Dorie Clark is a consultant and keynote speaker who teaches executive education at Duke University and Columbia University's graduate school of business. She's been named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and the Number 1 Communications Coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Clark is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and has been recognized as a branding expert by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Ink Magazine. The New York Times described her as an expert at self reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. She's the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. Her books have been translated into 11 languages.
In this episode, Dustin talks with Doris Clark about her book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.
You'll discover how long-term thinking is what will help—in those darkest moments of doubt—to keep prioritizing what matters most, doing small things over time to achieve our goals, and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard. Dorie shares lessons from her own life and relates anecdotes from others, to help listeners understand from personal experience what works and what doesn’t.
The Long Game provides new insight to help you free up your time, focus on what’s important and achieve your long-term goals.
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Resources Mentioned in the Episode with Dorie Clark:
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Dustin Burleson:
We all know lasting success takes persistence and effort. However, so much of our culture pushes us towards doing what's easy, what's guaranteed, and what looks glamorous in the moment. It's long term thinking that will help in those darkest moments of doubt to keep prioritizing what matters most, doing small things over time to achieve our goals, and being willing to keep at them, even when they've seen pointless, boring, or hard.
Hey, it's Dustin Burleson. Welcome to The Burleson Box for my guest today is Dorie Clark. Dorie is a consultant and keynote speaker who teaches executive education at Duke University and Columbia University's graduate school of business. She's been named one of the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and the Number 1 Communications Coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. Clark is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and has been recognized as a branding expert by the Associated Press, Fortune, and Ink Magazine. The New York Times described her as an expert at self reinvention and helping others make changes in their lives. She's the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out. Her books have been translated into 11 languages. And today, we discuss her latest book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long‑Term Thinker in a Short-term World. I'm excited to dig into today's episode on The Burleson Box.
All right, welcome everyone. I'm so excited to have Dorie Clark on the program. We're going to talk about her latest book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long‑Term Thinker in a Short-term World. Dorie, welcome to the program.
Dorie Clark:
Dustin, thank you. So glad to be here.
Dustin Burleson:
I'm so fascinated by your backstory. You've done a lot. I was reading through the book. You've even done standup comedy for a while. I just discovered you were a press secretary for a campaign. You teach. You coach. Kind of give the listeners your backstory.
Dorie Clark:
Sure. It has been eclectic. You didn't even mention I was an executive director of a bicycling advocacy organization.
Dustin Burleson:
Cool. Oh, we're going to be great friends.
Dorie Clark:
Oh, thank you. Yes, I can tell already. But broadly speaking, I started my career as a journalist and ended up getting laid off. So I had been covering politics, I tried to get another job as a journalist, but the market was very tight. So I switched over into working on political campaigns and worked on some really cool high profile races, governor's race, presidential campaign, but unfortunately my candidates did not win so I shifted into the nonprofit space. And then it's now been about 16 years, but I started my own consulting company. So I consult and speak and do executive coaching, and now business school teaching, all focused around communications and marketing strategies. So the intersection of how we can be better strategic thinkers in our life and how to communicate that effectively to the constituencies that matter, whether that's employees or customers or prospects.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. I just wanted to bring listeners up to speed because I love that you teach both at Duke and Columbia University, but also work with entrepreneurs and you work with large groups and you work with business owners. So you really are in both camps, right?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. You got to roll up your sleeves. I mean, literally yesterday I was doing a program for Columbia University for their executive education program for a large global law firm, but every large global law firm is made up of small regional law firm offices. We were talking about the future of work and how they could adjust to the post pandemic reality of the associates they're working with. Maybe having some different priorities and different views about life in the office. And I know from my friends and colleagues who are doctors, who are dentists, who are orthodontists, that they're facing a lot of similar issues with regard to staffing and dealing with staffing issues in this kind of great resignation post pandemic world. So I think they're pretty salient issues.
Dustin Burleson:
And you've lived this, right? I want to say in the book, if I'm remembering correctly, you got the green light for this from your publisher just days before the COVID pandemic?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. The manuscript got... Or the pitch, the sort of book proposal, got approved February 28 of 2020. And then literally the next morning I woke up in New York, where I was living at the time, had its first COVID case. And of course within basically a week, the entire world freaked out and everything kind of wet immediately downhill. But yeah, it was sort of the world's most rapid pivot that I started writing a book about long term thinking right at the moment where we probably all had to be short term thinkers more than we ever had before.
