1636 – Why Businesses and Managers Succeed or Fail with Peter Christian Books’ Peter Christian

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's peter christian peter you are a best-selling author uh you are an adjunct professor and you are found on the web at pete christian books.com peter thank you so much for joining us thank you very much for having me my pleasure yeah and and so um your books uh in terms of who you serve and who you write for and the impact you have in the world. Give us a quick overview. Okay. Well, they were primarily written as business books, but I think they have an application to everyday life. The first one, What About the Vermin Problem, was a collection of instances, experiences that I had with a variety of different clients when I was in the consulting world.

1:45and some of them were very positive experiences and some of them were not so positive experiences and the story behind each is that there's a fine line between whether you're very successful or not so successful based on the choices that you make and you can read through each of the instances and find out what went wrong or what went right and why things went well or didn't go so well and with just a slight change of discipline or attitude or action or whatever you want to call it, it could have been a very positive experience or similarly, the positive stuff could have turned out to be not so good.

2:23So, and we see that in our everyday life. We make choices and some turn out very, very well and some don't and we learn from them hopefully so we don't do that again. so that was book number one book number two then the person I was working with at the time on book number one in the middle of it said by the way nobody ever just writes one book which I hadn't really thought about up to that point so I thought about it and it was well what causes us to make the decisions that we make and take the actions that we take and who really has an influence on our life. And we find out that there are quite a few people in our lives who have influences on us, again, in a variety of things.

3:05In the business world, it could be our boss or it could be some executive at the company or just a coworker who we get along really well with and learn from. But similarly in life, there are all sorts of people that have impacts on us, both positively and negatively again. And we learn from those things and they shape the way we think and the way we act. And it never stops. It's really a continuum throughout our lives of learning experiences and that. And I think the gist there is to realize that, to thank the people that have been helpful to us. Never forget them because they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and they want to see us succeed.

3:50And be careful about the people who aren't having our best interests at heart. And you can still, again, learn from them. Okay. But not necessarily the kind of people you want to hang out with. So that's the kind of the gist of the two books. And like I said, they were primarily written for the business world, but I think they've got some real life, everyday applications as well. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in the first one, it's called, again, the title is What About the Vermin Problem? Why Vermin? Why is that a good metaphor. Well, it was really interesting. We're looking for catchy titles. I think it was fairly catchy because it gets everybody's attention.

4:31But it's one of the instances that I experienced working with a company, trying to help them to expand their business and how best to do it physically. And the decision was made to put an extension onto their plant and so forth. But we needed to move things around in order to make the flow better. So my colleague and I are presenting our final product to them. And right in the middle of the meeting, one of the owners says, well, what about the vermin problem? And there was a pause, as you could probably well imagine, like a stunned pause. And it was like, well, what's the vermin problem? Well, the original building was an old mill.

5:15And it still, I guess, had some grains and so forth in there. So they would still have mice or rats or whatever the case may be. And you would think after that period of time that they had figured out that there were things like exterminators and so forth. And they said, well, where you want to put the production operation is right where we have the infestation. Well, that's where the warehouse was. So we're going, so in other words, it's okay to store the materials and have these little critters running all through them, but it's not okay to have them running through your production operation by the way did you ever hear of exterminators and because we work with food industry and if you've ever been in a food industry you'll see rodent traps all over the place because again they attract you know the little critters and they've got to get rid of them it's just a way of life so it wasn't anything new so basically they rejected what we did because of this vermin problem and that whole part was about communication here we had worked with them for a number of months that never came up until the final output oh my goodness yeah i know it's like if you want people to help you you've got to let them know what's going on you've got to be truthful with them you've got to give them you know the best of your knowledge so that they can make good decisions from that if we had known about it we would have probably come up i'm not sure we would come up with a different solution but we certainly would have come up with additional things like here's the name of an exterminator to get rid of your vermin problem and by the way it's probably not a good idea to have them hanging around in your warehouse so in your materials and so forth but anyway they generally don't go rats don't generally go away on their own you got you got to work with them to kind of help them find a new home yes you do yes you do yeah you know as as an 80s kid it uh you know i always think of poltergeist you know that they built the homes on the burial ground, but they did, you know, they removed the tombstones, but they didn't remove the bodies.

