Joe Leech: Seven Traits of a Modern CEO

Business is nothing like it was 20 years ago yet we people still cling to the methods and styles of leaders of old. They don’t work anymore. It’s time for the Modern CEO. What are the traits of the modern CEO?

Business is fast moving and must constantly adapt to constant change – the recent impact of AI for example. Customers have ever higher expectations for quality and service. COVID irrevocably transformed the workplace, startups have toppled giants. Technology is changing the world. Joe will explain why the tried and trusted playbooks of old don’t work today and why you need a different approach to leadership.

He will share seven of the most common qualities of a modern leader and challenge you to consider how your leadership approach can set you apart in the 21st century.

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Transcript

Joe Leech 

Hi everybody.

So let’s start with a little experiment, shall we? This is a thought experiment. So we’ve got two parts to this thought experiment. There’s a bottle and there’s a goose. Now this is an ancient Buddhist thought experiment they used to give to those starting out in the ways of meditation, and they would give them this thought experiment. They take them years to solve it. We’re not going to do that today and get to the root of this.

Thought Experiment

So there’s two things in this thought experiment. The first thing is a goose. In fact, it’s a baby goose. It’s a Gosling. And the second thing, there’s a bottle. And you take this Gosling, and you slide it ever so gently into the bottle, and you pull its neck through the bottle. Now don’t worry, this is just a thought experiment. No geese are harmed during the making of this. You pull it to the neck through and then you begin to feed that goose. For the next few weeks, it gets bigger and bigger. Its rib cage expands. It gets larger and larger over the next few months, and before you know it, the goose is trapped, and you can’t pull the goose out. It’s trapped inside this bottle.

Now there are two rules to this thought experiment. You can’t destroy the bottle and you can’t kill the goose. How? My clever engineering friends, do you get the goose out of the bottle? Have a guess? Any any answers? Any ideas?

What’s that?

Put it on the diet could work, but unfortunately, it’s rib cage has grown so much you can’t get it through the neck of the bottle. Sorry. Any other ideas? Come on, engineers, there’s got to be some thoughts, some brains wearing on this. Keep going. What else other ideas have we got?

Heat up the glass. Yes, but you’re going to probably harm that poor, that poor Gosling. We can’t hurt the goose. We’ve got to rescue this goose. This goose is not happy that we’ve done this to it. Any other answers?

Tell it the benefits of living inside a glass.

You tell it the benefits of living inside a glass? I do like that. Yeah, glass half full kind of guy.

Bruce?

Offer a quarterly bonus for getting out. Quarterly bonus for getting it out. No, it’s actually OKRs. You set it in. OKR, no, you don’t.

I’ll tell you what you do this poor goose, it’s stuck inside this bottle, is you break the bottle. You smash that bottle, and you rescue that goose. Now, hold on a minute. You told me I couldn’t break the bottle, right? The whole point of this experiment, and the whole point of Buddhist thought is to understand that thought can constrain you. Who am I to tell you what rules to do the things that you’re doing? Okay? And the same thing is true of this goose. You need to break the fucking bottle, save that poor goose. Okay.

Play your own game.

This is the first piece of advice I’m going to give you today, and this is play your own game.

So all of you here are in some way a leader. Maybe you are a CEO, maybe you’re a consultant, maybe you’re a leader within your business. Part of what you have to do as a leader is play your own game, is to break the bottle, is stop being constrained by the rules that I tell you or other people tell you to do, to be happy inside the bottle, to heat the bottle, whatever those rules are, break the rules. Choose to break the rules, and you’re going to be in a much, much better place. Okay.

So I’m, hello everybody. I’m Mr. Joe. Lot of people commented on me being Mr. Joe. You can all call me Joe if you see me today in the halls of BoS. My background is, the last 20 years, I’ve worked with CEOs of startups through to high growth, to enterprise businesses. I’ve worked on them with strategy, all through to what I do now, which is where I’m a coach to CEOs to help them effectively break the bottle on what they do to get the success that they’ve been after for a long time.

And what I’m going to do today is to share a lot of my learnings from those folks with you, to help you break the bottle in what you do and to be better, CEO, leader, coder, consultant, whatever you are, you can take something away from today to be better at what you do. So back to you.

Now there’s a reason you are here today. There’s your thing, right? Maybe I spoke to you about your thing last night in the bar. Maybe I gave you some advice yesterday in the bar, there’s a certain thing you are here for. It’s not the networking, it’s not the talks. There’s a reason that you are here. Maybe there’s something you want to unlock in your business. Maybe it’s growth. Maybe you’re having a challenge with a co founder. Maybe there’s something you want to achieve in home, in work, and something else is to visualize that thing right now. Have you got your thing? Think about your thing. Have you got it?

Some nods out there. You know why you’re here? Okay, there’s something you. You want to achieve in your life that hasn’t happened yet, and part of the reason you are here today at BoS is because of that thing. So my encouragement from you is today is to speak to other people here today at BoS about this thing. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s some of the other speakers, maybe it’s your fellow attendees, but don’t keep that thing inside of you. This is your goose coming out of the bottle. All right. Talk about it, because there’s a reason you’re here.

There’ll be somebody here today who can help you with your thing, and I would love you to share that as you go over the next couple of days here at BoS. How does that sound? Going to share your thing? Great. Thanks, everybody. Great. OK, let’s keep going then.

Today then, I mentioned I’m going to share with you some ideas and some thoughts on what makes a CEO and leader great, and I’m going to share with another QR code I would like you to play along today with this. So can you take out your phone please? Take a photo of this QR code.

And while you’re doing that and getting yourself set up, part of my job as a coach is, in fact, let me tell you a joke. If you’ve probably heard this joke, how many coaches does it take to change a light bulb? Only one but the light bulbs really got to want to change. OK, this is part of that for you. So take a picture of this QR code. I’d like you to play along with this.

Of course, we’ve got a Wi Fi issue at the moment. Switch to 4G, you can do it on your phone. It shouldn’t take much bandwidth. We can play along with it. If this doesn’t work, hey, don’t worry. We can do it. You can do it as we go, right. Enter your details in here. Here’s the here it is today.