Dustin Burleson:
That's what I took away. I think you had a friend that was like, "Hey, is this really the best time to be writing a long term thinking book?"
Dorie Clark:
That's right. That's right. And I just had to have faith. I'm like, "You know what? It'll come back. I know it'll come back."
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. Yeah. We were all like, "How do we get through the day?" I remember doing daily updates for our listeners and members on just interpreting what are the different laws that are going to be passed on masks and when can we reopen to see certain types of patients. But you were right. I mean, in retrospect, looking at everything, right? We always joke and say in the long run, it's always the long run that matters. You absolutely helped, I think, a lot of people if you go through this book. And if you're a member in the paid subscription, you're going to receive a physical copy of Dorie's book. Mine is all marked up and down the margins, which a friend of mine shutters, he's like, "You can't write inside of a cloth bound book." And so I break all the rules, but I've got notes in the margins. I've got notes everywhere there's white space. Walk us through. I mean, I guess maybe we'll take a step back and go... I mean, why are we all so busy? Why are we kind of incentivized and focused on the short term?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, there's so many reasons and so many factors that tie together that it makes it challenging for most of us to unravel. But what I came to realize is if we actually do want to do long term thinking, and almost all of us are behind this conceptually, right? It's not like there's a sort of anti long term thinking lobby out there. Most people are like, "Yes, that sounds great, but I don't have time. I can't do it." And I realized that the first obstacle is if we're ever going to get to the place where we're really realistically able to do long term thinking, we need to somehow get past it. We need to somehow find a way around this insane, crazy busyness that so many of us fallen prey to.
So what I came to realize is there's a few things going on. I mean, the first is sort of the obvious one, the tip of the iceberg. And it's true of course. I mean, people aren't making this up, but yes, we have too many meetings. Yes, we have too many emails. That is accurate, but it's not the full scope of the problem. There was some fascinating research out of Columbia University by Silvia Bellezza and her colleagues talking about the fact that especially in American society, busyness really has become a contemporary status marker. And so for a lot of people, being busy becomes really bound up with our own self identity. And even if we claim that we want to be less busy or we sort of try to stop, we keep making choices that pull ourselves back into it because it's how we think of ourselves as being successful, being in demand, being a person who has value in the world. And it's actually really hard to extricate ourselves from it, because without even recognizing it's become a part of how we conceive of ourselves.
Dustin Burleson:
We wear it as a badge of honor. And particularly in America, right? I think I read recently almost half of paid sick leave and paid vacation time goes unused. Do you see a difference in your... I'm curious what you found with your clients outside of the US versus inside the US.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it even manifests on just the most obvious levels. In America, this sort of classic question when you're meeting someone which of course is not... It's so banal. I advise people not to use it because it's like, oh my God. But the classic one is, "Oh, hey, Dustin, nice to meet you. What do you do?"
Dustin Burleson:
What do you do? Yeah.
Dorie Clark:
It's a work question. It's like, okay, the first go-to that we're doing when we're grounding someone, when we're understanding who they are is, what is your job? Whereas the question that people ask in other European countries or in other countries around the world, it's actually really different. It's not to say that they're better necessarily because they have their own sort of weird overtones as well, but the question might be, "Well, where are you from?" And that can mean things like, "Well, what village? What ancestry?" Something along those lines. That can be problematic for different reasons. I mean, a great thing about America is it's sort of egalitarian. "I don't care where you're from. I don't care that you grew up on food stamps or whatever. Now you're a self-made man." That's an awesome thing. But it is interesting because it shows the difference that work is the lens that we're looking through rather than this other places where it might be like, "Well, who are your people?"
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. This is my personal experience. I don't have any research to back it up so it's anecdotal. But I feel like in America, we see someone who's running from meeting to meeting, never has any free time, busy, works late, responds to emails at 2:00 AM, but it's still at the 6:00 AM conference call, then on a jet. We see that we go, "Wow. They must be really important." And then in my European clients, we have about almost 30% of our members are outside the US, particularly in Italy, they see someone like that and go, "Oh." They're more impressed by someone who has excessive vacation time though. "That person must be really important" as an example in the book with David Crenshaw books, all of July and all of December completely off for family. Like, my European clients go, "Okay, he's got it," right?
