159. Timeless Strategies for Modern Management Explored with Jesan Sorrells

💭 What are timeless strategies in retaining information in a world where it is often forgotten?

Jesan Sorrells is the CEO and founder of HSCT Publishing, the home of the Leadership Box, the podcast host of Leadership Lessons from the Great Books and the author of 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership.

In this episode, Jesan shares how the digital era reshapes our quest for meaning and the application of knowledge. We delve into the profound psychological journeys individuals undertake to carve out significance in a rapidly changing world.

🎧 Download this episode that offers you a toolbox of timeless leadership strategies to navigate the complexities of team dynamics and organizational communication for modern management.

Time Codes:
0:00 Introduction
2:06 Exploring Leadership Lessons From Literature
15:17 The Future of Attention and Memory
25:52 Challenges of Finding Meaning and Application
34:52 Overcoming Psychology and Courage in Society
48:38 Impact of Technology on Daily Life
56:18 Leadership Toolbox and 12 Rules

🌐 Connect with Jesan:
• Website: https://leadershiptoolbox.us/ and https://www.jesansorrells.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendysteele/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jesansorrells/

📚 You can purchase Jesan's books at Amazon:
• 12 Rules for Leaders: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Z63J57T/
• My Boss Doesn't Care: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997408812/
• Marketing For Peace Builders: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530039320/

Books Mentioned:
• Sense and Sensibility Novel by Jane Austen
• Sun Also Rises Book by Ernest Hemingway

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

So what does Jane Austen teach us about emotional intelligence? What about war and peace and leadership? And what did Aristotle teach us about emotional intelligence well before Daniel Goleman came along? In today's episode of the Leadership Project, we're sharing with you a recent conversation I had with Haysan Soreles, and Haysan shares with us leadership lessons from the great books, and we unpack. Why do these nuggets of gold still hold true today? The world and technology are changing at ever-increasing speeds and yet the principles of leadership, when we consider them, clearly still hold true today, and that's because human beings, psychology and the needs of humans do not change over time.

Mick Spiers: 0:56

Sit back and listen to this enthralling conversation with Jesan Sorrells. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Jesan Sorrells. Jesan is the CEO and founder of HSCT Publishing, the home of the Leadership Box, and we're going to talk a little bit about that Leadership Box today. He's also the podcast host of an interesting podcast called Leadership Lessons from the Great Books I think that's going to blend in today as well and the author of a book called 12 Rules for Leaders, the Foundation of Intentional Leadership, and I think we might touch on that as well. So it's going to be an interesting conversation today, I think, with lots of nuggets of gold. So, without any further ado, hazan, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and what inspired you. I'm going to go straight to those great books. What inspired you to want to codify these great leadership lessons from great books?

Jesan Sorrells: 1:56

Well, first off, thank you, Mick, for having me on the Leadership Project. I really do appreciate it. And to all of you who are listening, mick is doing great work here, adding value to your lives and I hope to add value to your leadership lives as well today. So, in answer to the question sort of how did I come about? How did I come to this idea that there might be something worth discovering about leadership in the great books? Well, I was always a leader right, and I've always been a reader, and I do fundamentally believe, as one of our early guests on the podcast said, when we were reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he said to me something that has redounded throughout the podcast. He said leaders are readers and I fundamentally believe that. And so the display you see behind me, if you're watching this on video, those are all books that I've actually read. That is not a Zoom background, and if you're listening to this, go and obviously go and check out the podcast.

Jesan Sorrells: 2:49

But you know, the genesis of that began by me really realizing that business books can only take you so far. By the way, I'm a person who's written a business book, so I put my hand up for that right. I read a lot of business books. I've read, you know, think and Grow Rich, and I've read, you know, about how to go from good to great. And all of these business books, they all have a nugget of truth in them, but they're surrounded by a lot of other things that may not necessarily always go directly to the human condition. But you can get directly to the human condition even better by exploring great literature, because literature and novels can do things, particularly great literature and great novels of not only the Western world but also the Eastern world. What they can do is that they can take you into other human beings' experiences without you having to necessarily be there. And this is what a great humanities program used to do in colleges and universities in the United States for many, many years.

Jesan Sorrells: 3:43

And that got me on the thought of thinking how did people learn business before they had business books, so before there was Good to Great by Jim Collins? How did a farmer figure out how to be a business person on a farm with 400 acres and 40 workers and a family and everything else? Because that's a business, that was a small business back in the day. How did people learn business skills when they studied Latin and they studied Greek and they studied mathematics, but they weren't going to school for an MBA. And here's how they learned how to do business.

Jesan Sorrells: 4:19

They read extensively, so they read in literature, they read in the Greeks, they read Shakespeare particularly in a post-Enlightenment era. They read a lot of Shakespeare. They read and explored particularly guys like Thomas Jefferson who were very much agrarian, small business owners and small business creators. They talked to their neighbors. They figured out about emotional intelligence not only from reading books, but also from dealing with people around emotional intelligence.

Jesan Sorrells: 4:46

It isn't as if Daniel Goldman was the first one to come up with that idea, and so what I tell folks is this you can learn a lot about the science of emotional intelligence from Daniel Goldman, but the application of it. You need to read Jane Austen, you need to read Sense and Sensibility to understand the application of emotional intelligence in the small things and to be able to have that resonate with you so that you could take that lesson back to your workplace. You could take it back to a more formalized now post-industrial world in the West, and so taking those ideas and stringing them together led me to the thought that there might be a podcast here and people might want to take from this insight. And sometimes people will ask me how long do you plan on doing this podcast? I say forever, as long as there are books to read.

Jesan Sorrells: 5:29

We've done about 200 episodes coming up so far. We have a short format and we have a longer format and I'm never going to run out of books. I'm never going to run out of leadership insights that can be gained from those books and there's always going to be more things to mine. There's always going to be more books to delve into. As a matter of fact, on our upcoming episode we're delving into just the introduction to war and peace. There is so much about leadership in that book it isn't even funny.

Mick Spiers: 5:54

Really interesting. Hazan, I want to test one thing with you there In fact two, but I'm going to start one at a time because I'm going to try and take this conversation in a certain direction here. But the first one is why do you think it is like in a very fast changing world? The world is now different than it's ever been before. It's now changing at a speed that it never has before, but it's also changing at a speed slower than it ever will again, like it's a runaway train. And yet in these great books, these nuggets of truth do seem to hold true. So how is it that the world is changing so quickly? And yet, if you delve into these great books, I'm going to say the foundations have remained true.

