that I said to you that I was going to put a certain number of butts in the seats. And you took a risk because it was two-thirds of the audience, and that's what gave rise to the idea. And I took a risk in the sense that I think they're going to be wowed when they come, the ones that I convinced to write a check, give up two or three days of their life and come. So you were a hero to me, and I was a hero to you. Yes, very much so. And my feeling is that the greatest currency in the world of human progress is actually people being heroes to each other and producing specific results.
I get that. And at the end of the day, that's the greatest gift you can give somebody is the faith and your investment in them. But if you're clear about what you're shooting for, that's what an entrepreneur does, right? You have targets and you shoot for them. Yeah, and people ask me, you know, why are you doing this with Peter? And I says, because I believe in him so much that if I can just support his growth of the Abundance 360 over the next 25 years, we're going to get rewarded in ways we can't even imagine today. And it's been true. We've gone through a complete technological transformation here at Coach. Our best clients have utilized A360 to transform their businesses. And all I have to do is invest for 25 years in this one collaboration. And I get all this benefit.
desire, true emotional desire to reinvest and support you because of the faith you put in me, I want to over-deliver to you. Yeah, and we never have to keep books on this. It's just an agreement, and it's a time frame that we've agreed to every year to make it bigger and better. I'll have 10 individuals, and they each have this sheet of paper, and each of them has four projects. For example, we have a quarterly book now, and we're putting them on Kindle as free downloads, and this will happen within the next 60 days. And we have audios with these books. We have videos with these books. We have Mindset Scorecard. So what Gord, who's my product manager, has told me, and he said, you know, the more you get people when they do a free download, they can click on other dimensions.
of what supports the download, the more they start getting a relationship with you. And he says the final click is you send them to a 60-minute webinar, recorded webinar on Strategic Coach. So our goal for the first year is that we'll have 200,000 downloads of the books and we'll have 100,000 people who download the... webinar, and we get 1,000 extra sign-ups just from this. And it's all automated, and Kindle's giving it to us for free. Amazing. Now, that requires an enormous amount of backstage skill and coordination and everything else, which I have the foggiest idea of what's required, but he's running this, so that would be one of the ways he could be a hero, is to put this whole system in place.
No, I mean, I sit there and listen when I'm in the audience at Abundance 360. I mean, I'm not just sitting there, you know. First of all, I know you always check to see if I'm sitting there, so I've got to be there. I do, and I know you're paying attention. You always are. Yeah. So you have hero things. I mean, you have an annual cycle to Abundance 360, but there are crucial hero projects throughout the year. You know, it might be a particular new technology, and you would assign someone to actually manage that whole thing and produce the results that you're talking about. And I have four of them, and generally it goes about three months or six months, and then we have a review, and we redo that part of the sheet. But I also have...
Don't let the backstage work overwhelm your front stage results. I said, don't get caught up in meetings. Don't get caught up in backstage stuff at Strategic Coach. I want you delivering the product. If you do, you're going to drive me crazy. So let's talk about the four by four, the different stages in the life cycle of your employees. So when you're looking to hire, you'll create your four by four as sort of a hiring filter. Yep.
Well, there's usually an impact filter, you know, a tool that really describes what the job does and why the job is important. So that's not peculiar to an individual. It's just that this is a new project inside the company and this is what we'll do. And that's a one pager. So we actually go out to the agencies. We generally hire through agencies and we'll give them the impact filter and they have to do the Colby and they have to do all the testing at the agency side because there's particular Colby profiles that support that. And so the impact filter will be your first line of filtering? That's the job description, yeah. And then when you're down to your finalists, you'll share with them the four by four? Yeah, even before they come and meet me. So they get this. As a matter of fact,
Jack Gord, who actually got the job, he had been so knocked out by the specific requirements that I put out in the sheet of paper. He says, well, I'm just going to take it that I have the job. And it was two weeks later before he was actually hired. He said, I'm just going to start on all these projects right now. And he came in with 10 projects that he was going to do on day one. And he's four months. Yeah. And everything. But he knows every day I ask them, have this on your work desk right next to your computer. And first thing in the morning, take 10 minutes and look over the sheet. We're never going to have to have any meetings. We're never going to have any trouble. So let me slow this down a little bit for me and for our listeners. So showing the four.
by four before the hire is, listen, there's nothing unexpected, right? You've made it this stage, but here it is. And at the end of the day, if this is okay with you, this is what I need. If there's anything here that is not okay with you, it's really important for you to identify that right now. Yeah. And I haven't had the experience of someone opting out of the game as a result of this.
But here's what I'd say, Peter. Everybody thinks that a job description, say a set of activities and organized activities and metrics, tells a person what to expect when they come into an entrepreneurial organization. I would say it tells them about 20% of what's really required. And that is that you have certain expectations because you're Peter Diamandis. And there's four ways you can be a hero to Peter Diamandis. And I want to tell you the four ways you can drive him absolutely crazy. And this is understood from day one. I love that. You won't fire them because they only got 90% of their job description. You'll fire them because they drive you crazy.
Yeah, I'm clear about that. I have a program where I bring in a Strikeforce member. We've talked about this before. And I say, listen, there's a 90-day trial. This is from a sort of, they're coming in just for a job. You know, they're seeing if they'll be a member of your team. Yeah, so I have a team of a dozen millennials that work with me across everything I do. And then I will cycle through a couple of Strikeforce members. These are entrepreneurs by their very nature.