Dorie Clark:
That's right.
Dustin Burleson:
"He's got the life I want."
Dorie Clark:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because in so many things, we take our contemporary reality and just sort of backdate it and assume that that's always the way that it's been. But anybody who's watched Downton Abbey recognizes that even just a hundred years ago in England, the the most socially elite people really didn't even have jobs. They thought it was so weird if you had a job that was like, "Oh, how déclassé, you have to work for money."
Dustin Burleson:
I remember Maggie Smith's line. "What is a weekend?"
Dorie Clark:
That's right.
Dustin Burleson:
I love Downton Abbey. To provide some practical advice, which the book is just chock full of, you say the first step is to really set the terms for a meaningful life. I want to highlight for clients that in our meetings or when I sit down with a new member, often I'm told, "If I could wave a magic wand and fix what's going on in the businesses, I just want to get everyone on the same page with their employees or with their investors or the business partners." And I just kind of smile and go, "Okay, well, define that page. What is that?" And you start right there in the book and say we have to start there. To use the example again of Crenshaw, he's going to set his work priorities around the fact that all of July and all of December he's going to be inaccessible and with his family and on vacation. Can we kind of dig into that on where do we start when people say, "I realize I'm too busy. I'm running from meeting to meeting. I do want to think long term. How do I start? Where do I begin?"
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. It's such an important question. So there's multiple approaches. There's multiple ways and you've identified one of them in talking about Dave Crenshaw who's a colleague that I profile in the book, which is, you actually can start by creating rules for yourself. Now, obviously, if you're working 80 hour a week suddenly declaring, "I'm going to take two months off," it's probably not the most practical thing because as soon as it actually comes up, you're like, "Well, I can't do that. I have to..." And it'll blow up. But I think it's almost like retraining yourself when you're jet lagged, right? If you've been operating six or 10 hours in the future, you're going to be miserable and you're going to have a terrible day. You're going to ma make it not work very well if all of a sudden you sort of snap yourself back.
But if you're trying to retrain yourself, you want to make sure, "All right. I need to function, so I need to get some sleep. But let me incrementally sort of roll the clock back or roll the clock forward so that I can adjust." And similarly, it might be just essentially putting guardrails up for yourself, making a policy. If you're working till nine o'clock every night, maybe it's, "All right, well starting next week, you know what? I'm going to make a rule for myself that I'm going to leave work by 8:30 no matter what." That's something that's attainable enough that you force yourself to start to get smarter because you have to make better choices.
If you know that that is a fact and you're not going to bend, you're not going to violate it, then it enables you to sort of clear out some of the brush that you may have been distracted by and it forces you into greater levels of efficiency. And that can be done with the time that you stop work in the evening. It can be done with regard to your weekend schedule. It can be done as Dave does with regard to taking a month or even two off per year. That's often a starting point.
The other piece, Dustin, that I'll just mention is a problem that we get into. And unfortunately, this is the problem of successful people, right? A lot of the time management and productivity advice is aimed at, I'll call it like the one-on-one level, they'll be like, "Well, just stop watching so much TV." It's like, oh, come on. If you're a highly successful professional, you're making good money, you're at the top of your game, the problem is not that you're sitting there eating chips and binging Game of Thrones. It's that you're doing exactly what you optimized yourself for, which is at the beginning of your career, the way that you got successful was you accepted all the clients, you said yes to all the things, and when you found an opportunity to make money or to do the thing, you said yes. And that was a great thing to do early on. But what nobody tells you is that those excellent behaviors become liabilities when you reach a certain level of success, because you literally run out of time.
And so you need to train yourself to start seeing no to good things, even to good things. And that can be very painful and a big adjustment for successful people, but it's necessary for you to maintain your sanity and it's necessary for you to actually have space for great things.
Dustin Burleson:
It's so smart. I hope everyone goes back and re-listen to that segment. I've lived it. I'm curious, because anytime I meet bestselling authors who are flying all over the world, I kind of feel like maybe you've lived this as well but when I was young in my career, I did exactly that. I said yes to everything and I burned the candle at both ends. Up early, working late. I've learned to shift priorities later in my career. Can we talk about, maybe either through your personal experience, I'm guessing as a multiple bestselling author and someone who does keynote presentations all over the world and teaches at multiple universities, I'm guessing you've lived some of this, right?
