Roderick Jones & Mike Lefever: Episode 1132

Transcript

[0:00:39] HA: COVID-19, a time synonymous with conflict and turmoil, it was also the first time many businesses were forced to navigate a crisis of epic proportions. Whether your business faced exceptional obstacles during this time or has endured adversity before, the reality is undeniable: Crisis is inevitable. Welcomed back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty and my next guests are Mike Lefever, Roderick Jones. And they’re both here to talk about their new book called, Endgame First: A Leadership Strategy for Navigating Crisis and Business. Let’s get into it. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. I’m here with my friends, Mike and Roderick. I have a very special episode today because these two came together and created the book called Endgame First. I’m super excited to get into it. Thank you two for joining me today.

[0:01:39] ML: Thanks, Hussein.

[0:01:40] RJ: Thanks for having us, yeah.

[0:01:41] HA: Yeah, absolutely. It’s great to have you, I’m honored, I’m grateful for your service, not only to our country but through business and the work that you do in community. So let’s get into this, before we want to get into the book, I really like to have our guest share a little bit about their personal background, perhaps where you grew up and maybe one person that inspired you in the direction that you started to head down. Mike, we’ll start with you.

[0:02:03] ML: Great, yup. Grew up on the east coast, born in Pennsylvania and moved to New Jersey but then ended up at the Naval academy and that set my career on a path. I was a surface warfare officer, so it meant I was a ship driver by trade, destroyers, hydrofoils, cruisers, carriers, the like and did that for many years and then the last 10 or 15 years, heavily into counter terrorism and counter insurgency, working overseas quite a bit. As you’ll find out in the book, you know, one of the journeys I was on, I was a strike group commander and then was called in to lead the earthquake relief effort in Pakistan and then later assigned there as the senior military rep. After that was the director at the National Counter Terrorism Center for strategic operational planning and then worked in a commercial business at different consulting firms and then was fortunate enough to be here at Concentric with Roderick.

[0:02:57] HA: Amazing, what a journey. I have so many questions, you have no idea. Just like for all that good stuff that you, and then Roderick of course, it’s your turn, I want to hear a little bit about your background of course.

[0:03:07] RJ: I grew up in England in Birmingham and went to university and I was just thinking about a question, who inspires you. I would think that’s really difficult. I’m going to say something, actually, Mike really inspires me. I think finding someone later in your life that inspires you in different ways has been a really interesting journey and actually, this part of the genesis of this book. I think Mike has a very unusual ability to bring people together and he’s so humble about his experience but I’m certainly being very inspired by him and he changed my life since I knew him and when you ask the question, I was thinking, well actually, yeah, I didn’t really get inspired by too many people before I met him, maybe a sort of history professor here and there. I always described myself as a lapsed historian as that’s what I thought I was going to do in my life and career. But ended up going to work in national security in the UK and then starting this business in America but yeah, I would actually say my co-author has inspired me over all most people I’ve ever met, so there you go.

[0:04:04] HA: Wow, very powerful. It’s almost like Mike paid you for that or something?

[0:04:09] ML: That was just off the cuff.

[0:04:09] HA: What a great review. No, that’s awesome, I love that so much.

[0:04:16] ML: You can tell Hussein that it’s an amazing relationship, you know? Likewise, you know how we worked together and compliment each other tremendously, it’s just an amazing team.

[0:04:27] HA: Yeah man. You know, it kind of brings me to my next question really before we dive a little deeper. How did you two meet? Where did you guys end up connecting?

[0:04:35] ML: It is a funny story.

[0:04:36] HA: Here we go. You know it’s always good when it’s like, “Well, it’s a funny story.” Go ahead.

[0:04:43] ML: So our president of the company, Jeff Baker, has been with the company a long time and just an incredible human being as well. It’s just part of this eclectic team we have that’s phenomenally talented that really paints this incredible mosaic with people. He happen to hear me, I was out giving a talk on national security and leadership here in the Seattle area and it was at the same time my predecessor at the company was leaving to go for a dream job that he was looking for. And Jeff came up to me and says, “Hey, you know, wow, this is an opportunity, how serious are you moving to the pacific northwest?” and I said, “Well, my wife and I have been looking forward to it and I think we are.” He says, “Well, we might have a job for you” and that turned us on to the cycle that then later, a few weeks later, I was able to meet Roderick for dinner and it was the most engaging, fun dinner that I had described in the company, the challenges and the opportunities and what we could impact in our lives. So it was really phenomenal.

