Nir Bashan on How to Master the Solution Mindset | EP 706

27:21But we took a very measured, disciplined, and incredible approach there. General MacArthur was the steward of the Japanese islands for seven years. Seven years. He said, hey, this is about building roads. This is about getting back, the Japanese people, back to where they can contribute to the world and not become a fascist or a Nazi state. This is about rehabilitation. And that decision was made. But the actual work, right, the rubber meeting the road, got really bad. Why? because he got people together in Japan and said okay guys we have to rebuild this road and they were like great that's a committee that meets Tuesdays so he waited till Tuesday went to the committee meeting and he said guys we got to build this road oh yeah but that's on Thursdays that's a national road this is a local road there's a jurisdiction that handles both the roads and he was like the complexity was insane right everything had a committee everything had all of these layers that took an immense amount of time to get through right that sound familiar it's the very familiar bureaucracy of a government and a bureaucracy of an organization so he said guys no we're not doing this here's what we're going to do we're going to simplify this whole dang thing okay when we're going to do this road these three committees you guys get together and you figure out how to make one decision once a week on tuesdays okay this isn't We're not hopping back and forth for three months.

28:51And they were like, well, we can't. He's like, figure it out. And they got together and they figured out ways to lower and to minimize the bureaucracy so that stuff can get done. He touched health care, too. And he said, hey, if you break your arm outside of Tokyo at the little local hospital, let's say it's$100 to reset. I don't know the exact numbers, but let's say it is$100 to reset. If you go to the fancy, really nice hospital in Tokyo, it's$300. There's no difference in resetting your arm, right? You broke it. You had a fall, whatever. You break it. The two hospitals are going to reset it the same way.

29:27They put the cast on the same way. They take the same x-rays and all of that stuff. So he made a system in Japan that had one cost per incident, no matter what it was. That system still exists today. And it's incredible. They get together once a year and the pharmaceuticals and the equipment manufacturers and everybody always battle for the prices. But once they're set for a year, I think, or two, and people have predictability in that cycle. They know that the medicine will cost this much no matter where they go. They know that their health care, no matter where they go, will be consistent. And they've gotten the feeds down.

30:08They've gotten the expenses down. And I would love to do something like that in this country. Well, when you think about it, and my wife is a primary care provider, so does a lot of prescriptions, I always thought it was just, and still is, crazy that you can go to CVS, you can go to Walgreens, you can go to Walmart, and you have three completely different pricing architectures for the same drug. Wild. And go across the country, they're probably 100. Wild. What you are describing in Japan is they set one price, and that is one price for the entire country. One price is one price is one price. That's it.

30:46And it helps the bureaucracy of health care, because all the paperwork and the forms and the communication, it helps control their costs. They're actually a nationalized health care system. They take it out of everyone's paycheck every month, and it's set at a reasonable rate. it really that idea of eliminating clutter and focusing on the goal itself rather than letting the clutter become part of the solution. The reason I wanted to focus on this is because coming from big fortune 50 companies, I've seen this firsthand when I was at Dell, we were in the middle of, I would argue the largest transformation of the company.

31:27It has historically been a hardware provider. People knew it for enterprise servers and your personal devices. But Michael and the board knew that wasn't the long-term destiny to make money. So they needed to become a solutions-based, which solution mindset company. But in order to do that, it meant you started to have to take these new ideas and you had to get them out of the mothership. So when I was there, as they were unearthing going through this idea flow type of concept, new creative ideas, they would actually not only take the idea and assign it to a vice president or director and let them run with it, they mandated that it would go outside of the local area.

32:16And even when we were in Austin, there was another building that just housed Dell startups because they didn't want the bureaucracy of the big business to get in the way of them being able to be agile in the way that they were coming up with these ideas. Do you think that's a way that large companies could innovate without them getting stuck with coming into the slowness of the bigger mothership type of thinking process? A hundred percent. I think that's one of many ideas of how to get really good ideas out of these big companies that in a way the bureaucracy has been set by the company's growth and the company's success.