Dorie Clark:
For sure. For sure. I mean, I guess unfortunately, although it is a good problem to have, right? We always have the mantra that you're never without problems. It's just that some problems are better than others. We all of course have to recognize that a problem of too much work or too many inquiries, that's great. That's the problem you would've killed for when you were starting your business, but it doesn't mean it's not real. And so you continually have to adjust things. I mean, it's almost like every decade or so you just have to sort of reset your baseline about how much you can eat without gaining a lot of weight. You just have to get a little bit more rigorous in terms of thinking through how your metabolism is working.
Similarly, as you progress in your career, let's call it every five year years, I mean, if you're accelerating fast, maybe it's even every couple of years, you just have to tighten things a little bit, a couple of ticks to the dial. Where people who are reaching out to you and asking for your time, you need to get a little more selective. Or you may need not in some brutal Jack Welch way, but you may need to drop a certain percentage of your clients if they've been working with you and have sort of been grandfathered in it really ridiculously low prices. You may need to either renegotiate that or kindly refer them elsewhere because you can't allow your time to be bogged down with things that no longer make sense for your current reality.
Dustin Burleson:
In our life, we said yes to everything, every opportunity to teach, to get on a plane and present what we were doing, to add and bolt different things onto the business. I remember one day we looked back at the data on treating adult orthodontic patients in our practices and it wasn't enjoyable. It wasn't profitable. They were hard cases to finish. They really needed multiple specialists to get things done the way we wanted. So we pivoted and just said, "We love working with kids and they're young and healthy and everyone seems to be happy. By the way, we make more margin on those cases." I mean, we started telling members and clients that we weren't treating adults anymore, which is 25% of the average orthodontic specialist practice. And they looked at us like we had a third head, they're like, "Well, what do you mean you don't treat adults?" But it wasn't serving us. And we never stepped back to really figure out why we started doing it in the first place. And it was just because someone asked and we said yes.
Dorie Clark:
Yes.
Dustin Burleson:
You give some great examples in the book on how to filter and some great colleagues and friends and peers in your space. Do you have some favorites that have helped you say no to opportunities you may have said yes to when you were younger?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, definitely. I can get into that. And just to build for a moment, Dustin, on what you were just saying, I love that you did that, that you made that ultimately strategic choice because what we all need to be asking ourselves is, "Am I enjoying this work?" Is the reward for it, whether it's a financial reward or emotional or however you're measuring it, but is it commensurate with the labor you're putting in? I have a client that I worked with last year. And like a lot of people, she continued saying yes to different gigs for a lot of different reasons. And some of them were lower priced than what she wanted her baseline fee to be. But because she was a little nervous about things during the pandemic, she would say yes more often, or if they'd been a longstanding client, she felt bad so she would continue to say yes.
But I had her do an analysis. I mean, I think this is useful for everybody. It's not necessarily hard to pull the data together although we don't always look at it super systematically, but she realized that 25% of engagements that she accepted were currently less than what her technically her standard fee was now. So for 25%, she was accepting less than she wanted to or should have been. And what she also realized was that those engagements took up 40% of her time. And so I said to her, I'm like, "If you say, 'No, I will not go below this floor,' I know it might feel intimidating to get rid of 25% of your income. But if I said to you, 'Would you be willing to trade 25% of your income for 40% more time?' Would you take that trade?" And she's like, "Yes." And it suddenly became very clear what she needed to do.
So I think sometimes just really looking at the numbers and being honest with ourselves can be quite powerful. But yeah, I think that a lot of it really is taking the time to set parameters for ourselves. We often can make different excuses, "Oh, but this will be good exposure. This will be great audience" or whatever it is, but sometimes actually the secret is helping to outsource the decisions or forcing ourselves to check in with other people. I mean, frankly, I can be a little bit of a softie sometimes about like, "Oh, but they really want to have me" or, "Oh, this could work because of X, Y, Z." And so having a hard set of codified rules is important.
For that client that I was telling you about, I actually had her make a pact that she would not accept any engagement that deviated from her sort of standard fee, that there were no exceptions allowed unless she ran it past her finance people and they approved it.
Dustin Burleson:
Correct.
