Today’s guest highlights the importance of trust, empathy, and understanding in fostering meaningful experiences in the workplace. He also discusses the keys to successful acquisitions, how to avoid common mistakes by acquirers, and how to create post-acquisition strategy.

Anthony Webb is a mergers & acquisitions lifer, licensed lawyer, venture capital investor, servant leader, and engaged father.

Currently, he works in Corporate Development and M&A Integration for Adobe.

Anthony shares what makes work most meaningful to him, from being given the opportunity to solve complex problems, to building great team environments, to driving tangible results by empathizing with others, understanding their objectives, and providing supportive leadership.

Through a personal experience, Anthony illustrates how creating safe spaces allows trust to be built, in turn paving the way for effective communication. To empower your organization’s “culture carriers,” it is vital to create a space where ideas from both sides can come to the table, promoting innovation and better decision-making.

Asked what goes into a successful M&A, Anthony unpacks the concept of excellent end-to-end execution. It starts with creating a crisp corporate strategy, followed by homing into the target space, then getting the right people to the table for diligence, and, finally, building an integration strategy and approach.

Anthony explains that divesting businesses gave him a new perspective that allowed him to understand what to look for in an acquisition. Drawing from these experiences, he provides insight into the often unpleasant surprises that occur during acquisitions and offers strategies on how to avoid them, chief among them being the consequences of being overly optimistic and simplistic in a deal.

Anthony discusses the importance of knowledge retention and being sensitive to the motivations of the target company's employees. Building trust and openness, according to him, leads to better acquisition outcomes.

Anthony shares how simply attending routine meetings of the acquired company during a several-month "stabilization period"—allowing all voices to bring ideas to the table—allows acquirers to learn and gain more value from the acquisition for the long-term.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Anthony Webb:

● LinkedIn

Colleen Francis provides a proven, realistic gameplan to creatively adapt our sales and marketing efforts in a topsy-turvy world.

Colleen is an award-winning speaker, consultant, and the author of Right on the Money: New Principles for Bold Growth.

A successful sales leader for over 20 years, Colleen’s results have attracted hundreds of industry-leading clients, including Chevron, John Deere, NCR, Trend Micro, Merck, Abbott, Experian, Royal Bank, and Dow.

Colleen is a recognized thought leader in sales leadership, an inductee in the Professional Speaker Hall of Fame, and has been named the #1 sales influencer to follow by LinkedIn.

In Right on the Money, Colleen writes that the past two years could be regarded as “an evolutionary moment for sales”, and that “evolution came by revolution” as a result of the pandemic. That is, the world of sales was forever transformed once salespeople were forced to be creative sans traditional belly-to-belly interactions.

In fact, many sellers realized that they could be much more efficient and profitable working remotely to meet the needs of the new buyer, instead of being on the road all the time. Expense accounts could be scaled back and a lot of time could be saved—all with virtually no impact on employee and client trust.

Another huge shift Colleen has seen is the morphing of the business development specialist (BDS) role. Historically, this role has served as a “cold-calling team” that passes leads to senior sales people after a simple vetting process The new and more effective role for these more junior people is nurturing existing customers, giving customers strong reasons to stay loyal to your company.

In today’s world, Colleen’s clients have found that the inside sales role is better left to an experienced, seasoned professional able to have high-level discussions with prospects.

Colleen points out that the pandemic revealed poor sales practices, in that some companies had been going overboard on customer-centricity. She explains that a “customer is always right” approach can cost a business money, brand reputation, and access to markets.

Likewise, there is a danger to incorporating potentially controversial social issues in one’s branding and marketing efforts. Instead, Colleen advises, your company may wish to focus on the good it can do in its own community.

In Right on the Money, Colleen proposes a formula she calls “the Tempo Triad”, in which she encourages salespeople to engage in conversations across three different media platforms (she recommends LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) in three different ways:

1) sharing their company’s unique content

2) sharing something a customer posted

3) commenting or asking a question about something a customer has posted.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Colleen:

● www.engageselling.com

Get her book, Right on the Money:

● www.amazon.com/Right-Money-Principles-Bold-Growth/dp/163195671X

Today’s guest teaches us that by playing the long game, we future-proof our career.

I’ve known Dorie Clark for 11 years, and it was so much fun to have her on my podcast. I especially loved her story about a woman who became part of her Recognized Expert community and got back in touch a year later to thank Dorie. “I made one million dollars in my first year!” she reported. But that’s not the best part, which is that the woman is 80 years old.

This is an example of what Dorie does so well: to inspire others to reach higher and to give them the skills and tools necessary to succeed. Join us to hear countless actionable tips, including gems from her latest book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

Dorie teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.

She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, and was recognized as the #1 Communication Coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards.

The Long Game advocates taking a ten-year view when it comes to setting your goals and milestones. Dorie believes that, through a series of small and methodical steps and experiments, coupled with defining the kind of person you want to become, you can achieve extremely meaningful results.

