Think, live, be positive aggressive | Phil Soran | TEDxFargo

well culture eats strategy for breakfast that's a pretty bold statement if you think about for a minute culture eats strategy for breakfast you know a lot of leaders talk about having a great culture in their company and there's a few great companies that make it a conscious and calculate strategy I was started to successful startups and in those two successful startups a lot of our success was due to our technology a lot of our success is due to our team a lot of our success is due to our strategies but I really think a lot of our differentiation and success was because of our culture and our culture was so important that we actually named it we branded it and that brand was called positive aggressive now my goal today is to take our corporate culture and translate few to a positive ggressive lifestyle and hope you walk away with some good ideas how to do it my Angela once said that people are going to forget what you said people will forget what you did but they'll never forget how you made them feel and that really summarizes posit aggressive it's how you make people feel when they interact with you well let me give you a definition of positive recive so first of all aggressive is all about winning you're as competitive as the next person you want to win the game you'll get the lowest grade or bhai screen not the lowest grade that's really aggressive there baby you want to get the lowest price from your vendors you want to work the hardest to get that sales order so aggressive is all about winning but positive is about how you win the style of what you do it how people feel after they have that interaction with you and want to emphasize that positive aggressive does not mean that nothing is perfect and rosy all the time the aggressive part of positive says if you have challenges or obstacles you're going to address them right away and you address him aggressively well I think I kind of practice positive ggressive throughout my whole life here I just never had a name for it I grew up in South Denver a family of six kids a family of high expectations and I really never had any business role models but one thing I found is an early positive aggressive lesson is to reach high and try for them expected so picture this I'm in fifth grade eleven years old I'm the one on the right and the high water hand-me-down pants there I'm not the one with the big ears that was a joke and Here I am this little 11 year old guy and there was no job postings but I unsolicited on my own called the Denver Rockets season ticket office now the Denver NOC Rockets are the professional basketball team now they're called the Nuggets and I told them that I wanted to be their ball boy left my name and number and that was it well imagine the the shock of my mom's face when a cold months later the trainer of the Denver Rockets Lloyd Williams called and said he'd like me to be there Bob Way so for two years I take the number five bus into downtown Denver I put on my little ball boy uniform but that shirt went down to my knees cause I was so short and I had the experience of a lifetime in my very first job well the tip for you is to ask because you just might receive if you may not hit a thousand percent on those shots you take there you're going to hit zero percent if you don't shoot so ask you just might receive and reach high and try for that unexpected why later on went to college went to the University of Northern Colorado I spent four years as a junior high math teacher now highlight the hair on this first year teacher here pretty good huh I wish I had some of the color back there too baby well then I did another cold call for another job and I cold called IBM and I quickly learned that sometimes you're at your liabilities are actually your best assets IBM now at this point in time of the world her was the most admired company in the world and I went to my first training class and all my peers went to Stanford and Brown and Harvard and MIT I was probably the only Northern Colorado grad that IBM recruited at that time and I called my wife that night and I said honey I'm over my head I'm not going to make the cut I was very very nervous well IBM at that time he had five training classes and at the end of each one they drank each the employees one to thirty how they did in the class it turns out I was number one in every single class here's I found out those peers of mine were book smart but I had street smarts I also had more book smarts I gave myself credit for it turns out that teaching background that I thought was liability was actually an asset if you can handle 30 junior high kids in a classroom you can handle an IBM sales call the other thing was real nice as I had a fear of failure I had a little more grit than they did I had a wife and daughter at home and those Ivy League grad didn't have that I had to succeed I had to find a way to do it so turn your liabilities into your best assets well that's 1995 I'd gone to my IBM career I'd had an unsuccessful entrepreneurial endeavor and I went back to my basement with three my to my friends or three of us here you know in in Minnesota here if you're going to start a company you go to the basement and Silicon Valley you do it in the garage in Minnesota you die if you do it in the garage and I think something Midwesterners can understand what I'm talking about there so we found a company called zyo tech here and the team came first and the invention came second and what we admitted was called a storage area network and after four years we required for three hundred and sixty million dollars by Seagate now I recommend everyone do that one once it's a good idea but in positive aggressive you take care of those who got you there and the first thing we did we started this company is we had to raise some money we raised it from angel investors and angel investors are basically rich people and we did a lot of this fund raising at the Olympic Hills Country Club bar and later on we raised 28 million in venture capital well those venture capitalists are a little bit more Sharky they negotiate terms they're a little tougher one of them is a liquidation preference which means they get their money out first but then the other end investors get theirs and then the on Twitter's get to start making a little bit money well we did is we made them retro actively move those terms back for those angel investors so they get their money first - and our thought was and that cost us over a million dollars as founders here but our thought was those the people that took the most risk on us they're the reason we had a shot at doing this you got to take care of those who got you there so those angel investors were taken care of it was the right thing to do our employees also got us there and so one thing