Dorie Clark:
And they were never going to approve it, you know? I mean, I guess if it's like, "Oh, will you give a free talk for the White House" or something, I mean, yes, we make exceptions, but it's very rare that something rises to that level. And it just became a sanity check for her so that she didn't get sort of emotionally triggered and say yes to things that she shouldn't have.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. I don't know where I learned it, but you've got some great examples on the book on basically unless you're super excited about it, someone told me like, "If you wouldn't say yes and clear your schedule for it tomorrow, then don't say yes to it six months down the road," right?
Dorie Clark:
Yes.
Dustin Burleson:
I had the university where I teach came to me and said, "Hey, you've got a foot in the orthodontic world, you've got a foot in the business world. Would you develop a curriculum for management of the dental and orthodontic practice?" And I, years ago, would've said, "Oh, absolutely. Honored to be a part of it." And I said, "Let me think about it." And I went and I just dug through kind of like what I thought would be a semester long curriculum, then how many hours it would take me to create all those lectures. And I'm sure you're like me. I don't want to put it on a screen in front of a resident unless I've got eight different references and it's good research.
And then someone told me and said, "Okay, if you think that's going to be 16 hours of time or 30 hours of time, double it. Do you have 60 hours of time? Because as with Parkinson's law, things creep." And I did that. I went back maybe the next and said, "You know, there's just no way I have the time available to do it to the level that it deserves. I do think one of these years I'll figure out the time to do it." But it's so funny because years ago I would've said yes. So I love that, let's run it by the financial team and you know that they're going to say, "No way, man. You're going to lose money on this hand over fist." So I love that example. That's great.
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. I think you've cited a great example too, Dustin. I mean, one of the sort of rules of thumb that I talk about in The Long Game is there's a gentleman named Derek Sivers, he's a writer and speaker. He was the founder of CD Baby. His sort of classic line that he uses is, "If it's not a hell yes, it needs to be a no." And I think what's so useful about that framework is it's not typically that for so many of us we get caught up in accepting bad options, right? I mean, most of us are smart enough to say no to something that's a bad offer. But the problem is there's a lot of middling offers or a lot of things that it's like, "Well, it's not perfect, but it's got some attributes. Maybe I could make this work." And we often spend so much time pursuing those kind of average things and trying to make them good that it literally does crowd out the time that we could use for strategic thinking or for actually being able to jump on and exploit great opportunities when they do present themselves.
Dustin Burleson:
I felt like I see that with our members. And maybe some of the listeners can think about in their own lives. I'm curious what you found with your clients in that they often get stuck trying to figure out like, "It's not like it's not a hell yes, but it's not a no. How do I really pick if this is the right thing, if this is the right goal?" Do you see that and can you speak to that?
Dorie Clark:
For sure. For sure. I mean, I think this is one of the places where we can analyze it a couple of ways. Frankly for a lot of us, we've really gotten divorced from our intuition. I'm actually a big fan of a book called the Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, which talks about how we can get smarter about using our physiological reactions to actually unpack them and listen to them and understand that sometimes our bodies know things even before our conscious minds do, because our conscious minds are great at sort of making excuses or, "Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it that way" or, "No, it'll be fine really." But the truth is, science has shown that with our microbiome, we actually have all of the brain chemicals, the serotonin, the dopamine, the cortisol, we have it in our stomachs. So when we have gut reactions, we need to be listening to that. And we often override it to our detriment.
So being aware of what our reaction is. I mean, if you were presented with an offer and your heart is leaping and saying, "Oh my God, this is great," I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean do it. Of course, you want to be smart and vetted, but it's very positive. Whereas if there's a part of you that's saying, "Oh, well, this seems like a good idea. I guess I really should do it," but your body is sort of rebelling against it, that is really worth looking at. I think that the broader rule that we need to be adhering to here is that early in your career the bias should be towards saying yes. Whereas later in your career, as you get more successful, the bias should be towards saying no, unless something proves itself to be an excellent opportunity. And just being thoughtful about it in that way can be very powerful.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. I love that. The whole book's great, but chapter four, you could just cut that section out and sell it for 10 times the cost of the book, because once you've decided on a goal, you literally give I think 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 different steps that I love on how to actually go make that goal happen. So we've talked about kind of zooming out, thinking strategically, trying to reclaim some time. And now it's time to go make it happen.