32:57But yeah, there's definitely ways there's having that type of separation between the mothership and the startup. There is coming up with some mergers and acquisitions and acquiring that talent on. There is cultural shifts that can happen even in a behemoth company with tens of thousands of employees that just shifts the paradigm a little bit. Again, it's not everyone's always looking for the big kind of, oh, this is going to revolutionize everything and change everything tomorrow. But sometimes it's a little idea, the little movement that can create incredible ripples down the line that are some of the most powerful impacts ever.

33:39So I want to switch gears with you. And another one of the superpowers that you have in the book is to embrace the routine. And what I love about this is that you use a bourbon brand as one of the stories to illustrate this. And for those who are watching, the bourbon brand is Kentucky Owl. And this is a brand that has a long history, but that history was one that needed a rewrite. So what did that rewrite have to do with embracing that consistency and establishing a routine? How do those two intersect? Definitely. Good question. In my book, The Solution Mindset, I looked at a company dedicated to the long run, right?

34:24And I found two incredible companies. One was a bourbon company. The other is international paper, right? Out of all the companies, everyone thinks the liquor and cigarette business, oh, they're the worst. And even worse than them, the paper industry, right? They're clear-cutting forests everywhere. And it turns out that is like completely not true. What really is going on is that people are making in the bourbon industry and this company in particular are making choices for the long run. Right. Not about, hey, you know, what trend will come and go? So how do we make this bourbon last and take the trip so that when 18 years, 25 years, 30 years later, when we're all gone, hopefully not.

35:11But some of the people who work on that bourbon are 70, 80 years old. They won't be around in 30 years to taste what will come out of that. But their dedication, the quality and their investment in that long term is incredibly important. So it really is about looking at what we do and distancing ourselves from those short gains, John, and start looking and planning on making those long-term gains. Because in my opinion, those are the really important gains. But we're surrounded these days by social media. We're surrounded by the apps and everybody, oh, look at me. I've got a Maybach Mercedes and I'm riding around.

35:52Look at me and I'm taking selfies. but that is not real long-term wealth. That is not real long-term gold generation. That is not real long-term creativity. So breaking that down and understanding that these bourbon companies that are making things aren't in it for the initial gain, they're in it to make really good products to last. Reminds me of Dory Clark's work on the long game in many ways is oftentimes we think of things Things in months, in years, we don't really think about legacy. Right. So when you think about this topic and you take this to a human level, how could someone apply this concept into their personal life?

36:36You have, yeah, because you have two great brands here. You've got a bourbon brand, you've got international paper. But I also think that this one really applies to us personally. 100%. So for me, it is about recognizing that success comes in long and measured steps. It's not about showing up one day, coming up with an idea and having it hit just because, you know, you wanted it to. These are really long-term investments. In the case of International Paper, this is an incredible organization. They literally plant stuff now that they'll harvest in 30 years and they rotate the land so that they can get the ground, the soil to be fertile, to be able to support that kind of thing.

37:22They have wildlife plans. They have all kinds of things that help spread the growth long term. And for people, I highly suggest that somebody is frustrated at work. Things aren't happening. I highly suggest that you step out of that like laser focus of what's going on that minute, that day, that week and start to look at your career and start to look at your life as a long term trajectory. Right. Is it how you treat other people? Maybe you going to work at that particular place, John, isn't about the work that you do. maybe about how you're touching other employees there and how you're helping them through their problems how you're making an impact with your community because you got this company to invest in doing some work with some charities people always look at what's going on in the minute and make quick judgments oh yeah it's not going well oh yeah it's going great or whatever but when When we start looking at bourbon companies that 30 years to mature, when we start looking at these amazing forests that take all of this time to grow properly before they're harvested, we start to look at ourselves and find that sometimes the goals that we've set out to accomplish are really touched tangentially by an amazing connection to the world, to other people, to our communities.

38:49That is incredibly worthwhile. Thank you, Nir, for sharing that. When I was at Lowe's, one of my peers, Steve Shirley, who was in charge of strategy, used to always say to our CIO, Steve, we need to focus on failing fast and failing often. And our CIO used to always go to Steve and say, I cannot believe you're saying that. What we should be doing is winning fast and winning often. And he's like, Well, you win fast and you win often by failing fast and failing often. So one of the superpowers that you highlight in the book is the need to fail successfully, which is exactly what Steve Shirley was talking about.