we did we took care of with stock options and stay bonuses and things like that we also tried to create some traditions that made it special for them too so we announce this acquisition we announced that every single employee was going to get their own zyo Tech Super Bowl ring here's a picture of it you can check I wore mine today I've worn it well actually here it's pretty good so every employee got this this Super Bowl ring we had Jostens who does the Rings for the Super Bowl winners Commission the ring here and then we had a ring sizing party and guess where we had that ring sizing party at the Olympic Hills Country Club bar the employees loved it they wore those rings with pride it was just a great moment for him well now fast-forward to 2002 i'd retired for a while i said it's time to start another company i got the same founders i went back to the same basement this time he had carpeting in it and painted walls is pretty nice little cushy and here's some of the results we raised 53 million dollars of venture capital we went public on the New York Stock Exchange within five years and in 2011 we were bought for nine hundred sixty million dollars by Dell computer now some of you guys who returned b2b that's you know business to business well this is a different kind of b2b it's called basement two billion I was pretty good well it paused the aggressive culture is still very important here right and so it Compellent we did it by getting everyone involved and empowered and the group I was most proud of here that took that mantra heart here was our support group and support is usually the most neglected part of the company you know they handle all the problem calls from custom customers you know they're kind of the Forgotten children in the company here we tried to make them a competitive advantage and they were so important to us we named him and branded them they were the copilot's and here's the mantra for the copilot's when a customer calls in on that phone you are now in the cockpit with them if they don't land you don't land and we had a live technically savvy engineer answer every single call and those guys did whatever it took to solve the problem for the customer well tell you when we sold to Dell I had hundreds of customers tell me and Michael Dell don't mess up copilot it was their favorite feature in the whole company some pause aggressive you get everyone involved and empowered now once these people are empowered and they deliver the results for you you've got to recognize them recognition is huge we're public on the new york stock exchange one of the activities you have to do is the IPO Roadshow and on that IPO Roadshow the CFO and I have to do presentations to all potential investors well let me tell you a little bit about that grueling experience in eleven days we did 69 presentations in eleven different cities four different countries and flew 25,000 miles now the bankers they get a little private jet to do that and I recommend everyone do that once - that's pretty fun and so the last city we're going to present in is Minneapolis so I called my partners and said get our engineering and manufacturing leads together they're going to the New York Stock Exchange with us on the private jet so the next day they all loaded up in a way we went and these are not normal jet setters felt a Engineers and manufactured bill usually don't get their full dues this is really unique experience for them kind of a fun story we're on the floor of the exchange and our head of manufacturing fines as last airline ticket for the last time we wear the suit is his coat pocket here and it was a ticket on Braniff Airlines now just a COPI all chuckle because most guys are too young Braniff last flew in 1982 so it's important to recognize those who got you there and give them some unique unique recognition here we later went back a month later and with my senior management team and got to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange here and here we are doing it we're going a little crazy here I would tell you right below us on the floor of the exchange clapping for us was our families we invited our families and I did that very consciously because I'll tell you how to recognize those who got you there those families had made as much sacrifice to have their spouse spend all that time making that company successful so you recognize everyone who helped you get there and that's how you build a good culture another thing we did with celebrate milestones and in little victories here we had tradition to Compellent that when a rep got an order we'd ring a gong so if it's on the phone if the remote would ring the gong for them as we got bigger when there to start getting bigger we got a bigger Gong so you had a tiered Gong based on the size your order share well when we got the biggest order in company history a billion dollar acquisition we had Michael Dell buy us a big Gong and this is a picture of he and I breaking it in at a town hall meeting where all our employees were there and that was a pretty exciting day I'll tell you that well traditions are really really important and they're important in business they're important in your personal life and they're also important your family life I cannot tell you how important is to create them and nurture them people remember them so celebrate those little milestones and just remember people worked hard and @kz they want to be able to ring the gong well now let's keep going here you know it's also important after you have success to give back and so if I talk about my life right now I described it as one-third one-third one-third so third of the time I'm doing business stuff on some corporate boards and helping create some new companies a third of the time I'm having fun you know I climbed the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and a third of the time I'm doing flan to be if the Soren Foundation positive aggressive applies there too so what we try to do is invest in what we call trampoline charities versus safety net charities a safety net charity is going to catch you and the problem is though you got tangled up in this net you can't go anywhere right a trampoline charity's going to catch you but it's going to then launch you right back onto a path for success a lot of our money is actually going to inner-city education right now I guess you just can't take the teacher out of the to teach out of the teacher there so to do with some of the success here it took a lot a lot of risk I had to live life on the edge a little bit we just think about the positive side I have four kids no real savings my salaries can be zero and I go to my wife and say let's start a company in the basement honey you know on the aggressive side though you go I'm going to figure out a way to raise the money I'm going to find a way