Jesan Sorrells: 6:37

Because a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. So, yes, things are changing. Our technology has changed, right? Our tools for communication have changed. My father never would have imagined that I'd be on a podcast talking to someone from Australia and speaking to an Australian audience. My father was a Vietnam vet. Yes, he was passionate about radio, but he wasn't doing that kind of work. That wasn't something that was inside of his conception, right?

Jesan Sorrells: 7:04

And so many of us for the longest time in the work world were, and many of us still are, trapped in an industrial revolution concepts of what change should look like, like it should only take 20 years, it should be very slow and steady, we will have time to adapt to it, and so on and so on. And now to your point. We're in a place where things are changing once every two weeks, once every three weeks, once every few days right, in a post-COVID environment. But the one thing that's not changing once every two weeks and the one thing that's not changing once every two days are the relationships and the interpersonal relationships between human beings. And you talk about a foundation.

Jesan Sorrells: 7:40

Look, I'm not going to talk about good or evil on this podcast, although Alexander Solzhenitsyn infamously said in the Gulag Archipelago that the line from good and evil runs through every human heart. That's a foundational truth that will never change, no matter how much we tweet. And, as I used to say in the past to groups that I would train, we have an expectation that human behavior and human emotions and human relationships will change at the speed of a tweet. And they don't. And that's where these books really come in to really help us. Sorry, yeah.

Mick Spiers: 8:08

No, I think you've nailed it, hazan. It's what I was thinking, but I wanted to hold the floor for you to hear your thoughts. It is all. Leadership is about human beings, about how we relate to other human beings. And, yes, we evolve over time, but our psychological and physiological needs don't right. We still have these same needs for survival, for love and belonging, for freedom, for even fun, like we have these psychological and physiological needs that go beyond the length of time of these industrial changes that we've been going through. So, yes, our world goes at a cracking pace, but our psychological need for things, the need to feel like we matter, has always been there.

Jesan Sorrells: 8:52

Not only has it always been there, but I'll even go into the dark parts of humanity. Right, the dark parts of humanity haven't gone anywhere. We still struggle with pride and greed and envy and lust and avarice and contempt and desiring what someone else has and not being able to have it Right. And we put all of these desires infamously on social media platforms. Our social media platforms are full of us broadcasting these desires to the world and not getting any fulfillment from broadcasting those desires. And, by the way, sophocles could have told you you're not going to get any fulfillment. You know Plato could have told you we're going to get any fulfillment from broadcasting those desires and, by the way, sophocles could have told you you're not going to get any fulfillment. Plato could have told you you weren't going to get any fulfillment.

Jesan Sorrells: 9:30

Shakespeare just read King Lear, or even Julius Caesar, or even Hamlet or Macbeth. You're not going to get any fulfillment just from broadcasting your desires. Where you're going to get fulfillment is from having a relationship, a human-to-human relationship, with another human being, even in a world of AI, which, by the way, not going to go down that path. If you want to, we can, but you know large language algorithms are not Skynet folks. I'm also a movie guy. They're not Skynet. I'm going to be the first person to say that I understand that what you're seeing out there right now looks very challenging and scary and it looks like we're moving very quickly towards something where we need to put the brakes on. But fundamentally, underneath those systems, the first person to really program those systems even though they may learn later on is still a human being with human foibles, human problems, human desires, human temptations and, of course, a need to connect with other human beings.

Mick Spiers: 10:22

Yeah, I'd say there it starts with the human and it ends with the human right and, for me, AI, where it is going to change the way we go about things, but it's going to be an augmentation of the human existence, but it's still a human existence. It's still a human existence.

Jesan Sorrells: 10:39

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We say this on the podcast all the time.

Mick Spiers: 10:44

There we go. It's really interesting. You've codified that beautifully, by the way. And it's interesting because you brought up Daniel Goleman before and you got me thinking as well, and Daniel's one of my favorite authors, by the way. He's amazing. But then I think about my favorite quote about emotional intelligence, which you also brought up, comes from Aristocrates and which he also brought up comes from aristocraties, and I'm going to probably butcher it here, but it goes something along the lines of anyone can be angry, that's easy. But to be angry with the right person, for the right reason, to the right degree and in the right way, that's not easy. That's emotional intelligence in one quote.

Jesan Sorrells: 11:20

Even Tony Soprano on that great show on HBO back in the day. The Sopranos had to go to Dr Melfi to figure this out. We still need another human being to help us get through this. He wasn't going to find that sort of thing in a television. Books are still the most revolutionary technology that human beings have created, One of the two or three revolutionary technologies that human beings have ever created. And while we are in the midst, right now, of it I was just talking with my wife about this last night at dinner with the kids running around. But while we may be in the midst of a declining critical thinking and comprehension culture, we're not yet not yet at the bleeding edge, or even at the narrow edge of a declining critical thinking and comprehension culture. We're not yet not yet at the bleeding edge or even at the narrow edge of a literate culture. Not quite, just yet, Not yet.

Mick Spiers: 12:12

All right, really good. So what we've got so far, books stand the test of time, the nuggets of gold within them stand the test of time, and the reason is is because the human needs and human conditions have remained constant for quite some time. So really good. Now let's go to this medium part and let's talk about reading and whether it is impactful. I'm going to challenge you here for a moment. You've clearly mastered this, by the way, hasan, as yourself. But people do struggle with this in a three-second world. And if I talk about Glass's Pyramid for a moment which, by the way, we can look into the etymology of that and realize that he never created the pyramid, but it doesn't matter. There's a certain truthiness to it. People say that they only remember 10% of what they read. So, in your vast collection of reading books and finding those nuggets of gold, how do we make sure that the learning is captured, lasted, implemented in a world where it is often quickly forgotten?

Jesan Sorrells: 13:13

So this is the problem of attention spans. This is the problem of, and not even, attention spans. I'll even go a step back, further than that it's the problem of attention. So let me draw an example here. Okay, in the United States you may not know this in Australia, but in the United States the Hollywood writers and actors have been on strike. Actually, the actors have been on strike for like 109 days, something like that.

