Keep It Simple: Donald Miller

welcome everyone to franklin covey's on leadership series my name is scott miller and i am honored to serve as your ongoing host and interviewer now occasionally one of our guests is so magnanimous their content is so pervasive in terms of helping to create a better leadership culture in your organization build your leadership skills that when they write something new they promote a new offering we want to invite them back on because their content is so valuable we only have 52 episodes a year and about half of those are reserved to franklin covey thought leaders and half of them to people outside of our firm that are part of our broader family so you know you have to be pretty phenomenal to have earned a second spot on on leadership our guest today is donald miller the number one wall street journal best-selling author of the book everyone in america has read build building a story brand i think the entire company at franklin covey has read this book formed a book club around it and donald of course is the founder and ceo of business made simple where one of his most recent books launching today is business made simple 60 days to master sales leadership marketing execution management personal productivity and more joining us today from nashville tennessee donald miller welcome to on leadership thanks for having me it's good to be with you great to have you back donald now i'm a rabid follower of yours on social media you've got a significant social media following because of the value you add each day in your videos your thoughts your quotes what you teach from business made simple so i know a little bit about where you're sitting today because in tennessee you have with your wife and dogs built a compound that you tape and write a lot of your books and you've i think built a little bit of a writing shed that you've um codified on some of your video talk a bit about where you're broadcasting from today yeah my wife and i built a home we spent a couple years building our dream home and you know in my old house i had a shed in the backyard we called it the writing shed and it was so effective a little ten by ten room i i needed one here and so what i did was i built a concrete bunker in the back of the garage i'm sitting in a tiny room with no windows two white boards one on either side some bookshelves and it works fantastic and people ask me all the time what do you do without windows you're on 15 beautiful acres and you're sitting in the back of the garage but the reality is if there's no windows i get more work done i think it was annie dillard who said a rider who needs a window lacks imagination so i'm i'm holding her to that and so far it's worked pretty well i think there's great insight in that i enjoyed the social media post where you walked us on a video tour down to the basement and explained some of the psychology you use around you know focus as well donald you're you're a big business book you've written many books you have a large following in terms of readership around the world your seminal book building a story brand you know swept the world by storm several years ago i don't know of a chief marketing officer or somebody that has responsibility for messaging branding communication in your firm that has not read your book it has transformed the way franklin covey creates our own messaging you have brought i think a cognizance to this idea of the hero's journey and finding your client in your message you've taken a lot of self-serving messaging and turned it around to be client focused before we get into your new book business made simple would you teach us the big lesson that i think that we took from storybrand which was this idea around what are the mistakes most leaders make when they're designing the messaging for their firm where they put themselves front and center and they fair to they failed to let their clients kind of see themselves in it reteach that lesson if you will today well the big lesson if there's just a big paradigm shift in the book is that you should stop telling your story and start inviting customers into a story so you're still using story you're just not telling your story you're inviting customers into one and so when we tell our story it looks like telling our history saying we're a 75 year old company our grandfather started it you know this and that that that's a lot of times that's not even telling your story it's telling your history which is which is pretty boring what customers are actually looking for though is they want to be invited into a story in which they can play a heroic role to solve their problem and so that means we play a different role in the story we actually act as the guide inviting the customer into a story if we're a plumber it's about a story where they're their leaky faucets get fixed if we're a landscaper it's a story about uh their yard being the pride of the neighborhood uh if it were a financial advisor it's a story about them wisely investing money so that they can retire and be generous uh with and leverage the work they've done in the world you know those are the sorts of of stories that people want to be invited into and psychologically what actually happens when you tell your story is people ignore that story looking for a story to be invited into it's the buzz right now as you know scott everybody wants to tell their story and you know for at least the readers of my book they've learned there's that there's really absolutely no benefit to it in fact all of the really successful brands do not do that you actually don't know the history of home depot coca-cola doesn't tell their history and their advertising carmax doesn't tell the history of how they came into the used car business all of those brands