The Truth About Founders and Freedom with Bob Glazer

[00:00:00] Mark Abbott: Hey, Bob. Good morning, mark. Good to see you. Hey, this is, this is super cool for me. I, I have to admit, I didn't read the book until yesterday. 

[00:00:17] Bob Glazer: All right. And, and I'm like, you're proving that it's short, which is one of the cases I've made to people, 

[00:00:22] Mark Abbott: so, yeah. but dude, I love it. I really do. I love it.

And, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that I'm looking forward to talking about. I, have kind of the opposite of what you do in terms of my most recent book. It's in my only book, right? It's 350 pages. It's dense. It's got a lot in there. and, it's not really 

[00:00:50] Bob Glazer: meant to be read all at once, right?

No, it's, it's not, it's kind of a manual as you're going through some things. 

[00:00:55] Mark Abbott: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I, and, and so there's a, there's a lot of really cool. overlaps between, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of overlap. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap, which is super cool. So, one of the things I would love to start with is just, your backstory and the backstory on the book.

you know, books are hard. I know you've, what have you done now? Seven or so? yeah, 

[00:01:19] Bob Glazer: I, what I lack in quality, I, I make up in quantity. 

[00:01:25] Mark Abbott: It reminds me of a line I use all the time, which is kind of different, but it's, you know. We get to work up, we get to work early, but we make up for it by staying late.

Yeah. you know, that's how we try to get the stuff done that we're trying to get done. But, I'd love the backstory, for you and then on the book. I get it, but not everybody will have read the book that watches this thing. And of course I'd love for them to read the book. 

[00:01:51] Bob Glazer: How, how, how early do you want me to start?

[00:01:54] Mark Abbott: You know, you get to decide how far back in the way back machine my experience has been, if you start with when I was four, it's probably too far back. 

[00:02:02] Bob Glazer: Start with when I was 14 actually, I was just told, I was working on the speech for the book and one of my friends is one of the top speech coaches in the world and he said the best way to start speech is back when I was something and I was like, I don't have a story.

But then I actually did have a story, so. It, it, it was sitting there waiting for my report card, with my parents, like, the parent-teacher conferences with a sort of look of dread. So that's a good place to start. I was probably your classic EDD creative, entrepreneurial kid, did not really do that great in sort of traditional, environments and learning and, and sort of.

Was always told, Hey, you know, he seems, seems to have a lot of potential, but he is not really meeting it. That's literally what every report guard said. Yeah. So fast forward at some point, I, I, I realized I had a passion around business and marketing that clicked for me. I started to over achieve, for a while, and try to make up for, for sort of.

Pain of Underachieving, started, a few different companies, the largest of which is called Acceleration Partners. And it was that when we were building that company and kind of trying to change an industry that I realized that I like writing was a good, Vehicle for me. I ended up going to a leadership development, thing being really transformed on, on this subject of core realities, but not being told how to figure out what they were.

which is like Simon Sinek wrote this book like about why, and everyone was like, everyone's great. And then like the find your why did, it's not that easy. Like, and, and in fact I know the guy who went and built archetypes and whole system out of it because it wasn't, everyone's like, great, but like how, how, how do I do that?

So, you know, once I did that work, a lot of things about my life, changed and I ended up writing a book called, elevate. I started a company called Acceleration Partners. We, we started growing it and I kind of leaned into my writing, in the, as as we were taking on a different industry, and I became really fascinated with.

building the building process of, of, of a company, and a company kind of driven by, by culture and values. And eventually I would write this book called Elevate, which has been probably my most known book to date, and talked about core values as part of spiritual capacity. And people are like, same problem as the Simon Sinek.

They're like, this is great. I'm, you know, how do I do it? And I was like, well. I've got this process I've built over the years and I've used it in our leadership and I turned it into a course, but I, I don't know how to kind of get it to you, so I made it into a course. But, so that is a long way of how I got to this book of like, how, how do I, this work is really transformative.

How do I take it to people and, and then how do I make it like interesting? And I just didn't think a book on core values would be interesting. And that's when. I'm a big fan of parables, and that's when that format occurred to me. 

[00:04:59] Mark Abbott: Yeah. And I think if I, recall properly, a daughter named Chloe perhaps helped you, sort of like.

Yeah, 

[00:05:07] Bob Glazer: well, she, my daughter, like, you know, I'm very critical of my kids' writing. I, I, I'm a, I'm a very direct editor and not only did she look at the draft and make a bunch of changes on the first page, but at one point she was kind of challenging me to, Hey, why don't you try fiction and do something different?

You only read nonfiction. You only write nonfiction. So, that, that was interesting. And so that sort of all clicked for me. I was like, oh, like, I kind of think like. Five dysfunctions of the team. This is a thing you kind of need to see in order to, to, to, to get it. So I ended up getting Pat Lencioni and Bob Berg to, to read it and Pat helped with the title.

So I felt really honored. 'cause those are, those are some of the parables that I think are some of the. Better business ones of, of all time. 

[00:05:53] Mark Abbott: Oh yeah. I 

[00:05:53] Bob Glazer: mean, 

[00:05:54] Mark Abbott: I've read more parables by, you know, Lindsay, than, right. Yeah. Fascinatingly. 

[00:05:58] Bob Glazer: You know, most of us, probably you two, given what you do, you probably read the goal, right.

it's a, and it's like the most famous operations book in and, and hbs and it's a parable like, and you not think of like operations and a parable. But, but again, it might, it would just be probably boring to read as a, as a, as a as a book. Alright, 

[00:06:17] Mark Abbott: so I have the goal. Have you really read the whole thing?

I have, yeah. Yeah. So you're better than I am, man. Yeah, I, I have it. It's been something that sits there on my stack of books that I've gotta do, but, and of course, oh, you 

[00:06:32] Bob Glazer: would, you would love, I mean, it's all about it. The, not to ruin the book for everyone, but it's about the theory of constraints. And actually there's a story in that book that like, again, the mentor is telling to a guy that I have used to this data and it worked on.