Jesan Sorrells: 13:37

And the actors' demands are twofold in their strike against the Hollywood studios. One, they don't want to be replaced by AI versions of themselves, right, where their likenesses are replicated and then just repeated over and over again without them getting paid. Okay, I can see that. And then, two, they want more money, more compensation, from streaming shows. And then, two, they want more money, more compensation, from streaming shows. So when a streaming show goes out on, you know, like BBC four, right. Or it goes out on sky TV, right, they want to get paid for that. And they want to get paid commensurate with what the numbers are that HBO or BBC or whoever is reporting, or Apple, right? Okay, cool, don't have a problem with any of that, right, they want to make sure the streaming numbers are correct and they want to make sure the streaming numbers are correct and they want to make sure that their likenesses don't get replaced by AI, great Cool.

Jesan Sorrells: 14:23

However, hollywood is a legacy system and all legacy systems and this goes directly to attention and memory. All legacy systems operate on paradigms that existed beforehand Almost all legacy systems. They do not exist on paradigms that are going to operate in the future, and so what the Hollywood actors and the Hollywood studios both fail to understand is that they are in a competition for my attention that they've already lost. They've lost it to my neighbor across the street who's online. They've lost it to the TikTok influencer that I follow. They've lost it to the YouTuber that I pay $5 a month on a Patreon to. They've lost it to the self-published author that's way out on the long tail that can't get his work or her work turned into a movie or a television show in Hollywood because no Hollywood producer knows it. But I know about that person. I gave him 10 bucks last month. They've already lost the attention game. So the attention game in a long tail not fathead, but in a long tail. World always becomes more atomized.

Jesan Sorrells: 15:17

The challenge in books and this is a challenge, and again, you're not the first person to ask me this. The challenge in books for getting people to retain the knowledge, actually read it first, actually first even get attention on it, then read it, then retain it is a challenge of attention. How do we draw people's attention back to the things that matter? How do we draw people's attention back to the lessons inside of these books? Well, that's why I came up with the podcast, because I thought that it would be a really interesting way to do that. And so what we do is we read sections of the book, not the whole book. We pick the most dynamic sections we can. We pull the lessons from that. We say these are the three things or these are the two things, and then we summarize at the end and then boom, in an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, you're done.

Jesan Sorrells: 15:56

Now, the podcast itself is long form content, but the lessons inside can be divided up and can be split up and can be turned into 30 second bites if I so choose. But we decide not to go in that direction because we're making slow food, because some things need to be taken in as a matter of and I'm going to be a partisan for something here as a matter of discipline, as a matter of removing yourself from one area and putting yourself in another so you can retain what it is that you know right and what it is that you've learned. So you remembered that quote because you read it somewhere and you said, pardon me, I'm probably going to butcher it, and actually you didn't. You had better recall than you thought you did. And then I had recall from Tony Soprano saying that in a show that I watched 15 years ago.

Jesan Sorrells: 16:39

Human recall is amazing when it's sticky, and what makes things sticky? Well, what makes things sticky is the emotional content we attach to that. So how do you get people to act on these lessons? You create emotional content around it. You give it an emotional appeal.

Jesan Sorrells: 16:54

So when I read TE Lawrence Thomas Edward Lawrence he who was once Lawrence of Arabia, played by Peter O'Toole back in the day, when I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom one of the quotes from TE Lawrence that he gives in the book when he was at the peace, the peace table after World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, he said something as he walked out the door.

Jesan Sorrells: 17:13

He said leaders never outstay a climax, and then he walked out the door. Why would I remember that Because there's something about that in leadership that is applicable to my life, and so it's the stickiness right. You know, andrew Carnegie was a rail magnet and a mine magnet way back in the day and a steel magnet back in the day, and he said you know and I may be misquoting this as well, but he said you know, when I go into a mine, I'm not looking for the dirt, I'm looking for the gold. When we go into a book, we're looking for the gold, and there's a lot of dross, a lot of dirt. That's in our world today that we have to go through, that we have to wade through to get to gold, and books are a really easy way of handing you that gold.

Mick Spiers: 18:01

There's three things I'm taking from that, hasan, and I'm going to start with the last one, which is that mining we're not looking for the dirt, we're looking for the gold. I think that's really good. The second one is the search of personal meaning. So when I hear you talk about that, the things that you latched onto were things that you were able to translate into personal meaning for yourself. There was I used the word truthiness before, which clearly is not a word, but it's nice that when you read something, you're oh yeah, that's a certain truthiness for me, like a personal meaning to it. And the third one with your podcast.

Mick Spiers: 18:24

The other end of Glass's pyramid is when they talk about. You know, if you talk about that subject with other human beings, the retention dramatically increases. So people used to do things like book clubs right, they used to. Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock, we're going to have coffee and we're all going to have read Pride and Prejudice and we're going to talk about what it meant to me. But now we're, yeah, the personal meaning. But the discussion with other human beings, all of a sudden it's got some substance to it and I think that's what you're doing, that with your podcast. Podcast is a little bit asynchronous, but it's still a discussion, right? How does that sit with you?

Jesan Sorrells: 19:02

Yeah, it's still a discussion. So we send out a newsletter about twice a month and people respond to the newsletter and they ask us questions about things, and they ask us questions about the books and they make observations that we would have never thought of. And then we take those observations in, we go back to the podcast, we meld those and we weave those in and we build themes out with the books that we cover. So you know, I'll just use a large example here. So in the month of July in the United States for us, you know, july 4th is an important day in the United States, and so one of the things I'm a real bugaboo for, or I have a real bugaboo for and Mick, you probably share this as well you have a microphone. The same way I do. I'm a real bugaboo for freedom of speech. I think it's probably the most important innovation that human beings have decided. That this is how you talk about meaning a couple of times. This is how we can actually attain meaning through exploring both bad ideas and good ideas, and we have to give people the freedom to be able to speak, so we get those ideas out to see which ones work and which ones don't, and this is how you avoid the dangers of all of the isms and all of the ideologies. This is how you avoid them, right? I'm a partisan for freedom of speech and so, because I am, during the month of July, our theme is the Declaration of Independence. So we've talked about Declaration of Independence, we talk about the US Constitution, we bring on a lawyer who has a constitutional background and we talk about the meaning of these documents. What did this word mean? What does it apply? How do we take this apart? And then we look at the arguments that people had in 1775 and 1776 and 1789. We look at the arguments they had in the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Arguments they had about slavery that's not a new argument. Arguments they had about racism that's not a new argument. Arguments they had about the rights of people to be sovereign and autonomous. And then how does that translate to a state? How does that translate in the relationship of the people to the state? These are things that we're still arguing about now. Now we're doing it at a global level, but we're still doing it because human beings don't change. Anyway, that's our overarching theme in July, and so we're able to weave a narrative around that Our most downloaded episodes in the United States our most downloaded episodes occur during the month of July, because everyone's looking for meaning around those right.

