Kicking the Hornet's Nest: Controversial Business Advice

0:00I was stunned that what you said, which obviously we'll share here in a second. And it makes no sense to me why people would get emotional about that. It wasn't in any context negative. So it was funny that people like got all bristly about it, given that it was just a, hey, here's a three-step way to, you know, to be a better manager, basically.

0:27Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast with your hosts, me. That's Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice. who is now one of the most hated people online. I'm super hated. Yeah, according to a bunch of micromanagers. Yeah, I got my first viral hate piece in a long time. Have you had a viral love piece yet? Yeah, I don't think love pieces ever go viral. So no, no, never, like never. I think you only go viral for if you say something that really pisses off a lot of people, which apparently I did. I was stunned that what you said, which obviously we'll share here in a second, it makes no sense to me why people would get emotional about that.

1:11It wasn't in any context negative. So it was funny that people like got all bristly about it, given that it was just a, hey, here's a three step way to, you know, to be a better manager, basically. But why don't you share first the virality and then we'll talk about what it was. Yeah, well, I'll give some backstory on this. So I recently started publishing an email newsletter after it seems like everybody was doing it. And so I wanted to wait until the trend was basically over and then jump all the way into it. Like that's kind of my strategy. I first wrote about email newsletters back in 2007.

1:51I don't know if you knew that. But in 2007, I put out a little e-book called The Great Easing Experiment. So I was very early and now I'm super late. I want to miss the opportunity as much as possible. No, I decided I wanted to start publishing a weekly newsletter. The idea is just it's called The Accidental MBA. And it's just something that I've figured out accidentally, you know, running businesses for the past like 20 plus years. Kind of just a way for me to aggregate some of the knowledge that I've had, put it out there, see if I can share something with the world. And yeah, I'll be honest, when I published this particular issue and I was almost embarrassed by it because I'm like, this is the most kind of generic, like obvious kind of thing.

2:32But it was the week before my kids spring break. And so I just had to get something out there. And so I put it out there thinking like, this is not that big a deal. And when I published it to the subscriber list, I got this typical amount of feedback, like all positive. I published it on LinkedIn. Generally, everybody was like, this makes a lot of sense. A couple of people were like, I disagree with this, but that's fine. But what I've had the team doing is anything I post on LinkedIn, they're cross posting it on Facebook and Instagram and other places. And holy crap, when this thing hit my Facebook page and I didn't even notice it because I was basically out of town, it went nuts.

3:10I mean, if a normal post would get like 40, 50 ,000 reach, you know, it might get a hundred comments or something like that. Um, this one got over 2 million, um, impressions so far, uh, and like, you know, thousand, 1500, something comments, something crazy like that. Um, and so, yeah, I thought it'd be fun just to kind of talk about, I'd love to get your take and see like, what in this do you think is controversial, if anything. Did you look at who the comments, like, was there a significant influencer or somebody with a lot of reach that, that came in on it that would have caused it or that shared it?

3:51Cause I noticed it had, it had like three or 400 shares too, I think, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I did nothing that I noticed. So I guess I'm going to, I'm going to read the piece just like really quickly. Cause it's not, it's not that long. I mean, all of these are designed to be read in like two minutes or less, but it's basically, Hey, if you're bombarded with got a minute questions, You don't have a team. You have a swarm of problem messengers. To fix this once for all, implement the 3-3-3 method. So this is pretty simple. Here's how it works. Tell your team, step number one, to spend three minutes.

4:24So it's the three-minute Google first rule. Basically, before you bring me a problem, take three minutes to Google it or chat GPT it. And I firmly believe that every manager should do this because I don't know about you. I feel like for the longest time, I was essentially just Googling stuff for the people who work for me. And it drove me nuts. So I'm like, you know, rule number one, step number one, just take three minutes. See if you can't Google it. Step number two is ask three peers. See if there's just three other people. Basically, if you're going to, before you tap somebody on the shoulder, frankly, just tap a less expensive shoulder, right?