invite customers into a story and so after you read the book you start seeing it's obvious in all sorts of successful brands and then i give you the framework uh within which you can do that yourself you can invite customers into a story well donald not only is the concept profound i think it's counter-intuitive i'm gonna i'm gonna guess that you know small to medium businesses entrepreneurs they fall into the trap of wanting to talk about their experience their client base their r d budget how much research they've done how many offices they're in you want to tell your story what you're saying though is you're validating your desire to do that but it's really useless when it comes to client acquisition if the client can't find themselves in your story your story is useless that's exactly right the the customer is actually wondering what role am i going to play what tool are you going to give me to solve my problem so you know if you think about the customers are actually only asking one question how are you going to solve my problem what problem do you solve how are you going to solve it and so we come in and we say my grandfather started a company they say okay that doesn't solve my problem and when you say we're 75 years old they say that doesn't solve my problem they usually give you two or three strikes and then you're out and so we really you know train the people who come through our workshops train the people who read the book to stop doing that and to start saying to customers something like hey you know i've noticed you're struggling with this a lot of our customers have struggled with that but we've solved that problem for them would you like to have that problem solved for you and that's the kind of messaging that people click on they click buy now they place orders they call your sales rep back they respond to your email and ultimately they give you the money that they need to solve that problem so your company grows hey donald it honestly is an honor to have you joining us today we have a mutual friend john acoff who of course wrote many books including the book finnish my favorite book that john ever wrote is called a book finish i highly recommend it and the reason that i'm referencing that is we had you on this podcast over a year ago where you talked about your book building a story brand and for those viewers and listeners that remember that interview at the end i asked you what you were working on next and you said hey well i'm starting this book and in it i'm going to talk about mission statements which of course franklin covey knows a thing or two about and then of course you spent a year and or more and you wrote this book and you finished it and now here you are today and although we're not going to talk about mission statements per se i want to hold you up as a testament that a lot of people talk about what they're going to do and some people go and do it and you are a master of focus you teach your clients through business made simple how to focus how to narrow you do what you say you are going to do you are a prolific machine i'm guessing that wasn't always your competency what have you learned over the years of triumph and struggle and messes and successes what have you learned that's turned you into a finisher well yeah i actually write about it in the new book i write a little bit about mission statement that's 60 daily entries of five one of those is on mission statement and the other 59 are on other things but but i share that a couple tips that i'll share with your audience one is i i differentiate between my primary and secondary tasks so in the morning i have a planner that i fill out that planner comes free with the book you literally just download it and three-hole punch it and you've got a planner and in that planner it's a beautifully designed planner there are two lists one is primary task one is secondary task the primary tasks which will only give you three of them take up half the planner page the secondary task take up maybe a fifth and that's because i want you to understand the difference between working on that important project and going to pick up your dry cleaning so the brain has a difficult time understanding and prioritizing a list of actions so that you'll spend time returning emails that you really don't need to return today instead of getting that dominant job done so the first thing i do is every morning i fill out that planner page and i remind myself of what's actually important to work on that is normally scott as you suggested that's normally a book so i know that i need to work on the book today uh the second thing i do that was truly life-changing for me it used to take me two years to write a book now it takes me eight months and i think the books are actually better written the the reason is i i slot my time to do my important work which is for me it's write a book for for the listeners it might be something else i do that in the morning and so from 7 a.m to 9 00 a.m i am working on my primary most important tasks and what that really means is the rest of the day i can come in and out of meetings i can go pick up my dry cleaning i can do a lot of things but i know the most important work has already been done usually by 9 a.m if i'm if i run a little late it might be 7 to 10 a.m but i got this morning i got 2 000 words written yesterday morning i got 1600 words written i got them all i got that done before 9 a.m so it lets the you know we all have to understand that uh a bunch of our day is just going to be chaotic it's going to be answering questions answering emails but that the chaos tends to build up throughout the day so if you can get your primary tasks done in the morning you get an awful lot more done and that has been those two things