One of the questions I’m going to ask you today, in this first question, in fact, is, Have you have you noticed my rather wonderful bum bag here today, yeah? I have a store you can buy. You can’t buy your own version of my own bum bag. What I’m going to do today is one of the first questions I’d like you to do is to take a guess what I’m actually got inside my bum bag today, because it’s very important. Includes lots of things, and you can win this mug today. If you for the best guess of what is in my bum bag, wins this mug. OK, I love that. See. Put that answer down. Fantastic. Add it to the quiz. We’ll have a look at the end some of the best answers there about what’s in my bum bag. Okay, take a picture of the QR code and Karen with that. Okay.

You’re too good. Break the rules. I like your thinking. Break the bottle. Good work. All right. So the first rule I shared with you today, then, is to play your own game. Let me talk about this in a bit more detail.

Booking.com

So I have had the honor over the years, and the last 20 years of working, I worked with a huge number of hotel companies. And the very first one I worked with was was last minute.com which is a British one. And we went in and we redesigned, led the redesign of last minute.com about 20 plus years ago, and then a few months, six months, eight months later, I started working with Expedia, and they were very excited. Oh, you’ve worked with last minute.com? Yes. What’s their plan? What’s their strategy? I’m like, well, that’s interesting. They said they want to be number one in hotels. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s the same as our strategy. I’m like, Oh, that’s really interesting. Few months later, I was lucky enough to work for hotels.com before Expedia bought them, came in, what’s Expedia strategy? Oh, they want to be number one in hotels. That’s funny. That’s our that’s our strategy. We want to be number one in hotels. You can see the theme emerging here, right?

This was the strategy of pretty much all of these businesses here. When I started working them, from around about 2004 to about 2008, right? It was a great time to working with them. Yeah, they were all fighting each other. They were all obsessed with each other to the nth degree. So much so that was running strategy workshops, I remember running a strategy workshop with Marriott, I said, but this is really tough. How are we going to be number one? And they changed their strategy from we want to be number one in hotels to we will be number one in hotels, which I thought was a brilliant strategic move. Showed the energy that that CEO had to push things forward at Marriott, no, the reality was is, this is not a sustainable strategy. This is not breaking the bottle. This is not playing your own game. And then what happened is, these folks came along right? In about 2006, totally took over, took the market.

Now you all know this story, and Matt Lerner and others will tell you more about how it came to be, but effectively, booking.com didn’t play that game. They played their own game. They experimented, they changed, they adapted. They were not attached to being right. They did all of the things that were right. And of course, they overtook the market. And this is the first part of that, is not having crappy strategies, like we will be number one, right? You all know that to be true. You’re all smart thinkers. So let’s look a lead deeper than that. Look at the practicalities behind that.

So here’s some great research that was done about 15 years ago on what it takes to run a strategy, how to be successful. Very simple, you just need to have these things in order, right? All you gotta do is have this stuff. And what was common about all of those organizations I work with, they had something missing. A lot of it was vision. Because, again, being number one is not a vision. That’s an aspiration. It’s certainly not what you want to be. You need to have these things in place.

Now here’s the tip I’m going to give you, is, here’s to what to look out for when those things are missing. So my job as a coach is I come in and I look and I’m often hide because of these symptoms on the right hand side. Yeah, it’s a good one to take a photo of. There’s links to this in the stuff that I’ll send you at the end, okay. But this is what happens if these things are not in place. These are the symptoms that you see.

Now, again, you leaders, you’ve all seen those things on the right hand side. This is why you’re seeing them, because those things are missing on the left. Now here I make this really, really simple, okay? And this is true from a startup of four people to the businesses I work with, the CEOs who’ve got 20,000 employees. The same things are true at different scales. It’s harder to put these things in place with less people, but you still need all of these things in place. And I’ll keep come back and reference this as we go through as well, in terms of things like when founders fall out, when other elements of the strategy fail. Pretty much, this is why strategies fail. Take that away with you. Okay.

So next question on our little game, then, as a CEO, you cannot control everything that’s going on. You cannot control all of this stuff. This is not under your control. You can set up everything on the left hand side, all the elements of it, but you cannot control and create success. You cannot guarantee annual recurring revenue. You cannot guarantee MRR. You cannot guarantee success. You can guarantee everything on the left hand side, and that’s a big part of being a leader, is letting go of control over the outcome and looking at the elements that you need to put in place to create that. Okay.

A CEO can only create the conditions for success, not the success itself.

You need to let go of trying to control that success. You can’t do it the best leaders know they can’t do that. There’s nothing worse than trying to control everything that’s going on, because that’s stressful. It’s challenging. It leads to micromanagement. It leads to burnout, leads to all kinds of challenges for you as the leader, when you start to get into this world. All right.

So next question on the quiz. Answer this one. Okay, this is question two on my quiz. Have a look.

All right, let me tell you another story. This is a story about a VC that I was coaching for a few years. We’re still working together now. I was lucky enough to work with her during the period where confidence disappeared. We all know when that happened, the last couple of years. What was interesting about working with VCs around this time was the level of abundant thinking that was there before everything we’re going to do is going to be a success. We’ve got enough money. Everything’s going to be great. All of these businesses are going to be amazing. And over the course of about three months, it’s switched to a scarcity mindset.

Oh, you’ve got enough money for your runway. Or we can’t. We can’t invest in all these businesses. We’ve got to keep this money here. We need to keep this here. We can’t do this investment so much so that this VC firm got into real trouble because they weren’t making any investments. Right? Now, there’s some joke here, I’m sure, about what you call a VC firm that doesn’t make any investments. And the reality was, that’s what was happening. Partners were falling out. They were disagreeing, because they were all coming to it from a place of scarcity. They were nervous. They were scared they were going to lose, yet you contrast that to six months before, and they’re making some incredible bets, coming from a place of abundance at the start of that. And a big challenge you have to face, and something you have to embrace as a leader is again, your mindset. You need to think about your mindset and change that mindset from scarcity being worried that you’re going to lose everything that’s there, we’ve got to make sure our incomes. Shore up this income that stop these customers churning. You start to behave differently when you start to play this game. Scarcity is dangerous, because people can smell that nervous energy, and there’s nothing more off putting than the customer support or an account manager desperately trying to keep you as a client right? Absolutely awful place to be.