39:34And I had a guest on the show last year. Her name is Robin Steinberg. And Robin is really focused in the United States. She's an attorney on prison reform. And specifically, what she is trying to look at is mass incarceration and how it is not only flooding the system with too many inmates, but we keep the inmates in far too long for many of the things that they do. and this is something that you tackle in the book but you tackle it through another country who has looked at this and seen that there is a way to completely rethink in a creative manner about how do you take these inmates and reform them in a really amazing way so I was hoping you could walk us through that because I thought this was a great example of how you reform a large system but specifically how does the fail successfully come into play here in Norway?

40:36Yeah so Norway's prison system is amazing. It's like kind of an incredible thing and what's going on there is the rehabilitation, the focus on rehabilitation, right? In the U.S. our prison system is lock them up, throw away the keys and hope for the best and we have one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. And what that basically means is the rate of somebody who gets incarcerated gets out and goes back in. It's something like 70%. I don't know. I forgot the stat. I got to look at it, but it is incredibly high and it shouldn't be high. So we have a lot of creative decisions being made to improve that in Norway, right?

41:21For instance, there is more common sense in dealing with a prisoner, even if they're prisoned, even if they've committed some very serious crimes, right? There is less of a focus on punishing, more of a focus on rehabilitation. Incredible things like, hey, you get to go home for the weekend. Imagine that. Imagine a prisoner in the U.S. for grand larceny or whatever they're in for going home on the weekend. And you say to yourself, well, why would you do that? It's because our prison population is insanely high. There is no real focus on rehabilitation, and there should be because there's millions of people who can benefit from whether it's schooling or coaching or just given opportunities that they've never had to reintegrate into society and become contributing members.

42:10So what has been done in Norway is people focus on all of these little decisions along the way. Again, it's not, hey, we're going to do some big thing. It is about these little decisions along the way. How long do we incarcerate? What about the weekend? What about a spouse, a wife or a husband? What about kids? How do those, how do all of these things come together in order to make proper punishment decisions, but also proper rehabilitation decision? And I'm going to take it from Norway to a movie. So let's talk Shawshank Redemption for a second. There we go. When I think about that in the Morgan Freeman character, Red, he's, so here's a guy who's in for killing someone when he was 18 years old and he keeps going up for these hearings so that he could go back into the general populace and every time he gets denied until he finally says i wish i could go back and tell that 18 year old how stupid he was and oftentimes a lot of these it's happening to young males over indexed i think over female research i've looked at but if you look at what tim robbins the other character in the movie did is he was trying to create a library.

43:23He was trying to create different ways to educate the populace at Shawshank because he saw that was the best way to rehabilitate. Why do you think that has been such a thing in the States that we're not focused on? Man, that's a good question. I really don't know. I think that we've institutionalized the process and we've demonized the other, instead of being really creative and innovative and thinking, okay, this is a problem, how do we overcome it? We've gone back to the English Australia model where we're just gonna put them away, right? We're just gonna send all the prisoners away, and we do that today.

44:09Instead of sending them away to a different country, we just lock them up. But there's people in prison right now that are on drug charges. There's nonviolence. There's all kinds of reform that we could be doing, and I advocate for using creative and innovative solutions to improve not only our lot, but everyone's lot on Earth. It is all about finding new ideas and taking chances on them to improve life. When I think about it at a more macro level, it leads to another one of your superpowers when I was thinking about it, which is we should really be questioning the data and looking at it in a different way.

44:46If we are having decades and decades of mass incarceration increasing and we have repeat offenders time and time again, then ultimately the data is telling us something. And if you keep where I want to go with this is if you keep treating the data in the same way and you keep getting the same answers and they keep getting worse, then you've got to change the way that you're looking at the inputs that are causing the data to be where they are. which is my way of getting you to explain why is questioning the data so important. So important. It's so important. We need to look at data in new and different ways, right?

45:25People look at data like it's the best thing ever, right? Oh, I've got an Excel that shows me a certain thing and it must be true. The problem is that, yes, there is a lot of analytic data that shows there's recidivism and people coming in and out of prison, But there's also a lot of data showing that there's very focused programs that are working incredibly well. Some of them are faith-based. Some of them are like work-based where prisoners learn a certain tool, a technique, an approach, a vocation. And they go out there and do really well. And those are underfunded. And the ones that don't work are overfunded, right?