7:13The spirits, yes, yes. Yeah, I know. So it's just amazing what happens and what people don't tell you that can be as harmful as things that people do tell you. You know, and I think that there's often sometimes maybe operational dysfunction that, you know, maybe it's a little bit like the elephant in the room. Maybe we don't address it because it's not yet at the point where it's causing, you know, too much disruption, but it's an underlying weakness or threat. Right. And so sometimes, you know, we're just so busy with our day to day operations where we're putting out small fires that it's hard to consider, you know, hey, we're going to have to dig out that wound and, you know, really do some some deep work here.

7:57yep how how much tolerance for pain do you have before you finally do something about it is is kind of the gist of it all it just is amazing some people have a pretty high tolerance for pain and they let it go on like vermin problem so uh yeah what if these uh challenges are interpersonal in nature in other words maybe there's a cultural issue or maybe there's a um you know kind of a schism between um say like sales and operations or something like that because i know that never happens. No, no, no. I've never had that experience. Let's move on. Yeah. But oftentimes, you know, those, you know, those, the vermin problems can, can absolutely just be, listen, you know, our COO hates our CFO and, you know, it's just that, that has a tax on everybody.

8:49Even if we're, you know, just trying to listen, I, you know, It's a festering wound, but they still kind of get along or whatever the expression is. But still, I guess what you're saying is, when you can, take that time and let's go ahead and clean that wound out. Yeah. Because I had that experience before I got into consulting, I worked in the industrial world, primarily for Crayola Corporation for 17 years. and most of our executives were sales and marketing types and I had an engineering background we did not hit it off the best and they would always say oh you have the easy job because you just deal with numbers and stuff whereas we have to deal with people and people are so erratic and and all that stuff and they thought we had the easy job so they would throw stuff out you know with with no concept of how to actually make it happen.

9:48And we had to make it like really work, which was really interesting. And they did not seem to have that appreciation for the technical side of the business. It was always, you know, oh, the sales and marketing are the geniuses and the rest of you guys are just the drudge guys who just crank the numbers and everything works out. Well, it doesn't quite work that way. You know, it's just not a numbers game when you get into stuff. There's some pretty interesting things that have to happen in order for the engineering to work. And I don't think there was that appreciation. I tried to appreciate all the different folks I worked for because I worked with sales and marketing and finance and human resources.

10:29And we all came at things from a different way. And you have to appreciate that and kind of get an understanding of where people are coming from and why they're saying or doing the things they're doing. And then you try to work with them in order to make it happen. You know, if you just kind of shove the technical stuff down their throats, it isn't going to work. Similarly, if you try to shove the non-technical stuff down people's throats who are technical, it's not going to work. So you've got to have that understanding and appreciation for each other. You don't have to be an expert. I certainly am not an expert in a lot of those other disciplines, but I knew how to work with people and to get things done.

11:05That's what's important, I think. Yeah, yeah. What other interpersonal things do you see pretty commonly? Because again, I know that's the topic of your second book. But are there any dynamics that, you know, when we think about particularly, you know, who influences us, particularly, you know, if we are, you know, part of that executive leadership team, or we're the founders, certainly, you know, those influence are pretty, you know, they can be rather significant in, you know, kind of the totality of the impact. Right. I always felt, you know, in any industry, the two main areas to drive were certainly the sales and marketing because they were kind of providing the direction of what the products were going to be that were going to be sold and how they're going to be sold and who they were going to be sold to.

12:03And then we had to figure out, you know, how to make that happen. And the other side then is if you're in a manufacturing organization, you know, the people who make the stuff because they've got to satisfy those needs in order to make that product viable and accessible to people and so forth. And then everybody else is really then they're in a support role. So when I was in engineering and I managed engineers, I told them exactly what we were. You know, we are the support role for those other two organizations and whatever it is that they needed in order to fulfill what they needed to do, we needed to be there.

12:40So whatever we were working on, no matter how important, if they had a need, we had to drop what we were doing in order to support that, because otherwise it didn't make any sense. What we were doing did not drive the company. what they did, did, and our support of them then helped it along. And that's true of a lot of the other organizations. Again, human resources and finance, they're support organizations. Yes, companies need to have them in order to work and thrive, but they don't drive the stuff. So when somebody says, oh, well, our finance group was driving the company, that's a big red flag, okay?