The opposite is true. If you’re operating from a place of abundance, you bring a different energy to that conversation. You bring in a different energy to that investment. And what’s interesting about talking through with this is you can tell when you’re a place of scarcity, when you’re in a place of abundance, it feels very different, and you’ll know what that feeling’s like. What I’m questioning and asking you to do today is to go back to that place of abundance.

All right, back to your quiz. How are you feeling? All right? Are you in a place of scarcity or abundance, or somewhere in between? Answer that question. Okay, that’s question three on the quiz.

Change your mindset: scarcity to abundance

Okay. And that brings us back to your thing again, right? If your thing is you’re feeling nervous, you’re feeling scared, you’re feeling challenged by the world that you’re in. You’re worried about your business failing coming from that place of scarcity. Let’s talk. Okay, one of the things that I can help you do, and what a lot of people can help you do, is move to that place of abundance, even just by sharing that fear with somebody else today, even as another attendee, they can say, Hey, dude, I think you’re coming from a place of abundance, a place of scarcity here, let’s move to a place of abundance. Your thing could be so related to this, if you just shift your mindset away from scarcity to abundance on this. Okay.

So moving forward, let me tell you a story about another another. Founder of mine, absolutely fantastic, visionary, founder. Incredible. I bought a startup from two people, raised 6 million in seed, an incredible thing. Bought this business through to Series A, had a staff of 50 people. Was absolutely doing fantastic. Her superpower was to be across everything, absolutely everything. She was on top of any element in the operational of the business, any element in terms of the way that the code was put together. She was totally across everything. Her superpower was, she was on it with everything.

The big challenge she faced, it was absolutely exhausting. You can do that with a business of four people, a startup. You can’t do that with the business of 10 people. You can’t do that with the business of 20 people. You cannot be over everything. So we started talking, and it reminded me of something about parenting. Parents in the audience. Of course, there are parents in the audience here today, right? Obviously.

Know your umbrellas from your buses.

This is my little girl. She’s seven. We live in England. It rains. I live in Dorset on the coast. It really rains. Every day I check the weather to see if it’s going to rain. If it’s going to rain, I give her her umbrella, right? That’s good parenting, isn’t it? No, right? You know it’s not okay. She needs to get wet. She needs to go through the process of checking the weather herself. So she needs to remember to bring her umbrella herself. She needs to go through that process of learning what it means to have and not have her umbrella, okay? Management 101, right? Knowing your umbrellas and knowing and letting people fail, I do this with my daughter.

Now she was about to step in front of a bus. I’m not going to let her learn that lesson, am I? I’m going to pull her back straight away, right? I’m not right. Oh, she’ll learn that lesson. She won’t do that again. Absolutely not awful parenting, right? A big part of being a parent is knowing the umbrellas from the busses. A big part of being a leader is knowing your umbrellas from your busses, and what you find as a first time founder, when you are 3/4/5 employees, everything can feel like a bus, right?

Everything feels like the biggest thing ever. Oh, my God, they made the button green on the website. Let’s have a meeting about this for four hours and sort this out. Right? That is not a bus that, my friends, is an umbrella. And it’s an important distinction for you to all make in your heads, the difference between an umbrella and a bus when it comes to your decision making in your team, okay, allowing your team to make mistakes, to learn from their mistakes, to adapt, to learn is knowing the difference between umbrellas and busses. Okay, inexperienced CEOs or CEOs new to it, see everything as a bus again becomes exhausting. They end up micromanaging. They end up getting burnt out.

Okay, back to the quiz. How are you? And umbrellas and busses answer that question, folks.

OK, all right, let’s keep going.

I’m pleased to see my presenter display down here. It gives me the time. It actually has the time in fractions of a second, which 1000s of a second, which is, I think, extremely important for timing today. Knowing how tight Mark is on timings, it’s good to see this is very, very precise.

All right, OK, let’s keep going then.

So another challenge that I see with the series that I work with, and this is a common thing I’ve seen, and here’s a story of two that I have worked with, co founders, 50/50 equity, one CEO, one CTO, tell me if you’ve heard this one. Real common, second biggest cause of startup failures. We were talking about this in the bar last night, is founders falling out with each other. Founder disagreement, which is ludicrous, the destruction of wealth that’s involved in founders disagreeing with each other. Again, it’s something I’d spend a lot of time working on with founders. All right? And you hear things like this, all right, heard this before? Yeah, okay, expectations on both sides here, right? CEO says, We got to launch this thing. Sito is thinking, well, we’re going to launch something. Maybe it’s this thing. We’re going to work agile. You know, all of these approaches, different expectations on both sides. Another thing, right?

Expectations Kill Relationships

We need to exit in the five years. A common challenge that founders have and disagreements are caused by, is actually the direct the trajectory of the business. Right? We need to exit in the next five years. We’re building to change the world. These are two thoughts that are going on in two people’s heads. They both have different expectations about the future. Okay, really, really dangerous when this happens. Other things, okay? The business decides what gets built. The tech team decides what gets built, okay, and somebody should probably put their hand up saying, no, no, the product manager decides what gets built, right?

Poor product managers in the CEO, CTO. Mother, father relationship. It’s a real challenge when you have these expectations on both sides. Okay, I’ve seen these throughout. These are same things around equity distribution as well, the amount of effort that people put in, the amount of effort that people put into sales. Well, I do more sales work. I should get more, more of the equity of the business. You’ve probably heard lots of these before, okay? And they only come up when there’s a real problem at the end, or towards an exit when these whole things fall apart, or a moment of truth.

Swap expectations for agreements.

Expectations are extremely dangerous. So how do you sort this out? Well, the simplest tool that you can use is to create an agreement. An agreement is nothing more than you both sitting down and saying, What are we going to do about this exit? Well, I want this. Well, I want this. You write on a document 5-10 things about how you want the exit to go. All you do is look for expectations everywhere in your business, and these are all expectations. And when you see them, create agreements.