Jesan Sorrells: 21:16

Everyone's looking for the thing that sticks and we get the most listener feedback from those episodes during that month. It's amazing. The spike that we get in emails is unbelievable and people are coming with all kinds of ideas from all sorts of different political and non-political, secular, religious, whatever perspective on this, and they are filtering the information through their mindsets in order to get meaning and it's sticking with them and now they can go out and they are filtering the information through their mindsets in order to get meaning and it's sticking with them and now they can go out and they can be great citizens of the United States and they can probably make hopefully not probably hopefully make better decisions about who we elect to lead us.

Mick Spiers: 21:49

Really interesting, hasan, and so far we've got these universal truths that stand the test of time. Now we're searching for meaning collective meaning, personal meaning, and that discussion and dialogue to make sure that we're testing. I love what you said about testing good ideas, testing bad ideas, because if it stayed in a monologue in our head it wouldn't be tested, it would just be dormant and it wouldn't be co-created. So for you and I to have a conversation. It could be a very controversial concept when we hold space for each other and truly have that discussion about what started as some kind of nugget of truth, but then you and I discussed it. We then co-create our knowledge in a way where I feel richer, you feel richer, and we both go out into the world with newly found co-created knowledge through those meaningful conversations.

Jesan Sorrells: 22:37

And this is the promise of the Enlightenment that started all the way back in the 16th century. I'm pro-Enlightenment, I'm also pro-Reformation, because I think you have to have both of those things together. They operate together, they walk side by side, right. But the challenge that we had in the 20th century, which has now spilled over into the 21st century and actually, arguably, it probably began with Nietzsche, really in the back end of the 19th century is what happens when you overthrow religion as a source of meaning, when you say God is dead and, by the way, the rest of that quote from Nietzsche is and we don't have enough water around to wash the blood of his death off our hands. That's the end of that quote, by the way, that people always use.

Jesan Sorrells: 23:19

When you have that dynamic in the Western world, and now we're looking for meaning, we're going to wander through the isms. We're going to wander through existentialism. We're going to wander through nihilism which, by the way, I think we're at the end of in the West. We're going to wander through consumerism, wander through capitalism. We're going to try to find meaning in all of these other places that used to be filled by a religious impulse and now have to be filled by something else and at the end of it we have to go back, and this's not necessarily always online, it's not necessarily always in a blog. And, by the way, I'm a blogger, I've blogged. I'm not objecting to blogging. Blogging can be a source of meaning. But at Gale a blog, a podcast we've got to go back to the core things.

Jesan Sorrells: 24:12

So the promise of the Enlightenment was that we would be able to co-create, we would be able to create meaning with each other. And that's what makes the book such a revolutionary technology, because without that, if I'm Isaac Newton, I can't share an idea with Johannes Kepler. I just can't. I'm trapped in my own thing and eventually the knowledge will get to him. Originally, his knowledge will get to me, but it's going to be really hard, and the book is the easy way to transform those ideas and to translate those ideas in ways that allow us to grow closer together as human beings.

Mick Spiers: 24:43

It's good that you bring up some of the great scientists now at this point, because the question I was going to then ask is once we find that meaning and we co-create an advanced meaning, if you like and we get more and deeper and deeper into what it all means, how do we convert it into applied learning, hasan? Because the next step is to actually go and do something with it.

Jesan Sorrells: 25:03

It's interesting that that's how you ended that sentence or ended that question or that observation or that statement, because I always say at the end and I'll probably say it at the end of this podcast episode here today with you, this great conversation we're having I always told people at the end of trainings or even at the end of my own podcast episode. I will say now, go out and do something with this right and give them the permission to go do that. So how do we apply what we've learned? How do we have the guts to do that? Well, there's three C's I think that we need in order to be effective at application. We need clarity on what it is we're actually saying and thinking.

Jesan Sorrells: 25:37

Many, many, many of us folks in leadership positions, folks in followership positions, folks sitting on the sidelines and applauding from the cheap seats don't have clear thinking. Matter of fact, I would challenge you, mick, next time you're out with a group, even if it's a group of personal friends, ask them how many of you in this group think you actually think clearly and just watch how that question just lands with folks. Watch their eyes change because people don't think about thinking clearly, which is really interesting. By the way, shane Parrish has a great book out now, new York Times bestseller book, called Clear Thinking. I wish I'd bought that book, I wish I'd written that book, and he's also the podcast host of the Knowledge Project about how to actually think clearly Brilliant. But the first thing we have to do is get that clarity of thinking, not muddling messages or muddling our own thoughts. Once we're over that hump, then we have to have candor, and candor is the ability to tell the truth.

Jesan Sorrells: 26:27

Now there's two different kinds of truth and there's really only two. There's capital T truth and small t truth. Now, small t truths are my truth, mixed truth, listeners, your individual truths. Those are truths that are personal to us and probably can't be scaled up even past our families, much less to our neighborhoods, our communities or to a larger culture. There's a lot of attempts to scale those small t-truths and make them larger t-truths because of the absence of meaning at that larger level. That's happening right now in a lot of different areas in a lot of different places all across our globe. We can argue if that's good or bad, but it is happening.

Jesan Sorrells: 27:02

The second kind of truth is the large T truth, and the large T capital T truth are usually truths that have come with religious language. They come with the language of Islam or Judaism or Christianity or any of the other major religions. These are truths that stake a claim to what reality actually is. But we have to get candid about what kind of truth we're talking about candid with ourselves in order to be candid with others. And then the last C is the one that goes directly to application. Because once we're clear and once we're candid, now we're moving from internal to external. We're moving from just thinking to application.

Jesan Sorrells: 27:35

And that last C that you need is courage. You need the courage to actually apply what it is that you've learned. You need the courage to and let me use an example here. If I read about emotional intelligence, just to go back to that for a moment and I'm reading Goldman and I'm going yeah, this makes sense, this is absolutely perfect I think of the story that he writes in chapter nine of the I can't remember which edition, it might have been the first edition of emotional intelligence where he writes about the pilot who was flying the plane and basically crashed it because no one on his flight crew would tell him that he was wrong.