understanding what my primary task is and then blocking time in the morning to get it done every morning has completely changed my life and made me i would say it's doubled my productivity donald this recent book coming out today business made simple also the name of your firm follows a 60-day plan and you open it with sort of 10 differentiating competencies that if someone wants to become an economic value creator for an organization this is going to get them hired or promoted over someone else i'm going to read these 10 and ask you how you called these ten from the the sea of competencies they know how a business really works they are a clear and compelling leader they are personally productive they know how to clarify a message they know how to build a marketing campaign they can sell they are great communicators they are great negotiators they are a good manager and they know how to run an execution system we're at a similar age you have a tremendous amount of experience as an author a podcast host an advisor a coach speaker how did you call this list of 10 as kind of key differentiators well there are two things that really happen and each of the things that you just mentioned is actually five different entries in the book it's five full days in the book and what you do is you sit down with a book you read a daily entry they're numbered one through sixty you get an email in your email box and it's a video version of that entry it lasts about five to seven minutes and in that short period of time over the course of 60 days i think you get a better education than if you would have gone and bought an mba now this book is less than twenty dollars on amazon so you know if you compare the difference between fifty thousand 000 in college debt and 20 bucks i believe you actually learn more practical skills in fact most people i know who have an mba don't remember much of what they studied so that was the first the primary job of the book was to develop your people at uh at pennies on the dollar and then the second was as you suggested was figuring out what to put in it what do people actually need to know the first 10 entries are characteristics of what i call a value-driven professional and a value driven professional is somebody who gets at least a 5x return they give a 5x return on their paycheck to the company they work for so if you're getting a thousand dollars a week your you a valued professional will give four thousand dollars back to the company every week you make a hundred thousand dollars i think you should be making the the uh company five hundred thousand dollars a five ex return forgive me uh in return in fact when i when clients hire me to help with their business i i guarantee a 10x return on their investment for a day together or i give them their money back and and the reason is i always tell them the reason is because uh you know i want to be generous i want to be a good investment of course but i never ever want you to say that donald miller is a bad investment that is a value-driven professional and the more we understand how the market works scott the more you understand that there is a number floating above everybody's head now god sees you as priceless i see you as priceless your spouse sees you as priceless your kids see you as priceless the market sees you as a numeric value and we just have to understand that if you've got 15 an hour floating above your head your your skill capabilities are probably that you can cut up some potato and put it in some grease and lower it for three minutes and bring it up and make french fries but if you take that same person and you educate them about how to manage and unite a team around a common vision and mission they might be worth 25 an hour and then you teach them to clarify a message they might be worth 35 you teach them to make a sales funnel 45 you teach them how to manage cash flow they might be worth 60 bucks an hour the number that floats above our head is completely in our control based on what you know the skills you know so i took the 10 characteristics of a value driven professional and then the 10 skill sets that you need to understand including mission statement guiding principles personal productivity business strategy negotiation leadership management execution sales messaging marketing it's all in the book so imagine all of your your sales force or your staff your entire team spending 60 days watching videos and reading a book that was convincing them and training them on how to become a better economic investment and give a better return on the paycheck that they're entrusted and to me uh that's the key to growing a business is you turn all of your people into into educated developed rock stars so they're good at what they do and the whole business starts making more money people start to uh getting raises and moving up because their skill sets have increased that was the vision behind the book and uh the way i chose the ten characteristics or i spent about two years meeting with nfl head coaches presidents of the united states first ladies of the united states members of the judiciary three different billionaire business people who became billionaires in their lifetime rather than inheriting the money and what i found where they had 10 10 10 common characteristics and it doesn't it wasn't just integrity and good work ethic it was things like they see themselves as a good economic investment on the open market they know how to decrease drama in the workplace they know how to engage conflict without creating drama uh you know you know so on and on and on these things that they they all had in common and i wrote about those in the book donald i don't want it to be lost on our listeners and viewers and i think it's hyperbole to say you are