46:03It's about getting creative with the data and looking at it and going, okay, cool. This is an indication of something. but it's not the full story. Yeah, a great story of this from my time at Lowe's was when I took over the IT operations group, I knew I was given a huge issue to solve. We had just come off the largest hacking incident in retail history, and so I was being asked to lead the charge on overcoming that. but I will never forget I go to meet our head of HR her name was Maureen and I think we're going to be talking about this and maybe what I need to do on the bus to to put in new talent and she ends up saying we didn't talk about this during the interview process but we recently did an employee engagement survey where we looked at every single organization for the first time in the company and in addition to everything else you have to solve, your group was ranked worse in employee engagement in the entire company.

47:08And Lowe's at that time had 350 ,000 associates, 18 ,000 stores, 1 ,800 stores, this huge supply, and I have got the worst performing group. So where I'm going with this is there are many ways that I could look at the data, but But instead of looking at it as, oh, I've got the worst group, I started to look at it as, what did this employee's data show? And so the number one thing I found was that, repeated in their comments, was they had no idea how their jobs and what they were spending their time doing, how that impacted the company strategy or a typical customer walking into a low store because they couldn't see the correlation between sitting in a security command center or operations command center or data center or call center to solving a customer's needs.

48:05And so when I started to look at that data, I started to look at it, well, I need to give them a line of sight between why they're coming into work and their impact on a customer having a better shopping experience. So that I just wanted to give for the audience, that is a clear way that you can look at it that involves both your books because there's a creative angle to that, and then there's a solution angle to that. 100%. And that's so important to do, connecting the dots. Most people would go, oh, I've got the worst report in. Woe is me. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. and they give up or they fade into themselves and work out something for another few months while they're sending resumes, right?

48:47But you looked at that and said, hey, wait a second. What can this data do to improve? What can I do to take this worst scenario and look at ways to improve? And you found it. You found improving. And hey, it's really about connecting the narrative. The work that you're doing here in this department is really important to that mom and dad in Kansas City who are going and shopping to do their baby's room with paint and all this equipment because these three things that connects and all of a sudden you've energized somebody. A hundred percent the data is there not to just depress you. It's there so that you can work on it.

49:24It's there so that you can come up with solutions. But the data alone without creativity, without innovation, won't take you to where you want to go. I work with companies all the time and they're like near this is the data set and then we're a car manufacturer that i work with the evs aren't leaving the lot so what do we do i'm like the evs not leaving the lot is the best thing that could ever happen to you guys and they're like what what do you mean and i said you're taking a you got to make opportunities you got to make lemonade out of all these lemons they're like great well how do we do that i was like let's come up with ideas right maybe it's a micro lease program where somebody leases the EV for a month, they're like, how would that work?

50:06I'm like, I don't know. Let's figure it out. Is that like a decent idea? They're like, well, yeah, maybe we'll do a three-month program. Maybe there's something we could do with the rental car companies. And that generates all kinds of ideas. I think most people, when they get this bad data or negative data or tough to deal with data with the prisoner system, they know that's how things are. And that's how they've been yesterday. That's how they'll be tomorrow. That's the way it is. I've made a life out of questioning that. I've made a life out of working with people, and sometimes in a very intimate way, sometimes with tens of thousands of people on saying no.

50:44The acceptance of, hey, this is the way it is not indicative of your creative and innovative potential. Listen, we were born with genes that are turned on and off by creativity. Literally, it was a study that came out about a year ago that found that we are wired for creative and innovative solution. But somewhere along the way, we kind of lose it. We fall in love with analytics. We go to business school and it tells us, look, the Excel's got everything you want in it. It's every private equity company. Right. Ever. Right? So the problem is that's not true. And we've been led to believe that it's true.

51:23We need to balance creativity and analytics together in order to get where we need to go. Nir, earlier today, I recently hired a new PR firm. And one of the areas that they put a ton of focus on is who are your competitors? Who do you compare yourself to as passion struck? And I always hate this question because I don't necessarily, I'm not trying to be compared to someone else. I'm trying to create my own new category, but they like insisted. So I said, well, in some ways you could think of the ecosystem that Gary Vaynerchuk built with VaynerMedia, VaynerSpeakers, his VFriends. You could think of Mel Robbins and what she's trying to do.