Jesan Sorrells: 28:12

Well, you know what was required to tell the pilot he was wrong. Courage. But first they had to be able to be candid about what was wrong, and then they had to have clarity about what to say Clarity, candor, courage about what was wrong, and then they had to have clarity about what to say Clarity, candor, courage. Well, that's how you're applying emotional intelligence in that moment. Many, many of us these days lack courage and I hope that by some of the work that I'm doing, some of the work that you're doing and many other folks in the leadership space, we're providing people with that kind of courage.

Mick Spiers: 28:32

So I'm loving this, Hasan. I can see how the three of them play together. So clarity of message. Loving this, Hasan, I can see how the three of them play together. So clarity of message, the candor to be able to speak openly about it and the courage to do so. And I love your small T, big T, and I was thinking when I was listening to you. I was thinking about first position, second position, third position. So first position is my truth, is my perspective, though it's my perspective of truth. Second position is your perspective of truth. And then, third position is the helicopter view of looking from the outside. What is real, right, what is real? So there's mixed perspective, there's Hasan's perspective, but when they've got the candor and the courage to talk about it, we can start finding out what is real amongst those, starting with two perspectives. But keep on going, adding all of the perspectives. You end up with a society, a religion, a world, and you can get to what maybe is real. How does that sit with you?

Jesan Sorrells: 29:28

Absolutely. And let me be clear, we need people to challenge that as well. Remember, I said previously I'm a partisan for free speech. So one of the books that we're going to be covering next year, a very small book, it's actually an essay. It's called Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, and it's basically an essay about what does it take to be courageous and be a dissenter when everyone in the society or culture you may be in is looking in one direction, at one maybe capital T or small T truth and you're looking over here in another direction.

Jesan Sorrells: 30:02

It starts out with a basic conceit why would a green grocer place a workers of the world unite poster in his window when he may not care about the workers, he doesn't know anybody else in the world and he doesn't really care about them uniting. He just wants to sell tomatoes. Why would he put that poster up? What is the impulse behind that? And then what does it take for that green grocer, a small person, to not put up that poster one day, to just take action and leave the poster down? What are the consequences that are going to come to that person for engaging in that kind of courage? And that's what dissenters do in any society and culture all across time. They're the people that don't put up the poster. They're the people that say there's another truth over here that we may want to look at, or there's a non-dominant truth over here that we may want to look at the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In my own country, mahatma Gandhi okay, in India, these people were dissenters from what was the majority in the mainstream Right Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during World War Two. In Germany, the German theologian Right. You know, these are people who looked at the dominant society, looked at the dominant culture and said everybody's turning this way. We actually need to be looking what's over here? And people have a.

Jesan Sorrells: 31:13

In general, people overestimate their own courage inside of their own heads. They, in general, people overestimate their own courage inside of their own heads and then, when the rubber meets the road or when they have to, you know, stick their courage to the post, as the British might say. They sometimes lose it. They can't do it right. They lose at that point of impact and typically that's because I would assert that's because they haven't read enough stories about courageous people. But I would also assert that being courageous is really hard. So I don't want to make it sound like this is just an easy thing, like you're just going to read one book and then all of a sudden you're going to go out tomorrow and be courageous. I'm not naive, nor am I 12 years old. I do actually believe that this takes some measure of building up with yourself, building up with other people. It takes having allies, it takes talking out loud about these things, it takes commitment, but invariably it takes clarity in your own head about what your negotiables are and what your non-negotiables are.

Mick Spiers: 32:06

The dissenters that you talk about are exactly that. They're people that had the courage to talk about the conversations that we had to have as a world, and the world has gotten richer because of that need. But I'm going to tell you and you said, you know, we all think that we're more courageous than what we are, I think, psychologically. Come back to our human needs. This is a little bit where our own psychology plays against us, and I'm going to give you two examples, hasan, and I'd love to hear your view on both of them.

Mick Spiers: 32:34

The first one is that sometimes our need for love and belonging outweighs our need to be right. And we think about the Ash experiment, where people were put in a room and five actors would give the wrong answer and they'd scratch their head and go, and they'd give the same answer. And they'd scratch their head and go and they'd give the same answer because they didn't want to be the outlier. So the need for love and belonging sometimes outweighs the need to be right. And the second part about this is our fear of loss is greater than how we feel about gain, right. So when we stick ourselves out there, the fear of loss holds us back more than our pursuit for the opportunity of what we're trying to gain. So our psychology plays against us with that courage. How does that sit with you?

Jesan Sorrells: 33:19

Yes, I agree, our psychology does play against us. One of the things that you find out when you read enough literature and you really begin to filter it through a particular framework or particular mental model or even a particular mindset, is this you realize that one of our responsibilities, one of our fundamental responsibilities as human beings, is to overcome our own psychology. And I just want to let that sit with folks for just a moment, because I just said something very controversial there, because a lot of the messages we have that are in dominant cultures globally, however you are, that you were made is okay, is fine and in some cases should be celebrated in some areas, and that there's no need for you to change. Instead, society must shift around. Society must recognize your remember we talked about small T and large T truth. Society must recognize your small T truth and scale it up to a larger T truth.

Jesan Sorrells: 34:12

Well, here's the thing that negotiation is almost impossible. With almost 9 billion people. It's an almost impossible negotiation. I can't even get and, by the way, I'm not going to go to 9 billion because that's too big how about just getting the seven people in your household? Just start there, right? You can't do it. It's a struggle because, to your point, you are trapped, you're battling, you're negotiating Negotiating is a better word.

Jesan Sorrells: 34:38

You're negotiating with the dynamics of loss, negotiating with the dynamics of love and belonging. You're negotiating with the dynamics of acceptance and rejection in your own family, in your own backyard. That's where you're starting it. So you want to start overcoming your own psychology starts at home. You want to start with emotional intelligence and figuring out where you're clear and where you're not clear and what you're going to say and what you're not going to say starts at your own home. And, by the way, be prepared for pushback there, because those folks also are going to be people who are trying to overcome. If they're living their best lives, as is said now, they are going to be trying to overcome their own psychology. And all of those overcomings begin in the incubator of family, begin in the incubator of home.

Jesan Sorrells: 35:25

I always say to folks in training and development projects that I'm involved with, home is the first organizational behavior bacteria frap. It's the first place we learn all of the rules. We learn about love and belonging and loss. We learn about our own psychology. It's where we're nurtured and supported or sometimes it's where we are rejected and thrown out. It's the first spot where we learn all the lessons. And let's not change society and culture at scale first. Instead, let's change our families first. Let's go to our own houses and change those things.