Who did I use it on? Was it my son or someone weeks ago that like, if you're ever in a, you should put the, slowest person at the front of a line. So we're on a hike because they, they will, they, if they're in the back, they will drop off and the pace is considerably faster if you put the slowest person in front and they feel the weight of everyone behind them.

And I literally just used that strategy like a week or two on something and it, and it worked. 

[00:07:10] Mark Abbott: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, one of the things that, as I said, I love the book. And, one of the things that, you know, I've been writing about for 10 plus years now is, what I call work with a capital W, right?

And the big idea behind work with a capital W is that I deeply believe that, work is. Probably the most maligned, four letter word, right? that you cannot self-actualize without doing work. Because deep down we all wanna matter. And one of the best ways to matter is to serve others and to serve others through work that you deeply.

Enjoy doing. Right. And and so, you know, one of the things I love about the book is it, it sort of attacks the idea of doing work that you love doing through one of the, one of the angles of work, which is to work with people that you genuinely enjoy working with. Yeah, right. And and and obviously that's all about culture and.

And as you know, people know who've either read my book or read my substack or read my blogs or, you know, I'm, I, you know, I believe, you know, deeply believe, and you touch on it a little bit in the book too, by the way. when you talk about inclusion, right? I deeply believe that. The last 50 years, has been kind of anti-culture, specifically within sort of, you know, the more elite parts of, of, of, of, of, you know, the traditional institutions within society.

but you know, to me, you know, Drucker was a hundred percent. When, you know, he's, he supposedly, well, no one can find where he wrote this, right, or said it, but, you know, you know, culture treat strategy for breakfast. So I think the, you know, at the core, the book's sort of all about you getting comfortable with who you are.

So, in my opinion, you can go find people that you genuinely love working with so that you can genuinely turn work into a w, capital W as opposed to a lowercase w or worse, right? Where you think, you know. Work is, you know, just something that, you know, you, you, you do and you hate, which is, you know, which I think is just like, you know, which is, which is really super sad.

So, so you know, the whole idea around core values Yeah. And 

[00:09:42] Bob Glazer: that from, I was writing a piece like that I haven't released yet, but that comes from like, a, a change in the world. And I keep seeing, like with all this stuff going on in the world today, and everyone thinks it's about like. Let's just pretend we time, you know, zoom someone in from 200 years ago.

Yeah. And we don't give them social media or anything and we tell 'em to look around at what's going on. They're like, you mean I don't have to work in the field? You know, I can go like in an air conditioned building. And so look, there's only, there's three options in the world fundamentally. it boils down.

I think people forget this. You can. Forage and farm and do something that's self sustenance, you know, for you and your family or otherwise when people did, you can start your own business and create something in exchange, or you can go work in someone else's organization, that they, that they've created.

And, you know, that was a real gift, you know, a 200 years ago and now it's, you know, talked about as some sort of indentured servitude or otherwise. And I think to, to what you said, a lot of it is. Is the attitude you bring. And one of the things I've noticed is particularly more in the south, in the US and the Midwest, people just really happy in whatever job they're doing and doing it really well.

and yeah, there's just some, some weird stuff going on now that I just think pace. It comes from both wealth and entitlement in terms of how people think about work and jobs and doing the minimum and otherwise. 

[00:11:09] Mark Abbott: Yeah. And I, and I, I think, you know, and I get into this in, in work 9.0, you know, I, I, I go back and, you know, get back to core values.

Core values are, and I, and I want you, I would love you to, to define them for us here, right? But, you know, I think of core values as being a significant component, but not. The totality of, of worldview. Right. And if we go back and we look at, you know, the history of, of, you know, and I, I I bet you even goes beyond Yeah.

You know, humans, right? If we go back and look at it, there's, there's top down worldviews, which were brought to us by, by religion and mythology. And, and, and then later on, you know, in certain regards by, very, you know, sort of ideologist like societies like. Communism, and then there's bottom up, right?

Which is from the enlightenment. and then, you know, you have what I like to refer to as the sides swipers, which are the postmodernists who believe that, you know, nothing's real, whether it's top down and bottom up. All I 

[00:12:15] Bob Glazer: was explaining postmodernism to someone yesterday, like didn't know what it was, and they, they, they, they didn't know the definition.

They've seen it and they were like, they were just like, yeah, that, that's my favorite one. Yeah, I, I, I actually have this idea. To recruit Mark Burnett and have this global reality show called Civilizations. Right. And we pick four islands, thousand people each, and we install these systems that everyone romanticizes and see like what happens, you know?

Yeah. And my vote is that the postmodernist that will collapse the fastest, right? A hundred percent. Yeah. Like, won't even last. Like look, we, we, we to, to we all, I I, I mean a lot of. Dialogues and debates about Columbia and what's going on this week and stuff people, and I'm like, look, there are some basic things that we all agree to that might not exactly be what we want individually to be part of a functioning society.

And a lot of these intellectual, romanticized things exist in a textbook and they don't exist in functioning. Societies and, and again, there was, I would love to drive my car a hundred miles an hour and like with a bottle of alcohol in the back. Like there's just some things we all agree to. So that's society functions and as you said, there are these different views, but, but, and I think you agree and the same as an individual in the same as a company.

The core values are the non-negotiables. Like, why are we here? What's the common thread? It doesn't mean it defines me entirely. But I, I, I, I, when I talked about our company, and I'm, I'm sure you share the sentiment I, and having kids go through college, I was like, it, it's kind of like the college process, right?

There's, I've got a kid who wants a large urban campus party school, right? And I have a kid who wants a small liberal arts school. They're fundamentally different value propositions. They should attract different people. You shouldn't, if you love one, you, you probably wouldn't like the other. And, and that's.

That's what organizations are. They can't be everything to everyone. 