Now, I said this to the CEO, I’ve worked with recently, you should create more agreements with the CEOs. Well, I don’t need to create agreements. I’m the CEO. My expectations should happen. And the reality is, is what happens when you have expectations? Is the best that can happen is your team, they fulfill those expectations, and you’re like, well, great, my team fulfilled my expectations. You know, it’s a flat level thing. Or the worst that can happen is your team don’t meet that expect those expectations, and you get angry and upset about it. Well, the team have not met my expectations. This is wrong. Did you did you tell them what your expectations were? Well, yes, yes, of course I did. Did you write that down? Well, I didn’t need to write that down. They should, right? You can see this happening.

Expectations are dangerous. It’s time to create agreements based upon those, which are formal, written documents about what you both think, and so you can both agree on them, because expectations kill founder relationships. They kill employee relationships. They’re extremely dangerous things.

Okay, on the quiz, if you’re doing the quiz question five expectations for agreements, please.

By the way, I am. I was a, I was once an elementary school teacher. I taught kids sort of 4/5/6 years old. And so if I get a little bit teacher like today, I do apologize. Am I getting a little bit teacher like today? Maybe, no? yeah. All right, okay, if you do need to go to the bathroom, do put your hand up and only one at a time, please. I don’t want any more of that. Thank you very much.

Do you know it’s interesting? A lot of people ask me, Is it easier to work with a group of four year olds or CEOs? And my answer is, most definitely, there’s way more similarities than differences in working with both of these two audiences.

Okay, tell me if you’ve heard these. Okay, the CEO I was working with just kept hearing crap from their team all the time. They just kept getting loads of stuff. The competition isn’t doing that. Why are we doing that? This isn’t going to work, boss. This isn’t going to work. We can’t do this. This is important. We just can’t do this, boss. This isn’t going to work. The competition aren’t doing that. This aren’t doing that. This isn’t going to work. We just can’t do it, boss. We don’t know how. This is tough boss, so this is really difficult. What are we going to do about this? Boss, what should we do? Oh, boss, could you just pull the numbers from HubSpot? I need them for the sales presentation. Right? I worked with a CEO who was preparing the sales data for the sales team to present, ironically, to present back to the CEO. All right, what is it with sales people than HubSpot? Okay, honestly, other things, right? Dan isn’t performing. Okay, oh no. Dan just can’t do the job. He’s not up to the job. All of these things you hear as leader. Anybody heard this stuff as a leader before recognizing some of these things? Yeah, I’m getting lots of nods here, right? Okay.

These are monkeys, right? And as a leader, you can collect other people’s monkeys over the course of the day, you can collect what, five monkeys here. Hey, what should we do about this? People come to you for the answer, for something. We describe it, I describe it as collecting monkeys. By the end of the day, you’ve got five monkeys on your plate, right? You’ve got, not only got to pour the HubSpot numbers, you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do about each of these things, right? What we going to do about that? What we do about Dan? What am I going to do about this? Suddenly, all of these things are on you as a leader. You’re collecting everybody else’s monkeys. So the best game you can play as a leader is to hand the monkeys back at the end of each session you have with somebody. Okay, if somebody okay? If somebody comes to you with a monkey, and these are all monkeys here, make sure they leave with their own monkey. Don’t you hold that monkey. Okay. So if somebody says, Dan isn’t performing, don’t you take that on, right? Give that monkey back to that person.

Because, again, stress, burnout, micromanagement, the challenges of being a leader come from collecting other people’s monkeys. Not something you want to be doing. So how do you combat that? Right? Number one, you obviously, you pass the monkeys back. You get to real root of the problem. Now this is where great leaders excel, and this is the lot, a lot, that I’ve learned from enterprise CEOs. Okay, they don’t have answers. They deliberately don’t give answers. They ask questions, and this is the best question you can really ask. Okay, what’s really going on here today? All right, what’s really going on here? Dad isn’t performing, yeah, but what’s really going on here? Right?

You’re unpicking this in terms of an onion. You’re going layers and layers deeper to understand truly what each of these things mean. Okay, why are we worried about the competition not doing that? Why are we worried that this isn’t going to work? Why do I need to go and get the numbers from HubSpot? Why do you think we can’t do that? Okay, you start to dig under and go through the layers of the onion to really define the real, true root cause of that particular problem by asking one simple question, and this is the best question you can ask, what’s really going on here?

Leadership is about having the right questions, not having the right answers.

And if you find, if you’re working with a great leader, often, you’ll watch and you watch them interact. I mean, imagine some of the great leaders remember back to some of the great leaders you’ve worked with across your career, you’ll find that they just ask the best questions. They don’t have the answers. They don’t take that pressure on of having to know exactly what to do in each situation, they’ll often ask you the best questions to figure out what it is you should do in this situation. They help you with your umbrella problem. Okay? They help you understand what’s going on here. They help you understand what elements of the strategy are missing, which sections of it are missing, by asking this one simple question.

So the best leaders know it’s great to have the most important questions not to have the right answers. So take the pressure off yourselves. Take the pressure off yourself. Don’t expect or put that expectation on yourself to have all the answers all the time, because that is exhausting. And do you know what? You’re going to hire people much, much much smarter than you. I think somebody very smart once said that, right? I hire great people to tell me what to do, not so I can tell them what to do. Steve Jobs, OK, same idea. Ask questions. Don’t expect to have the answers for everybody that’s out there as well, right?

Question number six in your quiz, go, folks. OK, let’s keep going, right?

Here’s a cliche, running a business is like being on a roller coaster, right? You’ve all heard this one. Stop me if you heard this one, and it is, but it’s actually a bit of a different take on this is thinking about a roller coaster. So what? What emotion is she feeling here? What was that? Thrilled, yeah, what other emotion is she feeling here? Excited. What other emotion is she feeling here? Scared, fear, right?

Thrilled, excited, scared. All basically the same emotion, if you look at the neuroscience behind it, all effectively the same emotion. All that’s changed is your outlook and her outlook to that emotion. Okay, let me explain this more.