Dorie recommends that we consciously choose how to spend our time. That doesn’t mean filling out every minute of your calendar and sucking the marrow out of each moment of the day. She’s tried that, and she found that such an approach often does more harm than good.

Instead of taking an overly quantitative approach to setting your daily schedule, get clear on your top three goals for the year and invest ample time working toward each of those goals. For example, Dorie’s three areas of focus in 2022 are relaxation, monetization, and friends. So most of her activities center on these three priorities.

Dorie says, “We need to train ourselves to systematically toggle between heads up and heads-down mode.” Give yourself the “white space” to look around and look within. Take time to rest and recharge, and periodically take stock of your progress to ensure that you’re on the right track.

Finally, Dorie offers her advice on avoiding the comparison trap. While comparing yourself to others may be a good “research tool”, staying stuck in that critical mental space impedes your ability to chart your unique path forward.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Dorie:

● www.dorieclark.com

Get her book, The Long Game:

● www.dorieclark.com/longgame

What makes Google’s culture so special that it has enabled them to have a 22% compound annual growth rate for a decade? How do they promote collaboration and keep growing even though they are already a huge company?

Hint: it’s not the volleyball courts and free food.

In part two of my conversation with Neil Hoyne, he shares insights into practices behind this amazing performance. As the Chief Measurement Strategist at Google, Neil has led more than 2,500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers and has generated billions of dollars in incremental revenue for these customers.

Neil says that Google’s true strength lies in the “ability of the company and its employees to work across functions with minimal friction.”

In other words, Google has created a culture of curiosity and collaboration that promotes free exchange of ideas across all departments. Google incentivizes that behavior by allowing any employee to award a cash bonus to one of their peers.

Google has a perpetual interest in scaling the business, but only in the leanest and most efficient fashion possible. For instance, when a team or department at first glance appears understaffed, instead of simply hiring more people, leadership asks, "How can we make the process more efficient, so that we don't need more people?”

Importantly, Neil implores other companies to find the values, tools, and processes that uniquely work for them instead of simply trying to build a Google copycat. “Fit an idea, a system, a transformation, a metric to (your) company’s culture.”

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Neil:

● www.linkedin.com/in/neilhoyne/

Get his book, Converted:

● www.convertedbook.com

The world is in desperate need for a new model of leadership, say Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley. We have seen the results of self-centered leadership, the kind that loves power and status. They make the case that it’s just not working for us.

The two are the authors of the new book, “Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust”, which features one simple truth for each week in a year. It’s an elegantly powerful approach to sharing some big ideas, many of which Ken and Randy highlight in this podcast.

In this podcast, Blanchard and Conley persuasively argue that money isn’t the root of all evil, but rather overly strong love of money creates the problems. They say that just as the best use of power is in service to others, the best use of wealth is in service to others. When you see leaders and organizations use wealth to foster the growth and wellbeing of all their stakeholders, that’s where the magic happens.

Ken and Randy believe that we would all be far better off—in today’s incredibly fast-paced, results-driven society—if more leaders, regardless of their field, dropped that win/lose attitude in their work. Top-down leadership has largely gone out of style, and side-by-side leadership has taken its place. In today’s world, servant leadership is the name of the game.

Every company’s number one customer is their own people. By doing what’s best for employees, employees will in turn go out of their way to do what’s best for actual customers. That leads to raving fans, which directly contributes to the bottom line. As Ken puts it, “Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your people, who take care of your customers.”

Ken and Randy then touch on the crisis of anxiety among the younger generation, saying that this crisis is largely driven by assaults on self-worth and other distractions propagated by social media. It is a tool that can do a lot of harm; but it can do a lot of good in the right hands. They make the case that social media and digital tools in general can even augment the process of building relationships, personally and professionally.

Ultimately, though, we must always remember to go back to simple truths; chiefly, that the art of leadership, cultivating great relationships, and helping each other grow is about those others-focused belly-to-belly interactions.

“Leadership is much more about who you are than what you do. If you get the beliefs, the attitudes, and the values right on the inside, the actions will follow.”

The legendary Ken Blanchard is the co-author of more than 65 books; including “The One Minute Manager,” and is one of the top 25 bestselling authors of all time. Randy Conley is Vice President of Global Professional Services and Trust Practice Leader at the Ken Blanchard Companies.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Ken:

● www.kenblanchard.com

● LinkedIn

Visit Randy’s blog:

● www.leadingwithtrust.com

● Linkedin

Get their book, Simple Truths of Leadership:

● www.kenblanchardbooks.com/book/simple-truths-of-leadership-52-ways-to-be-a-servant-leader-and-build-trust

What makes a successful data-driven company?

Today’s guest says that it has very little to do with the company’s ability to analyze massive data sets. Rather, what’s most important is identifying the right questions to ask, and then finding the simplest ways to answer these questions.