to beat the odds and make this thing successful I love this quote from our VCS here that entrepreneurship is about living a few years your life like most won't so you can live the rest your life like most can't now challenge you to change your mindset to an entrepreneur mindset a aggressive mindset that kinda give you some feels some of the corporate learnings on this b2b journey and now I want to personalize it for you so first of all as you get started on your positive ggressive strategy I recommend you start out on your positivity first then go for the aggressive get that style down right get that you know the technique you're into it how you do the positive way first if you do it the other way around you might have some unintended consequences if you know what I mean so the only one emphasized the deposit aggressive moments are not all basement two billion dollar activities so let's give you some concrete steps so you can get started with on your positive aggressive trajectory number one is that positive ggressive people are about others not themselves the Dale Carnegie had a quote that you will find more friends by asking about them in two months then you'll get by asked to talk about yourself for two years so every day you have opportunity in the coffee shops and the elevator on the cab ride and the plane to meet people and what I encourage you to do is ask them what's your story put that cell phone down look them in the eye and ask them what's their story don't ask them out the weather ask them about themselves there and I encourage you to do this with people are different than you so do people different ages different sexes different cultures and especially different political leanings you'll be surprised how much more interesting the conversation is with people that are different than you so try it this next week put the phone down look them in the eye ask and then sit back and listen number two speak more ands and less buts you know I ran a board meeting as a at the company there if I had a problem I always had a potential solution when I presented to the board if you know and I love people to have solutions to the problem ideas here as opposed to kind of saying well we can't get it done they can have an idea maybe some ways you can pull out of it here let me give you an example listen to this sentence here I cannot do calculus because I'm not good at math period into the sentence or let's contrast this with math is difficult for me and I just need to spend some extra time if I'm if I'm gonna be able to succeed in calculus the ands and sentences make a big difference it shows you a get out of it now butts of the contrast check out this sentence I want to fix inner-city education but first we need to fix poverty buts just mean you're not up for the task so replace those butts with ends and I think you'll start seeing the results follow number three this is an aggressive move here recruit your own personal board of directors go find some people you look up to you respect you're probably actually afraid to approach them right now and just ask them this question will you be on my personal board of directors now who wouldn't be honored but requests like that strategize with them get their feedback make them make you accountable and when the and they need that changes on this board directors as life situations change now one thing I would tell you that you don't want to make requests of them they're your personal board directors not your personal headhunter so keep that in mind so who's on your board of directors once you start building one today number four how lucky are you you know when I do interviews I want to call my one to ten lightning round and the last question I ask my one to ten lightning round is one to ten how lucky are you now when I hear an answer of like two or three I'm kind of sitting there going not too positive aggressive here when I get those nines or tens I get excited those are the kind of people I want to hang out with and I got to tell you that privilege has nothing to do with their answers I've seen some people with the most toughest fanatic personal situations be the most optimistic people what I've found is those two people can make good things happen so what I challenge you to do is don't talk to n but start acting like a ten my last and final suggestion is going to take some time here for you and I suggest you do with your spouse your partner or you know significant others there and that's to build your own positive aggressive plan now let me do a teach you and how do you get started here and of course is a math teacher we're going to start with a hexagon so draw a hexagon and each of those six vertices write down the key areas of your life professional family spiritual emotional physical social and financial and just take one minute and go over each one and just give yourself an overall in 1 to 10 how am i doing in life in each of those areas after you do that you might be interesting some of the results you might get a skewed hexagon here and then what you want to do then is to start coming up with 4 to 5 strategies in each of these areas that might impact that grade and encourage you on those strategies some of them make them incremental ones you can achieve in a short amount of time some might be bigger let me give you some examples of ones that I did in the past year for a professional network with five people in the next quarter and network with them when I don't need anything from them on the family side let's do a family activity every Sunday this summer on the spiritual emotional side let's do a family service project in the next quarter on the physical side switch from soda to iced tea now I don't know if I had a three in one of these grades but that I probably need a little more aggressive that's all I might do on a three grade there right social go out to dinner with one of my kids new friends parents in the next quarter and on the financial side cut our expenses by $50 a month and apply it to our car loan and another one I had once was have a million dollar net worth by age 40 well I encourage you to start your pet positive aggressive plan today and this is something you got to update update frequently because things change you get some news accomplished grades change and you need to have different emphases start your positive aggressive plan today well at the end of the day pause aggressive is all about how you make people feel just keep thinking about that how's my interactions with the mirror what I encourage you to do is what is your personal brand what's your personal strategy do you have a name for it and I encourage you to start going positive recive today thank you very much

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Id: digQkAFiX_w

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 25 2014