[00:14:17] Mark Abbott: No. They, they, they can't be. And, and I think, you know, we'll get into it in a bit here, but the, you know, I believe that, you know, great companies have a soul. I believe that the soul of a great company are what I call four forever agreements.

One of those forever agreements is core values, right? So, and, and, and, and, and, and they're easier said and printed than done, which you get into big time, often 

[00:14:42] Bob Glazer: printed, right? Rarely, right. The, the old Enron 

[00:14:45] Mark Abbott: story. Yeah. So let's, let's just quickly, go through your definition of core values and what I think would be.

Most people probably are like, ah, yeah, we, we know that, right? But I, what would be really interesting is to hear how, what your definition, and then even if there's a journey for you in terms of how your definitions evolve, that would be awesome. 

[00:15:08] Bob Glazer: Yeah. And, and I wanna separate as I do in the book, personal and, and organizational.

So, some of the same principles apply, I think, to not having one word and being distinct. But core values are the non-negotiable principles that guide behavior and decisions. So like what you wanna be doing, and like, we're all a little children at the end of the day, and it's like a stick and a carrot.

It's like, which behaviors? The problem with Enron is whatever they said wasn't what. As you know, like people, you're rewarding certain things. You're either rewarding 80 hour weeks or you're rewarding good outcomes, right? Those are different behaviors that you're rewarding, so they guide your behaviors and decisions.

For a company, it's the, it's the sort of connections between a bunch of people and what is the things and, and the strings between us. So you imagine sort of the values and then the spokes. And then the people for an individual, the person's in the middle, you have the spokes and then the values. So, and obviously you're looking for alignment, but I think they're intrinsic.

They're not aspirational. They reflect who you are, not who you want to be. They're consistent. They show up across all areas of work, relationship, personal decisions. I, I often say like, family is not a core value, but for most, it's a priority. But a lot of people, how they show up for their family. The way that they show up is the same way they show up for their friends or their employees.

There's something about that that is consistent with them, and they're clarifying, right? They help you. At the end of the day, the best thing a core value can do is help you make a decision. Who do I, where do I live? I talk about the big three in the book. Where do I work? Who's my partner? What's the community I want?

Should I take this job? Should I not take this job? that, that's the most empowering and, and the bigger the decision. If you make those big three and they don't align to your core values, they have a very, low chance of, of success. And you live in a place that I'm slowly trying to migrate to. Right.

But I always say, I think the community part is the often underlooked one in that, you know, if you. Look, if you've had a heart issue and you're not drinking anymore and you live in Newcastle, Engle, England, where you know, everyone goes to the pub from, you know, seven till midnight every night, that that you're not gonna go to the pub and not drink, or you're gonna feel very like you.

The environment needs to match the things. If health is one of the top priorities in your life, then you need to live somewhere like Park City where you call your friend and be like, where are we hiking this morning? Right. It's not that I can't hike where I live right now. I can, and I do. Yeah. It's just not the dominant culture here in the same way.

[00:17:41] Mark Abbott: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the, you know, ultimately, you know, I, one of the things I write about, it's in the 9.0. It's also, you know, I've written about it a lot over the years, is. Similar to your, you know, the three, three big areas of your life where you really need to make sure that your core values are aligned.

You know, I talk about trust, right? And I talk about trust through three dimensions. Character, competency and connection. And connection is obviously this core value thing, right? And then I talk about, You know, think about it through the lens of what I call the seven types of relationships we have, right?

We have a relationship with others. Yeah. We have a relationship with our family, right? Others can be your, your groups that you're in, right? You have a relationship with things. You have a relationship with ideas. You have a relationship with yourself. You have a relationship with, basically the universe.

For some, that's God. Some they say spirituality for some they say none of that stuff, whatever. I'm not here to, you know, to judge on that one. And then, you know, one of my favorite is you have a relationship with time, right? Yeah. Which I think most people do, don't appreciate as much, but to the extent that you can have a high trust relationship with all seven of those types, you know.

Life is pretty damn good. Right? And, and, and you can rely on, you know, if, if one of them gets a little fun, funky, right? You can, you can dip into one of those other relationships and say, Hey, can you help me? Right? So I, I, I love the three big areas. I. Little simpler version than mine. Which, which, which is, you know, typical, complicated.

We established that I write 

[00:19:22] Bob Glazer: shorter than you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

[00:19:24] Mark Abbott: So remember eight 80 d, so, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I, you know, I, IIII love the model. so I got an interesting question for you that I was thinking about. Yeah. Before we started to get into some, some of this stuff in detail, have you thought about.

Or more than that. Have you done research on the bell curve associated with age and really figuring out your core values? 

[00:19:52] Bob Glazer: I, I haven't I, so I can just tell you anecdotally, right? like, I think that, and I have a new insight around this. So, the, the, it, it, it generally seems that either. Like early career or sort of midlife, particularly after some sort of exit or success or some flexibility, is where a lot of people are leaning in or after a really bad situation.

So one of the interesting things is that like. When something is taken away from us, like we're pretty good at reevaluating what we want and figuring out what good looks like. yeah. The, the, the most dangerous thing is, is okay enough? Yeah. Very few people quit. Okay. Enough they quit bad or, or they lose their job.

I, I know people start never would've started business. They weren't fired and they never liked what they were doing. And, and I Yeah, I understand. You got bills to pay in that stuff. Yeah. there's also this point. If you're in a relationship, I think there, someone once told me, you need three wives in your life.

And I told this story to my wife and she got angry every time because she didn't hear the full story of it. And it was that there are these phases where you inflect and you, you know, there's the. You know, meet each other single before kids. Fun stage. There's the growing kids stage and having kids, and then there's the post kid stage, right?

Yeah. And, and actually that's the one where a lot of people, the empty nest, are really trying to figure out what they're gonna do. And at those stages, you need to change and, and you have to inflect with your partner or, or otherwise. Interestingly though, like. I think that the older you get potentially, It might matter a little less so as you hit 60 or 70. 'cause, 'cause you've made all these decisions, right? Mm-hmm. And at this point, I actually think sometimes, and you're with this person kind of all day long, if it's a partner, it might be a little bit more about compatibility, about what you actually wanna be doing on a.