5:00And so I said, you know, step two is the three peer rule. If they still need help, they must consult at least three peers before escalating the issue. to us appearing definitely before kicking it up to the CEO. It doesn't matter if it's peers at the company or peers in a public forum. They just need to seek the advice of others at their level before engaging their bosses. There's wisdom in groups, especially when the number of these groups are in the trenches like they are. So I'm not trying to diminish the value of the peers. I'm saying they're in the trenches too. Oftentimes people bring me questions and I'm like, I don't know, give me some context.

5:32I don't know what you're talking about. And then step three, if you're going to bring it to me, then bring me at least three possible solutions. And so this goes back to the one, three, one rule that we teach that we talked about. Have one clearly stated problem, three possible solutions to show that you've done some homework, and then one recommendation. And then based on that, we can have a conversation. And so why does this work? Most problems don't need you. They just need better filters. This system builds an autonomous team and frees you to focus the result, fewer interruptions, smarter problem solvers, and a massive productivity boost.

6:09Now, that to me seems highly uncontroversial. Why are you calling all workers stupid, Ryan? My God, right. I mean, I guess the way that people took this is that it's so funny because like half of the comments were like, yeah, obviously. Like my favorite, somebody who was a teacher was like, this is, I basically have my students do something similar. Like, and I don't, I don't know if you remember this, like when you were in school, but I would ask the teacher how to spell something and be like, go look it up in the dictionary. I think you're digging your own grave because you're now you're saying that basically workers are no smarter than elementary school children.

6:49It's exactly what I'm saying. Um, and I'm going to double down on it. And the other thing that I'll say is, you know, having now parented four children, this is, this is what I do with my own kids that, you know, they'll ask me a question. I'm like, well, what do you think? Like, let's try to figure this out for yourself. And what cracked me up is people were basically saying, um, Oh, you think, you think they're dumb. You think they're not smart. It's like, no, it's actually the opposite. It's, I think that they actually are smart. I think that they have the ability to solve the problems themselves.

7:19I want them to believe that too. Yeah. So I liked the ones that said, well, what are managers for them? Yeah. Yeah. So there were the people who thought that I was like insulting the employees and I'm like, I kind of think you are. And then, yeah, people who are like, well, what do you think that managers are for? And it's like, dude, this mentality is exactly why this little, like this middle layer of management just gets cut and they're never missed. I think it's interesting though, because I didn't have the context of where you had released it before. I think you roll out the newsletter because those are people that generally probably like you, but not LinkedIn, which I think is a more professional crowd.

8:03And so the fact that you didn't receive this kind of response on LinkedIn, but you did on the social network that is now Facebook, and that's where it blew up. And that just feels to me like a place where nobody I know is on Facebook anymore, that it is a place for people who have way more time than they have, you know, anything else. And so those people are there. Maybe it's lower level management people that saw you as a, you know, taking a superior position of, you know, well, the way that you do that is 333. And I, you know, I don't respect frameworks or, you know, they were just looking for something to hate on, but it, it, yeah, it, it doesn't make any sense because everything that is in there is positive and everything is about building a team that is smarter, that will have the opportunity to advance.

8:57It is actually enriching for the people who are being asked to, to participate in this program. So it's, it's funny that, uh, I would, I mean, from what I read and I only read maybe 150 of the comments, but they seem to lean extremely negative, you know, the bulk of them more than positive. Yeah. And now that was exactly it. Yeah. Way more negative than, you know, than, than positive. And it was interesting because I did see some of it on LinkedIn, like there was some kind of negativity towards it, but not the bad, like the gross preponderance that, that, you know, that, that you see here. So, so I guess the question is like, now what, right?

9:47What, like, what does this, what does this mean? And, and, you know, kind of what, what should we do when, you know, when something, when something like this happens? Because what I know is that there would have been a time when, had this happened, I would have felt the need to go in there and respond to basically every single one of these people who had, you know, said that I was wrong. And, you know, I can tell you right now, I did not do that. I haven't responded. I haven't responded to any of them because I just, I was busy and didn't have time. But I mean, what do you think? What do you think is the appropriate response when you put something out there and people are just like, you know, you're an idiot and you get a ton of hate?

10:30Depends on what your desired outcome is. what's your desire so what do you think i should do on this i think it depends on your desired outcome if the desired outcome is um more reach and attention to the you know to the newsletter uh then i would double down and polarize and i would basically you know find a creative way to challenge and poke at the people who are poking at you because then they'll become even more stirred up and frenetic and feel like they've got to tell a thousand people and post again. And that'll get you more reach because the algorithms will reward the activity. And that's not a bad way to go.