52:10You could think of Simon Sinek and his Optimism Company or Mindvalley. But I always thought that there's this issue when you get into a comparison trap that can halt creativity and halt solutions. And this is actually one of your superpowers. So how does this comparison trap come into it? So I think we live in an unprecedented world where we can literally pull out a device and see what a competitor doing down the street. We could see real time what is going on around us. And it literally leads to nowhere good. Literally leads to nowhere good. We're constantly comparing ourselves to others and saying, oh, you should have done this and these guys did that.

52:55And what ends up happening is we lose that sense of creative and innovative problem solving that we are innately born with. The beauty of having creativity in your DNA is that the way that you solve problems is not going to be the same way that I solve it. And it's not going to be the same way that Gary Vaynerchuk or whomever. Do you remember when he was doing wine online? Yes. That's how it started. It goes back further than that. So I was talking to Matt Higgins, who wrote the book, Burn the Boat. People don't realize it, but Matt Higgins, through his efforts, was the first person who put money into the whole VaynerMedia ecosystem.

53:33But Cass and Mike, I can't remember their last names, they developed a company that they ended up selling to salesforce and gary actually begged them could i have a conference room to use in your corporate headquarters and he ended up overtaking their conference room but that's how he got to start got it and he positioned from getting that foothold in the wine industry to then realizing that media was going to shift and getting ahead of that and it's very similar when you back into it of Jeff Bezos. So Jeff realized he wanted to create the everything store, but he needed a starting point. So he thought, what better than books to try to disrupt?

54:16And so he developed a new creative way to do it and then implemented the solution mindset in order to do it. But there are two very good examples. Yeah, it's incredible. So when you think about the impact that you want this book to make. This isn't just about changing companies. This is about people themselves choosing a different solution mindset that they walk not only into their work life with, but their family life. So what do you hope that people who pick this book up will take away from it? I hope that people who read the book get energized and realize what a special gift it is to be alive today in a country like this, where we have so many opportunities and so much ability to do what it is that we want to do, and realize that you have the potential to solve any problem on earth.

55:14There is no problem that is bigger than our ability as a humanity to solve it. I believe that 1000%. And I've been on a mission now for several years to speak in front of different audiences, to write books like this, to get people really excited and energized about being able to solve problems. And part of that is selfish, right? Because I want people to go out there and solve pollution issues and all the problems that we're having today that affect my life. Because I know if I get people really excited and thinking in a new and a different way that our lives will all be better. I'm all about the need to matter.

55:56So I think oftentimes people come up with this huge idea flow and they come up with all these different ideas. So one of the things I wrote about in Passion Struck was something I call the deliberate action process. And one of the most fundamental aspects of that process is what I call the prioritization phase. You have another word for it. You call it use a filter. How does someone who has these creative ideas use the filter and then take that chance to implement it going forward? What would be your best advice? So a lot of people have all these ideas, right? Oh, it's the opposite just start problem.

56:35They, oh, I've got like 20 ideas. Let's go out and do it. The issue with that is that Sometimes we need to filter out the thoughts and identify and prioritize one of them. So in the book, I talk about that development of a filter through an amazing scientist who took on water in Africa. He traveled and noticed that there are large sections of the African continent where people don't have access to clean water, right? And he thought to himself, well, we got to come up with some way to filter it. And there was a lot of expensive solutions. solutions there was a lot of solutions that didn't work and at the end of the day he came up with a solution that is cheap that requires no moving parts that lasts like a year or a year and a half and that is personal and it's basically a straw that you can drink contaminated water from it's incredible they sell it here in the u.s for people camping or explorers or out in the wild or whatever but in parts of africa it's a day-to-day thing and it's basically called a life straw and it filters out all of the negativity and the contaminants and all the horribleness from the water.