On a weekly or monthly basis. So I don't have any scientific data on that, but when I think about the people who have engaged with the work, I would say there's a big pocket, sort of late forties, early fifties, and then kind of like teens and twenties or a bad job or kind of like, what should I be, what should I be doing?

But if I had to write an addendum, I'm already interested in exploring this thing where again, because the values are gonna be a lot about these decisions, once all the big decisions are made in your life. like, you kind of just wanna like, have fun, so I Yeah, they might, they might matter less. Well.

Well, 

[00:22:36] Mark Abbott: yeah. I always think about a buddy of mine, who, you know, used to say back to the conversation about, you know, our spouses Right. He used to say, look, I'm, I'm, I'm focusing on doubling my net worth not cutting it in half. Yeah. which, which gets back to, it's a very pragmatic 

[00:22:53] Bob Glazer: way 

[00:22:53] Mark Abbott: of, yeah. In a very pragmatic way.

Right. But, and it gets back to, One of the most important decisions I deeply believe, you know, you can make is who you marry, right? Yeah. who you, who, who you wanna have as your long-term partner? you know, the old, I think it was Jim Rohn, right? You are the five people, right? That you, that you, that you hang out with, and, And clearly, you know, that's gotta work and it's gotta work. You know, you talked about harmony versus, you know, versus a perfect match in terms of, in terms of the core values. In, in, in, and I got that wrong 

[00:23:27] Bob Glazer: in my twenties. I was like, oh, like do we, we have the same activities or we like, that's not it. It's, yeah, it's the big stuff.

And, yeah, I recently was coaching someone, you know, who's doing this work and we figured out two of her core values and she was going through a divorce and she was like. It kind of got really quiet and I was like, what? Like what are they not right? And she's like, no, I just realized that my like ex-husband is the absolute opposite of these two.

And I was like, that would be hard. Yeah, right. That's hard. If you're a person that's all gratitude and he's selfish. Like that's, that's hard. Like you can get away with like if there's five points of contact, and this one's a little off, but like if, if you, if you're running them as a negative magnet on all five, that's hard.

I 

[00:24:13] Mark Abbott: mean, it's, it's, you know, obviously hard's probably not even the right word, right? Yeah. I mean, it's just impossible to make it work and, and you know, part of your work, I know this, right? That's in the book obviously, and part of my work is to, you know, you know, I always say we are where we are, you know, learning the lessons we need to learn.

And I wouldn't change anything about my life because I wouldn't be who I am. Right? But that doesn't. Is, you know, back to f Scotts Fitzgerald, you know, the mark of a strong mind is to hold two contradictory thoughts. Doesn. Yeah. Well, but you're like, Colin, 

[00:24:47] Bob Glazer: all my favorite quotes today. Yeah. 

[00:24:48] Mark Abbott: That's like the fourth one.

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't mean that we're not Right. Trying to help you and I aren't trying to help people not make stupid decisions. Right. I mean, ultimately I think both of us have got a little bit of age on us. You know me a little more than you. Yeah. But where we're like, Hey, you know, I'd like to share some stuff so that you don't, you know, end up in a.

Marrying someone who you're just like, you know, if you just would've had a little bit of, you know, these tools, you know, you would've seen, Hey, you know, this is fun, but this ain't gonna last. 

[00:25:20] Bob Glazer: Right? Yeah. And, and look, I know a bunch of couples and interestingly, like I, I know couples who, you know, didn't make it outta the fun stage, right?

And, and to that parent stage, but then it's equal. That second stage is equally as dangerous, or if not more, which is, okay, well, what do we want to do? And some people. Want to go on and develop their life and their skill and a lot the other people don't wanna let go of that identity of being a parent, you know?

And, and, and that's where those issues, you know, come into, come into play. 

[00:25:52] Mark Abbott: One of the things that I am, I, I mentioned earlier, forever agreements and, and I have a theory that I, you know, that I think it's beyond just, you know. Some stupid theory. It's based upon lots of interactions. Yeah. Over 40 plus years of a career.

but I have a theory that, great businesses are built by founders who have a deep sort of sense for what the company they want to build is. And part of that deep sense is this sense for, you know, for the culture of the organization. and. It, you know, if they do a really, really good job, it's something that persists, you know, from leader to leader after they move on.

Yeah. and, and so that's a theory I have and, and I think that, you know, I've done decent enough, you know, sort of, yeah. I would, I would say third party research. To believe pretty strongly in that theory. Then as someone who's literally coached and or invested in, now what, four or 500 companies, you know, I've seen a lot of companies that, were built by an entrepreneur who got it to stage three or stage four, you know, where it could be passed on to another set of leaders, but they didn't really.

They, they weren't intentional about the culture, they weren't intentional about the core values in your work. do you see a lot of that? And when you go into a leadership team into who's leading a company that actually doesn't have a very well established set of core values, do you find that a lot of times.

The core values of the founders were just forgotten. Or that the founder was really an entrepreneur who never really thought about these things. And then, you know, so you got this little bit of a mess. And, yeah. And what's your experience in terms of helping businesses that are up and running and have leaders that frankly haven't sort of figured out this part of the game?

What's, what's your, what's your experience been? is that hard? And then, you know. And, and then you got what happens back to like, we're talking about relationships. What happens if you have two or three people on a seven person senior leadership team who are antithetical to one another? Deep down in terms of core values?

[00:28:28] Bob Glazer: it's a great question and I have about seven answers, so lemme, lemme, lemme try start. So, yeah, look, the, the. Company may have had values that tied to the founder. They may have been not what was on the wall or what was on the wall, or they may have been lost, or there may have been mergers and acquisitions.