[0:05:44] HA: I love that man and so you wrote, started working together, all that good stuff and you start building something together. You start to bring your expertise from everything you’ve done so far together, which is really powerful and you two really go into it. So what inspired you to write Endgame First? That tile is so powerful, I want you to share about the title but I want to know what inspired writing it and what sets it apart from other books on crisis management?

[0:06:10] RJ: The book really is a story of the conversations we had. As Mike just said, we started these conversations when I met him in DC after he’d sort of pronounced his interest in me into the pacific northwest and that first dinner, I think we started this conversation we have to this day really about Mike’s unbelievably varied and deep experience and then I’m always interested in how that translates into business or problems that we’re working on. And during that height of the pandemic, which was an enormous crisis for everybody and us included, the business went through some serious gyrations in that period, Mike was telling me the story about him landing in the Himalayas essentially and responding to this dreadful earthquake in Pakistan and when he arrived there, he was asked very bluntly by his superior, “What’s your endgame, you know?” “How do we get out of this, what’s your endgame? What’s your plan to leave?” and I just thought that was the most profound thing captured in a sentence and when he said it, we’re right in the depths of his crisis and you really had to decide how you were going to come through it. Were you going to come through it stronger, weaker, how were you going to do it? And I think about how you wanted the end to look that essentially informs your day-to-day for a crisis. And then of course, we delve into this bigger set of knowledge that Mike has about in crisis management and at the same time, we were very conscious that a lot of books that come from the military or actually really big business import, they don’t really speak to people managing small businesses or medium businesses or their own lives and so we’re trying to create that translation. Take this enormous set of experience that Mike has at this macro-level about how do you make that relevant to someone say, running an ice cream bar or something like that? So we’re really interested in that translation. So that’s how the title came about and the initial set of conversations came about that led us to write the book and as we talked more and more, we thought, “Huh, we think there’s something in here that we wanted to share” and so that’s how it started.

[0:08:17] HA: I love that, it’s beautiful. Mike, do you have anything to add to that?

[0:08:19] ML: No, Roderick nailed it. It was a funny conversation because there were times, you know, in experiences, there were some stuff that said, “Hey, you know, would you ever write a book with all your experiences?” and I’d laugh at times and said, “Probably not” but if the title of it was, you can’t make this stuff up and then Roderick in this discussion said, “Hey, we have something here, you should write a book” and I go, “Seriously?” you know? But then as we shaped it like Roderick articulated it, it really came together as this, you know, it’s something that we can share and something people could learn from our experiences and then the translation into the entrepreneurial business world that Roderick so marvelously was able to take my experiences and translate that, that we thought we had really something powerful.

[0:09:06] HA: Yeah, I think that’s so powerful because you know, out college, right out of college, I basically started a T-shirt printing business and I started it kind of in college but I didn’t take it very serious, I was studying architecture which took up a lot of my time, let’s just say but I’ll be honest. So as I grew this business, you know, after college, all these good stuff for about almost 12 years, there was a lot of moments of crisis and in business, of course, a lot of people can relate to this. Hell, there’s a lot of crisis moments in life in general and when you add business and money and people and employees and you know, layers and layers of sort of worry and anxiety, it gets very complex. Crisis management is very difficult but I know my father was my hero of course and he was so great at reminding me to try to stay calm and to stay connected to the divine, you know? That means something different for me but what is the thing that you can share specifically? Maybe a story from your own experiences that illustrates the importance of crisis management and learning about that and the concepts that you cover in your book of course. But where that lay in business and how to really think ahead by understanding our past and our way that you know, the way that we move. Roderick, can you speak to that a little bit?