Neil Hoyne is the Chief Measurement Strategist at Google. He has led more than 2500 engagements with the world’s biggest advertisers and has generated billions of dollars in incremental revenue for these customers.

Even at that level of success for someone in his profession, however, Neil says that he goes to work every single morning with the ability to explore whatever he finds interesting that day. It once again comes down to a focus on solving difficult problems over aimlessly reading columns of data.

Further, it is vital to consider the human beings behind the numbers when interpreting any data, even more so when business decisions are made on the basis of those interpretations. Neil himself says: “We still have a lot to learn in business about how intuition and human behavior drives performance.”

Neil also shares how to have meaningful conversations with customers, particularly when that communication is taking place online. He prefaces this by explaining that “you certainly want data to support your decisions”; however, many companies “are incredibly fixated on the short-term” when looking at data.

Basically, they ask: “Did they buy or not?”

But what is missed with that narrow focus is the potential for nurturing a long-term relationship. The key is to approach data analysis with customer lifetime value in mind over immediate ROI.

Ultimately, Neil attributes his success in the data analytics space to his being able to bridge the interpretation of raw data with a deep understanding and appreciation for behavioral economics.

Says Neil: “If you’re going to be successful, you need a head as well as a heart. The ‘head’ is the data and analytics, but it’s not going to be the complete story. But on the other hand, if you’re leaning on, ‘This is just how I feel about a problem,’ you’re going to be missing out because there are times in which your intuition is going to be challenged.”

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Neil:

● www.linkedin.com/in/neilhoyne/

Get his book, Converted:

● www.convertedbook.com

If you want to understand what often stops teams from being more productive and successful, look no further than the tendency of most people to avoid difficult conversations.

Recognizing this fact is leadership and talent expert Roberta Matuson, who has dedicated her latest book Can We Talk?: Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work to this universal workplace conundrum.

Asked to name the one topic that most people are afraid to bring up at work, Roberta says that it’s unquestionably that of employee performance.

For managers, this hesitation takes place when a team member is failing to meet expectations or when the time has come to inform them that they’re being let go. On the other hand, employees may struggle to tell their boss that the way they’re being managed isn’t working for them or that they deserve a raise or a promotion.

Roberta reminds us that “people don’t work for companies. They work for people.”

Can We Talk? offers seven principles that guide people toward “the right conditions for a meaningful discussion,” helping both parties see situations from each other’s point of view in order to move forward in a productive manner.

These are: confidence, clarity, compassion, curiosity, compromise, credibility, and courage.

Listen in as Roberta breaks down a few of these principles, while also explaining what drives satisfaction at work, a tactful approach to letting staff go (even at the executive level), and how to “select for success” to ensure your new hires only do work that energizes them.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Roberta:

● www.linkedin.com/in/roberta-matuson/

Get Roberta's book, Can We Talk?

www.amazon.com/Can-Talk-Principles-Difficult-Conversations/dp/1398601330

What's a "product"? Radhika Dutt argues it's the mechanism for creating the change you want to bring in the world. She is my podcast guest this week and is author of Radical Product Thinking. Her vison-led approach applies to anyone who wants to create change, from human rights activists to entrepreneurs to corporate innovators.

“Each person in your organization should be able to use their own words to describe the problem you are solving, who you’re solving it for, and why it is valuable to them. When you start with that, you can align everyone to march toward the same goal.“

Radhika Dutt is the author of Radical Product Thinking, a book about systematically making fundamental change as opposed to simply optimizing the status quo.

She was inspired to write the book after noticing the same set of what she calls “product diseases” throughout her work in businesses big and small over the past 20 years. “It was the same pattern of mistakes as we were translating a vision into reality.”

Radhika found herself asking whether only gifted individuals such as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk were capable of building world-changing products, and the rest of us were doomed to relying on cycles of trial-and-error.

Determined to answer that question, she and her team created a framework that empowered product developers of any kind to become leaders and changemakers in their organization.

Radhika’s research eventually culminated in her book Radical Product Thinking. A blend of inspiration and practicality, the book aims to answer the question: “How can we create change in the world through our products, and how do we do that systematically?”

She went further and sought to redefine the word “product” to mean “the mechanism for creating the change you want to bring.” From gadgets to services to causes to campaigns, Radhika makes the claim that anything that is vision-driven and created systematically is a “product”.

“Unless we have a really compelling answer to why is the status quo unacceptable,” Radhika says, “maybe there's no reason for our product to exist. We should start with the question, ‘What does the world look like when we're done?’”

Listen as we talk about Radhika’s approach for creating change in the world.

Connect with Amanda Setili:

● www.setili.com

● LinkedIn

● Twitter

● Facebook

Connect with Radhika:

● www.linkedin.com/in/radhika-dutt/

Get her book, Radical Product Thinking:

www.radicalproduct.com