I want to highlight a friend of yours and a colleague, Martin Lindstrom, who works with one of the Royal families on thinking generationally where most CEOs and a lot of people listening to this think every 90 days we've got to hit a goal this quarter, which I think is horribly destructive. And I think smart people like Warren Buffet agree if we could just give CEOs a little more time and a little more slack in the system, we might get a lot better results, not just for their companies, but for the environment and for their workers and there're a whole list of things we could go into.
Do you want to maybe highlight some of your favorites? I'm going through the list of like, getting the right support, hiring a coach, giving yourself a deadline, keeping your learning going and even when you lose, I want to talk about this kind of fail fast, fail often myth, if you will, out of the Silicon Valley that kind of scares some people. It's a lot there. I guess, maybe what are your thoughts on? And maybe referencing clients or research, once we've decided we want to do something, how do you go make that happen? What are some things, I guess, that you would share with the listeners?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. So of course part of the battle is deciding what needs to be done, but then we get into execution. And as we all know, there are a lot of places along the way where we can get waylaid. Some of it is being unsure. "Okay, I know I want to do X, but okay, there's a million ways I could do X. There's a million ways I could be approaching it." And all of them in theory could work. So the question is, well, where should you start or what should you even be doing? And then of course, there's a question of maintaining momentum. So there's a lot of rocky shoals that we need to be avoiding.
So part of it, I certainly am a big fan of making sure that we don't get triggered by paralysis when it comes to pursuing a goal. Sometimes people will ask in these very hush tones, "But what if I pick the wrong goal? Or what if I'm starting on my goal, but I do it the wrong way?" And what I like to say is kind of, "So what? It's really okay." I think that a lot of times we talk ourselves out of things or we talk ourselves out of doing anything because we assume that it's such a momentous decision. Jeff Bezos, of course the founder and former CEO of Amazon who I talk about quite a bit in the book because he truly is in the business world a rather singular strategic thinker, has a framework for this which I think is really powerful, where he talks about one way doors and two way doors.
The thing is, in business life almost every decision is a two way door. If you try something and it doesn't work or you try something and you don't like it, you can leave. You can go out the other side or you can swing back and go back to where you were and try something different. You're not locked in. There's very, very few decisions in life aside from having children that really are one way doors and are irreversible. I mean, even getting married. You don't want to get divorced, but you can. And similarly for business, you launch a product, you launch a service. If it's not selling well or you decide you don't like it, "Hey, I don't want to do adult orthodonture anymore," you don't have to.
We sometimes assume it would be this horrible thing, this , "Oh, it would look bad" or, "Oh, it would be so traumatic," but the truth is, it's not. The secret is actually just making sure that as best we can when we are starting something new, we start it in a small enough way so that we are testing it. And if we have to unwind it, it's not a big deal. My favorite words in business are, "Let's do a test. Let's try a pilot" because that inherently is framing it up, that, "You know what? We'll try it for 30 days. If it's not working or there's something wrong with it or it's just not fun, we don't have to keep doing it." That's the point of a pilot. And I think that we just need to hold a lot of things much more lightly than we do.
Dustin Burleson:
I love that example from Bezos. And from the people we work with, the very first marketing firm we hired to do SEO and test Google Ads, they were the first honest firm. I said, "Do you think great results with..." They were doing podiatrists and ophthalmologists. I said, "Do you think it'll work in dentistry and with dermatology and orthodontics?" And they said, "I don't know, we'll have to test it." But I love you. You're the first honest person. Everyone else was like, "Yeah, it'll work. Just give us your credit card."
Dorie Clark:
Totally.
Dustin Burleson:
Let's kind of go a little deeper on Bezos because you say in the book, "If you're learning, you're not actually failing." I think I might have the numbers wrong, but I know it was a significant amount. Amazon, remember the Fire Phone, right?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah.
Dustin Burleson:
They had this phone that you could just point at anything and basically find it on the store and buy it. And I thought, "Oh, what a cool idea?" Well, it turns out nobody wanted it. But I think they burnt like a hundred million dollars developing that. And then they were selling them for 99 cents on the Amazon store just to get rid of the inventory. And somewhere in an interview Bezos said, "Well, actually, everything we learned during that process set us up for Alexa," which is a huge success. So Bezos is such a strategic thinker, probably one of the smartest business people on the planet because he was so long term. I think all the way back from '97, he was like, "Here's what we're doing. We're going to burn a ton of cash to get there, but we're not going to stop with the end goal and they achieved it.