[0:10:19] RJ: I think crisis management, it’s almost the wrong term. As you said, every business faces some form of crisis that are in some ways and some businesses are set up actually to start and be born in crisis and then a startup at one point and those businesses are by definition, permanently in crisis because startups are pre-revenue, pre-profit for a long time, some of them and so that is just a long running crisis, really. So I think in some businesses, crisis is just built into it and I think what the book does and what is so powerful about it, it just normalizes that to some degree and allows you to understand that this isn’t an abnormal event. It’s actually a normal event, there isn’t a human being on the planet that hasn’t lived through a crisis, either a personal one or a global one or a business one and what Mike articulated to me and still does to this day very well is actually it’s covered in the book. One of the chapter titles is called anatomy of a crisis and he just lays out these very clear stages that you live for and work through in a crisis and I think that was really powerful and very grounding for me. As the owner of the business, Mike was CEO but you know, we’re managing this financial liability and employee issues, client issues and all of these stuff during the pandemic when it feels like the sky is falling in and that was unusual and extreme. But running any kind of organization has those kinds of things in it but once you realize there’s actually a pattern to these crisis and how you respond to them really allows you to control of them and have some ownership and agency, I think that empowers you to come out of it in a lot stronger way and so I actually think that was very grounding and actually a big reason why we wanted to write the book and certainly for me was how grounding that experience of knowing that you know, this isn’t the first time this has happened. There’s actually you know, quite a lot of experience of knowledge around how you manage these things and setting your course properly and understanding where you wanted to end up really helps you. So I found that very grounding and I think the business, it’s understanding that you’re never going to… there’s very few businesses that start to make a ton of money and everyone retires. There’s things along the way, so having a playbook in hand and how manage them felt to us very, very useful.

[0:12:45] HA: Mike, how do you see the role of intelligence and foresight and proactively preparing for managing a crisis? When you think about those kinds of things, of course, these are experiences that you’ve picked up along your journey of being in of course, military and all those kinds of things but how do you see the role of intelligence play a role here?

[0:13:03] ML: I think very important. It’s very complimentary to what you’re trying to achieve and you know, by starting now with a kind of a clear vision of the accomplishment of what you want to do that endgame, that strategic end state where you want to be and knowing throughout getting there is going to be a series of ups and downs and then, what intelligence provides for many sources is the ability to weigh the information and as Roderick talked about in the anatomy of a crisis, as you know as we experience now, the amount of information that’s readily available and that flow and how do you discern that. But also, in the face of the crisis, how do you manage that because in certain phases, you have an opportunity. There are some phases that you just have to respond so it’s so critical in that first stage, of the 911 moment to be able to respond to the casualties and triage but as you get more along, you remind yourself of what you wanted to achieve and so how does that information, intelligence come to you. How do you weight that and how do you make judgment calls on that as a leader and knowing that you’re not going to always have perfect information but you're going to have information that’s going to… and we all have biases of where we came from but again, getting back to where that endgame was, what you wanted to achieve, helps you ground in shaping that and shaping how you’re going to exit this and be set up for the future.

[0:14:37] HA: Yeah, that’s so powerful. Your team-up might be probably one of the best team-ups of all time. I’m just saying like as far as business management and creating something amazing, can you all just tell me a little bit about and I’ll point this to Mike, can you tell me about Concentric and sort of the work that you do now, just to kind of overlay sort of how this is actually adaptable in a work environment.

[0:14:59] ML: Yeah, Concentric is this very unique security company that we provide services, security services basically from a privacy aspect. So well before events can happen all the way through to the full spectrum of armed security if required to support our clients, people of high net worth, extreme high net worth as well as our corporate clients to be able to, as our mission statement is, you know, we manage risk to keep people safe. So that is one of our guiding principles as we continue to grow the business and provide that security umbrella throughout that full spectrum. So with our company, it’s growing quite rapidly as I talked about is the strength is I think our people and our backgrounds and our experiences like Roderick and myself and others that have been associated at different levels of government and then different government organizations as well as commercial organizations. That blends that expertise together with the national security’s perspective of how these things relate to one another. One of the big things we talk about in the book as well is about understanding that second and third order effects. What are those crisis that are happening now, events in Ukraine, the tension in Taiwan, whatever the case may be and how could that impact you, here whatever, in Seattle and Ireland and across the Europe, Middle East, Asia, whatever the case may be and how do we support that for our clients. So that aspect, being able to help people through very stressful times, uncertain times, through ambiguity and uncertainty I think is our strength because we’re able to understand that and help people through that and look at the bigger picture.

[0:16:50] HA: That’s really powerful. You know this idea of interconnectivity, right? Like one thing always impacts another, you may not know it, you may not see it but you better believe it. Something is always connected to something else, I think it’s really powerful and then bringing that up, you know, in how you adapt that throughout your business is incredible. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe discussing like the biggest challenges that you think businesses face in building an effective crisis response team and perhaps maybe what’s a couple of steps that I know this is very complex but maybe go to the highlights of the steps that can help those teams overcome those challenges in a way that is, you know, just adaptable to these businesses? Roderick, what do you think?