I can tell you what doesn't work. I speak at conferences and people come after me, you know, come after me. They come up, they come up to me after the show quietly. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Like, can I, I kind of like. So like if, if you really believe in all of this stuff and values and culture and all that stuff, and the leaders don't, and then landed me into like, what do you do?

And, and you know, it's like you need to find a different job. Like you can create a counterculture in your team. But, but clearly and, and one guy that was his dad, so that was a problem. That was a really awkward, yeah, he was like almost in tears. So companies look, they change, there's mergers, there's all kinds of stuff.

Usually there's a really strong leader that comes in and says like. I know the values are important and they don't feel right. I did a couple, projects with companies lately. I have a, I don't talk about as much, but I have a, I have a process on the business core value side that works. Mm-hmm. I think incredibly well.

One was a, a new leader came into a team that was pretty toxic, who's a very high culture core values guy. And so he wanted this all defined for his department and, and stuff. Yeah. And the other was a, a leader where, again, bunch of acquisitions, different companies, like it's just. It had sort of fallen apart a little bit and I do pretty deep interviews with all the employees.

and you know what I am trying to assess won't give away all the ip. Here is what, that's what's on the wall or otherwise. But what are the beha, like we said, what are the behaviors and characteristics that are either rewarded from management or that you really value in your peers? And what are the ones you can't stand?

At the end of the day, you get you, I always say that we're, we're, we're looking at like, talking to the back to the team, like a say do gap, right? I, and I'm like, tell the team if you, if, if you are saying these things and not doing them, I can't make you do that. But that is, that is your biggest problem right now is that actually people like that value, they believe in it and they think you're full of crap because it's not rewarded, you know, anywhere.

Yeah, there's another one too that's interesting where there's stuff that everyone can put their fingers on and say, that's really important here. Like, but it's not listed in the core values. And so actually, like it gains a lot of, cohesion by, by elevating that and doing that. But as soon as we figure out what those updated three or four values should be.

Like, it's not like, all right, see you later. It's like, look, here are the six ways that this is going to live or die in the organization. In your interview process, do you mm-hmm. Interview for values? Do you have a behavioral Oh, no. We don't do that. In your onboarding, do you tell stories or otherwise? No.

No, we don't do that. Do you have rewards or things about the core values? My friend, as a company, they have the core value baton. It gets handed on every month. Mm-hmm. It's peer to peer. Parking space in front of the factory, painted for the baton winner each month. Our company did core value awards.

There's a Slack channel with core value shout out. So, so there are there awards in recognition? Are you talking about in people's performance of you? Do people hear these things every day? So like that's where the rubber hit the road because. Back to the working hard or working smart, like at our company, I always try to be clear, like we don't reward working hard like we want outcomes and smart.

I can reward working hard by be like, look, mark was here for 80 hours last week. Look at Mark. Yeah, but why? Why do I wanna do that? I wanna be like, look at Susie. Susie. Is outselling everyone and her clients are having a 99% satisfaction rate. And like, let's all be like Suzy, you know? So, yeah. So, that, that's the tricky point.

It does, it does fade away or challenge or something in the organization changes, but there's gotta be a real top down impetus to first want to fix it and clarify it. Yeah. And then operationalize it. 

[00:32:33] Mark Abbott: Well, the top down impetus, right? Like, one of the things I, Say a lot is I'm not a magician, right? Yeah.

I can't help people get what they don't want. Right? So if, if the leader, if you were to see, you were, if you were, 

[00:32:47] Bob Glazer: if you could get help people what they don't want, you'd be a politician, right? Is that two shit. 

[00:32:55] Mark Abbott: we won't go down that rabbit hole. but that's hilarious. but, you know, I can't help people get what they don't want.

And, and so if the leader doesn't actually believe in culture, Then, you know, it's all just, you know, a bunch of Yeah. Bullshit. and, you know, I've, I've had a couple clients and it's worse to not 

[00:33:15] Bob Glazer: talk about it than to talk 

[00:33:17] Mark Abbott: about it disingenuously or, you know, wall Well, because it gets back. It gets back to trust.

I don't know if, if you've ever, if you've seen his work or aware of Paul, Zack, Dr. Paul, Zack. I don't, I don't know him. The trust factor, is a, unfortunately, he, he's passed away. but he did amazing work on a group trust and, and, and he literally could measure it by measuring, literally.

Levels of oxytocin Yeah. In all the group members. And so ultimately he got really clever and he created, you know, his, his basically his, the way he explains trust is using the acronym Oxytocin. Right. And so it's a long one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even for me, I, I, I still, every now and then I'm like, how do I spell it?

Like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's, it's, you know, the o is for, you know, for, there's two o's, one's for openness and the other one's for ovation, right? Yeah. And, and anyway, the, the, the last n of course, he had to, he had to fudge on. It's for authenticity, right? Yeah. So, you know. One of the things is, you know, if, if you're inauthentic, right, as a company, as an example, and these are your core values and they're not right, people aren't gonna trust you.

Just period into discussion. Right. And that's why Yeah. And that's why they, ya and 

[00:34:41] Bob Glazer: I was there for years. I yawned, I saw all these things and then I started seeing some really great companies and their core values and how they lived them and how Southwest lived them. And I was like, oh. It's not that it's not real, it's just that 90% of it is not real.

[00:34:57] Mark Abbott: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I, I would say we're actually going through an exercise right now. You know, here we are. I started the company in 16. so we're on our 10th year, you know, going on our 10th year here. And, and, you know, our, our core values have been, they started out as the tribe, right? so T was for teamwork and R for resilience and I for inquisitive, and B, for better and better version of best version of self, and then E for extra mile.

And then early on, within the first two years, I started seeing all this, what I call GSD, crap. Right. So people getting stuff done, but they weren't thinking about the knock on implications, right? They weren't thinking of that second, that third, that fourth order effect. And so all, so I like, we gotta add, so I added G, so it's the G tribe, right?