13:18Because they're not thinking about the market and the products and all that stuff. They're thinking about the bottom line. All right. And when you just deal off of the bottom line, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. All right. Granted, it's important and you need them to have there. You need to have the bean counters and you need to have the people who know how to to make things happen financially. But their support function at the end of the day, if you're not moving product and selling product and coming up with new product and making it and shipping it and all that stuff. The rest of it really doesn't matter at that point.

13:52So I think more people need to understand that. All right. And that was an impression certainly on me. So I knew where my place in the world was and certainly in the organization and what the role was. And I tried to get that across to people. You have done a lot of mentoring in your life. And I think of, you know, folks that are listening to this podcast and likely we are in a position where we can be that mentor. But sometimes, again, maybe we say, well, I'm going to start taking more of a mentor role independent of my operational duties at some point. Do you recommend mentoring for all business leaders?

14:33And if so, how do we incorporate that into our life? Or maybe we just kind of start by looking at what we do and who we work with. Well, absolutely. No one person does everything in the organization. I tend to like to use Jeff Bezos. You know, Jeff Bezos is in charge of Amazon, but he doesn't know what's going on minute by minute, day by day in the bowels of Amazon, and yet it all flows through. Well, as he grew the company, he had to mentor people and bring people into place who could do the different aspects because he couldn't do it all himself. So it's really important on us because as good as we are as individuals, if we're not training folks and guiding them and helping them along so that they do their jobs better and then that relieves us from worrying about that on a regular basis, then we're not, we're probably not going to grow the way we need to, all right?

15:33There's going to be lots of fumbles and stumbles and maybe even the disaster at some point. So you're really grooming the next group of folks that are going to take over. And I see that certainly as a consultant. And I tell people, you know, that's what I'm there for is to help you and your folks, but not to do the stuff in order to train people and so that they understand what's going on and point out where the problems are and where the good points are and, you know, what to maintain and want not to and so forth. And I certainly like to do that with students, you know, both in teaching and also I have some mentorship roles with a couple of the universities to point that out to them.

16:14So as they get out into the working world, they have a better understanding of what it's really all about, particularly when students work with me on projects, real life projects. And they'll come to me sometimes and say, you know, you know what they did or you know what they said, and that doesn't make sense. And I point out to them and I say, just remember that so that when you're in that position someday, you don't do the same thing that you just told me about that you didn't like so much. Learn from it, okay, and be a better person for it. That'll make you a better manager and leader and so forth.

16:49So I think it's very important from the mentorship standpoint that leaders and managers and so forth do that. The good ones do. The bad ones don't. They just kind of throw you in the pool and they say, you know, sink or swim. Well, that's not the way to establish stuff. You know, and I kind of had some of that. As much as I had good folks, I also had some people who just kind of threw me in the pool and said sink or swim. And I was kind of okay to learn for myself. And I think I did a pretty good job of it. But others aren't, you know, they don't swim very well and they sink. And that's not a good thing.

17:27That's not fair to people in order to do that. You, Peter, your website is PeteChristianBooks.com. And you do you still do consulting? I still do some consulting when the opportunities arise. I've had a couple since I've officially retired. So I like to do that. I have one that may be coming up very shortly to train 50 people in an organization on project management, which will be pretty cool. So, you know, I pick and choose, but I'm not actively out there seeking it when the opportunities come and they come, you know, at different times. Then I check them out. And if it works out, then I move ahead with it.

18:16But yeah, I worked with one company that wanted to increase their productivity and they did testing services. So I worked with them and they had a lot of work that needed to be done on their policies and procedures and how they did stuff and measured their kind of output. And it's a little bit more difficult because, you know, they get all different sorts of stuff in and they got to figure out how much time it's going to take and so forth. So I work on stuff like that. I worked on some programs with one of the universities in order to bolster that because they were trying to improve their internship program with outside firms.

18:59So we worked on materials and how to get them out and what to say to people and how to introduce it and so forth. So, yeah, so I still keep my hand in it, but not as actively, certainly, as when I was full time and in a business. Peter Christian, your books are What About the Vermin Problem? A Guide to Avoiding Damaging Business Practices and Influences and Influencers, How Our Relationships Affect and Shape Us. And again, your website is PeteChristianBooks.com. Peter Christian, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed it. Thank you again. I appreciate it.

19:43Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.

20:28Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.