So in the queue for or the line for a roller coaster, there are two types of people. There are the people who are like, Oh my god, this is going to be amazing. I’m so excited about this. And there’s the people are like, I don’t know if I can do this, right? You see both types of people in that line. That’s two sides of the same coin. That’s the same emotion. Just the outlook is subtly different on how that’s applied. Before coming on stage today, I was absolutely terrified. Bruce had to basically make sure I didn’t leave the room before I came here today, okay, but equally, at the same time, I was very, very excited about that.

These are two sides of that same emotion, fear could be a wonderful motivator. And I don’t mean that in an Elon Musk way. I mean that in a way that it all can also be an exciting way of doing something.

So let’s look at fear, right? There’s two places you can come from as an individual, right? There’s the comfort zone. Let’s talk about the comfort zone, right? It’s lovely to be in our comfort zone. We feel safe and we feel in control, all right? As a leader, you might be in your comfort zone, nothing’s going to change. I know exactly what’s going to happen here. I’m fully up on all my GitHub issues, all my JIRA tickets are closed. I’ve got full control here. My default answer is no. Life is easy, right? Life is not very satisfying in the comfort zone, right?

Comfort Zone can be nice place to be when things are difficult outside of our lives, at work, but the reality is, it’s not a nice place to be. A big part of what I do with my enterprise, the enterprise publicly listed CEOs I work with, is to get them out of their comfort zone because they’re bored, right? So if you’re a leader in your comfort zone, it could equally be boring for you, too.

Now, what happens with the comfort zone is the thing that surrounds it is the fear zone, right? And that’s scary. Okay, you can start to feel some of these symptoms on the on the on the other side here, you’ve got the screw. I’m done. Damn. I’m going to sell this business. I’m done. I’m going to exit right now. I’d have CEO had to talk down very recently from phoning up a broker and selling his business before Christmas, because, you know, basically one of his customer support people had written a wrong ticket right? Absolutely petrified this business going to end. He was in the fear zone. You’re affected by the people’s opinions. This isn’t going to work. We can’t do that. You’re angry. Okay? Again, if you’re in the fear zone, Anger can come out as well. Hello, Elon Musk. Okay, you see Elon Musk, when he goes into fear zone, he gets very, very angry.

Part of my job is, a lot of the CEOs, when I first talk to them, and I realize they’re in the fear zone, is they get angry with me. I ask them questions that makes them really angry, and that tells me something about that individual, and also imposter syndrome, right? You feel imposter syndrome. Any of you here feeling imposter syndrome? Right? Same here, okay, imposter syndrome is a feature and not a bug. Okay, I said that to the on the stage two years ago. What happens here? Then the fear zone, it can pull you through. If you’re excited. It feels great to be in the fear zone. I’m doing this. I feel really, really excited, or you can hear some of these symptoms here, and it can pull you back into the comfort zone. It’s like a like an elastic band. It can pull you either way. The fear can either propel you forward or it can pull you back. But you’ve just got to understand what you’re feeling is that fear.And here are some of the symptoms of that that you see here, right today.

Okay, so what’s on the other side of the fear zone? Well, it’s the Learning Zone, right? You start to deal with challenges and problems. You learn new skills. You extend your comfort zone. Your Comfort Zone gets bigger, right? This is the fun bit. You’re like, oh, this is fun, right? I’m standing on the surfboard. I’m surfing this wave. This feels great, okay, a little bit terrifying, but it feels great. So you need to go through that fear to get to that learning zone, okay? But equally, that elastic band, that rubber band, that rubber band, can pull you back into the comfort zone at any minute. Then eventually you get to the growth zone, which is the stuff that you really, really want to be doing. You’ve hit the numbers, you’ve got to the point you want to be you can now set new goals. You can realize aspirations. You can live your dreams, right? A big part of what I do is getting people from comfort to growth. It’s a big, big part, but we have to go through some challenges to get there. It has to be difficult before it’s easy again.

If you’re feeling fear, that’s a positive. If you’re feeling imposter syndrome, that’s a positive that shows you in exactly the right place, you’re doing the right things to change, because change can only come when you go through your fear zone. To get into that learning zone, fear is good and fear is important, but it’s your outlook on that fear that makes the difference.

So back to these things. Then look which zone are these people in saying these things to you as a CEO, which zone are they in? This isn’t going to work. What zone are they in? When somebody, one of your employees, says that to you, what zone are they in? Fear zone, right? What does that tell you? You’re doing the right thing,okay? They’re in the fear zone. Okay, right? I can see this, okay. Suddenly you’ve got an insight into where this person is coming from. You don’t have to browbeat them into saying, This is what we’re going to do. You have to understand they’re feeling scared, right? And they’re probably things get in the bad ways they want to go back to the comfort zone, or it’s nice and safe there. If the competition isn’t doing that, we don’t have to do it. I can feel nice and safe here, because this is new and not very exciting.

Fear is ok, it’s the reaction that is the problem.

Your job as a CEO is to pull people through the fear zone. Understand when they’re in the fear zone. Okay, same things to you, like, we just can’t do it, right? Okay, well, great. Let’s learn some new skills. That’s the Learning Zone, all right. This model can help you understand how your team are feeling at any one point, so you can have that insight about how to shift them forward.

Okay, question seven on the on the quizzes, off you go. I’m doing that teacher thing again, aren’t I? By the way, I’ll be, I will be grading and marking you on all of this as well. I’ll be marking you on a curve. And anybody who’s not good enough in this quiz will not be invited back to BoS next year. I hope that’s okay. That’s obviously a joke. I’m not going to do that.

Okay, so I’m going to tell you a story about another CEO that I’ve been working with, who you may recognize. This is Tall Jeff. And I’ve been working with Jeff for a few years now, and been very privileged to do that. I learned a lot from Jeff, and one of the big things that I learned from Jeff early on was, was this, you need to run towards a problem as fast as you can. So Jeff was, he’s got his own stuff to now called Reframe. You can chat to him about it. He’s here at the conference, but he was former CEO at Stack Overflow, and this is something that he learned with a large organization. Anytime you smell a problem or a challenge or a difficulty, you run at that as fast as you can.