You want to maybe talk about that? Because I think there's this myth that failing fast and failing often. I remember talking to Ozan Varol, his book Think Like a Rocket Scientist, on the program. He said, "Yeah, when you're building a rocket, you do have to test as you fly, and fly as you test, but you need to be learning. Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time and money." And in his example, blowing things up that could kill people, what have you taken away from that and how you help your clients kind of think differently about what I think Silicon Valley has convinced a lot of people that outright failure is great and you're saying, "Well, if you're learning, you're not actually failing"? Is that accurate?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. I mean, I think there's two realities here, right? I mean we might accept the premise intellectually. "Okay. Yay! Silicon Valley is right. Okay, fail fast, fail often and it's good." But the truth on the ground is that for most human beings, most people really, we might support the ethos of failure but we don't want to be the ones that fail. It's just not fun. It's just not satisfying. I think almost everybody would agree that it is a lot nicer of a feeling to be on the project that succeeds wildly rather than the one that goes down in flames and it's like, "Whoa, fail fast, fail often." You don't want to be that person.
And so quite rationally, whether you're inside Silicon Valley or outside where I think in general failure is not looked at quite so bullishly, people often hesitate to make moves because they don't want to fail. And I don't think that's irrational. I think that that makes a lot of sense. I think the key thing though is also recognizing if we're setting ourselves up so that we need a situation where you're guaranteed not to fail, then almost definitionally what that means is you can never do anything new, because if something is new, you don't know how it will go. So you're just stuck repeating things over and over again. Some people may be happy with that, but it's certainly not the way to grow a business or to become an innovator in any way.
So the interesting question is might there be a way that you could experiment, that you could innovate, that you could try new things, but not necessarily have some big catastrophic failure? And this is where I want to go back to the point about testing, because I don't think anybody... I mean, in a literal sense, yes a test failed if it didn't go the way you want, but nobody is going to call you a failure if you say, "You know what? I'm doing an experiment. I want to see if X, Y, Z. Let's run a test." And if you run that test, you are gathering data, right? I mean, it may work out one way, it may work out another way, but nobody is going to say, "Oh wow, you screwed up so badly. How shameful that this didn't work." Because it might actually be shameful if you said, "Oh, this is our new direction. We're going all in on this. This is the future of the company," and then it doesn't work, right? I mean, you've been a cheerleader, but not necessarily a scientist.
But if we can become scientists instead where we test things before we go all in, then it prevents us from going out over our skis and enables us to be data gatherers rather than someone who is suffering from a failure.
Dustin Burleson:
Do you think that's why some businesses plateau, they're not testing? I'm thinking the history books are filled with Sears Roebuck and Blackberry and firms that just got unseated by a new disruptor. Do you think that's a part of it? The not being willing to test because they're fearful of failure? Is that, I mean, it's just a hunch?
Dorie Clark:
Yeah. I mean that's certainly a big part of it, is you get locked into revenue streams in the way that things are done and you don't really want to disrupt a status quo in which you are the leader. So there's a lot of course that's been written about this, the need to sort of create an independent skunk works type scenario. This is something that Clayton Christensen wrote about a lot, that the corporate structure itself is likely to crush any innovation because that innovation threatens to unseat the power structure that has gotten people to where they are. So I think that that is a big part of it. It is also true though that if you have become sort of entrenched, you might have sort of lost touch with the ethos of scrappy innovation and sort of running fast, quick, cheap tests.
Sometimes if you are very successful, money can become a little bit of a curse because instead of running the test, you have too much self-confidence, you say, "Oh, well, we know what we're doing. Our people know what we're doing." And so if you have a lot of money, you might be inclined to just leap right in. "Oh, well, we're going to invest in the advertising right now. We don't need to test it," or, "Oh, well, we're going to make sure that we pay for the fanciest box possible because our customers want a really fancy box." And maybe they do. But if they don't want what's in the box, then it's to little avail.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. Customers don't always like when we tell them what they should have. I think back to Bezos, I mean his day one mantra and his... Oh, I mean, think he's shocked whoever was interviewing him years ago on CNBC and he is like, "Oh, we're fully prepared for the day when someone disrupts Amazon. And it'll happen, someone will unsee us." It's just such interesting way to think. How do you kind of encourage that or foster that if you're a listener and you're leading your company and you say, "Listen, I get it. We've kind of plateaued. We've been thinking too short term. We want to kind of embrace some of this testing and not be so fearful of it." How do you get, in your experience, mid-level managers perhaps, or team leaders in the company to kind of come on board?