11:17And we know that you're not going to make everybody happy and most of those people are not your audience. But if it helps you reach more people that are, then that's probably a net positive. I think the worst thing you could do would be to apologize and say, you know, no, I didn't really mean to offend what I was trying to do. You know, I think that that justifying, explaining or apologizing isn't helpful at all. Um, and is, is a weaker response and backs off of a solid thing that you had. And then the middle road is probably, um, a continuation piece that refines what you were saying, you know, the, the polarizing pieces to, is to pick at the things they do.

11:56You know, it's, it's like, you know, uh, a bad non-thought-out thing would be something along the lines of, you know, uh, uh, employees are like children and need to be told, need to be given a framework or need to be told what to do, or, you know, work is like a playground. Here's how to handle your kids, you know, something like that. Yeah. They would just go nuts over. They hate it, hate it, hate it. But then people like you and me would be like, that's kind of funny, you know? And also I love all the hate that he's getting and he's right, even though he's taking kind of a, you know, because you would deliver it in a humorous tongue in cheek kind of way.

12:30Um, that's probably the one I would choose, honestly. So kick. So basically the options are, um, apologize, run away and hide. Um, Um, option, uh, two is to seek to kind of reframe and kind of clarify what you meant, not apologize, but at least try to, and option three, it sounds like it's just to kick the hornet's nest. Yeah. I like kicking the hornet's nest on this one. I really do. What do you think? Yeah, I agree because number one, I would not apologize because there's nothing I said that I disagree with. And I think that's really important. I don't think whether you're, whether you define yourself as a creator or you're a CEO and you're just out there communicating, don't apologize for saying something that you feel is true simply because it offends somebody.

13:17Yeah. And I think that's so important. Now, if you say something in a way, even if you go to explain, to say you, you, you know, poke and then, you know, it's poke and clarify, but, but I would just say, you know, it's this, the, The response to the last post I made is overwhelming evidence of what's wrong with management and employees, that the relationship is misunderstood to be parental. And it's not supposed to be parental. It's supposed to be peer coaching like. It's to encourage growth and nurture and support and build your replacements, not to have an army of drones who are mindlessly going about the 1984 commercial from Apple doing exactly what they're told and being stamped.

14:07That's, to me, a great way to bring that home and lean into the controversy with this is what's wrong. And I actually believe that to be the case, too. What were you going to say? I'm sorry. I talked over you. No, I was going to say exactly that. Like, don't, I mean, so don't apologize for something that you believe to be true. And also don't miss the, like what I kind of, one of the things that, but that bothers me a little bit is that this happened days. I don't go on Facebook. I didn't know this was happening. and so I wasn't able to kind of like respond and kick the hornet's nest in real time because I completely agree with you what they're saying it's like they're self-satirizing that that's the thing that is is so comical to me it's like oh my god you're absolutely just making my point for me and anybody who disagrees with me is not my audience yeah anybody who does is going to see through and be like okay yeah I think I found my person anybody that disagrees with you on that point is not your audience.

15:12I don't know if I agree with that because I think they are because they need your help. They need to hear what you have to say. They need to be open to, I mean, if they believe that if they're managers, because that's who you're after more than the employees, if they're managers or better yet, business owners, a lot of them are living in the misinformed state or more likely the comfort state of it's easier for me to do it because if I do it, it's going to be right. If you want a job done, do it yourself. Then they are to actually create better thinking employees. And so I think like you hit the nail on the head of how to reach the audience that you absolutely do want of managers that are thinking like to me, even calling them out and saying, if you're a manager or an owner and you disagreed with this, or this gets you to, um, to feel angry, you should, but what you're angry about is the fact that you have not created a team and that you have built yourself a job you will never escape from in a business.

16:26That's not exitable. Uh, right. That and on and on that, that to me. so so i that's the only place i would slightly disagree with you i think that like that's the best way to reach those people they're living in pain that's why they're lashing out not because you're wrong or you know you said something terrible because there's no way you know there's no way any logical human could read what you had to say and get mad about it right you could disagree with it but not not what they were not the hating that was going on in that you know Yeah, it disagrees the wrong word. Somebody who's so close minded to it, because somebody who's like, I'm not so sure about this.