They're intended to be with me, work with me across everything I do, travel with me, be in my board meetings to keep their, you know, from age 21 to 32, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, the realization is the most important judgment factor for me is when I'm in a meeting with them, if they are quiet and I want to hear what they have to say. That's a good sign. In other words, not that they're quiet, but if I want to hear their opinion, the other side of it is if they're speaking and I'm in the back of my mind saying, would you please shut up so someone else can say something useful? That's like, you know, okay, time to let them go. That's column four. That's box number four. And that's like one of my most, it's kind of obvious, but I know when I feel it. No, no, but here's the thing. A lot of people feel I'm just kind of peculiar and I have sort of unreasonable demands. No, you have, you have expectations. So I say to people, aside from what's on the sheet of paper, I have no other expectations. If I haven't seen you for two weeks, you don't have to worry that I'm sitting there thinking about why isn't he doing this? I said, if it's.
It's not on the sheet of paper. I don't expect anything. And that gives an enormous guarantee for people just to focus on their work because they're not worried about what I'm thinking about them doing their work. They're just thinking about their work. I love this. Next question. So we've hired the person. You've hired Gord. How often do you update this document and sit down and review it with him? Well, I gave him four months worth of Be the Hero project, and he did them in six weeks. So I gave him a whole new set after six weeks. He accomplished in six weeks what I wanted him to accomplish in four months. And if a person doesn't want to step up to those? When do you want to know that? Yeah.
as soon as possible. It's kind of like going to HLI and I've come back and my team member said, you know, I wouldn't want to know any of that stuff. And I said, well, you will know about it. And I said, bad news of any kind. When would you like to know about it? And I said, probably yesterday. You know, I mean, it's the same thing with when is a person not working out? And I know we have a topic coming down. When do you kill a company that's not working? You know, when do you kill a company at that? Well, it's kind of like sensors. You know, you got to have a lot of sensors and this sheet provides enormous sensors. Yeah, I love it. How many people in your active management sphere or lack thereof, how many of these do you have out there?
Well, I have five with five more being created. So this is a brand new tool for the program. And so we're breaking this out because we've learned a lot about it. But you have five people that you've created the tool for right now. Yeah, yeah. And this is five people, but the area of activity is expanding. So I'm going to have five more. And they're already on board, but they'll get the four by four. And I did one on myself. And I tell entrepreneurs, actually do one of these on yourself and actually show people what their expectations should be of you. And I laid this out.
When you come to your workshop the next quarter, we're going to have everybody sketch out their expectations of themselves that they're committing to other people. Nice. I totally get that. And, of course, you can also have your team create that for you. Yep. Yep. They're a bit cautious about it, so I just went ahead and did it on myself. You know, and I have a column, Drives Others Crazy, and overloading the backstage.
You know, I just create stuff and I just load up the backstage. And I said, well, I create this new thing. I create this new thing. I create this new thing, you know, and everything like that. Well, you know, I did it quickly. Why can't you do it quickly? Yeah, no, I totally get that. I mean, there's interesting, right? Because a lot of folks for hiring a new person, I'm totally crystal clear of the value and how it sets us off on the right direction. But you can imagine you have current employees and you present this to them and they say, but Dan, you know, this request that you're making here for me to be a hero and do those things. That's not what I want to do. And then the question is, if they had been good enough before, do you bend or do you say, well.
You have to try to do it or we need to find a different role for you. Well, personally, I don't care who does it. I want it done. So if you're not the one to do it, you know, you be the manager who gets the person who can actually do it. And I understand that. Awesome. It's a who not how concept. Yep. One of my favorite concepts. Yeah. It's really interesting, Peter, because if you can free up entrepreneurs from the almost a lifetime guilt that they have that they're not really good managers, they weren't put on the planet to be managers. There aren't many entrepreneurs put on the planet there to maximize the creation of new things. They're not there to be managing what gets created.
So I can let go of my guilt, you're saying. I think it's about time. I think it's about time. And don't export any of it either. Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. I so love this because it is 100% true, right? I have my Jedi Council, which we meet on a monthly basis. And I'm always feeling like I'm never giving them enough direction and enough...
time. They're amazing and I love them all dearly. But this is a means by which if we reach agreement on this meeting, I present this and they accept it or they explain to me why. And they can explain why something doesn't work, right? Well, it's a negotiation. I mean, there's a negotiation in the marketplace. I mean, people who really know how to get things done.
have a better idea of how to do it than you do. You may say you have to get it done this way, but you're kind of a rice farmer in Nepal telling a Sherpa how to get to the top of Mount Everest. You have the fungiest idea how to get to the top of Mount Everest. You're a rice farmer. Yeah, so I'm not a great how person. I'm a great starter person. I think you're a great starter person. I'm not a great finisher person. What am I going to tell a finisher about finishing? Yes.
I can almost imagine that this tool besides individuals is a potentially great management tool for a team of individuals. Well, I'll tell you what, Peter, I'll work with you and you can do it on the entire membership of Abundance 360 next January. And when they come on board on the Sunday, you say, I just want to tell you who you have to be over the next two and a half days. And you could say, this is your performance. These are the routes. This is how you can be a hero to me. And this is how you're going to drive me crazy. And you tell all 360 and the four or 5,000 that are watching it on live stream, you tell them who you have to be. And first of all, they'll respond because who knows how you're supposed to be.
when you're going to a big conference. So I'll work with you on that. That'll be my contribution for the next one. You're brilliant, my friend. I love it, love it, love it. And I am so desirous to sit down and fill out my four by fours now for my team and for myself and for myself. Great. Yeah. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, Dan. Always love our times together. And any chance that you can make an entrepreneur free to create is truly exponential and it is exponential wisdom. Thank you, pal. Thank you very much. See ya.