[0:17:32] RJ: Yeah, I think one of the things we discuss is the idea of team and Mike is very strong on that. When a business faces a crisis, a lot of the old rules change immediately and you need a different set of plans to help you through that and what we do in the book is articulate some of the personalities that you probably want to identify and the company or the organization, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a company or organization to help you through one of the particular crisis that you’re looking to manage. I think there’s some distinct personalities that we found in our experience, experiences over the years that come to the fore and they’re not always personalities that you need in a non-crisis situation but you need these blend of people and I think this blend of people allows you to manage through a crisis and without giving too much of the book away, you know, we talk about characteristics of diplomacy and being a generalist or a specialist. Someone that defends the interest of the company is very important, you need that voice there to tell you about liability, risk, finance, things like that and we also have of course, the carve-out for the Maverick that’s going to kind of find the next land for you to conquer or the next revenue stream we need to find. So we have these personality types identified that I think are really useful to think about. Never see the map directly onto everyone’s situation but you do need this blend of talents to come forward and I think what Mike brings out through his experiences in Pakistan is, you know, you obviously have that at a macro level and a lot of access to all kinds of different personality types. He was able to identify that and for us in our security business, we’re able to look around and identify some of those personalities and how they play different roles at different times. So I think actually you know, the human element of emerging crisis and bringing a team together is very important and that we do quite a bit of work in the book identifying different aspects of the human aspect of this and building a team through to how relationships work and the mental health of those teams. So we actually draw quite a big sketch of the human side of this. I will say one thing about Concentric that as Mike gave a good explanation of what we do. But I think I’d sum it up in a shorter way and just say it’s the kind of security company that James Bond would use if you needed one. If that’s your thing, you’d like us.

[0:19:58] HA: I love that.

[0:19:58] RJ: If that’s not your thing, then that’s okay but we, you know, we’re for people that might need us.

[0:20:05] HA: Yeah, I can just imagine your team and just the cleanest suits and button-downs and looking sharp, super fancy gadgets, going around the world like Men in Black, you know? I love that.

[0:20:20] RJ: I mean, if that’s how you want to imagine it, that’s fantastic but I should warn you that territorial standards in the pacific northwest aren’t the same as you know, they are in London. So there’s a little disconnect there but you know?

[0:20:31] HA: Oh man, you guys make such an awesome team, this is so wonderful. I love that so much. I’ve always thought about yeah if I like owned a cool security team or something like it is a must. We are called Men in Black and we do very secretive things like very fictional of course. Okay, I got to ask you, you know, obviously writing a book as a team, as a duo, you know it has its challenges. It has its ups, it has its downs but what would you guys say that your most favorite part about putting this whole thing together because it’s no easy feat. Writing a book is difficult, let’s just put it out there but how did you all come together and really celebrate this knowledge and wisdom and what would you say your favorite part has been. Let’s start with Mike.

[0:20:31] ML: I think the favorite part Roderick and I often talked about it, this has been a journey but I think our favorite part is that the assistants that helped us write it are Scribe, each Friday afternoon for about two hours, we would dissect what we had is an outline of our book and emphasis in the ideas we wanted to make sure we’re highlighted in the different chapters and that gave us an ability as we bounce back and forth talking about what we were trying to achieve, what were the important things, what can we share and the examples that we used and actually our own experiences to how we got through it and what was significant about it.

[0:21:54] RJ: Yeah, I’d echo that. I mean, I think that the process of creating the content was really fun. As Mike said, we’d have these sessions with each other on a Friday afternoon and you know, really just lay down as much content as we could and of course, you don’t use everything. Some things end up not working, you create different loops and lengths that don’t actually make sense when you tie the whole thing together. So we found we have a lot of content and then you have to create some structure around it and I’m really, really pleased with the structure we ended up creating around it when we come back to look at them. Like, “Oh, that’s actually pretty good” you know? But it was that process again of what we are trying to capture was the conversations we have with each other and I think that’s so obviously the thing that I enjoyed the most was having those content creation discussions when we were setting it down. It was absolutely fabulous.

[0:22:42] HA: So powerful, man. I feel like you know, as you two sort of got through this book and of course you know, working with the team at Scribe and all that good stuff, what would you say is the most challenging aspect of pulling this book together?

[0:22:55] RJ: I think some of that obviously, you know, you have to lose some chapters and content that you become quite wedded to or they don’t work. There’s a little intellectual guess that has to happen there and emotionally. I think some of the copywriting process is obviously necessary but very difficult and then of course, just given the nature of my Mike’s career and content we had together both cleared through the Department of Defense and director of National Intelligence. But that delayed us but I don’t think it was too much of a painful process but losing some of the content that you kind of were, you know, happy with or some of the language, the editing process, those were some of the harder things.