Dorie Clark:
Well, I think we run into trouble where it's difficult for people is if they feel like they're being judged or if it's like, "Oh, well, you're not doing a good job. You need to do better. You're failing here. So kick it up a notch." For obvious reasons, nobody likes to feel like they're being scolded or evaluated negatively. But something that is a very useful exercise and I think that as long as an organization or firm or an office is doing this in a concerted way so that it's not pointing fingers at someone or a department or a person or whatever but instead just making it an institutional part of how we think, how we do business, there's a famous story about Andy Grove who was the longtime leader of Intel. There was an anecdote where he was talking and folks were struggling in the company. Somebody said the sort of revelatory thing, which is, "If we were fired tomorrow and they brought in new guys to replace us, what's the first thing that the new guys would do to turn it around?"
And so they say, "Oh, well obviously they'd do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And so then they say, "Well, why don't we do that?" And so just sort of thinking like, "Okay, if somebody were going to replace you, outstrip you, take over what you're doing in the market, et cetera, how would they unseat you? And well, why don't we do that ourselves?" is not a bad thought exercise.
Dustin Burleson:
What a great, great, great example. I know we're getting close to the end of our time together. I want to share some resource links. I do want to thank you for chapter 10. What do they say? If your ears were burning or so. So last week when I was going through my notes, if you saw a bright sunrise or sunset coming from the Midwest, I was just so thrilled to see chapter 10 because you included, particularly for me and my listeners, an important component of all this, and that is to learn how to celebrate when you actually do succeed at these when you set an objective, when you put wheels in motion to achieve your goal. It's so easy for high achievers to go, "Okay, what's next?" And we don't stop and celebrate it.
So I know we don't have a lot of time, but I just want to thank you for chapter 10. It's so good. It's so wonderful to see high level people thinking about not just, "Okay, we grew revenue, or we increased our net promoter score, or we achieved this key objective in the business" and now it's like, "Okay, we want to do more." And we just don't stop and celebrate, which is really, really important, right?
Dorie Clark:
So true. Yeah. Thank you, Dustin. I agree.
Dustin Burleson:
I just love that. I could talk to you for days. I know our time is limited. I'm going to include a link to Dorie's Ted Talk. It has over a million views. Probably way more by now the last time I checked. It's called The Real Reason We're All So Busy (and What to Do About It). It's a great Ted Talk. We'll have links to the books and research that we've mentioned on the show today. And I want to give Dorie a chance to tell listeners how to find her and learn more about her.
Dorie Clark:
Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to get a chance to speak with you and with your community. I'll also just mention that if folks are interested, I have a free resource, which is The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self-assessment, which is a series of questions to really help you become more of a long term thinker and sharpen that muscle. Folks can download it for free at dorieclark.com/thelonggame.
Dustin Burleson:
Awesome. We'll include that on the link story. Thank you for writing the book. It's just amazing. And thank you for joining us.
Dorie Clark:
Thanks, Dustin.
Dustin Burleson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Burleson box, where we bring you and your team leaders into the conversation with today's best authors and business leaders. If you enjoy today's program, be sure to share us with a friend or colleague, you can visit the burlesonbox.com. Sign up to receive my monthly reading list, study guides for each of the books and authors we interview. And as a member, you'll receive early access to add free episodes, exclusive transcripts, handouts, and PowerPoint templates to help guide your next team meeting. Just give us a call at (816)-226-7988 and we can discuss how a Burleson Box membership, monthly coaching, and our annual leadership conference can work for you and your employees. Be sure to listen each month for new resources. And until next time, remember the words of Charlie Munger who said, "Be a continuous learning machine." Charlie is a voracious reader along with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and many other hugely successful people. As the old saying goes, "We are old too soon and wise too late." Go, make it a great month and I'll see you right here next time on The Burleson Box.