Mick Spiers: 35:59

I love it. That's a great call to action. We spoke about call to action. Let's do that. Think about that in the audience. Think about your own home, petri dish. I'm going to call it for a moment because we're talking experiments. Think about your own home, petri dish. I'm going to call it for a moment because we're talking experiments.

Mick Spiers: 36:10

Think about your own home environment and think about all of the things that might be driving the behavior in your family, whether it's your own family, sorry, your own behavior or the behavior of your family members and start thinking about what and why is driving you to do what you do, think what you think, feel what you feel and challenge it. Can it be reframed? Do you know those things, like when you pay attention and you notice a name, what is driving you to do what you do, think what you think and feel what you feel? Then challenge yourself. Do you know that those things are true? Do you know that those things are true? And you can reframe it and look at it from a third person or a third position perspective. Go hang on a second. That wasn't. Yeah, that was all in my head. That was all in my head, and now you can reframe the entire relationship and how you behave.

Jesan Sorrells: 37:03

And this is the kind of action that resists the algorithm. This is the kind of stuff that, if we do it, so I'll frame up a concern this way. One of my major concerns is that, as I see people now almost 20 years into social media and social communication online, that's driven by algorithms that are driven by click-based behavior. You talk about action, right. My concern is that more of that click-based behavior is spilling out into the real world. We're behaving in ways that we would behave to game the algorithm with other human beings in the real world who are not driven, who are driven by different algorithms that are too personal for us to know. And so the things that allow us in our own echo chambers online from people that we like, who support us and give us love and acceptance and don't reject us because they don't put up a little resistance to us, those things right there or even a lot of resistance in some cases those things right there reinforce behaviors that do not allow us to overcome our own psychology. They don't challenge us to grow when we step out of those echo chambers, when we step away from those algorithms. This is why you see now studies coming out that show people are having trouble and you're going to see more of this, I think, not less, unfortunately are having trouble adjusting to real-world engagements and real-world conversations and real-world emotionally entangling relationships. You're seeing this in not necessarily the decline of marriage that's been going on for a while in the West. I'm talking about the decline of just interpersonal relationships period, because it's a real challenge to meet somebody else who's coming with all of their stuff and you don't know which click where is going to get you the acceptance, but you don't know what type of behavior is going to get the like from them. You have to test it, and that testing is really hard. And here's the thing there isn't an app for that kind of testing. Those are long, courageous struggles and you don't get a medal at the end and there's no claps. Mark Zuckerberg isn't waiting at your house for you to figure out how to get along with your family. That's something that goes to self-fulfillment, but it also goes to other fulfillment. We were made to fulfill other folks and they were made to fulfill us, and that's how you get collaborative relationships and that's how you get to truth and large key truth and, quite frankly, meaning as well. And so I want to talk a little bit if I have a moment, because we always get into this kind of conversation a little bit.

Jesan Sorrells: 39:31

We talk about books, so I'm just going to preempt the question which may be coming around the corner, which is this question of meaning. I do believe that books, particularly books that are right at the cornerstone, basement, particularly of Western literature, really do provide a foundation for meaning. So I think one of those books is the Bible. I think the Bible's all the way down there at the bottom. It's the book of books. Whether you believe in an existential God, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the nature of what that book describes. Okay, the nature of reality and how it describes it.

Jesan Sorrells: 40:02

You can argue with it. Many people do. You disagree with it, many people do but you cannot ignore it. You cannot ignore that it is a foundational book and it is a book that is so foundational it has resisted every single attempt at algorithmic flattening for the last 20 years and I'm going to bet that it will continue to resist algorithmic flattening for the next 100 or 200 or 300 years, because it describes something that's at the basement of reality. But there's another couple of books down there. Milton is down there at the bottom, shakespeare, any of Shakespeare's plays we've covered several of them on the podcast, they are right down there, foundational, bottom-level stuff. Any of writings by Sophocles or Plato, the Greeks, all the way down at the bottom. I would even argue Epic of Gilgamesh, books like that that describe ancient things all the way down at the bottom, because they create a foundation of meaning, because the questions of meaning can't be flattened out by the algorithm. They're too sharp, they're too deep. They go to who we are as human beings.

Mick Spiers: 41:08

Really interesting. Hazan, I want to play something back to you and see how this sits with you. So I am deeply worried about algorithmic bias fueled by confirmation bias, and you could reverse that if you like. It can be confirmation bias fueled by algorithmic bias, it doesn't matter, it's a cycle.

Jesan Sorrells: 41:24

I think it's an Ouroboros. It's a snake eating its own tail, exactly.

Mick Spiers: 41:27

Right, and, on top of that, the endorphin-driven pursuit of likes. I do worry about that as well, and what I'm hearing from you is, then, about seeking the foundational truth. So, in whatever it is that you're researching or clicking on right now, do you know it to be true is one question, but what is the foundational truth behind it? What is the foundational truth behind it? What is the foundational truth? And then, when we do have these dialogues with people, whether they're online or at the coffee shop and we talked before about having that dialogue and the discussion, making a co-creation make damn sure that you are not just listening to what you want to hear, or listening to things that confirm what you've already believed, but you're genuinely holding space for new thoughts, a challenging thought, to come in and go. Oh yeah, I never thought of it that way. Or the addition of well, if this is true and that is true, then maybe this is true, but it's foundational truths that we're looking for here. How does that sit with you?

Jesan Sorrells: 42:28

but it's foundational truths that we're looking for here. How does that sit with you? I absolutely agree with you about confirmation bias and algorithmic bias and the nature of how we have allowed ourselves and we really have allowed ourselves. I'm probably the last person in the Western world that believes in free will anymore, so I'm sorry I'm going to throw back to a simpler time maybe, but we have allowed ourselves, through our own free will, to be captured and, quite frankly, allowing our data to be captured as well. But ourselves, are our data, to be captured by platforms that are driven not by our best interests, but that are driven by marketing dollars and selling us stuff, if we're going to be quite blunt about it, from search all the way to social right and we've allowed this to happen. The exchange I'm old enough to remember when we were talking about this exchange in the late 90s and the early 2000s. I know I look young, but I've got some gray hairs. You can't see them all in the video, but they are there. I've got some snow on the mountaintop and I remember when this argument was going on about how much freedom, how much, and that's how we framed it. But how much freedom, how much individualism, how much of ourselves were we going to give to this thing called the internet in exchange for ease, in exchange for convenience, in exchange for safety? And it turns out that we're going to give it quite a bit. That's the answer to that question. And we're going to give it quite a bit. That's the answer to that question. And we're going to give it over willingly and so much.