transforming the book industry right i mean look behind me i know a couple of things about books i lead the book strategy for franklin covey worldwide offered a few myself but you you mentioned that when someone buys this book what they get is not just the knowledge in this book but they get the reinforcement of the complimentary planner that they download and they get these daily videos what can you teach everybody who's involved in writing a book wanting to write a book around the future landscape of the power of books well more and more value right people are consuming books so differently scott you know this than ever before up to 50 of the books that i sell are now audio books so people are actually listening to them and uh we actually put two hours worth of bonus material in the audiobook including a 60-minute uh talk that i give for business coaches and their clients on everything that they need to fix and assess within a business that's that that's a bonus just in the audio book so uh you know and then actually adding a video component we probably spent 200 000 or so filming the 60 videos that go with this but we don't charge anymore for the book so for us it was really about practicing what we preach and that is give people a shockingly great return on their investment so for 20 bucks i wanted to give people a return that was equivalent to an mba at a prestigious university and i and i believe that we have accomplished that and i'm hoping that people see it as a way to develop their entire team for just a small amount of money well perhaps the one benefit of being a podcast host is you get the books a little bit early and so i can assure you that my the listeners and viewers that you've done that let's dive in because i want to talk about some concepts um this idea of de-escalating drama you referred to it earlier it's one of the concepts you teach how do people become more adept at not just creating drama but de-escalating it well first we have to we have to all understand that drama costs money it costs energy more specifically so that when you have a dramatic person in the workplace somebody who overreacts to criticism or somebody who overreacts to somebody else making a mistake all of the energy that would normally go into producing a product that solves a customer's problem or all of the energy that goes to servicing customers now has to go to that team member so we've all worked with somebody who's dramatic and we wish there was a way for them to understand that they were dramatic and to stop doing it so i included that as one of the daily entries uh in the book the truth is we actually have an enormous amount of respect for people who they under respond to a dramatic situation rather than overreact to a dramatic situation when things get very dramatic we have enormous respect for people who can keep their cool and it's one of the ways that intuitively and maybe subconsciously we choose leaders we choose leaders within our organization who are capable of doing that uh and so i i wanted to write about that because i think drama costs the company money and it costs the service that we could be giving to our customers and we just need to rid it out of our our our uh our workplace i tell the story of the sully uh the the pilot who landed the plane on the hudson and how imagine if he would have been a dramatic person and overreacted even a little bit to drama but because he under-reacted to drama he was able to safely land the plane and that's what we need to emulate in the workplace donald speak to the concept of having a bias towards action not a new term you didn't coin this we all understand this but what what should someone be thinking about as they kind of benchmark their skills and their brand about whether or not they have a bias to action well i talk about it in the video that comes with that entry that i've been on i've met a few pretty successful people and uh i've been fly i've flown around on their private jets and what i've noticed about many of them to my surprise not all of them is they they were not exceptionally intelligent i mean they weren't creative they didn't have great ideas uh and i just started wondering how is it that this person became you know a billionaire and yet their ideas aren't really any better than anybody else's in fact they were very simple in their thinking often and what i figured out very quickly was they moved they didn't just sit and think about ideas uh when when we were trying to come up with a better strategy they had already taken action uh when their competition was iterating on an idea they had brought the the idea to market they just went and did things they made things happen and it was it was very convicting for me in fact it circles all the way back to the first question you asked about uh about organizing my time and being productive i realized that as a guy who has a strong imagination a visionary strategist i could spend a lot of time planning and i need to spend at least half my time just taking action just getting things done and since then my own company has probably doubled in size just from that one piece of advice have a bias toward action let's not sit and talk about it forever let's move let's get something done i think of the 60 days my favorite that i have been haunted by since reading this book over the last week plus is day eight and it's the concept of uh choosing to be confused or better yet do not choose to be confused i've read this passage four or five times i mean this is like watershed value i'd like you to take a couple of minutes don't give the book away but share this concept this was an epiphany for me well it actually was an epiphany to too scott and it was something that in the book i talk about how i i learned the phrase