[0:23:37] ML: Yeah, I think that would be it, it’s distilling down that content on what was key and being able to try to accurately describe some of the scenarios and how that related. Yeah, it was fun.

[0:23:49] HA: I love that so much. You applied a lot of what you sort of go through, whether it be business of course, your past experiences to the challenges ahead and it’s like you know, the idea is that we know that there is going to be more challenges, not just in our lives, just in our businesses of course but the idea I think in the book that have really resonated with me and that I loved is you know, really thinking ahead but studying who you are, your experiences, how those things can really help you shape a plan, a response system. You know for a long time because of the different types of fears I’ve had growing up, you know, refugee, all those kinds and growing up in America, right? There was a lot of fears that grew, right? And I think it wasn’t up until like maybe seven or eight years ago that I realized you know, these fears need to be reframed and I need to think about these things a little differently and a lot of what I came across in sort of developing myself was my reaction to things as opposed to my response to things. That was a huge sort of cantilever for me because once I realized, “Oh, I just need to get better at developing a response” then the reaction sort of takes care of itself and I love that because your book really, you know, in a way talks about these kinds of things fitting together and I think it’s generally not just helpful for business people man, it is helpful for people in general and you two really have the experiences and the work and of course the stories that go along with it all. So for me, that’s where I related the most is just understanding that response period and what I can do to develop it, whether it’s a crisis or something I’m looking forward to. You know, both kind of fit in that world. So thank you for putting those things together. I have one last question for both of you, Mike you can take the lead and then Roderick, you can land the plane for us. When a reader picks up your book and begins to flip through it, read through it, really digest the information, what do you hope they feel after putting it down and going about their lives?

[0:25:49] ML: For me, I think it would be that you know, we all had different leadership styles but hopefully part of leadership I think is understanding. We all had good and bad leaders that we were around and you learn a lot from each of them and so what I’m hoping instead they see is people pick up the book, they would understand and take our experiences of what we both went through from the crisis management that I was exposed to and in mine and then the translation in the businesses that would have an impact on how they would lead or cause them to think about it and start planning or take some of the traits that we had in and understanding the anatomy of a crisis or the communication skills or developing the relationships or how to look at the different events and how they occurred, that management, all the different chapters that we try to distill down into terms that they could apply not only to their own life but to their businesses as well and then understanding that and hopefully they can take those and apply it to their own situation and capitalize on that.

[0:27:01] RJ: Is it arriving in a time of when there’s not going to be a shortage of crisis in the world in fact. We’re told were moving into a poly crisis moment. So I think hopefully this acts as a manual for people who are faced with these various crises and they’re able to read it and provoke some thought and some leadership in them and allows them to be empowered and have agency to create better decisions and outcomes. I don’t think there’s going to be a shortage of crisis or crises but I do think there’s a shortage of leadership around all kinds of sectors and people have retreated from making decisions or wanting to be seen in those spaces and some of that is knowledge. You know, if you have some knowledge and you have a bit of a user manual, hopefully, you’ll be able to make some decisions that lead to a better endgame for everybody.

[0:27:49] HA: Beautiful, I love that so much. Thank you two, Mike and Roderick. My friends, it’s been an honor sitting with you and just getting to know you today, I learned so much. Again, thank you both for your services to our world, our national security if you will and of course, our community. I can’t express how grateful I am to just sit here and learn from people like yourself throughout my work and my work day. So you’ve added a lot more to my day, I appreciate both of your experiences. The book is called Endgame First: A Leadership Strategy for Navigating Crisis and Business. Besides checking out the book, where can people find you?

[0:28:26] RJ: There’s a website, endgamefirst.io, I believe or .com, one of those two and so we have the website and you know, that’s obviously, you’ll be able to Google it and find it on Amazon.

[0:28:36] HA: Can they find you on LinkedIn both you, Roderick and Mike?

[0:28:40] RJ: Certainly. Again, at Concentric website as well as concentric.io.

[0:28:43] HA: Beautiful. Well, thank you two again for your time. Much appreciated, have a fantastic rest of your day.

[0:28:48] ML: Thanks, Hussein.

[0:28:49] RJ: Thank you.

[0:28:50] HA: Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, Endgame First: A Leadership Strategy for Navigating Crisis and Business, right now on Amazon. For more Author Hour episodes, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.