Now, logically, I know, all know, you know, know this, right? As soon as you see a problem, if you address it, the sooner you address it, it gives you the ability that problem is not going to grow, okay, as soon as you see that problem, as soon as you go there and solve it, problem solved, you can move on to the next thing. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Okay? No, head in the sand. Easy, said than done, right? What’s the big thing you’re feeling when you see or you hear a problem? Why do people put their head in the sand when they hear a problem as leaders? Why? Scary, right? Absolutely. What zone are they in? The fear zone, right? You start to see how this links together.

Okay, way back to that chart that I shared with you at the start of all of the different boxes, okay, all of those emotions, if you look at them, basically, are in a reflection of fear or problems or challenges. So as soon as you see a problem, much of what I talked about today can helpfully help you run at that problem and know what to do about it. You’ve got the mindset, the leadership set, the ability to know what you’ve got to do in that sort of situation, the key insight is just as soon as you see a problem, is just to go and fix it and go and sort it right there and then. Unless it’s an umbrella. Definitely not with an umbrella, yeah, or a bus.

Stress comes from ignoring the things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.

OK, eight, back to your quizzes. Stress comes from ignoring the things that you shouldn’t be ignoring. OK, it’s extremely stressful to ignore things. We know that it takes more energy to actively push something out of your mind than it does to deal with it, right? Because you know when it comes back to haunt you, it comes back to haunt you at three o’clock in the morning, if you’re trying to hide or steer away from a problem. All right, the big challenge you face then is that it comes back and haunts you at the point you don’t need it to. I did a talk two years ago, pretty much at BoS on exactly this.

It’s much, much easier to deal with them. We know why you ignore them, because you’re in the fear zone. You’re worried about things. But you know what happens if you do. All right, back to the quiz. Question eight. Answer this one for me, folks.

Now, one of the biggest challenges you will address and you will face as a leader is the unknowns, right? You can’t know everything. You cannot be across everything. You cannot know all that is out there, with your customers, with your team. You cannot do that, right? But you need to put the things in place. That means things get filtered up to you when there is a problem. So I said, Well, okay, I understand that. Let’s make this a game. Shall we? How can we make this fun? So you’re looking for all of these things in your business that are problems, that are wrong, that you’ve overlooked, that you don’t know about. Let’s make it into a game for you and your team. Shall we have a bounty, right?

This is Fun.

Let’s talk about that one in a bit more detail then. So this is a another CEO I was working with recently. This was going through some of the support tickets on a Sunday evening, as you all do, just checking what some of the recent responses were to the support tickets. He had a business of 50 people doing extremely well, and he went, was going through these support tickets, and he started to see things that really worried him about – the tone of voice, the way these reports, or these these tickets are being answered to customers. He was really worried. He called me on Sunday night, right to say, I’m really worried about this. It was extremely stressful, because a lot was going on, right? This is my whole interaction with my customers. And the thing he said to me at the end of that conversation was, well, if, if these support tickets are bad, what what else is bad in my business? What else is going wrong? What else am I not doing here? What else am I missing? And as soon as you made that, he said that in his head, I could sort of hear his voice drop, extremely scared at that point about what he didn’t know as a leader.

So you’ve got one week. Why don’t you set this on Monday morning, all of your team have to go and find as many problems as possible, right? And the person in on your team who comes up with the most problems wins a bottle of champagne at the end of the week. You have a competition. On Friday afternoon, you get everybody together, you have a huge celebration of the number of problems you found in your business. And he’s like, Well, he’s like, Well, that sounds like fun. I’m like, Well, okay, yeah, that does sound like fun, doesn’t it? And you know what? He went through the process of that week, and they found maybe three, 400 challenges and problems that they didn’t know about. They got to that Friday, and they celebrated them by opening a bottle of champagne at the all hands on the Friday. Okay, how does that differ from how I spoke to him on the Sunday, in terms of his outlook on that?

So anytime you find or you see something that’s difficult or challenging or horrible or gnarly, ask yourself a simple question, how could this be fun? You change your outlook over that feeling. You go from that feeling of being scared on the roller coaster to being thrilled. What if I find some of these? We could find maybe two, 300 problems that’s really exciting. We could sort so much out in the course of this week, if we know what’s going on, if we know about our unknowns. And just by switching your Outlook onto how you address new deal and you look at things, can drastically change how things could work, because this hunting exercise could quite easily be chasing down employees with a big stick. What look so and so customer support has done this awful request. Let’s put them on notice. Let’s let’s fire them right. It could so easily become a difficult, challenging, horrible thing when the reality is in making it fun, we found more, way more problems. And you know the big thing that it did, the big thing that it did.

So my background, before I was a teacher, I was a neuroscientist. I studied neuroscience. In fact, I did part of a PhD in snail brains. If you’re interested, I don’t think you probably are interested, but there’s a particular part of your brain at the back called the reticular cortex. And the reticular cortex is fantastic at noticing things.

So I own the most unusual car in the world. You didn’t see it pop up earlier on. It’s called a Mazda Bongo, friendly, auto free top. It’s this crazy Japanese van. There are about 25 of them in the UK. I hadn’t seen one before, and when I bought one, I suddenly started seeing them everywhere. All right? There’s only a few of them in this country. I saw them everywhere. Okay? The same is true anytime you’ve bought a new car or the first time you saw a tester in the UK, oh, there’s a Tesla. Suddenly you see five or six more Teslas, right? This is your reticular cortex in action. It’s not that you’re not seeing the testers around the rest of the time. You’re just not noticing them. All right.

So once you activate your reticular cortex by looking for problems, what do you start to see a lot more of? Problems, right? The same is true, and especially if it’s fun. There’s people like, Oh, this is really exciting. I found a problem. That’s what my CEO was hearing for the next few weeks. People were really excited to bring him problems and challenges, right? As a leader, that’s exactly what you want to hear. By making it fun, it makes it a game. Activates a little bit at the back of your brain called the reticular cortex. People start to enjoy it suddenly, overnights the whole approach and the way that your team works changes, all right.