But to this day, I can tell you that, There are, there are like bacteria integrity thing in the book, right? There are various versions of GSSD in our company. And so we're actually rolling out, a one pager, like this is what GSSD means to us. This is what team means to us. This is what, you know, resilience means to us, et cetera.

Because even though they're there, and generally speaking. You know, you know, we, the year before LA, or actually last year, right? Not this year. 20, 20, 24, right. Yeah. You know, we were a great place to work. millennials, great place to work, parents, great place to work women, great place to work, minorities, great place to work technology, great place to work, meet.

I mean, we just like, you know, nailed all the great place to work things. Sweet. Yeah. Right. So, so the culture was, was, was, was, Obviously pretty damn strong. But you know, we had, we had to do some stuff this year that resulted in, in some people just there not being a place for them. One is because of the technology, our stack and all the work we're doing, we, we didn't need to have a GA organization anymore.

Right. Or QA organization, quality assurance. We moved to leveraging technology for what we call SRE site Reliability. Yeah. So site reliability experts. And so we had, we, we had let go of the whole. Q eight, Q eight team, which is like 10 people, and people are like, really? Like, that was bullshit. Right? And it's like, look, guys, right.

You know, especially today in the age of ai, you know, this is not a family where we can guarantee you, you know, lifetime employment. Yeah. This is a high performance team. And, and, and, and the game's even changing a little bit, which is weird. Right? And so maybe you needed these 11 players in this. At this level, but now we have 10 player game and we're at this level.

Right. And so, you know what, what's interesting is, you know, I think I, I think, you know, people overindexed on some things under index on some other things. And so, you know, even though the words aren't changing, we're doing a little bit of tweaking to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of what we're talking about.

So I, you know, I, I guess it's my long-winded way of saying even when you get the core values, I think in pretty decent shape there. You know, I, my experience has been you gotta tweak 'em every now and then because people kind of, they see what they wanna see and sometimes it isn't actually what you want them to understand.

What, what are your thoughts? 

[00:38:14] Bob Glazer: We had that experience. so, so I agree with you particularly as you, as you grow, and, and look the, the business decision you have to make and how, how you treat someone. I have a thing I'm working on called relational dissonance, like a theory, which is like a lot of times like.

Unfortunately, we have to make a hard decision with someone we like, so we try to make them someone we don't like. Versus being like, look, we gotta make this decision. It's a no-brainer. Like we're like, the world's not buying DVDs anymore. So I need streaming engineers, but I can treat people with respect and support and, and try to help 'em in the right place.

So we had a, our, core value of accountability early on, and I found some bugs in it because people were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I did the thing that I had to do. I was, I made the a hundred calls. But, but but you have no sales. Right? Right. And I was like, wait, what do, what do I, what are we missing here?

Like, this is not, there's a bug in it. So when we, when we updated the core values and, and, and shrunk them, we moved it to own it and own it included a description of like, you, you own it, you know the things that are in your control and outside of your control. And it was, you know, we lost some people after that.

And our definition of own, it was like, look. Not, it's not about blame, but you don't make excuses like you own sales. You own sales. Even if there's COVID, like, like there's just, there's things that are going on. So I, I, I, I also a hundred percent agree with you. I think the, we are a family is super dangerous.

I think we're a high performance team. On a high performance team. You do not leave the player in is missed. 12 shots in a row and is Yeah. Not passing the ball like that's not right to the rest of the team. So, you know, I, I, I, I, I think the family mantra and, and that's the kind of stuff that people say that really, you know, burns them.

So, look, we've had multiple lets of changes. Our industry is changing. We come to the point where we don't need roles anymore, and it's like. Hey, like, how can we help you? Can I help you interview new job? Like, I'm not gonna make up a job that we don't need. I'm gonna support you as a human. Like, to me, that is the culture.

Like do we own it? Do we, our, our other core value, do we placed a relationship? I mean, I have, I have, I'm like a chief recruiting officer when we, you know, and I've got the last two people jobs, you know, that, that, that, yeah. That sort of needed to, to move on. And I kind of wrote a, a book about that. So I, sometimes you gotta do stuff, you know, sometimes even you gotta do it because it's.

Puts the rest of the people in more safety. But, but how you do it is probably also very aligned to your values, and that's where people should call you out. If you say, we embrace relationships and you made it really transactional, then someone should call you out on that. 

[00:40:50] Mark Abbott: Yeah, a hundred percent. One of the things that, talk about a little bit in, in, in i, in, in the book and towards the end is, is a topic that I, back to the culture.

We didn't, and we've avoided the rabbit hole, you know, going into society right now and the nature of the world and complex. I have a feeling I know what you're 

[00:41:14] Bob Glazer: gonna ask me about, but go ahead. if not I'll 

[00:41:16] Mark Abbott: Yeah. but, I think that we've taken a step backwards, in terms of ego and leadership.

Yeah. And that this is actually like the part of the next game. And it's helping organizations understand, you know, ego. And what I mean by that is self and others awareness. Yeah. Right. And, and ultimately as goes the leadership team, so goes. The entire organization and in particular, this ego stuff and the culture stuff, they're way, that Venn diagram is really, you know, really overlapped.

And I love, you know, Susan, what Cook? Gartner loving her, Keegan, you know, there's a bunch of different ego development models that are out there. Wilbur, Ken Wilbur, I get a kick out of his stuff, right? A QAL. But, I, I, I believe that part of the next journey, this next stage of work, is all about helping people understand that as you rise up in the organization, your, you know, your.

need to be able to have a more evolved ego. And I, I use eq but not for emotional quotient. Yeah. I use it for e ego quotient needs to evolve and, and, and part of this is clearly. Involves your core values. And so I know you wrote a little bit about this towards the end, I would love to sort of, you know, go down that rabbit hole a little bit with you.