17:02And then they read it and they're like, oh, well, maybe. Yeah, that's exactly who I would want to talk to. But somebody who's going to read it and just be like, I'm mad now. And this is a day ruiner. Those are not, they're likely not who I'm going to be want to hang out with. Let's just say. So how many signups, if any, did that drive to the newsletter? Was there a spike? I mean, we definitely saw a spike. I mean, we saw about a 10 % increase in the overall signups. Yeah, so I'm not, I mean, I am not in the, it's funny because I was sitting at my kitchen island. I saw this, you know, so we're recording this on a Monday.

17:39I saw this on Saturday. And so you were sitting at your kitchen island on your throne, telling your family to go think of three things before they come back to you with all their crap, right? Yeah, exactly. Bratty little kids come to you with all their problems. And I'm like, you figured out yourself, brat. No, it was the morning. So they were all still asleep because it's a bunch of teenagers. But no, I'm sitting there and I was kind of chuckling, reading through this. And Emily, my wife, she sees it. She's like, what are you looking at? And I was like, check this out. And she was like, oh no, are you okay?

18:10Are you canceled? Yeah. And, and I, and it just struck me and, and there, there would have been a time when I would have had an emotional response to it. And the filter that I always try to run it through is going back and, and, you know, and reading it again, do I believe what I said? And do I still think that it's true? Was it said in a way where I intended to offend? And was it said in a way where I believe that a reasonable person who I know, like and trust would be offended by this? If the answer to all of those things is like, you know, yes, it's true. You know, obviously I didn't intend to offend.

18:49And no, I don't believe a reasonable person. Then I feel no energy towards it whatsoever. And now my brain just shifts into, okay, well, how can we be strategic, you know, with this? Because any time the marketplace gives you strong opinions, you got to look closely at that and figure out, okay, what is it here that we can potentially double down on? Because it's not something that I thought would be particularly offensive, but obviously it was. So I intend to kick this hornet's nest over and over and over again. I'll give you another example. I posted something on, and this one I did get hate for on LinkedIn.

19:30I posted on LinkedIn and I was talking about how like our system for creating company scorecards. And I said, you know, we don't use fancy business intelligence tools. We use this, you know, crazy tool called Google Sheets. And I want all of my people to manually enter their numbers in every single week. And everybody's like, oh, my gosh, what a giant waste of time. And I got so much hate for suggesting manual entry, which I know takes our people about 20 or 30 minutes once a week. And in that 20 or 30 minutes of actually looking at the numbers and manually entering it, they know their numbers.

20:09They become accountable to their numbers. Now I can say, hey, you know, Matt, just out of curiosity, you know, what's our, you know, what's our return on ad spend for this thing? And he knows it because every single week he's looking at it and putting it over. They're showing up to the meetings, knowing what the numbers are and having ideas for how to improve them as opposed to in the past, showing up to the meetings and being just as surprised as everybody else when the numbers are off because they're not looking at them. But oh my God, man, you would have thought that when I suggested that these precious little snowflake employees have to waste their valuable time taking 15, 20, 30 minutes to manually enter their numbers.

20:50I mean, it's like I was asking them to give vials of their blood to be sacrificed to you know, my own general awesomeness. Like it, it just was, you're the math teacher that's not allowing them to use calculators. Yeah, exactly. Like, don't you know that that could just be brought in? That's such a terrible use of like everybody's time. But those are the things now I file that away and I'm like, okay, this is something I want to return to again and again and again. We, you know, AI is something that we talk about a lot here. AI is really great for content ideas. AI is almost never going to serve up a counterintuitive idea.

21:32It's almost never going to serve up something that is a little bit controversial, almost by definition. It's going to kind of serve up what the masses believe to be true, which is why... You have to ask for counterintuitive. It does okay when you ask for it. It really does. Yeah, yeah, you're right. If you ask, but most people don't ask for it because they don't want to be that, because they don't want to deal with the hate, which means they kind of have no reason to exist in a post-AI content world. And so I just think that, yeah, like that's, I was hoping that's what you would say I should do, because I've kind of been waiting to like take action until we had this conversation.