So final one, then number nine on the quiz, this is fun. Okay? And I’m asking that quiz how much fun you’re having right now at your work. Okay, how much fun is what you’re doing. And one of the answers you’ll come back with from this because, again, I’m going to score you on your answers. I’ll give you some feedback as you do this quiz is, if you’re not having enough fun, you’re doing it a bit wrong. All right, if you’re having fun, fun is where the excitement starts to happen. Fun is exciting. It’s engaging. It’s what your employees love to do. Fun is key to this journey to keep you going for the next five to 10 years.

Okay, these are the things that I have shared with you today. I have shared with you these slightly more than seven traits of the modern CEO.

Now, part of me sharing this with you is this whole concept that I’m calling the modern CEO. The modern CEO is how leadership has changed in the last 30/40/50 years. Okay, the very ways the CEOs of old were trained and taught at business school is very, very different from the way that you as leaders are today. You are running businesses at the forefront of change, and the way you need to adapt and to think about the way you run your business has to change drastically. And here’s a start.

So I have about 100 of these. I’m writing a book that’s coming later on this year. You can find this at Mr. Joe.uk-/modernCEO. I share a QR code. There’s more of these here as well. I share videos for all of these as you come through. You’ll see some of these as you come through. I share these on my website. 100 of these. And the big one I want to take you away. For you to take away from today is this one is to break the bottle, folks.

I want to make sure that you are everything that you’re listening to today is about breaking the bottle, breaking free of those rules that have constrained CEOs of old. To become the modern CEO, to lean into it and to break that bottle. Thanks very much for your time.

Q&A

Joe Leech 

Any questions?

Mark Littlewood 

Gareth, you’re up. Here’s a mic for you. Oh, dear, I should have organized this bit better. Jann, you better be.

By the way, if you don’t feel like you want to ask a question to me. Now, I’ll be around for the next few days, please do come and talk to me. I’d love to chat or chat, or do reach out to me afterwards as well. And the same is true of anybody else. Any of the other speakers, they’re going to be here today, come and talk to us. We love to hear all about you and what you’re up to. So it’s a real treat for me when I get to speak to folks like that.

Mark Littlewood 

So except me, I hate people.

Joe Leech 

Apart from Mark, come speak to me. So questions then,

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah. Now this is first time, right? So Jann’s going to cover that side. Gareth is going to cover this side. If you haven’t been here before, you won’t know how we do questions. And if you have been here before, you may not have noticed, because it’s so seamless, it’s untrue. If you have a question, put your hand up, and we will try and get a mic to you so that we can have lots of questions, not a question, and then who wants to do the next one? So we’re going to start with Mark Stephens at the back. Anyone else with a question?

Joe Leech 

 I can share your results with you as well. So I’ve got some live scores as well we could do in a second, but go Mark.

Audience Member 

Hi Joe, but thanks for an amazing first talk. Thank you. You had the hard job, and you definitely delivered. So I wouldn’t like to be the second speaker at this event. So my question is, you talk about switching from scarcity to abundance? Yeah, and I’ve always regarded scarcity as a sort of killer advantage. So scarcity is why so. V Wilson created the ARM chip, and Intel never created a mobile chip. So can you talk about more how we can use because to me, abundance is always the killer. I always have enough. I always have plenty of time. I’ve got plenty of people. So can you, can you explain how we use abundance as an advantage as opposed to scarcity? Please?

Joe Leech 

Yeah. So a good way to think about it is in terms of your customers, right? So if you’re a B2B SaaS, you can think about scarcity in terms of, we’ve got to keep our customers. There’s only 10 customers out there. Our competition have got all the customers, right? You start to project a nervous energy that comes from there’s only a limited number of your customers that are out there. When you come from a place of abundance, there are unlimited customers out there. There’s wonderful, so many customers out there that we customers out there that we could work with. There’s so many ways of thinking about it. You bring a different energy to that interaction, especially if you work in enterprise SaaS sales, right?

So one of the biggest challenges I see in working with enterprise SaaS sales is if you’re in negotiations with Microsoft, oh my god, Microsoft. We really need this deal with Microsoft. Because you only need negotiations with Microsoft about this deal that can, you can bring a level of scarcity and fear to that because you really, really want this deal to happen, and that can project how you have that interaction in that conversation with Microsoft. If you come to it with a from place of abundance, well, if we don’t sign with Microsoft, we’ll sign with Google. Now, I know that’s easy for me to say, but if you come to it, even projecting that energy, it’s the energy that’s called with or without you energy, right? I’m going to do this with or without you Microsoft. For them, that’s extremely exciting. They come to it and go, whoa. They’re doing this anyway, with or without us. If you bring that with or without you energy to something that projects confidence and gets people to sign up with you. If you come to it with a scarcity mindset that you really need this sale, you know, it’s like being back at school again and being that needy boy or girl wanting that relationship to last, right? That’s extremely unattractive on both sides.

So that’s the element of scarcity there. Scarcity is a very unattractive human trait. We don’t like to see it in other people, but abundance projects confidence. That means that people want to do business with you no matter what. So you may be feeling scarcity, but actually, if you project abundance and with or without you energy, these deals can happen at a much better time.

Mark Littlewood 

Mike and Ninnu.

While the mics going out, let me share, let me share the scores, scores on the doors with you all do. Okay. Okay, so I asked you, oh, this is quite reassuring. How many of you wanted to break the bottle? What I like is that about what 58 of you have, and about three of you don’t want to break the bottle. That’s fine, don’t worry. Maybe you’re not as destructive as me. Other things that we see in here as well. Let’s have a look. Do you want to know what was in my bum bag? Yeah, let’s see what like I said. There’s a there’s a prize for this one as well. Okay, keys.

Mark Littlewood 

That wasn’t me.