[00:43:01] Bob Glazer: Yeah. So look why a lot of people have a hard time becoming a manager and transitioning a manager is because it's not about you anymore, right? And, and it goes from, you know, as a, as a contributing person, it's about your production, right? So I, as a salesperson, it's what I sell. Then I'm a sales manager, and now it's not about what I sell.

It's about my, my team sells and how I cultivate and hire new salespeople and how I prune salespeople that aren't doing well. You know, very frankly, a lot of people really struggle with that transition. 'cause some of them want it to be about them. They want the, that a boy, that a girl, you know, good job for, for, for what you did.

And, and it's why a lot of people. You know, shouldn't be in, in, in leadership. and, and, and we force them in certain roles like sales and engineering or otherwise. So. a as you make that transition, and I've actually found that the bug in a lot of this with a lot of companies review systems, is that they're still reviewing the leader for individual production metrics.

When it should be about how are they one, two, and three should be how are they leading, managing, and holding people accountable, right? It's not about, I don't care how many deals they closed, they shouldn't have had to close deals, right? Their salespeople should be closing the deals. So, so that process is going on and then, you know, when you start thinking about your legacy and your contribution, like, it, it it, for most people that is going to be about what they are muted into others and into their kids and into their employees and the, the sort of legacy that they leave behind.

I think some people make that transition and others. Want it to be about them. There's a famous chart, I think Sheryl Sandberg had it in a thing showing, look, leader A comes into an organization. You know, they, they leave here, and, and leader B comes into his organization. They leave here, the organization goes here or goes here.

Who was the better leader? Right. And a lot of people would think like, oh, well, like the, definitely the, the person that left in it, it fell off a cliff. You know, clearly they were the better leader because like, look, no one could do it without 'em, but, but the right answer is no. Like leader B focused on a team and other people, leader A made it all about them.

[00:45:20] Mark Abbott: The, so a couple D related things, right? The, you know, there's, I think there's, I don't know who gets credit for it, right? But a leader is a leader who developed a leader who's develop leaders. Yeah, yeah. Who's developed leaders kind of thing, number one, right? a very, going off, far left on this is the, you know, classic conversation that I have a very strong opinion on, which is, who's a better coach?

Belichick or Saban? And you look at their coach tree, right? Saban has, how many coaches has Saban, right. turned into Belichick has 

[00:45:50] Bob Glazer: none with a winning record. 

[00:45:51] Mark Abbott: Yeah. 

[00:45:52] Bob Glazer: Right, right. So he might be a better coach of players manager, but he's probably not a development of coaches. Yeah. Yeah. That is a great point.

Funny you're hitting all of my things is that one of my books has the whole Pat's analogy too. But what, what, what, what's interesting? What, what Belichick was so good at that leaders can't do is he had no institutional sunk costs of whether someone was better than someone else from a meritocracy or else Tom Brady would've never.

Gotten a, a shot because Drew Bezo was the highest paid quarterback in the league, and he just didn't care where you were drafted or otherwise. Like the best person. Yeah, w wa was going to play, but yeah, his, his people keep hiring from his tree and it's terrible 

[00:46:36] Mark Abbott: and it's interesting, right? So, coming to a close here, Couple rapid fire questions for you. One value you thought was core, but turned out to not be. 

[00:46:50] Bob Glazer: Yeah, I, I, I'll go a little bit for me and for other people with, with the family one, because I think, again, for it to be cons value, it's gotta be consistent and actually. If you look at how I show up the best for my family, it is in service of things like health and vitality and self-reliance and find a better way and share it and respectful often toward, like, those are the things that like I, I do really well with them, like teaching them and the ropes courses and like, that's, that, that's the prioritization in my family is those things that are important to me as in my team.

Mm-hmm. So, like I said, I think family's a priority. I don't think it's a value because. Typically when you look back on the values, they're things that you have done kind of all, all, all along. And every time someone fights me on that question and I really dig into it, they think it's really cool when they figure out like, oh, I'm gonna like show up and be their person.

And that's what I, or your presence counts. And that's what I do for my family and that's what I do for my friends and that's what I do for my employees. And like, oh, I actually never realized that. That's what I mean by that. 

[00:47:58] Mark Abbott: Alright, you ready for a tough one? Yeah. One of your core values that you've violated recently?

recently, well, recently could be in last year or whatever. I don't mean yesterday obviously. Yeah. 

[00:48:11] Bob Glazer: Yeah. So, so the one. That's easiest. The, the health and vitality one. And I had a couple things, you know, for, for me that are, some kind of health scares in the last couple years. And I've, I've really like taken ownership and, and done the things that I needed to do to, to, to keep those at, at, at bay.

But I, I know what I need to do. Like, and then sometimes I just don't do it. yeah, so the, the, the health one. Unfortunately, I remember years ago someone talked about the problem. She was saying, weight. She goes, if, if, if weight, if you are, if, if, if losing weight is the goal, right? Imagine yourself walking backwards from the goal and as soon as you get further away from it.

And, and you have some success, the motivation wanes. But if you turn yourself around and you're going towards a level of health to run a triathlon or something, then like, until you're there. And so I think this is a tricky one with health, which is that actually as you get it better and better, like it's easy to forget that you're, you're only a, a, a, a slip away.

[00:49:19] Mark Abbott: Yeah. I, I've got my own sort of theories on this and, and, and you know, that atomic habits and all that stuff, right? Yeah. So to me it's, you know, ultimately it's about, incorporating, you know, a discipline into your life and it's just the way you eat as an example, right? Yeah. or it's just, you know, the way, you know, every single day you get up and you go to the gym or whatever it is you want to do.

You just gotta turn it into, I don't like the word habit. 'cause I think habit sounds like it's easy. No, it's a discipline, right? So, the health one's a really interesting one. Final one. What's a belief you hold about work that most people would find contrarian? [00:49:59] Bob Glazer: yeah, so it's interesting. I, you know, recently I published a lot like I, I.