Jesan Sorrells: 43:51

Like William F Buckley said back in the day, the founder of the National Review, I'm one of those people, just like a dissenter would be in Eastern Europe during the height of communism. I'm one of those people that stands to thwart history and yells stop. There's. Now I'm being joined by many other people who are standing athwart the tech giants and saying stop, we need to stop. And the reason why we need to stop is for exactly the reason that you brought up.

Jesan Sorrells: 44:15

Look, dopamine driven behaviors are always short term. Anybody who's ever had an addict in their family and I've known people who are addicts. I've had close friends who are addicted to serious hard drugs Any close addict, any person who's close to an addict or a person who has an addictive behavior, will tell you that in order to break that behavior, sometimes the thing you have to do is to hit rock. Actually, not sometimes. Usually, the thing you have to do is hit rock bottom. The tragedy is, rock bottom looks different for everybody. It just does. It's an individual pursuit, because addiction is an individual thing.

Jesan Sorrells: 44:45

The fact that we're addicted to these platforms and the fact that biases of our own are packed in to these platforms and packed into what these platforms deliver to us honestly is our fault and we have to break away from them. We have to figure out how to negotiate with the tool rather than letting the tool rule us. So case in point, just so that you know I'm actually living what I say. Right, I'm not just spouting some stuff here to make myself sound good. My daughter just turned 18. My oldest daughter just turned 18.

Jesan Sorrells: 45:14

And in our house we have a rule no cell phones until you're like 15, 16. And then you get the lowest level cell phone possible with no social media access, and it's for texting and for getting calls from mom and dad and, okay, you have a good time and usually. Now I have four children. I have a 26 year old son, I have a, like I said before, I have an 18 year old daughter. I have a 13 year old we were kind of rounding the corner with this on her and I have a six year old boy. The only way I get to make, the only way my wife and I get to make that kind of rule in our home, the only way we get to enforce that, is because we actually have to role model that behavior.

Jesan Sorrells: 45:46

So I have a cell phone, for sure, but you know what there's boundaries around that thing. When my kids are talking to me, you know where the cell phone goes. Over there my kid has my 100% of my attention. When we are at the dinner table and we try to eat dinner at least three to four nights a week together, you know what's at the dinner table. There's no phones at the dinner table. I don't even have TV on in my house. No streaming, no Netflix, no laptops, no, nothing five days out of the week. Does that sound weird? Does that sound strange? Maybe to your ears it does. But again, going back to your lifestyle, your house, how are you living? Are you letting the algorithm rule you? Are you giving it the data that it needs to determine what your cognitive biases are and then to use those against you to sell you stuff? And then people ask me well, how will I be entertained, how will I find out about things? Well, there's books.

Mick Spiers: 46:36

Yeah, nice circle back to books. Well done, I love that. I want to play back some of that and round it out a little bit, and we're going to have to bring ourselves to a conclusion soon, hazen. So, listening to you, I love that. Our next call to action is also in the home again and thinking about mindfulness and presence, and that's what your family want. That's how you connect with other human beings, it's not through a device.

Mick Spiers: 46:55

And we've accidentally stumbled on the works of one of my favorite authors, by the way, hazan, which is Martin Seligman, and the pursuit of happiness. And thinking about what is the difference between the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life? And this dopamine release. It's got a yes, it's addictive and it's got this shorter half-life every time. That's not where the pursuit of joy and fulfillment is. The pursuit of joy and fulfillment is in, it's in meaning, it's in service of others, it's in gratitude. That's what fills your heart with joy and fulfillment in a renewable way. That is lasting.

Mick Spiers: 47:31

The dopamine devices sorry to say the dopamine devices short half-life. You need more and more and more of it to get the same hit, and that's not the answer to our troubles. It's not the answer to anything. And thinking about the platforms and I was listening to you talk before and one saying that always sticks with me is if you're on a platform and you can't work out what the product is, you are the product, you are the product. So that's what you're giving up is what you were talking about there, hazan and just think about how is it serving you? Is it serving you well? Is it serving others well? And what might you do differently? Go and connect with your family. Go and connect with other human beings. Go, connect with your family. Go and connect with other human beings. Go and connect to a book Absolutely wonderful, hazen. We didn't get a chance and I need to give you this chance now. How does all of that and your wonderful knowledge and seriously, I could talk to you for at least seven hours straight.

Jesan Sorrells: 48:21

Without any doubt we could break the Guinness World Record that Joe Rogan put together, if you want, for longest podcast. Longest podcast published.

Mick Spiers: 48:27

How does all that knowledge and wisdom and the nuggets of truth that you've found, and all this, how does that lead to the Leadership Toolbox?

Jesan Sorrells: 48:34

Yes. So Leadership Toolbox, fundamentally as a product, is the 12 things that we believe as an organization and then I believe as a founder, every leader should know something about, right, everything from conflict management all the way to dealing with difficult people, everything from change management all the way to building teams. We developed that product and we developed processes like our three C's model, where Clarity, candor and Courage come from. We developed that over the course of 12 years training almost 15,000 people live and in person, mostly pre-COVID, and then we switched to an online platform and now we continue to train folks and what we noticed was, invariably, leadership problems come in those 12 areas, and this is where the 12 rules for leaders book comes in, which is basically the most, for a couple of reasons.

Jesan Sorrells: 49:22

One, like I said, family's the first incubator. But then we rise out of family, maybe on our first day of kindergarten or preschool, or some of us maybe first grade right and we go out and we discover to our shock and awe that, oh my God, there's these other people and they don't think the same way that I do, and then we have all these collisions right together and eventually what winds up happening is we go to work and work level relationships, and this is borrowing from some anthropological language. Work level relationships are always second level relationships. We're never getting as real, we're never going as deep, we're never going as vulnerable, because there's all these boundaries right, there's all these structures, there's status, there's power, there's bias to your point, and there's also the organizational structure that we didn't build, we just got hired into it, and that's usually the vast majority of us get hired into it. And then there's the philosophy and the idea of how we think about our work, which usually most of us just think of work not as a calling or something that we were born to do, or something that we do that serves others in a meaningful way. We typically tend to think of work as something that we do that fills up the eight hours in our day, so we can get money to pay for the things we need, so that we can go off and do things that we really care about.