do not choose to be confused and i learned it from my coach at the time my business coach a mentor of mine his name is doug keim he was at cox communications back then and he's and i was just asking him his opinion on whether or not i should let somebody go and i talked about what they had done and that they you know didn't feel like they were a fit and this sort of thing uh and i thought maybe we could work it out this way or if we restructure their job description and doug said to me don do not choose to be confused if you if you if you step away from yourself for a second and you could give yourself advice about what you should obviously do what would that advice be and immediately i said to myself i gotta let him go and what i was doing was i was choosing to be confused about something i didn't want to do that there was actually nothing confusing about it absolutely nothing confusing about what needed to be done i was choosing to be confused well you know if you play that out at the end of distribution scott we tend to be confused about a lot of things whether or not we should work this weekend or spend time with our kids whether or not we should eat that third cookie on the plate or whether we should have stopped at one or none we choose to be confused about things when we want to do things we we shouldn't be doing or when we want to put off things we should do and uh as soon as you realize you're choosing to be confused of course you're motivated to take action i've never met a single successful leader who walks around confused they just don't they have they may not be right all the time but they clearly understand what they want to accomplish and what they want to do they are not confused about that and so it's a hallmark of a great leader that they have some clarity and they are not walking around choosing to be confused and so i thought that was worth one of the days in the book well mission accomplished because it's still haunting me because i think i mean it has such application in our professional lives and our personal lives right in terms of how we work with our family members tough decisions in our personal lives and i think uh it's a gift that you um included that thank you donald i i'm a father of three boys with my wife stephanie their boys are six eight and ten don't do that first of all that's not good advice to recreate that but you know one of my legacies with these three sons is to turn them into powerful communicators quite frankly i don't care if they pass trigonometry or algebra or physics i mean they probably need to pass it but these kids are probably not going to be rocket scientists or or you know cpas or attorneys they may be they'll do whatever they want what i'm going to make sure that they become is an exceptional communicator right the ability to express your thoughts in writing to be a persuasive communicator in the words you choose and that's one of the skills that you teach in here i think communication perhaps above all is what has been one of my hallmark um contributions right i don't have an mba i don't have a economics degree i can read a p l i'm a competent business manager but i think most people would tell you i'm fairly powerful and influential communicator my wife might say too much so sometimes talk to this competency this business skills value creation skill about being an exceptional communicator well communication is one of the weeks in the book so i spend five days helping you give a great speech i would agree with you scott that i think it is the most important skill as a professional if you want to make more money if you want to move up if you want to earn business from more customers if you want to engage shareholders in a vision being able to communicate is the key we developed that curriculum for a major american airline who wanted to become the greatest storytellers in the world and i share with you five days of what we discovered in the book uh i will say this to to your kids there's really one big thing that i think is the number one thing and i shared in the book one day in the book uh that all communicators need to understand and it's this start with the problem so if you're about to give a speech or if you're about to open a meeting or if you're if you're writing a sales email any form of communication if you start with the problem if you walk to the center of the stage and say we are here today to discuss the fact that fourth quarter revenue is in decline and i just don't think it has to be that way let me share with you if you if you just start with the problem then everybody in the audience knows why they should listen every audience is listening for the problem the problem the problem so when you get up and say my name is donald miller and i live in nashville tennessee and my wife is betsy and we have two dogs and we're about to have our first baby she's a daughter but they're listening okay what problem is he going to solve what problem is he's going to solve why should i listen why should i listen they're going to give you about eight seconds and that's it and then they're starting to decline and they're waiting and you can bring them back but you want to hit that problem in the first eight seconds so if your children want to be great communicators everything they write whether it's a book report uh whether it's a a speech that they're going to give at school whether it's a meeting that they they run you just want to say start with a problem let's sit down and figure out what the main problem is that you solve now the other thing that's so important in communication the other reason it's so important to start with the problem is people often base or perceive your value on whether or not you can solve a problem so not only do we want to lead