22:10But that's, I'm going to kick it not once, but twice, three times. I'm going ham on this thing. So what's the strategy of it? What's the desired outcome from the kicking? And what are some of the ways that you think you might go about angles of approach for the kick? So number one, the version of this piece is something where I will probably now look to write a version of this message and repost it at least every 90 days. So just now this piece is going to get recycled because it's a winner. And so anytime you have a winning anything in business, certainly if it's messaging, if it's a marketing campaign, if it's a post, make sure that you add that to your, we call it our proven promo vault.

22:54So if you have a winning promotional campaign, put that in the vault and literally go onto your calendar and make a note 90 days from now, run it again. Okay. Do it again. Because if it worked once, it'll work in 90 days. We just found that you can basically repeat the same stuff every 90 days, definitely every six months. So that's the first thing is some version of this will get repeated every 90 days until for whatever reason it stops working. And as you build up a repository of these things, that's when you're just always interesting to somebody. Just in the hey for what it's worth category.

23:29Figuring out what these things are. So that's the first. my tactically for this one, my plan is to go and do a, like a repost of it with a, you know, with a comment on there, exactly what you were saying. Like, can you believe this happened to try to bring it back up to the top of my feed? And now to get my followers, you know, the people are in my audience to have them go in there and do the responding. I think anytime you can get your audience to defend you, not only is it far more efficient, not only does it get, I think, a better message out there and kind of balance some of the hate, but it really galvanizes an audience and draws them much more closely to one another.

24:10Then I'm also going to use this as a marketing piece to go out to other folks and be like, this is probably why you want to subscribe to the newsletter because it's controversial ideas like this that you're going to be getting every single week. So those are, that's kind of what I have in mind right now. Anything else you think I should do? No, I just like it. I like it. You know, I like it aggressive too. I like, you know, three reasons or five reasons your team sucks, you know, things like that I think are, are cool. And, and even to respond to this, the way that you're analyzing it and thinking about it of, of how do you handle, um, difficult, how do you handle communicating difficult ideas, you know, and, and, and how do you respond to that?

24:59That, that alone is, is interesting along with the stats of how many people signed up. You know, we received a 72 % spike in our newsletter signups, which is primarily my ideal target because not a lot of people that hate you sign up for a newsletter. They block you or, you know, unsubscribe instead. And so if you're looking to reach a broader audience, maybe it's time for you to take a stand, you know, or that like all of those things are, are spinoff ideas of content that I think can come from it. So I, I like it a lot. I can tell you what not to do. So if you're fortunate enough to have something like this happen to you, and I, and I, and I mean that intentionally, if you're fortunate enough to put something out there that people notice, right.

25:45And, and, and especially if it's something that you still do believe to be true. We don't simply want to be noticed for saying just off the wall, stupid stuff for the purpose of ClickBank and getting noticed. And there's plenty of people doing that. I'm not suggesting that at all. But if you actually have a unique point of view, that is what the world is lacking. The world is lacking people with a truly unique point of view who are willing to defend their unique point of view. So if you have a unique point of view, you have a reason to exist and you have a reason to go out there and start speaking.

26:16So if that happens and if your unique point of view catches some heat, you know, and if it goes, what you don't want to do, and we talked about this, don't apologize for anything that you believe to be true. And number two, don't go and engage individuals in conversation. I think that this is really, really, really important. When it's an open forum like this, don't go through and start talking to individuals because number one, you don't really have the time or the bandwidth to respond to individuals. what you want to do is respond in your own terms, which looks like making a follow-up post or something like that.

26:52And then let them go and chirp and speak. And then hopefully deploy and deputize the people who follow you, who believe in what you're saying, who share your unique point of view. Let them go in and do it. It's far more efficient and it's just a better look overall. I've seen a lot of people get sucked into really stupid internet arguments with trolls. Yeah. They'll definitely troll you individually. And the other thing, which we didn't have this as an option, but don't do nothing. Don't just be like, okay, well, that was interesting. I think I'm going to stay away from that topic. It is your opportunity to leverage and capitalize on an actual net positive event because attention is what everyone wants and you have gotten attention.