I was voted twice in Glassdoor's best, CEO and culture, and I love my people otherwise, but I, I, you know, I, I, I, I, I'm really, I also have a lot of beliefs around, you know, entitlement. Work and that people aren't showing up. And that what I said before, like we're not entitled to a job. Like this is a new thing in the last kind of couple hundred years.

So you might read some of the stuff that I pub, like I'm a huge champion of people and I hope, like people always believe I've treated them well, even in hard situations. But yeah, you know, I was hearing an AI argument this week and someone was like, well, you know, people are putting profits over people and otherwise, and my answer was.

What happens when a generation of people show up to work and wanna do the minimum and wanna invoke mental health on everything and all of this stuff. And, I, I think that's a really easy decision to someone like, do I want to deal with this or do I want to just find a thing to do it? So, that's another one I would say my answer to that is I, I think we have two mental health crisis, like it, we have real mental health and then we have.

Fraudulent use of mental health as an excuse for everything in the workplace these days. And I think it's, I think it's hurting people and I think it's hurting companies. 

[00:51:24] Mark Abbott: Yeah. There's a, there's a really interesting idea that I've heard recently, that there are certain, there are certain ideas that actually are virus-like, and they turn into pandemics.

Right. And, and, and if you look back at like some weird things that have happened for, let's say the last 30 years that people are like, like, it's like weird. There's like this, this, this, this virus or this pandemic in terms of, and I'll, I'll give you the, one of the examples I heard. Yeah. It was cutting.

Right? Yes. And, and, and, and you know, what happened was all of a sudden it just became a thing and people were talking about it a lot. So people start to experiment with it. It wasn't right now. Now I don't mean to dismiss it by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not something we talk about as much as maybe it was 10, 15 years ago.

Right? But there are these things that become sort of like pandemic like, and they catch on. Well, this is 

[00:52:35] Bob Glazer: culture, right? It's rewarded. Right. Like, like it's celebrated. 

[00:52:38] Mark Abbott: Yeah. It's, yeah. It's, it's it, you know, you're kind of part of the, you know, the, the, the cool kids club or whatever it is. So, yeah, I think that the, that there's some stuff that, you know, we're probably as leaders we're all dealing with right now that, don't make a lot of sense, but sort of made it into the Pop Vogue and, yeah.

Well, and that's a part that's a hard part of leading right now, in my opinion. We're, 

[00:53:04] Bob Glazer: we're. I, there are people I've talked to and therefore that don't wanna lead because of this. They can't, doctors, training doctors who, when they tell them to do a surgery wrong, someone's crying and going and complaining to their supervisor.

And these aren't the doctors from a generation ago who probably were like, you fricking moron. Like, you know, do it wrong. They're training surgeons and they're saying you didn't do it right. And there's a collapse and they're like, oh my God, I don't want to be. I don't, you know, like I don't, I don't think I wanna be operated on by this, by this group of people.

And like, someone eventually has to be like, look like this is the job. Like, just like, you can't, like, you can't be a surgeon, be scared of blood. Like, I'm sorry. Like, it, it just, it's, it's part of the job. 

[00:53:47] Mark Abbott: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. Good to end on that. No, I mean, it's, but it's, that's why, you know, I think we're, you know, as I said, you know, I think we're in a new age and we need to understand why we do certain things and question things.

Right. And say, say the hard things 

[00:54:02] Bob Glazer: and say the things that don't make sense. And like I said, like I, I. I have, look, I think mental health is a real thing and people have real challenges or otherwise. I can also tell you that 20 year olds are being coached in Reddit forums on how to invoke mental health when they get a bad performance review now.

And that does more damage to everyone. Yes. and, and, and, and, and so like, again, I don't, I don't think, I don't think we shouldn't talk about it because I think that's a real. Problem in, in, in a lot of different ways. 

[00:54:30] Mark Abbott: Any parting thoughts on core values? And you know, and feel free to make a plug for the book.

Yeah. 'cause I've already done it a bunch of times. 

[00:54:37] Bob Glazer: Yeah. So, compass within, a little story about the values that guide us. It's at www.compasswithin.com, or you can go to robert glazer.com and, and find it to, if you pre-order, the book before October 15th, or launch the, the a hundred dollars companion course is included for free.

There's a form right. On the book page, I'd love everyone to get that course 'cause I think they read the book and they wanna get started and it kind of just gives you the scaffold, scaffolding around everything is in the book if you wanna do the work, but generally we need some scaffolding a around it.

So you can get, sign up and get the course. Sign up for my newsletter. reach out. I'd love to hear from people. 

[00:55:16] Mark Abbott: Yeah. And my, my, my only last comment, and you kind of, you kind of talked about it in, in the book, in, in, I think in the last chapter, I'll use a slightly different metaphor, but when you get these, when your core values are strong and, and they resonate with you.

You talked about, you know, going through a tunnel with no lights on and an expensive car and hit hitting the sides. And to me, you know, a great set of core values, they're, they're kind of like, you know, they're, they're the light over the road and they're, you know, on the side of the road how they have the little bumps.

Yeah. Like if you, if you drifts. Those little whatever they're called. Right. They just help you. Oops. Danger. Danger. Yeah. You hear the noise and you get back and they don't hurt the car. Yeah. Right. And you get back centered and, and ultimately whether it's those seven big, you know, the, those, your seven relationships or the three big decisions in life, right?

What's your community? What do you do? Who do you work with and, and, and, and who's your, your partner, your spouse, your, you know, they really do reduce the. The difficulty of this amazing thing called life as, and the journey associated there with, so I really super appreciate and the book is, the book is 

[00:56:26] Bob Glazer: a story.

Thank you. The book is a story, but below the story is the framework to actually discover your actionable core values. And you'll be showed that framework, at the end of the story, but it's, it's, it's almost easier seen through the characters first rather, rather than, than told. 

[00:56:40] Mark Abbott: Yeah. So thanks for writing it and, and thanks for spending this time with me. I loved it. 

Bob Glazer: Thank you, mark. 

Mark Abbott: Alright man.