our communication with the problem that we solve we want to be known as somebody who solves a problem somebody i was just talking to somebody today said don i've got an 18 year old what's the piece of advice that you would give them if you're starting out at 18 years old what's what's a great professional advice and i said become known for solving a problem because people who can solve problems are valuable so you want to figure out what problem you solved at 18 it might be lawn care it might be you know who knows pet sitting whatever it is but just say if you tend to drive to the airport feeling guilty about putting your pet in a pet kennel i solve that problem by pet sitting your pet and they will do business they will be useful they will be sought after now as you grow in your career of course the problem changes it evolves and hopefully if you if you want to be a good business person the problem that you solve becomes more and more economically valuable so that you can charge more for it and get a bigger paycheck but always be known for solving a problem and make that problem that you solve known to everybody and you will you will have job security for the rest of your life donald i'd love to talk about uh your sales topics your leadership topics your business acumen topics um negotiation you know i i'm going to leave that for people to buy the book whether they choose to consume it on audio digital or in print i'd like you to revisit a concept before we end here that you started with and you i think you call it the power hours of your day you talked a little bit about in the beginning on how you organize your time i will think now twice about going and picking up my dry cleaning because you're going to haunt me as well talk about the power hours what have you learned and what do you teach in the book about the insight from that well blocking my time has been a game changer for me so i did an exercise where i figured out my perfect week and in a perfect week what all would i get done and so i literally took a calendar and diagrammed you know i'd exercise from here to here i'd meditate from here to here i'd work on the most important projects from here to here then on tuesday i would do this and we came up with a system my assistant and i and i've got a staff of about 30 now it's you know it's it's a lot to to manage all those people but we came up with a system where on monday and tuesday i don't have any meetings i just write and on wednesday morning i write and thursday morning i write wednesday afternoons i have meetings thursday afternoons i have meetings friday i do media and uh and that changed everything for me so now i have these blocked hours in which i get my priority tasks done not just in the morning but the entire week now we don't sometimes i get on an airplane sometimes there's a podcast it's really important to be on and i'll break that uh i'll break that perfect week in fact almost every week i break it somewhere but i know when i'm i'm i've broken it this has been so effective scott that this year we're in our sixth year of business uh our sixth year of business the staff is at about 30. i've actually assigned the task to to the president of my company and the revenue director of my company to turn the entire company into a swiss watch so that not only do i have a perfect week every single member of my team has a perfect week and then we bring some of our meetings together so every you know basically not unlike the writers room it's saturday night live we have meetings at fixed times throughout the week and even though it's super creative work we're all you know this crew is in the room at this time then we go over and record what we just created uh then we we write the evergreen uh email that we're sending to our clients you know on and on and what we wanted to do was figure out uh if we repeated this week over and over and over would it cause us to double in sales and revenue and profit as a company so we reverse engineered the perfect week not based on what needs to get done but what would grow the company that through about 60 of the meetings that i would normally have out the window because we discovered those aren't meetings that grow the company they seem important but they don't meet our objectives so you know it's really important to know what everybody's primary tasks are and it's really important to align all of those tasks so that they work like a swiss watch so that it repeats itself week after week after week after week and essentially you turn your your work week into an assembly line it's a very hard task you don't ever nail it or get it perfect but the to the percentage chance that you can get there uh you see dramatic returns on your investment and i think as we implement more of that ourselves this year uh we're going to see that in our company as well donald the uh the problem that your book is solving is really complexity because i spent most of my career either at the walt disney company in orlando where i'm from or here at the franklin covey company which i'm still an associate after 25 years and i've spent much of my much of my time working for and in and fighting through complexity right you know there's longitudinal graphs from the harvard business review and 70 page powerpoint decks and presentations and town halls that went on for two hours that could have been 20 minutes and i used to think as a young leader that complexity was what was required if you weren't complex that you weren't a great leader that simple-minded leaders were that they were simple-minded but as i have merged into my 50s i realize it's actually the most powerful leaders that are those that are super simple that they can speak simply that they can communicate simply that all ideas that they