Joe Leech

A mini model of Mark Littlewood, a bust of Churchill mints, magic beans, towels. I got a towel in there actually. A Gosling and some broken glass. Yes? Goose, keys, plush toy, goosey. I like that one another, bum bag. It’s bum bags all the way down a cross between California. Wow. Your thing a dairy milk. Oh, yeah, that’s nice. Legs, 17 Lego figures. The conditions for success. Another, oh, this is great. A hammer to break the bottle, insulin pump. Okay? Sweets. A small there’s a lot of bum bag answers here as well. The squirrel mascot from the end. I love some of these. All right, which is our favorite answer? Do we think? Which ones have we liked here so far?

Mark Littlewood

Oh, the Californian sense. Amelia.

Joe Leech

All right. Californian sense. Amelia, okay. Whoever, whoever said this, come and find me afterwards. I’ll give you the prize of the this today as well. Okay, okay, so there was a question at the top. I’ll leave with some takeaways here as well.

Mark Littlewood 

Ninnu while the mic. And by the way, I’ve got prizes, and I’m not proud. So Mark Stephens, you asked first question. So congratulations.

Ninnu, oh, okay, so can we go to John Vincent? Pass it along the back there, Jann, and then the sound guys will get this mic working. Hang on. No, we’ll go first.

Joe Leech 

Start up here, and then we’ll come back. John. John.

Ninnu Campbell 

Oh, oh no, it’s working. Okay. He knew. Awesome. Come back to John. So you were talking about the comfort zone and the fear zone, and then moving to the learning zone, and then we kind of like it felt, felt like it stopped here, and that’s where I’m at the moment. I’m solidly on the learning zone. How do we move on from that?

Joe Leech 

From leave, from learning to growth? Well, it’s by tackling the challenge. It’s by doing it right? So you’re now learning about the challenge you’re facing. By learning about it and doing it, is how you move into growth. And once you’ve done it once, yeah, well, I’ve done that, now it becomes part of your comfort zone.

Ninnu Campbell 

Yeah, okay, so kind of like I’m looking at how to break into the growth zone from the learning zone.

Joe Leech 

And it’s basically just by doing it, which turns out particularly helpful, but just do it right, because the challenge you’ve got is, as Mark mentioned, as well, it’s very easy to procrastinate in certain zones and to be in the learnings. And you could stay there forever, because it’s a quite comfortable place to be once you’ve moved through fear. But you’ve just got to get on and do it. Listen to that advice as well. I know what you’re talking I know what you’re talking about as well. So yeah, let’s keep talking about.

Mark Littlewood 

I think you’ve got to get over your fear of failure, Ninnu, and I’m really hoping that someone, at some point during this conference is going to talk about failure and oh.

Joe Leech 

That’s you. John, wasn’t it you announced.

Mark Littlewood 

Another mic at the back, John.

Audience Member 

Do you mind if we just continue with the scarcity versus I like more on that. I wonder whether the excitement on a roller coaster which combines what you describe as fear and excitement, whether it’s a western idea to abstract scarcity and abundance in a dualistic, separate way, and whether in China, they might combine scarcity and abundance, think abundant thinking. In a way that perhaps you have used your roller coaster example. Because I think that there are so many examples of bands that have scarcity. They have no big recording contract, no big recording studio. The string is almost broken on the guitar, and that scarcity has led to, in a practical sense, a real scarcity. But the abundant mindset that a young person brings. So I think that perhaps, rather than saying all scarcity is bad and all abundance is good. I wonder whether we need to recognize the non duality.

Joe Leech 

I completely agree with you. I think you’re absolutely right. Yeah, I think it’s that. I think what I’m hearing from both of you is scarcity is extremely focusing in terms of markets out there. Scarcity can actually drive you forward in early stages of your career, because there’s a scarcity that you need to make this work because you haven’t got enough. Yeah.

Audience Member 

And as someone who sails across the Atlantic, I can’t tell my crew, magine we’ve got all everything,

Joe Leech 

Because it depends on your outlook and your situation as to which one’s most successful for you. I think the challenge comes at the point when you’re 3/4/5 years into your journey, and you switch from abundance back to scarcity again through outside events. I think that’s really what I’m talking about here. Is that point, almost that existential point when that hits you, versus the reality of how that can form you earlier on your journey. So no, thank you for clarifying it.

Audience Member 

It was just a question to you. You’re the expert.

Joe Leech 

No, no, I’m in agreement with you. Thank you very much for sharing. Any more questions?

Mark Littlewood 

One last quick one. Okay, come and see Joe in the break. He’s around all day. He’s very friendly, and you are going to be doing a breakout conversation in the afternoon with very excellent Christopher and the lovely wooly jumper.

Joe Leech 

Yes, I talk about that. So part of we ran it last year was we, alongside BoS, have been running a mastermind group for founders on the road to an exit. So we have cohorts of three to six founders together, and they’re on the journey in the next three to five years of exiting their business. And we help them on that journey. So if you want to come and talk to come and talk to me and Christopher from Quiet Light about that later on, please come do talk to me about exits. I’ve got some great stories about breaking bottles and getting better valuations from exits as well. So please come do. And by the way, before I finish.

What’s that? Sorry. Oh, what is in the bag? I’ve got a blog post. So I have some mints. I have my ibuprofen. I have a shopping bag. I have a magnet. I have some keys. I have a magnet and a line for getting things out of drains. I have all kinds of crazy stuff. Come and speak to me, and I’ll show it to you. I do have a blog post with it all in from last year, but thank you for the most important question of the day.

If you want to benchmark your scores about how you did on the quiz, by the way, here’s the overall scores from BoS. Is overall an audience 46% was the overall score. So if you want to benchmark that and come and talk to me about your scores, please do. Thanks very much much, people.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you.

Mr Joe Leech

Founder, Mr Joe

Joe is a trusted adviser and coach to CEOs of start-ups, high growth tech and Fortune / FTSE 100 companies.
A recovering neuroscientist, then a spell as an elementary school teacher, from UX research, to design, to product management then to product and business strategy. 

Joe is also the author of a book on psychology, and has has a background in Neuroscience and Psychology. Joe brings 15 years in tech, $20b in revenue, experience with 30+ startups & FTSE / Fortune 100 giants.

Find out more about Joe

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