57:43So the way that I use the filter and the way I teach business owners and different employees, people in different businesses, is I teach them, hey, use this filter to start filtering out these negative thoughts, the thoughts that will slow you down. I ask people, okay, cool. What do you want to do? Oh, Nir, I want to build a cart and go out and sell books in it. Okay, cool. That sounds great. Is that your dream? Yes, it's my dream, but I'm not going to do it. Why? Because the cart's expensive. Okay, cool. Maybe you should build your own cart or whatever. It's about filtering out the negative thoughts and amplifying the positive ones.

58:15Find a cart builder, partner with somebody, you know, to build the cart for you and give them a 10 % royalty on the sales. Again, it's about coming up with all of these ideas that get you over a perceived roadblock and filter out the negativity and add some positivity into it. Naira, last question for you before we wrap up is you are on PassionStruck. You are obviously passion struck about what you're doing yourself. So my question for you is what does it mean for you to be passion struck? Being passion struck for me, John, is all about really taking ideas and making them happen and energizing people and getting them excited and getting them knowledgeable about their ability and their role in this world.

59:06I think far too many of us have been beaten down by the news, by the press, by what we read and see out there in society, which is all bad news. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to amplify the good news, which is 10 times, 100 times, 1 ,000 times more prevalent than all the bad news we're believed this world is to be. There is so much good happening. There's so many good people like you, sir, doing amazing impact and helping people every single day just become a little bit better. And you should be on the cover of the magazine. You, sir, should be talked about in the news. And yet, well, we talk about the fringe cases.

59:47We talk about the cases that don't really matter. For me, being passion struck is recognizing what is really important. And what is really important is adding positivity, is making things matter, is making your life, the short time that we have here on earth, really matter. And that is what being passion struck means to me. I love that answer, Nir. And thank you for those plugs. If people wanted to learn more about you and the new book and where they can preorder it, where are the best places for them to go? Yes, sir. So it's on Amazon, Target, Walmart, anywhere you can buy books. My name is Nir Bashan.

1:00:23There's another Nirbhashan somewhere there on the internet uploading Minecraft clips. So that's not me. There's not that many of us on earth. I think there's three or four. My website's nirbhashan.com, N-I-R-B-A-S-H-A-N.com. The book is on Amazon now. All of the fine retailers available for pre-order. So Wiley and Son's book, an incredible book. And I hope that it gives you the gift of realizing how important and how incredible your ability is if you just tap into it and get it out into the world. Nir, thank you so much, my friend, for being here. I was so glad that we were able to do this in person.

1:01:03And thank you. And congratulations on writing such a fantastic book. Thank you so much. I think this is an amazing compliment to what you did with the first book and really brings the two together. So congratulations. Thank you. Really appreciate it. That's a wrap on today's conversation with Nir Bershon. It's always a pleasure to have Nir back on the show. What I appreciate most about Nir's work is this. He doesn't romanticize creativity. He operationalizes it. He reminds us that solutions don't arrive through brilliance alone. They arrive through discipline, clarity, and the willingness to engage.

1:01:37Here are a few ideas worth carrying forward. Creativity without structure leads to frustration. Simplicity isn't weakness, it's leverage. And becoming a problem solver starts with investing in yourself. If this episode helped you see a challenge differently, please share it. That's how this movement grows, person to person. And if you want to apply what you heard on today's show, join us at theignitedlife.net, where every episode becomes a practice, not just a conversation. Also, my new children's book, You Matter Luma, is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble. A reminder that problem solving, compassion, and mattering starts early.

1:02:14You can also find it at youmatterluma.com. Coming up later this week, I'm joined by Mark Murphy, New York Times bestselling author, for a powerful conversation on leadership communication and what it takes to be understood in a world full of noise. I happened to come across, and so this is in the 90s, I happened to come across a line that Michael Jordan had said. So Michael Jordan's one day walking off the court and one of the assistant coaches, Tex Winters, the guy who architected the triangle offense, he hollers over to Michael and he goes, hey, Michael, there's no I in team. And Jordan looks back at him and goes, yeah, but there isn't when, and walks off the court.

1:02:54And I said, yes, that is what I'm going to, when I someday write a book about teams, that is what I'm going to call it. Until then, solutions don't happen by accident. They happen by design. I'm John Miles. You've been passion struck. Now go live like you matter.

1:03:16Thank you.