have in their mind can be expressed really simply your book business made simple really solved that problem most of my you know undergraduate courses in college were useless you know in my career now is that the problem you set out to solve was a world of complexity it is and i think not unlike choosing to be confused we choose for things to be complex and hard to understand as an excuse not to take action or as a procrastination tactic to go research something rather than do something you know we've built this company from zero dollars to 20 million dollars in about we did that in about six or seven years with no investors no private equity no venture capital no debt and a sixty percent profit margin the way i did that scott is going to fascinate everybody listening it was not complicated what i did was i saw my business like an airplane and i explained this in five days in the book i saw it like an airplane the cockpit was my leadership the leadership had to know where we were going and get everybody there safe the body of the airplane was my overhead that was my rent that was a lot of the salary packages that was the the cokes in the coke machine and the flickering light over the coke machine you know those hard costs i needed to keep the overhead light or the plane would crash my wings were the product they had to be strong and light meaning they had to be in demand and they had to be very profitable my ride engine was my marketing my left engine was my sales and then my fuselage or my fuel tank was cash flow now you can have a perfectly built airplane but run out of cash and it's going to crash you have if you have tiny wings that is that is products that are not profitable or in demand the plane won't fly if your overhead is bloated the plane won't fly you know you could walk up to an airplane and see a giant belly of an airplane two tiny wings little bitty propellers that are run by rubber bands and and money uh cash or gas spilling out the back you would know intuitively not to get on that airplane you'd look at it and say that won't fly but very few people coming out of college even with an mba can walk into a business and within within a few hours say this isn't going to work or there's a reason this shouldn't be working and i can fix it really quickly your message is muddled your marketing sales funnel isn't getting returned your sales team isn't incentivized properly you're overhead you have this beautiful office your overhead is really bloated your cockpit leadership team does not have a mission that aligns the team and you're hemorrhaging money out the back the only reason this is sitting here is because of venture capital and private equity when that money runs out everybody's going to lose their money you you should be able to walk into a business with a couple hours tell be able to know what's wrong with it and why it doesn't work you just use the metaphor of the airplane and you can do it very very quickly they don't teach that in business school and so i wanted to show people look this this isn't rocket science it is difficult it takes work but it's not actually rocket science you can run a business successfully based on a few simple principles and aligning those principles and then putting them into action and so the idea was to take business which everybody thinks is super complicated make it very very simple and then educate as many people as possible uh to understand how to do it so the business grows donald miller thank you for your time today i am publishing a book for franklin covey called master mentors it comes out from harper collins leadership like your own book in september of 2021 where we have organized 30 people from our first 150 podcast interviews that we think offer transformational insights and you graciously accepted our invitation to be one of those 30 master mentors because your ideas are transformational your new book is business made simple 60 days to master leadership sales marketing execution management personal productivity and more donald thank you for your time when you buy the book you get the complimentary uh 60 daily videos you get the the planner the book is phenomenal what's next on your list what's not you're writing words every day what's next on the horizon for you i can't wait to talk to you about it scott it's a book called hero on a mission and it's basically an explanation of victor frankel's work about how we can find meaning in our lives and in our work and i'm i'm just i don't know that i've enjoyed writing a book as much as this one that book will be out i think in october by the way good luck with parenting when does that happen that happens in june i cannot we are very very excited we know it's a little girl i hope she looks like her mother and uh we can't wait oh man best of success look forward to having you back a year from now on the hero's journey book donald miller best of success on your launch i'm sure you're going to see a lot of people interested in business made simple from listening to today's conversation thank you sir see you back here in a year or so thank you so much hey thanks for joining us uh uh strong book recommendation the book is absolutely worth reading uh whether you consume it in audio video or audio digital or print the book's on sale today on all your favorite book publishers um thank donald for joining us again second time on the series and we'll see you back here next week with a new interview on leadership [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: FranklinCovey

Views: 7,371

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: Donald Miller, Business, Success, On Leadership, Scott Miller, FranklinCovey

Id: _gtHofrmI5U

Length: 39min 28sec (2368 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021