Jesan Sorrells: 50:38

We've got all of this stuff underneath, and then it's no wonder that we have conflicts at work. It's no wonder that we have posturing. It's no wonder that we have trouble negotiating. Number one problem in conflicts at work is a lack of ability of individuals, is the lack of ability for individuals to negotiate with each other, because they don't know how to ask, because they don't have clarity of thought, but they don't know how to ask for what they want. Therefore, they never know what's actually on offer.

Jesan Sorrells: 51:00

What do we do with all this? What do we do with all this information and this knowledge? And so we put our 12 rules together and we put our 12 lessons together, and the rule is based off of each lesson in the book and we focus really on what can leaders practically do? You talked about application. What can leaders practically do? What are the top five or top 10 things that they need to know inside of each one of these spaces and how can they execute on those things today? And so we've taken this and we've developed it over the course of time and you can check it all out at leadershiptoolboxus and we walk organizations and people through these 12 areas.

Jesan Sorrells: 51:35

Now, how does this tie into books? Here's how this ties into books At the bottom of each one of those areas from conflict to team building, from dealing with difficult people to adapting to change, even how to deal with diverse people, you know, and dealing with diversity. What does that actually mean At the bottom of all of those is literature. At the bottom of all of those are ideas that were explored first in great novels, that have stood the test of time and that have provided us with a lodestone of moving forward.

Jesan Sorrells: 52:01

And so one of the things that we're doing is working on a new course which will be coming out not in 2024, it'll be coming out in 2025. So you're going to hear this here first, but we're working on a course where we're taking the principles of leadership toolbox and we're looking at very closely the types of literature that we've been reading on the podcast and we're tying things together. We're knitting things together a little bit more tighter. We're going to be releasing that in about 2025. So it's going to be. It's really exciting and things are starting to. Things are starting to swirl together now and really come together.

Mick Spiers: 52:36

All right, brilliant Hasan. So I think that our third call to action in the show today is now to think about the workplace and remember that all businesses are people, businesses, everyone. It's all about how we relate to other human beings, and the 12 rules that Hasan is talking about are taking those fundamental truths of human behavior and psychology and bringing them into the workplace. And conflict management's a great one. Team building, like you said.

Mick Spiers: 52:52

Unity, direction all of these things are things that are about human beings at the end of the day, and how you might take some of these concepts, how might you apply clarity, candor and courage in your next conversation in the workplace, realizing that it's another human being that you're actually talking to, and understanding their needs and your needs in that mix. I think it's absolutely wonderful, hasan. I feel like we could continue on for another three hours unpacking all of that. What we'll do, rather than that, is we'll point people towards the leadership toolbox in the show notes and also the 12 rules for leaders, the foundations of intentional leadership and I love that word, intentional leadership, by the way, we could have done a whole show on that.

Jesan Sorrells: 53:32

We could have.

Mick Spiers: 53:34

Absolutely amazing, Hasan. I've been enthralled. I feel richer for having this conversation. We want to take us now to our rapid round. These are the same four questions we ask all of our guests what's the one thing you know now, Hasan Soreles, that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Jesan Sorrells: 53:49

I now know that I can be patient. I was very impatient in my 20s, and my children will tell you that I still am, but they didn't know me then. So no, I'm a lot more patient now than I was in my 20s.

Mick Spiers: 54:00

I can resonate with that. Okay, very good. Most difficult question for you ever what is your favorite book?

Jesan Sorrells: 54:05

So this is going to be a surprise, because I haven't talked about this author, but I was thinking about it and I've read this author, or I read this author literally every year, from the time I was about eight or nine when I first got the book, all the way up to about my mid-twenties, and then I stopped reading him and I just recently picked him up and was reading it for the podcast coming up and it brought back a whole bunch of memories. I got to see things differently through different eyes now, but my favorite book, probably the most consistent book across my life, has been the Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

Mick Spiers: 54:36

Well done, very nice. Okay, the next question is what's your favorite quote?

Jesan Sorrells: 54:39

So my favorite quote gosh this one's really hard because there's so many good quotes out of so many good books that I've read. But there is a line in the Sun Also Rises where one of the characters asks another character you know how did you go broke? And he says you know gradually at first and then all at once. And I kind of love that because it's just like anything you know. First you have little things and little things. Little things happen. You don't really notice it. You're putting out little fires here, little fires there, and then all of a sudden and we even saw this with recent geopolitical events all of a sudden just the cliff just falls over and you're off to the races. And now you're all of a sudden in chaos, as Carl Jung might say. You're all of a sudden in chaos fighting this dragon, and before you just thought it was a series of fires that you were putting out.

Mick Spiers: 55:18

Very good, I love it. And finally, how do people find you? Just like me, they're going to be really enthralled by either your book or the leadership toolbox, or just you in general, your podcast. How do people find you, hasan?

Jesan Sorrells: 55:28

Yes, find you, hazen. Yes, so the number one place that people can find me is, of course, if they want to connect with me, on LinkedIn. So I have an active LinkedIn profile, so just look for Hazen Sorrells on LinkedIn. I'm also on Facebook and on Twitter, even though I rarely tweet, you know, so not really doing so much of that and, of course, I am on Instagram. You can find me there on those social platforms.

Jesan Sorrells: 55:48

An easier way to get a hold of me is, of course, through the website leadershiptoolboxus. There we have links to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, so all of our new podcast episodes are posted there. We also have a link to the 12 Rules for Leaders book, which was my third book. We also have my links to my second book there, which had the great title of my Boss Doesn't Care 100 Essays on Disrupting your Workplace by Disrupting your Boss. You'll want to pick that up as well. It was made for such a time as this. And, of course, you'll be able to find out information about all of our training and development tools and webinars, in-person trainings and, of course, hybrid delivery models, and that's at leadershiptoolboxus.

Mick Spiers: 56:27

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much, hasan. We'll put those links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for the gift of your time today, the gift of your knowledge, your wisdom and your insights and the clear call to actions that we've got for our audience today. This has been wonderful. I feel richer for the conversation and I know the audience will be as well.

Jesan Sorrells: 56:44

Well, mick, thank you for having me on Leadership Project. To all of you who are listening, as I usually say that I would say now go out and do something with what you've heard today. Thank you.

Mick Spiers: 56:55

You've been listening to the Leadership Project. In the next episode it's going to be a solo cast and I'm going to share with you some special announcements about some changes we're making to the format of the show. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Project at mickspearscom. A huge call out to Faris Sadek for his video editing of all of our video content, and to all of the team at TLP Joanne Goes On, gerald Calabo and my amazing wife, say Spears. I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey, as we learn together and lead together.